In this episode, Dr. Jordan Peterson talks about being denied a grant for the first time in his academic career, and why he thinks it might have been because of his outspoken criticism of political correctness. He also talks about his recent public protest in which he was heckled and heckled by hecklers, and how he dealt with it. And, of course, he talks about the hammer and sickle and why it's a bad idea to use it as a symbol of hate. And, as always, there's a good ol' fashioned conspiracy theory about what's really going on in the minds of people around the world, and whether or not it's really as bad as we all think it is. (Spoiler: it's worse than we think.) Thank you for listening to this episode of Thick & Thin. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to our other shows on Apple Podcasts and Podchaser, wherever you get your favourite podchips! Also, if you like what you hear, please consider leaving us a five star rating and a review. We'll be looking out for you in the next week's mailbag! Thanks again for listening and supporting the podcast, and we'll see you next week for the next episode! Timestamps: 5:00 - What do you think of this episode? 6:30 - How do you feel about it? 7:40 - What would you would you like to see in the future of the podcast? 8:20 - What are your thoughts on the podcast moving forward? 9: What are you looking forward to? 10:00 11:00 -- What's the worst thing you've ever happened to you? 13:30 -- What would your favorite thing that you've seen in the past week? 15:00 | What's your biggest takeaway from this episode so far? 16:40 -- what do you would like to hear from someone else? 17:10 -- what would you want to see me talk about next? 18:20 -- what are you most excited about the future? 19:10 - What is your favorite part of the most? 21:00-- what's your favorite moment from the past day of the past? 22: Is it the most important thing you're looking forward for the most challenging part of your life right now? 25:50 -- what s your biggest challenge?
00:00:28.000I read that you were denied a grant for the first time in your history as an academic.
00:00:37.000And you think this is all based on your outspoken and very public denouncing of the political correctness and of all this stuff that you've been going through over the past more than a year now?
00:00:52.000I don't know, because I haven't got the full commentary on the grant yet.
00:00:56.000I only found out that it was denied, and it takes the granting agency a while to send out the full report.
00:01:02.000I know some other people who I would consider relatively high-profile researchers who also didn't get funded this round.
00:01:09.000So there might be multiple reasons, but I can't help suspect that the fact that the grant application concentrated on delineating the personality characteristics of politically correct belief might have had something to do with it.
00:02:14.000I mean, what you went through in one of your most recent public speeches where they allowed these kids to be in the room with you with bullhorns and they were screaming.
00:02:28.000Jamie, see if you can find the video of that.
00:02:33.000And you were giving your speech, and there were supposed to be some other people involved.
00:02:37.000They backed out, and you decided to continue on.
00:02:40.000So you're standing there in front of these people that were there to hear you talk, and there's a group of kids with bullhorns, like literally, and shouting and yelling and chanting with signs in the room.
00:02:53.000Just completely disrupting what you're doing, and they allowed this all to happen.
00:03:51.000But one of the things that was really not so good about all of that was that a lot of the people who were protesting were standing behind a hammer and sickle banner.
00:04:01.000You know, which just absolutely amazes me, because I still haven't been able to quite figure this out.
00:04:06.000I can't figure out why you couldn't do that with a Nazi symbol, but you can do that with a hammer and sickle.
00:04:15.000Maybe it's because the Nazi doctrine was so explicitly racist, but God, it's not like the hammer and sickle wasn't equally murderous, or actually quite profoundly more murderous, as it turned out.
00:04:26.000And how people cannot still know that is...
00:04:54.000But when you look at people who are in that state of mind, they're not looking at you as if you're a human being.
00:05:00.000You know, you're the target of their conceptualizations.
00:05:03.000You're the realization of their conceptualizations.
00:05:06.000Of course, they didn't listen to anything I said.
00:05:08.000Well, hardly anyone did, although I got to talk outside because I took everybody outside and then spoke out there for a while.
00:05:14.000And when you were outside, were there still yelling and bullhorns and the whole deal?
00:05:17.000Oh yeah, but what happened, I went outside and I stood on a couple of benches, and the people that wanted to hear kind of made a circle around me, and that more or less, by chance, pushed all the protesters to the back so that I could address the people that actually wanted to listen to what I was saying.
00:05:36.000And so did you have a dialogue with them, or did you give a speech, and how did that work?
00:05:41.000I didn't have a dialogue at all with the protesters.
00:05:44.000I mean, with the people that came to see you?
00:05:57.000I'm in this peculiar situation where if the protesters show up, that's good, and if they don't show up, that's good too.
00:06:03.000It's good if they show up, because I have access to a YouTube audience, obviously, and then it gets filmed, and the films get put together, and that gets put online, and generally speaking, when the social justice types have come after me, they've done a pretty admirable job of discrediting themselves.
00:06:20.000And so that seems to be all to the good.
00:06:22.000And then if they let me speak, well, then I get to speak and I can put that on YouTube.
00:06:26.000So it's a very strange situation for me, because as long as I don't do anything too stupid, or anything any stupider than I have done, let's say, I seem to come out okay.
00:06:36.000And I'm certainly not counting on that continuing, and I'm not...
00:06:43.000I'm surprised by it, but so far it seems to be working out.
00:06:49.000Well, I think the way you handled it is admirable.
00:06:52.000The way you kept your cool and just continued talking and didn't flip out and didn't give in, didn't succumb to the provocation.
00:07:02.000It's because they're obviously provoking you, and they're obviously...
00:07:04.000I just don't understand how the university allows them to do that, how they allow them to be in that room, first of all, with those air horns, which are really bad for anybody in that room who's near them.
00:08:02.000Be allies of the women for their own nefarious purposes?
00:08:05.000I mean, that's what it looks like to me, you know.
00:08:07.000Well, there's certainly an issue with that.
00:08:09.000It's a common thread with men, especially in the male feminist category, that they align themselves with these women as allies and as this...
00:08:20.000They take this moral high ground and they're this person that's going to show other men how to do feminism and how to behave with women.
00:08:39.000There's something seriously creepy about it.
00:08:41.000I mean, I saw, too, that guy at the Berkeley, the recent Berkeley...
00:08:49.000The guy who hit someone with a bike lock, remember, in a bag?
00:08:54.000And he was hiding behind some women, and then he darted out and just nailed the guy with a bike lock, with what turned out to be a bike lock.
00:09:12.000They compared his eyes to the professor's eyes.
00:09:15.000They know that the guy was there, and then the guy aligns himself with Marxism, and he's this, like, communist-slash-socialist professor who's very adamantly against right-wing ideology and this kind of shit.
00:09:32.000So, they're pretty sure that that's the guy.
00:09:52.000Well, it's just the idea that you could just walk up to someone you don't like the way they think and hit them in the head with a metal thing.
00:09:58.000It's so crazy and so delusional and so indicative of someone who looks at a person as the other.
00:10:05.000You're not looking at it as a human being who disagrees with you.
00:10:28.000Yeah, well, that's kind of what I thought about the protesters at McMaster, too.
00:10:32.000You know, it's partly why I don't get upset.
00:10:33.000It's like I look at these kids that are out there protesting, you know, apart from the professional protester types, and I think, well, Jesus, they've been served so badly by the education system that it's absolutely beyond belief, you know.
00:10:45.000They're basically being sent out as avatars of this...
00:10:49.000Pathological post-modern movement by their professors who are themselves too cowardly to show up, generally speaking, and certainly aren't brave enough to debate me.
00:10:58.000Or if they do show up, they're like this guy with a mask on hitting people in the head, who was a professor.
00:11:02.000Yeah, well, they don't believe in dialogue.
00:11:04.000You know, it's not part of the post-modern ethos to have a dialogue with people you don't agree with.
00:11:10.000So you weren't able to talk to anyone that opposed you?
00:11:49.000Well, that seems to me to be one of the weirder aspects of this The thing that you're going through, this series of altercations that you're going through, is the lack of discourse.
00:12:02.000And there was this one that you went on television, we talked about the last time you were here, with this very bizarre, androgynous person that was saying there's no gender, there's no biological basis for gender, which is just complete insanity, and you shooting that down.
00:12:24.000It's insanity for sure, but it's the kind of insanity that's going to have legal force very soon.
00:12:32.000Well, with Bill C-16, which was the bill that I was complaining about, or criticizing, let's say, there's a variety of surrounding policy documents that are derived from the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and they indicate quite clearly that you're to regard biological sex,
00:12:50.000gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity as varying independently.
00:12:57.000By any stretch of the imagination, they're so tightly correlated that, well, you can't use correlation to imply cause or to infer causality.
00:13:06.000But Jesus, when the correlations are above.95, you have to start wondering if there's actually not some causal link.
00:13:12.000And it's absurd to me that we really even have to have that discussion.
00:13:16.000But the notion, and this is being taught to school kids, this is mainstream doctrine, Joe.
00:13:28.000The gender unicorn is this little happy symbol that's being marketed to children in elementary school, describing to them the fact that biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity vary independently.
00:14:19.000So what you do if you're a kid is you put a little marker there on the arrow to show where you're located on all those independent dimensions.
00:14:26.000And obviously, if you look at the style of the gender unicorn, you can tell what sort of age it's aimed at, because that looks like it's aimed for, certainly not aimed at kids over, I would say, ten.
00:14:37.000Yeah, why does a gender unicorn have a double helix DNA symbol where its penis or vagina should be?
00:14:43.000That's to indicate that there's no such thing as biology, I presume.
00:15:57.000And the way they're keeping from engaging you is saying that you are demonstrating hate speech.
00:16:03.000Yeah, well, there's hate speech, there's racism.
00:16:06.000The reason I've been called a racist is because I complained, I criticized the University of Toronto's decision to use the Toronto chapter of Black Lives Matter as policy advisors.
00:16:16.000And the reason I did that was because the two women who founded Black Lives Matter in Toronto, let's say they have questionable reputations and leave it at that.
00:16:29.000And so apparently that makes me racist because...
00:16:32.000You're not allowed to question them because they're black.
00:16:52.000And the other one is embroiled in a lawsuit with the University of Toronto Students' Union for, essentially, she's been accused of embezzling with a couple cronies about $400,000 from the coffers of the Students' Union.
00:17:06.000So I felt that perhaps those weren't the best people for the University of Toronto to be associating with when they're formulating their anti-racist policies.
00:17:41.000Because men and women can be anything.
00:17:42.000Well, there's an interesting angle on the transsexual thing, too, because these activists, they stand out and claim that they're standing for oppressed communities, right?
00:17:51.000And first of all, they identify the identity group that they're activating on the part of as a community.
00:17:59.000And then they imply that it's a homogenous community.
00:18:02.000And then they state that because they happen to be members of that community by their own admission, let's say, or by their own declaration, that's a better word, that they are now legitimate representatives of that community.
00:18:14.000And one of the things that's been quite fascinating to me since this has occurred is that I've had a very, a comparatively large number of letters from transgender people, about 35 so far, and every one of those except one was positive.
00:18:27.000They are not happy about, like, the...
00:18:30.000My sampling of the trans community, which isn't It's not a random sample or anything like that, but 35 letters is a lot when the community of people is actually quite small.
00:18:45.000They're not happy to be so publicly discussed now, because many of them would just assume have some privacy, and they're already having trouble fitting in.
00:18:53.000They don't regard these people as legitimate representatives.
00:18:57.000They're not homogenous in their political viewpoints.
00:19:01.000You know, and they're not necessarily fans of the people who are playing gender-bender games, because many of the transsexuals who are, let's say, serious about it, you know, for lack of a better way of describing it, aren't happy that this has become a kind of a fad, essentially,
00:19:16.000and that they're being used by the politically correct types to further their political agenda.
00:19:23.000It isn't obvious to me at all that the attitude that I have towards the situation is actually different in any genuine sense than the attitude that at least a substantial minority of the transsexual people themselves have.
00:19:37.000And there's plenty of them on YouTube who are complaining about the social justice appropriation of their Well, I don't even know if they have a movement.
00:19:59.000I mean, but, you know, on the postmodern end of the spectrum, if you have some identifiable group feature, then that means you're one of that group and that everything that you do indicates only that.
00:20:14.000I mean, there are believers in race and gender.
00:20:18.000And sex, they believe in the reality of those categories far more than anybody on the right, as far as I can tell.
00:20:31.000And widespread, and powerful, and all of those things.
00:20:34.000It's very peculiar that they are not into labels unless it suits their purposes.
00:20:40.000They're not into labels or into generalizing behavior unless it suits their purpose.
00:20:46.000And also, another thing that's weird to me is that whenever something becomes an issue that becomes discussed, that becomes a hot-button issue, which clearly, transgender rights, Whether it's the North Carolina bill to keep transgender people out of the bathrooms that they identify with,
00:21:06.000Whenever there's some sort of a hot button issue, there becomes this thing where a bunch of people seek attention through those issues.
00:21:15.000And these people use whatever issue it is, it becomes like a part of their identity, like becoming an activist and really being very vocal about it.
00:21:28.000Whereas the actual cause itself gets muddied in the cult of personality and it gets muddied in these personal wishes and ideas that the people who are seeking to get attention by communicating about these ideas sort of soak in.
00:21:45.000You know, it just becomes a lot about human nature and human behavior more than it is about the actual issue itself.
00:22:03.000I mean, you can see that in the demonstrations, say, with regards to my talks.
00:22:07.000It doesn't matter what I'm talking about, and it actually doesn't matter what I've ever said.
00:22:11.000All that matters is that There's an occasion and an excuse to trot out the ideology and to pathetically mouth the same unbelievably sterile and chaotic phrases.
00:22:26.000I think the people at McMaster, the protesters, could only muster about three chants and two of them were seriously obscene, which I don't care about except that it's so mindlessly unimaginative They're operating at such a low level of intellectual effort and,
00:22:46.000of course, egged on by their pathological postmodern professors who are hiding behind them like scared weasels.
00:22:55.000Yeah, there's shut him down, that was the big one, racist, transphobic, homophobic, all these things without substance, because there's no...
00:23:03.000Piece of shit was the other one that was quite...
00:23:05.000Transphobic piece of shit, or just piece of shit?
00:23:07.000That's right, yes, no, no, it was more specific, yes, it was more specific, which was, you know, rather flattering and all of that.
00:23:13.000Yeah, well, you don't seem to have any hate towards trans people, at all.
00:23:19.000No, I mean, from discussions I've had with you, both on and off the air, The idea of you being transphobic seems so inaccurate because you seem pretty accepting about anybody, whether it's a trans person, a gay person.
00:24:09.000What I have an issue with is that I don't like to see the postmodern neo-Marxists use the transsexual issue as a lever for pushing forward their political nonsense.
00:24:20.000And I said that right from the beginning in the videos I made to begin with.
00:24:23.000The reason I wouldn't use the words Z and Xur and all those other made-up words, however many there are now, is because I'm not willing to cede the linguistic territory to postmodern radicals.
00:25:56.000I might use he then, but I don't know...
00:25:59.000Well, it's just all of it is palpably absurd.
00:26:02.000I think it's always hard to get the level of analysis for this sort of issue correct.
00:26:07.000You know, because the people who are pushing it forward say, well, we're against harassment and discrimination.
00:26:14.000And they attribute all the moral virtue to themselves.
00:26:18.000But then what I see is that they're utilizing a group, a very small minority group, who already have enough problems, in my estimation, for nothing other than straightforward political purposes.
00:26:42.000What I see mostly is resentment and the desire to undermine.
00:26:46.000And I'm quite familiar with the postmodern philosophy, not as familiar as I could be, and also reasonably familiar with its underlying Marxism.
00:26:53.000And there's nothing touchy-feely about any of that, I can tell you.
00:26:56.000The best you can do with postmodernist philosophy is emerge nihilistic.
00:27:03.000The worst case is that you're a kind of anarchical social revolutionary that's directionless, except that you want to tear things apart.
00:27:11.000Or that you end up depressed, which I see happening to students all the time, because the postmodernists, like, rip out the remaining structures of their foundations, of their ethical foundations.
00:27:22.000So just to be really clear, for anybody tuning in, your issues are absolutely not with someone who identifies with a gender other than their biological gender.
00:27:31.000As long as they're not using that to promote a political agenda.
00:27:34.000But I don't care about the gender thing.
00:27:43.000And I would also deal with it on an individual-to-individual basis.
00:27:50.000Because it varies just as much as there are extremely masculine men, extremely feminine women, and there's a broad spectrum of human beings in between, and each one should be dealt with on an individual basis based on what they want.
00:28:02.000But when you're talking about these made-up words, what it seems like is that some people are trying to push these made-up words and turn them mainstream.
00:28:13.000Now the question is, what's the motivation behind that?
00:29:22.000Whatever your name is, whatever you would like to be called, whether it's Wendy or Mike or whatever it is, that would be the noise that you want people to make with their mouth that means you.
00:30:01.000But when it gets to like zur and zee and the 78 different gender pronouns, it seems to a person outside of it, a person who's cisgendered, It seems pretty bizarre, and it seems pretty preposterous,
00:30:17.000and it seems pretty indulgent, and it seems like there's something else going on.
00:30:28.000If there wasn't something else going on, a relatively obscure professor's amateurish YouTube videos on a relatively obscure piece of Canadian legislation wouldn't have had any effect, right?
00:30:43.000And that's because there's more going on than the straightforward issue surrounding the pronoun use, and everybody knows it, or everybody feels it, at least.
00:30:52.000Well, what it seems like from someone who's outside of academia, someone like me, is it seems like you're pushing back against something that they are really trying hard to establish, and that it's some kind of control.
00:31:15.000It's a very small, isolated group of people that seem to be trying to indoctrinate others into their ways.
00:31:22.000And they're becoming very vocal and very angry and verbally violent about your opposition to their controlling the way that other people communicate about things.
00:31:33.000Yeah, well, they don't like me poking holes in their ideology.
00:31:37.000The post here, we could lay it out quickly, you know, because I've been thinking about how to communicate this properly.
00:31:43.000And so the thing about the postmodernists, and I'm going to speak mostly about Jacques Derrida, because I'll consider him the central villain.
00:31:57.000Well, he's a French philosopher, a French intellectual who became quite popular in the late 1970s and then was introduced to North America through the Yale Department of English.
00:32:06.000And, of course, English literature is one of the disciplines that has become entirely corrupt.
00:32:10.000And so Derrida was a Marxist to begin with.
00:32:16.000But that fell out of favour because it turned out that Marxist political doctrine kept producing evil empires and even radical left French intellectuals were forced to admit that by the mid-1970s.
00:32:28.000You know, they'd put their head in the sand for 20 years, 50 years really, thoroughly in the sand and made sure their ears were full too.
00:32:36.000But by the mid-1970s, the evidence that that was the case was so overwhelming that even a French intellectual couldn't deny it anymore, and so they started to play sleight of hand with the Marxist ideas.
00:32:46.000So instead of trying to promote the revolution of the working class against the capitalist class, let's say, they started to play identity politics and said, well, we can just separate everybody into oppressed versus oppressor, but we don't have to do it on economic grounds.
00:33:02.000And we can call it power instead of economics.
00:33:06.000And then the other thing, but the fundamental critique that Derrida focused on, this is really worth laying out, because the problem that he discovered, the postmodernists discovered, was discovered by a variety of other people at the same time in other disciplines.
00:33:24.000Among the people who were studying artificial intelligence, since the early 1960s, it was always supposed that we'd be able to make machines that could move around in a natural environment without too much problem.
00:33:34.000And the reason we could do that was because the world, in some sense, was just made out of simple objects.
00:33:39.000There they are, and all you have to do is look at them and you see them, and that's vision.
00:33:43.000And then the complex problem is not how to see or what to see, but how to act in reference to what you see.
00:34:45.000Like, if you look at a beanbag, you see a chair.
00:34:48.000Not because it's got four legs and a seat in the back, but because you can sit on it.
00:34:52.000And most of what we see in the world, we actually see functionally, rather than see as an object and then interpret the object and then figure out what to do.
00:35:00.000So the function of the object constrains our interpretation.
00:35:03.000But there's an endless number of interpretations.
00:35:06.000So, for example, if I was going to paint that, you know, Paint on canvas this set of pens and try to do it in a photorealistic way.
00:35:13.000I would be looking at tiny details of these objects, the multiple shades of red that are there and the multiple shades of white and black.
00:35:22.000You know, I would decompose it in many ways.
00:35:25.000And so the AI guys ran into this problem, which was that looking at the world turned out to be exceptionally complex.
00:35:34.000Okay, in literature, the same thing happened.
00:35:37.000What the postmodernists realized was that if you took a complex book, let's say the Bible, for example, or a Shakespeare play, there's an endless number of potential interpretations that you can derive from it because it's so complex and so sophisticated.
00:35:51.000So imagine that Well, you can interpret the word, you can interpret the phrase, you can interpret the sentence, you can interpret the paragraph, you can interpret the chapter.
00:36:02.000Let's say you have to interpret that within the confines of the entire work, then of the entire tradition, and then within the context of discussion that you're currently having, and all of those things affect how you're going to interpret the play.
00:36:17.000So that their conclusion was, well, there's an infinite number of ways to interpret a text.
00:36:21.000And then their conclusion was, well, there's an infinite number of ways to interpret the world.
00:36:26.000And there's a way in which that's correct.
00:36:30.000And so the next conclusion was, there's no right way to do it.
00:36:57.000The world is complicated beyond our ability to comprehend.
00:37:01.000So there is a very large number of ways you can interpret it.
00:37:04.000But, but, you have to extract out from the world A game from your interpretation that you can actually play.
00:37:14.000So if the lesson that you extract from Hamlet is you should kill your family and yourself, then we might say that that's not a very functional interpretation, right?
00:37:25.000Because, first of all, people are going to object to that, right?
00:37:32.000And it isn't a game that you can play over and over again in the world.
00:37:36.000So when we're interacting with the world, you see, what we're trying to do is to extract out a set of tools that we can use to function in the world, because we're constrained by the world, so that we don't suffer too much, and so that the things that we need in order to continue can be provided.
00:37:52.000And we need to extract those out in a way that other people will...
00:37:55.000so that other people will cooperate and compete with us in a peaceful and maintainable way.
00:38:03.000We have to extract out an interpretation that allows us to live and thrive over multiple periods of time in multiple environments while we're doing the same thing with other individuals who are motivated the same way.
00:38:16.000So there's a tremendous number of constraints on our interpretations and the postmodernists don't care about that at all.
00:38:24.000You can interpret the world any way you want.
00:38:27.000All people are ever doing is playing power games based on their identity, and there's going to be no crosstalk between the power hierarchies.
00:38:36.000That's why they don't engage in dialogue.
00:38:39.000See, just to talk to, like, let's say, if you're a postmodernist, just to have a discussion with someone like you, you know, a heterosexual, what do they call this, cisgendered male of power, you know, and white to boot, it's like, that's an evil act in and of itself,
00:38:55.000because all you're doing by engaging in dialogue with that person is validating their power game.
00:39:09.000It's built right into the philosophical system.
00:39:11.000They regard the idea that if you're in one power group and I'm in another, the idea that we can step out of that group, engage in a dialogue, have our worlds meet, and produce some sort of negotiated understanding.
00:39:28.000No, that's part of your oppressive patriarchal game, that idea.
00:39:44.000People don't understand that postmodernism is a complete assault on two things.
00:39:49.000One, it's an assault on the metaphysical substrate of our culture, and I would say that the metaphysical substrate looks something like a religious substrate, so it's a direct assault on that.
00:39:59.000And the second thing it's an assault on is everything that's been established since the Enlightenment.
00:40:36.000It's not any more than every Muslim knows the entire Muslim doctrine, or Islamic doctrine, or every Christian knows the entire Christian doctrine.
00:40:43.000You know, it's fragmented among people.
00:40:46.000But then when you bring them together, the fragments unite, and the entire philosophy acts itself out.
00:40:51.000So you don't think that this is a nefarious plot by a few well-planned out individuals that have some sort of an agenda that they're going to promote this ideology and they understand what they're doing?
00:41:04.000You feel like it's what you're saying, that there's a bunch of different factions, a bunch of different parts to this.
00:41:12.000It could be a lot of it is that people feel disenfranchised socially.
00:41:18.000They are empowered by their positions in universities and by these insulated environments and groups.
00:41:25.000They're intoxicated by the power that they have over young people and shaping their minds.
00:41:57.000It's like Richard Dawkins' idea of meme.
00:42:00.000You know, if you imagine that in your neural structure Whatever ideas that you're manifesting are represented neuron by neuron, let's say, it's a web of neurons.
00:42:13.000Not any one neuron has the entire idea set.
00:42:16.000This is obviously an oversimplification, but you get the point.
00:42:19.000There's a network from which the idea emerges.
00:42:22.000Well, the meme idea is that an idea can rest upon multiple individuals as if each individual is a neuron.
00:42:30.000And so, I mean, there are people who are more or less fully informed as to the nature of postmodern doctrine, and they're pushing it forward consciously and unconsciously.
00:42:43.000They're consciously pushing it forward and acting it out.
00:42:47.000And so there are individuals who are more representative of the entire set of ideas and individuals who are less representative.
00:42:53.000But if you get them together in a group, the thing that animates them and unites them is the common set of ideas.
00:42:59.000And those ideas were produced by the postmodern French intellectuals in the mid-70s, roughly speaking.
00:43:09.000Foucault was the person who famously pronounced that psychiatric diagnostic categories were primarily social in origin rather than biological.
00:43:17.000And, you know, I read Foucault's work, I think it was Madness and Civilization, where he advanced that particular doctrine.
00:43:25.000You can actually read Foucault, unlike Derrida and Lacan, but I just found what he was writing obvious.
00:43:31.000I knew from my clinical training that psychiatric categories have a Heavy sociological construction, partly because psychiatry isn't a science.
00:44:12.000I mean, everyone who's a sophisticated medical professional, psychiatrist, psychologist, everyone knows that.
00:44:20.000It's like, I mean, there's a book called Discovery of the Unconscious by a guy named Henri Allemberger that was written, I believe, in the 60s.
00:44:28.000Great book on history of psychoanalysis.
00:44:30.000And, like, he covers the shift in diagnostic categories across time.
00:45:26.000And we're in a war between these ideas.
00:45:29.000I mean, Marxism, we already know, was a tremendously powerful doctrine, and this is its newest manifestation.
00:45:35.000What is the motivation behind the individuals that are at the heart of this movement?
00:45:43.000Well, I would say that The motivations are as complex as human motivations are in general.
00:45:50.000But they seem to have solidified into a movement, right?
00:45:54.000Well, I think the dangerous part of it is that it's almost like a scapegoat mentality.
00:46:00.000It's almost like psychoanalytic projection.
00:46:02.000That's another way of thinking about it.
00:46:04.000It's like, one of the things that I've come to learn and one of the things I talk about a lot is that the battle between good and evil, so to speak, It isn't between states, and it's not between individuals precisely, although it manifests itself at those levels.
00:46:20.000It's an internal battle, a moral battle that happens inside people, and so people have a broad capacity for malevolence and for benevolence.
00:46:29.000And that's a terrible war for people, and it's a terrible thing to understand and realize.
00:46:34.000In fact, often, when people realize their capacity for malevolence, if they're not prepared for it, they develop post-traumatic stress disorder.
00:46:43.000So that happens to soldiers in battlefields.
00:46:45.000So they go out, they're innocent guys, you know, naive guys, young guys, and they go out onto a battlefield and they get put in a really stressful situation and, you know, they step outside themselves and they do something unbelievably vicious and brutal, and then they're broken.
00:47:02.000They can't take that manifestation of themselves and put it with, like, Iowa corn-fed, you know, nice guy.
00:47:12.000And no wonder, because one is like a flesh-eating chimpanzee on a war rampage, and the other is, you know, a relatively well brought up and polite farm boy from the middle of the United States.
00:47:24.000It's like, how in the world are you going to put those two things together?
00:47:30.000And to treat that, my experience with post-traumatic stress disorder is that you have to teach people a philosophy of evil, of good and evil, because otherwise they can't recover.
00:47:40.000And I've had, by the way, in the last four months, I've had two letters from soldiers with PTSD, and I met two personally, who said that watching my lectures had brought them back together.
00:47:53.000Because they couldn't understand what they had become before looking deeply at their malevolence.
00:48:02.000Now, so I would say, with regards to this movement, this postmodern movement, The malevolent aspect of it, there's a couple of them.
00:48:13.000I got a letter today from a university student in Italy.
00:48:16.000I don't know what university, but she'd been having kind of a flame war on Facebook with the social justice warrior.
00:48:23.000And at the end, she recommended that this particular social justice warrior seek out a local mental health counseling unit and put a link to it in the exchange.
00:48:34.000And then she got a letter from the university.
00:48:37.000I guess the other person, the SJW type, turned her in.
00:48:41.000But she got a letter from the university saying that that violated university policy and constituted harassment, and that she should seriously consider retracting it.
00:48:50.000And that, you know, future employers might be looking at what she posted, and it was inappropriate to put that on a public site.
00:48:59.000Wow, how could you be so clueless, as an administrator say, to think that your monitoring of your students' private utterances You're monitoring it at an institutional level,
00:49:14.000and your intervention and threat at an institutional level is less dangerous than letting two students, you know, troll each other on a public social forum.
00:49:26.000It's just, I just, I don't know what to think about it.
00:50:14.000Like, you can be Clued in enough to try to listen and learn and watch and pay attention to what your own senses are telling you and try to articulate that.
00:50:23.000And that's what the logos is, technically speaking.
00:50:27.000And the reason I'm bringing this up is because Jacques Derrida described Western culture...
00:50:33.000In a famous phrase, he described it as phallogocentric.
00:51:00.000It's essentially a theological concept, and that's where things get complicated, but you could describe it as As the manifestation of truth in speech.
00:51:10.000And the postmodernists, they don't like any of that.
00:51:13.000So foul logocentrists would be the ultimate mansplaining.
00:51:38.000I saw an example of that in an Australian congressional debate where a guy was accused of mansplaining by one of his colleagues and really tore a strip off her quite nicely.
00:51:49.000Well, Yates has just been pretty brilliant.
00:51:52.000She was fired by the Trump administration because she rejected this idea of...
00:51:58.000What was the very specific thing was about restricting immigration, about shutting down different people that are trying to come into the United States.
00:52:08.000And she had this debate with Ted Cruz where she, you know, just brilliantly shut him down with, you know, her knowledge of the Constitution and knowledge of what is and what is not legal or should or should not be allowed to happen.
00:52:23.000And she was fired for it and he was grilling her.
00:52:27.000Yeah, he's a very smart guy, Ted Cruz.
00:52:29.000Although I don't agree with him, and I agree more with her, the way it was going down, this debate was described as mansplaining, because it was a man talking to a woman.
00:52:40.000Yeah, well, I also read about something like that with regards to the Supreme Court, because somebody did an analysis showing that the female Supreme Court justices spoke less than the male Supreme Court justices, and immediately attributed that to sexism, because you know how oppressed female Supreme Court justices are.
00:53:00.000So, I still want to get back to this, that the hatred or the dislike of clear thinking, do you think that this comes from people, I'm not even sure I completely wrap my head around this, but do you think this is from someone with,
00:53:16.000they understand that their logic is muddy?
00:53:19.000They understand that their imposing of this muddy logic is illogical in some sort of a way?
00:53:29.000I mean, that's the other thing is that there isn't a lot of clear thinking on the side of the social justice types because a lot of what they're doing is reacting at an emotional level.
00:53:38.000Yeah, well, the best personality predictor of Of politically correct belief, because we've done this study, although it's not published yet, is trait agreeableness.
00:53:49.000And agreeableness, I would say, the best way to think about it is that it's the maternal dimension.
00:53:53.000That's an oversimplification, but not much of one.
00:53:58.000And the maternal viewpoint is something like anybody who's part of my in-group Is an infant in trouble and anyone who's outside of it is a predatory snake.
00:54:10.000And so you're seeing that manifest itself in a political doctrine.
00:54:13.000Well, you're clearly seeing that today with what's going on with these, like say, the Berkeley Milo rally, where people who are on the left, who you would think of as being pro-woman,
00:54:29.000pro-anti-violence, are more than capable of committing violence against women who support Trump, because then they categorize them as Nazis, and we're supposed to punch Nazis.
00:54:42.000And I mean, there's been a bunch of instances where you've seen video footage of people getting pepper sprayed and hit with sticks because they were wearing the wrong...
00:54:51.000It wasn't even a Make America Great Again hat.
00:54:54.000It was actually a Make Bitcoin Great Again hat.
00:54:56.000There's a very famous video of a girl getting pepper sprayed.
00:55:03.000And by people who are supposed to be, you know, quote unquote, progressive, and people who are supposed to be pro-women's rights, you know, anti-violence against women, anti-domestic violence, but yet they have no problem doing it to this other person, because this person becomes the other, because they're on the other side.
00:55:19.000Yeah, well, I was talking about this line between good and evil that runs down people's hearts.
00:55:25.000It's a terrible fault line, and it can be shocking to see that it's the case.
00:55:30.000And so it's much more convenient for people to divide the world into the righteous and the damned, let's say, and then to...
00:55:40.000Well, it's convenient, too, because whatever resentment and hatred and bitterness you have in your heart, and you have plenty of that, generally speaking, if you're a social justice type, because you regard yourself as oppressed.
00:55:52.000And that's a great starting point for resentment and hatred, to be a victim.
00:55:58.000We know that one of the precursors to genocide, and I'm not saying at all that we're near that state, I'm not saying that, but one of the precursors to genocide in a genocidal state or in a pre-genocidal state is the acceptance of victim status by the eventual perpetrators.
00:56:15.000Because the idea is, well, we're innocent, we're being persecuted, and those people are going to get us, so eventually that becomes, well, we'll get them first.
00:56:23.000So you have a target for all your resentment and your hatred, and it's a justifiable moral target.
00:56:29.000And so all the part of yourself that you don't recognize as contributing to whatever problem you think now pollutes the world...
00:56:52.000Or hitting them with bike locks while you dart out behind a woman who's conveniently standing in front of you.
00:57:00.000Is there an evolutionary origin for what we were talking about in regards to a soldier being able to commit these horrible atrocities in the name of war to these people that are able to look at someone who has a differing ideology as the other and attack them as almost like a subhuman?
00:57:21.000Is there some sort of an evolutionary origin for this disassociative sort of thinking and behavior?
00:59:10.000See, think about what happens to the space around the party.
00:59:14.000When you tell the joke, the second before you tell the joke, you're in one place.
00:59:18.000And the second after you tell the joke, when there's an awkward silence and everybody's looking embarrassed, you are no longer in the same place.
00:59:24.000You've stepped outside the protective embrace of that particular hierarchy, and you've made yourself an alien.
00:59:31.000And the thing that people use to process the alien is the snake detector, the serpent detector, the dragon detector.
00:59:40.000And it's always been that way because anything that's outside the hierarchy is a threat.
00:59:44.000Any stranger, any strange idea, any animal manifestation, any noise, any spirit, it's a threat to the integrity of the dominance hierarchy, and in many, many ways.
01:00:03.000There's a great paper published in a journal called PLOS1 about five or six years ago looking at something absolutely terrifying in my estimation which was there's this idea that part of what motivates the authoritarian end of political conservatism so let's say the right-wing fascist end is associated not with fear but with disgust.
01:00:26.000Disgust is an entirely different emotion.
01:00:29.000And so these researchers did this fascinating study where they went to a number of different countries and also looked at states within the same country, looking at the relationship between the prevalence of infectious disease and authoritarian attitudes at the individual level.
01:00:43.000The higher the infectious disease rate, the more authoritarian the political views.
01:01:41.000And so we respond to them with the same circuitry that we use to detect pathogens.
01:01:46.000And I'll tell you something even more frightening when we were working this out, because it's associated with this trait called orderliness, which is actually a good predictor of right-wing political belief.
01:01:55.000I went back and looked at Hitler's Table Talk.
01:01:57.000It's a book, Hitler's Table Talk, and he wrote that...
01:02:01.000It was derived from notes that were taken by his secretaries between 1939 and 1942 when he was eating dinner and spontaneously expounding on the structure of reality.
01:02:12.000He was very open, Hitler, a very creative person, but also extremely orderly.
01:02:18.000And I looked at the metaphors that he was using to describe the Jews and the gypsies and all the other people that he burned and destroyed and it was all pathogen, it's all pathogen metaphor.
01:02:57.000And he started this public health campaign in Germany, and he put together these vans that would go around, like, screening people for tuberculosis, which, you know, was a perfectly fine idea.
01:03:08.000But then they started a beautification program of the factories, because he didn't like how messy the factories were in Germany.
01:03:13.000So he had people clean them up, you know, sweep them out and plant flowers out front and fumigate them for rats and insects, right?
01:04:08.000The guy who created the Haber method of extracting nitrogen from the oxygen that we use for fertilizer today.
01:04:13.000Haber created Zyklon A and made it extremely toxic smelling so that you would know to avoid it.
01:04:21.000Zyklon B, that whatever element was removed from the smell so that it would be used in gas chambers, they'd have no idea that they were being gassed.
01:04:31.000Haber, who was a Jew, ironically, did not know that his Zyklon A was eventually going to be used on his own people.
01:04:37.000Yeah, well, I suspect they probably use Zyklon A doing the fumigations, you know, but the thing is, is that, well, so, you know, you said what's the biological basis, and the biological basis is that, like, we're basically wired in some sense also for the domain of order or the domain of chaos.
01:04:56.000That's another way of thinking about it.
01:04:58.000The domain of order, once again, is where you are when what you're doing is working.
01:05:04.000Because, you see, because our environment isn't just natural, it's also social.
01:05:09.000So not only do you have to deal with the vagaries of the natural world properly so that it gives you what you're aiming at.
01:06:01.000And almost, like you were saying of those kids, like almost an unhuman, or a disassociative, sort of the ability to act almost as if, like something other than a person, without reason or logic.
01:06:15.000Yes, well that's dehumanization, right.
01:06:17.000The thing is, another thing that's so funny is that We think that the natural response to looking at a human being is humanization, and that isn't right.
01:06:28.000Like, the default person, in some sense, isn't human.
01:06:32.000The default member of your tribe is human.
01:06:34.000I mean, most tribes around the world, the name for their tribe is the people, implying that they're the people, and all those other things out there are barbarians, right?
01:06:48.000Now, I don't want to be too bleak about it, because This is the basic debate between conservatives and liberals, to some degree, is the conservatives take the stranger equals pathogen route more frequently, and they're less attracted to the idea of,
01:07:05.000or they were conventionally, that trade with the foreigner has benefits that outweigh the...
01:07:49.000Like if you wanted to introduce something into a communist country that screamed the paramount status of the individual, you couldn't possibly create something that broadcast that more clearly than a car.
01:08:04.000Right, the car is driven by one person, the person is completely autonomous, they're completely sealed off, they don't need any state support or sanction whatsoever to move around in the car.
01:08:15.000It's like, if you wanted to rescue the communists from their collective pathology, the best thing to do would be to Parachute in automobiles, because the automobile just screams individual autonomy.
01:08:30.000And so when you get an artifact from a foreigner, you don't know what that's contaminated with, let's put it that way.
01:08:39.000And so we have a circuit for dealing with that, and it's the thing that associates the foreigner with...
01:08:48.000The force that eats the sun when it sets at night.
01:08:51.000That's the most archaic way of thinking about it.
01:09:17.000So, in a sense, the same dehumanizing force that allows people to act that way in war also allows people to disassociate between anyone who doesn't agree with their ideology in a school setting, in a university,
01:09:34.000Yeah, that's why I don't like ideologies, because the ideology divides the world into those safely ensconced within our dominance hierarchy and serpents And so, that's dangerous.
01:09:49.000And the reason that this doctrine that I described about the line between good and evil running down the individual's heart...
01:09:55.000I mean, I got that particular line mostly from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but it's also an idea that's been developed intensively in the West for thousands and thousands of years.
01:10:06.000I mean, maybe it's been developed since far before...
01:10:10.000We invented the stories in Genesis because, of course, the serpent.
01:10:14.000See, in Genesis, of course, Genesis is like a paradise, right?
01:10:17.000So you can think about it as a well-functioning hierarchy.
01:10:20.000It's also a balance between chaos and order.
01:10:25.000So, but there's a snake that pops its head in.
01:10:28.000And that's the same as that, as I said, that black dot inside the white serpent in the yin-yang symbol.
01:10:34.000It's that no matter how, it doesn't matter how perfect the environment is set up, something that doesn't fit is going to make its way inside.
01:10:44.000It's one of the oldest stories of mankind.
01:10:46.000And you see, the thing that makes itself manifest inside in the Genesis story is a snake.
01:10:53.000Now, that snake turns out to be Satan, which is like, how the hell does that happen?
01:11:41.000And then the idea kind of came out, this is so cool, the idea is that, well, the snake that's inside bad person A and the snake that's inside bad person B is somehow the same.
01:11:51.000So that's where the idea of an articulated morality starts to come from, is there's an equivalence of evil across individuals.
01:11:59.000So then the idea of evil itself starts to become abstracted at the same time that the idea of good does.
01:12:04.000Well, evil gets associated with Satan, and Satan gets associated with the snake.
01:13:31.000And that was always an issue with people, with invading tribes, and like you said, with other external threats, whether it was animals or insects or snakes or anything that could kill you.
01:13:42.000Yeah, well, I mean, in a primordial situation, I mean, guys are in warrior mode a good part of the time, and modern people don't even know what that's like.
01:13:50.000That's why they go out and they go into warrior mode and they get post-traumatic stress disorder, because it's so unlike the way they configure themselves that...
01:13:58.000That they can't even bridge the gap between the two identities.
01:14:02.000And just for sake of clarity, I think for some folks, post-traumatic stress disorder has actually come from not just that, but also from the threat of being attacked.
01:14:13.000From what I understand, people like special ops people, people like Rangers and Navy SEALs and the like, are less likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder because they're acting.
01:14:27.000Versus reacting that whereas people that are on that are going on like Patrol and then they get blown up like those people apparently have a far more likely issue with post-traumatic stress disorder because they're constantly worried about these external threats and Then they when they come back to civilization they have a very difficult time Getting back to baseline.
01:14:52.000So it's not just acting, but it's also reacting, that the reacting issue sometimes is even more problematic for the individual than the acting mode.
01:15:01.000Yeah, well, there's a funny dichotomy there, because very frequently, if you're going to When you encounter a stress, it's best to do it voluntarily, because you use a whole different circuit, use the approach circuit.
01:15:12.000And so, I mean, that sounds paradoxical, what you just said, because I said that, you know, people often observe themselves doing something and get post-traumatic stress disorder.
01:15:20.000And then you said, well, yeah, but if people act, they're less likely to.
01:15:23.000But that's part of a more general phenomenon, which is that in the face of a stressor, You're better off, psychophysiologically, to act voluntarily.
01:15:33.000You're either going to be the thing that advances on the anomaly, or it's prey.
01:15:40.000That's roughly the way to think about it.
01:15:42.000And to be a prey animal is a terrible thing, because it's doom, it's paralysis.
01:15:48.000Like, literally speaking, it's like in the Harry Potter series with the basilisk, right?
01:15:52.000You look at the basilisk and it turns you to stone.
01:16:15.000That is a really interesting thing that I never considered, that Medusa does have this head of snakes, and she looks at you, she turns you into stone, and that is the biggest issue with people.
01:16:30.000The freeze thing is very common with people, and I've seen it.
01:16:33.000I've seen it with people that just, they don't know what to do when they're in a stressful situation, and instead of reacting, they freak out.
01:16:44.000Yeah, well, you can see that if we go back to that example of, say, someone tells a joke, maybe they're kind of socially anxious and they finally manage to mumble out a joke and it falls flat.
01:16:53.000It's like, to freeze in the face of that is a very common reaction.
01:16:57.000You know, the person will freeze, then often they'll break into tears and run.
01:17:01.000So, well, if they're socially anxious, that's exactly what's going to happen.
01:17:05.000Now, they also know that they've been turned into a predator, let's say, a snake predator by the whole community, and that's very shaming.
01:17:13.000And so, that is dumped on top of them.
01:17:18.000I mean, socially anxious people are afraid of that all the time, that they're going to be regarded by the group as an outcast or a pariah, right?
01:17:37.000Yeah, I think this is a very important subject.
01:17:40.000And in explaining it this way, I think for the open-minded, whoever is willing to listen to this, who maybe might have opposed some of your ideas before, I think they'll get a better understanding of what's really dangerous about this lack of dialogue and this lack of engaging and this shutting you out and making you the other,
01:18:00.000Yeah, well, I mean, it's what postmodernism is fundamentally concerned about.
01:18:04.000They don't believe there's any other way of operating in the world than that.
01:18:07.000You see, and this is one of the things that I think Western civilization has contributed so brilliantly to the expansion of knowledge in the world.
01:18:19.000What's the cure for the inadequacies of the group?
01:18:23.000Well, you might say it's the perfect state.
01:18:27.000I'm going to do a series of lectures on the Bible starting May 16th, and for reasons that I outlined to some degree when I was talking about Genesis a little bit earlier.
01:18:36.000But in the Old Testament, for example, the Israelites are always trying to make their peace with God.
01:18:41.000So they're trying to live in the world without getting walloped constantly by natural events and by invading forces.
01:19:08.000That's one of the things that's so cool.
01:19:10.000And partly the reason you can bargain with reality is because the reality that you encounter as you move forward in time is partly the world, but partly the abstract social system.
01:19:22.000And so, you can bargain with the future abstract social system all the time.
01:19:27.000You do that every time you make a promise.
01:19:29.000You do it every time you sacrifice one thing for another.
01:19:32.000You know, so you forego an impulsive temptation, and that gives you a moral claim that you can redeem in the future.
01:20:17.000It's like a six million year path from chimpanzee to self-aware human being.
01:20:23.000You know, and we have no idea where these unbelievably sophisticated ideas that we have come from, like the idea of sacrifice.
01:20:29.000Do you know how much blood was spilled before human beings were able to sacrifice abstractly instead of killing something?
01:20:37.000We had to act out, God enjoys you killing something because he's happy with the blood.
01:20:43.000We had to act that out for God, who knows, 20,000 years, 100,000 years, before we got anywhere near the idea that you could do that abstractly.
01:20:53.000So, when I look at these old stories, I look at them like an evolutionary biologist.
01:20:58.000Now, I'm not trying to reduce them in any way, because what we don't understand about evolution, that could make a very thick book.
01:21:05.000And there's other strange things about religious phenomenology that we don't have a clue about.
01:21:10.000You know, like the fact that the drugs often called entheogens or psychedelics can reliably produce mystical experiences.
01:21:17.000Like, no one has any idea what to make of that.
01:22:21.000There's absolutely no doubt about that.
01:22:22.000But what do you think the reason for that is?
01:22:25.000Well, part of the reason is that we share an evolutionary pathway with all these things that we eat, you know, plants and fungi and, you know, look...
01:22:34.000We're linked evolutionarily to every form of life on the planet.
01:22:40.000Serotonin in lobsters has the same effect on lobsters as it does on human beings.
01:22:46.000So if you up their serotonin levels artificially, the lobster stands up more erect and stronger and is much more willing to fight.
01:22:53.000And if you decrease the serotonin in the lobster's nervous system, then it gets all depressed and runs away and hides.
01:23:49.000You have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors.
01:23:53.000Now, people have a hard time with that, but you could imagine that, roughly speaking, that would happen if every single woman had one baby and only every second man fathered a child.
01:24:03.000So for men, it would be you either have two kids or zero.
01:24:07.000Well, that's basically what it is on average across time.
01:24:10.000If you're a man, you have two children, maybe with two different women, or zero.
01:25:25.000What that means is that over the millions of years that a dominance hierarchy with those properties existed, so let's say since we split from chimps, let's say that's six million years.
01:25:35.000That means that the male dominance hierarchy is the environment that pushes the mating male to the top.
01:25:42.000So that means the male that's most likely to take precedence in the male dominance hierarchy is the one most likely to leave a genetic contribution.
01:25:51.000So that means that the male dominance hierarchy is a selection mechanism mediated by the female.
01:25:57.000So what that means is that as we've moved forward through six million years of time, men have become more and more well adapted, not only to the presence of the male dominance hierarchy, but to the ability to move up it.
01:26:10.000And that's the central spirit, you could say, in some sense.
01:26:13.000That's the central spirit of the individual.
01:26:14.000The individual is the thing that can move up dominance hierarchies.
01:27:41.000And so then not only are we genetically aiming at that with the dominance hierarchy as a selection mechanism mediated by female choice, but our stories are trying to push us in that direction.
01:27:52.000And so then we say, well, look, that person's admirable.
01:27:55.000We tell a story about him and we say, this person is admirable.
01:27:58.000We tell a story about him and this person is admirable.
01:28:01.000And at the same time we talk about the people who aren't admirable.
01:28:04.000And then we start having admirable and non-admirable as categories.
01:28:08.000And out of that you get something like good and evil.
01:28:11.000And then you can start to imagine the perfect person.
01:28:22.000That becomes a religious figure across time.
01:28:24.000That becomes a savior, a messiah across time, as we conceptualize what the ideal person is.
01:28:31.000And in the West, here's how we figured it out.
01:28:34.000We said the ideal person, the ideal man, is the person who tells the truth.
01:28:37.000And what that means is that's the best way of climbing up any possible dominance hierarchy.
01:28:42.000In the way that's most stable and most lasting.
01:28:45.000That's the conclusion of Western culture.
01:28:47.000So in a sense, psychologically, when you're talking about postmodernists and their rejection of these classic male structures, what they're doing is realizing that they're not going to compete in the classic, as stated, male hierarchy, so they're creating their own version of it.
01:29:03.000Sure, that's the creative element, sure.
01:29:05.000Well, we asked earlier, what's the motivation of these pathological guys who are out there, like, bolstering up the feminists?
01:30:25.000When you start to realize how much of what you've constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies, that is a horrifying realization.
01:31:12.000Now, you've been embattled in this conflict for quite a long time, and I've got to imagine that the way you look at the world, the way you see things many, many steps ahead, do you see any sort of a logical conclusion to this process?
01:31:28.000Do you see any light at the end of the tunnel, or do you see...
01:32:11.000All I know about the frog is the frog, the Trump frog, Peppy the frog who is apparently so distraught that his frog has been used to align with...
01:32:40.000So they used this symbol, K-E-K, to replace L-O-L. And the reason they did that was because K-E-K in Korean means L-O-L. And so it was just this little joke.
01:33:52.000We're in a period of chaos, and in a period of chaos, the time horizon shrinks because the outcome is uncertain.
01:33:58.000Well, this seems to be truly embracing chaos.
01:34:01.000I mean, just that statement, the frog, the Donald Trump thing with the hat on.
01:34:05.000This is one of the things that seems to me to be a reoccurring feature in this whole chaos ballet that we're watching play out, is that people are enjoying the fact that Donald Trump sucks as a president.
01:34:22.000And they don't like it because they want to burn this motherfucker to the ground and torch this thing and, like a phoenix, we'll rise from the fire.
01:36:41.000It's chaos, and down there there's all sorts of play of possibility.
01:36:44.000And the reason the frog was the guardian of chaos is because the frog is this thing that doesn't fit into categories, you see, because it's partly water, it's partly land.
01:38:55.000And, like, we're in an unstable period of time at the moment, in a transition period of some sort.
01:39:01.000I can't put my finger on it, but I know that that's partly why what I've been saying has been resonating with people, because obviously it's not about pronouns.
01:39:14.000Language turns out to be about a lot more than like you can't take a little thing Like the desire to transform pronouns and think that that's a little thing.
01:39:24.000It's also your disagreement with this use of these New gender pronoun words they're trying to force on people has opened up this discussion where you can Enlighten people on your very deep understanding of human psychology.
01:39:41.000It's not just simply This gender pronoun disagreement.
01:40:07.000To engage you in this battle of rhetoric, it allows you to expose your very deep understanding with the problems that are going on right now with human beings in general.
01:40:20.000Well, it looks like that to me because what happens, as far as I can tell, with my YouTube channel, say, is that people are often pulled in because of the social justice warrior stuff.
01:40:31.000But then they see I have all these other videos and they're curious about me, partly because people are calling me names.
01:40:37.000And so then they watch a video or two and they think, hmm, I haven't heard that before.
01:40:59.000I would imagine, over the last few months, it must be just overwhelming.
01:41:03.000Yeah, well, I've given up trying to keep up on my email.
01:41:08.000My wife helps me with that, and I've had some other people help me.
01:41:10.000But, you know, what I do is I look, and I try to say thank you to people and write them a couple of lines when I have a moment, but, you know, because I can't get to all of it.
01:41:53.000Well, my sense is that if you want to change the world, you start from yourself and work outward because you build your competence that way.
01:41:59.000It's like, I don't know how you can go out and protest the structure of the entire economic system if you can't keep your room organized.
01:42:06.000Yeah, isn't that an issue with people, though, that they always want to enact some sort of control over the outside world when their inside is all fucked up?
01:42:47.000There's a New Testament line about that, something about, you know, not worrying too much about the log in your neighbor's eye, or about the speck in your neighbor's eye when you have a log in your eye.
01:42:57.000It's like, yes, no kidding, but, you know, do you really want to face that?
01:43:02.000And so, what I've thought about is that, well, what you start to do is you start to tell and act out the truth locally.
01:43:09.000Like within the domain of your actual competence, you know, because the world presents itself as a series of puzzles, some of which you're capable of solving and some of which you're not.
01:43:19.000And you have many puzzles in front of you that you could solve, but you choose not to.
01:43:25.000You know, those are the things that weigh on your conscience.
01:43:28.000It's like, you know, I should really do this, but you don't.
01:43:30.000It's like, so I had this idea a long time ago, because the world is a pretty dreadful place.
01:43:34.000I thought, well, what would the world be like if people stopped avoiding the things they knew they should do?
01:43:40.000You know, because the question is, how much are we contributing to the fact that Life is an existential catastrophe and a tragedy.
01:43:48.000How much is our own corruption contributing to that?
01:45:13.000When you see people that have a lot of inspirational memes on, like, Instagram and Facebook, they're almost all fucked up.
01:45:23.000L. Ron Hubbard was completely insane and was self-diagnosing and One of the things he was trying to do I mean if you read Lawrence Wright's book going clear he was clearly trying to fix himself in creating this religion this Religion that was a lot of it based on self-help principles that he took from other sources That you see from a lot of these people that are like,
01:45:49.000I mean, there's legitimately motivational people that find great benefit in being an example, a powerful, strong example, and they find great comfort in showing people their methods that they've used in order to improve their life,
01:46:08.000like your own self-auditing system that you're promoting.
01:46:12.000So it's not that it's all not real or, you know...
01:46:20.000No, it's not like there's no way that people can improve themselves.
01:47:17.000And oftentimes you see that after initial success.
01:47:20.000You'll see some amazing motivation early in their career, then initial success, and then self-sabotage after the fact, not realizing their potential.
01:47:31.000Obviously, they've hit some sort of a frequency where they resonate with people that appreciate them.
01:47:36.000Authors you see that with, musicians, comedians, all sorts of people that create things.
01:47:42.000And then they're not living up to their potential because they've allowed the demons to take over the inner workings of their mind.
01:47:50.000And again, there's a lot of sincere people that are motivational people that I follow.
01:47:55.000I think there's a lot of people out there that take great pleasure in expressing to other people the things that have benefited them.
01:49:52.000But one of the things that's so interesting, and it's terrifying to realize that, which is why it's terrifying to realize the shadow, which is why people don't do it, It's no wonder they don't do it.
01:50:01.000You know, it's a horrible thing to realize that you're human, and what being human means.
01:50:08.000Like, angel, like Christ to Satan, that's the human being.
01:50:13.000And you might say, well, those aren't real.
01:50:16.000It's like, okay, well, they're figments of the imagination that the human race constructed to describe themselves.
01:50:42.000So, Jung's idea that you find so compelling was essentially that one has to understand their potential for horrific behavior, that it almost exists in all of us, that it's a facet of just the human experience.
01:51:00.000Well, look, I know partly why you're so popular.
01:51:47.000So it's one of the reasons why I do it in almost...
01:51:49.000Because I want it to be in an almost...
01:51:54.000In a way that you don't imagine human beings moving.
01:51:58.000You know that you it's like it confuses the mind because it's not standard human movement and Then on top of that the way I'm thinking and it's like Explosive like when he yells out nonsense and I say he because I don't think of it as me I really think it's it sounds so pretentious,
01:52:16.000but while I'm doing that my brain goes into another place You can't do that unless you're a monster It's a fucked up bit.
01:52:28.000I'm very happy when I retired it, by the way.
01:52:49.000So it was very funny to watch you do that.
01:52:52.000And I wondered how far you would let yourself get into it.
01:52:54.000But I think part of the reason that you're appealing to people, if you don't mind me saying this, you know, I'm not trying to be forward particularly, but I thought about it a lot, is that you're a tough guy.
01:53:54.000And that's the step on the way to enlightenment, weirdly enough, because that isn't what people think.
01:53:59.000Well, I definitely think that truth is a valuable commodity in this very bizarre time.
01:54:05.000And I think that's also one of the reasons why you're very popular, is that you have stuck your neck out in a world that does not encourage it, nor...
01:54:15.000Academia not only does it not encourage it encourages the exact opposite encourages you to stick your head You know in in the books and just to in in some way shape or form go with the tide like whichever way it is and you know get your tenure and Just yeah,
01:55:05.000In this book called Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche has his Zarathustra come down from a mountaintop after being enlightened, and he sees this.
01:55:13.000He goes into the public square, and there's this little tiny being there, like an inch high, and it has a gigantic ear on it.
01:55:21.000And it's talking, and people are gathered around listening.
01:55:24.000And that was sort of Nietzsche's metaphor for an intellectual.
01:55:31.000Maybe the rational faculty or something like that expanded to monstrous dimensions, unbalanced in that manner, and prone to become the subject of totalitarian ideology.
01:55:43.000That's the worship of the rational mind that the Catholic Church always warned against.
01:55:48.000You know, it's not like the Catholic Church.
01:55:50.000Of course I have to say this, but I won't even say it.
01:58:23.000Northrop Frye, who is a biblical scholar at the University of Toronto, this was one of his elucidations of the structure of the Bible.
01:58:31.000So the Bible's actually a story, which is weird because it's a whole bunch of different books written by a whole bunch of different people, edited kind of willy-nilly over thousands of years and then assembled, you know, by committee.
01:58:42.000It's a really strange book, but it has a narrative structure.
01:58:46.000And that sort of emerged as a collective decision across these thousands of years.
01:58:51.000So, the Old Testament, here's the rough story in the Old Testament.
01:58:57.000Israel is sort of a middle power, and it rises to power.
01:59:50.000And then it gets powerful for a brief period of time, and it gets corrupt, and a prophet comes up and says, remember that superordinate principle that you made a covenant with?
01:59:59.000You're not paying any attention to it anymore.
02:00:16.000The idea, because the state keeps rising, there's an idea that emerges out of that, that the aim is the perfect state.
02:00:23.000That's a utopian dream that arises out of that, let's call it, learned process over thousands of years.
02:00:30.000If we could only get the state perfect, if we could only get the state perfect, well let's say like the state of Israel, or the Russian state, the communist state, if we could only bring utopia in at the political level, our problems would be solved.
02:00:43.000Well, then what happens is there's a transition in conceptualization.
02:04:18.000Because every time I go back to Jung, which I do from time to time, thinking I've kind of mastered him, I learn a bunch of stuff that I didn't know.
02:04:27.000So what I've been trying to do is to resurrect...
02:09:06.000I mean, so look, there's an old medieval idea.
02:09:08.000This is the idea of the imitation of Christ.
02:09:11.000This is something that Jung elaborates on a lot.
02:09:13.000He believed, this is one of the things that he said, was that the proper goal of a Christian, roughly speaking, is to enact the The meta-pattern of Christ's life in their own, to make it their own story.
02:09:31.000Well, part of it is, see, one of the things that characterizes the mythological figure of Christ, let's say, is that he takes on the burden of mortality voluntarily.
02:09:41.000He accepts it as a precondition of existence.
02:09:45.000And we have to do that because otherwise we get resentful.
02:10:29.000I think people are constantly searching for that thing that you just described the thing of meaning you know having meaning in this life and That meaning has a different definition for everybody I mean everybody's meaning is dummy your meaning might be very different than mine or Jamie's I mean you kind of have to have your own path and I think that's also a One of the reasons why people are so confused is because you're thrust into an early age,
02:10:52.000into a very rigid system of education, and then of jobs, and then of career structure, where you're in this place, and most people don't feel like that's what they're supposed to be doing.
02:11:05.000And we feel very alienated by the very structure of society that we are embedded in.
02:11:11.000Well, one of the There's two primary masculine mythological figures, and one is the wise king, and the other is the king who devours his own son.
02:11:21.000That's the patriarchy that the feminists are always talking about.
02:11:33.000It needs you to adopt the norms and to squelch your peculiar individuality and to be a cog and to be socialized and, you know, to hem yourself in and control yourself and not be impulsive.
02:14:43.000Yeah, but a lot of women find great offense in someone saying that, especially a man saying that, mansplaining that a woman's purpose is to breed, right?
02:14:51.000I mean, isn't that a giant issue that a lot of women have?
02:14:53.000I didn't say that was the only purpose.
02:15:57.000And I would caution any women listening, if they're young, not to be deluded into the idea that their career will be of such high quality that itself evidently trumps having a family.
02:16:09.000You have to have a hell of a career before that's the case.
02:16:16.000Don't you think that's unique to the individual though, that some people just, they'll be more satisfied, I mean, depending on what they're doing artistically or creatively or whatever it is?
02:16:26.000Yeah, you can't make rules for the exceptional.
02:16:59.000A smart kid, the smarter the kid, the earlier they learn to lie.
02:17:02.000Lying is very powerful, because you can manipulate the world with your language, and then you can get what you want lots of times, or escape from things that you don't want, so why not lie all the time?
02:17:13.000Well, I think the reason is, there's a bunch of reasons, but one of them is that you can't trust yourself if you lie.
02:17:18.000And there's going to be times in your life where you have no one to turn to except you.
02:17:22.000And so if you've stuffed yourself full of lies, then you're going to be in a crisis one day, and you're going to have to make a decision, and you're going to decide wrong.
02:17:29.000And you're going to be in real trouble.
02:17:30.000Because you won't have the clarity of mind necessary to make the proper judgment.
02:17:34.000Because you've filled your imagination and your perception with rubbish.
02:17:40.000So, and if you really think that through, you see, there's this old idea in the Old Testament that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and I kind of understand what that means.
02:17:49.000Because one of the things, say, we do with the Future Authoring Program, we offer people a little heaven.
02:17:53.000It's like, okay, construct your ideal.
02:18:06.000It's now your approach systems, technically speaking, the positive emotion systems that motivate you are engaged because they're engaged in relationship to a goal.
02:18:15.000And the more transcendent the goal, the more they're engaged.
02:21:55.000You have to justify your miserable existence.
02:21:57.000Do you think, and this is my theory about that, I believe that there are certain human reward systems that we have ingrained in us and that have allowed us to survive this long.
02:22:08.000And that these reward systems, a lot of them entail overcoming struggle.
02:22:27.000Like you have to trick your body and you trick your brain and trick your humanity, your very existence, into having some sort of a purpose in order to be at a baseline.
02:24:03.000When people talk about meaning, though, when you talk about suffering and this idea, what is going on in the mind that desires this difficult pursuit?
02:24:22.000Of your ultimate happiness to have these obstacles to overcome and these character developing moments, character building episodes in order for you to manage life and to get through life with the most amount of happiness.
02:24:38.000There's a story about this, I think it's a frog and a scorpion.
02:24:44.000Yeah, well the frog, the scorpion, you know, convinces the frog to give him a ride across the river and the frog says, well, you're a scorpion.
02:24:51.000It's like, you know, I'm not going to do that because you're going to nail me with your tail.
02:24:56.000And the scorpion says, no, no, if I do that...
02:24:58.000When we're in the river, we'll both drown, so why would I do that?
02:25:02.000So the frog agrees to ferry the scorpion across, and they get halfway out, and the scorpion stings him.
02:25:07.000And the frog turns to him with his dying breath and says, why'd you do that?
02:25:10.000And the scorpion said, well, it's in my nature.
02:25:13.000And that's the answer to your question, is that it's in our nature.
02:25:18.000The hero archetype is the story of men.
02:25:21.000Right, but do you think that that nature is because that is how we survived?
02:25:25.000How over the millions of years we evolved from lower hominids to being a human being is that we needed to have the mechanisms in our very existence to overcome struggle.
02:25:41.000Well, I mean, I think it is part of the evolutionary process, but look...
02:25:46.000The thing about sexual selection or the mechanisms that we talked about, say, whereby the dominance hierarchy is the selection mechanism for the transfer of genetic material, there's a choice in that.
02:25:56.000Like, if a group of guys gets to get together and a leader emerges, someone everyone respects, it's like an election.
02:26:37.000Well, they certainly know about sexual selection by female choice, you know, but the full implications of that haven't been thought through.
02:26:44.000Like, I've just really started to grapple with the idea that the male hierarchy is a sexual selection device.
02:26:51.000It's like the men are voting on, well, who, which of us deserves to go sleep with a woman?
02:27:33.000But even with that sexual selection, even with that Say if a person does rise to the top of the social hierarchy in that small Dunbar's number of 250 people, is that enough?
02:28:07.000It's something Kierkegaard pointed out like 150 years ago.
02:28:10.000He said there'll come a time when everything has been done so well for everyone that the only felt lack will be for lack itself.
02:28:18.000Are you concerned because of that and because you're very acutely aware of this issue?
02:28:22.000Are you concerned with this potential future that we have in front of us with artificial intelligence and virtual reality and this need to live in a world that's not real?
02:28:31.000Like, I mean, how many kids today listening to this exist for a massive amount of their day watching video games, playing video games?
02:28:39.000Yeah, playing the archetypal hero online.
02:29:13.000Like I mean pale like he hadn't been outside in days and he was hanging out in the back of the Comedy Store and we were talking and he was addicted to I think it was EverQuest which is this crazy role-playing game that you just do and you just people would play it 18 hours a day and He said something I'll never forget.
02:29:31.000He said I'm so successful in the video game world and so unsuccessful in the real world that And he was sitting there shaking his head, and I was like, wow.
02:29:43.000In the real world, he was very unfulfilled, couldn't find a girlfriend, was struggling financially.
02:29:51.000In the video game world, he was like some warlock.
02:29:54.000He was out there slaying dragons, and he found...
02:29:58.000Great reward in that video game world.
02:30:02.000I'm very concerned that we will literally almost be like in The Matrix, plugged into some artificial electronic thing, which I think these video games that people are playing all day long, they're a precursor to that.
02:30:15.000Don't get me wrong, if you have great self-control, they're very enjoyable, they're fun, They're great social time with you and your friends.
02:30:21.000You get together, you play, and you have a great...
02:30:23.000As long as you're actually being productive and active in everyday life, I don't really think they're a problem.
02:30:28.000But my concern is that they are a precursor and that we are seeing the beginning steps to this artificial world that we'll be embedded in in the very near future.
02:30:39.000Well, you know, we decided already that we're in a period of chaos.
02:31:22.000You try to tell the truth, and maybe you'll get through it, and act it out as well, because what else do you have?
02:31:28.000Isn't that another fantastic sign of chaos?
02:31:32.000I mean, I say fantastic, not in a positive way, but that Donald Trump is our president now, the president who has had the biggest problem with the truth.
02:32:41.000I know people went into the voting booth and their hand was hovering over Hillary, you know, and it was shaking and they thought, oh, to hell with it, Trump.
02:33:55.000Well, that's the other thing that people, when they find out how little the rest of the world lives on, they find out that the top 1% of the world makes about $34,000 US. Yeah, well, it depends.
02:34:06.000I know if you're, you know, for many people, someone who's rich is someone who has more money than them.
02:34:49.000You want to have all the benefits of having all the benefits, and you want to have all the benefits of having none of the benefits.
02:34:54.000Because just all the benefits isn't enough for you.
02:34:57.000One thing that's a reoccurring subject that I find incredibly fascinating, and it keeps coming up, and it's been brought up even more so lately because of artificial intelligence and automated vehicles and all these different things that are happening, is there going to be an erosion of jobs.
02:35:14.000And a subject keeps reoccurring, and that's universal basic income.
02:35:45.000Well, leisure time, it's like, what is leisure time exactly?
02:35:48.000Is it sitting in a closet like a discarded android?
02:35:52.000I mean, that's often how people respond when they retire.
02:35:56.000Right, but would they have to retire or would they have their needs taken care of as far as food and shelter and then be able to pursue something that they actually enjoy and are interested in because the job that they were stuck in doesn't exist anymore?
02:36:08.000And I would say at the moment the data aren't great.
02:36:13.000You know, what happens to a lot of men who are unemployed, now they've, let's say, they've had that thrust upon them involuntarily, but most people who we would be talking about would be in that situation, is that, you know, they get depressed, they sit on the couch, they develop chronic pain problems,
02:36:56.000Automation does come along, and artificial intelligence does come along, and it really is a situation where a lot of the things that people do to occupy their time in order to feed themselves and shelter themselves, they don't exist anymore.
02:37:07.000So you're not talking about unemployment like, Bob, you're not a good enough lawyer, you've been fired, and now you're like, God, I'm a failure, I'm depressed, I am unemployed.
02:38:49.000So, creativity as such is a double-edged blessing, for sure.
02:38:54.000And part of the reason that lots of people aren't creative is because it's a lot, let's think about it from an evolutionary perspective, is because it's a hell of a lot easier not to be decked out in bright colours when the predators come along.
02:39:06.000You want to stay camouflaged against the herd like a zebra.
02:39:34.000Okay, so you're looking at some zebras, and you think, yeah, I need to look at one zebra to figure out what it's doing, because I'm trying to understand zebras.
02:39:40.000So you look at a zebra, and then you take some notes, and you look up, and you think, oh God, which zebra was that?
02:39:45.000Because the camouflage is against the herd.
02:39:47.000Just the idea that the camouflage is against the herd, that's such a useful idea to have in your mind, that camouflage is against the herd.
02:39:55.000So you go up to the zebra in your jeep and you've got a stick with a rag on it and you put a nice daub of red paint on the zebra's haunch or you clip its ear like with a cattle clip.
02:40:04.000And the first thing that you know, you get the hell out of there and the lions kill it.
02:40:09.000Because they can identify the thing that stands out and organize their hunt around it.
02:40:14.000And so that's why there aren't creative people.
02:40:16.000I think that is Sapolsky, and I think it was an ear clip.
02:41:00.000Animals can't, they only see in black and white, like prey animals like deer, and it's edge detection that they're looking for.
02:41:10.000And these things, the hard lines of the black and the brown and the lighter colors, it throws off the, that's fusion, that's a different color.
02:43:07.000I think that's true everywhere, but I think it's more true of Canada than it is of the U.S. I think it's celebrated a lot in the U.S. I mean, I think there's always going to be some resistance, especially from people that don't feel like...
02:43:19.000People always measure themselves against someone.
02:43:21.000If there's someone who's out there as just, you know, some genius in some form or another, there's always going to be people that measure themselves against that person and find themselves coming up short.
02:43:33.000That individual, someone who has just catastrophic success in some sort of a way.
02:43:38.000Yeah, well, I think that's another reason for people to be enemies of clear thought as well, because clear thought is a good pathway to success.
02:43:46.000And so if you can go after people who think clearly, it's another way of keeping the dominance hierarchy nice and flat for your delectation, let's say.
02:43:55.000So that's the enemy of competence element that I see as part of the social justice warrior movement.
02:44:28.000The best farmers, hey, they grow food.
02:44:32.000So, there's no appreciation for actual, the real world.
02:44:35.000Well, there's no real world in postmodernism anyway, so that doesn't matter, but there's no appreciation for competence or the fact that there is individual difference in competence, even though they're always talking about diversity.
02:44:46.000And there's a downplaying of competition and the importance of competition.
02:47:25.000It's not a good place to be in and good motivations don't come out of it, that's for sure.
02:47:30.000You've made some statements and we've had some conversations about your role in academia and that you might not necessarily be in structured academia forever, that this might be an issue,
02:47:50.000Well, I think what happened was the university reacted towards me because a bunch of people got irritated and organized in their irritated way and said that I was a bad person and something should be done about me.
02:48:05.000And there was enough of them, so the university thought they needed to react to that pressure.
02:48:10.000That's a charitable way of interpreting it, but reasonable.
02:48:14.000But then a bunch of people wrote the university and said, wait a second, I agree with what that guy's doing, you should leave him alone.
02:48:21.000And not only people from the general populace, but...
02:48:24.000Soon after I posted the original videos, like the press was kind of ambivalent about me for a while.
02:48:30.000In the first two weeks or three weeks, say, after I released those videos and there were the protests.
02:48:35.000But then they started to look into what I was doing and they thought, oh, it turns out that, you know, freedom of speech actually happens to be quite important to journalists too.
02:48:44.000And they came out like really radically...
02:48:48.000In support of me, some of the major journalists in Canada and the whole post media system, which was about 150 or 200 newspapers.
02:48:56.000And so the university had a reason to back off.
02:49:01.000And maybe they were happy to back off.
02:49:03.000I mean, the dean I was negotiating was, you know, he wasn't a bad guy.
02:49:43.000And then, so I was, I had a, like, a health crisis in December that More or less rectified itself by the beginning of January, but I wasn't sure that plus what had happened to me because of these videos and all the crazy response to them.
02:49:58.000I wasn't sure I was in a sufficiently together position to go back lecturing in January.
02:50:04.000I didn't even know for a while until December if I was going to be, let's say, allowed to continue to lecture.
02:50:22.000What is it like now when you're in school?
02:50:23.000Is it a completely different experience than before your notoriety exploded?
02:50:29.000Well, there's lots of things that are different about it.
02:50:31.000I mean, there are lots of people who come to my classes just to sit in the classes.
02:50:37.000There's people who are stopping me all the time in the hallways and wanting to introduce themselves, and that happens a lot in public, in the strangest situations, so I'm rather unused to that.
02:50:48.000The feeling at the university, well, I haven't processed any of that yet.
02:50:52.000I mean, I would say I'm about seven months behind in my understanding of my own life.
02:50:57.000You know, because things happened, so many things happened from September to now, that I haven't had time to think about any of them.
02:51:07.000You know, it's just, it's been a continual, an absolutely continual...
02:51:16.000Treadmill of trying to keep up with the requests for speaking and the email and I'm supposed to be making these YouTube videos because I have people who are supporting me for doing that so I'm trying to keep that up and then I'm trying to go speak when people invite me but not all the time because of course that's a lot of travel and so I'm trying to recalibrate my life I'm trying to figure out okay I got 10 million views on YouTube well what am I supposed to do with that piece of information?
02:52:01.000Yeah, just, I mean, think about it in terms of, is there any other academic that has ever done anything remotely like that, where you have 250,000 subscribers on YouTube in a relatively short amount of time, and then millions and millions of views on your videos.
02:54:13.000We don't want to get too far away from our bodies.
02:54:17.000We don't want to get too far away from our souls.
02:54:19.000That's another way of thinking about it.
02:54:21.000And, you know, there is this idea that, as I said before, that the Catholics always warned about is that the rational mind falls in love with its own productions, or even more, that it tries to elevate its productions to the status of God.
02:54:35.000And that's, I mean, that's really what Milton was warning about, at least in some sense, in his book Paradise Lost.
02:54:41.000You know, these utopias are human creations and then people fall prey to them.
02:54:47.000It really is very much like idol worship.
02:54:49.000And it's no wonder people get skeptical of the intellectuals because they're producing these utopias that are fake, that they inhabit.
02:54:58.000They're almost like the abstract equivalent of video games.
02:55:03.000I think you're right about that, but I also think there's something else going on.
02:55:06.000I think people are aware of this chaos that we described earlier, and they're terrified, and they're clinging to nonsense because of that terror.
02:55:14.000And they're embedding themselves in these fruitless pursuits, chasing their own tail.
02:55:22.000That chasing your own tail, that's a symbol of chaos.
02:55:25.000Chaos is the dragon that eats its own tail.
02:55:27.000So that came spontaneously to mind when you thought about that.
02:55:31.000It's because it's a downward spiral, man.
02:55:34.000Yeah, and the thing is that as you retreat from the chaos into your own little prison, You get weaker and weaker and the prison gets smaller and smaller and the chaos gets bigger and bigger.
02:55:44.000It's really an ugly pathway and you get more and more bitter and resentful and much more afraid of having your prison walls breached.
02:55:53.000And much less interested in pursuing the truth or any sort of objective reasoning and much more interested in Confirmation bias to the extreme.