Lecture and Q&A with Jordan Peterson (The Mill Series at Lafayette College) (V32WHDuy-Do)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=V32WHDuy-Do

Thank you all for coming. I’m going to begin by introducing Jordan Peterson and then I will talk a little bit about how this event is going to work and then we’ll get underway. So Jordan Peterson has been called quote one of the most important thinkers to emerge on the world stage for many years by the spectator. He has been a dishwasher, gas jockey, bartender, short order cook, beekeeper, oil derrick, bit re-tipper, plywood mill laborer and railway line worker. He’s taught mythology to lawyers, doctors and businessmen, consulted for the UN Secretary General’s high level panel on sustainable development, helped his clinical clients manage depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety and schizophrenia, served as an advisor to senior partners of major law firms, identified thousands of promising entrepreneurs on six different continents and lectured extensively in North America and Europe. He has flown a hammerhead roll in a carbon fiber stunt plane, piloted a mahogany racing sailboat around Alcatraz Island, explored an Arizona meteorite crater with a group of astronauts, built a Native American longhouse on the upper floor of his Toronto home and been inducted into the coastal Pacific Kwakwaka’wak tribe. Malcolm Gladwell discussed psychology with him while researching his books. Norman Deuge is a good friend and collaborator. Thriller writer Greg Hurwitz employed several of his quote valuable things as a plot feature in his number one international bestseller Orphan X and he worked with Jim Bausili, former RIM CEO on a project for the UN Secretary General. With his students and colleagues, Dr. Peterson has published more than 100 scientific papers, transforming the modern understanding of personality and revolutionized the psychology of religion with his now classic book, Maps of Meaning, the Architecture of Belief. As a Harvard professor, he was nominated for the prestigious Levinson Teaching Prize and is regarded by his current University of Toronto students as one of three truly life changing teachers. Dr. Peterson is a Quora most viewed writer in values and principles and parenting and education. He has innumerable Twitter followers and Facebook followers. His YouTube channel now has about a million subscribers and his classroom lectures on mythology were turned into a popular 13 part TV series on TV Ontario. Dr. Peterson’s online self help program, The Self Authoring Suite, has been featured in O the Oprah Magazine, on CBC radio and on NPR’s national website. It has helped over 150,000 people resolve the problems of their past and radically improve their future. Without further ado, please join me in welcoming Dr. Jordan Peterson to Lafayette County. So the way this is going to work is that I’m going to have a conversation with Dr. Peterson for 90 minutes and then there is going to be a 90 minute Q&A. This event is being video recorded and will be published online for non-commercial, non-advertising purposes. During the Q&A session, when you are handed a microphone, please speak directly into it. Our viewers on YouTube will appreciate it. And finally, I am a moderator between Professor Peterson and the audience but also a biased participant in this conversation. Okay. Well, it’s a relief that’s all over. Okay, so I thought we would start things off with this. I assume that many in the audience are curious but relatively unfamiliar with you or have heard a lot about you without ever reading or listening to you. So I thought we might start with you introducing yourself to the audience and maybe telling them some of the main things that you think they might be interested in knowing about you. Well, I guess the most relevant detail is that I spent about 15 years writing this and I worked on it about three hours a day, every day during that period of time. At the same time I was finishing off my doctorate and I started lecturing at Harvard but I was doing that continually and thinking about it continually and reading the material that I needed to read in order to write the book continually as well. I didn’t realize until more recently that what I was doing was at the heart of the postmodern conundrum, I would say. I was very much obsessed by the events of the Cold War for reasons I don’t exactly understand. I had a lot of dreams about nuclear annihilation for years on end. I mean, it wasn’t that uncommon to be obsessed by that when I grew up. I mean, because it was a preoccupation of everyone who was my age, I suppose. There were lots of years, probably between 1962, I would say, probably in 1985, where people were pretty convinced that the probability of a nuclear war was high, much higher than people consider now. I was curious about this. I was curious about why everyone wasn’t obsessed about this all the time, first of all, because it seemed like the fundamental issue that two armed camps were pointing something in excess of 25,000 hydrogen bombs each at each other. I couldn’t understand how anybody could concentrate on anything other than that, since it seemed so utterly insane. And I was curious. What was going on exactly? Was this one explanation was that there’s a very large number of ways that human beings could organize themselves in society, like a large number of games that we could hypothetically play. And they’re all equally arbitrary in an equally arbitrary universe, in that the communists had decided to play one kind of game, and the Western free market democratic types had decided to play another game, and it was all arbitrary in some sense. And so that’s what I was trying to figure out, was what the hell was going on with this conflict? Was it merely a battle between two hypothetically equally valid interpretations of the world drawn from a set of extraordinarily large potential interpretations, which I think would be essentially a postmodernist take on it. And I think I went into the problem neutrally, in that I didn’t think I knew what the answer was. You know, so lots of times when you talk to people who think, or when you talk to people They have an idea and it’s right, and then they write whatever they’re writing to justify the idea. That’s how they look at it. But it’s not a good way to write. A good way to write and think is to have a problem, and then try to solve it, right? To actually solve it, not to demonstrate that your a priori commitment is true. And you know, one of the signs I would say that my a priori commitments weren’t the purpose for the writing was that I walked away from that 15 year project with a view of the world that was completely different than the view that I had going in. And learned all sorts of things, especially about the role of narrative and religious thinking in life that I had no idea was possible when I started. And a lot of that was a consequence of reading the great people who I read deeply. You know, I read all the great works of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the great works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and most of Jung’s collected works, everything that had been published up to that point. And a very large swath of the relevant clinical literature, the great clinicians of the 20th century, and a huge stack of neuroscience, and etc. etc. Because I was reading constantly during this time. I realized some things that I think are true. The communists were wrong. They weren’t, and not just a little bit wrong, and not wrong in some arbitrary way. They were playing a game that human beings cannot play without descending into a murderous catastrophe. And there’s something about what we’ve done in the West that’s correct. And it’s complicated because our cognitive structures, that’s one way of thinking about or our socio-political arrangements, they actually parallel one another in an important way, are grounded in a strange set of axioms. And the axioms aren’t rational precisely, it’s more like they’re narrative. They’re narrative axioms. They’re stories. And the story of the West is that the individual is sovereign over the group. And that that’s the solution to tribalism. And I think that’s the correct solution. Now what that means metaphysically, because it’s also embedded in our religious doctrines, because especially in Christianity, although not exclusively to Christianity, the individual is sovereign, the suffering individual is sovereign. And there’s something about that that’s true at least psychologically. And I don’t know what that might mean metaphysically, because who the hell knows what anything means metaphysically, right? Your knowledge runs out at some point. Anyways, I worked all these ideas out and then I taught for a long time courses that were based on the ideas and the courses were very impactful, I would say. They had the same impact on the people that I was teaching as walking through the material had on me. And while it was out of that, that all this political controversy arose. I mean, I was never focused on political controversy, even though I’m interested in politics. And I thought at many points in my life about a political career. I always put it aside for a psychological and philosophical career, I would say. And but but things started to shift badly in Canada over the last five years. And our government dared to implement legislation that compelled speech. And one of the things that I had learned when I was doing all this background investigation was that there isn’t a higher value than free speech. It isn’t free speech. It’s not the right way of thinking about it, because it’s free thought. And even that’s not the right way of thinking about it, because thought is the precursor to action and life. So there’s no difference between free speech and free life. And I was just not willing to put up with restrictions on my free life. And so I made some videos pointing out the pathology of this doctrine and the fact that the government had radically overreached its appropriate limits. And well then, you know, well, and maybe you don’t know, but I’ve been enveloped in continual scandal since for 18 months as a consequence, which to me as a clinician indicates that I got my damn diagnosis right. It’s not about pronouns. It’s about something a lot deeper than that. And I stand by that. I believe that it’s the case. And I don’t think that we would all be here tonight if that wasn’t the situation. So I wanted my first or my next question to be about Lafayette. And so I thought I would read a couple of Facebook posts that certain students who are critical of you read in the lead up to this event and just ask you to respond to them. So this is a student writing, Lafayette College, I’m utterly disappointed that you’re allowing this to take place on our campus. I thought we went through this last semester with Roaming Millennial. Inviting hateful speakers who make wildly unsubstantiated claims is not going to fly with the student body. I get it. The mill series events are private and not endorsed by the college. But you absolutely have the power to make a statement on this. The fact that you’re not is an embarrassment to our community. If you believe this man is a legitimate source of knowledge because he has a degree in clinical psychology, feel free to ask our psychology department faculty and counseling center staff about the validity of his claims. I’m certain they would not endorse this speaker. Do better in all caps. For those of you unfamiliar, Jordan Peterson is known for denouncing the Me Too movement, claiming that women are in no way marginalized in the West, arguing against the existence of gender neutral pronouns, arguing against gun control in the U.S., and claiming that identity politics and social justice movements are part of a devious Marxist agenda. And then another student responded, and this is briefer, college conservatives know that if they bring in a speaker who is willing to blatantly insult a portion of the audience and the libs get angry enough about this for good reason, then they may get an op-ed written about them in the New York Times. As a result, there are a whole group of hacks like Milo and Peterson who get famous and invited purely for their promise to misgender trans students and advocate provocative but ultimately toothless arguments about social Darwinist race theory. What I’m saying is that you have every right to be pissed. Jordan Peterson is a harmful moron, but know that you being pissed is also 100% at the point of why he was invited. He’s not a conservative, he’s just a guy who’s mildly racist enough to offend college liberals and therefore secure wins for the cultural right. Comparatively mild stuff. It’s the chattering buzz of ideologically possessed demons. So there’s nothing in it that’s not entirely predictable. That’s one of the things you notice when you’re talking to people. If you want to find out whether the person is there or the ideology is there, you listen to see if you’re hearing anything that someone else of the same ideological mindset couldn’t have told you. I’ve had thousands of conversations with people because I’ve spent 20 years as a clinical psychologist. One of the things I’ve learned about people is that they’re unbelievably interesting. If you get someone to sit down and you move past the superficial, which you can actually do quite rapidly, they’ll tell you all sorts of things that only they know that are unbelievably enlightening about their own peculiar problems, about the way they look at the world, about their idiosyncratic familial dynamics. Just fascinating personal stuff. It’s the stuff of great novels. This is ordinary people. I don’t really think there is an ordinary person exactly. The facade of ordinariness, but behind that people are very rarely ordinary. The conversations are almost instantaneously fascinating. One of the guidelines that I used in my clinical practice constantly was, I had this sense, I probably learned this mostly from Carl Rogers, was that if the conversation wasn’t really interesting, then we weren’t doing anything that was therapeutically useful. But all of the interesting elements of it were very, very personal. To replace this, and I learned this mostly from Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his detailed analysis of what I would call ideological possession, he talked about people he met in the Gulag camps who were under the sway of rigid communist orthodoxy, and noted very clearly that it was like there was a crank in some sense on the side of their head, and you could just crank the crank and out would come the ideological dogma, and it’s all entirely predictable. People who are in a situation like that don’t understand that they’re possessed by an idea. Carl Jung said, people don’t have ideas, ideas have people. It’s like, so there’s nothing in that that’s anything other than exactly what you would predict. And then there’s a deeper issue too, and this is one that I think has bedeviled me ever since I made my initial videos, which is, it’s impossible for those on the radical left to admit that anyone who opposes what they’re doing might be reasonable, because what that would mean would be that you could be reasonable and oppose the radical left, and that would imply that what the radical left was doing wasn’t reasonable. And so instead of dealing with the fact that I actually happen to be quite reasonable, the attempt is to assume that anyone who objects must be part of the radical right. It’s like, well, actually, no. There’s lots of space between the radical left and the radical right. There’s the moderate reasonable left, for example, and then there’s the center, and then there’s the moderate reasonable right, and then there’s the far right, and then there’s the extreme right. All of that exists in opposition to the radical left, but it’s very convenient for the radicals on the left to say, oh, well, you don’t buy our doctrine, and then to immediately make the presupposition that you must be the most heinous example of that entire array of potential objections. It’s like, yeah, well, whatever. You know, it’s just not a viable stance. But it’s convenient, and it’s a bad thing because it drives polarization, and that’s a bad thing. But it also doesn’t address the issue. So one of the things that I’ve been thinking about deeply over the last couple of weeks and plan to write about, here’s a mystery for all of you. I don’t care what your political background is. It isn’t like I’m anti-left. I’ve made videos documenting this. I know why there’s a left wing. There’s a left wing because inequality is a problem. It’s a way worse problem than the radical leftists like to admit, because you can’t lay it at the feet of capitalism and the free market. Inequality is a way worse problem than that, but it’s definitely a problem. And because inequality is a problem, you need part of the political structure to speak up to the people who end up arrayed at the bottom of hierarchies. It’s crucial. Someone has to speak for them. That’s the place of the left. But then consider this. So we can state that. The right speaks for hierarchy, and the left speaks on behalf of those who are oppressed by inequality. Good. We need that dialogue. The radical left. We know from 20th century history that things can go too far on the right, no one disputes that, and that things can go too far on the left. We also know that when things go too far, it’s seriously not good. So when things went too far on the right, then we had 120 million people die in the Second World War. And when things went too far on the left, we had God only knows how many people murdered as a consequence of internal repression. At least 100 million. And we risk putting the entire planet into flames. So that’s the consequence. So now, in the aftermath of World War II, let’s say we’ve come to some sort of sociological agreement, I would say, that you can identify the radical right-wingers. When people make claims of racial superiority, you put them in a box and you say, well, you’re outside of acceptable political discourse. And so you saw that with William F. Buckley in the 60s when he started his conservative review. He dissociated himself from the David Duke types, and you saw it more recently with people, for example, like Ben Shapiro, who immediately distanced himself from the Charlottesville types. Okay, so now we kind of have a sense of where you’ve crossed the damn line in your ethno-nationalism. Right? As soon as you move into the racial superiority domain, ethnic superiority domain, it’s like, no, you’ve got to be dangerous. All right, here’s a question. Where the hell do you cross the line on the left? Exactly. Well, the answer is who knows? Well, that’s not a very good answer. I would say it’s incumbent on people in the center and in the moderate left to say, look, things can go too far on the left, and here’s how we know that’s happened. And that hasn’t happened at all. Now, I think there’s a reason for that. I think there’s a technical reason as well as a motivational reason. Two technical reasons. It’s harder for people on the left to draw boundaries, because people on the left aren’t boundary drawing types. They’re boundary dissolving types, temperamentally speaking. So that’s a problem. The second problem is it doesn’t look to me like there is a smoking pistol on the left. That’s as obvious as racial superiority doctrines. You know, it’s like, in Canada, there’s a lot of push for this triumvirate of radical ideas, diversity, inclusivity, and equity. Which diversity, it’s like, well, who’s against that? It’s like being against poverty. Inclusivity, well, yes, of course we want people included. But equity, that’s a more bitter pill to swallow, because that’s equality of outcome. And for me, that’s a marker. It’s like if you’re talking about equality of outcome, you’ve gone too far. And if you’re talking about diversity, inclusivity, and equality of outcome, equity, then you’ve gone too far. And you might disagree. You might disagree. That’s fine. Disagree. If that isn’t the marker for going too far, then what’s the marker? Because obviously you can go too far. And obviously that’s not good. And to close on that, I would also say to the people on the moderate left, if you want your doctrines to have purchase and to continue to speak for those who stack up at the bottom of inevitable hierarchies, then you owe it to yourself to dissociate yourself from the dangerous radicals, because otherwise they invalidate your ideas. And that doesn’t seem to be, you’d think the Democrats might have learned that in the last election, but they haven’t. They haven’t learned that. So that’s my spiel about those comments, I guess. So you’ve changed the lives of many young people and adults in this country, in the Anglosphere, in the West, in the world. You have a massive following. My girlfriend’s parents call you Uncle Jordan, for example. On the other hand, and this is just a fact, tons of people on the left, as we’ve just seen, because of your power and also your frontal attack on a lot of their views, hate you and viciously caricature you. Then there are these other figures, like Jonathan Haidt and Robbie George. They have a lot in common with you. They are respected academics. They are at least relatively well-known outside academia. They share your critiques of the humanities, of student activists, of trends in Western culture. They don’t have nearly the following that you do, but they also aren’t as hated or viciously caricatured. Moreover, they may have changed the minds of more people on college campuses. That is, people on campuses who have some sympathy for left activists or who may agree with much of what you say but react negatively to confrontation and harsh criticism. Haidt has appealed to such individuals by taking the Dale Carnegie win friends and influence people approach. So my questions are, first, do you agree with this dichotomy? Second, did you consciously choose one path over the other, and if so, why? Well, I mean, with Haidt, for example, there’s more power to him as far as I’m concerned. He has a different temperament than me. He’s more introverted. He’s less volatile, I would say. He’s probably more agreeable or more polite anyways. And I think that what he’s doing is extremely effective, especially from the perspective of very carefully documenting the empirical facts about the ideological, what, the ideological, the increasingly left leaning ideological tilt of campuses, which is something that needs to be explored on empirical grounds. So, like I said, more power to him and there’s nothing wrong with being reasonable. And then you asked, well, is that the right pathway for me? It’s like, well, apparently not. What happened when I made my initial videos was that, you know, I had, I’d spoke, I’d talked to people a lot. I’ve worked with people a lot about negotiation. It’s one of the things that I specialized in, I would say, in my clinical and consulting practice was teaching people how to negotiate. And I can tell you some things about negotiating that you might find interesting and useful. The first is you can’t negotiate from a position of weakness. So all of you who are going to be developing your careers in the future, you need to understand that if you want to push your career forward, well, first of all, that you do in fact have to push it forward because if you’re competent and silent, you will be ignored. And you know, that’s rough because you might think, well, people should reward you because you’re competent. And yes, of course they should. But if you’re competent and silent, then you’re just not, you’re not a problem. You’re just part of the background that’s keeping everything functioning. And so if you want to develop your career in terms of promotion, say, and salary is you have to be competent and you have to be strategic. And to be strategic when you negotiate for a new position or for a new salary, you have to be able to say, if you don’t give me what I want, then something you don’t like will happen to you. And what that means, it’s not a physical threat. It’s that you have an option. So you have your CV, your resume and order, right? You’re educated and competent and desirable to people outside of your immediate job. You’re willing to instantly put yourself in the job market and undergo the stress of finding a new position and undergoing interviews and all of that. And you have that all planned out so that when you go talk to the person that you’re negotiating with with regards to your salary, you’re credible. And you see, because they, it’s very seldom that you’re talking to the person who’s at the top of the pecking order, let’s say. What you need to do with them is to tell them a story that they can tell to their boss to make you not a problem. And one good story is, look, we really need this person because they’re hyper competent and they have a better offer. It’s like, well, then you’re going to win the negotiation. But if you go in there with no power, well, you’re going to lose, obviously. So the first thing that you need to know if you’re going to negotiate is that you have to be able to say no. And what no means is that you’re not going to do it. And when I made the videos about Bill C-16, I thought it through. And I thought, there’s no damn way I’m following this law. I don’t care what happens. And I didn’t say that lightly. I thought it through. I thought, okay, well, let’s assume the worst case scenario and the worst case scenario would be that a student would report me to the Ontario Human Rights Commission and then they would do an investigation. Then they would find me guilty because the Ontario Human Rights Commission finds 99% of the people brought to it guilty because that’s what totalitarians do. And then I would refuse to pay the fine or cooperate with whatever the re-education they would put me through would be. And then that would move to civil court. And then I would be fined for contempt. And then it would, you know, then the whole legal catastrophe would unfold. And I thought, well, I could either do that or I could allow the government to regulate my speech. It’s like, nope, that’s not happening. So you might think about that as confrontational. And it is confrontational. It’s like there isn’t a goddamn thing that can be done to me to make me allow the government to compel my speech. That’s not happening. And the reason for that, I believe the reason for that, is because I spent decades studying totalitarianism. It’s not good. And the way the totalitarian states develop is that people give up their right to be, their right to exist with their own thoughts. They lie. That’s what happens is that individuals sacrifice their own souls to the dictates of the state. And then everything goes badly sideways. It’s like, and you think, well, how much evidence for that do we need? You know, you’re looking at a quarter of a billion deaths. It’s like, isn’t that enough? Well, the people that I read who were profound, Viktor Frankl is a good example for beginners if you want to read about this sort of thing, he wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning. And Frankl and also Solzhenitsyn and a variety of other commentators as well, who really looked into what happened in both in Nazi Germany and in the communist states. Their conclusion was universal. The truth is that the lies of the state, the lies and tyranny of the state are aided and abetted by the moral sacrifice of the individual. It’s not top down. The Nazis are telling you what to do and you’re all innocent and obeying. That’s not how it works. You falsify your being bit by bit and you end up where you don’t want to be. And that’s a bad idea. And if you’re interested in that, there’s a great book called Ordinary Man. You read that and you won’t be the same person afterwards, so I would beware of reading it. But it’s a story about these policemen in Germany. So they were middle-aged guys, you know, and they grew up and were socialized before the Nazis came to power. So they were just your typical middle-class policemen. And they were brought into Poland after the Nazis had marched through and charged with keeping order in the occupied state. And they knew, their commander knew that it was going to be brutal because they were in war, wartime, and they regard the Jews, for example, as enemies. And so there was going to be a fair bit of rounding up with all of that, with all of what that implied. And the commander told the policemen that they could go home if they wanted to, that they didn’t have to participate in this. And then what ordinary men does is document their transformation from ordinary policemen, the sort of people that you know, to guys who are taking naked pregnant women out into the middle of fields and shooting them in the back of the head. And it documents one step at a time how an ordinary person turns into someone like that. You think, well, we don’t want that sort of thing to happen anymore. Well, then you don’t want to be that sort of person. That’s how it’s fixed. And if you’re not going to be that sort of person, then you don’t take the first steps. Because the first steps lead you down a pathway that, at least in principle, you don’t want to go. So, well, I think part of what makes me combative, say, compared to someone like Haidt, is that I’ve spent years looking at the worst things there are to look at. And I’ve learned from that. And I’ve certainly learned things that I won’t do. And one of them is, I won’t let the government regulate my speech. It’s a mistake. I don’t care what compassionate principles hypothetically motivate that move. It was unprecedented in English common law, that move. It was all buried under this leftist compassion, which is mostly a lie. So I have reasons, I think, other than those that motivate someone like Jonathan Haidt, to be particularly passionate about this issue. On the subject of totalitarianism, I wanted to do something very quickly. So I’m guessing that even though most people in the room have negative views of both men, they have a more intensely negative view of Hitler than of Stalin. I’m guessing almost everyone in the room has a far more negative visceral reaction to the swastika than to the hammer and sickle. Some of the protesters at your event at McMaster University stood behind a banner with a hammer and sickle. You’ve said that a hammer and sickle is no funnier than a swastika, that, quote, the reprehensible ideologies that are based in fundamental Marxism killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century, unquote. I’ve discussed this proposition with numerous people in recent months, and almost no one seems to buy it. No one disputes the body count under socialist regimes. Few dispute that Stalin was a vicious murderer, roughly on par with Hitler in moral terms. Most think that communism should not be tried again. In other words, they share your critique of the argument that previous communist experiments did not represent proper communism and that proper communism should be tried. Nevertheless, they still disagree with you that we should react as negatively to the hammer and sickle as we do to the swastika. Why? Because, they say, the two ideologies are not morally comparable. National socialism is much worse morally than Marxism or Marxism-Leninism. So what do you say to this? Well, I would say the first thing is that it’s highly probable that you were talking to intellectuals. Students? Well, we’ll call them budding intellectuals. It is a mystery, you know. It is a mystery, because it is the case that there is something about the Nazi doctrine that seems to have a visceral impact that the communist doctrine doesn’t have. And I said when I opened my remarks tonight that it might be the issue of racial superiority. It’s something single that you can put your finger on. Whereas what’s happening on the left that’s horrifying is murky. It might even be multi-dimensional. Maybe there isn’t a single radical leftist idea that’s murderous like the racial superiority doctrine. Maybe it’s a combination of three or maybe it’s some set of four out of ten. Who knows? Because of that, it doesn’t seem as repugnant. And there was also a universalizing tendency among the communists that seemed to be less morally reprehensible than the ethno-nationalism of the Nazis. So you think, if you go back to 1914, it’s complicated, but if you go back to, say, 1918, at the time of the Russian Revolution, it’s not like the communists knew that their attempts to bring about the socialist utopia would be doomed to absolute murderous catastrophe. They were working in ignorance. Now it’s not that simple, because by that time Dostoevsky had already written The Devils, The Possessed, and he outlined very, very clearly what he thought would happen if people like that got the reins of power. And Nietzsche had done the same thing in his writings. So people knew that there was something toxic, let’s say, and deadly about the doctrine. But it hadn’t been played out on the world stage. But now, it’s like, well, this is why I said what I said at the beginning. Fine. Now, if… I don’t know exactly how to make the moral distinction, but it’s a distinction that has to be made. I think that people who apologize, who say something, like, I think that it’s virtually… I don’t know if it’s as reprehensible to say that a given ethnic group should be consigned to the fire and to say that wasn’t real communism. But they’re damn close. And when I hear someone say that wasn’t real communism, I know what they mean. What they mean was, if I was the dictator in Stalin’s shoes, I personally would have brought in the utopia. That’s what that statement means. Or it means an ignorance of history that’s so utterly appalling that any political statement made on behalf of that person whatsoever should immediately be followed by a paroxysm of extreme embarrassment. May I say one… I just want to be clear that these students were conceding that they don’t agree. They share your critique of the… They don’t share it enough. Oh, okay. Fair enough. I just wanted to make that clear. So they would more or less agree with what you just said, I think, about it’s not okay to say those regimes weren’t proper communism and that proper communism should be tried. They still dispute, though, that socialism as an ideology is on par with Nazism. So I just wanted to make that clear. Well, we could say communism, let’s say. We could say radical leftist ideology. As I said already, there are reasons for the left and the right wing. The right wing stands for hierarchy and the left wing stands for those who are displaced by hierarchy. An endless problem. But that doesn’t mean… That still leaves it in the camp of the people speaking on behalf of egalitarianism to figure out just what the hell went wrong and to take some responsibility for it. It’s no joke. And we see these things play out continually. Still, look at what happened to Venezuela. Here’s a fun story. Do you know that it is now illegal for physicians to list starvation as the cause of death for a Venezuelan child in a hospital? That’s how they’re dealing with the fact of starvation. Right? You just make it illegal to have that diagnosed as your cause of death. That’ll solve the problem. It’s like, you know, we have a group of well-meaning socialists in Canada who just produced something called the Leap Manifesto a couple of years ago. And it’s a pretty radical document. They’re trying to move our socialist party, the NDP, New Democratic Party, towards the acceptance of this Leap Manifesto, which doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. But they were all radical promoters of the Venezuelan government before everything went like, badly sideways. You know, I think the average Venezuelan now has lost 17 pounds. That’s not because they were put on a voluntary dieting program. Right? It’s not good. And so if you’re tilting towards the left and you’re temperamentally inclined that way, and half the population is, then you have an ethical problem on your hands, which is how do you segregate yourself from the radical policies that produced the catastrophes of the 20th century? Then you can’t just say, well, that’s not my problem. It’s like, well, OK. If it’s not your problem now, it certainly might become your problem in the future. So and I would say it’s actually everybody’s problem. In the aftermath of the 20th century, it’s everybody’s problem. So it’s complicated. There is a genuine desire. I worked for a socialist party for quite a while when I was a kid. And I saw both sides of it. I saw some very, very admirable people. I was privy for a variety of chance reasons to the leadership of the socialist party in Canada at the provincial and the national level. I met the people who ran the provinces, some of the provinces, and who ran the party. And a lot of them were really admirable people. Like they’d spent their whole life, I would say, working on behalf of the working class. You know? So they were genuine labor leaders. And there was also a lot done in Canada on the left that looks like it was actually pretty good. Standard work week, the establishment of pensions, the introduction of our health care system, which I would say probably overall works better than the American system, although not at the upper end. And they were working hard on behalf of people who had working class lives. But then I also encountered the sort of low-level activist types, and I didn’t have any respect for them at all. I just thought they were peevish and resentful and irritable. And those two things exist in a very uneasy coalition on the West. There’s care for the poor and hatred for the successful. And those two things aren’t the same at all. And it looks to me like one of the things that really happened when the communist doctrines were brought into play, and also, by the way, we did the multinational experiment, right? It doesn’t matter where you put these policies into play, the same bloody outcome occurred. It didn’t matter whether it was Russia or China or Cambodia or Vietnam or to pick a random African country or Cuba or Venezuela for that matter. It was an unmitigated catastrophe. And so to me, that’s experiment plus replication. Enough. Enough. Well, that has to be dealt with, and it’s not… left in the West has been absolutely appalling in their silence on the communist catastrophe. Like for my students, a lot of my students really haven’t heard about anything that happened in the Soviet Union in any detail until they take my personality class in the second year of university. It’s like, well, what the hell? Why are they learning about that in a personality class in the second year of university? That should be first and foremost in their historical knowledge, what happened in the 20th century. I mean, it was almost fatal what happened, and we still haven’t completely recovered from it, right? I think, isn’t your president, Donald Trump, going to talk to like insane totalitarian number one sometime here in the near future? But that’s still a Soviet era state. Those people are armed to the teeth. You know, they have the weaponry that could easily take you out. And so we’re not… I don’t know if you know. Do you know what happens if you blast a single hydrogen bomb 100 miles above the United States? Just one. You lose all your electronics. Right. They’re all done. Tractors, cars, trains, subways, computers, phones, all of them burn out. And that’s it. So we’re not done with this yet. And the Korean state, North Korea, is an emblematic representative of the communist catastrophe. Everyone there starves. There’s millions of people died 20 years ago. It’s not got any better. So it’s not like we solved this problem. And there’s a deafening silence on the intellectual side of the spectrum with regards to what happened on the egalitarian left. And there’s no excuse for it. So… Relatedly, I think it’s fair to say that even though you have criticized segments of both the left, social justice warriors, and the right, the alt-right, your critical commentary over the last year and a half has focused significantly more on the left than on the right. A lot of people I’ve talked to here at Lafayette take issue with that. They say that we’re so far from a Marxist takeover of our culture and political institutions that to suggest otherwise is to engage in a classic kind of right-wing exaggeration and hysteria that we’ve seen before in Western countries in the early to mid-20th century. They also say, and this is important to them, that the nationalist authoritarian right poses more of a threat to freedom of the individual than the left does today, as it has in the West since the early 20th century. They argue that the left may have sway in the academy and large segments of the media, but nationalist right parties, figures, and movements with authoritarian tendencies have risen, become potent, and often been victorious in recent years. And they point to Trump, Brexit, the National Front. Pointing to Trump is rather pointless. I mean, I don’t know what Trump is, but to think of him as a figure of the radical right is a little on the absurd side. So I mean, we are polarizing. And so who God only knows where the ultimate danger will come from. If it’s the ethno-nationalists on the right, or if it’s the radical leftists on the left, who knows, right? I suspect to some degree that’s a matter of happenstance. I mean, that’s what you’d expect if you looked at 20th century history. But I emerged out of the academy, and the academy, like there aren’t right-wing people in the academy, not to speak of. That’s completely, that’s thoroughly documented. And it’s certainly not the case in a country like Canada. There’s no threat whatsoever in Canada from the radical right. It’s like, I don’t know if you rounded up everybody who was in the radical right in Canada, you might be able to scrape up like what, 3,000 or 4,000 people, if you really, like if you really worked at it. You know, so I just don’t see that, at least in my own country, that’s just a non-issue. It’s a non-starter. I mean, the last time there was any kind of radical right-wingers in Canada was probably in Quebec in the 1950s, and maybe from the 1930s to the 1950s, but it’s never been a political issue. What about the AFD or the Italian, I can’t remember the name of the Italian party, the National Front in France, where would you put, would you? Oh well, I mean, in Europe it’s more, there’s more polarization, I would say, but the Europeans also have problems that we don’t have. You know, they’ve been struggling with the consequences of non-ending violence in the Middle East and the wave of refugees that has emerged as a consequence of that, and so the situation in Europe is different, and I would say there is more movement and activity on the right. So but, and you know, I’m not an admirer of identity politics, well, and that’s for the reasons I brought up to begin with. I think that you have to decide conceptually, psychologically, familially, and socially what your vision of a human being is, and if your vision of a human being is essentially tribal, so that you’re defined by your collective identity in some manner, then you’re going to play identity politics on the left, you’re going to play identity politics on the right. It’s like, well I think the identity politics types on the left pose a bigger threat in my country. It’s not so obvious in your country, because you guys, your political landscape is more balanced I would say than ours. If the radical right posed a threat to the academy, which they most decidedly do not, then I would be just as upset about that. And so I think again, it’s part and parcel of the radical left’s failure to take, or the left’s in general, failure to take responsibility for the radicals. It’s like, oh well, why aren’t you criticizing equally on both sides? Well, the threat doesn’t exist equally on both sides, not in my country. So I think identity politics is a murderous game no matter who plays it. You know, and on the left it’s, well we’ve already talked about that, so what’s wrong on the right? Well, you stand up and wave your flag and talk about your ethnic identity or your racial identity and you take pride in that. It’s like, what the hell did that have to do with you? You goddamn loser. You know? It’s like, you’re one of the great heroes of the past, are you? That’s why you’re standing up and waving your flag. No, you’re not. You’re identifying with your group because you don’t have anything of your own to offer. And so it’s pathetic. And I’ve said that many times, and in my lectures too, and people know this if they’ve actually watched my university lectures, I spend a tremendous amount of time and have for 30 years convincing my students that if they had been in Nazi Germany there was a very high probability that rather than being Oscar Schindler and rescuing the Jews, they would have been a Nazi persecutor because there’s like five Oscar Schindlers and like many million Nazis so you can do the math for yourself. And if you don’t think that, if you think that you would have been one of the few heroes, then you’re either someone truly remarkable or you’re unbelievably deluded. And so I would suspect that you’re in the unbelievably deluded camp because truly remarkable people are rare. And I’ve really seen this in the last year or two because one of the things I have noted, like I knew that people were timid. You know, and I knew why. It’s dangerous to stick your head up above the rest. I mean, it’s predator avoidance strategy to keep your head down. And I mean that technically. It truly is. To blend in with the crowd is a predator avoidance strategy. That’s what fish do in schools of fish. Like it’s very low level behavior. And if you stick your head up, there’s some real danger. And the advantage to that is that people are pretty civilized and they go along with the group and that’s a good thing because, you know, we should be civilized and go along with the group, but it’s a really bad thing when the group goes sideways. And I’ve had many people, colleagues, but many other people too say, well, really, we agree with what you’re doing, but we can’t really take the risk of standing up and saying so. It’s like, well, now and then. So most people fall into that camp. When I went to Queen’s University a month ago and was subject to that chilling demonstration, I would say, where the radicals climbed up into the stained glass window, window wells and pounded, you know, unendingly for 90 minutes while we were all inside. I had a professor write me the day before and say, look, my wife and I work at the university. We really support what you’re doing, but we can’t even risk coming to the talk because what if the students see and complain? It’s like, well, yeah, there’s courage for you, man. There’s courage for you. You know, and so, but that’s par for the course and it’s unsurprising to some degree. But well, but anyways, on the right, it’s like, it’s an excuse by people on the left not to take the things that I’m saying seriously. That’s what it is. It’s like, well, he’s not attacking the right as much. It’s like, well, they’re not after me. They’re not trying to close down my speech. So I took that personally. So had it been right wingers coming after me, well, it would have been the same thing. So it’s a foolish objection, I think. For decades, ethnic groups have, on average, scored significantly differently on IQ tests. According to psychology professor Richard Heyer, whom you interviewed on your channel, YouTube, there is no scientific consensus on the causes of these average differences in IQ test scores. Yet, according to Heyer, psychologists do generally agree that general intelligence exists, that IQ measures it well and in a non-culturally biased way, that IQ is highly predictive of success in educational and professional terms, and that for decades, ethnic groups have, on average, scored significantly differently. So assuming this is true, should we talk about it? Sam Harris raised this question in a podcast conversation with Charles Murray. Some argue that we should not talk about this, as doing so could fuel the racial supremacist movements that you mentioned with potentially horrific consequences. Others, mainly on the intellectual dark web and to a very limited extent in academia, think we should talk about this topic, because average differences in IQ scores have existed for decades. They may have played a role in generating the disparate educational and professional outcomes that we observe and care about, and thus that we cannot properly analyze these disparate outcomes unless we do talk about this subject openly. Geneticist David Reich recently argued in the New York Times that if scientists do not openly discuss the biological basis of race, pseudoscientists could fill the vacuum with dangerous consequences. Furthermore, you, Professor Peterson, are highly critical of the oppression narrative that permeates segments of the academy and activist left, and knowledge about average differences in IQ scores between ethnic groups, while tough to assimilate, could puncture this narrative. So the question is, what is your view on all that I’ve just said? Jesus, you guys really did take a long time to prepare these questions, didn’t you? All right, so when I went to Harvard, I came from McGill, and I had spent a lot of time with my advisor there and a research team that he had, trying to understand the genesis of antisocial behavior, among adolescents mostly, as well as kids as well. Antisocial behavior is very persistent, so if you have a child who’s conduct disorder at the age of four, the probability that they will be criminal at the age of 15 or 20 is extremely high. It’s unbelievably stable. It’s a very dismal literature, because you see these early onset aggressive kids, and it’s persistent, and then you look at the intervention literature and you throw up your hands because no interventions work. And believe me, psychologists have tried everything you could possibly imagine, and a bunch of things that you can’t, in order to ameliorate that. So we were really interested in trying to understand, for example, if you’re antisocial by the age of four, then there isn’t an intervention that seems to be effective. And the standard penological theory is really quite horrifying in this regard, because what you see is that male aggression peaks around the age of 15, and then it declines fairly precipitously and sort of normalizes again by the age of 27. And standard penological theory, essentially, is this cold-hearted. It’s like, if you have someone who’s a multiple offender, you just throw them in prison until they’re 27, and then they age out of it. And that’s all there is to it. That’s what we’ve got. Now there’s some downside to that, because there’s a corollary literature that suggests that the worst thing that you can do with antisocial people is to group them together, which is what we do in prisons. So that’s a whole mess. Anyways, one of the things we were doing was trying to see if there might be cognitive predictors of antisocial behavior, and so we used this battery of neuropsychological tests that was put together at the Montreal Neurological Institute. Took about 11 hours to administer and hypothetically assessed prefrontal cortical function. We computerized that and reduced it to about 90 minutes, and then assessed antisocial adolescents in Montreal and found out that they did show deficits in problem-solving ability that we associated with prefrontal ability. When I got to Harvard, I thought, well, that’s interesting. We could use the neuropsych battery to predict negative behavior. Perhaps we could use it to predict positive behavior. So I thought, well, what if we turned the neuropsych battery over and thought, well, can we predict grades, for example, because that’s a decent thing to predict. So we ran a study that looked at Harvard kids, University of Toronto kids, line workers at a Milwaukee factory, and managers and executives at the same factory. What we found was that the average score across these neuropsychological tests, they were kind of like games. They were game-like. So in one test, there were five lights in the middle of the screen, and a box was associated with each light, and you had to learn by trial and error which box was associated with each light. That was one of the tests. So we took people’s average score across the tests because they seemed to clump together into a single structure. You can find that out statistically. If you take a bunch of tests, you can find out how they clump together statistically by looking at their patterns of correlations, and you might get multiple clumps, which is what happens with personality research where you get five, or you might get a singular clump, which is what happens in cognitive research. And we got a single clump, essentially. And then we were trying to figure out if, at the same time, I was reading the literature on performance prediction, and there’s an extensive literature on performance prediction, a lot of it generated by the armed forces, by the way, indicating that IQ is a very good predictor of long-term life success. And so here’s the general rule. If your job is simple, which means you do the same thing every day, then IQ predicts how fast you’ll learn the job, but not how well you do it. But if your job is complex, which means that the demands change on an ongoing basis, then the best predictor of success is general cognitive ability. And I learned that the general cognitive ability test clumped together into a single factor. That’s fluid intelligence, or IQ. And then we didn’t know if the factor that we had found was the same factor as IQ. And we still haven’t really figured out whether or not that was the case, because it kind of depends on how you do the analysis. But anyways, I got deeply into the performance prediction literature, and I found out, well, if you wanted to predict people’s performance in life, there’s a couple of things you need to know. You need to know their general cognitive ability, if they’re going to do a complex job. You need to know their trait conscientiousness. Some of you might have heard that rebranded as grit in a very corrupt act, by the way, because it’s a good predictor of long-term life success. Freedom from negative emotion, low neuroticism is another predictor, but it’s sort of third on the hierarchy. And then openness to experience, which is a personality trait, is associated with expertise in creative domains. The evidence that… Now, I should tell you, since it’s such a complicated question, I should tell you how to make an IQ test, because it’s actually really easy, and you need to know this to actually understand what IQ is. So imagine that you generated a set of 10,000 questions, about anything. They could be math problems, they could be general knowledge, they could be vocabulary, they could be multiple choice. It really doesn’t matter what they’re about, as long as they require abstraction to solve. So they’d be formulated linguistically, but mathematically would also apply. And then you have those 10,000 questions. Now you take a random set of 100 of those questions, and you give them to 1,000 people, and all you do is sum up the answers, right? So some people are going to get most of them right, and some of them are going to get most of them wrong. You just rank order the people in terms of their score. Check that for age, and you have IQ. That’s all there is to it. And what you’ll find is that no matter which random set of 100 questions you take, the people at the top of one random set will be at the top of all the others. With very, very, very high consistency. So one thing you need to know is that if any social science claims whatsoever are correct, then the IQ claims are correct. Because the IQ claims are more psychometrically rigorous than any other phenomenon that’s been discovered by social scientists. Now IQ literature is a dismal literature. No one likes it. Here’s why. Here’s an example. So here’s a fun little fact for you, for liberals and conservatives alike. Because conservatives think there’s a job for everyone if people just get off their asses and get to work. And liberals think, well, you can train anyone to do anything. It’s like, no, there isn’t a job for everyone. And no, you can’t train everyone to do everything. That’s wrong. And here’s one of the consequences of that. So as I mentioned, the armed forces has done a lot of work on IQ when they started back in 1919. And the reason they did that was because, well, for obvious reasons. Let’s say there’s a war. And you want to get qualified people into the officer positions as rapidly as possible, or you’ll lose. So that’s a reason. Now the armed forces has experimented with IQ tests since 1919. And in the last 20 years, a law was passed as a consequence of that analysis, which was that it was illegal to induct anyone into the armed forces who had an IQ of less than 83. Now the question is why? And the answer was, all of that effort put in by the armed forces indicated that if you had an IQ of 83 or less, there wasn’t anything that you could be trained to do in the military that wasn’t positively counterproductive. Now you’ve got to think about that, because the military is chronically desperate for people. It’s not like people are lining up to be inducted. They have to go out and recruit, and it’s not easy. And so they’re desperate to get their hands on every body they can possibly manage. And then, especially in wartime, but also in peacetime. But then there was another reason, too, which was the armed forces was also set up from a policy perspective to take people in the underclass, let’s say, and train them and move them up, at least into the working class or maybe the middle class. So there’s a policy element to it, too. And so even from that perspective, you can see that the military is desperate to bring people in. But, well, with an IQ of 83 or less, it’s not happening. OK, so how many people have an IQ of 83 or less? 10%. Now, if that doesn’t hurt you to hear, then you didn’t hear it properly. Because what it implies is that in a complex society like ours, and one that’s becoming increasingly complex, there isn’t anything for 10% of the population to do. All right, well, what are we going to do? Are we going to ignore that? Are we going to run away from that? And believe me, we have every reason to. Or are we going to contend with the fact that we need to figure out how it is, how it might be possible to find a place for people on the lower end of the general cognitive distribution to take their productive and worthwhile place in society? And that isn’t just going to be a matter of dumping money down the hierarchy, because giving people who have nothing to do money isn’t helpful. It doesn’t work. It’s not that simple. Well, so that’s kind of an answer to the question of whether or not we should deal with IQ forthrightly. It’s like, if you can find a flaw in that logic, like just go right ahead. It’s not like I was thrilled to death to discover all of this. By no stretch of the imagination was that the case. So what? So IQ is reliable and valid. That’s the first thing. It’s more reliable and valid than any other psychometric test ever designed by social scientists by a factor of about three. That’s fact number one. Fact number two is it predicts long term life outcome at about point three, point four, which leaves about 85%, 70 to 85% of the story unexplained. But it’s still the best thing that we have. Well, it’s also the case that in places like Great Britain, when IQ tests were first introduced, they were actually used by the socialists. And they were used to identify poor people who had potential, cognitive potential, and to move them into higher, into institutes of higher education. So there’s an upside, you know, a social upside as well. Ethnic differences. This is something you can’t say anything about without immediately being killed. So I’m hesitant to broach the topic. But I’ll tell you one thing that I did in the last week that’s relevant to this. And this just shows you how complex the problem is. First of all, we should point out that race is a very difficult thing to define because racial boundaries aren’t tight. And so when you talk about racial differences in IQ, you’re faced with the thorny problem of defining race. And that’s a big problem from a scientific perspective. But we’ll leave that aside. And I wrote an article this week. Somebody stood up at one point in one of my talks and vice bless their hearts, took this particular question and used it as an indication of the quality of the people who are my so-called followers. And by the way, the quality of my so-called followers is pretty damn high. And you can find that out quite rapidly just by going looking at the YouTube comments, which are head and shoulders above the standard set of YouTube comments. I can tell you that. So someone asked me about the Jewish question, right? And the implication, it was actually someone Jewish, and the implication was that Jews are overrepresented in positions of authority and power. And I had just spoken for like an hour and a half. And this guy had an axe to grind and I thought, there’s no goddamn way I’m getting into this at the moment. And so I said I can’t answer that question. But that’s not a very good answer. So I wrote a blog post this week and I said, look, here’s the situation. All right. Jews are overrepresented in positions of power and authority. But then let’s open our eyes a little bit, eh? And think for like two or three seconds and think, hey, guess what? They’re also overrepresented in positions of competence. And it’s not like we have more geniuses than we know what to do with. And if the Jews happen to be producing more of them, which they are, by the way, then that’s a pretty good thing for the rest of us. So let’s not confuse competence with power and authority, even though that’s a favorite trick of the radical leftists, who always fail to make that distinction. Well, why does this overrepresentation occur? Because it does. It also, there’s also overrepresentation in political movements, including radical political movements. OK, why? Well, answer one, Jewish conspiracy. OK, that’s not a very good answer. We’ve had, we’ve used that answer before. All right. But, but do we have an alternative? Well, here’s an alternative. The average Ashkenazi IQ is somewhere between 110 and 115, which is about one standard deviation above the population average. And so what that means is that the average Ashkenazi slash European Jew has an IQ that’s higher than 85% of the population. That’s a lot higher. Now, that doesn’t make that much difference in the middle of the distribution. OK? So geniuses don’t exist at the middle of the distribution. They exist at the tails of the distribution. And you don’t need much of a move at the mean to produce walloping differences at the tails. And the tails are important, because a lot of where we draw, we draw exceptional people from the exceptions. Right? So here’s an example, here’s another example of the same thing. Most engineers are male. Why? Because men are more interested in things, and women are more interested in people. And you might say, well, that’s sociocultural. It’s like, no, it’s not. And we know that, because if you stack up countries by their egalitarian social policies, which you can do quite effectively, and then you look at the over-representation of men in STEM fields, the over-representation increases as the countries become more egalitarian. So it’s not sociocultural. OK. Now, men aren’t that much more interested in things than women. It’s one standard deviation, which is about the same difference, by the way, between the population norm and the Ashkenazi Jews. But if you’re looking at the one person in 20, or the one person in 50, who’s most, who’s hyper-interested in things, and thus likely to become an engineer, then most of them are men. Here’s another example of the same thing. Men are more aggressive than women. Now, you might ask, how much? And the answer to that, the best place to look at that is in Sweden, where the egalitarian policies have been laid out for a long period of time. And you can get a more direct inference about biology. If you took a random man and a random woman out of the population, and you had to bet on who was more aggressive, and you bet on the man, you’d be right 60% of the time. So that’s not that much, right? It deviates from 50-50, but it’s not like 90-10, it’s 60-40. Okay, so what does that mean? Well, we’ve got a tail problem here again. Let’s say that now you decide to go out onto the extremes of aggression, and you identify the most aggressive one in a hundred persons. They’re all men. Guess who’s in prison? Those people. That’s why most of the people in prison are men. And so this is elementary. Part of the problem in our society is that we don’t understand statistics. We don’t understand that you can have relatively small differences at the population level that produce walloping consequences at the tails of the distribution. Okay, so back to IQ. One final thing to say about IQ. The ethnic differences are difficult to dispense with. It’s not easy to make them go away. You can say, well, the tests aren’t culture fair. Well here’s a test of that. So imagine you test group A with an IQ test, and you test group B with an IQ test, and then you look at their actual performance in whatever you’re predicting. If the test was biased against ethnic group A, then it would underpredict their performance, and that doesn’t happen. Now you could say, well, there’s systemic bias in the performance measures and the potential measures. And that’s a possibility. Alright. Now one other thing about that. There’s a real danger in the ethnicity IQ debate, and the danger is that we confuse intelligence with value. Or that we include, we confuse intelligence with human value. That’s a better way of thinking about it. And one of the things that we’re going to have to understand here is that that’s a mistake, is that being more intelligent doesn’t make you a better person. That’s not the case. It makes you more useful for complex cognitive operations. But you can be pretty damn horrific as a genius son of a bitch. It’s morally neutral. And we also know that from the psychometric data, by the way. There doesn’t seem to be any relationship whatsoever between intelligence and virtue. And so if it does turn out that nature and the fates do not align with our egalitarian presuppositions, which is highly probable, we shouldn’t therefore make the mistake of assuming that if group A or person A is lower on one of these attributes than group B or person B, that that is somehow reflective of their intrinsic value as human beings. That’s a big mistake. I don’t have anything else to say about that. Okay. So I had three more questions. And so maybe slightly shorter answers to these three, like maybe around. Well, hopefully they’re simpler questions. You know, average five minutes, maybe. And then and then we will open it up. So another taboo is to celebrate European culture. Multiculturalists get pretty unhappy when Europeans start expressing pride in their culture or heritage. Many especially on the left do not draw much of a distinction, at least in practice, between European pride and white supremacy. You care about freedom of the individual, the individual’s freedom to think, to speak, to associate, in short, to act as he sees fit without external compulsion, as long as he doesn’t infringe on the similar liberties of others. Professor Ricardo Duchesne, a historical sociologist and professor at the University of New Brunswick argues that, quote, individualism is a unique attribute of European peoples. Quote, it has been exported to some degree to other nations, but in my view, it is not something that comes to them naturally. So he continues, quote, you can’t play the game of we’re all individuals. We have to affirm and be proud of our ethnic identity and heritage to preserve the West’s curious individualism. If Europeans become minorities in the West, he argues, the founding idea of the West, that no entity, not an individual, not a community, not the state, can justly deprive an individual of life, liberty, or property by force, no matter what the individual’s race, class, or religion. I wouldn’t be surprised if Duchesne, when he made this statement, had you in mind. Look, the medieval Europeans identified seven deadly sins for a reason, and one of them was pride. It’s like, let’s make the presumption. I do believe that for reasons that aren’t obvious, that the West has got some things right. We’ve got the sovereignty of the individual right. That’s the most fundamental thing we’ve got right. We’ve articulated that, I think, in a remarkable way, not only theologically, philosophically, in our body of laws, in our societies. And one of the consequences of that, as it’s had its effect on the rest of the world, is that everyone is getting richer quite fast, and that’s a really good thing. Okay, having said that, it’s like, am I proud of that? It’s like, I didn’t do that. What the hell? Pride. What’s that? That’s not the right response. How about responsibility for that? How would that be? It’s like, you’re part of this great and unlikely set of propositions, this strange set of propositions that says that in some ineffable manner, the poorest person is as valuable as the king. It’s like, how the hell did we ever figure that out? That’s an impossible thing to think, and yet that’s the bedrock of our legal system. That’s nothing to be proud of. That’s something to tremble before, to take on as an ethical burden, and not to wave a flag for how wonderful you are that you happen to have the same skin color as some of the people who thought that up. It’s not the right response. It’s like, it’s to open your eyes and recognize that as a miracle, and a relatively new miracle on the world stage, and to participate in the process of upholding that in your personal and your public life. That’s not pride in European tradition. When I go to Europe, and I love going to Europe, and the European cities are unbelievable masterpieces, which is why they’re completely flooded by pilgrims, tourists, pilgrims, who go there to look at the beauty. I don’t feel pride about that. I feel like I have something to live up to. That’s not the same thing, man. So these right-wingers in this, it’s like, look what we’ve done. It’s like, no, it’s not you that did that. That’s something, man. You’ve got to have your act together before you would dare to say, well, that was me. It’s like, yeah, sure. Sure, it was you. Yeah, right. No. That’s hard to stand up and take your place in that kind of historical process, that unlikely, miraculous historical process. Not to just feel ashamed at the way that you’re presently constituted in the face of that That means that you’re diluted, and you’re using your great fortune at being a beneficiary of that system. Look at what we’ve got here, this great piece that we’re inhabiting right now. You’re using your unearned, the unearned gift that’s been granted to you as a source of personal pride in your accomplishments due to your skin. It’s like, no, not good. Not a good argument. And that doesn’t mean that, well, there’s nothing valuable about European culture. There’s plenty about it that’s valuable. It’s not even so clear to what degree it’s European. I mean, it came out of the Middle East. It’s so muddle-headed that you hardly know where to start. So hopefully that was less than five minutes. There we go. Just with the radical right-wingers in four minutes. I’ve heard a number of interesting things about Islam from you and one of your intellectual soulmates, Camille Paglia. Paglia says that men and women benefit in many ways from living in largely separate worlds, as they did in traditional European societies and obviously as they do in much of the Muslim world today. Relatedly, Paglia considers passionate masculinity a critical force for defending, sustaining, and advancing civilization. And she argues that passionate masculinity, while virtually moribund in the Western middle and upper classes, is alive and well in the Muslim world. You have expressed some sympathy for the Muslim critique of the West, its godlessness, its spiritual void, its materialism, its technology-induced removal from life’s elemental realities. You’ve said it is extraordinarily naive to believe that the differences between European culture and Islamic culture are not about anything fundamental. You’ve expressed concern that Islam is a totalizing system. And in a quote that stood out to me, you said in a Patreon chat on YouTube that in your view, quote, the only countries in the world that are essentially worth living in, in any real sense, are the ones that are predicated on the Judeo-Christian tradition and manifested in the Western body of laws, unquote. So an open-ended question. How would you synthesize your perspective on Islam and the fact that the Muslim populations of Europe and Canada, a product of recent immigration, are growing and reproducing much faster than the European descended populations in these countries? Man, you guys really did spend a lot of time coming up with troublesome questions, didn’t you? We can end with that. See, the problem is, the problem, one of the problems is that I’m an ignorant man, and there’s lots of things that I don’t know. You know, and I don’t know, I don’t understand Islam. I don’t know enough about it to be an intelligent commentary on it. I’ve done my best to peck away at the edges, but you know, it would require multiple years study to understand the similarities and differences between the two viewpoints. It looks to me like what Islam did was take a group of radically disparate tribes and unite them under a single ethos. Of course, the Muslim civilization expanded more rapidly than any other civilization ever had and occupied a very large part of the world, which of course it still does. Perhaps there’s something to be said for that unifying tendency. There’s a problem, and maybe this is at the core of the problem. There’s no distinction between church and state in Islam, and there is a distinction between church and state in the West. It isn’t obvious to me, if it’s the case that our culture is grounded in an underlying, let’s call it literary metaphysics, something like that, a religious metaphysics, part of the bedrock of our culture is the idea of the separation between church and state. And as far as I can tell, that idea doesn’t exist in the Muslim world. And so I cannot understand how that faith is commensurate with the institutions of the West. It doesn’t seem to me that there’s any evidence that it’s commensurate, because the number of Islamic democracies is, let’s call it, finite. The best example is probably being Turkey. And Turkey, as far as I can tell, isn’t doing that well at the moment on the democratic front. And it looked like the great shining hope, and a lot of that was a consequence of secularization. You know, I’ve spent a lot of time, when I was writing Maps of Meaning, for example, looking for commonalities among religious viewpoints. And I was able to find deep commonalities, I thought, between Buddhism and Christianity, and Taoism and Christianity, and Hinduism and Christianity, for that matter. It was a lot harder when it came to Islam. It’s not a faith that’s opened itself up to me. I don’t understand it well. But I hope that people of good will can build a bridge between the two cultures, because the alternative is too gloomy to contemplate. And finally, you’ve stated, quote, women are more agreeable by nature than men. And agreeable people are compassionate toward those they see as suffering. And that seems to include any minority, especially when you combine that with a kind of neo-Marxist doctrine that claims that anyone who has an advantage swiped it. Women have been voting for a century now. And this, you suggested in a Patreon chat, may help to explain why, in the West, we’ve collectively decided that, quote, egalitarianism and conflict avoidance constitute the two highest virtues and trump everything else, including free speech, unquote. You’ve said that in the West today, we are perhaps for the first time in history seeing on the political left or on segments of the political left, quote, what a female totalitarianism would look like, unquote. Elaborate. I did a research project with one of my students. We haven’t published it, unfortunately, for a variety of reasons. She’s been quite ill and I’ve been quite preoccupied. So those are the two barriers at the moment. But the first thing we wanted to do was to find out whether there was actually such a thing as political correctness. You can actually do that technically as a social scientist. So what you do is, this is what we did is, we got a group of people together and we collected a whole bunch of statements that seemed to be vaguely associated with the idea of political correctness. Maybe you could think, well, it’s a media construct and that’s fine. You can go analyze media statements and then you can collect ideas that seem to be associated with whatever political correctness is. We collected about 400 of those and then we asked, we turned them into questions and we asked a thousand people for their opinions. Then you can do this statistical process called a factor analysis. And it’s the same thing that pulls out a single factor of IQ from a group of questions, for example. It’s the same thing that produced the big five personality model. What the factor analysis does is tell you if questions group together. So let’s say you have opinion A. Well, if you have opinion A, if there’s a hundred of you, everyone who has opinion A also has opinion B and opinion C. And if that’s the case, then those clump together. There’s something about them that’s the same. Now what we could have found was that when we analyzed these 400 questions, there was like 50 clumps. And so that would have blown the there’s such a thing as political correctness hypothesis out of the water. But that isn’t what happened. We found two clumps, one of which looked like something like moderate leftism and the other that looked very much like totalitarian political correctness. And it was very, very robust finding. And we replicated it as well. She did this for her master’s thesis, by the way. And then we looked at what predicted these beliefs. First of all, the correlation between the moderate leftist clump of questions and the radical leftist clump of questions actually wasn’t very high. And so one of the things that we surmise is that there’s an actual division on the left between the moderates and the radicals. And that’s just not played itself out. And I think you can actually see that happening by the proclivity of the radical leftists to devour themselves, right? So which happens on a very regular basis. Or perhaps you can see it in the proclivity of the radical leftists to go after the moderate favorites when the moderates criticize the radicals. Whatever. So there’s two clumps to political correctness. Both of them were predicted by trait agreeableness, which is one of the traits that women score higher on than men. It’s the antithesis of aggression, by the way. And by also by being female, which was a real shock to us because most of the… So let’s say females and males differ with regards to some outcome. You try to figure out why that is. It might be just because they’re female, but there’s all sorts of things associated with being female or male that are like second order complications. What we found almost invariably with the personality literature is if you look at differences between men and women and then you control for personality, the differences go away. So they’re not differences between men and women per se. They’re differences between personality. But with political correctness, we found an effect of agreeableness, which was a pure personality effect and an effect of being female. So we also found a pronounced effect of having taken at least one seminar that was politically correct in its orientation. So that had a walloping effect. So there does seem to be something about political, according to that research, which, you know, I try to rely on better research, but none has been done. So that’s the best that I’ve got. And the woman who did this research is very, very smart and the study was well done. So I think it’s credible. So one of the things that’s interesting to me about that is that it does tie into the Freudian nightmare of the devouring mother, essentially, which was Freud’s, I think, signal contribution to psychopathology. You know, for most of Freud’s clients were people who were struggling to get out of the clutches of their family. And part of that is human beings are very dependent, right? Because well, because we have this incredibly long period of development, 30 years maybe, but certainly 18 years. So it’s hard to struggle up from infancy, mature and leave as an independent creature. And lots of people, you see this, if you’re a clinician, you see this all the time. People are so tangled up in their families that they can’t get away from them. And that’s the Oedipal situation that Freud described so brilliantly. And Jung also elaborated on it. A lot of that’s a consequence of hyperdependence, right? It’s the danger of overprotection. Now there’s a rule if you’re dealing with elderly people, say in an elder care institution, and the rule is something like don’t do anything for your charges that they can do themselves. It’s kind of a harsh rule. You know, if you see someone struggling with their buttons, maybe they’re three years old. You want to rush over and help. It’s like, well, maybe you don’t, because they need to learn how to do up their damn buttons. Or if they’re 85, they need to maintain their independence as much as possible without your compassion stealing it from them. Okay, well, we could hypothesize that there would be no pathology as a consequence of the female rise to political power. But given that females are human beings too, and we’re pretty much rife with pathology, the probability that there’ll be a downside is like there is to male participation, which would be more aggressive and hyper and hypercomp, aggressiveness and hyper competition. The probability that there would be a downside is extraordinarily high. But why wouldn’t it be a downside associated with hyperprotectiveness? It’s exactly what you’d expect. And then what you see playing out in the political landscape, as far as I can tell, and maybe I’m wrong, is wherever there’s an inequality, there’s an oppressor oppression narrative. And so anyone who’s stacks up at the bottom of a hierarchy is a victim slash infant, and anyone at the top is an oppressor slash predator. And I think confusing the hierarchical structure, especially when it’s based on competence, and Western structures of hierarchy are based in large part, although not entirely on competence, confusing that with a predator infant or oppressor oppression relationship is a very bad idea. Now, having said that, it’s obvious that every social structure has a tyrannical element. Like nobody in their right mind is going to say, well, our cultural structures are 100% fair and just. Obviously they’re not. And every single person in this room, and some far more than others, have been brutalized by the social structure, which takes you around the neck, shakes the hell out of you, and says, you better be like everyone else, or else. That’s the tyrannical aspect of the social structure. So you have to be naive not to think that there’s some oppressor oppression dynamic in a social structure. But to make that the only element of the discussion is extraordinarily dangerous. One of the things that looking at terrible things has done for me is make me a very grateful person. Like when I walk out on the street and I see that people aren’t at each other’s throats, I really think that that’s a miracle. Like I was just in Manhattan for a week. If your eyes are open, that place is an absolute miracle. I mean, there’s way too many people there. Seven million people come in a day. There’s way too many people. They’re just stacked on top of each other. These are all these massive skyscrapers. And they all stand up. There they are, all standing up. All the traffic lights work. All the electricity works. The buildings aren’t blowing up one after another because of natural gas leaks. They just don’t blow up. And people aren’t beating each other to death with clubs in the street. So when I go outside in New York, I think, my god, how did we manage this? Because I’m a Hobbesian by nature. It’s not like I’m entirely pessimistic. But I think that you’re naive if you don’t think that the natural state of human beings is one of brutality. All you have to do is look at history and you’d be convinced of that very rapidly. And so the fact that, look at us. We can all sit in here. We don’t know who, we don’t know each other. And we’re having a contentious political discussion. And like, nothing terrible is happening. And if you don’t see that as a miracle, then you’re way too protected for your own good. So well, so back to the agreeableness issue. There are tyrannies of care. The psychoanalyst said the good mother fails. And what that means is that when your kid is three years old, two years old, and stumbling around making mistakes, you back the hell off. And you let them make mistakes. And you don’t view the world as infant and predator. And you don’t project that onto the political system. Because it’s not a good idea. Especially for those who you’re misdiagnosing as predators. Okay, so now we are going to open it up for Q&A. All right, so the idea that I’ve put thought into this is perhaps an optimistic one. But as you might imagine, you’ve been a topic of conversation on this campus a lot in the past week or so. Certainly among a lot of us who discuss politics. And one of the things that sort of united people who like and dislike a lot of your ideas is that we appreciate your defense of free speech. And we appreciate you coming here to talk about it with us. But one of the things I thought was really interesting is Professor Van Dyke addressed the distinction between you and Jonathan Haidt. And you mentioned this as sort of a temperamental one. And I think I’m sure that’s true to some extent. But I notice you’ve made a lot of more sort of substantively inflammatory claims. Like in the course of this lecture, you called the authors of Facebook posts demons and totalitarians. In past events, you’ve called them things like neo-Marxists, cultural Marxists. You’ve called them, I believe, a fifth column that is committing treason against the West. And it seems to me this is more than temperamental. This is a substantive difference. It’s a substantive difference, yes. And another thing you’ve done is that unlike Haidt, you have a more sort of comprehensive political program. You’ve talked a lot in defense of traditional hierarchies, both of gender, of class, so on. Though emphatically not of race. And so it seems that… I haven’t talked about defense of traditional hierarchies in terms of gender and class. That’s not true. Well, you’ve talked about hierarchies in society. You’ve talked about… Yeah, that’s true. I have done that. But I haven’t justified them on the basis of gender and class. Or whatever the two categories. Not okay. That’s an important distinction. Yes, okay. But you defend hierarchies in society in a way that… You talk a lot about the Pareto distribution, yes? That doesn’t mean I defend it. Well, okay. No, not well okay. Yes. Well, I mean, I think you talk a lot… Observing that something exists is not the same as defending it. How in the world… Well, people attack it. What’s that? You don’t. People attack it. Attack what? That society is inherently unjust, right? Well, they’re unjust, but they’re also useful. Okay, so you say they’re useful. Some people disagree with that proposition. Look at it this way. Okay, look at it this way. You obviously think that it’s worthwhile to stand up and ask a question. Yes. So you think that standing up and asking a question is better than not standing up and asking a question. Yes. Okay, that’s a hierarchy of values. Yes. Okay, without the hierarchy of values, you couldn’t act. Of course. No, no, not of course. It’s partly why I’m defending the hierarchy. Without a hierarchy, there’s no impetus to act. No one disagrees about the fact of the hierarchy, right? What’s that? There is a hierarchy in society, right? No, there’s multiple hierarchies in society. Okay, there are multiple hierarchies in society, right? Yes. And you say that they are based… You invoke the lobster, right? That they are based in nature. I said that they were inevitable. Yes, that they were inevitable. Some people disagree with that. Right, that doesn’t mean that they’re good. But my point is that, this is generally relevant to it, you have a broader point than free speech. This is one of the things you talk about, yes? Yes. Okay, whereas I think there are some other activists who focus on more exclusively on free speech. I’m not an activist. There are some other individuals who engage in public political speech. Okay. Yeah. Who focus more exclusively on free speech, whereas you have other goals in mind. But one of the things that you’re more inflammatory language, and it’s not that I’m going to be so biased, but I think that you’re more of a political activist, you’re more of a political activist. But one of the things that you’re more inflammatory language, and it’s fair, it’s a substantive disagreement, has done, I think, is it’s politicized this free speech to an extent that someone like Haidt hasn’t. I’ve noticed that when someone hears the term free speech now, they associate it with a specific set of thinkers, often as viewed as on the extreme right. And I think arguably that’s a problem of all factions in society, because free speech should be a universal value. Polls certainly suggest that it’s coming under increasing threat from both sides. But I suppose the heart of my question, in addition to, of course, these other observations, is that do you believe free speech is your primary end, or do you believe these other points you’re making are important? Because I’ve heard you a bunch of times defend free speech sort of contextually, like you’ve complained about some of the laws in Canada that you dislike, that they institutionalize false facts into the law. But it seems to me that in absolutist defense of free speech makes no preference as to true or false. The point is that something, you are being forced to say something. It would be as bad as if you were forced to say something that is true, because the point of free speech is that you can say whatever you want, right? No, the point of free speech is so that you can think your way through life without running headlong into a brick wall. But being told to think position A versus position B is just as bad, right, even if one is true and the other is not. Okay, well there was a bunch of questions. Good job, by the way. Well, actually, can I just ask one additional addendum? Which is, I think the politicization of free speech is by far the biggest threat to free speech, because this is all… No, the radical leftists are the biggest threat to free speech. Well, okay, so this is… But I get your point. The professor alluded to in previous questions, the substantive threats to free speech in much of the world, in Europe certainly, I think in the United States as well from the government have come from the radical right. And I think it’s fair to say that on the specific narrow subset of certain departments on liberal arts colleges, it’s fair to say a threat comes from the left, though its scope is in dispute. But my question is, do you think that the way you talk about free speech, the way you link it to specific issues, the way you use inflammatory language, and the way you seem to make it… You seem to defend a specific set of free speech. There are certainly plenty of instances of free speech attacked on the other side that you don’t mention as much. Do you think you risk politicizing this? Because it seems to me that… Yes. Do you not think that’s a far greater threat? Because for example, the NRA… No. Well, sorry. The NRA is a group in the United States that defends guns rights, right? Okay, hold it. Yes. We need a question. Yes. Okay. My question is… Like I said, you’re doing fine, but it’s just too much. Like, I can’t keep it straight. Do you think that your behavior risks politicizing it, and do you think that politicization is justified? I think my behavior risks politicizing it, yes. I would rather it not be politicized. And I’m doing what I can to manage that risk. However, it’s become political in my country because the government implemented compelled speech legislation. So, I wasn’t complaining about that before it became political. Now, there is a time, even when you’re detached in some sense from the political realm, that you can’t be detached anymore. Well, I’m not happy with the fact that this has become politicized. You could say that I haven’t done a stellar job in ensuring in every possible manner that this has remained neutrally apolitical. Probably true, you know? But I’m not particularly unhappy with the way things have gone so far. And I’m not happy with the radical left. And so, if they’re irritated at me, so much the better, as far as I’m concerned. So, have I conducted myself perfectly? It’s like, undoubtedly no. So, I’ve got more than my fair share of faults. And a temper is one of them. But, I’m muddling through. Alright, I’m almost a little hesitant to ask a question now. But, so, one thing I was wondering about was a lot of people, I think, would argue that the values of Western civilization, free speech, the right of the individual, separation between church and state, have developed through not so much in continuous with the Judeo-Christian morality, but almost in their overthrow through such things as the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, and how these values would never have come out of just simply the continuous of the Middle Ages and that Judeo-Christian morality. But my understanding of your view would be that those values are inherent in the Judeo-Christian morality. And I’m just wondering how you think, yeah, just what is the value of Judeo-Christian morality in the modern world? Yeah, it’s a great question. They’re not rational values. They’re deeper than rational values. I mean, it was a surprise to me going back into the past, let’s say, to see how deep these values were. But, I would say that not only are they part of the Judeo-Christian story, let’s say, but that they’re grounded in phenomena that are even deeper than that. There’s been a fair bit of investigation into the emergence of fair play, let’s say, among animals, rats, primates, wolves, and so forth. There’s an ethos that emerges behaviorally and is then perhaps woven into narrative and then codified that seems to be isomorphic across these different levels. And I think it’s been well articulated in the narrative sense in the Judeo-Christian corpus of stories. And that it’s out of that that our legal systems and institutions of rights have emerged. People make the case that that was fundamentally an enlightenment issue, and it was certainly the case that the rational clarity that came along with the enlightenment increased the degree to which that was articulated and transformed into law. But I think to attribute it to that is a great mistake. I think it’s, I think the time span view is way too narrow. That’s 500 years ago. I’m a biologically minded guy. It’s like 500 years, that’s nothing. 5,000 years, well, that’s starting to register. 50,000 years, it’s worthy of note. Six million years, now you’re getting somewhere. The ethic that we’re discussing is way deeper than something conjured up in like 1500 by some northern Italians. So it’s an articulation of a substructure that’s much deeper than the articulation itself. That’s what it looks like to me. Now, I think there’s room for intelligent debate about that. But I’ve looked at the enlightenment thinkers and at the deeper, at people who I regard as deeper, and I think the deeper guys, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Jung in particular, Solzhenitsyn to some degree, they’ve got it right. So I don’t think that our rights are an enlightenment project. Their instantiation into codified law, that’s more part and parcel of the enlightenment. That would be particularly manifest in a place like the United States. Yeah, if I can just ask a related question. You mentioned Nietzsche, and from what I understand of your work, you seem to draw from him a lot, and again, you say you agree with him. Well, he thinks a lot of things. Yeah, so I guess I’m wondering where you think, because I imagine he went wrong in his interpretation of the Christian morality and how he believes that’s kind of a pernicious slave-based morality. So what exactly do you think, because you agree with a lot of other things. Well, he didn’t really critique Christian morality. He critiqued Christian dogma and structures. That’s not exactly the same thing. So you would agree with him then? Well, like I said, he’s a complicated guy. But I think the slave morality idea, the idea that the oppressed are somehow virtuous, which I don’t think is a central Christian idea, by the way. It was something that he criticized as part and parcel of what was constructed and concretized in institutional Christianity. And Nietzsche also, and this is a deeper critique, I think. Nietzsche really criticized institutional Christianity, particularly the Protestant and Catholic forms, I would say, for insufficient attention paid to the imitation of Christ and too much attention paid to the idea that the work of redemption had already been done, which is something that also divides the Orthodox Christian types from the Protestants and the Catholics. Because the Orthodox types tend to tilt more towards the moral demand that you imitate Christ in your own life. And so Nietzsche is a very… You can’t sum him up very easily. And I found him extraordinarily useful in training me how to think, to say that you agree with him. I don’t think that you can say with someone like Nietzsche that you agree with him. Because, you know, Nietzsche had… This is one thing that Nietzsche said that I really got a kick out of, because it’s the most arrogant statement I’ve ever heard anyone make. He said, I can write in a sentence what it takes other people, a book, to relate. And then he said, no, what other people can’t even relate in a book. And that’s exactly right. Like if you read Beyond Good and Evil, for example, which is mostly aphorisms, so, because he was a very sick man, and he couldn’t write for long periods of time, so he would think for long periods of time and then write down a little bomb. And Beyond Good and Evil is just sequential pieces of dynamite. And he wasn’t trying to be systematic, precisely. And so that’s why it’s not so easy to agree or disagree with Nietzsche, but you can sure let the bombs go off in your brain if you read what he has to say. And he was an interesting critic of Christianity, because, you know, if you’re all warped and bent and someone comes along and tells you how you’re warped and bent in a manner that might enable you to straighten up, it’s not obvious that you’re their enemy. That they’re your enemy. And I think that’s the right way to read Nietzsche with regards to Christianity. So there was plenty of rot, and that was part of what was causing, let’s say, the death of God. Now, it isn’t obvious at all that Nietzsche was antithetically opposed to the founding ideas. In fact, there’s many places where he writes that indicate quite the contrary. So… Thank you. Okay, so we’re going to go to Alex, and then Said is going to distribute the microphone. Thank you for being here. I really appreciate it. So I was watching a few of your interviews in preparation for this, and I heard you speak about religion quite a bit. And if you look up what religion means in the Webster Dictionary, you get something like a system of faith centered on a supernatural being or beings or something like that. But I’ve heard you use religion to describe things like punk rockers, for example, that that’s a religious experience. So my first question would be, how do you define what is considered religious? And then sort of as a follow-up to that, if, say, Sam Harris… Religious is what you act out. What’s that? Religious is what you act out. Anything you act out. Everything you act out is predicated on your implicit axioms. The system of implicit axioms that you hold as primary is your religious belief system. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an atheist or not. That’s just surface… That’s just surface noise. So it has nothing to do with divinity or supernatural beings? No, I didn’t say that. Or it doesn’t necessarily have to do with those? No, it probably necessarily has to do with it too, but it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with your voluntarily articulated statements about whether or not you believe in something like a transcendent deity. So, I mean, what you act out is much more what you are than what you say about yourself. And what the hell do you know about what you believe anyways? You’re complicated, man. It’s a fair question. Well, seriously, people are complicated. You know, like, we’re… we don’t… we’re not transparent to ourselves at all. That’s why we have to go to university and study psychology. It’s like, you know, we’re not exactly black boxes, but we are the most complicated things there are. Right? And we can’t even program our VCR clocks. So it’s like, how the hell can we propose to understand ourselves? And, you know, I’m existentially oriented, which is to say that I think that what you hold to be true is best determined as a consequence of an analysis of your actions, rather than as a consequence of an analysis of what you purport to believe. Now, in order to act, you can’t act without a hierarchy of value, which I tortured the other poor questioner about. You can’t act without a hierarchy of values, because you can’t act unless you think one thing is better than another, because why would you act otherwise? So that means that you’re embedded within a hierarchy of values, whether you know it or not, or maybe multiple fragmentary and competing hierarchies of value, which is all the worse for you, by the way, because it just makes you very confused. That hierarchy of values has an axiomatic… it’s based on axioms. And the probability that you understand them is very low, because generally people don’t understand their axioms. But that axiomatic system is essentially your religious system. And there’s no way out of that, as far as I can tell. And you can say, well, it isn’t predicated on conscious belief in a transcendent deity. It’s like, okay, have it your way. But, you know, most people in this room act out a Judeo-Christian ethic. And not only do they act it out, if they’re treated in a manner that’s not commensurate with that ethic, they get very, very, very annoyed. So, for example, if I fail to treat you as if you’re an embodiment of a divine fragment, let’s say, that’s characterized by the ability to make free choice and to determine your own destiny, in some sense, or if I fail to treat you as if you’re a valued member, valued contributing member of the polity as a sovereign individual, then you’ll find that very offensive and become angry. It’s like, okay, then that’s what you believe. Well, if I ask you if you believe any of that, well, that’s a whole different story. You might give me some radical leftist nonsense. But that doesn’t take away from the fundamentals of your action. As one final thing. So when you and, say, Sam Harris argue about religion, you’re arguing about fundamentally different things, it sounds like. His conception of what is religious is very different from yours. Yeah, well, he tends to think of religious thought the same way that a smart 13-year-old atheist thinks about a fundamentalist Christian. It’s like, yeah, okay. You’re just not getting to the heart of the matter. You know, and I just finished reading all of Sam’s books in the last couple of weeks. And as far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t ever get to the bottom of the issue. He doesn’t address the fundamental thinkers. There are some profound thinkers. Dostoevsky’s one, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Jung. It’s like they’re completely absent from, and the same with Dawkins. It’s completely absent. All that conceptualization is completely absent from their corpus of works. They don’t even have an understanding for the psychological utility of religion. And it’s a big problem. You know, you don’t get to be an atheist when the people you attack are fundamentalists. And I have some sympathy for the naive fundamentalists. It’s like what they’re basically saying is something like this. Look, we have an ethos that’s valuable. You scientist types are casually dismantling it. What the hell are we supposed to do? Well, the fundamentalists don’t know what to do about that. So they say, well, creationism is science. It’s like, well, no, it’s not. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t have a point. Their point is there’s something valuable here. It’s like, don’t break it casually. What are you going to replace it with? The new atheists wish that everybody becomes rational. It’s like, yeah, sure, that’s going to happen. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Peterson. I’m a student of religious studies, and currently I’m writing an honorary thesis on religious imagery in an Indo-Persian literary genre. There’s a poet philosopher who said the following, which I think you’ll like, who by the way was a huge fan of Goethe. He said that in addressing God, he says he calls him the hidden reality, and he asks the hidden reality to reveal itself, but using the robe of metaphor, because he thinks that metaphor is the only way, stories are the only way that human beings can comprehend the hidden reality. I know you’ve written a lot, you speak a lot about religious stories. I just wanted to ask you, although it may be a very broad question, what is the place of the religious in stories? Religious is something like the grammatical structure of stories. If you go down and you look at what makes a story a story, that’s religious. It’s not a story otherwise. A story is a particular sort of thing. In the simplest sense, a story is an account of how to get from point A to point B. It’s like a map. But there’s a value structure inherent in that, obviously, because otherwise you wouldn’t go from point A to point B. So just to make the map means to adopt a value structure, but the story is actually more complicated than that, because as you move from point A to point B, processes of radical transformation are often necessary. And the deep stories about the processes of radical transformation that occur as you move from point A to B are basically indistinguishable from religious stories. Now, I think the reason they tend to become religious, let’s say, is because it has something to do with the gap between the finite and comprehensible and the infinite and the uncomprehensible. It’s like we live in the finite and comprehensible, but we’re surrounded by the infinite and incomprehensible. And there has to be a border between those, like a mediating border. That’s poetry and art. That’s narrative. That’s religion. And it’s that strange metaphorical reality, let’s say, that’s not factual and it’s not comprehensible, but that’s not infinitely incomprehensible either. It’s a bridge between the two. So as you move closer to the infinite and the incomprehensible across that bridge, you get farther and farther away from what you understand, right? But how could it be otherwise, given that you’re finite, you are a finite being, surrounded by what’s infinite and incomprehensible? And that was his critique of the strict rationalists, that it’s hard for them to make this… That’s where poets come in and that’s where artists come in. Exactly. I learned a lot of this from Jung, because Jung’s idea was that rationality is embedded in a dream. Like there’s the infinite unknowable and then there’s the dream, and then inside the dream is the rational domain. And I believe that to be the case. Why else would we dream? We have to dream. If we don’t dream, we go insane. It doesn’t take very long. And so there’s an element of poetic conceptualization that grounds us. And it has to be taken seriously. You know, the rational critics of dreams think about them as random neural activity. It’s like there’s nothing… When you look at a TV screen that’s not on a channel, that’s random. When you dream something complex and sophisticated, that’s not random. So, yeah. So the metaphor surrounds us, let’s say. And we can critique it rationally and we can undermine it, but there’s real danger in that. Take one question from here, then take one on the other end. I think we have a right side of the room bias happening. Hi, Professor. Yeah, thank you for your talk. I’d like to find out from you, what’s your view of institutional racism? Is it a thing or is it some other radical leftist agenda? Say, I didn’t quite catch the first part of that. What’s your view of institutional racism or systematic racism as some people may call it? Institutional system? Yeah, yeah. Yes, yes. Is it a thing? Is it an actual thing? That’s a great question. Or is it some other agenda that you might attribute to radical leftists? It’s a multivariate problem. Right? Like no society is without its biases and prejudices. And some of them get built into the systems themselves. And so when you look at unequal outcomes and you’re trying to discover why those unequal outcomes exist, if you have any sense, then you do a multivariate analysis and you put in prejudice and discrimination as one of the factors. One of the factors. One of many, many factors. And the problem with the radical leftists is that they take the fact that societal structures are tyrannical to some degree, and arbitrary, which of course they are because they’re imperfect, and then they obliterate the rest of the complexity with that claim. So there’s lots of reasons for inequality. Systemic bias is one of them. It’s an open question to what degree systemic bias plays in the inequality problem, let’s say. But it’s something that we could hypothetically address with a certain degree of detachment and intelligence. So no system is perfect. Not, and certainly not ours. Reasonable? Reasonable answer? Okay, that’s wise. Alright, so I think it’s safe to say you’re a fervent critic of postmodernism. And there are times where I don’t think you quite give it a fair shake. And I’m no fan of a good amount of the literature or the theory. But if you could point to one or two of the French theorists and some of their pieces, whether it’s their literature or their theory, and you could point to that’s culpable for the sort of cultural rot that you charge postmodernism with causing, who would it be, what would it be? I would say Foucault and Derrida. Lacan, I would also blame him if I could understand him. But I don’t actually think he is understandable, so I can’t blame him. So, and I’ve done my best to read Lacan. And I think the reason I can’t read it is because it doesn’t make any sense. So, because I’ve read some very difficult things and I could understand them. So, Foucault, I think, is a tin pot genius. I read Madness and Civilization, for example. It just seems to me to be self-evident. Psychiatric diagnostic categories are in part social constructions. It’s like, great. We’ve known that since like 1960. You know, it’s just not that big a revelation. And Derrida, well, he’s a trickster, you know, and his critique of the West as phallogocentric is dead on point. Male-dominated, that’s his theory, and logocentric, well, he thinks that’s a problem. Well, I don’t think it’s a problem. So, and I think as well, it isn’t even that. And I understand the postmodernist viewpoint. Like, look, it is the case that a finite set of entities is subject to an infinite number of interpretations. Okay, that’s postmodernism in a nutshell. The AI guys figured that out in like, from 1960 to 1992. It took them that long to wade through that fundamental technical problem, a real problem. The problem of perception, for example. It’s been very hard to solve the AI problem of perception because there are a lot of ways to look at the world. Like, the objects aren’t just there in any simple sense. So, okay, there’s an infinite number of interpretations. No problem. There’s not an infinite number of viable interpretations. Okay, that’s a big problem. Okay, and a little bit of thinking through that would have gone a long ways for the postmodernists. So that’s number one. And then, what’s the other one? Oh, yes. And then the other problem is, okay, there’s an infinite number of interpretations. We won’t make anyone canonical. All right. Well, then how the hell are you going to act? Because you have to make a value system canonical if you’re going to act. Oh, well, we didn’t solve that problem. How about we just slip Marxism in underneath the carpet and not notice the problem? Then that gives us something to do. It’s like, people come out and criticize me and say, Dr. Peterson doesn’t understand that postmodernism and Marxism are incommensurate. It’s like, yeah, actually, I do understand that. But the postmodern neo-Marxists don’t seem to understand that. So how can you be a postmodernist and a Marxist at the same time? Well, the answer to that is actually to be found in the historical data. The postmodernist types, like Foucault and Derrida, were Marxists before they became postmodernists. And the postmodern overlay on the Marxism was, as far as I can tell, mostly a cover story for going about the same old murderous idiocy under a new guise. So… Do you think it’s possible that there are… I’m sorry? Oh, that there are lenses, like postmodern lenses, that we can view culture from under, that can at times be more powerful and useful than other lenses? Like, for example, Baudrillard, the idea of the simulacrum and the successive phases of the image. Joan Didion… Baudrillard could at least think. And I mean, you can’t throw all the postmodernists into the same jug, you know, but I would say it’s still Derrida and Foucault have the most pernicious effects. Okay, so you would charge them with the worst of the worst. Well, the… Opening up this can of worms that we haven’t really rebuilt. Well, the problem is they didn’t deal with it seriously. It’s like, you can’t just say no meta-narrative. It’s like, okay, how are we going to unite ourselves then? We’re going to use multiculturalism. Well, that’s really worked to produce a peaceful world, hasn’t it? So, you need a uniting narrative. We have… if we weren’t… didn’t have a uniting narrative, we wouldn’t all be sitting peacefully in this room. It’s the uniting narrative that governs our behavior in this room. And look, here we are, all peaceful. It’s like, they’re not dealing with the fundamental issues. And to slip Marxism back in as a backdoor route to having something to do with your life is intellectually and morally reprehensible. Okay, thank you. Yep. Let me see. Take one from down here then come on. Yeah. How are you, sir? My name’s Steve. I just wanted to ask you about this experience that I had after watching one of your lectures that really profoundly impacted me, and I was wondering if you could kind of help me out with understanding this. After watching your lecture on Jung and just talking about his life, you started talking about the Lion King and kind of connecting what the intro scene was in the Lion King and the idea of archetypes. And when I started to understand what you were saying, I had this unbelievable feeling in my stomach and my whole body. It was just this smat, like this very intense feeling. So warning never to read Jung. Yeah, well I have. I started with Ion, so that’s a good idea. No. It was just this powerful feeling and I got so emotional. And thinking about how to articulate this question to you, a few minutes ago I was just getting so emotional. It just seems like it scared the hell out of me, that feeling. But it was also a really meaningful, so valuable, amazing feeling. I thought it’s kind of like maybe what God is. And I usually get that feeling too, after listening to a band like the Cro-Mags or Black Flag or some hardcore band, that music is so important to me like that. It’s levels of reality stacking on top of each other. And the question that just made me so emotional too is, what could my life be? And that was something that I just found myself asking myself. And I wonder if you could give me some extra stuff on that, what that really was. Yeah, well you’ve got to be very careful when you’re doing something like reading Jung. Because he’ll reorganize your cognitive structures. And there’s deaths and rebirths that go along with that. You know, there’s… What you’re trying to do in part is to, in a sense, is you’re trying to bring what you do and how you imagine yourself and how you articulate yourself into alignment. So those three things are the same. It’s very hard because there’s more to you in your action than there is in your articulation. And there’s more to you in your action than there is in your imagination. And so, partly what you’re experiencing is an expanded sense of self and possibility. And you might think, well that’s a wonderful thing, but it’s also a very daunting thing. And it can be a very dangerous thing. When I was dealing with all of this material when I was writing my first book, I had to abandon a lot of the things that I was doing that were bad habits. Because it was so stressful to move through these systems of ideas that I couldn’t afford any additional mental energy being wasted on things I was doing that weren’t together. So… Hi Dr. Peterstead. So on February 13th, you got into a prolonged debate on Twitter with a quote bot, a Slava Zizac quote bot. And then again on March 9th… Was it a quote bot? Yeah, it was a quote bot. Well that wasn’t very bright, was it? No. And then again on March 9th actually with Noam Chomsky, a Noam Chomsky quote bot. And so I want to ask you as the leading… It’s because I’m old and don’t understand technology. Yeah, so how important do you think it is to debate these intellectuals and do you think that you won? Oh God, I always hesitate to claim victory. Like to escape without abject defeat is a pretty good ambition. So… And plus I think it’s rather improbable that I would win a debate with a quote bot. Some people thought it was pretty close. Yeah. Twitter is a weird platform. It’s complicated, yeah. It is a complicated platform. And I’ve modified my approach to Twitter in the last month and a half, I would say. I’ve been trying to selectively retweet information. I polled a bunch of people and asked them if they knew of credible Twitter sources that were producing valid good news. And I found a bunch of sites that were doing that and then winnowed them down. I really like humanprogress.org, which has done a lovely job of detailing… Well, they had a great tweet the other day. I really loved it. It was a mock-up of a New York Times cover. And it said, 127,000 people lifted out of abject poverty today, you know, in like large type. And then the tweet was, we could have run this every single day for the last 20 years. It’s like, you know, because some of you know, but perhaps some of you don’t, that between the year 2000 and 2012, and this hasn’t stopped yet, the number of people in abject poverty in the world fell by half. It was the most rapid period of economic development ever in the history of the world. There’s lots of things like that happening. There’s several hundred thousand people a day being hooked to the power grid, which is a big deal. For those of you who have power might also appreciate that. Infant mortality has been plummeting. You know, we’re going to plateau in terms of population at about 9 billion, and it’s going to level off and decline pretty rapidly after that. People are getting access to fresh water in record numbers. Like, there’s so many good things happening that it’s not even funny, and that are a real cause for celebration. I’ve been trying to select, trying to tilt what I’ve been distributing more in that direction, and I’ve also put a buffer between me and my use of Twitter, because it does reward an impulsivity that isn’t always, let’s say my impulsivity that isn’t always in anyone’s best interest. I made an agreement with my son, because he’s been watching, I have lots of people watching what I’m doing, and trying to keep me under some degree of control, let’s say. And his comment was that if I was going to, if it was serious enough to engage in Twitter combat, about it was serious enough to write a blog post about. And so I’ve kind of made this rule, which is I’m not going to comment on anything on Twitter in that sort of manner, unless I feel that writing about it at some length is justifiable. And so I started doing that this week. I wrote three blog posts, and that seems to have gone pretty well. So I hope that answered your question. Thank you. I’m going to go on a different topic. I have a personality psychology question. So when I did the Understand Myself quiz, I was very surprised to find out that I was on the bottom two percentile for conscientiousness. Are you high in openness? Yes. You’re an entrepreneurial type. You’re going to need to partner with someone who’s disciplined. That’s exactly it. See, there seems to be a real tension between openness and especially orderliness. You know, because open people, while they think laterally and they blow boxes apart, and they tend to make a mess when they’re transforming things, and they’re all over the place. And they have to be, because otherwise they wouldn’t be open. But it’s hard to do that and also be orderly and conscientious. And so, and corporations suffer from this tension all the time, right? Because they’re started by open people, but when they get going and get algorithmized, they’re run by conscientious people. But then the conscientious people can only go down one track, and if the environment transforms, the whole company disappears. So I would say, you take a look at the conscientiousness score. You see if you can figure out how to discipline yourself a bit more, and see if you can figure out how to schedule your time. Not like a prison, but like a structured set of opportunities. And then you understand that in order to be successful in life, likely, in the medium to long run, you’re going to have to find someone, could be someone close to you, could be business partners or whatever, that fill in that missing conscientiousness gap. I guess the part B was my boyfriend, we’ve been together for a very long time and we’re not that old, is also very high in neuroticism, and I feel that’s where our conflict comes. And as far as long term, what are some things that, you know, lowly, conscientious, and highly neurotic. Sedatives. Sedatives. We’ll look into that. Yeah, well, I mean, the simple, I can only, high levels of neuroticism are problematic in a relationship. It’s probably why 75% of divorces are initiated by women. Because women are higher in neuroticism than men. And I think the reason for that is that they have to be more sensitive to infant distress, and so that makes them more sensitive to distress in general. Now I don’t know that for sure. It’s a supposition. But high levels of neuroticism do tend to make a relationship volatile, and to put a fair bit of negative emotion into it. Now the question is, what the source of the high level of neuroticism is. It might be purely temperamental, but it also might be indicative of an underlying anxiety disorder, depression, or a physiological problem, because they can manifest themselves in high levels of negative emotion. And so there’s always the possibility of doing something about that. What I usually tell my clients who are high in neuroticism is two simple things. Number one, get up at the same time in the morning. Okay, because that helps stabilize your circadian rhythms. Number two, eat a large meal before you stress yourself in the morning. And mostly protein and fat based. Because if you’re high in neuroticism and you stress yourself before you eat, you dysregulate your emotional reaction system. And you can’t re-regulate them until you sleep again. So other than that, goodwill and understanding is about what you’ve got. How are you doing tonight, Dr. Peterson? Not too bad. Pretty good questions so far. A little on the brutal side, I might say. I’m incredibly nervous to talk in front of you, because you’ve got to be one of the most formidable people that I’ve ever heard of, or ever heard of, or ever heard of. That’s the first thing I’ve ever heard of, or ever listened to, or ever seen. So my question is, again, you’re one of the best communicators that I’ve ever listened to. If I could be half as good at you, or at communicating as you are, I would be set. How can I teach myself to do that? Practice. You know, really, like, well, there’s a couple of things. It helps to read a lot. It really helps to write. So if you want to make yourself articulate, which is a very good idea, then not only should you read, but you should write down what you think. And if you can do that a little bit every day, 15 minutes. Maybe you could steal 15 minutes and do it every day. But if you do that for 10 years, you really straighten out your thinking. If you’re going to speak effectively, you have to know way more than you’re talking about. This is often difficult for beginning lecturers at university, because they’ll do a lecture on a topic, but they only know as much as they’re saying in the lecture. And they get kind of stuck to their notes because of it. But you want to know 10 times as much as you are saying in the lecture, and then you can specify a stepping path through it and elaborate with the other things that you know. But to do that, you have to do a lot of reading. But you also have to do a lot of reading, because that’s where the synthesizing comes. So that’s on the input side. And then on the output side, well, there’s some tricks, techniques, let’s say. Like if you’re speaking in front of a group, you are not delivering a talk to a group. That’s not what you’re doing. The talk isn’t a packaged thing that you present to a group. There isn’t a group. There’s a bunch of individuals, and you talk to them. So when I talk to a group, I always talk to people one at a time. And that makes it easier, too, because you know how to talk to a person. It’s like, can you talk to a thousand people? Well, probably not, because it’s too intimidating. But there isn’t a thousand people there. There’s a thousand individuals. And so you just look at an individual and you say something, and you can tell if they’re engaged, they look confused, or they look interested, or they look angry, or they look bored, or maybe they’re asleep, in which case you look at someone else. And they give you feedback about how you’re doing. And so one thing is to have something to say, yeah, but the next thing is pay attention to who you’re talking to. Because unless you’re very badly socialized, and that seems unlikely in your case, because you present yourself at least moderately well, you know. And well, I mean, I don’t know you very well, but on first sight, you know, you’re doing fine. So the probability that if you pay attention to the individuals that you’re talking to, that your natural wealth of social skill will manifest itself is extremely high. And so you don’t deliver a talk to an audience. That’s a really bad way of thinking about it. You’re actually engaged in a conversation with an audience. Even if they’re not talking, they’re nodding and shifting position, and you know, looking like this, or, and you can pull all that in and use it to govern the level at which you’re addressing the entire audience. So the last thing I would say is, well, having the aim to be a good communicator is a good start. And you think, well, I could buttress that to some degree. There isn’t anything that you can possibly, this is the whole point of a liberal education, there isn’t anything that you can possibly do that makes you more competent in everything you do than to learn how to communicate. I don’t care if you’re going to be a carpenter. I mean, being a carpenter, by the way, is very difficult, especially if you’re a good carpenter. But if you’re good at communicating as a carpenter, you’re like 10 times better as a carpenter. So the, and this is something that the liberal arts colleges, I think, I don’t know if they’ve forgotten it, but they don’t do a very good job of marketing. It’s like, what’s the use of a bachelor’s degree, a bachelor of arts? It’s like, well, you can think, you can write, you can speak, you’ve read something. It’s like, the economic value of that is incalculable. The people that I’ve watched in my life who’ve been spectacularly successful are, they have skills, clearly. That’s a minimum precondition. But they’re also very, very good at articulating themselves. And so whenever they negotiate, they’re successful. Well, that’s kind of like the definition of success in life, right? You negotiate and you’re successful. It doesn’t mean you win. Because if you’re a good negotiator, if you’re a really good negotiator, everybody walks away from the negotiation thrilled. And so then people line up to do things with you. So and that’s all, that’s all dependent on your ability to communicate. So practice. Thank you very much. Oh, thanks. Sorry, I have to just, there’s a section of the book in here that I just want to talk about here. This is a confident young man. What’s rule 11 of this book here? Don’t bother children when you’re skateboarding. Well, the small bone to pick with Lafayette College is that my brother does get stopped skateboarding here. But that’s not the surmise of my question today. Really, I have two key questions. You said in one lecture that Alexander Solzhenitsyn basically memorized all of his literary work to bring it out and to show the world. But I’ve had professors assert to me and ones that are very, you know, studied on Slavic culture and studied on the Gulag tell me essentially that he was a KGB agent. I mean, would you agree with that statement? The only way that he would have been able to get all that stuff out of there, live in there for 20 years and not die or, you know, starve to death was from that. What do you think? I don’t really have anything to say about that. I mean, anything’s possible, but probably not that. Probably not that. All right. So KGB agent, like, I don’t know why anyone would tell you that. Like, what’s their evidence for that? It’s impossible for him to have documented that. That’s a document. So he must have been a KGB agent. It’s like memorize all that and bring it out of prison. Yeah. You know. I mean, was he writing in prison? He really couldn’t store anything. You’d be amazed at what people can remember when they have to remember. So people remember very large volumes of material when that’s what they have. Like, pre-literate people, you know, all they did was remember. I have a friend who’s not literate and what he can read. I have two friends that aren’t really very literate. One of them is really not literate. And what he can remember, you just can’t believe. Modern people don’t remember much because we don’t have to. We write it down and externalize it. But our capacity for memory is far greater than we realize. The shake from when the Greeks, you know, switch from an oral culture to a literate culture was very fascinating. But my second question before I go sit back down was how do you feel about the influence of, and I, you know, with reading Terence McKenna and things along these lines, the influence of psychedelics within our culture and how that and what that does to the human psyche. God only knows. I don’t think we understand. We don’t understand psychedelics one bit. And I don’t think we understand the force, the role that they’ve played in our religious and cognitive evolution. So we don’t understand them. They’re an absolute mystery. So play with them at your peril. Carl Jung and the guy who had an acid live in the same town. Yeah, yeah, Swiss, a pretty strange place for that to emerge from. But yeah. For future reference, the chairs and for random audience members to sit in. Ask your question. In a lot of your talks, you speak about the things that the West did correct. And I’m curious, yourself being a psychologist, what your thoughts are on Edward Bernays and the impact that he had on Western society, the guiding of masses or controlling them, and being able to take control in that way. I don’t know enough about him. I’m afraid to give you an intelligent answer. So do you have a question? Sure. My other question would be that to my understanding that worker control and people’s control is instrumental in the idea of socialism. And if these countries that we call socialist and communist are totalitarian states ruled by a single party or a single man, why do we continue referring to them as such? As referring them to as? As socialist, as when they don’t follow the main heart of it, which is worker control. That’s a good question. It’s a good question. I don’t really know the answer to that. It looks like, who knows, right? Maybe the inevitable end product of a collectivist viewpoint is something like a totalitarian state. It seems probable because most human governments have been essentially totalitarian states of one degree of severity or another. So the tribal tendency might manifest itself in a rigid hierarchy, but it is a perverse fact, right? And you think that it’s one of the mysteries about the continual apologetics for the radical left. It’s like, well, I’m going to go to the left, and I’m going to go to the right, and I’m going to go to the left. And you think that it’s one of the mysteries about the continual apologetics for the radical left. It’s like, well, didn’t China just announce that its president is now president for life? That’s actually a big problem. And despite the fact that they’ve moved quite a distance in the free market direction, obviously that underlying totalitarian impulse is still alive and well and thriving. And it’s a stand-on end. Thank you. Hi, Dr. Peterson. Okay. Are you out of mic range? It’s a pleasure to ask you a question. I wrote it down to minimize inarticulability. So you put a great emphasis on truth in your work. So this is you writing in 12 Rules for Life. And above all, don’t lie. Don’t lie about anything ever. Lying leads to hell. It was the great and small lies of the Nazi and communist states that produced the deaths of tens of millions of people. You’ve also talked about how Nietzsche foresaw the nihilism implicit in European culture in the 1800s that would likely lead to the authoritarianism and death tolls mentioned at the end of the previous quote. And I find this interesting for the following reason. So here’s Nietzsche and the will to power. Radical nihilism is the conviction of an absolute untenability of existence when it comes to the highest values one recognizes. This realization is a consequence of the cultivation of truthfulness. So in other words, Nietzsche saw that valuing truth to its fullest undercuts valuation itself. Yeah, he meant that specifically within the Christian context, by the way. I mean, one of the things that Nietzsche in his role as Christian critic pointed out was that the death of God was a consequence in his formulation of the Christian insistence on truth. So his idea was essentially that as Christianity elevated the truth to the position of highest moral virtue, and then that truth-seeking spirit developed a scientific and rational viewpoint that the logical consequence of that was the turning of the spirit of truth on the metaphysical presumptions of Christianity itself. So that’s the context for that. Right. So what I wanted to ask you is that you appear to care deeply about meeting and the philosophical problem of nihilism. So I was just wondering if you could elaborate on this tension between nihilism and valuing truth in light of what you’re saying and whether there’s a way in which you see your ideas as elaborated in your latest book as a solution to the problem of nihilism or how they fit into the broader scheme. Yeah, that’s a great question. I think really that Jung’s work is the answer to that question. Because Jung was profoundly influenced by Freud, obviously, and if you read the Freudian biographers, let’s say, it’s easy to conceptualize Jung as an acolyte of Freud, but it’s not really accurate, I wouldn’t say, or it’s insufficiently accurate because Freud had a great influence on Jung, but Jung was also exceptionally influenced by Nietzsche. And Jung, I think, you can also view Piaget in this manner, by the way, although not directly as a consequence of the influence of Nietzsche, it would be more indirect, but Jung really regarded what he was doing as an answer to Nietzsche’s question, and the question is something like, well, the inquiring Western rational mind has murdered the metaphysical presuppositions of Western society. Now what? Now Nietzsche’s idea was, well, we would have to invent our own values, we would have to become a new type of being, but Jung’s response to that, especially after World War II, and after encountering Freud, was something like, well, what makes you think we can invent our own values? So Jung’s idea was to rediscover the values of the past, to go within, and that was his hero’s journey, to go within, in the landscape of the imagination, and to rekindle the archetypes. That isn’t necessarily something that has to be done as an internal voyage, but that made the process something that was more akin to an archetypal transformation. So if it’s the father that’s dead, then you go into the belly of the beast to revitalize the father. That’s the pathway forward. And that’s been the pathway forward for human beings for as long back as we know, for tens of thousands of years. Then there’s this sort of cycling, though? Yeah, well, Mercea, I think I’m saying that right, some Romanian wrote me the other day and tried to teach me how to say it, Mercea, I think that’s right, Eliade, talked about the death of God as a recurring phenomena. I mean, that’s what he realized when he did his large-scale surveys of religious belief systems, is that God dies very frequently. And then that’s part of what you might describe as a developmental process. It’s very much akin to what happens to you when your dreams die. You know, when you put forward a hypothesis about a mode of being that you would like to embody, you have a dream, a vision, an ambition, maybe a love affair, something like that, and it collapses on you. Well, there’s a period of death that follows that. You could call it psychological death. But then there’s a reconstruction of the value system and a rebirth. And that’s the eternal human story. It really is. Now, Jung’s contribution to Nietzsche’s body of thought, and this is where I think also Dostoevsky surpassed Nietzsche, was that Jung realized that we didn’t invent our own values. We rediscovered those values that we always harbored within us. Now, that doesn’t mean that they still have to be given new form, though. You see this in an old story, the Egyptian, there’s an old story of Horus and Osiris, and Horus goes to rescue his father Osiris, who’s basically living like a dead ghost in the underworld. He goes to rescue him after defeating his evil uncle. He goes to rescue his dead father. And when he goes down into the underworld, he has an eye in his hand that Seth, the evil one, tore from his head during their combat. And instead of putting the eye back in his head, he gives it to his father. And then his father can see again, and then they both go back up to the surface of the world, and it’s their union that constitutes the spirit of the pharaoh. It’s an absolutely, unbelievably remarkable story, because the idea is, well, you will be damaged in your confrontation with life, particularly if you confront malevolence, because the confrontation with malevolence damages people. It will damage your vision. But if you take that damaged part of you and you reunite it with the dead spirit of your father, then you can revitalize that. That will strengthen you, and that will enable you to move forward into the future. It’s like that’s just exactly right, and it’s one of the deepest religious presuppositions of humanity. You see it everywhere, that idea. That’s what you’re doing in university if you take a liberal arts course degree. It’s like you’re resurrecting your dead ancestors so they can live again in your form, but in conjoined union with you. You’re the vision that gives the dead past its vitality and spirit. And that’s the purpose of being educated. That’s your initiation. And partly what you do when you’re initiated properly in that regard is you develop a comprehensive philosophy of good and evil, a deep philosophy of good and evil, and that protects you against the confrontation with malevolence. And I know that, you know, I know that not least, because one of the things that’s happened to me as a consequence of putting all these lectures online is that I’ve had many military people write me and come and talk to me who had post-traumatic stress disorder, and that’s almost always a consequence, often of them viewing themselves do something dreadful, but sometimes viewing that occurring as a consequence of other people’s actions. Until they have a philosophy of good and evil, they can’t recover from their post-traumatic stress disorder. And like, if you’re naive, metaphysically naive, and you come in contact with someone who truly wants to hurt you, the probability that that will undo you psychologically is very, very high. So you have to be wise as serpents, that’s the old saying, you have to be wise as a serpent, because otherwise you have no protection against serpents. Maybe we’ll do two more, because I’m starting to get fuzzy-minded, and I’ve learned to quit at that point, mostly. So we talked a bit before, or yeah, before you started, I don’t know exactly how to phrase this, and I think that this will be, like, I do want to acknowledge that all of this Q&A has been amazing, because it’s basically been a lecture mixed with reality, and… That’s a good combination. Yeah, it’s a good combination. We’ve all learned something from this, and I don’t think many speakers I go to actually know how to combine that the way you did, so thank you for that. But I guess this question is a bit of a departure from that, and it’s sort of going to something more of a… Something I don’t think everyone can relate to, because it’s… In your book you say, don’t lie, and I think that after living 21 short years, I learned that the hard way, but you and your life and me and my life, I feel like we both had a moment where we’ve had to confront a self-alienating instance of nature, where there is no path forward that we really have at our disposal, and there was a point where an unnatural amount of growth had to come out of us. So I just wanted to know where you drew that line at your own ability to develop as a person, to where you didn’t become tunnel visioned with trying to face life’s problems on your own, or… Well, we had talked just before this second part of this Q&A about my daughter’s illness, and about this gentleman’s illness in his family too, so that’s kind of the background to this. The first part of that is like… If we were going to be pessimistically realistic about all this, I would say that your best bet is truth, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s always going to do the trick, right? I mean, sometimes you go fight a dragon and it eats you. And if you being eaten wasn’t a real possibility, it wouldn’t be a real fight. And so you see people, like I’ve seen people… In my clinical practice sometimes, I had one client in particular who was undergoing a particularly vicious divorce with someone who was really seriously inclined to take him out, and would do pretty much everything at her disposal to do so. And I strategized with him for about three years, and we did everything, like hyper-carefully. He was a very conscientious and diligent person, and he put into practice everything that we discussed and strategized, and he still pretty much… he got backed into a corner so hard that I didn’t know how to help him anymore. So, I would say, however, that he was a very truthful person throughout that, and the one thing he did do was… part of it was a custody battle, and he did manage, despite his decline, in consequence of being repeatedly cornered, I would say, he did manage to establish what I think was a lasting relationship with his kids. So, he might have got enough out of what he did to justify it, even though the whole landscape was pretty awful. I think that not lying is your best bet, but life is hard, and people get run over, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to emerge in any obvious sense triumphant. But if you take the alternative path, especially when you’re facing severe tribulations, let’s say, and you complicate those with deceit, you can be sure that whatever tragedy that you’re confronting is going to turn into not only tragedy, but something very much akin to hell. And so, you might be able to at least minimize the degree of suffering, even if you can’t overcome it or transcend it. And that’s something, you know. It’s something. I’m always reminded in a discussion like this of what I watched when my wife’s family were around the deathbed of her mother. She had frontotemporal dementia, which is like Alzheimer’s, quite an awful way to go. And her husband, my father-in-law, really stepped up to the plate. He was quite the man about town, very extroverted partier type, and quite disagreeable. But when his wife got sick, man, he was there. It was something to watch. And so, he turned what could have been absolutely dreadful into just miserable. And then, when their entire family was gathered around her deathbed, like my wife and her sister had both dealt with dying people before, and the other sister was a pharmacist, and they were attentive to their mother, and there was no foolish catastrophes going on between the family, and they all pulled together. And so, their mother died, but what I observed was that their bonds were strengthened as a consequence, and that they gained something from the tightening of the remaining relationships that was at least partial compensation for the loss of their mother. And that beat the hell out of squabbling about everything while she was dying, because that’s a real possibility, and people certainly do that. So… One more, and maybe we’ll call it a night. So, Dr. Greaves, the one thing that has been kind of going through my mind in this discussion in general, and one I’ve watched your videos, personally one of the most interesting aspects of neuroscience to me is neuroplasticity, and the brain capacity to change the adaptive. But I think that a thematic issue in your talks and in your arguments is that people, both on the left and on the right, can be possessed by, you know, by these E-points that hold them to be stagnant and not to change their energy in the E-point. And they don’t really understand them, maybe to the level that they should, so they clutch them, right? And so my opinion is that that indicates a little bit of a paradox, because, you know, we are wired, we are hardwired essentially to become adept to change. We’re able to change ourselves to respond to the stimuli in our environment, and our brain itself changes, not just our behavior, but the actual, the behavior is just a derivation of what’s actually changing. So your argument is that a lot of people will become, you know, attached to this, and they’ll stay stagnant. So how do you explain, you know, what aspects of cultural phenomena or, you know, just social discourse, what is so powerful about that that it overcomes our predisposed condition to be able to change? Well, change is, change is, especially if it’s, the more radical the necessary change, the more pain that accompanies it, like the more opportunity as well. But, and a lot of what we learn, we learn painfully. And so it’s not surprising that people shrink away from learning. We learn in pain and anxiety very frequently. Everyone knows that, like the things that really, that you really learned in life. It’s like, it was no joy, man, like it took you out. And so the fact that people flee from that is hardly surprising. But it doesn’t help, that’s the thing. It just stores up the catastrophe for later. And so the better, the better idea is to eat a little poison every day, so that you don’t have to overdose in a month. It’s something like that. And it is the case that I think, because you don’t, you aren’t forced to, first of all, you don’t learn unless you’re forced to learn. I know there’s alternatives to that. There’s the voluntary search for knowledge. And that’s a fine thing, and that is an antidote to this. But apart from that, speaking more practically, you tend not to learn unless you’re forced to learn. And what you tend to learn by force are difficult lessons. And so people are very prone to not seek that out. It’s not surprising. But it’s because they don’t understand the consequences very well. You know, you, it’s because maybe, it’s because they’re convinced that there’s some way of forestalling the necessary learning. And there isn’t any way of forestalling it. All you do is make it worse in the future. You make yourself smaller, and you make the lesson harder. And so that’s why in so many religious doctrines, there’s emphasis on humility. You know, and humility isn’t to debase yourself. It’s to understand that you don’t know enough so that your life isn’t going to be miserable. And so every chance you get to grab something new that will help you along your way, you should take it as fast as you can. But you have to have a very tragic, I would say, view of reality. And also a harsh one. Because it’s not just tragedy, it’s also malevolence. You have to understand that those are waiting for you. And that makes you desperate enough to learn. And that might make you desperate enough to fall out of your ideology. But that’s a hard way of looking at the world. It beats living through it, though. It was very nice talking to all of you.