The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Modern Times

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00:00:51.040 I've really been trying to understand the underlying psychology of postmodernism and its relationship with neo-Marxism,

00:01:02.440 and then the spread of that into the universities and the effect on the culture.

00:01:07.160 And what I would like to start with is a description of your understanding of that,

00:01:11.660 because I've presented to the people who are listening to me my understanding of it.

00:01:16.220 I interviewed Stephen Hicks recently, and he wrote an interesting book called Explaining Postmodernism,

00:01:20.700 which I liked quite a bit.

00:01:22.480 It's been criticized for being too right-wing, although I don't think he's right-wing at all.

00:01:26.860 I think maybe you could characterize him as middle-of-the-road conservative,

00:01:31.580 but I would say he's more like a classic liberal.

00:01:33.440 But I'm really curious about your views about what postmodernism is, first of all.

00:01:41.780 I know you've identified it with the general tricksters, Derrida and Lacan and Foucault,

00:01:47.380 and Foucault in particular you've talked about,

00:01:49.360 but I'd like to know what you think about postmodernism,

00:01:52.640 and also why you think it's been so attractive to people.

00:01:55.400 Well, my explanation is that there is no authentic 1960s point of view in any of the elite universities.

00:02:04.840 But rather, the most liberated minds of my generation of the 1960s did not go on to graduate school.

00:02:11.900 I witnessed this with my own eyes.

00:02:13.460 I saw genuine Marxists at my college, which was the State University of New York at Binghamton,

00:02:19.480 upstate New York, Harper College,

00:02:21.180 which had a huge cohort of very radical, downstate New York Jews,

00:02:27.480 who, in fact, Harper used to be called Berkeley East.

00:02:30.960 So I saw genuine, passionate Marxists with my own eyes.

00:02:35.280 They were not word choppers.

00:02:37.780 They were not snide postmodernists.

00:02:40.620 They were, in your face, aggressive.

00:02:43.760 They used the language of the people.

00:02:45.840 They had a populist energy.

00:02:48.140 They dressed working class.

00:02:49.640 They were non-materialistic.

00:02:51.180 These are people who lived by their own convictions.

00:02:54.200 They were against the graduate schools.

00:02:56.900 When I went on to graduate school and it became known that I was going to go to Yale,

00:03:03.000 I was confronted by a leader of the radicals on campus,

00:03:06.520 in broad daylight in front of everyone,

00:03:09.000 who denounced me for, he said,

00:03:10.840 grad school is not where it's happening.

00:03:13.200 You don't do that.

00:03:14.580 If you have to go to graduate school, you should go to Buffalo.

00:03:16.860 Now, I had applied to SUNY Buffalo because the great leftist critic Leslie Fiedler was there,

00:03:23.300 who had a huge impact on me.

00:03:24.720 He created identity politics, but without its present distortions.

00:03:29.880 And Norman Holland, the psychoanalytic critic, was there.

00:03:32.400 I would have been very happy to have gone on to Buffalo,

00:03:34.140 but I needed the library at Yale, so I continued on to Yale.

00:03:37.160 There were no radicals in the graduate schools from 1968 to 72 when I was there.

00:03:44.200 Only one radical, Todd Gitlin, went on to have a career success.

00:03:48.980 The actual radicals of the 1960s either dropped out of college and went off to create communes,

00:03:56.760 or they were taking acid and destroyed their brains.

00:03:59.960 Now, I have also written about that, the destruction of the minds of the most talented members of my generation

00:04:07.040 through LSD.

00:04:08.420 It was going on all around me.

00:04:10.840 So what's happened is the actual legacy of the 60s got truncated.

00:04:14.480 The idea that these post-structuralists and post-modernists are heirs of the 1960s revolution

00:04:20.440 is an absolute crock.

00:04:23.200 What they represent, as Foucault shows, Foucault said that the biggest influence on his thinking

00:04:29.700 was Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which was a post-World War II play written in Paris

00:04:37.260 that was about the disillusionment and nihilism experienced after Hitler went through,

00:04:42.200 occupied France, right, and all of Europe was in ruins.

00:04:45.620 It had nothing to do, what's in Waiting for Godot has nothing to do with the authentic legacy

00:04:51.300 of the 1960s, which was about genuine multiculturalism, a movement toward India, toward Hinduism,

00:04:57.980 a transformation of consciousness through psychedelics, which I did not take,

00:05:02.360 but which I identify with totally through the music, etc.

00:05:04.960 It was a turn toward the body.

00:05:08.040 It was a turn toward sensory experience, okay, not this word chopping thing

00:05:12.460 and this like cynical removal from actual experience, right.

00:05:16.380 That French import, okay, came in, okay, to the graduate schools.

00:05:20.100 It did not affect any genuine 1960s person.

00:05:23.560 The real 1960s revolution was about Jung.

00:05:26.580 It was about a way of seeing the cosmos in mythological terms, right.

00:05:31.800 And the Jungian contribution went on into the New Age movement of the 1970s aside from the universities, right.

00:05:39.600 So who took over the universities were these careerists, okay.

00:05:43.780 I saw them with my own eyes.

00:05:45.580 I saw what happened.

00:05:46.760 I saw, I was at Yale when Derrida was being shipped over, right,

00:05:50.640 to address the, you know, the students, the grad students and the faculty.

00:05:55.440 And I said to a fellow student after hearing one of these guys speak,

00:05:59.820 it wasn't Derrida, it was another one of the theorists,

00:06:03.660 I said they are like high priests murmuring to each other, right.

00:06:08.440 This was an elitist form from the start, okay.

00:06:12.240 It was not progressive.

00:06:14.160 It was not revolutionary.

00:06:15.400 It was reactionary.

00:06:17.000 It was a desperate attempt to hold on to what had happened before the 1960s Sensory Revolution.

00:06:23.640 But this postmodernist thing, okay, this trashing, okay, of the text,

00:06:29.020 this encouragement, okay, of a superior and destructive attitude toward the work of art,

00:06:35.480 we're going through it, okay, primly with red pen in hand,

00:06:39.040 finding all the evidence of sexism, check, racism, check, homophobia, check.

00:06:43.680 That is not the empathic, emotional, okay, sensory-based, okay, revolution of the 1960s.

00:06:51.420 I am sick and tired of these people claiming any kind of mantle from the 1960s.

00:06:55.940 They're frauds.

00:06:57.040 These people are, what happened in the 1970s was a collapse of the job market in academe, okay.

00:07:03.460 All of a sudden jobs were scarce.

00:07:05.360 And this thing was there, the new and improved and shiny thing, okay, to be a theorist, okay.

00:07:11.300 People seized on it, okay.

00:07:12.840 It was institutionalized, right.

00:07:14.620 And it's an enormous betrayal of the 1960s.

00:07:17.620 Okay.

00:07:17.880 So that, you touched on this idea of the destruction of the work of art, you know.

00:07:23.000 And one of the things I really liked about reading Nietzsche was his discussion of ressentiment,

00:07:27.400 all right, of resentment, and it seems to me that a tremendous amount of the motive power

00:07:33.120 that drives the postmodernist, let's call it, it's not a revolution, transformation seems

00:07:40.220 to me to be driven by resentment about virtually anything that has any, well, what would you

00:07:45.560 say, any merit of competence or aesthetic quality.

00:07:48.220 And I don't know if that's, it seems to me that that's partly rooted in the academics disdain

00:07:54.420 for the business world, which I think is driven by their relative economic inequality because

00:07:59.220 most people who are as intelligent as academics are from a pure IQ point of view, make more

00:08:04.640 money in the private sphere.

00:08:06.120 And so I think that drives some of it.

00:08:08.040 But there also seems to be this, there's a destruction, an aim for destruction of the aesthetic

00:08:13.540 quality of the literary or artistic work.

00:08:16.940 It's reduction to nothing but some kind of power game.

00:08:20.160 And then surrounding that, the reduction of everything to something that approximates

00:08:25.280 a power game, which I can't help but identifying with jealousy and resentment as a fundamental

00:08:32.020 motivator.

00:08:33.020 Does that seem reasonable to you?

00:08:34.640 These professors who allege that art is nothing but an ideological movement by one elite against

00:08:44.740 the, against another group, right?

00:08:47.960 These people are Philistines, okay?

00:08:49.960 They're Philistines.

00:08:50.960 They're middle-brow, hopelessly middle-brow, okay?

00:08:53.080 They, they, they have no sense of beauty.

00:08:55.080 They have no sense of the aesthetic.

00:08:56.460 Now, Marxism does indeed assert this, okay?

00:08:58.960 Marxism tries to reconfigure the universe in terms of materialism.

00:09:03.960 It sees it, it does not recognize any kind of spiritual dimension.

00:09:07.180 Now, I'm an atheist, but I see the great world religions as enormous works of, of art, okay?

00:09:14.180 As the, as the, as the, as the best way to understand the universe and man's place in it.

00:09:18.180 I find them enormously moving.

00:09:20.180 They're, they're, they're, they're like enormous poems, right?

00:09:23.400 They, they, I, I, and I, I, what I have called for the true revolution, okay, would have been,

00:09:27.940 okay, to make the core curriculum of world education, the world, okay, the great religions

00:09:33.400 of the world.

00:09:34.400 I feel that is the only way to achieve understanding and it's also a way to, to, to present the aesthetic,

00:09:39.740 okay?

00:09:40.740 Because I, I feel that, that, that the real 60s vision was about exaltation, elevation, cosmic

00:09:47.240 consciousness, okay, all, all of these things, they were, were rejected, okay, by these, by

00:09:52.580 these midgets, okay, intellectual midgets, who seized on to Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault,

00:09:58.460 right?

00:09:59.460 It's an, and I, I, I, my career has been in the art school, so I, my, my, my entire career,

00:10:03.240 beginning at Benetton College, right, so I, I represent a challenge to this from the perspective

00:10:08.260 of art, right?

00:10:09.260 It is an absolute nonsense, okay, as poststructuralism maintains, that reality is mediated by language,

00:10:16.060 by words, everything that we can know, including gender.

00:10:18.280 It is absolutely madness, because I, I'm teaching students whose majors are ceramics, okay, or

00:10:24.780 dance, okay, or, who are, who are jazz musicians, who understand reality in terms of the body,

00:10:31.060 it's sensory activation, okay, so they, now, they, what, see, what happened was something

00:10:35.580 was going on in the art world as well.

00:10:37.400 I identify with Andy Warhol in pop art, okay, that was what was going on during, you know, my

00:10:41.820 years in college.

00:10:43.380 Everything about Andy Warhol was like, wow, admiration, wow.

00:10:47.960 What happened immediately after that, in the arts, 1970s, okay, was this collapse into

00:10:52.920 a snide sort of postmodernism also.

00:10:56.140 This happened in the art world, all right, and it was an utter misunderstanding, okay, of

00:11:01.140 culture, it seems to me, by that movement in, in the art world.

00:11:04.820 That is, oppositional art, in my view, is dead, okay, it's been, and this, and what postmodernism

00:11:11.160 is, isn't it a pathetic attempt to continue the old heroism of the avant-garde.

00:11:16.540 The avant-garde was genuinely heroic from the early 19th century, okay, where we're talking

00:11:20.920 about, you know, where the Courbet, the realists, you know, we're talking about Monet and the

00:11:25.160 impressions, people who have genuinely suffered for their radical ideas, their new, their innovations,

00:11:29.160 and so on, right, going right down to, to Picasso and down to, to Jackson Pollock, who, like,

00:11:35.160 was, who truly suffered, okay, for, you know, for his art.

00:11:38.080 It was only after his death, okay, that suddenly the market was created for abstract art.

00:11:43.620 Pop art killed the avant-garde.

00:11:45.860 The idea that the avant-garde continues is an absolute delusion of the contemporary art

00:11:49.900 world, you know, which feels that it must attack, attack, attack, challenge, okay, the,

00:11:54.400 the simplistic beliefs of the, of the hoi polloi, okay, somehow the art, what, excuse me,

00:11:59.160 okay, from the moment, okay, Andy Warhol went through and embraced the popular media,

00:12:04.760 embraced, instead of having the opposition to it, the serious arts that had, okay, that

00:12:09.400 was the end of oppositional art, okay, so we have been going on now for 50 years, the post-modernism

00:12:14.880 and academe, hand-in-hand with, with the stupidity and infantilism that masquerades as, you know,

00:12:20.920 as, as important art at galleries everywhere, this incredible, incredible, you know, it's mechanism

00:12:26.160 of, of, of contemporary art, you know, pushing things that are, that are so hopelessly derivative,

00:12:30.560 that, that, that, that, and, and with this idea that, once again, that the art world somehow has a superior view

00:12:34.960 of reality, the off, authentic leftism is populist, okay, it is based in working class style, working class language,

00:12:42.800 working class direct emotion, a, a, a, a, an openness and brushness of speech, okay, okay, not this fancy contorted jargon

00:12:50.560 of the pseudo leftists of academe, who are frauds, these people, these people who managed to, managed to rise to the top

00:12:57.360 at, at, at Berkeley, at Harvard, at Princeton, okay, the idea that these people are radical, they are career people,

00:13:02.960 they're corporate types, okay, who, like, who succeeded in, and they love the institutional context, they, they know how to

00:13:08.960 manipulate the bureaucracy, which has totally invaded and usurped, okay, the, you know, the, and academe everywhere, okay,

00:13:14.760 these people are company players, they could have done well in any, any field, okay, they, they love to sit in endless

00:13:20.600 committees, they love bureaucratic regulation, and so on, there's not, what, what, not one leftist, okay,

00:13:26.520 an American academe raised his or her voice against obscene growth, growth of tuition costs, which have

00:13:33.560 bankrupted a whole generation of young people, not, not one voice, okay, to challenge that, that, that, that

00:13:39.060 invasion by the bureaucrats, okay, absolute fascist bureaucrats, okay, who have, who have added,

00:13:44.660 they're like a, they're cancerous, okay, they, there's so many of them, they, they, the faculty

00:13:48.560 have completely lost any power in American academe, okay, it's a, it's a scandal what has

00:13:53.400 happened, okay, and, and, and they deserve the president's servitude that they're in right

00:13:56.680 now, okay, because they never protested, all right, my, when I, my first job at Bennington

00:14:00.500 College, 1976, I was there, when there was an uprising by the faculty against encroachment by

00:14:05.780 the board of trustees and the president, okay, and it was a huge thing, it was, it was, it was reported

00:14:10.440 on the New York Times and so on, and we, and we pushed that president out, okay, and, and, and, and,

00:14:14.640 and there's not been a single uprising of that kind against, against encroachment by the

00:14:18.500 trustees and by the administrations and all these decades, okay, passive, slaves, slaves,

00:14:24.100 they deserve their slavery.

00:14:25.440 Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

00:14:28.200 I, I've thought the same thing about university professors for a long time is that they get

00:14:32.540 exactly what they deserve because they never stand up and say no and the fact that in the

00:14:37.820 United States, it's not quite as bad in Canada, I wouldn't say, but the fact that the students

00:14:42.960 have been essentially handed a bill of indentured servitude here for their student loans is

00:14:47.300 absolutely beyond comprehension, you know, it seems to me that the bureaucracy has basically

00:14:52.260 conspired to determine how to pick the pockets of the students' future earnings, right, and

00:14:58.200 they do that by offering them an extended adolescence with no quality control, something like that,

00:15:03.420 so it's a real bargain with the devil.

00:15:05.020 And, and I told the abandonment of any kind of education actually in history and culture,

00:15:09.960 all right, it's gone along with it, that is the, the transformation into a cafeteria kind

00:15:14.720 of a menu, okay, where you can pick this course or that course or this course without any kind

00:15:18.720 of guidance from the university about a central core curriculum that teaches you history and

00:15:23.200 chronology and introduces you to the basics, right, because, because, oh, we have, well,

00:15:27.060 because our, our professors are, are such prima donnas, they can only teach in their little areas,

00:15:31.920 so we have this total fragmentation, okay, the, the great art history survey courses are being

00:15:36.460 abandoned steadily, and because, why, because graduate students are not trained to see the

00:15:41.000 great narratives, so the, because we are taught now that narratives are false, right.

00:15:44.700 Okay, so that's another issue that I'd like to bring up, because one of the things I cannot

00:15:49.000 figure out is the alliance between the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists.

00:15:54.460 I can't understand the causal relationship there, because the, the, the, tell me if you disagree

00:15:59.860 with this, okay, because I'm a psychologist, not a sociologist, and so I'm dabbling in things

00:16:04.960 that are outside of my field of expertise, and there is some danger in that, but the,

00:16:08.920 sent, the central postmodernist claim seems to me that because there's a near infinite

00:16:13.720 number of ways to interpret a complex set of phenomena, which, which actually happens

00:16:18.160 to be the case, that you can't make a case that any of those modes of interpretation are

00:16:23.260 canonical, and so if they're not canonical, if that, and if that canonical element isn't

00:16:28.840 based in some kind of reality, then it serves some other master, and so the master that it

00:16:33.220 hypothetically serves for the postmodernists is nothing but power, because that seems to

00:16:37.400 be everything that they believe in.

00:16:38.980 They don't believe in competence, they don't believe in authority, they don't seem to believe

00:16:42.840 in an objective world, because everything is language mediated.

00:16:46.280 So it's an extraordinarily cynical perspective that, that because there's an infinite number

00:16:51.720 of interpretations, none of them are canonical, you can attribute it everything to power and

00:16:55.620 dominance.

00:16:56.620 Okay, so that, does that seem like a reasonable summary of the postmodern?

00:16:59.800 Yes, exactly.

00:17:00.800 Okay.

00:17:01.800 So it's a radical relativism.

00:17:02.800 Okay, it's a radical relativism.

00:17:03.800 Now, but the strange thing is, despite, okay, and so what goes along with that is the demolition

00:17:08.600 of grand narratives, and so that would be associated, for example, with the rejection of thinkers

00:17:13.080 like Jung and Eric Neumann, because of course they're foundational thinkers in relationship

00:17:18.760 to the idea that there are embodied grand narratives, that's never touched.

00:17:23.560 But then, despite the fact that the grand narrative is rejected, there's a neo-Marxism that's

00:17:28.740 tightly, tightly allied with postmodernism, that also seems to shade into this strange

00:17:32.860 identity politics, and I don't, two things, I don't understand the causal relationship

00:17:38.580 there.

00:17:39.580 Like the, the skeptical part of me thinks that postmodernism was a, was an intellectual,

00:17:45.180 it's intellectual camouflage for the continuation of the kind of pathological Marxism that produced

00:17:50.400 the Soviet Union, and that has no independent existence as an intellectual field whatsoever.

00:17:55.860 But I still can't understand how the postmodernists can make the no grand narrative claim, but then immerse

00:18:04.120 themselves in this grand narrative without anyone pointing out the evident contradictions.

00:18:09.740 Like, I don't understand that.

00:18:11.200 So what do you think about that?

00:18:12.400 Well, I can only speak about literary, you know, professors, really, and they seem to

00:18:17.080 me, almost universally in the U.S., to be very naive, and they, they know not, they seem

00:18:21.120 to know nothing about actual history, political science, or economics, right, it, it, it is simply

00:18:26.120 an attitude.

00:18:27.120 They have an attitude.

00:18:28.680 Marxism becomes simply a badge by which they telegraph their, their solidarity with a working

00:18:35.360 class that they have nothing to do with, right?

00:18:37.400 I mean, the, the.

00:18:38.400 And generally nothing but contempt.

00:18:39.400 Yes.

00:18:40.400 And, and, and the thing is that, that the, the, the, the campus leftists are almost notorious,

00:18:44.400 okay, for their, for their, rather snobbish treatment of staff, and they don't, they don't

00:18:48.680 have any rapport with the actual working class members of the, you know, of the, of the infrastructure,

00:18:54.360 the janitor, the janitors, and, you know, and even the, even the secretaries.

00:18:57.680 There's a kind of high and mighty aristocracy, you know, about, they were, these are just,

00:19:02.240 these are people who, who have wandered into the English department, right, and are, were

00:19:07.180 products of a time when, during the, the new criticism, okay, when, when history, both

00:19:12.860 history and psychology had been excluded, all right?

00:19:15.020 I mean, my ambition, okay, was, I mean, I love the new criticism, okay, as, as a style of

00:19:20.400 textual analysis, all right, and, and the, and the new criticism had multiple interpretations,

00:19:25.240 okay, that were possible, okay, and that, and that were encouraged.

00:19:28.240 In fact, one of the, you know, one of the great projects was made in Mac's series, 20th

00:19:32.180 Century Views, where, when you had, at least, books, I adored them in college, it was about

00:19:35.920 Jane Austen, or about, you know, Emily Bronte, or about, um, Wordsworth, and they were collections

00:19:41.640 of alternate views of the same thing.

00:19:44.420 The idea that there were no alternate views, and, and there was no relativistic, you know,

00:19:48.680 situational kind, kind of a interpretive approach is nonsense, okay, about, but the point

00:19:53.360 it was, we needed to restore, okay, history to literary, literary study, okay, and we needed

00:19:59.320 to add psychology to it, because it was, it was great animus against Freud, and, and when

00:20:03.540 I arrived in, in graduate school, in fact, I actually went into the director of graduate

00:20:07.200 studies and protested the way Freud and Freudian were used as, as negative terms, okay, in a

00:20:12.680 sneering way by the very Wasp professors, all right?

00:20:15.300 So we needed to, and actually, it seemed like we were moving there, okay, in the early 1970s

00:20:19.360 was a great period of psychobiography, about great, about political figures, okay, and

00:20:25.320 so I thought, it's happening, let's see, and all of a sudden, it all got short-circuited

00:20:28.920 by this arrival, you know, of, of post-structuralism and post-modernism in the, in the, in the 1970s,

00:20:33.920 all right, um, so I, I, I, I feel I'm an old historicist, okay, not, not a new historicist,

00:20:39.420 so I think, I think new historicism is an absolute scam, right, and it's like, it's just a way,

00:20:44.120 it's like tweezers, you like, just, you pick a little bit of this, a little bit of that,

00:20:47.800 a little bit of that, you make a little tiny salad, okay, and some of this atomized thing,

00:20:52.440 okay, is supposed to mean something, it's all, to me, very superficial, very cynical,

00:20:57.160 uh, very distanced, I like, I, I am, I am the product, okay, of old historicism, of German

00:21:02.860 philology, and it's like, my, my first choice of a profession when I was a child was Egyptology,

00:21:08.440 archaeology, because I'm, I'm, everything I ever think about or say is, is related to an enormous

00:21:14.280 time scheme, okay, from, from antiquity, and indeed from the stone age, right, and that is the problem

00:21:19.160 with, with these people, they're, they're maleducated, the postmodernists, and academic Marxists,

00:21:24.280 okay, are maleducated, embarrassingly so, okay, they know nothing before the present,

00:21:30.280 Foucault, okay, is absolutely a joke before the Enlightenment, okay, I mean, perhaps he might be useful

00:21:37.160 to people to talk about what happened after neoclassicism, which by the way, he failed to notice,

00:21:42.200 okay, all right, a lot of what he was talking about, okay, turns out to be simply the hangover

00:21:47.480 of neoclassicism, okay, this, this is how ignorant that man was, I mean, he was, he was not talented

00:21:52.200 as a researcher, he knew absolutely nothing, okay, he was, he knew nothing about antiquity,

00:21:56.280 how can you make any kind of large structure, large mechanism, you know, to analyze western culture

00:22:03.080 without knowing about classical antiquity, okay, he did not see anything, he, this was a person

00:22:07.960 who had no business making large theoretical statements about anything.

00:22:10.840 Well, maybe, maybe part of it is that if you, if you generate an intelligible doctrine

00:22:17.000 of radical relativism, then there is no reason to assume that there are distinctions between

00:22:22.760 categories of knowledge, or between different levels of quality of knowledge, right, so,

00:22:27.880 I've seen the same thing in, in the psychology departments, although we have the, uh, what would

00:22:33.160 you call it, the luxury of being bounded, at least to some degree, by the empirical method,

00:22:37.240 and by biology, right, it's one of the things that keeps most of the branches of psychology

00:22:41.400 relatively sane, you know, because the real world is actually built into it to some degree,

00:22:46.840 but, if you accept the postmodernist claim of radical relativism, then you completely demolish

00:22:52.280 the idea that there are quality levels that are associated with education, because everything

00:22:56.760 becomes the same, and that seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable justification for maintaining

00:23:01.560 ignorance. You know, like Foucault, I actually found him the most readable of the Lacan-Derrida-Foucault

00:23:07.640 triad. You can read Foucault. I read Madness and Civilization and a couple of his other books,

00:23:12.840 and I thought that they were painfully obvious. You know, the idea that mental disorder is in part

00:23:18.360 a social construct is self-evident to anybody who has even a smattering of psychiatric training.

00:23:23.800 I mean, the real narrow medical types tend to think of a mental disorder, let's say, as something

00:23:30.920 that might be purely biological. They have a pure disease model, but nobody who's a sophisticated

00:23:35.880 thinker ever thinks that. It's partly because medicine is a brand of engineering, not a brand of

00:23:41.320 science, because it's associated with health, and the diagnostic categories are hybrids between

00:23:46.440 physiological observation and sociocultural condition. Everyone knows that, and so when I read

00:23:51.720 Madness and Civilization, I thought, well, that's not radical. That's just bloody self-evident.

00:23:57.000 But... Well, you know, Foucault's admirers actually think that he began, you know, the entire turn

00:24:02.600 toward a sociological, you know, grounding of modern psychology. The social psychology was well

00:24:08.920 launched in the 1920s, for example. The levels of ignorance that these people who think Foucault is

00:24:14.440 so original have not read Durkheim. They've not read Max Weber. They've not read Irving Goffman.

00:24:19.160 Okay, so in other words, to me, everything in Foucault seemed obvious, okay, because I had read the

00:24:24.120 sources from which he was borrowing without attribution. So, I mean, again, I know these

00:24:29.000 people. I mean, in some cases, you know, knew them in graduate school, people who went on to become

00:24:33.800 these admirers of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida. And I know what their training was. Their training was

00:24:39.800 purely within the English department. That's all they ever knew. They never made any research outside of that,

00:24:44.440 right? And so the idea, so Foucault is simply this easy, a mechanism. It's like a little tiny

00:24:50.760 kit by which they can approach everything in culture. And then, but the contortions of language,

00:24:55.960 the deliberate, labyrinthine, elitist language, at the same time as pretending to be a leftist,

00:25:01.400 okay, this is one of the biggest frauds ever practiced. So I got a story to tell you that you

00:25:05.960 might like, because I've thought a lot about that use of language, you know, because language can be used

00:25:11.000 as camouflage. And so here's the story. I think I got this from Robert Sapolsky. So he was talking

00:25:16.920 about zebras. And zebras, of course, have stripes and hypothetically that's associated with camouflage.

00:25:23.160 But it's not a straightforward association because zebras are black and white and they're on the veldt

00:25:28.520 along with the lions. The lions are camouflaged because they're grass-colored, but the bloody zebras are

00:25:33.560 black and white. You can see them like 15 miles away. So, okay, so biologists go out to study zebras,

00:25:40.280 and they're like making notes on a zebra, and they watch it, and then they look down at their

00:25:44.040 notes, and then they look up, and they think, uh-oh, I don't know which zebra I was looking at.

00:25:49.160 So the camouflage is actually against the herd because a zebra is a herd animal, not an individual.

00:25:53.960 And so the black and white stripes break up the animal against the herd, so you can't identify it.

00:25:59.000 So this was a quandary for the biologists, so they did one of two things. One was drive a jeep up to the

00:26:04.680 to the zebra herd and use a dab of red paint and dab the haunch of the zebra, or tag it with an ear

00:26:10.600 tag like you use for cattle. The lions would kill it. So as soon as it became identifiable,

00:26:18.120 the predators could organize their hunt around that identifiable animal. That's why, you know,

00:26:24.280 there's the old idea that lions and predators take down the weak animals, but they don't. They take

00:26:28.600 down the identifiable animals. So that's the thing, is if you stick your damn head up, you get picked off

00:26:34.760 by the predators. And so one of the things that academics seem to do is congregate together in

00:26:39.560 herd-like entities, and then they share a language, right? And the language unites them, and also keeps

00:26:45.720 them, as long as they share the same set of linguistic tools among themselves, they know that there isn't

00:26:51.160 anybody in the coterie that's going to attack them or destabilize the entire herd. And that seems to me to

00:26:58.440 account for that impenetrable use of language. It's group protection strategy, and it has absolutely

00:27:04.760 nothing to do with the search for, it's the search for security within a system and not the desire to

00:27:10.360 expand the system. So true. But to me it's blatantly careerist, because it was about advancement,

00:27:15.800 and it was also about the claim that somehow they have like special expertise. This is a special

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00:29:00.600 Only we can. But what's absurd about it, absolutely ludicrous, right, that these people, these American

00:29:06.440 academics, are imitating the contorted language of French translations from the French, okay.

00:29:14.120 When Lacan is translated into English, right, there's a contortion there, okay. What he was trying to do

00:29:20.920 in French was to break up, okay, the neoclassical formulations that descended from Racine. There was

00:29:26.920 something that was going on, there was a sabotage of the French language going on that was necessary

00:29:31.240 in France, not necessary in English. We have this long tradition of poetry going back to

00:29:36.280 Shakespeare in Chaucer. We have our own language far more vital than the French.

00:29:41.880 Oh yeah, the French constrain their language all the time by bureaucracy.

00:29:45.880 The absurdity in amateurism, okay, of American academics, okay, trying to imitate, okay, a translation

00:29:55.240 of Lacan, okay, when Lacan's doing something in France that is absolutely not necessary and indeed wrong to be

00:30:00.760 doing in English, all right. So the utter cynical abandonment, okay, of the great tradition of,

00:30:06.920 you know, of the English departments. And I felt that the true radicalism was not about adding on

00:30:13.560 other departments, okay, so we have African American studies and, you know, and women's studies and so on.

00:30:18.760 The true radicalism would have been to shatter the departmental structure. That's what I wanted. I feel that was the

00:30:24.600 authentic revolutionary 1960s thing to do, right, to blend all the literature studies together, okay,

00:30:32.520 to make easier, to make an interdisciplinary kind of organization, you know, closer to the British

00:30:37.640 model where a person can pursue related subjects, overlapping subjects. These departmental models,

00:30:44.040 okay, were to me totalitarian to begin with, okay, separating language into fiefdoms. And what this did to

00:30:51.400 create a women's studies department, absolutely out of the air, just snap your fingers and create

00:30:57.240 women's studies. The English department had taken a century to develop, okay, it was a huge argument

00:31:02.200 within it, right. And all of a sudden to create, okay, a department with a politicized agenda from the

00:31:08.360 start, okay, by people without any training, whatever, in that field, okay, what should be the parameters

00:31:13.480 of the field? What should be the requirements of that field? How about biology, okay, if you're going to be

00:31:17.480 discussing gender, that should have been a number one requirement, okay, as part of any women's

00:31:21.960 studies department or program. But no, okay, it was all hands off. It was just the administrators

00:31:27.160 wanted to solve a public relations problem, okay. They had a situation with very few women faculty,

00:31:33.560 nationwide, at a time when the women's movement had just started up. The spotlight of attention was on

00:31:38.440 them. They wanted, they needed women faculty fast. They needed the women's subject on the agenda fast,

00:31:43.480 right. So they just like, poof, let there be women's studies, okay. And now we'll just hire some women,

00:31:49.560 usually from English departments, you know, here and there, and we'll just throw them together.

00:31:53.800 You invent it. You say what it is. So that's why women's studies got frozen at a certain point of

00:31:59.720 ideology, okay, of the early 1970s. I was already in revolt from it, okay. I was a precursor in terms

00:32:06.040 of my endorsement of feminism before even now was created, right. But I couldn't, I couldn't even have a

00:32:12.280 conversation with any of these women. They were hysterical about the subject of biology. They knew

00:32:16.920 nothing about hormones, okay. I mean, I probably got in fistfights over this. They were, people were

00:32:21.480 so convinced that biology had nothing whatever to do with gender differences, right. See, that also

00:32:26.760 seems to me to be related to the postmodern emphasis on power. Yes. Because there's a, there's

00:32:32.040 something terrible underground going on there, and that is, and I think this is the sort of thing that

00:32:36.680 was reflected in the Soviet Union too, in the, especially in the 20s when there was this idea,

00:32:41.000 radical idea that you could remake human beings entirely, right, because they had no essential

00:32:45.560 nature. And so if your fundamental hypothesis is that nothing exists except power, and you believe

00:32:51.960 that, then that also gives you the right in some sense to exercise your power at the creation of the

00:32:58.120 kind of humanity that your utopian vision envisions. And then that has no, that, and that also seems to me

00:33:03.800 to justify the postmodern insistence that everything is only a linguistic construct. It again goes down to the

00:33:09.720 notion of power which Derrida and Foucault and Lacan are so bloody obsessed with. And so, and it seems

00:33:15.160 to me what they're trying to do is to take all the potential power for the creation of human beings to

00:33:20.680 themselves without any bounding conditions whatsoever, right. There's no history, there's no biology,

00:33:26.280 there's, and, and everything is a fluid culture that can be manipulated at will. And so, I mean, in Canada,

00:33:32.760 there are terrible arguments right now about biological essentialism, let's say. And, and one of the things that

00:33:37.720 happened, which was something I objected to precisely a year ago, is that the social constructionist view of

00:33:43.480 human identity has been built now into Canadian law. So, there's an insistence that biological sex,

00:33:51.000 gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity vary independently with no causal relationship

00:33:57.480 between any of the levels. And so that's in the law, and not only is it in the law, it's being taught

00:34:02.120 everywhere. It's being taught in the armed forces, it's being taught in the police, it's being taught to the

00:34:06.040 elementary school kids, and the junior high school kids. And underneath it all, I see this terrible

00:34:11.880 striving for arbitrary power that's associated with this crazy utopianism, and, and, and, but I still don't

00:34:18.280 exactly understand it. I don't, like, I don't understand that what seems to be the hatred that motivates it, that you see

00:34:24.440 bubbling up, for example, in identity politics, and, and in the desire to do nothing but, let's say, demolish the patriarchy.

00:34:31.160 It kind of reminds me, and this is something else I wanted to talk to you about, you know, and you're,

00:34:35.960 you're an admirer of Eric Neumann and of Carl Jung, yeah, and that's, the Neumann connection is really

00:34:40.440 interesting, because I think he's a bloody genius. I really like The Great Mother is a great book, and

00:34:45.160 really a great warning, that book, and also The Origins and History of Consciousness. One of my most influential

00:34:51.480 books, yeah. Yeah, that's so interesting. I read an essay that you wrote, I don't remember when it was. The lecture I gave on

00:34:56.680 Neumann at the NYU, yes. Yes, it's always been staggering to me that that book hasn't had the

00:35:01.960 impact that it should have had. I mean, Jung himself, in the preface to that book, wrote that

00:35:06.120 that was the book that he wished that he would have written. It's very much associated with Jung's

00:35:10.200 symbols of transformation, and it was a major influence on my book, Maps of Meaning, which was

00:35:14.840 an attempt to outline the universal archetypes that, that are portrayed in the kind of religious

00:35:20.040 structures that you, that you put forward. But the thing that I really see happening, and you can tell me

00:35:25.000 what you think about this. In Neumann's book, Consciousness, which is masculine, symbolically

00:35:30.760 masculine, for a variety of reasons, is, is viewed as rising up against the countervailing force of

00:35:37.880 tragedy from an underlying feminine, symbolically feminine unconsciousness, right? And it's something

00:35:43.080 that can always be pulled back into that unconsciousness. That would be, the microcosm of that would

00:35:48.360 be the Freudian Oedipal mother familial dynamic, where the mother is so over protective in all

00:35:54.920 encompassing, that she interferes with the development of the competence, not only of her

00:35:58.680 sons, but also of her daughters, of her children in general. And it seems to me that that's the

00:36:03.240 dynamic that's being played out in our society right now, is that there's this, and it's, it's related

00:36:08.280 in some way that I don't understand, to this, to this insistence that all forms of masculine

00:36:12.920 authority are nothing but tyrannical power. So the symbolic representation is tyrannical father,

00:36:20.120 with no appreciation for the benevolent father, and benevolent mother, with no appreciation

00:36:25.560 whatsoever for the tyrannical mother, right? And that's that, and because I thought of ideologies

00:36:30.520 as fragmentary mythologies, that's where they get their archetypal and psychological power, right?

00:36:35.640 And so in a balanced representation, you have the terrible mother and the great mother,

00:36:40.360 as, as Neumann laid out so nicely, and you have the terrible father and the great father,

00:36:44.920 so that's the fact that culture mangles you half to death while it's also promoting you and developing

00:36:49.800 you. You have to see that as balanced, and then you have the heroic and adversarial individual.

00:36:54.600 But in the postmodern world, and this seems to be something that's increasingly seeping out into

00:36:59.800 the culture at large, you have nothing but the tyrannical father, nothing but the destructive force

00:37:05.320 of masculine consciousness, and nothing but the benevolent, benevolent great mother. And it's a,

00:37:11.080 it's an appalling ideology, and it seems to me that it's sucking the vitality, which, which is exactly

00:37:16.760 what you would expect symbolically, it's sucking the vitality of our culture. You see that with the

00:37:21.480 increasing demolition of, of young men, and not only young men, in terms of their academic performance,

00:37:28.920 which, like, they're falling way behind in elementary school, way behind in junior high,

00:37:32.600 and bailing out of the universities like mad. And so, and I, I, well, the public school education has

00:37:38.360 become completely permeated by this kind of anti-male propaganda. I mean, and I, to me,

00:37:43.720 public schools are just a form of imprisonment, you know, right now. They're particularly destructive

00:37:47.720 to young men who have a lot of physical energy, okay. Now, you know, I identify as transgender,

00:37:52.440 okay, myself, but I do not, I do not require the entire world to alter itself, okay, to, to fit my

00:38:00.120 particular self-image. I do believe in the power of hormones. I believe that men exist and women exist,

00:38:07.480 and they're biologically different. I think that, I think there is no cure for, um, the culture's ills right now,

00:38:14.120 except if men start standing up, okay, and demanding that they be respected as men again.

00:38:20.280 Okay, okay, so I got a question about that. So, so one of the things, we did a research project a year ago,

00:38:26.280 trying to figure out if there was such a thing as political correctness from a psychometric perspective,

00:38:30.760 to find out if the, the loose aggregation of beliefs actually clumped together statistically.

00:38:35.880 And we actually found two factors, which I won't go into, but then we looked at things that predicted

00:38:40.600 adherence to that, that, uh, politically correct creed. And there were a couple that were surprising.

00:38:46.120 One was being female was a predictor. The personality attributes associated with femininity,

00:38:52.360 so that would be agreeableness and higher levels of negative emotion, were also both independent

00:38:56.200 predictors. But so were symptoms of personality disorder, which I thought was really important,

00:39:01.240 because part of what I see happening is that, like, I think that women whose relationship with men

00:39:06.760 have, has been seriously pathologized cannot distinguish between male authority and competence,

00:39:12.440 and male tyrannical power. Like, they fail to differentiate, because all they see is the oppressive

00:39:17.560 male. And, and they may have had experiences that, that, um, their experiences with men might have been rough

00:39:24.520 enough so that that differentiation never occurred, because it has to occur. And you have to have a lot of

00:39:29.480 experience with men, and good men, too, before that will occur. But it seems to me that we're also increasingly

00:39:35.720 dominated by a view of masculinity that's mostly characteristic of women who have terrible personality disorders,

00:39:41.880 and who are unable to have healthy relationships with men. Now, but here's the problem, you know,

00:39:47.560 this is something my wife has pointed out, too. She said, well, men are going to have to stand up for themselves,

00:39:51.960 but here's the problem. I know how to stand up to a man who's, who's, uh, unfairly trespassing against me.

00:40:00.120 And the reason I know that is because the parameters for my resistance are quite well defined, which is,

00:40:06.040 we talk, we argue, we push, and then it becomes physical, right? Like, if, if we move beyond the

00:40:12.680 boundaries of civil discourse, we know what the next step is. Okay, that's forbidden in, in discourse with

00:40:19.080 women. And so I don't think that men can control crazy women. I don't think, I really don't believe

00:40:24.520 it. I think that they have to throw their hands up in, in, in, in what, in, in, it's not even disbelief,

00:40:31.960 it's that the cultural, there's no step forward that you can take under those circumstances,

00:40:36.840 because if the man is offensive enough and crazy enough, the, the reaction becomes physical right

00:40:42.040 away, or at least the threat is there. And when men are talking to each other in any serious manner,

00:40:47.720 that underlying threat of physicality is always there, especially if it's a real conversation,

00:40:52.360 and keeps the thing civilized to some degree. You know, if you're talking to a man who wouldn't

00:40:57.880 fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you're talking to someone to whom you have

00:41:02.520 absolutely no respect. But I can't see any way, for example, there's a, there's a woman in, in Toronto

00:41:08.360 who's been, uh, organizing this movement, let's say, against me and some other people who are going to

00:41:13.880 do a free speech, um, um, event, and she managed to organize quite effectively. And she's quite, um,

00:41:20.440 offensive, you might say. She compared us to Nazis, for example, which, you know, publicly, using the

00:41:25.720 swastika, which wasn't really something I was all that fond of. But I, I'm defenseless against that kind

00:41:31.720 of female insanity, because the techniques that I would use against a man who was employing those

00:41:37.720 tactics are forbidden to me. So I don't know, like, it seems to me that it isn't men that have to stand

00:41:43.480 up and say enough of this, even though that is what they should do. It seems to me that it's sane women

00:41:48.920 who have to stand up against their crazy sisters and say, look, enough of that, enough man-hating,

00:41:54.360 enough pathology, enough bringing disgrace on us as a, as a gender. But the problem there, and then I'll

00:42:02.360 stop my little tirade, is that most of the women I know who are sane are busy doing sane things,

00:42:08.360 right? They're off, they have their career, they have their family, they're quite occupied, and they

00:42:12.040 don't seem to have the time or maybe even the interest to go after their, their crazy harpy sisters. And

00:42:18.120 so I don't see any regulating force for that, that terrible femininity. And it seems to me to be

00:42:24.840 invading the culture and undermining the, the masculine power of the culture in a way that's,

00:42:30.680 I think, fatal. I really do believe that. I too, I too believe that these are,

00:42:34.440 this is symptomatic of the decline of Western culture, and we, and it will just go down flat.

00:42:39.480 I don't think people realize that, you know, masculinity still exists, okay, in the world as

00:42:44.920 a code among jihadists, okay? And when you have passionate masculinity, okay, circling the borders

00:42:51.800 like the Huns and the Vandals during the Roman Empire, that's what I see. I see this culture rotting from

00:42:56.760 within, okay, and disemboweling itself, literally. Now, I have an overview of why we're having these

00:43:02.280 problems, right? And it comes from the fact that I'm the product of an immigrant family. All four of my

00:43:07.480 grandparents and my mother were born in Italy. So I remember from my earliest years in this factory

00:43:12.680 town in upstate New York, where my relatives came to work in the shoe factory, I can remember still,

00:43:18.040 okay, the life of the agrarian era, okay, which was for most of human history, okay, the agrarian era,

00:43:25.160 where there was the world of men and the world of women, and the sexes had very little to do with each

00:43:32.200 other. Each had power and status in its own realm, right? And they laughed at each other, in essence,

00:43:38.760 okay? The women had enormous power. In fact, the old women ruled, not the young beautiful woman like today,

00:43:44.600 okay? But the older you were, the more you had control over everyone, including the mating and

00:43:50.120 marriage. There were no doctors, so you had, you know, the old women were like midwives and knew all

00:43:56.840 the ins and outs of this inherited knowledge about pregnancy and all these other things, right?

00:44:01.080 I can remember this and the joy that women had with each other all day long, okay, cooking with each

00:44:08.200 other, you know, companions to each other, talking, conversing. My mother remembered as a small child

00:44:14.200 in Italy, when it was time to do the laundry, they would take the laundry up the mountain, up the hill

00:44:19.080 to the fountain, Il Sorgo, okay, and do it by hand. They would sing, they would picnic and so on,

00:44:23.960 all right? And we get a glimpse of that in the Odyssey, when Odysseus is thrown up naked on the

00:44:29.320 shores of Phoecia, all right? And he hears the sound of women, young women laughing and singing,

00:44:35.320 and it's Nausicaa, the princess, bringing the women to do the laundry, okay? It's exactly the same thing,

00:44:39.720 right? So there was a, each, each gender had its own hierarchy, its own values, its own way of

00:44:46.120 talking, and the sexes rarely intersected. Like, I can remember in my, in childhood, on a holiday,

00:44:51.800 typical, it could be a Christmas, it could be a Thanksgiving, whatever, all, the women would be

00:44:56.760 cooking all day long, everyone would sit down to eat, okay? And then after that, okay, the women would

00:45:01.880 retire en masse to the kitchen, and the men would go, I would, I would look at the window and see all the

00:45:07.560 men, the men would be all outside, usually gather around the car, okay? At a time when cars didn't

00:45:13.080 work as well as they do today, with the hood up, okay? And the men would be standing with their hands

00:45:17.320 on their hips like that, everyone's staring at the engine, okay? And I went, that's how I learned,

00:45:22.200 okay? Men were refreshing themselves by studying something technical and mechanical after being with

00:45:27.400 the women, okay? You know, for, during the dinner, okay? And so on. So, so all of these problems of today

00:45:32.280 are the direct consequence of women's emancipation and freedom from housework, thanks to capitalism,

00:45:39.080 okay, which made it possible for women to have jobs outside the home for the very first time

00:45:43.400 in the 19th century, no longer to be dependent on a husband or father or brother, right? And so this

00:45:49.640 great, great thing that's happened to us, that allowing us to be totally, you know, self-supporting,

00:45:55.640 independent agents, has produced all this animosity between men and women,

00:46:00.920 because the women, women feel unhappy. Women today, wherever I go, whether it's Italy or Brazil

00:46:07.160 or England or America, okay? Or Toronto, okay? The, the, the, of the upper middle class professional

00:46:12.760 women are unhappy, miserable. They want, and they don't know what, why they're unhappy. They want to

00:46:17.720 blame it on men, okay? The men must change. Men must become more like women. No, that is the wrong way to

00:46:24.920 go, okay? It's when men are men, okay? And understand themselves as men, are secure as men. Then you're

00:46:31.160 going to be happier. Yeah, well, there's nothing more dangerous than a weak man. Yeah, absolutely,

00:46:35.800 okay? Especially all these quizlings, okay? Spouting feminist rhetoric when I hear that, okay? It makes

00:46:40.760 me sick. But here's the point. Men and women have never worked side by side, ever. Maybe on the farms,

00:46:47.400 okay? When you were like, maybe one person's in the potato field, the other one's over here in the

00:46:50.440 tomatoes or whatever, okay? You, you, you had, you had families working, working side by side,

00:46:56.040 exhausted with each other. No time to have any clash of this. It was a collaborative effort on,

00:47:01.080 on farms and so on. Never in all of human history have men and women been working side by side. And

00:47:07.160 women are now the pressure about Silicon Valley. They're all so sexist. Oh, they, they, they, they don't

00:47:12.760 allow women in and so on. The men are being men in Silicon Valley, all right? And so on. And the women,

00:47:17.160 especially the engineers. And the women are demanding that you, oh, this is terrible. You're

00:47:20.760 being sick. Maybe the sexes, okay, have their own particular form of rhetoric, their own particular

00:47:26.040 form of, you know, of identity, okay? Maybe, okay, we need to re, re, re, re examine, okay, this business

00:47:31.720 about, you know, the, the, maybe we have to perhaps accept some degree of tension and conflict between the

00:47:37.480 sexes, okay, in, in a work environment. I don't mean harassment. I'm talking, I'm talking about women

00:47:42.840 feeling disrespected how somehow they, with their opinions when they express them, okay, are not

00:47:47.400 taken seriously. Or, or the, or even Hillary Clinton is complaining, oh, when a woman, a woman writes

00:47:52.120 something online, she's attacked immediately and so on. Well, everyone's attacked online. What are

00:47:56.760 you talking about? The world is tough. The world is competitive, okay? Identity is honed, okay, by conflict.

00:48:02.520 The idea that there should be no conflict, that we have to be in this bath, okay, of approbation.

00:48:07.160 Yes. Well, that's the devouring mother. It's infantile. That's right. It's absolutely infantile.

00:48:12.360 I mean, okay, so a couple of things there. Well, the first thing is, is that the agreeableness trait

00:48:17.560 that divides men and women most, there's three things that divide women and men most particularly

00:48:22.120 from the psychometric perspective. One is that women are more agreeable than men. And so that seems to be

00:48:27.800 the primary maternal dimension, as far as I can tell. It's associated with a desire to avoid conflict,

00:48:33.800 but it's, it's associated with interpersonal closeness, compassion, politeness. Women are

00:48:38.360 reliably higher than men, especially in the Scandinavian countries and in the countries

00:48:42.520 where egalitarianism has progressed the farthest. So that's where the difference is maximized,

00:48:47.800 which is one of the things James Damore pointed out quite correctly in his infamous Google memo. Okay,

00:48:52.920 women are higher in negative emotions. So that's anxiety and emotional pain. That, that difference is

00:48:57.880 approximately the same size. And again, that maximizes in egalitarian societies, which is extremely

00:49:03.640 interesting. And then the biggest difference is the difference in interest between people and

00:49:08.120 things. And so women are more interested in people and men are more interested in things,

00:49:12.200 which goes along quite nicely with your car anecdote. But the thing about men interacting with

00:49:18.760 men, again, is that it isn't that they respect each other's viewpoints. That's not exactly right.

00:49:23.320 What happens with a man, and I know a lot of men that I would regard as, as remarkably tough people,

00:49:29.880 for one reason or another. And everything you do with them is a form of combat. Like,

00:49:34.600 if you want your viewpoint taken seriously, often you have to yell them down. And like,

00:49:39.480 they're not going to stop talking unless you start talking over them, you know. And it's,

00:49:43.080 it's not like men are automatically giving respect to other men, because that just doesn't happen.

00:49:47.720 It's that the combat is there, and it's expected. And one of the problems, and so this is part of the

00:49:54.120 reason why I think men are bailing out of so much of academia, and maybe the academic world in general,

00:49:59.800 and maybe the world in general, is that men actually don't have any idea how to compete with women.

00:50:05.800 Because the problem is, is that if you unleash yourself completely, then you're an absolute

00:50:11.160 bully. And there's no doubt about that, because if men unleash themselves on other men, that can be

00:50:16.600 pretty goddamn brutal, especially for the men that are really tough. And so that just doesn't happen with

00:50:21.400 women ever. But, so you can't unleash yourself completely. If you win, you're a bully. If you

00:50:27.400 lose, well, you're just bloody pathetic. So how the hell are you supposed to play a game like that?

00:50:32.200 You know, so in, I've worked with lots of women in law firms, in Canada, for example, and high

00:50:38.120 achieving women, like really remarkable people, I would say. And they're often nonplussed, I would say,

00:50:44.280 by the attitude of the men in the law firm, because they would like to see everyone pulling together,

00:50:49.080 because they're all part of the same team. Whereas the men are like at each other's throats, in a

00:50:54.680 cooperative way, because they want the law firm to succeed, but they want to be the person who's at

00:51:00.280 the top of the success hierarchy, right? So, and that doesn't jive well with the more competitive or

00:51:06.840 cooperative ethos that's part and parcel of agreeableness. And so, we don't really have any

00:51:12.440 idea how to integrate male and female dominance hierarchies. Exactly. Exactly. That's exactly

00:51:17.160 right. This is why I love this show, Real Housewives, which is where Boris Adam scorns. And just last

00:51:23.640 night, okay, I was watching one, an episode, all right, where the women were at each other, okay,

00:51:27.720 at a party and recounting, but I said this to you, but you said this to me. And the men got together

00:51:34.280 there and said, well, this is the way they communicate, you know, with each other. And, you know,

00:51:37.640 men, we men, okay, just we'll have a fist fight and ten minutes later, we're going to have a beer at

00:51:43.880 the bar next to each other. And so, and I have observed that my entire life. My daughter used

00:51:49.800 to be really irritated about that because she, like most people, was the target of feminine

00:51:58.120 conspiratorial bullying. She's no pushover, my daughter, so it wasn't like this was a continual

00:52:03.480 thing or that she didn't know what to do about it. But she had observed these girls conspiring

00:52:08.920 against her and then blackening her name on Facebook, which is part and parcel of the typical

00:52:14.040 female bullying routine, which is often reputation demolition, right, that there's a good literature

00:52:19.240 on that. And then she'd watch what would happen if my brother or my son would have a dispute with his

00:52:25.720 friends, you know, and maybe they were drinking and there was a dispute, they'd have a fight and then

00:52:29.000 the next day they were friends again. And that's another thing that's strange is that, like,

00:52:32.840 men have a way of bringing a conflict to a head and resolving it, right? And that, it isn't obvious

00:52:39.080 to me that women have that same, perhaps you might call it a luxury, but it's also the case that men

00:52:44.440 don't know what to do when they get into a conflict with a woman, because what the hell are you supposed

00:52:48.280 to do, you know? Mostly what you're supposed to do is avoid it and... Well, I've seen, you know, I don't

00:52:55.320 know whether this crosses into other countries, but that there's a certain kind of taunting and teasing

00:53:00.040 that men and boys do with each other that toughens them, okay, and where they don't, they don't take

00:53:04.360 things seriously. But a girl's feelings become extremely hurt if she hears something that is

00:53:08.920 very tough, you know, like sarcastic against her. So, I mean, I do feel that there are profound

00:53:14.680 differences between the sexes in terms of emotions, in terms of communication patterns. You know,

00:53:19.640 my father used to say that he could never follow women's conversations. He said, he said,

00:53:23.960 women don't even finish their finished sentences. The women understand immediately what the other

00:53:28.680 woman is saying, okay? And the way women tend to be more interested or have been traditionally more

00:53:35.320 interested in soap operas, it's not just that the women were home without jobs. It's that, honestly,

00:53:39.800 I believe that soap opera does reflect, does mirror the way women talk to each other. There's

00:53:44.840 these communication patterns that have been built up through women, the world of women, okay,

00:53:49.000 which was, it made sense there was a division of labor, okay? It wasn't sexism against women that

00:53:54.520 there was a division of labor. The men went off to hunt and did the dangerous things. The women

00:53:58.120 stayed around the hearth because you had pregnant women, nursing women, older women, okay, they were

00:54:02.840 cooking and so on. So, I feel that these communication patterns that we're talking about have been built up,

00:54:07.160 okay, over the centuries. And the men had to toughen each other, okay, to go out. You know, the hunting

00:54:12.760 parties of Native Americans, you know, they could be gone for two weeks when the temperature was below zero,

00:54:17.800 okay? Many of them died, okay? You know, the idea that somehow, oh, any kind of separation of the sexes

00:54:23.640 or different spheres of the sexes is inherently sexist. And, yeah, and inherently driven by a power

00:54:29.480 dynamic. The answer to all of this, okay, everything that we're talking about, okay, is education into

00:54:36.200 early history, okay? And until you, until people understand the Stone Age, the nomadic period, the agrarian

00:54:42.200 era, and the, and how culture, how civilization built up, okay? In Mesopotamia, the great irrigation

00:54:48.600 projects where, or in, or in Egypt, okay, where you had for the first centralized government authority

00:54:54.120 became necessary, okay, to master these, these, you know, you had a situation where an environmentally,

00:55:00.040 uh, you know, uh, you know, difficult situation like the deserts of Mesopotamia or, or the, the peculiar

00:55:06.680 character of, of Egyptian geography where you can only have a little, tiny, fertile line along the

00:55:11.960 edges of the Nile, okay? And otherwise desert landscape. So the, this, this civilization and

00:55:17.160 authority, okay, okay, right, as not necessarily about power grabbing, but about organization to achieve

00:55:25.400 something for the good of the people as a whole. Yeah, see, well, see, that's, well, that's exactly the

00:55:30.760 symbolism of the, of the great father. By reducing all hierarchy to, to power, okay, and, and selfish

00:55:37.080 power, okay, is, it is utterly naive, it's ignorant, right? So I, I say education has to be totally

00:55:43.400 reconstituted, including public education, to begin in the most distant past, so that, so our young

00:55:48.840 people today, who know nothing about how the, how the world was created that they inhabit, okay, can

00:55:53.400 understand, okay, what, what marvelous, you know, technological paradise they live in, and it's the product of

00:55:59.320 capitalism, it's the product, product of individual innovation, it's the product, most of it's the

00:56:03.320 product of, of, of a Western tradition that everyone wants to trash now, etc. If you begin in the past

00:56:08.040 and show, and also talk about war, because, with the, because, with the war is the one thing that wakes

00:56:12.520 people up, okay, as, as we see. War is the reality principle. And as we may see. Yes, okay, war is the reality principle.

00:56:18.360 My father and all, and five of my uncles went to World War II, you know, and, and, and, and, and, and, and my, you know, my father

00:56:23.480 was, was, was part of the, the force that landed in Japan, okay, as a, you know, he was a paratrooper.

00:56:29.320 Um, you know, at the, at the time of the Japanese surrender, okay, and all, you know, and, and my,

00:56:33.800 a couple uncles got shot up, and so on. When you have the reality of war, when people see the reality

00:56:38.760 of the horrors of war, Berlin burned, you know, to, to a crisp, and, and so on, you know, starvation, okay,

00:56:45.320 then you understand, okay, this marvelous mechanism that brings water, you know, to, to the, to the kitchen,

00:56:50.280 and when you flip on a light, the electricity, the electricity comes out.

00:56:53.320 I know, well, for me, like, and I suppose it's because I have somewhat of a depressive temperament,

00:56:57.800 I mean, one thing that staggers me on a consistent basis is the fact that anything ever works.

00:57:03.720 I mean, because it's so unlikely, you know, to, to, to be in a situation where our electronic

00:57:08.440 communications work, where our, where our electric grid works, and it works all the time, right,

00:57:13.560 it works a hundred percent of the time, and the reason for that is that there are mostly men out there

00:57:18.600 who are breaking themselves into pieces, repairing this thing, which just falls apart all the time.

00:57:24.040 Absolutely, I said this in the monk debate, okay, in Toronto several years ago,

00:57:27.880 I said that there's the invisible, all these, these, these, you know, these elitist, you know,

00:57:32.920 professors sneering at men, it's men who are maintaining everything around us, okay,

00:57:38.280 this invisible army, okay, which, which feminists don't notice, right, nothing would work for the men.

00:57:43.320 Or regard, regard as oppressive, which is, you know, and like a professor is someone who's,

00:57:48.440 who's standing on a hill surrounded by a wall, which is surrounded by another wall,

00:57:52.200 which is surrounded by another wall, like it's walls all the way down, who stands up there and

00:57:56.280 says, I'm brave and independent. It's like, you've got this protected area that's so unlikely,

00:58:01.640 it's so absolutely unlikely, and the fact that people aren't on their knees in gratitude all

00:58:06.600 the time for the fact that we have central heating and air conditioning and, and pure water and reliable

00:58:11.960 food, it's just, it's so, it is, it's absolutely unbelievable.

00:58:15.720 I mean, people used to die for the, the water supply, okay, with, with, with,

00:58:18.920 it was contaminated with cholera, for heaven's sakes, right, people don't understand, okay,

00:58:22.280 they'd have clean water, fresh milk, fresh orange juice, all of these things, these are marvelous.

00:58:26.920 And all of the time.

00:58:27.720 All of the time.

00:58:28.360 It, it, and that, Western culture is, is heading, okay, because, because we are so dependent on this,

00:58:33.640 on this invisible infrastructure, we're heading for an absolute catastrophe when jihadists figure out

00:58:39.960 how to paralyze the power grid. The entire culture will be, be chaotic. You'll have mobs in the street,

00:58:46.920 okay, and within three days, okay, when, so suddenly the, the food supply is interrupted,

00:58:51.160 and there's no, like, there's no, no way to communicate. They'll be like a robber. I mean,

00:58:54.760 that, that is the way Western culture is going to collapse, okay, and it, it won't take much.

00:58:59.080 It'll just be a few days. Single points of failure.

00:59:00.760 Yeah, it, because we are so interconnected, and now we are so, so, so dependent on communications

00:59:06.440 and computers. The, the, the, the, I've, I've, I've, I used to predict for years there'll be an

00:59:10.760 asteroid hitting there. Yeah, well, do you, do you know how the solar flares work?

00:59:16.120 So back in, this happens about once every century, so back about 1880, and I, I don't remember the

00:59:21.560 exact year, there was a significant enough solar flare, so that produces an electromagnetic pulse,

00:59:26.680 like a hydrogen bomb, because the sun is a hydrogen bomb, and electromagnetic pulse will

00:59:31.640 emerge from the sun, and wave across the earth, and it produces huge spikes in, in electrical,

00:59:37.080 electrical current along anything that's electronic, and it'll burn them out. It let, it lit telegraph

00:59:41.960 operators on fire in the 1800s, and one of those things took out the Quebec power grid in 1985,

00:59:47.640 and knocked out the whole northeast corridor, and so they, they figure those things are about one in a

00:59:51.880 century event, but those single, I have, my brother-in-law, who's a very smart guy, he designed

00:59:57.240 the chip in the iPhone, we were talking about political issues the last time I went and saw him

01:00:01.960 in San Francisco, and his notion was that all that the government should be doing right now is stress

01:00:07.080 testing our infrastructure the same way they stress test the banks, because we're so full of these

01:00:11.640 single points of failure that, and I think you're absolutely right, luckily we've been, um, what would you

01:00:16.600 call invaded by stupid terrorists instead of smart terrorists, because a smart terrorist could do

01:00:22.120 an unbelievable amount of damage in a very short period of time, so, and it's just God's good

01:00:27.240 graces that that hasn't happened yet, and so. Yeah, and then what will happen is that it's the men,

01:00:32.920 okay, the men will reconstruct civilization, while the women cower in the houses, and have the men go out

01:00:39.480 and do all the dirty work, that's what's going to happen again, only men will, will bring civilization back

01:00:43.720 again. So what, okay, so now a couple of things, so the, the universities, I mean, I've proposed,

01:00:51.480 although it's something that's probably beyond my power, that what should happen is that the

01:00:55.960 universities, the real content of the universities should be stolen back from the universities,

01:01:00.120 because they're not making use of their intellectual property, and that something should be started

01:01:03.960 online that would constitute a genuine university. The problem is the accreditation issue, but I don't

01:01:09.160 think that's an unsolvable problem, but do you see, like all these people who have these postmodern

01:01:15.880 neo-Marxist agendas are completely embedded inside the universities, right? Absolutely, and, and, and the

01:01:21.400 point is, over, over the last 25 years, I have received constant mail from people dropping out of the

01:01:26.840 graduate schools, right, and, and, or, or giving up altogether on any idea of being a college professor,

01:01:31.480 okay, so what's happened is that the most talented and independent thinking people, okay, have avoided in the

01:01:36.280 school, so we're, we're now, what, who we have are the compliant, the servile, okay, the people who are

01:01:41.160 currently in the university, and, and hiring their successors, okay, are, are, are, are maleducated

01:01:46.120 themselves, okay, I mean, I, I, I, one of the first letters I received in the early 90s, I'll never forget it,

01:01:51.160 from a woman who, uh, was now painting houses in Missouri, and said she had been part of the comparative

01:01:56.840 literature graduate program at, uh, you know, at Berkeley, and that she finally had to drop out, because she said

01:02:03.320 every time she would express enthusiasm for what they were reading, the, the, the people looked at

01:02:09.960 her as if she had somehow created an offense, in other, in other words, enthusiasm for art,

01:02:15.240 I mean, the very things you need as a teacher in the classroom, okay, were being trained out, okay,

01:02:21.080 yeah, well, the thing is, if you respect art and literature, that means that you implicitly accept

01:02:27.160 a hierarchy of quality, right, and that, of course, contradicts the fundamental tenets of the postmodern

01:02:32.200 doctrine, which is that there are no hierarchies of quality, and, you know, you, you talked a little

01:02:37.000 bit earlier about the, the idea that, you referred again to the idea that everything is associated

01:02:42.440 with power, and that's, that's the thing that I can't, that's, that's the thing that I can't help

01:02:46.440 but associate with, with a kind of personality pathology, like, you know, from a psychometric

01:02:51.960 perspective, the best predictors of long-term success in our society are intelligence, IQ, which you can

01:02:57.960 measure very accurately, and trait conscientiousness, which actually is a real testament to the

01:03:02.680 culture, right, because what you'd hope is that the smart people who work hard are the people who

01:03:06.920 advance, it, not, it isn't like they deserve it exactly, that isn't what I mean, it's that if the

01:03:11.960 culture is harnessing the productive power of individuals properly, then it should differentially

01:03:17.240 reward people who are smart and conscientious, because they're going to do a bunch of really

01:03:20.600 interesting work for the rest of us, and that that's very well-established finding, it's, it's as good as any

01:03:25.880 finding in the social sciences, but despite that, and despite the fact that everything works, which

01:03:31.640 is a goddamn miracle of sorts, there is this consistent story that we live in a patriarchy,

01:03:38.200 that it's only oppressive, that it's done nothing but oppress women since the beginning of time,

01:03:42.200 which is also something that just boggles my mind, you know, like, I know that...

01:03:46.440 Men have sacrificed for women and children, including their lives, okay, for thousands of years,

01:03:52.040 workers, you know, and yes, there's been brutality, but the brutality is in the minority, okay,

01:03:56.040 yes, this, this, this sick, I, the portrayal of human history is nothing but male oppression

01:04:02.120 and female victimage, okay, this, this is a way to, to permanently ensure the infantilization of women,

01:04:07.080 yes, absolutely, yes, well, and you know, there, you can even make the case from a purely logical

01:04:11.720 perspective, so, so here's an interesting, here's an interesting fact, so most of the people who abused

01:04:18.360 their children were abused as children, but most of the people who were abused as children don't

01:04:25.080 abuse their children, right, so if you look at the population of abusers, they were all abused,

01:04:29.960 so you can say abuse causes abuse, but that's, that's not a good idea, because you have a specific

01:04:35.080 sample there, right, it's not a random sample, what happens is that abuse dampens out over the

01:04:40.360 centuries, it doesn't propagate itself, and that's obvious, because if there was, if, if the hypothesis

01:04:46.520 of essential male, male tyranny was true, it would spread exponentially through the population in

01:04:51.320 like three generations, and there wouldn't be an exception at all, and so what happens is, even

01:04:55.880 when there is a tilt towards tyranny, let's say, in the family, or even in the society, that regresses

01:05:01.320 back to something that's far more benign, very, very rapidly, and you see this, so, to me, one of the

01:05:08.520 biggest unexamined issues, is the transition from the great extended family of old, okay, into the nuclear

01:05:15.160 family, okay, so I, I, I, and I do feel that Freud is the best analyst of the particular kind of

01:05:20.680 claustrophobic cell of, of the modern nuclear family, it could be that human being, it could be

01:05:26.520 that human beings were never intended, okay, to be, to be trapped in a house just with their parents,

01:05:30.520 that they, they extended families, you had your aunts, and, and, you know, and grandparents, and, and, and

01:05:35.960 cousins, all of whom helped form your identity, okay, so one, one had, one's identity was, was, is a member of a

01:05:42.040 community, right, rather than in this, like, hothouse environment, so I think that a lot of current

01:05:46.680 issues, including, um, this sudden spate of transgender claims, and so on, that, a, a lot of these things

01:05:52.840 are coming from, um, this unstable of, in, in, in, in cell, it's a truly a prison cell, of a, of a nuclear

01:06:00.040 family, two parents, perhaps, cannot give all the knowledge of life, okay, to, to, to the young, and so I, I, I think

01:06:06.520 there are all kinds of, of, of, um, sexual issues, you know, in, in, uh, that, that are generated by it,

01:06:11.720 but with the, uh, you know, psychology today, um, is, uh, is, uh, is now, it's simply a mat, a, a, a, a practical

01:06:17.880 matter, people come in, uh, you know, the psychologist in, in, in the United States deals with your, your

01:06:23.160 present problem, let's not go into the distant past, okay, let's just deal with our present problem,

01:06:27.640 which are, which obviously we have forms of communication, we need to, like, fix this, and then you'll be fine, okay,

01:06:32.760 as a consequence, there is a complete absence of any kind of analysis of, of your experiences as a

01:06:38.840 child, with your parents, you know, with, with your siblings, and so on, how that might relate to your

01:06:43.720 current sexual identity issues, whether it's transgender, or whether it's homosexuality, it is

01:06:48.840 impossible, you cannot possibly ask, okay, about any genesis of homosexuality today, okay, because that

01:06:54.040 is automatically defined as homophobic, well, excuse me, every single, as an openly gay, you know, the person

01:07:00.120 myself, I, every gay person I know, okay, there's some story there, okay, it seems to be in childhood,

01:07:06.040 not only that, there's a strange sim, you know, similarity of the storylines of all of my friends

01:07:10.760 who are gay, okay, there's the same pattern that had to do with blurred border lines, in, in, in,

01:07:15.560 between a, a son and his mother, and so on, I'm not blaming the mother, okay, I'm not blaming the mother

01:07:19.960 at all, okay, what I, what I, I, I see is a dynamic going on in the bourgeois house of the nuclear family, okay,

01:07:25.320 where you had sometimes a, a distant father, okay, a father who was present, but, but not, not really

01:07:30.760 engaged, and a mother who, who, who, who, who made the son her companion in some way, often the mother

01:07:36.840 has great imagination, and flair, and they had a shared thing, and that, I mean, I, I, the idea that

01:07:41.480 homosexuality has nothing whatever to do, okay, with your family life is nonsense, I believe, well, it's

01:07:46.840 also completely, well, that's another thing, and I got a lot of trouble in Canada for my opposition to

01:07:52.680 Bill C-16, which was a bill that had to do with transgender rights, and I didn't really give

01:07:56.680 a damn about the transgender right issue, that had nothing to do with it, what bothered me was

01:08:01.160 that there was an issue of compelled speech, because you were required by the Ontario Human

01:08:05.320 Rights Commission to use the pronouns that, of the person's choice, right, otherwise...

01:08:09.880 And that is absolutely Orwellian, that is, that is, that is absolutely intolerable, you know,

01:08:14.760 I, I have said, I said years ago, okay, that my book, Sexual Personae, which was like a 700 page book,

01:08:19.480 I said that is the biggest sex change in history, because I, okay, with my transgender issues,

01:08:24.600 all right, look to the magnificent construction of English, okay, it was the English language,

01:08:31.080 okay, that I seized on to gain my identity and my power as a person, all right, and therefore,

01:08:37.480 any intrusion into English, someone trying to tell me how to use English, this great gift, okay,

01:08:43.400 to me, this is absolutely obscene and evil, okay, for any government to try to dictate to us how we're going

01:08:49.160 to use this magnificent instrument of English. Yes, absolutely, and I, that was for me the

01:08:54.280 breaking point, because I believed, well, and I think that that's associated with the idea of the

01:08:58.600 Logos in the West, you know, because that's a deep mythological idea, that the Logos is the thing

01:09:03.400 that brings order out of chaos through communicative speech, and that that's tightly aligned with your

01:09:09.800 soul, and I don't care if you're an atheist or a believer, it doesn't matter, it's still the right

01:09:13.960 language, and that no one has any right whatsoever, under any circumstances, to trespass against that,

01:09:19.560 and so, but that's okay, because that's law in Canada now, and so, but, okay, so now back to your,

01:09:25.480 let's see, you were making a point about. Where's my, oh, here, yeah, you want to go?

01:09:32.360 I know we would agree. Oh, yes, okay, because it's interesting to look at these things from,

01:09:37.480 obviously, from multiple perspectives, which is another thing ideologues don't do,

01:09:41.400 right, because for them, everything is one cause, there's one, that's how you can tell when you're

01:09:45.400 dealing with someone who's ideologically possessed, is they make everything attributable to a single

01:09:50.040 cause, like power, so, but, so one of the things that's happened with the nuclear family that's

01:09:54.600 quite interesting, too, is that parents are older, and they, and they have fewer children,

01:10:00.760 so you could imagine that that hothouse environment, in some sense, has been exaggerated for a bunch of

01:10:06.920 reasons, one is, well, your child is a lot more valuable to you, if you're older, and you only

01:10:12.520 have one or two, right, because you're not going to get another chance that, first of all, you might

01:10:16.840 have had some trouble having the child to begin with, and you're not going to get another chance,

01:10:21.240 so you've got all your eggs are in one basket, so to speak, and then, of course, children don't have

01:10:26.760 the number of siblings they used to have, and one of the things that's really useful about having

01:10:31.400 siblings is that they keep you in your place, right, they, they're primary socialization agents,

01:10:36.440 and, I mean, that can be brutal, and that's reflected, say, in the story of Cain and Abel,

01:10:40.760 you know, that that internal household dynamic with siblings can be, can really become murderous,

01:10:45.240 and that has to be kept under control, but I think the, the, the hothouse flower person who's, who's

01:10:52.120 incapable of tolerating any jibes or any, or any testing, any dominance hierarchy testing of the

01:10:57.880 sort that you said that men do, part of that's the consequence of being raised by older parents

01:11:02.680 who have excess resources, who have no siblings, because the child is then, of course, special,

01:11:08.680 and that specialness, well, there seems to be an inverse relationship between that specialness

01:11:14.680 that's protected and the person's robustness and resilience, and so, and then that's cotton to,

01:11:19.880 or not cotton to, that's, that's, uh, uh, pandered to by the universities, which insist upon

01:11:27.320 setting up a situation where no one is ever offended by anything, any of the time, and that's

01:11:32.520 something I also can't understand at all, because, let me just say, that's a huge point you just made,

01:11:36.440 okay, because it's the upper middle class of the professional class, okay, who postpones having

01:11:42.520 the children, okay, because they go to law school, they go to medical school, and they, and they have

01:11:47.320 the children after they're, they're, they're settled, okay, in, in, in a job, okay, so they're the ones,

01:11:52.040 okay, who have, who have injected this, this, this hypersensitive bourgeois, you know, code into the

01:11:58.360 universities, and my, my parents were 20 when they married, and 21 when they had me, okay, my father was,

01:12:04.840 uh, um, you know, uh, went, went to college on the GI Bill, getting out of, out of World War II,

01:12:09.400 so, when I was born, my father was still in college, and was sweeping, you know, floors, and so on,

01:12:14.760 I am the product of young parents, and nature wants, actually, young parents, right, because,

01:12:21.480 because pregnancy is, is, is quicker, it's safer, okay, and so on, and my parents had the energy,

01:12:26.200 okay, to, um, you know, this youthful energy, that can-do spirit that came out of World War II,

01:12:30.920 and so on, I'm a product of that, then, then, my only other sibling was born 14 years later, okay,

01:12:37.560 my father, at this point, was a college professor, okay, all right, so she had completely different

01:12:41.880 parents than, than I did, so she, she has very excellent manners, and so on, she's completely

01:12:46.120 different, okay, all right, and I, I have all this, like, the energy, I mean, my parents were just a lot

01:12:50.920 of their teens, okay, so now, today, we have this situation, no, and it's considered heresy to raise

01:12:56.040 this issue, okay, that you have, have young women are told, okay, there's one future for you, you are

01:13:01.080 a future leader, okay, you must, you must move forward, okay, four years of college, and then, and then,

01:13:06.120 perhaps it was a professional class, and it's not, all right, so it, it, it, it, it may be the women,

01:13:10.440 young women's bodies are signaling, okay, that they want to be another's, maybe, maybe, maybe,

01:13:15.960 maybe there are signals coming from the body, right, of maybe not wanting this, this, this, this system

01:13:22.440 of education that was devised for men, okay, this being funneled along, channeled along in this

01:13:27.560 mechanism, all right, so young women, you know, feel unhappy, they don't know why, they feel, they, they,

01:13:32.360 they have no sense of identity, they, if they, if they, if they want to marry and drop out of college,

01:13:37.000 right, and have, have a baby, they will be treated as traitors to their class, what, you are a future leader,

01:13:42.520 what, have a baby, only working class women would do that, okay, no, I find working class women, okay,

01:13:48.920 in general, okay, far more rounded as personalities, okay, they express themselves forcefully, they have body language

01:13:56.280 that takes up space, okay, a man says something to them in the street, they're right back in their face, and so on,

01:14:01.160 it is the bourgeois girls, okay, who are taught to, they're, they're special, okay, who have to postpone actual life, okay,

01:14:07.880 for, for all these years, you see, these, these are the girls who are, who, who misjudge the fraternity parties setting,

01:14:13.800 these are the girls who, like, run for parental protection and hand-holding on, on, on, on the, on the committee

01:14:19.320 investigating what went wrong on their date, and so on, so forth, so, so, yes, I, I think that what you, that you have located,

01:14:24.680 okay, that's very interesting, the idea that the, that these, these young girls, okay, who are so sensitive, okay,

01:14:30.840 in college, so unable to handle their sex life, are the product of older parents, because they went through

01:14:35.880 the professional career track, right, yes, and they are, they have not had the, you know, the experience

01:14:41.480 of the, you know, competitiveness, you know, and, and, and teasing of other siblings, and they don't know how to,

01:14:47.080 well, also, you know, the thing about young parents is they don't care as much as older parents,

01:14:51.880 and that actually turns out to be better, because what you really want for your children is minimum

01:14:57.480 necessary intervention, right, and, and the, the developmental literature is actually quite clear

01:15:01.800 on this, so, if you're at home with your child, what, the best role that you can play is to be there,

01:15:07.560 but not to be interacting with the child all the time, the child should be off doing whatever it is

01:15:11.480 the children do, which generally is playing with other children, right, without it being mediated,

01:15:16.120 also, by screens and, and, and technology, because that's how they formulate their identity,

01:15:20.840 and that's how they learn to play joint games with other people, and the parent is supposed

01:15:24.760 to be there as a recourse for the child, when they go out a little bit farther than they can tolerate,

01:15:29.880 and they have to come back and get some security, and so, but that isn't, that's especially not what

01:15:34.360 happens to single children, because they're basically raised as miniature adults, so, and I wonder too,

01:15:39.560 like, how much of the antipathy towards, these are dark musings, and I would say, how much of the antipathy

01:15:46.280 towards men that's being generated by, say, college-age women is deep repugnance for the role

01:15:52.680 that they've been designed, and a disappointment with the men, for who, you know, like, you think of

01:15:57.240 those, is it Carpathian, or, or, I can't remember the culture, the basic marital routine was to ride into

01:16:08.360 the village and grab the bride and run away with her on a horse, right, it's like the, like the motorcycle

01:16:14.280 gang member who rips the two naive woman out of, girl out of the bosom of her family, you know.

01:16:19.640 Like the Sabine women, it's like an ancient myth, yeah, there used to be bride stealing, it was quite,

01:16:24.440 quite widespread. Right, well, so I kind of wonder if part of the reason that modern university-age

01:16:29.400 women aren't so, aren't so angry is because that fundamental feminine role is actually being denied

01:16:35.400 to them, and they're, they're objecting to that at a really, really fundamental level, like a level of, of

01:16:41.000 primitive outrage at, well, because... Well, what's happened is the chaos that my generation

01:16:46.360 of the 1960s bequeathed through the sexual revolution. I went, when I arrived in college in 1964,

01:16:52.840 the colleges were still acting in local parentis in place of the parent. So my dormitory,

01:16:59.080 all women's dormitory, we women had to sign in at 11 o'clock at night. The men could run free the

01:17:04.680 entire night. So it was my generation of women that rose up and said, give us the same freedom

01:17:10.040 as men have. And the colleges replied, no, the world is dangerous, you could be raped, we have to

01:17:16.680 protect you against rape. And what we said, okay, was give us the freedom to risk rape, okay. And so

01:17:23.320 that what, today's women don't understand, it's a freedom that you want, it's the same freedom that

01:17:28.680 gay men have. When they go and they pick up a stranger someplace, they know it's dangerous, they know

01:17:33.160 they could end up beaten up or killed, okay, but they find it hot. If you want freedom, if you want

01:17:38.200 equality, okay, then you have to start behaving like a man. So what we did is we gave freedom to

01:17:44.840 these young women for several generations, but my generation had been raised in a far more resilient

01:17:50.920 and robust culture, okay. We had the strength, okay, to know what we wanted and to fight for what we wanted.

01:17:56.920 These young women have been raised in this protective, terribly protective ways, right. So I think in some

01:18:02.040 strange, you know, fashion that all these demands for intrusion from these, you know, Stalinist

01:18:10.120 committees, sexual, you know, investigating dates and so on, it's a way to re-institute, okay, the rules

01:18:16.600 that my generation threw out the window. So I think these young women are desperate, not only that,

01:18:21.160 but I have spoken out very strongly in, you know, in a piece I wrote for Time Magazine, that is in my most

01:18:27.080 recent book, that the raising the drinking age in this country, okay, from 18 to 21, okay, has had a

01:18:33.160 direct result, okay, in these disasters of binge drinking fraternity parties. Because to let college

01:18:40.760 students, the way we could, go out as freshmen, have a beer, sit in a protected adult environment, learn how to

01:18:47.240 go out of discourse with the opposite sex, in a safe, you know, environment, right, and so on.

01:18:53.320 And you, and now today, okay, because of the stupid rule that young people can't even buy a drink, okay,

01:18:58.920 you know, in a bar until they're 21, we have these fraternity parties that are like, it's the caveman era.

01:19:04.600 Well, of course, in this modern age, this advantages men, okay, men want to hook up, men want to have sex,

01:19:10.920 women don't understand what men want, you know, women are like put out because they're hoping that maybe the

01:19:15.640 man will continue to be interested in them, okay, the man just wants experience, okay,

01:19:19.320 that the hormones drive toward, toward, to me, I've theorized, okay, that the, you know, that the sex

01:19:25.640 drive in men is intertwined with, with hunting pursuit, okay, and so on. I feel absolutely, this is what

01:19:31.400 women don't understand, okay, and if women understood what I understand from my transgender

01:19:36.120 perspective, all right, these women on the streets, okay, you know, I, you know, I'm obviously, you know,

01:19:41.480 Madonna, you know, admirer, and, you know, I, and I, I, I support pornography and prostitution,

01:19:47.080 so I don't want what I'm, it's about to say to seem conservative, is it, it isn't, okay,

01:19:50.600 what I'm saying is, the women on the street, young women, okay, who are about, who are jogging,

01:19:55.960 okay, with no bra on, okay, short shorts, and have, and have earbuds in their ears, okay,

01:20:01.800 just jogging along, like as I said, these women do not understand the nature of the human mind,

01:20:07.160 they do not understand the nature of psychosis, okay, and this intertwining that I'm talking about,

01:20:11.640 okay, of, of the hunt, the hunt and pursuit thing, okay, they're triggering a hunt thing,

01:20:16.920 just what, what, what you, what you, what you, you have talked about in terms of the zebra herd,

01:20:21.880 okay, they are triggering the hunt, okay, impulse, okay, in psychotic men, okay, to have, here,

01:20:29.560 there goes a very appetizing and, and, and totally oblivious animal, okay, bouncing along here, okay,

01:20:35.800 and so on, and, and, and we, we're in a period now where psychosis is not understood at all, okay,

01:20:40.040 and yet, young women have had, have had no exposure to movies like Psycho, okay, and the,

01:20:46.600 the, the, you know, the kind of, the rapist serial murderer thing and so on, the, the kind of strange

01:20:51.800 dynamic that has to do with the, with the assault on the, on the mother imago, you know, in the, in the,

01:20:56.600 in the mind of the psychotic, but I think there's an incredible naivete, these young women are emerging

01:21:01.240 and going to college and, in, in, in this, like, incredible Dionysian environment of, you know, of,

01:21:07.000 of a sec, orgiastic sexual experience in fraternity houses, they're completely unprepared for it, right,

01:21:12.760 and, and, and so you're getting all this outrage, so feminist rhetoric has gotten more and more extreme

01:21:17.720 in this portrayal of men as evil, but in fact, okay, what, what we have is a chaos, is a, is a,

01:21:22.360 is a chaos in the sexual realm. The, the, the girls have not been told anything real, I mean,

01:21:28.280 in, in, in terms of, of biological substratum to sexual activity. No, and there's full of lies about

01:21:32.840 what constitutes consent, too. Exactly. And it's become something that's essentially portrayed

01:21:38.280 linguistically as a sequence of progressive contracts, which, you know, is, it's, well, I think,

01:21:44.120 you know, I've thought for a while that we're living in the delusional fantasy of a naive 13-year-old

01:21:49.000 girl. That's basically sums up our culture, and I look at all these sexual rules that permeate the, the,

01:21:55.080 the, the academia, and I think two things. The first thing I think is, well,

01:21:59.480 I know because I was an alcohol researcher for a long time, and you know that 50% of violent crimes

01:22:05.240 are directly attributable to alcohol, so if you're murdered, there's about a 50% chance that you're

01:22:09.880 drunk, and about a 50% chance that the person who kills you is drunk, and alcohol is the only drug

01:22:15.400 that we know that actually amplifies aggression. It does that in laboratory situations, plus it's a great

01:22:20.520 disinhibitor, right? So what alcohol does is it, it doesn't make you oblivious to the future

01:22:25.480 consequences of your action, because if you ask someone who's drunk about the consequences of

01:22:29.880 something stupid, they can tell you what the consequences are. But it makes you not care,

01:22:34.920 and it does that because it's technically an anxiolytic, like, like, like barbiturates,

01:22:39.400 or like benzodiazepines, and it also has a, as a, an activating property for many people who drink,

01:22:46.200 so it's, it's a stimulant and a, and an anxiolytic at the same time, and a very, very potent,

01:22:52.280 it's very potent for both of them, and you know, we put young people together and douse them in alcohol,

01:22:57.800 right, at the binge drinking level, and then, which also interferes with memory consolidation,

01:23:02.280 which of course makes things much more complex, and then we're surprised when there are sexual

01:23:06.520 misadventures, and you know, and then it's also attributed almost purely to the predatory element

01:23:12.040 that's, that's part and parcel of masculinity, but a tremendous amount of that is also naivety

01:23:17.160 and stupidity, you know, because we expect, like, 18, 18 year old guys, especially the ones that aren't,

01:23:23.480 that haven't been successful with girls, which is like 85 percent of them, because the successful men

01:23:28.040 are a very small percentage of men, the 85 percent who haven't been successful with men, or with women,

01:23:33.720 they don't know what the hell they're doing at all, right, and part of the reason they're getting

01:23:37.160 drunk is to garner up enough courage to actually make an advance, you know, and because I think

01:23:43.560 another thing that women don't understand, especially with regards to young men, is just exactly how

01:23:48.680 petrifying, attractive woman, who's of, say, somewhat higher status actually is to a young guy,

01:23:55.720 and there's lots of guys that write me constantly, and people that I've worked with, that are so terrified

01:24:00.360 of women, they can't even talk to them, it's very, very common. Well, you know, I take a very firm

01:24:05.640 position, which is that I want college administrations to stay totally out of the social lives of the

01:24:11.800 students, right, if a crime is committed, it should be reported to the police, I've been writing that

01:24:15.720 for 25 years now, all right, but, but it's not the business of any college administration to take

01:24:21.720 any notice, okay, of what the students say to each other, say to each other, as well as do with each

01:24:27.160 other, okay, I want it to totally stop, is fascism of the worst kind? Yeah, I agree, well, it's, and it's,

01:24:32.440 I think it's fascism of the worst kind, because it's an, it's a new kind of fascism, you know, it's, it's partly

01:24:39.000 generated by legislation, so like the Title IX memo that was written in 2011, I recently got a copy of that

01:24:45.240 goddamn thing, that was one polluting bit of legislation, that was, that memo basically told universities that

01:24:51.400 unless they set up a parallel court system, they were going to be denied federal funding,

01:24:54.920 unbelievable, it is absolutely unbelievable, incredible, and, and, and, and, and the leftists

01:24:59.800 are supporting this, I know, I know, it's, and this is, this shows there is no authentic campus leftism,

01:25:05.240 I'm sorry, it's a fraud, okay, I mean, you, the, the, we, the faculty should be fighting the administrations

01:25:10.680 on this, yeah, tooth and nails, fighting that federal, federal regulation of, of, you know, how we're supposed to

01:25:16.280 behave on campus? Well, how can you be so, how can you be so naive and foolish to think that taking

01:25:23.160 an organization like the university, which already has plenty to do, and forcing it to become a pseudo

01:25:30.920 legal system that parallels the legal system, could possibly be anything but utterly catastrophic,

01:25:37.400 it would mean you have to know absolutely nothing about the legal system, and about the tremendous

01:25:42.200 period of evolution that produced what's actually a stellar system, and, and an adversarial system

01:25:47.800 that protects the rights of the accused, and of the, and of the victim, and to replace that with an

01:25:52.920 ad hoc bureaucracy that has pretty much essentially the same degree of power as the court system,

01:25:58.280 with absolutely none of the training, and none of the guarantees. Absolutely. The kangaroo courts.

01:26:01.720 There are kangaroo courts. That piece that I wrote about date rape, it was in January 1991,

01:26:07.720 Newsday, got, the most controversial thing I ever wrote in my entire career,

01:26:11.480 I attacked the entire thing, and I demanded that colleges stand back and get out of the social

01:26:15.880 lives of the students, so on, and, and people, the reaction, people tried to call, they called the

01:26:20.920 president of my university, tried to get me fired, you can't believe the hysteria, okay, right?

01:26:25.880 I can believe it. Yeah, yeah, it, yeah, it, well, yes, I'm, yes, you can believe it.

01:26:28.440 I can believe it. Yeah, you can believe it, right?

01:26:29.800 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anything that where, anything that says to women, okay, that they should be responsible

01:26:36.680 for their own choices, is regarded as reactionary? Are they kidding me, okay? This is such a betrayal

01:26:43.480 of authentic feminism, in my view. Well, it's the ultimate betrayal of authentic feminism,

01:26:48.520 because it's, it, it, it's an invitation of all the things that you might be paranoid about with

01:26:54.360 regards to the patriarchy back into your life, right? It's an insistence that the most intrusive

01:26:59.320 part of the tyrannical king come and take control over the most intimate details of your life.

01:27:05.000 Incredible, absolutely incredible. And the, and the, the assumption is that that's going to make

01:27:08.840 your life better rather than worse, right? And, and, and not to mention this idea of, you know,

01:27:13.080 this, the stages of verbal consent, as if, as if, as if your impulses based in the body have anything

01:27:18.440 to do with words, and so on. I mean, that's the whole point is, you know, about sex, okay, is to abandon,

01:27:23.960 okay, that, you know, that, that part of the brain that's so, and, and, and, and entrammeled with words.

01:27:28.280 I mean, there's, there's, but you see these... It's actually a marker of, of lack of social ability

01:27:33.480 to have to do that, because if you're sophisticated, it's not like, if you're dancing with someone,

01:27:37.960 it's not like you call out the moves, right? If you have to do that, well, then you're, you're, you're,

01:27:43.320 you're more worse than a neophyte, right? You're an awkward neophyte, and anybody with any sense should get

01:27:48.760 the hell away from you. And so, if you're reduced to the point where you have to verbally negotiate every

01:27:53.880 element of, of intimate interaction, then... What a downer. Oh my God. Well, that, yes, but what a,

01:27:59.560 what an unbelievably, what would you call it, naive and pathological view of the manner in which

01:28:04.920 human beings interact. There's no sophistication in that. Well, what I'm worried about also in this

01:28:09.720 age of social media, I've noticed as a, as a teacher in the classroom, that the young people are so used

01:28:16.040 to communicating now by cell phone, okay, by iPhone, that they're losing body language and

01:28:23.640 facial expressions, okay, which I think is going to compound the problem with the, with these dating

01:28:29.240 encounters, okay, because the ability to read the, the, the human face and, and to, and to, and to read

01:28:35.400 little tiny inflections of emotion. Well, I think my generation got that from looking at great foreign

01:28:41.000 films with, with their, with their long takes, okay, so you'd have Jean Moreau and Catherine Deneuve, okay,

01:28:46.040 in like a potential romantic encounters, and you could see the tiniest little, little inflections,

01:28:50.920 all right, that, that, that signal communication or sexual readiness or, or irony or skepticism or

01:28:57.160 distance or whatever, okay, so the inability to read the, if, other people's intentions, okay, that, I think

01:29:03.400 this is going to be a disaster, okay, I, I just noticed that, um, how year by year, okay, the, the students

01:29:09.800 are, are becoming much more flat affect, okay, and, and they themselves complain that they'll sit in the same

01:29:14.600 room with someone and, and, and, and be texting to each other, okay, yeah. Yeah, well, there's a, there's a piece of evidence, too,

01:29:20.520 that supports that to some degree, so women with brothers are less likely to get raped. Aha! And the reason

01:29:26.840 for that is that they've learned that nonverbal language deeply, right, and they can, they can,

01:29:31.800 they can spot the, the. Not only that, okay, but I have, I have noticed, okay, uh, in my, in my career, okay,

01:29:37.880 that, that women who have many brothers, okay, are very good, okay, as administrators and as business

01:29:46.200 people, okay, all right, because they don't take men seriously, okay, they regard, they, they, they,

01:29:52.280 they saw their brothers, they think their brothers are jokes, okay, but they know how to control men,

01:29:56.120 okay, while, while they still like men, okay, they admire men, all right, so I, this is something

01:30:01.480 that I, that I have seen, you know, repeatedly, okay. Yeah, well, so that would be also reflective

01:30:05.480 of the problem of fewer, and fewer siblings. Yes, that's right, okay, yeah, yeah, and, you know,

01:30:10.600 I've noticed this in publishing, okay, that, that, that the, the, the women who have this, the job of

01:30:15.800 publicist, okay, and rise to the top as, as manager of publicity, okay, their ability to take charge of

01:30:21.160 men, and, and, and, and their humor at men, they, and, and, and, and, and they have great relationships

01:30:26.520 with men, okay, because they don't have the, the sense of resentment, and, and, and, and worry, and anxiety,

01:30:31.720 and so on, they don't see men as aggressors, okay, right, and I think that's another thing too,

01:30:35.800 is that as feminism, you know, moved into its presence, its system of ideology, okay,

01:30:42.520 it has tended to denigrate motherhood, okay, as, as a lesser order of human experience, and, and to

01:30:49.400 enshrine, of course, abortion. Now, I am 100% of abortion rights, I, you know, I belong to Planned

01:30:53.800 Parenthood for years until I, I finally rejected it as a branch of the Democratic Party, my own party,

01:30:58.360 and so on, but, but as motherhood became excluded, as, as feminism became obsessed, okay, with the,

01:31:04.920 with, with the, with the professional woman, okay, I feel that the lessons that, that mothers learn

01:31:10.600 have been lost, okay, you know, to, to, to, to feminism, okay, which is, okay, that if, if, if the

01:31:16.760 mothers who, who bear boy children, okay, understand the fragility of men, the fragility of boys, they

01:31:23.480 understand it, they don't, they don't see men, men, boys, and men as a menace, they understand the

01:31:29.320 greater strength of women, okay, so there's this tendness, you know, and connectedness between,

01:31:33.880 between the, between the mother and, and the boy child, okay, when motherhood is part of the

01:31:38.920 experience, okay, of, of women who are discussing gender, so, so what we have today is that this, this

01:31:45.400 gender ideology has risen up on campuses, where, where all, none of the, none of the girls, none of the

01:31:50.200 students have married, none of them have had children, okay, and you have, you have women, some of

01:31:54.280 whom have had children, but a lot of them are lesbians, or like, or like, or, you know, or like

01:31:57.880 professional women, and so on, okay, so this, this, the whole tenderness, and forgiving, forgiveness,

01:32:02.920 okay, and encouragement that women do to, to boys, okay, the fragility, they don't understand, this

01:32:09.320 hypersensitivity of boys is not understood, okay, instead, boys are seen as somehow more privileged,

01:32:15.640 okay, and somehow, you know, their, their, their energy level is, is, is interpreted as aggression,

01:32:21.160 okay, potential violence, and so on, okay, right, uh, so I, I think that, that, that, the, the, the,

01:32:26.760 that what we would do, the better, okay, if we would have, I, I have proposed, okay, that colleges

01:32:32.040 should allow, uh, when the moment a woman is, is entered, okay, she has entrance to that college for

01:32:37.640 life, okay, and that she, that, that she should be free to, to leave, okay, to have babies when she, when

01:32:44.520 her body wants to have babies, when it's healthy to have them, okay, and then return, have, have, have the

01:32:49.400 occasional course, okay, and build up credits, and, and fathers, I mean, you might be able to do it as,

01:32:53.160 as well, and so on, to get married women, women with children, into the classroom, the moment that

01:32:59.000 happens, as, as happened after World War II, okay, where you had, you had a lot of married guys in the

01:33:04.360 classroom, okay, and so on, not yet that many women, the experience of a married person with a family,

01:33:09.800 okay, talking about gender, but most of the gender stuff would be left out of the room, okay, if you had a

01:33:15.320 real mother in there, who had experienced, you know, childbirth, and had, and had raised, and it was

01:33:19.320 raising boys, and so on, but, so I think that's, that's also, uh, you know, something that, uh, has led to

01:33:24.840 this, this, this incredible art, you know, artificiality, and, uh, and hysteria, okay, of feminist rhetoric.

01:33:32.920 There's an, there's another strange element to that, which is that, on the one hand, the, the radical feminist

01:33:39.560 types, the neo-Marxist, post-modernists, are, are very much opposed to the patriarchy, let's say,

01:33:47.080 and that's that unidimensional, ideological representation of our culture.

01:33:50.200 It has never existed, I mean, perhaps the word can be applied to Republican Rome, and that's it.

01:33:55.080 Well, and maybe it could be applied usefully to certain kinds of tyranny, but not to a society

01:33:59.480 that's actually functional. Victorian England, arguably, okay, but other than that, to use the word

01:34:05.400 patriarchy in a slapdash way, so, so amateurish, absolutely, absolutely, you know, it just shows

01:34:10.920 people know nothing about history, whatever, have, have done no reading. So, and, so what confuses me

01:34:16.200 about that is that, despite the fact that the patriarchy is viewed as this essentially evil entity,

01:34:22.040 and that, that's associated with the masculine energy that built this oppressive structure,

01:34:27.160 the antithesis of that, which would actually be femininity, as far as I can tell, which is tightly

01:34:32.600 associated with care and with child rearing, is also denigrated. So, it's like the only proper

01:34:38.600 role for women to adopt is a patriarchal role, despite the fact that the patriarchy is something

01:34:43.640 that's entirely corrupt. So, the hypothesis seems to be that the patriarchy would be just fine if women

01:34:50.040 ran it. So, no changes, it's just that it would just be a transformation of leadership, and somehow

01:34:55.800 that would, that would rectify the fundamental problem, even though it's hypothetically supposed to

01:35:00.680 be structural. Okay, so I'm going to close with something. So, you know, there are elements in

01:35:07.720 my character that are optimistic, you know, I've, I've looked, for example, I worked for a UN committee

01:35:13.000 and, and on the relationship between economic development and sustainability, and I found out

01:35:17.400 a variety of things that were very optimistic, like the fact that, you know, the UN set out to have

01:35:22.360 poverty between 2000 and 2015 worldwide, and actually hit that by about 2010, right, so we're in the period of the

01:35:29.720 fastest transformation of the bottom strata of the world's population into something approximating

01:35:35.240 middle class that's ever occurred, and there's all these great technological innovations on the

01:35:39.720 horizon, and, and it looks to me like things could go extraordinarily well if we were careful, but

01:35:45.160 I'm not optimistic, and maybe that's me, I'm pessimistic, because I also see that there's five or six

01:35:51.320 things happening, all of which appear at the level of catastrophe that are all happening at the same

01:35:56.680 time, and so one of the things that I'd like to ask you is like, what do you see happening in the next

01:36:02.200 10 years in, in the universities or in culture at large, and, I mean, you just put forward a proposal

01:36:07.320 for the universities for the treatment of women, which I think is a very interesting one, because

01:36:10.840 women do have a different time frame than men, but like, what the hell is the proper way forward?

01:36:16.360 I've been encouraging young men to tell the truth and to take responsibility, and there's a huge market

01:36:21.080 for that message, but, but I'm not convinced by any stretch of the imagination that it's enough.

01:36:27.800 What, like, when you look forward and you try to be optimistic, what the hell do you see?

01:36:32.840 Well, and, and, and, and, and the largest, you know, scale, um, I'm concerned about the future of

01:36:39.320 western culture, because, uh, as a student of history, it looks too much to me like ancient Rome,

01:36:45.000 okay, which became overexpanded, uh, which became, it was at the mercy of, of, of bureaucratic, um,

01:36:51.160 um, uh, the creep, okay, uh, and, uh, I can imagine one of them. Yes, right, and the, in the, and Roman

01:37:00.040 identity eventually, um, got blurred, okay, in, in its incorporation of, of so many different cultures,

01:37:06.280 which at first seemed like a healthy kind of multiculturalism, but eventually overexpand and

01:37:10.360 simply collapsed of its own way. So I, I, and I, so I am concerned about the, you know, whether western

01:37:16.360 culture is in a rapid decline. I think it would be very easy because we are, you know, so interconnected

01:37:22.520 and so over complex, very easy, you know, to bring it to, to ruin. It would, it would only take one

01:37:27.400 major natural disaster, you know, to, to do that, but the universities themselves, I mean, I think people

01:37:32.120 are, are all of a sudden in, in the United States, much more, um, attentive to issues of political

01:37:38.280 correctness because of the, the riots at Berkeley, which was the, you know, which was the capital

01:37:43.160 of free speech. I mean, that, I mean, the free speech movement happened in the, the spring, uh,

01:37:47.800 before I entered college in 1964. It's, it's one, one of the great principles and, and, and inspirational

01:37:52.840 stories of my entire life, Mario Savio's, uh, you know, uh, uh, uh, assertion of, of, of, of the, of the

01:37:58.840 supremacy of, you know, free thought and free speech. These are, okay, and I, uh, so I, I think that perhaps,

01:38:04.360 you know, we, we might just have turned a corner and, but it's going to take a very, very long

01:38:08.120 time for the university to be reformed. I feel, okay, that the cafeteria menu, okay, of, of, um,

01:38:13.880 the university curriculum has to be abandoned. We must return to historical, uh, courses that

01:38:19.640 begin in, in, in, in the earliest period, the Stone Age and Antiquity, in order to give perspective,

01:38:24.680 you know, to, to, to our, to our present, to an analysis of, of our present culture. I want, um, uh,

01:38:29.880 50, 50 to 75 percent of college administrators fired, okay, and the money be transferred over, okay,

01:38:35.880 to, um, to, to faculty and to libraries and to, into, to instruction, okay. Um, I, I think that,

01:38:42.200 um, you know, the, the, the, the, the way things are being, people are being trained right now,

01:38:47.000 including at the public school level, okay, is I, I, I think that, I think the public school level

01:38:50.760 has gone to hell, okay. When my, when, when, when my mother came, you know, came to the United States

01:38:54.520 at the age of six, the, the, the, the old public school system was still very strict, and therefore,

01:38:59.320 and she had some excellent education, you know, it's, uh, and, um, you know, did, got all A's in,

01:39:04.840 in, in her, in her, in, even though she started out not speaking English, spoke without an accent,

01:39:09.400 et cetera, okay. So, so, so today, this, this kind of feel-good public school education, uh, which is,

01:39:15.400 which is a form of ideology and indoctrination right now, it's all about no bullying, okay, and so on,

01:39:20.680 and not about anything. And not even seriously about no bullying. Yes, yeah. So, I mean, I, I can tell,

01:39:26.120 in my own students, I mean, I've been teaching for 46 years, so I can tell the, the slow degradation

01:39:31.080 of public school education, okay, to the, to the point now, that the, that the students have

01:39:35.880 absolutely no sense of world geography, of world history, okay, they, they know absolutely nothing,

01:39:40.040 they, they don't know anything about wars, okay, and, and, and the reality, the, the, the barbaric reality

01:39:45.880 of most of human history, okay, and, and what, what a, what a, that's triggering. Yeah, right,

01:39:50.600 what a fantastic culture we live in, and so on. Now, identity politics itself has just got to stop. I mean,

01:39:55.480 it was important once, okay, again, I, I was a rebel against the, the WASP, you know, um, hegemony,

01:40:01.880 okay, either white Anglo-Saxon Protestant hegemony in American culture. It was, it was suffocating. I, I,

01:40:07.400 I was raised in the 1950s, right, when, when WASPs controlled corporations, and, and, and education,

01:40:14.200 and politics, and so on. And so, identity politics was necessary once, okay, to, to, to, we asserted gay rights,

01:40:20.920 okay, with the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969. We assert, we asserted, okay, the women's rights,

01:40:26.200 with the, with the, with the, with the rebirth of second wave feminism in the late 1960s, okay,

01:40:30.360 but this endless, okay, preoccupation with, with a fragmented identity, we must return to the

01:40:36.040 authentic 1960s vision, which is about identity coming from consciousness, which transcends gender,

01:40:42.600 which transcends all these divisions of race, okay, and, and ethnicity, okay, consciousness itself,

01:40:49.560 okay, right, there's no sense of that any longer. That's what the 1960s thought. Well, I see of that

01:40:55.320 as a complete abandonment of personal responsibility, because that, like, that consciousness, I think,

01:41:00.920 symbolically, and I got a lot of this from Jung, and also from Eric Neumann, I mean, that's the great

01:41:05.160 logos of the West, right, that's the transcendent principle, which is, is respect for the primacy of individual

01:41:11.880 consciousness, and what goes along with that primarily isn't individual rights, although that's

01:41:16.360 built into it, I mean, that's the reason we have individual rights, is for respect for that,

01:41:20.680 but the responsibility that comes along with being an individual instead of the member of some group,

01:41:25.240 especially a victimized group, which is like the, sure, I, I wrote an article with one of my students

01:41:30.520 who had toured the mass grave sites in, in the former Yugoslavia, you know, and had been exposed to that

01:41:36.040 sort of thing, and one of the things that our research indicated was that the best predictor of

01:41:41.320 genocide is victimization on the part of the group that produces the genocide, right, a sense of,

01:41:46.520 an accelerated sense of victimization, and then it's, well, we get them before they get us,

01:41:51.080 so, and everyone's being taught now that they're a victim, and then no one seems to have any sense

01:41:55.480 that, you know, that's part of the essential tragedy of being, that life is suffering, and that,

01:42:01.160 and that, and that, and that, and that, and that the world rests on a foundation of suffering,

01:42:05.480 it's nothing to take personally, and it's something to take responsibility for instead of

01:42:09.960 blaming and, and resentment and all of the things that have polluted our universities and our culture.

01:42:14.920 Well, and then there also was the abandonment, okay, of the, you know, of, of, of the canon, okay,

01:42:20.680 people, you know, asserted that the canon was the product of bias and again of a, you know, of a,

01:42:26.680 of a, you know, provincial elitism and so on, but in, in point of fact, as a student of history of the

01:42:31.880 arts, okay, I, I can, I can assure people that the canon, okay, overwhelmingly so, is, is the result

01:42:38.760 of what artists have determined, okay, we, we, we, we say a work is important, is canonical, because

01:42:45.400 artists following it, okay, were influenced by it, we have this, like, beautiful cascading tradition

01:42:50.440 of influence, all right, so, so that, that's, so it's another, but not another part of the philistinism,

01:42:55.560 okay, of, of current education, to, to, you know, to believe that there are these external reasons,

01:43:00.840 okay, for, for the, why a work lasts, why a work, you know, written 500 years ago or a thousand years

01:43:06.760 ago has a global relevance. As if it's some sort of political conspiracy that's based on power,

01:43:12.680 as if anybody could even manage that, no matter how nefarious they were. Right, right, but also,

01:43:18.120 you know, we, we in the 60s, you know, had the, had the idea, okay, that there was like this, a human,

01:43:23.400 human sensibility, okay, that, that transcendent individual nations and, and so on, all right, and that, and that,

01:43:30.120 there was this, like, rubric, you know, cosmic consciousness, okay, this, this sense of the

01:43:36.440 universe as a whole, and just to see the human being in relationship to great eternal principles

01:43:42.280 of, you know, life and death, mortality, and so on, whereas, you know, Marxism is blind, Marxism is very

01:43:48.920 narrow, all it sees is society, okay, it sees nothing beyond society, it doesn't see nature, okay, I mean,

01:43:55.800 it's absolutely mad, okay, how you can have a system being taught, okay, in universities, right,

01:44:01.320 which, which, which, which thinks that this tiny thing of society, okay, compared to the enormity

01:44:06.120 and beauty of, of nature, okay, it should take all of our, you know, all of our, you know, absorb all of

01:44:11.400 our energy and attention. So, I mean, I just think that there's like a parochialism, a provincialism,

01:44:16.440 you know, it, it, it, it, now a kind of, you know, systematized elitism in our current education has

01:44:25.000 just got to be rooted out, and we, I want to return to basics, great simplicities, I, I, all these faculty

01:44:30.920 members teaching their little tiny courses that have to, has to do with their own specialty, that's

01:44:35.160 got to stop, okay, people, people can pursue whatever they want in their private research as scholars, okay,

01:44:40.280 certainly, that's necessary, but they must teach in the core curriculum, I, I, I, and, and, and people

01:44:46.760 must decide what is crucial for an educated person to know. I do want a multicultural, I do want a global

01:44:52.280 curriculum, okay, I want, I want all the cultures taught, okay, right, this is not the answer, Marxism,

01:44:58.840 this neo-Marxism in the universities, okay, is simply, it's lazy, it's a lazy way to assert multiculturalism

01:45:05.960 without actually doing the research and the study of other cultures, okay, all right, that's a good

01:45:13.400 one to close on, we agreed on everything, I knew this, I knew it, all right, great, thank you very much.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - October 19, 2017

Modern Times - Camille Paglia

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