The Queen's University Talk： The Rising Tide of Compelled Speech (MwdYpMS8s28)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=MwdYpMS8s28

Welcome. Thank you. Welcome, everyone. I’m assuming that applause was not for me. My name is Bill Flanagan and I am the Dean of Law here at Queens University. And I am pleased to welcome all of you here today for the inaugural Liberty Lecture, generously sponsored by Greg Piazetsky, Law 80, a long time and very generous supporter of the law school. And Greg is here today and I just want to perhaps join me in thanking Greg for sponsoring this lecture series. Thank you. The Liberty Lecture is intended to explore the meaning of liberty in our contemporary society, a subject of rich interest to philosophers, political scientists, and legal scholars, just to name a few. And today’s Liberty Lecture is moderated by Professor Bruce Pardee, to my right, of the Faculty of Law, an expert in a variety of areas, including environmental law, environmental law and governance, ecosystem management, climate change, water law, and university governance. Our guest today is Dr. Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a clinical psychologist. His many publications include his recently published book, 12 Rules for Life, An Atto-doke to Chaos, and his research spans a number of topics, including the psychology of religion and the modern understanding of creativity and personality. I know that today’s lecture has generated a great deal of interest, as is evident from the packed hall here today. It’s also generated a certain amount of heat. The proposed topic, the rising tide of compelled speech in Canada, is for many a controversial one. And I know that many of you in the audience will hold widely divergent views. I fully support your opportunity to be heard and, should you wish, challenge the speakers to defend their positions. I know that today’s speakers likewise share this conviction and will welcome your comments and questions. As might be appropriate for a lecture series named after liberty, I believe it is also important for me to affirm at the outset that the core values of the Faculty of Law and of Queen’s University include academic freedom and respectful dialogue among those with differing views. This includes providing our speakers with the opportunity to be heard and providing all of you with the opportunity to respond in a respectful environment free from any harassment or any attempts to shut down the conversation. So it is in this spirit of free and respectful academic exchange that I am pleased to launch this new lecture series. Welcome again and welcome to our guest. And I look forward to our discussion. Thank you. Thank you, Bill. Welcome and thank you for coming. I would like to underline what Bill said, which is that this event would not have happened without the initiative and support of Greg Gieczewski. So Greg, thank you very much. As well, before we start, I would like to thank some people from the Faculty of Law, Diane Butler, Adam Blake-Galopo, and Christina Yulian for their help in putting this together. I would also like to acknowledge the support, help, and generous assistance of several people around the university. Lisa Plater and Event Services, David Patterson and the Campus Security Office. You have been professional, helpful, straightforward, and I thank you very much for making this possible. I would also like to return to Dean Flanagan’s observation about the importance of this moment and to acknowledge the role that both Dean Flanagan and Principal Wolf have played in enhancing the reputation of this university in terms of its commitment to academic freedom and academic debate. They have reflected an unflinching commitment to those ideas, as Principal Wolf said on his blog, informed, respectful debate is central to academia. And gentlemen, I salute your academic statesmanship. Thank you very much. So we are going to proceed as follows. The first thing I would like to say is that in the hall behind you afterwards there will be some of Jordan’s books on sale, 12, what’s the title again? 12 Rules for Life. 12 Rules for Life, I wanted to get the 12, what it was right. That’s not 12 steps, it’s 12 rules, right? We are going to proceed as follows. Jordan and I are going to have a conversation for half an hour, maybe 40 minutes, and then we are going to throw the floor open to questions. We’ll describe what kinds of questions that you should ask later on when we get to that stage, but our topic is the rising tide of compelled speech in Canada. I am going to take just a couple of minutes to give us some context and set it up, and then I’ll ask Jordan to tell us what he thinks. You may have seen the CBC production of The Tudors, the story of King Henry VIII. In one episode, the king has condemned Thomas More to death for refusing to say that the king is the head of the Church of England. More is in his cell, awaiting execution. A friend comes to him to plead with him to say what it is the king wants to hear. More says he cannot do that, for he does not believe it to be true. In exasperation, the friend says, you don’t have to believe it. You just have to say it. When your brain makes that kind of calculation, you know you are under the thumb of a tyrant. And Thomas More lost his head. The tide of compelled speech in Canada is rising. The law society of Ontario has introduced a new policy that requires each lawyer to develop a statement of principles which endorses and acknowledges an obligation to promote certain values. The Ontario Human Rights Commission says that under the Human Rights Code, failing to address somebody by their preferred pronoun will constitute discrimination for which you may be investigated and prosecuted. The Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario has introduced new curriculum to require teachers to teach elementary students about white privilege. And the federal summer grant program requires applicants to attest to the values that the government believes in. They don’t have to believe it. It’s a fucking lie! I know such thing as compelled speech, but the government cannot tell you what to do. You are under the thumb of a tyrant! You are under the thumb of a tyrant! You are under the thumb of a tyrant! You are under the thumb of a tyrant! You are under the thumb of a tyrant! You are under the thumb of a tyrant! You are under the thumb of a tyrant! You are under the thumb of a tyrant! You are under the thumb of a tyrant! You are under the thumb of a tyrant! You are under the thumb of a tyrant! You are under the thumb of a tyrant! You are under the thumb of a tyrant! You are under the thumb of a tyrant! That’s pure narcissism at work, by the way. You know, to hijack an event like this, that other people put time and effort into, and to use their civility of the crowd and the civility of the organizers as an excuse to blatantly yell out your ill-informed opinions, is no way to conduct a civil dialogue. It’s absolutely appalling. The people who do that should be embarrassed. I would also say that as students and as faculty members, you shouldn’t put up with it. There’s no way that you should allow people who are doing this to hijack your educational opportunities and to bend and twist the functions and the structures of the university. It’s not a good thing, not in any way at all. I would say that was a very disgraceful display, fundamentally. Let’s stick with it. Why do you think people are afraid of free speech? Well, you know, people develop an ideological view of the world because they don’t want to think through things in real detail. They’re aided and abetted in that endeavour by their pathological professors, and they’re giving them an oversimplified radical view of the world, in my estimation, is fundamentally based in resentment, not that there’s no reason for, say, a left-wing view of the world, and we can get to that later. It’s easy virtue. You know, you can stand up in front of 900 people with your placard and your screeching, and you can declaim to the entire audience your fundamental moral superiority. You can tell everyone at once that they’re all beneath you and you’re standing for the right thing, and absolutely none of that is earned. You know, like, what the hell was that? Seriously, man, it’s just complete misbehaviour. It’s embarrassing. The fact that the people who do that don’t have enough sense to go hide their head in shame just tells you how badly socialized they are and how terribly educated they are. And the thing is, the thing that’s so awful is that there are professors and educators who promote that. That’s how you change the world. It’s like it is how you change the world, but it’s certainly not how you make it better. You make it worse. Clearly, you know, there’s no comfort in that, and there’s nothing about it that’s impressive. It’s no better, in some sense, than a two-year-old having a tantrum on the floor. It shows, as far as I’m concerned, it approximates the same level of psychosocial development. So when the fact that this is happening continually at universities, it truly makes me embarrassed to be associated with the university. And I say that with great displeasure because, you know, I’ve been working for great universities for a very long time. And the university is an absolutely remarkable institution. You know, it’s survived for a thousand years. And to see it brought down by people whose behaviour would be out of place at a four-year-old’s birthday party is something abysmal to behold. So what about the actions of government now? Because it is government, after all, that is the source of this compelled speech, as well as other ways in which they seek to restrict speech. But the compelled speech is the most egregious form of violation of freedom of expression. So tell us about that. Well, I’ve been trying to sort this out because, you know, if you’re a clinician, I would say one of the problems you always have when you’re dealing with behaviour that’s gone astray is to understand at what level of analysis you should address it. You know, is it a theological problem? Is it a philosophical problem? Is it a psychological problem? Is it social? Is it economic? These are very complicated questions. Is it a trivial issue? Is it an issue of rights? Is it something else? The people who put in the Bill C-16, for example, and its associated legislation, they take the claim that it’s a legislative move that’s facilitated by nothing but compassion and desire to expand the domain of, let’s say, of rights and freedoms. You know, there’s nothing wrong in principle with expanding the domain of rights and freedoms, except, of course, for every right and for every freedom, there’s an attendant responsibility and obligation, so you have to keep that in mind. When I looked at Bill C-16 and the legislation that surrounded it, especially that was written by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, the policies that surrounded it, and also the policies that gave rise to the social justice tribunals, named social justice tribunals, appallingly enough, that gave rise to those tribunals in Ontario. The things I read just made my hair stand on end, you know? The social justice tribunals have the right to place themselves outside of legal, outside of jurisprudential precedents. It’s like, what the hell is that? It’s really… You’re going to make the case… The only way, I think, that you could justify doing that is that if you tortured yourself into the ideological proposition that English common law is somehow an oppressive branch of the patriarchy, and because of that you have every right and even obligation to place yourself outside of its structure of precedent, but we don’t want to place ourselves outside of the structure of precedent of English common law, I can tell you that. It’s one of the supreme achievements of the human race. It’s produced societies that are as free and as productive as any societies have ever been anywhere on the planet, and certainly are now. And to dare to state that you would place yourself outside of that precedent, that’s the sort of thing that made my hair stand on end. And there are other elements of the policies that were equally reprehensible, not least their complete incoherence of formulation. Now, I couldn’t understand some of it, like, I don’t understand, for example, with regards to the gender propositions, how it can be that you can be anywhere on the gender spectrum, which, by the way, is not a spectrum technically, and it actually matters which words you use if you’re writing law. You can be anywhere or nowhere on that spectrum. Like, I don’t know what that means, and I don’t believe that the people who wrote it know what it means either. And you don’t write things that you don’t understand into the damn law. You don’t do that because the law unfolds in society, and it tangles people up as it unfolds, and it’s no joke when that happens, so you be very, very careful when you’re writing law. And you certainly don’t want to write law to push forward your ideological commitments, especially in the face of precedent, because precedent is what keeps law from degenerating into ideology, essentially. And so, to answer your question, more fundamentally, I don’t believe that this argument has ever been about the rights of transgender people. I think that it’s an attempt by the radical left ideologues to push their ideological agenda forward using attempts to manipulate the linguistic domain. And I’m not willing to cede the linguistic domain because I don’t think there are anything more important than the words that you use. And when the government says, well, you should start using these words, you should start thinking hard about your damn government, because your words are no different than your thoughts, and your thoughts orient you and the world. And if someone’s going to tell you what it is that you have to think, then they’re going to disorient you and the world. And I wouldn’t recommend that, because there’s lots of terrible things that can happen to you. And if you’re disoriented, you’re going to run into a very large number of them. So that’s how it looks to me. But the ideological context of this seems like something has changed, yes? Because if you think back decades earlier, liberals were the champions of free speech. Yes, it was the conservatives at a certain moment in time who were the censors. They sought to curb blasphemy and obscenity, sedition, and so on. And the liberals said, no, free speech is the way we want to go. And yet today, that has flipped. If you look back to what the political system has done, this is what left-leaning officials and authorities and figures said. Let me just give you one quote. This is Samuel Gompers, who is the founder of the American Federation of Labor in 1886. He said this. He said, the freedom of speech has been granted to the people in order that they may say the things which… Sorry, I misquoted that. …have not been granted to the people in order that they may say the things which please and which are based upon accepted thought, but the right to say the things which displease, the right to say the things which may convey the new and yet unexpected thoughts, the right to say things even though they do a wrong. Now, that is not a sentiment now carried on by the left. What has happened? Well, again, I see that it’s a consequence of continual agitation by, I would say, a minority of the left, radical left in particular. And those are people who are Marxist, slash neo-Marxist in their fundamental ideological orientation and have joined that in an unholy union with the worst of French postmodernism. And they’re in a state of complete chaos. And they push forward ideological certainty. And the thing that’s really distressing about that is that if you know anything about the history of oppressed people, let’s say, much as I hate to engage in that particular form of dialogue under the current conditions, it’s pretty obvious that its freedom of speech is a freedom that’s particularly important for people who don’t have anything else. If you’re supporting freedom of speech, you’re not supporting the status quo. I mean, just think about it. Let’s use the logic of the radical leftists and assume that society is a tyrannical hierarchy and the people at the top have the upper hand in everything, including access to communication. These people are not your friends. You know, that’s… And mark my words, that’s the sounds of the barbarians pounding at the gates. Right. Yeah, that’s the sound of the barbarians pounding at the gates. Right. Yeah, that’s all. I’ll tell you again, too. That use of inchoate… What would you call it? Inchoate sensation is the best formulation of their argument. And there’s not much difference between knocking on the doors and knocking on you. So keep that in mind. It’s not amusing. There’s nothing to it. There’s nothing for it. The thing that’s also quite appalling is that there’s no evidence whatsoever that the people who are conducting these protests know what it is that they’re protesting against. You know, I was in… I was in the midst of a discussion attempting to make the case that it’s freedom of speech that is what people who have nothing still have. Right? So if you look at the tyrannical structure of our society, let’s say the people at the top have access to means of communication, everyone knows that. It’s the people at the bottom who have the right to say what they think, however badly they say it, that enables them to get a toehold into the system and to make their suffering known. That’s what freedom of speech is for. And so, like, what’s the protest against that? The radical neo-Marxist types, they speak the language of power, and that’s what they’re speaking right now. And if you want to live in a world where everyone speaks the language of power, then just let them do what they’re doing and see what happens. I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s not a pretty road. And you’re all in a position, you’re all in a situation in your life now where you have to make decisions about these sorts of things. Like, is this the sort of institution that you want this to be? One of the arguments against what you said about the pronouns was that, well, after all, all you’re being asked to do is to say something that is reasonable. It’s not unreasonable to address somebody by the pronoun that they prefer. And yet, if you think of any kind of speech which is prescribed, imagine a statute that said, people shall use the words hello and please and thank you in their conversations. That statute is untenable, yes, because it now requires people to use certain words in their conversations, even if those words are reasonable themselves. So that is not the question. And it was not your case you were making that using a pronoun was unreasonable in itself. Do I have that correct? Well, yeah. First of all, there’s a couple of things I’d like to say about that. You know, I looked at the process by which the Ontario government formulated its legislation with regards to the pronouns and the consultation process they used. And the consultation process was deeply flawed. They contacted activists and said, let’s activists of the trans community. Okay, well, there’s a couple of things I’d like to say about that. The first is, there is no trans community. Trans people are as diverse as any other group of people. And the idea that somehow because of one of their attributes, they constitute a homogenous group is, well, you’d think that that would be a falsehood that the people who are concerned about treating groups of people adequately would be loath to put forward. But even more importantly, there’s absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the activist types are actually representatives of any of the communities that they hypothetically activate on behalf of. It’s like they’re not elected, they’re not appointed, they don’t poll. They do this. They say, look, here’s a group. It’s a minority group and it’s oppressed. I’m a member of that group and therefore I stand for the group. It’s like, actually, no, you don’t. You don’t stand for your group. You maybe stand for yourself. You know, I don’t stand for men and I don’t stand for white men. I’m not entitled to speak on their behalf. And so the idea that it’s the trans community that wanted this is a completely unsustainable idea. It’s certainly unproven. I’ve had like 40 letters from trans people since I started to engage in this, call it this chaotic battle, and only one of them was mildly critical of what I was doing. All the other ones. There aren’t that many trans people. So to get 40 letters is actually quite a few. I’m not saying that this is a scientific poll, but it’s at least as scientific as the process by which the Ontario government generated its legislation. And I’m not… APPLAUSE And I’m not generating legislation. And what these people said to a person was, I didn’t ask to be the newest whipping boy for the radical postmodernists. All it’s done is made my life more difficult. You know, the basic letter would say, well, I’m transitioning from one gender to the other, and it’s very difficult, and I’m not sure that it’s the right thing to do. And this has made the process spectacularly more difficult on all fronts. It’s like, and these people don’t speak for me, and just because they say they do, that doesn’t mean they do. And so the other thing that we seem to have swallowed as a society is this crazy notion that, well, first of all, that we should be portioned up into our different minority groups, which I think is a return to tribalism and unbelievably dangerous. I can’t really think of anything more dangerous than that. And then we’ve swallowed the idea that if you identify yourself as a member of a minority group and then you bring forward a grievance, you have to be treated as if you’re a valid representative of that group. It’s like, well, why in the world would we do that? It’s guilt, I suppose. And I think that’s part of it, or I think it’s mostly guilt. You don’t want to stand up and say, well, who died and made you king, so to speak? You know? Can we stay on that logic for a moment, the idea? So this compelled speech material seems to insist upon treating people not as individuals, but as members of groups, to either blame them or to favour them as a member of a group. Can we take that logic and extend it, you know, that the group identity thing becomes intersectionality, where you’re not just belonging to one group but you also have these characteristics? Spin that out for us. What is the logic of that? Where does it lead us to? Well, okay, so the first thing I would say to everyone in the room is, I don’t think, and this is why I decided to do what I did, right from the beginning, you know, is that I don’t want to play the group identity game. I don’t want to construe the world in those terms. And I’m not going to use terminology that would require me to formulate my thoughts in that manner. I think it’s a terrible catastrophe to divide us all up into our tribal entities. I don’t see anything positive about that at all. So, I just don’t want to go there. And then second, I would say, and maybe this is even more relevant, you may or may not have heard about intersectionality, but intersectionality is a new development on the radical left. And I think it’s actually, if I wasn’t so intent upon seriousness in these matters, I would be constantly laughing about intersectionality. And the reason for that is that the radical left has discovered its own Achilles heel. So, look, what’s the problem with dividing us up into groups? Well, there’s many, and the descent into tribalism is not least among them. But the next is that, well, it turns out that we don’t fit into one group, any of us. We fit into multiple groups, and it’s not obvious at all which of those groups should be of paramount importance. You know, there’s a racial group and an ethnic group, and there’s groups of intelligence, and there’s groups of temperament, and there’s groups of attractiveness, and there’s groups of wealth, and you can multiply them really indefinitely. And I do mean indefinitely because you can categorize a finite number of entities a virtually infinite number of ways. And so the intersectionalists discovered this. They said, well, there’s, let’s say, there’s Latinos and there’s Asians. It’s like, okay, well, wait a minute, there’s male and female Latinos, and there’s male and female Asians. So do we treat, is the division into two enough, or do we need a division into four? Well, and then, well, then there’s socioeconomic class of male and female Asians, and male and female Latinos. And you can keep fractionating the groups, and technically without end, and you actually see this happening in real time, so to speak, as the acronym for the LGBT activists continues to expand, really without end. And see, what’s at the bottom of intersectionality, and this, I suspect, will be discovered eventually by the radical leftists if they get that far, is that you have to fractionate the groups right down to the individual. And that’s what Western culture discussed and articulated, discovered and articulated over the last 5,000 years. It’s like, oh, right, the group isn’t the paramount division, it’s the individual, because unless you treat each person like an individual, you’re not taking all the intersections into account. And so it’s extraordinarily, it’s extraordinarily comedic. But it also isn’t, as if it’s treating everyone as if they’re an individual, as if they’re an individual is an instant solution that will bring us to utopia. You know, it’s like Winston Churchill said of democracy, right? It’s essentially the least terrible approach we have. And life isn’t the sort of problem that is amenable to an instantaneous utopian solution, but our best bet is to meet each other with the desire for peace and productivity on this stage that enables individual interaction, because then we meet soul to soul, so to speak, and we also meet in a domain that we bear responsibility for as individuals, and that’s also extremely important, right? You should be responsible for what you say. You should have to suffer the consequences of what you say, not least so that you learn. And so the individual is paramount as far as I’m concerned. I think that’s the fundamental principle of Western civilization. Now, it’s not only the West that has come across that discovery, but I think we’ve done the best job so far of articulating it. And so we don’t want to lose that because the alternative isn’t a multicultural utopia. The alternative is a descent into tribal barbarism, and there are people who would be just as happy if that happened, but I would suggest that it’s not a destiny that an awake person would long for. Do you feel like taking some questions? Do you feel like taking some questions? All right, so we’re going to have questions, and we’d like you to participate in this conversation. Now, please do ask a question. We welcome you up to say what you’d like. If there is a preamble to the question that’s fairly short, then so be it. If there is a preamble to the question that’s fairly short, then so be it. But please do ask a question. We’re not actually inviting speeches, and we do primarily want to hear what Jordan has to say. So feel free to line up at the two microphones. We’ll take one at a time. Go ahead, sir. So first of all, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you. And second, this ties into my question. Just last week, my free speech coalition at Bishop’s University was officially ratified, and I would love to invite you to be our first guest speaker, if that’s at all possible. Thank you. And my question pertains to this. Dr. Peterson, what would you consider the most under-discussed or overlooked ideas and topics that you think should be discussed in the club? Because I know we’re looking for controversial ideas that we think are maybe not as discussed as much as they should be. Well, that’s a difficult question. I would say that it isn’t obvious to me that on university campuses at the present time, or in the education system in general, we’ve done a good job of taking stock of the advantages and disadvantages of our current socio-political systems. And I think there’s enough data so that we can start having intelligent conversations. So one thing I would recommend to you all, if you’re interested, is a book. I just finished reading it. It’s called The Great Leveler by Walter Scheidel, and it’s a discussion of inequality. And it’s a very intelligent book. So inequality, as you may or may not know, is rife throughout human societies. And that’s the case in the present day, and it’s been the case historically. But it’s also the case in animal societies by every measure. So inequality is the rule of life, let’s say. And that doesn’t mean it’s not an ethical catastrophe. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that the fact of inequality cannot be laid at the feet of the West or of capitalism or really of any human construction for that matter. One of the things Scheidel did was to investigate empirically the relationship between inequality and the poll of government. Because let’s say if you surveyed a very large number of states, you could determine whether the governments were left-wing or right-wing. And then you could do a compilation of inequality coefficients, and you could find out if left-wing governments had any ability to ameliorate inequality, just as an empirical question. And the answer that Scheidel generated was no. There’s no difference whatsoever in the inequality coefficients in left and right-wing states. And what that points to is a much more fundamental problem. And Scheidel, in his book, also points out that the only known historical forces that limit inequality, or that reduce inequality, are war, revolution, and pestilence. It doesn’t look like it’s easily under human control. And so, you know, the Marxists talked about inequality and the fact that capital tends to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people, which is sort of true, except that the people at the top tend to rotate a lot more quickly than the communists and the Marxists ever presumed. But it doesn’t look like that’s a consequence of capitalism. It looks like it’s a much deeper process. And capitalism, at least while it’s shoveling money and resources up to the top, also does lift the bottom very, very quickly, you know? And that’s just something we need to have a serious discussion about in the universities. So, like, one…because we shouldn’t be doing this. We should be partying in the streets. And here’s one reason why. Do you know that the level of absolute poverty in the world fell by 50% between the year 2000 and the year 2012? Do you know that was three years faster than the most optimistic UN projection considered? It was the fastest decline in absolute poverty that the world has ever seen. And, like, that’s a big deal. You know, about…there’s hundreds of thousands of people a week right now that are being connected to the power grid. And almost everybody has access to high-speed computation. And the struggling economies in Africa have, for the last four years, been the fastest growing economies in the world. You know, there’s almost no absolute privation left. There aren’t people starving, except for political reasons. We’re at a point where obesity is a worse problem than starvation. You know, and now I also think that a lot of that was purchased at the cost of the dreams and hopes of the working class in the West. You know, I think what we did in some sense for about a 30-year period was sacrifice the aspirations of the Western working class to alleviate poverty in India and China and in Southeast Asia. And it looks like that might have been a really good deal, although it was a little bit hard on the working class people, and that has to be taken into account. But we’re not having discussions of this sort in universities. It’s like we’re stuck in 1980 or maybe in 1960. We haven’t updated our models to take into account the new and often extraordinarily positive realities. And we’re tearing ourselves apart in the West with this identity politics idiocy. At the same time, things are getting better and better, faster and faster than they ever have by a huge margin in the history of mankind. So it’s like it’s time to wake up and throw off the depression of the Cold War and to look around and see what’s available in front of us and what we could accomplish. That would be much better than, well, this. So… I am told that there are developments outside. I’m sorry for the noise. They’re doing their best they can. Yes, ma’am. Hi. So, Mr. Peterson, you’ve said that one of your utmost priorities is the pursuit of truth. Could you just clarify what truth you mean when you’re presented with a situation where you have to, or you’re being asked to refer to someone to their preferred pronouns? Is it a truth that you see? Is it their truth? Is it your truth? To me, the issue isn’t the request of the individual to be addressed in a certain manner. It’s the compulsion of that by law. So when these issues get conflated constantly, look, I’ve dealt with all sorts of people in my life, a much broader range of people than most people ever encounter in the course of their entire lives. And I’m perfectly capable of deciding how to treat someone on a one-to-one basis. But when the demand for terminology becomes part of the legal system, I don’t care what the rationale is. It’s not happening as far as I’m concerned. And people say, well, we’re pushing it forward because of compassion, and maybe you could stop just being such a mean professor. It’s like, why should I believe that you know what the hell you’re doing with your compelling laws? You’re willing to move past a legal line in the sand that’s been drawn for, let’s say, 700 years. You do not write compelled speech into the legislation. Oh, but we’re doing it with the best of intents. Yeah, no, you’re not. So these issues have to be separate. Look, if this was about transgender rights, it would have disappeared in September of 2016. It’s not about transgender rights, and everyone knows it. So this is not about transgender rights, what these people are doing outside. It’s about something far deeper than that. So can we ask the question this way? Can we say, doesn’t everybody have the right, the liberty, to decide how to present themselves, how to be who they want to be, what to wear, what gender to call themselves? And the answer is yes, everybody has the liberty to do that. But everybody else has liberty too. And the liberty to do that doesn’t mean they have the right to compel other people to agree with it. In other words, liberty is not the right to demand that the world validate the choices that you’ve made. You have your choices, you have the freedom to make the choices, and everybody else has the freedom to make their choices too, and to approve or disapprove, or to call you this or to call you that. In other words, liberty is a two-way street, and everybody has it, and the fact that you’ve made choices doesn’t mean everybody else doesn’t have the same ability to make the same choices. Thank you. Back mic please, go ahead. Hi, that was loud. I just want to thank you for being here, I’m a really big fan, and I have a bad habit of making, or getting into arguments with a lot of radical leftists, and the most common argument they present to me generally is Bill C-16 only covers the Ontario Human Rights Code, so those are protected areas under the Ontario Human Rights Code, such as universities, elementary schools, etc. I was just wondering how you would combat this argument, seeing as their argument is generally, they’re only dealing with vulnerable groups, such as young students, and people that… It’s still bad enough. It doesn’t matter, they say, well it’s restricted in scope, yeah it’s not restricted enough. Look, here’s a couple of facts. Okay, so when I first made my videos about Bill C-16, one of the things that I suggested was that the act of making the video itself could well have been illegal. And of course people immediately accused me of fear-mongering, and perhaps with reason. It’s not always easy to understand the full intent of a new piece of legislation and surrounding policies, but I can tell you one thing. When the lawyers at the University of Toronto read through the new legislation and the surrounding policies, they also decided that what I was doing might have been transgressing the law, and that’s why they wrote me two letters telling me to stop. Okay, so that’s fact number one. Fact number two. Two words. Lindsay Shepherd. Okay, so let’s say for the argument that I’m a paranoid megalomaniac, and that I’m a bigot, and all of the other things that people have decided that I might be. Okay, well I’ll tell you what. In my paranoid megalomania, I never envisioned a situation where a teaching assistant, a 22-year-old teaching assistant at a major Canadian university would be hauled in front of a quasi-Myoist inquisition and have to record it because she dared to show five minutes of a video from a mainstream news program run by public television funded by the government of Ontario. So paranoid as I was, let’s say, it isn’t obvious that I was paranoid enough. So, and I don’t see how either of those examples can be disputed. You know, it was like the University of Toronto wrote me two letters without thinking about it. They went and consulted their high-powered lawyers, and the lawyers reviewed the policies in the legislation, and they thought, oh, Dr. Peterson, he might be contravening that legislation. It’s like, it was a weird paradoxical gift to me that they sent out those two letters telling me to stop because it was instant proof that what I was doing was, I wouldn’t say right because God only knows about that, but at least that my interpretation of the bill and its intent was correct. So… Can we just make this observation? That response to Jordan’s critique of C-16, the one that went, oh, he’s overreacting, nobody’s going to be punished or sent to jail for this, is silly in this sense. Remember, every single legal rule there is is a legal rule only because it is backed with the monopolistic violence of the state. There be… APPLAUSE There’s no such thing as a rule without punishment. So if, for example, there’s a no parking sign, what the parking sign says, oh, by the way, please don’t park here, but there are no tickets, well, people are going to park because that’s not really a rule. So if you have a rule in the Human Rights Code and if you breach it, if that’s discrimination, well, then true, the first thing that happens to you is not going to be thrown in jail. But there’s a process, a series of steps, right? The first one might be a mediation or an investigation and then there might be a fine. And then if you don’t pay the fine, then your wages might be garnished or you might be ordered to fix it. But believe me, if you refuse and refuse and refuse and refuse, that order will become a court order. And then if you don’t obey the court order, you’ll be in contempt of court and then that will lead to arrest and imprisonment. So every single rule in the Human Rights Code is effectively enforced with the most severe violence the state has, even though it’s not actually practiced most of the time, because most people obey. We also don’t want to underestimate, like I don’t know how many of you have had the pleasure of being dragged before a board that investigates your behaviour, but I would tell you that even if you don’t end up paying a fine or in jail, there’s nothing particularly pleasant about the process itself. It’s enough, you know, you wonder why people don’t speak up. I can tell you one of the reasons they don’t speak up is because merely being dragged in front of a board of inquiry, innocent or guilty, is enough to pretty much do you in for a whole year. Like if you’re a sensible person and you’re concerned with propriety and you want to maintain the stability of your life and your reputation is important to you, perhaps because the stability of your family depends on it, to be investigated for such things is a punishment all of its own. It’s no pleasant business. And many of you will experience that. I would equate being investigated by a non-punitive court, let’s say, with these punishments that Bruce described quite far down the distance. I would equate that to having a fairly serious disease in terms of its psychological and physical impact. I would also say, you know, no, I won’t say it. Let’s go with the next person. Alright, that’s the question, please. Thank you. Thank you. First of all, thank you both for doing this. It’s an honour to have you here. As embarrassing as what’s happening out there is for Queen’s University, I think what it does is show how important what we’re doing here is and how weak those people are. So thank you, first of all. In terms of my question, I think most people here believe that it’s extremely important, everything that we’re doing, to speak our mind, to speak freely. That’s why we’re here. But in terms of practicality, there’s a lot of things, again, in the way of our licensed students. We have our GPA to look out for, our job prospectors. So in terms of practicality, what are kind of maybe your tips and your perspective on the steps that students can take to kind of speak their mind while not sacrificing their future prospectors? Well, I can tell you a couple of things that are very practical. Don’t write in your essays what you think the professor wants to hear. There’s absolutely no excuse whatsoever for doing that. Now, first of all, most professors, even those who have descended into a state of ideological possession, let’s say, most of them still have enough character to grade an essay that’s well-written properly. So you’re actually taking less of a risk than you would think by stating what you have to state. But look, if you start practicing when you’re in university, when the stakes are rather low, pandering to the audience, let’s say, and saying what you think will get you by, you’re going to train yourself to do that. And what that means is you’re going to train yourself in the falsification of your character. And your character is the only thing you have to guide you through life. You know, people dream of riches and they dream of luxury and all of that, but that’s a thin defense against the harsh realities of the world. You have your character. And so what you do when you go to university is you learn to say what you think as clearly as you can, and to take the slings and arrows that come along with that. And you do that in an arrogant manner, right? Because like, what the hell do you know? You know, so you’ve got plenty to learn, but you want to formulate your thoughts carefully. You want to write what you think. Well, why? Because when you’re writing, you’re thinking. You’re laying out the arguments that you’re going to use to structure your existence in the world throughout your entire life. And if you start to twist and bend those for expedient reasons, you’re going to warp your soul. And I mean, I could talk about that neurophysiologically if you want to, you know. You become what you practice. You automate what you practice. So if you automate expedient speech for the sake of short-term gain, then that’s what you’re going to produce. You’re going to produce expedient speech for short-term gain. Well, God help you if you do that. Like, there is nothing that you will possibly do in your entire life that will serve you better than to get control of your voice in university. And obviously you do that by reading, right? You read great people. You do that by writing what you think. You stay true to yourself while you write what you think. And you take the risks and you gain the benefits that go along with that. You learn to stand up and speak and to listen carefully. And that makes you a negotiator of unparalleled power. And if you’re a negotiator of unparalleled power, there’s nothing in the world that won’t open itself up to you. So that’s what you’re doing in university. And if you find professors who reject that, and there’s fewer of them than you might think, then it’s your sacred obligation to stand up for yourself against that. Because it’s going to happen to you throughout your whole life and you might as well start practicing how to do it right now. So that’s how it looks to me. Yeah, there’s an old saying that I write. I write in order to know what I think. And you’ll note how compelled speech interferes in that process, yes? The idea that you have to write what your professor wants is the form of compelled speech. It’s like, I really do believe that this is a fundamental issue. As a therapist say, when I’m trying to help someone set their life straight, I do my best not to compel their speech. And the reason for that is quite clear. It’s like, you have your destiny with all its attendant triumphs and sufferings. And it’s on your shoulders. I don’t want to tell you how to think. I don’t want to tell you how to think because I do not know how you should think. You have to figure that out for yourself. And then you have to bear the responsibility for that. And you’re a terribly arrogant fool if you dare to tell someone else how it is that they should conduct themselves through life. Now, I mean, having said that, well obviously I say, well you should tell the truth or at least you shouldn’t lie. But that’s not a dictate of action, so to speak. It’s a dictate of process. It’s like, well you shouldn’t interfere with the mechanism that allows you to solve all the problems that you will face in your life. And you come to university maybe to prepare for a profession, you know, and to set yourself up economically. But to set yourself up economically properly, I don’t care what your profession is going to be. There is no one who is more powerful than someone who can communicate. It doesn’t matter what the field. It doesn’t matter if you’re a plumber or a politician. If you can formulate your thoughts clearly, if you can conduct yourself honorably in your action and your speech. If you’re articulate and careful, then the world opens itself up to you. You have an unlimited horizon of possibility. Thank you very much. Thank you both for coming. But firstly I’d like to thank everyone in the room who has not devolved into the hysteria we see outside. They would prefer that we lost our sanity and that our society would fracture into the nonsense we see. So by sitting here being as patient as you are, this is how we keep our academy, this is how we keep our society. Thank you. My question is a simple one. We see more and more of this new language I call of leftism, intersectionality, equity, diversity, inclusion. And we see people from all political and philosophical stripes adopting this new vernacular. Is this in any way dignifying that as a position? Is this dignifying the philosophical basis of these words? Do people recognize that when they use these words that they’re making that somehow a truth that we all ought to accept? And should we or should we not? I don’t think people do recognize that. Again, you know, I’d like to reiterate the reason I made those videos to begin with was because I was unwilling to cede the linguistic territory. As soon as you think of it, it’s already happening to some degree. So imagine that we define the socio-political landscape in terms of identity politics, which is happening very rapidly. In fact, we’re compelled to do so, right? So, well then what happens is you get activity on the identity politics front on the left and on the right. The left says, well, the oppressed shall rise and take their rightful place. And the right says, yeah, over my dead body and probably yours too. So as soon as we play the identity politics game, that’s where we’re at. And we start playing it by accepting the terminology. You know, already I find myself stumbling when I use the word sex instead of gender. And that’s not good. Like I have to consciously overcome a resistance to use the word sex instead of gender. Because, you know, I’m actually quite an agreeable person and it actually pains me to go against the crowd, let’s say. You know, I’m not temperamentally suited for it precisely, strangely enough. And so I feel the compulsion to use this kind of language welling up inside of me just to be nice, I suppose. You know? But I know where identity politics leads. It leads to the gulag. It leads to the concentration camps. It leads to blood in the streets. We don’t need that here. We’re doing pretty well. So we could leave it. Hi, Professor Peterson. I studied history for the duration of my degree. And I think it’s just sickeningly ironic that the people who are using their free speech want to take away your free speech. And furthermore, that they can’t see the irony of the situation of how tyrannical they’re being. My question is, however, I’ve noticed from a lot of what you’ve talked about, and I’ve been watching you since your rise in 2016, and I know that you’re a Christian, and I don’t want to divulge into that, but I noticed a lot of the sort of North American Protestant work ethic in your lessons. Like, you know, self-redemption and to be your own person. Like, we’ve been talking about that for the last hour and a half, I suppose. And in an ever-rising tide where people are, or rather, in the Western world where it’s becoming increasingly more and more difficult to be a Christian, or rather, in the Western world where it’s becoming increasingly, or rather, decreasingly Christian, specifically, yeah, decreasingly religious and specifically decreasingly Christian, how can you, what do you think is the best suggestion in order to be able to uphold those such important values that have been across the world from American cultural influence since the end of the Second World War? I apologize for the long question. No, no, it’s fine. You know, people have asked me repeatedly about my religious views, and I’ve answered them in a variety of different ways, but they say, do you believe in God, let’s say? And my response to that always is, well, I don’t know what you mean when you ask me that question, so I don’t know how to answer it. I don’t know what you mean by believe, but I can tell you something that I believe. And I would say this is a way of speaking symbolically. I do believe, so I was thinking the other day, a week ago, I was thinking about this little fantasy that entered my mind. I was thinking about St. Joseph’s Oratorio in Montreal, and St. Joseph’s Oratorio is a very large religious building. It’s one of the biggest cathedral-like structures in the world, and it’s set on the hill on Mount Royal, and it’s set up where it can catch the sun. So it’s an image of the heavenly city on the hill, right? It’s an image of the structures that we strive to create. That’s what it is, independent of its specifically Christian or religious function. That’s what it stands for symbolically. Okay, so it’s the city on the hill. It’s what we’re striving towards when we walk uphill in life. Okay, now, the way the oratorio is structured, there’s hundreds of steps leading to it up front. And in the early part of the 20th century, a lot of people who had physical disabilities came there, and they struggled up the step on their crutches. And many of them left their crutches in the oratorio. You can see hundreds of them if you go there. It’s quite an interesting sight. And I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about what that meant. And this is what it means. It means that, you know, everyone has their disabilities, let’s say. And I know that some people are far more terribly affected than other people. I’m perfectly aware of that. But the question is, what do you do about that? And what you do is you set yourself up on your damn crutches, and you struggle up the bloody hill. That’s what you do. And you struggle up the hill towards the kingdom of God. That’s what you do. Because the alternative is to descend into the abyss. That’s the alternative. And then so to say, well, do you believe? It’s like, I believe that you should struggle uphill towards the city of God on your crutches. That’s what you should do. That’s the opposite of the descent into the abyss. And so that’s at the foundation of our civilization, that idea. Well, argue with it if you will. See if you can figure out why that’s not an acceptable idea. Maybe you should help someone struggle up the hill. Perhaps you should. You know, you can lend a hand to someone, although you don’t want to take the burden away from them entirely. Because there’s something noble about struggling up the damn hill, right? That’s adventure. That’s the call to proper being. It’s like, well, we don’t need to forget this. You know, we don’t need to forget it. The universities have been there since time immemorial to try to make sure that we’re not going to be in trouble. We need to be in the memorial to try to push that idea forward through the generations. And everyone needs to know that idea. That’s what gives your life not happiness. Forget about that. If it comes, well, great. Accept it. Dignity, nobility, character, truth, responsibility, beauty. Those are the things to aim for. Honour, too, I would say. Honour. Thank you very much. And I hope when all this is done, I hope you take a nice long big vacation, because I think you really deserve it. Hello. Dr. Peterson, first, thank you for coming. And so, I’m Chinese. My parents grew up in the Cultural Revolution of China. So, I took particular attention when you mentioned in multiple occasions comparing what’s happening in the West right now to Mao’s China. And I agree, and it’s pretty obvious the connection between their ideology and their culture. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think that’s a really good point. Perhaps there’s indeed some medication, if I may write it that way, but that should seeds. But a real concern is the connection between the philosophy and the idiotic oversimplifying and tyrannical way of trying to promoting it. of trying to promoting it. Well, the first thing The first thing we should make clear is that there is such a thing as hate speech. is that there is such a thing as hate speech. Right, like let’s not be naive about this. That’s not the issue. That’s obvious. The issue is whether or not you should regulate that, and even more importantly, whether the state should regulate it. And the reason that’s an issue is because who’s gonna define it? I’ll tell you who’s gonna define hate speech. It’s the people who are doing that that are going to define hate speech. And right now, they’re defining you sitting in here as hate speech. I mean, that’s exactly what’s going on while we sit here. It’s like, who would be interested in defining the parameters of hate speech? Here’s the answer. The people that you would least want to have adopt that responsibility. And hate speech is like, let’s say, I was interviewed a while back and the journalist asked me, well, why should your right to offend trump someone’s right to be secure? It’s like, okay. Well, let’s say I’m talking to one person and you might say, well, I don’t have the right to offend them. It’s like, all right. What if I’m talking to ten people? Do I have the right to offend one of those people when I speak to them? What if it’s a thousand people? Look, you can’t have a conversation about something serious without offense. Like, if I’m thinking about something serious, like, I offend myself. You know, and I seriously mean that. I really mean that. So, like, if I’m laying out a set of hypotheses, for example, about a complex social problem, I might lay out 20 hypotheses and maybe two of them I think, God, I hope that’s not true. But, like, maybe it is true, you know? Sometimes you discover things as a social scientist that you wish weren’t true. And those are usually the things that you’ve discovered that are actually true, right? Because they violate your assumptions. So, you can’t even think if you’re not willing to offend yourself. That’s what thinking does. If you’re ever talking about something wouldn’t be serious if it didn’t have the possibility of frightening and offending people. That’s kind of like the definition of seriousness. It’s like, well, we can only talk about things that no one ever gets upset about. It’s like, well, then it’s like you’re trapped in an elevator for the rest of infinity listening to nothing but music. That’s a kind of hell, man. If you’re going to think and also if you’re going to speak, you’re going to offend people. You’re going to go after their deepest presuppositions and your own as well. You’re going to shatter them at times. It’s going to be brutal, absolutely brutal. And you all know that because every single one of you has had a serious conversation with someone that you love. And the probability that that was an easy conversation and that either of you escaped without offence and terror is zero. If you haven’t had a conversation like that, well, well… You’re not human, right? I mean, right. Because everyone has conversations like that all the time except when they run from them which is most of the time and no bloody wonder. You know, real conversations are… There’s nothing worse than a real conversation except the war that you have if you don’t have the conversation. That’s basically how it goes. I just want to underline… Applause I just want to underline Jordan’s first point. Which is really that it’s a very dangerous thing. Any legal rule that relies on some kind of reasonableness because reasonableness lies in the eyes of the beholder. I mean, those people out there think that you guys are uttering hate speech. They think that you guys should be the one who are arrested. And just imagine if they were the ones who had the reins of government power. It’s all very well to think of hate speech as a reasonable idea but as soon as you give up the control about what that means, you’re liable to run into real trouble. Next. Hello, Mr. Peterson. My name is Zachary Milligan. First off, I’d just like to start by actually thank you for all the hardship and troubles you’ve endured for standing up for our rights and being a part of this debate. I come from a dairy farm in Napanee, rural, raised conservatively. And my question is, in the face of when we have a social situation so divisive, when you genuinely believe what you’re doing is the right thing, in this particular instance, since you have experience with it, what would you say is there a more effective, I don’t want to say an easy way to reach out for them, but what do you think is the best way to try and talk some sense into those folks outside in a one-on-one setting? So the first thing is, I don’t necessarily think that what I’m doing is the right thing because, you know, you have to be careful when you make a claim like that. But I can tell you one thing, I’m not going to let anyone stand in the way of me trying to figure out what the right thing is. That’s the thing. — applause — And then I would say, we’re doing exactly what we should be doing. Right now, in this discussion, it’s just exactly right. Right? I mean, admittedly, we have to talk over the noise, but that’s really not that big a catastrophe. And everybody in here is comporting themselves in a reasonable manner, and we’re trying to struggle our way through the topics, and we’re asking questions, and we’re trying to have a genuine dialogue about them, and that’s what we’ve got. We’ve got three things. We’ve got negotiation, we’ve got slavery, and we’ve got tyranny. Those are your choices. And so this is negotiation, right? That’s public discourse. And the reason that freedom of speech, thought, is obviously important. Everyone can understand that. You might say, well, you don’t need to speak freely because you can think who’s going to get inside your head. But the problem with that is that that’s not it. You can’t think very well because there you are in your little world, you know, with all your biases and your ignorance. You’re wrong about so many things, and you’re going to learn it really painfully. And then maybe you can trot out some of the things you think erroneously and ignorantly, and other people will give you a tap on the side of the head instead of running you over with a freight train, right? They’ll give you a little tap on the side of the head, and maybe you’ll walk away a little smarter. And that’s why freedom of speech is so important, is because a lot of thinking, especially about things that are beyond you, for whatever reason, have to take place publicly as we stumble around towards an adequate formulation of the problems that beset us. So I would say, well, in this book I wrote, I have a rule, I think it’s rule eight, which is tell the truth, or at least don’t lie. I would say, well, that’s another reasonable way to start approaching the situation. It’s not so easy to tell the truth because, like, what do you know? You know, you can’t come out and say, well, here’s the truth. But I know one thing you can do, which is when you know that what you’re saying is a lie by your own standards, you cannot say it. And you can have a consultation with yourself, and you can try to learn to say those things that make you strong, instead of saying those things that make you weak. And you contribute to the health of the public dialogue in an incalculable manner that way. And this is another issue that pertains to the dignity and importance of the individual. How you conduct yourself in your life is way more important than you think. And I mean, I think that that’s a daunting idea because, you know, let’s say you’re nihilistic and life is meaningless. Well, what’s the payoff for that? You think, well, there’s no payoff. It’s like, well, yeah, there is. You have no responsibility. That’s a pretty decent payoff. I mean, you have to pay the price of meaninglessness, but it doesn’t matter what you do. Well, we’ll flip that over and say, no, no, sorry, you’re wrong. Your life is meaningful. It’s way more meaningful than you think. But you have to bear responsibility for your thoughts and your actions. It’s like, there’ll be plenty of meaning in that. Well, if you understand that properly, that will cleave you to the depths of your soul. And maybe you learn to speak carefully and to act carefully. And that will have a beneficial effect on everyone around you. You’re far more powerful in the place you stand, in the place you sit and stand than you think. And I think everyone has an intimation of that. And if you don’t think that’s true, then try treating people around you as if it’s not true. Try treating people that you know in your life as if they don’t matter. And just see what kind of response you get. People are not going to be happy with you, not in any sense whatsoever. You’ll ruin all your relationships. You have to treat people as if they matter. And maybe you have to treat them as if they matter because maybe they do. And that goes for you, too. And so if you matter, then you should act like you matter. And that’s a very daunting proposition, that’s for sure. And as a footnote to that, let’s just observe this. In legal terms, there are only two categories of actions, voluntary and involuntary. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. Either you’re choosing on your own and handling the consequences, or the government is telling you what to do. Those are the only two possibilities. Thank you, sirs. At the back, go ahead. Hello, Dr. Peterson. I would like to recall the part in your conversation in which you mentioned how the radical left switched from the 1960s and 70s to being pro- back when they were pro-free speech and their recent opposition to it. I know that you often mention their obsession with power, at least among their more Marxist types. I was wondering if perhaps they think that now is the opportunity where they can consolidate their power, and if they do so successfully, that it will become the morality of our civilization for the next thousand years like Christianity was when Rome adopted it. From what you’ve seen, would you say that that’s close to their strategy? Well, it’s hard to exactly understand the strategy of an ideology. Because all the people who were outside were united in some sense under the umbrella of an idea. An idea is a living thing. It’s embedded in living tissue. It’s distributed in a fragmentary manner across the mob, let’s say. Each person in the mob only possesses a fragment of the ideology, because the full neo-Marxist post-modernist doctrine is quite complex. But when you get the mob together, then it acts under the dictate of the ideology. And the question then is, well, what does the ideology want? And I would say, well, it wants what its formulator says it wants. And Derrida, for example, whose head trickster of the post-modernists, regarded the Western society as feligocentric, right? And what that meant was male-dominated. That’s the fellow, fellus part. And then logocentric, well, that refers to the word logos, which means it’s the root word of logic, but is also the person of Christ, essentially, the logos. And so the purpose of the post-modern critique was to demolish that. Well, fair enough. My sense with people is, especially if they’ve written things down and thought them through, that they’re actually aiming for what they say they’re aiming for. Well, if you buy the idea that the West is a male-dominated tyranny, essentially, a patriarchal tyranny, and that your moral duty is to tear it down, well, then that’s what you’re doing. And then you might say, well, what is going to be erected on its ashes? Well, that’s where things get complicated. You know, the first question might be, are the people who wish to tear it down builders, or are they just destroyers? And my strong sentiment is that they’re primarily destroyers. Now, you might say, well, why do people wish to destroy? Well, it’s because they’re hurt by life and they’re resentful. And resentful people become vengeful, and vengeful people become dangerous. And there’s no shortage of motivation to make things worse. Now, school shooters make things worse. People make things worse. Now, you know, maybe lurking in the rhetoric is this appeal to an egalitarian utopia, but we’ve tried egalitarian utopias already. We sacrificed 100 million people to egalitarian utopias, and we have yet to produce one. And so my sense is the corpse is stacked up high enough to constitute proof. So it’s destruction mostly that motivates it, as far as I can tell, masquerading as compassion. Thank you for that question. Next, please. Dr. Peterson, Professor Pardee, thank you both for being here today. I’m a political scientist. What I’ve studied in my research is that the way in which the world is structured is that the way in which the world is structured is that the way in which the world is structured As a political scientist, what I’ve studied is totalitarian regimes. Sorry, I’m going to move this over. Totalitarian regimes I’ve studied, I’ve tried to look at the Iranian Revolution and the Islamic Republic in Iran, and I’ve argued how the Shia Islam that is teached in the Islamic Republic is very close to a totalitarian regime. But now I live in a country where my ideas are considered controversial. If you believe in God, if you believe in family, if you believe in having responsibility and traditional values, I feel ostracized by the community here. I came from UC University of Calgary. Over there, I didn’t feel this way. There, it was more welcoming. Here, I feel marginalized, and I do feel alone. And when I see this, it disgusts me that here they can do this, but I couldn’t go to their events and do anything. I’d have to shut up. There’d be a disciplinary committee for me, but for them, they can break windows to God knows how old this building is, and it’s okay for them to do that. So my question to you is now, being here experiencing this, I’m starting to second-guess that maybe the totalitarian Islamic regime that I was so, you know, talking about and critical of back in Iran isn’t so bad when I have a choice between having to be here and be oppressed and be there and at least have my ideas be okay with the regime. So my argument is, if this free speech and the arguments you guys are making here doesn’t work, would that not be the next step for people to go towards totalitarianism? If dialogue fails, then isn’t force of arms the only thing left? How can people compromise when they don’t want to talk, when they want to yell? Thank you. Applause I think you make a very good point. I don’t think we should fool ourselves. This is about force, and it’s almost a dare to suggest that certain elements are not allowed to enforce their view of the world and that speaking contrary to it isn’t an affront to those values and they won’t shut you down. I mean, that is what is at stake. We are no longer really in a situation where this will all be resolved through sort of gentle, reasonable, civil dialogue. That happens on the side, but it’s not real anymore. It’s not really where the fight is happening. This is an imposition of the force of the state. And it is skewed. It is skewed a certain way, and we are getting to the point where a certain kind of language, a certain kind of dialogue is approved and all right, and a certain kind is not. And that is the campaign that is going on that this is all part of. And I have to say that your presence here and your endorsement of this kind of event is the kind of thing that has the major pushback to that trend. But the trend is continuing and is a very dangerous one. And this is a difficult moment in the life of this country, would you say, Jordan? So some comments about your career, let’s say. So you’re a young man, and you’ve got lots of years ahead of you. So you want to prepare for the war and not for the battle, right? Okay, because there’s going to be many battles for you personally, and perhaps politically and all of that. And so you want to make yourself as articulate and educated as you can, and you want to have patience. I would say that there’s no cause for despair. I believe that the people who are attempting to radicalize our society and to transform it into a battleground of identity politics are in a distinct minority. And I think that there’s no reason to assume that we can’t push the devil back into the bottle, so to speak, to push the genie back into the bottle. And so don’t despair. Now, from a personal perspective, it’s like you’ve got lots of things to learn and you’ve got lots of things to say and to write. And you’re going to find now and then that you’re imposed upon in a manner that you don’t find tolerable, right? I can’t live like this, right? It’s going to distress you. And well, then you’ve come across your moral conundrum, right? It’s specific to you. And then you have to, that’s when you have to grow up and think strategically. It’s like you decide, are you willing to live under those conditions? If you’re not, then you develop a strategy. It’s like, okay, I’m going to fight this. I’m going to fight it carefully, intelligently, thoughtfully, on multiple fronts, and I’m not going to back down. Now, you don’t make that decision lightly. You know, most things you should let blow by you because there’s not that much of you and there’s lots of things. But now and then you’ll find a stumbling block that you can’t get over because it hurts you, it damages your soul. That’s the right way to think about it. Well, then that’s the time for you to put your education to use. And you’ll be able to do that. I mean, you don’t want to underestimate the utility of deep, forthright speech. I don’t believe that anything can stand in its way. You have the courage of your convictions, but don’t give way to despair. Like, this battle is by no means over, by no means. And it isn’t even obvious that the bad guys are winning, so to speak. I mean, here we are. We’re having this talk. The university came out forthrightly in favour of free speech. Hooray for that. APPLAUSE You know, and so far all the questions today have been thoughtful and intelligent. You seem like informed people. It’s like, don’t underestimate your strength. And so, and McMaster just published a set of guidelines governing this sort of behaviour so that it will no longer be acceptable to disrupt perfectly reasonable proceedings on university campuses. And so that discussions like this can continue properly. I mean, there’s definitely a place for give and take and for informed opposition, let’s say. But there’s a difference between informed opposition and childish grandstanding. And I think people know the difference between that. So don’t be desperate about it. But pick your battles. A little courage goes a long way, right? Because other people see it. And there is, I think, a silent majority out there that is silent and is scared. But if they see courage from somebody, they respond to it well. I think you described lawyers in a way that appealed to me once. He said, I think, I know that’s rare, but you said lawyers, I think these are the words. You said lawyers are difficult and emotionally stable. And it’s the combination of those two things, the willingness to be difficult, but not to be emotional about it. Don’t wed your emotions to the fight. Take a step back, engage in it, say what you think, be courageous, but don’t get wrapped up in it. Don’t be emotional about it. Retain your strengths for the long haul. Well, you know, one of the things I’ve learned strategically, and this is really worth thinking about too, is that when you’re engaged in a public dispute like this, it’s not obvious when things are going your way. You know, you think, well, this protest is not such a good thing. It’s like, I wouldn’t be so sure about that. You know, what’s happened to me in the last 18 months is that virtually every time that I’ve been attacked, and some of the attacks have been quite, well, I wouldn’t say brutal because we haven’t got to that, thank God, but they’ve certainly been, they’ve taken me aback. You know, it’s not a straightforward thing to be in a hall with, and this happened at McMaster with 100 people yelling at you and blaring air horns and all of that. But that wasn’t a bad thing, as it turned out, because it was filmed and it was put on YouTube. And it was terrible for the people who protested. You know, it wasn’t good. And so you’ve got to detach yourself too. You know, if you say what you think and you’re careful about it, it’s going to have some short-term effects and it’s going to have some medium-term effects and it’s going to have some long-term effects. One of the things that you need to do, I would say, and this is an element of courage, is you have to have faith that the medium to long-term consequences of you saying what you have to say as clearly as possible is going to be positive. And you have to act on that supposition. You don’t know, right? You can’t know. You can’t know. That’s the existential leap of faith. You can’t know, but you act anyway. And my experience has been that you don’t want to make judgment too quickly because it’s not always clear when things are going your way. So you know, you might stand up in a class and say something that people react negatively to and you might get pilloried for that by some people, but you never know who you’re touching in the crowd and you don’t know how that’s going to unfold across time. That might be a defining moment in someone else’s life to watch you stand up and say what you have to say. So don’t underestimate the power of truth and courage, really. Thank you, David. APPLAUSE Honestly, they should be thankful at how civil and how peaceful you guys are. They should be thankful. They shouldn’t be angry. APPLAUSE I regret to say we probably have time for probably just a couple more questions. So let’s go to the back. Hi. So my question is directed at Dr. Peterson. I’ve been watching your lectures online for a while and you talk a lot… Come a little closer to the mic. Thank you. You speak a lot about character archetypes and narrative and the importance of the Jungian idea of the personal narrative. I’m having trouble formulating this into a question, but I guess with the idea of archetypes in mind, are you familiar with Benui Mandelbrot’s idea of fractal patterns? And if so, what do you think? Is there a connection there maybe to be found? Well, there seems to be a metaphorical connection in that the great is reproduced in the small. And that’s certainly an idea that permeates, let’s say, religious and theological speculation. You know, there’s an idea that… Here’s an idea that… It’s like the idea of the genie, which is the same root word as genius. The genie is something of unimaginable power that’s constrained in a very small space. And that’s kind of what a person is like. You know, we have this affinity, we have this connection to the infinite, we have this connection to the divine, but it’s constrained within our frames, right? And we have to act out the divine narrative in the confines of our own life. And so there is this overarching reality, which is something like the forthright confrontation with the catastrophe of life, right? But that has to be made personal, you know? So that’s one of Jung’s, I would say, deepest ideas, is that the archetypal has to be made personal in your own life. And so you take the generic pattern, and you personalize it, and then the infinite and the finite meet, and that’s the perfect combination. And there’s something about that that’s, well, unutterably profound, I would say, and as true as anything can be. And I think people know this at a very deep level, because you do know, when you’re struggling to go to sleep at night and your conscience is bothering you, and you think through the things that you did in the day and the week, you’ll take solace in the things that you did that were noble and true, and you can breathe a sigh of relief that you’re not completely corrupt and lost, and then you can sleep. It’s like everyone knows this. Well, we need to know it consciously, right? And that’s part of the process of making the archetypal personal. And that’s part of what the religious process is supposed to be about, is to outline the archetypal pattern, and then to say, look, you have to meditate on this, and you have to figure out how to make it true in the confines of your own life. And that gives, see, the reason that works, I think, is because there’s no doubt that your life is tragic, and there’s no doubt that you have a malevolent element, and that you’ll be touched by betrayal and all those terrible things. But there’s a nobility about you, too, and that nobility might be sufficient to transcend your limitations. And I would say that your life is a struggle to determine if that might be the case, and that’s the act of faith. And I also do believe, I was asked today by a South African journalist if I’m the ultimate pessimist or the ultimate optimist. You know, and I would say in some ways, I am the ultimate pessimist. I know, I think, as much as I can tolerate how terrible life can be. But I do believe that the human spirit can overcome that catastrophe and can rise out of it. And I think the universities are that idea expressed in stone and tradition. It’s a great idea. Everyone needs the idea, especially people who are young. You know that your life is going to be difficult. It’s like no one can say, well, it’s going to be easy. But you might say, well, do you want it to be easy? What’s in it for you if it’s easy? Well, no, you want it to be difficult and worthwhile, and you want to be the sort of person that can manage that. And that’s what you should be encouraged to be at university. And that’s what the universities are for. So, well, that’s the archetypal and the personal, I would say. Yeah. Thank you very much. APPLAUSE This will have to be our last question. Go ahead, sir. In recent time, I would probably identify the most recent US election as the turning point for this. And I’m saying that as an American citizen, this is my first time living in Canada, I’ve noticed that public discourse has taken to elevate fascism as the ultimate evil, and maybe rightfully so. There are many horrific things committed by fascist states in the 20th century. And you see people, like Facebook cover photos, like Bash the Fash. Stickers on laptops, this machine kills fascists. There’s this big backlash against fascism and the horrors that it caused. But in spite of that, you don’t see the same reaction to the horrors and the genocide that were caused by socialist and communist states in the 20th century. APPLAUSE You see people who virtue signal endlessly about how horrible the Holocaust was, about how awful these things were, and then just hand wave away the famine genocide of the Ukraine, the Great Leap Forward. They think these things are inconsequential or even necessary sacrifices for the rise of the greater good of socialism or communism. And I personally find that morally reprehensible, and I can’t understand where that comes in, how you can stand there and be so opposed to this genocide, but say that this genocide is somehow just, oh, it’s not a problem. And why do you think that, how do you think that disconnect happens? How do you think people can convince themselves of that? And why do you think that happens? It’s a great question. You know, I have, my house is covered with art from the Soviet era. And I have a lot of reasons for that. Part of it is to remind me of what happened. Part of it is to watch the struggle between the art and the propaganda on the canvases sort of in real time. You know, I’m very interested in that. But I would never decorate my house with Nazi regalia, you know? And you think, well, why is that exactly? It’s not like I don’t know that what happened in the communist regimes was utterly reprehensible. And perhaps it’s not acceptable to have socialist realist paintings in your house, but it’s certainly more acceptable, or it seems that way, to have paintings from the Nazi era, let’s say. So then you think, well, why is that exactly? And I think, you know, back in 1918, at the dawn of the Russian Revolution, when Europe was in flames and in ruins and the monarchical societies were collapsing, and the Industrial Revolution was in full force, and there was terrible poverty and terrible inequality, the dream of universal brotherhood was a compelling dream, the dream of egalitarianism. And maybe, who knows how much of it was motivated by genuine benevolence? Some, at least. It’s very difficult to see that the Nazi phenomena was ever generated by any genuine benevolence. That’s very difficult to make a case for. So maybe you can forgive the socialist, the communist utopians a hundred years ago because they didn’t know what they were getting in for. People had warned them. Dostoevsky warned them. Nietzsche warned them. But still. And then the other thing, too, is the problem of inequality. It’s like the problem of inequality is a real problem, and it doesn’t go away. Like, it’s very difficult when you walk down Bloor Street, for example, in Toronto, and you see homeless people, alcoholics and drug addicts who are struggling and mentally ill who are on the street, and they’re in their little domain of hell. It’s really difficult for that to not tear at your heartstrings and say, well, isn’t the world an unjust place or an unfair place, which it is. And so you can see the never-ending wellsprings of motivation to support the oppressed. And I think the fact that the communist dogma at least had that as part of its initiating ethos is partly what seems to make it forgivable. I also think it’s easier for people to identify why fascism is wrong. We can say, look, racial superiority? No. Okay, it’s pretty simple, right? It’s three words. You can really get it. But equality of outcome? It’s like, that’s really wrong. It’s really wrong. But it’s not so obvious why, right? You can’t just say equality of outcome, no, and have everyone clap. Because it isn’t as… Well, and that’s the thing. It’s really difficult to isolate the pathological elements in radical left-wing thought. Because they’re not self-evidently pathological. Like, there’s this old cliché, from each according to his ability to each according to his need. It’s like, yeah, that sounds pretty good. We have needs. It’s like, let’s have them fulfilled. And well, you have an ability. Well, like, manifest it. It’s like, well, it doesn’t work in practice. In fact, it’s murderous in practice. And it’s a great catastrophe in some sense that it’s murderous in practice. So I just think it’s… Maybe part of it is it’s just a hell of a lot harder to learn why it’s wrong. That combined with, you know, the genuine outpouring of compassion for the oppressed. Which is, like, who’s for poverty? No one, right? And inequality is a painful reality. It’s painful for everyone. You know, even people who are self-righteous about their status, let’s say, in the depths of their soul. The struggling of… The fact of the struggling still rips at them. And so, it’s a more difficult lesson for us to learn. So, yeah. Thank you. Applause. To those people lined up at the mics, I’m sorry for leaving you hanging. I’m sure we could go on all night if we had the time. But we must call this to a close. I would like to salute you for your patience and your dedication in the face of the noise from outside. Very nicely done. Well done. Applause. As you no doubt are aware, Professor Peterson has written an international bestseller. It’s called 12 Rules for Life. There are some for sale in the hall. Now, before you go, let me just say this. You have participated in what I would consider to be an important step in the life of this university. And for that, we should thank you. So, thank you for coming and thank you for your support. Applause. Professor Peterson may be the most important intellectual voice in this country today. And I would like to thank him very much for coming. Applause. Good night. Be safe. I just have one small thing to say. I would very much like to stay and talk with a bunch of you. And I generally do that. But I can’t do it today because I have to go back to Toronto and I’m going to Australia tomorrow. So, I can’t do that even though I would like to. So, I have to run off and then I have to drive back to Toronto. But despite that, thank you very much for coming and for being patient and all of that. Applause. Fuck white complicity! Fuck white complicity! Fuck white complicity! Applause. Applause. Fuck white supremacy! Fuck white supremacy! Fuck white supremacy! Fuck white supremacy! Fuck white supremacy! Fuck white supremacy! Fuck white supremacy! Applause. Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame on Queens! Shame on Queens! Shame on Queens! Shame on Queens! No freedom for hate speech! No freedom for hate speech! It’s actually really catchy. It’s not even that good but it’s really catchy. No freedom for hate speech! I haven’t really chosen where I’m at with him. I’ve been looking at his points and I’ve been looking at the protest points and I’m not really sure. I just think it’s interesting that he’s drawing this sort of crowd and that what’s happening here is happening. I think that really sets the line about participation at Queens. We’re here to protest Jordan Peterson being given a platform at Queens University. I think that it’s a really good thing that Jordan Peterson, aside from not knowing what he’s talking about vis-a-vis the law, Peterson tends to incite hatred wherever he goes. It’s not a discussion about which toppings you like on pizza. It’s a discussion about which people should be considered puner, which people we should respect. And that’s not a debate that should happen anywhere. I love that they are here having this discourse because clearly they don’t agree with what he has to say so they’re showing it. But I have seen a lot of people call for him to be cancelled. They are shouting that Daniel Walsh should be ashamed of himself for allowing this to happen and that I just think is wrong. I don’t know. It seems like we have a lot of very angry people here because someone is expressing an idea different than their own. And here at a university I kind of thought that was the point. I’m going to go to the bathroom. I’m going to go to the bathroom. I’m going to go to the bathroom. I’m going to go to the bathroom. I’m going to go to the bathroom. I’m going to go to the bathroom. I’m going to go to the bathroom. I’m going to go to the bathroom. I’m going to go to the bathroom. I’m going to go to the bathroom. I’m going to go to the bathroom. I’m going to go to the bathroom. I’m going to go to the bathroom. I’m going to go to the bathroom. There she is. It’s refreshing! It’s refreshing! It takes bravery to say that. Hate is unacceptable guys. They broke the fuckin’ window in there. Good bye, Peterson! You will not be missed! Have fun in Toronto!