Higher Ed & Our Cultural Inflection Point： JB Peterson⧸Stephen Blackwood (nlgG8C1GydA)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nlgG8C1GydA

I’m Stephen Blackwood. I’m part of a small team of people founding a new university in Savannah, Georgia. I’m the president of that new institution. I’m here today at Cambridge University, an ancient, august, and beautiful institution. And I have the great pleasure today to have with me Dr. Jordan Peterson, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, and I think it is safe to say an unignorable figure of our time. Jordan, it’s a real pleasure to have you here today. Thank you. Thanks. Pleasure to be here. This unbelievable place. Jordan and I are going to talk today about what he has called the inflection point. And my hope is that that conversation will lead us into a discussion of the possibilities for cultural renewal. Indeed, the possibilities for the renewal, the renaissance of a more fully human culture. Jordan, I think you’ve called that the inflection point, or called our cultural temporal moment a kind of inflection point. What do we start there? What is the inflection point? Well, I think we’re deciding, we’re trying to decide if there’s such a thing as a direction to move forward to into the future. That’s what it looks like to me. I mean, on the one hand, we’re making tremendous technological progress in all sorts of directions simultaneously. And that seems to be having mostly positive effects, especially economically, especially on a global scale. And on the other hand, we seem more confused about the foundations of our culture and the potential directions that we’re moving in than we have been for a while. And that seems especially acute in educational institutions. And that seems to be a consequence of the constant cultural critique that’s been generated, I would say mostly on the on the postmodern edge, edge of the academic, what would you say, academic territory. So, so we’re trying to figure out what’s next, what do we have to offer to students, all of that. Mm hmm. I know that just yesterday was published the 50th anniversary edition of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago with a foreword that you’ve forward written by you, which I think you’ve described the writing of as one of the greatest honors of your life. Have I got that right? Yes. Academic honor. Now, I suppose the question I have there is, why is that so important? Well, the book was important because it was the first work that succeeded in undermining the Marxist project from a moral and an intellectual perspective simultaneously. I mean, other people had pointed out the terror of the Soviet enterprise, Malcolm Muggeridge and George Orwell, among others, often people on the left, interestingly enough. But it was always possible right up until the end of the 1960s for the people who held on to that collectivist utopian dream in the West to rationalize what had happened in the Soviet Union, partly by sweeping it under the rug, but also partly by, while using the old adage that you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, it became obvious by the end of the 1960s that the omelet wasn’t very well prepared and that millions of eggs, so to speak, to belabor a metaphor had been broken. And so when Solzhenitsyn wrote his great book, it became impossible for anyone who was willing to be part of the cultural moment to ignore the fact that something had gone dreadfully sideways and that it couldn’t be attributed merely to a cult of personality or to some abnormality that wasn’t intrinsically part of the doctrine itself. And so that was partly what Solzhenitsyn revealed about the Soviet Union as such, but at the same time the evidence that precisely the same thing had been happening in places like Maoist China, perhaps to even a larger degree, well undoubtedly to a larger degree, and then in Cambodia and all the other places where Marxism produced utterly murderous consequences. And so that was the book that did that and it made Marxism morally repugnant. It was also one of the events that catalyzed the transformation of Marxism into identity politics as far as I’m concerned because a lot of the people who held the victim-victimizer narrative as sacrosanct, that that was the appropriate way to look at the world, to divide people into identity groups of whatever form, and then to see history as the battle between them, history, the present and the future, that transmuted especially in France because even though the Marxists had been unmasked, the murderousness of the doctrine had been unmasked, the people who’d held that doctrine were still looking for the easiest lateral move. And so that was one of the driving forces for the development of postmodernism, not the only one. The postmodernists also figured out something or run across something that really is an intractable problem. They ran across the problem of categorization and that actually happened in multiple disciplines at the same time, including artificial intelligence and psychology. People start to realize about in the early 60s, it was probably under the pressure of the AI types, that it was very difficult to perceive the world because objects aren’t just there for the looking, because every object is made of sub-objects and is part of a higher order structure of objects, and defining what constitutes the appropriate boundary to put around a phenomenon so that it can be perceivable as an object turns out to be a virtually impossible task. We’re not sure how it can be managed. And so that realization of the intrinsic complexity of things led to a crisis, I would say, an intellectual crisis, which was, well, if there’s a near infinite number of ways to perceive a finite set of entities, how is it that you can call any one interpretation either canonical or valuable? And that’s part of the postmodern skepticism, let’s say, of metanarratives, and it’s actually a reasonable critique. The problem is, as far as I’m concerned, that what the postmodernists did was use that problem, which is a genuine problem, as a critique of the structure of the West, and then instead of addressing the problem directly, which is, well, the world is very complex, but we do in fact perceive it, and there actually are value structures, they just circumvented that and popped back into a bastardized form of mar- the bastardized form of Marxism that we see today as identity politics, and that’s been extraordinarily destructive to the universities. Well, let’s talk about that a bit more, because it seems to me that it would be a great shame if people were to think that your writing this forward to Solzhenitsyn was simply to document something as an historic phenomenon, as essentially important as that historic documentation is. It seems to me that what is of interest to you is not simply to shed light on the terrors the hundred million slaughtered in the course of the various communist revolutions of the 20th century, those various ideologies motivated by Marxism and other other forms of philosophical ideology, but because it seems to me that you take what was present in that philosophically, ideologically, still to be at work in, in, to have been, as it were, reborn in the West, and so I suppose what I’d like to ask you about is what are the, what are the characteristics of the Marxist ideology that led to those, that, that, that very obvious death and destruction, which in a, in a subtler way you see to be, am I right to say, you see to be at work in the West? So I’d like, it seems to me very important that we have a deep sense of what the, the governing assumptions of our culture are, or it’s hard to transcend them. Yeah, well, that is exactly the issue because the question is whether or not the past is over. I mean, there’s a Marxist, Marxist philosopher named Richard Wolff who challenged me recently on YouTube to a debate, and really the answer that I posted was this forward, and he accused me of being stuck in the past, you know, it’s well, the, you know, the wall fell in 1989 and the horrors of the Soviet era are over, and we, we, we can’t paint, we can’t eternally tar Marxism with the brush of these past events. I mean, as if these events are over, or as if 50 years is sufficient time to forget about the corpses, but that’s his idea, you know, and to me it’s the same idea that you might put forward if you were a neo-Nazi by saying that, well, you know, all that happened back in 1945, the fundamental doctrine was sound and we can’t allow our judgment about these eternal truths manifested in the National Socialist doctrine to be forever tainted by some unfortunate historical events, and I think that that’s just, well, I don’t even know what to say about it. I mean, one of the telling things about his comments was that he only talked about the Soviet Union and not all the other terrible places that the same doctrine had been implemented with equally murderous effects, and so that was quite the argument by evasion, but I, what I tried to do in the forward and in my thinking in general is I’m always trying to get to the bottom of things. What’s at the bottom? And it seems to me that what happened, if you look at what happened in the Russian Revolution, like the first thing you want to do is give the devil his due, okay, and the way you do that is by pointing out that hierarchical structures, you know, we’ll start even before that, people have problems that have to be solved. Life is a sequence of problems that have to be solved. If you don’t solve the problems that life puts forward, you suffer and you die. So assuming that you don’t want those two outcomes, then there are problems you have to solve, and so you have to set an aim, and the aim is to solve the problem, and then because we’re social creatures, we have to solve the problems by organizing collectively, and the way we do that, generally speaking, in relationship to an aim is to produce a hierarchy, and the reason for that is that if you have a problem and you want it to be solved, and you get a variety of people working on it, you’re soon going to discover that some people are much better at solving the problem than others, and that will inevitably produce a hierarchy, and it should, because then even the structure of authority is in sync with the aim, and the aim is valuable because it’s a problem that everybody agrees that is an actual problem, so you’re going to get hierarchical organizations, and you should. Now the problem with that is that as soon as you produce a hierarchical organization, two things happen. One is that a small minority of the people do almost all the creative work, that’s the Pareto principle, and the other is that the benefits of the hierarchy flow disproportionately to a small number of people at the top, so that’s another manifestation of the Pareto principle, and it is something that Marx pointed out, although he blamed it on capitalism, which is a big mistake even if you’re concerned for those the hierarchy dispossesses, so you produce a hierarchy, both the work flows from a minority of people and the benefits flow to a minority of people, and those might not be the same people by the way, right, because hierarchies aren’t perfect in their ability to distribute resources as a consequence of productive effort, that’s part of the problem with hierarchical organizations, but then what the hierarchy does is produce a layer of the dispossessed that stack up at the bottom near zero, and it’s the majority, it’s always the majority, so that’s the price you pay for hierarchies. Now, what the left does is say, look at the dispossessed and keep the hierarchy flexible enough so that it can twist and bend and transform when necessary, but also so that the dispossessed don’t fall so close to zero that a, that they’re done, they’re in misery, b, that the talents they might possess can’t be utilized, and c, that the whole structure doesn’t become so untenable that it destroys itself because of the inequality, perfectly reasonable propositions, and so then you could say, well, there’s a certain number of people on the left who are genuinely motivated by concern about dispossession as well as the dispossessed, of course, fine, so that’s to give the devil his due, and so then you might say, well, there was moral reasons, there were moral reasons for at least a subset of those who were involved in the Russian Revolution to be involved, they were interested in helping the dispossessed, but there’s a problem, and this is the problem of the left, there’s problems on the right as well, the problem on the right is once the hierarchy is established, those who dominate the top have every right to overstate the moral virtue of the hierarchy because it privileges them in particular. On the left, the problem is that it’s not easy to distinguish between care for the dispossessed and hatred for those who occupy positions of, well, you could say authority, the leftists would say power, you could also say competence, which I think is more to the case, or ability, it’s not easy to distinguish care for the dispossessed from hatred for those who occupy the preeminent positions in the hierarchy, and if it’s power, then it’s hatred for power, but if it’s competence, and it is competence if the hierarchy is functional, then it’s hatred for the competent, okay, then you say, all right, so those are the two competing motivations, care for the dispossessed and hatred for the, let’s say, competent, let’s play that out historically speaking and see which is the more powerful force, well, that got played out very rapidly in the Russian Revolution, and what happened was even if there was a minority, perhaps even a majority, although there wasn’t, but perhaps even a majority of those who truly cared for the dispossessed, those who hated the competent slaughtered them, it turned out that the hatred was a much more potent geopolitical force than the compassion, and then, and another twist occurred too, because the narrative was bourgeoisie against proletariat, let’s say, and so that’s those at the uppermost pinnacle of the hierarchy against those who are the dispossessed, and that was also the historical narrative, and then it was the right and responsibility of those who were oppressed to rise up, but that ran into another problem, which is basically the problem that the postmodernists, especially on the feminist side, have now identified as intersectionality, it’s like, well, turns out that you can’t so easily be placed into one group, like, in fact, this is the perception problem that we talked about before, there’s a very large number of groups you could be placed in, it might be an unlimited number of groups, in fact, and so, then, if you’re motivated primarily by hatred, and your desire is to produce as much mayhem as possible, you can take any given person, and you can analyze the multiple groups that they belong to, and then you can find one group in which they’re the oppressor, and then, because there’s no excuse whatsoever for the oppression, even if there’s one dimension of your identity along which you’re an oppressor, then you’re grist for the bone-crushing mill of the Soviet work camp, and that’s exactly what happened, and so, as the Soviet revolution progressed, more and more people got thrown into the cauldron, let’s say, the socialists, the students, the religious people, the original revolutionaries, Stalin had all them killed, because there was some, and if it wasn’t you that was guilty because of your group membership, then they just expanded the parameters of the idea of group, well, you’re not an oppressor, but your grandfather was a landowner, well, that’s good enough, that’s your class, and so that’s sufficient justification to throw you to the wolves as well, and so what you saw is this just unbelievable expansion of murderousness driven by the twin improper presuppositions that you could define people by their group identity, and that history was best conceptualized as a battle between the fortunate and the unfortunate along those group identities. Yes, and if we could pick up that notion of the group identity and the collect, what you call the collectivist thinking, it seems to me that might be opposed to a kind of robust view of the human individual as the site of responsibility and agency suffering, and so it seems to me that what I’d like to ask you about is the connection between, or the ways in which the collectivist thinking results in the annihilation of all human particularity, whether it’s economic or familial, or you might say it seems to me that what’s going on in the collectivist thinking is the absolute enemy of human particularity and freedom itself. Yes, the enemy of the idea of the individual, the sovereign individual, which is the central idea of the West, I mean and that’s manifested in the underlying religious structure, so if you think about Christianity for example, you think about Christianity psychologically, you strip it of its metaphysics, at least for the purposes of the argument, you see the emergence of the idea of the divine individual as, well as what, as part of what’s, as part of divinity itself, right, as an integral, that’s part of the trinitarian idea, the part of divinity itself, and that divinity to me is the capacity of the, of individual consciousness to generate order from potential, so the way I look at people, first of all, so like people who have been criticizing what I’ve been doing, think about my philosophy such as it is not that it’s mine, as a sort of variant of Ayn Rand’s ideas of the centrality of the individual, individual above all, that’s not the issue, it’s a conceptual issue, is that what, what, what category is to be primary, and for me the individual is to be primary, and there’s a variety of reasons for that, first of all the individual is the locus of suffering, and also the locus of responsibility, so those are really the two reasons that the individual has to be made primary, but, and the divinity element of the individual, and this I think is coded in our deepest stories, it’s really deeply coded in Genesis, particularly in the opening chapters of, opening verses of Genesis, is that what human beings confront in their lives is akin to what God himself confronted at the beginning of time, and so it’s easy for us to believe that we’re deterministic creatures like clocks, and that it’s the past that drives us forward in a deterministic manner into the future, but I don’t believe that’s the case, I actually don’t think there’s any evidence that that’s the case, because people are so complex you actually can’t predict them as if they’re deterministic, except in very constrained circumstances, and so it’s a hypothesis, but it’s not a very good one, and although it has its utility, what seems to me to be the case, and I think this is how people conceptualize themselves, and how they act towards themselves, and towards other people, and how our social structures, our political structures are constituted, is that human beings constantly confront a landscape of possibility, it’s potential itself, and we have a belief in the idea of potential, we have an idea that there are things that could be, it’s a very strange conception of reality, because it’s not a materialistic conception, because things that could be aren’t measurable in any sense, right, but we certainly act as if they exist, and we all treat each other as if our one of our fundamental ethical requirements is for you to confront that potential properly, and that would be to live up to your responsibility, it’s just you have these gifts and talents, and possibilities that have been granted to you, and if you fail to make use of them, your talents, let’s say, then that’s a sin of sorts, and that’s a religious way of thinking about it, but it doesn’t matter, because that’s how people treat each other, if you have a child for example, or a spouse, or a friend, brother, anyone you care about, and you see, you have the intuition that they could be making more of themselves and what they have than they are, then you’re deeply disappointed in that, and the reason you’re disappointed in that is because there’s a call to us, an existential call, to confront that potential that’s everywhere, that faces us in every direction, and to transform it into the most functional, inhabitable order possible, and the way that that is to be done properly is with truth, and I think that all of those ideas are integral to the Judeo-Christian substrate of Western culture, they’re fundamental ideas, and so if you put the group before the individual, then all of that disappears, like when you’re debating with the radical leftist postmodern types about free speech, you’re actually not debating with them about free speech, because they don’t believe in free speech, it’s not part of their conceptual universe, because for speech to be free, and therefore valuable, the people conducting the conversation have to be sovereign individuals, capable of generating independent thought, independent of their canonical group identity, and reach a consensus through that process of dialogue, none of that exists in the postmodern world, all of those preconceptions would be attributed to, well, something like Eurocentric neo-colonialism, something like that. Well, it seems to me that what’s at work with that is a radical dismissal of the possibility that the individual has access to anything at all, that is to say that the belief in free speech is fundamentally motivated by or sustained by the confidence that our discourse, our dialogue, that human thinking itself can reach something stable, that it has a relationship beyond immediacy, and that therefore, and beyond power, it reaches beyond power to truth. There’s no point never having a conversation about anything if the conversation itself doesn’t have access to something transcendent. Exactly right. Well, so what happens with, and this is especially true for people like Foucault and Derrida too, to some degree, is, well, the first thing you do is you define the fundamental motivation as power, because that’s all there is, is there’s the dominance of one group or the other, and so then the dialogue has to serve power, because that’s all there is, and so yeah, all of that is obliterated, and by doing that, actually, the postmodernists make it impossible for them to solve the conundrum that validly drove postmodernism to begin with. So the conundrum is infinite set of potential interpretations. That’s a real conundrum. That’s the problem of complexity, right, and it’s real. So then the question is, well, is there any solution to the problem of complexity? And this is where issues of moral relativism start to become paramount, because if there’s no solution to the problem of complexity, then there’s no canonical interpretations, and all the interpretations are just, well, what would you call it, they’re expedient. They have the expedience of power. But see, my best pathway through that, essentially, I think, has come from the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, and Piaget could be considered a neo-Cantian. You know, Kant’s fundamental doctrine was, act such that if your action became a universal maxim, that that would be of universal benefit. But Piaget differentiated that and demonstrated how that evolved naturally in the course of the spontaneous maturation of children through play. It’s absolutely brilliant. So I can give you a quick example. So my granddaughter, who’s 14 months old, has just learned a new game. And the game is, she plays it with her wooden spoon. And the game is, she has the spoon, and then she looks at you, and then she gives you the spoon. And then you take it from her, and she lets it go, and then she watches you, and then you give the spoon back. And she’s very happy to get the spoon back, but she’s also very happy to give it to you. And then she turns to the next person, and she gives them the spoon, and then she gets it back. And then you can play with her. And the play is, well, now you’ve started to embody the principle of reciprocity, right? We can trade. And it’s a repeating game. It’s not one trade. You don’t end up with the spoon, and I don’t end up with the spoon. We both have the spoon some of the time across time. And there’s some utility in the exchange itself. Okay, so she’s playing with that and thrilled about it. And no wonder, because it’s a walloping discovery. And so then you take the spoon from her, and maybe you hold it a little longer than she expects, and that makes her a little nervous. But then you give it back, and then she’s relieved, and that makes her happy. Or you cover the spoon with your hand, and then she’s a bit confused about where it might be. And you show it to her, and you give it back, and she’s happy about that. Or she reaches out to grab it, and you pull it away a little bit, and move it back and forth. So she has to do a little more effort to get it. And as long as you don’t push that, and it’s a bit of a challenge to her, both physically, in terms of coordination, but also psychologically, in terms of delay of gratification, she also finds that gratifying. And the reason for that is that you’re showing how robust and resilient the idea of reciprocity is across sequences of transformations. And it’s just this little thing you do at the table. You think, well, that’s nothing. It’s like, no, it’s something. And so the Piagetian idea is something like, there’s an implicit morality that emerges to constrain the infinite set of interpretations. And it has to do with the structure that will maintain reciprocity optimally, including the largest number of people across the largest amount of time. And so the way that I’ve been portraying that for the people who’ve been listening to my lectures is that, well, you need to take responsibility for yourself, as if you care for yourself. Okay, so first we figure out what’s yourself. Well, it’s not just you now, because you aren’t just you now. You’re the community of yous that stretch across time. So in order for you to take care of yourself properly now, you have to learn to play an iterative game with yourself that’s sustainable and even potentially improvable across time. And there aren’t many games that you can play like that, so that starts to radically constrain the set of possibilities. And then it’s more constrained than that, because not only do you have to play a game with yourself that can repeat across time to minimize suffering, to remove the possibility of death, to allow for the possibility of productive movement and a certain amount of happiness, but you have to do that with other people around you and across time. And so there’s you and the multiple yous embedded in your family and the multiplicity of your family members embedded inside a culture and the extension of that culture across time. And so for you to act properly, then all of those things have to be harmoniously balanced at the same time, and that radically reduces the set of potential interpretations. And that’s the antidote to the chaos of the infinite array of potential perceptual worlds. And then there are questions that emerge out of that, like, well, what’s the best way to play that game? But we certainly know that reciprocity, fair play, the spirit of fair play is immensely important to that, and that’s what Piaget documented, and that’s what we all know. And also that there’s something about truth that’s absolutely integral to that as well. And the postmodernists, they got the problem right, but they never went the next steps. And it’s partly because, well, why is it? They had an easy answer at hand that required almost no transformation in their original worldview. Well, we’ll just keep the Marxism, we’ll just transform it into something that looks different, and that’ll be good enough, minimal change. So it seems to me that the collectivist thinking that’s at work in the insistence that only the group matters has the effect of radically annihilating the integrity of the individual. In fact, that may be even its essence. I think it’s its aim, actually. That is its aim. I believe so, at the bottom, because there’s a murderousness at the bottom of the collectivism that needs to be accounted for. And so I see what’s at the bottom, and this is partly consequence, say, of the insistence that the West is a patriarchal tyranny. The desire is, it’s the Cain and Abel desire. See, Cain was jealous of Abel, not so much because Abel was God’s favorite, but because Abel deserved to be God’s favorite, because he had done things right. And it’s very bitter, it’s very bitter in life to see a gap widening between you and someone else, period. But it’s particularly bitter if you know the gap is widening because the person who is doing well is doing, is actually doing good and doing well. And that implies, at least in eradicating the vagaries and randomness of life, and I’m perfectly aware of those as factors, it’s bad enough to be down, but it’s worse to know that you’re down because you’ve put yourself down. And then you have a choice, which is, do you turn against the ideal itself because it becomes so painful to gaze upon it, or do you destroy the ideal out of vengeance and spite? And that’s a simpler pathway forward than decomposing and deconstructing yourself and being reborn. The Christian idea, for lack of a better word, is that something has to be sacrificed in order for the potential of the future to be manifest in the best possible way. There’s always a demand for sacrifice. The question is what should be sacrificed? And the answer is you. That’s the answer. It’s you that should be sacrificed. And then the question is, well, what part of you? And the answer to that is, well, the part of you that’s not worthy. That needs to be put into the flame. That needs to be burnt off. And that’s a process of death and rebirth. And if there’s lots of you that has become corrupt, then most of what passes through the fire will be burnt off. And that’s terribly painful for people. That’s the desert. Imagine that your essential personality structure is tyrannical. So you’re a rigid ideologue. You’re cast in stone. And so you decide to move from the tyranny. You escape from the tyranny. Well, where do you end up? Well, you don’t end up in the promised land. You end up in the desert for 40 years. And maybe you die there. I mean, even Moses did. So it’s out of the frying pan, into the fire. That’s for sure. And it’s no wonder that people are loath to let go. And then the more tyrannical they’ve become, the more they’ve restricted their possibility and all of that and sold their soul to the dogma of human beings, let’s say, as Solzhenitsyn would describe it. The less there is of them that will be left after everything is stripped bare. And that’s a terrifying possibility. It’s much easier to take the other route. And it becomes easier and easier. And then, well, there are other motivations that pile up as well. Bitterness, the hatred that bitterness can… Because you know you’ve lost your chance, right? You had your chance. And you’ve squandered it. And the feeling of that, I think that’s why Cain tells God after he gets caught, after his murderous act, he says that his punishment is more than he can bear. Because it’s the realization of what he’s done. He’s destroyed his own ideal. And that’s what you do if you’re a collectivist. You destroy yourself as an individual. And that’s all you have. And so there’s nothing in that except, I would say, a continually opening pit of hopelessness and despair. And then that drives bitterness and hatred and desire for revenge and all of that. It’s a terrible cycle. And we’ve seen it play itself out over and over. And we haven’t yet precisely learned from that. So to me, it’s part of an eternal struggle. You know, it’s been outlined as a war in some sense that’s going on in the human psyche since the beginning of time for all intents and purposes. It seems to me, Jordan, that your position is fundamentally a positive one. It’s an affirmation of human dignity, the freedom that dignity demands, and an affirmation of the infinite particularity of human life. If one were to contrast the collectivist thinking on the one hand, one might call it a kind of abstract rationality, as if there’s one solution to fit them. One size fits all, kind of top-down logic. What’s on the other side? What’s the antidote to that in the individual? Yeah, it is particularity. I mean, one of the things I talk about in 12 Rules for Life, and in my lectures, this has become a meme, strangely enough, something that’s widely distributed on the web, partly because there’s a comical element to it. It’s to clean up your room. And everyone laughs about that because I’m taking that seriously. It’s like, well, clean up your room. Everyone’s mother has told them that a thousand times, right? But I try to explain why. It’s like, well, you have a bit of chaotic potential right in front of you. It’s, in some sense, infinite in its potential. And the domain in which you can manipulate that might be rather restricted because of the restrictions that are part and parcel of your existence. But maybe you have your room, and you might think, you might have contempt for that, and so it’s a complete bloody catastrophe. But you don’t have to. You could think, well, I’ve got a little… It isn’t a room. It’s a place of potential. And as soon as you know that, then it’s not your room anymore. It isn’t a room. The room that you see is your preconception of the space that you inhabit. What’s there is a fragment of infinity. That’s what’s there. And what you see is the low resolution consequence of your assumption and lazy habit and blindness. That’s your initial room. And you think, well, no, that’s not the room. See, part of what artists do, for example, when Van Gogh paints a room and you look at it glowing, he’s trying to show you what’s beyond your perception of the room. And I mean this technically. Like, the way that your visual system is set up is that whenever memory and presumption can replace direct perception, it will, because it’s simpler. So you literally see what you expect to see. And if what you see is dull and drab and boring and pointless and uninspiring, then that’s you. It’s not what’s there. And what the artist does when he or she re-represents that mundane reality is to remind you of what’s behind it, the potential that’s there. And so what I’m suggesting to people is that they take the potential that’s right in front of them. It’s like, OK, and here’s the rule. You’re aiming up. There’s something that you could change, that you would change. That might be a very small thing. Could, well, that’s within the grasp of your power. Would is within the grasp of your will. To combine those two things might be very small shift. You might only be willing to make a very tiny step forward. It’s like, fine, good enough. Make a tiny step forward. And that makes you a slight bit stronger than you were before. And then the next step can be slightly larger. And it’s the path of humility. It’s what people act out. So there’s this cathedral. It’s actually, it’s not a cathedral. It’s an oratorio in Montreal. I think it’s the second largest one in the world. It’s set on a hill, at the top of a hill. And there’s a huge staircase leading up to it from the bottom of the hill. And people often who are crippled and who are on crutches and so forth or in wheelchairs go there and make their way painfully up the hill. Or maybe they do that on their knees. And the idea is that they’re struggling incrementally uphill, step by step, despite their burdens, to reach the city of God on the hill. And they’re acting out. That’s life. It’s like the proper aim is the city of God on the hill. And what is that? Well, that’s that place that we talked about already where these levels of responsibility are stacked together harmoniously. So that you’re acting in your best interest and in your family’s best interest and in the world’s best interest. And I would say in the best interests of reality itself, assuming that we have some integral role to play in reality, which is certainly at least true at the human level, that’s the city of God on the hill that beckons to everyone. And you move up that, you move towards that humbly. So that’s one step at a time. And you do it despite your burden and your suffering, all of that. And that’s all dramatized in that. And it’s a perfect drama of that. And would you even say it’s not simply despite your suffering, it’s in and through your particular suffering. One thing that strikes me about clean up your room, clean up your room. Yes. The affirmation of the particularity of your life. I mean, one thing that strikes me about deepest in our human experience is that it is infinitely particular. I mean, you mentioned your granddaughter I mean, the loves, the people, the experiences, the places that were shaped by they’re not places in the abstract, this top down senses if there could be the same kinds of clothes and the same kinds of experience for all human beings. That’s the enemy of the very deepest truth of our human experience, which it seems to me is infinitely particular, but not infinitely particular in the sense of which those particularities just go all off into nothingness. Those particulars are precisely our points of access to the transcendent, to the infinite, to that which… That’s where the reality is. Yes. Yeah. Well, so that’s why Jung said that modern men can’t see God because they don’t look low enough. They’re not paying attention to the importance of the particularities because the particularity is where the pen meets the paper, right? And it’s just a tiny dot every like when you’re writing, it’s a dot and then it extends into a line and those transform into words and sentences and paragraphs, but the particular act is where the pen meets the paper. Yes. Yes. Yes. That’s that focal point, right? That’s the center of the cross, by the way. It’s the same thing. Yes. Well, you mentioned the cross. I mean, certainly in the history of the West, one of the ways this comes through is… And in the East too, in Christian theology, is the very notion of the incarnation. What is that to say? But that the infinite is in the particular and that they are co-inherent, that the infinite in fact has no life except in the particular and the particular itself has a relation to or is comprehended by that very infinite. And so it seems to me that what is going on there is an affirmation that every particularity, no matter how tiny itself is revelatory of a transcendent and deep reality. Yes, well, I think it was from the Gospel of Thomas, but I might have this wrong. The kingdom of God is spread upon the earth, but men do not see it. And that’s that infinite possibility in each moment of particularity. And that is what artists, that is what great artists are reminding us of. They’ll take a slice of space and time. Was it Monet who painted the haystacks? He went out into the fields in France and he painted the same haystack like many, many times under different conditions of lighting to show how different it might be. If it’s a haystack, it’s the same thing. But it wasn’t. He paid attention to the particularities. And so what great artists are trying to do is, well, first of all, so imagine a painting. So it’s a painting of a landscape. And so the first thing is that it’s layers of time because the painter has gone out there and seen the landscape and then seen it again and then seen it again and then seen it again and then seen it again. And has to pay attention to the particularities of the light and the color and all of that to represent it properly. So it’s, and the mere fact that he’s done that is it’s the acting out of the idea that in this tiny slice of time and space, there’s something worth attending to for an infinite amount of time. But you can’t because you just can’t do it. But you need to know that you could do it and that it would be worthwhile. And so the painter encapsulates the landscape and then frames it and says, like, look, look through this window at the transcendent that’s behind the low resolution representation of your assumption, the blindness that you the expedient blindness that you by necessity bring to bear to every situation. Remember what’s behind this. Always remember what’s behind this. And that’s what art calls us to do. That’s what beauty calls us to do, is to make contact with that. Then you say, well, the problem with the particularly, the problem with the particularly is that it brings suffering. And the bringing of suffering with particularity can also allow evil to enter the world because that particular suffering can engender bitterness and resentment and hatred and all of those things and the desire to destroy. So the particularity carries with it a tremendous risk and a tremendous burden. And so the answer, the question is, well, how do you tolerate the particularity and take advantage of the potential? And the answer is to make a relationship with the infinite that’s behind the particularity. And that’s the fundamental religious idea is to if you can maintain the particularity, but also stay in contact with what’s transcendent and infinite beyond that, then you can then you have the potential strength to tolerate the catastrophe of what’s limited. And then you get to have your cake and eat it too in principle. Yes, yes. I want to return to education in a moment, but on the way there, as it were, Jordan, I want to ask you, you’ve talked about this, the inflection point. What is the inflection point and how might it be understood relative to what I take to be a very decadent worldview in its last gasps? It seems to me even that many of the frankly, simply slanderous attacks on you personally blatant misrepresentations of the very plain fact of what you’re saying. It seems to me that there’s an animus there that is precisely… Definitely an animus, yes. There’s an animus there, but the question is, where is that coming from? Well, if you look at Derrida, for example, and his critique of the idea of logocentrism, as the central motif of the West, let’s say, and he knew at multiple levels what that critique meant because he knew what logos meant. Logos means embodied truth, and there is, of course, a religious dimension to that. And so he was criticizing the notion of phallogocentrism. So he was going right at the core of the doctrine of the individual. Now, the question is, why might someone do that? Now, I think the reason for that, fundamentally, is that there’s a terrible responsibility that goes along with it. So imagine that you offered people… Here’s the offer. Offer one. You don’t matter. It’s really, say, the narrowest of materialist viewpoints is, you weren’t here, then you were, for a brief period of time, and then you’re gone, and that all washes out in the endless sands of time. Nothing in your life is significant. Nothing about humanity is significant. Nothing about the world itself is significant. It’s all a matter of blind random chance, and it’s all the same in the end. Who cares in a million years? And the price you pay for that is insignificant. But the advantage that you gain from that is that, fundamentally, you have no responsibility because nothing you do matters. And so then there’s no moral burden. There’s no obligation. And, of course, if you can gather expedient pleasure while you’re deteriorating pointlessly, then that’s all to the good. So it’s a libertinism as well. And that’s inviting, obviously, because short-term pleasure is, by definition, inviting. And so you can abandon any pretension to a relationship with the infinite and consider that only a sign of delusion and weakness. Assume that your life is material and irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. And then you can shrug off all responsibility and pursue short-term pleasure. Well, there’s some real advantages in that. It’s a very easy pathway. The alternative is, as far as I’m concerned, is no, you don’t understand. You are the center of the world. Past center of the world. It has many centers. And you do partake in this process of casting the potential of the future into the reality of the present and the past. That’s what your consciousness does. And the quality of what you produce is dependent on the ethics of your choice. Your choice between good and evil in every moment is what determines the course of the world. And that’s on you. It’s like, well, that’s deeply meaningful, but it’s unbelievable. It’s ultimate responsibility in the literal sense. And I think that in order for us to set things right, we have to understand that we have to take on that burden of ultimate responsibility. Not only as if it’s ours, which it is, but as if there isn’t anything better that we could do. And one of the things that I found so gratifying about the lecture tour that I’ve been doing, and why I keep doing it, the live events in particular, because we’ve done about a hundred of them now so far, is that when I explain to the audiences, and this is especially true, it seems to be especially true of men, but of young men, but not so young even, to say, look, you have an ethical obligation to lift the heaviest load you can possibly conceive of. And that’s the primary call to adventure in life. And that call to adventure is so worthwhile that it justifies the particularity. Everybody, it’s like lights go on. They think, oh, I see. So you need a meaning to set against the suffering and to protect you against that temptation towards malevolence. You need that. Well, where’s the meaning to be found? Well, it’s not happiness. It’s not short-term pleasure. It’s not self-development. It’s not self-esteem. It’s none of those things that are so focused on the individual psyche even. It’s literally the stumbling uphill towards the city of God with your burden. People go, well, that’s where the meaning is. And they know that because they know responsible people. They know they admire responsible people. They already got that. Say, well, that’s what you should become. And not only that, that’s what you could become because that’s what you are in the deepest sense. Yes. Would you say that the antidote to nihilism is meaning? And if so, I think you’ve described yourself, Jordan, as you’ve said, I think that you’re the surfer, not the wave. And I suppose I want to ask you, what is the wave? Because it seems to me we’re at a moment of very great cultural potential. And it could go any number of ways. But that the very fact of what one might call the Jordan Peterson phenomenon worldwide, your book translated into dozens of languages, your lecture halls packed, is a sign of a longing, a self-conscious longing for meaning. How would you describe what that wave is that you didn’t create but that you are speaking to? Some of it’s technological. So I would say that wave has got multiple levels. So we could start from what’s most obvious, and that would be the medium rather than the message. So I, and these people that I’ve been associated with, this intellectual dark web group, we’re in the fortunate position of being early adopters of extraordinarily powerful technologies. And the technologies are twofold. There’s online video and then there’s podcasts. And so they’re technologically revolutionary in a variety of ways. So online video is revolutionary because it brings something closely akin to a live performance to an infinitely large number of people on demand permanently. So then you think, well, what’s the advantage of a book? Well, it’s permanent. It’s relatively low cost. It’s easily distributable. Right? So well, what’s the advantage to online video? Well, it’s inexpensive. It’s not inexpensive. It’s free. It’s far easier to produce than a book. Like the lag time from video to publication is the day. Like we could put this online today instead of the three-year lag that a book would require. And then far more people can watch and listen than can read because reading is a minority ability in some sense, really fat, real expert level reading. You know that because such a tiny minority of people buy books and people are made uncomfortable by books. They’re intimidated by them. Even if they have the intelligence in principle to do the reading, it’s not part of their cultural milieu. That’s a small minority of people. And so all of a sudden online video allows the spoken word to have the same impact as the written word. And that’s deadly. That’s a Gutenberg revolution. And then with podcasts, that’s even magnified because you don’t have to sit and watch a podcast. You can walk around. You can exercise. You can do the dishes. You can drive. Many people who come to my lectures are like long haul truckers and guys who run forklifts. And they’re in their machinery all day. And all they do is listen to podcasts. And they can listen to the podcasts because more people can listen than can read. And maybe way more people can listen than can read. We have no idea. Maybe the potential market is 10 times as big. And so they can do it when they want to. They can also do it in private. If you read and you’re on a subway, people can tell you’re reading. If you’re sitting at home and reading, well then you’re with a book. And if you’re uncomfortable with a book, you think that’s pretentious or presumptuous or part of a class that you don’t belong to or anything that makes you feel inferior. Well, you can just circumvent that. You listen in private. And so people are taking that opportunity like mad. And so that’s part of the wave, let’s say, that technological revolution in communication that’s illustrated that people have far more depth and capacity to concentrate than anyone would have imagined. You even see this with Netflix and HBO. It used to be on TV there was an idea that while a movie was about as long as you could attract people’s attention for 90 minutes, that’s the most the typical person could concentrate for. That turned out to be complete rubbish. People will follow these incredibly complex, like literary level narratives, Breaking Bad for example, that has multiple characters following multiple streams of development for endless hours and they’ll binge watch it. So we have way more capacity for sustained concentration than we thought. And these new bandwidth, unlimited technologies are revealing that to us. And I happen to be an early adopter of this. And so that’s part one of the wave. And then there’s the message part. And it has something to do with, see our culture for a very long time has articulated out a right of rights. You have rights. You need to demand them. You need to claim them. It’s like, but that’s half the story. And it’s not the most salutary half because it turns out that the meaning in your life isn’t the consequence of the claiming of rights. Rights are in some sense what other people owe you. I know there’s more to it than that. But it’s that in large part. Well, you can just get what you’re owed. It’s like, no, that’s not where you’re going to find your meaning. What you’re going to find, where you’re going to find your meaning is responsibility, which is the other half of the rights responsibility equation. And people don’t know that. This is the, what would you call, this is where, this is where, this is the point where things come together properly. You need a meaning in your life to forestall the suffering and to make you strong enough to resist malevolence. Where’s the meaning to be found? Rights, impulsive pleasure and happiness. No. Responsibility. Oh, who would have guessed that? It’s not part of the narrative because the responsibility narrative even is usually about duty or patriotism or something like that, which is okay. But it’s an ideological narrative too in its own right. This is different. It’s like, no, you don’t understand is that what makes life worth living is to pick up the, to take its catastrophe and embrace it and carry it and to realize through that process who you are. So one of the things I figured out in this lecture tour, there’s this old idea that you go into the abyss. It’s a Nietzschean idea that you can gaze into the abyss. You gaze long and what you find in the abyss is a monster. Tolstoy wrote about that. That’s the dragon at the bottom of the abyss, let’s say. That’s Satan himself for that matter. And, but if you go into that, into that as deeply as you can, what you find is you find, you find, you find your fragmented father in a comatose condition, in a desiccated and separated condition. And then you revivify that. Well, what does that mean? It means something. It means that if you look in the darkness, you find the light. That’s one thing it means. And that the light really stands out against the darkness, but that the light is to be found in the darkness. So that’s a very interesting thing. That’s a quest narrative. But it means more than that. It means something fundamental. So we know, for example, that if you take yourself out of your current state of predictability and safety, you put yourself in a new situation, you’ll learn, right? You’ll incorporate new information. So that’s a cognitive issue. But that isn’t all that happens. What happens is that new genes turn on within you and code for the production of new proteins. That happens neurologically. New parts of you turn on. And so the idea is that if you can move yourself out into the world and push yourself out against a maximum array of challenges, more and more of you turn on, turns on. And then the question would be, well, what would you be if all of you that could be turned on was turned on? And the answer would be, you would be the resurrection of the ancestral father. That’s what you would be. And so that’s why Christ says, I am the way and the truth and the life. And no one comes to the father except through me. What that means is that if you take on the unbearable burden of being voluntarily, then that transforms you into the ancestral father. And that’s true. And so that’s unbelievably optimistic because what it’s so interesting because it’s dark beyond belief, right? To say, well, the world is characterized by suffering and by malevolence of a depth that’s virtually beyond comprehension. But if you choose to comprehend that, what you discover in that is the light that destroys the darkness. And that’s, well, that’s really something to discover. It’s the discovery that, there isn’t a discovery that’s more profound than that. That’s the search for the Holy Grail or the Philosopher’s Stone, all of that. Isn’t that the search and indeed the finding that every human being is made for? What I want to ask you, Jordan, is about the role of education here. So it seems to me that the meaning that people are finding in your work, that you can listen to in a podcast while you’re doing a long run drive across the prairies or wherever it may be. But it seems to me that the deconstruction of our culture by a world view that has denied the integrity of the individual, that has denied the individual’s relation to the transcendent, to any stable knowing, denied the dignity of the individual, that that deconstruction, it’s not for no reason that the postmodern view calls itself deconstruction, that has very deconstructive effects in my view in the world. It seems to me that the rebirth of, or the renaissance of a more adequate, a more fully human culture depends on more than, it depends on institutional life. We need cultural forms, we need architecture. There’s all kinds of, a full culture is a complex, an infinitely complex structure. But I think we’ve, as it were, deleted out the memory banks in so many profound ways. And so what I’d like to ask you about is the- We still have the libraries. We still have the libraries. Well, thank God for that. Well, thank God for that. And that’s where I want to turn to education because you say, in one point you say that we need to rescue the treasure trove of the past, rescue the values of the treasure trove of the past and integrate them. And I suppose I’d like to ask you about the role- That’s what the universities are for, is to remind people, to lead people to doing that. I mean, we wandered around Cambridge today and you showed me King’s Chapel, for example, which is so beautiful that it’s just beyond belief. And that’s a call, right? That it’s a call to a mode of being. Socrates believed that all learning was remembering. And it’s true in the sense that we just discussed, is that through encounter with the tragedy of life and the malevolence of life, that more of you will come to manifest itself. But that can be facilitated by your incorporation of the greatness of the past. So you say, well, each great philosopher, each great thinker is a fragment of the ultimate ancestral being. It’s a fragment of God the Father, let’s say. And you get a fragment from Nietzsche and you get a fragment from Plato and you get a fragment from Wittgenstein and you get a fragment from Shakespeare. And there’s something, imagine this, there’s something that makes all those people great. It’s whatever greatness is. And it’s broken up across all of them. But if you experience, if you’re exposed to each of them, then you absorb what you’re exposed to and have the possibility to imitate and absorb that greatness across its fragmentation, across many people. And then that can come to awaken that within you. And that is the purpose of the universities. And the reason for that, it isn’t something casual. It’s like, well, it’s good to be more, if you go to university and you take a humanities degree, you’ll come out more well rounded. You know, that’s not the, that’s not, it’s such a weak way of putting it. It’s that, no, you wake up and realize who you are and then you’re ready to take the world on your shoulders. And that’s what the universities are here. And that’s what students are dying for that. That’s why men are abandoning the universities is because that call isn’t there. Yes. Well, there’s no answer to the call. You might say that it seems to me that the wave is the longing, the longing for that call to be answered. And it seems to me that our universities have failed us and ultimately failed us. Well, they’re doing it. Exactly. They’re antithetical to it. You might call them the water main that is distributing a worldview that is corrosive of what is best in the human being. Well, the doctrine, so one of the fundamental doctrines of the collectivist leftists, especially on the feminist end of things, is the idea that Western culture is a patriarchal tyranny. And so first of all, we could say, well, that’s inappropriate psychologically because the way that you represent culture archetypically is with the tyrant and the wise king. And so you can say that there’s the tyrant and that’s always true, but you also have to say that there’s the wise king, but there’s no wise king. There’s only a tyrant. Okay. And that tyrant is, that’s all men. It’s all male. And so, and so then, and so that’s a view of history, right? Is that the view of history is that, well, women have been, you know, the primary force of oppression in relationship to women throughout history has been men. No idea about the cooperative endeavor of men and women or their mutual desire to lift each other out of misery, which is a much more accurate way of representing history and a much more grateful and appropriate way. None of that. No, it’s a patriarchal tyranny and men are responsible. Okay. Well, so where does that leave young men? Well, let’s say young men are attempting to manifest competence in the world and to become good people. Well, there’s no good and there’s no competence. There’s only power and it’s related to the patriarchal tyranny. And so that conflation of competence with power, which is an absolutely pathological move in my estimation, is also the desire to discourage and to devalue and to destroy. And partly it’s based on fear because the idea would be, well, a fully fledged man is nothing but a powerful tyrant and therefore dangerous, better to emasculate him completely. So is nothing but harmless. Even though he’s useless, he can’t do anything that’s bad, which is an unbelievably horrifying. That’s the castrating mother, the Freudian castrating mother. That’s the terrible element of the female body politic. That’s the evil queen. That’s the counterpart to the evil king, something we never talk about. So, and that’s what’s facing young men, is that at least they’re discouraged from becoming what they could be. At least they’re not encouraged, but it’s worse than that. They’re actively discouraged. And so the universities have become, they’ve become institutions of active discouragement and especially for men. And so what’s the consequence of that? Well, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Well, it’s obvious. All you have to do is look at the statistics. All the men are leaving. There won’t be a man left in the humanities and social sciences in 15 years at the current rate of gender transformation of the disciplines. And then you see this equally appalling phenomena occurring, phenomenon occurring, which is that virtually all of the female dominated disciplines are politically correct. And I think that the reason for that is that the reasonable women don’t know how to regulate the behavior of the unreasonable women. The benevolent queen can’t regulate the evil queen. And that hatred for the patriarchy that’s the feminist part of the postmodern neo-Marxist monster has decided that emasculated and weak men are preferable to tyrants. And those are the only options because there’s no such thing as genuine competence. What you want to call young men forward to do is to take their place and say, look, you have to understand it’s not just about you. The world will be a lesser place without that which you could reveal to it because of your particularity. And that hole that you leave by the absence of your presence is going to be filled with something terrible, not just something neutral, but something terrible. And that’s on you. And so you have a calling that’s vital. And people need that. They die without that. Yes. It seems to me that the ideology that’s dominant in very much the university is not only destructive in all these ways, but just boring. And that it’s patent inadequacy to our deepest human longings, male, female, of all races and kinds, the deep transcendent longings that we all have, the need for self-knowledge. That ideology is patently inadequate to its satisfaction. What I see in young people today, many, many young people, and I know you see this in the thousands that you encounter, is they’re not interested in fighting some cultural war. They simply want to discover the deepest truth of themselves. And so I want to ask you a little bit about the role of education. We talked about the lighting up and the awakening, the encounter with depth and truth. There’s a certain abstract view of education as though it’s a inert process. You’re just downloading into the mind. But in fact, the nature of our souls is such that it’s a dynamic reality. The room is not just the room. It’s the place in which you encounter yourself in the rule of clean up your room. But it seems to me that that’s what’s going on in all education at its best, and that it’s not enough simply for the library to be there. There needs a certain mediation of the institution. So for example, there’s a piano in the other side of this room. We could say, well, there’s a piano. You’re free to play the piano. But I can’t play the piano. I don’t know the chords and the scales. And yet if I did all that, then what I can make happen on the piano is infinitely richer than if I’ve never learned to play the piano. And I suppose when we talk about rescuing the values of the treasure trove- That’s discipline as the precondition for freedom, right? Which is actually a Nietzschean idea, at least in part. I mean, it’s older than that. It’s the apprenticeship idea. It’s that before you can be a painter who can paint what’s beyond mere memory, you have to inculcate that discipline skill. And a lot of that is painful repetition and hard grinding work. It’s the sacrifice of the present for the future. But once you manage that, then things open up. And virtually everything you learn of value is like that. It’s very, very, difficult to learn to write. And there’s arbitrary rules that you have to follow and bind yourself to. And while you’re learning those rules, the probability that you have any creative freedom to speak of or any facility with the rules is very low. You’re a rank beginner. And even to some degree, whatever creativity you have is going to have to be stifled while you’re passing through that keyhole. But if you pass through it, then something massive opens up on the other side. And it is definitely the case that disciplinary institutions, universities, are exactly that. Is there places of guidance and there are places to encourage people to develop the discipline that’s necessary to see beyond the discipline. I mean, that’s why we have disciplines, right? I mean, the words aren’t there by accident. You have to narrow yourself first, and then you can broaden outward. And that’s part of the process of maturation. That’s part of the sacrifice of childhood. Say, in childhood, you’re nothing but potential, but it’s not realized and you don’t know how to realize it. And so then the question is, well, how do you get to a point where you realize the potential? And the answer is you sacrifice almost all of it to a single direction. This is Nietzsche’s commentary on the Catholic Church. He’s a great admirer of the Catholic Church, despite the fact that he was also a radical critic of Christianity. So the thing about the Catholic Church is that it forced everything to be interpreted within a single explanatory framework. And that was a discipline. And once that discipline was established, then the disciplined mind could explode in every direction, which is precisely what happened. And so, and that’s the thing about growing up, is that when you’re a teenager and a young adult, you have to sacrifice everything you could have been as a child to be the one thing that you’re aiming at. But then that opens up and the universities are part and parcel of that process. And you need the guidance because the library is too large to wander through it unaided. Yes, and I think that comes down to the question of what you need to, what are the books that can be read to be transformative? I mean, the otherness that realizes and that awakens and opens up the self that turns those lights on is not just a random otherness. I mean, you can look at a brick wall all day and never get anything like what we get by looking at the King’s Chapel that we just came from a few minutes ago, that the levels of pattern and depth and beauty that are present in that building. That’s a kind of metaphor for what the most wonderful, most fecund texts of our own past offer to us. You know, there they are lying on the shelf, but when opened up and explored fully, they open up in us. There are portals. A book isn’t a book, a book isn’t paper. Yes. That’s your memory, that’s your perception of the book. It’s a portal. And you know, one of the ideas, the postmodern idea is that, well, there’s no canon. And if there is a canon, it’s only there to support the tyrannical patriarchy, because of course the tyrannical patriarchy is the explanation for everything. But I’ve been trying to solve that problem technically with, I have a small staff that’s trying to produce an educational system online, and we’ve been trying to understand, well, what is it that makes a book canonical? There’s actually a technical answer to that. So you imagine that books exist in relationship to one another. That’s a perfectly reasonable postmodernist claim, by the way. Books exist in relationship to one another. Okay, well, some books have hardly any relationship to other books. Those are trivial books. Now, they might be undiscovered works of genius. That’s another possibility, if they’re recently written. But it doesn’t matter, because you can’t separate the wheat from the chaff. At present, it’s too difficult. There’s too much chaff. But if you go back into the past, you can rank order books by the degree to which they’ve influenced other books. So it’s like citations, in some sense. And the books that have influenced the largest number of other books are the canonical books. And the ultimate canonical book in the West is clearly the biblical corpus, because it’s influenced virtually everything. And so you have to know it, because it’s implicit in everything else. And so you start there, and so you have that. You have that knowledge, at least to some degree. And it gives you the foundation, the metaphorical foundation, the conceptual foundation, the mythical foundation, that you can use to then, well, then maybe you can now, Shakespeare opens up to some degree, and now Milton opens up to some degree, and Dante opens up to some degree. And you think, well, why should those open up? And the answer is, well, as the social constructionists claim, you’re at least in part a historical creature. Well, then those books are about you. The patterns in those books are the patterns of your perceptions and your actions. And without understanding them, then you don’t know who you are, and you can’t guide yourself properly through life. And so you come into university, and you encounter experts, and they say, look, this is canonical. Why? Because it’s had a disproportionate influence on everything else. So there’s something here that you need to know about, because it’s about you. And it isn’t about the you that’s here now, in some sense. It’s about the you that can unfold across time in the best possible way. So each of those works is a call to adventure. Every painting that’s a great painting, or a building like the King’s Chapel, if that’s not a call to adventure, I mean, what else could it be? We were talking about that. So these ancient buildings, these great ancient buildings that Europe is littered with, these were, people were aiming at something beyond themselves, beyond the span of their lifetime. They engaged in the collective manifestation of these great works to aim, to participate in aiming something at something that was beyond them. It was a divine aim. They had the will to produce this beauty that transcended centuries. You know, and maybe the will that produces beauty is always aligned with that which transcends centuries. Maybe those are the same things in even paintings, oil paintings, you know, they take a moment in time, and they cast it into a permanent form that can be preserved across centuries. And so there’s something about, there’s something about the establishing a relationship with eternity that’s key to the construction of something that’s beautiful, and then that in itself becomes a call to a relationship with eternity. So, and you need that, people, hunger for it. I’m at the University of Toronto, there’s the European Cathedral side of the campus, the older part, and then there’s the modern factory side of the campus, and it’s soul deadening. My building is made out of cinder blocks, you know, and my brother-in-law, who’s his own sort of genius, calls that hosable architecture. Anything could happen there, and you could wash it away. It’s like, and it’s just, it’s, it’s, it’s, I have my students now and then sit in a classroom like that and look at it and tell me how it makes them feel. Random wires hanging from the ceiling, you know, nothing but cinder block, the cheapest form of construction, nothing that’s beautiful, pure, boring, dull, utilitarianism with these bare, shiny desks and terrible fluorescent lighting. It’s like, it’s ugly right to the core, and it’s corrosive, it eats away at the heart of the university, which is about the beauty that’s eternal, and that isn’t optional, it’s not impractical, it’s the most practical, it’s that upon which the idea of practicality itself is predicated, and that’s the university, and people should be flocking to the universities, dying to be educated, because they are dying to be educated. I have dozens of young men who come to me all the time after my talks and say, look, they give me a note, one did last night, here’s the note. Six weeks, six months ago, I was deeply suicidal, I had no reason to live, I was completely nihilistic, I started watching your lectures, I started to adopt a more responsible outlook, I realized that that was important, I started to try to tell the truth and to put myself together, and without that I wouldn’t be here, and that’s a little note, and that happens over and over, you know, and then I go talk to journalists, and this happened in Scandinavia, it happened with this GQ interview I just did, well your message is primarily directed towards young men, it’s like, and there’s this judgment about that, it’s like, oh, there’s a problem with that, is there? I mean, that wasn’t the point, but that is the audience, is what, there’s something wrong with talking to young men and encouraging them, it’s like, that makes me somehow suspicious. The hatred of humanity that is present in that critique is mind-blowing. It is, it’s absolutely beyond belief, and you think, well, it’s only misogyny, it’s like, no, it’s not, it’s like, who are you leaving for the women to have as partners, these demolished and weak men? Well, it’s a zero-sum quality of it, I mean, as if lifting up any human being is not a good for all of us, I mean, that’s the whole point about the necessity of our care for the oppressed, is because they are part of us. No, you only care about them in groups. The individual oppressed person is irrelevant, it’s the group of oppressed people that’s relevant, and so if you just help one person, oh well, you see, then that flies at the heart of the collectivist doctrine. You say something very powerful when you talk about, people should be flocking to the universities, you know, an image that comes to my mind is the image of a fountain, and people come to the fountain to drink, to slake their thirst, and it seems to me that we need new institutions of higher education. That’s the fountain of living water. Yes, yes. That’s why Moses is a master of water in the desert, so he’s not a master of stone, he’s a master of water. Yes, and one thing that really excites me, Jordan, is that what we see right now is this longing, so many thirsty people. It seems to me we simply need to build new fountains, because as you say, the books are in the library. We can give a rebirth to the past in the form of the hunger and thirst that are in young people, simply by feeding it, and that it seems to me that there’s a kind of cultural passivity, particularly when it comes to the university. People say, oh well, you know, you could never do anything about that. Well, you know, the university, they’re just, well, you just have to kind of write them off. Well, why do we have to do that? Why can’t we start new ones? People, there have been thousands of universities started over the years. Well, when the students come into the university and they’ve got this facade of cynicism, you know, that partly because they haven’t had great experiences with the educational system, and it’s no wonder, and partly because… Well, it goes all the way back to the beginning. Yes. I mean, you’ve talked about this in your book, that the university, it didn’t mean to interrupt, but what moves in the whole K-12 educational system in a certain sense was founded, in large part, to bring about that collectivist control and to stultify and to annihilate the freedom of the individual. And so that’s pretty well ingrained by the time someone comes to university, and no wonder they don’t like it. They don’t think they like educational institutions. Yes, well, but they’re still desperate enough to come, and they might say, well, I’m doing this practically because I need a degree to get a job, which is, you know, as… Perfectly reasonable. It’s perfectly reasonable. As a fragmentary ambition, it’s a good fragmentary ambition, but their core is dying for something deeper than that, and they’re coming to university the way that you enter a cathedral properly, if you enter it properly. They come prayerfully. They’re hoping, but they won’t talk to anyone about it. They’re hoping, God, I hope that what I need is here. And if you provide that, then they’re just overwhelmed by it, and then they’re motivated to work and to move and to put themselves together, because it doesn’t take much water to really transform a parts surface, and these young people, they have their cynical facade, and it’s easy to be intimidated by that, because they’re judgmental in their lectures, and maybe they’re not paying attention, and they’re snapping gum, and they’re playing with their computers, but there is part of them that’s at the back listening and hoping that something will emerge that will captivate them, and when that happens, then, well, then that’s when it becomes something absolutely remarkable to be an educator, because then you’re providing guidance, and you’re providing the guidance that’s… Well, that’s the bread that’s more than mere material bread, and then the students are extraordinarily rewarding to work with, because they’re so… It’s not pleased, it’s way more than pleased. They’re so engaged by what’s happening that the whole thing comes alive. That’s when it’s a great thing to be an educator, and it’s been great for me to go on this lecture tour, because… Which is why I keep doing it, is because every evening it’s like that. I get 2,500 people in an auditorium, and I start talking about the things we’ve been talking about, and everybody’s dead silent, and they’re locked onto it, and it’s an unbelievably gratifying process, and then people come up and say, you know, oh, this has been so useful to me, things were so terrible and falling apart in so many ways, and like all of a sudden I’m just stacking these things up and putting them together. It’s so interesting watching the young men who come and talk to me, and it’s young women as well, and not always just so young. Many of the women come and say, thank you very much for what you’ve done for my sons, for example, but the men come up and they say, it’s like they’re telling me a secret, you know, and it’s the sort of secret that you’d only tell an intimate friend that you trusted. It’s like, you know, man, I wasn’t doing so well. These are often rough-looking guys, you know. They say, look, I’ve been really trying to get my act together, you know, I’ve been working it out with my wife, and I’ve been trying to get my relationship with my son straightened out, and here’s my father, by the way, he came along with me, and we’re getting along just fine, and it’s really working, and they say it in a hushed voice, you know, and they say, thank you very much, and I say, great, that’s so great, I’m so thrilled to hear that, and they’re telling me that because they’re hoping that I would in fact be thrilled to hear that, because they want to tell it to someone who would be thrilled to hear it, and I am thrilled to hear it, because I do believe that redemption is something that is accomplished at the level of the individual, and every time you hear someone say that they’ve oriented themselves properly, it’s like a bell rings in heaven, it’s exactly that, and so well, so that’s absolutely and chronically overwhelming, but it’s absolutely remarkable to see this, to see how much desperation there is for this, when I talk to audiences about the relationship between responsibility and meaning, they inevitably go dead silent, there’s not a rustle, there’s not a cough, it’s like, is that the secret, is that the secret, is that it’s the voluntary adoption of responsibility, it’s like, well, that’s the central message of the West, it’s like to pick up your cross and bear it, you know, and everyone’s been told that, but they don’t know what it means, because it’s not been articulated enough, so that it becomes something that’s practical, it’s like, yes, look at the terrible responsibilities you have right in front of you, your family is hurting, you’re in trouble, there’s problems in the world, it’s like, all of that’s right there, and all you have to do is take responsibility for it, and then you’ve got what you need, all of a sudden, you think, oh, that’s what I needed, I didn’t know that, I thought that was something to avoid, it’s an impediment to short-term hedonistic pleasure, you know, and to happiness, there’s nothing happiness about, happy about lifting the suffering of the world onto your shoulders, it’s like, this is way, way better than, happiness isn’t what you feel in the king’s chapel, it’s something so magnificent that happiness pales in comparison, and so it’s, it’s thin, drool happiness, and young people know that, they’re pursuing hedonistic pleasure, and you know, no wonder, but there’s nothing in it that’s sustaining, and all it does is make you cynical, it’s like, is that’s all there is? Another one-night stand? Another, another binge party? You know, and it’s not like I have anything against, in principle, against some of that exuberant, youthful hedonism, but it’s not, if, look, the universities have turned into places of parties, why? Well, because that’s what the students find best to do there, well that’s not good, what you want to offer them is a reason to not party, it’s like, no, you’ve got to understand, you come to this class hungover, you’re not going to be able to get it, you’re not going to be able to write properly, you’re going to pay a price for that hedonism, it’s like, and the price will be too high for you to bear, it’s like, oh well, enough hedonism for me then, like, I’ve got something important to do, that’s the way out of that, but that thing that’s more important has to be offered, and it can be offered, so when I’ve seen it happen over and over to people, and it’s extraordinarily good for them, if you’re an addict, and I’ve talked to many people who are addicted, you need a reason to stop being addicted, which means you need something better than the drug, well, that’s what you offer at universities, it’s something better, it’s something better than everything else, and if you’re not offering that, then it’s all a facade, it’s all a factory, a knowledge factory, which is the modern university, factory knowledge, factory products. It seems to me, and we’ll conclude here, I think momentarily, it seems to me that the time is ripe for a radical and beautiful rebirth of a more fully human culture, and when I hear you speak, Jordan, about your lectures, and what moves me deeply is the love that you have for the people who come to you, and I suppose I want to just conclude on a question about, I want to conclude on an optimistic note by drawing out what’s in that love, it’s that the potential that lies in each and every individual for deep transformation, for connection to the transcendent, and just to talk about that longing, it seems to me that that longing is overwhelming, and if only we can start to refill the fountains with water, or build new fountains, that the possibilities are beyond our imagining. That’s the point we’re at at the moment, that’s partly why this is an inflection point too, because so many things are transforming, that the landscape of possibility is opening up to us in a way that it never has, partly because of our technological transformations, and so the importance of the particularities of our ethical choices are becoming more and more exaggerated, because while we’re going to build artificial intelligence, and it’s going to be a reflection of us, and so we better make sure that it reflects the part of us that we want reflected, and you talked about that care for people, is the care for me is predicated on my realization that I prefer heaven to hell, having done what I could to explore hell, let’s say in my academic career, and in my private life, and in my clinical practice, and to see what’s there, that unnecessary suffering and that malevolence, is like, well, it would be best to move away from that towards something better, that’s something I genuinely believe that it’s for the best for everything that we aim up, and then when I see someone decide to aim up, I think, well, that’s something that’s one more step away from hell. It’s not just the climbing up the hill painfully towards the city of God, it’s move away from the abyss, and I think it’s easier for people to believe in the abyss, it was for me, to believe in the existence of malevolence and apocalypse and catastrophe, I mean, all you have to do is study history to believe that, think, well, not that, anything but that, away from that, well, away from that is amorphous, right, it’s again, it’s like Moses leading his people from the tyranny in Egypt, it’s like, well, where are we going? Well, away from that, well, that’s into the desert, and that’s where we are now, well, that’s not so good, but at least it’s away from that, well, that’s something, but then there’s something beyond that, it’s like, well, what is it that we’re striving towards, and well, we can each imagine that in our own way in some sense, but I would say, well, you start locally, it’s like, fix up what you can fix up, when you see a problem that announces itself to you, a small problem, that’s your problem, that you could fix, that’s your one step forward, take it. Yes, it seems to me, in addition to that life of the individual, we need to think very broadly about the institutional life that supports all of that individual realization and freedom, we need to think about universities, we need to think about our architecture, we need to think about, that is to say that the whole horizon that lies before us needs to be considered for the fullness of possibility that it holds, and that those possibilities are not realizable simply by this individual doing this and that individual doing that, but that they also require a kind of, it requires that we think about the whole, and that we allow to give birth, we allow to come into being the kinds of institutional lives, institutional life that upon which our realization depends, upon which that awakening depends, and so it simply can’t be, simply a matter of living our lives in a kind of solitary way. No, it’s definitely not. To think about what are the fountains on which, if we’re in the desert, it seems to me that, okay, so we’re in the desert, it’s a lonely and dry place, but there… We’re the narrative fragments. Sure, that’s all the deities that Israelites come to worship, the false idols, because the narrative fragments. And that is the precisely the moment, paradoxically, at which we can rediscover ourselves, what our nature, what our longing is for, and so it seems to me that we’re at a time of astonishing possibility, but that we must take it up. Well, hopefully, you know, when you train graduate students and you train undergraduates, you know, you orient them towards the truth, and then they learn to teach in accordance with that, and that facilitates the process that we’re describing, and that they regard the relationship with individual students as of paramount importance, and see the teaching as something that’s noble, and the research as well. Yes, yes, the awakening of each particular individual, say, in an educational institution, is precisely what allows them to go on in 10,000 ways, in 100,000 ways throughout their lives, to transmit and open up those transcendent possibilities. Thank you, Jordan, very much. My pleasure.