https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=PfH8IG7Awk0
Hello everybody, my name is Angelo and I am your MC for the evening. And on behalf of the UBC Free Speech Club, we would like to welcome you and thank you for attending our third Dr. Jordan B. Peterson event. Now, I know you’re all very excited to hear the man, so I’m going to keep these opening remarks very short. The UBC Free Speech Club is devoted to the sanctity of liberty in our society and the necessity to keep liberty safe from those who want to destroy it. Within just a year, our club has grown to over a thousand members and is now in the process of incorporation so that we may continue to bring speakers and host events such as this one. None of that would be possible without Dr. Peterson, who has inspired countless students all over North America to start speaking up on their campus. And in fact, this club sprung up around the same time when Dr. Peterson publicly came out against Bill C-16. That was just over a year ago, and since then his philosophy of cleaning your room and sorting yourself out has bettered and influenced the lives of countless people. He’s an accomplished psychologist, professor, and author. His book Maps of Meaning is an analytical window into the myths and cultures of humankind. And now he has written a new book. It’s called 12 Rules for Life and Antidote to Chaos and is available for pre-order on Amazon with the release date of January 23, 2018. And on that note, on behalf of the UBC Free Speech Club, we would like to introduce you all to Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. Well, thank you very much for that. That’s quite something. All right. There’s a house mic, right? I don’t need this one? Okay, well then let’s just move it out of the way. Great. So I’m going to talk to you tonight about the ideological nexus of postmodernism and Marxism, and I want to get into it fairly deeply so we can have a thoughtful talk and then discussion afterwards. So it’s a confusing topic because it’s not obvious by any stretch of the imagination why postmodernism and neo-Marxism or Marxism proper would be aligned because postmodernism is an anti-grand narrative philosophical movement and Marxism is a grand narrative. And so the fact that those two things seem to coexist in the same space definitely needs some explanation. And it’s a very tricky thing to get to the bottom of. So we won’t get to the bottom of it, but we’ll get farther to the bottom of it than I’ve got before and hopefully farther than many of you have got before. So let’s see what we can figure out here. So I’m going to start with some definitions. I’ll return to them as we continue. You know, with philosophical movements, they’re often not named by the major thinkers in the movement. They’re sort of named afterwards. The name covers a very large range of ideas and actions and perceptions. Like it’s not that easy. People talk about existentialism, for example. It’s not that easy to come up with a one paragraph summary of what constitutes existentialism. My sense for the existentialists is that it’s fundamentally a movement that’s predicated on the idea, at least in the psychological sense, that Freud tended to attribute human suffering and mental disorder to childhood trauma. It’s more complex than that, but that’ll do for a quick overview. But the existentialists thought that there was enough suffering intrinsic in life so that it wasn’t insanity that was the question. It was sanity. It was how it was possible for people to be sane and, let’s say, normal, for lack of a better word, given that there was brutality and malevolence intrinsic in life. The fact that you had to rise up as an individual and stand in relation to that, relationship to that, is part and parcel of what constitutes existentialism. There’s all sorts of different people who were thinkers who were existentialists. Some of them atheistic, some of them deeply religious, like Dostoevsky. So it’s not, I’m using that as an example to show you how difficult it is to bring a set of thinkers under one umbrella. You’re bound to oversimplify, but we’ll go ahead and oversimplify. Postmodernism, you can think about it as an attitude of skepticism. Irony towards and rejection of grand narratives, ideologies, and universalism, including the idea of the objective notions of reason. That’s a big one. Human nature, that’s a big one. Social progress, absolute truth, and objective reality, all those things being questioned. I kind of think of the head joker at the top of the postmodern hierarchy as Derrida. Foucault is often mentioned, as are a number of other people. Here’s some other attributes of postmodern thinking. There’s a recognition of the existence of hierarchy, that’s for sure. And there’s an echo of that idea, the recognition of hierarchy in the term patriarchy, because of course patriarchy is a recognition of hierarchy. It’s a very particular kind of recognition. But the postmodernists also tend to define hierarchy as a consequence of power differential. And so the world they envision, as far as I can tell, is something like a sociologically Hobbesian nightmare. So Hobbes thought of, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes thought of, the natural state of human beings as every individual in some sense at the throat of every other individual. So the basic state of mankind, unlike the Rousseauian state of, say, virgin innocence and the primitive garden of paradise was an all out war of everyone against everyone else, and that that required the imposition of a social order to keep peace, essentially. So it’s a fairly dark view of humankind. Rousseau, on the other hand, would think of people as intrinsically good and the social order as intrinsically tyrannical. So you can actually think about Hobbes and Rousseau in some sense as opposites that need to be paired together in order to get a relatively comprehensive view of human nature. Well the postmodern view is like the Hobbesian view in some sense except you want to replace the individual with pyramids of social organization, so hierarchies of social organization that are based on group identity and that the landscape in which those pyramids exist is one of unbroken enmity and inability to communicate. So it’s a very dark view as far as I’m concerned. And I think it’s fundamentally wrong in many ways. It’s right in that there are groups of people and there is some difficulty in communication between them and that power is an element in the formation of hierarchies, but you can’t reduce hierarchy or group relationship to those premises. It’s too simplified because people also cooperate. We’re also not groups. Many of us belong to many groups. So it’s too, the actual situation is far too complex to reduce it to that degree, to reduce it to that degree. Even though you can come up with a good explanatory story if you do so, it doesn’t capture the And they’re not just nuances. It doesn’t capture the essence. Now the thing is that when you make the presupposition that the reason that hierarchies exist is because of power, then essentially what you do is turn every hierarchy into a tyranny. And so if there is a hierarchy, then you assume it’s a tyranny. Well, that’s really the patriarchy. The patriarchy’s hierarchy assumed as tyranny. And that’s also just not true, except in pathological hierarchies. So for example, we know from the psychological literature that the best predictors of long-term life success are intelligence and conscientiousness, in Western countries at least. Well, that’s what you’d hope for, right? More or less. If you wanted even to set up a society, even if you weren’t particularly smart or hardworking, you might want to set up a society where intelligence and hard work were good predictors of success because then the people who were smart and hardworking would produce a bunch of things that you could have if you could trade for them. And of course, that is actually the situation that most of us are in. And of course, the other thing about people who believe that hierarchies in the West are only composed of power and tyranny is that their own actions belie that because whenever they make a decision to interact with that hierarchy, they attempt or to make a purchase or to make a trade, let’s say, or to obtain a service of any importance, let’s say a medical service, they are going to definitely act as if there are less and more competent people within that hierarchy and seek out the ones that are more competent, obviously, which you don’t do if the hierarchy is only composed of tyranny and power. There’s no point in looking for competence. But anyways, in the West and in functioning societies, the hierarchies are basically predicated on competence and not power. And you might say, well, that’s pretty naive. It’s like, no, actually, it’s not very naive. I’m not saying at all that inappropriate power plays don’t play a role in corrupting hierarchies of competence. That happens. But generally what happens is if the hierarchies of competence get corrupted enough by power, then they crumble because they can no longer function. So, you know, the evidence that our hierarchies of competence work is everywhere because everything around us works all the time. I am her the elite tells it to two interesting stories in her book Infidel, which is a great book, by the way. She came from Africa and from a country that wasn’t very functional. And when she came to Holland, she said there were two things that really amazed her. And this really struck me because, you know, now and then you get lucky and you can see the the world you live in from an outsider’s perspective. Right. You get to see through someone else’s eyes. She said the first thing that knocked her off her feet was waiting for a bus in in Amsterdam. And on the you know, she’s standing at the bus stop and there’s a pole there and there’s a digital sign on the pole. The digital sign says when the next bus is going to come and counts down and then when it hits zero, the bus appears and she’s she just she just she absolutely could not believe that that would happen, that there could be a sign that told you when the bus would come and that it would change and the bus would actually appear. And you think, well, yeah, no, that’s a miracle, man. That’s an absolute miracle. It is. It is. You’ve got to think that through. You know, the amount of timing and organization and and and reliability, mechanical reliability and sociological or social organization and dedication on the part of the bus drivers and the entire company and the organization of the whole city and the state to make that possible is absolutely beyond belief, especially when it’s time to. Well, perhaps not the second, but to 10 seconds or something like that. That is absolutely beyond belief. And her inability to comprehend that was the correct response. And then the other thing she was amazed by was that you could go talk to policemen and they would help you. That was just that was just a no go for her because for her, her experience was policemen were there to shake you down and and hurt you. And so you think, well, you know, well, I won’t I won’t dwell on that point any longer. The point is, is that it’s absolutely ridiculous, blind to make the assumption that the hierarchies in functioning Western democracies are fundamentally predicated on power and tyranny. And then, you know, I can use a biological example, too, which would place me outside of the postmodern realm of argument because the postmodernists don’t believe in biology. But but they act like they do because they all die. So. So this primatologist named well, I’ll tell you two stories, OK, because these are these are really useful. So the one’s about rats. And I got this story from Yac Pankec, who is a great neuroscientist. He wrote a book called Affective Neuroscience, which, by the way, is on my reading list. It’s on my website. It’s a really good book, Affective Neuroscience. He’s a great scientist. He was one of the people who he learned that he learned that rats laugh. They laugh ultrasonically like bats. So if you’re going to you tickle them with a pencil eraser, they laugh. But you have to record it and then slow it down and then you can hear them. And you might think, well, rats laugh like who what? But you need a grant for that. What kind of idiocy is that? It’s like, no, no, no, just don’t don’t don’t get ahead of yourself here. You know, he was showing that that that capacity for social interaction, for social interaction that was mediated by physiological touch, activated the same. Excuse me. Activated the same circuits in rats, but a dozen people. And that those are actual biological circuits and we share them even with rats. Now, rats are quite similar to human beings, as it turns out. I could say especially postmodernists, but I won’t. And and and so the fact that that you know that little rats giggle when you tickle them is is actually extraordinarily important. He also identified. Surprising. I’ve been talking too much lately. He also identified the primary place circuit in mammals. And that’s a big deal, too, from a scientific perspective. That’s like discovering a new continent, like discovering a whole brain system that people really didn’t know existed. That’s a big deal. So here’s a little story about rats. So young rats like to engage in rough and tumble play, especially juvenile males. It’s also the case for puppies. If you’ve ever had a puppy, dogs are like that. They like to wrestle. And it’s one of the things that male human beings tend to do with their offspring. And it’s a really, really good thing. Like rough and tumble play with children really helps socialize them because it helps them figure out how to get along with each other. The difference between touch and even rough touch and pain. You know, because one of the things you’re doing when you’re rough and tumble playing with a little kid is, you know, you throw them up in the air and you wrestle them around. I built my, I had two couches when my kids were little that were sort of face to face. So we built this little wrestling ring and I used to go in there and pound them half to death every night, you know. So they love that. I mean, they get so excited about that. They love that so much. It’s just crazy. But the reason for that is like you’re stretching out their bodies and you’re showing them that they can’t put their thumb in your eye and you’re teaching them to be graceful and you’re teaching them the difference between something new that’s happening to the body and something painful. You’re really teaching them to dance. And it’s this really complicated physiological dance that is indicative of a socialized being. And that’s partly why women like men who can dance, by the way. Because it shows that you can pay attention to someone else, first of all, that you’re coordinated. But even more importantly, that you can take the fact of your coordination and coordinate that with someone else’s coordination. So and that’s very primal and physiological. It’s built right into your body and rough and tumble play helps with that a lot. Anyways, rats also like to rough and tumble play for much the same reasons and sort of sort of pretty much all social mammals. So you can tell that rats like it. See, how do you know if a rat likes something? Well, he’ll work for it. And one of the ways you can figure out if a rat wants to work for something is that, you know, you get him in a state where maybe he’s desperate for whatever he’s working for. And you can put a little spring on him and figure out how hard he pulls to go somewhere he knows where he’s going to get that. And then you can measure the force that he’s willing to apply. And that gives you a rough estimate of his motivation or maybe he has to bar press like a, you know, like a cocaine addicted rat to receive the reward. And you can count rate of bar pressing and you can get an estimate of how excited the rat is to go do whatever it is the rat’s going to do. And so Panksepp used to put rats, he’d pair them, one rat against the other, in kind of a play arena. Not a very big thing. And these were juvenile males and they would work to do that. Okay, so they liked it. And then maybe one rat was 10% bigger than the other. And then when you paired them, the big rat would beat the little rat because 10% weight advantage was enough to make the bigger rat dominant. Okay, so then they established basically dominance and submission. You might think about that as a power relationship. And to some degree it is, but it’s more complicated than that. And this is very important. So the rats play together once and the big rat pins the little rat, really very much like wrestling. The rats wrestle, just like people wrestle. And if you pair them together, then the big rat can pin the little rat. Okay, so now you’ve got dominant rat, subordinate rat, roughly speaking. And, but then you see, if you stop the experiment there, you’d think, well, the rats play to establish dominance and submission. But the thing is, is that rats don’t just play once, they play many, many, many times. And that’s also the case with human beings, is that you don’t just play once. You play many, many times. And there is a difference between the rules of a game and the rules of a set of games. And that’s so unbelievably important, so you keep that in mind, because we’ll return to that. So anyways, the next time the two rats get together, the little rat has to ask the big rat to play. Because the rule basically is subordinate entity asks dominant entity to play. And so the little rat does what mammals do to play, you know, they kind of put their paws down and put their rear end up a bit up in the air. You see dogs do that, and unless you’re completely clueless, you know that that doesn’t mean he’s going for your throat. It means he wants you to whack him on the side of the head so he can sort of pretend to bite you, you know. It’s pretty obvious if you’ve played with dogs and children. So, and I make that comparison because dogs and children understand each other, right? They’re pack animals, they follow the same basic rules, they know how to play, they can become friends. Otherwise you wouldn’t have them as pets. I mean the dogs, not the children. So anyways, the little rat asks the big rat to play. And the big rat thinks, yeah, yeah, okay, we’ll play. They wrestle, and you pair them multiple times. Well, if you pair them multiple times, what you find is that unless the big rat lets the little rat win 30% of the time, the little rat won’t ask the big rat to play anymore. And then you think, well, who cares? Why is that important? It’s like it’s really important. That’s a really important discovery because it shows you that even rats have a sense of the importance of the little rat. That even rats have a sense of fair play that emerges across iterated games. It’s evidence for the biological instantiation of a social morality. It’s a big deal, man. That’s a big discovery. And it shows you that even at the level of rats, they’re very social animals, by the way. The interactions between rats are mediated by something like a sense of fairness or justice. And so that’s extremely cool. Because, you know, we tend to think of animals as having dominance hierarchies, and that’s predicated on power. And that idea, even though the bloody postmodernists don’t believe in biology, they extend that analogy up to human beings. It’s just not true. Okay, well, the same turns out to be true of chimpanzees. So Franz de Waal, who’s a Dutch primatologist, a very smart one, too, he’s been interested in the biological basis of morality as well. And he’s written a lot of good books on primate behavior, chimps in particular. Chimps are brutal creatures, man. Like, they go to war, eh? And so, if you have a chimp territory out in the jungle, then the juveniles will, the males in particular, they’ll band together in groups of four or five. There’s often, but not always, a female or two with them. And if they come across chimps from another troop that aren’t within their hierarchy, let’s say, they will, if they outnumber them. Because they can’t really count, but they can estimate magnitude visually. It’s not the same as counting. But if they outnumber them, they will tear them to pieces. And chimps are at least twice as strong as a really well-developed human male. And so they can tear you up pretty good. And chimps are perfectly capable. They hunt. They’re carnivorous, like human beings. And they hunt, they hunt colobus monkeys often. They weigh about 40 pounds. And they’ll basically eat them alive. And monkeys screaming away like mad, because, you know, it’s in pain because it’s being eaten. And that doesn’t slow the chimps down a bit. There’s no cross-species empathy stopping them from having their snack. And so chimps are very brutal creatures. And it isn’t obvious they have a lot of internal inhibition of their aggression at all. Most of the inhibition is sociological. It’s out in the hierarchy. And so the reason chimps aren’t always aggressive with one another is because they know who can pound them and who will gang up on them and who won’t. They establish their hierarchy. Anyways. You know, you think about a chimp hierarchy and you’re talking about a fairly strong and aggressive creature, you might think it’s biggest, ugliest, meanest, most vicious, irritable, unpleasant chimp that rises to the top. Well, that’s kind of the postmodernist view of human society. But that’s not the case. It happens sometimes. But what happens, and DeWall has documented this quite nicely, is that tyrant chimps lead unstable regimes. Now, you know, that might sound familiar because the same thing, of course, is true of human beings. Why is that? Well, it’s because, you know, people don’t like tyrants. Chimps don’t like them that much either. And chimps are actually quite reciprocal in their social interactions. So they don’t just dominate each other. They groom each other. They have friendships. They contract social relationships over very long periods of time. No, and they do that. And so they engage in reciprocal interactions. Let’s say pro-social reciprocal interactions. And you might think, well, what’s the weak point of the biggest, ugliest, toughest chimp in the troop? And that is he doesn’t have any friends. And so, you know, maybe he has a bad day. He’s a little hungover, whatever, from eating fermented bananas or whatever he is partying with. And two of the slightly less ugly, slightly less mean chimps decide, well, this is a good time to take him out. And so one of the things DeWalt has pointed out quite nicely is that if you want to have a stable chimp dominance hierarchy, let’s call it a regime, the stable ones aren’t ruled by the tyrants because the tyrants get taken out by paired up friendship dyads, something like that. So that’s really worth thinking about too, you know, because… Because it indicates that even in creatures that have less complex sociological orders, and they do, because one of the things that predicts how complex your social order is, is how big your brain is compared to your body. It’s encephalization, essentially. And the more encephalized a creature, the larger the social groups it can track. And of course, human beings are very highly encephalized, so we have to be careful about that. And so, you know, that’s the big thing. Okay, so, you know, so much for the idea that power is the only game in town. Then you’ve got to ask the question, well, this is actually a postmodern question. And so, you know, if you want to have a stable chimp, you’ve got to have a stable chimp, and that’s the thing that’s important to think about, is that it’s not just about the power of the chimp, but it’s about the power of the chimp, and that’s the thing that’s important to think about. So, you know, one of the things Derrida said, the main postmodern joker, is that by categorizing, you privilege one concept, and you force other concepts out to the margins. And so, he believed that when you constructed a hierarchy of power, that the hierarchy of power privileged certain people and marginalized others. And, you know, that’s really not that brilliant an observation, as well. It’s rather commonplace. All it means is that when you categorize something, that there are things that are in the category and a bunch of things that aren’t. And so, you actually can’t categorize anything, which means you can’t perceive anything, which means you can’t think or live without making some things in the middle and everything else on the outside. It’s part of categorization itself. And so, maybe the postmodernists would go far enough to question the utility of categorization itself, and I think to some degree they do that. But the point here is that if you… You have to ask why it is that you would, if you were a postmodernist yourself, why it is that you would privilege the idea of power above all else. It’s exactly what is it that you’re pushing to the margin. And so, that’s something that we’re going to talk about. Now, here’s one thing you might push to the margin. Let’s say that you believe that hierarchies are a consequence of power. Well, then you push competence to the margin. And then, applying the postmodernist logic, you might say, well, the reason you’re privileging power is so that you can produce… so that you could push competence to the margin. And so, you want to keep that in mind, too, because that’s the way you’re going to push it. And you’re going to keep that in mind, too, because that’s going to become important as we discuss the relationship between postmodernism and Marxism. Maybe you’re after the destruction of the idea of competence itself. All right, so… Okay. Postmodernism. We talked about it a little bit. We’ll return to it. Now, we’re going to talk a little bit about Marxism. I’ve got a quote here from Marx. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. Well, that was pretty good for, like, 1880 or 1890 or whenever it was. He wrote it somewhere around that period of time. Turned out the proletarians had a lot more to lose than their chains. They had their lives and their families to lose. That was demonstrated amply as a consequence of the… what would you call it? The sociological movements that were put into place when the Marxist presuppositions began to govern societies like the Soviet Union. So… all right. So, let’s take the same postmodernist approach. So, here’s some basic tenets of Marxism. It’s bourgeoisie against proletariat. The bourgeoisie are the capitalists, the property owners, those sorts of people. The proletariat, working class, for all intents and purposes. The basic idea is that history itself is nothing but the… what would you call it? The documentation of the struggle of one class against the other. Okay. No. Like, that’s wrong. But it’s okay, because it’s too simple, obviously. It’s obviously too simple. There’s all sorts of motivations that people have. Some of them are economic, some of them are associated with power. But that’s okay. We’ll leave that. Let’s give the devil his due and say, well, yeah, fair enough. There’s still fair bit of tension between the haves and the have-nots. Maybe that was even more intense in previous societies than it is now. And there’s no doubt that economics plays a role in the struggle of the proletariat. It plays a role in virtually everything that human beings do, and a fairly significant role. So let’s accept that as a potential theory. It’s simple, but maybe it’s practically useful. And then there’s kind of an offshoot of that theory, which is that, well, if you’re a Marxist, that means you have sympathy for the working class, right? Because that’s what you’re saying all the time. It’s like, well, the poor working class, they’re all oppressed. The poor proletariat, you know? And then you’re also saying, well, we’re the good guys, because we’re standing on the side of the oppressed. And so then you might also ask what you’re marginalizing when you claim that you’re the good guys, because one of the things that you would be marginalizing is all of the ways in which you’re not the good guys. But we can leave that aside for a moment, too. So, but there’s the claims, is that, you know, there’s the working class against the ruling class. Another claim is the ruling class is the ruling class because they exploit the working class, basically stealing their excess labour from them. Another very, very, what? Surfacely attractive claim that lacks any reasonable justification, you know, because it’s predicated on the idea of the world as a zero-sum game, and clearly the world is not a zero-sum game. So when someone creates wealth, when someone is wealthy, it can be at least at times because they created it, not because they swiped it from someone else. I think, you know, you can think of someone like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs as a good example of that. You know, they’re, what they produced had a value that far exceeded what they garnered as a consequence of their production, even though what they garnered was very substantial. So anyways, but we’ll get, like I said, we’re going to give the devil his due. Okay, it’s the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. We’ll accept that. It’s class warfare is the primary historical mover. No problem. Now, but here’s one I’m not willing to give away so easily. We have sympathy for the working class, primarily, and we’re good because of that. No, I’m not going to just like give that away so simply. So let’s investigate that a little bit. Let’s see if we can actually figure out if that’s true. We’ll say, we use a pragmatic approach, because I’m a pragmatist in the William James sense. Or maybe you could think about it even more deeply and anciently. There’s a statement in the New Testament. I think it’s by their fruits, you shall know them. Fine. So we’re going to walk down that road before we do that. So now that’s another thing you have to keep in mind. Before we do that, I want to make one more detour. Okay, so I like making detours and then tangling them all back together. So I want to give you a bit of a history of theories of suffering. And I’m going to compare the Marxist theory of suffering to the Judeo-Christian theory of suffering. And the Judeo-Christian would be, and the reason I’m doing that is because I think the Judeo-Christian theory of suffering is actually one of the foundation stones of our entire culture. And so it actually matters why you think they’re suffering. And so the story that describes the entry of suffering into the world, the mythological story, is the story in Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve, and the story of the story of the story of Adam and Eve. And basically what happens in the story of Adam and Eve is Adam and Eve are unconscious to begin with, and they’re sort of in this paradisal state. There’s no death, or at least there’s no knowledge of death. There’s also no knowledge of self. And then Eve eats the apple that the serpent gives her, and the scales fall from her eyes. And she gives the apple to Adam, and he eats it as well, so she makes himself conscious. They both wake up. The first thing that happens is they realize that they’re naked. And they cover themselves up. And the second thing that happens as a consequence of that realization is that they come to know the difference between good and evil. And I mean, that’s an insanely complicated story that’s dealing with an absolutely incomprehensible number of complex phenomena simultaneously. But it basically goes something like this, is that to be aware that you’re naked is to be aware of your fragility and your mortality. When you have a nightmare about being naked in front of a crowd, it means that you’re exposed to the crowd. All your flaws, all your mortal vulnerability is exposed to the crowd. For them to see, for you to be ashamed of, for them to judge. That’s partly why we’re all clothed. That’s partly why human being, why clothing is a human universal. There’s many human universals, by the way. Clothing is one of them. And all that stuff, I don’t want toholmate. If I felt that wood had director big-head surely would feel sorry for not causing this to take place. But then why have we not balanced alcoholics with the Parahthisis repeatable? Because of its frangaweight, it eitherابes, but it’s still Brazilian. But it’s significant, although it’s used for many different purposes. So Adam and Eve cover themselves up, because they’ve realized that they’re It’s a whole different. It’s a qualitatively different issue in the case of human beings. We’re self-conscious Self-consciousness loads on trait neuroticism technically speaking which means that self-consciousness is primarily something that manifests itself in the form of negative emotion And we all know that you’re on stage you get self-conscious. Is that a good thing? No, you can get so self-conscious that your tongue tied right? It’s not good You don’t have to be self-conscious. You can get so self-conscious that you’re tongue tied right? It’s not good. You don’t want to be self-conscious on stage or maybe ever you get self-conscious in the in the face of someone you’re trying to impress You turn all red you stammer. It’s like self-consciousness is a rough business And it’s no wonder because you know yourself for the for the fragile fool that you are It’s even worse than that because see it took me a long time to figure out why it was that when Adam and Eve woke up They also developed the knowledge of good and evil I just couldn’t figure that out because didn’t make sense to me How self-consciousness knowledge of vulnerability and the knowledge of good and evil were tangled together? Or even really what the knowledge of good and evil meant? But I figured it out eventually I thought oh I get it I get it it was like a real revelation to me As soon as you know you’re vulnerable you know the difference between good and evil Because as soon as you know you’re vulnerable then you know everyone else is And as soon as you know that everyone else is vulnerable you know how to hurt them And so that means you consciously know how to bring suffering into being And that’s the knowledge of good and evil and you know that because let’s say that you’re really good at torturing people and there’s No doubt a number of people in the audience who are actually quite good at that and maybe you all have a bit of an affinity for it If you’re married, I’m sure your partner would testify to that So If you’re going to hurt someone you’re going to hurt them So If you’re going to hurt someone what you think essentially is okay. What would really hurt me? Then you think well. I’ll just do that to them. It’s like that’s that’s that’s a that’s a good theory It’s very sophisticated So anyways so okay, so what happens adam and eve wake up they weren’t supposed to do this god told them that they’re going to be sorry if they did that but they did it anyways because that’s what people are like and Because we always learn things that that that knock us out of our present paradises, right? We’re curious and we won’t leave things alone and maybe things are not so bad And then you you know ask some questions that maybe you’re not so happy about asking once you find the answer And you fall out of your little paradise into history and you got to work to set things right again and anyways God gets wind of this and And he chases adam and eve out of the garden of eden But he says some interesting things when he chases them out he says all right now you know What’s the consequence of that and he says to adam you’re gonna have to work? Now that’s cool. That’s really cool. Well. He is god after all you know so he he knows what he’s talking about He says you’re gonna have to work, so why would you have to work now that you knew you were vulnerable? Well the answer to that is well if you’re going to be a god You know that you’re going to die you know that you’re fragile. It’s like Maybe all your problems are solved right now. You’re all sitting here. You’re safe. You’re not hungry You don’t want anything to drink etc, but what about tomorrow? What about next week or next month or 10 years from now? It’s like just because you got all your problems solved for this second doesn’t mean you got them solved For the rest of your iterations through time So you got to work and the work is the sacrifice And so that’s exactly right you have to work Now you see see what’s interesting about that? This is the theory that I was told and then of course god tells that eve well you’ve really You know screwed things up, too You’re gonna have these big brain babies, and and that’s a big problem you’re Going to suffer in childbirth, and then they’re going to be dependent on you forever and because of that you’re going to be dependent on this man And you’re going to be dependent on your children And so that’s it that’s the curse in some sense and and it’s exactly right But the thing is there’s a theory in there. There’s an interesting theory of suffering that’s implicit in that story And the theory of suffering is that suffering is built into the structure of self-conscious being It’s built right into the structure so if you’re a self-conscious being that’s a good thing But you’re not going to be able to do that You’re going to be able to do that in a way that’s going to be a good thing So that’s a big deal because that’s a that’s an important theory because one of the questions is well You know why is there suffering or what are you going to do about it? And it’s a big it’s a lot different if it’s just a big deal So you’re going to be able to do that in a way that’s going to be a big deal And that’s the thing about it is that it’s not just a big deal It’s not just a big deal It’s not just a big deal It’s not just a big deal It’s not just a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal So that’s a big deal And this is what I’m talking about this terrible thing waited at the door you let it in and then you entered into a creative union with it and you produced something as a consequence That’s this tormented spirit that you have now and it’s polluting your relationship with reality and that’s why things aren’t working so out very well for you So go put yourself together before you come and tell me And cain isn’t very happy about that because really is that really what you want to hear right like you have more misery than is Necessary because you really didn’t put your act together, and you know it and you’ve done it creatively and So cain goes and kills abel That’s the story of how resentment enters the world and it’s the first story in the Judeo-Christian Canon let’s say about actual human beings because Adam and eve were made by God, so they don’t really count cain and abel were born And so that’s something so there’s a reaction to suffering right the necessity of sacrifice and the consequence of the necessity of sacrifice Is that some sacrifices work and others don’t and then if your sacrifices aren’t met with the with the goodwill of God Let’s say well, then that makes you angry Well of course it does you can take God out of the story if you want if you’re not happy with it You’re not happy with that kind of Mythological or narrative statement, but doesn’t really matter because the whole point is is that if you make sacrifices especially if they’re second-rate things aren’t going to go very well for you, and you’re going to get bitter and resentful and murderous and maybe Genocidal and it’s really interesting you know because cain has descendants and if you bug if you transgress against them They don’t just kill you they kill seven of you and then his later descendants kill 49 of you There’s this exponential growth of murderousness as a consequence of cain’s Primary primal fratricide, and then the next story is the flood and that’s not an accident There’s nothing in those stories is an accident Okay, so now you’ve got two different theories about the nature of suffering you’ve got the one I just laid out it’s called the foundational story of suffering and Malevolence and you have the Marxist story which is Well, there’s oppressed people and the reason they’re oppressed and suffering is because the oppressors are oppressing them those are not the same theories Right and there’s a utopianism that’s implicit in Marxism which is if you could just get the damn oppressors to stop oppressing the oppressed then the utopia would arrive And so not only are the oppressors responsible for the suffering of the poor They’re also responsible for the fact that the utopia isn’t here for everyone and so how reprehensible can you get Well then that certainly justifies that degree of Malevolence justifies pretty much anything you’d like to do to them. So anyways, so let’s take this apart in a little more detail Do the Marxists have sympathy for the working class George Orwell was interested in this question And so he wrote this book called Wiggin rode to Wigginpere Which I would highly recommend it. It’s on a reading list. I had made it’s on my website You can check that out. Those are books that have been particularly influential to me and so Orwell was a socialist he wrote the book for the Left Book Club Which published a kind of a socialist book once a month? Orwell by the time he wrote this book. He was already awake You know by in the 1920s After the Russian Revolution no one really knew what to make of what was happening in what would become the Soviet Union, right? I mean it was after World War one Planet was in ashes for all intents and purposes the old aristocratic order was crumbling It was a horror show and These revolutionaries came out with these new ideas and Tried to give the in principle give the working class a break and everybody watched to see what would happen and The honest people and the intellectuals watched and I separate them for a reason But by 1920 21 22 something like that it was obvious already that something was rotten in the state of Denmark To check out how the collectivization of the farms was going and he found out it was actually pretty murderous Right because what this what the communists did was round up all the successful farmers and rape them and kill them and steal everything They had and send them off to Siberia which turned out actually to be a pretty bad idea Now you think you think about it those people were or serfs not very long before a couple of generations at most They were a very good group of people They were so not much more than slaves and some of them had risen up to the point where they may had a nice brick house And a couple of cows and maybe a person working for them or two and there was a small proportion of the agriculturalists in the Soviet Union That were producing most of the food and that’s just how it goes because that’s a preto distribution issue in any field Where there’s human productivity a small proportion of the people produce almost all of the output It’s actually a very small number of people So if you have a hundred farmers ten of them produce half the food But if you have ten thousand a hundred of them produce half the food Okay, so what happens when you kill all the good farmers? You starve six million Ukrainians to death in the 1930s and you know that’s not something that’s all that widely known, but if you want to Provide some additional fodder for your nightmares you can do that So that underneath the under the collectivization principles So let’s say you’re a mother and you were starving to death and so are your children and you know The communists had come in and forcibly collectivized you and then they took all the grain that your collective farm had produced And they shipped it all to the city say and so that’s all done, and you think okay You know the city’s got a lot of grain and you know the city’s got a lot of food and you know You know the city’s got a lot of food and you know the city’s got a lot of food and you know Picking up the grains that the harvesters missed so that you can you know the ones that they’ve been lying there There’s not so good. There’s not that many of them you go out and glean. You pick up the seeds that weren’t picked up So you can feed your kids so they don’t die and so what’s the punishment for that death? Because you were obliged under the collectivization orders to turn in any Poor, you know, you know, you have to you know So they could be shipped to the cities I suppose which is of course absurd because of course that would never happen But it was mostly so that you could just actually die so okay Anyways back to the road to Wigan Pier now I’m gonna read you a little bit about about the The Book so Orwell went out to this mining town in the northern UK and coal miners Orwell had sympathy for the working class he really worked on that his whole life because he was a middle class upper middle class snobby type Englishman and he knew it And he tried really hard to overcome that he he he served in the mining town He wandered around as a tramp he worked in in low-end restaurant He worked as a low-end worker in restaurants in Paris and and in London. He has a very good book I think it’s called down and out in Paris in London that describes that he was seriously committed dude and really a smart guy And so he’s going up to these terrible Towns in the northern UK where the coal miners worked and had their families and so he was a very good guy He said the women he talked to said teeth are just a misery. It’s better to get rid of them as soon as you can And and and they went and the man went and mined coal and that was rough You know they all had black lung by the time they were 40 and they were all black And he said he was a very good guy He was a very good guy and he was a very good guy And he was a very good guy And so they went and the men went and mined coal and that was rough You know they all had black lung by the time they were 40 and they were they were done fundamentally, but Here’s a just a bit a bit of a story about how hard their lives were so They had to go in the mines During the day so they never saw the day So that’s one thing they had to go to the mines and then they had to like knock coal off the walls That’s hard with hammers and picks and all of that and they had to move it That was their job, but there was the commute So here was the commute so imagine that the typical tunnel was about that high something like that And the typical coal miner was about that high That’s a problem because you got to walk through those tunnels to get to work. So you have to walk like this Then the question might be well, how far do you have to walk to work? And the answer is three and a half miles And that’s how far you have to walk back from work after you put your eight-hour shift in at the coal mine And you don’t get paid for the commute And so Orwell said that was more or less like climbing a small mountain In the morning before you went to work and then climbing another one at night before you went home And so that was just I mean believe me i’m telling you very little about how tough their lives were But that gives you a little flavor. I said one day like that for a modern person. You’re just you’re dead Or you wish you were dead anyways and so Orwell talks about going up there to stay in terrible places He lived in while he was up there and the terrible food he ate and and the miserable wretched scenes that he saw And here’s one of the miserable wretched scenes. He’s on a train Through the neighborhoods. He says the train bore me away Through the monstrous scenery of slag heaps chimneys piled scrap iron foul canals paths of sindery mud Crisscrossed by the prints of clogs. This was march, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere There were mounds of blackened snow As we move slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little gray slum houses Running at right angles to the embankment At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones Poking a stick up the leaden waste pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked I had time to see everything about her her sack apron her clumsy clogs her arms reddened by the cold She looked up as the train passed and I was almost near enough to catch her eye She had a round pale face The usual exhausted face of the slum girl who’s 25 and looks 40 thanks to miscarriages and drudgery and it wore For the second in which I saw it the most desolate hopeless expression I’ve ever seen It struck me then that we Meaning the middle class at that time are mistaken when we say that it isn’t the same for them as it would be for us And that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums For what I saw in her face was by no means the ignorant suffering of an animal She knew well enough what was happening to her understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny It was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold on the slimy stones of a slum backyard Poking a stick up a foul drainpipe All right, so Orwell writes the first part of the book And it details the lives of these people and then he makes an argument He says like how can you read about this? How can you know about this without having some sympathy for? Redistribution schemes and social and socialist ideas And so he’s actually asking himself this question. It’s not just a rhetorical question He’s I mean, he’s a serious guy right he went he goes up there He tells you a story that you have to have a heart of stone If you if you don’t if you read that you don’t think man something should be done about this. It’s really awful so he set up this situation where Your sympathies are completely with the people that he’s describing But socialism wasn’t all that popular in britain at that time and and so And socialists weren’t all that popular with orwell. He didn’t really like them that much He was trying to figure out why that was So this is what he wrote in the second part of the book now this got him in a lot of trouble They didn’t want to publish his damn book after he wrote the second part But he fought with them and he got it published and it’s a classic and and people still read it and you should read it Because it’s a great book and orwell’s a great writer and orwell is another one of those people Intellectuals who woke up and they were like oh my god. I’m going to kill myself And orwell was another one of those people Intellectuals who woke up pretty early you know orwell wrote animal farm in 1984 he wrote 1984 in 1948 Wrote animal farm approximately around the same time He knew what was happening under stalin and he wasn’t afraid to say it But it was a message that in some sense fell on deaf ears especially among the intelligentsia and there’s complicated reasons for that but But it wasn’t like the facts weren’t there for people to see them if they wanted to and as already said muggerage malcolm Muggeridge had made it pretty clear in the 1920s and that was widely publicized by the way throughout the uk what was happening during dekulakization the kulaks being the farmers that I talked about earlier who who had committed the unspeakable sin of crawling out of their Surf status over a couple of generations to the point where they weren’t mere Property and half starved so this is what orwell had to say about socialists It might be said however that even if the theoretical Oriented book trained socialist is not a working man himself at least he is actuated by a love of the working class He’s endeavoring to shed his bourgeois status and fight on the side of the proletariat Obviously that must be his motive But is it Sometimes I look at a socialist The intellectual tracked writing type of socialist with his pullover his fuzzy hair And his marxist quotation and wonder what the devil is motive really is it’s really difficult to believe that it’s a love of anybody Especially of the working class from whom he is of all people the furthest removed The truth is that too many people calling them socialists revolutionaries Revolution does not mean a movement of the masses With which they hope to associate themselves it means instead a set of reforms which we the clever ones are going to impose Upon them the lower orders on the other hand It would be a mistake to regard the book trained socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited He is perfectly capable of displaying hatred Sort of queer theoretical invacuo hatred against the exploiters Hence the grand old socialist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie It is strange how easily almost any socialist writer can Lash himself into frenzies of rage against the class to which by birth or by adoption he himself Almost invariably belongs Now I worked for the NDP when I was a kid And I had privileged access to the leadership for provincially and federally for reasons that I won’t go into and I thought that Many of them were honorable people who were really striving to give the working class a voice And I believe that the working class needs a voice a political voice For the right to vote and for the right to vote I think the democrats in the united states have made an absolutely dreadful abysmal mistake replacing their working class Political ethos with identity politics we’re going to talk about that and And I don’t think the situation has changed that much I think one of the things that we need to do is World stability and peace in some ways has been purchased at the expense of north american working class well-being You know because the chinese have got rich Compared to 30 years ago 40 years ago 50 years ago The the indians have got rich again same comparison basis. There’s more middle class And the middle class is more middle class The trade arrangements that have been in north america allowed for the rise of middle classes globally At the same time they opened up the working class in north america to competition from those low wage sources And maybe that’s a good deal. It’s hard to say right because It’s not such a bad thing that the middle class is getting rich But it’s not a bad thing that the middle class is getting rich And it’s not such a bad thing that the indians aren’t starving and that those societies are transforming themselves actually into communities that are quite wealthy It’s like hooray for that. It’s an absolutely miraculous transformation It’s the most rapid growth of human wealth in the history of humanity So we should be pretty happy about that, but we should also remember at least to some degree Who’s paid the price for it? And we should be happy about that We should also remember at least to some degree who’s paid the price for it And so As far as i’m concerned the working class needs a voice and It isn’t obvious that they have one at the moment Having said that however, it isn’t obvious to me at all That the people who purport to stand for the working class Actually do so Or that if they do so that the reason they do so is because they’re all compassionate and sympathetic and loving and kind and saint like i’m more convinced by Orwell’s argument so back to the ndp The people I met at the leadership level A lot of them I had a fair bit of admiration for but as I worked with the party over about a five-year period There was this contradiction that came kept emerging for me and that was that I didn’t really like the low-level party Functionary activist types like they just weren’t personally appealing to me. They seemed peevish and resentful And then at the same time I was going to college. I was about 17. I got Elected to the sit on the college board of governors and at that time alberta was conservative politically right it still is of course, but It was part of the progressive conservative Empire Because they ruled alberta forever and all the board of governor members were basically nominees, right? They were conservative nominees so these were conservative people and I was an ndp member and I thought And I’d worked for small businessmen too who weren’t ndp. They were they were conservative I think you never figure that out, but i’ll tell you about that in a minute but I had a bad case of cognitive dissonance because it actually turned out that I admired the people on the board of governors And they were mostly it was in grand prairie. It’s not a very big place, and it’s not very old and so if you were reasonably Successful in grand prairie the probability that you would inherited your money from the Aristocracy was like zero because there wasn’t one right it the whole damn town was 50 years old So if you had any influence or or wealth you were a small businessman small to middle-sized businessman and you’d You knew what you were doing And I actually admired these people I thought well. That’s not very good I admire them and I don’t share their political views and then there’s these other people with whom I Hypothetically share political views and I don’t admire them at all What’s going on and then I read road to wig and pear and I thought oh? That’s it They don’t like the poor they just hate the rich It’s not the same thing it’s not the same set of motivations And so let’s say that you’re a postmodernist and you privilege compassion for the oppressed Think well, what do you push to the margins? Well, what are you doing with all your hatred and your resentment? And your evil it’s like you don’t have any of that That’s a bad theory, that’s a really bad theory Okay, so fine so you can say well yeah you can say that but I don’t buy it I still think that the people who stand to speak for the oppressed are in fact Motivated by empathy and sympathy their hearts are in the right place see I don’t really buy that either because I don’t really think Generally speaking that it’s a credible claim for someone to make that their heart is in the right place Now you can ask me I’m not saying that you’re in the right place Now you can ask that of yourself, and if you think your heart is in the right place well more power to you You know I I can’t see the halo from here however And so given that you’re just as malevolent as Your neighbor or maybe even more so and that that’s actually pretty malevolent given The nature of human beings I can’t help but wonder what you’re doing with all those traits that you’re not admitting to But you can You could even object well you know that’s a pretty pessimistic view of humankind It’s not by the way it’s just not naive, but anyways you could object that and you can say no actually The weight of moral authority is in fact on the left even the radical left with those who identify with the oppressed And who are working to better their conditions Okay Fair enough so then let’s say well let’s give those people some power And if they’re actually motivated by compassion and empathy and desire for the working class if you give them power And you give their ideas power then as those ideas unfold in real time you’re going to find out like do things get better? For the working class let’s say or do they get worse Because we could we could consider that like an experiment we could consider the outcome proof I don’t know what else you would do I don’t know how else you would you would come to your decision because it’s just theory till you see it happen Now Nietzsche said back in the 18 late 1800s that After he said that God was dead And I suppose that would also mean the theory that of suffering that I outlined at the beginning that is at the basis of judaic christian civilization That God was dead and that people had killed him and that we’d never find enough water to wash away the blood It’s a paraphrase, but I’ve got the basic message right and he also said there’ll be two consequences of that nihilism Because there’s no transcendent meaning and a move to totalitarianism because people can’t tolerate nihilism He said the most likely pathway to totalitarianism would be communism essentially he didn’t quite use those words, but He meant that He the words are close enough He said socialism, but i’m going to use communism to distinguish in it distinguish it from democratic socialism And he said that probably tens of hundreds tens of millions of people would die in the 20th century as we played out that example And then he said but it might be worth it if we learn something from it Rough man I mean and and unbelievable like I cannot figure out how in the world he knew that that was going to happen Especially so far in advance, but dostoevsky knew the same thing he wrote this book called the devils or the possessed you could read that That’s a great book it takes about 150 pages to get going But once it like everything everything’s smoothed out And it’s basically his prophecy about it’s an examination of the kind of person Who had arisen in the aftermath of the death of god in russia who would lead the communist revolution? That’s essentially it and it’s brilliant. It’s it’s it’s terrifying and it’s a great intro to Solzhenitsyn’s gulag archipelago which describes what did happen when those sort of people took over the communist revolution So let’s look at what happened after the revolution And we might say well this how about we replicate the experiment a few times because you know how it is if you’re running a scientific experiment You want to find out? What something does if you allow it to behave you don’t want to just run it once because? Well, maybe there was something specific about those conditions that led to the outcome you want to generalize it as a kind of a A very long period of time in a variety of exceptionally diverse cultures and languages So let’s do that Okay, well we could first start with the with the soviets And let’s look at the first part of the experiment So let’s look at the first part of the experiment So let’s look at the first part of the experiment Why most people are very serious about the experiment? Lets see I’m curious about this Let’s focus on Shieldgeroma So after the revolution If you have a risk that you know some events weren’t happening You won’t even talk about that And let’s do yes boy let’s do that Okay, Well we can first start with the with the soviets If you want to know about that you can read Solzhenitsyn’s writings about Lenin because they communist apologists say well It wasn’t Lenin Lenin was a good guy. He was all motivated by love of the working class It’s like well his henchmen was Stalin and if your henchmen is Stalin. You’re not a good guy and and Lenin was around during the early collectivization and if you read the And if you read what he wrote you’ll find out that he is perfectly willing to have any number of people die as long as His ideological system could be brought into being so there’s no celebrating Lenin. There’s no we’re cool young Marxist hip revolutionaries, and he’s our idol. It’s like there’s none of that Not if you know anything not if you’re decent There was death of the kulaks I told you about that there was Ukrainian famine that’s six million gone there There was the rise of the gulag state because it turned out that Russia the Soviet Union couldn’t run on the principles that it had that it had Laid down as sacrosanct. They just didn’t work so you had to enslave everybody and run your economy as a slave state and as a slave state And so you had to run your economy And try not to kill the people in the gulags so fast that you can’t suck some productive labor out of them There’s the death of tens of millions of people. We don’t even know the estimates range from 15 to 60 million and like We won’t get too picky in about the numbers because after the first 10 million you kind of made your point and You know the numbers are pretty good We won’t get too picky in about the numbers because after the first 10 million you kind of made your point and The fact that we don’t know between 15 and 60 is actually an indication of the horror of it because our count is off by tens of millions and that’s only within the last century and then there was the 1956 crackdown on Hungary and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia then there was the whole like Thermonuclear holocaust thing that was going on at the same time and the fact that in 1962 and in 1984 we were Seconds away from complete annihilation right during the Cuban Missile Crisis the keys were in the intercontinental Ballistic missile release systems and Castro as he admitted to Jimmy Carter in case any of you are Castro fans Which you shouldn’t be That he was perfectly willing to have Cuba annihilated if it would have meant the defeat of the United States And then in 1984 Approximately I may have the date exactly wrong the Russians received an indication from their early warning systems that the Americans had launched five thermonuclear missiles and one Russian decided that it was a mistake and Refused to launch the retaliation, and he just died about two weeks ago So you know that was pretty close and So that was experiment number one let’s say that that wasn’t good that experiment let’s put it that way It wasn’t good it was exactly the antithesis of good it was precisely the antithesis of good But that wasn’t all I mean There’s the People’s Republic of China That’s a different country like seriously a different country right different tradition different language How many people died in China under Mao no one knows Same issue with the Soviet Union although Mao was a bigger monster than Stalin and that’s that’s impressive you know because there’s Hitler There’s Stalin and there’s Mao and of the three Mao was probably the worst He’s still revered in China Maybe that accounts for their affinity for North Korea which could still destroy us all the remnants of that horrible state Maybe a hundred million people died in China during the great leap forward. That’s a hell of a leap forward Well, maybe it wasn’t a hundred million. You know maybe it was only 40 million, but as I said before When you’re counting in the tens of millions your points already made and then there was Cambodia and the killing fields and Bulgaria and East Germany and Romania and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea That’s North Korea and Vietnam and Ethiopia Hungary Etc etc etc. It was never a successful communist state Cuba I suppose came closest, but it was radically The Soviets poured money into Cuba so that doesn’t really count So then the first question was well are these Marxists motivated by love or hatred well Is it love or hatred that produces a hundred million dead people Is that enough evidence or not And if it’s not enough evidence if you think to yourself well, that’s not enough evidence. It was never really given its proper a Proper try It’s like well, what would have been a proper try see I always think when I hear someone say that I know what you think You think in your delusional arrogance That you understand the Marxist doctrines better than anyone else ever has and that if you were the one implementing those doctrines You would have ushered in the utopia. That’s what you mean when you say that and You know they say and there’s an idea in the New Testament that there’s a sin it’s the sin against the Holy Ghost If you commit that sin no one really knows what it is That you can’t be forgiven and I would say well if you want a candidate for the sin against the Holy Ghost in the 21st century the statement Communism Communism is a very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very Real communism was never tried with the underlying idea that if you had been the person implementing it it would have worked I think that’s a pretty good contender for something for which you should never be forgiven All right, so that’s Marxism, so let’s go on to postmodernism We talked a little bit about it Now hypothetically It’s an attitude of skepticism irony towards rejection of grand narratives ideologies and universalism Criticizes objective notions of reason human nature social progress absolute truth and objective reality It’s predicated on the idea that the reason that you categorize especially that the reason that you categorize is to marginalize You categorize to marginalize to obtain power power is pretty much all there is There’s other elements of postmodernism one of them is that human nature is merely a social construct See the reason for that as far as I’m concerned and this is a postmodern critique as well I’m going to move the center to the margin and the margin to the centers Why would you think that human nature is only a social construct? Well here’s why it’s because that means you could construct it any way you want to That was a very common idea among this among the communists You know they that’s why Mao wanted to wipe out Chinese history That’s why the Red Guard went around in China and tried to destroy everything Every element of China’s history prior to approximately 1960 At that great culture thousands and thousands of years old as well, so you could bring in the new man Well was the new man well was whatever slave Mao happened to fantasize about or it was the utopian person you take your pick But like I said if you take a look at the corpses you can pretty much figure out Which of those two it was? So what’s up with these people? These deconstructionists these postmodernists, what are they up to exactly well? Here’s the first thing They came about pretty much when Marxism Was no longer credible no longer tenable as an intellectual a set of intellectual propositions now if you were a French intellectual You had to have a lot of corpses piled at your feet before you were willing to think that you were wrong so Here’s an example. I don’t remember his name. He was the architect of the French Revolution He was the architect of the French Revolution Here’s an example. I don’t remember his name. He was the architect of the Killing Fields in Cambodia wasn’t Paul pot it was one of his advisors Unfortunately, I can’t remember his name. He took his PhD at the Sorbonne and He developed the thesis in the Sorbonne with Marxist thesis that The cities were parasites on on the land You know it’s an extension of the whole bourgeoisie proletariat thing the cities were full of bourgeois types educated and Educated parasites essentially who were doing nothing but stealing what was rightly the farmers So when he came back to Cambodia he put that into action and emptied out the cities And put all the intellectuals and the city dwellers either to death or to work which generally resulted in death and killed about 1-6 to 1 quarter of the population, but he got his PhD from the Sorbonne And that’s a good story because that’s exactly how complicit the Western leftist intellectuals were in Facilitating the horrors of the 20th century, and it’s not like we’ve learned anything since then quite the contrary. We’ve just gone underground And that’s what I see That’s what I see when I see postmodernism So what happened was Despite the affinity of Western intellectuals for Marxism Maybe because they weren’t paid as much as bankers Let’s say if we’re being cynical about it because I’ve often thought that if you paid Sociologists as much as investment bankers. They’d be capitalists very rapidly Well which is also to say that you may underpay intellectuals at your peril And you know that’s actually dangerous because one of the things that’s happening is that as the universities have become Corporatized and corrupted in a variety of ways more and more of the professors are adjuncts right I think it’s up to 30 40 50 percent Something like that now. They’ve got no tenure. They’ve got no job security, and they’re paid like $24,000 a year It’s not a good idea to radicalize the people that are teaching your children By the end of the 60s So much data on the catastrophic failures of communism had accrued that even the most intransigent of French intellectuals had to admit that the jig was up But that’s a problem because That’s the whole point of the problem And that’s the whole reason that he says in his terrible, Alberta French You’re gonna just give that up what are you gonna do after that? Well what happened was postmodernism was invented and so it’s a sleight of hand as far as I can tell so It’s a little bit of a shock to me And so the postmodern transformation is Well, we’re a little wrong with the working-class thing turns out that Communists kill them all and Capitalists make them all rich and that’s actually exactly the opposite of what we predicted But maybe there’s still a way this could be done And I think that’s a good point I think that’s a good point I think that’s a good point But maybe there’s still a way this could be salvaged. How about if we we don’t say Working-class capitalists we say oppressor oppressed well just We’ll just transform the terminology a bit and we’ll start thinking about all the other ways that people are oppressed and then and All the other ways that people are oppressors and then we can play the same damn game under a new guise And now look the postmodernists were Marxists. So let’s make no mistake about that Derrida himself said that postmodernism was a transformation of Marxism I’m not making this up. The question is why? Well, because you could say well postmodernism is a valid philosophical school and we’ll get into that for a minute And they make some valid claims one of them for example This is a central postmodernist claim is that there’s an infinite number of ways of interpreting the world and that actually turns out to be Technically correct part of the reason that we’ve had a very difficult time building robots AI robots that can operate in the real world Is because perceiving the real world turns out to be so difficult that we really can’t figure out how human beings do it because it is Susceptible to an infinite number of interpretations. So that’s actually correct now I’m not going to give the postmodernists a Tremendous amount of credit for discovering that because it was discovered simultaneously in about five disciplines at pretty much the same time, but You give the devil is due so So what’s the logic and something like well, there’s an infinite number of interpretations of the world You can’t tell which of those are canonically correct correct The basic narrative of human struggle is oppressor versus oppressed We use category structures to constrain that infinite number of interpretations Because the basic narrative is oppressor versus oppressed we choose those narratives that serve our function as oppressors So it’s Deeply cynical but credible, you know and you can say if you’re not naive that people are motivated by power and that Our interpretations of the world can be self-serving I mean we do want to serve ourselves after all because otherwise we die and so and we are centered in one place And so we can’t see everything and we’re biased so So there is the probability that the way that we look in the war at the world will be tainted by Narrow self-interest and maybe even tainted by in-group interests beyond narrow individual self-interest We know this is true, but it’s also not all bad You know like we a good person takes care of his or her family. What does that mean? It means you prefer your family to outsiders. You’re gonna get rid of that It’s a form of prejudice like it really is Like your choice of sexual partner is a form of prejudice, right? I mean, maybe it should be distributed in an egalitarian manner. Hey That would be a lot fun to do But that would be the sh Hayır it isn’t the possibility like in in in in Huxley’s Brave New World That was the rule you you shared yourself with whoever asked because it was rude not to and you know what? It is actually rude not to it’s seriously rude now Is that something you want to take away from people you want that to be distributed in an egalitarian fashion? How prejudiced are you when you choose someone to sleep with You go for the best person you can find who can tolerate you It’s prejudicial in every possible way so Well, so okay, so you’re self-serving and you construct a view of the world that Serves the world as a whole And you’re not going to be able to do that You’re not going to be able to do that You’re not going to be able to do that You construct a view of the world that Serves those self-serving causes and some of that has to do with power Fair enough That doesn’t mean it all has to do with power though It means that some of it has to do with power. It’s like racism people are kind of racist Or maybe people prefer their in-group. It’s not that easy or maybe people prefer the familiar to the novel You know that iat that the social psychologists have come up with implicit association test that measures Unconscious bias we don’t know what the hell that measures the people who invented that bloody thing They know we don’t know what it measures. They know it’s not reliable They know it’s not valid enough to be used as an individual diagnostic instrument. That’s technically the case They also know that you can’t train people out of their unconscious biases Because there is not much difference between unconscious bias and instantaneous perception But they don’t really care I’ve i’ve written to mazarin banaji Who’s one of the inventors of the iat several times saying how about you come out in public and say what you already know? Which is that people are misusing your damn test? silence Well, that’s partly because her discipline social psychology is a corrupt discipline as the social psychologists have discovered over the last Four years and be turning themselves inside out trying to rectify which they haven’t Anyways We’re giving the devil his due There’s an infinite number of interpretations of the world and it’s highly probable that you’ll lay a self-serving one on top of it Yes, and also that’ll serve the interests of your group. However, you define that yes But it only accounts for a fraction of your behavior There’s all sorts of other things that work as well and you don’t get to reduce all human motivations to one motivation Power and then you might also ask why would you want to reduce all human motivations to power? It’s so you can use power That’s why you can justify the use of power That’s force You don’t have to engage in civilized debate You don’t have to give a damn about the facts, especially if you’re not a post-modernist because you don’t believe in facts Anyways, and you might ask but why don’t you hey, i’m not kidding. I’m not kidding Post-modernists don’t believe in facts. They believe that the idea of fact Is part of the power game that’s place played by the white dominated male Patriarchy to impose the tyrannical structure of the patriarchy on the oppressors It’s like i’m not making this stuff up. It’s embedded right in the theory. All you have to do is read it and you find this out So they don’t believe in facts while facts would constrain the use of power At least that’s how it looks to me Okay, so fine we gave the devil is due there’s an infinite number of interpretations and You’re likely to use biased compression algorithms on the world and they’re likely to be biased in your favor true but Only partly true And the difference between an ideologue And the thinker is that a thinker knows the difference between things that are only partly true and Things that are completely true Things are complicated like i like to think everything is as complicated as a military helicopter You have to like i think it’s eight hours of maintenance to keep those things in the air for one hour because they don’t fly They’re rocks they plummet It’s really hard to keep them in the air and they’re full of parts And if you don’t know all those parts you don’t go in there and monkey about with them because you just wreck it and That’s just a helicopter Like everything is way more complicated than a helicopter So you don’t just go muck about in there hoping you’re going to make it better. That isn’t how it works You need to be competent All right, so look Here’s where the postmodernists are wrong. I think there’s three places and there’s serious errors. The first is that There is an infinite number of interpretations, but there is not an infinite number of viable interpretations There’s a very finite number of viable interpretations And I don’t think that this is theory I think that game theorists have already demonstrated this to some degree and it’s going to be built into ai systems very rapidly Okay. So what are the constraints? Okay, first of all, you can’t have an interpretation that leads to immediately to your death or you’re dead now if you want to be dead That’s fine. But if you don’t want to be then you’ve got a lot of limited options, right? You don’t get to run naked across an eight lane freeway at night blindfolded Because probably you’ll be dead that’s a bad interpretation Okay, so you might say because you’re fragile and vulnerable and mortal That there’s a limited number of ways that you can look at the world that don’t result in Let’s say death or serious damage or agony. That’s a bad thing. Agony is a bad thing Most people agree on that so you’re constrained by pain and anxiety at least Your interpretations are constrained by pain And you know You can make pain worse or better by thinking about it to some degree but only to some degree When push comes to shove pain is your master Okay, so that’s a big constraint that’s a big big constraint well, but the constraints are worse than that because Not only do you not Get to have an interpretation of the world that produces anxiety and suffering right now Get to have an interpretation of the world that produces anxiety and suffering right now But you don’t get to have an interpretation of the world that if you iterate it across time produces pain and suffering And so that’s that’s a big problem because there’s lots of you could go out tonight and get yourself blind drunk on cocaine And sleep with six hookers and you know, maybe that maybe that’d be a good night You know, you might not think about it being so good tomorrow But then maybe you’re dead of aids in a year or maybe you’re addicted to cocaine or maybe you’re a street alcoholic or whatever It’s like as an iterable game. That’s a downhill And the thing is you play iterated games. You don’t play one you play iterated games And so your interpretation of the world has to be one that will sustain multiple iterations across time Because you have to worry about 40 year old you and 60 year old you And that’s a big problem. That’s a lot of you’s stretched over a long period of time And it’s worse than that because it’s not just you It’s like you and your family Right and not only so not only do you have to take care of yourself now in a manner that allows you to take care Of yourself when you’re 40 you have to take care of yourself now in a manner That takes care of you when you’re 40 so that other people are happy to have you around now And continually so that they’ll cooperate and compete with you in a positive way And so That’s getting ridiculously complicated. It’s not just you now and you in the future It’s you surrounded by other people doing the same thing now and in the future and there’s a lot of other people It can’t even just be you and your family, you know, like like the psychopathic burglar mob That’s just not going to go so well, right other people are going to object and the world’s going to object And so fine. There’s an infinite number of interpretations. That doesn’t mean there’s an infinite number of viable interpretations In fact, there are hardly any there are hardly any playable games Now piaget jean piaget the developmental psychologist who’s a very smart guy He pointed out something very interesting. He said imagine you ran a set of iterated games as a competition And in one iterated game the rule was you bloody well do what I tell you to And the other one is well, we’ll all get together and decide how we’re going to do this Okay So what’s the point of this? Okay. Now we run the competition a piaget’s claim is you do what I tell you fails And the reason for that is I have to impose force in order to keep you Cooperating and the imposition of force is a cost It’s an efficiency cost and across time that efficiency cost is going to multiply and the equilibrated state solution Which is the one where we all agree it wins So what’s the point of this? Well, you know, it’s a game of you know, you know, you’re trying to organize your family You’re trying to organize your family You have a little family conference about who’s doing what in the household And what do you if you want peace and harmony and an iterated game you get everybody to say well Here’s the tasks and we they have to be done people have to agree on that And then you say well, which task would you do you have to do some how about you? And you know, which task would you do and everybody agrees and then That’s the one we’re going to go with and then people can be a little resentful and angry about the conditions of existence Where they have to work, but they can’t really blame that on anyone else And maybe that’s the best solution you can come up with and that was piaget’s idea of the equilibrated state. It was like It’s a voluntary agreement that can be iterated across time that works at multiple levels of social organization Man, that’s a serious serious serious set of constraints And piaget by the way was looking for a way to Reconcile science and religion he was looking for a biological origin to morality and he thought he found it in the idea of the Equalibrated state it’s even deeper than that So imagine this equilibrated state idea is actually there’s something to it That if you set the the state up properly it will iterate across time so long that it becomes a permanent part of the environment A hierarchy is exactly that’s exactly what a hierarchy is hierarchies are 350 million years old They’re not the patriarchal invention of white european christian males in the last 300 years They’re 350 million years old. They’re stable They’re stable solutions to this iterated game problem and they’ve been around so long that we’re actually adapted to them And that’s part of the reason we have archetypal representations of the social structure So and we also have archetypal representations of the relationship of the individual To the social structure your job as an individual in relationship to the social structure is to embody the social structure But also to serve as its eyes and its mouth so that can update itself when necessary So you take on the mantle of your father. Let’s say but he’s dead He’s the past he can’t see you can see So you take the structure that’s already there and you modify it where it’s necessary and that modification process is necessary Or the state becomes too static and collapses and that’s why the state has to be subordinate to the individual And that’s what western culture has discovered And we can’t just let it go. That’s the idea the logos. That’s a big idea And you’d want to live somewhere where you want to live somewhere where the individual is subordinate to the state It’s like hey go right ahead. There’s lots of places like that man emigrate You can’t just go there 90 of the world’s countries are like that if you want to live like that man go find out what it’s like You don’t see immigration going there. That’s for sure Okay, so that’s a big mistake that the postmodernist made it’s not trivial that’s a big mistake but it’s not the only one Well, here’s another one. They don’t like inequality. Well, who does? I’m against poverty, you know, that’s like classic protest sign. It’s like really It’s like i’m against torture it’s like It’s so obvious you don’t get any brownie points for being against poverty. No one in the right mind is for poverty You know you ever watch the simpsons you ever see the The republican party and the simpsons they all meet in an old haunted castle at night with Lightning bolts going off and there’s a vampire and a crazy texan and Even the simpson republicans don’t sit around in the haunted tower at midnight saying hey, we need more poverty Here’s an interesting thing so one of the postmodernist claims is that diversity is necessary and they make it racial and they make it Sexual they may get ethnic and all of that. That’s actually technically incorrect by the way because I study individual differences. So those are the differences between people And I know the literature so you know about james demoros memo right from google He wrote that partly because he was watching my videos, which is why he wanted me to interview him And i’m a believer that there are biological differences in temperament between men and women Apart from the other obvious differences and that they’re actually not trivial And that they maximize in the societies that have the most have moved farthest to producing egalitarian states Scandinavian countries and that the reason for that is that there’s two reasons why men and women differ in temperament one is Biological and the other is environmental and if you remove the environmental variation which you do if you make the state egalitarian You maximize the genetic variation And that’s been demonstrated in the scientific literature over about four decades and no one wanted it or hoped for it And they weren’t biased in looking for it because that was exactly the opposite of what social scientists wanted to find Because social scientists lean heavily to the left and what they wanted to find was you flatten out the state so that everyone has equal Opportunity and the differences between people disappear. That is not what happened the opposite happened That was what happened But If you take let’s say there’s a big difference between men and women in terms of trait agreeableness Compassion and politeness on average But if you take let’s say the social science The social science is a very important part of the social science And it’s a very important part of the social science And it’s a very important part of the social science So let’s say you take a look at the social science And you take a look at the social science And you take a look at the social science And you take a look at the social science And you take a look at the social science And you take a look at the social science And you take a look at the social science And you take a look at the social science And you take a look at the social science And you take a look at the social science And you take a look at the social science And you take a look at the social science And you take a look at the social science And you take a look at the social science Within the ephemeral civil society And then to actually guide you through all that And that’s the additional people And that’s really what the, the но That’s why you need diversity by group right that’s why you need different races That’s why you need different ethnicities and sexual preferences and all of that well that’s wrong There’s more difference within the groups than there is between them you don’t get Diversity by crossing the groups you get diversity by by selecting across individuals in fact the idea that there is more Differences between groups and there is between individuals Is actually the fundamental racist idea it’s the fundamental racist idea, which is well. Let’s say you’re Asian Oriental to use the old word to discriminate the one type of Asian say from the other You’re so different from me that there’s no overlap between our groups and You’re also so different, and there’s so little difference within your group That now that I know that you’re not me. You’re not one of mine. I actually know what you’re like No Technically that’s incorrect. That’s wrong. That isn’t how you get diversity Now diversity is actually necessary because people differ in intelligence and they differ in temperament and they different skills And so you actually need diversity because otherwise you can’t take that diversity by group So you need diversity, but you need Genuine diversity and like what would genuine diversity mean if you’re trying to put together a work team you want enough you want people of Sufficient diversity so that they more or less so that You gather together the appropriate talents to produce the implement. That’s necessary to work properly in the world. That’s a competence So you need diversity Because otherwise your business is going to fail and so the proper diversity with regards to employment is that diversity that Meets the the requirements of the business essentially Obviously, that’s why you try to hire people carefully and not randomly. Let’s say Third error First errors there’s only a finite number of valid interpretations second error is that There are real differences between groups of people, but there’s more difference within the groups than between them third difference is social status and payment especially in a free democratic capitalist society is based more on competence than on Power So you’re not going to be able to do that So what’s the difference between the two? What’s the difference between the two? The difference between the two is that the hierarchy is based more on competence than on power In fact, we would say that When a person in a hierarchy starts to act like their position Entitles them to power then that hierarchy has become corrupt Harvey Weinstein’s a good example of that What he did was not good But it’s an indication it’s revealed. It’s an indication that the misuse So he’s competent fine. He gets to have Position because we need people who are competent But that doesn’t mean you get to turn into a tyrant if you turn into a tyrant then that overshadows your competence And out you go That’s the definition of a functioning state and our state essentially functions. It’s not perfect. That’s for sure but Compared to what? That’s the issue compared to your hypothetical marxist utopia. Well compared to your hypothetical marxist utopia I mean, we’re living in oswit’s but your but your actual marxist utopia is Indistinguishable from oswit’s so we’re not listening to that comparison We’re going to take a look at what we have and we’re going to compare it to other places that actually existed in time and Geographically and by those criteria. It’s like is there another time you’d rather live There’s another place you’d rather live I mean a real place in a real time I mean you want to live back in 1895 even in the western world where the average person lived on less than a dollar a day in today’s money You want to live like those coal miners? Like the answer to that’s no if you have any sense you should have some gratitude That’s another problem with the postmodern neo-marxist like zero Zero zero gratitude. It’s all oh my god. I’m oppressed Of course you’re oppressed, but you’re not oppressed by the patriarchy for god’s sake So you have status in a hierarchy you might say well, that’s like a reward so you’re you’re a high status person It’s a reward the reward should be shared equally. It’s like a badge of merit that you get it’s a privilege It’s not the reason that in a capitalist society filthy selfish capitalists Put you in the position so they can extract maximum productivity from you And that’s exactly why you’re there you get paid you get paid so you keep working Why do we want you to work because your work is actually valuable to us? And so we’re going to pay you so you don’t quit. It’s not a reward because you’re a good guy. It’s not a privilege That’s not what it is you don’t hand those things out like merit badges That’s not how it works. The society is set up on selfish principles We pay people who are competent so they won’t stop striving because we want what they can produce So you don’t just distribute that like like it’s a gift. It’s not a gift. It’s not a gift at all So that’s another place where they’re wrong Social status and payment is the consequence of the selfish desire of individuals and the group to extract resources of Intellect creativity and industriousness from those who possess them in excess Now of course, it’s not 100 like that There’s incompetent people who rise to the top you can fool people and you can manipulate them and you can act like a tyrant And you know we might say maybe the system is like 30% warped something like that It’s not much more than that because we can account for people’s success across life By looking at their individual differences intelligence Conscientiousness emotional stability creativity. We can do a pretty good job of predicting their trajectory So there’s error Some of its health right because sometimes you’ve got what you need But you get cut off at the knees or your family members do or you know some tragic thing befalls you There’s a randomness in this system that accounts for a fair bit of it and then there’s a certain amount of corruption fair enough But not so much that the lights go off Okay What time is it 8 15 and I started when Sorry, it’s been 6 30 I should stop then i’m supposed to stop pretty soon I’m gonna go for five more minutes, and then I’ll wrap this up. I want to talk about Intersectionality and and white privilege a bit So So I first said well we analyzed marxism we have analyzed postmodernism I Suggested that postmodernism is a Way for the marxists to keep going under a new guise I suggested that marxism was fundamentally based on hatred rather than sympathy and and empathy I suggested that the corpses were the evidence for that I told you why I think postmodernism is fundamentally wrong Now I want to talk to you a little bit about white privilege I think that’s a good question But now I want to talk to you a little bit about white privilege So The first thing that I can I haven’t got this quite figured out yet. I can’t quite figure out Why the postmodernists have made the canonical distinctions they’ve made race? ethnicity sexual proclivity sexual gender identity let’s say those are four Dimensions along which people vary, but there’s a very large number of dimensions along which people vary right in fact Given that there’s an infinite number of ways of interpreting the world You could immediately point out that there’s an infinite number of dimensions along which people vary and so then the postmodern question is why? Would you privilege some of those dimensions over the other and I would say well because it sustains your bloody Marxist interpretation That’s why but you’re not going to say that because it marginalizes right you’ve marginalized that so you can Ignore it so that’s one of the fun things about postmodernism you can you can I? have a very vulgar image in my mind, but I Won’t share that with you, but you can infer it Here’s some ways people differ intelligence temperament geography Historical time you live now and not a hundred years ago attractiveness. That’s a big. That’s a big one That’s a big one would you imagine you you could? We won’t we won’t go there either youth ye it’s it’s advantageous to be young you’ve got potential It’s advantageous to be old you’ve got wealth health. That’s a good one sex Women have advantages men have advantages maybe one has more than the other it’s not self-evident women live about eight years longer. They’re multi-orgasmic Athleticism wealth family structure friendship education Well, then there’s the classic You know postmodern ones race ethnicity etc Why not those other very dimensions of variation? There’s no evidence that they’re less important in fact. There’s quite a bit of evidence that they’re more important So like why not consider them then you get intersectionality? This is one of the things that’s really comical I think because the postmodernist identity politics types actually realized this they thought well, okay race and gender Fair enough what if you’re what if you’re a black woman? That’s a problem because Well now you’ve got two dimensions of differentiation. What the hell are we gonna? Do about that? What if you’re what if you’re gay and black and female? Well, then what if you’re not very bright and gay and black and female? Then what if you’re ugly and not very bright and gay and black and female and like you can keep playing that game You can keep playing that game An infinite number of ways because there’s an infinite number of ways to categorize things as the postmodernists already pointed out and so the Intersectionality theorists came along to plug the hole, but they don’t know where they’re going They don’t understand that the logical conclusion of intersectionality is individuality Because there’s so many different ways of categorizing people’s advantages and disadvantages that if you take that all the way out to the end you say Well the individuals the ultimate way to categorize people is to categorize them as individuals And you say well the individual is the ultimate minority and that’s exactly right And that’s exactly what the West discovered and you know the intersectionalists will get there if they don’t kill everyone first So on to white privilege So it’s really interesting to find out where these ideas come from Because it’s usually the scholarship is so awful. You just cannot possibly believe it. It’s just absolutely It wouldn’t in at the University of Toronto in the psychology department the original paper on white privilege Wouldn’t have received a passing grade for the hypothesis part of a undergraduate honors thesis We’re not even close. There’s no methodology at all the person who wrote it It was called white privilege and male privilege a personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women’s studies Well first of all personal account, it’s like sorry no So she she listed a bunch of ways that she thought she says these are personal Personal examples of her unearned privilege or underprivileged that she saw as she experienced in the 1970s 1980s So this by the way that so this idea is the opinion of one person who wrote one paper That has absolutely no empirical backing whatsoever Which is a set of hypotheses which had never been subject to any statistical analysis like if I ask you a bunch of questions It’s not obvious how many questions I’m asking you because I could say how tall are you? Or I could say if you’re laying on the ground how extended would you be it’s like that two questions It’s like no. It’s one question It’s just asked two ways and the way you figure out if you ask someone a bunch of questions How many questions you’re asking them is by doing something called a factor analysis Which is kind of an elementary form now of social science investigation if you make a questionnaire you have to subject it to a factor analysis because you’ve got to Find out how many questions you’re asking because you might think it’s 60, but it’s probably not it’s probably five That’s the big five by the way anyways who cares about that. There’s no such thing as methodology anyways That’s all part of the oppressive white male European Patriarchy so we can just not bother with that and we can just not bother with that And then we can screw up the entire political system two decades later Okay, so here’s your white privilege list some of it. There’s like 50 things I can if I wish arranged to be in the company of people of my race most of the time If I should need to move I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area Which I can afford and in which I would want to live That’s actually a wealth thing by the way I can be pretty sure of that if I were to move to a country that I could afford to live in I can go shopping alone most of the time pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed I can turn on my television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race Widely represented when I’m told about our national heritage or about civilization I am shown that people of my color made it what it is There’s 50 of those. I think something like that, okay I Is that white privilege is that like majority privilege Is the same true you go to China your Chinese is the same true if you’re Chinese Does the majority privilege and if it’s majority privileges like isn’t that just part of living within your culture? So let’s say you live in your culture You’re privileged as a member of that culture well obviously that’s what the culture is for that’s what it’s for Why would you bother building the damn thing if it didn’t accrue benefits to you now you might say well one of the consequences that it Accrues fewer benefits to those who aren’t in the culture Yeah, but you can’t immediately associate that with race you can’t just do that say it’s white privileged There’s many things it could be certainly could be wealth and the intersectional people have already figured out that there’s many things it could be So like what the hell? Seriously well what’s going on well we let these pseudo disciplines into the university because we’re stupid and guilty Seriously, and they have no methodological requirements and plenty of power and plenty of time to produce Nonsensical research and produce like resentful activists and now we’re bearing the fruits of that It’s not pretty so white privilege is the same as the majority privilege It’s not pretty so white privilege well the other thing you might notice is that to attribute to the individuals of a community the Attributes of that community on the basis of their racial identity is called racism That’s what racism is there’s no other way of defining it It’s attributing to the individual the characteristics of the group as if the group was homogenous Now the intersectional people have already decided That’s not a fair game because there’s so many differences between people But the postmodernists don’t care about logical coherence because they regard logical coherence here It comes again as a creation of the white European male patriarchal structure That’s designed to oppress the oppressed and that’s technically the case so logical incoherence It doesn’t matter and you could say well if you act out your logically incoherent ideas in the world You’re gonna run face first into a brick wall and the postmodern answer to that is there’s actually no real world It’s all interpretation, so there’s no there’s no having that discussion But the postmodernists don’t care because they don’t believe that discussion between people of different power groups is possible anyways So here we are Well, so I made a case tonight. You know I’ll go over. What’s the case? The postmodernists are wrong they’re philosophically naive They’re right about an infinite number of interpretations and wrong about a finite number of viable interpretations And that’s like that’s that’s death. That’s the end of postmodernist theory And that’s not the only way in which they’re wrong. They’re wrong in a bunch of other ways, but they’re more subsidiary the Marxists They’re not just wrong they’re wrong And murderous or wrong murderous and genocidal unless you think murderous and genocidal Doesn’t mean wrong and you you can think that there’s lots of would-be revolutionaries who would be happy to have blood running in the street if they had their chance for revenge and the Opportunity to move up the hierarchy of tyranny So you can you don’t have to think that murder and genocide is wrong? Especially if the right people are murdered and genocided right that’s actually part of the part of the But if you’re willing to think that murder and genocide on a mass scale across many cultures over many decades is wrong then Marxism is wrong and the postmodernists don’t get to just come along and adopt Marxism as a Matter of sleight of hand because their Marxist theory didn’t work out, and they figured out a rationalization They don’t get to get away with that because it’s too dangerous. It’s too dangerous to the rest of us And we don’t and It isn’t necessary for us Who are trying with the small part of our hearts that might be oriented towards the good? To allow people who are manipulating us with historical ignorance and philosophical sleight of hand To render us so goddamn guilty about what our ancestors may or may not have done So that we allow our shame and our ignorance to be manipulated by the people who are trying to manipulate us So that we allow our shame and our guilt to be to be used as tools to manipulate us into accepting a future that we do not want to have And that’s that Okay, so we’re just gonna do the we’re gonna move on to the Q&A now But before we do the venue wants to do a little announcement Ladies and gentlemen, sorry, my name is Cameron McGowan the co-managing director at the Chan Center As you are all leading the panel today, I’m going to be talking about the The The The Outside the building there is an individual impersonating a UBC security guard It is not in the building. It was in the Rose Garden. There was no damage done. Nobody was hurt But there is an impersonator out there. So just please be aware of that Thank you very much So for those of you in the first two rows you can either line up here or at the mic over there and ask your questions And also try to keep it short because we don’t have that much time Hello Jordan B Peterson huge fan in your lectures use the term post-modernism interchangeably with cultural Marxism Nihilism and moral relativism. I wonder if you’ve considered or heard alternative beliefs that the term post-modernism is not necessarily necessarily always congruent on a one-to-one scale with these other terms and in some limited circumstances is Positive specifically the idea that when you use the term post-modernism To vilify is by some others referred to as pseudo modernism Whereas some would call what you endorse to not be modernism, but in fact metamodernism post-millennialism or Post post-modernism which unfortunately has a terrible name and then I have a brief Just definitions of those words if you need me to well No As I said tonight You have to give the devil his death So yes, there’s a very large number of ways of interpreting the world There’s no doubt about that Yes, people use biased interpretive lenses to as means of interpreting the world to put their own Priorities forward without necessarily knowing that they’re doing so and that that is a very important thing Priorities forward without necessarily knowing that they’re doing so and that that can corrupt them and society The psychoanalysts figured that out way before the post-modernist so they don’t get any credit for that like really none So it’s useful to keep those things in mind It’s when they’re put but it’s when they’re put forward as absolute truth that disturbs me It’s like yes people are probably racist they might even be implicitly racist although We don’t know what that means and we don’t know how it’s related to their explicit behavior, and we can’t separate it from in-group preference or Necessarily from reaction to novelty so it’s a tricky business. You know and we don’t know how to separate stereotypical racial perceptions from Perceptual heuristics we don’t know how to do that because you’re always over simplifying the world because you’re not smart enough to live in the world As it is you have to oversimplify it so yes there are times when postmodernism is useful I used it quite usefully tonight to deconstruct postmodernism in fact so but But it’s when it’s turned into an absolute especially a moral absolute that it and when it allies itself with Marxism It’s like sorry guys. No you don’t like grand narratives. You don’t get to go there. Well. That’s where you that isn’t where you Went that’s where you came from you never you never left there, so That’s that’s basically what I have to say about that. Thanks Hello, dr. Peterson. Thank you very much now my question is regarding ADHD Which is something I haven’t heard you speak a whole lot about maybe a little bit Now it seems to me that we are at least maybe just me do not quite understand ADHD to what could be its full capacity maybe and Because there’s many many voices saying that it’s an overdiagnosed overblown small Mental variance that’s prevalent in boys, or it’s just young boys being young boys And then there are some that would fight and advocate for very different treatment in the academic world And I was wondering what you what your thoughts are on ADHD itself and on The whether you think it’s overdiagnosed and maybe advice for me as someone who has been diagnosed with ADHD On how to overcome it without maybe becoming completely reliant on prescribed medication Okay, so first of all it’s definitely overdiagnosed Second it’s it’s a very unreliable Psychiatric diagnosis many psychiatric diagnosis are unreliable and that’s because psychiatric diagnosis aren’t precisely Scientific categories they’re weird hybrids right first of all psychiatrists aren’t scientists. They’re engineers Engineers are trying to do something rather than to describe the objective world and psychiatrists are trying to make people healthy whatever that means It’s actually partly ethical. It’s very complicated We don’t know how to distinguish it from temperamental variation So for example if you’re high in openness and high in extroversion and low in conscientiousness Low in agreeableness conscientiousness and and high in neuroticism you’re likely to manifest symptoms of ADHD It’s because you’re exploratory you don’t like to sit down you’re full of ideas your attention is on the Topics and you’re not very stable temperamental variation is also much more common among boys Panksepp showed same guy with rats that if you deprive young rats of Rough-and-tumble play which is what the young boys are deprived of in school. Let’s say that they get hyperactive And they’re not very stable And that you can treat that quite effectively with Psychomotor stimulants like Ritalin So that’s kind of an interesting bit of scientific information that no one pays any attention to There is also absolutely no evidence whatsoever that long-term use of psychomotor stimulants produces increases in cognitive gain Zero in cognitive gain So that’s kind of interesting So Then the second part of that was what about Adjustments for in the academic world say that we disability adjustments. It’s like That’s a such a rat’s nest that I don’t want to even discuss it I mean it all gets to the point where you’re like oh, I’m not going to do this I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to do this That’s a such a rat’s nest that I don’t want to even discuss it. I mean it all discusses for like 15 seconds There is a never-ending multiplication of disabilities That’s what’s happening right now the disability offices in the universities are swamped like I know Some people have it rough like believe me. I know that I was a problem. I seriously know that I’ve dealt with extraordinarily damaged people in my life You’re bloody hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t have a serious problem or Who doesn’t have a serious problem in a close family member? It’s like where do you draw the line with regards to disabilities well you can’t You can’t they multiply Just like LGBT identities multiply just knows really technically just like that just like Intersectionality categories of oppression multiply it’s it’s it’s inevitable The way that you deal with it is you have objective standards you apply them to everyone not because that’s fair It’s not fair if you if your criteria for fairness is that everyone has the same outcome. It’s not fair at all It’s not even close to fair. It’s just less tyrannical than the alternatives now We don’t know that yet because we haven’t seen the full range of the tyranny of the alternatives manifest itself Not in our culture, but it certainly did in other cultures. I think it’s a bad idea now I Don’t want to be absolute about that like It’s tricky you know because if you have a disability That would allow you to do the work in the university and in the workplace With a modification then perhaps the modification could be made But I think that was done a lot better when that was in the hands of the professors and not in the hands of these crazy Bureaucratic structures that have risen up around the disability issue like they’re one of the ten things that are going to kill the universities Or maybe have already killed them possibly because they may they’re walking corpses as far as I can tell Zombies so and that might be wrong, but it’s what it looks like to me First Say I want to say thank you so much So it was an amazing talk and I was wondering if you could elaborate what I noticed a lot I go here to UBC is that a lot of students and young people they’re often desensitized to for example the atrocities that communism or ideologies that forged terrorism and maybe it’s some sort of Stockholm syndrome that I’m seeing where it’s like People are just they’re cat they’re like trapped and they can’t they feel in a way They can’t do anything about it, and then they start to like lot like like communism or they start to see more socialists or adopt socialist policies that in the end Will get them killed will get them hurt I was wondering if you kind of like elaborate down on what you think can be done about that or even if something can be done It would not respect well. I think something can be done. I mean I’ve been trying to educate people about the horrors of The Nazi Regime and and the Soviet regime in particular I’ve concentrated mostly on those two because that that’s good enough and Trying to let people know that it was through the fault of people much like them that those systems arose and and that there are steps you can take to limit the probability that you would participate in such a thing and that those steps are associated with trying to Be truthful in your speech and actions because the stability of those systems depends on the willingness of individuals to lie and and also on your willingness to take responsibility for the malevolence in your own heart that manifests itself in those social movements and So that When I Do when I do my lectures when I do talks like this when I put them on YouTube what I’m trying to do is exactly that because That was the best pathway forward through such things that I could think up over 20 years of thinking about it No one is so Habituated to suffering that they can read the Gulag Archipelago Which is actually quite hard to read Without having it affect them like you’re psychopathic if that book doesn’t affect you, you know It should if you read it properly it affects you deeply and it’s not the only Example of that kind of literature so the people who are habituated aren’t they’ve just been shown low-resolution Representations of things they don’t understand that look vaguely bad You don’t know a damn thing about them and our education system has done a tremendously Appalling job of educating young people about the absolute catastrophe of radical leftism now It’s not much better with regards to say the actions of the Nazis although I would say on average people are more aware of that, but they don’t but it’s shallow shallow knowledge So you make the knowledge deep and deep knowledge changes people and wakes them up You know I mean the only reason that I ever got convinced that they’re the good and evil were real More real than anything else wasn’t because I learned that good was real That’s hard. That’s that’s hard. It’s hard to learn that you have to find examples of transcendent good You know they’re rare evil All you have to do is look read history a bit and read it like it’s about you and There’s no way that you can do that without a transformation, but people won’t do it It’s like you want to imagine yourself as an Auschwitz guard That’s a rough thing you see because you have to figure out See Jung said if you confronted the shadow which was the dark side of people the aggressive side the malevolent side that it it really reaches all the way down to hell and Dante sort of Was trying to put forward the same thing when he wrote the inferno right with the levels of evil right because it was a voyage Through the levels of evil right to the bottom he thought the bottom was betrayal. It’s pretty good The most the center of malevolence is betrayal I like that because to betray someone you have to get them to trust you and trust is a moral virtue right especially if it’s courageous trust because it It puts you in alignment with other people and allows you to move forward into life And if you betray that you really it’s like a knife in the it’s like knife in the heart through the back Especially if it’s someone who loved loves you betrays you and especially if they betray you for your virtues. That’s a really nice twist So I Believe because I think that people are Capable of good that if they know enough about evil that that will straighten them out So but who wants that you know this is one of the things I really like about young He’s often regarded as a new-age thinker. That’s wrong He’s no new-age thinker He knew that the the pathway to enlightenment Was barred by the necessity of a passage through hell and That no one was going to do that. That’s why there isn’t a world full of enlightened people you might say Like it was just a matter of doing nice things following your bliss. Let’s say However, you might put it Then why wouldn’t everyone walk up the stairway to heaven that isn’t how it works That’s not how it works at all I don’t think you can be convinced of the necessity for moral action until you understand Exactly how dark and terrible things can get and that it’s your fault that they’re getting that way Who wants to think that? So you can think it though But not not without it burning you so Hello, dr. Peterson Thank you for coming we all appreciate it a lot I wanted to get your opinion on Censorship that we’re seeing on the web. It’s accelerating. You were a very notable example You were locked out of your gmail and me and Trump account part of me Yeah, Trump just got deleted by an errant person, you know now they’re saying that perhaps this was just a contractor and you know, maybe Someone from Twitter who’s gone in a very far left Direction YouTube has gone in a very far left direction I’m just wondering I’ve started an alternative to YouTube called pew tube what kind of What do you see for possible solutions and just your thoughts in general? Here’s it. It’s a crazy thought but I’m gonna tell it to you anyways So I was just reading one of Ray Kurzweil’s books. I think it was called how to make a mind. I really liked it actually It helped me understand how the brain compresses information because the world’s really complicated a so you have to make a low-resolution representation of it to live in it and He actually explained to me in a way that I hadn’t really understood how the brain might do that neurologically So that was cool, but you know Kurzweil this guy who thinks that he’s a smart guy very smart guy and He’s invented a fair bit of high-end technical technological software and hardware And he’s the guy that thinks that we’re heading towards the singularity and so the singularity is you know how? processing speed doubles every 18 months and like hard disk capacity every year and There’s a bunch of doublings going on a huge number of them and they accelerate exponentially and so It’s probably we’re probably three years away. Maybe even less than From building a computer that has the capacity to make as many calculations as Reasonable estimates of the calculating capacity of the human brain are currently set at 18 months away two years away something like that and Then we’re 18 months away from having one that’s twice that fast and then 18 months away from having one that’s twice as fast as that so that’s like say six years and And we’ve got something that’s eight times as smart as a human being But there’s a twist on that and this is Kurzweil’s theory Which is as soon as you make a machine smart enough to make the next machine that’s smarter than it which is sort of what we’re doing Because computers are so fast that that will scale up to near infinite computing computing power almost instantaneously now You think no probably not and Ellen Gates partner has written critiques of Kurzweil and you know you might think if something’s impossible Then it won’t happen even if you don’t know why and there’s reasons to not think that that will happen, but Kurzweil’s traced to back the doubling of computing power way before the existence of the transistor and it’s been ridiculously stable crazily stable, so God only knows what we’re coming up with here You know and you don’t know what something of infinite computing power might be like Like you seriously don’t know And that’s what we’re doing here And you know And there are serious people who are very very very worried about that They’re very worried for example that companies like Facebook and Google will manage that first And you know those companies are already making censorship ai bots And that’s not that smart. It’s sort of like making really fast robots that can shoot people It’s not that smart and we’re doing that too very rapidly and you know I know some guys who work in advanced ai and you know how you look you watch the Terminator movies and you see the robots that miss when they shoot at you like they’re not very bright Because the bright ones not only shoot at where you are But they estimate where you’re going to be when you make your escape moves and they shoot there simultaneously and their death rate is 100 and so There’s no war against the robots I mean when those things get going they’re going to be so much faster than us that will look like we’re moving through molasses to them so You know so maybe what we’re deciding now with all of our individual decisions about censorship and the way that we’re going to construct The world and all that is exactly what kind of super intelligence we’re going to bring into being And I would suggest that we try to bring one in that’s good and moral rather than one that’s evil and demonic Right so what can we do about that? The there’s only one answer to that as far as I know that works is get your act together You’re going to be the person who’s working in ai right? I know some of these people they better be good people Because they’re going to build whatever they’re like into their machines So they better have their head screwed on straight Because they’re going to get amplified like mad and I don’t like what’s happening with google and and facebook and youtube They’re building censorship bots predicated on a certain kind of ideology the kind of ideology that we outline today It’s a very bad idea Hopefully good people will stop that So then that what that means is that your moral obligation is to be good and the way you do that is first by stopping being bad And everyone comes out and says you’re a good person And the way you do that is first by stopping being bad and everyone can do that a little bit so I hope that’s what everyone does because The consequences of not doing it are not going to be pleasant. They never are Thank you Hi, uh, this question is about your biblical lecture series um I like that one because it’s about genesis, which is usually Ignored as being We’re this post-enlightenment society. We don’t need these ancient creation myths and also, I thought revelations kind of gets the same treatment as being dismissed because it’s the Crazy hallucinogenic trip trip. That’s why some isolated madman in the middle of the mediterranean So I was wondering if after you’re done with genesis if you were think about doing revelations not without traversing the the geography in between Okay Yeah, I want to walk through the whole thing if I can do that before I expire So, I mean i’ve read it and thought about it and like it’s such a strange book because It’s really big among the evangelical republican types and you’d think really Really? That’s the book that’s that you rely. Have you read it? It’s it’s it’s a it’s it’s a crazy hallucinogenic trip. That’s what revelation is now. That’s not to play it down Because god only knows About crazy hallucinogenic trips. That’s for sure. I mean there’s there’s accruing evidence. I would say that A tremendous amount of the religious orientation of human beings, you know that deep mythological symbolic orientation is In no small part a consequence of humanity’s experimentation with psychedelic substances I think that’s that the evidence for that I think has become virtually overwhelming so Anyways, I will get there. Maybe probably not because at the rate i’m going through the first stories It’ll take me forever to get there, right? But that’s okay So thank you. Yeah Dr. Peterson, thank you. First of all, it’s a great pleasure being here. It’s awesome to see you live. Um I basically got into your works just earlier this year and I had an original question But your talk today kind of made me decide to change my mind. I was going to ask Um, do you feel as though Would you agree with me in the sentiment that the left has pushed so hard for total control of our society over the last However many years it’s almost to a point. We’re saying 2013 was a different time um, would you say that Because they pushed so hard they’ve created this backlash and the backlash Created caused them to backlash back again. So they doubled down with their ideology and then they get They lose another argument. They Lose another ideological war they lose another meme war and they double down And they double down again and again and they can’t seem to meme They can’t seem to argue. They can’t seem they can’t they don’t want to have an intellectual discussion and as An interpretation of what you were saying. There is no there doesn’t seem to be any any Any care of what’s right with them? They just want power. They just want they just want to win um, do you would you agree with the sentiment that they’re burning themselves out and creating the mass red pilling of the Conservative movement that we see going on would you possibly think that maybe they’ve committed suicide and and talks like this people like yourself ben shapiro and others who Talk to people like what the subjects that we do the taboo of nowadays possibly that This this is the answer to defeat the The leftist stranglehold that’s on our society. We’ll untangle some of that Okay so first of all well first of all the first observation is a really interesting one because you know that Things can go out of hand very very rapidly. Yeah, and the reason they do that is because of positive feedback loops Now the thing that kurtzweil talks about is a positive feedback loop an intelligent machine makes another intelligent machine that makes another intelligent machine That’s a positive feedback loop and that can spiral upwards out of control very rapidly and that’s what polarization is It’s like I tap you you tap me. I slap you you punch me Well up it goes Well, I think that’s partly why in the new testament for example. There’s an injunction that says Turn the other cheek resist not evil why Because otherwise you get into a positive feedback loop and then you better look the hell out And things can tilt very very rapidly. I mean all you have to do look at what happened in world war one No one expected that it was like one one Relatively minor member I think of the aristocracy if I remember correctly was assassinated in one minor little country. It’s like bang Everything fell apart and that’s positive feedback loops, right? And so that’s what we’re in right now and we’ve got to be and that’s a really chaotic time. And so I would say Maintain self-control and don’t aim to win aim at peace Because winning that’s that’s not peace. It’s better to aim for peace. You know, I’ve got this talk coming up in november 11th I’m quite worried about it because I know there’s going to be protesters there and that they’ve been emboldened by the fact that they shut the Talk down before and I want to make a video I’ll probably do it tomorrow telling everyone that comes to that meeting to like watch their bloody step and stay out of the gutter because you just We’re at we’re at we’re at a point now where under the wrong circumstances if the wrong person does the wrong thing That the consequences will be very great now. We can’t predict which Action is going to precipitate that and or even if that will happen But it’s chaotic enough so that it could happen So, you know so govern yourselves accordingly now the problem is is that there are people who would be happy if there was blood running in the street They’re the same sort of people that shoot up high schools or kill innocent You know elementary school kids just to show what they’re made of and what they believe and that’s a big problem But for the rest of us like hopefully calmer heads can prevail and so it really is important not to win It’s like fighting with your wife You don’t win You can’t because you have to live with her. She can’t win But maybe you can solve the problem and bring about peace and so you got to practice doing that practice restraint And remember too that these people that you’re talking about who are radical leftists is most of the time. They’re not Like they’re 95 percent like you and if you pull them out of the mob. They’re just like No, it’s just that they’re possessed by these ideas, but but only partially you know You hardly find it full-blooded Absolutely committed Rebellious and so you have to remember that You have to remember that You have to remember that You have to remember that You have to remember that You hardly find it full-blooded Absolutely committed radical leftist activist you know like there are some but not very many most of it. It’s just Fragmentary behavior and you have to remember that like when the students come out to protest me was a case particularly at McMaster I have to remember These kids they’re not much different than my kids They are when they’re in a stupid mob behind a hammer and sickle flag You know but but but You don’t want to make a low resolution homogeneous representation of them and So and so you that’s why again I think instead of winning you turn to your own development you turn to your own development you Do what you can to stop doing the things that you’re doing that aren’t good Because you’re not going to hurt anybody if you do that all you’re going to do is help and otherwise you’ll participate in this polarization and that’s Unless you want that and you know there’s a dark part of people that it’s part of the part that voted for Trump Would like to burn things to the ground it’s like to hell I know how people felt when they went to the voting booth it was like Hillary Hillary hell with it Trump You know and that’s a that’s a hell of a thing to say to hell with it You know although I could I could certainly understand that sentiment so we have to be careful and all of you people who are here who are advocates of free speech and who are theoretically Happy to come hear me speak. It’s like I really do believe it I truly believe this and this is something I learned in part from social nets and in part from the illness that The way that you set the world straight is by constraining The malevolence in your own heart, and that’s no joke man. That’s no easy thing and that’s a good Voyage for people to go on if they want something difficult and worthwhile to do so Thank you very much Just a quick thing We’re not gonna have time for pictures, so you’re unless you’re yours is the last question, okay? So sorry to everybody else, but you’re the last one Hi, dr. Peterson, thanks for coming my question is a little bit off topic from everything else tonight But I really want to hear what you had to say about it. Um, I work in President’s life here at UBC and in the community where I am we were recently affected by a suicide of someone who lived in our community and I was upset about it not just because obviously it’s a horrible thing to have happen but also because res life in the university like they talk all this talk about like self-care and your mental health is so important to us, but then Things like this still happen. So I wanted to know like if you think Like what do you think the university should be doing to keep stuff like this from happening in the future? Well It’s not Self-evident that it’s the university’s responsibility and the reason for that. I’m not saying it isn’t okay I’m saying it’s not self-evident that it is because Different institutions can only do so many things, you know and we were already requiring that the universities to educate and to act as substitute parents increasingly and to take on the role of judge jury and executioner as there are more What should be criminal cases being handled within the university say Having said that you could ask the broader question is well, what do you do to help people? Be sufficiently in love with life so that they don’t wish to end it You know and I’ve tried to puzzle through that for a long time and that’s partly why I’ve written the things that I’ve written It’s partly why I’ve produced the online programs that I’ve produced No, and so we know that if you do if you have students do the future authoring program For example, they’re much less likely to drop out of university about 30% less likely and their grades go up and that’s especially true if they’re male and Marginalized it has a bigger impact on those communities And so, you know, I’ve tried to get universities interested in that the data is there but they’re not and it’s very difficult to get a big bureaucracy to move a like big big is immobile so I’m not sure there’s anything they can really do about it It’s certainly possible that the things that they’re trying to do about it are making it worse You know, that’s another thing that you learn if you’re a good social scientist It’s like there was evidence and I don’t know if this is still the case, but but there was good evidence I looked into this about 15 years ago. Say you want to prevent suicide to put a suicide hotline In your town and you advertise it what happens? Suicide rate goes up because you’re advertising suicide Right and lots of lots of interventions are like that It’s really really hard to make things better and it’s really really easy to make them worse And so that’s another problem you get these big bureaucracies Let’s say and they’re hypothetically motivated by positive intentions And I would say hypothetically again because it takes an awful lot of work to help someone straighten out It’s no joke, especially if they’re in real trouble and they put in place these Structures that are designed to help but they don’t ever evaluate them and they could easily be making it worse so So I don’t have a straightforward answer to that question I think that Well, that’s that’s the only answer I have yeah, thank you, okay Okay, so that’s the end of the show If you’re in the first two rows, you can stick around and get some pictures Otherwise drive safe and yeah