https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=S0P6H7cm0E4
About to join me now is probably the world’s most famous intellectual, certainly the most famous intellectual to come out of Canada in the last 20 years. And he will be speaking with me about the role of the university and about his meteoric rise to intellectual and media influence, Dr. Jordan Peterson. Dr. Peterson, I’m going to start on an incidental thing, at least it’s incidental to me and has bothered me since you became known as it is now to all the world. And that was in the very early days of the controversy that came to you when the University of Toronto sent you some monetary letters that I thought, I’ve used this word before, more insolent, that I thought were against the spirit of the university, that they weren’t supporting you, they were actually threatening you. And that said to me that something is beyond the particular controversy, something deeper is wrong here, that universities, or this university is upside down. How did you reason that? How did they get there that they could be so completely unaware of their own position? Well, I think a lot of it was confusion and a lack of experience with this sort of thing. I mean, the University of Toronto is a peaceful place and a rather conservative university, all things considered. The administration wasn’t prepared to handle a controversy of the nature that swirled around me. They were used to making minor administrative decisions and when they were put on the spot and forced to defend their fundamental presumptions, let’s say, it isn’t clear that they were ready and prepared to do so. Partly because of lack of practice, it isn’t necessarily the case that you climb the administrative chain in a university by engaging in continual philosophical reappraisal of the fundamental presuppositions of a university as an institution. It’s a much more administrative job. And so, I’m going to say everything I can in favour of the University of Toronto before I say anything contrary. You know, I’ve found too that when I’ve been put on the spot by journalists and asked to defend, let’s say, customs that everyone has always accepted, like marriage, it’s very difficult to generate a defence for such an institution off the top of your head, let’s say, because part of the whole purpose of customs is that everyone accepts them. You don’t think, you don’t think, they’re reflex. Yeah, they’re unstated presuppositions. So, when you’re put on the spot, you don’t know what to do. When I first got the letter, the first letter, and I know how HR departments work, they send you one letter of warning so that it’s documented, and then they send you another so that it’s documented, and then they send you a third. And if you haven’t ceased by then, well then they go to the next step, which would be something to do with whatever approximation, determination they might be able to manage. They document you. Yes, yes. And they’re documenting all their steps. I told the person who delivered the letter to me, who’s a person I actually got along with quite well, that it was full of errors and it was poorly written and that they should take it back and write it properly because I did. I followed it. I know. And because if they were going to do this, they better do it right or there was going to be trouble. And I didn’t mean that I was going to cause trouble necessarily, but that there was going to be trouble. But they didn’t take it back. So I read it on YouTube. And then I did the same thing with the second letter. And then I met the dean after that, and we agreed. We had quite a congenial discussion, I would say, and we agreed to have a discussion, at least a debate. It never was a debate. It was, I don’t know what they call those now. They can’t be debates. They were forums or something like that. Something like that, yeah. Not a debate about free speech on campus. That was the three. Yeah, I saw that. I saw the staffle. Yeah, it was quite the… But they did do it, which was something. And I’ve also heard that behind the scenes, because I have some friends who, some colleagues who have some access to administrative decisions, and they believe that the University of Toronto, in the aftermath of all this, has actually reconfirmed its internal commitment to free speech. And I don’t know how much of that is true, but I’m willing to give them a certain amount of benefit of the doubt. But it’s important to understand that people can be caught unaware. And the other thing, too, is that they actually did me a bit of a favour, because one of the things I claimed in the YouTube video that I made was that what I was doing by making the video was probably illegal. Yes, I remember. And their lawyers basically said that it was probably illegal. And so that also helped establish my bona fides, let’s say, as a reasonable interpreter of the law. And so it wasn’t all bad, although it was extraordinarily stressful, that and the demonstrations that followed. How is it that any university, which of all things, obviously it’s the exercise of thought, the training of the mind, and therefore the power of expression that comes as a result of those two things, that the say things under the banner of reason and an exercised mind, that’s what it is. So how comes it that on certain issues, the transgender one as well, there’s a whole list of them, the politically correct ones, that suddenly not only is language being bent, it’s being turned upside down in some cases. Also neologisms are floating out there every six seconds with new rules on them. A word you never heard yesterday is somehow rather prejudice if you say it today. Yes, or even illegal to use. Very much. Like the idea of deadnaming. Well, the very one I was thinking, the word didn’t exist two days ago. And now if you deadname someone, which is a word that doesn’t exist, you’re in violation of something or a horrible bigot. When have we let go of the straps that kept us either to something like reason, or when have we lost our nerve that when people come to you and they say to you things that you know, not from bias, are nonsense, that they can’t simply be dismissed as nonsense with no peril whatsoever. Well, you’re assuming that we had nerve. Yeah, sorry. Well, I mean, some people have nerve. But one of the things I’ve learned over the last three years, because really this all started in October of 2016, was that the percentage of people who have nerve is very small, and vanishingly small. You know, I’ve met people. Douglas Murray has nerve, that’s for sure. Roger Scruton has nerve. Yes, he has. There’s a handful of people that I’ve met who you can’t move. You know, you’re one of them, I would say. Try. Well, succeed, I would say. And I’ve met a number of journalists who, you know, I’ve had my fair share of conflict with journalists, that’s for sure, I would say. Talking to journalists is the most stressful thing I’ve done apart from talks at university campuses. That’s just to sidetrack that, because it’s a very good issue. Journalism, I’ve been playing at it from the margins for a long while. Journalism is very much corrupted. It is not the media in the middle. It is, in many cases, wittingly or unwittingly partisan. It is part of the game that it says it’s covering. Journalism is one of the failing institutions in society, much as universities. Yeah, well, you know, there’s technological reasons for that. You know, the journalism as such is under unbelievable pressure from the new technologies, YouTube, podcasts in particular, which of course have also vastly expanded what constitutes journalism. And so journalists are running scared. It’s very difficult for them to find paying jobs. Their staffs are shrinking. The newspapers are in trouble. Television stations are vanishing. And so there’s increasing pressure on journalists to find jobs. There’s increasing desperation, I would say, as well as decreasing professionalism among those who still practice. And so some of it’s the personal failings of the ideologues who happen to be occupying the positions that ideologues occupy. But some of it’s a consequence of these transformations in communication technology that are so vast that they’re actually inconceivable. And I think YouTube, both YouTube and podcasts are great examples of that. Podcasts even more than YouTube because YouTube serves billions of people, which is one walloping network. But podcasts are maybe ten times as popular. And that’s all underground. It’s interesting because they don’t attract as much attention, you know, or as much controversy. Maybe because they’re more siloed in some sense. But the journalists are fighting a losing game. And I think as you fight a losing game, I’ve seen this happen with corporations, you lose your best people first. And then the death spiral begins. And I think we’re seeing exactly that. And then that’s exaggerated by this proclivity to polarization that also might be part and parcel of the technological changes, you know. Let me sweep back to that other word, nerve. I know, because I follow you, how deep your respect and attention to Alexander Solzhenitsyn is. If he’ll have a hero, obviously he is it. Now in the Soviet Union, if Solzhenitsyn writes a small note or something, he gets tossed off into a gulag for nine years or more. If a man looks the wrong way in China, he can put up some damn camp. In Korea, we won’t even go into it. In those countries, if you want to say something, even if it’s merely innocuous, you really have to have courage. Solzhenitsyn should be called Stalin. He had the steel. Over here, when, okay, we have a trans activist group, let’s name the one that’s in the thing. And you almost innately know that this is absurd. And you say, well, I don’t think I’m going to say that’s absurd. What are we afraid of? We fight wars and say we gave all our soldiers deaths. We will preserve democracy and freedom of speech. There is no loss if you decide to challenge in terms of any contrast with the totalitarian systems where if you said something, you really did pay a price. Worse thing, you’d lose a job. Well you can be hauled in front of quasi-judicial tribunes as well. They’re certainly willing to do that. I think the human rights tribunals should, in my opinion, they should be obliterated. They’re a travesty. Yes, we’re setting up these quasi-judicial inquisitions in all sorts of institutions. And ideologically constituted because I read the biographies of some of the people who are appointed to them. And no one can be a judge in their own cause. In this context, it’s the cause people judging the causes. Yeah, precisely. But I- And look what’s happening in British Columbia with this case. What’s the person’s name? Jessica or Jonathan. I prefer Jonathan. I think we’ll go with Jonathan. I think we will. And we’ll see if they’ll haul us in front of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. We will go together. That would be too much to bear, undoubtedly, but it would be interesting. But no, he’s got 16 people. A good portion of them are immigrant women. He is insisting that they wax his penis and testicles. He’s got here on the first, it’s a bit of a worry. And he’s got 16 of them under charge. And I ask the question, if 16 people are of this mind and one person is of this, which is the more likely to be off? Yeah, well, it seems irrelevant. And I mean, it’s a consequence, you know. One of the things I pointed out with Bill C-16 was that it contained multiple internal contradictions, especially in the background policies, which I had read in quite a bit of detail. They were formulated in Ontario, although the federal government removed the link on their website to those policies after I pointed out the fact that that link existed, which I thought was unbelievably underhanded and still believe so. But Carl Jung once said that internal contradictions are played out in the world as fate. You know, the thing about propositions, if they’re accurate, is that they represent real states of being in the world. And if you entertain a set of propositions that are internally contradictory, then you’re going to run yourself into all sorts of sharp objects and dead ends. And that’s exactly what’s happening. And every time, and I’ve thought this really for three years, every time you think that there’s no possible way that this could get more absurd, then one more example comes up where it’s more absurd. And I would say the situation in BC is precisely that. I mean, one of the women that he’s persecuting, because I think he and this terrible bureaucracy is persecuting, was an immigrant woman. I believe she was Muslim, who had an aesthetics business in her own home, as a consequence of the negative publicity, or the publicity and the pressure she shut down her business. And God only knows what that means for her family, and for her. And you were asking about courage earlier, you know. One of the things that I have watched quite frequently is the way that people respond to being mobbed on Twitter. Now, I’ve almost stopped looking at Twitter. It’s been about three months that I’ve taken a Twitter hiatus, let’s say. I still post, I don’t even have my password anymore. I send what I want to post to a third party, and they post it, because it keeps me out of the… An antiseptic distance. That’s right, exactly. And that’s exactly the right way of thinking about it. You know, people, civilized people, and I mean that in civilized, socialized people, cannot tolerate being mobbed. No, they can’t. Because there’s a reason for that. You see, you said, with regards to the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, you know, if there’s 16 people on one side and one on the other, you might be thinking that the 16 people are right. More or less. Right, right. Think of the situation where you’ve said something on Twitter and, you know, a thousand people mob you publicly. I mean, your first response is going to be to examine your own conscience and see how you transgressed. It’s not really much different psychologically. I mean, it’s lesser, I suppose, but it’s not that much different than waking up one morning and coming to your door and finding a mob of your neighbors angrily aggregated on your lawn. It’s just terrible shock for people and it really hurts them. You know, they’re often, by all accounts, you know, damaged for lengthy periods of time by this. And their first impulse is to apologize, which is truly the wrong thing. Like the right thing to do. Yeah, it is. It’s stank. Well, the right thing to do is to understand that if you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t apologize. Now that’s very difficult. Yeah, I know. It’s very difficult. And then to wait. Because if you wait two weeks, people will come to your defense. Yeah, they will. But it takes the people who will come to your defense two weeks to get their act together, where it takes the activists who are unbelievably organized 15 seconds to mob you. Well, there’s two points to draw out of there. First of all, because you have now been almost firehosed into the world of celebrity multimedia and vast attention. I’ve dabbled in a lesser zone for a long while, so you adjust to the kind of swirl, okay? But what I’ve never forgotten, and I’m serious, is that people who are not into that at all, my father or the mechanic down the road or the doctor over here, doesn’t that be class? If you haven’t had media and if you haven’t adjusted to it, and suddenly your name, and I’m just backing up your point, your name suddenly becomes the center of some great Twitter snowstorm in pejorative terms, and people are speaking of you with the most vulgar responses, it is a terror. It isn’t to me, because I just miss it, but people who have not experienced it, it is really, really, really something that, it’s an unbearable pain. And they bring it down with club force and the great megaphones of national networks in the states, etc. You can expunge a person’s personality with this kind of brutality. Yes, well, and it’s permanent, right? Because the record never disappears. And I want to put a personal question to you now. When you, because I know you had been on YouTube, you knew the media in that sense, but you weren’t a media person. In your baptism, harsh as it was, how hard was it in the first couple of weeks for you to find balance and scale? You may be a clinical psychologist and you are obviously mature. Oh, I don’t think I’ve ever found balance and scale. Well, join my club. I don’t believe it. I mean, I’ve been here still. I mean, in that great throbbing moment when all this stuff came in and he hates this one and your name is flashed all over the world. That was the first real magnitude of media attack on you. So even for you, how was that period? Well, it was dreadful. I mean, especially the first couple of months because, well, because the attention was, well it has been since then, but the attention was unbelievably intense. I mean, I had, there were days upon days where there were reporters lined up coming into the house one after the other. And that really hasn’t stopped. I mean, it stopped, let’s say in the last two months since the end of March, however long ago that is, because I’ve shut myself off because of my, I have some family health trouble that’s very serious. But I don’t think I’ve ever adjusted to it. What’s made it bearable, I would say, and some of it’s been very good. Yeah, I know it has. I mean, it’s taken my life, which was fairly broad. I had a fairly broad range of experiences, partly because I’m a clinical psychologist. It’s taken it from good and bad to great and unbearable. And yo-yo between those states. What’s helped is, well, the first thing is that I determined right from the beginning that I was going to say carefully what I believed to be true, because there wasn’t a safer route than that. It’s interesting. You know, that in the final analysis, it wasn’t certain that anything would protect me. Better than doing the right thing. Well, whether that would work or not was debatable, but there wasn’t a better option. Yeah, I can understand it. And I believe that. I still believe that. And I think the success of what I’ve done is an indication of that. The success of my book, which is also absolutely overwhelming. It’s impossible to… Especially, I’m kind of old. I’m just about 60. And you’re white and you’re male. Oh, there’s all of those things. You are a bad man. Yeah, well, the old part, I think, has to do with the ability to adapt. I’m even older and whiter than you. I’m a good person. I’m a good person. I’m a good person. I’m a good person. I’m a good person. I’m a good person. I’m a good person. I’m a good person. I’m a good person. Yeah, well, but it’s fulfilled. And the lectures and the podcasts as well, and the YouTube videos, they’ve fulfilled a need, which also is something that’s very difficult for me to reconcile myself to. Every time I walk down the street, someone stops me. Someone stopped me on the way here. And as opposed to my treatment at the hand of a minority of journalists, which has been atrocious upon occasion, and academics as well, the treatment I receive from people in public is so positive that it’s almost unbearable. Let me tell you a personal anecdote that relates to you. I don’t mix my old stuff with family members, but my sister is a non-political kind of person. And as I say, I don’t mix those things. She called me, and she’s out of this world altogether. She called me about, I don’t know, a year ago. Have you seen Dr. Jordan Peterson? Do you know Dr. Jordan? Lovely stuff. And she is following the videos, the biblical lectures. She’s a smart, nice woman. And then that was one thing. That was unsolicited. She’s not in the world of publicity. She doesn’t follow fads, but somehow your name got in there, and she’s watching these with great attention, great enjoyment, actually. But the better one, it wouldn’t be particular, a friend of mine from home. I never finished school. He’s about 55, 56, so we’re not into the team cohorts. And he calls me up. I don’t think he’s read a book in six years. And he says, I’ve been watching this Peterson fellow. I can’t reproduce what he was saying. It was just that he found such comfort, and he found such support. And my thought when I was hearing this, it was some way to relay it to you in all the ping pong back and forth that you’re going to. These voices are saying something. You’re doing something really fine for people that I could never project would be receiving the message. This is also something that’s been very difficult to both understand and I would say in a strange way to tolerate, because I’ve become opened up to the trouble that people have in a way that far exceeds even what I experienced as a clinical psychologist. Last year, my wife and I went to 160 cities. Well, we figured we better make, hey, well, the sun shines. So you’re a stronger man than I. Well, you get caught up in the wave of events. The adrenaline self-supplies. Well, and it was exciting and worthwhile, and the demand was there. I enjoy lecturing, and I used the opportunity. I delivered a different lecture every night, and I used the opportunity to think and to communicate, which of course is what you’re… And in a psychologically, in a manner that I believed would be psychologically helpful. But it was also, I think, and I don’t know exactly what the cumulative effect has been on me, but I had no idea the degree to which people were dying for a word of encouragement. So many people want… That’s what my friend was about. I’m speaking back to you now on the same thing. I know what he was saying. He had felt no soft brain for a long, long time. And he was in this camp of the truly neglected. You’re uneducated, you’re not particularly sophisticated, you’ve got a low-paying job. Who gives a fuck about you? And then someone is out there of stature and credibility, and this guy who would never be in your circle, never. You send an echo ping to him, and he was calling me to say, my God, this is so good. Allow yourself to feel good. Well, the funny thing is that it doesn’t feel good. And that might be a reflection of my general state of mind, which is very unsettled at the moment for the reasons that I told you, and well, because of everything that’s happened over the last few years. To get a taste of the depth of despair that can be ameliorated with not much more than some words of encouragement, some statement that you as a human being aren’t intrinsically worthless and that you have a spirit worth preserving and that the things that you do in your life that you do correctly are important. It’s like people are literally dying for lack of that. And I mean that honestly. I don’t know how many people have told me, and these are very hard things to hear. It’s been hundreds of people, because I meet people after each of my lectures who’ve told me that they are still alive because they watched my lectures or because they read my book. And then they usually have a good story to tell, you know, about what sort of hell they happened to be in six months earlier and what they did to pull themselves out and how that’s brought their family back together or helped them advance in their career or got them out of bed or stopped them from using heroin or being alcoholic. Or jumping off a bridge. Yeah, well, and you know, all of that is… Is it something that you at some point have at least to shield against? No. No? No. No. Well, maybe I can put it in another way. I meant to ask this a little early, but you’re already telling me. When this began, I want to say when you began this, when this began, this is an experience and you set out to the world. You had maps of meaning. I also know without knowing you that you had spent some considerable time doing actual thinking, which is something people don’t do very much. Yes, obsessively. You thought and you thought things through in a way that this, these generations have almost abandoned. So you were prepared in that sense and you went out and there were certain things you saw wrong or discordant either in the universities or in the general system. And you said, I’d like to spread some reason here. I’d like to talk also about reality and life. Now when that began, I would think everything was fairly sufficient. What did you learn and how did… I’ll call it a mission, if I may. How did the mission change over time when you came in contact with the audience that you’re now describing? And what is it that you have learned? You have done a lot of thought beforehand. You knew what you were at. But when you go out and encounter all of these and all of these individuals, what new came to you? Well, I would say it isn’t obvious to me that the mission itself changed. I think it’s an extension of what I’ve been doing since 1985 and maybe even before that. It’s just that the scale continued to grow. I mean, even with my YouTube channel where I put my lectures in rather primitive technological form because I was just using an iPad and a lapel mic. I had a million views by April 2016. That really made me think because I worked with TVO, of course, and my lectures were popular with big ideas which showcased a number of public intellectuals. I think I had five lectures in the top 20 or something like that. So I knew that there was… And I was getting a certain amount of recognition in public for that. Not a lot, but enough. And then from a very wide variety of people, which was quite interesting. When I hit the million mark on YouTube, I really thought about that because I thought, well, I don’t know what to do with that figure. I don’t know how to conceptualize it in context because a million is a lot of people. It’s 20 football stadiums full of people. It’s an overwhelmingly bestselling book. It’s far more people than you’d teach in your life. And I thought, well, it wasn’t cute cat videos. And this was back when YouTube was still a developing force, let’s say, and something to be sort of ignored in some sense because of its humble beginnings. And it was a very secondary place. Yes, it was a very secondary place. Although that was starting to change, I thought, what the hell is this, YouTube? What are we doing here? And it struck me that, well, this was a Gutenberg revolution that we were experiencing, that the spoken word was now as permanent and as immediate, more immediate than the printed word and just as permanent and with a much larger audience because more people, as far as I can tell, can listen than can read. And even with my book, a tremendous percentage of my books have been sold in audio form. So I really started to think about YouTube at that point. I suppose that was one of the things that drove me in my foolish curiosity to make those political videos that I made in October, which was the first time I’d ever tried something like that. And that was, in some sense, I wouldn’t call it a whim. But I woke up at 3 in the morning because I was so irritated about this bill and its attempt to force a certain type of language usage. And I could see what was behind that quite clearly. I thought, well, you know, this really is annoying me to death. And often what I would do when something was annoying me to death was get up and write. But I thought, well, I’ll make a YouTube video and see what happens. It’s like, well, I certainly saw what happened. It’s just like… Yeah, you did. Yeah, yeah, no kidding. Well, the thing is, you know, you’ve got a hold of something. Let’s say it’s YouTube and you think you know what it is. And you don’t. You don’t have any idea what it is. And neither does anyone else. And that’s certainly still the case. We have no idea what these multiple technologies are doing to us. But I can tell you that YouTube is an overwhelming force and it’s becoming more and more powerful day by day. I’ve especially seen that in countries… Slovenia was a good example, where no one really trusts the mainstream press. All the young people do. And not so young either. And pretty much everybody under 35, I would say, all they watch is YouTube. And that’s the case all over the world. And so it’s… I think on my YouTube channel, my videos have been watched 110 million times. The total viewership is probably… Because people keep cutting them up and distributing them, which is something else that can be done on YouTube, right? You can have a dialogue, right, where people edit and make their own commentaries. The total for that would be at least 500 million. Yeah, that’s for sure. Dear God. It’s… Yeah, it’s a new… Well, it’s not a new conversation, it’s a new idea of conversation. I don’t even know if that is the word for it. Yeah, well, it certainly has that conversational aspect that television lacks. It’s very comical to watch an organization like CBC try to adapt itself to YouTube, because they’ll put on a 10-minute clip and they break all the rules. They put two 30-second commercials in front of it, which you can’t skip. No one will watch it. No one will watch it. What you do with YouTube is you put on a 10-second commercial and you let people skip it after 5 seconds. That’s the rule. They break that rule. Then they don’t allow comments. And so they’ll put up something you might want to watch for 10 minutes and they’ll get like 20,000, 30,000 views, because they don’t take the conventions of the… they don’t take it seriously. It’s like, you should take YouTube seriously. Well, they also have no intuition for these particular forms. And they’re also… this will circle back to even to the beginning. They’re wrapped up in certain ideas about things and they’re wrapped up in a certain orientation towards change and politics, that there’s only a certain quarters that they will walk down. Yeah. And there are other quarters which you are forbidden to or it is heresy to even admit that they exist. Yes, and populations you won’t deign to address. See, one of the things that’s interesting about the YouTube stars, you know, like Rogan and say Dave Rubin, is that they don’t think their audience is stupid. That’s a good beginning. And it is. It is a really good beginning. It is a very good beginning. And you know, one of the things I’ve noticed that at my lectures is… well, you talked about the gentleman who sent you the email. I know he’s 55. He wasn’t well-educated. A tremendous number of the people who are coming to my lectures are people in that camp. They’re working class. Yes. And they’re men, but not always. So women as well, but more men. And they’re long-haul truckers or construction workers and they’re listening to three-hour lectures and complex lectures too. That’s the point. You know, and it’s because they’re not stupid. They’re interested in the world. It also defies the great axiom. If you were in the television world, private or public, for 30 years, the idea… if you had an interview… I did a provincial show for years and years. If you had an interview, you may get four minutes. They’re going to watch you for five minutes. Right. If you had a commentary, can you make it 60 seconds? The idea that people had an attention span that went beyond four minutes never entered into the world of people in the studio. No. That’s right. And you put stuff on that has no glitz, in profound, it can be complex, and it goes on for 60, 70, 80 minutes, and everyone is happy. Yeah. I mean, it’s all upside down. They’ve been operating under wrong assumptions for three decades. Yeah, well, and Rogan’s interviews are three hours long. Yeah. You know, and people watch the whole thing or listen to the whole thing. Let’s go back to another area where you really have been on the mark. I’m saying that personally, and I think you’re absolutely correct. This is not circumference. Some of the stuff that goes on in the university, some of the… if I read the course syllabus, if I read some of these legal peer reviews, some of the subjects in there are beneath tripe. Well, that’s why they’ve flourished. I’m serious. I’m serious. I know you’re serious. I’ve thought about this a lot. It’s like, what the hell happened? And here’s what happened is that, you know, the scientific types and the serious scholars, they’re a specific sort of person. They’re rather obsessed, the good ones. Yeah. The good, the great ones are completely obsessed. Yeah, and partly mad. Well, and then, well, maybe you need a bit of that to be completely obsessed. I think you are. And, you know, a minority of scientists produce the majority of the literature. And it’s the same in the humanities and in the social sciences. And so those are people who are working 70 or 80 hours a week. All they do is work. And what they work on is their thing. And they need to do that because, well, they’re on the cutting edge and they want to stay there. And they have their ambitions for some of… sometimes it’s political ambitions, but their stuff never lasts. But the good scholars are… some of them are great. They discover amazing things. I mean, I’ve encountered amazing psychological research, you know, that’s just… especially in the physiological… on the physiological end of things in the general literature, that’s just absolutely brilliant beyond belief. And even the voyage of discovery is a tremendous ecstasy in itself. Yes, right. Well, and it’s a minority taste in some sense. Yeah, of course it is. And then there’s these pseudo-disciplines, which have multiplied since the 1960s. And no one who was serious paid any attention to them. See, that’s what happened, is that the serious people were busy doing their serious things. And there was all this… Yeah, stuff. Yeah, political activism in these… Identity politics, gender stuff. That’s right. That’s right. In the… what do they call them? Grievance studies departments, you know. And everybody just sort of assumed that they were noisy, but harmless. But they were not harmless because they were extraordinarily well organized. And the balance tipped. You know, it almost tipped in the 90s because there was a big rising of political correctness around 1993. Yeah, there was. But then the American economy boomed like mad. And that kind of… I think that just kind of took the steam out of the… out of the… what would you call it? Out of the objections. Yeah. But something happened four years ago, something like that, five years ago, where the scales tipped. I think it was… the fair part of this, I really like your opinion, is the growth of this… it’s an awful philosophy. The idea of identity politics, which carries two great axioms, that I can only communicate with you if you’re of the same tribe as I am, and if you’re teaching me in particular, I can’t be taught by you if you’re not of my tribe. But education is actually to receive it from everybody else and take you out of yourself. And the second thing is the subdivisions of identity politics, that ridiculous story out in BC is on identity politics, gender politics, that’s roared out into society. Yeah. Half the people and half the dinner tables of North America are afraid to bring these subjects up. Yes, probably more than half. And we’re being ruled by them. Yeah. Well, it doesn’t take a very large determined minority to shut down a large and silent majority. That’s unfortunately the rule. And the identity politics issue, it’s a reversion to tribalism. It is. And so the miracle actually… the surprise isn’t actually that it’s back, the surprise is that it ever went away. True enough. And we took the fact that it went away for granted. And we forgot the reasons that it went away. We forgot the axioms, right? We started to lose faith in them, let’s say. And well, that’s partly what I’ve been trying to fight against and to write about why those rules were necessary and what they meant. Is it… is part of your project… you know the various words I’m using here… is part of your project a kind of restoration or a reminder that certain markers are fundamental and cannot be moved? Well, that is the project. I mean, when I wrote my first book, which took me about 15 years to write, and I spent… really, I spent all my time, except when I was writing scientific papers, and when I was socializing, which I did a fair bit of thinking about that book. I mean, it was really an obsessive thinking, chronic, from the time I woke up till the time I went to bed, unless I was engaged in some other activity that would shut down my mind. I was trying to understand whether there were… was what… a foundation of stone underneath the presumptions of Western civilization, or… and it was really a postmodern book, Maps of Meaning, which I didn’t understand, because at the time, being unfamiliar with that lexicon, let’s say, there was the terrible Cold War raging, and you know, it wasn’t obvious that it wasn’t merely a matter of opinion. You know, you could make that case as that, well, here’s your set of Marxist presuppositions, many of which sounded incredibly attractive and which still do, you know, from each according to his ability to each according to his need. I mean, no one likes to see people with needs unfulfilled. The problem is that needs multiply without end, and ability is limited. But, you know, you have to start thinking about the world in a harsh and sophisticated way to notice that flaw. I wanted to analyze that system, and the Nazi system to a lesser degree, but also that, and the Western system to see if there was something at the bottom that was rock-like, that wasn’t merely arbitrary, and I believe that what I discovered, let’s say, or thought through, was that we got some things in the West fundamentally correct, and they’re correct for biological reasons, which is very important because we’ve been around a very long time, and biological reasons are very fundamental, but also that that biology reflects some underlying metaphysics as well that we don’t understand, because we don’t understand anything about the fundamental nature of the world. It’s beyond us. The why. Yes, the why’s and the wherefores for that matter, the purpose, all of that, the fact that people have religious experiences, and that they’re easily duplicable, and that they seem to be consistent across societies, at least to some degree, and what I decided then, because I was trying to understand why the world had divided itself up into armed camps that were hell-bent on mutual destruction, mutual assured destruction, the terrible acronym MAD, which was an insane, satanic joke, and why it was so important for us to defend our tribal positions in that manner, and what, if anything, could be done about it. Here’s the solution. We have this terrible tribal warfare that’s characteristic of our species, and it’s accelerated to a degree that’s not sustainable. What do we do about it? And the answer that came to me as a consequence of what I studied was that we try to make ourselves better people. The solution to tribalism is the elevation of the individual, and the West got that right. The individual is the atom that begins the entire reaction. That’s why the identity politics makes the individual a simple avatar of the collective, and everything that attaches to him is always extrinsic and not essential. And you strip personality, and we’re adding up groups and trying to administer justice via a collective. It’s insane. It’s terrible. It’s so dangerous. And I heard you on this. Why do we seek to perpetrate some sort of justice over the generations? It was one of the worst things in all of history that you would make the son or the daughter carry the sin of their parents. And now you’re seeing it in reparations again. All the ideas that we thought had been completely wiped out, either enlightenment or just civil logic itself, they’re back. Why are we so easily yielding to this? I mean, the patterns of correctness in language and people kind and things of that order. It’s an absurdity. Well, I think some of it is the desire to escape from individual responsibility. If you can dissolve yourself in the collective, then the impetus isn’t on you to act as forthrightly as would otherwise be necessarily the case. So there’s that, and then there’s the undeniable attraction of having someone to blame for the miseries of your existence, which are likely manifold. It’s also the comfort of saying I can start a small war with one tribe and another, and we can play games with each of these blocks. It won’t be a society, it won’t be a country. But if you dissolve the collective politics, I mean the real politics, into the subcategories of gender, sex, ethnic, religion, and each of these is now claiming a right only as a collective, everything else falls apart. You know your Yates, and there’s no need to quote it. But again, back to the universities. If there’s one place that can reset balances, it starts with mind. It starts with the younger mind, that will be met with a more mature mind, and taught the ways of the mind, how the mind works, what you should read, how you form judgments, how you put contrast over great lengths of time, not today and tomorrow, but 500 years ago. If you train the minds, then there is a balance, and there’s an opportunity to see the world as it really is. You have to believe in the mind in order to do that. Well, you know, it goes back to exactly what we were discussing, is that, you know, one of the things I’ve pointed out to my audience is that there isn’t a debate about who should speak on campuses. There’s a debate about whether free speech exists. That’s a whole different debate. I know it is. I know that people don’t understand the difference in the severity of those two debates. Like, if I don’t want you to talk, I still might believe that people can talk, and they can exchange opinions, and they can change each other’s minds, and even if they’re different, the argument that’s being put forward on the campuses to stop people from speaking is that there is no such thing as free speech. All there is is the exchange of the ideas of avatars who are possessed by their group ideology. Exactly. And the consequence of that is to refuse to let them speak, because why should you allow the group that you’re in direct competition with to have its voice? And so it’s the collectivists, the identity politics types, it’s the very idea of individuality that they’re opposed to, that they’ve dispensed with. And that goes back to the French, the terrible, the despicable French intellectuals who, in my opinion, were responsible for leading this revolution. And it got picked up, as always, the most obnoxious and useless ideas, useless in the sense of their intrinsic logic, find the easiest welcome on the campus. It’s the most trendy institution in the world. Yeah, well, and it came through the, it came through, well, it came through the Yale English Department. Yes, of all of them, yeah. Yeah, that’s where, that’s where the French continental ideas made their entrance into North America. You know, in all your travels and speeches, I know much of it gets small peed into the politics, because that’s the world we’re in. Do you get much chance, because obviously no one could follow you around, it wouldn’t last. Do you get much chance to expand on the beauties of the culture, I’m thinking of poetry and music and things of this nature, the other side of the academic, the things that sometimes, you know, they sing to the human spirit? I do, I do. I mean, that’s one of the reasons that I was so motivated to continue the lectures, you know, because we actually put together a sequence of tours. We didn’t plan 160 cities in one go. I mean, it sort of unfolded. I mean, you wouldn’t banal lift. Yeah, yeah. Well, it unfolded across time, you know, because they were so popular and the popularity didn’t seem to be waning. But it was an opportunity to put forward the case for all the wonderful things that we’ve done and to express gratitude and amazement at the fact that, you know, our, the fact that our city, this city, Toronto, this city works is, for me, it’s, and I think this is partly because I’ve been sensitized so much to the catastrophes of existence in sort of the collective and the personal senses that when I go outside and everything works and there’s all these people of different colours and creeds and religions walking down the street and it’s all peaceful and the lights go on regularly and the power is always working and everything technological is 100% reliable and there’s no riots in the street and the probability that you’re going to meet with a, you know, a group of people who are going to be there to help you. And the probability that you’re going to meet with an untimely and painful death at the hands of someone else is almost nil and that we live for such a long time. All of this to me is a complete, it’s a complete miracle. It truly is. And I remind people of the unlikelihood of that constantly in the lectures and ask them to be grateful for the fact that, I mean, you think, you look 100 years ago in 1919, you just think of what you would have been through in the last six years. Right? The Russian Revolution, the First World War, the Spanish Influenza, just absolute bloody hellish catastrophe one after the other. The conception of Nazism was brewing then too. Right, right, right, right, right. The seeds of the next catastrophe were already at work. They were. And also, of course, the same thing with the Russian Revolution, which was bloody enough to begin with, but which certainly accelerated in its brutality as it expanded. And, you know, we don’t have any of that at the moment. It’s actually, the world is more peaceful than it’s ever been. There’s no wars in the Western Hemisphere. That’s the first time since the coming of Columbus that the entire Western Hemisphere is free of conflict. I see frequently on your various sites that you do list up, and that’s another great counter. The environmental crowd, and I don’t take them as being pure either. Some of them are, obviously. Most of them are not. They’re always having a spectacular, at the high table, a catastrophe. The world is ending the war. This is the worst it will ever be. We’re destroying the planet. You point out very frequently that certain of the technologies, certain of the advances of the civilization have lifted people out of poverty. They put them into new situations. We have relieved more suffering in some cases, maybe not more than we have caused. But it’s a different century. We should be grateful for things. Gratitude is in short supply. Yes, and it’s completely absent among the collectivists and the people who play identity politics. There’s no gratitude at all. And it’s so interesting to me to see that because, let’s say, the professors who lead those movements, they are the most protected people who’ve ever lived. It’s like they’re standing on a hill, and around them is a wall, and it’s four feet away, and around them that wall is another wall that’s four feet away, and another wall, and another wall. There’s just sequential walls, and this edge of the sequential walls is a huge army, and it’s powerful. And all of that protects them, absolutely. Absolutely. And they say, everything is corrupt and going to hell. And there’s just no sense of gratitude whatsoever. And that’s appalling to me because it’s so unlikely to occupy a position like that. And the proper response, although criticism is necessary, obviously, criticism means, well, this is wrong and this is how we could fix it. It doesn’t mean tear everything down and leave people with nothing. And that certainly happens to people in universities now. They come in barely formed, and they leave… Ill-formed. Yeah, they leave in tatters, you know, and that’s… And it’s also true, to go back to where you referred to it, I referred to it, there are so many people outside of the higher structures of society that no one is talking to. That’s where Mr. Trump comes in, and more power to him for that matter. He is talking in this thing. I know that’s another absolute heresy. He’s not the cause of these things. He’s the result of failures of other and more sophisticated people. Well, and I think… I have a friend who’s working very closely with the Democratic Party in the United States and has been quite effective at doing so, and trying to move the party closer to the middle and away from the radicals. We discuss this a lot because, you know, I think one of the reasons that the people who hate the Democrats in the United States truly hate them, right, that there’s just vitriol there, is because they’ve proved themselves incapable of generating a candidate who can actually take on Trump. And I think there’s a disappointment even among the enemies of the Democrats that’s so profound there that it generates precisely this vitriol. It’s like the man is characterized by manifold flaws. And I’m not saying this in a partisan way. No, I know. Except… And the fact that the system works so poorly that a credible centrist candidate can’t be found to offer himself at least as a viable alternative. I mean, my poor friend, who I said has been following this and has been deeply involved in the debates, he’s just tearing out his hair watching the Democrat debate. Watching the Democrat debates and watching it degenerate. Well, he should. Well, exactly. He should. It’s so sad to see that. You have a new age spiritualist who is going to be president of the United States, and you have them dissolving the idea of nationhood. We will abandon the border. Anyway, it is such a weak thing, but the people in the street, the guy who called me about you, that’s a class, and it’s a vast class. Yes. That’s the great 50% that has been walked over and is turmoil. And all of the identity politics and all of those things that get traffic and commerce in conversation in the media, these are irrelevant to them, apart from being insulting. Yes. And after a while, the social pressure builds, and this game that’s going on over here will have to close or something breaks. Yes. Yes. Well, I guess Trump was an attempt to break it. Brexit was another attempt. Yeah, that’s right. Brexit was another attempt. And Australia could illustrate. I’ll let you go with one more question only. After all that you have done and all the energy, obviously, that it required to do it, have you come at this point to something fresh in your understanding about what counts and what does not count, how one conducts oneself about the universe? Has something new occurred to you, or is it a refinement of what you went in with? I think the fundamental thing that I’ve learned is that you can speak in the deepest terms imaginable, if you’re careful, to an extraordinarily wide range of people and that that’s desperately needed and that hopefully it’s salutary. It looks like it’s salutary. And so that’s hopeful. You know, the counterpoint to the stress of the last three years has been my observation of the positive consequences of having these sorts of deep, as deep as I can make them anyways, philosophical discussions, and to watch thousands of people participate as if it’s important. You know, when I talked to Sam Harris in Dublin about the relationship between facts and values and religion and science, which is about as academic a topic as you could hope for, we had 10,000 people come to the… So that’s… The university may not be functioning where it’s supposed to be functioning, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not functioning. It’s out there. Thought will find its place. Well, that’s what it looks like to me. And so that’s been unbelievably positive, although very demanding. Yeah, very. It’s… Well, I’m in… In these interviews, and more frequently, I’ve tended to get emotional, and the reason for that is the health problems that are plaguing my family, at least in part. Yes, I understand. So that makes me more… Much more… Susceptible. …fragile than I should otherwise be, despite my exhortations to people to, you know, bear their cross. My friend, I’m a cross for you to bear. Listen, I thank you greatly for your courtesy, because you obviously didn’t have to do this, and I really do admire what you’re doing. And I will say on behalf of the people who will never meet you, that you are a very fine person. Thank you. Thank you very much for the support that you’ve shown me over the last few years. It was much appreciated. I would do it twenty times. Well, I appreciate that very much. It was a pleasure to meet you. A pleasure to meet you, sir, I’ll tell you that.