The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Australia's John Anderson & Dr. Jordan B Peterson： In Conversation

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00:00:58.480 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. You can support these podcasts by donating

00:01:07.840 to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description. Dr. Peterson's

00:01:13.620 self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at selfauthoring.com.

00:01:18.040 Well, Dr. Jordan Peterson, welcome to Sydney on your Australian tour. You're talking to packed

00:01:32.180 out houses and the interest is extraordinary. And we've had the opportunity to talk personally

00:01:37.140 and I can understand why. I want to begin with something that Churchill wrote in the 1930s.

00:01:44.320 And he said this, one of the signs of a great society is the diligence with which it passes

00:01:51.000 culture from one generation to the next. When one generation no longer passes on the things

00:02:00.060 that are dear to it, its heroes and their stories and its religious faith, it's in effect saying

00:02:05.720 that past is null and void. It's of no value. He goes on to say that leaves young people feeling

00:02:14.280 a lack of direction and a lack of purpose and opens them to the dictum of Karl Marx that

00:02:21.600 are people derived of their history are easily persuaded. Have we stripped our young people

00:02:28.000 of purpose and meaning and left them open to being bullied around?

00:02:32.280 Well, there's two things about that that I think are really worth laying out. The first

00:02:37.600 is an analysis of the purpose of memory. Because people think that the purpose of memory is

00:02:42.880 to remember the past. And that's not the purpose of memory. The purpose of memory is to extract

00:02:48.940 out from the past lessons to structure the future. And that's the purpose of personal memory.

00:02:55.040 And so you're done with a memory when you've extracted out the information that you can use

00:02:58.780 to guide yourself properly in the future. So if you have a traumatic memory, for example,

00:03:02.460 it's really obsessing you. If you analyze that memory to the point where you figured out how

00:03:08.480 you put yourself at risk and you can determine how you might avoid that in the future, then

00:03:12.940 the emotion associated with that goes away. So memory has a very pragmatic function. And

00:03:18.760 cultural memory is the same thing. Is that we need to extract out stories from our past that

00:03:24.020 structure our future. And we need that because, first of all, if you don't have a purpose,

00:03:29.460 let's say, it isn't that your life becomes neutral in a meaningless sense. It's that your

00:03:35.540 life becomes characterized by unbearable suffering. Because the baseline condition of life is something

00:03:41.400 like unbearable suffering. And what you have to set against that is a noble and worthwhile

00:03:47.240 purpose. And hopefully your determination of that purpose is buttressed to some degree by

00:03:53.200 the wisdom of the past. Because you can't conjure something like that up on your own. And if

00:03:57.700 you provide people with nobility of purpose, then they can tolerate the suffering of existence

00:04:02.780 without becoming entirely corrupted by it. And cultures that don't do that, it isn't even

00:04:07.980 so much that they die. It's that cultures that don't do that are dead. They're done. They

00:04:13.440 don't have a story anymore. They don't have a call to adventure. And then, well, then everyone

00:04:18.280 suffers stupidly as a consequence. It's a very bad thing. So Churchill made the same observation

00:04:24.120 that many of the great psychologists and philosophers made in the early part of the

00:04:27.460 20th century. It's like, bring the story forward and propagate it and make it the most noble

00:04:35.060 possible story. And then you motivate people to transcend themselves, which they need to

00:04:40.580 do. So, yes, he's exactly right in his diagnosis.

00:04:44.320 Just to stay with him for a moment, he's painted as the great defender of freedom. It's possible

00:04:50.160 that your country, Canada, and certainly my country, Australia, would have not continued

00:04:54.520 as free societies had it not been for that man courageously standing at a time when so few

00:05:01.120 did. He wasn't the inventor of freedom. Freedom as we understand it, and I want to unpack that

00:05:07.220 a bit, something very, very few people in very few cultures down through the ages and even

00:05:12.640 today have ever really experienced.

00:05:14.600 Oh, well, yes. And partly because we're afraid of it, I would say. I mean, people think of

00:05:21.980 freedom as the ability to implement your whim. And freedom opens up that as a possibility.

00:05:28.980 But sustainable freedom, that isn't what it's about at all. It's about, it's primarily about

00:05:33.680 responsibility. It's about determining which load you're going to pick up and carry. That's

00:05:37.700 the proper definition of appropriate freedom. It's not dim gratification of instantaneous

00:05:45.040 impulse. It's self-evident that that doesn't work. Two-year-olds do that, and that's why

00:05:49.040 they can't live in the world. They can't organize themselves across time. They can't sacrifice

00:05:54.360 the moment for the future. And the more sophisticated you get, I suppose, in some sense, the more you're

00:05:59.780 able to do that. And then your freedom becomes the freedom to choose the proper responsibility.

00:06:05.040 And that's not, that's also not something that we've been good at communicating to young

00:06:08.380 people. If we talk to them about responsibility, we generally do it in a finger-wagging sort

00:06:12.480 of way. It's like, well, you're breaking the rules. You're a bad person. And, well, that

00:06:17.540 may be true because people break the rules and there's no shortage of badness in people.

00:06:22.060 But the proper message for young people is to say, well, no, you don't understand. You

00:06:26.880 want to take on responsibility. You want to take on the heaviest load that you can conceive

00:06:31.580 of that you might be able to move because it gives your life nobility and purpose. And

00:06:36.320 that offsets the tragedy. And not only psychologically, not only does it offset it psychologically because

00:06:42.340 you have a purpose and something to wake up for, right, and to face the difficulties

00:06:47.100 of the day, but also because if you face the difficulties of the day properly, you actually

00:06:51.960 ameliorate suffering, not only in the psychological sense, but because you make the world at least

00:06:57.440 a less terrible place. And that's something, right? To move things away from hell is something.

00:07:03.580 Even if you're not, you know, self-evidently moving forthrightly to heaven, to move things

00:07:08.760 away from the worst they can be is, well, that's a noble goal in and of itself. So, and young

00:07:14.860 people are starving for that idea. It's very interesting to watch.

00:07:18.180 As I look at it, it seems to me that, that Acton had it right. Freedom properly understood

00:07:24.140 needs to be seen as a negative and as a positive. The negative is, is, is, is a sort of concept

00:07:29.560 of freedom from fear, addiction, persecution, tyranny, in a personal sense. And then freedom

00:07:39.860 to be is to reach your potential. But it seems to me that what's missing is an understanding

00:07:45.180 that freedom exercised within a framework of responsibility, i.e. doing what you ought,

00:07:52.260 will guarantee ongoing freedom for yourself and for your neighbours. Freedom exercised

00:07:57.420 in a way that confuses it with licence tends to destroy freedom. In fact, you could even

00:08:03.200 go so far as to say that misunderstood freedom turns out to be its own worst enemy.

00:08:08.560 Well, that's, that's, that's the, that's the difficult distinction between freedom

00:08:12.720 of the moment and, and freedom of, of the, the freedom with everything taken into account.

00:08:17.640 You know, I'm a real admirer of the work of Jean Piaget and Piaget is a developmental psychologist

00:08:22.600 and few people know, the world's most well known developmental psychologist, and few people

00:08:28.300 know that he was actually motivated in his intellectual pursuits by the desire to reconcile science

00:08:33.780 with religion. That was what, his driving force from the time that he was a young man. You

00:08:37.640 wouldn't know that even necessarily by reading his writings because it's implicit rather

00:08:41.460 than explicit in them. But he, he, he has a different model of what constitutes morality

00:08:48.840 than, than Freud. Freud's model is combative. It's sort of the superego as tyrant. So the

00:08:54.020 superego would be the strictures of society, the id, the biological impulses and the ego crushed

00:09:00.560 between those, right? So the ego is this thing that's crushed between nature and culture. And

00:09:04.680 so it's a really, it's a tense and combative model of the human psyche. And there's something

00:09:09.460 about it that's, that's, that's accurate because some of the restrictions that are put on your impulse

00:09:15.060 gratification are imposed on you in a, in a sense, tyrannically. But Piaget's perspective was much more,

00:09:21.500 um, optimistic and I think much more accurate. He noticed that as children organized themselves spontaneously

00:09:28.680 as they developed, especially within the confines of their own spontaneous play. They didn't so much

00:09:35.520 subsume or, or inhibit their dark and aggressive impulses as make them sophisticated and transform them into

00:09:45.120 universally acceptable games. So for Piaget, a game that a group of children were playing, that all of them were playing voluntarily and that was going well and that they all wanted to continue playing, was a microchip.

00:09:57.680 was a microcosm of society. And, and literally a microcosm of society. The reason the children were playing those games was to practice being productive members of society.

00:10:06.680 And he felt that the appropriate game tended towards what he described as an equilibrated state. So an equilibrated state would be a game that you'll play because you've decided it's a good game.

00:10:16.680 But that you can play with others because they've also decided that it's a good game. And so that can work at the individual level and at the familial level and at the social level.

00:10:25.680 And if you get all those things working simultaneously, then you have a sustainable enterprise. And it's, it's predicated not so much on the, on the inhibition of impulse or on the regulation of it, but of the integration of impulses into a, into a pattern of being that gratifies them on a relatively permanent basis.

00:10:44.680 You know, if you want to go to university and become a physician, I think there's a lot of, uh, sacrifice of impulsive gratification that goes along with that.

00:10:55.680 But if you become a physician, then it's a noble enterprise, people support you socially, and all of the needs that you need to have fulfilled will also be fulfilled by that enterprise.

00:11:06.680 Well, that's a way better model. And so it's strange that the maximum freedom comes with the adoption of a discipline and then also the adoption of responsibility.

00:11:15.680 That frees you up and everyone else around you in the long run. And if you explain that to people, especially in this day and age when they be fed a never ending diet of idiot rights and freedom,

00:11:24.680 they're immediately on board with it because they know, they know that most of the meaning that people experience in their life is a consequence of adopting responsibility.

00:11:34.680 So they're starving for that idea to be articulated.

00:11:37.680 Opens up a whole can of very, very interesting issues. Let's try and pick a couple of them, but if I do, it's evident to me, and I'm enormously encouraged by this because I'm a passionate Australian.

00:11:49.680 I want this country to be the sort of place that offers opportunities of the sort that I had when I was young.

00:11:55.680 You know, I've had my opportunities, but I look at my kids' generation. What's going to be there for them if we keep feeding them this sort of thin gruel?

00:12:05.680 Well, in reality, the people turning out in vast numbers, every one of your talks in Australia has been oversubscribed massively.

00:12:13.680 It tells you they kind of get that there's more to this than they're being told.

00:12:18.680 Oh, they know. Oh yeah, they know. Well, it's one of the things that's so interesting about dealing with archetypal themes.

00:12:23.680 You know, archetypal themes are archetypal because they actually speak of the structure of human experience.

00:12:29.680 That's why they last. And so it's human nature and human experience has a pattern.

00:12:35.680 You don't have the capacity to articulate that pattern as an individual, in part because your life is too short.

00:12:41.680 You just can't figure it out. But the ancient representations of those patterns are everywhere around you.

00:12:47.680 And you know some of them in the image. You cotton on to them automatically. You fall into them if you go to a movie, for example,

00:12:54.680 because movies always express archetypal themes. If you hear them articulated, you think, I knew that. I knew that. I just didn't know how to say it.

00:13:02.680 That's the platonic idea of learning as remembering. Your soul already knows, but it doesn't have the words.

00:13:11.680 And so when people talk to me about watching my lectures, let's say, they basically say one of two things.

00:13:20.680 If it's not just a simple thank you, they say one of two things. A third of them say, a quarter of them say,

00:13:26.680 when I listen to you talk, it's as if you're telling me things that I already know.

00:13:31.680 It's like, yeah, well, that's exactly right, because that's what archetypal stories are.

00:13:35.680 They're the description of what you already know. But that can be articulated.

00:13:39.680 And then who you are and how you see yourself and the way you describe yourself all become the same thing.

00:13:46.680 So that's wonderful. Then you're not at odds with yourself, you know.

00:13:49.680 And then you have, then you're a functioning unity, and that makes you much stronger and more indomitable

00:13:53.680 than you would otherwise be. And then the other thing that people say, and this is more like three quarters of them,

00:13:58.680 is that they say, I was in a very dark place. I was addicted. I was, I was drinking too much.

00:14:04.680 I had a fragmented relationship with my fiancee, and I wasn't getting married.

00:14:08.680 Things weren't going very well with my family. My relationship with my father was damaged.

00:14:12.680 I didn't have any aim. I was wasting my time. Some variant of that, some combination of those.

00:14:18.680 And they say, well, I've been watching your lectures. I've decided to establish a purpose.

00:14:24.680 I'm trying to tell the truth. And things are way better. And I've, and so, let's say I've done maybe eight or nine large-scale public talks in the last two months.

00:14:34.680 So that's probably 20,000 people. And about half of them, a third to half of them have stayed afterwards to talk to me.

00:14:40.680 So that's about 7,000 people who have said that to me. And then people stop me on the street all the time and tell me exactly that story,

00:14:47.680 which is just wonderful. Like, you can't imagine how good it is to be able to go to places you've never been,

00:14:53.680 and to have people stop you on the streets spontaneously and say, look, my life is way better than it was.

00:14:59.680 It's like, it's so good. And so, and I've got like, I don't know, 35,000 letters from people since last August.

00:15:07.680 It's more than that. I can't keep track of them. And it's exactly the same thing.

00:15:10.680 Like three-quarter, a quarter of them say, well, you've given me the words to say what I already knew was true.

00:15:15.680 And thank you for that. I can see that in the audience. It's so interesting because I can lay out a story.

00:15:20.680 People go like this and say, they're doing that all the time. It's like the lights are going on.

00:15:24.680 And that's a really, well, there's almost nothing better than that,

00:15:27.680 to watch lights go on when you're talking to people. It's like, that's just absolutely fantastic.

00:15:32.680 But to get this response from people, my father, I have, my father's about 80, he's 83, I think, 81.

00:15:41.680 He's 81. And I put him in charge of going through my viewer email, which is an overwhelming job.

00:15:49.680 But, you know, we've had discussions about this constantly.

00:15:52.680 He's overwhelmed by the fact that so many people are writing and saying the same thing.

00:15:56.680 It's like, well, I have a purpose, man. My life actually matters. I finally realized that.

00:16:01.680 And I'm putting it into practice. And I'm bearing up under the heaviest load I can imagine.

00:16:05.680 And it's really helping. It's like, God. And that's tens of thousands of responses now.

00:16:11.680 So it's, it's, you couldn't hope for anything better than that.

00:16:17.680 There's zero harm in it, right? It's just people putting their lives together.

00:16:21.680 They're not mucking about with other people.

00:16:23.680 They're not trying to make broad scale social transformations about which they have no idea.

00:16:27.680 They're trying to make their immediate environment better.

00:16:31.680 And it's working. It's like, great. It's great.

00:16:35.680 Well, you say there's zero harm in it. I'd say as a former legislator that there's an enormous amount of good in it.

00:16:40.680 A country is only the sum total of the people that make it up.

00:16:43.680 To the extent that they're put together, resilient, able to contribute, don't have to ask others to help them.

00:16:50.680 The stronger the nation and the society will be.

00:16:53.680 Oh, yes. And rapidly. Like, I mean, I think, I was thinking the other day, some, a journalist asked me why the audience, why people are responding so positively to what I'm saying.

00:17:02.680 The young men, for example. And I thought, hmm, why, yeah, that's a good question.

00:17:06.680 He says, well, I'm actually on their side. I'm really happy that, I'm really happy that they're not wasting their lives.

00:17:13.680 I'm really sad to see that people are disenchanted and nihilistic and depressed and anxious and aimless and perverse and vengeful and all of those things.

00:17:22.680 It's terrible. And then to see people question whether that's necessary and then to start to rise out of it.

00:17:29.680 It's like, it's so fun. Like last night I was at, after my talk. It's overwhelming.

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00:20:27.680 I don't usually think about these things, but I was after my talk last night and so all these people line up and you know they have their 15 seconds with me and they're kind of tentative.

00:20:36.680 They're excited and attentive when they come up to talk to me and then they have 15 seconds of time to tell me something.

00:20:41.680 I'm really listening to them and they're hesitant about whether or not to share the good news about their life.

00:20:47.680 You know, and I think it's often because when people share good news about their life, people don't necessarily respond positively.

00:20:57.680 You know, they don't get encouragement and people need so little encouragement.

00:21:02.680 It's just unbelievable.

00:21:03.680 And so they'll tell me something good and I think, God, that's so good.

00:21:06.680 You know, if somebody says, oh, I'm getting along way better with my father.

00:21:09.680 I hadn't seen him for 10 years and now we get along.

00:21:11.680 It's like, God, great.

00:21:13.680 Great.

00:21:14.680 And then the power of that, you can't overstate the power of that for individuals to get their life together.

00:21:20.680 The individual is an unbelievably powerful force and every single person who gets their act together a little bit has the capacity to spread that around them.

00:21:29.680 It's a chain reaction and so it's a lovely thing to see.

00:21:34.680 That's fantastic.

00:21:38.680 My observation of atheists would be they don't live like atheists.

00:21:41.680 They don't live as though they really believe they're just a cosmic accident and there's no purpose.

00:21:46.680 Well, most of them, the best of them, I have a lot of respect for the atheists generally because they've generally thought a lot more about the situation

00:21:55.680 and struggled with it more than the complacent fundamentalists, you know, who wallpaper over their doubts with overstatements about their belief.

00:22:05.680 The atheists, you know, the word Isaac means, or Israel, the word Israel means he who struggles with God.

00:22:11.680 It's like, well, it's not obvious that it's not the atheists, you know, they're struggling away.

00:22:15.680 It's like they're obsessed with it even.

00:22:17.680 And so they have God more on their mind than the typical person who's a believer.

00:22:21.680 And so it's interesting, too, because there's been this little community developed around my biblical lectures in particular,

00:22:27.680 of people who call themselves Christian atheists, which I think is quite remarkable.

00:22:31.680 So if I lay out the rationale for the Christian ethic, which is something like pick up your damn cross and struggle uphill,

00:22:38.680 which is a really good message, they think, oh, yeah, well, that makes a lot of sense.

00:22:42.680 It's like, well, I don't need the metaphysical baggage.

00:22:44.680 It's like, well, maybe you do and maybe you don't.

00:22:47.680 But even to pick up the practical utility of that idea, which is overwhelming, that's an excellent start.

00:22:56.680 And I was going to follow on that.

00:22:57.680 And so it strikes me with a lot of young people, and I think this is enormously due to their credit and goes to the heart,

00:23:02.680 I think, of what you're saying.

00:23:04.680 They're told that morality is relative.

00:23:07.680 They don't live that way.

00:23:08.680 They're actually looking for truth, aren't they?

00:23:10.680 Well, if you live that way, everyone hates you.

00:23:13.680 But that's the creed that we're in.

00:23:15.680 Oh, yes, yes.

00:23:16.680 But that's a good example of who you are can be out of sync with how you represent yourself.

00:23:21.680 It's like I was walking through these ideas with the audience last night.

00:23:26.680 It's like, well, how do we treat each other when things work?

00:23:30.680 And how do you treat yourself?

00:23:31.680 Well, first of all, you have to treat yourself like you matter.

00:23:34.680 Because if you don't, then you don't take care of yourself, and you become vengeful and cruel.

00:23:39.680 And you take it out on people around you, and you're not a positive force.

00:23:44.680 None of that's good.

00:23:45.680 So you suffer more, and so does everyone around you.

00:23:47.680 And there's a malevolence that enters into it.

00:23:49.680 None of that's good.

00:23:50.680 So that's what happens if you don't treat yourself like you matter.

00:23:53.680 And then what happens if you don't treat other people like they matter?

00:23:56.680 Well, you lie to them, you cheat them, you steal, you enter into impulsive relationships with them.

00:24:03.680 They can't trust you.

00:24:05.680 That doesn't go anywhere.

00:24:06.680 They don't like you.

00:24:07.680 You end up alone at best, and maybe, like, incarcerated at worst.

00:24:12.680 Like, that doesn't work.

00:24:13.680 And so you watch the people around you who thrive, regardless of what they say.

00:24:18.680 They act out the proposition that everyone matters.

00:24:22.680 And then you have a functional society.

00:24:24.680 And I think, okay, well, if when you act out the proposition that everyone matters, you have a functional society,

00:24:31.680 maybe that's evidence that that proposition is true.

00:24:34.680 It's like, I think it's true.

00:24:36.680 I think the idea that the individual has a spark of divinity within him or her,

00:24:40.680 I think there isn't a more true way of saying that.

00:24:44.680 And if you act that out, well, this goes back to the idea that you brought up about potential,

00:24:49.680 which is also something I've discussed with my audiences a lot.

00:24:52.680 It's like, we don't act like we live in a material reality.

00:24:57.680 We act like we face a landscape of potential, an external landscape of potential,

00:25:03.680 with an internal reservoir of potential.

00:25:05.680 That's how we act.

00:25:06.680 And then we call each other out on it.

00:25:08.680 We say things like, well, you're not living up to your potential.

00:25:12.680 And persons go, so yeah, well, I know.

00:25:13.680 It's like, well, what do you mean by that?

00:25:15.680 What do you mean by that?

00:25:16.680 Well, you mean there's more to you than meets the eye.

00:25:19.680 Even though it's not measurable, right?

00:25:21.680 It's not tangible.

00:25:22.680 It's just possibility.

00:25:23.680 But everyone acts as though that's a reality.

00:25:26.680 And we all act as if we make choices about what reality to bring into being.

00:25:32.680 We punish ourselves for our moral errors and other people as well.

00:25:37.680 We act out this ethic that puts us each at the center of being as active participants in the world that we want to bring forward.

00:25:45.680 Everyone acts that way.

00:25:46.680 And if we don't, then things go to hell instantly.

00:25:49.680 So it's like, well, what do we believe?

00:25:51.680 This is the argument I've had with people like Sam Harris, the atheist types.

00:25:55.680 It's like, yeah, you think you're atheist, man.

00:25:56.680 It's like you're Christian, Judeo-Christian, let's say, to the core.

00:26:00.680 You just don't understand it.

00:26:02.680 You just don't realize it.

00:26:03.680 And it's understandable, but it's not helpful.

00:26:06.680 This idea that you put forward of a spark of divinity in every human being surely lies at the heart of the miracle of Western freedom.

00:26:14.680 The idea that every individual has worth and dignity and standing.

00:26:18.680 It's the idea that killed slavery, right?

00:26:21.680 Slavery is everywhere.

00:26:22.680 The greatest human rights movement of all times, so successful that it obliterated the idea that it was all right to keep slaves, let alone change the law.

00:26:32.680 It changed the way the world fought, even though there are evil people who still keep slaves.

00:26:37.680 And here's a rub.

00:26:39.680 It was plainly led by people of profound Christian faith.

00:26:43.680 There's no other way of putting it.

00:26:45.680 Anyone who honestly, honestly, and truthfully looks at the history of that period can't get away from it.

00:26:51.680 But because it doesn't suit the modern left's narrative, it's airbrushed out.

00:26:55.680 Doesn't that in itself say something profound about our willingness to try and distort truth to suit our objectives?

00:27:04.680 It's hard to say what it speaks of.

00:27:07.680 It's like the whitewashing of what happened in the Soviet states, in the communist states in the 20th century.

00:27:14.680 I mean, anybody who goes through that literature with any degree of care comes away traumatized, right?

00:27:21.680 Shell-shocked.

00:27:22.680 It's just, it's everything the Nazis did on a larger scale.

00:27:28.680 It's horrifying.

00:27:29.680 And yet I see with my students, for example...

00:27:31.680 50 or 60 million people who dared to disagree died?

00:27:34.680 At minimum, it was...

00:27:35.680 In their own culture?

00:27:36.680 It was something...

00:27:37.680 In their own society?

00:27:38.680 We don't know.

00:27:39.680 In the Soviet Union, the estimates range from 20 to 60 million.

00:27:42.680 And in Maoist China, the estimates are as much as 100 million.

00:27:46.680 Are our kids taught this in school?

00:27:47.680 No, not at all.

00:27:48.680 In universities?

00:27:49.680 Why not?

00:27:50.680 It's very...

00:27:52.680 I think it's part of the...

00:27:53.680 You see, their societies, let's preface something.

00:27:55.680 The modern fight, it seems to me, in many ways, is between what might be called freedom and fairness and equality.

00:28:03.680 Equality sounds terrific.

00:28:06.680 Yep.

00:28:07.680 But we've actually seen what happens in societies where they set equality up as the ultimate goal.

00:28:13.680 They became terrible places.

00:28:14.680 How did that happen?

00:28:15.680 Well, I think this is part of the problem.

00:28:16.680 It sounds good.

00:28:17.680 Yeah, well, I think that's also part of the whitewashing, is we can't understand how one of our primary moral intuitions, which might be fairness, let's say, can transform itself into something so utterly murderous when it's played out on a large political stage.

00:28:34.680 And I think because we don't understand that, I mean, look, there's reasons to be on the left.

00:28:39.680 There are temperamental reasons first.

00:28:40.680 So, a lot of your political preference is influenced, let's say, by your temperament.

00:28:46.680 And a lot of your temperament is influenced by biological factors.

00:28:49.680 So, there are temperamental reasons to be on the left.

00:28:52.680 People who are on the left tend to be higher in creativity and lower in conscientiousness, for example.

00:28:56.680 Those are the two best predictors.

00:28:58.680 But there's also practical reasons to be on the left.

00:29:02.680 And one of the practical reasons are that human societies, which tend to be hierarchical, like all animal societies, or almost all animal societies, produce inequality as they go about their business.

00:29:14.680 And inequality is actually quite painful.

00:29:17.680 No one likes it.

00:29:18.680 Nobody, no rich capitalist walks down a busy urban street and sees a starving homeless person who's clearly mentally ill, suffering madly,

00:29:27.680 and thinks that inequality is okay.

00:29:30.680 No one thinks that.

00:29:31.680 No one's for poverty.

00:29:33.680 Right?

00:29:34.680 And so we have this moral intuition that it would be better if the downtrodden were lifted up.

00:29:38.680 And it's difficult to discriminate between that and an inequality narrative.

00:29:42.680 And so, I think part of the reason that we can't face the lesson of the 20th century is because it's the left that mostly has to face the lesson.

00:29:52.680 And they don't know how to reconcile their deep intuitions about the injustice of inequality with the fact that when you put that doctrine at work into operation as a political tool, you instantly stack up millions of corpses.

00:30:06.680 We don't know what to do with that.

00:30:07.680 And so we just avoid it.

00:30:09.680 And that's, well, then of course, we risk replicating it, which is not a good, that's not a good tactical move, let's say.

00:30:16.680 Well, that's the problem.

00:30:17.680 If we don't learn from history, we're destined to repeat it.

00:30:20.680 I entirely accept, and some Australians might be surprised by this.

00:30:24.680 They say, no, I can't understand a lefty perspective.

00:30:26.680 I think I can.

00:30:27.680 I can understand the nobility of wanting to ensure that everyone is respected as a full member of a human family, of our culture and our society.

00:30:36.680 But this is where it gets so tricky, and it's where I think many young people are starting to wake up.

00:30:41.680 They're being sold a pup.

00:30:42.680 Do you have that expression in Canada?

00:30:43.680 No, no.

00:30:44.680 Sold a pup?

00:30:45.680 No.

00:30:46.680 Sold a dad.

00:30:47.680 I see, yeah.

00:30:48.680 It's not a sound idea.

00:30:49.680 But many of the things that sound attractive don't necessarily work.

00:30:54.680 So perhaps we need to be arguing the case for freedom and fairness, which will produce at least a high degree of equality of opportunity, rather than arguing for equality, which history tells us tends to severely erode freedom.

00:31:13.680 Well, it's a harder sale, though, because it's easy to appeal to compassion immediately, thoughtlessly, right?

00:31:21.680 And since that's such an instantaneously positive moral virtue, and you don't need sophisticated argumentation to buttress it, it's a lot more difficult to make a cold analytical case that the proposition freedom first, let's say freedom and responsibility first, lifts the bottom up better.

00:31:40.680 Yeah.

00:31:41.680 It's a cold argument, and it requires rationality to parse through, so it's a harder sale.

00:31:45.680 I would argue, though, it's not just rationality.

00:31:47.680 It's history.

00:31:48.680 Yes.

00:31:49.680 If you bring rationality and honesty to the study of history, I think the case is actually quite compelling.

00:31:55.680 I think it is, too.

00:31:56.680 In fact, I think it's open and shut.

00:31:57.680 I think it's...

00:31:58.680 Well, there's a book that I've just been reading that I would recommend by a man named Walter Scheidel, and he wrote a book called The Great Leveler, which I really like.

00:32:07.680 It's an empirical analysis of inequality.

00:32:10.680 And his research questions were something like, well, what is the phenomena of inequality?

00:32:18.680 To what can you attribute it?

00:32:20.680 And what, if anything, can we do to ameliorate it?

00:32:23.680 Okay.

00:32:24.680 So the first answer is something akin to what I wrote in the first rule in my book, 12 Rules for Life, which is, well, you can't lay hierarchy and inequality at the feet of Western civilization or capitalism.

00:32:35.680 We're done with that argument.

00:32:37.680 That's wrong.

00:32:38.680 Animal societies are hierarchical, and they produce unequal distributions.

00:32:43.680 And there's evidence for that in the biological realm going back a third of a billion years.

00:32:48.680 And that's happened for so long that your nervous system has primarily adapted to it.

00:32:53.680 So it's a deep reality.

00:32:54.680 And blaming it on capitalism, it's like, no.

00:32:56.680 Inequality is a big problem.

00:32:58.680 It's way worse than Marx thought.

00:33:00.680 Okay.

00:33:01.680 Fine.

00:33:02.680 And people tend to stack up at zero.

00:33:04.680 That's a bad thing because it destabilizes your society to have people who are so far down in the underclass that they have nothing to lose by flipping the game.

00:33:13.680 That's a bad idea.

00:33:14.680 And it drives male-on-male homicide as well.

00:33:16.680 And the social science evidence for that is clear.

00:33:19.680 All right, so we want to ameliorate inequality to some degree because we don't want people to stack up at zero and destabilize the society.

00:33:25.680 And we don't want young men in particular to become violent.

00:33:28.680 Fine.

00:33:29.680 So then Scheidel takes another tack.

00:33:31.680 It's like his observations, he looked at Neolithic grave sites for signs of inequality.

00:33:37.680 And you see what people are buried with.

00:33:39.680 And in one of his cases there's 200 people in a grave and one of them has 190 pounds of gold.

00:33:43.680 And the next richest person has like four ounces of gold and then everyone else has none.

00:33:48.680 It's like, so even in these Neolithic societies inequality was the rule.

00:33:51.680 Hunter-gatherer societies are the same way.

00:33:53.680 Except the inequality isn't material because they don't have a surplus.

00:33:57.680 Inequality is everywhere.

00:33:58.680 Okay, so then Scheidel asks two other questions.

00:34:01.680 One is, well, how has it generally been reduced?

00:34:07.680 Pestilence and war.

00:34:09.680 That's it.

00:34:10.680 So you can reduce inequality if you demolish everything.

00:34:14.680 Because that just brings everyone down to zero.

00:34:16.680 But the inequality is less.

00:34:18.680 And then he does an empirical analysis and asks a very interesting practical question, which is,

00:34:24.680 imagine that you totted up the inequality coefficients of the right-wing societies

00:34:30.680 and you did the same with the left-wing societies.

00:34:32.680 Is there a difference between the inequality coefficients?

00:34:35.680 And you'd hope, yes, because you'd hope that what would happen as a consequence of activity on the left would be that something would actually occur to ameliorate inequality.

00:34:45.680 He found no evidence for that whatsoever.

00:34:47.680 So, the left is sensitive to the catastrophe of inequality, let's say.

00:34:53.680 But their compassion-oriented doctrines designed to ameliorate that, on the positive side, there's plenty of resentment on the left too, and I don't want to sweep that under the rug.

00:35:05.680 Their compassion-oriented policies do not produce an improvement in the equal distribution of goods.

00:35:13.680 So, it's a way bigger problem than we think.

00:35:19.680 So, and putting into place these thoughtless, compassionate doctrines, let's say, putting them in place again is just going to produce exactly the same outcomes that were produced all through the 20th century.

00:35:30.680 We must learn again to bring the wisdom of the past back to the table of today if we're to find our way out of the malaise that's affecting the West, I think, to a better place.

00:35:40.680 But before we do that, explore that line of thinking, let's go back to freedom.

00:35:45.680 All of the great sages down through the age, I think you make that point in this fascinating book of yours, obliquely at least, and particularly though the founder of Christianity, I think, would say to a person that your personal freedom is the thing you need to get right and sorted first.

00:36:06.680 It's one by one, and I'm thinking of young Australians that I feel so passionately about as I say this.

00:36:15.680 You know, it's very easy not to be free. Very easy. Addiction, fear, anxiety, depression, all the things.

00:36:24.680 Lack of discipline.

00:36:25.680 Lack of discipline.

00:36:26.680 Lack of discipline.

00:36:27.680 Because then you're a tool of your whims.

00:36:28.680 Let's go back to a society which set equality as its goal, Soviet Russia,

00:36:34.680 and in the pursuit of that equality killed 60 or 70 million, that's the estimate, of those who disagreed, who had a different view, who lost their freedom.

00:36:46.680 Of those who even announced their own suffering.

00:36:49.680 Because in the Soviet Union, if you dared to say that things weren't going so well for you, then you were instantly a political criminal for announcing your own suffering.

00:36:59.680 Because the utopia had already arrived, you understand.

00:37:01.680 Yeah.

00:37:02.680 And so if you were still suffering, well obviously there was something wrong with you.

00:37:05.680 Yeah.

00:37:06.680 So imagine a society like that, where your own suffering becomes criminal.

00:37:09.680 Well, exactly.

00:37:10.680 Yeah.

00:37:11.680 But let's come to Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

00:37:14.680 We know a lot about what happened because of him.

00:37:17.680 He became an incredible global figure when I was a young man.

00:37:22.680 And I read his book, The Gulag Archipelago.

00:37:24.680 Here is this man who describes the horrors of being a political prisoner because he disagrees, he converted.

00:37:31.680 He was originally a supporter of communism.

00:37:33.680 He came to see how evil it was and how oppressive it was.

00:37:37.680 He was imprisoned for having a different view to the state-ordained insistence that everything was terrific.

00:37:46.680 And he writes unbelievably that lying on his prison bunk one day, listening to the guards beat up a fellow prisoner, the screams and the yells, he found freedom when he realised that a dividing line between good and evil, in fact, didn't lie between captor and captive.

00:38:03.680 In fact, the jailers were captive too to a system, to a blind ideology, to an inability to think freely.

00:38:09.680 Well, most of them were trustees, so they were perpetrating the very system that imprisoned them.

00:38:14.680 Not between Catholic and Baptist, he wrote, not between woman and man, not between black and white.

00:38:19.680 But the dividing line between evil actually lies somewhere across every human heart.

00:38:24.680 Plainly, you believe it's incredibly important that we understand that.

00:38:27.680 It comes back to what you said.

00:38:28.680 I think when it's framed, we understand it.

00:38:31.680 Everyone knows that.

00:38:32.680 Everyone knows it.

00:38:33.680 If they think, because all they have to do is think about their own transgressions.

00:38:36.680 I mean, if you ask someone to sit for five minutes and think, okay, well, what mistakes have you made in your life?

00:38:42.680 It's like, haha, that'll come up pretty quickly.

00:38:45.680 And you can even ask people, what terrible, unforgivable mistakes have you made in your life?

00:38:49.680 It's like, yeah, yeah, well, we know about those too.

00:38:52.680 It's like, no one's so naive, you know, unless they've really wrestled intensely against themselves.

00:39:00.680 There's virtually no one so naive to not be able to answer those questions.

00:39:05.680 You know, so we know that we've done things we shouldn't have done and we know that we're not living up to our potential.

00:39:12.680 I mean, but...

00:39:14.680 Are we doing our children a massive disservice by trying to imply that there's nothing wrong with them, no need for guilt, no need for shame, no need to come to grips with evil?

00:39:23.680 Oh, this is so...

00:39:24.680 Because the problem's the environment?

00:39:26.680 Well, one of the things that's so funny about what's happened...

00:39:28.680 The problem is that we've just got to fix society, fix the institutions, and then they'll be, all this will disappear?

00:39:35.680 Psychologists have been, not all psychologists obviously, but the psychological profession is neck deep in this pathology,

00:39:43.680 has been beating the self-esteem drum for 50 years.

00:39:47.680 Oh no, you're okay, you should feel good about yourself.

00:39:49.680 Like, you're fine the way you are.

00:39:51.680 It's like, you think, well that's a calming message for people.

00:39:53.680 It's like, no it's not.

00:39:54.680 It's not at all.

00:39:55.680 And I watch my audiences, it's like, it's full of people in the audience who think, I'm suffering a lot more than I think is tenable.

00:40:01.680 A whole bunch of it's my fault.

00:40:03.680 My life is not in the order it should be.

00:40:05.680 I know I'm doing 50 things wrong.

00:40:06.680 It's like, what the hell's wrong with me?

00:40:08.680 What's wrong with the people around me?

00:40:09.680 This is really serious.

00:40:10.680 And some, you know, well-meaning person comes up and says, you know, you're okay just the way you are.

00:40:15.680 It's like, no one wants that message.

00:40:17.680 It's like, no, I'm not okay the way I am.

00:40:19.680 I'm not okay at all the way I am.

00:40:21.680 I know that.

00:40:22.680 And so, you know, when I'm speaking to, when I'm speaking now, I say to people, well, you're nowhere near what you could be.

00:40:29.680 That's the positive message.

00:40:31.680 It's like, yeah, you're a mess, but you don't have to stay that way.

00:40:34.680 If you're a mess, you know it, obviously, you're suffering away like so much you can barely tolerate it.

00:40:39.680 It's like, that's okay.

00:40:41.680 You can do something about it.

00:40:42.680 And that's the thing that turns the lights on.

00:40:45.680 It's like, you can do something about it.

00:40:46.680 It's like, oh.

00:40:47.680 So there in a freezing prison cell, in the most appalling circumstances, half starved to death, he finds freedom in himself.

00:40:56.680 He finds something positive and something to live for by first coming to grips with evil and understanding what it is.

00:41:03.680 There's a conundrum in there.

00:41:04.680 And he said, too, like, and he underwent the Christian process of metanoia, which is to go over your, it's confession, essentially, and repentance.

00:41:14.680 It wasn't mediated by a religious structure in Solzhenitsyn's case, but it was exactly the same process.

00:41:19.680 And he knew that perfectly well.

00:41:20.680 I'm not making this up.

00:41:22.680 He said, when he was in the prisons and decided that he was at least in part to blame for his own imprisonment and the imprisonment of everyone around him,

00:41:31.680 that that was his fault, or at least his, both his fault and his responsibility, that he was going to take that on.

00:41:37.680 He said the first thing he did was, he went over his life with a fine tooth comb, in memory.

00:41:43.680 And his goal was, okay, I'm going to remember everything I did, in my life up to now, where I did something that I knew to be wrong.

00:41:52.680 And not because of some external authority, defining it as wrong, but in relationship to his own conscience, right.

00:42:00.680 And then he was going to determine if there was some way that could be rectified now, to atone for it, right, to become at one with it again.

00:42:08.680 And so that was part of the process he undertook.

00:42:10.680 And the concluding consequence of that was that he wrote the Gulag Archipelago, which is an absolutely overwhelming piece that blew the intellectual slats out of the foundation of communism permanently, right.

00:42:24.680 Once Solzhenitsyn published it.

00:42:25.680 But until now, we seem to be trying to gloss over it.

00:42:28.680 Academia seems to be full of people who want to soft-pedal that and reinstitute this naive view that if we just create the right institutions, everybody will behave rationally, we'll all be equal, everything will be okay.

00:42:41.680 They want to enforce it.

00:42:42.680 They won't say that, but that's what they want to do.

00:42:44.680 They want to enforce it.

00:42:45.680 Yeah, well, I think it's easier...

00:42:47.680 And it's only a few short decades since all of that happened.

00:42:49.680 Yeah, well...

00:42:50.680 Are we mad?

00:42:51.680 Well, we're characterized by inertia and ignorance.

00:42:56.680 It's not easy to...

00:42:58.680 It's not easy to understand history.

00:43:00.680 It's...

00:43:01.680 Especially not if you read it properly.

00:43:03.680 You know, you read...

00:43:07.680 I had a client at one point who was an unbelievably naive person.

00:43:12.680 You cannot overestimate her naivety, no matter how hard you tried.

00:43:15.680 Her parents taught her that adults were angels.

00:43:18.680 Literally.

00:43:19.680 And she believed that in a strange sense.

00:43:21.680 When I met her, she was in her twenties.

00:43:23.680 And she had this extraordinarily naive view of people, and had been hurt.

00:43:30.680 And if you're very naive, and you've been hurt by someone, you often disintegrate.

00:43:35.680 Because it blows your world apart, and that's what had happened to her.

00:43:38.680 And I said...

00:43:39.680 She had a university degree.

00:43:40.680 And I said, well, look...

00:43:42.680 Like in the liberal arts.

00:43:43.680 I said, didn't you read any history?

00:43:45.680 And she said, well, yeah.

00:43:47.680 And I said, well, didn't that disturb the whole adults or angels hypothesis?

00:43:52.680 And she said, well, I read it, but I just compartmentalized it.

00:43:55.680 And that gave me the key to what was wrong with her.

00:43:58.680 And we successfully dealt with it.

00:44:00.680 But I had her to begin her process of cure, oddly enough, because she had to understand malevolence.

00:44:07.680 Because she had been touched by it, right?

00:44:09.680 She had to understand it.

00:44:10.680 Because her naive worldview had been shattered by the hand of malevolence.

00:44:14.680 I had her read a book called Ordinary Men by Browning.

00:44:19.680 And it's a study of these Polish policemen, German policemen, who were sent to Poland after the Nazis had marched through Poland.

00:44:28.680 And they were sent to police Poland.

00:44:30.680 And they were, you know, decent middle class guys, essentially.

00:44:33.680 Most of whom had been hit maturity before Hitler had come to power.

00:44:38.680 So they weren't indoctrinated Nazis.

00:44:40.680 You know, not like the Nazi youth types were.

00:44:43.680 And they had to go to Poland and be policemen under wartime conditions.

00:44:49.680 And they had a very humane commander.

00:44:52.680 And he told all of them that they were going to have to do things that would be far more brutal in all life.

00:44:57.680 than they were normally prepared to do in their role as non-military policemen.

00:45:04.680 But that they could go back to their old job if they wanted to.

00:45:07.680 So it wasn't top-down enforcement of an authoritarian ethos.

00:45:11.680 And Browning documents their transformation from the guy next door, you know, the policeman next door,

00:45:17.680 into people who were taking naked pregnant women out into fields and shooting them in the back of the head.

00:45:22.680 And it's a brutal book because, well, these men, it's like, it just ruined them to do that to themselves.

00:45:29.680 They were physically ill during the process of transformation.

00:45:32.680 You know, and he does a very good job of documenting how an ordinary person transforms into a Nazi murderer.

00:45:40.680 And I had to read that.

00:45:42.680 I said, but don't you compartmentalize it.

00:45:44.680 This is about you, right?

00:45:46.680 This isn't about someone else.

00:45:48.680 When you read history, you think, well, that's about someone else.

00:45:50.680 It's like, unless maybe you're a victim and you identify with the victims.

00:45:54.680 It's a very rare person who reads history and identifies with the perpetrators.

00:45:58.680 But unless you read history and identify with the perpetrators, then you don't understand history at all.

00:46:03.680 And so who wants to understand that?

00:46:05.680 And I get my students, I said, look, I've told them this for 30 years.

00:46:10.680 Here's something you have to understand.

00:46:12.680 If you were in Nazi Germany, the statistical probability is overwhelming that you would have been a perpetrator.

00:46:20.680 You think you would have rescued Anne Frank.

00:46:23.680 It's like, think again.

00:46:25.680 Those people are very, very, very, very rare.

00:46:29.680 They put their lives on the line to do that.

00:46:31.680 They put their families' lives on the line to do that.

00:46:33.680 You think you're one of those people?

00:46:35.680 Really?

00:46:36.680 It's like, all that means is that you know nothing.

00:46:39.680 You know nothing about yourself.

00:46:40.680 You know nothing about people.

00:46:42.680 You know nothing about politics or economics or history.

00:46:44.680 It's a harsh lesson.

00:46:46.680 The truth about Germany in the 1930s, it was probably the most educated society in the world had seen to that point in time.

00:46:53.680 Education alone, cleverness in inverted commas, alone, intelligence alone.

00:47:01.680 No substitute for character.

00:47:03.680 No, right, right, right.

00:47:05.680 Absolutely.

00:47:06.680 There's no substitute for character.

00:47:08.680 So we don't want to, you know, Pascal called about the, talked of the glory and the scum.

00:47:17.680 To reach our full humanity it seems to me we need to understand both intention.

00:47:23.680 Carl Jung said that.

00:47:24.680 The unbelievable scum that lies in terms of our potential at the bottom of every heart.

00:47:30.680 The extraordinary nobility, you call it the spark of divinity, I would say made in the image of a mighty creator.

00:47:38.680 You've got to hold those things in suspension if you define your real humanity.

00:47:43.680 And in fact the way through to the good place is surely through the valley of darkness in the first place.

00:47:49.680 You know, that's, you think, well if it's possible to be enlightened why isn't everyone enlightened?

00:47:54.680 It's like, well you don't get to paradise, you don't get to heaven without harrowing hell first.

00:47:59.680 Right, and who's going to do that?

00:48:01.680 Like, that's a terrible thing to do.

00:48:03.680 It isn't even clear that you can survive it.

00:48:05.680 No, I mean, it's brutally damaging to come to terms with your own proclivity for malevolence.

00:48:12.680 And so people don't do it, and it's no wonder.

00:48:15.680 But, but the funny thing is, and this is also something that I think that people who've been watching my lectures have been attracted by, especially the young men.

00:48:22.680 It's like, until you know you're, until you understand that you're a monster.

00:48:28.680 Until perhaps you even develop that as a capacity, you don't have the moral force to do good.

00:48:33.680 And so, not only is that dissent to begin with, necessary to scare you straight, right?

00:48:41.680 To make you understand what exactly it is that you're dealing with.

00:48:44.680 But you don't even have the strength of character to be good until you understand just exactly what sort of monster you can be.

00:48:50.680 I have a rule in my book, rule five.

00:48:53.680 Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.

00:48:57.680 Yeah, I read it.

00:48:58.680 It's a meditation on the monstrousness of parents.

00:49:01.680 It's like, don't underestimate yourself, your capability to ruin your children's lives.

00:49:08.680 You let them act in a manner that makes you disprove of them.

00:49:12.680 You will take revenge on them in ways you cannot even imagine.

00:49:16.680 And unless you understand that, you're not going to be careful enough as a parent, and you're not going to set proper boundaries.

00:49:22.680 Don't let your children annoy you.

00:49:24.680 It's a very bad idea.

00:49:26.680 Now, you know, that means that you should try to regulate your proclivity to be annoyed, and you should try to be civilized,

00:49:32.680 and you should talk to your partner, your wife, or your husband about your over-sensitivities and foolishnesses.

00:49:38.680 But having said that, you need to know who the monster is, and it's you.

00:49:43.680 So if we're washing that wisdom out, I don't want to sound condemnatory here.

00:49:47.680 I'm more sympathetic and concerned for what's happening in our family homes and the environment in which our kids are being raised.

00:49:54.680 And you and I, I mean, you're very passionate in your concern for these people.

00:49:59.680 So we don't want anyone to think here that we're trying to condemn them.

00:50:01.680 Far the opposite, just the opposite.

00:50:03.680 But if we're washing this out of the system, what then happens to our kids when they hit institutions,

00:50:09.680 schools, colleges, universities?

00:50:14.680 Well, we're going to find out because increasingly the elementary and the school systems that our kids are going through

00:50:23.680 from, say, the age of five to the age of 18 are increasingly occupied by the postmodern neo-Marxist ideologies.

00:50:30.680 I think we have to learn to identify what those are.

00:50:34.680 That's a start.

00:50:35.680 I mean, there's buzzwords, diversity, inclusivity, equity.

00:50:39.680 Equity, that's a no-go zone, equity.

00:50:43.680 That's equality of outcome.

00:50:44.680 That's a preposterous, murderous doctrine masquerading in sheep's clothing.

00:50:49.680 White privilege, systemic racism, gender, all of those.

00:50:54.680 None of those as individual topics are necessarily off the table.

00:50:57.680 You can have an intelligent discussion about any of them except equity, because that's just a no-go zone.

00:51:02.680 But to see those concepts emerge as a network of meaning, you know that you're in the presence of this pernicious postmodern neo-Marxist doctrine

00:51:12.680 that's fundamentally ideological at its core.

00:51:14.680 And people need to see that, and they need to understand what that means, and they need to stop it.

00:51:20.680 Now, how they're going to stop it?

00:51:22.680 They're going to make a million individual decisions about that, but at least they could start by identifying it.

00:51:28.680 I've suggested to parents in Canada, in the US, that as soon as teachers talk to their children about diversity, inclusivity, and equity,

00:51:38.680 that they suggest to their children that they leave the class.

00:51:42.680 Because they're no longer in the educational realm, they're in the indoctrination realm.

00:51:46.680 And people aren't taking that, I wouldn't say they're not taking that seriously.

00:51:50.680 It's not an easy thing to figure out, and it sounds very, very radical to suggest, you know, encouraging your children to leave the class.

00:51:57.680 But I think we're at that point.

00:51:59.680 I wonder why our universities are not offering high quality courses in how freedom was secured by Western societies for its individual member people,

00:52:12.680 and how it might be secured, and how you secured fairness from unfairness.

00:52:19.680 Those sorts of things are not there.

00:52:20.680 Well, some of it, I think some of it has to do with what we've been speaking about,

00:52:25.680 is that to address the problem squarely is actually quite daunting.

00:52:32.680 I mean, the difficulties are manifold. Inequality is real. Individual malevolence is real.

00:52:38.680 To constrain it inside yourself is extraordinarily daunting.

00:52:41.680 To read history as a perpetrator is traumatizing. These are hard things.

00:52:46.680 And then, to think through the problems of addressing something like inequality,

00:52:52.680 instead of reacting to it in a knee-jerk, compassionate manner, and implement policies on that basis that are going to be counterproductive,

00:53:01.680 that's also extraordinarily difficult. So there's difficulty as part of it.

00:53:05.680 And then I would also say, well, we haven't talked about the resentment that drives the discussion of inequality.

00:53:11.680 It's not all. It's not like everyone on the left is overwhelmed by compassion, and that's why all these brutal things tend to happen.

00:53:18.680 It's that they're also overwhelmed by the same sort of jealousy that Cain had for Abel,

00:53:23.680 and the same sort of murderous impulses that emerge very rapidly as a consequence of that jealousy.

00:53:28.680 He has more than me. He must be a perpetrator. It's morally obligatory for me to take him out.

00:53:34.680 That's an easy message to sell. I read about how the communists de-kulakized the Russian countryside.

00:53:43.680 So imagine, imagine, it's Russia. You're in a village. It's 30 years, something like that, after the serfs have been emancipated.

00:53:52.680 There's a few agriculturalists who've managed to produce successful agricultural enterprises.

00:53:58.680 You know, maybe they have a couple of cows, they have some land, they're able to hire a few people, and they're raising almost all the food, right?

00:54:05.680 And so, and they're a minority in any village, because the hyper-productive successful are always a minority.

00:54:12.680 So they're a minority in every village, all right? And so, and there's people who are doing worse,

00:54:17.680 and then there's a lot of people who aren't doing so well at all.

00:54:20.680 And then the communist intellectuals show up, and they tell the people who aren't doing so well,

00:54:25.680 some of whom are just suffering because of life, but some of whom aren't doing well,

00:54:29.680 because they've never done anything productive with even a second of their life.

00:54:33.680 And the communist intellectuals come in and say, you know those guys that are doing so much better than you?

00:54:37.680 Yeah. They actually stole all of that from you.

00:54:41.680 And you're morally obligated to go take it back.

00:54:45.680 It's like, oh man, you know, after six cups of mead, let's say, or let's say ten, or let's say twenty,

00:54:52.680 and I'm drunk out of my mind, and I've got my cruel buddies with me,

00:54:56.680 and we're all resentful right to the core because we've wasted our miserable lives.

00:55:00.680 And now we have an opportunity to go, like, down the street to our wealthy neighbour's house

00:55:04.680 and to rape his daughters, and we can do it in the name of good.

00:55:07.680 It's like, well, there's a story you can market.

00:55:10.680 And that happened everywhere in the Soviet Union.

00:55:12.680 And so they wiped out the kulaks. It's like, great.

00:55:14.680 And then six million Ukrainians starved to death.

00:55:16.680 Yeah, that's right. Brilliant.

00:55:18.680 I'm a farmer. Brilliant.

00:55:19.680 The Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe.

00:55:21.680 That's what it was.

00:55:22.680 Then it became a region pathetically unable to feed itself.

00:55:27.680 And yet, the same sort of world view that gave rise to that, we're now being told.

00:55:34.680 You use the word neo-Marxist.

00:55:36.680 Many people in Australia use the word cultural Marxist.

00:55:39.680 I've got an old friend who said to me, what are you talking about, John?

00:55:44.680 You know, free capitalist Australia is not going to let that happen here.

00:55:48.680 Well, Qantas Airlines took a nice step towards that the other day.

00:55:53.680 And they adopted their language policing policies.

00:55:56.680 These corporations who should know far better let these far left fifth columns into their organisations.

00:56:02.680 They think they're not going to pay for that.

00:56:04.680 They think they're going to stop with some demands for the reconstruction of language.

00:56:08.680 Not like the demands for reconstruction of language, by the way, are trivial.

00:56:12.680 They're maybe the most important thing you could possibly demand, right?

00:56:16.680 I want to reshape the way you speak.

00:56:17.680 I want to reshape the way you think.

00:56:19.680 It's like, well, that's okay, as long as it doesn't interfere with the bottom line.

00:56:22.680 It's like, it'll interfere with the bottom line.

00:56:24.680 You let that fifth column in.

00:56:26.680 It's a warning to corporate people.

00:56:28.680 You let that fifth column in, man, you're going to regret it.

00:56:31.680 You're going to regret it.

00:56:32.680 So, and things can turn on a dime, you know, a very well-organised minority.

00:56:37.680 Even if the majority opposes them, and they do.

00:56:41.680 A very well-organised minority can have an unbelievably pernicious effect on an organisation.

00:56:46.680 Margaret Mead's made that point.

00:56:48.680 Societies change direction when a small group of people decide to change its direction.

00:56:52.680 That's the way history works.

00:56:53.680 Well, that's what happened in the universities.

00:56:55.680 Let's come back.

00:56:58.680 This issue of the redefining of language.

00:57:00.680 It seems to me that there are two things that people who want to reshape society in brutal ways do.

00:57:07.680 The first is they start to silence good debate.

00:57:10.680 Either silence it or shut it down or whatever.

00:57:13.680 The second thing they do is they redefine language so it's very hard to have a debate.

00:57:17.680 So, diversity, actually, I mean, there's no other way to put it.

00:57:22.680 In this country, it's rapidly coming to mean a stifling conformity.

00:57:26.680 You dare not deviate from the line.

00:57:28.680 And you see it with a whole lot of other words that are bandied around.

00:57:32.680 Equality being one of them.

00:57:34.680 Yep.

00:57:35.680 Because it's confused.

00:57:36.680 Equality of opportunity is confused with equality of outcome.

00:57:39.680 Well, the initial wedge was equality of opportunity.

00:57:42.680 And then that flew.

00:57:43.680 And so, well, no, no, it's equality of outcome.

00:57:46.680 That's equity.

00:57:47.680 And that's, I cannot believe how rapidly that idea, which is the ultimate in terrible ideas.

00:57:52.680 I can't believe how rapidly that spread.

00:57:55.680 And how little people criticize it.

00:57:58.680 Well, that's because it's too uninformed analysis.

00:58:02.680 It sounds good if you're feeling carelessly compassionate.

00:58:05.680 Because you go back to the Ukrainian example.

00:58:08.680 In destroying the leading edge farmers, you actually guaranteed misery for everyone.

00:58:13.680 Oh, unbelievable.

00:58:15.680 People were selling human body parts in the Ukraine for food.

00:58:19.680 You know, it was, if you were a mother, and your children were starving, and you went out into the fields,

00:58:25.680 after they were harvested, and you picked up individual pieces of grain that the harvesters had left,

00:58:31.680 and you didn't turn them over to the state, that was a capital offence.

00:58:35.680 Right.

00:58:36.680 And that's, that was, and the funny thing is, that was in the glory days of the Russian Revolution, right?

00:58:42.680 That wasn't in the, like, 1950s.

00:58:43.680 That wasn't in the 1930s, even.

00:58:45.680 That was in the 1920s.

00:58:46.680 That was right when this started.

00:58:48.680 And I think it was, I think it was Malcolm Muggeridge who was reporting on that for, for a UK newspaper whose name escapes me at the moment.

00:58:56.680 He was pointing all of this out, you know?

00:58:57.680 Yeah.

00:58:58.680 And no one paid attention to it.

00:58:59.680 No one paid attention.

00:59:00.680 Towards the end of his life, he warned that the West is in danger of eating itself out from within.

00:59:04.680 And I wonder whether, in fact, he wasn't being very prescient.

00:59:07.680 And you and I want to stop that happening for the sake of our young people, as much as anything else.

00:59:11.680 For the sake of everyone.

00:59:12.680 For the sake of everyone.

00:59:13.680 We went down that pathway already.

00:59:14.680 We've seen it.

00:59:15.680 Like, we don't need to do it again.

00:59:16.680 We've tried it.

00:59:17.680 And things.

00:59:18.680 History should be like science, in the sense that it ought to be objective.

00:59:22.680 It ought to be told truthfully.

00:59:23.680 It ought not to be used to secure some dominant group's preferred version of society.

00:59:34.680 Well, this is also why, see, what I've been trying to do about this, because I thought this through a long time ago.

00:59:39.680 Well, I don't want to, I think the group identity game ends in blood.

00:59:44.680 It doesn't matter who plays it.

00:59:45.680 Left wingers play it.

00:59:46.680 Blood.

00:59:47.680 Right wingers play it.

00:59:48.680 Blood.

00:59:49.680 And lots of it.

00:59:50.680 Not just a little bit.

00:59:51.680 You can't play the identity politics game.

00:59:54.680 Well, so what do you do instead?

00:59:56.680 You live the mythologically heroic life as an individual.

01:00:01.680 That's the right place to work.

01:00:03.680 And that's the message of the West, as far as I'm concerned.

01:00:05.680 Yeah, it is.

01:00:06.680 Is that we figured that out.

01:00:07.680 We figured out that the collective identity was not the pinnacle statement.

01:00:11.680 That the individual, not that collective identities have no value.

01:00:14.680 Obviously, family has value and your organizations have value.

01:00:19.680 All of that.

01:00:20.680 That's not the issue.

01:00:21.680 The issue is what's the paramount value?

01:00:24.680 What's the metric by which people should be measured?

01:00:26.680 And the answer is, they should be measured as individuals.

01:00:29.680 As if they have a divine soul.

01:00:31.680 They should be measured in that manner.

01:00:32.680 But it can't be a selfish thing.

01:00:34.680 That is to say, if I recognize I have worth and dignity, I'm obliged to recognize it.

01:00:39.680 So do you.

01:00:40.680 I think you can't recognize that you have intrinsic worth and dignity without also doing,

01:00:45.680 without also recognizing it in others.

01:00:47.680 And vice versa.

01:00:48.680 I don't think that I can recognize the worth of another person without stumbling onto the

01:00:53.680 idea that I also have to recognize that for myself.

01:00:56.680 And then you think, well, everyone would want that.

01:00:58.680 But, well, people don't.

01:00:59.680 Because you're also charged with the responsibility of your own care, as if you matter.

01:01:05.680 Well, that's a big responsibility.

01:01:07.680 Yeah.

01:01:08.680 It's a lot easier to assume that everything is pointless.

01:01:12.680 I mean, that's painful and all of that.

01:01:13.680 But, well, you don't bear any responsibility.

01:01:15.680 And no one lives that way.

01:01:17.680 No.

01:01:18.680 Well, not for long.

01:01:19.680 Not for long.

01:01:20.680 Well, not for long.

01:01:21.680 Exactly.

01:01:22.680 But, you know, Voltaire's biographer, it wasn't actually Voltaire himself.

01:01:25.680 It was a lady who wrote one of the many biographies of him in the 1930s.

01:01:30.680 Came up with that adage summarizing his views, that I may disagree with you, but I'll defend

01:01:36.680 to the death your right to say it.

01:01:38.680 There's a couple of things implicit in that that seem to be incredibly important.

01:01:42.680 So, I may disagree with you, but you have dignity and standing and worth and a right

01:01:47.680 to put your view.

01:01:49.680 That's the first thing.

01:01:50.680 I'm respecting the other person.

01:01:51.680 Oh, you should crave it.

01:01:53.680 Yeah.

01:01:54.680 And the second thing it implies is it's the idea on the table that's important for two

01:01:58.680 reasons.

01:01:59.680 One is, we need to have a debate about that, not attack the person who put it there.

01:02:02.680 Yeah.

01:02:03.680 Show some respect for them.

01:02:04.680 The second thing is, it's only by honest debate that you find the best way forward.

01:02:09.680 Well, that's the thing.

01:02:10.680 And that ties back to the discussion we had about the purpose of memory and the purpose

01:02:14.680 of historical education.

01:02:15.680 It's like, look, there's another rule in my book, which is rule nine.

01:02:20.680 Assume that the person that you're listening to knows something you don't.

01:02:23.680 Well, they do.

01:02:24.680 The person you're listening to knows some things you don't.

01:02:27.680 You can be sure of that.

01:02:28.680 Now, whether or not you can get to them is a different matter.

01:02:30.680 But if you do get to them, it's a real deal for you.

01:02:34.680 That's why you want to listen to the other person's arguments is because you're not everything

01:02:38.680 you could be.

01:02:39.680 You don't know the pathway forward with as much clarity as you could.

01:02:42.680 And it's possible.

01:02:43.680 This is one of the wonderful things that I've had the privilege of experiencing as a clinician.

01:02:49.680 Because people, it's like I live inside a Dostoevsky novel as a clinician.

01:02:53.680 People come in and they tell me about their lives.

01:02:55.680 And I listen to them and they tell me things that are just absolutely beyond belief, you know.

01:03:00.680 And I learn from my clients constantly.

01:03:03.680 They're telling me honestly about their experience.

01:03:05.680 They tell me things they wouldn't tell anyone else because I actually listen to them.

01:03:08.680 But part of the reason I listen is because I'm desperate to listen.

01:03:11.680 It's like there's a possibility.

01:03:13.680 I'm going to do something stupid in the next five years that's going to be like fatal.

01:03:17.680 And there's some small possibility that if we have a decent discussion that you'll tell

01:03:22.680 me something that will eliminate some of my blindness so that I don't have to fall into

01:03:27.680 that particular pit.

01:03:28.680 And if you have a good sensitivity for the depth of the pit, then, you know, you're pretty

01:03:32.680 bloody motivated to avoid it.

01:03:34.680 And so, and that dialogue, it's dialogic.

01:03:39.680 It's dialogos, right?

01:03:40.680 It's shared logos.

01:03:41.680 It's the way that we redeem ourselves mutually moving forward.

01:03:45.680 But it all depends on having the facts on the table as best you're able to establish

01:03:50.680 them, not distortions of fact.

01:03:53.680 Not what you wish would be the case.

01:03:55.680 At least your best approximation of what you think to be true and not what you wish for.

01:04:00.680 No one.

01:04:01.680 Because the new version of this seems to be, if I disagree with what you say, I'll paint

01:04:06.680 it as hate speech or challenging to my notions of diversity and inclusiveness and I'll fight

01:04:13.680 to the death your right to even have your say.

01:04:16.680 Well, that's why hate speech laws are so pernicious.

01:04:19.680 It's like, and that needs to be taken apart.

01:04:22.680 First question.

01:04:23.680 Is there such a thing as hate speech?

01:04:26.680 Yes.

01:04:27.680 Obviously.

01:04:28.680 People say terrible things, reprehensible things, quasi-criminal things even.

01:04:33.680 All the time.

01:04:34.680 Brutal.

01:04:35.680 And some of them cause a lot of trouble.

01:04:37.680 So, the idea that there's hateful speech, it's like, yeah, okay, that's self-evident.

01:04:41.680 No problem.

01:04:42.680 Well, let's regulate it.

01:04:44.680 Okay.

01:04:45.680 Fair enough.

01:04:46.680 Because it's hateful.

01:04:47.680 You know, maybe we'd rather that there wasn't any of it.

01:04:50.680 Okay.

01:04:51.680 No problem.

01:04:52.680 Who defines hate?

01:04:54.680 Well, we'll worry about that later.

01:04:56.680 It's like, no you won't.

01:04:58.680 That's actually the problem.

01:04:59.680 Here's the answer to who defines hate.

01:05:02.680 Those people that you would least want to have define it.

01:05:05.680 That would be the inevitable consequence of the legislation.

01:05:08.680 Because sensible people won't have anything to do with that.

01:05:11.680 Like, people who are power mad will gravitate to that domain to make an ethical case to exercise

01:05:19.680 their controlling power over the language of other people.

01:05:22.680 You know, and I've had journalists say, well, what makes you think that your right to free speech

01:05:26.680 trumps the right of someone to not be offended?

01:05:29.680 And I think, that's really the level of our political discourse.

01:05:32.680 Okay, so we'll run a little thought experiment.

01:05:34.680 So, I'm talking to one person.

01:05:35.680 I'm talking to you.

01:05:36.680 And the rule is, I don't get to offend you.

01:05:38.680 Okay.

01:05:39.680 Maybe we can still have a discussion about something difficult.

01:05:42.680 But let's say I'm talking to ten people about an important thing.

01:05:46.680 Now I have to make sure that I don't say anything, despite the fact that this is an important and contentious issue.

01:05:51.680 That I don't say anything that offends even one of those ten people.

01:05:54.680 Okay, maybe I can even manage that.

01:05:57.680 What if I'm talking to a thousand people?

01:05:59.680 There's going to be someone in that thousand people, there's going to be someone who's offended at the mere fact that I exist.

01:06:06.680 So, it's an impossible standard.

01:06:10.680 It's like, well, you can't say anything offensive.

01:06:12.680 Okay, fine.

01:06:13.680 Then you can't say anything.

01:06:15.680 Okay.

01:06:16.680 So what?

01:06:17.680 You don't get to say anything, because no one should be offended.

01:06:20.680 Well, then you don't get to think.

01:06:22.680 Well, what happens if you don't think?

01:06:24.680 Well, then you can't negotiate your way through the future.

01:06:27.680 And you fall into a pit.

01:06:29.680 And so does everyone else.

01:06:31.680 So that's where that all ends up.

01:06:33.680 You can't say offensive things.

01:06:35.680 Equals.

01:06:36.680 You cannot negotiate your way properly through the future.

01:06:40.680 Equals.

01:06:41.680 Everyone suffers.

01:06:43.680 Well.

01:06:44.680 That's a bad...

01:06:46.680 That's a bad strategy.

01:06:48.680 So...

01:06:49.680 And it's all covered up with, well, you know, it would be better if no one was ever offended.

01:06:54.680 It's like, well...

01:06:55.680 Who thinks that?

01:06:57.680 You know how naive you have to be to think that?

01:07:00.680 You have to be pathologically naive, which is the kind of naive that you could have grown out of.

01:07:05.680 But you willfully refuse to, because you weren't willing to see what was in front of your face.

01:07:10.680 And then you impose that blind naivety on everyone else, because you don't want to allow them to upset your, like, rosy view, your rosy view of yourself and the world.

01:07:23.680 It's just...

01:07:25.680 There's no end to how terrible that is.

01:07:28.680 One of our very astute writers recently made the comment that freedom of speech is the most important freedom, because it's the freedom by which we defend all of our other freedoms.

01:07:41.680 It strikes me that freedom of speech, though, is most important not for the powerful or for the elites.

01:07:50.680 It's actually for the minority groups.

01:07:53.680 A free society surely is one that allows those who swim against the tide and have a different perspective the right to do so without fear of mob or state sanction.

01:08:06.680 You've had some personal experience.

01:08:09.680 Sure.

01:08:10.680 Well, I gave a talk at the University of British Columbia about a year ago.

01:08:13.680 It was called A Left-Wing Case for Freedom of Speech.

01:08:16.680 It's like it's really easy to make a left-wing case for freedom of speech.

01:08:19.680 It's like, well, that's how the dispossessed have the opportunity to make their suffering known.

01:08:24.680 Right?

01:08:25.680 Yeah, clearly.

01:08:26.680 I mean, it's the fact that that argument even has to be made shows you how pathological the radical left has become, because it's clearly the case that freedom of speech is not generally in the interests of the power elite.

01:08:40.680 Right?

01:08:41.680 Because they already have access to what they need to maintain their grip on the world, let's say, if you look at things in that manner.

01:08:48.680 It's the people at the bottom of the hierarchy whose right to expression needs to be protected.

01:08:52.680 Yeah.

01:08:53.680 If you're in control of the debate, you don't need freedom of speech.

01:08:55.680 Right.

01:08:56.680 Right.

01:08:57.680 Obviously.

01:08:58.680 So it's always useful for the dispossessed, the freedom of speech issue.

01:09:01.680 And then the other issue that you wrote, that the writer that you described wrote, brought to the forefront, is the idea of the hierarchy of rights.

01:09:12.680 Now, in our conception of rights in Canada, we're not willing to assume that any right has priority over any other right.

01:09:20.680 Now, that doesn't work out, because when the two rights come into conflict with one another, which they do, you have to adjudicate their relative status.

01:09:27.680 And what's happened in Canada is that equality rights keep trumping everything else.

01:09:30.680 And that's not good.

01:09:31.680 It's actually a good reason why you shouldn't have a bill of rights.

01:09:34.680 And we never should have had one, in my estimation.

01:09:37.680 But, whatever.

01:09:39.680 The freedom of speech, you say, well, speech is...

01:09:42.680 The right to freedom of speech is central, because it's the right by which you defend all the other rights.

01:09:47.680 Well, that's why the idea of logos in the West is the most sacred concept, right?

01:09:52.680 So, Christ, think about this psychologically, is Christ is the ideal of perfection.

01:09:58.680 Now, this is independent of any religious discussion or any historical accuracy.

01:10:02.680 It doesn't matter.

01:10:03.680 We're looking at this from the perspective of the analysis of a myth or a story.

01:10:07.680 What Christ represents is the perfect individual.

01:10:10.680 Whatever that is.

01:10:11.680 Now, you discuss endlessly what that is.

01:10:14.680 But one of the things the West is settled on is the idea, well, is that the perfect individual utters the truthful speech that makes potential into habitable order.

01:10:24.680 Does that through truth.

01:10:26.680 And that's embedded in the first few sentences in Genesis, for example, when God brings the world into being.

01:10:33.680 And the idea that that truthful speech that brings the world into being from formless potential also characterizes each person.

01:10:40.680 That's our fabrication in the image of God.

01:10:45.680 That's the idea of the West.

01:10:47.680 It's an unbelievably remarkable idea that perfection, individual perfection, is to be found in a relationship with spoken truth.

01:10:55.680 God, that's the great idea.

01:10:58.680 Well, it's out of that arises the observation that there's no, there's nothing more central to the hierarchy of rights and obligations as well, let's say, than freedom of speech.

01:11:11.680 Yes, it's absolutely central.

01:11:13.680 That's why Christ is the word made flesh.

01:11:15.680 The idea is that the perfect individual is the person who's, well, who speaks truth but also acts out the truth of those words.

01:11:23.680 It's a very, it's a proposition whose merit is virtually self-evident when you understand it in that manner.

01:11:31.680 So, yeah, to see assaults on freedom of speech, especially compelled speech, well, that's where I drew the line in my life.

01:11:38.680 It was like, we have compelled speech legislation in Canada.

01:11:41.680 Perhaps that's why the left is so determined in this country to get Christianity out of the classroom.

01:11:46.680 But tell us something of the chilling...

01:11:48.680 There's no doubt that's why they're determined.

01:11:50.680 I mean, people like Derrida, I mean, he called the West phallogocentric, right?

01:11:54.680 Male-dominated, logos-centric.

01:11:57.680 It's like, that is the West.

01:11:58.680 It's a logo-centric.

01:11:59.680 If you want to take the West down, you remove the idea of the divine word from the substructure of the society.

01:12:06.680 So you have to do that.

01:12:07.680 It's like, and this is the level at which this war is being fought.

01:12:10.680 It's fundamentally a theological war.

01:12:12.680 Interesting.

01:12:13.680 People don't like to think that, but...

01:12:15.680 Well, in his famous Waterloo lecture, the inaugural Blaise Pascal lecture in 1978,

01:12:23.680 Malcolm Muggeridge said the West was in danger of eating itself out from within.

01:12:28.680 And he spoke at great length about this attempt to...

01:12:34.680 About how the West was abandoning Christianity and it had become a very empty and soulless and financially bankrupt place as a result.

01:12:42.680 But it wouldn't be the end, he said, despite the attempts to kill it in places like Communist China and Russia,

01:12:50.680 there will always be people who will fight through to the truth.

01:12:55.680 And, of course, we can see now, three decades on, whatever, that he was absolutely right.

01:13:00.680 Closer to four decades on, he was right.

01:13:02.680 Well, you know that Christianity is spreading faster in Communist China than it did in Rome during its most rapid period of expansion,

01:13:08.680 in terms of proportion of people transforming.

01:13:10.680 So Christianity is spreading incredibly quickly in China.

01:13:13.680 Who would have guessed that, right?

01:13:15.680 I mean, that just makes you shake your head.

01:13:19.680 Tell us a little more about your chilling experience.

01:13:21.680 I mean, Canada and Australia are culturally in many ways very alike.

01:13:24.680 If it can happen in Canada, presumably it's coming here.

01:13:28.680 Oh, it's going to happen here.

01:13:30.680 I think it's absolutely inevitable.

01:13:32.680 It's not that big a move from where you're already at.

01:13:36.680 And the fact that, well, the Qantas Airline thing is a really good example.

01:13:39.680 The fact that these things are happening and that corporations aren't standing up in outrage against the introduction of ideas like equity.

01:13:45.680 It's like, you guys are all primed for this.

01:13:47.680 Why not compelled speech?

01:13:49.680 Especially if it's done for the best of all possible reasons.

01:13:52.680 I was accused of denying the identities of the oppressed.

01:13:55.680 It's like, well, to me that wasn't the issue at all.

01:13:59.680 The issue was, no.

01:14:01.680 Look, I'm not an advocate of hate speech laws for the reasons I already described.

01:14:05.680 It's like, who's going to define hate?

01:14:07.680 Not the people you want to define it.

01:14:09.680 For sure, that's what's going to happen.

01:14:11.680 That's bad enough.

01:14:13.680 But then to say, well, I have to use the language of my detestable radical leftist foes, let's say.

01:14:22.680 That's not happening.

01:14:24.680 And that's what I said when I made these videos.

01:14:26.680 Some of the most wonderful Australians I know are corporate leaders.

01:14:29.680 And, you know, they're generous, they're philanthropic, they're thoughtful, they're contributors to the public debate.

01:14:34.680 But I'd have to say far too many of them seem, I'll use the expression, pig ignorant of the reality.

01:14:39.680 They're playing with fire.

01:14:41.680 They're playing with cultural forces that will destroy the very activities that they would hold up as being central to our wealth and prosperity.

01:14:51.680 Those cultural forces are playing with them.

01:14:54.680 Well, it's even worse.

01:14:56.680 Oh, yes.

01:14:57.680 So these astute people can't realize, don't see, they're being toyed with.

01:15:01.680 They're being toyed with demonic forces in a sense.

01:15:05.680 And again, I mean that in a psychological sense.

01:15:08.680 Carl Jung said, people don't have ideas.

01:15:12.680 Ideas have people.

01:15:14.680 It's like, you think about that for about five years.

01:15:18.680 You know, like the, if you take the typical student radical out of their demonstration and you have a chat with them one-on-one,

01:15:26.680 you find out that, you know, they're the daughter of the guy down the street that you waved to, you know, while she was growing up.

01:15:33.680 And that 80% of her is sensible person, you know, and 10% is resentful and 10% is ideologically possessed.

01:15:42.680 Partly because of the machinations of her idiot professors.

01:15:46.680 And so, she's okay.

01:15:48.680 But if you get 10 of her together and each of them are 10% possessed, then you have the whole devil in the room, right?

01:15:55.680 And that thing has a will.

01:15:57.680 It has a historical will.

01:15:59.680 And you better not be thinking you're running the show, especially if you're ignorant of the process.

01:16:05.680 And the corporate types who are letting the radical left fifth column into their midst,

01:16:10.680 and mostly through their human resources, their human resources departments,

01:16:14.680 which should probably just be shut down, they have no idea what they're messing with.

01:16:20.680 They should watch what happens to Google.

01:16:22.680 I have to say I've been pretty stunned by two or three of the senior chairmen in this country

01:16:27.680 who have said to me or said to friends of mine in the context of recent politically correct debates here

01:16:33.680 that they've been startled themselves by what their companies underneath of them have said,

01:16:40.680 which raises some interesting questions about their need to get up to speed.

01:16:45.680 They're not startled enough.

01:16:47.680 So I've seen, many people have sent me these sorts of training programs that the diversity consultants are foisting on the corporate world.

01:16:55.680 I mean it's as if a women's studies program has been placed in the midst of the corporate environment.

01:17:02.680 It's not only the academic left, let's say, made manifest in a PowerPoint presentation.

01:17:11.680 It's the worst elements of the activist academic left.

01:17:15.680 The most appalling parts of the university are making themselves manifest in the corporate world at an amazing rate.

01:17:21.680 And the corporations are guilty, partly because, well, partly because of inequality I would say.

01:17:26.680 They're guilty and they want to wallpaper over their bad conscience with some hand waving to the equality pushers.

01:17:33.680 It's like, well, play with that at your peril.

01:17:38.680 So it's a very bad idea.

01:17:41.680 Diversity, inclusivity, equity.

01:17:43.680 That's a bad game.

01:17:44.680 You're going to be burned if you play it and in ways you can't imagine.

01:17:47.680 So, Google already.

01:17:49.680 Freedom, fairness, respectful debate will take us a lot further.

01:17:55.680 Responsibility.

01:17:56.680 That's right.

01:17:57.680 Responsibility.

01:17:58.680 Justice, that's a good one.

01:17:59.680 Let's circle back to young people because the future is going to belong to them before we know it.

01:18:05.680 Remarkable and very insightful and engaging human being, Jonathan Haidt,

01:18:16.680 is perhaps a leading example of somebody who's seen from a left perspective himself how dangerous all of this is

01:18:25.680 and how we're endangering young people by not being honest with them,

01:18:31.680 not encouraging them to explore what they instinctively feel needs to be explored, going back to our earlier topic,

01:18:38.680 and when leaving them without the resilience that they're going to need to confirm, if you like, a free and prosperous society.

01:18:49.680 And I had a question here relating to this, which I'd just like to read.

01:18:55.680 In his piece, The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt outlines why millennials today are so fragile

01:19:03.680 and lacking resilience in life and in relationships, in university courses and the workplace,

01:19:09.680 and what has led to this overwhelming push to be protected from anything difficult or uncomfortable or offensive.

01:19:16.680 And he calls it the flight to safety.

01:19:18.680 And I think you've used that expression.

01:19:21.680 He outlines the core reason for this fragility of mind and emotion.

01:19:26.680 He says it stems, firstly, from over-functioning and over-protective parents, then schools, now reaches into our universities.

01:19:34.680 And, of course, more people than ever go to universities in the West.

01:19:36.680 So they form a much bigger bulk in our community afterwards.

01:19:39.680 And it leaves them tragically unprepared and unarmed for life and relationships.

01:19:44.680 Would you comment on that?

01:19:46.680 Well, I think it's good to take a step back from that and think about it in the broadest possible terms.

01:19:53.680 There is definitely an epidemic of over-protective parenting.

01:19:58.680 But it's useful to ask why.

01:20:01.680 And my suspicions are that this is driven by very fundamental biological and cultural phenomena

01:20:09.680 that aren't generally considered in relationship to this issue.

01:20:12.680 We don't have very many children.

01:20:15.680 We don't have twelve, you know, six of whom die.

01:20:21.680 We have one or two.

01:20:25.680 And that makes them very precious, right?

01:20:27.680 We're unwilling to take risks with them.

01:20:29.680 And no wonder.

01:20:31.680 And then we also have them much later in life.

01:20:34.680 And so, like, if you have a kid when you're eighteen, you're still a kid.

01:20:38.680 You know, you're going to go out and have your life, right?

01:20:41.680 Because you're so...

01:20:43.680 Well, you're in the height of your exploratory...

01:20:47.680 You're in the height of the exploratory part of your life.

01:20:51.680 You're not going to overprotect your kid because you're still a kid.

01:20:55.680 But if you're forty and you have one child, it's like all your eggs are in one basket.

01:21:00.680 And the probability that you're going to take undue risks with that precious person is very, very low.

01:21:06.680 Now, obviously, there's some advantages to that because, great, you devote resources to your child, you know, and foster their development.

01:21:12.680 But the downside is that you have every motivation to hover.

01:21:17.680 And maybe you're also extraordinarily desperate, as a mother, to maintain that bond with your child because you've struggled so long to achieve it.

01:21:27.680 It's highly, highly valuable.

01:21:29.680 You can't take a risk.

01:21:31.680 Well, so these...

01:21:33.680 So we might say, well, perhaps overprotective parenting is a secondary and unintended consequence of the birth control pill and the fact that people now have children later in life.

01:21:42.680 Could easily be.

01:21:43.680 You know, if you have six kids, it's like, what are you going to do, helicopter parent them?

01:21:47.680 It's like, no, you're so tired you can't even get off the couch if you have six kids.

01:21:52.680 And they're, they outnumber you, right?

01:21:54.680 They're raising each other.

01:21:55.680 They're competing and they're taking each other down a peg.

01:21:58.680 They're not, there's no overprotection there.

01:22:00.680 But with a single child landscape or dual child landscape, mostly a single child landscape, then you're going to overprotect.

01:22:09.680 And then that ethos starts to permeate the schools and it starts to permeate the higher education institutions as those children mature.

01:22:17.680 And then that all reinforces it.

01:22:19.680 Not good.

01:22:20.680 It's not obvious what to do about it either.

01:22:22.680 Because if it is driven by demographics in that sense, it's a much more intractable problem than we think.

01:22:27.680 So, I did some of that in 12 Rules for Life.

01:22:30.680 You know, I said, look, what you have to understand is that you're a danger to your children no matter what.

01:22:35.680 Right?

01:22:36.680 You can let them go out in the world and be hurt or you can overprotect them and hurt them that way.

01:22:43.680 So, here's your choice.

01:22:44.680 You can make your children competent and courageous or you can make them safe.

01:22:49.680 But you can't make them safe because life isn't safe.

01:22:53.680 So, if you sacrifice their courage and competence on the altar of safety, then you disarm them completely.

01:22:59.680 And all they can do is pray to be protected.

01:23:02.680 So, in the very act of trying to do the right thing by them, although often with a selfish motive.

01:23:08.680 Right.

01:23:09.680 Often with a selfish motive.

01:23:11.680 We strip away the tools and the equipment, the understanding they really need to make life work.

01:23:20.680 Well, that's the Oedipal Mother, right?

01:23:22.680 That was Freud's great discovery of the Dark Mother.

01:23:25.680 And the Dark Mother is the person, she's the witch in Hensel and Gretel.

01:23:29.680 Gingerbread house, lost children, too good to be true.

01:23:34.680 It's like a house of candy.

01:23:36.680 Well, who could want anything better?

01:23:38.680 What lives inside the house of candy?

01:23:40.680 The witch that wants to fatten you up and eat you.

01:23:44.680 Write a cautionary tale about overprotective parents, overprotective mothers, about the overprotective feminine.

01:23:52.680 It's like the psychoanalysts, they were so smart, said the good mother necessarily fails.

01:23:57.680 That's such a brilliant phrase.

01:23:59.680 It's like, you can't, as your child matures, you have to fail more and more as a mother,

01:24:07.680 right?

01:24:08.680 Until by the time you're 30, your child's 30, let's say 25 for that matter, you're not their

01:24:14.680 mother anymore.

01:24:15.680 I mean, obviously you are.

01:24:16.680 But the relationship has hit something like quasi-peer status.

01:24:20.680 Not entirely, obviously.

01:24:21.680 But the child's independent, able to stand up on their own two feet and take on the world.

01:24:25.680 So now we see this thing, a university student runs into some difficulties with study or whatever,

01:24:30.680 and brings their parents in to talk to the faculty.

01:24:32.680 Yeah, or they go off and colour.

01:24:34.680 I mean, when I went to Queen's University a week ago, and there was a lot of noise and

01:24:40.680 horror around that, you know, that the people who were decrying my visit set up colouring

01:24:45.680 book stations so that people could be comforted because, you know, the evil professor was coming

01:24:50.680 to talk.

01:24:51.680 It's like, and you know, as a clinician, and Haidt knows this as well, and all the clinicians

01:24:55.680 worth their salt know this, the worst thing you can do for someone who's anxious is overprotective.

01:25:02.680 It makes them worse.

01:25:04.680 The clinical literature on that is crystal clear.

01:25:06.680 What you do for people who are hyper-anxious is gradually expose them with their voluntary

01:25:12.680 consent to increasingly threatening situations.

01:25:16.680 That cures them.

01:25:17.680 It's exactly the opposite of what all the mental health professionals so, and I use that

01:25:21.680 term extraordinarily lightly, are trying to do to produce safe spaces on the university

01:25:27.680 campus.

01:25:28.680 Like if a safe is, if a space needs to be defined as safe, you can be sure that's the

01:25:34.680 one thing it is not.

01:25:37.680 Jordan, this has been fascinating.

01:25:39.680 Let me pay you a compliment.

01:25:41.680 In some ways I think the most valuable thing you can do for us is to model the courage to

01:25:47.680 speak your mind.

01:25:48.680 You do it forcefully, you do it courageously, you do it compassionately, because the reality

01:25:55.680 is you only have to spend a bit of time with you to realise that you actually care, especially

01:26:00.680 about our young people and what they're experiencing.

01:26:03.680 And especially for our young men, because we know boys model themselves on men who they

01:26:12.680 respect.

01:26:14.680 You're doing a great job of modelling courage in the face of fire.

01:26:17.680 Well, there's something I'd like to say, maybe in closing, about courage.

01:26:21.680 People say that to me and, you know, I don't think it's exactly right.

01:26:25.680 There's a line in the Old Testament, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.

01:26:29.680 And I think it's more like that.

01:26:30.680 It's not that I'm courageous, it's that I'm afraid of the right things.

01:26:34.680 So when I made my videos, it wasn't like that didn't make me nervous.

01:26:39.680 But I was less nervous about going back to bed and not saying what I had to say than

01:26:44.680 I was about making the videos.

01:26:45.680 Because I know where this is going.

01:26:47.680 I don't want to go there.

01:26:49.680 And so, it's not so much courage, it's a matter of, it's less risky to say something

01:26:59.680 than to remain silent when you know there's something to be said.

01:27:03.680 I know that to be the case.

01:27:05.680 And so, lots of times in life, it's like there's no pathway forward that's going to shield you from risk.

01:27:10.680 You get to pick this risk or you get to pick this risk.

01:27:13.680 And I think I picked the lesser risk.

01:27:15.680 And that might be wise, but I'm not so sure it's courageous.

01:27:18.680 Well, I think it's admirable.

01:27:21.680 Let's leave it on that basis.

01:27:22.680 Thank you.

01:27:23.680 Thank you very much for the conversation.

01:27:33.680 Thank you.

01:27:34.680 Thank you.

01:27:35.680 Thank you.

01:27:36.680 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - April 26, 2018

Australia's John Anderson & Dr. Jordan B Peterson： In Conversation

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