The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Our Cultural Inflection Point and Higher Education

00:00:00.000 What is the future of energy?

00:00:02.180 Find out on Energize, a new podcast brought to you by GZERO Media's Blue Circle Studio

00:00:07.400 and presented by Enbridge.

00:00:09.180 I'll be bringing you a series alongside Enbridge CEO Greg Ebel.

00:00:13.160 Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

00:00:16.440 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious

00:00:20.640 and important.

00:00:21.780 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling

00:00:26.200 depression and anxiety.

00:00:27.540 We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take

00:00:32.360 a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.

00:00:35.480 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding

00:00:40.160 of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.

00:00:43.240 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's

00:00:47.740 absolutely possible to find your way forward.

00:00:50.640 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone.

00:00:53.820 There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.

00:00:56.480 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.

00:01:02.760 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:01:06.300 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

00:01:14.120 To support this podcast, you can make a donation at jordanbpeterson.com slash donate, or by following

00:01:21.480 the link in the description.

00:01:23.880 Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, and understand myself, can be found at self-authoring.com

00:01:31.640 and understand myself.com.

00:01:33.960 Thank you.

00:02:03.940 I'm Stephen Blackwood.

00:02:04.740 I'm part of a small team of people founding a new university in Savannah, Georgia.

00:02:09.700 I'm the president of that new institution.

00:02:12.120 I'm here today at Cambridge University, an ancient, august, and beautiful institution.

00:02:18.980 And I have the great pleasure today to have with me Dr. Jordan Peterson, professor of psychology

00:02:25.720 of the University of Toronto, and, I think it is safe to say, an unignorable figure of our time.

00:02:32.800 Jordan, it's a real pleasure to have you here today.

00:02:35.440 Thank you.

00:02:36.100 Thanks.

00:02:36.820 Pleasure to be here.

00:02:37.760 This unbelievable place.

00:02:39.480 Jordan and I are going to talk today about what he has called the inflection point.

00:02:44.340 And my hope is that that conversation will lead us into a discussion of the possibilities for cultural renewal.

00:02:55.140 Indeed, the possibilities for the renewal, the renaissance of a more fully human culture.

00:03:03.480 Jordan, I think you've called the inflection point, or called our cultural temporal moment, a kind of inflection point.

00:03:12.180 Why don't we start there?

00:03:13.220 What is the inflection point?

00:03:15.680 Well, I think we're deciding, we're trying to decide if there's such a thing as a direction to move forward to into the future.

00:03:22.980 That's what it looks like to me.

00:03:25.940 I mean, on the one hand, we're making tremendous technological progress in all sorts of directions simultaneously,

00:03:34.320 and that seems to be having mostly positive effects, especially economically, especially on a global scale.

00:03:41.300 And on the other hand, we seem more confused about the foundations of our culture and the potential directions that we're moving in

00:03:49.940 than we have been for a while.

00:03:51.740 And that seems especially acute in educational institutions, and that seems to be a consequence of the constant cultural critique

00:04:00.240 that's been generated, I would say, mostly on the postmodern edge, edge of the academic, what would you say, academic territory.

00:04:12.120 So we're trying to figure out what's next, and what do we have to offer to students, all of that.

00:04:21.740 I know that just yesterday was published the 50th anniversary edition of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago

00:04:33.920 with a forward that you've, a forward written by you, which I think you've described the writing of as one of the greatest honors of your life.

00:04:44.740 Have I got that right?

00:04:45.520 Yes.

00:04:45.840 Academic honor.

00:04:46.620 Now, I suppose the question I have there is, why is that so important?

00:04:52.980 Well, the book was important because it was the first, it was the first work that succeeded in undermining the Marxist project

00:05:03.300 from a moral and an intellectual perspective simultaneously.

00:05:08.340 I mean, other people had pointed out the terror of the Soviet enterprise.

00:05:14.860 Malcolm Muggeridge and George Orwell, among others, often people on the left, interestingly enough.

00:05:19.820 But it was always possible, right up until the end of the 1960s, for the people who held on to that collectivist, utopian dream in the West

00:05:31.220 to rationalize what had happened in the Soviet Union, partly by sweeping it under the rug,

00:05:37.080 but also partly by, while using the old adage that you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs,

00:05:44.980 it became obvious by the end of the 1960s that the omelet wasn't very well prepared

00:05:51.620 and that millions of eggs, so to speak, to belabor a metaphor, had been broken.

00:05:58.500 And so when Solzhenitsyn wrote his great book, it became impossible for anyone who was willing to be part of the cultural moment

00:06:09.920 to ignore the fact that something had gone dreadfully sideways

00:06:14.500 and that it couldn't be attributed merely to a cult of personality or to some abnormality

00:06:19.760 that wasn't intrinsically part of the doctrine itself.

00:06:23.600 And so that was partly what Solzhenitsyn revealed about the Soviet Union as such,

00:06:28.480 but at the same time, the evidence that precisely the same thing had been happening in places like Maoist China,

00:06:35.200 perhaps to even a larger degree, well, undoubtedly to a larger degree,

00:06:39.680 and then in Cambodia and all the other places where Marxism produced utterly murderous consequences.

00:06:49.760 And so that was the book that did that, and it made Marxism morally repugnant.

00:06:57.400 It was also one of the events that catalyzed the transformation of Marxism into identity politics,

00:07:05.000 as far as I'm concerned, because a lot of the people who held the victim-victimizer narrative as sacrosanct,

00:07:13.040 that that was the appropriate way to look at the world,

00:07:15.020 to divide people into identity groups of whatever form,

00:07:18.620 and then to see history as the battle between them, history, the present and the future,

00:07:25.360 that transmuted, especially in France,

00:07:30.180 because even though the Marxists had been unmasked,

00:07:34.320 the murderousness of the doctrine had been unmasked,

00:07:37.440 that didn't, the people who'd held that doctrine were still looking for the easiest lateral move.

00:07:43.060 And so that was one of the driving forces for the development of postmodernism.

00:07:48.180 Not the only one.

00:07:49.380 It's the postmodernists that also figured out something,

00:07:51.940 or run across something that really is an intractable problem.

00:07:55.660 They ran across the problem of categorization.

00:07:58.940 And that actually happened in multiple disciplines at the same time,

00:08:02.700 including artificial intelligence and psychology.

00:08:05.360 People start to realize about, in the early 60s,

00:08:08.800 it was probably under the pressure of the AI types,

00:08:11.540 that it was very difficult to perceive the world,

00:08:14.460 because objects aren't just there for the looking.

00:08:17.300 Because every object is made of sub-objects,

00:08:20.520 and is part of a higher order structure of objects,

00:08:23.760 and defining what constitutes the appropriate boundary to put around a phenomenon,

00:08:28.860 so that it can be perceivable as an object,

00:08:30.860 turns out to be a virtually impossible task.

00:08:33.020 We're not sure how it can be managed.

00:08:35.460 And so that realization of the intrinsic complexity of things

00:08:41.500 led to a crisis, I would say, an intellectual crisis,

00:08:46.060 which was, well, if there's a near infinite number of ways

00:08:49.680 to perceive a finite set of entities,

00:08:52.740 how is it that you can call any one interpretation

00:08:55.680 either canonical or valuable?

00:08:58.540 And that's part of the postmodern skepticism, let's say, of metanarratives,

00:09:02.580 and it's actually a reasonable critique.

00:09:05.540 The problem is, as far as I'm concerned,

00:09:07.920 that what the postmodernists did was use that problem,

00:09:11.440 which is a genuine problem,

00:09:13.340 as a critique of the structure of the West.

00:09:17.480 And then instead of addressing the problem directly,

00:09:20.380 which is, well, the world is very complex,

00:09:22.800 but we do, in fact, perceive it,

00:09:24.680 and there actually are value structures,

00:09:26.600 they just circumvented that and popped back

00:09:29.620 into the bastardized form of Marxism

00:09:32.960 that we see today as identity politics.

00:09:35.180 And that's been extraordinarily destructive to the universities.

00:09:39.160 Well, let's talk about that a bit more,

00:09:41.340 because it seems to me that it would be a great shame

00:09:44.920 if people were to think that your writing this forward

00:09:50.340 to Solzhenitsyn was simply to document

00:09:52.880 something as an historic phenomenon,

00:09:55.120 as essentially important as that historic documentation is.

00:10:00.260 It seems to me that what is of interest to you

00:10:02.960 is not simply to shed light on the terrors,

00:10:06.680 the hundred million slaughtered,

00:10:08.420 in the course of the various communist revolutions

00:10:11.340 of the 20th century,

00:10:13.000 those various ideologies motivated by Marxism

00:10:16.200 and other forms of philosophical ideology,

00:10:20.720 but because it seems to me that you take

00:10:23.780 what was present in that philosophically,

00:10:26.400 ideologically, still to be at work,

00:10:29.420 or to have been, as it were, reborn in the West.

00:10:33.780 And so I suppose what I'd like to ask you about

00:10:35.160 is what are the characteristics

00:10:36.920 of the Marxist ideology

00:10:41.180 that led to that very obvious death and destruction,

00:10:46.640 which in a subtler way you see to be,

00:10:49.280 am I right to say,

00:10:50.500 you see to be at work in the West.

00:10:53.300 So I'd like,

00:10:53.960 it seems to me very important

00:10:55.080 that we have a deep sense

00:10:56.800 of what the governing assumptions

00:10:59.440 of our culture are,

00:11:01.180 or it's hard to transcend them.

00:11:02.900 Yeah, well,

00:11:03.580 that is exactly the issue

00:11:04.820 because the question is

00:11:06.220 whether or not the past is over.

00:11:07.920 I mean, there's a Marxist philosopher

00:11:10.520 named Richard Wolff

00:11:12.660 who challenged me recently on YouTube

00:11:15.100 to a debate,

00:11:16.660 and really the answer that I posted

00:11:18.800 was this forward,

00:11:20.320 and he accused me of being stuck in the past.

00:11:23.660 You know, it's, well,

00:11:24.400 the wall fell in 1989

00:11:27.900 and the horrors of the Soviet era are over,

00:11:30.800 and we can't paint,

00:11:34.540 we can't eternally tar Marxism

00:11:36.420 with the brush of these past events.

00:11:38.440 I mean, as if these events are over,

00:11:41.560 or as if 50 years is sufficient time

00:11:44.780 to forget about the corpses.

00:11:46.580 But that's his idea, you know.

00:11:49.020 And to me, it's the same idea

00:11:50.580 that you might put forward

00:11:51.980 if you were a neo-Nazi

00:11:53.500 by saying that,

00:11:54.800 well, you know,

00:11:55.620 all that happened back in 1945.

00:11:58.220 The fundamental doctrine was sound,

00:12:00.300 and we can't allow our judgment

00:12:01.800 about these eternal truths

00:12:03.900 manifested in the National Socialist doctrine

00:12:06.820 to be forever tainted

00:12:08.180 by some unfortunate historical events.

00:12:11.180 And I think that that's just,

00:12:13.300 well, I don't even know what to say about it.

00:12:15.440 I mean, one of the telling things

00:12:16.660 about his comments

00:12:17.440 was that he only talked about the Soviet Union

00:12:20.040 and not all the other terrible places

00:12:22.360 that the same doctrine had been implemented

00:12:24.340 with equally murderous effects.

00:12:27.120 And so that was quite the argument by evasion.

00:12:30.260 But what I try to do in the forward

00:12:32.000 and in my thinking in general

00:12:33.640 is I'm always trying to get to the bottom of things.

00:12:36.580 What's at the bottom?

00:12:38.680 And it seems to me that what happened,

00:12:41.440 if you look at what happened

00:12:42.500 in the Russian Revolution,

00:12:44.400 like the first thing you want to do

00:12:45.760 is give the devil his due.

00:12:47.560 Okay, and the way you do that

00:12:48.640 is by pointing out that hierarchical structures,

00:12:52.120 we'll start even before that.

00:12:54.440 People have problems that have to be solved.

00:12:57.060 Life is a sequence of problems

00:12:58.480 that have to be solved.

00:13:00.120 If you don't solve the problems

00:13:01.780 that life puts forward,

00:13:02.960 you suffer and you die. 0.98

00:13:04.040 So assuming that you don't want those two outcomes,

00:13:07.260 then there are problems you have to solve.

00:13:09.460 And so you have to set an aim

00:13:11.720 and the aim is to solve the problem.

00:13:14.040 And then because we're social creatures,

00:13:15.880 we have to solve the problems

00:13:17.100 by organizing collectively.

00:13:19.160 And the way we do that,

00:13:20.260 generally speaking,

00:13:21.180 in relationship to an aim

00:13:22.360 is to produce a hierarchy.

00:13:23.420 And the reason for that is that

00:13:25.380 if you have a problem

00:13:26.540 and you want it to be solved

00:13:27.840 and you get a variety of people working on it,

00:13:30.340 you're soon going to discover

00:13:31.660 that some people are much better

00:13:32.920 at solving the problem than others.

00:13:34.380 And that will inevitably produce a hierarchy.

00:13:36.420 And it should,

00:13:37.480 because then even the structure of authority

00:13:41.380 is in sync with the aim.

00:13:46.360 And the aim is valuable

00:13:47.240 because it's a problem

00:13:48.160 that everybody agrees

00:13:49.180 that is an actual problem.

00:13:50.980 So you're going to get

00:13:51.780 hierarchical organizations

00:13:52.980 and you should.

00:13:53.980 Now the problem with that

00:13:55.180 is that as soon as you produce

00:13:56.320 a hierarchical organization,

00:13:57.960 two things happen.

00:13:59.160 One is that a small minority of the people

00:14:01.320 do almost all the creative work.

00:14:02.920 That's the Pareto principle.

00:14:04.320 And the other is that

00:14:05.200 the benefits of the hierarchy

00:14:06.820 flow disproportionately

00:14:08.200 to a small number of people at the top.

00:14:10.960 So, and that's another manifestation

00:14:12.660 of the Pareto principle.

00:14:13.680 And it is something that Marx pointed out,

00:14:15.540 although he blamed it on capitalism,

00:14:17.160 which is a big mistake

00:14:18.520 even if you're concerned

00:14:19.960 for those the hierarchy dispossesses.

00:14:22.900 So you produce a hierarchy,

00:14:25.000 both the work flows from a minority of people

00:14:27.880 and the benefits flow to a minority of people.

00:14:29.800 And those might not be the same people,

00:14:31.680 by the way, right?

00:14:32.480 Because hierarchies aren't perfect

00:14:34.100 in their ability to distribute resources

00:14:36.320 as a consequence of productive effort.

00:14:40.340 That's part of the problem

00:14:41.360 with hierarchical organizations.

00:14:43.300 But then what the hierarchy does

00:14:45.200 is produce a layer of the dispossessed 0.98

00:14:47.720 that stack up at the bottom near zero.

00:14:50.680 And it's the majority.

00:14:52.020 It's always the majority.

00:14:53.340 So that's the price you pay for hierarchies.

00:14:55.200 Now, what the left does is say,

00:14:57.720 look at the dispossessed

00:14:59.440 and keep the hierarchy flexible enough

00:15:02.260 so that it can twist and bend

00:15:03.580 and transform when necessary,

00:15:04.980 but also so that the dispossessed

00:15:06.380 don't fall so close to zero

00:15:07.840 that A, that they're done,

00:15:10.340 they're in misery,

00:15:11.560 B, that the talents they might possess

00:15:14.120 can't be utilized,

00:15:15.500 and C, that the whole structure

00:15:17.640 doesn't become so untenable

00:15:18.960 that it destroys itself

00:15:20.460 because of the inequality.

00:15:22.200 Perfectly reasonable propositions.

00:15:24.100 And so then you could say,

00:15:25.500 well, there's a certain number

00:15:26.720 of people on the left

00:15:27.600 who are genuinely motivated

00:15:29.500 by concern about dispossession

00:15:32.860 as well as the dispossessed.

00:15:34.400 Of course.

00:15:34.820 Fine.

00:15:35.360 So that's to give the devil his due.

00:15:37.380 And so then you might say,

00:15:38.320 well, there was moral reasons.

00:15:39.820 There were moral reasons

00:15:40.860 for at least a subset of those

00:15:42.940 who were involved

00:15:43.480 in the Russian Revolution

00:15:44.440 to be involved.

00:15:45.960 They were interested

00:15:46.800 in helping the dispossessed.

00:15:48.180 But there's a problem.

00:15:49.960 And this is the problem of the left.

00:15:51.820 There's problems on the right as well.

00:15:53.620 The problem on the right is

00:15:54.720 once the hierarchy is established,

00:15:56.520 those who dominate the top

00:15:57.720 have every right to overstate

00:15:59.400 the moral virtue of the hierarchy

00:16:01.100 because it privileges them in particular.

00:16:03.860 On the left, the problem is

00:16:05.360 is that it's not easy to distinguish

00:16:07.420 between care for the dispossessed

00:16:09.420 and hatred for those who occupy positions of,

00:16:13.600 well, you could say authority.

00:16:15.080 The leftists would say power.

00:16:16.840 You could also say competence,

00:16:18.120 which I think is more to the case,

00:16:19.900 or ability.

00:16:21.000 It's not easy to distinguish

00:16:22.560 care for the dispossessed

00:16:24.200 from hatred for those

00:16:26.160 who occupy the preeminent positions

00:16:28.240 in the hierarchy.

00:16:29.480 And if it's power,

00:16:30.980 then it's hatred for power.

00:16:32.120 But if it's competence,

00:16:33.840 and it is competence

00:16:34.920 if the hierarchy is functional,

00:16:36.560 then it's hatred for the competent.

00:16:38.580 Okay, then you say,

00:16:39.440 all right,

00:16:39.760 so those are the two competing motivations.

00:16:41.840 Care for the dispossessed 1.00

00:16:42.880 and hatred for the,

00:16:43.880 let's say, competent.

00:16:44.820 Let's play that out,

00:16:47.220 historically speaking,

00:16:48.300 and see which is the more powerful force.

00:16:50.540 Well, that got played out very rapidly

00:16:52.200 in the Russian Revolution.

00:16:53.660 And what happened was,

00:16:55.240 even if there was a minority,

00:16:58.540 perhaps even a majority,

00:17:00.160 although there wasn't,

00:17:01.340 but perhaps even a majority

00:17:02.720 of those who truly cared for the dispossessed, 0.98

00:17:05.260 those who hated the competent, 0.52

00:17:07.480 slaughtered them.

00:17:08.160 It turned out that the hatred 0.94

00:17:10.460 was a much more potent

00:17:12.080 geopolitical force

00:17:14.880 than the compassion.

00:17:16.760 And then,

00:17:17.160 and another twist occurred too,

00:17:19.280 because the narrative was

00:17:21.760 bourgeoisie against proletariat,

00:17:24.660 let's say,

00:17:25.060 and so that's those

00:17:25.800 at the uppermost pinnacle

00:17:27.260 of the hierarchy

00:17:27.840 against those who were the dispossessed.

00:17:29.700 And that was also

00:17:30.400 the historical narrative.

00:17:31.940 And then it was the right

00:17:33.500 and responsibility

00:17:34.340 of those who were oppressed

00:17:35.540 to rise up.

00:17:36.340 But that ran into another problem,

00:17:38.600 which is basically the problem

00:17:39.920 that the postmodernists,

00:17:42.840 especially on the feminist side, 1.00

00:17:44.320 have now identified

00:17:45.180 as intersectionality.

00:17:46.840 It's like,

00:17:47.180 well,

00:17:47.540 turns out that you're,

00:17:48.980 you can't so easily

00:17:49.980 be placed into one group.

00:17:52.260 Like,

00:17:52.580 in fact,

00:17:53.340 this is the perception problem

00:17:54.740 that we talked about before.

00:17:56.540 There's a very large number

00:17:57.920 of groups you could be placed in.

00:17:59.540 It might be an unlimited

00:18:00.940 number of groups,

00:18:02.060 in fact.

00:18:03.100 And so,

00:18:04.080 then,

00:18:04.580 if you're motivated

00:18:05.340 primarily by hatred

00:18:06.520 and your desire

00:18:08.680 is to produce

00:18:09.340 as much mayhem as possible,

00:18:10.960 you can take

00:18:11.460 any given person

00:18:12.400 and you can analyze

00:18:13.740 the multiple groups

00:18:14.780 that they belong to,

00:18:16.220 and then you can find

00:18:17.020 one group

00:18:17.760 in which they're

00:18:18.500 the oppressor.

00:18:19.920 And then,

00:18:20.380 because there's no excuse

00:18:21.780 whatsoever for the oppression,

00:18:23.300 even if there's

00:18:23.860 one dimension

00:18:24.460 of your identity

00:18:25.240 along which you're

00:18:26.280 an oppressor, 0.51

00:18:27.060 then you're grist

00:18:28.580 for the bone-crushing

00:18:31.100 mill

00:18:31.960 of the Soviet work camp.

00:18:34.340 And that's exactly

00:18:35.180 what happened.

00:18:36.100 And so,

00:18:36.680 as the Soviet revolution

00:18:37.980 progressed,

00:18:39.100 more and more people

00:18:40.160 got thrown into

00:18:41.520 the cauldron,

00:18:42.720 let's say.

00:18:43.340 The socialists,

00:18:44.300 the students,

00:18:44.960 the religious people,

00:18:46.140 the old,

00:18:46.640 the original revolutionaries, 0.67

00:18:49.580 Stalin had all them killed, 0.87

00:18:51.080 because there was some,

00:18:52.320 and if it wasn't you

00:18:53.300 that was guilty

00:18:53.980 because of your group membership,

00:18:55.460 then they just expanded

00:18:56.460 the capacity of,

00:18:57.800 the parameters

00:18:59.020 of the idea of group.

00:19:00.580 Well,

00:19:00.880 you're not an oppressor,

00:19:02.400 but your grandfather

00:19:03.460 was a landowner.

00:19:05.140 Well,

00:19:05.360 that's good enough.

00:19:06.100 That's your class.

00:19:07.520 And so,

00:19:08.820 that's sufficient justification

00:19:09.980 to throw you 0.97

00:19:10.980 to the wolves as well.

00:19:12.460 And so,

00:19:12.800 what you saw

00:19:13.320 is this just

00:19:14.040 unbelievable

00:19:15.300 expansion

00:19:16.660 of murderousness

00:19:18.680 driven by

00:19:19.800 the twin

00:19:20.900 improper

00:19:22.440 presuppositions

00:19:23.480 that you could

00:19:24.200 define people

00:19:24.940 by their group identity,

00:19:26.260 and that history

00:19:27.000 was best conceptualized

00:19:29.660 as a battle

00:19:30.400 between

00:19:30.900 the fortunate

00:19:32.220 and the unfortunate

00:19:32.900 along those group identities.

00:19:34.420 Yes.

00:19:35.880 If we could pick up

00:19:36.760 that notion

00:19:37.220 of the group identity

00:19:38.200 and the collect,

00:19:39.000 what you call

00:19:39.380 the collectivist thinking,

00:19:41.620 it seems to me

00:19:42.200 that might be opposed

00:19:43.260 to a kind of robust view

00:19:45.420 of the human individual

00:19:47.100 as the site

00:19:47.900 of responsibility

00:19:48.760 and agency,

00:19:50.720 suffering,

00:19:51.780 and so it seems to me

00:19:53.500 that

00:19:54.100 what I'd like to ask you about

00:19:55.980 is the connection

00:19:57.020 between,

00:19:58.240 or the ways in which

00:19:59.100 the collectivist thinking

00:20:00.320 results in the annihilation

00:20:02.480 of all human particularity,

00:20:05.500 whether it's economic

00:20:06.500 or familial

00:20:09.040 or,

00:20:11.240 you might say,

00:20:12.420 it seems to me

00:20:12.880 that what's going on

00:20:13.660 in the collectivist thinking

00:20:14.720 is the absolute enemy

00:20:16.100 of human particularity

00:20:20.200 and freedom itself.

00:20:21.200 Yes, yes.

00:20:21.380 It's the enemy

00:20:21.860 of the idea

00:20:22.420 of the individual,

00:20:23.440 the sovereign individual,

00:20:24.360 which is the central idea

00:20:26.040 of the West.

00:20:26.740 I mean,

00:20:26.960 and that's manifested

00:20:27.800 in the underlying

00:20:28.540 religious structure.

00:20:29.560 So,

00:20:30.060 if you think about Christianity,

00:20:31.620 for example,

00:20:32.220 you think about Christianity

00:20:33.240 psychologically,

00:20:34.620 you strip it of its metaphysics,

00:20:36.240 at least for the purposes

00:20:37.500 of the argument,

00:20:38.700 you see the emergence

00:20:39.620 of the idea

00:20:40.300 of the divine individual

00:20:41.500 as,

00:20:42.120 as,

00:20:43.040 well,

00:20:43.320 as,

00:20:44.260 as what,

00:20:44.880 as part of what's,

00:20:46.360 what,

00:20:46.780 as part of divinity itself,

00:20:48.540 right,

00:20:48.720 as an integral,

00:20:49.560 that's part of the Trinitarian idea,

00:20:51.060 of the part of divinity itself.

00:20:55.080 And that divinity,

00:20:55.980 to me,

00:20:56.800 is the capacity

00:20:58.300 of the,

00:20:59.360 of individual consciousness

00:21:00.540 to generate order

00:21:02.360 from potential.

00:21:03.740 So,

00:21:03.960 the way I look at people,

00:21:05.260 first of all,

00:21:06.100 so,

00:21:06.520 like,

00:21:07.040 people who have been criticizing

00:21:08.580 what I've been doing

00:21:09.320 think about my philosophy,

00:21:12.580 such as it is,

00:21:14.480 not that it's mine,

00:21:15.720 as a sort of variant

00:21:17.260 of Ayn Rand's ideas

00:21:19.240 of the centrality

00:21:20.340 of the individual,

00:21:21.160 individual above all.

00:21:22.260 That's not the issue.

00:21:23.680 It's a conceptual issue,

00:21:25.280 is that what,

00:21:26.660 what,

00:21:27.640 what category

00:21:28.560 is to be primary.

00:21:30.480 And for me,

00:21:31.280 the individual

00:21:31.820 is to be primary.

00:21:33.300 And there's a variety

00:21:34.200 of reasons for that.

00:21:35.180 First of all,

00:21:35.700 the individual

00:21:36.160 is the locus of suffering,

00:21:37.940 and also the locus

00:21:39.020 of responsibility.

00:21:40.520 So,

00:21:40.740 so those are really

00:21:41.600 the two reasons

00:21:42.340 that the individual

00:21:43.800 has to be made primary.

00:21:47.240 But,

00:21:47.860 and the divinity element

00:21:49.220 of the individual,

00:21:50.580 and this,

00:21:51.240 I think,

00:21:51.460 is coded

00:21:51.860 in our deepest stories,

00:21:53.100 it's really deeply

00:21:54.000 coded in Genesis,

00:21:55.500 particularly in the

00:21:56.260 opening chapters of,

00:21:57.460 opening verses of Genesis,

00:21:59.280 is that what human beings

00:22:00.920 confront in their lives

00:22:02.220 is akin to what God

00:22:04.160 himself confronted

00:22:05.140 at the beginning of time.

00:22:06.880 And so,

00:22:07.780 it's easy for us

00:22:09.440 to believe that we're

00:22:10.240 deterministic creatures

00:22:11.420 like clocks,

00:22:13.340 and that it's the past

00:22:14.740 that drives us forward

00:22:15.780 in a deterministic manner

00:22:17.280 into the future.

00:22:18.120 But I don't believe

00:22:19.680 that's the case.

00:22:20.940 I actually don't think

00:22:21.880 there's any evidence

00:22:22.540 that that's the case.

00:22:24.400 Welcome to the

00:22:25.460 Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

00:22:28.180 To support this podcast,

00:22:30.020 you can make a donation

00:22:30.940 at jordanbpeterson.com

00:22:32.960 slash donate,

00:22:34.400 or by following the link

00:22:35.960 in the description.

00:22:37.800 Dr. Peterson's

00:22:38.780 self-development programs,

00:22:40.580 Self-Authoring,

00:22:41.780 and Understand Myself,

00:22:43.400 can be found at

00:22:44.340 self-authoring.com

00:22:45.580 and understandmyself.com.

00:22:49.420 Going online without ExpressVPN

00:22:51.340 is like not paying attention

00:22:52.760 to the safety demonstration

00:22:53.840 on a flight.

00:22:54.860 Most of the time,

00:22:55.700 you'll probably be fine,

00:22:57.020 but what if one day

00:22:58.160 that weird yellow mask

00:22:59.380 drops down from overhead

00:23:00.400 and you have no idea

00:23:01.900 what to do?

00:23:02.680 In our hyper-connected world,

00:23:04.160 your digital privacy

00:23:05.140 isn't just a luxury.

00:23:06.460 It's a fundamental right.

00:23:07.800 Every time you connect

00:23:08.600 to an unsecured network

00:23:09.780 in a cafe, hotel,

00:23:11.140 or airport,

00:23:12.080 you're essentially broadcasting

00:23:13.260 your personal information

00:23:14.360 to anyone with a technical

00:23:15.800 know-how to intercept it.

00:23:17.160 And let's be clear,

00:23:18.020 it doesn't take a genius

00:23:19.100 hacker to do this.

00:23:20.340 With some off-the-shelf hardware,

00:23:21.920 even a tech-savvy teenager

00:23:23.320 could potentially access

00:23:24.460 your passwords,

00:23:25.480 bank logins,

00:23:26.260 and credit card details.

00:23:27.740 Now, you might think,

00:23:28.960 what's the big deal?

00:23:29.840 Who'd want my data anyway?

00:23:31.400 Well, on the dark web,

00:23:32.540 your personal information

00:23:33.680 could fetch up to $1,000.

00:23:36.020 That's right,

00:23:36.560 there's a whole underground economy

00:23:38.080 built on stolen identities.

00:23:40.060 Enter ExpressVPN.

00:23:41.840 It's like a digital fortress,

00:23:43.300 creating an encrypted tunnel

00:23:44.480 between your device

00:23:45.500 and the internet.

00:23:46.520 Their encryption is so robust

00:23:48.100 that it would take a hacker

00:23:49.120 with a supercomputer

00:23:49.980 over a billion years

00:23:51.380 to crack it.

00:23:52.160 But don't let its power fool you.

00:23:53.860 ExpressVPN is incredibly

00:23:55.300 user-friendly.

00:23:56.300 With just one click,

00:23:57.320 you're protected

00:23:57.760 across all your devices.

00:23:59.340 Phones, laptops, tablets,

00:24:00.940 you name it.

00:24:01.520 That's why I use ExpressVPN

00:24:02.900 whenever I'm traveling

00:24:04.020 or working from a coffee shop.

00:24:05.640 It gives me peace of mind

00:24:06.720 knowing that my research,

00:24:08.040 communications,

00:24:08.540 and personal data

00:24:09.800 are shielded from prying eyes.

00:24:11.660 Secure your online data today

00:24:13.180 by visiting expressvpn.com

00:24:15.280 slash jordan.

00:24:16.400 That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S 1.00

00:24:18.440 vpn.com slash jordan

00:24:20.160 and you can get

00:24:20.780 an extra three months free.

00:24:22.800 Expressvpn.com slash jordan.

00:24:24.660 Starting a business can be tough,

00:24:30.340 but thanks to Shopify,

00:24:31.520 running your online storefront

00:24:32.800 is easier than ever.

00:24:34.480 Shopify is the global commerce platform

00:24:36.480 that helps you sell at every stage

00:24:38.020 of your business.

00:24:38.760 From the launch your online shop stage

00:24:40.660 all the way to the

00:24:41.380 did we just hit a million orders stage,

00:24:43.720 Shopify is here to help you grow.

00:24:45.800 Our marketing team uses Shopify

00:24:47.200 every day to sell our merchandise

00:24:48.660 and we love how easy it is

00:24:50.300 to add more items,

00:24:51.560 ship products,

00:24:52.160 and track conversions.

00:24:53.840 With Shopify,

00:24:54.600 customize your online store

00:24:55.740 to your style

00:24:56.680 with flexible templates

00:24:57.780 and powerful tools

00:24:58.840 alongside an endless list

00:25:00.520 of integrations

00:25:01.240 and third-party apps

00:25:02.220 like on-demand printing,

00:25:03.640 accounting,

00:25:04.220 and chatbots.

00:25:05.280 Shopify helps you turn browsers

00:25:06.740 into buyers

00:25:07.520 with the internet's

00:25:08.240 best converting checkout,

00:25:09.640 up to 36% better

00:25:11.020 compared to other

00:25:11.760 leading e-commerce platforms.

00:25:13.740 No matter how big

00:25:14.460 you want to grow,

00:25:15.340 Shopify gives you

00:25:16.080 everything you need

00:25:16.820 to take control

00:25:17.560 and take your business

00:25:18.580 to the next level.

00:25:20.140 Sign up for a $1 per month

00:25:21.520 trial period

00:25:22.140 at shopify.com

00:25:23.460 slash jbp

00:25:24.580 all lowercase.

00:25:26.080 Go to shopify.com

00:25:27.300 slash jbp now

00:25:28.460 to grow your business

00:25:29.480 no matter what stage

00:25:30.720 you're in.

00:25:31.380 That's shopify.com

00:25:32.720 slash jbp.

00:25:46.820 I'm Stephen Blackwood.

00:26:06.380 I'm part of a small team

00:26:07.600 of people founding

00:26:08.280 a new university

00:26:09.040 in Savannah, Georgia.

00:26:10.840 I'm the president

00:26:11.780 of that new institution.

00:26:13.420 I'm here today

00:26:14.380 at Cambridge University

00:26:15.880 an ancient,

00:26:18.140 august

00:26:18.540 and beautiful institution

00:26:19.780 and I have the great

00:26:21.280 pleasure today

00:26:21.980 to have with me

00:26:23.640 Dr. Jordan Peterson,

00:26:26.080 professor of psychology

00:26:27.100 of the University of Toronto

00:26:28.300 and I think it is safe

00:26:29.900 to say

00:26:30.340 an unignorable figure

00:26:32.380 of our time.

00:26:34.240 Jordan, it's a real pleasure

00:26:35.000 to have you here today.

00:26:36.840 Thank you.

00:26:37.620 Thanks.

00:26:38.220 Pleasure to be here

00:26:38.960 in this unbelievable place.

00:26:40.920 Jordan and I are going

00:26:41.520 to talk today

00:26:43.000 about what he has called

00:26:44.460 the inflection point

00:26:45.700 and my hope

00:26:48.320 is that that conversation

00:26:49.420 will lead us

00:26:50.280 into a discussion

00:26:53.600 of the possibilities

00:26:54.540 for cultural renewal.

00:26:56.680 Indeed,

00:26:57.360 the possibilities

00:26:58.240 for the renewal,

00:27:01.640 the renaissance

00:27:02.360 of a more fully human culture.

00:27:06.800 Jordan,

00:27:07.400 I think you've called

00:27:08.040 the inflection point

00:27:09.680 or called our cultural

00:27:11.040 temporal moment

00:27:11.820 a kind of inflection point.

00:27:13.200 Why don't we start there?

00:27:14.600 What is the inflection point?

00:27:16.960 Well,

00:27:17.660 I think we're deciding,

00:27:19.680 we're trying to decide

00:27:20.720 if there's such a thing

00:27:22.160 as a direction

00:27:22.780 to move forward to

00:27:23.660 into the future.

00:27:24.900 That's what it looks like

00:27:25.960 to me.

00:27:27.360 I mean,

00:27:27.820 on the one hand,

00:27:30.380 we're making

00:27:30.860 tremendous technological progress

00:27:32.900 in all sorts of directions

00:27:34.560 simultaneously

00:27:35.360 and that seems

00:27:36.480 to be having

00:27:37.120 mostly positive effects,

00:27:39.680 especially economically,

00:27:40.840 especially on a global scale.

00:27:42.680 And on the other hand,

00:27:43.500 we seem more confused

00:27:46.040 about the foundations

00:27:48.500 of our culture

00:27:49.180 and the potential directions

00:27:50.500 that we're moving in

00:27:51.340 than we have been

00:27:52.480 for a while.

00:27:53.140 and that seems

00:27:53.940 especially acute

00:27:54.800 in educational institutions

00:27:56.960 and that seems

00:27:58.540 to be a consequence

00:27:59.340 of the constant

00:28:00.700 cultural critique

00:28:01.640 that's been generated,

00:28:03.140 I would say,

00:28:03.740 mostly on the postmodern edge,

00:28:06.500 edge of the academic,

00:28:08.720 what would you say,

00:28:09.960 academic territory.

00:28:13.480 So,

00:28:13.740 we're trying to figure out

00:28:16.480 what's next

00:28:18.880 and what do we have

00:28:20.020 to offer to students,

00:28:21.020 all of that.

00:28:21.580 I know that

00:28:26.000 just yesterday

00:28:27.360 was published

00:28:28.460 the 50th anniversary edition

00:28:32.180 of Solzhenitsyn's

00:28:34.180 Gulag Archipelago

00:28:35.300 with a foreword

00:28:36.660 that you've,

00:28:39.080 a foreword written by you,

00:28:41.180 which I think you've described

00:28:42.300 the writing of

00:28:42.840 as one of the greatest honors

00:28:44.580 of your life.

00:28:46.120 Have I got that right?

00:28:46.900 Yes.

00:28:47.220 Academic honor.

00:28:48.480 Now,

00:28:49.080 I suppose the question

00:28:49.820 I have there is,

00:28:50.580 is,

00:28:51.580 why is that so important?

00:28:54.160 Well,

00:28:54.920 the book was important

00:28:56.000 because it was the first,

00:28:57.260 it was the first work

00:28:59.880 that succeeded

00:29:01.840 in undermining

00:29:03.500 the Marxist project

00:29:04.680 from a moral

00:29:06.200 and an intellectual

00:29:07.680 perspective simultaneously.

00:29:09.680 I mean,

00:29:09.920 other people had

00:29:10.700 pointed out

00:29:11.960 and pointed out

00:29:11.980 the terror

00:29:13.500 of the Soviet enterprise.

00:29:16.380 Malcolm Muggeridge

00:29:17.200 and George Orwell,

00:29:18.400 among others,

00:29:19.120 often people on the left,

00:29:20.400 interestingly enough.

00:29:22.000 But,

00:29:22.600 it was always possible

00:29:24.620 right up until the end

00:29:25.820 of the 1960s

00:29:26.880 for the people

00:29:28.080 who held on to that

00:29:29.340 collectivist,

00:29:30.720 utopian dream

00:29:31.620 in the West

00:29:32.600 to rationalize

00:29:34.140 what had happened

00:29:34.920 in the Soviet Union,

00:29:36.260 partly by sweeping it

00:29:37.500 under the rug,

00:29:38.440 but also partly by,

00:29:40.180 while using the old adage

00:29:42.520 that you can't make an omelet

00:29:44.400 without breaking a few eggs,

00:29:46.820 it became obvious

00:29:47.900 by the end of the 1960s

00:29:49.760 that the omelet

00:29:51.320 wasn't very well prepared

00:29:52.940 and that millions of eggs,

00:29:55.480 so to speak,

00:29:56.300 to belabor a metaphor,

00:29:57.940 had been broken.

00:29:59.860 And so,

00:30:00.520 when Solzhenitsyn

00:30:01.340 wrote his great book,

00:30:03.520 it became impossible

00:30:05.280 for anyone

00:30:06.000 who was

00:30:06.920 willing to be

00:30:09.680 part of the cultural moment

00:30:11.300 to ignore the fact

00:30:12.240 that something had gone

00:30:13.960 dreadfully sideways

00:30:15.880 and that it couldn't be attributed

00:30:17.700 merely to a cult of personality

00:30:19.360 or to some abnormality

00:30:21.140 that wasn't intrinsically

00:30:23.060 part of the doctrine itself.

00:30:24.980 And so that was partly

00:30:25.820 what Solzhenitsyn revealed

00:30:28.140 about the Soviet Union

00:30:29.120 as such,

00:30:29.880 but at the same time

00:30:30.900 the evidence that

00:30:32.360 precisely the same thing

00:30:34.400 had been happening

00:30:35.080 in places like Maoist China,

00:30:37.000 perhaps to even a larger degree,

00:30:39.000 well,

00:30:39.340 undoubtedly to a larger degree,

00:30:41.060 and then in Cambodia

00:30:42.640 and all the other places

00:30:44.300 where Marxism

00:30:46.140 produced utterly

00:30:48.480 murderous consequences.

00:30:51.080 And so,

00:30:52.100 that was the book

00:30:53.140 that did that

00:30:54.460 and it made Marxism

00:30:57.280 morally repugnant.

00:31:00.120 It was also

00:31:00.940 one of the events

00:31:02.040 that catalyzed

00:31:02.820 the transformation

00:31:03.440 of Marxism

00:31:05.120 into identity politics

00:31:06.280 as far as I'm concerned

00:31:07.240 because a lot of the people

00:31:08.320 who held the

00:31:09.600 victim-victimizer narrative

00:31:12.480 as sacrosanct,

00:31:14.440 that that was the appropriate way

00:31:15.600 to look at the world,

00:31:16.400 to divide people

00:31:17.260 into identity groups

00:31:18.980 of whatever form

00:31:20.020 and then to see history

00:31:21.840 as the battle

00:31:23.220 between them,

00:31:24.380 the history,

00:31:25.180 the present

00:31:25.940 and the future,

00:31:27.300 that transmuted,

00:31:30.180 especially in France

00:31:31.220 because even though

00:31:32.700 the Marxists

00:31:33.360 had been unmasked,

00:31:35.760 the murderousness

00:31:36.560 of the doctrine

00:31:37.120 had been unmasked,

00:31:38.840 that didn't,

00:31:40.460 the people who'd held

00:31:41.380 that doctrine

00:31:41.900 were still looking

00:31:42.600 for the easiest

00:31:43.340 lateral move

00:31:44.280 and so that

00:31:45.480 was one of the

00:31:46.380 driving forces

00:31:47.000 for the development

00:31:47.740 of postmodernism,

00:31:49.500 not the only one.

00:31:50.760 It's the postmodernists

00:31:51.620 that also figured out

00:31:52.860 something

00:31:53.320 or run across

00:31:54.660 something that really

00:31:55.400 is an intractable problem.

00:31:57.140 They ran across

00:31:57.840 the problem

00:31:58.360 of categorization

00:31:59.500 and that actually

00:32:01.600 happened in multiple

00:32:02.440 disciplines at the same time

00:32:03.860 including artificial

00:32:04.780 intelligence and psychology.

00:32:06.800 People start to realize

00:32:08.300 about in the early 60s

00:32:09.920 it was probably

00:32:10.700 under the pressure

00:32:11.320 of the AI types

00:32:12.360 that it was very difficult

00:32:14.760 to perceive the world

00:32:15.740 because objects

00:32:17.000 aren't just there

00:32:17.920 for the looking

00:32:18.680 because every object

00:32:20.620 is made of sub-objects

00:32:21.860 and is part of

00:32:22.700 a higher order

00:32:23.660 structure of objects

00:32:24.660 and defining

00:32:26.920 what constitutes

00:32:28.000 the appropriate boundary

00:32:29.060 to put around

00:32:29.740 a phenomenon

00:32:30.240 so that it can be

00:32:31.000 perceivable as an object

00:32:32.140 turns out to be

00:32:32.800 a virtually impossible task.

00:32:34.460 We're not sure

00:32:35.200 how it can be managed

00:32:36.840 and so that realization

00:32:40.640 of the intrinsic complexity

00:32:42.260 of things

00:32:42.880 led to a crisis

00:32:45.320 I would say

00:32:46.000 an intellectual crisis

00:32:47.000 which was

00:32:48.060 well if there's

00:32:49.500 a near infinite number

00:32:50.600 of ways to perceive

00:32:51.780 a finite set of entities

00:32:53.720 how is it that you can

00:32:55.560 call any one interpretation

00:32:57.060 either canonical

00:32:58.300 or valuable

00:32:59.180 and that's part

00:33:00.920 of the postmodern

00:33:01.840 skepticism

00:33:02.800 let's say

00:33:03.240 of metanarratives

00:33:03.940 and it's actually

00:33:04.680 a reasonable critique.

00:33:06.780 The problem is

00:33:08.220 as far as I'm concerned

00:33:09.200 that what the postmodernists

00:33:10.520 did was use

00:33:11.480 that problem

00:33:12.720 which is a genuine problem

00:33:14.180 as a critique

00:33:17.100 of the structure

00:33:17.940 of the West

00:33:18.580 and then instead

00:33:19.480 of addressing

00:33:20.380 the problem directly

00:33:21.480 which is

00:33:22.220 well the world

00:33:23.100 is very complex

00:33:23.940 but we do in fact

00:33:25.340 perceive it

00:33:25.920 and there actually

00:33:26.920 are value structures

00:33:28.000 they just circumvented

00:33:29.640 that and popped

00:33:30.620 back into

00:33:31.260 a bastardized form

00:33:32.360 of Marxism

00:33:34.360 that we see today

00:33:35.080 as identity politics

00:33:36.220 and that's been

00:33:37.160 extraordinarily destructive

00:33:39.380 to the universities.

00:33:40.600 Well let's talk about

00:33:42.040 that a bit more

00:33:42.580 because it seems to me

00:33:44.020 that it would be

00:33:45.140 a great shame

00:33:46.300 if people were to think

00:33:47.460 that your writing

00:33:51.060 this forward

00:33:51.720 to Solzhenitsyn

00:33:52.560 was simply to document

00:33:54.260 something as

00:33:55.160 an historic phenomenon

00:33:56.060 as essentially important

00:33:57.920 as that historic

00:33:59.600 documentation is.

00:34:01.220 It seems to me

00:34:02.340 that what is

00:34:03.040 of interest to you

00:34:04.340 is not simply

00:34:05.240 to shed light

00:34:06.860 on the terrors

00:34:08.000 the hundred million

00:34:08.760 slaughtered

00:34:09.800 in the course

00:34:10.960 of the various

00:34:11.840 communist revolutions

00:34:12.720 of the 20th century

00:34:13.820 those various

00:34:15.260 ideologies

00:34:16.200 motivated by Marxism

00:34:17.580 and other

00:34:18.000 forms of

00:34:20.260 philosophical ideology

00:34:22.100 but because

00:34:23.740 it seems to me

00:34:24.540 that you take

00:34:25.160 what was present

00:34:26.680 in that philosophically

00:34:27.700 ideologically

00:34:28.380 still to be at work

00:34:30.100 in

00:34:30.780 or to have been

00:34:32.480 as it were

00:34:32.920 reborn

00:34:34.340 in the West

00:34:34.620 and so I suppose

00:34:35.700 what I'd like to ask you

00:34:36.400 about is

00:34:36.680 what are the

00:34:37.300 characteristics

00:34:38.300 of

00:34:39.300 the Marxist

00:34:41.760 ideology

00:34:42.560 that led to

00:34:44.260 that very obvious

00:34:46.760 death and destruction

00:34:47.520 which in a

00:34:48.660 subtler way

00:34:49.900 you see to be

00:34:50.680 am I right to say

00:34:51.680 you see to be

00:34:52.400 at work

00:34:53.100 in the West

00:34:53.880 so I'd like

00:34:55.100 it seems to me

00:34:56.000 very important

00:34:56.480 that we have

00:34:56.900 a deep sense

00:34:58.180 of what the

00:34:58.780 governing assumptions

00:35:00.820 of our culture are

00:35:02.480 or it's hard

00:35:03.280 to transcend them.

00:35:04.340 Yeah well

00:35:04.760 that is exactly

00:35:05.740 the issue

00:35:06.200 because the question

00:35:07.360 is whether or not

00:35:08.000 the past is over

00:35:08.900 I mean there's a

00:35:09.880 Marxist philosopher

00:35:11.900 named Richard Wolff

00:35:14.040 who challenged me

00:35:15.520 recently on YouTube

00:35:16.480 to a debate

00:35:17.760 and really

00:35:18.780 the answer

00:35:19.480 that I posted

00:35:20.180 was this forward

00:35:21.160 and he accused me

00:35:22.820 of being stuck

00:35:24.140 in the past

00:35:24.860 you know

00:35:25.200 it's well

00:35:25.600 the wall fell

00:35:28.440 in 1989

00:35:29.240 and the horrors

00:35:30.120 of the Soviet

00:35:30.740 era are over

00:35:32.000 and we

00:35:32.920 we can't

00:35:34.480 paint

00:35:35.220 we can't

00:35:36.360 eternally

00:35:36.820 tar Marxism

00:35:37.820 with the brush

00:35:38.480 of these past

00:35:39.300 events

00:35:39.820 I mean

00:35:40.540 as if

00:35:41.060 these events

00:35:41.920 are over

00:35:42.380 or as if

00:35:43.740 50 years

00:35:44.960 is sufficient

00:35:45.820 time to forget

00:35:46.600 about the corpses

00:35:47.620 but that's his

00:35:48.700 idea

00:35:49.600 you know

00:35:50.220 and to me

00:35:50.980 it's the same idea

00:35:51.940 that you might

00:35:52.780 put forward

00:35:53.360 if you were

00:35:54.160 a neo-Nazi

00:35:54.860 by saying that

00:35:56.000 well you know

00:35:56.760 all that happened

00:35:57.800 back in 1945

00:35:58.880 the fundamental

00:36:00.320 doctrine was sound

00:36:01.540 and we can't

00:36:02.340 allow our judgment

00:36:03.180 about these

00:36:04.180 eternal truths

00:36:05.280 manifested in the

00:36:06.760 National Socialist

00:36:07.820 doctrine

00:36:08.200 to be forever

00:36:09.100 tainted by some

00:36:10.080 unfortunate historical

00:36:11.360 events

00:36:12.160 and I think

00:36:13.140 that that's just

00:36:14.100 well I don't even

00:36:15.640 know what to say

00:36:16.200 about it

00:36:16.620 I mean one of the

00:36:17.440 telling things

00:36:18.040 about his comments

00:36:18.820 was that he only

00:36:20.000 talked about the

00:36:20.740 Soviet Union

00:36:21.400 and not all the

00:36:22.440 other terrible places

00:36:23.740 that the same

00:36:24.480 doctrine had been

00:36:25.320 implemented

00:36:25.740 with equally

00:36:26.540 murderous

00:36:27.200 effects

00:36:27.920 and so that was

00:36:29.220 quite the argument

00:36:30.280 by evasion

00:36:31.140 but I

00:36:31.880 what I tried to do

00:36:32.800 in the forward

00:36:33.420 and in my thinking

00:36:34.560 in general

00:36:35.020 is I'm always

00:36:36.000 trying to get to

00:36:36.720 the bottom of things

00:36:37.660 what's at the bottom

00:36:39.480 and it seems to me

00:36:41.520 that what happened

00:36:42.420 if you look at what

00:36:43.600 happened in the

00:36:44.120 Russian Revolution

00:36:44.900 like the first thing

00:36:46.700 you want to do

00:36:47.140 is give the devil

00:36:47.840 his due

00:36:48.320 okay and the way

00:36:49.520 you do that

00:36:50.020 is by pointing out

00:36:50.980 that hierarchical

00:36:52.540 structures

00:36:53.100 we'll start even

00:36:54.520 before that

00:36:55.620 people have

00:36:56.320 problems that

00:36:56.860 have to be

00:36:57.340 solved

00:36:57.700 life is a

00:36:59.020 sequence of

00:36:59.540 problems that

00:37:00.080 have to be

00:37:00.540 solved

00:37:00.860 if you don't

00:37:02.420 solve the

00:37:02.860 problems that

00:37:03.340 life puts

00:37:03.900 forward

00:37:04.220 you suffer 1.00

00:37:04.760 and you die 0.95

00:37:05.420 so assuming

00:37:06.480 that you don't

00:37:07.180 want those 0.93

00:37:07.800 two outcomes

00:37:08.520 then there are

00:37:09.100 problems you

00:37:09.540 have to solve

00:37:10.100 and so you

00:37:12.220 have to set an

00:37:12.840 aim

00:37:13.120 and the aim

00:37:14.020 is to solve

00:37:14.580 the problem

00:37:15.080 and then because

00:37:16.120 we're social

00:37:16.720 creatures we have

00:37:17.500 to solve the

00:37:18.040 problems by

00:37:19.040 organizing

00:37:19.540 collectively

00:37:20.180 and the way

00:37:20.880 we do that

00:37:21.480 generally speaking

00:37:22.460 in relationship

00:37:23.140 to an aim

00:37:23.740 is to produce

00:37:24.260 a hierarchy

00:37:24.800 and the reason

00:37:25.880 for that is

00:37:26.560 that if you

00:37:27.300 have a problem

00:37:27.920 and you want

00:37:28.540 it to be solved

00:37:29.220 and you get a

00:37:30.160 variety of people

00:37:30.820 working on it

00:37:31.500 you're soon going

00:37:32.540 to discover that

00:37:33.280 some people are

00:37:33.880 much better at

00:37:34.460 solving the problem

00:37:35.100 than others

00:37:35.560 and that will

00:37:36.220 inevitably produce

00:37:37.260 a hierarchy

00:37:37.680 and it should

00:37:38.420 because then

00:37:39.440 even the

00:37:41.000 structure of

00:37:42.220 authority

00:37:42.760 is in sync

00:37:45.900 with the aim

00:37:47.380 and the aim

00:37:48.180 is valuable

00:37:48.620 because it's a

00:37:49.280 problem that

00:37:49.780 everybody agrees

00:37:50.560 that is an

00:37:51.500 actual problem

00:37:52.180 so you're going

00:37:52.940 to get

00:37:53.160 hierarchical

00:37:53.780 organizations

00:37:54.380 and you should

00:37:55.080 now the problem

00:37:56.120 with that

00:37:56.560 is that as soon

00:37:57.160 as you produce

00:37:57.700 a hierarchical

00:37:58.360 organization

00:37:58.960 two things

00:37:59.860 happen

00:38:00.240 one is that

00:38:01.220 a small minority

00:38:02.180 of the people

00:38:02.700 do almost all

00:38:03.380 the creative work

00:38:04.160 that's the

00:38:04.740 Pareto principle

00:38:05.300 and the other

00:38:06.200 is that the

00:38:06.780 benefits of the

00:38:07.760 hierarchy

00:38:08.200 flow disproportionately

00:38:09.580 to a small

00:38:10.400 number of people

00:38:10.980 at the top

00:38:11.560 so and that's

00:38:13.340 another manifestation

00:38:14.140 of the Pareto principle

00:38:14.960 and it is something

00:38:15.680 that Marx pointed out

00:38:16.740 although he blamed

00:38:17.560 it on capitalism

00:38:18.280 which is a big

00:38:19.520 mistake even

00:38:20.300 if you're concerned

00:38:21.320 for those

00:38:22.580 the hierarchy

00:38:23.300 dispossesses 0.98

00:38:24.080 so you produce

00:38:25.120 a hierarchy

00:38:25.720 both the work

00:38:27.340 the work flows

00:38:28.160 from a minority

00:38:28.880 of people

00:38:29.260 and the benefits

00:38:29.980 flow to a minority

00:38:30.860 of people

00:38:31.200 and those might not

00:38:32.040 be the same people

00:38:32.920 by the way

00:38:33.460 right because

00:38:34.160 hierarchies aren't

00:38:35.020 perfect in their

00:38:35.840 ability to distribute

00:38:37.120 resources as a

00:38:38.120 consequence of

00:38:39.000 productive effort

00:38:41.200 that's part of the

00:38:42.500 problem with

00:38:42.900 hierarchical

00:38:43.480 organizations

00:38:44.120 but then

00:38:45.240 what the hierarchy

00:38:46.300 does is produce

00:38:47.340 a layer of the

00:38:48.340 dispossessed

00:38:49.120 that stack up

00:38:50.320 at the bottom

00:38:50.900 near zero

00:38:51.820 and it's the

00:38:52.660 majority

00:38:53.200 it's always the

00:38:53.860 majority

00:38:54.280 so that's the price

00:38:55.560 you pay for

00:38:56.000 hierarchies

00:38:56.500 now what the

00:38:57.540 left does is say

00:38:58.780 look at the

00:39:00.000 dispossessed

00:39:00.820 and keep the

00:39:02.340 hierarchy flexible

00:39:03.340 enough so that it

00:39:04.060 can twist and bend

00:39:04.980 and transform when

00:39:05.860 necessary but also

00:39:06.700 so that the

00:39:07.240 dispossessed don't

00:39:08.080 fall so close to

00:39:09.000 zero that

00:39:09.760 A that they're

00:39:11.180 done

00:39:11.600 they're in

00:39:12.100 misery

00:39:12.520 B that the

00:39:14.180 talents they

00:39:14.840 might possess

00:39:15.500 can't be utilized

00:39:16.600 and C that the

00:39:18.320 whole structure

00:39:19.020 doesn't become so

00:39:19.800 untenable that it

00:39:21.040 destroys itself

00:39:21.840 because of the

00:39:22.420 inequality

00:39:22.920 perfectly reasonable

00:39:24.520 propositions

00:39:25.500 and so then you

00:39:26.400 could say well

00:39:27.020 there's a certain

00:39:27.840 number of people

00:39:28.480 on the left

00:39:29.000 who are genuinely

00:39:30.220 motivated by

00:39:31.560 concern about

00:39:32.860 dispossession as

00:39:34.640 well as the

00:39:35.100 dispossessed

00:39:35.680 of course

00:39:36.120 fine so that's to

00:39:37.480 give the devil his

00:39:38.280 due and so then

00:39:39.140 you might say well

00:39:39.820 there was moral

00:39:40.800 reasons there

00:39:41.420 were moral reasons

00:39:42.240 for at least a

00:39:43.520 subset of those

00:39:44.320 who were involved

00:39:44.860 in the Russian

00:39:45.340 revolution to be

00:39:46.460 involved they were

00:39:47.780 interested in helping

00:39:48.660 the dispossessed

00:39:49.380 but there's a

00:39:50.180 problem and this

00:39:51.740 is the problem

00:39:52.340 of the left

00:39:53.020 there's a problems

00:39:54.060 on the right as

00:39:54.720 well the problem

00:39:55.460 on the right is

00:39:56.120 once the hierarchy

00:39:57.080 is established

00:39:57.720 those who dominate

00:39:58.660 the top have

00:39:59.320 every right to

00:40:00.180 overstate the

00:40:00.980 moral virtue of

00:40:02.000 the hierarchy

00:40:02.480 because it

00:40:02.980 privileges them

00:40:04.060 in particular

00:40:04.800 on the left

00:40:05.980 the problem is

00:40:06.740 is that it's

00:40:07.740 not easy to

00:40:08.340 distinguish between

00:40:09.260 care for the

00:40:10.080 dispossessed

00:40:10.800 and hatred

00:40:11.720 for those who

00:40:12.980 occupy positions

00:40:14.320 of well you

00:40:15.500 could say

00:40:15.800 authority the

00:40:16.580 leftists would

00:40:17.220 say power you

00:40:18.340 could also say

00:40:18.980 competence which

00:40:20.020 I think is more

00:40:20.680 to the case or

00:40:21.400 ability it's not

00:40:22.980 easy to distinguish

00:40:23.800 care for the

00:40:24.960 dispossessed from

00:40:26.060 hatred for those

00:40:27.560 who occupy the

00:40:28.780 preeminent positions

00:40:29.640 in the hierarchy

00:40:30.340 and if it's power

00:40:32.240 then it's hatred

00:40:32.880 for power but if

00:40:33.720 it's competence

00:40:34.620 and it is competence

00:40:36.320 if the hierarchy

00:40:37.160 is functional then

00:40:38.180 it's hatred for the

00:40:39.080 competent okay

00:40:40.200 then you say

00:40:40.760 alright so those

00:40:41.460 are the two

00:40:41.820 competing motivations

00:40:42.700 care for the

00:40:43.700 dispossessed and

00:40:44.420 hatred for the

00:40:45.100 let's say competent

00:40:46.220 let's play that

00:40:48.220 out historically

00:40:49.020 speaking and see

00:40:50.160 which is the

00:40:50.640 more powerful

00:40:51.160 force well that

00:40:52.380 got played out

00:40:52.960 very rapidly in

00:40:53.780 the Russian

00:40:54.080 revolution and

00:40:55.160 what happened

00:40:55.660 was even if

00:40:57.380 there was a

00:40:58.240 minority and

00:41:00.000 perhaps even a

00:41:00.600 majority although

00:41:01.700 there wasn't but

00:41:02.880 perhaps even a

00:41:03.780 majority of those

00:41:04.520 who truly cared

00:41:05.340 for the dispossessed

00:41:06.280 those who hated

00:41:07.480 the competent

00:41:08.440 slaughtered them

00:41:09.580 it turned out that 0.56

00:41:11.360 the hatred was a

00:41:12.320 much more potent

00:41:13.460 geopolitical force

00:41:16.280 than the

00:41:16.840 compassion and

00:41:18.200 then and another

00:41:19.100 twist occurred too

00:41:20.420 because the

00:41:21.820 narrative was

00:41:23.140 bourgeoisie against

00:41:25.240 proletariat let's

00:41:26.220 say and so that's

00:41:26.980 those at the

00:41:27.800 uppermost pinnacle of

00:41:28.820 the hierarchy against

00:41:29.560 those who were the

00:41:30.120 dispossessed and that

00:41:31.420 was also the

00:41:31.940 historical narrative

00:41:32.980 and then it was the

00:41:34.080 right and

00:41:35.080 responsibility of

00:41:36.100 those who were

00:41:36.580 oppressed to rise

00:41:37.420 up but that ran

00:41:38.800 into another problem

00:41:39.680 which is basically

00:41:40.700 the problem that

00:41:41.600 the post-modernists

00:41:43.840 especially on the

00:41:44.840 feminist side have 1.00

00:41:45.860 now identified as

00:41:46.820 intersectionality

00:41:47.740 it's like well

00:41:48.720 turns out that

00:41:49.680 you're you can't so

00:41:51.040 easily be placed

00:41:51.980 into one group

00:41:52.940 like in fact this

00:41:54.940 is the perception

00:41:55.680 problem that we

00:41:56.420 talked about before

00:41:57.320 there's a very large

00:41:59.000 number of groups you

00:41:59.880 could be placed in

00:42:00.620 it might be an

00:42:01.760 unlimited number of

00:42:03.040 groups in fact

00:42:03.920 and so then if

00:42:06.160 you're motivated

00:42:06.700 primarily by hatred

00:42:07.900 and your desire is

00:42:10.320 to produce as much

00:42:11.100 mayhem as possible

00:42:12.040 you can take any

00:42:13.040 given person and

00:42:14.300 you can analyze the

00:42:15.380 multiple groups that

00:42:16.380 they belong to and

00:42:17.760 then you can find one

00:42:18.780 group in which they're

00:42:19.880 the oppressor and

00:42:21.420 then because there's

00:42:22.580 no excuse whatsoever

00:42:23.680 for the oppression

00:42:24.500 even if there's one

00:42:25.480 dimension of your

00:42:26.180 identity along which

00:42:27.500 you're an oppressor 0.79

00:42:28.220 then you're grist 0.96

00:42:29.960 for the for the for

00:42:31.440 the bone-crushing

00:42:32.400 mill of the of the

00:42:34.560 soviet work camp

00:42:35.600 and that's exactly

00:42:36.560 what happened

00:42:37.180 and so as the

00:42:38.480 soviet revolution

00:42:39.360 progressed more and

00:42:41.040 more people got

00:42:41.880 thrown into the

00:42:43.220 cauldron let's say

00:42:44.520 the socialists the

00:42:45.780 students the

00:42:46.440 religious people

00:42:47.200 the old the the

00:42:48.780 the old the

00:42:49.780 original revolutionary

00:42:50.720 Stalin had all them 0.99

00:42:51.820 killed because there

00:42:52.780 was some and if it

00:42:54.120 wasn't you that was

00:42:55.040 guilty because of

00:42:55.840 your group membership

00:42:56.620 then they just

00:42:57.400 expanded the capacity

00:42:58.460 the the parameters

00:43:00.380 of the idea of

00:43:01.220 group well you're

00:43:02.520 not an oppressor

00:43:03.660 but your grandfather

00:43:04.840 was a landowner

00:43:05.980 well that's good

00:43:07.120 enough that's that's

00:43:08.000 that's your class

00:43:08.900 that's that's and so

00:43:10.080 that's sufficient

00:43:10.840 justification to throw 0.97

00:43:12.220 you to the wolves as

00:43:13.020 well and so what you

00:43:14.440 saw is this just

00:43:15.420 unbelievable expansion

00:43:18.040 of murderousness

00:43:20.060 driven by the twin

00:43:22.280 improper presuppositions

00:43:24.840 that you could define

00:43:26.000 people by their group

00:43:26.920 identity and that

00:43:28.000 history was best

00:43:29.180 conceptualized as a

00:43:31.440 battle between the

00:43:33.060 fortunate and the

00:43:33.860 unfortunate along those

00:43:34.860 group identities

00:43:35.600 yes and if we could

00:43:37.920 pick up that notion of

00:43:38.740 the the group identity

00:43:39.580 and the collect what you

00:43:40.620 call the sort of the

00:43:41.500 collectivist thinking

00:43:42.420 it seems to me that

00:43:43.780 might be opposed to a

00:43:45.540 kind of robust view of

00:43:47.120 the human individual as

00:43:48.920 the site of

00:43:49.420 responsibility and

00:43:50.580 agency suffering and

00:43:53.460 so it seems to me that

00:43:55.460 what I'd like to ask you

00:43:57.180 about is the is the

00:43:57.980 connection between or

00:43:59.800 the ways in which the

00:44:00.660 collectivist thinking

00:44:01.700 results in the

00:44:03.120 annihilation of all human

00:44:05.680 particularity whether

00:44:07.060 it's economic or

00:44:08.840 familial or you might

00:44:13.380 say it seems to me that

00:44:14.360 what's going on in the

00:44:15.420 collectivist thinking is

00:44:16.360 the absolute enemy of

00:44:18.580 human particularity and

00:44:21.880 freedom itself

00:44:22.580 the enemy of the idea of

00:44:23.940 the individual the

00:44:24.940 sovereign individual which

00:44:26.420 is the central idea of

00:44:27.580 the West I mean and

00:44:28.420 that's manifested in the

00:44:29.600 underlying religious

00:44:30.320 structure so if you

00:44:31.740 think about Christianity

00:44:32.800 for example you think

00:44:33.920 about Christianity

00:44:34.600 psychologically you

00:44:36.140 strip it of its

00:44:36.740 metaphysics at least for

00:44:38.160 the purposes of the

00:44:39.260 argument you see the

00:44:40.660 emergence of the idea of

00:44:41.840 the divine individual as

00:44:43.280 as well as as what as

00:44:46.400 as part of what's what

00:44:47.880 as part of divinity

00:44:49.180 itself right as an

00:44:50.360 integral that's part of

00:44:51.420 the trinitarian idea of

00:44:53.120 the part of divinity

00:44:55.460 itself and that divinity

00:44:57.120 to me is the capacity of

00:45:00.140 the of individual

00:45:01.340 consciousness to generate

00:45:03.140 order from potential so

00:45:05.240 the way I look at people

00:45:06.400 first of all so like

00:45:08.060 people who have been

00:45:09.460 criticizing what I've been

00:45:10.440 doing think about my

00:45:12.340 philosophy such as it is

00:45:15.300 not that it's mine as a

00:45:17.980 sort of variant of Ayn

00:45:19.680 Rand's ideas of the

00:45:21.180 centrality of the

00:45:22.020 individual individual

00:45:22.860 above all that's not the

00:45:24.280 issue it's a conceptual

00:45:25.860 issue is that what what

00:45:28.680 what category is to be

00:45:30.600 primary and for me the

00:45:32.760 individual is to be

00:45:33.680 primary and there's a

00:45:35.340 variety of reasons for

00:45:36.200 that first of all the

00:45:37.180 individual is the locus of

00:45:38.440 suffering and also the

00:45:40.160 locus of responsibility so

00:45:42.020 so those are really the

00:45:43.160 two reasons for that the

00:45:44.840 individual has to be made

00:45:45.800 primary but and and the

00:45:49.720 divinity element of the

00:45:50.920 individual and and this I

00:45:52.640 think is coded in our

00:45:53.600 deepest stories it's it's

00:45:54.820 really deeply coded in in

00:45:56.300 Genesis particularly in the

00:45:57.640 opening chapters of opening

00:45:59.160 verses of Genesis is that

00:46:01.060 what human beings confront in

00:46:03.180 their lives is akin to what

00:46:05.160 God himself confronted at the

00:46:06.900 beginning of time and so

00:46:08.580 it's easy for us to believe

00:46:11.260 that we're deterministic

00:46:12.360 creatures like clocks and

00:46:14.920 and that it's the past that

00:46:16.320 drives us forward in a

00:46:17.720 deterministic manner into the

00:46:19.220 future but I don't believe

00:46:21.060 that's the case I actually

00:46:22.940 don't think there's any

00:46:23.620 evidence that that's the

00:46:24.520 case because people are so

00:46:25.560 complex you actually can't

00:46:27.040 predict them as if they're

00:46:28.500 deterministic except in in

00:46:30.100 very constrained circumstances

00:46:31.380 and so it's a hypothesis but

00:46:33.340 it's not a very good one and

00:46:35.620 although it has its utility

00:46:37.860 what what what seems to me

00:46:40.800 to be the case and I think

00:46:42.240 this is how people

00:46:43.080 conceptualize themselves and

00:46:44.980 how they act towards

00:46:46.260 themselves and towards other

00:46:47.860 people and how our social

00:46:49.420 structures or political

00:46:50.900 structures are constituted is

00:46:52.940 that human beings constantly

00:46:55.480 confront a landscape of

00:46:57.180 possibility it's potential

00:46:59.000 itself and and we have a

00:47:00.740 belief in the idea of

00:47:01.760 potential we have an idea

00:47:03.540 that there are things that

00:47:05.180 could be it's a very strange

00:47:07.240 conception of reality because

00:47:08.420 it's not a materialistic

00:47:09.480 conception because things

00:47:11.360 that could be aren't

00:47:12.240 measurable in any sense

00:47:13.620 right but we certainly act as

00:47:15.520 if they exist and we all

00:47:17.820 treat each other as if our one

00:47:20.560 of our fundamental ethical

00:47:21.860 requirements is for you to

00:47:26.080 confront that potential

00:47:27.300 properly and that would be to

00:47:28.940 live up to your

00:47:29.540 responsibility it's just you

00:47:31.000 have these gifts and talents

00:47:33.140 talents and and possibilities

00:47:35.460 that have been granted to

00:47:36.900 you and if you fail to make

00:47:39.240 use of them your talents let's

00:47:41.080 say then that's a sin of

00:47:43.200 sorts and that's a religious

00:47:46.060 way of thinking about it but it

00:47:47.200 doesn't matter because that's

00:47:48.620 how people treat each other if

00:47:49.740 you have a child for example or

00:47:51.740 or a spouse or a friend brother

00:47:54.520 anyone you care about and you

00:47:56.460 see you have the intuition that

00:47:59.040 they could be making more of

00:48:01.260 themselves and what they have

00:48:03.000 than they are then you're

00:48:04.520 deeply disappointed in that and

00:48:06.280 the reason you're disappointed in

00:48:07.720 that is because there's a call to

00:48:10.300 us an existential call to confront

00:48:13.700 that potential that's that's

00:48:15.480 everywhere that faces us in every

00:48:17.560 direction and to transform it into

00:48:20.320 the most functional and habitable

00:48:23.420 order possible and the way that

00:48:26.220 that is to be done properly is with

00:48:28.280 truth and and i think that all of

00:48:30.700 those ideas are integral to the

00:48:33.720 judeo-christian substrate of

00:48:35.560 western culture they're fundamental

00:48:37.140 ideas and so if you put the group

00:48:40.780 before the individual then all of

00:48:43.560 that disappears like when you're

00:48:45.520 when you're debating with the

00:48:47.020 radical leftist postmodern types

00:48:48.920 about free speech you're actually

00:48:50.880 not debating with them about free

00:48:52.260 speech because they don't believe in

00:48:54.120 free speech it's not part of their

00:48:55.760 conceptual universe because for for

00:48:58.060 speech to be free and therefore

00:49:00.080 valuable the people conducting the

00:49:03.160 conversation have to be sovereign

00:49:06.160 individuals capable of generating

00:49:08.620 independent thought independent of

00:49:10.680 their canonical group identity and

00:49:13.040 reach a consensus through that process

00:49:15.340 of dialogue none of that exists in the

00:49:17.920 postmodern world all of those

00:49:19.660 preconceptions would be attributed to

00:49:22.000 well something like eurocentric

00:49:23.760 neo-colonialism something like that

00:49:26.520 it seems to me that what's at work

00:49:27.480 of that is is a radical dismissal of

00:49:29.520 the possibility that the individual

00:49:30.840 has access to anything at all that is

00:49:33.060 to say that that that in if you don't

00:49:35.580 the belief in free speech is

00:49:37.900 fundamentally motivated by the by or

00:49:40.240 or sustained by the confidence that

00:49:43.140 our discourse our dialogue that human

00:49:45.080 thinking itself can reach something

00:49:47.200 stable that it has a relationship

00:49:49.160 beyond yeah but beyond immediacy and

00:49:52.400 that and that and that they're on

00:49:54.080 power and beyond power it reaches

00:49:56.480 beyond power to truth there's no point

00:49:58.460 never having a conversation about

00:49:59.960 anything if the conversation itself

00:50:03.200 doesn't have access to something

00:50:04.880 transcended exactly right well so what

00:50:06.860 happens with when this is especially

00:50:08.540 true for people like Foucault and

00:50:10.520 Derrida to to some degree is well the

00:50:12.740 first thing you do is you define the

00:50:14.360 fundamental motivation as power because

00:50:16.460 that's all there is is there's the

00:50:18.060 dominance of one group or the other

00:50:19.520 and so then the dialogue has to serve

00:50:23.000 power because that's all there is and

00:50:25.040 so yeah all of that is obliterated and

00:50:27.400 and by by doing that actually the the

00:50:31.000 the postmodernists make it impossible

00:50:33.880 for them to solve the conundrum that

00:50:35.980 validly drove post postmodernism to begin

00:50:38.560 with so the conundrum is infinite set of

00:50:41.340 potential interpretations that's a real

00:50:43.480 conundrum that's the problem of

00:50:45.380 complexity right and and it's real so

00:50:48.620 then the question is well is there any

00:50:50.540 solution to the problem of complexity

00:50:52.400 and this is where issues of moral

00:50:54.380 relativism start to become paramount

00:50:58.220 because if there's no solution to the

00:50:59.960 problem of complexity then there's no

00:51:02.420 canonical interpretations and all the

00:51:04.640 interpretations are just well what would

00:51:06.920 you call it there they're expedient they

00:51:09.320 have the expedience of power but see my

00:51:12.860 best pathway through that essentially I

00:51:16.100 think has come from the developmental

00:51:18.260 psychologist Jean Piaget and Piaget could

00:51:21.500 be considered a neo Kantian you know the

00:51:24.500 Kant's fundamental doctrine was act such

00:51:27.860 that if your action became a universal

00:51:30.020 maxim that that would be of universal

00:51:31.940 benefit and so and but but Piaget

00:51:34.820 differentiated that and and and and

00:51:38.720 demonstrated how that evolved naturally in

00:51:41.300 the course of the spontaneous maturation

00:51:44.180 of children through play it's absolutely

00:51:46.760 brilliant so I can give you a quick

00:51:48.740 example so my granddaughter who's 14

00:51:52.280 months old has just learned a new game

00:51:54.080 and the game is she plays it with her

00:51:56.540 wooden spoon and the game is she has the 1.00

00:51:58.940 spoon and then she looks at you and then

00:52:00.620 she gives you the spoon and then you take

00:52:02.780 it from her and she lets it go and then

00:52:04.580 she watches you and then you give the spoon

00:52:06.620 back and she's very happy to get the spoon 0.81

00:52:08.540 back but she's also very happy to give it

00:52:10.520 to you and then she turns to the next

00:52:12.380 person and she gives them the spoon and

00:52:14.420 then she gets it back and then you can

00:52:16.400 play with her and and the play is well now

00:52:19.700 you've you've you've you've you've started to

00:52:22.700 embody the principle of reciprocity right we

00:52:25.640 can trade and and it's a repeating game it's

00:52:28.460 not one trade you don't end up with the

00:52:30.380 spoon and I don't end up with the spoon we

00:52:32.540 both have the spoon some of the time across

00:52:34.940 time and there's some utility in the

00:52:37.220 exchange itself okay so she's playing 0.58

00:52:39.620 with that and thrilled about and no

00:52:41.240 wonder because it's a walloping walloping

00:52:43.880 discovery and so then you take the

00:52:45.920 spoon from her and maybe you you hold it a

00:52:48.200 little longer than she expects and that

00:52:50.300 makes her a little nervous but then you

00:52:51.800 give it back and then she's relieved and

00:52:53.240 that makes her happy or you cover the

00:52:54.920 spoon with your hand and then she's a 0.98

00:52:56.900 bit confused about where it might be and

00:52:58.280 you show it to her and you give it back

00:52:59.900 and she's happy about that or she reaches

00:53:02.600 out to grab it and you pull it away a

00:53:03.920 little bit and move it back and forth so

00:53:06.020 she has to do a little more effort to 0.95

00:53:07.460 get it and as long as you don't push

00:53:09.440 that and it's a bit of a challenge to

00:53:11.480 her both both physically in terms of

00:53:14.840 coordination but also psychologically in

00:53:17.720 terms of delay of gratification she also 0.96

00:53:19.700 finds that gratifying and and the reason

00:53:22.400 for that is that you're you're showing how

00:53:24.740 her how robust and resilient the idea of

00:53:28.580 reciprocity is across sequences of

00:53:30.980 transformations and it's just this little

00:53:33.140 thing you do at the table you think well

00:53:34.580 that's nothing it's like no it's

00:53:36.140 something and so the Piagetian idea is

00:53:39.680 something like there's an there's an

00:53:42.080 implicit morality that emerges to

00:53:43.860 constrain the infinite set of

00:53:45.380 interpretations and it has to do with the

00:53:47.480 structure that will maintain reciprocity

00:53:49.400 optimally in the largest including the

00:53:53.300 largest number of people across the

00:53:54.800 largest amount of time and so and so the

00:53:58.040 way that I've been portraying that for the

00:53:59.780 people who've been listening to my lectures is

00:54:01.400 that well you need to take responsibility

00:54:02.840 for yourself as if you care for yourself

00:54:05.660 okay so first we figure out what's

00:54:07.820 yourself well it's not just you now

00:54:09.740 because you aren't just you now you're the

00:54:12.740 community of you's that extra stretch

00:54:15.160 across time so in order for you to take

00:54:17.340 care of yourself properly now you have to

00:54:19.560 learn to play an iterative game with

00:54:21.260 yourself that's sustainable and even

00:54:23.680 potentially improvable across time and

00:54:26.000 there aren't many games that you can play

00:54:27.840 like that so that starts to radically

00:54:29.460 constrain the set of possibilities and

00:54:31.620 then it's more constrained than that

00:54:32.760 because not only do you have to play a

00:54:35.100 game with yourself that can repeat across

00:54:36.900 time to minimize suffering to remove the

00:54:39.960 possibility of death to allow for the

00:54:42.000 possibility of productive movement and a

00:54:43.740 certain amount of happiness but you have

00:54:45.480 to do that with other people around you and

00:54:48.080 across time and so there's you and the

00:54:50.640 multiple you's embedded in your family and

00:54:53.440 and the multiplicity of your family members

00:54:55.900 embedded inside a culture and and the

00:54:59.140 extension of that culture across time and

00:55:01.360 so for you to act properly then all of

00:55:03.760 those things have to be harmoniously

00:55:05.320 balanced at the same time and that

00:55:07.180 radically reduces the set of potential

00:55:09.880 interpretations and that's the antidote to

00:55:12.520 the to the chaos of of of of the infinite array of

00:55:17.860 potential perceptual worlds and and well and

00:55:23.420 and then there are questions that emerge

00:55:25.040 out of that like well what's the best way

00:55:26.780 to play that game but we certainly know

00:55:28.580 that reciprocity fair play the spirit of

00:55:31.760 fair play is is is immensely important to

00:55:34.760 that that's what Piaget documented and that

00:55:36.800 what it's what we all know and also that

00:55:39.320 there's something about truth that's

00:55:40.820 absolutely integral to that as well so and

00:55:44.000 the postmodernists just they just they got

00:55:46.640 the problem right but they they never went

00:55:51.320 the next steps and it's partly because well

00:55:54.680 why is it why is it they had an easy answer

00:55:57.820 at hand that required almost no transformation

00:55:59.780 in their original worldview well we'll just

00:56:02.180 keep the Marxism we'll just transform it into

00:56:04.220 something that looks different and that'll be

00:56:06.560 good enough minimal change so it seems to me

00:56:09.920 that that the that the the the the collective the

00:56:12.720 collectivist thinking that's at work in the

00:56:14.740 insistence that only the group matters has the

00:56:17.400 effect of radically annihilating the integrity

00:56:21.360 of the individual in fact that maybe even

00:56:23.280 it's it's essence well I think I think it's

00:56:24.960 it's a actually that is it's a I believe so at

00:56:27.480 the bottom like and because there's a there's

00:56:29.620 a murderousness at the bottom of the

00:56:31.400 collectivism that needs to be accounted for and

00:56:34.500 so I I see what's at the bottom and this is

00:56:37.040 partly consequence say of the insistence that

00:56:40.320 the West is a patriarchal tyranny the the desire

00:56:43.360 is it's the Cain and Abel desire see Cain was

00:56:47.260 jealous of Abel not so much because Abel

00:56:50.020 was God's favorite but because Abel

00:56:52.420 deserved to be God's favorite because he

00:56:55.100 had done things right and it's very bitter

00:56:57.580 it's very bitter in life to see a gap widening

00:57:02.400 between you and someone else period but it's

00:57:05.560 particularly bitter if you know the gap is

00:57:07.480 widening because the person who is doing well

00:57:09.360 is doing is actually doing good and doing

00:57:13.020 well and that implies at least in eradicating

00:57:17.520 the vagaries and randomness of life and I'm

00:57:19.920 perfectly aware of those as factors it's it's

00:57:23.820 bad enough to be down but it's worse to know

00:57:26.600 that you're down because you've put yourself

00:57:28.860 down and then you have a choice which is do

00:57:32.700 you do turn against the ideal itself because

00:57:36.060 it becomes so painful to gaze upon it or do

00:57:39.540 you destroy the ideal out of vengeance and

00:57:41.940 spite and that's and that's that's a simpler

00:57:45.600 pathway forward than decomposing and

00:57:47.760 deconstructing yourself and being reborn the

00:57:50.700 the Christian idea for for lack of a better word is

00:57:55.140 that something has to be sacrificed in order for

00:57:58.260 the potential of the future to be manifest in

00:58:01.080 the best possible way there's always a demand for

00:58:03.120 sacrifice the question is what should be

00:58:05.060 sacrificed and the answer is you that's the 0.94

00:58:09.560 answer it's you that should be sacrificed

00:58:12.200 and then the question is well what part of

00:58:13.760 you and and the answer that is well the

00:58:16.160 part of you that's not worthy that needs to

00:58:18.200 be put into the flame that needs to be 0.67

00:58:20.000 burnt off and and that's a process of

00:58:22.520 death and and rebirth and if there's lots of

00:58:24.860 you that has become corrupt then most of

00:58:28.820 what passes through the fire will be burnt

00:58:31.640 off and that's terribly painful for people it's

00:58:34.160 it's that's the desert you know imagine that

00:58:36.920 you're that your essential personality

00:58:38.660 structure is tyrannical so you're a rigid

00:58:41.300 ideologue you're cast in stone and so you

00:58:43.940 decide to move from the tyranny you escape from

00:58:46.100 the tyranny well where do you end up well you

00:58:48.320 don't end up in the promised land you end up in

00:58:50.340 the desert for 40 years and maybe you die there I

00:58:53.540 mean even Moses did so it's out of the frying pan into

00:58:57.420 the fire that's for sure and it's no wonder that

00:58:59.880 people are loath to to to let go and then the

00:59:02.520 more tyrannical they've become the more they've

00:59:04.560 restricted their possibility and all of that and

00:59:07.320 sold their soul to the dogma of human beings let's

00:59:10.560 say as Solzhenitsyn would describe it the less there is

00:59:13.560 of them that will be left after everything is stripped

00:59:16.380 bare and that's a terrifying that's a terrifying

00:59:19.980 possibility it's much easier to take the other route and it

00:59:22.980 becomes easier and easier and then well there are other

00:59:25.380 motivations that pile up as well bitterness the hatred

00:59:28.680 that bitterness can because you know you've lost your

00:59:31.020 chance right you had your chance and you've and you

00:59:35.060 squandered it and the feeling of that I think that's why

00:59:38.760 Cain tells God after he gets caught after his murderous act

00:59:42.960 he says that his punishment is more than he can bear because

00:59:46.500 it's the realization of what he's done he's destroyed his

00:59:48.900 own ideal and that's what you do if you're a collectivist you

00:59:52.280 destroy yourself as an individual and that's all you

00:59:55.320 have and so there's there's nothing in that except I would

01:00:00.060 say a continually opening pit of hopelessness and despair and

01:00:04.500 then that drives bitterness and hatred and desire for revenge and

01:00:07.800 all of that it's a terrible cycle and we've seen it play itself out

01:00:11.240 over and over and and and and we haven't yet precisely learned from

01:00:15.700 that so to me it's part of an eternal struggle you know it's been outlined as a

01:00:21.320 as a war in some sense that's going on in the human psyche since the beginning

01:00:26.060 of time for for all intents and purposes it seems to me Jordan that your

01:00:29.960 position is is fundamentally a positive one it's an affirmation of human

01:00:35.400 dignity the freedom that dignity demands and an affirmation of the infinite

01:00:40.980 particularity of human life you were if one were to contrast the collectivist

01:00:47.220 thinking on the one hand if one might call it a kind of abstract rationality as

01:00:52.720 if there's one solution to fit them one size fits all kind of top-down logic

01:00:57.420 what's on the other side what's the what's the antidote to that in the

01:01:01.160 individual yeah it is particularity I mean one of the things I talk about in

01:01:05.540 12 rules for life and this is and in my lectures this has become a meme strangely

01:01:10.480 enough something that's widely distributed on the web partly because

01:01:13.520 there's a comical element to it it's to clean up your room and everyone laughs

01:01:17.820 about that because I'm taking that seriously it's like well clean up your

01:01:21.480 room everyone's mother has told them that a thousand times right but I try to

01:01:26.200 explain why it's like well you have a bit of chaotic potential right in front of

01:01:31.500 you it's in some sense infinite in its potential and the the domain in which you

01:01:37.640 can manipulate that might be rather restricted because of the restrictions

01:01:41.960 that that are part and parcel of your existence but maybe you have your room

01:01:46.300 and you might think you might have contempt for that and so it's a complete

01:01:49.900 bloody catastrophe but you don't have to you can think well I've got a little it

01:01:55.600 isn't a room it's a place of potential and as soon as you know that then it's it's

01:02:00.320 not your room anymore it isn't a room the room that you see is your

01:02:05.280 preconception of the space that you inhabit what's there is is a fragment of

01:02:11.200 infinity that's what's there and what you see is the is the is the low resolution

01:02:18.640 consequence of your assumption and lazy habit and blindness that's your initial

01:02:24.460 room and you think well no that's not the room see part of what artists do for

01:02:28.060 example when van gogh paints a room and you look at it glowing he's trying to show

01:02:32.920 you what's beyond your perception of the room and I mean this technically like the

01:02:38.140 way that your visual system is set up is that whenever memory and presumption can

01:02:43.240 can can replace direct perception it will because it's simpler so you literally see what

01:02:51.120 you expect to see and if what you see is dull and drab and boring and pointless and and and

01:02:58.660 and uninspiring then that's you it's not what's there and what the artist does when he or she

01:03:05.300 re-represents that mundane reality is to remind you of what's behind it the potential that's there

01:03:11.420 and so what I'm suggesting to people is that they take the potential that's right in front of them

01:03:16.340 it's like okay and here's the rule you're aiming up there's something that you could change

01:03:24.260 that you would change that might be a very small thing could well that's within the grasp of your

01:03:30.640 power would is within the grasp of your will to combine those two things might be very small shift

01:03:36.200 you might only be willing to make a very tiny step forward it's like fine good enough make a tiny step

01:03:43.000 forward and that makes you a slight bit stronger than you were before and then the next step can

01:03:48.720 be slightly larger and it's it's the path of humility it's what people it's what people act out

01:03:56.420 when so there's this cathedral it's actually it's not a cathedral it's an oratorial in montreal

01:04:02.320 i think it's the second largest one in the world it's set on a hill at the top of a hill

01:04:06.280 and there's a huge staircase leading up to it from the bottom of the hill and people often who are

01:04:13.460 crippled and who are on crutches and so forth or in wheelchairs go there and make their way painfully

01:04:19.260 up the hill or maybe they do that on their knees and the idea is that they're struggling incrementally

01:04:26.180 uphill step by step despite their burdens to reach the city of god on the hill and they're acting out

01:04:33.540 that's life it's like the the proper aim is the city of god on the hill and what is that well that's

01:04:40.200 that place that we talked about already where these levels of responsibility are stacked together

01:04:45.660 harmoniously so that you're acting in your best interest and in your family's best interest and

01:04:51.140 in and in the world's best interest and i would say in the best interests of reality itself right

01:04:57.680 assuming that we have some integral role to play in reality which is certainly at least true at the

01:05:03.300 human level that's the city of god on the hill that beckons to everyone and you you move up that

01:05:10.260 you move towards that humbly so that's one step at a time and you do it despite your burden and your

01:05:17.620 suffering all of that that's all dramatized in that and it's it's a perfect drama of that and would

01:05:23.280 you even say it's not simply despite your suffering it's in and through your particular suffering i mean

01:05:27.980 one thing that strikes me about you know clean up your room clean up your room yes the affirmation

01:05:33.260 of the particularity of your life i mean one thing that strikes me but deepest in our human experience

01:05:37.480 is that it is infinitely particular i mean that you mentioned your your granddaughter i mean the the

01:05:42.940 the loves the people the experiences the places that were shaped by they're not places in the abstract

01:05:48.900 this this top-down sense as if there could be the you know the same kinds of clothes and the same

01:05:54.640 kinds of experience for all human beings it that that that's the enemy of the very deepest truth

01:06:01.740 of our human experience which it seems to me is infinitely particular but not infinitely particular in

01:06:08.080 the sense in which those particularities just go all off into nothingness those particulars are

01:06:12.080 precisely our points of access to the transcendent to the infinite to the to the to to to that which

01:06:19.080 that's where the reality is yes yeah well so that's why jung said that modern men can't see god because

01:06:24.480 they don't look low enough yes they're not they're not paying attention to the importance of the

01:06:28.620 particularities because the particularity is where the pen meets the paper right yes and it's just a

01:06:33.880 tiny dot every every like when you're when you're writing it's it's a dot and then it extends into a line

01:06:39.340 and those transform into words and sentences and paragraphs but the particular act is where the pen

01:06:44.280 meets yes yes yes that's that focal point right that's the center of the cross by the way yes same

01:06:50.000 yes yes well you mentioned the cross i mean certainly in the in in in in the in the history of of the

01:06:56.720 west one of the ways this comes through is uh and in the east too is in christian theology is the

01:07:01.520 very notion of the incarnation you know what is that to say but that the the infinite is in the

01:07:07.300 particular and that they that that they are that they are co-inherent that the infinite in fact has

01:07:13.060 no life except in the particular and the particular itself has a relation to or is comprehended by that

01:07:22.580 very infinite and so it seems to me that that what is going on there is an affirmation that every

01:07:30.020 particularity no matter how tiny itself is revelatory of of a transcendent and yes well that i think it

01:07:39.940 was from the gospel of thomas but i might have this wrong the kingdom of god is spread upon the earth but

01:07:44.400 men do not see it and that's that that's that infinite that's that infinite possibility in each

01:07:49.960 moment of particularity and that is what artists that is what great artists are reminding yourself

01:07:54.900 they'll take a a a slice of space in time was it monet who painted the haystacks he went out into

01:08:03.900 the fields in france and he painted the same haystack like many many times under different

01:08:08.820 conditions of lighting just to show how different yes if it's if it's a haystack it's the same thing

01:08:14.800 but it wasn't he paid attention to the particularities and so what great artists are trying to do is well

01:08:20.740 first of all so imagine a painting so it's a painting of of a landscape and so the first thing

01:08:26.440 is that it's it's layers of time because the painter has gone out there and seen the landscape and then

01:08:32.300 seen it again and then seen it again and then seen it again and then seen it again and then seen it

01:08:35.120 again and has to pay attention to the particularities of the light and the color and all of that to

01:08:39.900 represent it properly so it's and and and the mere fact that he's done that is it's it's the acting out

01:08:47.720 of the idea that in this tiny slice of time and space there's something worth attending to for an

01:08:55.860 infinite amount of time but you can't because you just can't do it but you need to know that you could

01:09:02.100 do it and that it would be worthwhile and so the painter encapsulates the landscape and then frames it

01:09:07.840 and says like look look through this window at the transcendent that's behind the low resolution

01:09:15.980 representation of your assumption the blindness that you the the expedient blindness that you by

01:09:21.740 necessity bring to bear to every situation remember what's behind this always remember what's behind

01:09:27.660 this and that's what art calls us to do that's what beauty calls us to do is to make a contact with

01:09:33.220 that and then you say well the problem with the particularly the problem with the particularity

01:09:38.260 is that it brings suffering and the bringing of suffering with particularity can also allow evil to

01:09:44.440 enter the world because that particular suffering can engender bitterness and resentment and hatred

01:09:49.760 and all of those things and the desire to destroy so the particularity carries with it a tremendous risk

01:09:54.820 and a tremendous burden and so the answer the question is well how do you tolerate the particularity

01:10:00.500 and take advantage of the potential and the answer is to make a relationship with the infinite

01:10:05.680 that's behind the particularity and that's the fundamental religious idea is to if you can maintain

01:10:12.080 the particularity but also stay in contact with what's transcendent and infinite beyond that

01:10:19.080 then you can then you have the potential strength to tolerate the catastrophe of what's limited

01:10:25.800 yes and then you get to have your cake and eat it too in principle yes yes I want to return to education

01:10:31.400 in a moment but but on the way there as it were Jordan I want to ask you you you've talked about this this the inflection point

01:10:41.080 what is the inflection point and how might it be understood relative to what I would I take to be a very decadent worldview in its last gasps

01:10:53.080 it seems to me even that many of the frankly simply slanderous attacks on you personal personally blatant misrepresentations of the the very plain fact of what you're saying

01:11:10.080 it seems to me that there's an animus there that is precisely definitely an animus there's an animus there but the question is where is that coming from

01:11:17.080 well if you look at Derrida for example and his critique of the idea of logocentrism you know as as the as the central motif of the West let's say and he and he knew at multiple levels what that critique meant because he knew what logos meant logos means embodied truth and there is of course a religious dimension to that but it's a

01:11:40.080 and so he was criticizing the notion of phallogocentrism and and so he was going right at the core of the

01:11:47.080 doctrine of the individual now the question is why might someone do that now I think the reason for that fundamentally is that there's a terrible responsibility that goes along with it

01:11:58.080 so imagine that you offered people here here's the offer offer one

01:12:05.080 you you don't matter you it's it's a really say the narrowest of materialist viewpoints is you weren't here then you were for a brief period of time and then you're gone and that all washes out in the endless sands of time

01:12:19.080 nothing in your life is significant nothing about humanity is significant nothing about the world itself is significant it's all a matter of blind random chance and it's all the same in the end

01:12:30.080 who cares in a million years right and and the price you pay for that is insignificance but the advantage that you gain from that is that fundamentally you have no responsibility

01:12:42.080 because nothing you do matters and so then there's no moral burden there's no obligation and of course if you can gather expedient pleasure while you're deteriorating pointlessly then that's all to the good

01:12:54.080 that's all to the good so it's it's a libertinism as well and that's inviting obviously because short term pleasure is by definition inviting and so you can abandon any pretension to a relationship with the infinite and consider that only a sign of delusion and weakness assume that your life is material and irrelevant it doesn't matter and then you can shrug off all responsibility and pursue short term pleasure while there's some real advantages in that it's very it's a very easy pathway

01:13:23.080 the alternative is as far as i'm concerned is no you don't understand you are the you are the center of the world past center of the world it has many centers and you do partake in this process of casting the potential of the future into the reality of the present and the past that's what your consciousness does and the quality of what you produce is dependent on your

01:13:53.060 on the ethics of your choice your choice your choice between good and evil in every moment is what determines the course of the world and that's on you it's like well that's deeply meaningful but it's unbelievable it's in its ultimate responsibility in in the literal sense and i think that in order for us to set things right we have to understand that we we have to take on that burden of ultimate responsibility as if it's not only as if it's ours which it is but as if there isn't anything better that we could do

01:14:23.040 and i and one of the things that i found so gratifying about the lecture tour that i've been doing is that and why i keep doing it the live events in particular because we've done about a hundred of them now so far is that when i explain to the audiences and this is especially true it's been seems to be especially true of of men but of young men but not so young even to say look you you have you you have an ethical obligation

01:14:53.040 what you can possibly conceive of and that's the primary call to adventure in life and that call to adventure is so worthwhile that it justifies the particularity everybody it's like lights go on they think oh i see so you need a meaning

01:15:11.100 meaning to set against the suffering and to protect you against that temptation towards malevolence you need that well where's the meaning to be found well it's not happiness it's not short-term pleasure it's not it's not self-development it's not self-esteem it's none of those things that are so focused on on on the individual psyche even it's it's literally the stumbling uphill towards the city of god yes with your burden

01:15:41.100 no they admire responsible people they already got that say well that's what you should become and they think and not only that that that's what you could become because that's what you are in the deepest sense yes yes yes would you would you say that that that that that the antidote to nihilism is meaning

01:15:57.520 and if so uh you know i think you've described yourself jordan as uh you've said i think you're the surfer not the wave and i suppose i want to ask you what is the wave because it seems to me we're at a moment of very

01:16:11.000 very great uh cultural potential and it could go any number of ways but that the very fact of what one might call the jordan peterson phenomenon uh worldwide your book translated into dozens of languages your lecture halls packed uh is a sign of a longing uh a self-conscious longing for for for for meaning how would how would how would you how would you describe what that wave is that that you didn't create but that you well some of it

01:16:40.980 some of it's technological so so i would say that wave is it's got multiple levels so so we could start from

01:16:47.800 uh we'll start from i i would say what's most obvious and that would be the medium rather than the message so

01:16:53.660 i um and these people that i've been associated with this intellectual dark web group we're we're in the fortunate position of being early adopters of extraordinarily powerful technologies

01:17:04.280 so and and the technologies are twofold there's there's online video and then there's podcasts and and so

01:17:11.560 they're technologically revolutionary in a variety of ways so online video is revolutionary because it brings

01:17:18.460 something closely akin to a live performance to an infinitely large number of people on demand permanently

01:17:27.660 so then you think well what's the advantage of a book well it's permanent it's relatively low cost it's easily

01:17:34.740 distributable right so well what's the advantage to online video well it's it's inexpensive it's not

01:17:40.800 inexpensive it's free it's far easier to produce than a book like the lag time from video to publication is

01:17:48.180 the day like we could put this online today instead of the three-year lag that a book would require and then

01:17:55.180 far more people can watch and listen than can read

01:17:58.840 because reading is a minority ability in in some sense really fat real real expert level reading

01:18:05.020 you know that because such a tiny minority of people buy books and people are made uncomfortable by books

01:18:10.120 they're intimidated by them even if they have the intelligence in principle to do the reading it's not part of their

01:18:15.640 cultural milieu that's a small minority of people and so all of a sudden online video allows

01:18:21.440 allows the spoken word to have the same impact as the written word and that's deadly that's a gutenberg 1.00

01:18:28.300 revolution and then with podcasts that's even magnified because you don't have to sit and watch a podcast

01:18:35.540 you can walk around you can exercise you can do the dishes you can you can drive many people who come to

01:18:41.480 my lectures are like long-haul truckers and guys who run forklifts and you know they're in their machinery

01:18:47.900 all day and all they do is listen to podcasts and so all of us and they can listen to the podcast

01:18:54.660 because more people can listen than can read and maybe way more people can listen than can read we

01:18:59.860 have no idea maybe the potential market is 10 times as big and so they can do it when they want to

01:19:05.620 they can also do it in private if you read and you're on the subway people can tell you're reading

01:19:10.520 if you're sitting at home and reading well then you're with a book and if you're uncomfortable with a

01:19:14.280 book you think that's pretentious or presumptuous or part of a class that you don't belong to or

01:19:18.760 anything that makes you feel inferior well you can just circumvent that you listen in private

01:19:23.860 and so people and people are taking that opportunity like mad and so that's part of the wave let's say

01:19:30.600 that technological revolution in communication that's illustrated that people have far more depth

01:19:36.460 and capacity to concentrate than anyone would have imagined you even see this with netflix and hbo

01:19:41.680 it used to be on tv there was an idea that while movie was about as long as you could attract

01:19:47.000 people's attention for 90 minutes that's the most the typical person could concentrate for it's like

01:19:52.200 that turned out to be complete rubbish people will follow these incredibly complex like literary level

01:19:58.120 net narratives breaking bad for example that has multiple characters following multiple streams of

01:20:03.820 development for for endless hours and they'll binge watch it so we have way more capacity for sustained

01:20:10.340 concentration than we thought and these new bandwidth unlimited technologies are revealing that to us

01:20:16.820 and i happen to be an early adopter of this and so that's that's part one of the wave and then

01:20:23.320 then there's the message part and it has something to do with see our culture for a very long time

01:20:29.380 has articulated out a a right of rights you have rights you need to demand them you need to claim them

01:20:35.960 it's like but but that's that's that's half the story and it's not the most salutary half because

01:20:42.400 it turns out that the meaning in your life isn't the consequence of the claiming of rights the rights

01:20:48.820 are in some sense what other people owe you i know there's more to it than that but but it's that in large

01:20:53.920 part well you can just get what you're owed it's like no that's not where you're going to find your

01:20:58.840 meaning what you're going to find where you're going to find your meaning is responsibility which is the

01:21:03.580 other half of the rights responsibility equation and people don't know that this is the the the the

01:21:10.300 the what would you call this is where this is where this is the point where things come together

01:21:15.780 properly you need a meaning in your life to forestall the suffering and to make you strong enough to

01:21:20.920 resist malevolence where's the meaning to be found rights impulsive pleasure and happiness no

01:21:26.740 responsibility oh who would have guessed that it's not part of the narrative because the

01:21:34.400 responsibility narrative even is usually about duty or patriotism or something like that which

01:21:38.580 which is okay but it's it's it's an ideological narrative too in its own right this is different

01:21:44.500 it's like no you don't understand is that what makes life worth living is to pick up the

01:21:50.620 to to to take its catastrophe and embrace it and carry it and to realize through that process

01:22:00.300 who you are so one of the things i figured out in this lecture tour there's this old idea

01:22:04.960 that you go into the abyss it's a nietzschean idea that you can gaze into the abyss you gaze long

01:22:10.860 and what you find in the abyss is a monster tolstoy wrote about that that's the dragon at the bottom

01:22:16.100 of the abyss let's say that's satan himself for that matter and but if you go into that into that

01:22:21.980 as deeply as you can what you find is your you you find you find you find your your your fragmented

01:22:28.780 father in a in a comatose condition in a in a in a desiccated and and and separated condition

01:22:38.140 and then you revivify that well what does that mean it means something it means that if you look in

01:22:44.880 the darkness you find the light that's one thing it means and that the light really stands out

01:22:49.060 against the darkness but that the light is to be found in the darkness so that's a very interesting

01:22:53.320 thing that's a quest narrative but it means more than that it means something fundamental so we know

01:22:58.640 for example that if you take yourself out of your current state of of predictability and safety you

01:23:07.620 put yourself in a new situation you'll learn right you'll absorb you'll incorporate new information

01:23:12.780 so that's a cognitive issue but that isn't all that happens what happens is that new genes turn on

01:23:18.900 within you and code for the production of new proteins and that happens neurologically new parts of you

01:23:24.940 turn on and so the idea is that if you can move yourself out into the world and push yourself out

01:23:31.040 against a maximum array of challenges more and more of you turn on turns on and then the question

01:23:37.680 would be well what would you be if all of you that could be turned on was turned on and the answer

01:23:43.460 would be you would be the resurrection of the ancestral father that's what you would be and so

01:23:48.940 that's why christ says i am the way and the truth and the life and no one comes to the father except through

01:23:54.680 me what that means is that if you take on the unbearable burden of being voluntarily then that transforms

01:24:02.880 you into the ancestral father and that's true and so that's unbelievably optimistic because what it

01:24:09.540 it's so interesting because it's it's dark beyond belief right say well the world is characterized by

01:24:15.400 suffering and by malevolence of a depth that's virtually beyond comprehension but if you choose

01:24:20.560 to comprehend that what you discover in that is the light that destroys the darkness and that's

01:24:27.420 well that's and that's really something to discover it's it's the it's it's the discovery

01:24:34.240 that there isn't a discovery that's more profound than that that's the search for the holy grail or

01:24:39.060 the philosopher's stone all of that it isn't that that isn't that the search and indeed the finding

01:24:44.360 that every human being is is made for um what i want to ask you jordan is about the role of education

01:24:50.880 here so it seems to me that that what the meaning that people are finding in your work that you can

01:24:57.240 listen to in a podcast you can you can you can while you're doing a long run uh uh drive across the

01:25:04.140 prairies or wherever it may be um but it seems to me that that the the deconstruction of our culture

01:25:11.520 by a worldview that has denied the integrity of the individual that has denied the individual's

01:25:18.060 relation to the transcendent to any stable knowing denied the dignity of the individual that that

01:25:26.300 deconstruction it's not for no reason that the the postmodern view calls itself deconstruction that

01:25:32.480 has very deconstructive effects in my view in the world it seems to me that the rebirth of a or the

01:25:38.960 the renaissance of a more adequate to more fully human culture depends on more than it depends on

01:25:46.240 institutional life we need cultural forms we architecture there's all kinds of a fully a full

01:25:51.960 culture as a complex uh uh an infinitely complex structure uh but i think we've we've as it were

01:26:00.300 deleted out the memory banks in so many profound ways and so what i'm what i'd like to ask you about

01:26:06.820 is the we still have the libraries we still have the libraries well thank god for that well thank god

01:26:10.880 for that and that's where i want to turn to education because you say in uh at one point you say

01:26:14.860 that that we need to rescue the treasure trove of the past the treasury rescue the values of the

01:26:20.840 treasure trove of the past and to integrate them and i suppose i'd like to ask you about the role

01:26:25.720 that's what the universities are for is to remind people to to to lead people to doing that i mean

01:26:31.380 we wandered around cambridge today and you showed me king's chapel for example which is so beautiful

01:26:35.660 that it's just beyond belief and like that's a call right that it's a call to a mode of being

01:26:40.700 and it's a socrates believed that all learning was remembering and and it's true in the sense that

01:26:47.240 we just discussed is that through encounter with the tragedy of life and the malevolence of life

01:26:52.540 that that more of you will come to manifest itself but that can be that can be facilitated by your

01:27:00.040 incorporation of the greatness of the past so you say well each great philosopher each great thinker

01:27:05.740 is a fragment of the ultimate ancestral being is a fragment of of god the father let's say

01:27:12.180 and you get a fragment from nietzsche and you get a fragment from plato and you get a fragment from

01:27:17.280 wittgenstein and you get a fragment from shakespeare and and and there's something imagine this there's

01:27:23.320 something that makes all those people great it's whatever greatness is and it's broken up apart

01:27:30.060 it's broken up across all of them but if you if you experience if you're exposed to each of them

01:27:35.940 then you you absorb what's you're you're exposed to and have the possibility to imitate and absorb

01:27:42.560 that greatness across its its fragmentation across many people and then you can that can come to awaken

01:27:50.180 that within you and that is the purpose of the universities and the reason for that it isn't it isn't

01:27:55.460 something casual it's like well it's it's it's good to be more if you go to university and you

01:28:00.980 take a humanities degree you'll come out more well-rounded you know that's that's not the that's

01:28:05.640 not it's such it's such a weak way of putting it it's that no you wake up and realize who you are and

01:28:11.640 then you're ready to take the world on your shoulders yes and that's what the universities are here and

01:28:16.020 that's what students students are dying for that yes that's why men are abandoning the universities is

01:28:21.060 because that call isn't there yes well there's no answer to the call you might say i the the seems

01:28:26.520 to me that the the wave is the longing the longing for that call to be answered and it seems to me

01:28:31.440 that our universities have failed us and not only failed us well exactly they're antithetical to you

01:28:36.620 might call them the the water main that is distributing a worldview that is corrosive of of of of

01:28:42.740 of what is best in the human being well the the the doctrine so one of the fundamental doctrines of the

01:28:49.300 of the collectivist leftists especially on the feminist end of things is the idea that western 0.85

01:28:56.140 culture is a patriarchal tyranny and so first of all we could say well that's inappropriate

01:29:01.600 psychologically because the way that you represent culture archetypally is with the tyrant and the

01:29:07.640 wise king and so you can say that there's the tyrant and that's always true but you also have to say

01:29:13.000 that there's the wise king but there's no wise king there's only a tyrant okay and that tyrant is

01:29:18.280 that's all men it's all male and so and so then and so that's a view of history right is that the view

01:29:25.080 of history is that well women have been the primary force of oppression in relationship to women 1.00

01:29:31.120 throughout history has been men no idea about the cooperative endeavor of men and women or their

01:29:37.100 mutual desire to lift each other out of misery which is a much more accurate way of representing

01:29:42.000 history in a much more grateful and appropriate way none of that no it's a patriarchal tyranny

01:29:47.360 and men are responsible okay well so where does that leave young men well let's say young men are

01:29:52.920 attempting to manifest competence in the world and to become good people well there's no good and

01:29:59.240 there's no competence there's only power and it's related to the patriarchal tyranny and so

01:30:03.460 that conflation of competence with power which is an absolutely pathological move in my estimation

01:30:09.900 is also the desire to discourage and to devalue and to destroy and partly it's based on fear because

01:30:18.400 the idea would be well a fully fledged man is nothing but a powerful tyrant and therefore dangerous

01:30:24.380 better to emasculate him completely so he's nothing but harmless even though he's useless he can't do

01:30:30.020 anything that's bad which is unbelievably horrifying that's the castrating mother the freudian castrating 0.96

01:30:36.280 mother that's the terrible element of of the of the female body politic that's the evil queen that's 1.00

01:30:42.540 the counterpart to the evil king something we never talk about so and that's what's facing young men is

01:30:48.620 that at least they're discouraged from from becoming what they could be at least they're not encouraged

01:30:56.060 but it's worse than that they're actively discouraged and so the universities have become

01:31:01.320 they've become institutions of active discouragement and especially for men and so what's the consequence

01:31:08.180 of that well especially in the humanities and social sciences well it's obvious all you have to do is

01:31:13.320 look at the statistics all the men are leaving there won't be a man left in the humanities and social

01:31:18.380 sciences in 15 years at the current rate of of gender transformation of the disciplines and then you see

01:31:24.420 this equally appalling phenomena occurring phenomenon occurring which is that virtually all of the

01:31:31.040 female dominated disciplines are politically correct and i think that the reason for that is that the 0.99

01:31:36.940 reasonable women don't know how to regulate the behavior of the unreasonable women the the benevolent 1.00

01:31:42.740 queen can't regulate the evil queen and that and that hatred for the patriarchy that's the feminist part of 1.00

01:31:51.420 the post-modern neo-marxist monster is is has decided that emasculated and weak men are preferable to 0.79

01:31:59.180 tyrants and but and those are the only options because there's no such thing as genuine competence

01:32:03.600 what you want to call young men forward to do is to take their place and say look you have you have to

01:32:08.960 understand it's not just about you is the world will be a lesser place without without that which you

01:32:16.040 could reveal to it because of your particularity and that hole that you leave by the absence of your

01:32:23.680 presence is going to be filled with something terrible not just something neutral but something

01:32:28.420 terrible and that's on you and so you you you have a calling that's that's vital and and people people

01:32:35.840 need that they're dying they die yes yes it seems to me that the ideology that's dominant and very much

01:32:42.060 of the university is not only destructive in all these ways but just boring and that it's patent

01:32:50.320 inadequacy to our deepest human longings male female of of all of all races and kinds that the deep 0.94

01:32:58.580 transcendent longings that we all have the the need for self longing for self knowledge that that

01:33:05.180 ideology is it's is is patently inadequate to its satisfaction what i see in young people today many many 1.00

01:33:11.880 young people i know you see this in the thousands that you encounter is is they're not interested in

01:33:18.200 fighting some cultural war they simply want to discover the deepest truth of themselves and um so

01:33:25.660 i want to ask you a little bit about about the role of education we talked about the lighting up and the

01:33:30.060 awakening the encounter with depth and truth um you know there's a certain kind of abstract view of

01:33:36.640 education as though it's a kind of inert process you're just sort of downloading into the into the

01:33:42.900 into the mind but in fact the nature of our of our of our of our the nature of our souls is such that

01:33:52.120 it's an it's a dynamic reality you know the room is not just the room it's the place in which you

01:33:58.200 you encounter yourself in the in the in the rule of clean up your room but it seems to me that that's

01:34:02.520 what's going on in in in all education at its best and that it's not enough simply for the library to

01:34:08.480 be there there needs a certain mediation of the institution so for example we could have a there's

01:34:13.320 a piano on the other side of this room you know we could say well there's a piano you're you're free

01:34:17.220 to play the piano but i i can't play the piano i don't know the chords and the scales i haven't

01:34:21.680 and yet if i if i if i did all that then what i can make happen on the piano is infinitely richer than

01:34:32.440 if i've never learned to play the piano and i suppose i suppose when we talk about rescuing

01:34:36.760 the values of the treasure trove that's discipline as the precondition for freedom yes right which is

01:34:41.760 which is a which is actually a nietzschean idea at least in part i mean it's older than that it's

01:34:45.760 the apprenticeship idea it's that it's that before before you can be a painter who can paint what's

01:34:52.340 beyond mere memory you you have to inculcate that discipline skill and a lot of that is painful

01:34:59.360 repetition and hard grinding work it's the sacrifice of the present for the future but once you manage

01:35:06.960 that then things open up and and virtually everything you learn of value is like that's very

01:35:11.880 very very very difficult to learn to write and there's arbitrary arbitrary rules that you have

01:35:17.360 to follow and bind yourself to and while you're learning those rules the probability that you have

01:35:22.380 any creative freedom to speak of or any facility with the rules is very low you're a you're a rank

01:35:28.120 beginner and and even to some degree whatever creativity you have is going to have to be stifled

01:35:34.040 while you're passing through that that keyhole but if you pass through it then something massive

01:35:40.660 opens up on the other side and it is definitely the case that disciplinary institutions universities

01:35:46.720 are exactly that is their places of guidance and and their places to encourage people to develop the

01:35:53.240 discipline that's necessary to see beyond the discipline i mean that's why we have disciplines

01:35:57.580 right i mean the words aren't there by accident you have to narrow yourself first and then you can

01:36:03.660 broaden outward and so that's and that's part of the process of maturation that part of the that's part of

01:36:09.160 the sacrifice of childhood say in childhood you're nothing but potential but it's not realized and

01:36:15.400 you don't know how to realize it and so then the question is well how do you get to a point where

01:36:19.320 you realize the potential and the answer is you sacrifice almost all of it to a single direction

01:36:24.540 this is nietzsche's commentary on the catholic church he's a great admirer of the catholic church

01:36:29.340 despite the fact that he was also a radical critic critic of christianity said the cat see the thing

01:36:36.080 about the catholic church is that it forced everything to be interpreted within a single

01:36:41.840 explanatory framework and that was a discipline and once that discipline was established then

01:36:47.940 the disciplined mind could explode in every direction which is precisely what happened

01:36:52.400 and so and and and that's the thing about growing up is that when you're a teenager and a young adult

01:36:58.380 you have to sacrifice everything you could have been as a child to be the one thing that you're aiming

01:37:04.120 at but then that opens up and and the universities are part and parcel of that process and you need

01:37:09.580 the guidance because the the the library is too large to wander through it unaided yes and that and

01:37:17.600 and i think that comes down to to the to the question of of what you need to what what are the books that

01:37:23.360 can be read to be transformative i mean we you know it's you know the the the otherness that realizes

01:37:29.400 and that awakens and opens up the self that light that turns those lights on is not just a random

01:37:34.000 otherness i mean you can look at a at a brick wall all day and never get anything like what

01:37:38.960 we get by looking at the king's chapel that we just came from a few minutes ago

01:37:43.280 that that that the the levels of pattern and depth and beauty that are present in that building

01:37:49.240 that's a kind of metaphor for what the most wonderful most fecund texts of our own of our own past offer to

01:38:02.840 us you know there they are lying on the shelf but when opened up uh and explored fully they open up in

01:38:10.560 us yeah they are portals so it's a book isn't a book a book isn't paper yes that that's you that's your

01:38:16.460 memory that's your perception of the book it's a portal yes and and and you know one of the ideas

01:38:22.260 the postmodern idea is that well there's no canon and if there is a canon it's only there to support

01:38:27.880 the tyrannical patriarchy because of course the tyrannical patriarchy is the explanation for

01:38:32.000 everything but i've been trying to solve that problem technically with i have a small staff that's

01:38:36.580 trying to produce an educational system online and we've been trying to understand well what is it

01:38:41.620 makes a book canonical there's actually a technical answer to that so you imagine that books exist in

01:38:48.140 relationship to one another that's a perfectly reasonable postmodernist claim by the way books

01:38:52.720 exist in relationship to one another okay well some books have hardly any relationship to other books

01:38:58.040 those are trivial books now they might be undiscovered works of genius that's another possibility if

01:39:03.840 they're recently written but it doesn't matter because you can't separate the wheat from the chaff

01:39:08.100 at present it's too difficult there's too much chaff but if you go back into the past you can rank

01:39:13.960 order books by the degree to which they've influenced other books so it's like citations in some sense

01:39:20.160 and the books that have influenced the largest number of other books are the canonical books

01:39:25.060 and the ultimate canonical book in the west is clearly the biblical corpus because it's influenced

01:39:29.800 virtually everything and so you have to know it because it's implicit in everything else and so you start

01:39:36.380 there and so you have that you have that knowledge at least to some degree and it gives you the

01:39:41.600 foundation the metaphorical foundation the conceptual foundation the mythical foundation that you can

01:39:47.860 use to then well then maybe you can now that now shakespeare opens up to some degree and now milton

01:39:53.080 opens up to some degree and dante opens up to some degree and you think well why should those open up

01:39:57.820 and answer is well as the social constructionist claim you're at least in part a historical creature

01:40:06.060 well then those books are about you they're the the patterns in those books are the patterns of your

01:40:12.820 perceptions and your actions and without understanding them then you don't know who you are and you can't

01:40:18.000 guide yourself properly through life and so you you you come into university and you encounter experts and

01:40:24.540 they say look this is canonical why because it's had a disproportionate influence on everything else

01:40:31.140 so you need there's something here that you need to know about because it's about you and and it isn't

01:40:36.340 about the you that's here now in some sense it's about the you that can unfold across time in the in the

01:40:42.160 best possible way so each of those works is a call to adventure every painting that's a great painting or

01:40:48.220 a building like the king's chapel if that's not a call to adventure i mean what else could it be

01:40:54.000 we were talking about that so these ancient buildings these great ancient buildings that

01:40:58.760 europe is littered with these were people would were aiming at something beyond themselves beyond the

01:41:05.480 span of their lifetime they they engaged in the collective manifestation of these great works to

01:41:10.980 aim to to to participate in aiming something that at something that was beyond them it was a divine aim

01:41:17.660 they had that that will to produce this beauty that transcended centuries you know and maybe the will

01:41:24.440 that produces beauty is always aligned with that which transcends centuries maybe those are the same

01:41:29.340 things and even paintings oil paintings you know they they take a moment in time and they cast it into a

01:41:36.360 permanent form that can be that can be preserved across centuries and so there's something about

01:41:41.360 there's something about the establishing a relationship with eternity that's key to the construction of

01:41:47.800 something that's beautiful and then that in itself becomes a call to a relationship within with eternity

01:41:52.700 so and you need that people hunger for it i'm at the university of toronto there's the the there's

01:41:59.400 the european cathedral side of the campus the older part and then there's the modern factory side of the

01:42:06.060 campus and it's soul deadening my building is made out of cinder blocks you know and my my brother-in-law

01:42:12.800 who's his own sort of genius calls that hosable architecture anything could happen there and you

01:42:18.340 could wash it away it's like and it's just it's it's it's i have my students now and then sit in the

01:42:24.380 classroom like that and look at it and tell me how it makes them feel random wires hanging from the

01:42:30.120 ceiling you know nothing but cinder block the cheapest form of construction nothing that's beautiful

01:42:35.300 pure boring dull utilitarianism with these bare shiny desks and terrible fluorescent lighting it's like

01:42:42.940 it's ugly right to the core and it and it's it's corrosive it eats away at the heart of the

01:42:47.940 university which is about the beauty that's eternal and and that isn't optional it's not impractical

01:42:55.200 it's it's the most practical it's it's it's that upon which the idea of practicality itself is

01:43:02.040 predicated and that's the university and people should be flocking to the universities dying to

01:43:08.280 be educated because they are dying to be educated i have dozens of young men who come to me all the time

01:43:14.800 after my talks and say look they give me a note one did last night here's the note six weeks six

01:43:22.800 months ago i was deeply suicidal i had no reason to live i was completely nihilistic so i started watching

01:43:27.780 your lectures i started to adopt a more responsible outlook i realized that that was important i started

01:43:34.260 to try to tell the truth and to put myself together and without that i wouldn't be here and that's a

01:43:39.860 little note and that happens over and over you know and then i go talk to journalists and this happened

01:43:46.140 in scandinavia it happened with this gq interview i just did well your message is primarily directed

01:43:51.360 towards young men it's like and there's this judgment about that it's like oh there's a problem with

01:43:56.680 that is there i mean that wasn't the point but that is the audience is what there's something

01:44:01.880 there's something wrong with talking to young men and encouraging them it's like that makes me somehow

01:44:07.420 somehow suspicious the hatred of humanity that is present in that critique is mind-blowing it is it's

01:44:14.920 it's absolutely beyond belief and you think well it's only misogyny it's like no it's not it's like

01:44:19.980 what who are you leaving for the women to have as partners these demolished and weak well it's a zero-sum 0.77

01:44:26.520 quality of it i mean as if as if as if lifting up any human being is not a good for all of us i mean

01:44:32.520 that's the whole point about the the necessity of our care for the oppressed is because they are part

01:44:38.280 of us no you only care about them in groups the individual oppressed person is irrelevant it's the

01:44:44.200 group of oppressed people that's relevant and so if you just help one person oh well you see then

01:44:49.000 then that's in that's that that that that flies at the heart of the collectivist doctrine you said

01:44:54.500 very very powerful when you talked about people should be flocking to the universities you're an

01:44:59.220 image that comes to my mind is the image of a fountain and your people come to the fountain to

01:45:03.540 drink to slake their thirst and and and and it seems to me that we need we need new institutions of

01:45:10.100 higher education that's the fountain of living water yes yes that's why moses that's why moses is a

01:45:15.460 master of water in the desert yes so he's not a master of stone yes yes yes yes and one thing that really

01:45:20.900 excites me jordan is that is that what we see right now in is is this longing so many thirsty people

01:45:26.820 it seems to me we simply need to to build new fountains because you know as you say the books

01:45:32.180 are in the library we can we can we can give a rebirth to the past in the form of the hunger and

01:45:38.900 thirst that are in young people simply by feeding it and that it seems to me that that there's a kind of

01:45:44.660 cultural passivity particularly when it comes to the university people say oh well you know you could 0.98

01:45:49.460 never do anything about that well you know the universe they're just well you just have to kind

01:45:53.700 of write them off well why do we have to do that why can't we start new ones people there have been

01:45:58.420 thousands of universities started over over the years come into the university and they've got this

01:46:03.060 facade of cynicism you know that partly because they haven't had great experiences with the educational

01:46:08.420 system and it's no wonder and partly because all the way back to the to the beginning yes i mean you've

01:46:13.140 talked about this in your book the university that's to interrupt that the the what what moves in in

01:46:19.140 the whole k-12 educational system in a certain sense was founded in large part to bring about

01:46:25.620 that collectivist control and to to stultify and to annihilate the the the freedom of the individual

01:46:32.980 and so that's that's pretty well ingrained by the time someone comes to university and no wonder they

01:46:38.180 don't like they don't think they like educational institutions yes well but but they're still desperate

01:46:42.260 enough to come and they might say well i'm doing this practically because i need a degree to get a job which

01:46:46.740 is you know as perfectly reasonable it's perfectly reasonable as a as a fragmentary ambition it's

01:46:52.180 it's a good fragmentary ambition but their their their their core is dying for something deeper than

01:47:00.100 that and they're coming they're coming to university the way that you enter a cathedral properly if you

01:47:07.060 enter it properly they come prayerfully they're hoping but they won't talk to anyone about it they're hoping

01:47:12.740 god i hope that what i need is here and if you provide that then they're just overwhelmed by it

01:47:21.460 and and then they're motivated to to work and to move and to put themselves together because it doesn't

01:47:26.820 take much water on to really transform a parched surface and these young people they have their cynical

01:47:33.700 facade and it's easy to be intimidated by that because they're they're judgmental in their lectures and in

01:47:38.900 your lectures and maybe they're not paying attention and they're snapping gum and they're playing with

01:47:42.500 their computers but there there is part of them that's at the back listening and hoping that something

01:47:48.500 will emerge that will captivate them and when that happens then well then well then that's when it

01:47:53.780 becomes something absolutely remarkable to be an educator because then you're providing guidance and

01:48:00.260 you're providing the guidance that that's that's well that's that's that's the bread that's more than mere

01:48:06.100 material bread and then the students are extremely extraordinarily rewarding to work with because

01:48:10.900 they're so it's not pleased it's way more than pleased they're so engaged by what's happening that

01:48:16.820 the whole thing comes alive that's that's when it's a great thing to be an educator and what it's been

01:48:23.060 great for me to go on this lecture tour because which is why i keep doing it is because every evening

01:48:29.060 it's like that i get 2500 people in an auditorium and i start talking about the things we've been talking

01:48:34.660 about everybody's dead silent and they're locked onto it and it's it's an unbelievably gratifying

01:48:40.740 process and then people come up and say you know oh this has been so useful to me things were so

01:48:46.580 terrible and falling apart in so many ways and like all of a sudden i'm just stacking these things up

01:48:51.380 and putting them together it's so interesting watching the young men who come and talk to me and

01:48:56.740 it's it's young women as well well not always just so young uh many of the women come and say thank you

01:49:02.420 very much for what you've done for my sons for example but the men come up and they say it's

01:49:06.980 like they're telling me a secret you know and it's the sort of secret that you'd only tell an intimate

01:49:11.380 friend that you trusted it's like you know man i i wasn't doing so well and these are often rough

01:49:16.100 looking guys you know um they say look i've been really trying to get my act together you know i've been

01:49:22.100 working it out with my wife and i've been i've been trying to get my relationship with my son

01:49:26.500 straightened out and and here's my father by the way he came along with me and we're getting along just

01:49:30.420 fine and it's really working and they say it in a hushed voice you know and and they say thank you

01:49:35.700 very much and i say great that's so great i'm so thrilled to hear that and they they're telling me

01:49:41.220 that because they're hoping that i would in fact be thrilled to hear that because they want to tell

01:49:46.100 it to someone who would be thrilled to hear it and i am thrilled to hear it because i do believe that

01:49:52.420 the that redemption is something that is accomplished at the level of the individual and

01:49:57.860 every time you hear someone say um that they've that they're they've oriented themselves properly

01:50:05.220 it's like a bell rings in heaven it's exactly that and so well so well so that's absolutely and

01:50:14.100 chronically overwhelming but it's it's absolutely remarkable to see this to see how much desperation

01:50:20.820 there is for this when i talk to audiences about the relationship between responsibility and meaning

01:50:26.100 they inevitably go dead silent there's not a there's not a rustle there's not a cough it's like

01:50:32.180 is that the secret is that the secret is that it's the voluntary adoption of responsibility it's like well

01:50:37.780 that's the that's the central message of the west it's like to pick up your cross and bear it

01:50:43.540 you know and everyone's been told that but they don't know what it means

01:50:47.060 because it's not been articulated enough so that it becomes something that's practical it's like

01:50:51.220 yes look at the terrible responsibilities you have right in front of you your family is hurting

01:50:57.300 you're in trouble there's problems in the world it's like all of that's right there and all you have

01:51:02.740 to do is all you have to do is take responsibility for it and then you've got what you need all of a

01:51:09.460 sudden you think oh that's what i needed i didn't know that i thought that was something to avoid

01:51:13.860 it's an impediment to short-term hedonistic pleasure you know and to happiness there's nothing

01:51:18.980 happiness about happy about lifting the suffering of the world onto your shoulders it's like this is

01:51:24.100 way way better than happiness isn't what you feel in the king's chapel it's something so magnificent that

01:51:32.500 happiness pales in comparison and so it's it's it's thin gruel happiness and young people know that

01:51:40.260 they're pursuing hedonistic pleasure and you know no wonder but there's nothing in it that's

01:51:45.220 sustaining and all it does is make you cynical it's like is that's all there is another one night stand

01:51:51.140 another another binge party you know and it's not like i have anything against in principle against

01:51:57.620 some of that exuberant youthful hedonism that but but it's it's not if look the universities have

01:52:07.620 turned into places of parties why well because that's what the students find best to do there

01:52:14.100 well that's not good what you want to offer them is a reason to not party it's like no you gotta

01:52:20.180 understand you come to this class hungover you're not going to be able to get it you're not going to

01:52:25.060 be able to write properly you're going to pay a price for that hedonism it's like and the price will

01:52:29.940 be too high for you to bear it's like oh well enough hedonism for me then like i've got something

01:52:34.500 important to do that's the way out of that but that that thing that's more important has to be

01:52:39.780 offered and it can be offered so when i've seen it happen over and over to people and it's it's

01:52:44.660 it's extraordinarily good for them if you're an addict and i've talked to many people who are

01:52:49.140 addicted you need a reason to stop being addicted which means you need something better than the drug

01:52:57.140 well that's what you offer at universities it's something better it's something better than everything

01:53:01.700 else and if you're not offering that then it's it's all a facade it's all a factory a knowledge

01:53:07.460 factory which is the modern university factory knowledge factory products seems to me and we'll

01:53:15.300 conclude here i think momentarily it seems to me that that the time is ripe for a radical and beautiful

01:53:22.660 rebirth of a more fully human culture and when i hear you speak jordan about your lectures and

01:53:28.820 you know what what what moves me deeply is is the the love that you have for the people who come to

01:53:38.420 you and i suppose i want to just conclude on a question uh about i want to conclude on an optimistic note by

01:53:50.500 by drawing out what's in that love it's that the potential that is that lies in those in each and every

01:53:58.100 individual for deep transformation for connection to the transcendent and and and and and and and

01:54:05.460 and just to talk about that that longing that seems to me that that that longing is overwhelming

01:54:12.260 and if only we can start to can refill the fountains with water or build new fountains that

01:54:19.140 the possibilities are beyond our our imagining right for the point yes the point we're at at the moment

01:54:28.180 that's what partly why this is an inflection point too because so many things are transforming

01:54:33.220 the landscape of possibility is opening up to us in a way that it it never has partly because of our

01:54:39.060 technological transformations and so the importance of the particularities of our ethical choices are becoming

01:54:45.940 more and more exaggerated because while we're going to build artificial intelligence and it's going

01:54:52.660 to be a reflection of us and so we better make sure that it reflects the part of us that we want

01:54:57.300 reflected and you talked about that care for people as the care for me is predicated on my realization

01:55:03.700 that i prefer heaven to hell having done what i could to explore hell let's say in my academic career

01:55:09.700 and in my private life and in my and in my clinical practice and to see what's there that unnecessary

01:55:15.540 suffering and that malevolence is like well it would be best to move away from that towards something

01:55:21.300 better that's something i genuinely believe that it's it's it's for the best for everything that we

01:55:27.460 aim up and then when i see someone decide to aim up i think well that's that's something that's one more

01:55:33.060 step away from hell it's not just the it's not just the climbing up the hill painfully towards the city

01:55:39.780 of god it's move away from the abyss and i think it's easier for people to believe in the abyss it was

01:55:45.060 for me to believe in the existence of malevolence and apocalypse and catastrophe i mean all you have

01:55:50.020 to do is study history to believe that think well not that anything but that away from that well away

01:55:57.060 from that is amorphous right it's again it's like moses leading his people from from the tyranny in egypt

01:56:02.420 it's like well where are we going well away from that well that's into the desert and that's where

01:56:10.420 we are now well that's not so good but at least it's away from that well that's something but

01:56:15.620 then there's something beyond that it's like well what is it that we're striving towards and

01:56:19.540 and well we we can each imagine that in our own way in some sense but i would say well you start locally

01:56:24.980 it's like fix up what you can fix up when you see a problem that announces itself to you a small

01:56:30.420 problem that's your problem that you could fix that's your one step forward take it yes it seems

01:56:37.060 to me in addition to that that life of the individual we we need to think very broadly about

01:56:42.180 the institutional life that supports all of that individual uh realization and freedom we need to

01:56:49.940 think about universities when you think about our architecture we need to think about that is to say

01:56:54.580 that that that the the whole horizon that lies before us needs to be considered for the fullness of

01:57:03.220 possibility that that it holds and that those possibilities are not realizable simply by you know

01:57:12.020 this individual doing this and that individual doing that but that they also require a kind of um

01:57:17.780 um it requires that we think about the whole and that we allow to give birth we allow to come into

01:57:25.860 being the kinds of institutional lives institutional life that um upon which our realization depends upon

01:57:36.100 which that awakening depends and so it simply can't be a simply a matter of of our living our lives in a

01:57:41.700 kind of solitary way no i was thinking about you know what we we what you know to think about what

01:57:47.460 are the fountains on which you know if we're in the desert it seems to me that that okay so we're in

01:57:53.620 the desert it's a it's a it's a lonely and dry place but there we're the narrative fragments we're

01:58:00.420 the narrative sure that's all the deities that the the israelites come to worship the false idols

01:58:05.140 because the narrative fragments and that is the precisely the moment paradoxically at which

01:58:11.140 we can rediscover ourselves what our what our nature what our longing is for and so it seems

01:58:16.260 to me that we're at a time of astonishing possibility but that we must take it up well

01:58:23.540 hopefully you know when you train graduate students and you train undergraduates you know

01:58:27.140 you orient them towards the truth and then they learn to teach in accordance with that and that

01:58:32.900 and that facilitates the process that we're describing and that they regard the relationship

01:58:37.540 with individual students as of paramount importance and see the teaching as something that's noble

01:58:42.260 and the research as well yes yes the awakening of each particular individual say in an educational

01:58:46.900 institution is precisely what allows them to go on in in ten thousand ways in ten hundred thousand

01:58:53.220 ways throughout their lives to to to transmit and open up those transcendent possibilities

01:59:00.340 communities thank you jordan very much my pleasure

01:59:13.700 you

01:59:30.340 you

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - February 21, 2019

Our Cultural Inflection Point and Higher Education

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript