https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=v-hIVnmUdXM
I’ve really been trying to understand the underlying psychology of postmodernism and its relationship with neo-marxism and then the spread of that into the universities and the effect on the culture and what I would like to start with is a description of your understanding of that because like I’ve presented to the people who are listening to me, my understanding of it I interviewed Stephen Hicks recently and he wrote an interesting book called Explaining Postmodernism which I liked quite a bit it’s been criticized for being too right wing, although I don’t think he’s right wing at all I think maybe you could characterize him as middle of the road conservative but I would say he’s more like a classic liberal but I’m really curious about your views about what postmodernism is, first of all I know you’ve identified it with the general tricksters, Derrida and Lacan and Foucault and Foucault in particular you’ve talked about but I’d like to know what you think about postmodernism and also why you think it’s been so attractive to people well, my explanation is that there is no authentic 1960s point of view in any of the elite universities rather, the most liberated minds of my generation of the 1960s did not go on to graduate school I witnessed this with my own eyes I saw genuine Marxists at my college, which was the State University of New York at Binghamton upstate New York, Harper College which had a huge cohort of very radical downstate New York Jews who, in fact, Harper used to be called Berkeley East I saw genuine passionate Marxists with my own eyes they were not word choppers, they were not snide postmodernists they were in your face aggressive, they used the language of the people, they had a populist energy they dressed working class, they were non-materialistic these are people who lived by their own convictions they were against the graduate school when I went on to graduate school and it became known that I was going to go to Yale I was confronted by a leader of the radicals on campus in broad daylight in front of everyone who denounced me, he said, graduate school is not where it’s happening, you don’t do that if you have to go to graduate school, you should go to Buffalo now, I had applied to SUNY Buffalo because the great leftist critic Leslie Fiedler was there who had a huge impact on me, he created identity politics but without its present distortions and Norman Holland, the psychoanalytic critic was there I would have been very happy to have gone on to Buffalo but I needed the library at Yale, so I continued on to Yale there were no radicals in the graduate schools from 1968 to 72 when I was there only one radical, Todd Gitlin, went on to have a career success the actual radicals of the 1960s either dropped out of college and went off to create communes or they were taking acid and destroyed their brains now, I have also written about that the destruction of the minds of the most talented members of my generation through LSD it was going on all around me so what’s happened is the actual legacy of the 60s got truncated the idea that these post-structuralists and post-modernists are heirs of the 1960s revolution is an absolute crock, what they represent as Foucault shows Foucault said that the biggest influence on his thinking was Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot which was a post-World War II play written in Paris that was about the disillusionment and nihilism experienced after Hitler went through occupied France and all of Europe was in ruins it had nothing to do with the authentic legacy of the 1960s which was about genuine multiculturalism, a movement toward India, toward Hinduism a transformation of consciousness through psychedelics, which I did not take but which I identify with totally through the music, etc. it was a turn toward the body, it was a turn toward sensory experience not this word chopping thing and this cynical removal from actual experience that French import came in to the graduate schools, it did not affect any genuine 1960s person the real 1960s revolution was about Jung, it was about a way of seeing the cosmos in mythological terms the Jungian contribution went on into the New Age movement of the 1970s aside from the universities so who took over the universities were these careerists I saw them with my own eyes, I saw what happened I was at Yale when Derrida was being shipped over to address the students, the grad students and the faculty and I said to a fellow student, after hearing one of these guys speak it was not Derrida, it was another one of the theorists I said they are like high priests murmuring to each other this was an elitist form from the start it was not progressive, it was not revolutionary, it was reactionary it was a desperate attempt to hold on to what had happened before the 1960s sensory revolution this postmodernist thing, this trashing of the text this encouragement of a superior and destructive attitude toward the work of art we’re going through it primly with red pen in hand finding all the evidence of sexism, check, racism, check, homophobia, check that is not the empathic, emotional, sensory based revolution of the 1960s I am sick and tired of these people claiming any kind of mantle from the 1960s they are frauds, what happened in the 1970s was a collapse of the job market in academe all of a sudden jobs were scarce and this thing was there, the new and improved and shiny thing to be a theorist, people seized on it, it was institutionalized and it’s an enormous betrayal of the 1960s so you touched on this idea of the destruction of the work of art and one of the things I really liked about reading Nietzsche was his discussion of resentment and it seems to me that a tremendous amount of the mode of power that drives the postmodernist, let’s call it, it’s not a revolution transformation seems to me to be driven by resentment about virtually anything that has any well, what would you say, any merit of competence or aesthetic quality and I don’t know if that’s, it seems to me that that’s partly rooted in the academic’s disdain for the business world which I think is driven by their relative economic inequality because most people who are as intelligent as academics are from a pure IQ point of view make more money in the private sphere and so I think that drives some of it but there also seems to be this, there’s a destruction, an aim for destruction of the aesthetic quality of the literary or artistic work it’s reduction to nothing but some kind of power game and then surrounding that, the reduction of everything to something that approximates a power game which I can’t help but identify with jealousy and resentment as a fundamental motivator does that seem reasonable to you? these professors who allege that art is nothing but an ideological movement by one elite against another group, these people are Philistines they’re Philistines, they’re middle brow, hopelessly middle brow they have no sense of beauty, they have no sense of the aesthetic now Marxism does indeed assert this, Marxism tries to reconfigure the universe in terms of materialism it does not recognize any kind of spiritual dimension now I’m an atheist but I see the great world religions as enormous works of art as the best way to understand the universe and man’s place in it I find them enormously moving, they’re like enormous poems and what I have called for, the true revolution would have been to make the core curriculum of world education the great religions of the world, I feel that is the only way to achieve understanding and it’s also a way to present the aesthetic I feel that the real 60s vision was about exaltation, elevation, cosmic consciousness all of these things were rejected by these midgets, intellectual midgets who seized Ante Lacan, Derrida and Foucault my career has been in the art school, my entire career beginning at Bennington College so I represent a challenge to this from the perspective of art it is an absolute nonsense as post structuralism maintains that reality is mediated by language, by words, everything that we can know including gender it’s absolutely madness because I’m teaching students whose majors are ceramics or dance, jazz musicians who understand reality in terms of the body, sensory activation what happened was something was going on in the art world as well I identify with Andy Warhol in pop art, that was what was going on during my years in college everything about Andy Warhol was like wow, admiration, wow what happened immediately after that in the arts, 1970s was this collapse into a snide sort of postmodernism also this happened in the art world and it was an utter misunderstanding of culture it seems to me by that movement in the art world that is oppositional art in my view is dead what postmodernism is, isn’t it a pathetic attempt to continue the old heroism of the avant-garde the avant-garde was genuinely heroic from the early 19th century we’re talking about the Courbet, the Realists, we’re talking about Monet and the Impressions people who genuinely suffered for their radical ideas and their innovations and so on going right down to Picasso and down to Jackson Pollock who truly suffered for his art it was only after his death that suddenly the market was created for abstract art pop art killed the avant-garde, the idea that the avant-garde continues is an absolute delusion of the contemporary art world which feels that it must attack, attack, attack, challenge the simplistic beliefs of the hoi polloi somehow the art, excuse me, from the moment Andy Warhol went through and embraced the popular media instead of having the opposition to it, the serious arts that had that was the end of oppositional art so we have been going on now for 50 years the postmodernism and academe is hand in hand with the stupidity and infantilism that masquerades as important art at galleries everywhere this incredible, incredible mechanism of contemporary art pushing things that are so hopelessly derivative and with this idea that once again that the art world sometimes has a superior view of reality the authentic leftism is populist, it is based in working class style, working class language, working class direct emotion an openness and bruskiness of speech, not this fancy contorted jargon of the pseudo leftists of academe who are frogs, these people who managed to rise to the top at Berkeley, at Harvard, at Princeton these people are radical, they are career people, they are corporate types who succeeded in they love the institutional context, they know how to manipulate the bureaucracy which is totally invaded and usurped, the academe everywhere these people are company players, they could have done well in any field they love to sit in endless committees, they love bureaucratic regulation and so on there is not one leftist in American academe raised his or her voice against obscene growth of tuition costs which have bankrupted a whole generation of young people not one voice to challenge that invasion by the bureaucrats, actual fascist bureaucrats they are like cancerous, there are so many of them, the faculty have completely lost any power in American academe it’s a scandal what has happened and they deserve the presence of servitude that they are in right now because they never protested, my first job at Bennington College in 1976 I was there when there was an uprising by the faculty against encroachment by the board of trustees and the president and it was a huge thing, it was reported on the New York Times and so on and we pushed that president out and there has not been a single uprising of that kind against encroachment by the trustees and by the administrations and all these decades, passive, slaves, slaves, they deserve their slavery I couldn’t agree more, I’ve thought the same thing about university professors for a long time is that they get exactly what they deserve because they never stand up and say no and the fact that in the United States, it’s not quite as bad in Canada I wouldn’t say but the fact that the students have been essentially handed a bill of indentured servitude here for their student loans is absolutely beyond comprehension, you know, it seems to me that the bureaucracy has basically conspired to determine how to pick the pockets of the students future earnings, right and they do that by offering them an extended adolescence with no quality control, something like that so it’s a real bargain with the devil and I told the abandonment of any kind of education actually in history and culture it’s gone along with it, that is the transformation into a cafeteria kind of a menu we can pick this course or that course or this course without any kind of guidance from the university about a central core curriculum that teaches you history and chronology and introduces you to the basics because our professors are such prima donnas, they can only teach in their little areas so we have this total fragmentation, the great art history survey courses are being abandoned steadily why? because graduate students are not trained to see the great narratives because we are taught now that narratives are false okay, so that’s another issue that I’d like to bring up because one of the things I cannot figure out is the alliance between the post-modernists and the neo-marxists I can’t understand the causal relationship there because tell me if you disagree with this, okay, because I’m a psychologist, not a sociologist and so I’m dabbling in things that are outside of my field of expertise and there is some danger in that but the central post-modernist claim seems to me that because there’s a near infinite number of ways to interpret a complex set of phenomena which actually happens to be the case that you can’t make a case that any of those modes of interpretation are canonical and so if they’re not canonical, if that canonical element isn’t based in some kind of reality then it serves some other master and so the master that it hypothetically serves for the post-modernists is nothing but power because that seems to be everything that they believe in they don’t believe in competence, they don’t believe in authority they don’t seem to believe in an objective world because everything is language mediated so it’s an extraordinarily cynical perspective that because there’s an infinite number of interpretations none of them are canonical, you can attribute everything to power and dominance okay so that seemed like a reasonable summary of the post-modern yes exactly, it’s a radical relativism okay it’s a radical relativism now but the strange thing is despite, okay and so what goes along with that is the demolition of grand narratives so that would be associated for example with the rejection of thinkers like Jung and Eric Neumann because of course they’re foundational thinkers in relationship to the idea that there are embodied grand narratives, that’s never touched but then despite the fact that the grand narrative is rejected there’s a neo-marxism that’s tightly, tightly allied with post-modernism that also seems to shade into this strange identity politics and I don’t, two things, I don’t understand the causal relationship there like the skeptical part of me thinks that post-modernism was an intellectual it’s intellectual camouflage for the continuation of the kind of pathological marxism that produced the Soviet Union and that has no independent existence as an intellectual field whatsoever but I still can’t understand how the post-modernists can make the no grand narrative claim but then immerse themselves in this grand narrative without anyone pointing out the evident contradictions like I don’t understand that, so what do you think about that? well I can only speak about literary professors really and they seem to me, almost universally in the US, to be very naive they seem to know nothing about actual history, political science or economics it’s simply an attitude, they have an attitude marxism becomes simply a badge by which they telegraph their solidarity with a working class that they have nothing to do with and generally nothing but contempt yes and the thing is that the campus leftists are almost notorious for their rather snobbish treatment of staff they don’t have any rapport with the actual working class members of the infrastructure the janitors and even the secretaries there’s a kind of high and mighty aristocracy these are people who have wandered into the English department and were products of a time when during the new criticism when both history and psychology had been excluded my ambition was, I love the new criticism as a style of textual analysis and the new criticism had multiple interpretations that were possible and that were encouraged in fact one of the great projects was made in Max’s series 20th century views you had these books, I adored them in college, it was about Jane Austen or about Emily Bronte or about Wordsworth and they were collections of alternate views of the same thing the idea that there were no alternate views and there was no relativistic situational kind of an interpretive approach is nonsense but the point was we needed to restore history to literary study and we needed to add psychology to it because there was great animus against Freud and when I arrived in graduate school in fact I actually went into the director of graduate studies and protested the way Freud and Freudian were used as negative terms in a sneering way by the very WASP professors so we needed to add, it actually seemed like we were moving there in the early 1970s was a great period of psychobiography about great, about political figures so I thought it’s happening and all of a sudden it all got short-circuited by this arrival of post-structuralism and post-modernism in the 1970s so I feel I’m an old historicist, not a new historicist so I think the historicism is an absolute scam and it’s just a way, it’s like tweezers you pick a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of that you make a little tiny salad and somehow this atomized thing is supposed to mean something it’s all to me very superficial, very cynical, very distant I am the product of old historicism, of German philology my first choice of a profession when I was a child was Egyptology, archaeology everything I ever think about or say is related to an enormous time scheme from antiquity and indeed from the stone age and that is the problem with these people, they’re mal-educated the post-modernists and academic Marxists are mal-educated, embarrassingly so they know nothing before the present Foucault is absolutely a joke before the Enlightenment perhaps he might be useful to people to talk about what happened after neoclassicism which by the way he failed to notice a lot of what he was talking about turns out to be simply the hangover of neoclassicism this is how ignorant that man was I mean he was not talented as a researcher he knew absolutely nothing, he knew nothing about antiquity how can you make any kind of large mechanism to analyze Western culture without knowing about classical antiquity he did not see anything this was a person who had no business making large theoretical statements about anything well maybe part of it is that if you generate an intelligible doctrine of radical relativism then there is no reason to assume that there are distinctions between categories of knowledge or between different levels of quality of knowledge I’ve seen the same thing in the psychology departments although we have the luxury of being bounded at least to some degree by the empirical method and by biology it’s one of the things that keeps most of the branches of psychology relatively sane because the real world is actually built into it to some degree but if you accept the post-modernist claim of radical relativism then you completely demolish the idea that there are quality levels that are associated with education because everything becomes the same and that seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable justification for maintaining ignorance you know like Foucault, I actually found him the most readable of the Lacan-Dérida-Foucault triad you can read Foucault I read Madness and Civilization and a couple of his other books and I thought they were painfully obvious you know the idea that mental disorder is in part a social construct is self-evident to anybody who has even a smattering of psychiatric training the real narrow medical types tend to think of a mental disorder let’s say as something that might be purely biological they have a peer disease model but nobody who’s a sophisticated thinker ever thinks that it’s partly because medicine is a brand of engineering not a brand of science because it’s associated with health and the diagnostic categories are hybrids between physiological observation and socio-cultural condition everyone knows that and so when I read Madness and Civilization I thought well that’s not radical that’s just bloody self-evident well you know Foucault’s admirers actually think that he began the entire turn toward a sociological grounding of modern psychology the social psychology was well launched in the 1920s for example the levels of ignorance these people who think Foucault is so original have not read Durkheim they’ve not read Max Weber they’ve not read Erwin Goffman in other words to me everything in Foucault seemed obvious because I had read the sources from which he was borrowing without attribution so I mean again I know these people I mean I’ve met in some cases knew them in graduate school people who went on to become these admirers of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and I know what their training was their training was purely within the English department that’s all they ever knew they never made any research outside of that so the idea, so Foucault is simply this mechanism it’s like a little tiny kit by which they can approach everything in culture and then the contortions of language the deliberate labyrinthine elitist language at the same time as pretending to be a leftist okay this is one of the biggest frauds ever practiced so I got a story to tell you that you might like because I’ve thought a lot about that use of language you know because language can be used as camouflage and so here’s the story I think I got this from Robert Sapolsky so he was talking about zebras and zebras of course have stripes and hypothetically that’s associated with camouflage but it’s not a straightforward association because zebras are black and white and they’re on the veldt along with the lions the lions are camouflaged because they are grass-colored but the bloody zebras are black and white you can see them like 15 miles away so okay so biologists go out to study zebras and they’re like making notes on a zebra and they watch it and then they look down at their notes and then they look up and they think oh I don’t know which zebra I was looking at so the camouflage is actually against the herd because a zebra is a herd animal not an individual and so the black and white stripes break up the animal against the herd so you can’t identify it so this was a quandary for the biologists so they did one of two things one was drive a jeep up to the zebra herd and use a dab of red paint and dab the haunch of the zebra or tag it with an ear tag like you use for cattle the lions would kill it so as soon as it became identifiable yes the predators could organize their hunt around that identifiable animal that’s why you know there’s the old idea that lions and predators take down the weak animals but they don’t they take down the identifiable animals so that’s the thing is if you stick your damn head up you get picked off by the predators and so one of the things that academics seem to do is congregate together in herd-like entities and then they share a language right and the language unites them and also keeps them as long as they share the same set of linguistic tools among themselves they know that there isn’t anybody in the in the coterie that’s going to attack them or destabilize the entire herd and that seems to me to account for that impenetrable use of language it’s group protection strategy and it has absolutely nothing to do with the search for it’s the search for security within a system and not the desire to expand the system to me this blatantly careerist because it was about advancement and it was also about the claim that somehow they have like special expertise this is a special technical language no one else can understand it only we can but what’s absurd about it absolutely ludicrous that these people these these american academics are imitating the contorted language of French translations from the French when Lacan is translated into English there’s a contortion there what he was trying to do in French was to break up the neo-classical formulations that descended from Racine there was something that was going on there was a sabotage of the French language going on that was necessary in France not necessary in English we have this long tradition of poetry going back to Shakespeare and Chaucer we have we have our own language far more vital than the French oh yeah the French constrain their language all the time by bureaucracy in the amateurism of american academics trying to imitate a translation of Lacan when Lacan is doing something in France that is absolutely not necessary and indeed wrong to be doing in English the utter cynical abandonment of the great tradition of the English departments and I felt that the true radicalism was not about adding on other departments so we have African-American studies and you know and and women’s studies and so on the true radicalism would have been to shatter the departmental structure that’s what I wanted I feel that was the authentic revolutionary 1960s thing to do right to like to blend all the literature studies studies together okay so to make easier to make an interdisciplinary kind of organization you know closer to the British model where a person can pursue related subjects overlapping subjects these departmental models okay are were to me totalitarian to begin with okay separating language into fiefdoms and what what this did to create women’s studies department absolutely out of the air to snap your fingers and create women’s studies the english department had taken a century to develop okay it was a huge argument okay within within it right and all of a sudden to create okay a department with a politicized agenda from the start okay by people without any training whatever in that field okay what should be the what should be the parameters of the field what should be the requirements of that field how about biology okay if you’re going to be discussing gender that should have been a number one requirement okay as part of any women’s studies department or program but no okay it was all hands off it was just the administrators wanted to solve a public relations problem okay they had a situation with very few women faculty nationwide at a time when the women’s movement had just started up the spotlight of attention was was on them they want they needed women faculty fast they needed the women’s subject on the agenda fast right so they just like poof let there be women’s studies okay and now we’ll just hire some women usually from english departments you know here here and there and we’ll just throw them together you invent it you say what it is so that’s why women’s studies got frozen at a certain point of ideology okay of the early 1970s i was already in revolt okay i was a precursor in terms of my endorsement of feminism before before even now was created right but i couldn’t i couldn’t even have a conversation with any of these women they were hysterical about the subject of biology they knew nothing about hormones right i mean i i probably gotten fist fights over this they were people were so convinced that biology had nothing whatever to do with gender differences right see that also seems to me to be related to the post modern emphasis on power yes because there’s a there’s something terrible underground going on there and that is and i think this is the sort of thing that was reflected in the soviet union too in the especially in the 20s when there was this idea radical idea that you could remake human beings entirely right because they had no essential nature and so if your fundamental hypothesis is that nothing exists except power and you believe that then that also gives you the right in some sense to exercise your power at the creation of the kind of humanity that your utopian vision envisions and then that has no that and that also seems to me to justify the postmodern insistence that everything is only a linguistic construct it again goes down to the notion of power which derrida and foucault and lacan are so bloody obsessed with and so and it seems to me what they’re trying to do is to to take all the potential power for the creation of human beings to themselves without any bounding conditions whatsoever right there’s no history there’s no biology there’s and and everything is a fluid culture that can be manipulated at will and so i mean in canada there are terrible arguments right now about biological essentialism let’s say and one of the things that happened which was something i objected to precisely a year ago is that the social constructionist view of human identity has been built now into canadian law so there’s an insistence that biological sex gender identity gender expression and sexual proclivity vary independently with no causal relationship between any of the levels and so that’s in the law and not only is it in the law it’s being taught everywhere it’s being taught in the armed forces it’s being taught in the police it’s being taught to the elementary school kids and the junior high school kids and underneath it all i see this terrible striving for arbitrary power that’s associated with this crazy utopianism and and and but i still don’t exactly understand it i don’t like i don’t understand that what seems to be the hatred that motivates it that you see bubbling up for example in identity politics and and in the desire to do nothing but let’s say demolish the patriarchy it kind of reminds me and this is something else i wanted to talk to you about you know and you’re you’re an admirer of eric neumann and of carol you yeah and that’s the neumann connection is really interesting because i think he’s a bloody genius i really like the great mother is a great book and really a great warning that book and also the origins and history of consciousness is one of my most influential books yeah yeah that’s so interesting i read an essay that you wrote i don’t remember when it was the lecture i gave on neumann at the nyu yes yes it’s always been staggering to me that that book hasn’t had the impact that it should have had i mean jung himself in the preface to that book wrote that that was the book that he wished that he would have written it’s very much associated with young symbols of transformation and it was a major influence on my book maps of meaning which was an attempt to outline the universal archetypes that that are portrayed in the kind of religious structures that you that you put forward but the thing that i really see happening and you can tell me what you think about this and in neumann’s book consciousness which is masculine symbolically for a variety of reasons is is viewed as rising up against the countervailing force of tragedy from an underlying feminine symbolically feminine unconsciousness right and it’s something that can always be pulled back into that unconsciousness that would be the microcosm of that would be the freudian edible mother familial dynamic where the mother is so over protective and all-encompassing that she interferes with the development of the confidence not only of her sons but also of her daughters of her children in general and it seems to me that that’s the dynamic that’s being played out in our society right now is that there’s this and it’s it’s related in some way that i don’t understand to this to this insistence that all forms of masculine authority are nothing but tyrannical power so the symbolic representation is tyrannical father with no appreciation for the benevolent father and benevolent mother with no appreciation whatsoever for the tyrannical mother right and that’s that and because i thought of ideologies as fragmentary mythologies that’s where they get their archetypal and psychological power right and so in a balanced representation you have the terrible mother and the great mother as as neumann laid out so nicely and you have the terrible father and the great father so that’s the fact that culture mangles you half to death while it’s also promoting you and developing you you have to see that as balanced and then you have the heroic and adversarial individual but in the post-modern world and this seems to be something that’s increasingly seeping out into the culture at large you have nothing but the tyrannical father nothing but the destructive force of masculine consciousness and nothing but the benevolent benevolent great mother and it’s a it’s an appalling ideology and it seems to me that it’s sucking the vitality which is exactly what you would expect symbolically it’s sucking the vitality of our culture you see that with the increasing demolition of of young men and not only young men in terms of their academic performance which like they’re falling way behind in elementary school way behind in junior high and bailing out of the universities like mad and so and i well the public school education has become completely permeated by this kind of anti-male propaganda i mean and i think to me public schools are just a form of imprisonment you know right now they’re particularly destructive to young men who have a lot of physical energy now you know i identify as transgender myself but i do not i do not require the entire world to alter itself okay to fit my particular self-image i do believe in the power of hormones i believe that men exist and women exist and they are biologically different i think that i think there is no cure for the culture’s ills right now except if men start standing up okay and demanding that they be respected as men again okay so i got a question about that so so one of the things we did a research project a year ago trying to figure out if there was such a thing as political correctness from a psychometric perspective to find out if the loose aggregation of beliefs actually clumped together statistically and we actually found two factors which i won’t go into but then we looked at things that predicted adherence to that that politically correct creed and there were a couple that were surprising one was being female was a predictor the personality attributes associated with femininity so that would be agreeableness and higher levels of negative emotion were also both independent predictors but so were symptoms of personality disorder which i thought was really important because part of what i see happening is that like i think that women whose relationship with men have has been seriously pathologized cannot distinguish between male authority and competence and male tyrannical power like they fail to differentiate because all they see is the oppressive male and and they may have had experiences that that their experiences with men might have been rough enough so that that differentiation never occurred because it has to occur and you have to have a lot of experience with men and good men too before that will occur but it seems to me that we’re also increasingly dominated by a view of masculinity that’s mostly characteristic of women who have terrible personality disorders and who are unable to have healthy relationships with men now but here’s the problem you know this is something my wife has pointed out too she said well men are going to have to stand up for themselves but here’s the problem i know how to stand up to a man who’s who’s unfairly trespassing against me and the reason i know that is because the parameters for my resistance are quite well defined which is we talk we argue we push and then it becomes physical right like if we move beyond the boundaries of civil discourse we know what the next step is okay that’s forbidden in discourse with women and so i don’t think that men can control crazy women i don’t think i really don’t believe it i think that they have to throw their hands up in in in what in in it’s not even disbelief it’s that the cultural there’s no step forward that you can take under those circumstances because if the man is offensive enough and crazy enough the the reaction becomes physical right away or at least the threat is there and when men are talking to each other in any serious manner that underlying threat of physicality is always there especially if it’s a real conversation and keeps the thing civilized to some degree you know if you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever then you’re talking to someone to whom you have absolutely no respect but i can’t see any way for example there’s a there’s a woman in in toronto who’s been organizing this movement let’s say against me and some other people who are going to do a free speech event and she managed to organize quite effectively and she’s quite offensive you might say she compared us to nazis for example which you know publicly using the swastika which wasn’t really something i was all that fond of but i i’m defenseless against that kind of female insanity because the techniques that i would use against a man who was employing those tactics are forbidden to me so i don’t know like it seems to me that it isn’t men that have to stand up and say enough of this even though that is what they should do it seems to me that it’s sane women who have to stand up against their crazy sisters and say look enough of that enough man-hating enough pathology enough bringing disgrace on us as a as a gender but the problem there and then i’ll stop my little tirade is that most of the women i know who are sane are busy doing sane things right they’re off they have their career they have their family they’re quite occupied and they don’t seem to have the time or maybe even the interest to go after their their crazy harpy sisters and so i don’t see any regulating force for that that terrible femininity and it seems to me to be invading the culture and undermining the the masculine power of the culture in a way that’s i think fatal i really do believe that i too i too believe these are there’s a symptomatic of the decline of western culture and it will just go down flat i don’t think people realize that you know masculinity still exists okay in the world as a code among jihadists okay and when you have passionate masculinity okay circling the borders like the huns and the vandals during the roman empire that’s what i see i see this culture rotting from within okay and disemboweling itself literally now i have an overview of why we’re having these problems right and it comes from the fact that i’m the product of an immigrant family all four of my grandparents and my mother were born in italy so i remember from my earliest years in this factory town in upstate new york my relatives came to work in the shoe factory i can remember still okay the the life of the agrarian era okay which would not which was for most of human history okay the agrarian era where there was the world of men and the world of women and the sexes had very little to do with each other each had power and status in its own realm right and they and they laughed at each other in essence okay the women had enormous power in fact the old women ruled not the young beautiful women like today but the the older you were the more you had control over everyone including the mating and marriage um you there were no doctors so the so you had the you know the old women were like midwives and knew all the ins and outs of this inherited knowledge about pregnancy and all these other things right i can remember this this and the joy that women had with each other all day long okay cooking with each other companions to each other talking conversing my mother remembered as a small child in italy when it was time to do the laundry they would take the laundry up the mount up the hill to the fountain il sorgo okay and and do it by hand they would sing they would picnic and so on all right and we get a glimpse of that in the odyssey when Odysseus is is thrown up naked on the shores of faecia all right and and he hears the sound of women young women laughing and singing and it’s nozickia the princess bringing the women to do the laundry it’s exactly the same thing right so there was a each each gender had its own hierarchy its own values its own way of talking and the sexes rarely intersected like i can remember in my in childhood on a holiday typical it could be a christmas it could be a thanksgiving whatever all the women would be cooking all day long everyone would sit down to eat okay and then after that okay the women would retire en masse to the kitchen and the men would go i would i would look at the window and see all the men the men would be all outside usually gather on the car okay at a time when cars didn’t work as well as they do today with the hood up okay and the men would be standing with their hands on their hips like that everyone’s staring at the engine okay and i went yeah that’s how i learned okay men were refreshing themselves by studying something technical and mechanical after being with the okay you know for during the dinner okay so so all of these problems of today are the direct consequence of women’s emancipation and freedom from the housework thanks to capitalism okay which made it possible for women to have jobs outside the home for the very first time in the 19th century no longer to be dependent on a husband or father or brother right and so this great great thing that’s happened to us that allowing us to be totally as self-supporting independent agents has produced all this animosity about between men and women because the women women feel unhappy women today wherever i go whether it’s italy or brazil or england or america okay or toronto okay the the the upper middle class professional women are unhappy miserable they want and they don’t know what why they’re unhappy they want to blame it on men okay the men must change men must more like women no that is the wrong way to go okay it’s when men are men okay and understand themselves as men are secure as men then you’re going to be happier yeah well there’s nothing more dangerous than a weak man yeah absolutely okay especially all these quizzlings okay spouting feminist when i hear that okay it makes me sick but here’s the point men and women have never worked side by side ever maybe on the farms okay when you were like maybe one person’s in the potato field the other ones over here in the tomato during tomatoes or whatever okay you you had you had families working working side by side exhausted with each other no time to have any clash of this it was a collaborative effort on farms and so on never in all of human history have men and women been working side by side and women are now the pressure about silicon valley they’re all so sexist oh they don’t allow women in and so on the men are being men in silicon valley all right and especially the engineers and the women are demanding that oh this is terrible you’re being said maybe the sexes okay have their own particular form of rhetoric their own particular form of you know of identity okay maybe okay we need to re-examine okay this business about you know the maybe we have to perhaps accept some degree of tension and conflict between the sexes okay in a work environment i don’t mean harassment i’m talking i’m talking about women feeling disrespected how somehow their their opinions when they express them okay are not taken seriously or or that or even hillary clinton is complaining oh when a woman writes something online she’s attacked immediately and so on well everyone’s attacked online what are you talking about the world is tough the world is competitive okay identity is honed okay by conflict the idea that there should be no conflict that we have to be in this bath okay of approbation yes and you know it which is well that’s the devouring mother that’s right it’s absolutely infantile and meaning okay so a couple of things there well the first thing is is that that the agreeableness trait that divides men and women most there’s three things that divide women and men most particularly from the psychometric perspective one is that women are more agreeable than men and so that seems to be the primary maternal dimension as far as i can tell it’s associated with a desire to avoid conflict but it’s it’s associated with interpersonal closeness compassion politeness women are reliably higher than men especially in the scandinavian countries and in the countries where egalitarianism has progressed the farthest so that’s where the difference is maximized which is one of the things james demore pointed out quite correctly in his infamous google memo okay women are higher in negative emotion so that’s anxiety and emotional pain that that difference is approximately the same size and again that maximizes in egalitarian societies which is extremely interesting and then the biggest difference is the difference in interest between people and things and so women are more interested in people and men are more interested in things which goes along quite nicely with your car anecdote but the thing about men interacting with men again is that it isn’t that they respect each other’s viewpoints that’s not exactly right what happens with a man and i know a lot of men that i would regard as as remarkably tough people for one reason or another and everything you do with them is a form of combat like if you want your viewpoint taken seriously often you have to yell them down and like they’re not going to stop talking unless you start talking over them you know and it’s it’s not like men are automatically giving respect to other men because that just doesn’t happen it’s that the combat is there and it’s expected and one of the problems and so this is part of the reason why i think men are bailing out of so much of academia and and maybe the academic world in general and maybe the world is that men actually don’t have any idea how to compete with women because the problem is is that if you unleash yourself completely then you’re an absolute bully and there’s no doubt about that because if men unleash themselves on other men that can be pretty goddamn brutal especially for the men that are really tough and this so that just doesn’t happen with women ever but so you can’t unleash yourself completely if you win you’re a bully if you lose well you’re just bloody pathetic so how the hell are you supposed to play a game like that you know so in i’ve worked with lots of women in law firms in in canada for example and high achieving women like really remarkable people i would say and they’re often non-plussed i would say by the attitude of the men in the law firm because they would like to see everyone pulling together because they’re all part of the same team whereas the men are like at each other’s throats in a cooperative way because they want the law firm to succeed but they want to be the person who’s at the top of the success hierarchy right so and that that doesn’t jive well with the more competitive or cooperative ethos that’s part and parcel of agreeableness and so we don’t really have any idea how to integrate male and female dominance exactly exactly that’s exactly right this is why i love this show real housewives which is which is yes and just say just last night okay i was watching an episode where the women were at each other okay at a party and all in recounting but i said this to you but you said this to me and you’re like and the men got we got together there and said well this is the way they communicate you know with each other and you know men we we men okay just we’ll have a fistfight and we’ll and 10 minutes later we’re going to have a beer at the bar with next to each other and so and i i have observed that my entire my daughter my daughter used to be really irritated about that because she she like most people was the target of feminine conspiratorial bullying at one she’s no pushover my daughter so this it wasn’t like this was a continual thing or that she didn’t know what to do about it but she had observed these girls conspiring against her and then blackening her name on on facebook which is part of the part and parcel of the typical female bullying routine which is often reputation demolition right that there’s a good literature on that and then she’d watch what would happen if my brother or my son would have a dispute with his friends you know and maybe they were drinking and there was a dispute they’d have a fight and then the next day they were friends again and that’s another thing that’s strange is that like men have a way of bringing a conflict to a head and resolving it right and that it isn’t obvious to me that women have that same perhaps you might call it luxury but it’s also the case that men don’t know what to do when they get into a conflict with a woman because what the hell are you supposed to do you know mostly what you’re supposed to do is avoid it and and well i’ve seen um you know i don’t know whether this crosses into other countries but that there’s a certain kind of taunting and teasing that men boys do with each other that toughens them okay and where they don’t they don’t take things seriously but a girl’s feelings become extremely hurt if she hears something that is very tough you know again sarcastic against her so i mean i do feel that there are profound differences between the sexes in terms of emotions in terms of communication patterns you know my father used to say that he could never follow women’s conversations he said he said women don’t even finish their finished sentences they’re there with the women understand immediately what the other woman is saying okay and and the in the way women tend to be more interested or have have been traditionally more interested in soap operas it’s not just the women who are home without jobs it’s that i honestly i believe that soap opera does reflect does mirror the way women talk to each other there’s these communication patterns have been built up through women the world of women okay which which was it made sense there was a division of labor okay it wasn’t sexism against women that there was a division of labor the men went off to hunt and did the dangerous things the women stayed around the hearth because you had pregnant women nursing women older women okay they were cooking and so on so i feel that these communication patterns that we’re talking about have been built up okay over the centuries and the men had to toughen each other okay to go out to go out you know the hunting parties of native americans you know they could be gone for two weeks and when the temperature was below zero okay many of them died okay yeah the idea that somehow oh any kind of separation of the sexes or different spheres of the sexes is inherently sexist and yeah and inherently driven by a power dynamic the answer to all of this okay everything that we’re talking about okay is education into early history okay until you until people understand the stone age the nomadic period the agrarian era and the and how culture how civilization built up okay in messapartamia the great irrigation projects where or in or in egypt okay where you had for the first centralized government authority became necessary okay to master these these you had a situation where environmentally uh you know uh you know a difficult situation like the deserts of messapartamia or or the the peculiar character of egyptian geography where you can only have a little tiny fertile line along the edges of the Nile okay and otherwise desert landscape so this civilization and authority okay all right it’s not necessarily about power grabbing but about organization to achieve something for the good of the people as a whole yes you will see that well that’s exactly the symbolism of the great father by reducing all hierarchy to to power okay and and selfish power okay is it is utterly naive it’s ignorant right so i say education has to be totally reconstituted including public education to begin in the most distant past so so our young people today who know nothing about how the how the world was created that they inhabit okay can understand okay what what marvelous technological paradise they live in and it’s the product of capitalism the product of individual innovation is the pro most of it’s the product of a western tradition that everyone wants to trash now is there if you begin in the past and show it also talk about war maybe because with the war is the one thing that wakes people up okay as we see war as we may see yes okay war is the reality principle my father and all in five of my uncles went to world war two you know and you know my father was was part of the the force that landed in japan okay uh as he was a paratrooper um you know at the time of the japanese surrender okay and all you know and my a couple uncles got shot up and so on when you have the reality of war when people see the reality of the horrors of war berlin burned again you know to a crisp and so on your starvation and all kind then you understand okay this marvelous mechanism that brings water you know to you to the to the kitchen and when you just slip on a light the electricity electricity can turn fast for me like and i suppose it’s because i have somewhat of a depressive temperament i mean one thing that staggers me on a consistent basis is the fact that anything ever works i mean because it’s so unlikely you know to to to be in a situation where our electronic communications work where our where our electric grid works and it works all the time right it works a hundred percent of the time and the reason for that is that there are mostly men out there who are breaking themselves into pieces repairing this thing which just falls apart all the time i said this in the monk debate okay in toronto several years ago i said that there’s the invisible all these these these you know these elitist professors sneering at men it’s men who are maintaining everything around us this invisible army okay which which you feminists don’t notice right nothing would work or regarded regarded as oppressive which is you know and like a professor is someone who’s standing on a hill surrounded by a wall which is surrounded by another wall which is surrounded by another wall like it’s walls all the way down who stands up there and says i’m brave and independent it’s like you’ve got this protected area that’s so unlikely it’s so absolutely unlikely and the fact that people aren’t on their knees in gratitude all the time for the fact that we have central heating and air conditioning and can pure water and reliable food it’s just it’s incredible it is it’s absolutely unbelievable people used to die for the water supply okay with was contaminated with cholera for heaven’s sakes right people don’t understand okay they have clean water fresh milk fresh orange juice all of these things these are marvel and all of the time all of the time that’s western culture is heading okay because we are so dependent on this on this invisible infrastructure we’re heading for an absolute catastrophe when jihadists figure out how to paralyze the power grid the entire culture will be be chaotic you’ll have mobs in the street okay you know within three days okay when suddenly the food supply is interrupted and there’s no like there’s no no way to communicate it’ll be like a robbery i mean that is the way western culture is going to collapse okay and it won’t take much single points of failure because we are so interconnected and now we are so so so dependent on communications and computers the the i’ve i’ve used to predict for years there will be an asteroid hitting there yeah well do you have another do you know how the solar flares work so back in this happens about once every century so back about 1880 and i don’t remember the exact year there was a significant enough solar flare so that produces an electromagnetic pulse like a hydrogen bomb because the sun is a hydrogen bomb and electromagnetic pulse will emerge from the sun and wave across the earth and it produces huge spikes in in electrical electrical current along anything that’s electronic and it’ll burn them out it let it lit telegraph operators on fire in the 1800s and one of those things took out the quebec power grid in 1985 and knocked out the whole northeast corridor and so they figure those things are about one in a century event but those single i have my brother-in-law who’s a very smart guy he designed the chip in the iphone we were talking about political issues the last time i went and saw him in san francisco and his notion was that all that the government should be doing right now is stress testing our infrastructure the same way they stress test the banks because we’re so full of these single points of failure that and i think you’re absolutely right luckily we’ve been um what would you call invaded by stupid terrorists instead of smart terrorists because a smart terrorist could do an unbelievable amount of damage in a very short period of time so and it’s just god’s good graces that that hasn’t happened yet and so and then what will happen is that it’s the men okay the men will reconstruct civilization while the women cower in the houses and have the men go out and do all the dirty work that’s what’s going to happen again only men will will bring civilization back again so what okay so now a couple of things so the the universities i mean i’ve proposed although it’s something that’s probably beyond my power that what should happen is that the universities the real content of the universities should be stolen back from the universities because they’re not making use of their intellectual property and that something should be started online that would constitute a genuine university the problem is the accreditation issue but i don’t think that’s an unsolvable problem but do you see like all these people who have these post-modern neo-marxist agendas are completely embedded inside the universities absolutely and the point is over the last 25 years i have received constant mail from people dropping out of the graduate schools right and or giving up altogether on any idea of being a college professor so what’s happened is that the most talented and independent thinking people they have avoided in the school so we’re now what who we have are the compliant the servile okay the people who are currently in the university and and hiring their successors okay are maleducated themselves okay i mean i i went on the first letters i received in the early 90s i’ll never forget it from a woman who was now painting houses in missouri and said she had been part of the comparative literature graduate program at you know at berkeley and that she finally had to drop out because she said every time she would express enthusiasm for what they were reading the people looked at her as if she had somehow created a defense in other in other words enthusiasm for art and the very things you need as a teacher in the classroom okay we’re being trained out yeah well the thing is if you respect art and literature that means that you implicitly accept a hierarchy of quality right and that of course contradicts the fundamental tenets of the postmodern doctrine which is that there are no hierarchies of quality and you know you you talked a little bit earlier about the the idea that you referred again to the idea that everything is associated with power and that’s that’s the thing that i can’t that that’s the thing that i can’t help but associate with with a kind of personality pathology like you know from a psychometric perspective the best predictors of long-term success in our society are intelligence iq which you can measure very accurately and trait conscientiousness which actually is a real testament to the culture right because what you’d hope is that the smart people who work hard are the people who advance it not it isn’t like they deserve it exactly that isn’t what i mean it’s that if the culture is harnessing the productive power of individuals properly then it should differentially reward people who are smart and conscientious because they’re going to do a bunch of really interesting work for the rest of us and that that’s very well established finding it’s it’s as good as any finding in the social sciences but despite that and despite the fact that everything works which is a goddamn miracle of sorts there is this consistent story that we live in a patriarchy that it’s only oppressive that it’s done nothing but oppress women since the beginning of time which is also something that just boggles my mind you know like i know that they have sacrificed for women and children including their lives okay for thousands of years you know yes there’s been brutality but the brutality is the minority okay yes this this is sick i think portrayal of human history is nothing but male oppression and female victimage okay this is a way to permanently ensure the infantilization of women yes absolutely yes well and you know there you can even make the case from a purely logical perspective so so here’s an interesting here’s an interesting fact so most of the people who abused their children were abused as children but most of the people who were abused as children don’t abuse their children right so if you look at the population of abusers they were all abused so you can say abuse causes abuse but that’s that’s not a good idea because you have a specific sample there right it’s not a random sample what happens is that abuse dampens out over the centuries it doesn’t propagate itself and that’s obvious because if there was if if the hypothesis of essential male tyranny was true it would spread exponentially through the population in like three generations and there wouldn’t be an exception at all and so what happens is even when there is a tilt towards tyranny let’s say in the family or even in the society that regresses back to something that’s far more benign very very rapidly you see this so to me one of the biggest unexamined issues is the transition from the great extended family of old okay into the nuclear family okay so i and i do feel that freud is the best analyst of the particular kind of claustrophobic cell of of the modern nuclear family it could be that human being it could be that human beings were never intended okay to be to be trapped in a house just with their parents that they extended families you had your aunts and you know and grandparents and and and cousins all of whom helped form your identity okay so what one had one’s identity was was as a member of a community rather than in this like hothouse environment so i think a lot of current issues including um the sudden spate of transgender claims and so on that a lot of these things are coming from um this unstable of in in cell it’s really a prison cell of a of a nuclear family two parents perhaps cannot give all the knowledge of life okay to to the young and so i i think there are all kinds of of sexual issues you know in that are generated by it but with the you know psychology today is is now it’s simply a matter a practical matter people come in uh you know the psychologist in in the united states deals with your your present problem let’s not go into the distant past okay let’s just deal with our present problem which are which obviously we have forms of communication we need to like fix this and then you’ll be fine okay as a consequence there’s a complete absence of any kind of analysis of of your experiences as a child with your parents so you know with your siblings and so on how that might relate to your current sexual identity issues whether it’s transgender or whether it’s homosexuality it is impo you cannot possibly ask okay about any genesis of homosexuality today okay because that is automatically defined as homophobic well excuse me every single as an openly gay you know the person myself every gay person i know okay there is some story there okay seems to be in childhood not only that there’s a strange similarity of the storylines of all of my friends who are gay okay there’s a same pattern that had to do with blurred borderlines in between a son and his mother and so on i’m not blaming the mother okay i’m not blaming the mother at all okay what i what i see is a dynamic going on in the bourgeois house of the nuclear family where you had sometimes a distant father okay a father who was present but it but not really engaged and a mother who who who who made the son her companion in some way often the mother has great imagination and flair and they had a shared thing and i mean i the idea that homosexuality has nothing whatever to do okay with your family life is nonsense well it’s also completely well that’s another thing and i got a lot of trouble in canada for my opposition to bill c16 which was a bill that had to do with transgender rights and i didn’t really give a damn about the transgender right issue that had nothing to do with it what bothered me was that there was an issue of compelled speech because you were required by the ontario human rights commission to use the pronouns that of the person’s choice right otherwise and that’s absolutely orwellian that’s right that is absolutely intolerable you know i have said i said years ago okay that my book sexual persona which was like a 700 page book i said that is the biggest sex change in history because i okay with my transgender issues all right they’ll look to the magnificent construction of english okay it was the english language okay that i seized on to gain my identity and my power as a person right and therefore any intrusion into english someone tell him try and tell me how to use english this great gift okay to me this is absolutely obscene and evil for any government to try to dictate to us how we’re going to use this this magnificent instrument of english yes absolutely and and i that was for me the breaking point because i believed well and i think that that’s associated with the idea of the logos in the west you know because that’s a deep mythological idea that the logos is the thing that brings order out of chaos through communicative speech and that that’s tightly aligned with your soul and i don’t care if you’re an atheist or a believer it doesn’t matter it’s still the right language and that no one has any right whatsoever under any circumstances to trespass against that and so but that’s okay because that’s law in canada now and so but okay so now back to your let’s see you were making a point about i know we would agree oh yes okay because it’s it’s interesting to look at these things from obviously from multiple perspectives which is another thing ideologues don’t do right because for them everything is one cause there’s one that’s how you can tell when you’re dealing with someone who’s ideologically possessed is they make everything attributable to a single cause like power so but so one of the things that’s happened with the nuclear family that’s quite interesting too is that parents are older and they and they have fewer children so you could imagine that that hothouse environment in some sense has been exaggerated for a bunch of reasons one is well your child is a lot more valuable to you if you’re older and you only have one or two right because you’re not going to get another chance that first of all you might have had some trouble having the child to begin with and you’re not going to get another chance so you’ve got all your eggs are in one basket so to speak and then of course children don’t have the number of siblings they used to have and one of the things that’s really useful about having siblings is that they keep you in your place right they they’re primary socialization agents and i mean that can be brutal that’s reflected say in the story of cain and abel you know that that internal household dynamic with siblings can be can really become murderous and that has to be kept under control but i think the hothouse flower person who’s incapable of tolerating any jibes or any testing any dominance hierarchy testing of the sort that you said that men do part of that’s the consequence of being raised by older parents who have excess resources who have no siblings because the child is then of course special and that specialness well there seems to be an inverse relationship between that specialness that’s protected and the person’s robustness and resilience and so and then that’s caught into or not caught into that’s that’s pandered to by the universities which insist upon setting up a situation where no one is ever offended by anything any of the time and that’s something i also can’t understand at all because let me just say that’s a huge point you just made okay because it’s the upper middle class of the professional class who postpones having the children okay because they go to law school they go to medical school right and they and they have the children after they’re settled okay in a job okay so they’re the ones okay who have injected this this this hypersensitive bourgeois idea you know code into the universities now my parents were 20 when they married and 21 when they had me okay my father was uh you know went to college on the gi bill getting out of out of world war two so when i was born my father was still in college and was sweeping floors and so on i am the product of young parents and nature wants actually young parents right because because pregnancy is is quicker it’s safer okay and so on and my parents had the energy okay to um you know this useful energy that can do spirit that came out of world war two and so on i’m a part of that then then my only other sibling was born 14 years later okay my father at this point was a college professor okay all right so she had completely different parents than than i did so she has very excellent manners and so on she’s completely different okay all right and i i have all this like the energy i mean my parents were just a lot of their teens okay so now today we have this situation no and it’s considered heresy to raise this issue okay that you have have young women are told okay there’s one future for you you are a future leader okay you must you must move forward okay four years of college and then perhaps it’s a professional class all right so it it maybe the women young women’s bodies are signaling okay that they want to be others maybe maybe there are signals coming from the body right of maybe now wanting this this this system of education that was devised for men okay this being funneled along channeled along in this mechanism all right so young women you know feel unhappy they don’t know why they feel they they have no sense of identity they if they if they if they want to marry and drop out of college right and have have a baby they will be treated as traitors to their class what you are future leader what have a baby only working class women would do that okay now what i find working class women okay in general okay far more rounded as personalities all right they express themselves forcefully they have body language that takes up space okay a man says something to them on the street they’re right back in their face and so on it is the bourgeois girls okay who are taught that they’re they’re special okay who have to postpone actual life okay for for all these years you see these these are the girls who are who who misjudged the fraternity party’s setting these are the girls who have run for parental protection and hand holding on the on the committee investigating what went wrong on their date and so on so forth so yes i i think that what you that you have located that’s very interesting the idea that these these young girls okay who are so sensitive okay in college so unable to handle their sex life are the product of older parents because they went through the professional career track right yes and they are they have not had the you know the experience of the you know competitiveness you know and um and teasing of other siblings and well also you know the thing about young parents is they don’t care as much as older parents and that actually turns out to be better because what you really want for your children is minimum necessary intervention right and and the developmental literature is actually quite clear on this so if you’re at home with your child what the best role that you can play is to be there but not to be interacting with the child all the time the child should be off doing whatever it is the children do which generally is playing with other children right without it being mediated also by screens and and technology because that’s how they formulate their identity and that’s how they learn to play joint games with other people and the parent is supposed to be there as a recourse for the child when they go out a little bit farther than they can tolerate and they have to come back and get some security and so but that isn’t that’s especially not what happens to single children because they’re basically raised as miniature adults so and i wonder too like how much of the antipathy towards these are dark musings and i would say how much of the antipathy towards men that’s being generated by say college-age women is deep repugnance for the role that they’ve been designed and a disappointment with the men for who you know like you think of those is it carpathian or i can’t remember the culture the the basic marital routine was to ride into the village and grab the bride and run away with her on a horse right it’s like the like the motorcycle gang member who rips the two naive woman out of girl out of the bosom of her family women so like yeah ancient myth yeah there used to be bride stealing it was quite quite quite widespread right well so i kind of wonder if part of the reason that modern university-age women aren’t so aren’t so angry is because that fundamental feminine role is actually being denied to them and they’re they’re objecting to that at a really really fundamental level like a level of primitive outrage at well and because what happened is the chaos that my generation of the 1960s bequeathed through the sexual revolution i went when i arrived in college in 1964 the colleges were still acting in loco parentis in place of the parent so my dormitory all women’s dormitory we women had to sign in at 11 o’clock at night the men could run free the entire night so it’s my generation of women that rose up and said give us the same freedom as men have and the colleges replied no um the world is dangerous you could be raped we have to protect you against rape and what we said okay was give us the freedom to risk rape okay and so that what that today’s women don’t understand it’s a freedom that you want is the same freedom that gay men have when they go and they pick up a stranger someplace they know it’s dangerous they know they could end up beaten up or killed okay but they find it hot if you want freedom if you want equality okay then you have to start behaving like a man so what we did is is we we gave freedom to these young women for several generations but my generation had been raised in a far more resilient and robust culture okay we had the strength okay to to know what we wanted and to fight for what we wanted these young women have been raised in this protective terribly protected ways right so i think in some strange you know fashion that that all these demands for intrusion from these you know stalinist committees sexual you know investigating dates and so on it’s a way to reinstitute okay the rules that my generation throughout the window so i think these young women are desperate not only that but i have spoken out very strongly in you know in a piece I wrote for Time magazine is in my most recent book that the raising the drinking age in this country okay from 18 to 21 okay has had a direct result okay in these in these disasters of binge drinking fraternity parties because to let college students the way we could go out as freshmen have a beer sit in a protected adult environment learn how to discourse with the opposite sex in a safe you know environment right and so on and you and now today okay because because of the stupid rule that young people can’t even buy a drink okay you know in a bar until they’re 21 we have these fraternity parties that are that are like it’s a caveman era well of course in this modern age this is this advantage is men okay men want to hook up men want to have sex women don’t understand what men want so you know women women like put out because they’re hoping that maybe the man will continue to be interested in them okay the man just wants experience okay the hormones drive toward to me i’ve theorized okay that the you know that the sex drive in men is intertwined with with hunting pursuits okay yes yes and so i feel absolutely this is what women don’t understand okay and if women understood what i understand from my transgender perspective all right these women on the streets okay um you know i know i’m obviously you know madonna you know admirer and you know i and i i support pornography and prostitution so i don’t want what i’m about to say to seem conservative is it it isn’t okay what i’m saying is the women on the street young women okay who are about who are jogging okay with no bra on okay short shorts and have and have earbuds in their ears okay just jogging along like as i said these women do not understand the nature of the human mind they do not understand the nature of psychosis okay and this intertwining i’m talking about okay of the hunt the hunt and pursuit thing okay they’re triggering a hunt thing just what what what do what uh you have talked about in terms of the zebra herd okay they are triggering the hunt okay uh impulse okay in psychotic men okay i to have there goes a very appetizing and and and totally oblivious animal okay bouncing along here okay so and we’re in a period now where psychosis is not understood at all okay and young women have had no exposure to movies like psycho okay you know the kind of the rapist serial murderer thing and so on the kind of strange dynamic that has to do with the with an assault on the on the mother immago you know in the in the in the mind of the psychotic but i think that’s an incredible naivety these young women are emerging and going to college and in this like incredible dynation environment of you know of orgiastic sexual experience in fraternity houses they’re completely unprepared for it right and and so you’re getting all this outrage so feminist rhetoric has gotten more and more extreme in its portrayal of men as evil but in fact okay what we have is a cast it’s a it’s a chaos in the sexual realm the girls have not been told anything real i mean in terms of biological substratum which is sexual no and there’s full of lies about what constitutes consent too exactly and it’s become something that’s essentially portrayed linguistically as a sequence of progressive contracts which you know is it’s well i think you know i’ve thought for a while that we’re living in the delusional fantasy of a naive 13 year old girl that’s basically sums up our culture and i look at all these sexual rules that permeate the the the academia and i think two things the first thing i think is well i know because i was an alcohol researcher for a long time and you know that 50 percent of violent crimes are directly attributable to alcohol so if you’re murdered there’s about a 50 chance that you’re drunk and about a 50 chance that the person who kills you is drunk and alcohol is the only drug that we know that actually amplifies aggression it does that in laboratory situations plus it’s a great disinhibitor right so what alcohol does is it it doesn’t make you oblivious to the future consequences of your action because if you ask someone who’s drunk about the consequences of something stupid they can tell you what the consequences are but it makes you not care and it does that because it’s technically an anxiolytic like like like barbiturates or like benzodiazepines and it also has a as a an activating property for many people who drink so it’s it’s a stimulant and a and an anxiolytic at the same time and a very very potent it’s very potent for both of them and you know we put young people together and douse them in alcohol right at the binge drinking level and then which also interferes with memory consolidation which of course makes things much more complex and then we’re surprised when there are sexual misadventures and you know and then it’s also attributed almost purely to the predatory element that’s that’s part and parcel of masculinity but a tremendous amount of that is also naivety and stupidity you know because we expect like 18 18 year old guys especially the ones that aren’t that haven’t been successful with girls which is like 85 percent of them because the successful men are a very small percentage of men the 85 percent who haven’t been successful with men or with women they don’t know what the hell they’re doing at all right and part of the reason they’re getting drunk is to garner up enough courage to actually make an advance you know and because i think another thing that women don’t understand especially with regards to young men is just exactly how petrifying a attractive woman who’s of say somewhat higher status actually is to a young guy and there’s lots of guys that write me constantly and people that i’ve worked with that are so terrified of women they can’t even talk to them it’s very very common well you know i take a very firm position which is that i want college administrations to stay totally out of the social lives of the students right if a crime is committed it should be reported to the police i’ve been writing that for 25 years now right but but it’s not the business of any college administration to take any notice okay of what the students say to each other say to each other as well as do with each other okay i want it to totally stop is fascism of the worst i agree well it’s in it’s i think it’s fascism of the worst kind because it’s an it’s a new kind of fascism you know it’s it’s partly generated by legislation so like the title nine men memo that was written in 2011 i recently got a copy of that goddamn thing that was one polluting bit of legislation that was that memo basically told universities that unless they set up a parallel court system they were going to be denied federal funding it is absolutely unbelievable incredible the leftists are supporting this i know i know it’s and this shows there is no authentic campus leftism i’m sorry it’s a fraud okay i mean you think the faculty should be fighting the administrations on this yeah fighting federal in federal regulation of you know how we’re supposed to behave on campus well how can you be so how can you be so naive and foolish to think that taking an organization like the university which already has plenty to do and forcing it to become a pseudo legal system that parallels the legal system could possibly be anything but utterly catastrophic it would mean you have to know absolutely nothing about the legal system and about the tremendous period of evolution that produced what’s actually a stellar system and an adversarial system that protects the rights of the accused and of the and of the victim and to replace that with an ad hoc bureaucracy that has pretty much essentially the same degree of power as the court system with absolutely none of the training and none of the guarantees and what records there are kangaroo courts that piece that i wrote about date rape it was in january 1991 newsday got the most controversial thing i ever wrote in my entire career i attacked the entire thing and demanded the colleges stand back and get out of the social lives of the students so on and people the reaction people tried to recall they called the president of my university tried to get me fired you can’t believe the hysteria okay i can believe it yeah yeah it yeah well yes yes you can believe it anything that way if anything that says to women okay that they should be responsible for their own choices is regarded as reactionary are they kidding me okay this is such a betrayal of authentic feminism in my view well it’s the ultimate betrayal of authentic feminism because it’s it’s an invitation of all the things that you might be paranoid about with regards to the patriarchy back into your life right it’s an insistence that the most intrusive part of the tyrannical king come and take control over the most intimate details of your life incredible and the the assumption is that that’s going to make your life better rather than worse right and not to mention this idea of you know this the stages of verbal consent as if as if your impulses based in the body have anything to do with words and so on i mean that’s the whole point is you know about sex okay is to abandon okay that you know that part of the brain that’s so that you know and entangled with words i mean there’s you see these it’s actually a marker of of lack of social ability to have to do that because if you’re sophisticated it’s not like if you’re dancing with someone it’s not like you call out the moves right if you have to do that well then you’re you’re you’re you’re more worse than a neophyte right you’re an awkward neophyte and anybody with any sense should get the hell away from you and so if you’re reduced to the point where you have to verbally negotiate every element of of intimate interaction then what a downer oh my god that yes but what i what an unbelievably what would you call it naïve and pathological view of the manner in which human beings interact there’s no sophistication in that well what i’m worried about also in this age of social media i’ve noticed as a teacher in the classroom that the young people are so used to communicating now by cell phone okay by iphone that they’re losing body language and facial expressions okay which i think is going to compound the problem with these dating encounters okay because the ability to read the the human face and into into read little tiny inflections of emotion well i think my generation got that from looking at great foreign films with their with their long takes okay so you’d have jean maro and kevin denose okay in like a potential romantic encounters and you could see the tiniest little little inflections all right that that that signal communication or sexual readiness or irony or skepticism or distance or whatever okay so the inability to read the other people’s intentions okay that i think this is going to be a disaster i just noticed that how year by year okay the students are becoming much more flat affect okay and they themselves complain that they’ll sit in the same room with someone and be texting to each other okay yeah yeah well there’s a there’s a piece of evidence too that supports that to some degree so women with brothers are less likely to get raped and the reason for that is that they’ve learned that non-verbal language deeply right and they can they can they can spot the not only that okay but i have i have noticed okay uh in my into my career okay that that women who have many brothers okay are very good okay as administrators and as business people okay all right because they don’t take men seriously okay they regard but they they they saw their brothers they think their brothers are jokes okay but they know how to control men okay while while they still like men okay they admire men right so this is something that i have seen you know repeatedly yeah well so that would be also reflective of the problem of fewer and fewer siblings yes that’s right okay yeah yeah and you know i’ve noticed this in publishing okay that the women who have the job of publicist okay and rise to the top as manager of publicity okay their ability to take charge of men and and and their humor at men and they have great relationships with men okay because they don’t have the sense of resentment and worry and anxiety and so they don’t see men as aggressors okay right and i think that’s another thing too is that as feminism um you know moved into its present system of ideology okay it has tended to denigrate motherhood okay as as a lesser order of human experience and and to enshrine of course abortion now i am 100 of abortion rights i you know i belonged to planned parenthood for years until i finally rejected it as a branch of the democratic party my own party and so on um but but as motherhood became excluded as as feminism became obsessed okay with the with with the professional woman okay i feel that the lessons that mothers learn have been lost okay to to to feminism okay which is okay that if they if the mothers who who bear boy children okay understand the fragility of men the fragility of boys they understand it they don’t they don’t see boys and men as a menace they understand the greater strength of women okay so there’s this tenderness you know and connectedness between the between the mother and and the boy child okay when motherhood is part of the experience okay of of women who are discussing gender so what we have today is that this this gender ideology has risen up on campuses where where all none of the none of the girls none of the students have married none of them have children okay and you have you have women some of whom have had children but a lot of them are lesbians or like or like or like professional women and so on okay so this the whole tenderness and forgiven forgiveness okay and encouragement that women do to to boys okay they’re fragile they don’t understand this hypersensitivity of boys is not understood okay instead but boys are seen as somehow now more privileged okay and somehow you know and their their their energy level is is interpreted as aggression okay potential violence and so on okay right so i i think that that the that what we would do the better okay if we would have i i have proposed okay that colleges should allow when the moment a woman is entered okay she has entered that college for life okay and that she that she should be free to to leave okay to have babies when she when her body wants to have babies when it’s healthy to have them okay and then return have have the occasional course okay build up credits and fathers you might be able to do it as well and so on to get married women women with children into the classroom the moment that happens it has happened after world war two okay we’ve had you had a lot of married guys in the classroom okay and so on not yet that many women the experience of a married person with a family okay talking about gender but most of the gender stuff would be laughed out of the room okay if you had a real mother in there who had experienced your childbirth and had had raised and it was raising boys and so on so i think that’s that’s also you know something that has led to this this this incredible art you know artificiality and uh and hysteria okay of feminist rhetoric there’s an there’s another strange element to which is that on the one hand the the radical feminist types the neo-marxist post-modernists are are very much opposed to the patriarchy let’s say and that’s that unidimensional ideological representation of our culture it has never existed i mean perhaps the word can be applied to republican rome and that’s it okay well and maybe it could be applied usefully to certain kinds of tyranny but not to a society that’s actually functional victorian england wouldn’t arguably okay but other than that to use the word patriarchy in that in a slapdash way so amateurist absolutely absolutely you know it just shows people know nothing about history whatever have have done no reading so and so what confuses me about that is that despite the fact that the patriarchy is viewed as this essentially evil entity and that that’s associated with the masculine energy that built this oppressive structure the antithesis of that which would actually be femininity as far as i can tell which is tightly associated with care and with child-wearing is also denigrated so it’s like the only proper role for women to adopt is a patriarchal role despite the fact that the patriarchy is something that’s entirely corrupt so the hypothesis seems to be that the patriarchy would be just fine if women ran it so no changes it’s just that it would just be a transformation of leadership and somehow that would that would rectify the fundamental problem even though it’s hypothetically supposed to be structural okay so i’m going to close with something so you know there are elements in my character that are optimistic you know i’ve i’ve looked for example i worked for a un committee and and on the relationship between economic development sustainability and i found out a variety of things that were very optimistic like the fact that you know the un set out to have poverty between 2000 and 2015 worldwide and actually hit that by about 2010 right so we’re in the period of the fastest transformation of the bottom strata of the world’s population into something approximating middle class that’s ever occurred and there’s all these great technological innovations on the horizon and and it looks to me like things could go extraordinarily well if we were careful but i’m not optimistic and maybe that’s me i’m pessimistic because i also see that there’s five or six things happening all of which appear at the level of catastrophe that are all happening at the same time and so one of the things that i’d like to ask you is like what do you see happening in the next 10 years in the universities or in culture at large and i mean you just put forward a proposal for the universities for the treatment of women which i think is very interesting one because women do have a different time frame than men but like what the hell is the proper way forward i’ve been encouraging young men to tell the truth and to take responsibility and there’s a huge market for that message but but i’m not convinced by any stretch of the imagination that it’s enough what like when you look forward and you try to be optimistic what the hell do you see well and in the largest you know scale i’m concerned about the future western culture because as a student of history it looks too much to me like ancient rome okay which became over expanded which became it was at the mercy of a bureaucratic the creep okay and i can imagine one of them yes right and in the and roman identity eventually got blurred okay in its incorporation of so many different cultures which at first seemed like a healthy kind of multiculturalism but eventually over expand and simply collapsed of its own way so i and i so i am concerned about the you know whether western culture is in a rapid decline a rapid decline i think it would be very easy because we are you know so interconnected and so over complex very easy you know to bring it to to ruin it would only take one major natural disaster you know to do that but the universities themselves i mean i think people are all of a sudden in in the united states much more um attentive to issues of political correctness because of the the riots at berkeley which was the you know which was the capital free speech i mean the free speech movement happened in the spring before i entered college in 1964 it’s one of the great principles and inspirational stories of my entire life mario salvio’s you know you know assertion of the of the supremacy of you know free thought and free speech these okay and i so i i think that perhaps you know we we might just have turned a corner and but it’s going to take a very very long time for the university to be reformed i feel okay that the cafeteria menu okay of of the university curriculum has to be abandoned that we must return to historical courses that begin in the earliest period in the stone age and antiquity in order to give perspective you know to our to our present analysis of our present culture i want um 50 50 to 75 percent of college administrators fired okay and the money be transferred over okay to um to to faculty into libraries and to into instruction okay um i i think that um you know obviously the the way things are being people are being trained right now including at the public school level okay is i think i think the public school level has gone to hell okay when my when my mother came you know came to the united states at the age of six the the old public school system was still very strict and therefore and she had an excellent education you know it’s and um you know got all a’s in her in her and even though she started out not speaking english spoke without an accent etc okay so so today this this kind of feel good public school education which is which is a form of ideology and indoctrination right now it’s all about no bullying okay and so and not about anything and not even seriously about no bullying yes yeah so i mean i i can tell in my own students i mean i’ve been teaching for 46 years so i can tell the slow degradation of public school education okay to the to the point now that the that the students have absolutely no sense of world geography of world history okay they know absolutely nothing they don’t know anything about wars okay and the reality the the barbaric reality of most of human history okay and what a what a defense that’s triggering yeah right what a fantastic culture we live in and so now identity politics itself has just got to stop i mean it was important once okay again i i was a rebel against the wasp you know hegemony okay white anglo-saxon protestant hegemony in american culture it was it was suffocating i i was raised in the 1950s right when wasps controlled corporations and and education and politics and so on so identity politics was necessary once okay to we asserted gay rights okay with it was stonewall rebellion of 1969 we assert we asserted okay the women’s rights with the with the rebirth of second wave feminism in the late 1960s okay but this endless okay preoccupation with with a fragmented identity we must return to the authentic 1960s vision which is about identity coming from consciousness which transcends gender which transcends all these divisions of race okay and ethnicity okay consciousness itself okay right there’s no sense of that any longer that’s what the 1960s saw well i see if that is a complete abandonment of personal responsibility because that like that consciousness i think symbolically and i got a lot of this from young and also from eric neumann i mean that’s the great logos of the west right that’s the transcendent principle which is is respect for the primacy of individual consciousness and what goes along with that primarily isn’t individual rights although that’s built into it i mean that’s the reason we have individual rights is for respect for that but the responsibility that comes along with being an individual instead of the member of some group especially a victimized group which is like the assure i i wrote an article with one of my students who had toured the mass grave sites in in the former yugoslavia you know and had been exposed to that sort of thing and one of the things that our research indicated was that the best predictor of genocide is victimization on the part of the group that produces the genocide right a sense of an accelerated sense of victimization and then it’s well we get them before they get us so and everyone’s being taught now that they’re a victim and then no one seems to have any sense that you know that’s part of the essential tragedy of being that life is suffering and that and that and that and that the world rests on a foundation of suffering it’s nothing to take personally and something to take responsibility for instead of blaming and and resentment and all of the things that have polluted our universities and our culture well and there also was the abandonments okay of the you know of of the canon okay people you know asserted that the canon was the product of bias and again of a you know of a of a you know provincial elitism and so on but in point of fact as a student of the history of the arts okay i can i can assure people that the canon okay overwhelmingly so is is the result of what artists have determined okay we we we we say a work is important is canonical because artists following it okay we’re influenced by it we have this like a beautiful cascading tradition of influence all right so that that’s so it’s another part of the philistinism okay of current education to to you know to believe that there are these external reasons okay for for the why a work lasts why a work you know written 500 years ago or a thousand years ago has global relevance as if it’s some sort of political conspiracy that’s based on power as if anybody could even manage that no matter how nefarious they were right but also you know we in the 60s you know had the had the idea okay that there was like this a human sensibility okay that that transcendent individual nations and so on all right and that and that there was this like rubric for you know cosmic consciousness okay this this sense of the universe as a whole and just to see the human being in relationship to great eternal principles of you know life and death mortality and so on whereas you know marxism is blind marxism is very narrow all it sees is society okay it sees nothing beyond society it doesn’t see nature okay i mean it’s absolutely mad okay how you can have a system being taught okay in universities right which which which thinks that this tiny thing of society okay compared to the enormity and beauty of nature okay it should take all of our you know all of our you know absorb all of our energy and attention so i mean i just think that there’s like a parochialism and provincialism uh you know it now a kind of you know systematized elitism in our current education has got to be rooted out and we i want to return to basics great simplicities and all these faculty members teaching their little tiny courses that have to have to do with their own specialty that’s got to stop okay people people can pursue whatever they want in their private research as scholars okay certainly that’s necessary but they must teach in the core curriculum and and and people must decide what is crucial for an educated person to know i do want a multicultural i do want a global curriculum okay i want i want all the cultures taught okay right this is not the answer marxism this neo-marxism in the universities okay is simply it’s lazy it’s a lazy way to assert multiculturalism without actually doing the research and the study of other cultures okay all right that’s a good one to close on we agreed on everything i knew this i knew it all right great thank you very much