All Episodes
Previous Next
March 2, 2017 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:50:55
2017/02/11: An incendiary discussion at Ryerson U
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Music Music Music Music Music Music So I've been talking about your cause I guess since you started your videos and since you started having troubles with you know, with human rights tribunals or threats by U of T
and I just think it's common sense as I said that I think that promoting critical thinking, helping people to be able to tolerate subjects that they may not feel comfortable about, But that they should be able to hear and process, not based on emotions, but based on an actual analysis of the facts, the evidence, the reality, versus some agenda being shoved down their throat, whether it's through media, through the professors.
And anyone teaching in academia knows that there are professors who have no problem with basically teaching their truths As fact.
And so I've been promoting this, I've been promoting it within my own organization, the Ontario Psychological Association.
I got a lot of flack from other psychologists who thought, no, we can't allow this type of speech to happen.
That discussion that you're supposed to have had, the travesty really, it was October, I believe, when you had those other professors coming in and talking about the issue.
Some psychologists wrote pieces in national articles Media publications saying this kind of discussion should not happen.
And this is from psychologists, the ones who are supposed to be best trained to be able to tolerate the discomfort that goes along with discussing uncomfortable topics.
So I was hoping for you to be able to share with the audience your experience in the last few months in trying to promote what you're basically trying to promote.
I'll let you describe in your own words.
Okay.
So let me think about those videos for a minute.
Well, I think there were two things that...
Oh, I should give you some background on the videos, I guess.
I mean, I just made them in my office at home.
I wasn't...
I had no idea what the consequence would be.
I was just trying to sort out my thoughts about, partly about, not so much Bill C-16 as the background policies that surround it, especially on the Ontario Human Rights Commission website.
Because the bill itself looks rather innocuous.
It's only about two paragraphs long.
The only part of it that isn't innocuous is the insistence that...
The insistence on transforming the hate speech codes, including harassment and discrimination based on gender...
What was it?
Gender identity and gender expression in the hate speech codes.
I thought, that's weird.
There's something up there.
Anyways, I started digging more into the background on the Ontario Human Rights Commission website, and the policies surrounding Bill C-16, to call them appalling, is barely to scratch the surface.
They're unbelievably badly written and internally contradictory and over-inclusive and dangerous.
I mean, they do things, for example, like make employers responsible for all the speech acts of their employees, whether they have intended or unintended consequences.
That's completely...
The only reason you would write a law like that is to get as many employers in trouble as you could possibly manage, because there's no other reason for formulating the legislation that way.
And I've also, a colleague of mine came in recently at the university, and he's starting to teach a little bit about the background for this sort of thing in one of his classes, and he showed me the developmental progression of the policies surrounding Bill C-16, and originally they were written in a much more We're good to
go.
In order to not bother anyone who they had consulted with, they decided, for example, that gender identity should be nothing but subjective choice, which is...
I don't even know what to say about that.
If you're a psychologist and you have any sense at all, that's a completely insane proposition.
It's, first of all, predicated on the idea that your identity is your subjective choice.
And that's never been the case for any sort of identity anywhere.
Your identity is twofold.
The first thing that your identity is is a functional set of tools to help you operate in the world.
I mean, read Piaget, you know, just scratch the surface of Piaget, even.
And you find out that, you know, children start to construct their identities.
Really, when they're breastfeeding, because that's when you first start your social interactions, you start integrating your basic biological reflexes from a Piagetian perspective into something resembling a social relationship, because breastfeeding actually happens to be quite a complex act.
You expand your developing identity out into the small microcosmic social world of the family, basically starting with your mother, but then you have siblings and your father and your relatives, you know, conventionally speaking, and your identity is a negotiated game, and you're not the only one in charge of it by any stretch of the imagination at all.
I mean, one of the things that Piaget pointed out was that between the ages of two and four, and I think later research has really hammered this home, That even kids who are hyper-aggressive at two, and there's a small proportion of them that are like that, learn to integrate their subjective desires into a broader social game and become socially acceptable to other children, and they do that through play.
You know, and what they're doing is playing their identity into being, and then once they're older than about four, and they've become properly socialized, so other children actually want to play with them, because that's the critical issue, it's the fundamental issue.
Then the peer community of children helps them bootstrap their identity up to something that will eventually approximate an adult identity.
But that's functional.
It has nothing to do with whim.
It's a crazy idea.
So partly your identity is the set of tools with which you function in the actual world.
Part of it is a negotiated agreement with the other people around you, and that's all being taken out of the...
That's all actually, as far as I can tell, that line of theorizing is technically illegal now in Ontario.
And I'm not even talking about the potential biological basis of identity, because the idea that identity has no biological basis...
That's just wrong.
Like, factually wrong.
And we've written a social constructionist.
We've written a radical social constructionist view of identity into the law.
But even worse than that, we've gone beyond social constructionism, because Piaget was a constructionist, into just pure whim.
Your identity can be at any moment what you assume that it's going to be.
That's not a tenable solution.
There's nothing about that proposition that's reasonable.
So I was looking into this and I thought, this is just beyond comprehension, that we've written that idea into the policy surrounding Bill C-16.
So I made that video, I was trying to sort that out and to figure out even what it meant.
The terminology is messy in the extreme.
First of all, with regards to gender identity, gender identity is not a spectrum.
It's a modified bimodal distribution.
And if you're making law, you don't get to muck around with the words.
You have to use the right words.
And so it's a modified bimoldan distribution because almost everyone who has a biological identity of male or female identifies as male or female.
It's 99.7%.
And you could argue that that's a little tighter than it would be if society was more accepting of gender variation, let's say.
But even if it went down to 99%, which would be an increase of...
What?
Well, it would be almost an order of magnitude increase.
You still have the overwhelming number of people whose gender identity matches their biological sex.
And then you can stack on top of biological sex, gender identity, virtually perfect match, then gender expression, almost everyone who...
Is biologically male or female, who identifies as biologically male or female, expresses themselves as male or female.
And then the vast majority of them have a sexual orientation that's in keeping with their, you know, in traditional keeping with their biological sex, gender identity, and gender expression.
So now we have a law that says those are independent.
Guess what?
That's not the definition of independence.
And you can't just play much games with your legislative terminology.
It gets people in trouble.
So it's not a spectrum, and that's that.
It's a modified bimodal distribution.
And there are obviously exceptions, and I never argued once in the videos that I put out, despite how people reacted to them, that there weren't exceptions.
Of course there are exceptions.
And if you look at temperament, for example, You know, the big differences between men and women are agreeableness and neuroticism, fundamentally.
Women are about half a standard deviation more agreeable, that's compassion and politeness, and they're about half a standard deviation higher in negative emotion.
And that's cross-cultural, by the way, and it also accounts for the reasons why women are about three to four times more likely to suffer cross-culturally from depression and anxiety, whereas men are more likely to be aggressive in prison and to drink, and low agreeableness is actually the best predictor of incarceration.
Those are solid biological differences, but if you try to segregate men and women using only those two dimensions, you only get it right about 75% of the time.
So there's a substantial overlap, but that still doesn't mean that it's not a spectrum.
And the idea that there are no biological differences between men and women is such a preposterous claim that I can't even believe that we would ever have that discussion.
I mean, men have wider jaws.
Men are taller.
They have broader shoulders.
Women have more endurance in endurance sports.
Women have a subcutaneous layer of fat.
The shape is different.
The way the arms are placed is different.
The voice is different.
And that's just gross morphology.
I'm not even talking about genitalia.
And then you can look at microstructures.
There's differences between men and women at every level of the human microstructure, from the cellular all the way up to the social.
So, like, what in the world are we talking about?
What's going on here?
It's crazy!
So that was video number one.
Video number two was the bloody human resources department at the University of Toronto has adopted an equity position.
Okay, so what equity means is that it doesn't mean equality of opportunity.
It means equality of outcome.
And that is...
So this is the idea.
The idea is that you take a social institution, like a university, And then you look at the organization of that university at every single strat, from the executive level all the way down to the student level.
Then what you do is you do an analysis of each level by community demography, right?
You get to define the demographic characteristics that you're going to discuss, however, which is actually a big problem.
Then you make the presupposition that unless that organization at every level matches the demographic representation of the population, Well, if you don't think so,
then why are most psychology classes 80% women?
And that, and that, and that, uh, Differentiation is accelerating rapidly, like I've seen it over the course of my career, from maybe 60% men at the beginning of my career to like 80% women now.
And men occupy more of the positions in the STEM fields, at least for now.
It's the same in bloody Scandinavia.
It's 20 to 1 women to men nurses in Scandinavia, and 20 to 1 men to women nurses.
In engineering.
And that's in Scandinavia.
And so what's happened in Scandinavia, as they've made the society more egalitarian in terms of its legal and social structures, is that the gender differences in personality between men and women have got bigger, not smaller.
So what that means is that social constructionism isn't wrong.
That's what it means.
Wrong.
Disproved.
It's exactly the opposite of what the theory would have predicted, because the theory predicted, and God only knew how it was going to sort itself out.
It's not like people knew this to begin with.
The idea was that as you equalized the social structure that the differences between men and women would disappear.
Guess what?
That didn't happen.
And it's not studies of just a few hundred people in a few locations.
Those are population-wide studies and they've been replicated multiple times.
The funny thing is that there are temperamental differences between men and women.
And neuroticism and agreeableness are not the only temperamental differences.
So if you fragment extroversion, it fragments into assertiveness and gregariousness.
Women are more gregarious, men are more assertive.
If you fragment conscientiousness into orderliness and industriousness, women are more orderly and men are more industrious.
If you fragment openness, which is the creativity dimension, into interest in ideas and interest in aesthetics, you find that women are more interested in aesthetics and men are more interested in ideas.
Because you can fractionate the big five into ten.
You get gender differences across all of them.
And they're not trivial, either.
They make a difference.
So, okay, so anyways, back to the equity thing of all the preposterous and idiotic ideas.
So, first of all, to make gender equity across every dimension of an organization, you have to assume that men and women have identical interests.
And temperaments.
And that if they don't, the state should intervene to bloody well ensure that they do, which is something for all you women to figure out, because now there's many, many, what, positions in society that women preferentially occupy.
So what are you going to do about that?
And what are you going to do about the Asians?
Because they occupy preferential positions as well.
you know they're overrepresented in all sorts of professional institutions and the probability is that that's going to increase what are you going to do about that what about the Jews what are you going to do about them because they're in the same position as the Asians you're going to put quotas on all those people What kind of stupidity is that?
And then it's worse, too, because let's say you equalize women, just for the sake of argument, across all these different dimensions of society.
Well, then what are you going to do?
Are you going to equalize for black women and Latino women and Asian women?
Are you going to subtype black women?
Because it's not like they're all the same.
Are you going to ensure that women from lower classes are represented just as much as women from upper classes?
And how many generations back are you going to go to check that?
What about intelligence?
So the problem with the fractionation by group identity is that it's endless.
There's no way of ensuring equality across groups, because there's an infinite number of groups.
You can fragment group identity all the way down to the level of the individual, which is exactly what you should do, which is what we already did in the West.
We figured, well, the ultimate diverse population is a population of individuals, so you let the individuals sort it out.
No, no, we're going to replace that with group.
Well, what that means for the bloody social activists is that they'll be able to play this game forever because you can continually fractionate group identity ad nauseum, and so the system will never be equal.
And you can bloody well be sure that as we implement social policy to make sure that all outcomes are equal, that the amount of space that you personally are going to have to maneuver in is going to shrink and shrink and shrink and shrink.
We've already seen that happen in many societies.
You'd think we would learn from the 20th century.
So that's the equity issue.
And then worse even, this is the HR and equity people, they're actually mucking about with people's unconscious biases.
So this is what we want, right?
We want your employers and the state to re-educate you so that your perceptions, because that's what we're talking about with regards to unconscious bias, so that your perceptions fall into accordance with their demands.
And not even your voluntary perceptions.
By the way, your involuntary...
Have to be retrained.
Okay, so maybe that's not so good, especially when you look at that bloody implicit association test, Mazarin Banagy from Harvard and Anthony Greenwald from the University of Washington.
So Banagy is an avowed Marxist, and Greenwald and Banagy both bloody I'll let you take over when you do that.
So despite the fact that You'll take a few minutes, so...
Yeah, well, despite the...
Okay, so the implicit association test, in principle, is this word association game.
It's actually predicated, I would say, on psychoanalytic ideas, most particularly on Jungian ideas, because Jung developed the association test many, many, many years ago.
But it purports to investigate whether you are unconsciously biased towards one group or against another group.
Could be gender, could be ethnicity, could be race, could be attractiveness, whatever.
But the problem is, is that when you give the same person the damn IET twice, they don't get the same results.
So there's a rule for diagnostic tests.
And the rule is the reliability, test-retest reliability, has to...
0.9, 0.8 at least.
So the big five does that, IQ tests do that, but there's a damn few tests that pass that reliability criteria, and the IAT is only reliable, I don't remember precisely, but I think it's about 0.5, which isn't even, it's not even near close enough to be used as a diagnostic test.
Plus, it's not valid.
So what does that mean?
Let's say I assess your unconscious bias and give you a diagnosis.
Well, there's no evidence that it predicts your behavior.
So what good is it?
What good is it?
Well, it's good if you want people to send you to retraining exercises so that you can have your perceptions adjusted in the direction that your organization and the state thinks is proper.
And that's happening everywhere.
I got letters this week already from people at CBC. It's becoming mandatory there.
St.
Mike's Hospital, same thing.
And they've decided that all of their micro-institutions within the hospital We'll be equitable.
There'll be 50% women and 50% men at every single level of the organization, or the organization is corrupt and oppressive.
It's like...
I wrote Mazarin Benagy and Anthony Greenwald yesterday and sent it off to some of my colleagues saying, are you going to come out and make a public statement about the fact that your damn test is being used by pathological people for nefarious purposes?
It's like, well, we'll see what they have to say about that.
I was a bit more polite in my letter than that.
But there's no excuse for it.
There's absolutely no excuse for it.
And as far as I'm concerned, it's part of the broader corruption of social psychology.
You guys may know, or may not, that social psychology has been rife with controversy and scandal over the last three or four years.
And a big part of the reason for that is it's damn corrupt discipline.
And the use of the IAT for political reasons is a perfect example of that.
There is no excuse for it.
And the people at St.
Mike's, you know, they say, well, this is scientifically validated.
It's like, no, it's not.
And worse, let's say you do have unconscious bias, just for the sake of argument, and you can measure it reliably.
Which it isn't.
Let's say all of those things were in case.
There's no evidence whatsoever that those damn unconscious bias training programs, retraining programs, have the effect that they're supposed to have, and there's some evidence that they actually have the reverse effect.
And maybe that's because people don't really like being marched off to re-education by their employers after they've been diagnosed as racist, even if there's no evidence that they in fact are.
So it's an absolute misuse of psychology, and it's politically motivated.
It's politically motivated.
It's an assault on freedom.
Anyways, I made those two videos, and I tried to take the HR and equity people at U of T to task, because they made that training mandatory for their HR people, I thought.
You don't have the right as an employer to invade the unconscious structures of your employees' minds and alter their political perspective, even though you can't do it.
You don't have the right to do that, and to think about it as something you should do as a matter of course, as part of your ethical duty, is...
You really want that?
You really want that?
That's what you want your employers to be able to do.
Figure out, independently of your behavior, whether or not you're a racist, or a classist, or a misogynist, or whatever that happens to be.
And you really think that the bureaucrats at the university, for example, or bureaucrats anywhere, for that matter, are actually capable and qualified of doing such a thing properly, of doing far more damage than any possible good.
Well, so anyways, I made those two videos trying to sort this out and to investigate it, and then, for whatever reason, you know, the proverbial, well, you know what happened.
By, within two months, there was 180 newspaper articles written about it, and I don't know how many millions of people have watched these things online now, but it's plenty.
And so what that also means is I put my finger on something, because who cares what a dim-witted professor from the University of Toronto does with his spare time at midnight?
No one should care.
I should have had my 15 minutes of notoriety, if that.
But that isn't what happened.
It was major news in Canada for three months, and I'm still talking to people all over the world about it.
I get a hundred letters a day, at least.
I can't keep up with them, from people who are being...
Cornered in all sorts of ways by their idiot employers and these safe space propositions at universities and the restrictions on their speech, they tell me constantly, well, I really agree with you, but I'm afraid to say anything about it.
It's like, oh good, that's a wonderful position for us to be in, where people are afraid, they're afraid to speak their minds.
What the hell?
And it's not getting better.
And if we don't do something about it, it's going to get a lot worse.
You saw what happened at Berkeley.
That's just a taste of what's to come.
You know, one day there's going to be an anti-fast demonstration with a little bit of violence, and the bad guys on the other side are going to come out.
And we're not going to like that very much.
So maybe we should get our acts together and stop that from happening before it actually happens, unless that's what you want, and I wouldn't recommend it.
We have a pretty sophisticated society, and it wouldn't take much to put a spanner into the spokes and flip everybody on their forehead.
So...
Wake up, for Christ's sake.
This is not good.
And the fact that...
You know, the bloody federal government has decided that they won't let people pick the judiciary anymore unless they take unconscious bias retraining.
Right?
What the hell?
It's crazy.
So...
Anyways, that's what happened.
In addition to, you know, this ideologically driven, in addition to that, do you think, and I'm always quite cynical, do you think it's also a make-work project for a bunch of people that they figure, you know, we can create these tests that aren't valid, aren't reliable, but we've got an industry, you know, that's going to keep going forever now.
You'd never expect social psychologists to be careerists, would you?
Yes, yes, definitely.
Well, I mean, it got out of hand, too.
It's not, you know, people don't necessarily plan these things.
I'm sure that the Ontario Human Rights Commission, when they were talking about preferred pronoun use, had no idea whatsoever that, you know, within four years of introducing the policies that there would be 71 different gender identity categories.
No one saw that coming.
How could you possibly see that coming?
And I don't think Banagy and Greenwald Had any idea that their test would be transformed into an implemented public policy so rapidly.
Okay, and just for those who are interested, the implicit associations or implicit attitudes test, my students, I always give a link to that, and if anyone's interested, I can give you a link where you can go to the test and actually do it yourself and find out.
Because the assumption is that if you are implicitly racist, so explicitly racist, you would say, I hate blacks, let's say.
Implicitly racist, oh no, some of my best friends are black.
But when you do this test, the idea is that if you're shown a black person's face versus a white person's face, you're more likely to associate that black person with, let's say, violence.
So you're basically being primed unconsciously.
So when you see a black face, if you subsequently see a weapon and you're asked to decide whether this is a weapon or a tool, you're more quickly going to say weapon because you're already thinking dangerous, violence, weapons because you have this negative association of blacks with weapons.
And you'll do that faster than when you see a whiteface, because with a whiteface it should be more neutral.
So whether you see after the whiteface a gun or a weapon, in theory it should take equal time to determine whether it is one or the other.
Things like that.
This is the kind of test that they do, and they've associated, or they've done this test As Dr.
Peterson said, with countless other types of constructs.
And again, the reliability, the validity, it's not just suspect, it's just non-existent.
And as I said, if you'd like to try it out, if you're a student, check out on the Brightspace page.
If you're not, email me, Facebook me, and I'll give you the link.
And they've done it to, I think, 50 different at least.
Democrat, Republican, vanilla, strawberry.
There's all these different things that you can do and see where your What implicit or unconscious biases are.
And as Dr.
Peterson is saying, it's getting out of hand.
And it's all I did with the gender pronouns, because during the debate that you had, or whatever that was, at the U of T, one of the people there, at least she was a lawyer, very condescendingly...
Brenda Cosman.
That's right.
She's like, oh, this kind of thing would never happen.
You don't know what you're talking about.
Well, first of all, on the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal page, they specifically say that you have to identify people by their preferred identity or expression, which includes pronoun usage.
It's there on their page.
It's not explicitly stated in Bill C-16, but the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, who will, in fact...
Inact any type of action against somebody who's, you know, who's violated these policies, okay?
It's on their very page.
And I know you spoke about your own experience.
I hope that, because not everyone saw the debate.
Can you just talk about that part where, speaking to other professionals who don't seem to be ideologically driven, like Kossman, what they said about the risk?
Oh, well, Kossman was interesting.
I mean, she's definitely not looking at this the same way that I do, but, you know, one of the things she said In a rather condescending manner was that I wouldn't be sent to jail even though I wanted to be.
I'm paraphrasing, but that's roughly what she said.
But that, you know, the Human Rights Tribunal could take away my property and my wages and all of that.
But that seemed to be okay for her as long as it didn't extend to jail.
But that's also nonsense because...
If you're found guilty by the Human Rights Tribunal and you don't pay, then that's contempt of court and that goes to a different court and then they put you in jail and that's already happened.
So it's crooked lawyer hand-waving, fundamentally.
And it's an attempt to...
Play down the significance of the law.
You go online and read about the powers of the Human Rights Tribunal and then see how safe you feel.
So here's one of the things they can do.
This is section 1.6.
It's in a document about powers of the tribunals.
They call them social justice tribunals in Ontario.
They actually call them social justice tribunals.
It's mind-boggling.
They can suspend precedent, normal legal precedent, and jurisprudential tradition in the pursuit of their aides.
That's one of the... it's actually documented as one of their powers.
Think about that.
Like, we live in a society that's essentially bound by the restrictions of English common law.
And English common law is one of the most remarkable developments of civilization ever, period.
Because what, see, in the English system, basically, the presupposition is that you have all the rights there are.
They're not enumerated.
You just have all of them, except when one of those rights imposes a restriction on someone else, and then they get irritated at you and take you to court.
And then the judge sorts out who has which micro-right, and then that's laid out as precedent.
And so English common law is this tremendous body of evolved doctrine about how the infinite number of human rights that each individual has interacts with everyone else's rights.
When you brought in the Human Rights Code, the Bill of Rights, the Canadian Bill of Rights, there were lots of people who were upset by it, because it's a different form of legal reasoning.
The Bill of Rights says, here's the rights you have that the government is granting you.
That's not how it works under the English Code.
The English Code is, you have all the rights there are, but they rub up against other people's rights, so we have to sort that out.
We do that with court and precedent.
And that's what the Human Rights Commission and tribunal in Ontario can dispense with if they want.
And the reason there, I know the reason that they put that line in there, it's because...
The social justice hypothesis is that the legal structures of Western civilization are oppressive and patriarchal, and so it's perfectly reasonable to toss them over if you're in pursuit of something like social justice.
It's like, that's fine, people.
Sure, go ahead and do that.
But if you think that you can transform what we have already now into some kind of utopia, then You're dangerous, because that isn't how the world works, and utopians would be more dangerous than any other people for the last hundred years, that's for sure.
Like, there's all sorts of things wrong with Western society.
Always, and there always will be, but compared to 85 to 90 percent of the rest of the planet, this is bloody heaven.
And that's why people want to move here.
So, you can say, well, it's corrupt compared to my imaginary utopia.
It's like, yeah, that's for sure, it certainly is.
But if your imaginary utopia was realized in hardcore politics over a 30-year period, everyone would be out in the streets starving to death.
We already know that because it happened multiple times throughout the 20th century in societies that were, well, they weren't as sophisticated as our society is now, but they were plenty sophisticated for their time.
And you'll hear the neo-Marxist types.
This is the most annoying argument anyone ever makes.
They say, well, what happened in the Soviet Union?
That wasn't real communism.
It's like, first, oh yes, it was.
That's why it also happened in China, which was a very different society.
But what they really mean when they say that is, well, you know, that's Stalin character.
He wasn't such a good guy.
He didn't really know how to implement the Marxist doctrines.
But me, I'm pretty pure of heart, and if you would have made me dictator for 20 years...
Then the utopia would have arrived as promised.
It's like, first of all, if you think that, there's something wrong with you.
You're dangerous.
And second, let's just say for a minute that some saint did get a hold of the tools of power and tried to implement from each according to his ability to each according to his need, and actually did that in a pure and saint-like manner.
Here's what would happen.
The next people in the revolutionary string, like Stalin, would come along and stab them in their bed in the middle of the night, and that would be the end of that.
So there's absolutely no excuse whatsoever for that sort of thinking.
If you read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, which you should do, like everyone should, because it's like the definitive document of this sort of thing that emerged from the 20th century, Solzhenitsyn laid out with extraordinary clarity, first in his writings on Lenin and then in his writings on the Soviet Union more broadly,
exactly how the pernicious and pathological Marxist doctrines were transformed Logically and systematically into the sorts of laws that killed millions of people.
Millions of people.
There were people starving so badly in the Soviet Union by the 1920s that they had posters telling them not to eat their children.
So we've been down that road already.
So what the hell are we doing?
We're going down that road again under the guise of equity.
Right?
And equality.
Well, that was the doctrines that promoted those laws to begin with.
Not good.
When Dr.
Peterson, when you talk this way, some people are going to say either you're blowing things out of proportion or you made a huge leap from where we are now to where we should be.
And so I think there's a lot of room for misunderstanding for people, especially if they have certain ideologies that they'd like to protect.
So one of the reasons I wanted to invite people over was to be able to ask questions.
You've heard some of Dr.
Peterson's tenets that he's trying to convey.
I don't know how many videos each person has watched, but you have an opportunity right now because that's okay.
If someone has a specific question, either from something Dr.
Peterson has said today or things you've heard in the videos with me nagging at you, I really want to ask him face-to-face, straight up, what do you mean by this or what is your solution to that?
Please, I'm opening up the floor.
Just talk really loud, please, so the mic can pick it up and then everyone can hear.
Does anybody have a specific question that you'd like to ask?
Okay.
Oh, sorry.
I'll let you...
Oh, sorry.
Okay.
Barbara Kaye.
Okay.
It's a little bit of a sidebar, but I've watched several of your videos.
They're brilliant, and some of your longer ones in explaining, and I'm intrigued by your...
I know that Solzhenitsyn is one of your heroes.
I know that Solzhenitsyn was a great man.
I'm a little disturbed, and I would love to know...
why was he anti-Semitic?
You know, the book that he wrote in which he was accused of anti-Semitism has not been yet translated into English.
You mean there was only one place?
Well, one of the things that he did, there's certainly no sign of anti-Semitism in the Gulag Archipelago, not as far as I could tell.
And I don't think, in the other books I've read, I haven't seen that either.
He did write a book near the end of his life on the role that Jewish intellectuals played in the establishment of the Soviet Union, but you can't get it in English, so I don't know what to say about that.
I know that it's been criticized From both sides, I would say.
One side saying, well, this was a story that needed to be told, and the other side saying, well, this veers into anti-Semitism.
So, but, you would ask that question.
That's a good question, man.
Okay, so, I'm going to venture out on a limb, because I've been thinking about this for a while.
Am I going to venture out on the way of mine?
No, I'm not.
I haven't got my thoughts formulated well enough.
The leftist doctrines tend to be very attractive to intellectuals.
And so, any group that's overrepresented in intellectuals is likely going to be overrepresented on the leftist end of the spectrum.
And there are temperamental reasons for that.
We know that if you lean left, it's because you're higher in openness and lower in orderliness.
And that seems to be associated with IQ, at least in part.
but I don't want to go into it any more than that because I haven't thought it through sufficiently but I also haven't been able to get a copy of Solzhenits' last book because you can't get it in English it hasn't been translated for one reason or another but I don't think you'll see anything like that in the Gulag Archipelago okay, thank you There's another question.
Before, I'm going to have you ask the question, but afterwards, I want to get back to this, because you've mentioned this a number of times, about the correlates between IQ and the left, and that the people who believe in, or who support thought police, are not actually just, they're not leftists, they're a whole other category.
It's such an important distinction that you can turn to in a few minutes.
But first, this question, please.
So, if the current proposition is too extreme, do you have a theory with regards to how we do expand equality without going to such extremes?
I think we're doing a good job of that right now.
I mean, how fast do you think things, how fast could you even hope for things to change?
Look at what's happened to the situation with women since 1970.
That's changed so fast that people can't even keep up.
It's not obvious, by the way, either, that it's been particularly good for women.
Now, you could make a case that it was good for society, maybe.
It's a tough one, eh?
Because the birth rate has plummeted.
And so, you know, maybe you don't care about that.
Maybe you think there's too many people on the planet already.
Whatever.
But, you know, it isn't that easy to figure out when something is working properly.
One of the things we do know, we seem to know, is that to the degree that rights are extended to women, economic prosperity follows.
So you can see worldwide that the societies that have extended the rights to women most extensively are also the societies that seem to be flourishing economically, and there does seem to be a causal relationship.
But women have paid a big price for that.
So what's happened in part is, first of all, for, say, women who are middle class or lower, Their lives have essentially fallen apart, because marriage is now restricted to the rich, which is also something to think about for those of you who think marriage is an oppressive, patriarchal institution.
It's like, okay, then, why are only the rich people getting married?
They're oppressing themselves?
I don't think so.
And so the women who are in the lower socioeconomic stratus are suffering madly.
And so are their children.
And they have terrible jobs most of the time, like jobs in retail where, you know, they're called in every day for the next day.
They don't have a schedule that's set out ahead of them.
They get paid very badly.
They've got kids to take care of.
And so they have no free time.
It makes them really easy targets for useless predatory males.
And it's really hard on the kids.
And that's like 40% of the female population, something like that.
You guys, you know, well, I don't know about all of you, but you're in university.
You're part of the privileged cognitive elite, you know.
So these sorts of things don't really touch you the same way they touch other people.
And so women are much unhappier if you look at national polls than they were, say, in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
And I think that's partly because Freedom and happiness, those are not the same thing.
They're not even close.
And I see young women all the time struggling to figure out what to do with their lives because they have no idea how to have a job slash career and a family.
And there's no answer to that.
It's a really difficult problem.
And there's all sorts of ideas.
I did a lot of consulting for law firms for a long time, about a decade.
I had a lot of clients who were extremely high-functioning female lawyers, younger ones, trying to figure out how to balance their career with their desire to have a life.
You hear all the time about women being denied access to positions of power, and that's the consequence of prejudice and oppression.
Yeah, yeah, everything is caused by the same thing first.
Right.
You have got one causal principle.
Wonderful.
Now you're a philosopher.
You can figure out everything with it.
It's like the law firms cannot keep their women in their thirties.
They cannot keep them, the big law firms.
They all leave.
Why?
Because the women hit 30.
They're brilliant, conscientious, intelligent.
They were deadly in high school, deadly in university.
They nailed law school.
They whipped through their articling.
They made partner by the time they were 30.
It was like they were in a rocket to the top position.
What do they find when they get there?
80-hour work weeks.
Right?
Because that's one of the things you want to think about.
You know, you think that the people who run things are sitting at home smoking big cigars and, like, telling their minions what to do.
It's like, that is The 1920s millionaire that's on the cover of the Monopoly game.
That's no sociological analysis.
I know lots of people like that, and they work all the time.
All the time.
From the second they wake up, till the second they go to sleep.
And they don't just casually work.
You know, because I know some of you go to the library for six hours, and you say, well, I studied in the library for six hours.
Like, no, you didn't.
You studied for half an hour.
You had coffee, and you looked through Facebook, and, you know, you went home, and you said, well, I studied for six hours, and you're happy about it, but you know bloody well you did, partly because you can't.
You know, I can only read for about three and a half hours till I'm done, and I'm pretty good at it.
So, these people who are running things, there's corrupt people, obviously, but The vast majority of them first are self-made and second.
They're so bloody efficient and smart, you cannot believe it!
And they work 80 hours a week.
And most of them happen to be men.
And why is that?
Because there are a small number of insane men who will do nothing but work 80 hours a week.
And no matter where you put them, if you put them in the middle of a forest with an axe, all they would do is run around chopping down trees.
So, the issue isn't why aren't there more women in positions of power.
It's why are there any men insane enough ever to occupy those positions.
You know, because we also know, and the data on this is very clear, What's the relationship between money and well-being?
Once you have enough money to keep the bill collectors from your door, so once you have enough money to stave off misery, which is sort of lower middle class, something like that in our society, maybe a little lower than that, extra money does not help you.
It does not improve your life.
So why bother with it?
Well, that's what the women in the law firms think.
It's like most of them, by the time they're in their 30s, are married.
Almost all of them are married to men who make as much money or more than they do because that's what women go for cross-culturally.
Four to five years older, Equal or higher in the socioeconomic status.
So their husbands already make $350,000 a year.
It's like they think, well, I don't need much more money.
The men use money to keep track of the competition, by the way, because all the male lawyers that I talk to are usually real hard-ass guys, really low in agreeableness, really high in conscientiousness.
Conservative types, low in openness as well.
And they want to win.
And the reason they care about their damn bonus at the end of the year isn't even so much because of the money, it's because they got a much bigger bonus than the other son of a bitch sitting beside them, and they're happy about that.
So there's a real brass knuckles competition that drives these sorts of things.
We get things backwards so often in psychology and in sociology.
It's not why there aren't more women in positions of power.
It's why do any men want those positions?
You just have no idea the amount of responsibility that comes along with that.
Just imagine for a minute trying to run a billion-dollar corporation.
You can't even bloody well balance your checkbook, and there's dust bunnies underneath your bed.
How in the world would you ever run a billion-dollar corporation?
Those things are complicated.
And you have enemies, and they're trying to take you out.
All the time.
You look at Apple and Samsung, man, they're just torturing each other in the courts nonstop.
You know, if you're running a big corporation, you'll be handling two or three hundred lawsuits at a time.
And that's just nothing compared to the complexity of what you actually have to do.
Stay on top of the technology, constantly interact with your large customers, travel all the time because you have to maintain the relationships, you have to regulate the politics inside the business.
Believe me, it's no picnic.
And you think, well, they get a lot of money.
It's like, what makes you think that's such a good thing?
You know, like, if you're half crazy and you have a lot of money, you're going to be crazy a lot faster, I can tell you that, because it frees you from all sorts of constraints.
You know, we know the data on lottery winners.
They're no happier a year later, and some of them are done, especially if they had had, like, a bit of a cocaine problem to begin with, because...
You know, being broke stops you from dying if you're a cocaine addict.
You get enough money and away you go.
And you think to yourself, you know, you've got all sorts of bad habits and weirdnesses.
If somebody dumped an infinite amount of money on you, what makes you think you wouldn't unravel completely?
It's highly probable.
So, anyway, so back to these women.
You know, what they do when they're 30 is they look around and they've hit partners, so they've hit the pinnacle of their profession.
They think, what the hell am I doing this for?
Why would anyone in their right mind want to be woken up at 3 in the morning on Sunday by their irate Japanese client who wants them to work for the next five hours non-stop to fix this damn problem which is going to cost them $100 million right now?
Or we'll find someone else to pay $750 an hour or two to fix it right now.
And you think, well, that's, you know, a masculine form of value, because that's one of the criticisms.
If the law firms just adopted a more feminine structure of value, it's like, what kind of bullshit is that?
The reason that you get up at three in the morning on Sunday to talk to your Japanese client who's freaking out about their contract is because if you don't jump the hell up and do it right now, there's some starving associate who's Unbelievably ambitious in New York who will pick up the pieces in two-tenths of a second, and they're smart and aggressive, and they'll take you out.
So it has nothing to do with masculine structures of values, all the foolish ideas.
And, you know, it's not just law where this happens.
We know, for example, that female doctors work far fewer hours, too.
So the more female doctors you have, the more doctors you have to have.
And I'm not complaining about women's priorities.
I'm not saying that women are wrong.
Not at all.
It's like the older I get, the more I understand that marriage and family are of primary importance.
And the more I see women in particular, you know, they hit 35 or 40 and they're not married and they don't have kids and they are not happy.
Because what the hell are you going to do from the time you're 40 till the time you're 80?
You got no family?
You got no relationships?
What are you going to do?
Go run your company.
Yeah, well, if you're one in a thousand, that'll satisfy you.
So you bloody well better make sure you're that one in a thousand, and you're probably not, because those people are rare.
So...
So then, because, Dr.
Peterson, one of the natural responses to what you said would be, okay, well...
The priorities are it's a rigged game because only women are the ones who are able to procreate.
So what do we answer to that?
Of course it's a rigged game.
Obviously it's a rigged game.
Women have complicated lives and the pill has made them more complicated.
Well, that's not...
I wouldn't say that exactly because...
In 1895, the average person in the Western world lived on one dollar a day in today's money.
So those people worked so hard and slaved away to such a degree that you can't even imagine it, and all their kids died.
The death rate among kids below five was beyond comprehension, and so women had a terrible time of it, and so did men.
They got to be coal miners and soldiers, because that wasn't exactly entertaining.
You know, so life was very, very, very, very, very hard before we got rich.
And we're rich.
Even those of you who are in this class who think you're poor, it's like, huh, no you're not.
You're in the top one-tenth of one percent by historical standards, and probably there by current world standards as well.
Of course, you can just compare yourself to the few people who are richer than you and feel sorry for yourself, but that's pretty pathetic in my estimation.
So, and it's certainly historically uninformed.
So yeah, women have it rough, obviously.
Now, there's other things to consider.
You do live eight years longer.
So that's not trivial.
Testosterone kills men.
That's basically why men die earlier.
You know, men are much more likely to be killed in dangerous jobs.
They do almost all the dangerous jobs.
They do almost all the outside work.
And there's lots of reasons that men get paid more than women that have nothing to do with prejudice.
It's because they take awful, horrible jobs, like working in the oil rigs in northern Alberta when it's bloody 40 below, and come out of that after five years with two or three fingers missing and all warped up.
Because you really want to wrestle pipe when it's 40 below and it's filthy with a bunch of ornery Men who are hungover beyond belief?
It's like, that's not very entertaining.
So, yeah, I mean, each gender, each sex has its own unfairness to deal with, but to think of that as a consequence of the social structure, it's like, come on, really?
What about nature itself?
And this is something that seems to be completely invisible on the left side of the political spectrum.
It's like, of course you're bloody oppressed and your life is full of suffering, obviously, but to think about that as a direct consequence of unjust social structures is just moronic.
It's like, that's part of the reason, a small part, but look where you're sitting, people.
It's pretty warm in here.
And you're so privileged, you can come here on Saturday morning and listen to an intellectual lecture.
It's like, you should be happy about that, because by historical standards, you should be out lifting rocks in your skeletal form, about five foot three with no teeth.
So...
Fighting with cougars.
Yeah.
Cougars and lions.
Yeah, exactly.
So, you know, there's no gratitude.
That's the thing.
There's no gratitude for what our society is capable of doing.
So...
Uh, three...
Dr.
Peterson, tell me what you think about this, because I was thinking about this.
What happens when the forces of the gender identity, gender expression clash with the capitalist market forces, for example?
Sports is a multi-billion dollar industry and if some women start saying, we express ourselves as men, we think we're men and the law is on their side, do you think that this billion dollar industry is going to put up with some women wanting to be on football teams, on the Toronto Maple Leafs?
I don't think so.
So I'm wondering if some of the market courses will clash with this and then Well, market forces will be a constraining factor, partly because the market tends to punish things that don't work in the market very, very rapidly.
You know, and that's another thing with regards to thinking about, say, equality or equity in the workplace.
If you believe that there is an equivalent distribution of talent across all possible categories, that you have some reason to wait for the market to sort itself out, because Even if you're an anti-capitalist, you at least have to understand that the people that you despise are motivated by greed.
And so they're going to try to find people who will make them the most money, and they basically do that.
It's a pretty stupid employer who won't take someone talented when they come along.
You might say, well, they're prejudiced and they're not doing such a great job of, like, sorting out the applicants.
It's like, that's fine.
They'll be stopped real good by people who are much better at it.
Because, like, talent is unbelievably rare.
I don't know if you guys have talked about the Pareto distribution at all.
But, well, productivity is not normally distributed.
You know, you learn in psychology that everything is normally distributed.
It's like, no, it's not.
Random things are normally distributed.
But productivity isn't random.
And so what you see, productivity is actually governed by something called Price's Law, which is a variation of another principle called the Pareto Principle, which was discovered back in the late 1800s by Vilfredo Pareto, who was an economist.
What Price showed, Price actually studied scientific productivity, and so what he showed, it's quite cool, at the time when he did this, this was in 1960, the typical PhD student had one publication on graduation.
Half as many had two.
Half as many as that had three.
Half as many as that had four.
Massive step down in productivity.
And you see this in scientific productivity period.
So what happens is that in any given scientific domain, there's a clump of people sort of on the left side of the distribution, the less productive side.
And in that clump, men and women are equally productive.
But then there's a tiny percentage of people who publish, like all the papers, And they're all men.
And they're those insane men that I was telling you about before that do nothing but work for 80 hours a week.
And the thing is, if you want to rise to the top of a profession, you think about it.
What do you need to rise to the top of a competitive profession?
You better be smart.
Because smart makes you fast.
And you're not going to get to the next place faster than anyone else unless you're faster than them.
You bloody well better be conscientious.
Industrious in particular.
It should make you feel horrible every second of your life you spent doing something that involves leisure.
And there's going to be some people in here that know that because they're hyper-conscientious.
I can't stand sitting around doing nothing.
I've got to find some work to do.
And you'll do whatever you have to that's work because you feel guilty and horrible if you're sitting around.
So you need to be hyper-conscientious.
Maybe you need to be in the top 1% for intelligence and maybe the top 5% for industriousness.
So that's 1% of 5%.
So you're looking at it.
I think that's 1 in...
What is that 1% of 5%?
Yeah, it's 1 in 100 and 1 in 20.
1 in 2000?
I think that's right.
Anyways, you're a rare bird if you're going to be in that position.
And so...
Because of the Pareto distribution and because of the concentration of productivity in a very small number of people, there's tremendous economic incentive to identify those people, no matter where they're from, no matter who they are.
And employers who have any sense know that.
And they're hungry.
Like, these law firms, you know, you have no idea the knots they tie themselves in trying to keep their qualified women, because those women are worth a bloody fortune, you know?
They pay them a lot, but they bring in way more business than...
They bring in far more economic resources than they take.
The law firms want to keep them.
Now, that doesn't mean all the men in the law firms don't have their problems with highly qualified women, because they don't know what to do with them.
You know, like, if you're a guy and you're assertive and competitive, then you're going to be asserting yourself and competitive with other guys.
But it's a lot harder to do that with a woman, because you think, well, how am I going to be?
Am I going to be, like, hyper aggressive around her?
Because that just doesn't work out.
And so the guys really don't know what to do about that.
And I would say there's some residual trouble in law firms and other high-end industries because of that.
They just don't know how to sort it out.
But mostly the employers are thinking, I don't care if you're green.
If you're smart and you can bring in business and you're reliable and you can solve problems.
Like, we don't have anybody like you.
We need you.
Please stay.
It doesn't happen.
So yes, the market forces will...
But the market forces, I think, are already going to push things hard in the direction of maximizing the utility of talent.
You just have no idea how much more productive a productive person is than a non-productive person.
It's crazy.
It's crazy.
I just want to juxtapose that with a publication, which is...
Not to get your blood boiling, because somebody sent me...
Glaciers, Gender and Science, a Feminist Glaciology Framework for Global Environmental Change Research.
You want to talk about productivity?
And then there's academia.
Not to denigrate all of academia, but unfortunately, this is a profession in which people have killed trillions of trees for bullshit, basically.
So I just thought that would be a nice ironic twist.
Yeah, well, you know, the postmodernists, they don't believe in...
I don't know how much you know about postmodernist philosophy.
You're at Ryerson, so probably quite a bit.
But not that the U of T is any better, because it's not.
But the postmodernists don't believe in science.
There's lots of things they don't believe in.
They don't believe in logic.
And I'm not making this stuff up.
Like, you can go read it for yourself, Derrida in particular.
They think that logic is part of the oppressive patriarchy and that there's no point in dialogue because all there is is different power groups identified by their groups and they can't really talk.
It's just a power struggle.
And that's why the radical leftists stop people from speaking on campus.
That's why I couldn't find anybody to debate me, roughly speaking, at the University of Toronto.
And I went to Queen's University two weeks ago, to the law school there, because I was invited by a group called Runny Bean Association, and they asked six professors if they would debate me.
I was like, no.
I said, why not?
I'm not even a lawyer.
And lawyers can debate.
They're good at that.
That's what they're trained to do.
No, they wouldn't debate me.
So they had to get somebody to play devil's advocate.
And he did a good job.
He did a very credible job, I thought.
But...
And you think, well, why wouldn't they come out and debate me?
That's easy.
They don't believe in dialogue.
Period.
It's part of the philosophy.
Because you have to believe in logic, first of all, to believe in dialogue.
You have to believe that people can communicate as individuals, fundamentally, and not that you're just locked in your identity as group member against all the other identity groups that are struggling for power in the kind of Hobbesian landscape.
That's all part of postmodernism.
And this, well, this is just an extension of that.
It's like science is just a patriarchal, oppressive patriarchal structure.
And so we need to reconstitute it from the bottom up.
They type on their computers while they say this, not noticing that by the fact that they're using the damn computer, which wouldn't work.
You know, people had to figure out quantum mechanics before they could make computers.
They use the computer, science isn't real.
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
They do the same thing when they're in jet planes.
Science isn't real.
Here I am, 600 miles an hour, typing on my computer.
That's called a performative contradiction from a philosophical perspective.
And that's the same as a logical paradox.
You don't get to say one thing and do another and say that you've got it right.
Well, you do if you're a postmodernist, because you can do whatever you want if you're a postmodernist.
And the reason the damn postmodernists are Marxists, as far as I can tell, because inevitably they are, is because the problem with postmodernism is it doesn't even leave postmodernists anything to do, because postmodernists don't believe in overarching directional narratives.
And the problem with that proposition is if you don't have an overarching directive narrative for your life, you don't know what to do.
And it's really important that you know what to do because you're alive and you need to do things.
Well, we'll just turn back to the original Marxism and we'll say, well, we'll just group ourselves up in oppressed groups and we'll have wars between the oppressed groups.
That'll give us a sufficient overarching narrative.
It doesn't matter that it contradicts the postmodernist thesis because they don't care about contradictions.
Well, so, hence this, you know, feminist glaciology.
Okay, so I've got a few questions that you've been watching pop up.
So there's one back there first.
Okay, Phyllis?
So, as far as I can tell, you've created a conflict, or a prejudice, describing a conflict, really between determinism and choice, right, that, you know, psychological and biological determinism,
with In fact, the matter is a woman, based on different psychological structures, and on the other hand, there's gender choice or identity choice, and there is choice that we can make both beyond our internal subconscious.
It's a good question.
No, I don't think so.
Even though I think your question is well-formulated and intelligent, I don't think that dichotomy is that straightforward.
Because there's a tremendous amount of deterministic thinking on the social justice warrior end of the distribution, too, because they regard you as the deterministic product of your environment.
So it's more like the localization of determinism.
So you might say that for the more biologically oriented people, there's more biological determinism.
So I think that the conflict between free will and determinism basically runs across the entire political spectrum.
But then I would also say it's probably an ill-formed argument.
Because there isn't an absolute...
Paradoxical contradiction between free will and determinism.
Quite the contrary.
You actually need elements of determinism, I think, for a system to operate freely.
So, for example, think about playing chess.
You can do a lot of things when you're playing chess.
Or think about composing music.
You can do a lot of things when you're composing music.
But there's an underlying rule structure.
The environment within which all of those choices manifest themselves.
It's the same with online video games, which are a really good example, I think, because they are micro-worlds.
And they're determined, in some sense, because they have an underlying rule structure.
That's the rules of the game.
But they're free in many other ways.
And so I don't think there's anybody, pretty much on any side of the political spectrum, who would regard people as entirely possessed of free will.
We have constraints and limits, and we're also pretty good at adjusting those on the fly.
So, for example, you'll be much less irritated if a three-year-old runs into you carelessly while tricycling than you will if an adult man runs into you with his scooter, because you'll take the constraints of the individual into account very, very rapidly.
It's not as simple as free will versus determinism mapped onto the political spectrum.
Sorry, Joey.
Alan, you mentioned that if somebody thought that socialism was done wrong because it was done by Stalin, that frequently they're saying that, well, I would have done it right, and that that frequently they're saying that, well, I would have done it right, and that there's something And I see what you're saying.
I asked her once in a video about twisted compassion.
About how people get their compassion all twisted.
And that you appeal to the individual.
It seems that attacking on that level, that's not your mojo, that's not how you do things really, but it seems like you'll get people on their heels, sort of.
I see some hatred for Americanism or something like that, or Muslims, and I think that just makes people, they naturally feel identified with their land or their category.
It'll just make them defend that stance even more, instead of reaching for the individual understandings about compassion and order.
Okay, so I have to take that apart a little bit, because there's a bunch of issues in the question.
How many people in here are in your psychology course, are taking psychology?
Are most of you taking psychology courses?
How many people are taking psychology courses?
Okay, so a goodly number.
Well, one of the things you want to do with a conception like compassion is you actually want to start thinking about it like a psychologist or like a scientist, because compassion is actually definable.
And I think the easiest way to approach it is to think about it in big five terms, because it maps onto agreeableness.
And especially, you can break agreeableness down into compassion and politeness.
And the liberal types, especially the social justice types, are way higher in compassion.
It's actually their fundamental characteristic.
And you might think, well, compassion is a virtue.
It's like, yes, it is a virtue.
But any unidimensional virtue immediately becomes a vice, because real virtue is the intermingling of a number of virtues and their integration into a functional identity that can be expressed socially.
And compassion is great if you happen to be the entity towards which it is directed, but compassion tends to divide the world into crying children and predatory snakes.
Right, and so if you're a crying child, hey, great, man.
But if you happen to be identified as one of the predatory snakes, you better look the hell out.
And so, you know, compassion is what the mother grizzly bear feels for her cubs when she eats you because you got in the way.
Right, exactly.
So we don't want to be thinking for a second that compassion isn't a virtue that could lead to violence, because it certainly can.
And the other problem with compassion...
This is why we have conscientiousness, right?
There's five canonical personality dimensions.
Agreeableness is pretty good if you're dealing, again, in a kin system.
You want to distribute resources equally, for example, among your children, because you want all of them to have not only the same chance, you even want them roughly to have the same outcome, a good one.
But the problem is, is you can't extend that moral network to larger groups, not as far as I can tell.
You need conscientiousness, which is a much colder virtue.
And it's also a virtue that's much more concerned with larger structures over the longer period of time.
And you can think about conscientiousness as a form of compassion, too.
It's a strange form.
It's like, straighten the hell out and work hard and your life will go well.
It's like, I don't care how you feel about that right now.
And like someone who's cold, low in agreeableness, say, and high in conscientiousness, that's what they'll tell you every time.
Don't come whining to me.
I don't care about your hurt feelings.
Do your goddamn job or you're going to be out on the street.
You think, oh, that person's being really hard on me.
It's like, not necessarily.
They might have your long-term best interest in mind.
And you're fortunate if you come across someone who's, like, not tyrannically disagreeable, but moderately disagreeable in high unconsciousness, because they'll whip you into shame.
And that's really helpful.
I mean...
You'll admire people like that.
You won't be able to help it.
And you'll think, oh wow, this person's actually giving me good information, even though you feel like a slug after they've taken you apart.
Okay, so that's the compassion issue.
It's like, you can't just transform that into a political...
I think part of what we're seeing is actually the rise of a form of female totalitarianism.
We have no idea what totalitarianism would be like if women ran it, because that's never happened before in the history of the planet.
And so we've introduced women into the political sphere.
Radically over the last 50 years.
We have no idea what the consequence of that is going to be, but we do know from our research, which is preliminary, that agreeableness really predicts political correctness, but female gender predicts over and above the personality trait, and that's something we found very rarely in our research.
Usually the sex differences are wiped out by the personality differences, but not in this particular case.
And then, you know, women are getting married later.
And they're having children much later, and they're having fewer of them.
And so you also have to wonder what their feminine orientation is doing with itself in the interim, roughly speaking.
And a lot of it's being expressed as political opinion.
Like, fair enough, you know, that's fine.
But it's not fine when it starts to shut down discussion.
Also, if you think about politics from a temperamental perspective, it gets to be extraordinarily useful.
So, if you're conservative, you're high in conscientiousness, particularly orderliness, and you're low in openness.
Okay, so what good are you?
Well, you're not great if you ought to have a wonderful philosophical conversation about ideas and then go hit an art movie.
It's like, no, conservative's your wrong date for that particular bit of business.
But if you want someone to run a company that's already been established, or to make sure that algorithmized processes are being undertaken properly, you want conservatives.
They're very good at managing, and they're very good at administering.
Conscientiousness is the best predictor of those two domains, apart from IQ. Okay, so fine.
What do you need the damn liberals for?
Well, you don't want them running anything, but you want them thinking up new things.
Because the entrepreneurs and artists are high in openness.
And low in conscientiousness, especially orderliness.
And they have to be, because if you're starting something new, you don't want to have everything in the neat little boxes.
You have to break rules.
You have to take things apart.
And so, the liberals need the conservatives to run enterprises, and the conservatives need the liberals to start them.
And it makes sense from a temperamental perspective, if you think about it, too, because there's five basic personality dimensions.
They're all normally distributed.
And what that implies is that there's a niche For every personality type, in proportion to the frequency of the occurrence within that normal distribution, there's some places for really extroverted people.
There's more places for Extroverted and moderately introverted.
But there are places for everyone in that dimensional structure.
And there's utility for all of those people.
And so that's why you have to keep the dialogue going.
It's like if you're hyper-liberal, you have to talk to the damn conservatives because sometimes they're right.
Sometimes you're right, but sometimes they're right.
And so if you don't talk, then the system tilts off to the extreme that's represented by that temperament.
And so what you'd have is a bunch of liberals talking about new things while the buildings were falling down around them.
So, we need each other.
And that's, see, part of what's happened in the West is we figured that out a long time ago.
We figured out, oh, well, yeah, I've got to talk to those stupid people who don't think the way you do.
Because sometimes, despite the fact that they're annoying and nowhere near as smart as you, they're actually correct.
And so, here's another way of thinking about it.
Imagine the environment does this, like a snake.
It's always moving, right?
You don't know where the damn thing's going.
And you want to be in the middle.
It's like two cliffs.
It keeps shifting.
You want to be in the middle, far from the cliffs.
It keeps moving around, and you're trying to walk forward.
Well, sometimes it's over here, so the conservatives, they have to pull it back.
And sometimes it's over here, so the liberals, they have to pull it back.
But because it keeps changing, you don't know who's right.
And so you have to keep talking.
And that's what a democratic society actually allows for.
Exchange the opinions, move the damn polity, so that we can stay in the middle of the snake, roughly speaking.
And so, you've got to have some respect for people who aren't like you.
They're actually not like you.
So, I figured out recently, I think, that I couldn't figure out why openness and conscientiousness are the dimensions that are determining political belief.
Because they're not even correlated.
So why the hell do they clump for political belief?
And I think I figured it out.
I think it's because of borders.
I think the fundamental political issue is how open versus closed borders should be.
And I don't just mean borders between states.
I mean borders between states.
I mean borders between institutions.
Borders between genders.
Borders between sexes.
Borders between ideas.
The Conservatives say, keep everything where it belongs, because it's working.
And the Liberals say, yeah, it's working for now, but unless we make some adjustments, it's not going to keep working.
And they're both right.
So, we better have the dialogue.
Because otherwise we wander off the cliff, on the left or the right.
And we know where that goes.
That goes, there's flames down at the bottom of those cliffs.
And people die horribly down there.
And we've seen that on the right and the left.
We've had plenty of evidence for that.
I have a bunch of smart friends who have leaned to the left, and it feels like their compassion got twisted somehow, and I have compassion for that.
I want to speak to that.
These are people that I love and stuff like this, and I think that they are kind of ideologically twisted, so I'm just going to worry.
Well, one of the things I've also spent a fair bit of time thinking about is the role that resentment plays in political ideology.
I have recommended it in my lectures, but I'll recommend it here, too.
There's a great book by George Orwell called Road to Wigan Pier, which I would highly recommend.
But Orwell did.
He was a leftist.
He went and fought on the communist side in the Spanish Civil War against the fascists, roughly speaking.
I mean, Orwell was a tough guy and very, very smart, super smart.
And he went up to visit the coal miners in the 1930s in the northern UK. And I mean, those people, Ben, they had to crawl to work for two and a half miles in a tunnel that was like three and a half feet high just to get to their shift.
And then, you know, that meant breaking rock for seven and a half hours.
Then they had to crawl back, and they didn't get paid for the commute.
You know, so they had rough time.
They had no teeth by the time they were 30.
And, you know, they were done and old by the time they were 40.
It was rough.
And so, you know, Orwell went up there and said, Jesus, that industrial nightmare is just killing these poor oppressed people.
He's like, yeah, that's for sure.
And he lays it out.
You can't read that without thinking, A, thank God I'm not a coal miner.
And B, yeah, it's pretty rough at the bottom of the Industrial Revolution, like, seriously rough.
But in the second half of the book, he did an analysis of socialist philosophy, and one of the things he pointed out was that his observation was that the sort of middle-class, ideologically bound socialist types didn't care for the poor at all, they just hated the rich.
It's like, yes.
That's right.
Not everyone.
Not everyone.
I worked for the NDP when I was young, and I met a number of the leaders of the NDP, including Grant Notley.
I knew him quite well, who's Rachel Notley's father, because we come from the same town.
And I had a lot of admiration for the leaders back then, because they were really trying to give a voice to the working class.
It's like, you better give a voice to the working class, or you end up electing Trump, for example.
But, you know, the socialists have abandoned the damn working class.
It's like, no, we'll go play identity politics instead.
It's like, that worked out really well for Hillary Clinton, I noticed.
So, because it was identity politics that certainly shifted the election towards Trump.
She lost the working class people.
Well, someone has to give them a voice.
So there are genuine, there are people on the left who are genuinely working to better the lot of people who, because of situation, haven't had the opportunity they might have.
But so many people are resentful.
It's like, no, there's some people out there that have more than me.
That's a terrible thing for a North American to think.
It's like, we're so goddamn privileged that, you know, we should spend at least one extra day in hell after we die for every time we complain about how poor we are.
Right.
Oh, there's some people who are richer than me.
Yeah, that's pretty rough, man.
That's a rough break for you.
It's the funny thing you hear about the 1% all the time in North America.
It's like, oh, the 1%.
First of all, that's a moving target.
The people in the 1% shift like crazy.
You have, I think, about a 10% chance of being in the 1% at one point in your life, and about a 40% chance of being in the top 10% for at least one year of your life.
So, there is a 1%.
But you're the bloody 1%.
All you have to do is compare yourself with the rest of the world.
So, like, what are you complaining about?
These tiny proportion of people have more than you.
Like, what's up with you?
How can you be so clueless that you would do that?
How can you be so ungrateful and arrogant and blind?
It's terrible.
I mean, people have rough lives in the rest of the world.
I mean, we're making people richer very fast.
You know, 300,000 people a day now get connected to the electrical grid, and about 250,000 people are lifted out of abject poverty.
We're wiping out abject poverty faster than ever before in human history by a huge margin.
So that's all for the good.
It's really impressive.
But a huge chunk of that twisted compassion is just resentment.
Since there's a few people who are better off than me, maybe if I compare them to myself across one dimension.
Jesus.
Dismal.
But that's what's getting lost in the discussion today.
It's all...
It's so deflecting outward.
It's all trying to, you know...
It's...
As I say, it's like...
It's this resentment.
It's this wanting and stuff like that.
It's this lack of gratitude for just how lucky we really are.
And it's this complete lack of insight and reflection.
I think that's a big problem.
Well, it's partly lack of historical knowledge.
It's like people...
It's easy to take what we have for granted.
Here we are, the lights are on.
It's like some stupid poor son of a bitch is out there climbing You know, with this damaged arm to make sure that we can all sit here and complain about how oppressed we are.
You know, it's pretty pathetic.
But it's no wonder we take it for granted.
That's the funny thing, because your minds are organized so that if something always works, you ignore it.
Because, well, why would you pay attention to it, right?
It always works.
You don't have to pay attention to it.
So, as soon as something is predictable, you zero it out.
And so then you think, well, of course it's like this.
This is just It's a miracle that this stuff works ever.
It's crazily improbable.
And it always breaks, right?
Everything is always breaking all the time.
And somebody's out there beatling away, trying to fix it.
So we're ungrateful partly because we take things that work for granted.
If our systems worked only 99% of the time, our society would probably be better.
Because when the lights went off, everyone would go, and the heat would go, oh yeah.
You can't see in the dark, and you get cold when there's no You think, oh yes, that's much better.
But it always works.
Speaking of envy and resentment, would you care to comment on the apparently well-established neo-Marxist idea that men have a common collective interest and women have a separate common collective interest, a class interest, and that these interests come into conflict, that there's competition, in some sense, on a collective level?
Well, I think there is competition between men and women, but it's nested inside a broader arena of cooperation.
You know, this is another thing that you learn from reading Piaget, if you're careful, is that...
because Piaget was smart enough to understand that there is no dichotomous opposition between cooperation and competition.
So, you know, one of the sort of tenets of the kind of leftist mumble-jumble that I hate is that you should...
kids shouldn't play competitive games.
Let's take hockey.
Is it competitive or cooperative?
Well, it's competitive.
Well, wait a second.
No one brings a basketball to the hockey game.
No one brings a chess board.
Everyone that comes to the hockey game comes there to play hockey.
That constitutes cooperation.
We'll mutually define the aim.
Piagetian cooperation will mutually define the aim.
We'll assign each other roles.
We'll all agree to stick to the roles.
Well, that's cooperation.
And if you break the rules, what happens?
You get stuck in the penalty box.
You're not playing hockey.
Off you go.
And people...
People go off.
They go sit in the penalty box.
They don't go kill the referee with a stick.
They go and sit in the penalty box.
You know, 6'7", 300 pounds.
So, okay, and then you think, well, what about within the team?
Is that cooperation or competition?
Well, each team member is trying to be the best player, but try not passing to your colleagues and see what happens.
You know, even if you're really good, you're just a diva, and no one's going to be happy with you.
No, they'll put horrible things in your beer after the game.
So, it's cooperation there as well.
And then there's a meta level of cooperation, which is that everybody's trying to improve their skills simultaneously.
And so that serves a higher-ordered good.
And everyone's trying to learn how to be a good player so that they can play many games.
It's like, well, we shouldn't play competitive games.
It's like, you must have been educated at OISI. It's sad.
It's very sad.
And it's so ignorant for people who know something about child development to say something like that.
It's just, what is with you?
Where were you educated, or where weren't you educated is the right response.
So with men and women, well, there is group competition.
For example, you're competing, roughly speaking, with all your classmates, right?
And some of the women are going to outshine you.
And so that's tough for men.
It's particularly tough for men because it isn't obvious how you compete full-bore with women.
It's not obvious.
And we don't know how to solve that problem.
And then, of course, status in relationship to the male hierarchy is more important for men than it is for women because women pick their mates based on their position in the social hierarchy.
And so that puts men also in an awkward way.
It puts women in an awkward position, too.
Like a lot of you women, let's say, there's a fair number of you here who have an IQ of more than 130, which puts you in, like, maybe the top, you know, you're 1 in 20, 95th percentile.
And then, you know, you've got pretty good career propositions.
So, like, your pool of eligible mates...
It's miniscule.
And the data shows that clearly.
If I remember correctly, a 15-point increase in IQ for a woman decreases her probability of finding a partner by about 40%.
It's something like that.
It has zero effect for men, by the way, because men made across and down dominance hierarchies, not across and up.
So if you're a smart woman and you're attractive and you're young and you're hardworking and you have a good career, it's like you need a man who's smart, hardworking, young, Who has a good career, but he has to be a little better at those things than you.
It's like, good luck.
Good luck.
It's going to be rough, because there just aren't that many people like that.
And so there's another problem that faces women, too, which is you're not going to be smart, hardworking, with a good career until you're 30.
Well, then you have to compete with 25-year-old women.
And so that's also an insoluble problem, because the thing about 25-year-old women is they put less stress on men.
Why?
Why?
Because they can have babies for an extra five years, so every guy thinks, yeah, yeah, I'll have kids sometime.
Because he can think that.
He can have kids until he's 80.
What the hell does he care?
Women?
No, no.
35, 40.
You better get it together by then.
And so, when you're 30 and you've got your act together, you've got those 25-year-old women to compete with.
And men don't care about your damn status.
So it's rough.
It's rough.
So there is lots of competition between men and women, but it's nested inside a much broader domain of cooperation.
Marriage is the fundamental solution to that.
And I think the evidence for that is also clear.
It's like it's better for women, you have a better sex life, you're healthier, your kids are better off, you're not nearly as likely to plummet into a lower socioeconomic category, which almost always happens to women who get divorced.
Good luck.
Like, you're poor.
And if you're not, it's because you're working.
So often, the only time you have to have a date is with some psychopathic man who's useless and can bend his schedule around yours.
Yeah, well, I've seen plenty of this, man.
I'm not talking through my hat.
I know exactly what the hell happens when you...
When you're a little older and a little poorer and a little more desperate.
It's not exactly fun.
So I wouldn't recommend that you end up there.
Okay.
I'm not happy Valentine's Day.
No.
It's a two-part question.
You mentioned you talked earlier about English common law.
About 20 years ago, I read an article from a constitutional expert who warned against the...
The negative repercussions that would come from the way we wrote the Charter of Rights and Freedom, particularly codifying select victim groups.
And that we've turned our back on 800 years of English Chronoquan and effectively stepped away from the rule of law.
And the second part that relates to that is there was an excellent question last Saturday From the great granddaughter of Robert Baldwin who talked about the lack of stories, which I thought was a really important question.
And how those two relate in my mind is my in-laws escaped from a communist country.
And I've had dinner time conversations for decades now with my father-in-law, with both of them, about what that looked like and what that felt like.
And I think where Baldwin's great-granddaughter's question was important, which is that we don't have the stories that would inform us, and you touched on that, because some of the stories from their experience are really horrible,
horrible, and I know that there are all kinds of Canadians, and they actually are fearful for where we are in society right now, but they're frightened to speak out, and I think bringing that back around to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, We've codified preferred victim groups, but we've overlooked then that most trauma and abuse happens within groups.
And also, going back to Barbara Kay's point earlier, we sort of overlooked that just because someone's in a victim group doesn't mean that they're also not a perpetrator.
And that doesn't get a lot of press.
Yeah, whenever anyone claims victim status without simultaneously claiming perpetrator status, you should run away from that person.
It's like, I'm a saint and everyone's been hurting me.
No, probably not.
Sorry.
You're a saint?
Really?
I don't think so.
I doubt it.
I imagine you have your fair share of abstract blood on your hands, just like everybody else, and so people need to take responsibility for that.
Just one more thing.
I'm wondering if what you're describing now is basically what I didn't understand two decades ago without learning about the charter rights and free law.
Oh yeah, that was a catastrophe.
To lay that bit of logical rationality on top of the English common law system was a catastrophe.
It was unnecessary.
And it is resulting in much of what we're seeing today.
The problem with the codified Bill of Rights is the rights conflict.
Right?
Now, English common law dealt with it by just saying, forget, we're not enumerating your damn rights.
You have all of them.
Okay?
What problems is that going to solve?
We don't care.
We'll solve them one by one as they emerge.
Brilliant.
It's an evolutionary approach to law, essentially.
English common law is phenomenal.
And we made a huge mistake codifying our rights, I think.
And that is part of what's put us here.
And then building in the victimhood of groups.
That's a hell of a thing to tell someone, too.
You're part of a victim group.
It's like, it's so clueless historically, too.
You know, the serfs in the USSR, who were pretty much all Caucasian, they weren't emancipated until the late 1800s.
Like, you don't have to go very far back in anybody's racial history to find the equivalent of slavery.
I mean, okay, serfs weren't slaves.
Yeah, yeah, they were.
They were.
They were sold with the property.
So that's 150 years ago.
Slavery was not some exception perpetrated on the world by the United States.
Every damn society virtually that ever existed up until we invented machines ran on slave labor.
So, saying, well, you know...
Some groups have been affected more by slavery in the recent past than others.
I think that's fair to say.
But the problem is, well, what exactly do you do about that, then?
And who defines it?
And it's a big mess.
And besides, none of it's to be trusted anyways, because all it is is postmodern neo-Marxist sleight of hand.
You know, Marxism got demolished in the 70s.
Demolished.
Ruined.
It was never to rise again.
Postmodernists.
Sneaky French intellectuals.
Played a little sleight of hand.
Okay.
It's not the working class against the wealthy.
It's the victims against the oppressors.
Great.
All we did was move the goalposts slightly.
Now we get to play the same game.
Yeah, well, it's a lot easier than thinking.
So...
And because we have so many people who have escaped communism...
That's what they thought.
Well, exactly, exactly.
So why do you think those stories are not getting out, because...
God, that's a good question.
I teach about the Gulag Archipelago in my personality class, of all the dopey places to teach it.
It's like, at the beginning of the class, I say, well, how many of you know that 30 million...
Soviet citizens were destroyed through internal repression between 1919 and 1959.
It's like four people put up their hands.
I say, well, how do you know?
I watched your lectures on YouTube.
You know, that's not taught in schools.
Why?
I know why.
It's because the bloody intellectual leftists have never apologized for their complicity in the catastrophes of the 20th century.
The Germans apologized.
Sorry about the Nazis.
Well, the left-wing intellectuals, they say, well, that wasn't real Marxism.
It's like, oh, okay, how many corpses have to pile up around you before you're willing to question your beloved ideological presuppositions and face your resentment and your narcissism and your desire for destruction?
You don't like people anyways.
The planet has too many of them.
So, like, a nice war might clear that up well.
Then all the plants can grow again.
They talked about the population explosion that was going to wipe out the planet by the year 2000.
They said outright that human beings were a cancer on the planet.
Lots of people think that.
It's like, oh boy, let's put the atom bomb phone in your hands.
Human beings are a cancer on the planet.
What a hell of a thing to say.
You can say that to a four-year-old.
I saw a bloody professor at Queen's University tell a whole roomful of 18-year-olds that if they had an ethical Fiber in their body, they wouldn't have any kids, or they'd only have one, because all they're doing is going out there and raping the planet.
It's like, what, you know, what the hell?
I don't understand that.
It's like, human beings are hard on the planet, but it's pretty damn hard on us in return, you know?
It's like we're just sort of trying not to die too miserably, and we make a bit of a mess while doing it.
It's like, yeah, Christ, we've only known for 50 years that we were disrupting the oceans.
How fast do you think we can learn?
You know, a hundred years ago, Thomas Huxley, who was a great biologist, said, the oceans are so plentiful that there's not a chance we could ever put a dent in them.
So that was only a hundred years ago.
Fifty years ago, we thought, oh man, there's more of us and we're better at this than we thought.
It's like, okay, how fast do you expect people to learn?
You know, one generation, one year?
We're trying to do our best.
Most people are trying to do their best.
And some people are trying to do their worst.
But most people are trying to do their best.
And so we should have a little compassion, a little sympathy for human beings instead of considering ourselves like raping, patriarchal, oppressive destroyers of the world.
Jesus!
You don't like that label?
It's so cruel.
It's so mean.
There's no sympathy there.
It's like...
People are struggling hard to get by.
Usually, the other thing about people that's so interesting, and you really learn this if you're a clinical psychologist, is that every single one of you in this room has at least one serious problem.
We're laboring under it.
And that's why the whole handicap thing is a big problem as well.
It's like, okay, you're not mentally ill this moment, but you will be.
You'll be depressed or anxious or you'll hit some trauma in your life that'll take you out.
And even if you happen to be in the small minority of people who are physically healthy their whole life and emotionally healthy, you're going to have a family member, a child, a parent, a parent with Alzheimer's, a child who's got some illness.
You know, you're going to be carrying some vicious burden for most of your life.
And most of the time, you're going to stumble off to work anyhow and do your damn job and contribute to society.
I can't even believe that our system works, because you just have to talk to someone for five minutes, and they tell you, well, here's the three horrible things that happened to me in the last year.
And they're horrible things!
Their mother died of, like, you know, some degenerative neurological disease.
Those are particularly entertaining.
And their father was alcoholic and used to beat them up, and their sister's schizophrenic.
And it's like...
But away they go, and do their minor heroism for the day, and the lights stay on.
It's like...
You know, human beings, we're admirable creatures, despite the fact that we're, you know, finite and useless and vicious and all of those things, so...
Okay, David?
If I'm head of the PR of a large corporation, I'll have a senior manager of diversity and inclusion reporting to me.
Now, I can't eliminate the position, because I would incur suicide, so what should I tell them to do?
Well, you should pay very careful attention to their definitions of diversity, and then you have to pay careful attention to the criteria by which you choose people.
That's an extraordinarily difficult question, because it's a personnel selection decision.
But one of the things I would say is, well, if you're looking for managers and administrators, screen them for conscientiousness.
You get about a.25,.3 correlation.
You think, well, that's nothing.
That's wrong.
It switches your probability of hiring an above-average employee from 50-50 to 67.5, 32.5, if it's a.30, let's see, sorry, 65-35, if it's a.30 correlation.
And because there's massive variability in the productivity of individuals tilting your selection up to There's no bias in the conscientiousness test.
When the court says it?
The board.
The CEO said, help by the way, you're the diversity officer.
What would you look at?
Well, one of the things you might do is track the shifting ratio of men versus women in the corporation.
But that's the sort of thing that requires a micro-analysis.
You know, like, there's going to be, and increasingly there are, many disciplines where women are over-represented at every single level.
That's happening in universities so fast.
There won't be a damn man left in the Faculty of Arts and Science in ten years.
It's like, so for all you women who are looking for mates, you better be thinking about that.
Because when men are bailing out of university so fast, you cannot believe it.
Like, I've watched the curves for 15 years.
It's linear up for women, linear down for men.
And so, you can think, well, that's really good for women.
It's like, that's so clueless.
There can't be anything that's bad for men that's good for women, and vice versa.
Say, well, what's the industry?
How does that map onto the valid, natural interests of men and women?
Is there any evidence that we're hiring stupidly?
And the mere fact that you don't have as many women or as many men in one place versus another doesn't indicate, therefore, that you're prejudiced.
You have to buy the equity argument to buy that.
And if you buy the equity argument, well, you're done with anyway.
Because you're going to fall down that spiral.
You'll never get out of it.
You'll never hit equity.
Not a chance.
Now, a lot of these corporations are doing it out of guilt and fear.
You said that people are afraid to speak up.
Jesus, you just have no idea how afraid people are to speak up.
And it's actually no wonder.
I mean, I made those videos.
It was like I got hit by a time wave.
It freaked me right out.
It still does.
I can't believe what happened.
I would say overall it's been good, but it's not necessarily the kind of good you would wish on someone.
I kind of would like to have my old life back.
But whatever, you know.
I knew what was coming, so it was only a matter of time.
But people are so afraid to speak up, you just cannot believe it.
Tenured professors?
Those are the most protected people in the universe.
And they're afraid to speak up.
And that tells you a lot about what people are like.
But I should tell you, you should be afraid to speak up.
But I'll tell you something else.
You should be more afraid not to speak up.
That's the thing.
It's like you're screwed both ways.
Pick your poison.
You can either suffer the consequences of having a voice, or you can suffer the consequences of not having a voice.
And I would highly recommend that you don't pick the suffering that goes along with not having a voice.
That's dreadful.
And so you might say, well, if I don't speak up, I'm safe.
It's like, yeah, you are, for the next 15 minutes.
But you've sacrificed a bit of your soul.
You might need that thing to get through life without getting all bitter and twisted and resentful.
So if you've got something to say...
Maybe even to your board.
You say it, and you don't know what's going to happen.
It might be bad, it might be good, but silence has exactly the same consequences.
And Dr.
Peterson's hiring, so when they get rid of you...
Or they're hiring to replace me.
They're not, by the way.
The university is backed off completely.
And I'm sure that was a big part because of all the public support.
I mean, I'm not trying to paint them as evil villains because they're not.
But also the students were very welcoming to me when I came back to class, which was a big deal because I was very nervous when I came back to class, like very nervous.
I didn't know what the hell was going to happen, or even if I was going to come back.
So, but...
There's at least one more question, or two questions, and then we're going to probably wrap up.
I listened to you on the Joe Rogan podcast, which is one of my favorite episodes, but you mentioned that despite it being difficult for you to say, you would not recommend that today's youth attend university in the traditional sense.
So I wanted to know what advice you would have for people who are aspiring to be clinical psychologists or want to pursue any form of further education.
Don't take any nonsense.
sense.
Read the damn classics.
You know, now in clinical psychology programs, they're reading that bloody winged Daryl Tsu, or whatever his name is, that microaggression guy.
You know, it's like, here's how you do cross-cultural counseling.
It's like, no, that's a bunch of things you don't do.
Like, I mean, that's what the books are.
Here's things that you shouldn't do if you're doing cross-cultural counseling.
That's helpful, but what are you going to do?
Read Freud, read Jung, read Adler, read Rogers, read Maslow.
These people knew what the hell they were talking about.
Read the behaviorists.
Get yourself educated with regards to neuroscience.
There's lots of great things out there to read, and if your professors are too stupid to teach you what they should teach you, then you've got to educate yourself in university anyways.
So that's what I would recommend.
And any institution is corrupt, always.
And so, you know, you're lucky.
You're lucky if you're in graduate school with one in five classes, it's really worth taking.
You know, but you can't get too cynical about that.
Things don't necessarily work all that well.
But there are great things to read.
I mean, read Jung.
That'll turn you inside out.
You know, read Nietzsche.
There's lots of great thinkers there.
And, you know, you have to read them intelligently.
People squawk about Nietzsche because he was slightly misogynistic.
But, I mean, God, he was sick.
He could hardly even see.
He could only write like one sentence at a time.
He lived alone.
He didn't get along with women.
They were always rejecting him.
It's anything to do with the women.
And he didn't know if anyone was ever going to read what he wrote.
He sold like 500 copies of Beyond Good and Evil.
It's like, so now and then he got annoyed and wrote something snippy.
It's like, Jesus, give the guy a break.
You know?
And so when you read Freud as well, you know, the stuff's dated, so you have to adjust your reading for the context.
context, but when someone comes across a misogynistic statement and says, "Oh, I'm not reading this person," all they're saying is they're too stupid to separate the wheat from the chaff or too lazy.
It's like, "Oh, I don't have to read Nietzsche." Well, that's a relief.
That's for sure.
That's a relief, man.
So I was thinking more about parents who were trying to make a decision to send their kids to university.
It's like, so much of it is corrupt.
Social work, anthropology, social psychology, education, English literature, a huge chunk of the humanity The humanities go, the universities are done, because they're the soul of the universities.
You can get technical training.
You can be trained technically in all sorts of other ways, and corporations are starting to figure this out fast.
So we lose the humanities, the universities are gone.
And we're losing them fast, because all they do is teach you identity politics.
Jesus, you can learn the rules to that game in one day, right?
Divide the world into oppressed and oppressor.
That's easy.
Man, that's a snap.
Assume the oppressors are the bad people and the oppressed are the good people.
That's easy.
Make noise about it and feel good.
That's basically that.
And, you know, don't pay any attention to your role.
So.
Just make yourself $200,000.
Very good.
Well, there's that, too.
Yeah.
Well, and the universities are in for a big shake-up because they don't know what's going to hit them with YouTube and online lectures.
They've got no idea what's coming down the pipes.
Online lectures are powerful beyond belief and someone who's going to sort out the accreditation problem in the next four or five years and cut the universities off at their knees So, it's certainly going to come within the next ten years.
My question for you is, as a training therapist and a post-modern partner, how do you think that that might affect the process of therapy?
Well, it puts you in there with all sorts of a priori axioms.
You know, one of the things...
I really like Carl Rogers.
And one of the things Rogers does is listen to him.
That's what you do as a therapist.
We'll get better.
And you have to listen without prejudice.
And I didn't mean that in the technical sense.
It's like, okay, so I'm listening to you.
It's like, I don't know what you're going to say.
And I don't know if you're right.
And I'm not going to tell you what to do because I don't know what you should do.
And that's something about being a therapist.
It's like, you do not want to tell people what to do because that's their life and you might screw it up.
So what you want to do is listen to them very, very carefully and let them unwind their story.
And most of it, they'll take care of themselves.
You know, because no one's listened to them.
And so they don't even know what they think.
Their head is full of jumbled mess of thoughts and experiences.
It's like a tangling of knots.
And maybe the person needs to talk for like three years.
To sort it all out.
And what you should do is listen to them.
From a different culture, whatever.
Like, there's going to be friction because of that.
Because you'll come at it, at least to some degree, with different assumptions.
But read the damn therapists.
Those people were smart, man.
They tell you things about...
It's like each of them gives you a different toolbox.
They're not scientific theories, exactly.
But as a clinician, you're not a scientist.
You're an engineer of the soul.
That's a better way of thinking about it, because it's like engineering.
It's an applied science.
So that makes it not a science, exactly.
You can use scientific knowledge, but you're still aiming at the good, right?
That's what you're doing as a therapist.
With the other person, you say, look, you already know that things aren't as good for you as they need to be.
We're going to work on that.
And you're here to make things better, and I'm here to help you figure out how to make things better.
Then I'll listen to you.
And we'll move towards some place that's lighter and better.
And then you have tools that you can use in that kind of analytic and listening process.
And the great psychotherapists, man, those people have their 10,000 hours, you know, and they all come at it from slightly different temperamental What I'm hearing from you is that the postmodern stance is helpful for the field of psychotherapy,
from what you're saying is to listen and that you're not giving an absolute truth to these clients.
Yeah, but the problem is that the postmodern thing works out pretty well, but they keep nesting it in Marxism.
It's like, oh yeah, but their primary identity is sex or gender or ethnicity or race.
It's like, no, sorry, we're not going there.
And it's not exactly postmodernism, because the postmodernists are misinformed about the nature of scientific theories, I think.
They don't really see them as tools, but I see them as tools.
And so you can have a diverse range of tools, and each one doesn't have to claim Epistemological or ontological priority.
But that means that you have to view those sorts of theories as tools.
That makes you a pragmatist, not a post-modernist.
All right.
And speaking of patients, I've got to go see some in an hour.
So a few things I want to wrap up.
Now, just to that point, I said this earlier today, and first of all, one of the reasons I really wanted to have Dr.
Peterson come, and first of all, Serena, thank you very much for arranging that.
She did.
She said that, you know, months ago she said she'd have me come in.
I said, yeah, sure.
And she did.
So I really appreciate A, Serena, and B, especially Dr.
I would have preferred to broadcast this widely and then have said, look, you know what, I want all the Peterson haters to come in.
I want you to have a chance to be able to actually face to face, confront what you're afraid of.
Don't be ignorant.
Don't just impose your own beliefs and your biases and everything onto what you're saying, but actually hear it, process it, come to a reality and fact-based conclusion about the things that you're trying to promote.
Because in today's society, truly, everything you've been talking about, I don't think this is hyperbole.
I think that we are going down a dangerous path.
We're seeing the consequences of it.
And I mean, you know, all my students know this.
I have been promoting this in therapy, in my classes, in my family, this idea that you need to be able to expose yourself to things that make you uncomfortable, that you're not aware of.
And again, that's kind of a ground rule of good psychotherapy.
It might be the ground rule of good psychotherapy.
That is speaking honestly.
And be honest.
Honest about yourself.
Honest about your biases, your fears, your flaws.
You can't grow without that.
So this to me was a metaphorical manifestation of that desire.
I wanted to bring you here and I really do appreciate you taking the time.
I know you've got many speaking engagements.
I do appreciate that and I'm glad that so many people had very poignant questions that you were able to address.
What are you going to do with the video?
What's the plan for that?
Being very low in conscientiousness, I hadn't thought that far ahead.
Yeah, I'll probably put it in Dropbox.
I'll definitely give you the...
Well, lots of people will watch it, so it doesn't matter.
That's the thing that's so cool about YouTube, man.
You have a stadium.
I have a stadium now every time I talk, which is weird, man.
It's very weird.
Right.
Well, we'll definitely be uploading it, and I'll send it to you, and we'll take the arrangements.
▲
Export Selection