レックス・マーフィー（REXTV）がジョーダン・ピーターソンにインタビュー (Rex Murphy (REXTV) interviews Jordan Peterson)

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we owe about to join me now is probably the world's most famous intellectual, certainly the most famous intellectual to come out of Canada in the last 20 years on, he will be speaking with me about the role of the university and about his meteoric rise too intellectual on media influence.
Dr.
Jordan Peterson.
Dr Peterson, I'm going to start out on an incidental thing at least is incidental to me and has bothered me since you became known.
A zit is now to all of the world.
That was in the very early days off the controversy that came to you when the University of Toronto sent you some military letters that I thought I've used this word before insolent that I thought were against the spirit of the university that they weren't supporting you never actually threatening you.
Yes, And that's said to me that somebody is beyond a particular controversy.
Something deeper is wrong here that universities are.
This university is upside down.
How did you reason that?
How did they get there?
That they could be so completely?
Uh, I'm aware of your own position.
Well, I think a lot of it was was confusion um, and and the lack of experience with this sort of thing.
I mean, the University of Toronto is a peaceful place and rather conservative university.
All things considered, the administration wasn't prepared to handle ah, controversy of nature that swirled around me.
They were used to making minor administrative decisions, and when they were put on the spot and forced to defend their fundamental Presumptions, let's say it isn't clear that they were ready and prepared to do so.
Um, partly because of lack of practice.
It isn't necessarily the case that you climb in the administrative chain in the university by engaging in continual philosophical reappraisal of the fundamental presuppositions of university as an institution.
You know, it's it's a much more administrative job.
And so I'm going to say everything I can in favor of the University of Toronto before I say anything contrary.
Um, you know, I found to that when I've been put on the spot by journalists and has to defend.
But let's say customs that everyone has always accepted like marriage.
It's very difficult to generate a a defense for such an institution off the top of your head.
Let's say, because part of the whole purpose of customs is that everyone except you don't think it reflects.
Well, on the way out of there, there unstated presuppositions.
So when you put on the spot, you don't know what to do.
When I first got the letter, the first letter and I know how HR departments work, they send you one letter of warning so that it's documented.
Then they send you another so that it's documented, and then they send you 1/3.
And if you haven't ceased by then while then they go to the next step, which would be something to do with whatever approximation determination, they might be a document.
You Yes, yes, And they're documenting all the steps.
And I told the person who delivered the letter to me, who is the person I actually got along with quite well, that it was full of errors and it was poorly Renton and that they should take it back and write it properly.
I did.
I I followed him.
No.
And because if they were gonna do this, they better do it right there.
There was gonna be yeah, trouble.
And I didn't mean that I was going to cause trouble unnecessarily, but that there was going to be trouble, but they didn't take it back.
So I read it on YouTube.
So and then I did the same thing with the second letter.
And then I met the dean.
And after that, and, you know, we'd agreed.
We had quite a congenial discussion, I would say.
And we agreed to have a discussion.
At least a debate would never was a debate.
It was I don't know what they call those now.
They can't be debates.
They were forums or something.
Yeah, not a debate about free speech on campus.
That was a three.
Yeah.
Sorry.
I saw that Stoffel.
Yeah, it was quite the was, but they didn't do it, which, which was something, you know.
And I've also heard that behind the scenes, because I have some friends who some callings who have some access to administrative decisions.
And they believe that the University of Toronto, in the aftermath of all this, has actually reconfirmed its internal commitment to free speech.
So and you know, I don't know how much of that is true, but I'm willing to give them a certain amount of off benefit of the doubt, but it's important to understand that people can be caught unaware.
And the other thing, too, is that they actually did me a bit of a favor because one of the things I claimed in the YouTube video that I made was that what I was doing by making the video was probably illegal.
Yes, I remember.
Their lawyers basically said that it was probably illegal, and so that also helped establish my born of fightings that say s a reasonable interpreter of the law.
And so it wasn't all bad, although it was extraordinarily stressful that demonstrations that followed.
How is it that in the university which have evolved sings, Obviously it's the exercise of thought training in mind and therefore the power of expression that comes as a result of those two things that say things were under the banner of reason and an exercise mind.
That's what it is.
So how come?
How comes it that uncertain issues the transgender one is, Well, there's a whole list of the politically correct ones that suddenly I don't know his language being being bent.
It's being turned upside down.
In some cases, it's also theology ISMs are floating out there every six seconds with new rules on them.
A word you never heard yesterday, eyes somehow or other prejudice If you say it today, yes, or even illegal to use very much like the idea of dead naming what, like the very one I was thinking that the world didn't exist two days ago.
And now if you dead name someone, which which is the words, it doesn't exist.
You're in violation of something Are horrible bigot.
When have we let go?
To scraps that kept us eater to something like reason or women?
We lost our nerve that when people come to you and they say to you things that you know, not from bias are nonsense that they can't simply be dismissed as nonsense with no peril whatsoever.
Well, you're you're assuming that we had nerve.
Yeah.
I mean, well, sorry.
Well, I mean, you know, some people have nerve, but one of the things I've learned over the last three years, because really, this all started in October of 2000 16 was that the percentage of people who have nerve is very small and vanishingly small.
You know, I've met people, Douglas Murray has nerve.
Yeah, that's for sure.
Roger Scruton hasn't.
Yes, he has.
Lindsay Shepherd has nerve.
Yes.
Yes.
Um, there's a handful of people that I've met.
Who You can't move, you know, you're one of them.
I would say, um, try.
Well, succeed, I would say.
And I've met a number of journalists, too.
You know, I've had my fair share of conflict with journalists, that's for sure.
I would say talking to journalists is the most stressful thing I've done apart from talks at University Campuses Journal.
That's just a side track that because it's a very good issue journalism.
I've been playing at it from the margins for along what journalism is very much corrupted.
It is not the media in the middle.
It is, in many cases, wittingly or unwittingly partisan.
It is part of the game that it says it's covering.
Journalist.
This is one of the failing institutions society, Muchas universities.
Yeah, well, you know, there's there's technological reasons for that.
You know, the journalists journalism as such is under unbelievable pressure from the new technologies.
YouTube part casts in particular, which of course, have also vastly expanded what constitutes journalism.
And so journalists are running scared.
It's very difficult for them to to find paying jobs.
It's their staffs are shrinking, the newspapers are in trouble, television stations are vanishing.
And so there's increasing desperation, I would say as well is decreasing professionalism among those who still practice.
And so some of it's the personal failings of the ideologues who happened to be occupying the positions that ideologues occupy.
But some of it's a consequence of these transformations and in communication technology that air so vast that they're actually inconceivable.
And I think YouTube, both YouTube and podcasts are are great examples of that podcasts even more than you two, because YouTube serves billions of people, which is one walloping network but podcasts or maybe 10 times as popular.
So it and thats all underground is interesting.
They don't attract as much attention.
You know, our is much, much controversy.
Um, maybe because they're more siloed in some sense.
But the journalists are fighting a losing game, and and I think as you fight a losing game, I've seen this happen with corporations.
You lose your best people first, and then the death spiral begins, and I think we're seeing exactly that And then that's exaggerated by this proclivity to polarization that also might be part and parcel of the technological changes.
Okay, let me sweep back to that Other were nerve.
I know, because I follow you how deep your respect and attention to Alexander Solzhenitsyn is.
If you have a hero, obviously, is it now in the Soviet Union?
If so, soldier that tonight's a small note or something, he gets tossed off until a bullet, like for nine years or more.
Uh, the man looks the wrong way in China, taking some damn camp in career.
We won't even go into it in those countries.
If you want to say something, even if it's not fairly innocuous, you really have to have courage.
Soldier.
Nixon should be gone.
Stalin, He had to steal over here when?
Okay, we have, ah, trans activist group left and in the thing on, and you almost almost innate.
We know that this is absurd and you say, Well, I don't think I'm going to say that's absurd.
What are we afraid of?
We fight fight wars and say we gave all our soldiers that we would preserve democracy and freedom of speech.
There is no, there's no loss if you decide to challenge in terms of any contrast with the totalitarian systems.
Where if you said something you really did pay a price am worst thing, it new over here, lose job.
Well, you could be hold in front of quasi judicial.
I know that Tribune's as well, and then there's certainly willing to do that.
I think the human rights tribunals should it might have been and they should be obliterated.
Travesty.
There, there, there.
Yes, we're setting up these quasi judicial inquisitions in all sorts of an ideologically constituted, because I read the biographies of some of the people who are appointed to Yeah, and normal could be a judge in their own calls.
In this context, it is to cause people judging the causes.
Yeah, precisely.
But I I don't know what's happening in British Columbia with this case is what's What's the person's name Jessica or Jonathan?
I prefer Jonathan.
I think with Jonathan, I think they will haul us in front of the human race.
Will go to hit.
We will rule together everything that would be too much to bear.
But no, he's He's got 16 people the portion of them are immigrant women.
Yeah, hey, is insisting that they wax is being a sin testicles.
He's got here on the first incident of a worry, and he's got 16 of them under charge.
And I asked the question, Uh, if 16 people are of this mind and one person's of this, who is the?
Which is the more likely to be off?
Yeah, well, it seems it seems irrelevant.
And I mean, it's a consequence.
You know, one of the things I pointed out with Bill See 16 was that had contained multiple internal contradictions, especially in the background policies which I had ready quite a bit of detail.
They were formulated in Ontario, although the federal government removed the link on their website to those policies after I pointed out the fact that that link existed, which I thought was unbelievably underhanded and still believe so.
But Carl Young once said that internal contradictions are played out in the world as fate, you know, is that the thing about propositions, if they're accurate, is that they represent real states of being in the world.
And if you entertain a set of propositions that are internally contradictory.
Then you're going to run yourself into all sorts of sharp objects and and dead ends.
And that's exactly what's happening and every time.
And I thought this really for three years, every time you think that there's no possible way that this could get more absurd than one more example comes up where it's more absurd.
And I would say the situation in B.
C is precisely that.
I mean, one of the women that he's persecuting because I think he and this terrible bureaucracy is persecuting was on immigrant woman.
I believe she was Muslim who had a on aesthetics business in her own home, and as a consequence of the negative publicity for the publicity and the pressure, she shut down her business.
Just God only knows what that means for her family and well and for her.
And then you were asking about courage earlier.
You know, um, one of the things that I have watched quite frequently is the way that people respond to being mobbed on Twitter.
Yeah, now I've almost stopped looking at Twitter.
It's been about three months that I've taken a Twitter hiatus.
Let's say I still post, I don't even have my password anymore.
I send what I want opposed to 1/3 party and they posted because it keeps me out of the an antiseptic distance.
That's right exactly, and that's exactly the right way of thinking about it.
You know, people, civilized people, and I mean that in a civilized, socialized people cannot tolerate being mobbed because it again, because there's a reason for that.
You see you, you said, with regards to the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, you know, if there's 16 people on one side and one on the other, you might be thinking that the 16 people are right, right, right.
But then you think, Think of the situation where you've said something on Twitter and 6000 people mob you publicly.
I mean, your first response, if you're your first response, is going to be to examine your own conscience and see how you transgressed.
It's not really much different psychologically.
I mean, it's lesser, I suppose, but it's not bad, much different then, waking up one morning and coming to your door and finding a mob of your neighbors angrily educated on your lawn.
You know, it's a terrible shock for people, and it really hurts them.
You know, they're often they're often by all accounts, you know, damaged for lengthy periods of time.
By this and their first, their first impulse is to apologize, which is which is truly the wrong thing.
Like the right thing to do is stand well.
The right thing to do is to is to is to understand that if you haven't done anything wrong, you you don't apologize.
Now that's a very difficult, very difficult and then to wait.
Because if you wait two weeks, people will come to your defense what it takes the people who will come to your defense two weeks to get their act together, where it takes the activists who are unbelievably organized 15 seconds to mob you.
Well, there's two points to draw out of there.
First of all, because you have now been almost fire hosed into the world of celebrity multimedia, vast detention.
I've dabbled in a lesser zone for a long one.
So you adjust to the kind of swirl.
Okay, But what I've never forgotten that I'm serious is that people who are not in it at all My father or a mechanic down the road or the doctor over here does that pretty class if you haven't had media and if you haven't adjusted to it and some of your name and I'm just backing up your point, your name suddenly becomes the center of some great footers.
Snowstorm in majority of terms.
And people are speaking of you with the most vulgar responses.
It is a terror.
It isn't three dismiss it.
But people who have not experienced it is really, really, really something that it's unbearable pain.
Yes, and they bring it down with club force and the great great megaphones of national networks in the States, et cetera.
You can expunge a person's personality with this kind of brutality.
Yes, well, and it's permanent, right, because the record never disappears.
I put a personal question to you.
Now when you guys I know you had been unusual view.
You knew the media in that sense, but you weren't a media person in your baptism.
Harsh is it was how hard was it in the first couple of weeks for you to find balance in scale?
Maybe clinical psychologists and you're obviously mature?
Oh, I don't think I've ever found balancing and scale join my club.
I don't believe it.
I mean, I I know.
I mean, in the that great throbbing moment when all this stuff came in and he's hates this one, and your name is flashed all over the world.
That was the first real magnitude of media attack on Yeah, So even for you, how was how was that period?
Well, it was dreadful.
I mean, especially the first couple of months, because, well, because of the attention was, well, it has been since then.
But the attention was unbelievably intense.
I mean, I had There were days upon days where there were reporters lined up coming into the house, one after the other, and that's that really hasn't stopped.
It stopped.
Let's say in the last two months since since the end of March, however long ago without it's because I've shut myself off because of my I have some family health trouble.
That's very serious.
But, um, I don't think I've ever adjusted to it.
What's made it bearable, I would say, and some of it's being very good, you know?
I mean, it's taken my life, which was fairly broad.
I had a fairly broad range of experiences partly because I'm a clinical psychologist.
You know what's taken it from good and bad, too great and unbearable.
And I yo yo, between those states, um, what's helped is, Well, the first thing is is that, you know, I determined right from the beginning that I was going to say carefully what I believe to be true because there wasn't a safer route than that.
It's interesting, you know, that in the final analysis, it wasn't certain that anything would protect me better than going to write Well, whether that would work or not was debatable, but there wasn't a better option.
Yeah, I understand that.
And I believe that, you know, I still believe that, um, I think the success of what I've done is an indication of that.
The success of my books say, which is also absolutely overwhelming.
I mean, it's it's impossible to.
Did you actually, I'm kind of cool, you know, I'm just about 60 and then you have your white tenure.
May.
Look, there's all of those things are bad, man.
Yeah, well, the old part, I think it has to do with with the ability way.
Yeah, well, But you know it, it's it's fulfilled and the lectures in the podcasts as well.
And the YouTube videos.
They've filled a need, which also is something that's very difficult for me to reconcile myself to, you know, meaning on Every time I walked out in the street, someone stops me.
Someone stopped me on the way here and as opposed to my treatment at the hands of a minority of journalists, which is being atrocious support occasion and academics as well.
The treatment I received from people in public is so positive that it's almost unbearable.
Let me tell you personally, that relates to you.
I don't mix my old stuff with family members, but my sister is a non political kind of person and a say I don't mix those things.
She called me.
She's out of this world altogether.
She called me, but I don't know.
A year ago, you have you seen George Dr Jordan pages, you know, a doctor, lovely stuff.
And she is following the videos, the biblical lectures.
She's a smart, nice woman.
And then that was one thing that I was unsolicited.
She's not in the world of publicity, Sheldon qualified, but somehow your name got in there and she's watching these with great attention.
Enjoyment, actually.
But the better one won't be particular.
A friend of mine from home Ah, never finished school.
He's about 55 56 so we're not into the team coordinator and he calls me up.
I don't think he's read a book in six years, and he says, I've been watching this Peterson fellow and you know I can't reproduce.
What he was saying is just that he found such comfort.
Yeah, and he thought she found such support.
My thought when I was hearing this, it was some way to relate to you in all the Ping Pong back and forth.
And you're going to hear these voices air saying something.
You're doing something really fine for people that I could never project would be receiving.
The minutes.
It's it's and it's very This is also something that's being very difficult to both understand.
And I would say in a strange way to tolerate, because I become opened up to the trouble that people have in a way that far exceeds even what I experienced as a clinical psychologist.
You know, last year my wife and I went to 160 cities.
Yeah, it was.
Well, we figured.
Do we better make hay while the sun shines?
So, uh, you're stronger men to the, you know, be well, you get caught up and you get caught up in in the wave of events, you know, and the adrenaline itself supplies well, and it was It was exciting and worthwhile.
And the demand was there, you know.
And yes, I enjoyed lecturing, and I used the opportunity.
I delivered a different lecture every night and are used the opportunity to think, you know, and to communicate, which, of course, is what And in in a psychologically, in a manner that I believed to be psychologically helpful.
But it was also, I think, and I don't No, exactly what the cumulative effect has big mourn me, but I had no idea the degree to which so they were dying for a word of so many people want.
That's what my friend was about.
I'm speaking back to you know, the same thing.
I know what he was saying.
He had felt no soft brain for a long, long time.
Yeah, and he was in this camp of the truly neglected.
Yeah, yeah.
Uneducated and not particularly sophisticated.
Got a low paying job.
Who gives a fuck about you?
Yeah.
And someone is out there of stature and Fred and credibility And this guy who would never be in your circle.
Never you send an echo ping to him.
And he was calling me to say, My God, this is so fun.
Allow yourself to feel good.
Yeah, well, I did.
That thing is, the funny thing is is that it doesn't feel it doesn't feel good.
Um, you know when that might be a reflection of my general state of mind, which is very unsettled at the moment for the reasons that I told you Well, because of off of everything that's happened over the last few years, But to get a taste of the depth of despair that that could be ameliorated with with not much more than, you know, some some words of encouragement, some some statement that you know you as a human being aren't intrinsically worthless, worthless, and that you have, ah, spirit worth preserving and that the things that you do in your life that you do correctly are important.
It's like people are literally dying remark of that, and I mean that I mean that, you know, honestly, I don't know how many people have told me, and these are very hard things to hear.
It's bean hundreds people could I might meet people after each of my lectures.
You know, who've told me that they are still alive because they watch porn actors because they read my booker.
And then they usually have a good story to tell you know about what sort of hell they happen to be in six months earlier and what they did to pull themselves out and how that's brought their family back together or helped them advance in their career or got them out of better stop them from using heroin or being alcoholic coming up.
Yeah, well, and you know, all of that is I'm But is it something that you, at some point, have at least to shield against?
No, no, no, no, I Maybe I could put it another way.
I meant to ask this a little early, but you're already telling me when you when this began, I want some.
When you began this when this began, is this is a experience, and you set out to the world you started.
You had maps of meaning.
I also know what knowing you that you had spent some considerable time doing actual thinking, which is something people don't do very much as successively you thought and you thought things through in a way that this these generations of almost abandoned.
So you were prepared in that sense and you went out and there were certain things you saw wrong or discordant eater in the universities or in the general system.
And you said I'd like to spread some reason here.
I'd like to talk also about reality in life.
Now, When that began, I would think you everything was fairly fairly sufficient.
What did you learn?
And how did I'll call it the mission, If I may?
How did the mission change over time when you came in contact with the audience that you're describing?
And what is it that you have learned?
You haven't had a lot of salt before, and you know what you're at.
But when you go out and encounter all of these and all of these individuals, what new came to you?
Well, I would say it isn't obvious to me that the mission itself changed.
I think it's an extension of what I've been doing for since 1985.
Maybe even before that.
It's just that the scale continued to grow mean even with my YouTube channel, where I put my lectures in rather primitive technological form because I was just using an iPad.
And you know what?
Lapel mic?
Yeah, I remember.
I had a 1,000,000 views by April 2016.
You know, that really made me think because I've worked with TV.
Oh, of course.
And my lectures were popular with big ideas, which showcased a number of public intellectuals.
I think I had five lectures in the top 20 or something like that.
So I knew that there was, and I was getting a certain amount of recognition in public for that.
No, I'm not a lot, you know enough.
And then from a very wide variety of people, you know, which was quite quite interesting when I hit the 1,000,000 mark on YouTube.
I really thought about that because I thought, Well, I don't know what to do with that figure.
I don't know how to conceptualize it in context because a 1,000,000 there's a lot of people.
It's 20 football stadiums full of people.
That zest.
It's a It's an overwhelmingly bestselling book.
It's It's it's far more people than you teach in your life.
And I thought, Well, what?
And it wasn't cute cat videos.
You know, when this thing this was back when YouTube was still a developing force, let's say and something to be sort of ignored in some sense because of because of its humble beginning, it was a very second to replace.
Yes, it was a very secondary place.
Although that was starting to change, I thought, What the hell is this you to What?
What are we doing here?
And then it struck me that while this was a Gutenberg revolution that we were experiencing, that the spoken word was now as permanent and as immediate, more immediate than the printed word at justice permanent and with a much larger audience because more people, as far as I can tell, can listen then can read.
And even with my book, a tremendous percentage of my books have been sold in our audio form.
So So I really started to think about YouTube at that point.
And I suppose that was one of the things that drove me, in my foolish curiosity to make those political videos that I made in October, which was the first time I'd ever tried something like that.
And that was in some sense, I wouldn't call it a whim.
But you know, I woke up at three in the morning because I was so irritated about this bill and it's it's, it's, it's it's attempt to force a certain type of language usage, and I could see what was behind that.
Quite clearly, I thought, Well, you know, this really is annoying me to death and often what I would do when something was annoying me to death was get up and right.
But I thought, Well, I'll make a YouTube video and see what happens.
It's like, Well, I certainly saw you did Yeah, Yeah, no kidding.
Well, see, the thing is, you know, you you've got you've got ahold of something.
Let's say it's YouTube and you think you know what it is.
You know, you don't you don't have any idea what it is, and neither does anyone else, and that's certainly still the case.
We have no idea what these multiple technologies air doing to us.
But I can tell you that you do is a no overwhelming force, and it's becoming more and more powerful day by day.
I've especially seeing that in countries Slovenia was a good example where no one really trusts the mainstream press, all the young people do, and not not so young.
Neither pretty much everybody under 35.
I would say all they watches you do, and that's the case all over the world.
And so it's, I think, on my YouTube channel, my videos have been watched 110 million times.
The total viewership is probably like because people keep cutting them up and distribute, which is something else that could be done on you, too, right?
You can have a dialogue right where, uh, edit and make their own commentaries, and the total for that would be a least 500 million shirt.
Yeah, that's for sure.
Dear God, it's It's a new It's well, it's not a new conversation.
It's a good idea of conversation, you know?
That is the word for it.
Yeah, well, it is Certainly it certainly has that conversational aspect that television lax.
It's very comical.
Tow watch organization like CBC tried to adapt itself to YouTube because they'll put on a 10 minute clip.
Yeah, they break all the rules.
They put 2 32nd commercials in front, which you can't skip.
So you know I don't watch it.
No one will watch it.
No.
What do you do with you?
Do is you put on a 12th commercial and you let people skip it after five seconds.
That's the rule.
They break that rule, then they don't allow comments.
And so they'll put up for something you might wanna watch, you know, for 10 minutes and they'll get like, you know, 50,000 views, because they don't take the conventions of the you know of the they don't take it seriously.
You should take YouTube seriously when they also they also have no intuition for these particular forms.
And they're also that this is a circle back to even to the beginning.
They're wrapped up in certain ideas about things they wrapped up in a certain orientation towards change in politics, that there's only a certain certain certain quarters that they will walk down.
And there are other corners which you are forbidden to awards.
Or it is heresy to even admit that they exist.
Yes, and populations you won't gain to address one of the things that's interesting about the YouTube stars.
You know, like Rogan and say, Dave Rubin, um, is that they don't think their audience is stupid.
That's a good beginning.
In the end, it is.
It is a really good because very no one of the things I've noticed that my lectures is what you talked about.
The gentleman who sent you the e mail haven't always 55.
He wasn't well educated.
A tremendous number of the people who are coming to my lectures are people in that camp.
They're working class, often men, but not always women as well.
But more men and their long haul truckers are construction workers, and they're listening to three hour lectures and complex.
That's the point, you know, and it's because they're not stupid.
They're interested in the world.
It also defies the great accident.
If you were in the television world private republic for 30 years, the idea if you had an interview, I did a provincial show for years and years.
If you had an interview, you may make it four minutes.
We're gonna watch you for five minutes.
If you had a commentary, can you make it 60 seconds?
The idea that people have an attention span and beyond four minutes never entered into the world of people in the studio and you, right?
And you put stuff on that has no glitz.
It's profound.
It could be complex and it goes on for 60 70 80 minutes and everyone is happy.
Yeah, I mean, it's all upside that they've been operating on the wrong assumptions for three decades.
And while in Rogan's Grogan's interviews or three hours long, Yeah, you know when people watch the whole thing or listen to the whole thing, let's go back to another area where you really have been on the mark.
I'm saying that personally, and I think you're absolutely correct.
This is not sick infancy.
Some of the stuff that goes on in the university.
Some of the I read the course syllabus.
If I read some of these regal period views, some of the subjects under R are beneath tripe.
Well, that's that's why they have flourished.
I'm serious.
I'm serious.
Thought about this a lot.
It's like, what the hell happened?
And here's what happened is that, you know, the scientific types and the serious scholars there, there a specific sort of person.
They're rather obsessed.
The good ones.
Yeah.
Um good.
The great ones are completely obsessed and partly mad.
Well, and then, well, maybe you need a bit of that.
I did completely obsessed.
I think you are.
You know, a minority of scientists produced the majority of a literature, and it's the same in the humanities and in the social sciences.
And so those are people who are working 70 or 80 hours a week.
All they do is work, and what they work on is their thing.
And they need to do that because, well, they're on the cutting edge and they want to stay there, and they have their ambitions for some of some of sometimes it's political ambitions.
But there there stuff never lasts.
But the good scholars are, some of them are great.
They discover amazing things.
I mean, I've encountered amazing psychological research, you know, that's just especially in the physiological on the physiological end of things in the general literature that's just absolutely brilliant beyond belief.
And even though the voyage of discovery is a tremendous ecstasy and itself, yes, right, well and and it's a minority taste in some sense, of course.
And then there's the pseudo disciplines, which have multiplied since the 19 sixties, and no one who was serious paid any attention to them.
See, that's what happened is that the serious people were busy doing their serious things.
And there was all this stuff.
Yeah, political activism, identity, politics, gender stuff.
That's right.
That's right in the in the what they called grievance studies departments.
And everybody just sort of assumed that they were noisy but harmless.
But they were not harmless because they're extraordinarily well organized and the balance tipped.
It almost tipped in the nineties because there was a big, big rising of political correctness around three waas in the American economy boomed like mad.
And that kind of I think that just kind of took the steam out of the out of the What would you call it out of the objections?
Yeah, but well, something happened four years ago, something like that five years ago where the scales tipped, and I think it was fair.
Part of this I'm like, really like your opinion is the growth of this.
It's an awful philosophy, the idea of identity politics, which carries two great axioms that I could only communicate with you if you're on the same drive as I am and you're teaching me in particular.
I can't be taught by you if you're not my drive.
But education is actually to receive it from everybody else and take you out of yourself.
And the second thing is the subdivisions of identity politics.
That ridiculous story on NBC's on the identity politics of gender politics that's roared out into society.
I have two people have to dinner tables of North America are afraid to bring these subjects up with.
More than half were being ruled by them.
Yeah, well, it doesn't take much.
It doesn't take a very large, determined minority to shut down a ah large and silent majority that's unfortunately the rule and the identity politics issue.
It's a reversion to tribalism, and you know, So it's the miracle.
Actually, the surprise isn't actually that it's back.
The surprise is that it ever went away and We took the fact that it went away for granted and and we forgot the reasons that it went away.
We forgot the axioms, right?
We started to lose faith in them, Let's say and well, that's partly what I've been trying to fight against, to write about why those rules were one way those rules were necessary and and, uh, and what they meant is it is part of your project.
You know, the various words amusing here is part of your project, a kind of restoration or a reminder that certain certain markers are fundamental and cannot be moved.
Well, that is, that is the project.
I mean, when I wrote my first book, which took me about 15 years to write, and I spent really I spent all my time, except when I was writing scientific papers and when I was socializing, which I did a fair bit of thinking about that book.
I mean, it was really obsessive thinking chronic from the time I woke up until the time I went to bed.
Unless I was engaged in some other activity that would shut down my mind, I was trying to understand whether there were was what ah foundation of stone underneath the Presumptions of Western civilization.
Or And it was really a postmodern book, maps of meeting, which I didn't understand because at the time being unfamiliar with that lexicon.
Let's say there was the terrible Cold War raging.
And, you know, it wasn't obvious that it wasn't merely a matter of opinion.
You know, you could make that case.
Is that well, here's your set of Marxist presupposition, many of which sounded incredibly attractive and which still, due to some, you know, from each according to his ability to each according to his need.
I mean, no one likes to see people with needs unfulfilled.
The problem is that needs multiply without end and ability is limited.
But you know, you have to start thinking about the world in a harsh and sophisticated waited two to notice that flaw.
I I wanted to analyze that system and the Nazi system to a lesser degree, but but also that and the Western system to see if there was something at the bottom that was rock like.
That wasn't merely arbitrary, and I believe that what I discovered let's say or thought through was that we got some things in the West fundamentally correct, and and they're they're correct for biological reasons, which is very important because we've been alone around very long time.
Biological reasons are very fundamental, but also that that biology reflects some underlying metaphysics as well.
That we don't understand because you don't understand anything about the fundamental nature of the world is beyond us.
So why, yes, the wise and the wherefores, for that matter, the purpose.
All of that.
The fact that people have religious experiences and that they're they're easily do clickable on.
But they seem to be consistent across societies, at least to some degree.
And Andi what I decided then because I was trying to understand why the world had divided itself up into armed camps that were hellbent on mutual destruction.
Right, mutual assured destruction, right?
The terrible acronym Mad, which was, you know, an insane, satanic joke.
And what why was so important for us to defend our tribal positions in that manner?
And what, if anything, could be done about it like it?
Here's here's the solution.
We have this terrible tribal warfare.
It's characteristic of our species, and it's accelerated to a degree that's not sustainable.
What do we do about it?
And the answer that came to me as a consequence of what I studied was that we try to make ourselves better people.
It's it's a The solution to tribalism is the elevation of the individual in the West.
Got that right?
The individual is the atom.
Yes, that begins the entire reaction.
Yes, that's why the identity politics makes the individual a simple avatar of the collective right.
And everything that attached to him is always extrinsic and not essential.
Yes, on your strip personality.
And we're adding up groups and trying to administer justice.
The collective.
Yeah, it's insane.
Why did we never It's terrible.
It's so dangerous.
And why I heard you on this.
Why do we seek to perpetrate some sort of justice over the generations?
It was one of the worst things in in all of history that you would make the son or the daughter carry the same live off their parents.
Yeah, and now it's your sting in reparations again.
Yeah.
All the ideas that we thought had been completely wiped out Leader enlightenment or just signal logic itself.
You're back.
Yeah.
Why?
Why are we so easily yielding to this?
I mean the patterns of correct isn't language of people kind and things of that order.
It's an absurdity.
Well, I think some of it is is the desire to escape from individual responsibility.
No, If you could dissolve yourself in the collective and and then then the impetus isn't on you to act forthrightness, as would otherwise be necessarily the case.
So there's that.
And then there's the the the undeniable attraction of having someone to blame for the miseries of your existence, which which are likely manifold.
It's also the comfort of saying I could start a small war, but one driving another and we we can play games with each of these blocks.
Wanna be a society will be a country.
But if you dissolve the collective politics, I mean the real politics into substance subcategories of gender, sex, ethnic, religion.
And each of these is now claiming a right only as a collective.
Everything else falls apart.
You know, your gates on don't even voted yet.
Uh, but I gotta get back to the university's.
If there's one place that can reset balances, it starts with mine.
It's not the younger mind that when we met with more mature mind and talk the ways off the mind how the mind works, what you should read, how you form judgments, how you put contrast over rate lands of time, not into more 500 years ago.
If you train the minds and there is a balance and there's an opportunity to see the world as it really is, you have to believe in the mind in order to d'oh!
You know what keep goes back to exactly what we were discussing is that, you know, one of the things I pointed out to my audience is, is that there isn't a debate about who should speak on campuses.
There's a debate about whether free speech exists.
That's a whole different debate.
I know people don't understand the difference in the severity of those two debates.
Like, if I don't want you to talk, I still might believe that people can talk.
Yes, it can exchange opinions and they can change others minds.
And even if they're different, the argument that's being put forward on the campus is to stop people from speaking is that there is no such thing as free speech.
All there is is the exchange of of the ideas of avatars who are possessed by their group.
It actually is, and then the logical consequence of that is to refuse to let them to speak.
Speak.
Because why should you allow the group that you're in direct competition to to have its voice?
And so it's It's the collective ists, the identity politics types it's It's the very idea of individuality that they're opposed to, that they've dispensed with that goes back to their, you know, to the French terrible, terrible.
The despicable French intellectuals who, in my opinion, we're responsible for leading this revolution.
And it got picked up, as always, the most obnoxious and useless ideas uses in the sense of other of their intrinsic logic.
Find the easiest welcome around the campus.
That's the most trend.
The institution in the world.
Yeah, well, and it came through the came through Well, came through the Yale in English department.
Yes, yeah, yeah, that's where that's where the French Continental ideas made their entrance into North America.
You know, you know all your travels, the speeches I know much of it gets small Pete into the politics, politics because that's the world we're in.
Do you get much chance is in the lead followed you around.
They wouldn't last.
You get much chance to expand on the beauties of the cultural thing of poetry and music and things of this nature, the other side of the academic and the things that sometimes they sing to the humans I d'oh d'oh!
I mean, that's one of the reasons that that I was so motivated to continue the lectures because we actually put together a sequence of tours.
What we didn't plan 160 cities in one go.
I mean, it's sort of unfolded on a new one.
Bottle left.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, it unfolded across time, you know, because they were so popular.
The popularity didn't seem to be waning, and but it was an opportunity to put forward the case for all the wonderful things that we've done them.
And to express gratitude and amazement at the fact that, you know, are the fact that our city, this city Toronto, the city works is for me.
It's and I think this is partly because I'd been sensitized so much, too to the catastrophes of existence in sort of the collective and the personal senses that when I go outside and everything works and there's all these people of different colors and creeds and religions walking down the street and so peaceful and the lights go on regularly and the power is always working and everything, technological is 100% reliable and there's no riots in the street, and the probability that you're going to meet with a untimely and painful death at the hands of someone else's almost nil and that we live for such a long time.
All of this to me, is a complete It's a complete miracle.
It truly is.
And I remind people of the unlikelihood of that constantly in the lectures and asked them to be grateful for the fact that I mean, you think you look 100 years ago, 1919 in 1919.
Just think of what you would have seen through in the last six years, right?
The Russian Revolution, the first World War, the Spanish influenza just absolute bloody hellish catastrophe one after the other conception, and that season was brewing them to break right, right, right, right.
The seeds of the next there were asked if we were already a word they were, and and also, of course, the same thing with the Russian Revolution, which was bloody enough to begin with, but which certainly accelerated in its brutality as it expanded.
And you know, we don't have any about at the moment.
It's actually the world is more peaceful than it's ever bean.
There's no wars in the Western Hemisphere.
That's the first time since the coming of Columbus that the entire Western Hemisphere is free of conflict.
I say frequently on your various sites that you do list up.
That's That's another great counter, the environmental crowd.
And I don't take them as being pure either.
Some of them are obviously most of them are not there.
They're always having spectacular at the high table, the catastrophe.
The world is ending, the more this is worse than ever be we're destroying the planet. 00:50:35.580 --> 00