In this episode, Dr. Jordan Peterson and Dr. Oren Amitay discuss freedom of speech, ideological possession, unconscious bias, and the implicit association test, and other issues germane to psychology and the modern world. Dr. Peterson discusses his experience with human rights tribunals and the challenges he has faced in advocating for critical thinking and the need for people to be able to tolerate subjects that they may not feel comfortable about, but that they should be allowed to hear and process based on the facts, not based on emotions. This is an incendiary discussion at Ryerson University, originally published to YouTube on March 2nd, this podcast is a recording of a conversation between Dr. Peterson and Amitay, who invited Dr to speak to his students at . The discussion covers issues such as , and the section of the Human Rights Code, as it pertains to Bill C-16, which was passed by the Ontario Human Rights Court of Appeal in 2017. This is a fascinating conversation, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it! Thank you so much for listening and supporting the podcast. Please know that you are not alone. If you are struggling with anxiety, depression, or stress, or a variety of other mental health issues, please reach out to someone who can help you. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. With decades of experience helping others who may be feeling this way. -Dr. Jordan B. Peterson -Let this be a better place you deserve to feel better. -JORDAN B. P. Peterson, MD Dr. JORDAN TALKING TO YOURSELF. ( ) (JORDEN A. B. PETERSON ( ) - JORDEN M. PEDRO ( ) ( )( ) (TALK TO US ABOUT THIS EPISODE (PRODUCING TO THEM ABOUT THIS PODCAST AND THE DECISION AND THE FUTURE YOU DREAMING OF A BETTER THAN YOU DO NOT HAVE A GOOD RELATIONSHIP) (RATE $5,000 ATTRACTIVELY? (TWITTER LINKS) AND SUBSCODE: ) (PROMOTIONAL LINKS: FREE TRAINING MODULE DOWN BELOW (CLICK HERE) (PROGRAM DOWN)
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00:00:51.000Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
00:00:58.000This is episode 16, an incendiary discussion at Ryerson University.
00:01:03.000Originally published to YouTube on March 2nd, this podcast is a recording of a conversation between Dr. Peterson and Dr. Oren Amitay, who invited Dr. Peterson to speak to his students at Ryerson.
00:01:19.000The discussion covers freedom of speech, ideological possession, unconscious bias, and the implicit association test, and other issues germane to psychology and the modern world.
00:01:34.000To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, the link to which can be found in the description.
00:01:41.000Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at self-authoring.com.
00:01:49.000So I've been talking about your cause, I guess, since you started your videos and since you started having troubles with, you know, with human rights tribunals or threats by U of T.
00:01:59.000And I just think it's common sense, as I said, that promoting critical thinking, helping people to be able to tolerate subjects that they may not feel comfortable about, but that they should be able to hear and process.
00:02:12.000Not based on emotions, but based on an actual analysis of the facts, the evidence, the reality, versus some agenda being shoved down their throat.
00:02:19.000Whether it's through the media, through the professors, and anyone teaching in academia knows that there are professors who have no problem with basically teaching their truths as fact.
00:02:28.000And so I've been promoting this, I've been promoting it within my own organization, the Ontario Psychological Association.
00:02:34.000I got a lot of flack from other psychologists who thought, no, we can't allow this type of speech to happen.
00:02:40.000That discussion that you're supposed to have had, the travesty really, it was October, I believe, when you had those other professors coming in and talking about, you know, the issue.
00:02:49.000Some psychologists wrote pieces in national media publications saying this kind of discussion should not happen.
00:02:58.000And this is from psychologists, the ones who are supposed to be best trained to be able to tolerate the discomfort that goes along with, you know, discussing uncomfortable topics.
00:03:07.000So I was hoping for you to be able to share with, you know, the audience, your experience in the last few months in trying to promote this, you know, what you're basically trying to promote.
00:03:18.000Which I think, I'll let you describe in your own words.
00:03:56.000The only part of it that isn't innocuous is the insistence that, the insistence on transforming the hate speech codes, including harassment and discrimination based on gender, what was it, gender identity and gender expression in the hate speech codes.
00:04:16.000I thought, that's weird, there's something out there.
00:04:19.000Anyways, I started digging more into the background on the Ontario Human Rights Commission website.
00:04:23.000And the policies surrounding Bill C-16, to call them appalling, is barely to scratch the surface.
00:04:28.000They're unbelievably badly written and internally contradictory and over-inclusive and dangerous.
00:04:35.000And, I mean, they do things, for example, like make employers responsible for all the speech acts of their employees.
00:04:42.000Whether they have intended or unintended consequences.
00:04:45.000That's completely, the only reason you would write a law like that is to get as many employers in trouble as you could possibly manage.
00:04:52.000Because there's no other reason for formulating the legislation that way.
00:04:56.000And, I've also, a colleague of mine came in recently at the university.
00:05:01.000And he's starting to teach a little bit about the background for this sort of thing in one of his classes.
00:05:06.000And he showed me the developmental progression of the policies surrounding Bill C-16.
00:05:11.000And originally they were written in a much more, in a tighter format.
00:05:15.000But then they were farmed out for what they called public consultation.
00:05:18.000Which basically meant, they ran them by a variety of people who I would say were strongly on the activist end of the political spectrum.
00:05:27.000And they basically, in order to not bother anyone who they had consulted with, they decided, for example, that gender identity should be nothing but subjective choice.
00:05:36.000Which is, I don't even know what to say about that.
00:05:39.000If you're a psychologist and you have any sense at all, that's a completely insane proposition.
00:05:44.000It's, first of all, predicated on the idea that your identity is your subjective choice.
00:05:49.000And that's never been the case for any sort of identity anywhere.
00:05:56.000The first thing that your identity is, is a functional set of tools to help you operate in the world.
00:06:01.000I mean, read Piaget, you know, just scratch the surface of Piaget, even.
00:06:07.000And you find out that, you know, children start to construct their identities, really, when they're breastfeeding.
00:06:13.000Because that's when you first start your social interactions.
00:06:16.000You start integrating your basic biological reflexes, from a Piagetian perspective, into something resembling a social relationship.
00:06:24.000Because breastfeeding actually happens to be quite a complex act.
00:06:27.000And then, you expand your developing identity out into the small microcosmic social world of the family.
00:06:34.000Basically starting with your mother, but then you have siblings, and your father, and your relatives, you know, conventionally speaking.
00:06:41.000And your identity is a negotiated game.
00:06:45.000And you're not the only one in charge of it, by any stretch of the imagination at all.
00:06:50.000I mean, one of the things that Piaget pointed out, was that between the ages of two and four, and I think later research has really hammered this home.
00:06:57.000That even kids who are hyper-aggressive at two, and there's a small proportion of them that are like that, learn to integrate their subjective desires into a broader social game, and become socially acceptable to other children.
00:07:13.000You know, and what they're doing is playing their identity into being.
00:07:17.000And then, once they're older than about four, and they've become properly socialized, so other children actually want to play with them.
00:07:23.000Because that's the critical issue. It's the fundamental issue.
00:07:26.000Then, the peer community of children helps them bootstrap their identity up to something that will eventually approximate an adult identity.
00:07:39.000But that's functional. It has nothing to do with whim. It's a crazy idea.
00:07:45.000And then, so partly, your identity is the set of tools with which you function in the actual world.
00:07:51.000And part of it is a negotiated agreement with the other people around you.
00:07:55.000And that's all being taken out of the...
00:07:57.000That's all actually, as far as I can tell, that line of theorizing is technically illegal now in Ontario.
00:08:03.000And I'm not even talking about the potential biological basis of identity, because the idea that identity has no biological basis, that's just wrong.
00:09:07.000And so it's a modified bimodal distribution, because almost everyone who has a biological identity of male or female identifies as male or female.
00:09:50.000Almost everyone who is biologically male or female, who identifies as biologically male or female, expresses themselves as male or female.
00:09:59.000And then the vast majority of them have a sexual orientation that's in keeping with their, you know, in traditional keeping with their biological sex, gender identity, and gender expression.
00:10:09.000So now we have a law that says those are independent.
00:10:49.000And they're about half a standard deviation, higher in negative emotion.
00:10:53.000And that's cross-cultural, by the way.
00:10:55.000And it also accounts for the reasons why women are about three to four times more likely to suffer cross-culturally from depression and anxiety.
00:11:02.000Whereas men are more likely to be aggressive in prison than to drink.
00:11:06.000And low agreeableness is actually the best predictor of incarceration among men.
00:11:11.000Those are solid biological differences.
00:11:13.000But if you try to segregate men and women using only those two dimensions, you only get it right about 75% of the time.
00:11:21.000But that still doesn't mean that it's not a spectrum.
00:11:24.000And the idea that there are no biological differences between men and women is such a preposterous claim that I can't even believe that we would ever have that discussion.
00:12:28.000The idea is that you take a social institution like a university.
00:12:33.000And then you look at the organization of that university at every single strata from the executive level all the way down to the student level.
00:12:41.000Then what you do is you do an analysis of each level by community demography.
00:12:47.000You get to define the demographic characteristics that you're going to discuss, however, which is actually a big problem.
00:12:52.000Then you make the presupposition that unless that organization at every level matches the demographic representation of people at every level, then it's corrupt, oppressive, and discriminatory, and it needs to be changed.
00:13:07.000Okay, so you think, well, what's wrong with that?
00:13:10.000Every level should have 50-50 men and women, let's say.
00:13:12.000It's like, you're really sure about that, are you?
00:13:15.000You don't think there's any natural differences in interest between men and women.
00:13:19.000Well, if you don't think so, then why are most psychology classes 80% women?
00:13:24.000And that differentiation is accelerating rapidly, like I've seen it over the course of my career, from maybe 60% men at the beginning of my career to like 80% women now.
00:13:36.000And men occupy more of the positions in the STEM fields, at least for now.
00:13:55.000And so what's happened in Scandinavia, as they've made this society more egalitarian in terms of its legal and social structures, is that the gender differences in personality between men and women have got bigger, not smaller.
00:14:07.000So what that means is that social constructionism is wrong.
00:14:15.000It's exactly the opposite of what the theory would have predicted, because the theory predicted, and God only knew how it was going to sort itself out.
00:14:22.000It's not like people knew this to begin with.
00:14:25.000The idea was that as you equalize the social structure, that the differences between men and women would disappear.
00:14:36.000And it's not studies of just a few hundred people in a few locations.
00:14:40.000Those are population-wide studies, and they've been replicated multiple times.
00:14:44.000And the funny thing is that there are temperamental differences between men and women.
00:14:50.000And neuroticism and agreeableness are not the only temperamental differences.
00:14:55.000So if you fragment extroversion, it fragments into assertiveness and gregariousness.
00:15:01.000Women are more gregarious, men are more assertive.
00:15:03.000If you fragment conscientiousness into orderliness and industriousness, women are more orderly and men are more industrious.
00:15:10.000If you fragment openness, which is the creativity dimension, into interest in ideas and interest in aesthetics, you find that women are more interested in aesthetics and men are more interested in ideas.
00:15:20.000Because you can fractionate the big five into ten.
00:15:23.000You get gender differences across all of them.
00:15:28.000So, okay, so anyways, back to the equity thing of all the preposterous and idiotic ideas.
00:15:35.000So, first of all, to make gender equity across every dimension of an organization, you have to assume that men and women have identical interests and temperaments.
00:15:48.000And that if they don't, the state should intervene to bloody well ensure that they do, which is something for all you women to figure out.
00:15:54.000Because now there's many, many, what, positions in society that women preferentially occupy.
00:16:04.000So what are you going to do about that?
00:16:06.000And what are you going to do about the Asians?
00:16:08.000Because they occupy preferential positions as well.
00:16:11.000You know, they're over-represented in all sorts of professional institutions.
00:16:14.000And the probability is that that's going to increase.
00:16:28.000And then it's worse, too, because let's say you equalize women, just for the sake of argument, across all these different dimensions of society.
00:29:18.000I mean, she's definitely not looking at this the same way that I do.
00:29:22.000But, you know, one of the things she said, in a rather condescending manner, was that I wouldn't be sent to jail even though I wanted to be.
00:29:30.000I'm paraphrasing, but that's roughly what she said.
00:29:33.000But that, you know, the Human Rights Tribunal could take away my property and my wages and all of that.
00:29:39.000But that seemed to be okay for her as long as it didn't extend to jail.
00:29:42.000But that's also nonsense because if you're found guilty by the Human Rights Tribunal and you don't pay,
00:29:49.000then that's contempt of court and that goes to a different court and then they put you in jail and that's already happened.
00:30:59.000Except when one of those rights imposes a restriction on someone else.
00:31:03.000And then they get irritated at you and take you to court.
00:31:06.000And then the judge sorts out who has which micro-right.
00:31:09.000And then that's laid out as precedent.
00:31:11.000And so English common law is this tremendous body of evolved doctrine about how the infinite number of human rights that each individual has interacts with everyone else's rights.
00:31:22.000And, like, back when Trudeau, when the first Trudeau brought in the Human Rights Code, the Bill of Rights, the Canadian Bill of Rights, there were lots of people who were upset by it.
00:31:32.000Because it's a different form of legal reasoning.
00:31:35.000The Bill of Rights says, here's the rights you have that the government is granting you.
00:31:38.000That's not how it works under the English Code.
00:31:41.000The English Code is, you have all the rights there are, but they rub up against other people's rights, so we have to sort that out.
00:31:49.000And that's what the Human Rights Commission and Tribunal in Ontario can dispense with if they want.
00:31:56.000And the reason there, I know the reason that they put that line in there, it's because the social justice hypothesis is that the legal structures of Western civilization are oppressive and patriarchal.
00:32:11.000And so it's perfectly reasonable to toss them over if you're in pursuit of something like social justice.
00:32:34.000Like, there's all sorts of things wrong with Western society.
00:32:37.000Always, and there always will be, but compared to 85 to 90% of the rest of the planet, this is bloody heaven.
00:32:46.000And that's why people want to move here.
00:32:48.000So, you can say, well, it's corrupt compared to my imaginary utopia.
00:32:52.000It's like, yeah, that's for sure, it certainly is.
00:32:55.000But if your imaginary utopia was realized in hardcore politics over a 30-year period, everyone would be out in the streets starving to death.
00:33:04.000We already know that because it happened multiple times throughout the 20th century in societies that were, well, they weren't as sophisticated as our society is now, but they were plenty sophisticated for their time.
00:33:15.000And you'll hear the neo-Marxist types, this is the most annoying argument anyone ever makes, they say, well, what happened in the Soviet Union?
00:33:51.000And second, let's just say for a minute that some saint did get a hold of the tools of power and try to implement from each according to his ability to each according to his need,
00:34:02.000and actually did that in a pure and saint-like manner, here's what would happen.
00:34:07.000The next people in the revolutionary string, like Stalin, would come along and stab them in their bed in the middle of the night, and that would be the end of that.
00:34:16.000So, well, so there's absolutely no excuse whatsoever for that sort of thinking.
00:34:21.000And if you read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, which you should do, like everyone should, because it's like the definitive document of this sort of thing that emerged from the 20th century.
00:34:32.000Solzhenitsyn laid out with extraordinary clarity, first in his writings on Lenin, and then in his writings on the Soviet Union more broadly, exactly how the pernicious and pathological Marxist doctrines were transformed logically and systematically into the sorts of laws that killed millions of people, millions of people.
00:34:54.000There were people starving so badly in the Soviet Union by the 1920s that they had posters telling them not to eat their children.
00:35:04.000So we've been down that road already. So what the hell are we doing? We're going down that road again under the guise of equity, right? And equality.
00:35:15.000Well, that was the doctrines that promoted those laws to begin with. Not good.
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00:43:56.000So, you can see worldwide that the societies that have extended the rights to women most
00:44:01.000extensively are also the societies that seem to be flourishing economically.
00:44:05.000And there does seem to be a causal relationship.
00:44:08.000But women have paid a big price for that.
00:44:10.000So, what's happened in part is, first of all, for, say, women who are middle class or
00:44:16.000lower, their lives have essentially fallen apart.
00:44:19.000Because marriage is now restricted to the rich, which is also something to think about.
00:44:23.000For those of you who think marriage is an oppressive, patriarchal institution, it's like, okay, then, why are only the rich people getting married?
01:01:14.000All the men in the law firms don't have their problems with highly qualified women.
01:01:19.000Because they don't know what to do with them.
01:01:21.000You know, like, if you're a guy and you're assertive and competitive, then you're going to be asserting yourself and competitive with other guys.
01:01:28.000But it's a lot harder to do that with a woman.
01:02:36.000Not to denigrate all of academia, but unfortunately, this is a profession in which people have killed trillions of trees for bullshit, basically.
01:02:46.000So, I just thought that would be a nice ironic twist.
01:02:49.000Yeah, well, you know, the postmodernists, they don't believe in...
01:02:52.000I don't know how much you know about postmodernist philosophy.
01:02:55.000You're at Ryerson, so probably quite a bit.
01:02:58.000But, not that the U of T is any better, because it's not.
01:03:01.000But, the postmodernists don't believe in science.
01:03:04.000There's lots of things they don't believe in.
01:03:08.000Like, you can go read it for yourself, Derrida in particular.
01:03:11.000They think that logic is part of the oppressive patriarchy, and that there's no point in dialogue, because all there is is different power groups identified by their groups, and they can't really talk.
01:04:01.000Because you have to believe in logic, first of all, to believe in dialogue.
01:04:04.000You have to believe that people can communicate, like, as individuals, fundamentally.
01:04:09.000And not that you're just locked in your identity as group member against all the other identity groups that are struggling for power in the kind of Hobbesian landscape.
01:04:21.000So, and this, well, this is just an extension of that.
01:04:24.000It's like, science is just a patriarchal, oppressive patriarchal structure.
01:04:28.000And so, we need to reconstitute it from the bottom up.
01:04:32.000It's like, they type on their computers while they say this, not noticing that by the fact that they're using the damn computer, which wouldn't work.
01:04:42.000You know, people had to figure out quantum mechanics before they could make computers.
01:04:56.000And here I am, 600 miles an hour, typing on my computer.
01:05:00.000It's like, that's called a performative contradiction from a philosophical perspective.
01:05:05.000And that's the same as a logical paradox.
01:05:08.000You don't get to say one thing and do another and say that you've got it right.
01:05:12.000Well, you do if you're a postmodernist, because you can do whatever you want if you're a postmodernist.
01:05:16.000And the reason the damn postmodernists are Marxists, as far as I can tell, because inevitably they are, is because the problem with postmodernism is it doesn't even leave postmodernists anything to do.
01:05:28.000Because postmodernists don't believe in overarching directional narratives.
01:05:32.000And the problem with that proposition is, if you don't have an overarching directive narrative for your life, you don't know what to do.
01:05:39.000And it's really important that you know what to do, because you're alive and you need to do things.
01:05:44.000Well, we'll just turn back to the original Marxism, and we'll say, well, we'll just group ourselves up in oppressed groups, and we'll have wars between the oppressed groups.
01:05:52.000That'll give us a sufficient overarching narrative.
01:05:56.000It doesn't matter that it contradicts the postmodernist thesis, because they don't care about contradictions.
01:06:01.000So, well, so, hence this, you know, feminist glaciology.
01:06:07.000Okay, so I've got a few questions that you've been watching, Hans, pop up.
01:06:10.000So there's one back there first. Okay, Felix?
01:06:13.000Yeah, so first I can tell you, you've created a conflict, or described a conflict, really between determinism and choice, right?
01:06:25.000That, you know, represent psychological and biological determinism.
01:06:29.000It's a good, it's a good question. No, I don't think so. Even though I think your question is well formulated and intelligent. I don't think it's that dichotomy is that straight.
01:06:47.000Because there's a tremendous amount of deterministic thinking on the social justice warrior end of the distribution, too. Because they regard you as the deterministic product of your environment.
01:06:59.000So it's more like the localization of determinism. So it's more like the localization of determinism.
01:07:13.000So you might say that for the more biologically oriented people, there's more biological determinism.
01:07:19.000So I think that the conflict between free will and determinism basically runs across the entire political spectrum.
01:07:27.000But then I would also say, it's probably an ill-formed argument. Because there isn't an absolute paradoxical contradiction between free will and determinism.
01:07:39.000Quite the contrary. You actually need elements of determinism, I think, for a system to operate freely.
01:07:45.000So, for example, think about playing chess. You can do a lot of things when you're playing chess. Or think about composing music. You can do a lot of things when you're composing music.
01:07:55.000But there's an underlying rule structure that sets up the environment within which all of those choices manifest themselves.
01:08:04.000It's the same with online video games, which are a really good example, I think, because they are micro-worlds.
01:08:10.000And they're determined in some sense because they have an underlying rule structure. That's the rules of the game. But they're free in many other ways.
01:08:17.000And so, I don't think there's anybody, pretty much on any side of the political spectrum, who would regard people as entirely possessed of free will.
01:08:27.000You know, we have constraints and limits. And we're also pretty good at adjusting those on the fly.
01:08:33.000You know, so, for example, you'll be much less irritated if a three-year-old runs into you carelessly while tricycling than you will if an adult man runs into you with his scooter.
01:08:44.000Because you'll take the constraints of the individual into account very, very rapidly.
01:08:50.000So, I think, so well, so that's, it's not as simple as free will versus determinism mapped onto the political spectrum.
01:08:57.000When a woman experiences an unplanned pregnancy, she often feels alone and afraid.
01:09:04.000Too often, her first response is to seek out an abortion, because that's what left-leaning institutions have conditioned her to do.
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01:10:17.000You mentioned that if somebody thought that socialism was done wrong because it was done by Stalin, that frequently they're saying that I would have done it right, and that there's something wrong with that person.
01:10:39.000I see what you're saying, but I wonder, I asked her to say once in a video about twisted compassion, about how people get their compassion all twisted, and that you appeal to the individual.
01:10:52.000It seems that like attacking on that level, it's not that that's not your mojo or that's not how you do things really, but it seems like you'll get people on their heels, sort of.
01:11:01.000You know, I see, like, some hatred for Americanism or something like that, or Muslims, and I think that just makes people, they naturally feel identified with their land or their category.
01:11:12.000It'll just make them defend that stance even more, instead of reaching for the individual, like, understandings about compassion, right?
01:11:20.000Okay, so I have to take that apart a little bit, because there's a bunch of issues in the question.
01:11:28.000How many people in here are in your psychology course, are taking psychology? Are most of you taking psychology courses? How many people are taking psychology courses?
01:11:35.000Okay, so a goodly number. Well, one of the things you want to do with a conception like compassion is you actually want to start thinking about it like a psychologist or like a scientist.
01:11:45.000Because compassion is actually definable. And I think the easiest way to approach it is to think about it in big five terms, because it maps onto agreeableness.
01:11:55.000And especially, you can break agreeableness down into compassion and politeness. And the liberal types, especially the social justice types, are way higher in compassion.
01:12:04.000It's actually their fundamental characteristic. And you might think, well, compassion is a virtue. It's like, yes, it is a virtue.
01:12:12.000But any unidimensional virtue immediately becomes a vice. Because real virtue is the intermingling of a number of virtues and their integration into a functional identity that can be expressed socially.
01:12:27.000And compassion is great if you happen to be the entity towards which it is directed. But compassion tends to divide the world into crying children and predatory snakes.
01:12:40.000Right. And so if you're a crying child, hey, great, man. But if you happen to be identified as one of the predatory snakes, you better look the hell out.
01:12:49.000Right. And so, you know, compassion is what the mother grizzly bear feels for her cubs when she eats you because you got in the way.
01:12:57.000Right. Exactly. So we don't want to be thinking for a second that compassion isn't a virtue that could lead to violence. Because it certainly can.
01:13:07.000And the other problem with compassion, this is why we have conscientiousness. Right. There's five canonical personality dimensions.
01:13:16.000Agreeableness is pretty good if you're dealing, again, in a kin system. You want to distribute resources equally, for example, among your children.
01:13:23.000Because you want all of them to have not only the same chance. You even want them, roughly, to have the same outcome. A good one.
01:13:29.000But the problem is, is you can't extend that moral network to larger groups. Not as far as I can tell. You need conscientiousness, which is a much colder virtue.
01:13:39.000And it's also a virtue that's much more concerned with larger structures over the longer period of time. So, and you can think about conscientiousness as a form of compassion, too.
01:13:51.000It's a strange form. It's like, straighten the hell out and work hard and your life will go well. It's like, I don't care how your feelings, how you feel about that right now.
01:14:00.000And, like, someone who's cold, low in agreeableness, say, and high in conscientiousness, that's what they'll tell you every time.
01:14:06.000Don't come whining to me. I don't care about your hurt feelings. Do your god damn job or you're going to be out on the street.
01:14:12.000Think, oh, that person's being really hard on me. It's like, not necessarily. They might have your long-term best interest in mind.
01:14:18.000And you're fortunate if you come across someone who's, like, not tyrannically disagreeable, but moderately disagreeable and high in conscientiousness, because they'll whip you into shame.
01:14:28.000And that's really helpful. I mean, you'll admire people like that. You won't be able to help it.
01:14:34.000You know, and you'll think, oh, wow, this person's actually giving me good information, even though, you know, you feel like a slug after they've taken you apart.
01:14:43.000So, okay, so that's the compassion issue. It's like, you can't just transform that into a political stance.
01:14:49.000And I think part of what we're seeing is actually the rise of a form of female totalitarianism.
01:14:55.000Because we have no idea what totalitarianism would be like if women ran it, because that's never happened before in the history of the planet.
01:15:03.000And so we've introduced women into the political sphere radically over the last 50 years.
01:15:09.000We have no idea what the consequence of that is going to be, but we do know from our research, which is preliminary, that agreeableness really predicts political correctness.
01:15:18.000But female gender predicts over and above the personality trait, and that's something we found very rarely in our research.
01:15:25.000Usually the sex differences are wiped out by the personality differences, but not in this particular case.
01:15:30.000And then, you know, women are getting married later, and they're having children much later, and they're having fewer of them.
01:15:37.000And so you also have to wonder what their feminine orientation is doing with itself in the interim, roughly speaking.
01:15:46.000And a lot of it's being expressed as political opinion.
01:15:48.000Like, fair enough, you know, that's fine.
01:15:51.000But it's not fine when it starts to shut down discussion.
01:15:56.000You know, also, if you think about politics from a temperamental perspective, it gets to be extraordinarily useful.
01:16:02.000So, if you're conservative, you're high in conscientiousness, particularly orderliness, and you're low in openness.
01:16:11.000Well, you're not great if you want to have a wonderful philosophical conversation about ideas, and then go hit an art movie.
01:16:18.000It's like, no, conservative's your wrong date for that particular bit of business.
01:16:24.000But if you want someone to run a company that's already been established, or to make sure that algorithmized processes are being undertaken properly, you want conservatives.
01:16:35.000They're very good at managing, and they're very good at administering.
01:16:38.000Conscientiousness is the best predictor of those two domains, apart from IQ.
01:17:22.000And what that implies is that there's a niche for every personality type in proportion to the frequency of the occurrence within that normal distribution.
01:17:34.000There's some places for really extroverted people.
01:17:37.000There's more places for people who are moderately extroverted and moderately introverted.
01:17:41.000But there are places for everyone in that dimensional structure.
01:17:45.000And there's utility for all of those people.
01:17:48.000And so, that's why you have to keep the dialogue going.
01:17:50.000It's like, if you're hyper-liberal, you have to talk to the damn conservatives, because sometimes they're right.
01:19:20.000So, I figured out recently, I think, that I couldn't figure out why openness and conscientiousness are the dimensions that are determining political belief.