00:00:10.000I am off the grid this weekend enjoying the beautiful country in the summer.
00:00:14.000And so we are giving you a rewind of our greatest episodes because we have grown probably tenfold since the last time some of these episodes dropped.
00:00:22.000My conversation with Jordan Peterson at a Turning Point USA event, you guys are not going to want to miss it.
00:00:27.000My conversation with the great, the amazing Jordan Peterson, who has really impacted my life tremendously.
00:00:34.000Please consider becoming a contributor at charliekirk.com slash support.
00:01:23.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:30.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:56.000It said, Dr. Peterson's doctrine of masculinity.
00:02:00.000I kind of look around at a young women's leadership summit getting a standing ovation.
00:02:04.000It's a little bit different than the narrative they've been trying to paint about you recently.
00:02:10.000Well, you know, the more identity politics leaning media types that have been covering what I'm doing have a very difficult time with it because they can only see the world through their ideological lens.
00:02:24.000And the lens that they use basically assumes that the world is populated by groups above all, and that every individual within that group is nothing but a mouthpiece for the group and its, let's say, claims for power.
00:02:41.000I'm trying to help people put themselves together as individuals, but that isn't part of that narrative because within that narrative framework, which I've characterized, and other people as well, as sort of postmodern/slash neo-Marxist, even those two things don't fit together very logically.
00:02:59.000In that narrative, there aren't any individuals.
00:03:50.000So I've been on this tour of one form or another since January.
00:03:55.000We've gone to about 40 cities, something like that.
00:03:59.000There's probably about another 40 or so on the roster in the US and Canada and the UK and Europe and Australia.
00:04:06.000And, you know, part of what I'm doing in that tour is laying out a conceptual landscape.
00:04:13.000And part of the basis of that is the blunt truth, I suppose, that life has a tragic element, you know, because we're vulnerable, all of us, and we know it, which is the particularly human curse, let's say.
00:04:29.000And it's not just vulnerability in the tragic sense, it's also the human proclivity for evil that makes the tragedy of life even worse than it would otherwise have to be.
00:04:40.000And you could say that that's a basic truth.
00:04:42.000You could even say that that's a basic truth with regards to the meaning of life.
00:04:45.000You know, it's a pessimistic way of looking at it in some sense, but it leads to an optimistic conclusion.
00:04:52.000All of us have to face our limitations and malevolence in the world and the possibility that we'll be betrayed or betray other people and act improperly.
00:05:05.000But the truth of the matter is, as far as I'm concerned, that each of us has enough potential, character, power of character, let's say, if it's properly manifested, to contend with that in a noble way and to rise above it and to transcend and to deal with it in large part, because we can make the world a much better place than it is for each of us individually and for our families and for our community.
00:05:32.000And we can constrain the malevolence, at least in our own hearts, and perhaps have a positive effect on those around us as a consequence.
00:05:40.000And that actually does make things better, and we actually can do that.
00:05:44.000And that's where the meaning in life is to be found.
00:05:46.000And that meaning, you know, that goes along with the adoption of that kind of responsibility is actually the antidote to the suffering.
00:05:53.000You know that perfectly well, because all of you need a reason to get out of bed in the morning, especially on a rough morning, you know, when things aren't going so well in your life.
00:06:02.000And there will be plenty of times when things aren't going so well in your life.
00:06:06.000And you still need a reason to get up and get moving and get out there.
00:06:09.000And if you have adopted the responsibility at an individual level to make things better, given how bad they are, if you've adopted the responsibility to make things better, then you have a reason to get up.
00:06:22.000And so one of the things that I've been stressing to people is that there's very little difference between the meaning in life that gives you fulfillment and that engages you in existence and the willingness to shoulder as much individual responsibility as you can possibly handle.
00:06:42.000Everybody knows this because, first of all, if you're not living up to your responsibilities, even to take care of yourself, the probability that you're going to be ashamed of that at some level is extraordinarily high.
00:06:54.000And so your own soul tells you that you're in error, so to speak.
00:06:58.000But also, if you look at who you spontaneously admire, which is a good indication of where your value system really sits, you'll see that the people you admire are always people who take responsibility for themselves and responsibility for their family and responsibility for their community.
00:07:15.000You know, cynically, it's often considered that we admire, let's say, the rich and successful because of their status and their wealth and their power.
00:07:27.000But that's a very shallow and it's very trivial.
00:07:31.000And I also don't really believe that it's true.
00:07:34.000I think that the people we admire are people who conduct themselves admirably in life.
00:07:39.000And you get a spontaneous admiration as a consequence of that.
00:07:42.000And that's a call from the deepest reaches of your being to imitate and to follow in that pathway.
00:07:51.000And so, well, and so that's not a narrative that fits very well with the whole identity politics collectivist notions of how humankind is constituted.
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00:08:53.000And so for those in the room that are not totally familiar with this idea of postmodernism and identity politics, where did this come from?
00:09:01.000And what is your analysis of where it stands today?
00:09:04.000And what is the true agenda of those people that are pushing postmodernism, identity politics, so on and so forth?
00:09:10.000Well, I would say that the intellectual groundwork for postmodernism was probably laid in France in the late 60s and early 70s.
00:09:22.000And it was mostly laid by people who were at one point Marxist types.
00:09:28.000And I mean, that was very common, especially in France at that time, because there was an immense student revolutionary movement in France, probably bigger there than anywhere else in the world except perhaps the United States.
00:09:39.000And the problem was that the leftist narrative ran into some major problems in the late 60s and early 70s.
00:09:47.000And the basic leftist narrative is the radical leftist narrative.
00:09:51.000I should say, just as a point of clarity, that there is utility for political belief across the spectrum from the left to the right, right?
00:10:00.000Because what the right tends to do is to make a case for the utility of hierarchies.
00:10:07.000And what the left tends to do is say, well, look, one of the things you have to understand about hierarchies is that they tend to dispossess people so that they stack up at the bottom.
00:10:15.000And so you need people to speak for the dispossessed, and you need people to speak on behalf of hierarchies.
00:10:22.000And there should be a dialogue between those two groups constantly because you want to keep your hierarchies functional and intact and healthy, but you want to make sure that they don't alienate people who aren't succeeding in the hierarchies because then they stack up at the bottom and that's hell for them and it's not good for the stability of society in general.
00:10:51.000We kind of know when that's gone too far.
00:10:53.000When they go too far on the left is a much more difficult thing to determine conceptually.
00:10:58.000I think the left-wingers go too far when they start talking about, for example, equality of outcome, which is an absolutely catastrophic doctrine.
00:11:06.000Anyways, what had happened at the end of the 60s was that the evidence that the extreme leftist experiments had failed catastrophically became so overwhelming that even the radicals couldn't, in all good conscience, support an affiliation with those systems anymore.
00:11:24.000I think the real deathblow to the idea of communism as an acceptable moral solution came with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago in the early 70s.
00:11:34.000And I would highly recommend, and I'm dead serious about this, I would highly recommend that you read that book.
00:11:39.000It's one of the seminal books of the 20th century, certainly one of the most important 10 books that were written in the 20th century.
00:11:46.000And the reason that it's so important to read it is not only because it documented the absolute catastrophe of the Soviet system and by implication the Maoist system and the system that obtained in Cambodia and in Venezuela more recently and in North Korea, these catastrophically murderous systems.
00:12:05.000It documented their excesses, but that isn't the particular contribution of the book.
00:12:10.000The particular contribution of the book is that it showed that the catastrophe of the system wasn't an aberration in relationship to radical leftist thought, but the logical conclusion of it.
00:12:23.000And, you know, there was an idea that was pushed hard because people had been documenting what was happening horrifically in the Soviet Union, really from the 1920s onwards.
00:12:32.000And of course, the revolution only happened in 1918.
00:12:35.000So the catastrophe started to pile up right away as soon as the revolution occurred.
00:12:40.000People attempted to finesse that by saying that it was, well, it was a cult of personality and that the catastrophe could be laid at the feet of Stalin and that that wasn't real communism, despite the same thing that was every time it's tried.
00:12:54.000And so, but by the 1970s, the early 1970s, it was clear that that narrative wasn't going to fly anymore because the evidence that it was an utter catastrophe of unparalleled proportions became so clear that even French intellectuals had to admit that something was wrong.
00:13:13.000And what arose instead was this postmodern view.
00:13:20.000The postmodernists basically stumbled onto a problem that's actually bedeviled a lot of different disciplines.
00:13:28.000And the problem is that the world is unbelievably complex and it's very difficult to perceive it.
00:13:34.000This is why it's been difficult to build artificial intelligence systems that can perceive the world, because it turns out that just looking at the world is incalculably difficult because there are so many ways of looking at the world.
00:13:45.000There are an immense number of ways that you can look at anything.
00:13:48.000So even small sets of objects are complicated in ways you can't possibly imagine.
00:13:53.000And so the postmodernists figured this out in literary theory, essentially.
00:13:57.000They thought, well, we have these books.
00:14:00.000How is it that we should interpret them?
00:14:03.000And the answer was, well, there's an indefinite number of interpretations, which is actually true.
00:14:09.000There isn't, like, trying to interpret something like the corpus of books that make up the Bible, for example, it's like there's no end to the number of interpretive frameworks that you can use.
00:14:23.000Mystery number two was, well, if there's an indefinite number of ways of interpreting something, how do you know which ways are to take precedence?
00:14:32.000Well, that was a big problem because, you know, if you're teaching, for example, a course in literary theory and you have an interpretation of a book, you want to make the assumption that there's something particularly valuable about your interpretation or why bother teaching it.
00:14:46.000But if there's an indefinite number of interpretations and you can't rank order them, then how can you justify your particular approach?
00:15:05.000And the consequence of that was a questioning of the idea of a canonical interpretation at all.
00:15:12.000And so there's a real ethical and moral relativism that comes in there.
00:15:15.000But that was the underlying intellectual rationale for that.
00:15:20.000Well, what happened, and this is where things get strange, is that the problem with a viewpoint like that is that it doesn't leave you with any way to orient yourself in the world, right?
00:15:30.000Because if no interpretation is better than any other interpretation, then why do anything?
00:15:44.000And so there's a real nihilistic element to postmodernism that's built into it.
00:15:49.000And the way that that was resolved, as far as I can tell, was really blindly in some sense by an alliance between the neo-Marxist types that were still around and looking for a new doctrine and the postmodern types.
00:16:00.000It's like, even though the postmodernists criticized the idea of overarching narratives, and Marxism is certainly an overarching narrative, that didn't stop them from allying with this leftover Marxism and reconfiguring it in some sense.
00:16:14.000So instead of the old Marxist narrative about the bourgeoisie, the upper class, the ownership class, say, and the proletariat who were being oppressed by them, we got identity politics out of it.
00:16:25.000And what we got is the same old victimizer-victim narrative in new form.
00:16:31.000And instead of being fundamentally economic, it became racial or ethnic or gender-based or sex-based or you name it, age-based or attractiveness-based.
00:17:08.000You see, I think the postmodernists are seriously wrong.
00:17:11.000And I actually think we know why they're wrong.
00:17:14.000Because although there is a very large number of ways of looking at the world, or perhaps a near-infinite number of ways of looking at the world, there isn't a near-infinite number of ways of acting in the world in a manner that actually is successful.
00:17:29.000So there are constraints on how you can interact with the world in a successful manner.
00:17:35.000Let's assume that you don't want undue pain and anxiety.
00:17:40.000And I think that's a reasonable proposition.
00:17:42.000You can tolerate some pain and anxiety if it's in the service of something greater, obviously, but I just mean pointless pain and anxiety.
00:17:49.000We don't want any more of that than is necessary.
00:17:52.000And that means that you have to take care of yourself to some degree.
00:17:55.000But the manner in which you take care of yourself is severely constrained.
00:17:59.000This is partly why you have to be intelligent and careful and plot your way through life properly.
00:18:05.000You have to take care of yourself today, but you have to take care of yourself today in a way that doesn't interfere with you taking care of yourself tomorrow and next week and next month and next year and five years from now and ten years from now.
00:18:21.000So you can't do just what you want to in the next hour because if it's impulsive pleasure seeking, let's say, something like that, excess alcohol use or excess drug use or careless sexual behavior or betrayal of people to gain you something in the moment, you're going to pay for that.
00:18:41.000You're going to pay for it next week and next month and next year.
00:18:44.000And so because you're going to exist in the future and because you have to live with yourself, there's only a certain number of ways that you can act that are going to work.
00:18:53.000It's not just that you're responsible to your future self or the set of all your future selves, is that you also have to act in a way that works for your family.
00:19:03.000Because otherwise your family is going to disintegrate and break down and cause you and them all sorts of misery and grief.
00:19:09.000And not just your family now, but also your family into the future.
00:19:13.000And then not just your family either, but also your community.
00:19:16.000And so you have to set your aspirations so that they serve you in the broadest sense over a long period of time.
00:19:24.000And they also serve your family and they also serve your community.
00:19:27.000And that's a very tight set of constraints.
00:19:30.000And I think that the best solution to that set of constraints from a philosophical perspective or maybe even a theological perspective is to view the world as a place not of groups but of individuals, of sovereign individuals who are responsible for their destinies, responsible for their families and for their communities.
00:19:47.000And that's essentially the ethos of the modern West.
00:19:51.000Because the thing that's so remarkable about the West, I would say, is that we did a remarkable, we did a wonderful job of articulating out the idea of individual sovereignty and we made that the cornerstone of our political and economic systems.
00:20:34.000But rights are really there to facilitate your adoption of individual responsibility.
00:20:40.000And one of the things I would like to say to all of you, and it's one of the things I really wanted to talk about coming here today, and I was thinking about it, is that you don't want to play identity politics.
00:20:50.000And that can happen because it can be played on the right and the left.
00:21:56.000And I think a modern conservatism, which isn't really all that distinguishable from a classical liberalism, as it turns out, is to put tremendous stress on the responsibility of the individual.
00:22:07.000And one of the things that's wonderful about that, as far as I'm concerned, and I made reference to this a few minutes ago, is that you need a meaning to offset the tragedy of life.
00:22:18.000Otherwise, you just suffer stupidly and you tend to make people around you suffer the same way.
00:22:26.000And the way that you find that meaning is by adopting as much responsibility as you can.
00:22:32.000And what's also so fascinating about that is, you know, you're characterized by an indefinite potential.
00:22:39.000And it isn't easy to understand exactly what that is, that potential, but you know, it's what people call you on when they say, you know, you're not living up to your potential, whatever that is.
00:22:48.000That potential will be called forth from you as a consequence of adoption of responsibility because it won't manifest itself unless you take on a load.
00:22:57.000You're not going to develop in all the ways you could develop unless you set yourself a serious challenge.
00:23:03.000Because it takes the challenge to pull that out of you and also to motivate you to rid yourself of all the weaknesses and personality flaws that you've accumulated across the years and to let those disappear and burn off you.
00:23:17.000You need to load yourself up before the demands of life will be such that you will discipline yourself properly.
00:23:25.000And a noble goal is a very good way of beginning that.
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00:24:53.000What do you think is, and this is a debate that you see a lot, what is the motivation then of the postmodernists?
00:24:59.000Are some of the individuals afraid or hesitant to take responsibility their very own life and they want to play the victim and they find admiration in that victimhood or they find meaning in the victimhood?
00:25:10.000Well, I think a lot of them, I think this is particularly true for a lot of the young people in universities, is, you know, I think the universities are in some sense, especially the radical end of the humanities and the social sciences.
00:25:22.000And so I'd really put my finger on disciplines like women's studies and ethnic studies, all the cultural studies programs, anthropology, sociology, social work.
00:25:31.000Education is an absolute bloody catastrophe.
00:25:36.000Well, there was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education just three weeks ago saying exactly that.
00:25:41.000Law is degenerating at a very rapid rate.
00:25:44.000But these radical disciplines, see, what I see them doing is the same thing that cults do.
00:25:50.000And what cults do is prey on people who are dispossessed in various ways.
00:25:55.000And I think that if you have had bad relationships, perhaps particularly with men, in your life, you've never had a stable relationship with someone who is masculine and you're confused about exactly how the world works in relationship to how men and women should behave, that you're a great target for exploitation by radical professors.
00:26:16.000But a lot of the people who are in that position are people who've been badly hurt in one way or another.
00:26:21.000And, you know, and they're trying to contend with the fact of their hurt, and they are often doing that by identifying the perpetrators.
00:26:28.000You know, the problem is, is that they've often had something terrible perpetrated upon them.
00:26:33.000But that doesn't mean the fact that you've suffered at the hands of a man, let's say, or a woman for that matter, doesn't mean that all men are somehow suspect as a consequence.
00:26:45.000Or that the proper way of dealing with that is to transform the sociological structure of the world.
00:26:51.000But many, many young people are taught exactly that by their idiot professors.
00:27:03.000I mean, there's also, see, there's this weird amalgam of compassion for the dispossessed and hatred for the successful as well.
00:27:14.000That's a constant characteristic of the left.
00:27:17.000It's what George Orwell observed when he was a former socialist.
00:27:20.000Said, socialism has become much more about hating the rich than helping the poor.
00:27:26.000Yeah, well, the problem is, and this is something I just, I actually, I've been working on the preface to the 50th anniversary version of the Gulag Archipelago, the abridged version, and so that'll come out in about a year.
00:27:38.000And so that's been a great thing to work on.
00:27:40.000And I was trying to distill Solzhenitsyn's observations about why the Russian Revolution went so catastrophically wrong, because as I already said, there's reasons to be concerned about the dispossessed, right?
00:27:55.000And that's the proper area of concern of the, let's call them the moderate left.
00:28:02.000It's something perhaps the Democratic Party has been reasonably good at over the decades, is serving as a political forum for the working class, and they need a political voice, obviously.
00:28:17.000The problem is, and this started to happen very early on after the Soviet Revolution with its demands for equality of outcome, is that, first of all, who's an oppressor and who's oppressed is not a very easy thing to figure out.
00:28:32.000And the problem really is that each of us is an amalgam of oppressor and oppressed, because you think about it this way, is all of you have, I hate to use this terminology, but I'll use it for the purposes of illustration.
00:28:47.000It's like, well, you didn't build this infrastructure, you didn't build the highway system, you didn't build this amazing technological society that you live in that granted you a certain unparalleled standard of living.
00:29:02.000You know, you're undeserving, let's say, beneficiaries of what your ancestors bestowed upon you.
00:29:08.000And so, and you could call that privilege if you wanted to.
00:29:12.000Now, the problem with that is that you can divide people up in a very large number of ways.
00:29:18.000And so, what do you have for privilege?
00:29:20.000Well, maybe you have gender privilege, and maybe you have attractiveness privilege, and maybe you have intelligence privilege, and maybe you have being born in the United States privilege, and you have being.
00:29:34.000And so, if you buy the idea that all that has been purchased at someone else's expense, then that makes you an oppressor.
00:29:39.000Now, this is what happened in the Soviet Union.
00:29:41.000It's really what happened is the initial doctrine was let's raise up the dispossessed.
00:29:46.000But the problem is, is that you can categorize people so many different ways in groups that you can always find a reason why someone's not a victim, why they're a victimizer.
00:29:55.000And you just can't believe, and this is why you need to read the Gulag Archipelago, you just cannot believe how many groups of people were obliterated in the nature of, in the service of, in the name of equality.
00:30:08.000You know, the communists wiped out all the socialists, so that's very interesting.
00:30:12.000They wiped out all the religious believers, they wiped out all the students, they wiped out anybody who had a middle-class background, and that didn't just mean middle-class people, it meant their families, including their children and their extended relatives.
00:30:25.000It's like if you were even peripherally associated with someone who could be regarded as privileged by any measure whatsoever, then the probability that you were going to get rounded up and killed or imprisoned or brutalized in some manner was, well, was almost 100%.
00:30:40.000And so, the problem is that it's not very easy to distinguish those who have compassion for the dispossessed from those who are using compassion for the dispossessed as an excuse to take revenge against anybody they think has any more than them.
00:30:57.000And because unless you're a saint, and you're probably not, the proclivity for hatred can be a more powerful motivator than the proclivity for love, given that you're not very developed, then it was the proclivity for hatred that seemed to rise to the top very rapidly in these revolutionary societies.
00:31:15.000And the consequence of that was absolutely, to call it dreadful is barely to scrape the surface.
00:31:20.000And so, hypothetically, there's motivation with regards to compassion for the dispossessed.
00:31:26.000But in real life, even if these movements are often started to give the devil his due by people who are genuinely compassionate, that doesn't mean they won't be taken over by people who have hatred as their fundamental motivation very, very rapidly.
00:31:40.000And that certainly happened in, I can't think of a circumstance where there was a radical leftist revolution in the last hundred years where that didn't invariably happen.
00:31:54.000And the proper response to that, as far as I'm concerned, is to develop a view of the world that's focused on the individual conceptually, to think of the individual as the fundamental category, and then to act that out pragmatically.
00:32:08.000And what that essentially means is get your act together.
00:32:20.000So at minimum, you have an ethical responsibility to ensure that the world doesn't devolve into something approximating hell.
00:32:27.000And at maximum, you have the responsibility, again, the ethical, and it's a heavy ethical responsibility to do everything that's in your power to make things as good as you can possibly make them in this sophisticated manner that takes you and your family and your community into account.
00:33:00.000It makes you into someone strong and someone competent and someone who's worthwhile and who lives in a manner that justifies their own suffering.
00:33:10.000And that's what there's nothing better than you can possibly do than that.
00:33:19.000So I guess among the professors you've dealt with, would you say that they're coming from a position of virtue and goodness or from the triad of evil that you talk about?
00:33:30.000From the kind of destruction of the envy?
00:33:33.000I don't really think about it that way necessarily.
00:33:37.000I do think about it more in the manner that I just laid out.
00:33:40.000It's like I think that the collectivist viewpoint is very dangerous, and I just described why.
00:33:45.000I think you do not subsume the individual to the group.
00:33:48.000The other thing that should, that is happening on the left that shouldn't happen, and it does happen on the right too, by the way, is that individuals are accused of the crimes of their group, which is sort of the essence of bigotry, I would say.
00:34:03.000And again, this is something that happened in these totalitarian radical left societies, where if you were the member of a group and the group was accused of some sort of crime, whatever the crime happened to be, the fact that you were a member of that group meant you were also guilty of that crime.
00:34:19.000I think that's an absolutely terrible way of looking at things.
00:34:23.000I would say it's better to stay disentangled from the collectivist narrative entirely.
00:34:29.000Because one of the things that I've come to realize here is that if you want things to work out properly, the best way to make them work out is to tell a better story.
00:34:37.000It's not necessary to fight against the people that you think don't hold your viewpoint, because the fighting actually produces negative consequences.
00:34:45.000And I'm not saying you should be a pushover, because you bloody well shouldn't be a pushover.
00:34:50.000You should be able to stand up for yourself.
00:34:55.000But I mean, part of the reason that all of you are here is because you're looking for something.
00:34:59.000You know, and hopefully you're not looking for an enemy, although an enemy can make your life like it can give a facade of meaning to your life.
00:35:06.000Hopefully, the reason that you're here is because you've decided that you're going to take your proper place in the world and that you're going to move forward with dignity and with strength and with responsibility and all of that.
00:35:18.000And I would say you can, in some sense, forget about the collectivist narrative if that's what you're going to do, because the act of putting yourself together will be so powerful, both for you personally and for the people around you, but also by example, that you'll just blow the other narrative completely out of the water.
00:35:33.000And it's to tell the better, the person who tells the best story wins.
00:35:39.000And the idea of the transcendent individual, that is the best story.
00:35:43.000There's nothing that can compare to that.
00:35:45.000And everyone wants that because you, I mean, even if you're cynical and bitter, you know, and maybe embittered towards the world, you know, there's still a part of you that would like things to work out well.
00:35:57.000And you can call to that part in people and say, look, you know, no matter how much you're suffering and no matter how bad things have been for you, things can improve and you can become the sort of person that you admire.
00:37:16.000If you're looking for a host of reasons why people might view the world from a collectivist perspective and attribute blame elsewhere, is because, well, that is a dispersal of responsibility.
00:37:27.000And we should also point out quite clearly that the idea that even the societies in the world that are thriving, and I would say those are fundamentally Western societies, although that's spreading very rapidly all around the world, right?
00:37:41.000Because things are getting better on the economic front at a rate that's absolutely beyond comprehension.
00:37:48.000You know, I don't know if you know this or not, but this is worth knowing.
00:38:55.000And Southeast Asia is increasingly rich.
00:38:57.000And the fastest growing economies in the world right now are in sub-Saharan Africa.
00:39:01.000And child mortality rates are plummeting, and people are getting access to fresh water at an unparalleled rate, and we're spreading cell phones all around the world.
00:39:08.000And about 300,000 people a week are being hooked to the power grid.
00:39:11.000And like things are happening that are good so fast you cannot believe it.
00:39:16.000And if you don't know that, one of the things you should ask is: well, why don't you know that?
00:39:20.000Because that's the biggest news that there is.
00:39:22.000And I think there's this chronic pessimism that's invaded our society.
00:39:26.000Maybe it's a consequence of 50 years of the Cold War or something like that.
00:39:30.000And we just can't believe that maybe we're not going to light everything on fire and die in an apocalypse, but improve the conditions of living all around the world.
00:39:40.000So, well, so the way that you do that is by okay, sorry, Charlie, I lost my track there.
00:40:50.000It's easier to roll downhill than it is to walk uphill, obviously.
00:40:54.000And so it's hard to take responsibility.
00:40:57.000And if you've also had hurtful relationships with people in your life, it's not necessarily that easy to distinguish competence from power and tyranny.
00:41:08.000And one of the things that's also happening, and I would say this is very characteristic of the hurt radical left, is that people who've been hurt are afraid of any display of competence because they can't distinguish it from power and tyranny.
00:41:21.000And so they're also unwilling in some sense to manifest that individual competence in their own life because they think of that as a manifestation of the tyranny that they're accusing the entire system as being characterized by.
00:41:34.000You know, the idea that I hate this idea, it's a terrible idea.
00:41:38.000The idea that the West is a patriarchal tyranny, which, well, it's absurd.
00:41:46.000How many of you are taught that in schools, by the way?
00:41:48.000That there's a patriarchy and it's all ripped up.
00:41:51.000Well, but I mean, let's look at this clearly.
00:41:54.000I mean, every society tilts towards tyranny and corruption, right?
00:42:00.000I mean, because all hierarchies degenerate, and the way they degenerate is by having people by becoming twisted so that power becomes an appropriate way of climbing up the hierarchy.
00:42:11.000It's like the definition of a tyranny.
00:42:16.000But one of the things that you're responsible for as a sovereign individual is to make sure that your hierarchies don't tilt towards tyranny.
00:42:23.000And so the leftist complaint that hierarchies tilt towards tyranny is actually accurate, but the leftist, the radical leftists, claim that our hierarchies are tyrannies and that all action that fosters those hierarchies is power and tyranny.
00:43:28.000But, well, there's all sorts of reasons.1.00
00:43:30.000Now, part of the reason that there's a gender pay gap, and perhaps part of the reason that there's a mother pay gap, is because of arbitrary prejudice, because the system isn't perfect.0.99
00:43:40.000But the question is, what proportion of the pay gap is due to arbitrary prejudice?0.99
00:43:45.000And the answer to that is a far smaller proportion than the total pay gap.
00:43:49.000And then to attribute all of that to the tyranny and prejudice of the patriarchy is the sign of the fuzziest possible thinking.
00:44:03.000Well, the thing about that sort of thinking is that it's not even helpful to the people that you're hypothetically trying to help because you don't solve a problem by conceptualizing it stupidly.
00:44:14.000And so if you can't do it, if your diagnosis isn't correct, like it could easily be, and this is something for all of you to sort out because this is going to be a problem for all of you, is that it isn't obvious what we should do about the fact that motherhood produces a vicious economic hit for women.
00:44:34.000You could say, well, that's a problem.
00:44:35.000Now, maybe we don't know how to solve it.
00:44:37.000Maybe the only way to solve it is the way we have been solving it, which is to make it a problem that's essentially solved by the family.
00:44:43.000Maybe that's the best solution there is, but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem.
00:44:47.000But we're certainly not going to solve it at all unless we specify the damn problem.
00:44:51.000And to conflate the problem of the economic hit that women take for becoming mothers with the gender pay gap is just going to get us nowhere.
00:45:00.000We'll just get tangled up in stupid arguments about the patriarchy.
00:45:06.000And I have to say, I was made aware of you probably eight or nine months ago, but where I really leaned in is when you just obliterated Kathy Newman.
00:45:16.000Is that her name, Kathy Newman, from the UK?
00:45:21.000And what was so amazing about it is it seemed like you were being so kind and you were giving her as much opportunity as possible.
00:45:29.000And you said essentially what you said, there is a multivariate analysis based on the gender wage pay gap.
00:45:34.000And she said, well, that must make you anti-women.
00:45:38.000It was astonishing that she couldn't reconcile what you were saying, that you were actually trying to find some commonality upon that this might be a problem.
00:45:45.000There might be some ways to potentially have a discussion around it.
00:45:48.000She was immediately trying to marginalize your viewpoint of there's no way that we could possibly have any sort of agreement.
00:46:24.000And I'm making a very careful point here, and it's one you want to attend to very, very carefully, because you're all interested in whatever you're interested in as a consequence of being here, political action to some degree, I would presume, but perhaps also psychological development.
00:46:43.000It's like what I did in that interview, and what I've been able to do a number of times with a certain amount of success is apply the doctrine of minimal necessary force.
00:46:53.000And I'll tell you, this is a very important thing to master, and it's very sophisticated.
00:46:58.000So there's a New Testament idea that you should turn the other cheek.
00:47:01.000And that's a very tough one to contend with because it's not easy to separate out that from the appearance of weakness, let's say.
00:47:08.000Because you want to be able to stand up and defend yourself, obviously.
00:47:10.000There's no credibility unless you're capable of doing that.
00:47:14.000And you have no credibility unless you're capable of doing that.
00:47:19.000In the interview that you're referring to, I attempted to use minimal necessary force.
00:47:25.000And all I was doing was deflecting accusations that, as far as I was concerned, had nothing to do with me.
00:47:31.000And the reason that that was successful was exactly because there was no obliteration, it was just stepping back, say, well, that's not accurate the way that you're formulating that.
00:47:42.000And what happened was that she had to show her hand.
00:47:46.000And it was her showing her hand that produced the consequences that were associated with that video, which I think has been viewed, the video itself, about 11 million times in the various clips and cuts, is probably 50 million by now.
00:48:00.000But she, because I didn't use force or any more than was necessary, then she had to keep stepping forward with her accusations and her ideology, and she just laid it out completely so that everyone could see it.
00:48:14.000And so it's another thing you really want to think about.
00:48:16.000Like, you don't want to be thinking about this as a polarized political battle, because then you're in the damn polarized political battle, and it's actually the polarized political battle that's the problem.
00:48:29.000Now, it's not like, as I said already, it's not like you want to be a pushover.
00:48:32.000But you step away from that and you work on yourself so that you're an increasingly powerful person.
00:48:38.000But one of the ways that you do that is that you learn to use minimal necessary force.
00:48:43.000It's like you don't defend yourself any more than you have to.
00:48:57.000And you think, well, I like a little conflict.
00:48:59.000It's like, look, fair enough, a little conflict, man, no problem.
00:49:02.000It keeps your life kind of interesting.
00:49:04.000And maybe that's on the problem-solving edge.
00:49:07.000But a little conflict can become a lot of conflict very, very rapidly.
00:49:10.000And if you have any sense at all, that's not what you want.
00:49:13.000You know, especially if you have other things that are better to do, and you should have other things that are better to do.
00:49:18.000And so, you know, to deal with these sorts of things, even when you're provoked with a light hand, there is no more effective strategy than that.
00:49:27.000And it's a real mark of sophistication and your ability to keep your temper in check.
00:49:33.000And that's true even when you're dealing with yourself.
00:49:36.000You know, you don't punish yourself any more than necessary.
00:49:40.000When you're negotiating with someone that you love, a partner, for example, a husband or a wife, at least in principle, you defend yourself with minimum necessary force.
00:49:50.000And so it's not, you know, there's been a lot of videos that have been cut out of my talks that Jordan Peterson obliterates ex-journalist or why journalist.
00:50:01.000And they're clickbait to a large degree.
00:50:04.000But when I've been successful in responding to attacks, it's only because I've responded to them minimally.
00:50:13.000So for example, there's been a number of times when I've gone to universities and had pretty nasty demonstrations.
00:50:19.000There was one at McMaster University that got quite out of hand and a worse one at Queen's University where people were pounding on the windows while we were all sitting in the hall.
00:50:30.000It's like control of temper, detachment, understanding that the full event has yet to play itself out, the ability to step back and the requirement to use minimal necessary force.
00:50:44.000And when I've been able to manage that, then it's worked.
00:50:47.000And if I get if my temper gets riled up and I have a temper and if it gets riled up and I start to lash out more than necessary, then that goes badly right away.
00:50:58.000And I can see that in the comments and I can see that the memes that are made of me turn a little bit more mean instead of funny.
00:51:05.000And so this is really an important thing to know.
00:51:08.000It's like keep your temper under control.
00:51:11.000Don't burst out into self-righteous anger, in particular against those that you might regard as your political enemies.
00:51:28.000See, you can accomplish what you want to accomplish if you're being wise about it by being eminently reasonable.
00:51:36.000That's the thing, is you can have reason on your side.
00:51:39.000And I mean reason in the best possible sense.
00:51:41.000It's like you don't have to be temperamental and impulsive in this sort of situation.
00:51:47.000You can try to put yourself together, which I would highly recommend, and then you can lay yourself open to the attacks.
00:51:56.000Now, that means you should be able to defend yourself.
00:51:58.000You should have the articulated structures at hand.
00:52:02.000You should orient yourself properly politically and philosophically, and even physically for that matter, so that you're a force to contend with.
00:52:09.000But once you have that down, then you play it with the lightest possible hand.
00:52:13.000And that way also you have the highest probability of, let's say, of changing the minds of people who are possessed by an ideology so that they can rejoin the productive political dialogue.
00:52:56.000No, you didn't, because there that person is, waking up next to you the next day.
00:53:01.000And so if you won, you know, and they're defeated and humiliated because of it, then the probability that they're going to react properly to you, if they have any sense at all, is very low.
00:53:13.000And so what you want is you want to negotiate your way to a sustainable peace.
00:53:19.000And that's what you want to do in the political realm, too, because, well, in this country, you know, there's a certain amount of polarization.
00:53:25.000I don't think it's anywhere near as bad as the media is making it out to be as they go through their death spirals and generate clickbait like mad.
00:53:33.000Because in the U.S., you guys have been voting 50% Republican and 50% Democrat for what, about 20 years, right down the middle.
00:54:41.000You want to decrease the polarization, to bring everyone back under the umbrella of intelligent conversation.
00:54:48.000And you want to also know that just as you perhaps are temperamentally predisposed, being more conservative, to standing for patriotism, standing for the, what would you say, the, well, let's say patriotism, we'll leave it at that, and for the utility of hierarchies, that there are people who need to speak for the dispossessed, and you have to engage in a dialogue with them for your own good as well as theirs.
00:55:12.000Because healthy hierarchies do take care of the people who are dispossessed by the hierarchies, and that's one of the things that makes them stable.
00:55:19.000It's not an easy thing to figure out how to do, right?
00:55:22.000I mean, you don't do it self-evidently by things like redistribution of income, but it's still a universal problem.
00:55:28.000The problem of the dispossessed is a universal problem, and it has to be addressed, and that's why you need the political dialogue.
00:55:34.000So, no victory, peace is the goal, not victory.
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00:56:54.000There's another thing I wanted to say because this is particularly a meeting of women, and because I think this is one thing that you could all do.
00:57:02.000One of the things I've noticed, and I think this is true right from the beginning of, let's say, women became particularly emancipated as a consequence of the development of the birth control pill, which was much more a technological revolution than a political revolution.
00:57:18.000Okay, because now you have control of your reproductive function, at least in large part.
00:57:23.000And so, and there's other technological advances that have also made that possible.
00:57:28.000So, now the question is: well, with that additional freedom of choice, let's say, what is it that you want?
00:57:36.000And you see, this is something that a women's movement like this could figure out, because I don't think we really know.
00:57:43.000I know it's my observation, like I've worked with women my whole life, partly because I've always worked in female-dominated industries.
00:57:50.000So, you know, I'm young enough, let's say, so that women were fully integrated into the workforce in every domain I was in right from the time I started working.
00:57:58.000And so, I've watched women in academia, for example, but in all sorts of other professions as well, negotiate their careers over their entire lifespan.
00:58:08.000And this is what I've observed, and I'm not saying it's right, this is what I've observed: is that it looks to me like in our society, young women are taught to overvalue career.
00:58:20.000And what I mean by that is that they're not taught when they're 18 or 19 or 16 to 20, something like that, that what's actually going to play a crucial role in their lives.
00:58:31.000And so, we have this idea that, well, you're going to have a meaningful career.
00:58:34.000It's like, well, first of all, most people don't have careers.
00:58:58.000And even if you have a career, careers are strange things because they're not as intrinsically meaningful as the purveyors of careers like to tell you.
00:59:08.000And like I worked with a lot of women in law firms, for example, and these were like impressive, these were impressive people, man.
00:59:14.000They aced their high school, they nailed their university, they were top fifth percentile in their LSATs.
00:59:22.000They nailed law school, they went into articling, they got their internship.
00:59:27.000That's not what it's called in law, but the word escapes me from articling.
00:59:31.000And then they became partners by the time they were 30.
00:59:33.000They were on this rocket-like trajectory.
01:00:09.000But, you know, money loses its incremental utility after you have enough money really to keep the bill collectors at bay.
01:00:15.000The psychological literature on that is quite clear.
01:00:18.000The women wake up when they're in their late 20s and they think, it isn't obvious to me why anyone would work 80 hours a week when they have other things to do, like have a relationship, like have a family.
01:00:31.000And let's be perfectly clear about this.
01:01:00.000Like some of my clients got new microwaves because it took a few seconds shorter to heat their coffee in the morning.
01:01:07.000And so, and I'm dead serious about that, man.
01:01:10.000They were timed to the second, those people.
01:01:12.000And you think, well, do you want to live like that?
01:01:14.000It's like, well, maybe the answer is yes.
01:01:16.000But certainly the answer could be no, because, well, why would you do that?
01:01:21.000What's the purpose of doing that when you could also have an intimate relationship that you spend some time on and a family?0.89
01:01:28.000And so one of the things that you people should figure out, could figure out, is, well, if you could have what you wanted as emancipated women, you know, capable of taking whatever place you want in society, what do you want?
01:01:44.000Like, how do you find out what women want?
01:01:46.000I would say that you could consider partnering with some reasonable social scientists and start doing some surveys and survey women of all different ages from 19 up to, well, up to 70 and find out what women want.
01:02:00.000You know, I think you'd see it radically shift from 19 to 35, by the way, and I'd like to see that documented because my experience has been that as women mature from 19 to 30, the value that they lay on permanent relationship and family increases.
01:02:20.000And the value that they lay on career decreases.
01:02:22.000Now, maybe that's wrong because it hasn't been documented particularly well, but I don't think it's wrong.
01:02:29.000Because then you could also find out, if you didn't find out what women actually want, and I don't think we've done a good job of figuring that out at all, then you could also figure out how to facilitate that.
01:02:38.000And that would be a wonderful thing, because we actually need to know that.
01:02:41.000And I think to some degree, the academic disciplines in the universities are so corrupted by identity politics that they can't answer these, or ask or answer these questions without falling into an ideological trap.
01:02:55.000Like, we know, for example, that men and women do differ temperamentally.
01:02:59.000And they do differ in their interests.
01:03:01.000You know, so women are more likely to be interested in people and men are more likely to be interested in things, broadly speaking, and there's exceptions.
01:03:11.000So we know, for example, as well that as societies become more egalitarian, and this is an important point to know, as societies become more egalitarian, the proportion of women who choose STEM disciplines, science, technology, engineering, mathematics, decreases.
01:03:31.000Now, I don't know what to make of that, and I don't know whether that's a bad thing or a good thing, but I do know that men and women do differ in their proclivities and their interests on average.
01:03:41.000And it would be interesting to see if we took that fully into account, which would seem to be something you do with a true feminism: is like, well, we are going to deal with women as they are, and perhaps as they could be, but at least we could start with as they are.0.61
01:04:20.000How is that going to work out properly for society?0.68
01:04:23.000And is there any way that that could be properly facilitated?
01:04:26.000It'd be a lovely thing for everyone to find out and for it to be depoliticized to the degree that that was possible.
01:04:32.000So one of the questions we're getting a lot of on Twitter, it's interesting, is this war on men and the idea of masculinity of all questions at a women's summit.
01:04:55.000I really think the fundamental way you do that is by constraining it in your own relationship.
01:05:00.000You know, now, one of the things you'll find, now I'm going to tread on thin ice here, but that's okay.
01:05:05.000One of the things you'll find is that that attitude towards, let's say, toxic masculinity is likely to manifest itself in your own relationship, in your distrust of your partner, say.
01:05:17.000And I'm not saying that you should naively trust your partner.
01:05:21.000I don't think you should naively trust anyone.
01:05:24.000And sometimes people confuse naivety with trust.
01:05:27.000Say, well, when I was a kid, I trusted everyone.
01:07:09.000You need to let your partner know who you are and what you want.
01:07:13.000And that also means you have to let yourself know, and that's not such an easy thing, too.
01:07:17.000You have to have a dialogue with yourself and figure out what you want, and you have to be willing to share that with your partner.
01:07:22.000I think the way that you glue the relationships between men and women back together is by doing that locally, first of all, right?
01:07:29.000You deal with your boyfriend, you deal with your husband, you deal with your brothers, you glue things back together with your father if you can do that.
01:07:38.000You establish a positive relationship with your son, and then having learned how to do that, well, you're going to spread your influence out properly into the broader community.
01:07:49.000And I'm a very big admirer of local action.
01:07:52.000It's like, because local action isn't local, it spreads out so quickly you can't believe it.
01:07:57.000And if you do things right in the little domains that you have right in front of you, first of all, that's not easy.
01:08:03.000Like, it's hard to have a good relationship that maintains itself properly across time.
01:08:09.000And if you're capable of developing the character that will allow you to do that, moving that out into the broader social world will be a simple thing in comparison.
01:08:19.000So you start by manifesting courageous faith in your partner and the men that are close to you in your life.
01:08:30.000And then you watch, and you let them know when that trust has been violated, obviously, because you're not a pushover.
01:08:37.000You say what you have to say, and that way you heal those relationships, and that'll do the trick.
01:08:54.000So the universities have become so radical when you say things such as men are better at some things than women and women are better at some things than men.
01:09:09.000Those are considered horribly radical statements because of some of the insanity that has infiltrated higher education.
01:09:18.000I think some of the miscategorization upon your work and your teaching is just rooted in how they've moved the goalposts.
01:09:26.000Well, it's a funny, it's such a comical thing.
01:09:31.000The data that I've put forward with regards to the differences between men and women isn't controversial.
01:09:39.000So, you know, you say, well, so this is pseudoscience, that's one accusation.
01:09:45.000Well, here, let me tell you about it, okay?
01:09:47.000So, just so you know, okay, so you've got to try to figure out when scientific data is credible.
01:09:55.000Okay, so here's one, because you might say, well, it also gets contaminated with politics, and that does happen.
01:10:01.000Now, science has mechanisms to stop that from happening across time.
01:10:05.000But one thing you can be reasonably sure of is that if scientists publish data that violates their own political leanings, that's one bit of evidence that it might be reliable because they're not going to rush out and be thrilled about publishing something that shows that their fundamental political presuppositions are in error.
01:10:28.000Okay, so let's look at the personality literature just because this is where you see the differences between men and women.
01:10:34.000Okay, so the first thing is that the best way those have been measured is by using a scale called the big five personality inventory.
01:10:44.000There's a variety of different variants of it, but they all measure five fundamental traits.
01:10:48.000Extroversion, positive emotion dimension, neuroticism, a negative emotion dimension, agreeableness, which is compassion and politeness, conscientiousness, and openness, which is a creativity dimension.
01:11:01.000Okay, now, the first question is, how did those dimensions come to be identified?
01:11:06.000Because you might say, well, is there political bias there?
01:11:12.000So the way no one predicted these dimensions, they emerged as a consequence of brute force statistical analysis.
01:11:20.000So imagine that you ask a great number of people an immense number of questions.
01:11:25.000Okay, and every sort of question you can imagine.
01:11:28.000And I mean that because you get teams of people sitting down and writing down as many questions as they can think up.
01:11:34.000And so you give those questions to as many people as possible.
01:11:37.000And then you use a process called factor analysis, which is a statistical process that tells you how the questions clump.
01:11:43.000So for example, questions like, I'm in a good mood in the morning and I'm often happy.
01:11:48.000People who answer seven on a scale of one to seven for the first question and seven on a scale of one to seven for the second question, that's going to happen and the statistics can pull out those patterns.
01:12:48.000If you took a random woman and a random man out of the population and you had to lay a bet on who was more agreeable, so that's more compassionate and polite, and you bet on the woman, you'd be right 60% of the time.
01:13:25.000And that's also in keeping with the psychiatric literature that indicates that worldwide women have two to three times the rate of depression and anxiety, which goes along with that.
01:14:00.000You say, okay, well, let's look across countries at differences between men and women.
01:14:05.000And so if the socio-cultural explanation is correct, as societies become more egalitarian in their social policies, the differences between men and women should disappear.
01:14:20.000And it's not some obscure damn study that's collecting dust under some tree in the middle of a field.
01:14:27.000These are studies that have been cited thousands of times and by scientific standards that's overwhelmingly successful.
01:14:33.000If your paper is cited 100 times, it's a major deal.
01:14:37.000If it's cited like 3,000 times, you've hit it out of the park.
01:14:40.000Like that happens to you once in your career or probably never.
01:14:44.000So these are major pieces of scientific inquiry and with tens of thousands of subjects.
01:14:49.000So and what they found was, so you stack up countries by the egalitarian nature of their social policies and then you look at differences between men and women.
01:15:10.000This is why the paper got cited like 3,000 times.
01:15:13.000It's like, whoa, we didn't expect that.
01:15:17.000And the reason is, it seems to be, is that imagine that there are two reasons why men and women might differ, sociocultural and biological.
01:15:25.000You remove the sociocultural influences, the biological differences maximize.
01:15:30.000Now it isn't what anyone expected, and it isn't what the researchers wanted to find.
01:16:26.000And what are we going to do about them?
01:16:28.000Because one of the things that happens because of these differences, it appears, is that men and women sort themselves out into different occupations if you let them.
01:16:36.000And you see that most particularly, again, in the Scandinavian countries, where there's a massive preponderance of male engineers.
01:16:44.000And remember, being an engineer is a very niche category, right?
01:16:48.000Most people aren't of the engineering type.
01:17:11.000Well, this is the sort of thing that your generation is going to have to figure out.
01:17:16.000Do we want to, like my proclivity, and this is a personal proclivity, would be to let people sort themselves out as they see fit.
01:17:23.000That's kind of a free market solution.
01:17:28.000And then it seems to me that that's a saleable message to young women.
01:17:34.000It's like, well, you're not exactly the same as men.
01:17:39.000Now, the parameters of difference aren't fully defined, and the causes for that aren't fully understood, but there seems to be a fair bit of variability.
01:17:47.000It's like, manifest the variability in a free market.
01:17:51.000That seems to be, to me, that's the least injurious solution.
01:17:55.000And I think that's a salable message to young women.
01:17:57.000It's make your choices based on your proclivity.
01:18:01.000All right, assuming that you're also taking care of yourself and your families and your community.
01:18:05.000And I think that that's a perfectly reasonable way of going about it because the alternative is to engage in really large-scale and intense social engineering in an attempt to eradicate the differences.
01:18:16.000And the other thing, too, is we don't know how useful those differences are.
01:18:19.000So I've been, and this is my opinion, just so you know it, I've been trying to puzzle out why women are more prone to negative emotion than men and why that kicks in at puberty.
01:18:31.000So because it's not so fun to be more prone to negative emotion, right?
01:18:42.000So why in the world, why in the world would women be characterized by higher levels of negative emotion, given that it produces an excessive depression and anxiety and it's associated with a fair bit of suffering.
01:18:52.000And I thought, well, here's a bunch of reasons.
01:18:54.000You can tell me what you think about them.0.99
01:18:56.000Okay, women become sexually vulnerable at puberty.
01:18:59.000And sex is more dangerous for women than it is for men for obvious reasons, right?0.57
01:19:39.000And it looks to me like you have to be quite susceptible to distress because what should happen when your infant is upset is that that should make you upset.
01:20:11.000And that puts you at a certain disadvantage in dealing, say, with adult men in the general world because you're a little bit more sensitive to negative emotion than might be optimal.
01:20:19.000But that's the price that you pay for being particularly sensitive to incredibly dependent offspring, which of course is characteristic of people.
01:20:26.000Now, I don't know that that's true, but those are hypotheses I have about why the negative emotion differences exist.
01:20:33.000And if they do exist, like maybe it is the case that your infant has a slightly higher possibility of surviving if you're a little more sensitive to threat.
01:21:29.000But what's troubling is that from even your home country, there's a movement where parents say, oh, I'm going to let my kid decide if they're a boy or a girl.
01:21:40.000There's this third option on the birth certificate.
01:21:46.000But, you know, so I've got a funny story for you about that.
01:21:53.000So I had a family member who adopted kids, and they were...
01:21:57.000They were kind of early adopters of the gender-neutral idea, but in a low-level way.
01:22:03.000You know, they were just not going to use stereotypical approaches to their children.
01:22:09.000And the outcome of that was absolutely comical as far as I was concerned.
01:22:15.000Their girl, she was like the most feminine girl I've ever seen.0.97
01:22:19.000Her bedroom was like pink, and it was full of flowers, and it was just everything you'd expect from a stereotypical feminine person.
01:22:27.000And their son liked to hunt and fish, even though his father did neither of those, and grew up to work on the oil rigs and was a real rough guy.
01:22:37.000It's like, didn't make any difference at all.
01:22:40.000And I suspect that these intrinsic gender differences, the sex differences, are robust enough so that some minor league social engineering, first of all, is unlikely to change them, but might even exaggerate them.
01:22:53.000Because, you know, if you try to suppress something, that doesn't make it go away.
01:22:59.000What that tends to do is to make it angry and get bigger.
01:23:02.000And so, I mean, I think that the call for gender fluidity and the idea that there's a gender spectrum is likely to be very confusing for children and adolescents at times when, at a time in their life where the last thing they need is extra confusion about who they are under the guise of choice.
01:23:29.000So I think that it's a foolish bit of social engineering.
01:23:33.000I think the underlying theory on which it's predicated, which is now law in Canada, appallingly enough, the social constructionist version of gender, I think it's the reason it's been transformed into law is because the activists lost completely in the scientific domain.
01:23:49.000They had to circumvent the whole proof issue and just introduce it by fiat.
01:23:56.000I think it's a sign of the degeneration of the education system in general.
01:24:01.000But I also think that getting rid of gender differences, so to speak, is going to be a lot harder than any social engineers can possibly imagine and that the probability that it will kick back hard is really high.
01:24:17.000Because I think that what most people will do is defensively revert to a more rigid identity as an attempt to defend themselves against the confusion.
01:25:12.000And whether that's academia or government or private enterprise, like, I mean, the first thing you want to think about is this, is that you take a typical corporation, and so maybe it runs on a 5% profit margin.
01:25:23.000That means it spends 95% of its effort just lumbering forward.
01:25:28.000And if you know anything about big corporations, you know perfectly well that they're capable of, well, they do way more stupid things than they do intelligent things, right?
01:25:37.000And the bigger the corporation, the more likely that is to be the case, which is why they tend to precipitously fail.
01:25:44.000Like I think the typical Fortune 500 company lasts 30 years, right?
01:25:49.000Which is partly, it's also partly why capital doesn't accumulate in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of the same people, even though there is that 1% distribution that's characteristic of pretty much all economies.
01:26:01.000So almost all large-scale human enterprises produce a tremendous amount of stupidity.
01:26:10.000And so the fact that 80% of humanities papers receive zero citations is mostly a consequence of the fact that most papers are hardly ever cited.
01:26:24.000So what you basically do is you take the number of papers that are published and assume that the square root of that number receives half the citations.
01:26:32.000So if there's 10,000 papers published in a discipline, then 100 of them will receive half the citations.
01:26:38.000And that's the same law that applies to the distribution of money.
01:26:41.000It's the same law that applies to number of basketball hoops successfully completed by pro-athletes or goals scored by hockey players or size of trees in the Amazon or size of cities or mass of stars or like it's a universal principle.
01:27:02.000However, the fact that 80% of the papers receive zero citations is a metric for something approximating catastrophic failure.
01:27:14.000Now one of the things that's happened in the universities that's facilitating this, the reason I put that preamble in is because I don't want you to think that the universities are more spectacularly unsuccessful than most things because they're not.
01:27:26.000But that doesn't mean the lack of success isn't worth assessing.
01:27:31.000So one of the things that's happened is a lot of these systems for evaluation have been gerrymandered.
01:27:37.000So zero citations means really no one, not even your friends or yourself, has cited your paper.
01:27:52.000They request that the library subscribe to them.
01:27:56.000And the libraries pay radically inflated prices to subscribe to these journals, which is why the publishers publish them.
01:28:03.000And the price of the subscription is subsidized by tax money or by insane tuition fees, either way, it's equally reprehensible.
01:28:11.000So there's a market for useless information that's generated by the subsidization of publishing journals at inflated prices.
01:28:19.000And so you get this generation of excess material that's completely useless and expensive, and that's part of what's driving this sort of thing.
01:28:30.000I mean, it's one of about seven fatal errors that the universities are making, because I think they're making approximately seven fatal errors.
01:28:38.000So too much administrative overhead, like way too much administrative overhead that's been getting out of hand over the last few decades.
01:28:48.000When the size of the faculty has remained essentially constant and the number of faculty that have full-time positions has been plummeting, that's error number two.
01:28:56.000The faculty are being replaced with part-timers who have no job security, who get paid nothing.
01:29:01.000And I really, I don't mean literally nothing, but it's so close to nothing that it might as well be nothing.
01:29:06.000And who have no power over the destiny of the universities whatsoever.
01:29:12.000So that's part-time adjunct staff that are up to 40% of professors in many institutions now and higher in some.
01:29:18.000So administrative overhead, the decimation of the professoriate, insane acceleration of tuition fees, far above the cost of inflation, right?
01:29:28.000Way outstripping the value of the degrees, gerrymandering the, what would you call it, the standards necessary to graduate, the proliferation of the activist disciplines, the use of these ethics committees that have taken scientific research, especially on human beings and animals, down at the knees.
01:29:49.000They've made it so cumbersome and slow that anyone with any sense is appalled by it.
01:29:54.000The fact that in the United States, if you take out student loans, which are easy to access, that you can't declare bankruptcy, which is just absolutely mind-boggling to me because it's a form of indentured servitude.
01:30:06.000It's a way that the university administrators have figured out how to pick the pockets of the future earnings of their current students.
01:30:15.000But failure to teach people how to read, failure to teach people how to write, failure to teach people how to speak, failure to teach them the proper classics, especially in the humanities, because they're actually worth learning.
01:30:27.000It's just an unbridled, bloody catastrophe.
01:30:30.000And the universities are going to pay for it.
01:30:36.000Well, beyond that, I had a campus lecture a month ago where a student came up and they said, you know, in our literature class, we are no longer, this is Stanford, actually.
01:30:49.000We don't learn Shakespeare because he was a white male.
01:30:54.000And so I'm going to push back with one thing you said.
01:30:58.000I don't know if it's going to get better anytime soon.
01:31:43.000Well, the reason it's useful is because it's useful.
01:31:46.000Is that these are examples coded in stories and often in explicit philosophy that tell you how to live properly with a minimum of excess suffering, with a minimum of unnecessary damage to others.
01:32:08.000Okay, and then the liberal arts also hypothetically taught you to speak clearly, to write intelligibly, to think properly, and to familiarize yourself with those great works.
01:33:22.000Because the rich knew that that was the best possible training for leadership positions.
01:33:27.000And it wasn't because it was a romp through the park for four years and then daddy's inheritance.
01:33:32.000It was because if you learned how to communicate, you were unstoppable.
01:33:36.000Now, if the universities stop teaching people valuable things, they abandon the classic literature, for example, and they abandon their sacred duty to teach people how to communicate properly, all that means is that they'll devalue their brand and they'll disappear because that's their brand.
01:33:53.000And then if they leave all that valuable material just lying around, then you can be sure that someone else will come and pick it up and make something useful out of it.
01:34:02.000And so I think that'll happen way faster than people think.
01:34:05.000It's already starting to happen online.
01:34:07.000I mean, the lectures that I put online, they're university lectures and they're devoted to what I just described, to helping people put their lives together and learning to communicate.
01:34:16.000I mean, there's millions of people have watched them.
01:34:19.000It's like, and that technology is just sitting there.
01:34:22.000And so the probability that we can generate systems quite rapidly that will educate and accredit thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people at very, very low cost you watch, that's going to happen so fast it'll make your head spin.
01:34:39.000I always say you can learn much more from watching Dr. Jordan Peterson and Prager University for a month than going to spend four years trying to pursue some liberal arts degree for $200,000 in debt.
01:34:55.000More wisdom, more instruction for life.
01:34:58.000So in the short time we have remaining, what advice do you have for this room, this particular audience, and what would you like to say that you haven't already had a chance to say to this historic gathering of young women?
01:35:17.000Don't overestimate yourself, but don't underestimate who you could be.
01:35:22.000That's a much better way of thinking about it.
01:35:24.000You know, psychologists of the careless sort, I would say, have been pushing the idea of self-esteem for a very long time, probably since the early 60s, in its more careless forms.
01:35:36.000You should be content with yourself the way you are.
01:37:09.000In my opinion, you have been the most important thinker in my life and the creation and advancement of Turning Point USA and my world philosophy.
01:37:18.000And I believe you are the most instrumental thinker that will continue to allow us to help save Western civilization.
01:37:26.000And you are my hero, and I want to thank you again for making the time.
01:37:35.000Please email me or questions, freedomatcharlikirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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