Joe Rogan Experience #877 - Jordan Peterson

Key Takeaway

Today, spend 30 minutes writing a vivid three-to-five-year future you would genuinely want—across health, relationships, education, career, and habits—then write the opposite future that follows if your worst patterns continue. Turn the desired future into a few concrete next steps. Peterson argues that self-authored goals give people direction and a reason to confront avoidable problems, rather than outsourcing responsibility to an ideology or waiting for society to change first.

Episode Overview

Joe Rogan talks with clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson about compelled speech, ideological conformity, university culture, online education, and the historical risks Peterson sees in rigid political ideologies. The most practical portion of the conversation centers on Peterson’s Self-Authoring programs: using structured writing to clarify a future, process unresolved experiences, and convert values into implementable plans.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Joe Rogan Experience #877 - Jordan Peterson from Joe Rogan Experience. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

all right we're live sir first of all thank you very much for coming on I really appreciate it I've enjoyed your YouTube video I wouldn't say I've enjoyed I have enjoyed them but I've been puzzled by them been puzzled by the subject and for people who have no idea what's going on let's sort of unpack this for them in Canada Canada is very different than the United States I love Canada I'm a giant fan of Canada if there's one place I would live outside of the u.s.

100% it would be Canada I love it up there I think the people or at least 20% more polite than America but you've got some weird [ __ ] going on up there and your king what's that what do you call him Prime Minister Trudeau that fella the caster lover the Castrol lover oh he's gonna say that this [ __ ] guy and people have been posting today all the atrocities that Castro committed during his regime to sort of show how monsters and firing squad deaths a few thousand how about all the different people that they executed and then sold their blood to the Vietcong yes you see that wonderful man he bucks a pint yeah he was a wonderful man that that [ __ ] Savage Trudeau in what he represents is I think the good side of it what he's trying to do the trying to make a kinder more progressive more inclusive country but along the way what they're doing is they're they're promoting what you would call online social justice warrior values and some of them are a little preposterous you are one of the very few academics who have fought against some of these ideas that are not just being promoted but are being enforced and enforced and written into law and one of them is about gender pronouns one would mean by gender pronouns is not just he and she but a whole slew of invented gender pronouns gender pronouns that you're going to be compelled to use yes already compelled to use and likely in the States to even though people don't know it yet certainly in New York and the employment EEOC has already ruled on that with regards to businesses for the US and yeah businesses and I believe also landlords I think yeah so if your landlord chooses to misgender you and not just misgender you like if you're a transgender woman you used to be a man now you're a woman and they call you a he it's not just that like you're compelled to use how many what is it what is that and a number of them now while there's no standard nomenclature for the non gender or the further non-binary types there's many many invented words and which of those you're supposed to use is dependent entirely on the subjective choice of the person that you're talking with now most people I believe out there listening are going what the hell are they talking about right now we're talking about as many as 70 plus invented gender pronouns like z x e a buzzer hir a bunch of weird ones and this is for people that don't necessarily think they're a he or a she so they prefer these things on top of that you have animal kin where himself which was most amusing worm self i guess that's for the low self-esteem other kids this is people that truly believe that they are in the wrong body and that they should have been born some form of animal and would like you to refer to them as this animal your elf or elf or fairy or if I see Pepsi yeah Pixy Ken I haven't seen Pixy kid that's a good one let's just get on tumblr gotta get on to me yes professor Peterson what the hell's going on what is this well I think it's partly if it's partly a form of narcissism yes it's it's it's partly a consequence of of the read of the rise of the new rise again of say Marxist doctrine I would say it's part of post-modernism maybe it's post-modernism more than anything else because the post modernist that's a philosophical community let's say believe that the entire point of human categorization is power and the dialogue between people is only a power dialogue and that there's no real reality outside of interpretation and that basically what we do is exchange interpretive viewpoints to ratchet up our dominance and status and that's that and there's no biology as an ideology and the idea of the objective world is an ideology and Sciences and ideology and it's all interpretation all the way down like Turtles all the way down what do you mean by it it's all about power okay in what way well you imagine that that there are groups of people who are competing in the world for resources I suppose and that it's a zero-sum game and it's every group against every other group and the reason that we engage in dialogue isn't to establish the truth or move towards some some closer approximation of reality but to structure this social interaction so that our group comes up on top right and that it that is really what the problem is with all this is that it's not just a matter of choosing to be defined in one way but compelling others to define you in that way well one of the most most awful elements of it I think is the idea that individuals should be defined in terms of their group by density at all I mean you could argue and this is one of these weird inversions that's so characteristic of this chaotic state that we're in when people originally started fighting against unfair discrimination and and I say unfair discrimination because lots of discrimination is fair if you discriminate against people on the basis of their competence that's perfectly reasonable it's unfair discrimination that that constitutes the proper battleground for people who have a more egalitarian viewpoint but the initial idea was to eliminate the proclivity for people to be categorized according to the group identity because that was interfering with everyone's ability to view them as as competent individuals but that got flipped probably in the 70s after the Soviet state so who self-evidently was revealed as a catastrophe that got flipped so that the world was turned into one group against another power struggle from one group against another and then the social justice warrior types and the lefties even the Democratic Party started categorizing everybody according to their ethnic or sexual or racial identity and made that the canonical element of their being and that's an absolutely terrible thing to do it leads to in the Soviet Union when that happened for example when they introduced that idea along with the notion of class guilt so for example when the Soviets collectivized the farms they they pretty much wiped out her or raped and froze to death all of their competent farmers they they called them cool acts and they attributed class guilt to them because they were successful peasants and they defined their success as oppression and theft they killed all of them pretty much shipped them off to Siberia and frozen to death and they were the productive agriculturalists in the Soviet Union and then in the 1930s in the Ukraine because of that about 6 million Ukrainians starved to death but the Soviets were big on collective guilt and all of these things that you hear about now like white privilege for example they're they're they're variants of collective guilt I I picked your bloody identity whatever it happens to be and then I make you a guilty member of that category and then you and the rest of the guilty members of that category are judged as a as a unit it's absolutely its murderous pushed to its extreme and we've seen that many many times yeah you're oppressed or your your your opinions rather are suppressed and you are automatically put into this category of people who should be dismissed because of the fact that you have white privilege you should step back and let others talk you should step back and this is a narrative that gets repeated over and over again in social justice warrior culture this idea that you should just step back and let these others talk because they understand as long yeah and the others are always other group mates right and somehow their their discourse is to be privileged in reverse because hypothetically they're a member of an oppressed class right of course and you can multiply the numbers of oppressed classes at nauseam which is another part of the problem yeah like the idea is that in giving them privilege because they have been marginalized you will balance things out and you'll somehow another reverse yeah but and that's another example of the class-based guilt idea you know it's it doesn't seem to me self-evident that I'm to blame for slavery for example I mean being a Canadian it's a slightly different situation I suppose but the the idea that as the member as a member of a culture that you're somehow responsible for the past sins of that culture let's say it it's a very very anti Western ethos it goes along with this idea of class guilt because your group membership is the most important thing if your group at some point in the past did something reprehensible which of course every group has done that's for sure then you were de facto responsible in the present for that how do you think we got to this point where people are repeating these patterns that were ultimately incredibly unsuccessful and dangerous and deadly in the past like Marxism for example like people proudly proclaim themselves as having Marxist ideology one five one in five social scientists claims to be a Marxist kind of owner I understand the history once you feel people in on how that went bad well the estimates vary but in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959 somewhere between 30 and 50 million people were killed in internal repression alone so that's pretty bad and then and in China which was operating under exactly the same principles it might have been up to a hundred million killed during Mao's time and of course ma was still revered in China appallingly enough and Vietnam Vietnam and Cambodia and wherever these ideas were implemented Cuba wherever these ideas were implemented the result was absolute mayhem absolute mayhem and I think what happened is that the Marxist ideas are actually quite attractive if you're an intellectual and if you're I would say if you're tilted towards compassion from a personality perspective because they're based on doctrines like from from each according to his ability to each according to his need and the idea that you should fulfill people's needs or that society should fulfill people's needs is on the surface of it an attractive idea of course the problem is who gets to define the needs and who gets to define the abilities and that really is a big problem and well and then those ideas were put into practice first in the Soviet Union and Alexander Solzhenitsyn who wrote the Gulag Archipelago did a very lovely job of detailing in in horrifying detail how those initial doctrines were transformed into legislation and then how those legislation was transformed into endless genocide essentially and almost destroyed the world let's not forget that partly with partly with the help of Castro who just died the the doctrines when when put into proxy in into into actual practice were murderous instantaneously know what happened they're always apologists for the left in the West especially in France especially among the French intellectuals especially in the late 1960s and then when all of the information about what was happening is in in the Soviet Union came flooding forward and that culminated say in 19 Boat 1973 when Solzhenitsyn's book was published the French intellectuals changed their tune instead of agitating on a part of the working class which was which allied them with murderous Marxists they switched and and started to talk about power and and to talk about a group identity it was like a sleight of hand the underlying pathological philosophy remained exactly the same but the surface nomenclature changed and that became very attractive and at the same time the Soviet Union dissolved and so one of the problems I think we have now a perverse problem is that these Marxist ideas are very attractive to compassionate intellectuals and we don't have good bad examples like the Soviet Union around that everybody can point to and go yeah yeah well that sounds good but you know what about the murderous death camps and the millions of people who are suffering we still have North Korea but you know people treat North Korea like it's a joke instead of like it's an exemplar of a pathological system and and people have no historical memory like my students and and that's partly because they're taught so badly in schools is they have no idea what happened in the Soviet Union they have absolutely no idea they know a little bit about the Second World War maybe and of course people generally know about the Holocaust but they have no idea what happened in the Soviet Union so they have no idea where these ideas could lead and as and the universities and the high schools are so full of people who are radically left-leaning that they're never taught any that students are never taught any proper history you know they're taught about the evils of capitalism and you know I mean it's not like any system is perfect but there's difference between imperfect and and consciously murderous I think one of the things that you just said that's very important is that it's attractive to compassionate intellectuals people that without really looking at what the potential for these these laws and regulations with a negative potential for them is the the the underlying inclination to lean towards that is that you you you care about people and then you you want people to be ok and yeah well you're kind of treating them like they're your children and and I don't mean that in an entirely sarcastic manner it's reasonable in some sense to treat other people like people that you love although it's not reasonable in in very many other ways which is why you don't invite every stranger on the street to come and live with you in your house I mean everybody puts up boundaries and you have to do that but and and people tend more than we ever expected and I've done a lot of research and this is my lab people do tend to vote and think their temperament a lot more than than anyone really realizes and and if you're kind and that's your highest virtue then you tend to treat people like their kin because that's what kind means right it's it's an extension of the word kin but that doesn't work well in large groups you need other principles and so you look at something like the idea of equity which is equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity on the surface of it it seems perfectly reasonable to say well if every resource isn't distributed absolutely equally to every group then the system is unfair and on the face of it that's a reasonable proposition but it falls apart under minimal examination so here's something to think about for for everyone who thinks that equality but no outcome is a good idea it's like why the hell are you striving for anything then because the reason anyone straw to better themselves or to develop a skill or to move forward in life at all is to produce inequality you're trying to rise above the mediocre masses every time you make an effort at anything and so everything that we associate positive movement forward to your positive motivation is actually an attempt to render the world more unequal now you're rendering it unequal in a just way right because we might say well if you work really hard you deserve an unequal outcome well yeah unless you want people to stop working hard and that was the old joke in the Soviet Union you know they pretend to pay us we pretend to work so it's so it's it's it's so thoughtless that that's that's the problem that is a big problem to phrase income inequality you never hear effort in equality because effort is not as well you know in some on some campuses and this is true in California it's now considered a form of aggression it's classified under the micro aggression to say that hard work is the one one of the reasons that people accumulate more accumulate more cumulate more value accumulate more property accumulate more money it's it's it's an aggression its aggressive to say that because it implies that people who are poor don't work hard now see that's another terribly fuzzy form of thinking because there are lots of reasons for people to not have money many to be poor let's say which is even different than not having money alcoholism drug addiction mental illness physical illness intellectual incapacity and lack of work all of those things can also environmental factors immunities you grow up into what you're being exposed to people imitate their atmosphere you're around people that are constantly in in trouble with the law and you're dealing with horrible environments there's a lot of factors yeah and I think one of the things that's really important about having these discussions is that they they break down these rigid ideologies that a lot of these kids that are going to these universities are sort of being into they're being shoved into these ideology you're either on the left or you're on the right and there's very few on the right there's no open market of ideas when it comes to discussing these things you're compelled and enforced into certain height is that he's a psychologist at the New York New York University Business School he's done a really good job of documenting the dearth of ideological viewpoints let's say political or temperamental viewpoints because that's more accurate in the modern University and it's appalling because with along with all this push for ethnic and sexual and racial diversity which i think is just a mask to enforce a kind of ideological homogeneity there's no even understanding that idiot diversity is the only relevant value for a university the rest of its all predicated say on the assumption that if you do select people because of their ethnicity or racial background or gender that that will in and of itself produce diversity of ideas which is another really pernicious idea because it assumes that and it's so contradictory the left describes anything that's associated with the assumption that someone who's female for example will think in a female way they regard that as an unreasonable prejudice yep they're perfectly reasonable to say that we need more women in X discipline because they will bring in female ideas it's like well what what what what the hell are female ideas you can't have it both ways unless you're completely in unless you don't care at all about coherence or consistency and an ideologue has really don't because they care about putting their ideology forth but the idea that you're gonna get a diversity of ideas because you have a diversity of of class of people assumes that ideas and identity are the same thing and that's an absurd proposition in fact that's that's it's an essentially racial racist proposition black people think differently than white people it's know some do and some don't and the overlap is substantive and the difference between the individuals is far graded the difference between the groups I think we also need to make a very clear distinction between discrimination and people that are just inclined to gravitate towards different careers and different focuses there's a big difference between women being forced out of tech and women being not as compelled to enter into tech careers as men but well that that tech the tech issue is a really interesting one for a couple of reasons I mean one is that of course high tech basically developed after the playing field for men and women was more or less leveled I mean that happened in the 1970s and despite that there aren't any near anywhere near as many women in tech there's far more women in caring professions and you see that particularly in Scandinavia where they've done everything they can to equal to equalize the playing field it's 20 to 1 female to male nurses and 20 to 1 male to female engineer explain that if you could the Scandinavia because it's very interesting over there and what the results of them yeah well imagine that there are two reasons that people differ there are more than two but just imagine for the time being that there are two one is for environmental reasons cultural reasons and the other is for biological reasons what happens if you flatten out the environmental reasons which is what's happened in Scandinavia is you maximize the biological differences you don't get rid of them you maximize them and so what's happened in Scandinavia is that men and women are more different from a temperament personality perspective and also in terms of their interests they're more different in Scandinavia than they are anywhere else in the world now what have they done to try to flatten things out as you say well they've transformed their social policies so that men and women have as close to equal opportunities say as any society has managed but that hasn't produced the hope for equality of outcome quite quite the contrary in many situations it's exaggerated it and you could say that that that's actually ok is that what you want is to have a society where the genuine differences between people are free to manifest themselves so for example if you if you have three or four kids say the kids are going to be different from one another genetically that's why they're not identical twins they differ genetically and if you set the environment up so that each child is supportive that chil actually turn out quite differently now if you're an absolute brute and you beat them and you abuse them then they'll all turn out the same because there's tremendous environmental influence on them then but if you if you form an individual relationship with each of them and allow their strengths to manifest themselves as they will in in a supportive environment then the kids are going to turn out very different and so a free society is actually one that that produces massively unequal outcomes because it allows the genuine differences between people to manifest themselves these people who are pushing equity which is equality of outcome that's what the word equity codes for by the way equality of outcome and not equality of opportunity I don't know what in the world they do with with regards to the fact that a very large number of professions are you know high quality high high paid professions are female dominated physicians for example psychologists any any of the disciplines that have to do with human care almost inevitably dominated by women and that's increasingly the case is it we're supposed to stop that is that also a sign of oppression we're gonna force women to do things they're not interested in well there's also a very disingenuous way of framing it here in America where people consistently even the president United States Obama was talking about income inequality and the way they frame income inequality they talk about the 79 cents to the dollar but what they don't discuss is that we're talking about completely different careers we're not the way they frame it as if two people are working side by side one is a man one's a woman they're both doing the same job the man makes a dollar the woman makes 79 cents that is not the case it's typical of ideological conversation because what happens technically like imagine that a given we talked about poverty a few minutes ago and we said well there's there's many many reasons that one person might have more money than another there are many many reasons why women might make less money on average than men there there are small businesses that women run for example make far less money than men's the small businesses that men run but that's partly because a lot of women run their businesses part-time because they have kids it's also partly because men do all the horrible dangerous jobs the ones where there's a high chance of dying men are much more likely to work outside men are much more likely to move in in pursuit of a career there are lots of reasons that that men and women differ in terms of their income but if you're an ideologue you can only handle one variable Oh men and women measured on Mouse don't have the same incomes therefore the system is corrupt Jesus how much thinking does it take to come up with a with a theoretical scenario like that it's so boneheaded and it just runs it just pushes the ideological it just pushes the ideology forward with no thought now as a professor why is this sort of objective reasoning and really absolutely honest assessment of this situation why is this so rare amongst professors why is this so rare in universities why is this such an unusual subject well I think the reason is is that when people first encounter a complex topic like income differences it's it's like imagine you were drawing a map of a territory and you don't know the territory very well the first thing you do is just roughly sketch out the shapes of the continents and maybe you're wrong like the early European maps of North America you know you kind of get one coastline right and you guess and the rest it's blurry and gray and then as you investigate more and more your picture of the situation becomes higher and higher and higher and higher in resolution it's hard to go from a low resolution representation to a high resolution representation and ideologies are low resolution representations so the thing about a low resolution representation is it looks like it covers everything but it doesn't the closer you look the more details there are you know if you get a three-year-old to draw a helicopter they put it like a little cross on the top and a circle and a stick in another circle and that's the helicopter well you know when you look at it that's a helicopter but no one would expect that thing to fly if you want to change that into a real model of a helicopter you have to increase your focus and concentration on every single element of the entity and that takes a tremendous amount of cognitive effort and sometimes you don't even know what you don't know about something you know I could say well there are 50 reasons why men and women's income differ well that doesn't mean you I can say all 50 of those differences in each of those 50 differences are fragmental into maybe another dozen categories each maybe there's 600 reasons why men and women's celery differ but you have to spend a tremendous amount of time paying attention and thinking to build your model of reality into that level of resolution and basically what you do is default to temperamentally influence ideologies they give you a one bit answer to everything why are men and women why do men and women's salaries different oppression it's always the same thing and it makes it makes you feel like you know something and people like that because they don't like the feeling that there's something they don't know they don't like to be in chaos that's basically chaos they like to be an order an order is where you know everything so and professors are no different no different than then then people obviously given that they're people maybe they're more intelligent on average they're also more sheltered I would say in many ways on average and they're also not challenged as often tenure 10 years an issue and also not competing in the marketplace not being in the workforce going from being in high school to being in universities to getting a degree to teaching to being a professor to getting tenured staying inside of that intellectual bubble you know what it's complicated often these things these things happen they're like positive feedback loops you know when you bring a speaker too close to or a microphone too close to a speaker and it starts to howl and I think something like that's happened in the universities is that they started to tilt towards the left in the 60s and then as they tilted they tilted harder and as they tilted harder they tilt it even harder until all of the diversity was forced out of the universities and I don't know if it's so much a consequence of the actual policies of the university as as just a feedback process that got out of control I mean if it's 50% liberals and 50% conservatives know no problem but if it's 70% liberals and 30% conservatives maybe it rapidly goes to 99 percent liberals and 1% conservatives is that what it's like right now I mean what and when you look at the University of Toronto where you are what is the number if you had a guess well it would depend to some degree on the discipline but but but professors are also also tend to be characterized by personality traits that do tilt them towards liberalism their higher and trait openness which is both creativity and interest in ideas that's one of the things that temperamentally distinguishes liberals from conservatives conservatives are more conscientious they're more orderly and industrious liberals are more open so they're more interested in aesthetics and ideas and of course being interested in aesthetics and ideas does tilt you towards an academic career it's hard to tell I mean it's certainly the bulk of intellectuals are are liberal and liberal left virtually all of them I would say and and that's probably not that's not as true we know this it's not as true in the hard sciences but in the social sciences and the humanities it's or the overwhelming majority I mean I could see that even in this in this battle that I've been in in Canada with regards to Bill c16 and these compelled pronouns that almost no support from my faculty colleagues no I didn't expect any I mean and I'm not shocked by that but but it's an indication that if you put to them a choice between social justice slash all-consuming compassion and freedom of expression they're gonna tilt hard towards the social justice compassion end of things so what are almost seemed like when I was watching some of the debates that you've engaged and it almost seems like they're politicians some seems like they they're wetting their finger and going with the breeze there's some conversations that you had that were just I had to stop and rewind them because I couldn't believe the arguments there was a woman I don't know it was a was it a transgender man that you were having a discussion with that was saying that there's no difference no biological difference in the sexes no biological scientific I'm not sure I'm not I don't believe so he he was a professor who taught transgender studies at the University of Toronto and yeah and he said outright that there were no biological differences between men and women and that that was the scientific consensus he and he believed that he had the qualifications to say that because he was a historian of Medicine you know which which hardly qualifies as scientist not that you have to be a scientist to notice that there are biological differences between men and women it was very bizarre for me at that at that point in this in the last few months because I was under substantial pressure from the university to stop repeating my claim that I wouldn't use compelled pronouns to refer to people because the university regarded that is against the university policies and also against the Ontario Human Rights Code so also illegal and as my employers they're responsible for everything I say whether or not there has been a complaint made whether or not the consequence of my speech is intended or unintended because that's built into the legislation and believe me that's coming your way because this legislation spreads like mad but on the one hand I was I got two letters of warning from the University for refusing to use these compelled pronouns which I regard as the ideological constructions of radical left wingers and this professor went on the agenda this is Ontario news show and announced publicly that there were no biological differences between men and women it was like huh you think maybe the university would have had something to say about that since they do in fact have a biology department but oh no that that that went by without notice that that's in simply fine it's such an insane thing to say if there's no biological difference then why are they taking hormones well that's a good question why bother with the surgery and or especially the hormones yeah because that's not like you could argue with surgery that that's cosmetic yeah this person whoever this professor was as expert in transgender studies Nicolas Matt I'm pretty sure that used to be a woman or she they you're not allowed to say that if you say that you're a bad person if you say they and they in them is the most reasonable of these pronoun these alternative pronouns they in them like you could say if you know a guy and he doesn't know how to swim they should probably stay out of the pool right right let's say that you use that in a non-polar form yes and they is used to repair awkward sentences basically but it's never been used despite the claims of the of the gender bender activists it's never been used for the singular and we shouldn't we shouldn't we shouldn't we should not give up the distinction between the plural and the Sigma now exactly need to know whether it's one person or more than one person do you think it's reasonable for people that are asexual people that really are uncomfortable with the idea of being a man or a woman is it reasonable that we come up with a distinction for that I mean that seems like it would be nice and this is one of the things that you said one of the things that you don't like about this that you're being compelled to use these made-up pronouns and that if we as a society as a culture as a civilization sort of adopt a new phrase that you would be finally bad one we had transsexual yeah but I know I know that's problematic because it's not a sexual you know transsexual would be transition and here's the other distinction this is another important thing those aren't the people that have the problem with it the people that have the problem with these pronouns the transsexual community almost entirely or at least I shouldn't say entirely but predominantly prefer the alternative program a male to female transgender person prefers to be called a woman or she and use the female pronouns yes points yes so there's some tiny discussion of the trans sexual community or we could say there's some tiny fraction of people who are identifying themselves with the transgender community which is already a tiny fraction who claims that they have an identity that doesn't fit into either binary category right well it's a proposition that I think bears some scrutiny to begin with because I don't believe that the claims that that tiny community is making are coherent in any sense because they say well you could be man woman or neither or both it's it's it's those aren't coherent claims in my estimation and if what what they're saying is it we don't fit into a category and therefore we get to invent our own plurality of categories it's not logically tenable that isn't how it works because you get an infinite number of categories out of that and that's what's happening already online one of my favorite stories came out of an all-girls university in Massachusetts where a group of women where they were trying to pick president of the student body or whatever and one of the girls who went to that school decided that she identified as a man so she changed her name and I don't believe there was any hormones or anything involved I think it she just changed her name she called herself masculine of Center gender queer changed her name to a masculine name ran for president of whatever the hell this is I think it was willingly yes I believe you're right one and then was denounced by the rest of the class because now she was a white male so she was a part of the patriarchy and she was a part of the whole problem with Society and that she should not be allowed or he should not be allowed to take that position which I just I think that's a really good example we read it on air and I couldn't stop laughing right well that's a that's a really good example of the chaos that ensues when you start to blow apart standard categories there's a chaos in between categories that that's made of an infinite multiplicity that's why you see too with the LGBT rainbow they're getting caught in their own metaphor so there's an infinite number of gradations in a rainbow and there's an infinite number of letters that are accumulating on the LGBT rainbow and and there's an element of clear absurdity to that and one of them is I believe it's q+ that includes the other kin types it's like well the claim is well I'm marginalized and then that sort of becomes normalized and then there's a group right outside of that that says well I'm marginalized too and another group says well I'm here I am I'm also marginalized and there's absolutely no logic once you've identified yourself as marginalized there's no logical way that you can exclude anyone else who regards themselves as marginalized and so the marginalized that the community of the marginalized expands and expands and part of the reason for that is that people are of every individual is a multiplicity and there's an element to every individual that's marginalized you know so for example it's clearly the case that when a child is socialized there's pros and cons to that the pros are the socialization turns the little beastly two-year-old into a four-year-old that other children can play with and that does happen between the ages of 2 & 4 if a child is socialized properly then then what the child does is kind of turn into a clone of everyone else so that he or she can benefit from being able to interact with everyone else now that that builds up a certain amount of individuality because kids learn to talk and they learn to play and all that and it destroys a certain amount of individuality so everybody sacrifices a certain portion of their peculiarities to become a socialized creature and some of that's good and some of it's bad and and we know that that's that's the standard story of the rebellious adolescent against society for crushing their individuality right and and there's there's there's an element of that that's true but by the same token if you don't sacrifice a certain amount of your individuality to the group there's no such thing as society everybody has to live on their own everyone is in their own subjective bubble which is of course now required by this law and society itself breaks down and so you can't have a society without marginalizing people or you can't have a society without making everyone part of everyone marginalized and so then when you start to concentrate on the marginalized it just grows and expands and grows and expand until everyone becomes marginalized and and that just highlights a real problem with quote mining that someone's gonna take that you can't have a society without marginalizing people quote and put it under dr.

Jordan Peterson this is what he believes well that's actually what Jacques Derrida said the most famous of the post modernists that that's why Derrida is such a invasive force he said well you can't have a society without marginalizing it's like well that's true it's it's true comma but dot dot dot right but the fact that you can't have a society without marginalizing doesn't mean that you shouldn't have a society and it doesn't mean that the only reason that society exists is to marginalize and that was stare at his claim that that's what makes him so he's absolutely pathological to the core Jacques Derrida and and apart from his claims that all we do is trade power games because that's another one of his claims his other claim is that the purpose of categorization the purchase purpose of society is to marginalize and that's absolutely absurd the purpose is so that we can all play a moderately mediocre but productive homogeneous social game is it perfect well obviously not does it require the sacrifice of individuality yes is some of that sacrificed individuality valuable absolutely what's the alternative no society well I don't think so that doesn't seem like a very good alternative to me or maybe some sort of egalitarian utopia well yeah we had a hundred years of that and a hundred million deaths as a consequence and so maybe not that either what we have right now is a flawed system but it's the best flawed system that anybody's ever come up with and of course it marginalizes people how could it not you know it's if kids organize themselves in the playground to play hide-and-go-seek they've marginalized all the kids that wanted to play tag obviously but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't come to a consensus and go ahead and play a game at least they're bloody while playing a game that you know pretty much everybody has access to I think marginalized is a lot of times associated with oppression that term marginalized and it's not necessarily the case and I think that society as a whole in civilization is sort of a work in progress we're working all this out and that's one of the beautiful things about you being able to discuss these things on your YouTube page as opposed to just having to battle it out inside the echo chamber of the universities you're able to express this stuff out in the world where people like me that are 49 years old and aren't in college have a chance to read this and see like wow what is this guy going through over there at the University of Toronto and then you start to examine the laws and you start to look at what's going on here and this egalitarian utopia idea it's beautiful in its concept that we should all be able to get along and everything should be equal the problem is it defies human nature it defies the two hundred three hundred thousand years of DNA that we have bouncing around inside of our bodies that demand certain types of behavior and I think it's so important that we discuss these things and I think that society and civilization as a whole dis this thing that is ultimately in this growing state this constant state of improvement and and an objective interaction there has to be some sort of discussion and one of the problems that I have with the so called social justice warriors and with this movement is that they're enforcing a certain type of thinking and behavior and they're incredibly aggressive about it hence the warrior term yeah well I think I think a fair bit of that is grounded again in temperament which is quite comical I mean one of the things that our research indicated research on political correctness indicated that this trait agreeableness is a good predictor of holding politically correct views and also that being female is a good predictor of holding politically correct views and I think part of the reason for that and and the warrior aspect to it too is that agreeableness is a maternal instinct trait roughly speaking and you know human beings have very powerful maternal instincts that's true for women and for men because men are very involved male human beings are very involved in the raising of their children which makes them quite different than in many large animals on the one hand if you're very maternal you're very compassionate and protective of those that are within your kin boundary and you can try to include more people in that if you want and and that's the that's the political goal but you're unbelievably hostile to anyone who's outside of that that you regard as a threat slash predator and so agreeable agreeableness makes you divide the world up into protected children and predator and predators and you see that on social justice warriors Twitter pages I mean I've followed bunch of them and I go to them and I watch this and incredibly supportive to ridiculously so of in terms of like mediocre expressions tweets oh my god it's so brilliant and they're like it's you're saying almost nothing yeah and they're so incredibly supportive of the people that think along their lines and so incredibly hostile and this this idea of shaming people that don't agree with them not interacting with them but almost immediately insulting them almost immediately marginalizing them which is ironic this is what you see constantly is like super supportive and super aggressive against people that that have any sort of an opposing viewpoint yeah well they're all predators the ones that have an opposing viewpoint and that's what they define them it's one of the things that's very comical about this from my perspective is that it's such sex stereotypical behavior is that at the same time that the social justice warriors are denouncing the idea that psychology for example might have anything to do with sex differences they're acting out sex stereotype behavior like mad in terms of their persecution of predators and their protection of the of the Kin Kin slash in-group so in your ura is social psychologist no no no I'm not I'm a clinical personality psychologist and what is the difference well one of the differences is that personality and so and clinical psychology isn't a corrupt Enterprise whereas social psychology fundamentally is it's been going through an absolute internal revolution over the last two years because of all because of its own discovery that many of its fundamental studies and propositions are flawed I would say social psychology is the most social justice / left-leaning part of psychology and its methods are generally appalling they're they're not well documented and they produce all sorts of categories that don't exist whereas personality I know it seems like it might seem like trivial distinction to people outside of the field but these these disciplines are quite separate from a historical perspective they developed quite separately personality psychologists are very very careful about defining what they measure and so for example I study the big five personality traits that's extraversion neuroticism agreeableness conscientiousness openness and under openness Falls Intel halogens these are very well documented we can really measure them we can't measure them as well as we would like to we've identified the biological basis for most of the traits and we understand a fair bit about how they make people different and and and personality psychologists have been very very careful about measurement whereas social psychologists are as a general rule very very cavalier about their about their concepts and that's led to a tremendous pollution I would say of the psychological literature the implicit association test is a good example of that that's the test that's being used to assess people's unconscious biases unconscious racial biases and so for example if if I showed you a bunch of pictures of black people and a bunch of photographs of white people and then I asked you to associate a good or a bad word with the black people or the white people to respond after you've seen the picture if you are white and you saw white photos you'd be faster at responding to the to the positive words and so they've used that as evidence of racism but part of the problem with that is that you can't distinguish it from a novelty response so I mean most people in a given racial group are far more familiar with members of their racial group and the fact that they're more likely to associate negative things with racial groups that are outside of their racial group isn't something that can be easily distinguished from just a novelty effect but they make wide-ranging claims about the inbuilt biases in people and also and that's lent impetus to these movements that are racing through corporations across the United States and governmental agencies where people are being subjected to mandatory unconscious racial bias retraining and there's no evidence by the way that that works at all in fact the evidence that there is suggests quite the contrary I saw this on one of your videos you you were discussing how preposterous this is on one of your videos because one of the people that was opposing you was actually a part of something like this right yeah well the human resources inequity people at the University of Toronto have made mandatory unconscious racism training anti bias training and they made it mandatory for their staff and I found that absolutely appalling first of all it's political its political re-education so when you say mandatory like this is something that you haven't you know I didn't have to because I'm not a I'm not part of the human resources staff okay but the people that they're consulting with to implement these sorts of programs certainly have faculty and students in their sights I mean these are these are trial runs for much broader rolling out of exactly this sort of reeducation with methodology behind it and how has this been house has been vetted oh I don't think it's been vetted at all the like if you're going to let's say you want to put into practice an educational process what you need to do is you need to measure the initial state validly so that your measure so you need to use multiple measures and all those measures need to say the same thing so if you're going to accuse someone of racism you need several different measures of racism and then you have to show that across all the measures it's like using different meters all the meters should read the same thing then you have to implement your educational intervention carefully defined then you have to do you have to see afterwards if the consequence of the educational effort was a reduction in those initial indices those initial measures that sort of thing when it's been done at all has showed that educational interventions of that sort that are mandatory actually make racism and bias worse rather than better but why let a few facts stop you because we already know from the postmodernist that there's no such thing as facts anyways so there's in Canada here here's something this been one of the things that really makes me proud of my country our government has now announced that the judiciary in Canada will be selected if you're going to be a candidate to be a judge you have to produce a dossier that specifies your your identities whatever they happen to be racial ethnic religious and then you the the committee that's going to appoint you to the judiciary has to have undergone mandatory anti racism and bias training before they're allowed to serve on the committee so basically we've set up a situation in Canada where are the people who select their judges have to go a kind of indoctrination that has no validity from a scientific perspective before they're allowed to select our judges now who's enforcing this Mr Justice Minister where did this program come from there's all sorts of people who are offering these programs now and so we become a growth industry but what is their qualifications that's a good question right not all efficacious yeah well there's no way of having qualifications for doing this sort of thing because it's not a valid procedure so how does they claim to be qualified so they claim to be qualified they come to the University and they say I have a solution the University says finally just run with it and I meant it because to question anything that would absolve racism is racist yes right yes and they did that in collaboration with the black liberation collective which is bliing that one because that that one's adorable the black liberation collective isn't that isn't that the group that somehow thinks that white people are inferior because they don't have enough melanin so it was started by a woman who who said exactly that she's a black supremacist and she said that the reason that white people are inferior is because they don't have enough melanin in their skin and melanin apparently is this agent it's obviously it's a pigment but it's apparently this agent that transforms cosmic energy into wisdom I mean she's completely you can make up your own mind about her and then the other person who started the black liberation collective is a woman who used to work for the University of Toronto Students Union who is now being pursued by that Students Union for embezzling three hundred thousand dollars of from from from that organization with the help of a couple of her cronies well why let a few facts stand in the way of abolishing racism yeah well they also they also are perfectly willing to promote violent means of social transformation and the university claims that it's in favor of safety you know because they've gone after me because my refusal to use compelled pronouns has apparently made the campus unsafe but they're perfectly willing to take advice from the black liberation collective and not only are they willing to take advice from them and not disavow them despite their support for violent means of social revolution they're also pushing equality of outcome on their employees and and the people who taught their mandatory anti racism and anti bias training program set out right in their training material which I have copies of that any institution that doesn't have equality of outcome as part of its characteristic at every level of the power organization is corrupt and should be restructured but that pales in comparison to my refusal to use compelled pronouns obviously don't understand how this gets so far I just don't understand how no one has there's there's no rational thinking involved in the administration and then the people that are implementing these ideas I just don't understand how it gets to the point where things get to terrible places one tiny step at a time you know if I encroach on you and I'm sophisticated about it I'm gonna encroach two millimeters I'm gonna encroach right to the point where you start start to protest then I'm gonna stop then I'm gonna wait then you're gonna calm down then I'm gonna encroach again right to the point where you protest then I'm gonna stop then I'm gonna wait and I'm just gonna do that forever and before you know it you're gonna be back three miles from where you started and you'll have done it one step at a time and then you'll go oh how did I get here and the answer was well I pushed you a little farther than you should have gone and you agreed and so then I pushed you a little farther than you should have gone again and you agreed and if anybody is interested in this sort of process and this is a horrifying book if you want to read about how this process works you can read a book called ordinary men by Robert Browning an ordinary man is about browning was interested in how the Nazis trained they're there they're there they how they trained people to kill basically and so Robert Browning studied this police battalions very interesting book so these were middle-aged German men so they they were they were raised and educated really before Hitler came to power so they weren't indoctrinated Nazis they were policemen and when the no Nazis went through Poland and then and then needed to impose their brand of order on Poland they brought policemen in they brought this battalion of middle aged please and they're commandant their commander was by all accounts a pretty decent guy and he told them that because it was wartime they were probably gonna have to do some pretty terrible things but that they could go home if they didn't think they were up to it so there was no compulsion you know this wasn't a Milgram experiment or or an experiment where you had to obey orders the guy who was giving the orders said look this is gonna be awful but you can back off but the guys thought well I'm not gonna leave my comrades here to do the dirty work you know which is kind of a virtue in a in a perverse way and then browning details how they went from ordinary policemen to guys who were taking naked pregnant women out into the middle of fields and shooting them in the back of the head and they were physically ill during most of the transformation process you know they started out by wounding up the Jewish men between the ages of 16 and 65 well you know you can kind understand that cuz you're at war and then well then they put them in stadiums and then well then they had to shoot some of them then they had to load them on cattle cars it was like one step at a time these guys were having a dreadful time of it they didn't stop and so that's how things get to where they are now is that I mean and no they're not at that point and I'm not trying to make the case that they're at that point well you're one of the first people that's sounding an alarm that there's there's a real issue with controlling people there's a real issue with controlling dialogue controlling the way people communicate and that these ideologies although seemingly innocuous they can take you down very dangerous road yes well seemingly innocuous ideology those words do not go together there are no innocuous ideologies and there there are forms of pathological oversimplification and there are also clubs I mean I mean the kind of clubs that you hit people with as well as the clubs that you belong to the advantage to me being an ideologue is that I can explain everything I can feel morally superior and I know who my enemies are and you know what you're supposed to do with enemies they're not your friends right you move against them and you know we're approaching a situation and this has already happened I think more in the United States than in Canada although our countries are competing to see who can cross the idiot line fastest you're you're in a situation in the US we're 50% of your population won't talk to the other 50% that's not good and I would say it's more pronounced on the left liberal side because they regard everybody who voted for Trump as essentially as an enemy it's like hey people that's 50% of your citizens you might think about talking with them you know people you can't talk to those are enemies why ironically I really truly believe that one of the big factors in Trump's rise to power is that people are sick of this oversimplification in this ridiculous ideology coming from the left like that this another system by the entity politic exactly and so they've chosen an identity politics that opposes the identity politics that they think is disgusting yeah and that's just starting it's just a start that's right well if you teach one side to play identity politics de-facto you teach the other side to play identity politics and I've seen more and more people who are Center people as far as I'm concerned pushed to the right because of the continual insistence that by their mere existence they're part of the perpetrator group just by being a white person who is somehow or another successful you are a privileged person you're a part of the elite you're part of the 1% you're part of the problem yeah you're part of the oppressors yeah absolutely you're an oppressor by being just too just by pushing with a home in the suburbs well it's also extremely annoying for people who've worked really hard and who've made the requisite sacrifices to become successful along some dimension to have that immediately attributed to their oppression yes and it's not it's not obvious that that's something we want to do it's like for the social justice warrior types out there who might be listening it's like do are you really willing to say that every single person who's accomplished something has done that as a consequence of oppression that's again with the Soviets claimed with regards to the to the successful peasants in the nineteen in the just before the 1920s it's like well the peasants weren't emancipated they were serfs until about 30 years before that they were serfs they were basically slaves and some of them had clambered up to the point where maybe they owned their Hut and a cow and could you don't employ someone well the Soviet claim was well that's all theft you got that all because you're an oppressor and so then the Soviet intellectuals went into the villages and just imagine how this happened so imagine a village a small town where everyone knows everybody and there's maybe 1020 people there who are moderately successful okay and so you can imagine that those 20 people have like a hundred enemies at the bottom of the socio-economic distribution useless horrible people who are jealous and resentful about the fact that these people have been successful okay so now the intellectuals come in and say property is theft success is oppression and then they look for the people in the village who are willing to move against those 20 successful people while those guys at the bottom those hundred resentful jealous murderous people at the bottom they're just waiting for an opportunity to go kick down some doors and that's exactly what they did in the 1920s and as I said they wiped out all their productive peasants and then six million Ukrainians starved to death they had posters the Soviets produced posters in the 1930s that said essentially don't forget it's wrong to eat your children so whoa yeah whoa there's nothing about the Soviet there's nothing that you can imagine that's horrible enough so that it matched the reality of what happened in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959 and you know the West knew about this too early Malcolm Muggeridge in the 30s was documenting for England further for English newspapers exactly what was going on in the Soviet Union bloody intellectuals didn't admit it to the mid-70s you know with the exception of people like George Orwell so why do these patterns repeat themselves what is it about human beings well we like things simple so-so and then you often like a simple explanation is a good explanation unless it's too simple but distinguishing between simple and too simple is no easy matter we like we like to know who's our friend and who's our enemy and we like the feeling of unearned moral superiority and unearned morals that's why you're sad especially when there's no such thing as earning anyways so and then I mean there's deeper and darker things that are underneath that it's like the the human proclivity to pull down those who have more than you it's like these kids on the campuses who are claiming identity with the oppressed you know what some are like Yale it's like how in the world you can speak of oppression if you happen to be at Yale is beyond me I mean first of all your North American which puts you in the top one percent and then of North Americans you're in the top 1% to the top 1% of 1% but yet you you want that you want to have all the power that goes along with that and you want to have the moral superiority that comes from being a representative of the oppressed so that's exactly what you want you want all the power and you want all the victimization at the same time well years Yale is a great example because Yale was one of what happened with the Halloween costume debacle at Yale was one of the first videos that was released that made people horrified where they they couldn't believe how students were communicating with professors yeah well though a student who streamed up a storm about about that the male professor who was the husband of the woman who wrote the pro Halloween costume letter it turned out she was on the bloody hiring committee that hired him one of the things she screamed was who hired you it was like well it turned out it was you because you were on the committee just a few years before I know when they took it like yeah that was absolutely not two people that don't know what what the hell we're talking about well explain this debacle because it really was about questionable Halloween costumes well it was about questioning Halloween costumes Halloween costumes are part of the whole point of Halloween is to have questionable costumes right you play with death for example and decay and and horror and and it's it's a time when the norms with regards to the expression of things that are outside of our normal behavior are suspended so that everybody can can have a little celebration as it turns out well you know campuses have got all upset about things like cultural appropriation at Queen's University in Canada just the other week they were going after students who were dressing up as Vietcong for example or Mexicans it's like I just don't see what they racist about dressing up like a Mexican Mexicans have a traditional traditional clothing there's nothing wrong with Mexicans so why is it wrong press up like right and if you want to be punch oviya for halloween what's wrong with that well you can you can regard that as an Amar's just as much as a denigration that's like why is that such a problem right but anyways it doesn't matter because nothing's too trivial to be a problem to a social justice warrior and because they don't like to deal with real problems and yael went after halloween cost so this woman wrote a letter saying maybe we should just relax about this stuff and you know not don't put restrictions on what people wear for Halloween but let people decide what is and isn't offensive yes and well many Halloween costumes are offensive that's the point but her letter wasn't really reason I was perfectly reasonable it was like an adult wrote it yes yeah and and you know all hell broke loose fall help and she ended up quitting and I think he did you know I don't think he left but she's seeing him bow down to this woman screaming at him swearing in his face was so disturbing it was so humiliating I felt so humiliated for him because she was screaming this is our home what the [ __ ] are you doing you're not making it's not really home the university is not a home right it's not a safe space it's not a secure space none of that and and if that winning it a university isn't a home that's not what it is it's a place to be confronted by I would say often horrible ideas you want to learn about history you think that's gonna be safe you know what human history is like it's an endless bloodbath with we know with with a certain amount of hopeful progress underlying it it's it's an it's a it's a horror show and great literature's like that and and and biology is terrifying and physics is terrifying and you want to be safe it's stay home stay home with your mom stay home with your dad don't come to university if you want to be safe because let me go outside no why don't you if you're going if the university is going to make you safe then it ceased to be a University so one of the things I try to do in my class I have this class called maps of meaning which concentrates on atrocity basically on Soviet atrocity and and Nazi atrocity and what I try to do in the class is to teach my students that have they been to Nazi Germany in the 1930s they would have been Nazis and had they been offered the opportunity to be in Auschwitz OSH whit's camp guard then maybe they would have left at it and maybe they would have been in the sadistic in the more sadistic proportion of the Auschwitz camp guard population you think that makes you feel safe it doesn't make you feel safe to know that Nazis were humans and you happen to be one of them and so I think that educators that tell students that they're offering them a safe space are doing them a profound disservice and you don't I'm a clinical psychologist and here's one of the things you do to make people less afraid you don't make the world safer what you do is you people tell you what they're afraid of and then you break it into little bits so that they can go confront them you know so maybe they're afraid of going to a party and you break that down you say well do you know how to introduce yourself and they said well I don't I don't really even know how to shake someone's hand and so then you practice having them shake their hand and introduce themselves because maybe they weren't taught by that by their half-witted parents when they were young because they were ignored and so then you say well maybe you can go to a party for half an hour and all you have to do is introduce yourself to two people and we'll call that success and you build up their confidence and their confidence one step at a time and what happens that the clinical literature indicates quite clearly is you don't make people less anxious by doing that you make them braver it's not the same thing you don't make the world and its horrors smaller you make the person and their their capacity to deal with horror larger you encourage them you strengthen them that's what you do at a university you armed people with arguments you you hone their intellect you you help them learn to write so they can marshal their arguments you have you'll help them learn how to engage in intellectual combat because that's better than engaging in real combat and you make them hard and strong you know oli coddled them and make them safe unless you're their enemy unless you're trying to devour their spirit and that's what we have in the universities we have we have the reign of the eatable mother who's who's answered everything is oh just come a little closer dear and I'll protect you from the world it's just like Hansel and Gretel's the you know the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story well my house is made of gingerbread just come in here and everything will be fine while she feeds the county to fatten you up so she can eat you that's the archetype of a modern University when did the start when did the trigger warnings when to the safe spaces when did all this emerge well it has its roots in the student radicalism of the 1960s especially the far-left radicalism it really popped up in the 1990s in the early 90s when I was teaching in the US at that point and which universe I taught at Harvard from 93 to 98 and there was a fair push for political correctness especially in the early part of the 90s but but it got pushed back down and disappeared and went underground it went on the ground is more accurate and then it's just come back with a vengeance in the last five years and I think it's partly because we have all these radical left political activist departments at the universities women's studies being at the top of the of the list that have done nothing for the last 30 years to even longer than that now it's almost 40 years 30 years let's say have done nothing but produce a never-ending stream of ideological he minded counter civilization political activists and that's all subsidized by by tuition and by the public purse and that's another thing we really got to ask ourselves is why the hell are we subsidizing revolution why are we doing that it's crazy and it's dangerous it's dangerous what so what exactly is going on with women's studies that you believe is fostering revolution well you'd go on their websites and read read what they say I mean first of all for the for the women's studies types and this is what would you call it false anthropology there's this idea that way back when there was a feminist paradise and that would be like noble savage mode of living where everything was egalitarian and and women dominated it was a matriarchal culture that was put forward by a UCLA anthropologist named Gambia Tess I can never pronounce her name properly but I think I got it and then that was overthrown by patriarchal institutions start essentially starting at about the time say of the of Judaism and that was all overthrown and ever since then we've lived in an oppressive patriarchy and now that's what our culture is it's an oppressive patriarchy so they're pointing to one unsuccessful society that they believed existed or didn't exist no it didn't exist there's no evidence for it whatsoever it's it's it's complicated but it's the it's the telling of a kind of psychological myth as if it was history well and and and anyway so so the basic claim is that Western civilization is a brutish patriarchy and that whatever positive things that might have managed to accomplish were all accomplished as a consequence of oppression and and and theft and that the appropriate thing to do is to restructure it from the bottom up and they mean that they mean every single bloody concept and you can marry that with modern post-modernism and throw in a nice dash of Marxism and you have the the ideological and motivated grounds for social revolution and just go online and look at a dozen Women's Studies websites just read them you can see what they say they produce political activists and their goal is to restructure the patriarchy well what's the patriarchy well the patriarchy is Western civilization and what is restructure mean that's easy it means tear it down and destroy it why because it's a brutish system that's predicated on nothing but oppression it's nothing but a tyranny in the in the eyes of the of the radical women's studies types heterosexuality that's a tyranny capitalism that's a tyranny democracy well that doesn't even exist and even if it did it would be a tyranny everything's a tyranny and so you can ask these and and what would they replace it with they'd replace it with their own ideological utopia well we've already had a hundred years of that we saw what happened oh wow that doesn't matter that wasn't real Marxism that's what the bloody Marxists always say that wasn't real Marxism it's like oh how many millions of people have to die before you're convinced that it's real Marxism and I know what they mean by that - they mean hey if I was the Marxist dictator things would have gone a lot better it's like you should think again sunshine if you are the Marxist dictator things wouldn't have gone a lot better so and if you're the sort of person that thinks that if you would have been control things would have gone a lot better then you're exactly the sort of person who should never be in control so and it's resentment it's horrible resentment you know that's an important point because I think this is something that you've said that I absolutely agree with it I think a lot of this thinking and the way people are behaving it seems based on revenge for awkward upbringing social uncomfortable uncomfortability it seems like there's something about the way they view the world where they want to get back at people that have literally done them no wrong it's resentment for the burden of being it's deeper it's deeper I mean human being human existence is characterized by a fair bit of suffering you know we're limited creatures and life is very hard everyone dies everyone you love is going to die most of the things you do all of the things you do will eventually fail you know suffering is a certainty and it's very easy for people to become resentful about about being about existence you know these kids who shoot up high schools and and and these mass shooters there they're the perfect examples of people who run on nothing but resentment they're out to kill the innocent because that's the best marker of that's the best way of showing just how much contempt they have for existence itself why punish the guilty they deserve to be punished it's a lot more malevolent and and and and vengeful to punish the innocent it's like people are motivated to a great degree by resentment of being and a huge chunk of that is manifested in that's the dark side of the ideological possession so I get to decide who my enemies are and then I get to go after them and I can go after them for every single thing that's ever been done to me that isn't good and well a lot of that's just built into the structure of existence then they group up they exhibit confirmation bias they all form some sort of a groupthink and then they act accordingly and this is what you've been warning against and this is where I completely agree with you and that's why I think the subject is so important and I love the way you've outlined all the steps and the problems with Marxism and ideologies in general that we are dealing with this these are the beginning steps of it and people who look at it now and they say it's social change its social justice it's not it's not it's not that's right it's not and this is not going to improve things implementing these policies will make things worse they've made things worse every single place they've ever been implemented and often they've made things so much worse that you actually can't imagine it and people don't do the reading I've done the reading I know how bad things can get they can get so bad that no matter how bad you think they are you're not even in the bloody ballpark well it's just so strange that these sort of courses and these sort of ideologies are thriving in universities and it's really disconcerting to someone who has children you know that your children are gonna go there and the schools you know I think I think that I think Harvard just as said in the trade school I think the universities I think you can make a reasonable case that the universities do more harm than good now I hate to say that well there's also this is a strange time where access to information is so incredibly easy you can get you could educate yourself right seemingly endlessly online and with books and just there's so much information available it's is not the 1930s is not a time where it was difficult to get an education outside of that yeah well the university the universities may have or the University which is like the repository of human wisdom and the attempt to expand that may have already moved outside the universities you know just because an institution calls itself a university doesn't mean it is and many disciplines have turned into ideological factories and so where's the university universities where where anyone wants to learn about their culture and where anyone wants to expand the domain of human competence and a lot of that's happening online now so maybe that's the future the only thing the universities have now I think that that people can't get elsewhere is accreditation but they're doing everything they can as fast as possible to make their accreditation valueless anyways so yeah it's really it's yeah it's a terrible thing to say that the universities may do more harm than good and and I haven't come to that conclusion lately well there's also say it I'm sure you do there's also a gigantic financial stake the the amount of money that you well doubt and this is especially the case in the u.s.

I mean one of the things that's happened over the last 30 years is that the the proportion of university expenditures that's gone to the administration has has massively massively increased and at the same time the student loan burden has increased and so what's happened in the weird sense is that the administrators have conspired to steal the future earnings of their students and then you can't declare bankruptcy so to me it's indentured servitude you can't declare bankruptcy on student loan you cannot declare bankruptcy on student loans so you think about that you tell me what difference there is between that indentured servitude there's not much because it's the only thing that I can even think of where that corporations can go bankrupt right can individuals can businesses can fail you you can be deemed in incompetent or not capable of paying your debt in every other case but not with universe yes right that is crazy it is crazy it's crazy because they were just trying to combat the issue where so many kids were defaulting on their student loans they try to make you perpetually responsible for it or you know the idea is that these kids have to learn responsibility is that the way to do it by overcharging them for some you say that it's not a particularly useful to to burden your citizenry with with a massive debt as soon as they graduate at a time when they're most likely to take entrepreneurial risks yes you know you're not gonna take entrepreneurial risks if you're so burdened with debt you can't get yourself off the ground yeah and we're talking about thousands of dollars in debt with people that if you're lucky you're gonna make what forty fifty thousand dollars a year straight out of college if you're lucky so you're dealing with the amount of money that you would have to make if you didn't pay any taxes or didn't have any expenses you'd have to work for four or five years longer than you would actually be in college to get that degree in the first yes it's insane it's insane I would say to to the university students are listening like a lot of your professors or Marxists ask them ask them if they're Marxists read the Gulag Archipelago first because you need to get your arguments together and know Solzhenitsyn won a Nobel Prize for that book and for his other writing and it was one of the key there was a couple of things that brought down the Soviet Union but one of them was Alexander Solzhenitsyn book and he demolished the intellectual credibility of Marxism forever but you have to read the damn book and you've got to get your arguments in order you go after your Marxist professors it's difficult bull doctor it's a very difficult book to read it's a very difficult book although it's difficult because it's so horrifying it's not difficult particularly because it's impenetrable it's in fact it's an absolutely fascinating book and in the same way that a terrible horror story is fascinating but but there's no excuse for this there's no excuse for these these professors who claim who claim to be benevolent Marxists well I think the way you framed it is very important I think the way you frame that is them being compassionate intellectuals that are inclined toward this because on the surface it seems like it's what a compassionate intellectual would would support yeah yeah and it's the unthinking adherence to compassion as the highest moral virtue and it's also whenever you have an ideology whenever you have these rigid established forms of communication or methods of thinking you you you box people in you box people and you control them and you get them to stick inside that ideology and in doing so you suppress people it's so ironic that the people that are against suppressing are actually suppressing people through enforcing these ideologies and and suppressing the marketplace of free ideas you're not allowed to have free ideas you're not allowed to debate these things I mean I've seen there was that really famous instance at the University of Toronto where this one guy I don't even remember what was Farrell yes what was his more yeah why men make more it was a multivariate analysis of the income disparity between men and women he is to be a feminist activist he decided to go look into the claim that you know women were making I think at the time it was 70 cents for every dollar that men were making he thought well I have daughters I'd better go check this out and see you know do a little bit of in-depth investigating and he what he found out was that there were many reasons for the disparity and perhaps one of them was unfair discrimination but there were another dozen and they seem to account for more of the disparity than the discrimination I mean just the fact that men take the more dangerous jobs is a is a huge contributor to that and it's not trivial you should get paid more if you're putting your limbs on the line you know I mean I grew up in northern Alberta where were where a lot of young men dropped out of school went worked on the oil rigs it's like you go try that well maybe you would could do it but you know the guys would lose their fingers they lose their toes they it was 40 bloody below up there and they'd be wrestling pipe in the middle of the bush I have a friend who doesn't have a friend does that any other than Alberto horrific it's tough work throughout the bush for two weeks yeah when you go outside there's temperatures where you literally can't be outside of your truck for more than 30 minutes right you have to jump back in the truck and I was where I grew up yeah absolutely absolutely those are very difficult jobs and they're very high-paying because people die yeah they're hard work there's not a lot of women to those jobs no one and and a good thing too so this guy I'm sorry what is his name again Warren Farrell Warren Farrow who wrote this book was giving a speech about this book and it would the response was so unbelievably violent and crazy and aggressive and also ignorant ignorant to what he was saying ignorant and not not wanting to debate the facts but wanting to call him a misogynist wanting to call this hate speech and you know that's a favorite man it's already accused of that twice in the last two months because I don't want to use these compelled pronouns well the one woman in the debate that you had with the other man that I believe is transsexual yeah the one woman who was trying to say what is the difference between not using those words and using racial slurs and hate speech to describe these people like the idea that that's a woman who is a professor who's expressing it in that way what is the difference between not choosing to use made-up pronouns versus calling someone generally accepted racial slurs yeah that they're trying to frame that is the same thing the lecture dishonest well the racial slurs are also legal so what what's happening is the law is already the raw is already such that not using one of these made made-up pronouns is a crime whereas using a racial epithet isn't Wow that's crazy that's crazy so you could use the n-word no it's legally - yes but you can't use you can't you you have to say zero yeah you have to say Z whoo this is crazy this is really crazy this is a is a bizarre moment in time where is this preposterous nature of it is so undeniable that it's forcing a lot of people and I applaud you for for doing what you're doing and risking your your your status with the University risking your support of your peers and and sticking your neck out the way you've been doing with your YouTube videos because if you hadn't done that there's a lot of people who wouldn't be aware of how insidious and what you were describing earlier the creep you're slow creep towards pushing forward waiting for you to object waiting and then moving forward a little bit more once you relax yeah cuz that's what this is yeah yeah and it's it's been it's been it's been bizarre I can tell you that I mean my son and I counted the number of press articles that have been devoted to this these are serious press articles this doesn't count YouTube or radio or TV or any of those things and I mean the YouTube coverage has been I would say overwhelming there's been a hundred and seventy major press articles written about those videos in the last two months and what's the general consensus are I mean are they going to begin with in the first two weeks which was the most stressful part of this for me I would say the bulk of the of the press articles were were ran contrary to my views and their basic theme was something like why doesn't the mean professor just play nice it was something like that but but luckily fortunately I seemed to maneuver past that and then people started to actually read the policies that I was speaking about and started to think about them and one thing about the press is that there are actually fairly in favor of free expression given that that's their absolute bread and butter and so the the tenor shifted and I would say the overwhelming majority of press articles in the lab apart from the first two weeks have been have been positive well that's great the what you've done in your YouTube videos which i think is an amazing forum particularly for what you're doing is document and describe in great detail the issues with every single one of these problems with no interruption and I think that's one of the best things about it the better the fact that there's not really a whole lot of forums that will give you the chance to express yourself I've seen some of your videos have hundreds of thousands of views and there's not a whole lot of forums where you can do that and speak for I mean they're all like an hour long right I know no I mean it's it's amazing it is amazing YouTube is YouTube is well I started I post started posting my lectures on YouTube my classroom lectures in 2013 and in really bare-bones form they're just an iPad recording of me lecturing I didn't edit in the slides of the images partly because that's very time-consuming but then I watched it for about two years and by September of this year it had climbed to about a million views and then I really started thinking about YouTube because YouTube was cute cat videos you know and Justin Bieber songs for a very long period of time but it's not that anymore and that's probably been about two years or maybe two and a half years but then I realized that YouTube is actually a revolution that's as as overwhelming as the Gutenberg press revolution Gutenberg invented the printing press and because for the first time in human history a lecture can have the same reach and the same longevity as a book and it's a lot easier for people to listen and that the time lag to publication is basically zero right I mean because you can do it live I guess as we are right now or you can post it in a day or two after publishing it and and you have access to this insanely large audience and the other thing that's really interesting about YouTube with regards to my especially the more academic videos is there's only one reason that people are watching them one it's not the production quality the audio is okay and I'm a good speaker but it's not the production quality the reason they're watching them is cuz they want to know and that's something that's really cool about YouTube and YouTube also seems to be quite skeptical about advanced production values you know the people who are who are popular are often people like you who are basically sitting there talking and everyone's listening it's like oh well people are actually talking about something and this turns out to be interesting it's like the rebirth of genuine journalism so yeah YouTube's uh god only knows what YouTube is but why it's a social revolution I believe you're right and I think the Internet in general is this really new thing in terms of the ability to express yourself I mean it's only existed for twenty plus years and in terms of human history that's a blink of an eye and it's only really been used as you've described over the last couple of years in this form and I think it also is responsible I think in for a great deal of the rise of the popularity of the social justice movement I think it's double-edged sword I think these echo chambers and these people that do find these patterns of behavior that they subscribe to and I think that is that's a part of the problem with ideologies in general is that instead of thinking for yourself you subscribe to a predetermined pattern of behavior and you lock in like this is what I'm supposed to believe this is what I'm supposed to enforce this is what I'm supposed to side with and you go with that one of the good things about the Internet is that it is potentially possible to see contrary viewpoints and analyze them in the comfort of your own home and being by yourself and and looking at maybe one of your videos and maybe someone come to your and I'm sure a lot half come to your videos in anger mad at you and then listen to your points of view and listen to how clearly you've established all of these positions and what what you actually feel is the problem with these positions in a very very calm and very rational and a very well educated point of view I think these people they have the potential to be at least informed and because your need that I've had lots of letters obviously maybe I don't know 2500 letters maybe to my to my email accounts know about this and a very large number of them maybe maybe 200 letters 150 to 200 have been from people on the radical left who've written to me and said that they can no longer speak because the authoritarian types the PCO authoritarians have got so controlling that there once fashionable position is now been deemed unacceptable and and they're alienated and excluded I mean you see that happening with feminists like Germaine Greer I mean Germaine Greer who's been banned from campuses she's not very happy with the idea that being a woman is something that's being reduced to a whim right because she thinks that there's more to being a woman than mere subjective choice well that's no longer a tenable viewpoint on the left and so people who hold that viewpoint many of them are feminists are no longer getting along with the say radical gender bender activist types who've got center stage at the moment so yeah christine summers has the same issue with that she's a feminist and she calls herself the factual feminist and she pushes back against and what what her perspective is is instead of embracing these false narratives and running with them as if they're the facts and and just using that to reinforce your ideology she's saying that does feminism a disservice let's look at the actual reality of the situation and let's look at it from a balanced and an objective perspective and she gets so much hate for them the idea of being rational and objective without that's because as far as the postmodern and social justice warriors are concerned those are just code words for oppression there's no object you've got to remember this with regards to having these sorts of arguments when you say objective and rational that's predicated on your implicit belief that there is such a thing as the objective and there is such a thing as rational and the radical postmodernists they do not buy that not at all as far as they're concerned that's just another power game on your part and built built into the laws like Bill c16 in Canada now on the same in the laws in New York City that governed the use of these gendered pronouns built into the law is the idea that there's no biological foundation for your identity and that it's all purely subjective they built that into the law no objective reality no biology that's gonna unfold over the next 20 years or not I mean isn't it isn't it possible that these kind of discussions and that your videos and then all the people that agree and all the people that are pushing back against this can have some sort of an effect on this movement I do you think it's a yes I mean are you cynical about the future no no no I'm not at all cynical about the future I am cynical about my ability to predict the future like when I was younger much younger back in the 1980s I mean I was very very concerned about the possibility of nuclear war but we all right yes as we all were yes by barba by about the mid-90s though I realized that things were in such a state of chaotic flux that the one thing I could be certain of was that no matter what I was afraid of with regards to the future that isn't what was going to happen and so I'm not cynical about the future but I do believe that we're in an unprecedented state of indetermination indeterminacy and flux and god only knows what could happen I'm not up having said that I wouldn't say I'm optimistic about the possibility that the universities will reform themselves because I think that well even with the free speech debate that the University of Toronto hosted they did three politically correct during the debate which which I thought was really interesting because if I would have staged the debate and been working on their side let's say I would have said strategically speaking no politically correct maneuvering during this debate because all its gonna do is discredit us but that isn't what happened the university opened up by noting that the land on which we were having the debate was once the what was once property owned by the original native Native Americans which is something I find it boring because on the one hand we took it and now on the other hand we want to be friends it's like that's I don't think you get to have both sides of that moral play at the same time but that's ok that's how the university opened the debate and then the next thing that happened was that they announced that there would be counselors waiting outside for anybody who was too traumatized by the contents of the discussion and then they closed they closed by announcing the trans Day of Remembrance you know and button the reason I'm pointing this out is because it just shows you the fact that those things happened they weren't even strategic that's just how things are at the University and they didn't even notice that people were going to turn themselves inside out noticing that saying well god this is so biased I can hardly believe it which is exactly what happened that's how saturated the universities are with this kind of thinking and I don't have any idea what can reverse that collective decisions on the part of citizens a to stop sending their children there B to stop donating money and leaving it in Wills and C to pressure politicians like in my Wilder moments I think cut the funding to the universities by 25 percent and let the faculty have a war about what's important and maybe what would be left over with what the university should be but I really think it's with the exception of the science technology engineering and mathematics ends of things I think it's come to that don't you think that what you're doing when you're making these videos is in a sense branching out away from just a university and teaching online because you are like I said I think that that you could make a case that that's where the university is because that's where people are going just get knowledge they have no other motivation and this is a new thing obviously but at one point in time so is the printing press right and this this this new ability to disseminate information seems to me to be more effective more accessible more reasonable yeah and it's entirely possible that what we're looking at is the future of education it could be I mean I've been spending a lot of time in the last month or so also concentrating on video editing and so I spend about 10 hours this week video editing about an hour discussion with a Russian Orthodox icon carver weirdly enough that I'm going to launch in the next three or four days and we we discussed things that that are very image heavy and so I've been cutting in a lot of images and it is a technology that far supersedes what I mean I like lecturing and lecturing lectures can be very effective but basically with YouTube you can turn your lecture into a documentary and then instead of teaching a hundred people you can teach 50 thousand it's like that's a lot different and they're permanently yes and that 50 thousand can grow and grow and grow and as it becomes more spread and shared the also the discussions about it become more varied yeah well 3 more than 3 million people have watched some element of this in the last couple of months and in September I had about 9000 subscribers that took me about two years three years to build and one of my ambitions which was kind of a tongue-in-cheek and comical ambition as I thought yeah you know I bet I can get more subscribers in the next three years than the U of T has students I thought well that's pretty interesting is like all of a sudden I could have a body of students let's say that's larger than the entire universities like what well just exactly what the hell does that mean and the answer to that is I don't know what that means who knows what that means but one of the other perverse things that happened while I was being warned and cautioned by the university was that my subscriber base grew from 9,000 to 65,000 oh so now I have more YouTube subscribers than the University of Toronto has stood it's like so then I think well hell you know I could do a whole series on Solzhenitsyn I could do a whole series on George Orwell I could do a whole series on Aldous Huxley I could do a whole series on archetypal biblical stories and half of me thinks well if 50,000 people are gonna watch each of those and I can turn them into documentaries instead of just lectures maybe that's what I should be doing like I couldn't write a book with that much reach that's crazy reach it's crazy yeah it's it's it's it's revolutionary I believe that I believe it's revolutionary I believe it is to and I believe no one saw it coming and I think it's such a new thing that we're all just sort of starting to get a handle on how to use it and what it's capable of yes well it was like the internet was for pornography well that changed quick and YouTube was for cute cat videos and that changed quick too you don't know what the technology's gonna do well it's also I don't know how much you've paid attention to virtual reality or how much you've experimented with it but my good friend Duncan Trussell has one of those HTC vibes and we put it on over his house he runs a podcast and we we played with it for about an hour and a half and then we did a podcast and I am thoroughly convinced especially now with new phones there's a phone that I just got called the Google pixel and it comes you can buy it with this headset you slide the phone into the headset you put on this virtual reality program and you're watching a virtual reality show on your phone I mean a regular phone that fits in your pocket just slides into his headset you could do not just a two-dimensional thing where you're showing a lecture and showing images and having a discussion and putting these images in the background or in the foreground and have the audio over it but rather you could have three-dimensional things where you could show a city a village a mountain range you could show geometric patterns you could get involved in I mean it could be used for a million different things and not just for entertainment but also for education and I think that is that's the next step I think I mean it's a it's some unbelievably fascinating well you must be we must be shark to some degree at how popular your podcasts have become I mean you have I don't know how many people on YouTube have the largest subscriber base than you but it's not that many so I mean how do you account for that and and does that surprise you it's surprising but it's this whole this whole podcast thing is very surprising but it's the YouTube is only a small fraction of the amount of people that actually listen to the bottom right the numbers of the the downloads are insane Jaime was last month's numbers was the YouTube was around 12 million for the month and audio is at 60 million Wow yeah like I haven't played there anywhere near enough with turning my online lectures into podcasts you definitely should it's I mean a lot of it you could listen to when you're in a car right or when you're yeah glued to a screen with the podcast no I was doing some work around my office when I was listening to one of yours one of one of you things on YouTube and I found that it was just as interesting if I was doing some other things around my office yes it's a very good passive like podcast themselves or a very good passive form of Education yes absolutely entertainment that makes them different than reading yeah no because reading is faster if you're a good reader but I can't do anything else while you're doing it right people are much more naturally attuned to listening than they are to read it yeah cuz we've only been reading really human beings have only been reading roughly speaking in any large numbers for 500 years right right it's a blink of the eye whereas we've been listening for a very very long period of time and all this new technology like puts us right back it puts us back into tribal mode basically except with this incredible technological enhancement it wouldn't be difficult at all to extract the audio from any of these YouTube videos and just start putting it online as a podcast and again you know people that listen to it when they're in traffic you can't look at it on planes on the bus you know wherever you are where you can just sit down and you know you can close your eyes and and you don't have to be paying attention to it visually yeah well I about four or five months ago I mailed the University the University of Toronto because they have a kind of a massive online course branch which they're toying and I said look I've got a million people who've watched my videos like maybe you guys should give me a hand we should do something about this because I got a million people who are watching these videos it's like that's that's a significant number of people it's worth attending to but perhaps I contacted the wrong people but I never did get a response but it's something I'm well I'm doing it actively right now and I think the quality of my videos has improved substantially in the last month and I really like doing the video editing although it's very painstaking but it's definitely the university's better be careful because they're dumping their content online as fast as they can they're going to make themselves completely superfluous and some smart person I've been thinking about this for 20 years is going to take over the accreditation end because you know all you'd have to do is set up a series of well-designed examinations online and only let a minority of people pass you have instant accreditation credibility it's like here's an entire three years worth of psychology courses here's the exams you take them only 15% of the people pass why only 15% why would you limit the number because it makes the accreditation valuable but you would limit the number based on what if you had a much larger group than 15% that were effectively absorbing the information well fair enough you'd have to toy with you'd have to tie with the accreditation mechanisms but I mean part of part of the utility and the accreditation is that it's inequality if everyone gets accredited then the accreditation is worth let me just make it difficult because right okay so you wouldn't necessarily be limiting the number you would just make it so difficult that the number would be added almost well I think I'd probably make it I'd probably yes that's exactly right I wouldn't limit the number of times people could take the exams that's a great idea as well so as long as he hit threshold I mean that's what happens often say with with like if you're trying to trying to pass the bar or something like that you get to take it a number of times but you have to hit threshold well Thaddius Russell who's a history professor at Occidental he he's doing that very same thing he talked about it here that he's building right now an online university and he is planning on giving out degrees in history through his online university because he's been teaching at universities for a long time and he has a huge problem also with the politically correct movement and he was speaking out against this really crazy story where these two kids adults got intoxicated and had sex and because they were both intoxicated for some reason the boy was described as the attacker and was he was being accused of sexual assault the even though was consensual completely consensual even though they were both not only did she send him and she sent him text saying do you have condoms come on over we're gonna do this but he because they were intoxicated he was the one that was the rapist which is insane it's sexist it's a hundred percent sexist though the kid is suing you know and Thaddeus Russell came on here and disgusted but that politically correct ideology where I mean it's essentially it's prejudice against men in that particular the idea thing so he's stepping outside of the university slowly means God is doing that and you know he gets a hundred thousand people watching his video yeah he's been out here a few times yeah I love that guy and again he's another one who liked yourself has stuck his neck out and spoke about about what he thinks is this preposterous movement towards denying facts denying reality and forming these narratives that are based on their ideologies and and sticking within this box and then seeking to find people that agree with it and and then reinforcing these ideas in this echo chamber and it's just it's a for someone who's outside of it like myself it's a fascinating thing to watch for someone's inside of it like yourself it must be maddening well we've tried out we've tried other online interventions too so I have my these YouTube videos up but we also designed I work with some corporations a while back because I've done some consulting and I had designed tests to help people hire better employees which I still do and in fact I work with this company up in in California called the founder Institute and it's the world's largest stage early technology company incubator it's created 2,500 companies in the last four years and we test now in a hundred and thirty five cities but when I was marketing these tests to companies they kept asking me what could be done about their poorer performing employees and I said well I didn't know because it's not that easy to if you have someone who's problematic who's troubled it's not that easy for a manager to figure out how to straighten them out and they just don't have the time they don't have the manpower and they don't have the training usually to do that but I designed this set of programs called the self authoring suite and one of them the future authoring program helps people write out a plan for their life so it helps them ask you some questions about six dimensions of your life you know your your health mental and physical your use of drugs and alcohol your wishes three to five years down the road for intimate relationships for family for career for education and so on it asks you what could your life be like three to five years down the road if you set it up for you like you were someone you were taking care of so it asks you those six questions then it asks you to write for 15 minutes about about your vision for your life you get to have what you want and what would be good for you what would that be and then it asks you to write for 15 minutes about what your life would be like three to five years down the road if you let your bad habits and your you know idiocy z' and your foolishness --is and your weaknesses take the upper hand and argue you into the ground because everyone knows about that and so it's like you get to design a little heaven to strive for and a little hell to avoid and then you write for then you basically turn that into an implementable plan that's the second part of the program we've used that with about five thousand five to seven thousand university students now mostly in Europe at the Rotterdam School of Management and we've raised there a grade point average of their kids twenty five percent drop their dropout rate the same and has had a walloping effect on men and on non-western ethnic minorities it's moved the non Western ethnic minority student population performance at Rotterdam School of Management from 70% below the average to above the female Dutch natives and so the other the reason I'm telling you this apart from the fact that it's a very good program and we did it at Mohawk College in Canada a year ago and we dropped their dropout rate in the first semester 50% and that especially again worked well for men because men are at more risk of dropping out now and especially for men who didn't have good grades in high school so not only is there the possibility for the net to provide tremendous dissemination of intellectual material but there's also the possibility for the net to provide dissemination of psychological interventions that have major impacts on people's mental health and productivity at almost extraordinarily low cost so that's really being fun too so well I think providing some that sort of a structure and a framework giving people the tools just in form of asking them questions what would you like to do please describe this what is your view and when you do that you sort of allow them to help themselves outline what they would like to accomplish which most people don't do know allowing our education system was designed in Chicago in the late 1800s to produce factory workers because it was set up when when rural people were migrating to the cities on mass because their kids first of all we're likely to get factory jobs and second of all if you were working in a factory your kids needed to be taken care of and so the purpose of the schools was to Train factory workers which is why everyone's lined up in rolls rose and why there are bells it's a factory model the problem with that is that now people's careers basically have to be self-determined but that's never that's never part of the education system part of the reason I developed these programs was because I realized this is the same course where I'm teaching students that if they would have been in Germany in the 1930s they would have been Nazis I'm trying to get them to design their lives and it's way better to have someone articulate their own plan you actually neurologically rewire people by having them formulate their own thoughts which is why you know your school teachers used to say put it in your own words so actually very good advice if they would explain what that means it's like if you have to conjure up the thoughts and you have to articulate them then they change you and so well and so this program has had the the the effects have been absolutely overwhelming for us as researchers because it's very very difficult to produce an intervention that actually has a positive effect on people you know you hope it does but generally when you test it out it's like no it doesn't do what you thought it did or sometimes it even has the reverse effect that sounds fascinating how do people have how can someone a regular person have access yeah it's called self authoring so that's SEL F authoring like like writing a book self authoring calm and the programs I gave away the future authoring program I think it might still be free it was yeah it is till the end of November I did a video called message to Millennials where because one of the things Jonathan Hite said about he called Karl Marx the patron saint of the social justice warriors and John Stuart Mill the patron saint of people say who stood for objective truth and freedom of expression and I thought that was really smart he said Brown University is number one for social justice warrior universities in Chicago for truth universities but one of the things that Marx has over John Stuart Mill is that Marx is the social revolutionary and young people like to think about ways to change the world right and that's actually a positive part of their development it's a stage that the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget called the messianic stage and he associated that with late adolescence it's like while young people want to change the world the problem is is that that's being harnessed into attempts to change other people but that isn't what you should do if you want to change the world you should change yourself and I don't mean that in some cliched sense I mean it in the sense that Alexander Solzhenitsyn said when he analyzed the Soviet Union he said don't be thinking that the line that divides good from evil runs down a political spectrum or or countries or something like that it runs down right down the middle of your soul and if you want to sort out the world and what you do is you sort yourself out it's a serious business right they say it's more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city and that's the truth because you're complicated and there are horrible monsters inside of you that need to be tamed and to be brought into alignment and submission so that you can be US powerful and useful person and I gave away the future authoring program as part of this video I made suggesting to Millennials that instead of rushing out there to change the world by changing other bad people that they should look inward and sort themselves out properly and I think we've given away about four or five thousand of those programs so far about three to the end of November and what happens with it it's well the self or the Future authoring program is regularly $14.95 and the whole self authoring suite which involves it's a program that helps you write an autobiography so it helps you sort out things about your past that are still burdening you you can tell a if if you have a memory that's more than 18 months old approximately and when you pull that memory up to mind if you still have an emotional reaction that means you haven't fully articulated the memory you haven't analyzed it causally you haven't you haven't freed yourself from its grasp and you're carrying it like a weight and your brain responds to that like the more of more weight you're carrying like that more baggage let's say the more of the stress hormone cortisol your brain produces and cortisol makes you old some of this work has been done by James Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin because he he started to pioneer these sorts of writing programs and he found that if people wrote about uncertain things past present or future so they could be traumatic things they could be uncertain things that their physical health improved and he he did a lot of detailed research trying to figure out why that was and basically came down to the explanation that it was something like an uncertainty reduction mechanism at work because your brain is always figuring out how well situated are you in the world how much do you not know compared to how much have you mastered and you can tell that you've mastered things because when you go somewhere and you act things turn out the way you want them that's an indication of mastery and your brain is sort of keeping track across your whole life of how many places you've been where things haven't worked out compared to how places you have been where they have worked out and if all those places in your past where things haven't worked out you need to map and master and that that decreases the existential load on you but that actually decreases your psychophysiological load it makes you healthier it makes you less stressed and so we put all that together in this self authoring suite to help people write about their past to sort it out in a in a detailed autobiography to ask you questions about your past it says divide your life up into six epochs and then divide each of those that might be say old birth to kindergarten and then maybe elementary school and then maybe junior high school however you want to do it and then to write about the emotionally significant events in each of those epochs and then to describe their effects on you and then to analyze how you did in those situations what you might have done differently what you might have do differently in the future to straighten out your past and I've done that with my students in my maps of meeting class for about the last ten years and some people have written 15,000 words it's not that uncommon for students to write 15,000 words in their autobiography Wow so that's such great advice about reconciling with your past because so many people just carry it around yeah well if you're if you're thinking about your past what it means is you haven't analyzed the causal change because you might say well why do you remember your past well you might say well it's in order to have an objective you know record of the past it's like it has nothing to do with that there's only one reason you remember the past and that's to be prepared for the future that's why you remember the past and so what you're supposed to do is take the past and extract out from it wisdom and wisdom is the ability to avoid stumbling blindly into ditches and so you think well here's a time in my past I stumbled blindly into this horrible ditch and terrible things happen to me it's like okay you need to take that apart you need to figure out how was it that that events conspired with your participation voluntarily or involuntarily so that that terrible consequence emerged you need to know why that happened and how you could react differently in that situation and as soon as you do that your leave it alone he won't obsess you about it anymore because the anxiety-producing parts of your brain are basically trying to tell you where there are obstacles in your environment it's like look out don't go there it's like well don't go there there's fire well maybe you could master the fire right then you're a wielder of fire you're not just a victim and loss of situations our dangers are not dangerous depending on your level of mastery right life is like that and so a negative emotion that's associated with a memory is is something that's crying out for mastery and writing can really help with that so you're reorganizing your brain when you write autobiographically you're basically the emotions imagine emotion memories can be stored at different levels of your brain some from sort of primordial reptilian image laden areas that are very emotional up to finally articulated plans for your future life well you want to take everything that's negative and emotional and transform that into a fully articulated vision for your future and that frees you of your past you shouldn't be thinking about your past I mean maybe if you're 80 and you know you're going over a well-spent life that's a whole different thing but if you're thirty thirty-five or twenty and most of the time you're thinking about your past it's like it's like your soul is trapped back there and you need to free it through investigation and the metaphysical language is appropriate because that is in a sense what you're doing you're trapped in the past it's like you got to break free of that so you can use all your resources to move ahead into the future anyways in these programs the Future authoring program like I said has had walloping effects on people it's that's fantastic advice I mean it's just so it's so logical and it sounds so great I mean I think that's one of the gigantic problems that a lot of people have with education that you're learning facts you're learning information but you're not learning how to use your own mind yeah well here's something that's really interesting about that so I spend a lot of time I'm a scientist but I'm also I would say I'm also a religious person I'm a deeply religious person and how do you practice exactly well that's a nice pain literally I've spent 40 years thinking about that and for 20 of those years I did almost nothing but think about that all the time and I realized something partly from reading Carl Jung and what I realized was that even the fundamentalists have have the wrong idea about religious truth religious truth is not scientific truth like the stories in Genesis which are very old stories maybe tens of thousands of years old they're obviously not scientific theories because the people who wrote the board scientists we didn't have science until about five hundred years ago so the idea that the stories in Genesis are scientific theories is it's just false and on every possible front and so then you might say well there's no other truth but scientific truth it's like well wait a minute that's not true because what scientific truth tells you is what things are but genuine religious truth tells you how you should act and those things are not the same and so a great story like a great novel which is a quasi religious construction because it's it's like a distillation of ordinary life into its most important elements that's a map about how you should comport yourself in the world and you might say well what do you mean by should and because that's that's the question the moral relativists ask and there's an answer to that too as far as I can tell and I got this partly from reading Jean Piaget so imagine that here's how you should act so that things are good for you like they would be for someone you're taking care of but they have to be good for you in a way that's also good for your family and they have to be good for you and your family in a way that's also good for society and maybe even also good for the broader environment if you could manage that so it's balanced at all those levels and then they that has to be good for you and your family and society and the world right now and next week and next month and a year from now and ten years from now and so it's this harmonious balancing of multiple layers of being simultaneously and and that's a that's a that's a Darwinian reality I would say your brain is actually a tuned to tell you when you're doing that and the way it tells you is that it reveals that what you're doing is meaningful that's the sign that you and your nervous system is adapted to do this it's adapted to exist I would say on the on the edge between order and chaos and chaos is where things are so complex you can't handle it an order is where things are so rigid that it's too restrictive in between that there's a place a place that's meaningful where you're partly stabilized and partly curious and you're operating in a manner that increases your scope of of knowledge so you're you're inquiring and growing and at the same time you're stabilizing and renewing you your family society nature now next week next month and next year and when you have an intimation of meaning then you know you're there and I can give you an existential demonstration of that so imagine that each of these levels of existence the way I just laid them out are like patterns they're patterns within patterns within patterns within patterns and there's a way of making all that harmonious that's what music models that's why music is so meaningful you know you take a beautiful orchestral composition and all the instruments are doing different things at different levels but they all flow together harmoniously and you're right in the middle of that is a listener and it fills you with a sense of it's almost like a sense of religious awe even if you're a punk rock nihilist you know and the reason for that is because the music is modeling the manner of being that's harmonious it's the proper way to exist and religious writings in the deepest sense of those are archetypal writings are our guidelines to that mode of being so they're not true like scientific truth is true there I think of them as hyper they're hyper true or meta true it's like we take the most true things about your life and then we take the most true things about ten other people's lives and we amalgamate them into a single figure and that would be like a literary hero and then we take a thousand literary heroes and we extract out from each of them what makes the most heroic person that's a religious daddy that's what Christ is he's a meta hero and that sits at the bottom of Western civilization and his archetypal mode of being is true speech that's the fundamental idea of Western civilization and it's right now when you say when you talk about this harmonious frequency that's achieved what how do you reconcile all the stories that were like say in the Old Testament that were extremely violent or they're ridiculous like who was the guy that could they made fun of these children made fun of them so God sent a bear to kill the children because they made fun of them for being bald or there's a bunch of stories and ridiculous tales in the Bible that obviously have the hand of man on them how do you separate those from the the beautiful concepts that are outlined in religion like you know treat everyone as if they are your brother you know love and let love know it's very very difficult because it's all in the Old Testament let's say I mean the Old Testament was obviously written by people who were deeply tribal right of course we're also deeply tribal and some of the problems that those people were trying to face trying to sort out was well how do you organize yourself within your own tribe justly and mercifully and at the same time defend yourself against the barbarians who constitute other drives well that was that was the problem that humanity was trying to solve when it was amalgamating all of its tribes a process that obviously still hasn't hasn't finished and some of the ways that you protect your own tribe rapidly become horrifying and so many of the stories in the Old Testament that have to do essentially with tribal protection are immediately horrifying but there's also a there's a developmental pathway through the combination of the old and new Testament that that that show I would say how that morality that was fundamentally tribal to begin with transformed itself over thousands of years into a morality that was what what transcended tribal distinctions and so part of the imposition of the New Testament on to the Old Testament was the imposition of a morality that transcended tribal morality on to a morality that was fundamentally tribal in origin but the New Testament of course was constructed by Constantine in the series of bishops they took things out they add oh yes I mean how so it's not much different here's a way of thinking about it okay so I have a friend who's a comic-book writer and I've talked to him a fair bit about archetypes and comics for example he was a student of mine at Harvard a long time ago and well that the comic book universe is a very interesting one because obviously these fictional characters were thought up by single people and then the fictional characters were transformed into stories and then the stories were sent out into a broader community but then what started to happen was the broader community started to stay in contact with the people who are writing the stories and so if you do something like write Batman now there's a bunch of things you can't do with Batman because there's been a collective decision made in the entire community of multiple writers and the entire community of multiple readers that have decided that there's a core story that has a certain structure in certain elements and so there's this collective process of imagination that's gone into constructing what you might describe as a heroic meta-narrative and the reason I'm using that as an example is because there isn't a lot of difference perversely enough in the construction say of comic book heroes and the construction of religious deities and I'm not saying that religious deities are nothing but comic book characters or maybe I'm elevating comic book characters beyond the status that they normally attain but if you think think about this for example with regards to something like the construction of the recent Marvel Universe I mean those Avenger movies are among the most expensive technological artifacts that human beings have ever made and they drive our computational capacity to its absolute limit and the reason for that is because we're using that fictional space to lay out an archetypal and mythological view of the universe it's a practice domain for modes of being and I mean in the marvel universe obviously Tony Stark Iron Man is his technological man right he's trying to develop a real relationship with his partner Pepper Potts who's you know her own sort of independent woman and he's attempting to use technology to build himself up into something that has the status of of approximately a God to transcend mortal limitation and all of that so there's a there's a deity like aspect the growth of a deity emerging there and then of course Thor and Loki are they're not comic-book deities at all there are actual deities they're the hostile brothers it's an archetypal pair like Christ and Satan or Batman and the Joker or Superman and Lex Luthor and that's the good part of the individual against the evil part of the individual roughly speaking that's played out in these myths and so that collective process that you described whereby an entire group of people comes together to decide what the central religious text is I mean on the one hand you can think of that as the gerrymandering of a religious process maybe that's something that's only devoted towards the acquisition of power like that would be a Marxist analysis but on the other hand you can think of it as the collective imagination attempting to build a dramatic to build to build an exemplary drama that everyone can act out and it's it's in acting out that exemplary drama that we are actually able to interact in a civilized and productive manner like look at this discussion that we're having to the degree that it's working we're both trying to articulate our our notions of reality and I do that you listen and maybe you have some comments and then you do that and I listen and maybe you have some comments but together we're building something that's different from what we both came in here with right and in a sense what we're doing is we're participating in the process of articulating each other's spirits and I mean that most technically like part of your spirit is in the Mel gum of the information that you've encountered a lot of that's articulated articulated wisdom and so it's soul construction if you're having a good conversation and that's also a conversation that is meaningful and you can tell that when you're having it it's that your your decomposing parts of yourself your your false presuppositions your letting them die and your letting something new be born as an alternative and your participating in this process of death and rebirth constantly when you're having a meaningful conversation it's like oh that was wrong calling to let that die whoo that's a little painful I was kind of attached to that concept but I'll let it go I'll let it burn off and a new part of you will emerge and then another part dies and a new part emerges and that's this process of eternal death and rebirth it's part of the general mythology of redemption you see that all the time - in the Harry Potter series for example at the very end of the Harry Potter series parter undergoes a literal death and rebirth and that's how he finally defeats evil these stories are deeply built into people there's a reason that that JK Rowling became the richest person in England by she's richer than the Queen she got rich by telling the story properly you know and the second volume of Harry Potter when when there's the basilisk underneath the castle that turns you to stone when you look at it that's everything that people are afraid of that freezes you like a rabbit freezes when it sees a wolf and the story in Harry Potter is you go underneath the castle to where the thing that fear frightens you the most resides and you face it down and in doing that you free the virgin right that's st.

George he frees Virginia in the Harry Potter story and maybe you have died because of that because he gets bit bitten by that bass class can just about dies and then it's the Phoenix that saves them because the Phoenix is the spirit of death and rebirth these stories they come up everywhere there's no avoiding them and it's because they're true but they're not true like scientific truths there are different there are behavioral truth if are a pragmatic truth or a dramatic truth and part of the reason that our society is so damn unstable now and part of the reason all this weird chaos is emerging this is a consequence of Nietzsche's observation back from the late 1800s about the death of God we blew the metaphysical foundations out from underneath our culture and the whole thing is shaking and twisting and it's it's vacillating between the horrors of the extreme right and the horrors of the extreme left it's been doing that for a hundred and forty years and we're in the throes of that again we blew the metaphysical foundations out from underneath our culture and we need to get them back part of the reason that people are so obsessed by things like The Avengers movies and the superheroes and Harry Potter and all of that is because and Star Trek and Star Wars is because our collective imagination is trying to regroup at the level of drama and reformulate our fundamental metaphysics I was reading this thing that was talking they were equated CrossFit and yoga to religion and they were saying it's essentially religion for people that have abandoned traditional religions is that the idea is that what we're seeking is camaraderie order and discipline discipline and some sort of a shared community experience so what you're talking about when you're saying your religion you're not talking about a literal translation like a guy actually came back from the dead what you're talking about is the concepts and the thoughts and and the harmonious frequency that is achieved when people follow the tenets of that religion and live by these laws as you're saying of stacking on these ideas is this good for you is it good for the community in five years in ten years and and that that that's what you're saying when you're talking about well your belief in love really thing about that is that like imagine that there's there's a pathological mode of being that's so terrible that when you enact you just die a good drug addiction will do that for you if you pursue that meth addiction pursue that for about 10 years you know and you'll descend to the lower levels of Hell and then you'll die right well so then you might might say well what's what's what's at the opposite end of that what would be the final manifestation of a mode of life that was revivifying and healthy how how how how redemptive and rejuvenating would that be and I would say the answer to that is that we don't know we have no idea and these ideas of death and rebirth are definitely true on the micro level like so that developmental psychologist Piaget said for example that when you incorporated new information however you did that learning or conversation that that new information would exist in in contradiction to something that you already presumed and so that thing you presumed would have to disintegrate and die and and then something new would be born that can happen at different levels of analysis so sometimes you learn something minor and sometimes you're shook to your bloody core you know and and you undergo a descent into the underworld fundamentally sometimes even a descent into hell that's where you get Jenna Seidel and resentful and then maybe you're lucky and you pop up reborn well those those exist as as constant metaphysical truths that that's how human beings transform we don't know the upper limits of that transformation we have no idea what that might be because I don't know for example how healthy you could be as if you were as healthy as you could be if you straighten yourself out completely I don't know what what your what limits you could transcend and neither does anybody else so we don't know the upper limits of the truth of these religious stories now we do know what happens if you let go of them too badly you end up with something like the Soviet Union or Mao's China which were both based on I mean they they were atheist yeah they were secular they were they yeah that he dispensed commune Oh for Marx it was religion was the opiate of the masses it's like it's not like I don't understand that I understand that but it's another one of those situations where it's like religion is the opiate of the masses yeah and it's also 50 other things hmm and you don't want to forget those like really we know for example from anthropological studies religious belief is a human universal and the reason for that in part is because there is a distinction between good and evil and there is a distinction between good and bad otherwise you wouldn't do anything like you're always striving for the good I mean unless you've taken a malevolent turn it's a natural impulse in human beings to make what is better well it means we have an we have a deeply inbuilt sense of what constitutes better and we're all aware of that harmonious state that's achieved community well yeah the thing that's interesting about it like what one of the things that Nietzsche thought was after he announced the death of God was that people would be able to create new values and Carl Jung took issue with that he was a student of Nietzsche's and he pointed out basically that well wait a minute who says you can create your own values you can't even get yourself out of bed to go exercise in the you're not under your own control maybe we could discover maybe we could rediscover the values that we once held and that's the descent into the underworld and the resurrection of the Father that's what happens in Pinocchio for example you know when Pinocchio goes down into the depths to face monstro and and revitalize his dead father there's a reason that movie was made in the 1930s and why it was so popular it's like you want to have you want to get rid of your damn strings and stop being a neurotic jackass that's what the story is about is you go down to the bottom of the ocean you find the thing you're most afraid of you face it you rescue your dead father from the depths and you rise back to the surface with him that's what our culture has to do now when you say that you're a religious person though people automatically assume that you there's especially in this country the religious right there's a very dogmatic and very simplistic view of what God wants and the it it's lumped into no homosexuals certain restrictions on the behavior of women though if you look at the Bible and the Bible is obviously a reflection of the people that lived at the time where it was constructed although even trying to figure out when that is you know it was an oral tradition for thousands of years before it was ever written down written in ancient Hebrew translated to Latin and Greek and Roman or in English rather well there's always a tension in religions between the dogmatic element and the spiritual element Brian and conservatives technically speaking tend to tend to marshal themselves on the sides of the more rural oriented and dogmatic elements of the religion and liberals roughly speaking tend to marshal themselves more on the spiritual side and that's because of the distinction that you were saying earlier about the the behavior patterns of people that tend to be concerned conscientiousness versus openness roughly speaking and I mean the dogmatic structures are necessarily necessary the dogma is necessary because it conserves the structure but the spiritual aspect is necessary because it updates the structure and there's always this tension and there's a tension in people it's like you have to believe things or you couldn't test you couldn't act you have to hold on to the dogmatic structure of your belief but you have to be open for its update on a continual basis and that's well that's basically what consciousness is for that seriously speaking consciousness is the thing that attends to the unknown and to the anomaly and integrates it with the structure and there's meaning to be found and not to that's that's to boldly go where no one has gone before you know in the words of the Star Trek writers as something that deeply appeals to young people when they watch that sort of thing but so what the fundamentalists are doing is they're they're trying to hold on to their tradition and it's no bloody wonder because if if the tradition falls apart you end up isolated and drowning in the ocean alone but if the tradition gets too intense and restricted well then then you're just clones in a prison and and and that's these that's these two two forms of hell in a sense they meet you know if they get extreme enough they meet that the hell of absolute chaos and the hell of absolute order and and the Conservatives tend towards the hell of absolute order in that and left-liberal types tend towards the hell of absolute chaos there's some point in the middle that's the line between yin and yang by the way because that's order in chaos and the Taoist say well that's life that's existence order in chaos and order is the place you are when what you dub do works and chaos is where you are when what you do doesn't work and no matter where you go order and chaos exist and your job is to be right on the border between those and that's to live in Dao that's to live in meaning and that's that same place where all these things stack up and so well and so with regards to religious tradition on the one hand you have to maintain the tradition it's like maintaining the Constitution in the US on the other hand you have to be awake and alert because the tradition is a dead thing right it was composed by dead people in the dead past it can't respond as flexibly as it should to the demands of the present that's up to you and you do that with your vision with your capacity to see and with your capacity to to articulate and forever forever really the major deities that mankind have produced Marduk from up for the Mesopotamians and Osiris or [ __ ] Horus for the Egyptians and and Christ for the Christians and Buddha for the Buddhists these are these have been people who are noted for their vision for their ability to watch and pay attention because there's nothing more important than the ability to pay attention pay attention and speak the truth your truth and that's how you keep everything stacked up in order harmoniously that's how you keep the balance between order and chaos that's how you articulate your being that's how you revivify the world that's how you rescue your dead father from the bottom of the ocean that's how you adopt your responsibility as a citizen that's how you live a proper life and a proper life I know what a proper life is because I've thought about this for a long time life is suffering and suffering can make you resentful murderous and then genocide 'el if you take it far enough so you need an antidote to suffering and maybe you know you could think well I'll build walls of luxury around myself and that'll protect me from the suffering it's like well good luck with that because that isn't gonna work and maybe you could build a delusion and live inside that but that's gonna fall apart well what is there that helps you fight against suffering that's easy that's the truth the truth is the antidote to suffering and the reason for that is because the truth puts reality behind you so that you can face the reality that's coming straight at you without becoming weak and degenerating and becoming resentful and and wishing for the destruction of being because that's the final hell is your soul wishing for the destruction of everything because it's too painful and you're too bitter and that happens to people all the time now as a person who is someone who's extremely critical of ideologies a lot of people would think it's a contradiction for you to embrace religion because religion being the biggest and oldest ideology ideology is a parasite on religious substructures you can't look we could go back to the harry potter example that's a good example I mean JK Rowling had kids reading like 400 page books right she could fill a stadium when she was reading why is because she got the archetypes right she got the religious sub- correct they're not ideologies ideologies work because an ideology is a parasite on top of a religious substructure and a religious a religious narrative has has a particular set of characteristics it's very balanced so for example there's the feminist idea of the patriarchy well the religious idea of society has a evil patriarchy notion built into it that would be the dying King the once great dying King you see this in the Egyptian story of Osiris for example he was eventually chopped up by his evil brother you see it in the Lion King with with Mufasa and Simba Simba's father in symbols evil evil uncle those are the two representatives of the patriarchy the wise King and the tyrannical King in the religious story properly set up archetypal story there's there's the natural world the chaotic world there's a positive element and a negative element there's the social world there's the wise King and the tyrannical King and there's the individual world and that's the the adversary in the hero there's always a positive and a negative at each level and it stops it from being an oversimplification because it says to you well of course bloody society is an oppressive patriarchy but it's also the wise father that has taught you to speak every word you know it's like you don't get to say only this part of the story without having gratitude for this part of the story and it's true at each level of the representation a properly balanced story is how it has got the balance between positive and negative always correct is that in many ways like a lot of people who are anti Western capitalism are also the only they will find that capitalism and Western capitalism in particular is the only culture that has embraced the acceptance of people right like transgender people people who are gay people who are marginalized I mean Western capitalist society is one of the very few cultures that openly abhors racism right right right well and these people are anti-capitalist on their iPhones right you don't get to do that right it's it's a performative contradiction so that's so important yeah they're on their iPhones while they're flying yeah yeah it's like well actually no you're not you're just deeply confused that's what you are it's deeply confused it's not capitalism that's the problem it's evil it's the problem it's well it's also the it's a deeper problem evil is our problem so there's a religious scholar named Mircea Eliade a-- who looked at flood myths cuz there are flood myths all over the world God gets fed up floods everything it's like just like in New Orleans so here's a funny thing about New Orleans what caused the New Orleans flood well hurricane no yeah no how about human corruption how about the corruption of the state how about the fact that people knew the dam dykes weren't gonna hold that the levees weren't gonna hold how about that they knew that for a hundred years and didn't care how about that they pocketed the money that should have gone for their repair and so in flood myths you always see two things you see that I'm paraphrasing say there's a storm there's dykes and there's people responsible for maintaining the dikes well the storm won't wipe out the city it could but if the dykes are high enough then it won't and if people aren't corrupt and they build the dikes properly and so God floods the world when the dykes have rotted and the people have become corrupt and it's a very old story and it's disseminated everywhere and the reason is is well we inhabit a social structure that's old and-and-and and dead our infrastructure is decayed our our political economic and practical infrastructure has decayed why it's old everything decays okay everything's already always decaying that's dangerous and corrupt people don't do a very good job of keeping it order and so if things get old and decayed enough and if people get corrupt enough then god floods the world why because that's what happens over and over and over and you don't mean God in the literal sense of the word you need God as these are the consequences to these type of actions you are not prepared good say what transcended reality you could look at it that way you know and and I mean the idea of God is a very very complicated idea but you could say if you were thinking about it merely merely from an intellectual perspective is you could say that God is what transcends your knowledge that's all it's just it's what you don't know it's what's outside of your knowledge structures there's a very old story and this goes all the way back to the Tower of Babel is that one of the things that characterizes or authoritarians is that there's never anything outside of their knowledge structures they make their null instructors absolute so in the Tower of Babel human beings build this structure that's supposed to reach all the way to heaven - - so that we can invade the place of the gods while God has none of that he just blows it apart and throws people all over the world it's and it's a very early dramatic representation of the danger of human hubris and hubris is we know everything there's nothing that needs to be left outside of what we know it's like you know that's what God is God is what's always outside of what you know is the problem with the term God though the people think of God as being a man they think of it being a person they even use the masculine pronouns in reference to God I mean that's one of the funny things about God is calling them a he well it's a problem I mean and that certainly being a problem young talked about that a lot about the the exclusion of the feminine within the domains of classic judeo-christian thought for example I mean you have Mary who's who's a kind of a quasi deity who pops in sort of like as a fourth member of the Trinity but the exclusion of the feminine is definitely a conceptual problem is the fact that God is conceptualized as a human being or as a man a problem it's a problem and a solution I mean if you if you remove the human element of God then God gets so abstract that it's easy for him to float off into space and to never show up again you lose the human connection I mean the way the Catholics solved that to some degree is that they have God who's sort of at the top of the hierarchy and then they have this hierarchy of saints who are sort of like gods but half human and then they have human beings at the bottom and that allows for what would you say a continual chain communication between the highest level of abstraction and the actual you know the actual concrete person but but the other you the other thing that's useful about the conceptualization of God in anthropomorphic terms is that and this is worth noting is there is nothing more complex in the cosmos than a human being so if you're looking for something to represent the ultimate in complexity it's hard to beat a human being so your brain is ungodly complicated so to speak mm-hmm so I mean these things are obviously too complicated to unpack you know you know you know getting into this conversation but I'm glad we did D do you think that these stories exists because somewhere in our code somewhere in our very being we understand that there is a need for this order to find this wholly frequency oh they're an it's sure they're an expression of our deepest being they're they're an expression of how it is that we must live in order to reach our full potential even more than that even to avoid hell and you can take the you can think about Hell as Nazi Germany if you want you can think about it as the Soviet gulag archipelago or Mao's Cultural Revolution like we can get there no problem if you you walk down in some of the Cedar areas in LA you'll see people in hell no problem sure go Skid Row yes yes and you can tell where the when those people are there because they will get angry if you look at them and you'll you'll walk a big berth around them you're not going to come within 10 feet of the let's call it psycho geography of their existence mmm right and now they're there in a place it's a metaphysical place but it's but it's it's not defined by the damn geography right you know Skid Row is as much of a psychological place as it is a physical place in fact it's more that more a psychological place but that doesn't make it any less a place and if your descend into the hell of Skid Row deep enough you'll get to the point where most of your thoughts are murderous and that's like that's that's as a suburb of the underworld fundamentally those that place exists people visit it all the time and sometimes they don't get out it's real I've been discussing this a lot recently because people like to talk about the concept of apocalypse that we're headed towards an impending apocalypse and my thought is that apocalypse is already here it's just not right here yes always you go to Liberia and look at people defecating in the streets and eating human flesh I mean do you I don't know if you ever seen the Vice piece on Liberia but it's it's unbelievably terrifying the apocalypse is an archetypal idea and the apocalypse is always here and it's here like it's here at the micro level like when we have a discussion and our concepts change those are micro apocalypses little bits of our being are being blown apart and restructured and that can be happen at a small scale or a large scale or it can it can get to the point where everything collapses and is destroyed and life is apocalyptic in that matter because we all get sick we all die you know our families are vulnerable there's an apocalyptic element to being and we and we have to face that and confront it and deal with it properly and and the wrong way to deal with it is to is to is to generate more hell than heaven I suppose and and to do that consciously and people do that all the time - there's never a situation that's so bad that there isn't something you can do to make it worse and there's very seldomly a time when you're not motivated at some level of your being to put the knife in and twist it just one more quarter turn people are like that and we have reason life is hard it's no wonder people get corrupted by it it's not an easy thing to to live in a it's not an easy thing to live let's say in a truthful manner but but the alternative the alternative is hell the I mean part of the reason that I made these videos to begin with was because and I learned a lot about the importance of spoken truth as a as the countervailing force against tyranny and authoritarianism it isn't an alternative little structure that's the countervailing force it's it's this it's spoken truth that's the countervailing force it's like well why would I put my job on the line to have an opinion about compelled pronouns I know why because the ability to speak your truth is the bulwark against hell and losing your job that's nothing that's nothing compared to where things can go when they go badly for me it was just preventative it's like this isn't going in a good direction well should you take a risk it's like you don't have that choice you're silent that's a risk now most people don't understand the risks of silence I happen to understand the risks of silence because I've been studying them for 40 years is it frustrating for you to get so little support for these actions and for for your protests well I wouldn't say that that's what happened I mean so little support because you get a lot of support yeah outside of the in the outside of the university it's okay it doesn't matter where the support comes from like I mean it's it's disappointing in the same way that it's disappointing for me to say I think the universities now do more harm than good that's disappointing but but it doesn't it's not surprising to me like it isn't as if intellectuals are characterized by an intrinsic moral superiority oh they're smart so they'll leap to the defense of what's right it's like no there's no evidence for that intelligence and and moral wisdom aren't the same thing like and if you're corrupt and smart all that makes you is way more treacherous it doesn't make you less likely to be corrupt it just makes you much more you're 50 snakes instead of two or you're 56 headed snakes instead of two like I've had clients who were who had very serious personality disorders who are very intelligent it's like that's not necessarily a good thing for them they're just better at arguing for their pathology to themselves that is a real problem where people automatically assume that intelligent people are going to be healthy yeah well they're healthy in that often psyche a lot better in the world you know because more their yes their skills are more marketable and so on but there's no evidence that there's any relationship between intelligence and morality I mean God let me tell you a story man one time I have this client this woman was just ruined she looked like a street person you know and she had very dirty clothes and she was so shy that she couldn't even approach you she had to shield her eyes from you as if you were emitting light and she did that to everyone on the street like she was bent over and and and and humble like like a Chinese peasant brought before the Emperor you know and one of the things I was doing with her in behavior therapy was trying to just get her to present herself in a more normal manner so that people wouldn't shy away from her and you know be instantly prejudiced towards her and and she'd come to the behavior therapy clinic and she wasn't bright this woman just to think she had only had like a seventh grade education she was quite intellectually impaired and she lived with her her sick aunt who was who was schizophrenic and who had like a a satanic Lee possessed alcoholic boyfriend that was always tormenting my client she lived in absolute hell but she had this dog and she used to take it out and walk the dog all the time and then she she'd actually come to the behavioral therapy clinic partly because of her own problem but but she'd come to this place called the Douglas Hospital and she'd been an inpatient in the Douglas Hospital in India in the Douglas Hospital there were these long-term psychiatric clients and they looked like something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting or Dante's Inferno I mean these people were this is way worse than one Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest these people were seriously destroyed and they couldn't be let back on in the streets during the institutionalization like they were lifers and she had decided that part of the reason she wanted to come to the hospital is because she had been institutionalized there and she thought that maybe when she took her dog out for a walk she could go and get one of those damn inmates and take them out for a walk too now that was a person who was immoral dumb as a post just screwed in 50 different directions nothing going for her and she had that blood moral capacity to decide that there was someone worse off than her and believe me that wasn't easy to find that maybe she could do them some good if the hospital would let her which they didn't by the way yeah well that's the story of the soul that's not the intellect that's for sure so so I didn't expect any support from my from my colleagues and and it isn't that I don't care if I got it but it's here it's in some sense it's irrelevant it's irrelevant to me because my goal was I'm not saying those goddamn pronouns and the reason I'm not saying them is because they're made up by left-wing ideologue and I don't like left-wing ideology I don't like ideology period and I know where corruption of speech leads and I'm not going there and you know one of the things I tried to learn when I was taking apart what happened in Auschwitz and trying to put myself in the position of a nosh wits camp guard which by the way you can do if you use your imagination a bit I wouldn't call it exactly the world's most pleasant meditative experience but you can call up parts of yourself that would be capable of taking someone who just got off a transport train and having them carry a hundred pound sack of wet salt from one side of the camp compound to the other and back you can conjure that part of yourself up if you want and that'll teach you something about what you're like people don't do it because it's too frightening but I know perfectly well that I could do that sort of thing and so once I learned that I could do that sort of thing and maybe that I could even enjoy it I thought okay fine I get it I'm gonna see if I can figure out how to live so that if that opportunity was presented to me I wouldn't take it and I think that's the lesson that people need to learn from the 20th century it's like that's what human beings did okay well we're all human okay so how is it that we should live so that we don't do that again well part of that is to try to say the truth no matter what because the alternative is worse and it is worse the truth no matter what and that is the real problem that you see with being forced into using these made-up pronouns yeah absolutely it's my language I'll take responsibility for what I say I am NOT saying your words and being compelled to say your words by law well that's that that that makes it that that takes it past the point of absurdity to the point of tyranny and in my estimation and I've seen some criticisms where people are saying you know he's talking about this but really he's grandstanding because no one's doing anything legally but the potential exists that's rubbish but that is yes they wouldn't have changed the damn criminal they put it in the hate speech category and altered the Criminal Code it's as simple as that and then you could say well no we didn't really mean it it's like oh yeah you did you really meant it two of the social justice warriors that have debated me the last two months accused me directly of hate speech all I had to do was poke them a tiny bit and they came right out with it and then the university's legal team reviewed everything I said carefully believe me and they decided that oh it was not only illegal to not use these compelled pronouns it was probably illegal to make a video saying that I wouldn't use them because otherwise why would they write me a warning letter and tell me that I violated University policy on the Ontario Human Rights Act how did that lightly have they acted on this at all is there a oh they won't know well they've acted in that they sent me two warning writers and told me to stop talking and they don't the idea that I was going to be teaching in January again because I teach all my undergraduate courses from January to May that was on the table and I think the only reason that it hasn't happened one of the reasons it hasn't happened and I'm not attributing nothing but malevolence to the university administration because obviously it's very complicated and they did agree to host the debate for example but the idea that I wouldn't be teaching in January and and still might not be isn't is by no means that was a perfectly plausible outcome and had this not caused a firestorm much of which has emerged in support of me then I would say there was a 50/50 chance that I would have had my teaching privileges revoked it's having two other professors so the idea that I'm making it like that this is a tempest in a teapot it's like yeah okay fine why did you change the criminal code then and why did you put it under the hate speech laws exactly so nope doesn't wash and I and the fundamental proof of that is the university's response because for sure their legal team crafted those letters you know what was like recalcitrant employee you're responsible for them okay what do you do with a recalcitrant employee you write them a letter telling them what they're doing wrong and asking them to stop then if they don't stop you write them a second letter that's more strongly worded then if they don't stop you write them a third letter even more strongly worded then you take disciplinary action that's like HR 101 that's how you do it so so here we said at the end of November closing in December you're literally a bit more than a month away and you don't know whether or not you're teaching your courses in January it seems highly probable that I'll be teaching them I wouldn't say it's certain but if I'm teaching them it's because the cost of having me not teach them would now be too high it's not because the university believes that what I'm doing is either necessary or acceptable if someone who's listening to this or watching this feels compelled to act out in your support how can they do that I think they could do the future authoring exercise and that that would be the best way to have I'm dead serious about this is like sort yourself out sort yourself so you try to figure out the world and yes that's the primary objective that's your that's your most important thing that you can do so yourself so yourself oh and and marshal your arguments and put yourself in order so that when someone pushes you a little farther than you should go you can say no and you know what's going on now I think that's outstanding the advice that's a very very important advice and I think this has been one of my favorite podcasts ever I really appreciate you coming on I appreciate everything you've done I appreciate you having the courage to stick your neck out and I appreciate also your incredibly well thought-out arguments for that for those actions so thank you thank you how do people get a hold of your YouTube page what does your YouTube page what's the address Jordan Peterson videos on YouTube and do you use Twitter I know you put your Twitter page up but you use it and that is Jordan Jordan BPD's Peterson yeah okay thank you Sarah really really appreciate it it was it was an honor thank you thanks for the invitation SIA