In this episode of Thick & Thin, we are joined by Professor Jordan Peterson to discuss a variety of topics, including: 1. The rise of postmodernism 2. Gender Pronouns 3. Social justice warrior values 4. Postmodernism is a form of narcissism 5. The idea that science is an ideology 6. Science is all about power 7. There is no such thing as an objective world 8. There are no objective facts 9. We are all subjective 10. We cannot be objective 11. We can only be subjective 12. We have no objective reality 13. We only have subjective opinions 14. We don t have a real reality 15. We do not know what we are supposed to do 16. What we do know is that we do not have any real power 17. What are we to do with that power? 18. What does it mean to be objective? 19. What do we do with it? 22. What is it even about? Is there a point of view that we can be objective or subjective? 23. How can we be objective and subjective and still be subjective and yet be objective in the same thing? 24. How do we know we are not? 25. Is it possible to be both objective and objective and yet we are also subjective and objective at the same time? 26. What's the difference between reality and reality? 27. Is there any such a thing that we are all the same? 28. How does it matter? 29. Who are we are we have no idea what we're supposed to be and are we don't have a subjective reality and we're not allowed to be? and we can't be subjective or we're all subjective and we don t know that? And so on and so on, etc. and so much more, we're talking about it all in this episode, we'll talk about it in depth and we'll discuss it! We hope you enjoy it, we hope you like it, y'all enjoy it. We'll see you next week, yay, bye! -Jon & bye, bye, Jon! -Jonotha. - Jonotha, Caitie, Sarah, Caitlyn, - Ben & Sarah, Caitie & Gage, - EJ & Rachael, --
00:01:07.000Yeah, he was a wonderful man, that fucking savage.
00:01:12.000Trudeau, what he represents is, I think...
00:01:17.000The good side of it, what he's trying to do, they're trying to make a kinder, more progressive, more inclusive country.
00:01:24.000But along the way, what they're doing is they're promoting what you would call online social justice warrior values.
00:01:33.000And some of them are a little preposterous.
00:01:36.000You are one of the very few academics who have fought against some of these ideas that are not just being promoted, but are being enforced.
00:01:48.000And one of them is about gender pronouns.
00:01:53.000What we mean by gender pronouns is not just he and she, but a whole slew of invented gender pronouns that you're going to be compelled to use.
00:02:06.000Yeah, you're already compelled to use, and likely in the States, too, even though people don't know it yet.
00:02:11.000Certainly in New York, and the employment EEOC has already ruled on that with regards to businesses for the U.S., and Yeah, businesses and I believe also landlords.
00:02:25.000I think if your landlord chooses to misgender you, and not just misgender you, like if you're a transgender woman, you used to be a man, now you're a woman, and they call you a he.
00:03:27.000I guess that's for the low self-esteem otherkins.
00:03:31.000This is people that truly believe that they are in the wrong body and that they should have been born some form of animal and would like you to refer to them as this animal.
00:04:18.000Maybe it's postmodernism more than anything else.
00:04:20.000Because the postmodernists, that's a philosophical community, let's say, believe that the entire point of human categorization is power.
00:04:31.000and that dialogue between people is only a power dialogue and that there's no real reality outside of interpretation and that basically what we do is exchange interpretive viewpoints to ratchet up our dominance and status and that's that and there's no biology as an ideology and the idea of the objective world is an ideology and science is an ideology and it's all interpretation all the way down like turtles all the way down What do you mean by it's all about power?
00:05:01.000Well, you imagine that there are groups of people who are competing in the world for resources, I suppose, and that it's a zero-sum game and it's every group against every other group.
00:05:14.000And the reason that we engage in dialogue isn't to establish the truth or move towards some closer approximation of reality, but to structure the social interaction so that our group comes up on top.
00:05:28.000And that is really what the problem is with all this, is that it's not just a matter of choosing to be defined in one way, but compelling others to define you in that way.
00:05:39.000Well, one of the most awful elements of it, I think, is the idea that individuals should be defined in terms of their group identity at all.
00:05:47.000I mean, you could argue, and this is one of these weird inversions that's so characteristic of this chaotic state that we're in, when people originally started fighting against unfair discrimination, and I say unfair discrimination because lots of discrimination is fair.
00:06:00.000If you discriminate against people on the basis of their competence, that's perfectly reasonable.
00:06:06.000It's unfair discrimination that constitutes the proper battleground for people who have a more egalitarian viewpoint.
00:06:15.000The initial idea was to eliminate the proclivity for people to be categorized according to their group identity because that was interfering with everyone's ability to view them as competent individuals.
00:06:26.000But that got flipped probably in the 70s after the Soviet state so self-evidently was revealed as a catastrophe.
00:06:34.000That got flipped so that the world was turned into One group against another.
00:06:40.000Power struggle from one group against another.
00:06:43.000And then the social justice warrior types and the lefties, even the Democratic Party, started categorizing everybody according to their ethnic or sexual or racial identity and made that the canonical element of their being.
00:06:54.000And that's an absolutely terrible thing to do.
00:06:57.000In the Soviet Union, when that happened, for example...
00:07:00.000They introduced that idea along with the notion of class guilt.
00:07:05.000So, for example, when the Soviets collectivized the farms, they pretty much wiped out or raped and froze to death all of their competent farmers.
00:07:15.000They called them kulaks, and they attributed class guilt to them because they were...
00:07:39.000But the Soviets were big on collective guilt.
00:07:41.000And all of these things that you hear about now, like white privilege, for example, they're variants of collective guilt.
00:07:48.000I pick your bloody identity, whatever it happens to be, and then I make you a guilty member of that category, and then you and the rest of the guilty members of that category are judged as a unit.
00:08:06.000Yeah, you're oppressed, or your opinions, rather, are suppressed, and you are automatically put into this category of people who should be dismissed because of the fact that you have white privilege.
00:08:16.000You should step back and let others talk.
00:08:20.000And this is a narrative that gets repeated over and over again in the social justice warrior culture, this idea that you should just step back and let these others talk because they understand more.
00:08:29.000Yeah, and the others are always other groups.
00:09:21.000It goes along with this idea of class guilt.
00:09:23.000Because your group membership is the most important thing.
00:09:26.000If your group at some point in the past did something reprehensible, which of course every group has done, that's for sure, then you are de facto responsible in the present for that.
00:09:36.000How do you think we got to this point where people are repeating these patterns that were ultimately incredibly unsuccessful and dangerous and deadly in the past?
00:09:47.000People proudly proclaim themselves as having Marxist ideology.
00:09:51.000One in five social scientists claims to be a Marxist.
00:09:55.000How do they not understand the history?
00:09:57.000Why don't you fill people in on how that went bad?
00:10:00.000Well, the estimates vary, but in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959, somewhere between 30 and 50 million people were killed in internal oppression alone.
00:10:12.000And then in China, which was operating under exactly the same principles, might have been up to 100 million killed during Mao's time.
00:10:21.000And of course, Mao was still revered in China, appallingly enough.
00:10:25.000And Vietnam and Cambodia and wherever these ideas were implemented, Cuba, wherever these ideas were implemented, the result was absolute mayhem, absolute mayhem.
00:10:36.000And I think what happened is that the Marxist ideas are actually quite attractive if you're an intellectual and if you're, I would say, if you're tilted towards compassion from a personality perspective because they're based on doctrines like from each according to his ability to each according to his need.
00:10:53.000And the idea that you should fulfill people's needs, or that society should fulfill people's needs, is on the surface of it an attractive idea.
00:11:01.000Of course, the problem is who gets to define the needs and who gets to define the abilities, and that really is a big problem.
00:11:07.000And, well, and then those ideas were put into practice first in the Soviet Union, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote The Gulag Archipelago, did a very lovely job of Detailing, in horrifying detail, how those initial doctrines were transformed into legislation and then how those legislation was transformed into endless genocide,
00:11:29.000essentially, and almost destroyed the world.
00:11:32.000Let's not forget that, partly with the help of Castro, who just died.
00:11:39.000The doctrines, when put into actual practice, were murderous instantaneously.
00:11:48.000There were always apologists for the left in the West, especially in France, especially among the French intellectuals, especially in the late 1960s.
00:11:57.000When all of the information about what was happening in the Soviet Union came flooding forward, and that culminated, say, in about 1973 when Solzhenitsyn's book was published, the French intellectuals changed their tune.
00:12:10.000Instead of agitating on the part of the working class, which allied them with murderous Marxists, they switched and started to talk about power and to talk about group identity.
00:12:30.000And at the same time, the Soviet Union dissolved.
00:12:33.000And so one of the problems I think we have now, a perverse problem, is that these Marxist ideas are very attractive to compassionate intellectuals.
00:12:41.000And we don't have good, bad examples like the Soviet Union around that everybody can point to and go, yeah, yeah, well, that sounds good, but, you know...
00:12:48.000What about the murderous death camps and the millions of people who are suffering?
00:12:51.000We still have North Korea, but, you know, people treat North Korea like it's a joke instead of like it's an exemplar of a pathological system.
00:13:09.000They know a little bit about the Second World War, maybe.
00:13:12.000And, of course, people generally know about the Holocaust, but they have no idea what happened in the Soviet Union, so they have no idea where these ideas could lead.
00:13:20.000And the universities and the high schools are so full of people who are radically left-leaning that students are never taught any proper history.
00:13:30.000You know, they're taught about the evils of capitalism.
00:13:33.000I mean, it's not like any system is perfect, but there's a difference between imperfect and consciously murderous.
00:13:43.000I think one of the things that you just said that's very important is that it's attractive to compassionate intellectuals, people that, without really looking at what the potential for these laws and regulations,
00:13:59.000what the negative potential for them is, The underlying inclination to lean towards that is that you care about people and that you want people to be okay.
00:14:12.000Yeah, well, you're kind of treating them like they're your children.
00:14:14.000And I don't mean that in an entirely sarcastic manner.
00:14:20.000It's reasonable in some sense to treat other people like people that you love, although it's not reasonable in very many other ways, which is why you don't invite every stranger on the street to come and live with you in your house.
00:14:31.000I mean, everybody puts up boundaries, and you have to do that.
00:14:36.000And people tend more than we ever expected, and I've done a lot of research in this in my lab, that people do tend to vote and think their temperament a lot more than anyone really realizes.
00:14:48.000And if you're kind, and that's your highest virtue...
00:14:52.000Then you tend to treat people like their kin, because that's what kind means, right?
00:15:01.000And so you look at something like the idea of equity, which is equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity.
00:15:08.000On the surface of it, it seems perfectly reasonable to say, well, if every resource isn't distributed absolutely equally to every group, then the system is unfair.
00:15:17.000And on the face of it, that's a reasonable proposition, but it falls apart under minimal examination.
00:15:22.000So here's something to think about for everyone who thinks that equality of an outcome is a good idea.
00:15:28.000It's like, why the hell are you striving for anything then?
00:15:32.000Because the reason anyone strives to better themselves or to develop a skill or to move forward in life at all is to produce inequality.
00:15:42.000You're trying to rise above the mediocre masses every time you make an effort at anything.
00:15:49.000And so everything that we associate positive Movement forward to your positive motivation is actually an attempt to render the world more unequal.
00:15:59.000Now, you're rendering it unequal in a just way, right?
00:16:03.000Because we might say, well, if you work really hard, you deserve an unequal outcome.
00:16:07.000Well, yeah, unless you want people to stop working hard.
00:16:11.000And that was the old joke in the Soviet Union, you know.
00:17:35.000And I think one of the things that's really important about having these discussions is that they break down these rigid ideologies that a lot of these kids that are going to these universities are sort of being shoved into.
00:17:48.000They're being shoved into these ideologies.
00:17:50.000You're either on the left or you're on the right, and there's very few on the right.
00:17:53.000There's no open market of ideas when it comes to discussing these things.
00:17:59.000You're compelled and enforced Yeah, well, Jonathan Haidt, he's a psychologist at the New York University Business School.
00:18:08.000He's done a really good job of documenting the dearth of ideological viewpoints, let's say political or temperamental viewpoints, because that's more accurate in the modern university.
00:18:18.000And it's appalling, because along with all this push for ethnic and sexual and racial diversity, which I think is just a mask to enforce a kind of ideological homogeneity, Ideational diversity is the only relevant value for a university.
00:18:39.000The rest of it's all predicated, say, on the assumption that if you do select people because of their ethnicity or racial background or gender, that that will in and of itself produce diversity of ideas, which is another really pernicious idea because it assumes that,
00:18:55.000and it's so contradictory, The left describes anything that's associated with the assumption that someone who's female, for example, will think in a female way.
00:19:07.000They regard that as an unreasonable prejudice.
00:19:09.000Yet they're perfectly reasonable to say that we need more women in X discipline because they will bring in female ideas.
00:19:17.000It's like, well, what the hell are female ideas?
00:19:21.000You can't have it both ways unless you're completely...
00:19:25.000Unless you don't care at all about coherence or consistency, and ideologues really don't, because they care about putting their ideology forth.
00:19:33.000But the idea that you're going to get a diversity of ideas because you have a diversity of class of people assumes that ideas and identity are the same thing.
00:19:52.000Black people think differently than white people.
00:19:55.000It's no, some do and some don't and the overlap is substantive and the difference between the individuals is far greater than the difference between the groups.
00:20:03.000I think we also need to make a very clear distinction between discrimination and people that are just inclined to gravitate towards different careers and different focuses.
00:20:12.000There's a big difference between women being forced out of tech and women being not as compelled to enter into tech careers as men.
00:20:21.000Yeah, well, the tech issue is a really interesting one for a couple of reasons.
00:20:25.000I mean, one is that, of course, high tech basically developed after the playing field for men and women was more or less leveled.
00:20:35.000And despite that, there aren't anywhere near as many women in tech.
00:20:39.000There's far more women in caring professions.
00:20:41.000And you see that particularly in Scandinavia, where they've done everything they can to equalize the playing field.
00:20:47.000It's 20 to 1 female to male nurses and 20 to 1 male to female engineers.
00:20:53.000Explain that if you could, the Scandinavia issue, because it's very interesting what they've done over there and what the results have been.
00:21:00.000Imagine that there are two reasons that people differ.
00:21:03.000There are more than two, but just imagine for the time being that there are two.
00:21:06.000One is for environmental reasons, cultural reasons, and the other is for biological reasons.
00:21:11.000What happens if you flatten out the environmental reasons, which is what's happened in Scandinavia, is you maximize the biological differences.
00:21:18.000You don't get rid of them, you maximize them.
00:21:20.000And so what's happened in Scandinavia is that men and women are more different from a temperament and personality perspective, and also in terms of their interests.
00:21:27.000They're more different in Scandinavia than they are anywhere else in the world.
00:21:31.000Now, what have they done to try to flatten things out, as you say?
00:21:35.000Well, they've transformed their social policies so that men and women have as close to equal opportunities, say, as any society has managed.
00:21:42.000But that hasn't produced the hope for equality of outcome.
00:22:11.000And if you set the environment up so that each child is supportive, the children actually turn out quite differently.
00:22:17.000Now, if you're an absolute brute and you beat them and you abuse them, then they'll all turn out the same because there's tremendous environmental influence on them then.
00:22:23.000But if you form an individual relationship with each of them and allow their strengths to manifest themselves as they will in a supportive environment, then the kids are going to turn out very different.
00:22:34.000And so a free society is actually one that...
00:22:37.000That produces massively unequal outcomes because it allows the genuine differences between people to manifest themselves.
00:22:43.000These people who are pushing equity, which is equality of outcome, that's what the word equity codes for, by the way, equality of outcome and not equality of opportunity.
00:22:53.000I don't know what in the world they do with regards to the fact that a very large number of professions are, you know, high-quality, high-pay professions are female-dominated.
00:23:03.000Physicians, for example, psychologists, any of the disciplines that have to do with human care are almost inevitably dominated by women, and that's increasingly the case.
00:23:16.000We're going to force women to do things they're not interested in?
00:23:19.000Well, there's also a very disingenuous way of framing it here in America, where people consistently, even the President of the United States, Obama, was talking about income inequality.
00:23:27.000And the way they frame income inequality, they talk about the 79 cents to the dollar.
00:23:31.000But what they don't discuss is that we're talking about completely different careers.
00:23:35.000The way they frame it, they frame it as if two people are working side by side.
00:23:44.000Well, it's typical of ideological We talked about poverty a few minutes ago, and we said, well, there's many, many reasons that one person might have more money than another.
00:25:14.000Well, I think the reason is that when people first encounter a complex topic, like income differences, it's like, imagine you were drawing a map of a territory, and you don't know the territory very well.
00:25:30.000The first thing you do is just roughly Sketch out the shapes of the continents.
00:26:06.000The closer you look, the more details there are.
00:26:08.000You know, if you get a three-year-old to draw a helicopter, they put like a little cross on the top and a circle and a stick and another circle, and that's the helicopter.
00:26:16.000Well, you know when you look at it, that's a helicopter.
00:26:18.000But no one would expect that thing to fly.
00:26:21.000If you want to change that into a real model of a helicopter, you have to increase your focus and concentration on every single element of the entity.
00:26:28.000And that takes a tremendous amount of cognitive effort.
00:26:31.000And sometimes you don't even know what you don't know about something.
00:26:35.000You know, I could say, well, there are 50 reasons why men and women's income differ.
00:26:41.000Well, that doesn't mean I can say all 50 of those differences.
00:26:45.000And each of those 50 differences are fragmentable into maybe another dozen categories each.
00:26:50.000Maybe there's 600 reasons why men and women's salary differ.
00:26:55.000But you have to spend a tremendous amount of time paying attention and thinking to build your model of reality into that level of resolution, and basically what you do is default to temperamentally influenced ideologies.
00:27:09.000They give you a one-bit answer to everything.
00:27:11.000Why are men and women, why do men and women's salaries differ?
00:27:51.000Tenure's an issue and also not competing in the marketplace, not being in the workforce, going from being in high school to being in universities to getting a degree to teaching to being a professor to getting tenure, staying inside of that intellectual bubble.
00:28:09.000They're like positive feedback loops, you know, when you bring a speaker too close to or a microphone too close to a speaker and it starts to howl.
00:28:16.000And I think something like that's happened in the universities is that they started to tilt towards the left in the 60s.
00:28:21.000And then as they tilted, they tilted harder.
00:28:24.000And as they tilted harder, they tilted even harder until all of the...
00:28:28.000Diversity was forced out of the universities, and I don't know if it's so much a consequence of the actual policies of the university as just a feedback process that got out of control.
00:28:38.000I mean, if it's 50% liberals and 50% conservatives, no problem.
00:28:42.000But if it's 70% liberals and 30% conservatives, maybe it rapidly goes to 99% liberals and 1% conservatives.
00:28:53.000When you look at the University of Toronto, where you are, what is the number, if you had to guess?
00:28:59.000Well, it would depend to some degree on the discipline, but professors also tend to be characterized by personality traits that do tilt them towards liberalism.
00:29:09.000They're higher in trait openness, which is both creativity and interest in ideas.
00:29:13.000That's one of the things that temperamentally distinguishes liberals from conservatives.
00:30:37.000Was it a transgender man that you were having a discussion with that was saying that there's no difference, no biological difference in the sexes?
00:31:04.000had the qualifications to say that because he was a historian of medicine.
00:31:09.000Which hardly qualifies as a scientist.
00:31:12.000Not that you have to be a scientist to notice that there are biological differences between men and women.
00:31:17.000It was very bizarre for me at that point in the last few months because I was under substantial pressure from the university to stop repeating my claim that I wouldn't use compelled pronouns to refer to people because the university regarded that as against the university policies and also against the Ontario Human Rights Code,
00:31:37.000And as my employers, they're responsible for everything I say, whether or not there has been a complaint made, whether or not the consequence of my speech is intended or unintended, because that's built into the legislation.
00:31:48.000And believe me, that's coming your way, because this legislation spreads like mad.
00:31:52.000But on the one hand, I got two letters of warning from the university for...
00:31:58.000Refusing to use these compelled pronouns, which I regard as the ideological constructions of radical left-wingers.
00:32:04.000And this professor went on the agenda, this Ontario news show, and announced publicly that there were no biological differences between men and women.
00:33:29.000We actually need to know whether it's one person or more than one person.
00:33:33.000Do you think it's reasonable for people that are asexual, people that really are uncomfortable with the idea of being a man or a woman?
00:33:39.000Is it reasonable that we come up with a distinction for that?
00:33:42.000I mean, that seems like it would be nice, and this is one of the things that you've said.
00:33:46.000One of the things that you don't like about this is that you're being compelled to use these made-up pronouns, and that if we as a society, as a culture, as a civilization, sort of adopt a new phrase, that you would be fine with that.
00:34:12.000Those aren't the people that have the problem with it.
00:34:14.000The people that have the problem with these pronouns, the transsexual community almost entirely, or at least, I shouldn't say entirely, but predominantly prefer the alternative pronoun.
00:34:24.000A male to female transgender person prefers to be called a woman, or she, and use the female pronouns.
00:34:31.000So there's some tiny fraction of the transsexual community, or we could say there's some tiny fraction of people who are identifying themselves with the transgender community, which is already a tiny fraction, who claims that they have an identity that doesn't fit into either binary category.
00:34:49.000Well, it's a proposition that I think bears some scrutiny to begin with, because I don't believe that the claims that that tiny community is making are coherent in any sense, because they say, well, you could be man, woman, or neither, or both.
00:35:04.000Those aren't coherent claims in my estimation.
00:35:09.000What they're saying is that we don't fit into a category and therefore we get to invent our own plurality of categories.
00:35:25.000One of my favorite stories came out of an all-girls university in Massachusetts where a group of women, where they were trying to pick a president of the student body or whatever, and one of the girls who went to that school decided that she identified as a man.
00:35:45.000So she changed her name, and I don't believe there was any hormones or anything involved.
00:36:02.000Won, and then was denounced by the rest of the class because now she was a white male, so she was a part of the patriarchy, and she was a part of the whole problem with society, and that she should not be allowed, or he should not be allowed to take that position,
00:37:14.000Once you've identified yourself as marginalized, there's no logical way that you can exclude anyone else who regards themselves as marginalized.
00:37:23.000And so the marginalized, the community of the marginalized, expands and expands and expands and expands.
00:37:29.000And part of the reason for that is that People are, every individual is a multiplicity, and there's an element to every individual that's marginalized.
00:37:40.000You know, so for example, It's clearly the case that when a child is socialized, there's pros and cons to that.
00:37:49.000The pros are, the socialization turns the little beastly two-year-old into a four-year-old that other children can play with.
00:37:56.000And that does happen between the ages of two and four, if a child is socialized properly.
00:38:01.000Then what the child does is kind of turn into a clone of everyone else so that he or she can benefit from being able to interact with everyone else.
00:38:10.000Now, that builds up a certain amount of individuality because kids learn to talk and they learn to play and all that.
00:38:16.000And it destroys a certain amount of individuality.
00:38:19.000So everybody sacrifices a certain portion of their peculiarity to become a socialized creature.
00:38:25.000And some of that's good and some of it's bad.
00:39:01.000You can't have a society without marginalizing people, or you can't have a society without making everyone, part of everyone marginalized.
00:39:09.000And so then when you start to concentrate on the marginalized, it just grows and expands and grows and expands and grows and expands until everyone becomes marginalized.
00:39:17.000And that just highlights a real problem with quote mining, that someone is going to take that, you can't have a society without marginalizing people, quote, and put it under Dr. Jordan Peterson, this is what he believes.
00:41:35.000And I think that society as a whole and civilization is sort of a work in progress.
00:41:40.000We're working all this out, and that's one of the beautiful things about you being able to discuss these things on your YouTube page, as opposed to just having to battle it out inside the echo chamber of the universities.
00:42:10.000Egalitarian utopia idea it's beautiful in its concept that we should all be able to get along and everything should be equal the problem is it defies human nature it defies the 200 300,000 years of DNA that we have a Bouncing around inside of our bodies that demand certain types of behavior and I think It's so important that we discuss these things.
00:42:36.000And I think that society and civilization as a whole, this thing that is ultimately in this growing state, this constant state of improvement and objective Interaction.
00:42:49.000There has to be some sort of discussion.
00:42:52.000One of the problems that I have with the so-called social justice warriors and with this movement is that they're enforcing a certain type of thinking and behavior, and they're incredibly aggressive about it, hence the warrior term.
00:43:07.000Yeah, well, I think a fair bit of that is grounded again in temperament, which is quite comical.
00:43:12.000I mean, one of the things that our research indicated, research on political correctness indicated that this trait, agreeableness, is a good predictor of holding politically correct views, and also that being female is a good predictor of holding politically correct views.
00:43:26.000And I think part of the reason for that, and the warrior aspect to it, too, is that agreeableness is...
00:44:07.000But you're unbelievably hostile to anyone who's outside of that that you regard as a threat slash predator.
00:44:14.000And so agreeableness makes you divide the world up into protected children and predators.
00:44:20.000And you see that on Social Justice Warriors' Twitter pages.
00:44:23.000I mean, I follow a bunch of them, and I go to them and I watch this, incredibly supportive, ridiculously so, in terms of mediocre expressions, tweets, oh my god, it's so brilliant, and you're saying almost nothing.
00:44:36.000And they're so incredibly supportive of the people that think along their lines and so incredibly hostile.
00:44:43.000And this idea of shaming people that don't agree with them, not interacting with them, but almost immediately insulting them, almost immediately marginalizing them, which is ironic.
00:45:07.000It's one of the things that's very comical about this, from my perspective, is that it's such sex-stereotypical behaviour, is that at the same time that the social justice warriors are denouncing the idea that psychology, for example, might have anything to do with sex differences,
00:45:23.000they're acting out sex-stereotype behaviour like mad in terms of their persecution of predators and their protection of the kin-slash-in-group.
00:45:41.000Well, one of the differences is that personality and clinical psychology isn't a corrupt enterprise, whereas social psychology fundamentally is.
00:45:49.000It's been going through an absolute internal revolution over the last two years because of its own discovery that many of its fundamental studies and propositions are flawed.
00:45:59.000I would say social psychology is the most...
00:46:03.000Social justice slash left-leaning part of psychology and its methods are generally appalling.
00:46:11.000They're not well documented and they produce all sorts of categories that don't exist.
00:46:17.000I know it might seem like a trivial distinction to people outside of the field, but these disciplines are quite separate from a historical perspective.
00:47:00.000And personality psychologists have been very, very careful about measurement, whereas social psychologists are, as a general rule, very, very cavalier about their concepts.
00:47:09.000And that's led to a tremendous pollution, I would say, of the psychological literature.
00:47:13.000The implicit association test is a good example of that.
00:47:16.000That's the test that's being used to assess people's unconscious biases, unconscious racial biases.
00:47:23.000For example, if I showed you a bunch of pictures of black people and a bunch of photographs of white people, and then I asked you to associate a good or a bad word with the black people or the white people to respond after you've seen the picture.
00:47:37.000If you are white and you saw white photos, you'd be faster at responding to the positive words.
00:47:45.000And so they've used that as evidence of racism.
00:47:48.000But part of the problem with that is that you can't distinguish it from a novelty response.
00:47:53.000So, I mean, most people in a given racial group are far more familiar with members of their racial group.
00:47:59.000And the fact that they're more likely to associate negative things with racial groups that are outside of their racial group isn't something that can be easily distinguished from just a novelty effect.
00:48:09.000But they make wide-ranging claims about the inbuilt biases in people, and that's lent impetus to these movements that are racing through corporations across the United States and governmental agencies, where people are being subjected to mandatory unconscious racial bias retraining.
00:48:29.000And there's no evidence, by the way, that that works at all.
00:48:32.000In fact, the evidence that there is suggests quite the contrary, if you...
00:48:37.000You were discussing how preposterous this is on one of your videos because one of the people that was opposing you was actually a part of something like this, right?
00:48:45.000Yeah, well, the Human Resources and Equity people at the University of Toronto have made mandatory unconscious racism training, anti-bias training, and they've made it mandatory for their staff.
00:48:58.000And I found that absolutely appalling.
00:49:00.000First of all, it's political re-education.
00:49:02.000So when you say mandatory, like this is something that you had engaged in?
00:49:05.000No, I didn't have to, because I'm not part of the human resources staff.
00:49:09.000But the people that they're consulting with to implement these sorts of programs certainly have faculty and students in their sights.
00:49:16.000I mean, these are trial runs for much broader rolling out of exactly this sort of...
00:49:23.000of exactly this sort of re-education process.
00:49:25.000What's the methodology behind it and how has this been vetted?
00:49:30.000Oh, I don't think it's been vetted at all.
00:49:32.000Like, if you're going to, let's say you want to put into practice an educational process, what you need to do is you need to measure the initial state validly so that your measure, so you need to use multiple measures and all those measures need to say the same thing.
00:49:48.000So if you're going to accuse someone of racism, you need several different measures of racism and then you have to show that across all the measures, it's like using different meters, all the meters should read the same thing.
00:49:59.000Then you have to implement your educational intervention, carefully defined.
00:50:04.000Then you have to see afterwards if the consequence of the educational effort was a reduction in those initial...
00:50:14.000Indices, those additional measures, that sort of thing, when it's been done at all, has showed that educational interventions of that sort that are mandatory actually make racism and bias worse rather than better.
00:50:36.000This is one of the things that really makes me proud of my country.
00:50:40.000Our government has now announced that the judiciary in Canada will be selected.
00:50:45.000If you're going to be a candidate to be a judge, you have to produce a dossier that specifies your identities, whatever they happen to be, racial, ethnic, religious.
00:50:55.000And then the committee that's going to appoint you to the judiciary has to have undergone mandatory anti-racism and bias training before they're allowed to serve on the committee.
00:51:06.000So basically, we've set up a situation in Canada where...
00:51:10.000The people who select our judges have to go a kind of indoctrination that has no validity from a scientific perspective before they're allowed to select our judges.
00:52:00.000Yes, and they did that in collaboration with the Black Liberation Collective.
00:52:04.000Explain that one, because that one's adorable.
00:52:07.000The Black Liberation Collective, isn't that the group that somehow thinks that white people are inferior because they don't have enough melanin?
00:52:14.000Yeah, it was started by a woman who said exactly that.
00:52:18.000She's a black supremacist, and she said that the reason that white people are inferior is because they don't have enough melanin in their skin.
00:52:25.000And melanin, apparently, is this agent.
00:52:28.000Obviously, it's a pigment, but it's apparently this agent that transforms cosmic energy into wisdom.
00:52:35.000You can make up your own mind about her.
00:52:38.000And then the other person who started the Black Liberation Collective is a woman who used to work for the University of Toronto Students' Union who is now being pursued by that Students' Union for embezzling $300,000 from that organization with the help of a couple of her cronies.
00:52:55.000Well, why let a few facts stand in the way of abolishing racism?
00:52:58.000Yeah, well, they also are perfectly willing to promote violent means of social transformation.
00:53:04.000And the university claims that it's in favor of safety, you know, because they've gone after me because my refusal to use compelled pronouns has apparently made the campus unsafe.
00:53:14.000But they're perfectly willing to take advice from the Black Liberation Collective.
00:53:17.000And not only are they willing to take advice from them and not disavow them, despite their support for violent means of social revolution, they're also pushing equality of outcome on their employees.
00:53:29.000And the people who taught their mandatory anti-racism and anti-bias training program said outright in their training material, which I have copies of, That any institution that doesn't have equality of outcome as part of its characteristic at every level of the power organization is corrupt and should be restructured.
00:53:50.000But that pales in comparison to my refusal to use compelled pronouns, obviously.
00:53:54.000I just don't understand how this gets so far.
00:53:57.000I just don't understand how no one has...
00:54:44.000I pushed you a little farther than you should have gone, and you agreed.
00:54:47.000And so then I pushed you a little farther than you should have gone again, and you agreed.
00:54:51.000And if anybody's interested in this sort of process, and this is a horrifying book, if you want to read about how this process works, you can read a book called Ordinary Men by Robert Browning.
00:55:26.000And when the Nazis went through Poland and then needed to impose their brand of order on Poland, they brought policemen in.
00:55:34.000They brought this battalion of middle-aged policemen in.
00:55:38.000And their commandant, their commander...
00:55:41.000He was, by all accounts, a pretty decent guy, and he told them that because it was wartime they were probably going to have to do some pretty terrible things, but that they could go home if they didn't think they were up to it.
00:55:51.000So there was no compulsion, you know, this wasn't a Milgram experiment or an experiment where you had to obey orders.
00:55:58.000The guy who was giving the orders said, look, this is going to be awful, but you can back off.
00:56:01.000But the guys thought, well, I'm not going to leave my comrades here to do the dirty work, you know, which is kind of a virtue in a perverse way.
00:56:09.000And then Browning details how they went from ordinary policemen to guys who were taking naked pregnant women out into the middle of fields and shooting them in the back of the head.
00:56:17.000And they were physically ill during most of the transformation process.
00:56:21.000You know, they started out by rounding up the Jewish men between the ages of 16 and 65. Well, you know, you can kind of understand that because you're at war.
00:56:29.000And then, well, then they put them in stadiums.
00:56:31.000And then, well, then they had to shoot some of them.
00:56:33.000And then they had to load them on cattle cars.
00:56:42.000And so that's how things get to where they are now.
00:56:45.000I know they're not at that point, and I'm not trying to make the case that they're at that point.
00:56:49.000Well, you're one of the first people that's sounding an alarm, that there's a real issue with controlling people.
00:56:54.000There's a real issue with controlling dialogue, controlling the way people communicate, And that these ideologies, although seemingly innocuous, they can take you down very dangerous roads.
00:57:38.000And, you know, we're approaching a situation, and this has already happened, I think, more in the United States than in Canada, although our countries are competing to see who can cross the idiot line fastest.
00:57:49.000You're in a situation in the U.S. where 50% of your population won't talk to the other 50%.
00:57:56.000And I would say it's more pronounced on the left liberal side because they regard everybody who voted for Trump as essentially as an enemy.
00:58:02.000It's like, hey people, that's 50% of your citizens.
00:58:06.000You might think about talking with them.
00:58:09.000You know, people you can't talk to, those are enemies.
00:58:13.000Well, ironically, I really truly believe that one of the big factors in Trump's rise to power is that people are sick of this oversimplification, this ridiculous ideology coming from the left.
00:58:25.000Yeah, they're sick of identity politics.
00:58:38.000Well, if you teach one side to play identity politics, de facto, you teach the other side to play identity politics.
00:58:45.000And I've seen more and more people who are center people, as far as I'm concerned, pushed to the right because of the continual insistence that by their mere existence, they're part of the perpetrator group.
00:58:56.000Just by being a white person who is somehow or another successful, you are a privileged person, you're part of the elite, you're part of the 1%, you're part of the problem.
00:59:09.000You're an oppressor by being just a person with a home in the suburbs.
00:59:14.000Well, and it's also extremely annoying for people who've worked really hard and who've made the requisite sacrifices to become successful along some dimension to have that immediately attributed to their oppression.
00:59:29.000For the social justice warrior types out there who might be listening, it's like, are you really willing to say that every single person who's accomplished something has done that as a consequence of oppression?
00:59:41.000That's again what the Soviets claimed with regards to the successful peasants just before the 1920s.
00:59:48.000It's like, well, the peasants weren't emancipated.
00:59:51.000They were serfs until about 30 years before that.
01:00:36.000And then they look for the people in the village who are willing to move against those 20 successful people.
01:00:42.000Well, those guys at the bottom, those hundred resentful, jealous, murderous people at the bottom, they're just waiting for an opportunity to go kick down some doors.
01:00:51.000And that's exactly what they did in the 1920s.
01:00:53.000And as I said, they wiped out all their productive peasants.
01:00:56.000And then six million Ukrainians starved to death.
01:01:15.000There's nothing that you can imagine that's horrible enough so that it matched the reality of what happened in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959. And, you know, the West knew about this too.
01:01:27.000Early, Malcolm Muggeridge in the 30s was documenting for England, for English newspapers, exactly what was going on in the Soviet Union.
01:01:34.000Bloody intellectuals didn't admit it until the mid-70s, you know, with the exception of people like George Orwell.
01:02:59.000You want all the power and you want all the victimization at the same time.
01:03:02.000Well, Yale is a great example because Yale was one of the...
01:03:07.000What happened with the Halloween costume debacle at Yale was one of the first videos that was released that made people horrified, where they couldn't believe how students were communicating with professors Yeah, well, the student who screamed up a storm about the male professor,
01:03:25.000who was the husband of the woman who wrote the pro-Halloween costume letter, it turned out she was on the bloody hiring committee that hired him.
01:03:32.000One of the things she screamed was, who hired you?
01:03:35.000It was like, well, it turned out it was you, because you were on the committee just a few years before.
01:03:42.000Explain that to people that don't know what the hell we're talking about.
01:03:45.000Explain this debacle, because it really was about questionable Halloween costumes.
01:03:52.000Well, it was about questioning Halloween costumes.
01:03:54.000Halloween costumes are Part of the whole point of Halloween is to have questionable costumes, right?
01:04:02.000You play with death, for example, and decay and horror.
01:04:06.000And it's a time when the norms with regards to the expression of things that are outside of our normal behavior are suspended so that everybody can...
01:04:17.000Have a little celebration, as it turns out.
01:04:20.000Well, you know, campuses have got all upset about things like cultural appropriation.
01:04:23.000At Queen's University in Canada just the other week, they were going after students who were dressing up as Viet Cong, for example, or Mexicans.
01:04:31.000It's like, I just don't see what the hell's racist about dressing up like a Mexican.
01:04:39.000There's nothing wrong with Mexicans, so why is it wrong to dress up like them?
01:04:43.000If you want to be Pancho Villa for Halloween, what's wrong with that?
01:04:46.000Well, you can regard that as an homage just as much as a denigration.
01:04:51.000It's like, why is that such a problem?
01:04:53.000But anyways, it doesn't matter, because nothing's too trivial to be a problem to a social justice warrior, because they don't like to deal with real problems.
01:05:00.000And Yale went after Halloween costumes.
01:05:03.000So this woman wrote a letter saying, maybe we should just relax about this stuff, and don't put restrictions on what people wear for Halloween, but let people decide what is and isn't offensive.
01:05:16.000Yes, and well, many Halloween costumes are offensive.
01:07:44.000What you do is people tell you what they're afraid of and then you break it into little bits so that they can go confront them.
01:07:50.000You know, so maybe they're afraid of going to a party and you break that down and you say, well, do you know how to introduce yourself?
01:07:55.000And they say, well, I don't really even know how to shake someone's hand.
01:07:58.000And so then you practice having them shake their hand and introduce themselves because maybe they weren't taught by their half-witted parents when they were...
01:08:05.000When they were young, because they were ignored.
01:08:07.000And so then you say, well, maybe you can go to a party for half an hour and all you have to do is introduce yourself to two people and we'll call that success.
01:08:14.000And you build up their confidence and their confidence one step at a time.
01:08:18.000And what happens, the clinical literature indicates quite clearly, is you don't make people less anxious by doing that.
01:08:24.000You make them braver It's not the same thing.
01:08:28.000You don't make the world and its horrors smaller.
01:08:32.000You make the person and their capacity to deal with horror larger.
01:08:58.000You don't mollycoddle them and make them safe unless you're their enemy, unless you're trying to devour their spirit.
01:09:06.000And that's what we have in the universities.
01:09:07.000We have the reign of the Oedipal Mother, whose answer to everything is, oh, just come a little closer, dear, and I'll protect you from the world.
01:09:15.000It's just like Hansel and Gretel's, you know, the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story.
01:09:21.000Well, my house is made of gingerbread.
01:09:23.000Just come in here and everything will be fine.
01:09:24.000Well, she feeds you candy to fatten you up so she can eat you.
01:09:27.000That's the archetype of a modern university.
01:11:11.000There's this idea that way back when there was a feminist paradise, and that would be like noble savage mode of living where everything was egalitarian and women dominated.
01:12:02.000And anyway, so the basic claim is that Western civilization is a brutish patriarchy and that whatever positive things it might have managed to accomplish were all accomplished as a consequence of oppression and theft.
01:12:16.000And that the appropriate thing to do is to restructure it from the bottom up.
01:13:50.000If you were the Marxist dictator, things wouldn't have gone a lot better.
01:13:54.000So, and if you're the sort of person that thinks that if you would have been in control, things would have gone a lot better, then you're exactly the sort of person who should never be in control.
01:14:08.000That's an important point, because I think this is something that you've said that I absolutely agree with, that I think a lot of this thinking and the way people are behaving, it seems based on revenge.
01:14:17.000It seems based on revenge for awkward upbringings, social uncomfortability.
01:14:24.000It seems like there's something about the way they view the world, where they want to get back at people that have literally done them no wrong.
01:14:32.000It's resentment for the burden of being.
01:14:52.000And it's very easy for people to become resentful about being, about existence.
01:14:57.000You know, these kids who shoot up high schools and these mass shooters, they're the perfect examples of people who run on nothing but resentment.
01:15:06.000They're out to kill the innocent because that's the best marker of...
01:15:10.000That's the best way of showing just how much contempt they have for existence itself.
01:15:17.000It's a lot more malevolent and vengeful to punish the innocent.
01:15:22.000It's like people are motivated to a great degree by resentment of being.
01:15:27.000And a huge chunk of that is manifested in...
01:15:29.000That's the dark side of ideological possession.
01:15:33.000So I get to decide who my enemies are, and then I get to go after them, and I can go after them for every single thing that's ever been done to me that isn't good.
01:15:40.000And, well, a lot of that's just built into the structure of existence.
01:15:48.000That form some sort of a groupthink, and then they act accordingly.
01:15:52.000And this is what you've been warning against, and this is where I completely agree with you, and this is why I think the subject is so important, and I love the way you've outlined all the steps and the problems with Marxism and ideologies in general, that we are dealing with this.
01:16:06.000These are the beginning steps of it, and people who look at it now and they say it's social change, it's social justice.
01:18:29.000There's also a gigantic financial stake, the amount of money that you're...
01:18:33.000Well, and this is especially the case in the U.S. I mean, one of the things that's happened over the last 30 years is that the proportion of university expenditures that's gone to the administration has massively, massively increased.
01:18:46.000And at the same time, the student loan burden has increased.
01:18:50.000And so what's happened in a weird sense is that the administrators have conspired to steal the future earnings of their students.
01:18:58.000And then you can't declare bankruptcy.
01:19:33.000It's crazy because they were just trying to combat the issue where so many kids were defaulting on their student loans, they're trying to make you perpetually responsible for it, or the idea is that these kids have to learn responsibility.
01:19:45.000By overcharging them for some useless education?
01:19:48.000Well, I would also say that it's not particularly useful to burden your citizenry with a massive debt as soon as they graduate at a time when they're most likely to take entrepreneurial risks.
01:20:01.000You know, you're not going to take entrepreneurial risks if you're so burdened with debt, you can't get yourself off the ground.
01:20:06.000Yeah, and we're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt with people that if you're lucky, you're going to make, what, $40,000, $50,000 a year straight out of college?
01:20:36.000Read the Gulag Archipelago first, because you need to get your arguments together.
01:20:41.000And Solzhenitsyn won a Nobel Prize for that book and for his other writing, and it was one of the key...
01:20:48.000There was a couple of things that brought down the Soviet Union, but one of them was Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book, and he demolished the intellectual credibility of Marxism forever.
01:21:24.000There's no excuse for these professors who claim to be benevolent Marxists.
01:21:30.000Well, I think the way you framed it is very important.
01:21:32.000I think the way you framed it is them being compassionate intellectuals that are inclined toward this because, on the surface, it seems like it's what a compassionate intellectual would support.
01:22:00.000You box people in, and you control them, and you get them to stick inside that ideology, and in doing so, you suppress people.
01:22:06.000It's so ironic that the people that are against suppressing are actually suppressing people through enforcing these ideologies and suppressing the marketplace of free ideas.
01:22:17.000You're not allowed to have free ideas.
01:22:19.000You're not allowed to debate these things.
01:22:49.000I better go check this out and see, you know, do a little bit of in-depth investigating.
01:22:54.000And what he found out was that There were many reasons for the disparity, and perhaps one of them was unfair discrimination, but there were another dozen and they seemed to account for more of the disparity than the discrimination.
01:23:07.000I mean, just the fact that men take the more dangerous jobs is a huge contributor to that, and it's not trivial.
01:23:14.000You should get paid more if you're putting your limbs on the line.
01:23:17.000You know, I mean, I grew up in northern Alberta where a lot of young men dropped out of school and went and worked on the oil rigs.
01:23:26.000But, you know, the guys would lose their fingers, they'd lose their toes, it was 40 bloody below up there and they'd be wrestling pipe in the middle of the bush.
01:24:04.000Warren Farrell, who wrote this book, was giving a speech about this book, and the response was so unbelievably violent and crazy and aggressive and also ignorant.
01:24:31.000In the last two months because I don't want to use these compelled pronouns.
01:24:34.000Well, the one woman in the debate that you had with the other man that I believe is transsexual, the one woman who was trying to say what is the difference between not using those words and using racial slurs and hate speech to describe these people.
01:24:53.000The idea that that's a woman who's a professor, who's expressing it in that way, what is the difference between not choosing to use made-up pronouns versus calling someone generally accepted racial slurs?
01:25:08.000That they're trying to frame that as the same thing is so intellectually dishonest.
01:25:12.000Well, the racial slurs are also legal.
01:25:15.000So what's happening is the law is already such that not using one of these made-up pronouns is a crime, whereas using a racial epithet isn't.
01:25:49.000This is a bizarre moment in time where the preposterous nature of it is so undeniable that it's forcing a lot of people.
01:25:59.000And I applaud you for doing what you're doing and risking your status with the university, risking your support of your peers, and sticking your neck out the way you've been doing with your YouTube videos.
01:26:12.000Because if you hadn't done that, there's a lot of people who wouldn't be aware Of how insidious and what you were describing earlier, the creep.
01:26:20.000The slow creep towards pushing forward, waiting for you to object, waiting, and then moving forward a little bit more once you relax.
01:26:54.000To begin with, in the first two weeks, which was the most stressful part of this for me, I would say, I would say the bulk of the press articles were...
01:27:15.000But luckily, fortunately, I seemed to maneuver past that.
01:27:22.000And then people started to actually read the policies that I was speaking about and started to think about them.
01:27:31.000And one thing about the press is that they're actually fairly in favor of free expression.
01:27:38.000Given that that's their absolute bread and butter.
01:27:41.000And so the tenor shifted, and I would say the overwhelming majority of press articles in the last, apart from the first two weeks, have been positive.
01:27:53.000What you've done in your YouTube videos, which I think is an amazing forum, particularly for what you're doing, is document and describe in great detail the issues with every single one of these problems with no interruption.
01:28:07.000And I think that's one of the best things about it.
01:28:09.000The fact that there's not really a whole lot of forums that will give you the chance to express yourself.
01:28:14.000I've seen some of your videos of hundreds of thousands of views.
01:28:17.000And there's not a whole lot of forums where you can do that and speak for...
01:28:21.000I mean, they're all like an hour long, right?
01:28:27.000Well, I started posting my lectures on YouTube, my classroom lectures in 2013, and in really bare-bones form.
01:28:35.000They're just an iPad recording of me lecturing.
01:28:38.000I didn't edit in the slides or the images, partly because that's very time-consuming.
01:28:43.000But then I watched it for about two years and by September of this year it had climbed to about a million views and then I really started thinking about YouTube because YouTube was cute cat videos, you know, and Justin Bieber songs for a very long period of time.
01:28:55.000But it's not that anymore and that's probably been about two years or maybe two and a half years.
01:29:01.000But then I realized that YouTube is actually a revolution that's as overwhelming as the Gutenberg press revolution.
01:29:08.000Gutenberg invented the printing press and Because for the first time in human history, A lecture can have the same reach and the same longevity as a book.
01:29:19.000And it's a lot easier for people to listen.
01:29:21.000And the time-lagged publication is basically zero, right?
01:29:25.000I mean, because you can do it live, I guess, as we are right now, or you can post it in a day or two after publishing it, and you have access to this insanely large audience.
01:29:35.000And the other thing that's really interesting about YouTube, with regards to my, especially the more academic videos, is there's only one reason that people are watching them.
01:30:49.000I think these echo chambers and these people that do find these patterns of behavior that they subscribe to.
01:30:57.000And I think that's a part of the problem with ideologies in general, is that instead of thinking for yourself, you subscribe to a predetermined pattern of behavior, and you lock in, like, this is what I'm supposed to believe, this is what I'm supposed to enforce, this is what I'm supposed to side with,
01:31:15.000One of the good things about the Internet is that it is potentially possible to see contrary viewpoints I'm sure a lot have come to your videos in anger,
01:31:34.000mad at you, and then listen to your points of view and listen to how clearly you've established all of these positions and what you actually feel is the problem with these positions in a very...
01:31:45.000Very calm and very rational and a very well educated point of view.
01:31:49.000I think these people, they have the potential to be at least informed.
01:31:59.000Maybe, I don't know, 2,500 letters maybe to my email accounts now about this.
01:32:04.000A very large number of them, maybe 200 letters, 150 to 200, have been from people on the radical left who've written to me and said that they can no longer speak.
01:32:15.000Because the authoritarian types, the PC authoritarians, have got so controlling that they're...
01:32:21.000Once fashionable position is now being deemed unacceptable and they're alienated and excluded.
01:32:28.000I mean, you see that happening with feminists like Germaine Greer.
01:32:30.000I mean, Germaine Greer, who's been banned from campuses, she's not very happy with the idea that being a woman is something that's been reduced to a whim.
01:32:41.000Because she thinks that there's more to being a woman than mere subjective choice.
01:32:45.000Well, that's no longer a tenable viewpoint on the left, and so people who hold that viewpoint, many of them are feminists, are no longer giving along with the, say...
01:32:53.000Radical, gender-bender activist types who've got center stage at the moment.
01:32:59.000Yeah, Christine Summers has the same issue with that.
01:33:02.000She's a feminist, and she calls herself the factual feminist, and she pushes back against...
01:33:07.000What her perspective is, is instead of embracing these false narratives and running with them as if they're the facts...
01:33:15.000And just using that to reinforce your ideology, she's saying that does feminism a disservice.
01:33:20.000Let's look at the actual reality of the situation and let's look at it from a balanced and objective perspective.
01:33:29.000The idea of being rational and objective Well, that's because as far as the postmodern social justice warriors are concerned, those are just code words for oppression.
01:33:39.000You've got to remember this with regards to having these sorts of arguments.
01:33:43.000When you say objective and rational, that's predicated on your implicit belief that there is such a thing as the objective and there is such a thing as rational.
01:33:53.000And the radical postmodernists, they do not buy that.
01:33:58.000Not at all, as far as they're concerned.
01:34:00.000That's just another power game on your part.
01:34:02.000And built into the laws, like Bill C-16 in Canada now, and the same in the laws in New York City that govern the use of these gender pronouns.
01:34:10.000Built into the law is the idea that there's no biological foundation for your identity, and that it's all purely subjective.
01:34:28.000I mean, isn't it possible that these kind of discussions and that your videos and that all the people that agree and all the people that are pushing back against this can have some sort of an effect on this movement?
01:35:02.000By about the mid-90s, though, I realized that things were in such a state of chaotic flux That the one thing I could be certain of was that no matter what I was afraid of with regards to the future, that isn't what was going to happen.
01:35:17.000And so, I'm not cynical about the future, but I do believe that we're in an unprecedented state of indeterminacy and flux, and God only knows what could happen.
01:35:30.000Having said that, I wouldn't say I'm optimistic about the possibility that the universities will reform themselves, because I think that, well, even with the free speech debate that the University of Toronto hosted, They did three politically correct things during the debate,
01:35:45.000which I thought was really interesting, because if I would have staged the debate and been working on their side, let's say, I would have said, strategically speaking, no politically correct maneuvering during this debate, because all it's going to do is discredit us.
01:36:01.000The university opened up by noting that the land on which we were having the debate was once the What was once property owned by the original Native Americans, which is something I find abhorrent because on the one hand we took it and now on the other hand we want to be friends.
01:36:19.000It's like I don't think you get to have both sides of that moral play at the same time.
01:36:26.000That's how the university opened the debate.
01:36:28.000And then the next thing that happened was that they announced that there would be councillors waiting outside for anybody who was too traumatized by the contents of the discussion.
01:36:35.000And then they closed by announcing the Trans Day of Remembrance.
01:36:41.000But the reason I'm pointing this out is because it just shows you the fact that those things happened.
01:36:49.000That's just how things are at the university.
01:36:52.000And they didn't even notice that people were going to turn themselves inside out, noticing that, saying, well, God, this is so biased, I can hardly believe it, which is exactly what happened.
01:37:01.000That's how saturated the universities are with this kind of thinking.
01:37:04.000And I don't have any idea what can reverse that.
01:37:08.000Collective decisions on the part of citizens, A, to stop sending their children there, B, to stop donating money and leaving it in wills, and C, to pressure politicians.
01:37:17.000Like, in my wilder moments, I think, cut the funding to the universities by 25%.
01:37:22.000And let the faculty have a war about what's important.
01:37:27.000And maybe what would be left over was what the university should be.
01:37:34.000With the exception of the science, technology, engineering and mathematics ends of things, I think it's come to that.
01:37:40.000Don't you think that what you're doing when you're making these videos is, in a sense, branching out away from just a university and teaching online?
01:38:22.000I mean, I've been spending a lot of time in the last month or so also I'm concentrating on video editing, and so I spent about 10 hours this week editing about an hour discussion with a Russian Orthodox icon carver, weirdly enough, that I'm going to launch in the next three or four days,
01:38:39.000and we discussed things that are very image-heavy, and so I've been cutting in a lot of images, and it is a technology that far supersedes what...
01:38:50.000I mean, I like lecturing, and lectures can be very effective, but...
01:38:55.000Basically with YouTube you can turn your lecture into a documentary and Then instead of teaching a hundred people you can teach 50,000.
01:39:03.000It's like that's a lot different That's a lot different and it's up there permanently.
01:39:08.000Yes, and that 50,000 can grow and grow and grow and as it becomes more spread and shared The also the discussions about it become more varied.
01:39:17.000Yeah Well, more than three million people have watched some element of this in the last couple of months.
01:39:23.000And in September, I had about 9,000 subscribers.
01:39:27.000That took me about two years, three years to build.
01:39:30.000And one of my ambitions, which was kind of a tongue-in-cheek and comical ambition, is I thought, ha, you know, I bet I can get more subscribers in the next three years than the U of T has students.
01:40:12.000So then I think, well, hell, you know, I could do a whole series on Solzhenitsyn.
01:40:16.000I could do a whole series on George Orwell.
01:40:18.000I could do a whole series on Aldous Huxley.
01:40:20.000I could do a whole series on archetypal biblical stories.
01:40:24.000And half of me thinks, well, if 50,000 people are going to watch each of those, and I can turn them into documentaries instead of just lectures...
01:41:37.000You put on this virtual reality If you're watching a virtual reality show on your phone, a regular phone that fits in your pocket, just slides into this headset, you could do not just a two-dimensional thing where you're showing a lecture and showing images and having a discussion and putting these images in the background or in the foreground and have the audio over it,
01:42:00.000but rather you could have three-dimensional things where you could Show a city, a village, a mountain range.
01:42:43.000This whole podcast thing is very surprising, but the YouTube is only a small fraction of the amount of people that actually listen to the podcast.
01:43:16.000You're not glued to a screen with the podcasts.
01:43:18.000No, I was doing some work around my office when I was listening to one of yours, one of your things on YouTube, and I found that it was just as interesting if I was doing some other things around my office.
01:43:28.000It's a very good passive, like podcasts themselves are a very good passive form of education.
01:43:53.000Whereas we've been listening for a very, very long period of time.
01:43:56.000And all this new technology puts us right back into tribal mode, basically, except with this incredible technological enhancement.
01:44:07.000It wouldn't be difficult at all to extract the audio from any of these YouTube videos and just start putting it online as a podcast.
01:44:13.000And again, you know, people could listen to it when they're in traffic, when they can't look at anything.
01:44:17.000On planes, on the bus, you know, wherever you are where you can just sit down and you can close your eyes and you don't have to be paying attention to it visually.
01:44:28.000Yeah, well, about four or five months ago, I emailed the University of Toronto because they have a kind of a massive online course branch which they're toying with.
01:44:38.000And I said, look, I've got a million people who've watched my videos.
01:44:42.000Like, maybe you guys should give me a hand.
01:44:44.000We should do something about this because...
01:44:47.000I got a million people who are watching these videos.
01:44:49.000It's like, that's a significant number of people.
01:46:37.000So as long as you hit threshold, I mean, that's what happens often, say, if you're trying to pass the bar or something like that.
01:46:45.000You get to take it a number of times, but you have to hit threshold.
01:46:49.000Well, Thaddeus Russell, who's a history professor at Occidental, he's doing that very same thing.
01:46:55.000He talked about it here, that he's building right now an online university.
01:47:00.000He is planning on giving out degrees in history through his online university because he's been teaching at universities for a long time and he has a huge problem also with the politically correct movement and He was speaking out against this really crazy story where these two kids adults got intoxicated and had sex and And because they were both intoxicated,
01:47:26.000for some reason, the boy was described as the attacker and he was being accused of sexual assault, even though it was consensual, completely consensual, even though they were both...
01:47:40.000Not only did she send him texts saying, do you have condoms?
01:47:53.000That kid is suing, and Thaddeus Russell came on here and discussed it, but that politically correct ideology where – I mean, it's essentially, it's prejudice against men.
01:48:06.000So he's stepping outside of the university.
01:48:20.000And again, he's another one who, like yourself, has stuck his neck out and spoke out about what he thinks is this preposterous movement.
01:48:28.000Towards denying facts, denying reality, and forming these narratives that are based on their ideologies, and sticking within this box, and then seeking to find people that agree with it, and then reinforcing these ideas in this echo chamber.
01:48:44.000For someone who's outside of it, like myself, it's a fascinating thing to watch.
01:48:49.000For someone who's inside of it, like yourself, it must be maddening.
01:48:52.000Well, we've tried other online interventions too, so I have these YouTube videos up.
01:48:59.000I worked with some corporations a while back because I've done some consulting, and I designed tests to help people hire better employees, which I still do.
01:49:09.000And in fact, I work with this company up in California called the Founder Institute, and it's the world's largest stage early technology company incubator.
01:49:17.000It's created 2,500 companies in the last four years, and we test now in 135 cities.
01:49:23.000But when I was marketing these tests to companies, they kept asking me what could be done about their poorer performing employees.
01:49:30.000And I said, well, I didn't know because it's not that easy to...
01:49:34.000If you have someone who's problematic, who's troubled, it's not that easy for a manager to figure out how to straighten them out.
01:49:56.000It asks you some questions about six dimensions of your life.
01:49:59.000You know, your health, mental and physical, your use of drugs and alcohol, your wishes three to five years down the road for intimate relationships, for family, for career, for education, and so on.
01:50:10.000It asks you, what could your life be like three to five years down the road if you set it up for you like you were someone you were taking care of?
01:50:29.000And then it asks you to write for 15 minutes about what your life would be like three to five years down the road if you let your bad habits and your, you know, idiocies and your foolishnesses and your weaknesses take the upper hand and auger you into the ground.
01:50:43.000And so it's like you get to design a little heaven to strive for and a little hell to avoid.
01:50:48.000And then you write for, then you basically turn that into an implementable plan.
01:50:52.000That's the second part of the program.
01:50:54.000We've used that with about 5,000, 5 to 7,000 university students now, mostly in Europe, at the Rotterdam School of Management.
01:51:01.000And we've raised their grade point average of their kids 25%, dropped their dropout rate the same.
01:51:07.000And it's had a walloping effect on men and on non-Western ethnic minorities.
01:51:12.000It's moved the non-Western ethnic minority student population Performance at Rotterdam School of Management from 70% below the average to above the female Dutch natives.
01:51:27.000And so the other, the reason I'm telling you this, apart from the fact that it's a very good program and...
01:51:33.000We did it at Mohawk College in Canada a year ago, and we dropped their dropout rate in the first semester, 50%.
01:51:39.000And that especially, again, worked well for men, because men are at more risk of dropping out now, and especially for men who didn't have good grades in high school.
01:51:47.000So, not only is there the possibility for the net to provide tremendous dissemination of intellectual material, but there's also the possibility for the net to provide dissemination of Psychological interventions that have major impacts on people's mental health and productivity at almost extraordinarily low cost.
01:52:21.000When you do that, you sort of allow them to help themselves outline what they would like to accomplish, which most people don't do.
01:52:30.000No, our education system was designed in Chicago in the late 1800s to produce factory workers because it was set up when rural people were migrating to the cities en masse because their kids, first of all, were likely to get factory jobs and second of all,
01:52:46.000if you were working in a factory, your kids needed to be taken care of.
01:52:49.000And so the purpose of the schools was to train factory workers, which is why everyone's lined up in rows and why there are bells.
01:52:58.000The problem with that is that now people's careers basically have to be self-determined, but that's never part of the education system.
01:53:05.000Part of the reason I developed these programs was because I realized this is the same course where I'm teaching students that if they would have been in Germany in the 1930s, they would have been Nazis.
01:53:16.000I'm trying to get them to design their lives.
01:53:19.000It's way better to have someone articulate their own plan.
01:53:24.000You actually neurologically rewire people by having them formulate their own thoughts, which is why, you know, your school teachers used to say, put it in your own words.
01:53:32.000It's actually very good advice if they would explain what that means.
01:53:35.000It's like, if you have to conjure up the thoughts and you have to articulate them, then they change you.
01:53:41.000And so, well, and so this program has had...
01:53:48.000The effects have been absolutely overwhelming for us as researchers, because it's very, very difficult to produce an intervention that actually has a positive effect on people.
01:53:57.000You know, you hope it does, but generally when you test it out, it's like, nah, it doesn't do what you thought it did, or sometimes it even has the reverse effect.
01:54:24.000I did a video called Message to Millennials where...
01:54:27.000Because one of the things Jonathan Haidt said about...
01:54:31.000He called Karl Marx the patron saint of the social justice warriors and John Stuart Mill the patron saint of people say who stood for objective truth and freedom of expression.
01:54:51.000One of the things that Marx has over John Stuart Mill is that Marx is a social revolutionary, and young people like to think about ways to change the world, right?
01:54:59.000And that's actually a positive part of their development.
01:55:01.000It's a stage that the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget called the messianic stage, and he associated that with late adolescence.
01:55:08.000It's like, while young people want to change the world, the problem is that that's been harnessed into attempts to change other people.
01:55:48.000Because you're complicated and there are horrible monsters inside of you that need to be tamed and to be brought into alignment and submission so that you can be a powerful and useful person.
01:56:02.000I gave away the future authoring program as part of this video I made suggesting to millennials that instead of rushing out there to change the world by changing other bad people that they should look inward and sort themselves out properly and I think we've given away about four or five thousand of those programs so far.
01:56:37.000If you have a memory that's more than 18 months old, approximately, and when you pull that memory up to mind, if you still have an emotional reaction, that means you haven't fully articulated...
01:57:10.000Some of this work has been done by James Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin because he started to pioneer these sorts of writing programs and he found that if people wrote about uncertain things, past, present or future, so they could be traumatic things, they could be uncertain things,
01:57:26.000that their physical health improved and he did a lot of detailed research trying to figure out why that was and basically came down to the Explanation that it was something like an uncertainty reduction mechanism at work because your brain is always figuring out how well situated are you in the world?
01:57:42.000How much do you not know compared to how much have you mastered?
01:57:46.000And you can tell that you've mastered things because when you go somewhere and you act things turn out the way you want them.
01:57:52.000That's an indication of mastery and your brain is sort of keeping track across your whole life of How many places you've been where things haven't worked out compared to how many places you have been where they have worked out?
01:58:03.000And if all those places in your past where things haven't worked out, you need to map and master.
01:58:10.000And that decreases the existential load on you, but that actually decreases your psychophysiological load.
01:58:19.000And so we've put all that together in this self-authoring suite to help people write about their past, to sort it out in a detailed autobiography.
01:58:27.000It asks you questions about your past.
01:58:29.000It says, divide your life up into six epochs.
01:58:34.000That might be, say, birth to kindergarten, and then maybe elementary school, and then maybe junior high school, however you want to do it.
01:58:41.000And then to write about the emotionally significant events in each of those epochs, and then to describe their effects on you, and then to analyze...
01:58:50.000How you did in those situations, what you might have done differently, what you might do differently in the future, to straighten out your past.
01:58:57.000And I've done that with my students in my Maps of Meaning class for about the last 10 years, and some people have written 15,000 words.
01:59:03.000It's not that uncommon for students to write 15,000 words in their autobiography.
01:59:47.000And so you think, well, here's a time in my past I stumbled blindly into this horrible ditch and terrible things happened to me.
01:59:54.000It's like, okay, you need to take that apart.
01:59:56.000You need to figure out how was it that events conspired with your participation, voluntarily or involuntarily, so that that terrible consequence emerged.
02:00:07.000You need to know why that happened and how you could react differently in that situation.
02:00:12.000And as soon as you do that, Your brain will leave it alone.
02:00:15.000It won't obsess you about it anymore because the anxiety-producing parts of your brain are basically trying to tell you where there are obstacles in your environment.
02:01:01.000Memories can be stored at different levels of your brain, from sort of primordial, reptilian, image-laden areas that are very emotional, up to...
02:01:11.000Finally articulated plans for your future life.
02:01:14.000Well you want to take everything that's negative and emotional and transform that into a fully articulated vision for your future.
02:01:59.000I mean, it's just so logical and it sounds so great.
02:02:03.000I mean, I think that's one of the gigantic problems that a lot of people have with education, that you're learning facts, you're learning information, but you're not learning how to use your own mind.
02:02:14.000Yeah, well, here's something that's really interesting about that.
02:02:17.000So I spent a lot of time, I'm a scientist, but I'm also, I would say, I'm also a religious person.
02:02:27.000Well, that's, and I spent, literally, I've spent 40 years thinking about that.
02:02:30.000And for 20 of those years, I did almost nothing but think about that all the time.
02:02:36.000And I realized something, partly from reading Carl Jung, and what I realized was that Even the fundamentalists have the wrong idea about religious truth.
02:02:48.000Religious truth is not scientific truth.
02:02:51.000Like the stories in Genesis, which are very old stories, maybe tens of thousands of years old.
02:02:55.000They're obviously not scientific theories because the people who wrote them weren't scientists.
02:02:59.000We didn't have science until about 500 years ago.
02:03:02.000So the idea that the stories in Genesis are scientific theories is It's just false on every possible front.
02:03:09.000So then you might say, well, there's no other truth but scientific truth.
02:03:29.000And so a great story, like a great novel, which is a quasi-religious construction, because it's like a distillation of ordinary life into its most important elements, that's a map about how you should comport yourself in the world.
02:03:43.000And you might say, well, what do you mean by should?
02:03:46.000Because that's the question the moral relativists ask.
02:03:49.000And there's an answer to that, too, as far as I can tell.
02:03:52.000And I got this partly from reading Jean Piaget.
02:03:54.000So imagine that here's how you should act.
02:03:57.000You should act so that things are good for you like they would be for someone you're taking care of.
02:04:03.000But they have to be good for you in a way that's also good for your family.
02:04:07.000And they have to be good for you and your family in a way that's also good for society.
02:04:12.000And maybe even also good for the broader environment if you can manage that.
02:04:18.000And then That has to be good for you and your family and society and the world right now and next week and next month and a year from now and ten years from now.
02:04:30.000And so it's this harmonious balancing of multiple layers of being simultaneously.
02:04:35.000And that's a Darwinian reality, I would say.
02:04:40.000Your brain is actually attuned to tell you when you're doing that.
02:04:43.000And the way it tells you is that it reveals that what you're doing is meaningful.
02:04:49.000That's the sign that your nervous system is adapted to do this.
02:04:53.000It's adapted to exist, I would say, on the edge between order and chaos.
02:04:58.000Chaos is where things are so complex you can't handle it, and order is where things are so rigid that it's too restrictive.
02:05:05.000In between that, there's a place, a place that's meaningful, where you're partly stabilized and partly curious, and you're operating in a manner that increases your scope of Of knowledge.
02:05:51.000You know, you take a beautiful orchestral composition, and all the instruments are doing different things at different levels, but they all flow together harmoniously, and you're right in the middle of that as a listener, and it fills you with a sense of, it's almost like a sense of religious awe, even if you're a punk rock nihilist,
02:06:15.000And religious writings in the deepest sense, so those archetypal writings, are guidelines to that mode of being.
02:06:23.000So they're not true, like scientific truth is true.
02:06:28.000I think of them as hyper-true or meta-true.
02:06:33.000It's like we take the most true things about your life and then we take the most true things about ten other people's lives and we amalgamate them into a single figure and that would be like a literary hero.
02:06:45.000And then we take a thousand literary heroes and we extract out from each of them what makes the most heroic person.
02:07:18.000When you talk about this harmonious frequency that's achieved...
02:07:25.000What how do you reconcile all the stories that were like say in the Old Testament that were extremely violent or they're ridiculous like Who is the guy that could they made fun of these children made fun of them?
02:07:36.000So God sent a bear to kill the children because they made fun of them for being bald or there's a bunch of stories and Ridiculous tales in the Bible that obviously have the hand of man on them.
02:07:52.000The beautiful concepts that are outlined in religion, like, you know, treat everyone as if they are your brother, you know, love and let love...
02:08:03.000No, it's very difficult, because in the Old Testament, let's say, I mean, the Old Testament was obviously written by people who were deeply tribal.
02:08:11.000And of course, we're also deeply tribal, and some of the problems that those people were trying to face, trying to sort out, was, well, how do you...
02:08:18.000Organize yourself within your own tribe, justly and mercifully, and at the same time defend yourself against the barbarians who constitute other tribes.
02:08:29.000Well, that was the problem that humanity was trying to solve when it was amalgamating all of its tribes.
02:08:35.000A process that obviously still hasn't finished.
02:08:38.000And some of the ways that you protect your own tribe rapidly become horrifying.
02:08:44.000And so many of the stories in the Old Testament that have to do essentially with tribal protection are immediately horrifying.
02:08:50.000But there's also a developmental pathway through the combination of the Old and New Testament that show, I would say, How that morality that was fundamentally tribal to begin with transformed itself over thousands of years into a morality that transcended tribal distinctions.
02:09:11.000And so part of the imposition of the New Testament onto the Old Testament was the imposition of a morality that transcended tribal morality onto a morality that was fundamentally tribal in origin.
02:09:24.000But the New Testament, of course, was constructed by Constantine and a series of bishops.
02:10:49.000Or maybe I'm elevating comic book characters beyond the status that they normally attain.
02:10:53.000But if you think about this, for example, with regards to something like the construction of the recent Marvel Universe, I mean, those Avenger movies are among the most expensive technological artifacts that human beings have ever made.
02:11:06.000And they drive our computational capacity to its absolute limit.
02:11:11.000And the reason for that is because we're using that fictional space To lay out an archetypal and mythological view of the universe.
02:11:18.000It's a practice domain for modes of being.
02:11:21.000And I mean, in the Marvel universe, obviously Tony Stark, Iron Man, is a technological man, right?
02:11:27.000He's trying to develop a real relationship with his partner, Pepper Potts, who's, you know, her own sort of independent woman.
02:11:34.000And he's attempting to use technology to build himself up into something that has the status of approximately a god, to transcend mortal limitation and all of that.
02:11:45.000So there's a deity-like aspect, the growth of a deity emerging there.
02:11:49.000And then, of course, Thor and Loki, they're not comic book deities at all.
02:12:10.000And so that collective process that you described Whereby an entire group of people comes together to decide what the central religious text is.
02:12:19.000I mean, on the one hand, you can think of that as the gerrymandering of a religious process.
02:12:24.000Maybe that's something that's only devoted towards the acquisition of power, like that would be a Marxist analysis.
02:12:29.000But on the other hand, you can think of it as...
02:12:32.000The collective imagination attempting to build a dramatic...
02:12:37.000to build an exemplary drama that everyone can act out.
02:12:44.000And it's in acting out that exemplary drama that we're actually able to interact in a civilized and productive manner.
02:12:51.000Like, look at this discussion that we're having to the degree that it's working.
02:12:55.000We're both trying to articulate our notions of reality.
02:13:01.000And I do that, you listen, and maybe you have some comments, and then you do that, and I listen, and maybe you have some comments.
02:13:07.000But together, we're building something that's different from what we both came in here with, right?
02:13:12.000And in a sense, what we're doing is we're participating in the process of articulating each other's spirits.
02:13:28.000If you're having a good conversation, and that's also a conversation that is meaningful, and you can tell that when you're having it, it's that you're decomposing parts of yourself, your false presuppositions, you're letting them die, and you're letting something new be born.
02:14:01.000And then another part dies, and a new part emerges.
02:14:03.000And that's this process of eternal death and rebirth that's part of the general mythology of redemption.
02:14:11.000You see that all the time, too, in the Harry Potter series, for example.
02:14:14.000At the very end of the Harry Potter series, Potter undergoes a literal death and rebirth, and that's how he finally defeats evil.
02:14:21.000These stories are deeply built into people.
02:14:24.000There's a reason that J.K. Rowling became the richest person in England by, she's richer than the Queen.
02:14:30.000She got rich by telling the story properly.
02:14:33.000You know, and the second volume of Harry Potter, when there's the basilisk underneath the castle that turns you to stone when you look at it.
02:14:40.000That's everything that people are afraid of.
02:14:42.000That freezes you like a rabbit freezes when it sees a wolf.
02:14:46.000And the story in Harry Potter is you go underneath the castle.
02:14:50.000To where the thing that frightens you the most resides, and you face it down.
02:14:56.000And in doing that, you free the Virgin, right?
02:14:58.000That St. George, he frees Virginia in the Harry Potter story.
02:15:01.000And maybe you half die because of that, because he gets bitten by that basilisk and just about dies.
02:15:06.000And then it's the phoenix that saves him, because the phoenix is the spirit of death and rebirth.
02:15:11.000These stories, they come up everywhere.
02:15:15.000But they're not true like scientific truths.
02:15:18.000They're a different, they're a behavioral truth, or a pragmatic truth, or a dramatic truth.
02:15:23.000And part of the reason that our society is so damn unstable now, and part of the reason all this weird chaos is emerging, this is a consequence of Nietzsche's observation back from the late 1800s about the death of God.
02:15:34.000We blew the metaphysical foundations out from underneath our culture, and the whole thing is shaking and twisting, and it's vacillating between The horrors of the extreme right and the horrors of the extreme left has been doing that for 140 years and we're in the throes of that again.
02:15:49.000We blew the metaphysical foundations out from underneath our culture.
02:15:54.000Part of the reason that people are so obsessed by things like the Avengers movies and the superheroes and Harry Potter and all of that is because, and Star Trek and Star Wars, is because our collective imagination is trying to regroup at the level of drama and reformulate our fundamental metaphysics.
02:16:13.000I was reading this thing that was talking, they were equating CrossFit and yoga to religion.
02:16:19.000And they were saying it's essentially religion for people that have abandoned traditional religions.
02:16:24.000The idea is that what we're seeking is camaraderie, order, and...
02:16:30.000Discipline and some sort of a shared community experience.
02:16:35.000So what you're talking about when you're saying your religion, you're not talking about a literal translation like a guy actually came back from the dead.
02:16:42.000What you're talking about is the concepts and the thoughts and the harmonious frequency that is achieved when people follow the tenets of that religion and live By these laws, as you're saying, of stacking on these ideas.
02:17:01.000Is it good for the community in five years, in ten years?
02:17:03.000And that's what you're saying when you're talking about your belief in love of religion.
02:17:09.000Well, but the other thing about that is that, like, imagine that there's a pathological mode of being that's so terrible that when you enact it, you just die.
02:17:17.000A good drug addiction will do that for you if you pursue that.
02:17:45.000And these ideas of death and rebirth are definitely true on the micro level.
02:17:50.000So the developmental psychologist Piaget said, for example, that when you incorporated new information, however you did that, learning or conversation, that that new information would exist in contradiction to something that you already presumed.
02:18:03.000And so that thing you presumed would have to disintegrate and die.
02:18:09.000That can happen at different levels of analysis.
02:18:10.000So sometimes you learn something minor.
02:18:13.000And sometimes you're shook to your bloody core, you know, and you undergo a descent into the underworld fundamentally, sometimes even a descent into hell.
02:18:21.000That's where you get genocidal and resentful.
02:18:23.000And then maybe you're lucky and you pop up reborn.
02:18:26.000Well, those exist as constant metaphysical truths.
02:19:23.000And you don't want to forget those, like, really we know, for example, from anthropological studies, religious belief is a human universal.
02:19:30.000And the reason for that in part is because there is a distinction between good and evil.
02:19:35.000And there is a distinction between good and bad.
02:19:39.000Like, you're always striving for the good, I mean, unless you've taken a malevolent turn.
02:19:43.000It's a natural impulse in human beings to make what is better.
02:19:48.000Well, it means we have a deeply inbuilt sense of what constitutes better.
02:19:53.000And we're all aware of that harmonious state that's achieved in community.
02:19:57.000Well, yeah, the thing that's interesting about it, like, one of the things that Nietzsche thought was, after he announced the death of God, was that people would be able to create new values.
02:20:20.000Maybe we could discover, maybe we could rediscover the values that we once held, and that's the descent into the underworld and the resurrection of the father.
02:20:28.000That's what happens in Pinocchio, for example, you know, when Pinocchio goes down into the depths to face Monstro and revitalize his dead father.
02:20:36.000There's a reason that movie was made in the 1930s.
02:20:41.000It's like, you want to get rid of your damn strings and stop being an erotic jackass.
02:20:45.000That's what the story's about, is you go down to the bottom of the ocean, you find the thing you're most afraid of, you face it, you rescue your dead father from the depths, and you rise back to the surface with him.
02:21:02.000Now, when you say that you're a religious person, though, people automatically assume that you, especially in this country, the religious right.
02:21:10.000There's a very dogmatic and very simplistic view of what God wants, and it's lumped into no homosexuals, certain restrictions on the behavior of women.
02:21:28.000If you look at the Bible, and the Bible is obviously a reflection of the people that lived at the time where it was constructed, although even trying to figure out when that is, you know, it was an oral tradition for thousands of years before it was ever written down, written in ancient Hebrew, translated to Latin and Greek and Roman,
02:24:07.000And that's that same place where all these things stack up.
02:24:11.000And so, well, and so with regards to religious tradition, on the one hand, you have to maintain the tradition.
02:24:18.000It's like maintaining the Constitution in the U.S. On the other hand, you have to be awake and alert because the tradition is a dead thing, right?
02:24:26.000It was composed by dead people in the dead past.
02:24:29.000It can't respond as flexibly as it should to the demands of the present.
02:24:44.000The major deities that mankind have produced, Marduk for the Mesopotamians, and Horus for the Egyptians, and Christ for the Christians, and Buddha for the Buddhists, these have been people who are noted for their vision, for their ability to watch and pay attention.
02:25:01.000Because there's nothing more important than the ability to pay attention.
02:25:04.000Pay attention and speak the truth, your truth.
02:25:07.000And that's how you keep Everything's stacked up in order harmoniously.
02:25:11.000That's how you keep the balance between order and chaos.
02:25:33.000And suffering can make you resentful, murderous, and then genocidal, if you take it far enough.
02:25:39.000So you need an antidote to suffering, and maybe, you know, you could think, well, I'll build walls of luxury around myself, and that'll protect me from the suffering.
02:25:46.000It's like, well, good luck with that, because that isn't going to work.
02:25:50.000And maybe you could build a delusion and live inside that, but that's going to fall apart.
02:25:56.000Well, what is there that helps you fight against suffering?
02:26:02.000The truth is the antidote to suffering.
02:26:05.000And the reason for that is because the truth puts reality behind you so that you can face the reality that's coming straight at you without becoming weak and degenerating and becoming resentful and wishing for the destruction of being.
02:26:20.000The final hell is your soul wishing for the destruction of everything because it's too painful and you're too bitter.
02:26:29.000And that happens to people all the time.
02:26:32.000Now, as a person who is someone who's extremely critical of ideologies, a lot of people would think it's a contradiction for you to embrace religion, because religion being the biggest, the oldest ideology of all.
02:26:46.000Ideology is a parasite on religious substructures.
02:27:46.000Mufasa and Simba's father and Simba's evil uncle.
02:27:50.000Those are the two representatives of the patriarchy, the wise king and the tyrannical king.
02:27:55.000In a religious story, properly set up archetypal story, there's the natural world, the chaotic world, there's a positive element and a negative element.
02:28:05.000There's the social world, there's the wise king and the tyrannical king, and there's the individual world, and that's the The adversary and the hero.
02:28:13.000There's always a positive and a negative at each level.
02:28:15.000And it stops it from being an oversimplification.
02:28:18.000Because it says to you, well of course the bloody society has no press of patriarchy.
02:28:23.000But it's also the wise father that has taught you to speak every word you know.
02:28:28.000It's like, you don't get to say only this part of the story without having gratitude for this part of the story.
02:28:35.000And it's true that at each level of the representation, a properly balanced story, Has got the balance between positive and negative always correct?
02:28:45.000Is that in many ways like a lot of people who are anti-Western capitalism are also the only, they will find that capitalism and Western capitalism in particular is the only culture that has embraced the acceptance of people like transgender people,
02:29:03.000people who are gay, people who are marginalized.
02:29:06.000I mean, Western capitalist society is one of the very few cultures that openly abhors racism.
02:31:29.000I mean, the idea of God is a very, very complicated idea, but you could say, if you were thinking about it merely from an intellectual perspective, is you could say that God is what transcends your knowledge.
02:31:44.000It's what's outside of your knowledge structures.
02:31:46.000And there's a very old story, and this goes all the way back to the Tower of Babel, is that one of the things that characterizes authoritarians is that there's never anything outside of their knowledge structures.
02:31:57.000They make their knowledge structures absolute.
02:31:59.000So in the Tower of Babel, human beings build this structure that's supposed to reach all the way to heaven so that we can invade the place of the gods.
02:33:10.000I mean, if you remove the human element of God, then God gets so abstract that it's easy for him to float off into space and to never show up again.
02:33:21.000I mean, the way the Catholics solve that to some degree is that they have God who's sort of at the top of the hierarchy, and then they have this hierarchy of saints who are sort of like gods but half human, and then they have human beings at the bottom.
02:33:36.000A continual chain of communication between the highest level of abstraction and the actual, you know, the actual concrete person.
02:33:44.000But the other thing that's useful about the conceptualization of God in anthropomorphic terms is that, and this is worth noting, there is nothing more complex in the cosmos than a human being.
02:33:57.000So if you're looking for something to represent the ultimate in complexity, it's hard to beat a human being.
02:34:03.000So your brain is ungodly complicated, so to speak.
02:34:09.000I mean, these things are obviously too complicated to unpack in a...
02:34:15.000I didn't expect us to even get into this conversation, but I'm glad we did.
02:34:19.000Do you think that these stories exist because somewhere in our code, somewhere in our very being, we understand that there is a need for this order, to find this frequency?
02:34:33.000Sure, they're an expression of our deepest being.
02:34:36.000They're an expression of how it is that we must live in order to live.
02:36:01.000I've been discussing this a lot recently because people like to talk about the concept of apocalypse, that we're headed towards an impending apocalypse.
02:36:08.000And my thought is that apocalypse is already here, it's just not right here.
02:37:16.000There's never a situation that's so bad that there isn't something you can do to make it worse.
02:37:21.000And there's very seldomly a time when you're not motivated at some level of your being to put the knife in and twist it just one more quarter turn.
02:39:12.000It doesn't matter where the support comes from.
02:39:14.000Like, I mean, it's disappointing in the same way that it's disappointing for me to say, I think the universities now do more harm than good.
02:40:57.000One of the things I was doing with her in behavior therapy was trying to just get her to present herself in a more normal manner so that people wouldn't shy away from her and, you know, be instantly prejudiced towards her.
02:41:08.000And she'd come to the behavior therapy clinic and she wasn't bright, this woman.
02:41:13.000I think she had only had like a seventh grade education.
02:41:15.000She was quite intellectually impaired and she lived with her sick aunt who was schizophrenic and who had like a A satanically possessed alcoholic boyfriend that was always tormenting my client.
02:41:33.000But she had this dog and she used to take it out and walk the dog all the time.
02:41:37.000And then she'd actually come to the behavior therapy clinic, partly because of her own problem, but But she'd come to this place called the Douglas Hospital and she'd been an inpatient in the Douglas Hospital and in the in the Douglas Hospital there were these long-term psychiatric clients and they looked like something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting or Dante's Inferno.
02:41:56.000I mean these people were this is way worse than one flew over the cuckoo's nest.
02:42:00.000These people were seriously destroyed and they couldn't be let back out in the streets during deinstitutionalization like they were lifers.
02:42:07.000And she had decided that part of the reason she wanted to come to the hospital was because she had been institutionalized there, and she thought that maybe when she took her dog out for a walk, she could go and get one of those damn inmates and take them out for a walk too.
02:42:22.000Now that was a person who was immoral.
02:43:27.000And, you know, one of the things I tried to learn when I was taking apart what happened in Auschwitz and trying to put myself in the position of an Auschwitz camp guard, which, by the way, you can do if you use your imagination a bit.
02:43:39.000I wouldn't call it exactly the world's most pleasant meditative experience.
02:43:43.000But you can call up parts of yourself that would be capable of taking someone who just got off a transport train and having them carry a hundred-pound sack of wet salt from one side of the camp compound to the other and back.
02:43:56.000You can conjure that part of yourself up if you want, and that'll teach you something about what you're like.
02:44:01.000People don't do it because it's too frightening.
02:44:04.000But I know perfectly well that I could do that sort of thing.
02:44:07.000And so once I learned that I could do that sort of thing, and maybe that I could even enjoy it, I thought, okay, fine, I get it.
02:44:12.000I'm going to see if I can figure out how to live so that if that opportunity was presented to me, I wouldn't take it.
02:44:20.000And I think that's the lesson that people need to learn from the 20th century.
02:44:23.000It's like, that's what human beings did, okay?
02:44:57.000And being compelled to say your words by law.
02:45:00.000Well, that takes it past the point of absurdity to the point of tyranny, in my estimation.
02:45:08.000And I've seen some criticisms where people are saying, you know, he's talking about this, but really he's grandstanding because no one's doing anything legally.
02:46:13.000The idea that I was going to be teaching in January again, because I teach all my undergraduate courses from January to May, that was on the table.
02:46:21.000And I think the only reason that it hasn't happened...
02:46:24.000One of the reasons it hasn't happened, and I'm not attributing nothing but malevolence to the university administration, because obviously it's very complicated.
02:46:32.000And they did agree to host the debate, for example.
02:46:34.000But the idea that I wouldn't be teaching in January, and still might not be, is by no means...
02:46:41.000That was a perfectly plausible outcome.
02:46:46.000And had this not caused a firestorm, much of which has emerged in support of me, then...
02:46:54.000I would say there was a 50-50 chance that I would have had my teaching privileges revoked.
02:47:44.000That's like HR 101. That's how you do it.
02:47:49.000So here we said at the end of November, closing in on December, you're literally a bit more than a month away, and you don't know whether or not you're teaching your courses in January?
02:48:06.000It seems highly probable that I'll be teaching them.
02:48:09.000I wouldn't say it's certain, but if I'm teaching them, it's because the cost of having me not teach them would now be too high.
02:48:18.000It's not because the university believes that what I'm doing is either necessary or acceptable.
02:48:26.000If someone who's listening to this or watching this feels compelled to act out in your support, how can they do that?
02:48:37.000I think they could do the future authoring exercise.
02:48:41.000And that that would be the best way to act on your support.
02:48:56.000Sort yourself out and marshal your arguments and put yourself in order so that when someone pushes you a little farther than you should go, you can say no.