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June 22, 2017 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

02:01:45

2017/06/15: 12 principles for a 21st century conservatism

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Time	Text
	Good evening, everyone.
	I hope everybody can hear me.
	Speakers are working fine.
	Everybody can hear?
	Listen, thank you very much for being here.
	It's lovely, wonderful to see such a...
	Large audience here in Carleton Place tonight.
	And I want to indeed thank everybody for being here.
	And I'll just check with the official timer.
	Bruce, did we get it within five minutes?
	For those who don't know, my name is Randy Hillier.
	I'm the Member of Provincial Parliament for Lanark, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington.
	And of course I represent this area at Queen's Park.
	And I trust and expect and hope that everyone will find this evening very informative, very interesting, and very enjoyable.
	I'd like to just recognize a few other people who are here this evening for tonight.
	And I see that we have Councillor Fay Campbell and Councillor Brian Dowdle from Beckwith Township in the audience this evening.
	Thank you very much.
	We also have the Deputy Reeve and Reeve, Deputy Reeve Sharon Musso and Reeve Richard Kidd from Beckwith Township here this evening.
	And last but not least, His Worship and Mayor of Carlton Place Louis Antonakis has joined us this evening as well.
	Thank you very much for being here tonight.
	I hope I didn't miss anybody.
	Did I miss somebody?
	Oh!
	Pardon me?
	The Mayor of Mississippi Mills, Sean McLaughlin, is here.
	He snuck in.
	I don't know how he got in here without me seeing you, Sean, but thanks for being here as well.
	I should also mention just a couple items before we begin this evening.
	There is washrooms outside the main doors and to the right if anybody is looking for the washrooms.
	There's also trying to keep the flashes and the recordings to a minimum.
	We do have a couple photographers here tonight.
	This evening's event is being fully recorded, video and audio, and will be published online in its entirety.
	So you don't need to do any other recording.
	It will all magically appear on the internet sometime tomorrow, I would imagine.
	And it, of course, will be free and available to everybody.
	After tonight's presentations, And I guess I should also state that this is not a partisan or political event tonight.
	We will have a question and answer period after Dr.
	Peterson has made his presentation.
	And I know many people here know much about Dr.
	Peterson.
	He is widely read and knowledgeable.
	And insightful on a great many subjects, but we would like to see the questions relevant to tonight's topic.
	So, and with that, I think I'll just start a little bit about myself.
	Before being elected, before entering politics, I, like many other people, was increasingly getting disappointed with the way government was conducting itself, with the ever-increasing government laws,
	their rules, their regulations, that, in my view, were unduly infringing on what I considered my own personal jurisdiction, my own personal responsibility.
	And also how these increasing role of government was shifting and altering society in ways that I felt uncomfortable with, that I felt were contrary to my beliefs and my values.
	And like most people, I grumbled about it, and grumbled, and spoke with other people who grumbled about things.
	But we didn't do very much about it.
	We just bore, Greenham bore the ever-increasing role of government.
	But back in 2002, very fortunately, I came across a few other fellas who had very much the same attitudes and views as myself.
	And in 2002, four of us met around a kitchen table at Merle and Ruth's Bo's home, out on the concession four of Ramsey.
	And we decided that it was time to act.
	Now none of us actually knew what that meant.
	None of us had actually ever done anything about government.
	But we knew that we needed to speak out.
	And we knew that we needed to make a difference.
	So we formed a group and we called it the Lanark Landowners Association.
	And I was asked to be the spokesperson and the president of that new association of four people.
	And of course we said, that's great.
	Now what do we do?
	Well, we decided to hold a meeting not far from here.
	Indeed, over in Beckwith Township was our first meeting of the Lanark Landowners Association.
	We went around the area.
	We put up posters on hydro poles and telephone poles.
	We put posters up in the general stores and the stores around the area.
	And we also sent a few letters to the newspapers indicating what our concerns were.
	And we wanted to see, you know, because we really had no idea If there was anybody else who thought, like we did.
	We knew there was the four of us, but we didn't know if there was any others.
	So we held this meeting, decided to give it a go.
	And surprisingly, The hall was packed in Beckwith Township that night.
	And people came.
	They shared their stories.
	They shared that they had similar thoughts, similar beliefs, similar values.
	And at the end of that night, our association of four people became an association of 90 people.
	And within the next five years, The Lanark landowners would go to include chapters from around the province and a membership of 15,000 people.
	People found a vehicle to speak out through that association.
	they found a vehicle to become involved and to make a difference.
	Excuse me.
	During those years, we held many town halls in every corner of the province.
	We provided testimony at government committee hearings.
	We argued with politicians and bureaucrats alike in many different forms.
	We had the Senate committee come out to Merle's house.
	They wanted to hear more about our stories.
	Many people, politicians and parties, asked to meet with us and we had politicians and political parties knocking on our doors seeking our support and seeking our advice.
	Now many of you will know that we didn't just confine ourselves to the gentlemanly arts of diplomacy and discussions with the Lanark landowners as well.
	On occasion, we did a take activism and our voice to different heights.
	We conducted skits and plays at farmers markets.
	We shuttered and closed down government buildings.
	We had a cattle auction on Parliament Hill.
	We held tractor rallies and closed down highways and bridges throughout the province.
	We were very fortunate that we had a great many members with a great many skills and also a lot of creativity and passion for our subjects and our demand for greater personal responsibility and less government involvement in our property.
	I learned many valuable lessons through those years.
	Many which were quite contradictory to the conventional wisdom.
	The first lesson I learned is that we have a mistaken belief that political leaders are leaders.
	It became clear to me that most politicians are followers, not leaders.
	And that people must demonstrate and show government and politicians alike that in order to change a policy, change an activity or an issue, politicians require a demonstration of public support.
	Political parties often use polling or focus groups to determine where it's safe to go.
	And when I'm speaking about politics and government, I'm leaning more to the provincial and federal side of politics as well.
	I want to make that clear.
	Municipal politics is very much, of course, it's not a party-oriented system at municipal level, and there's a great many differences at the municipal level.
	But political parties use those focus groups and polling to try to determine where it's safe for them to go.
	But in doing so, it really negates and diminishes that fundamental principle of representative democracy.
	Elected people and parties, speaking with and knowing the pulse of their communities, their constituents, their constituency, but also in helping to lead and advocate for change for the better.
	In short, democracy does not mean the government.
	It does not mean politicians, although they are both necessary ingredients.
	Representative democracy means you and me.
	It means us.
	That's what representative democracy must have for it to function properly.
	It does not include the words they or them.
	It is you and I for a representative democracy to work.
	Another lesson, and I often, often during those days with the landowners, I would be approached by people.
	People would come up to me in many venues, and invariably they would say something along this line, someone ought to do something about this.
	Always.
	They would come up to me, say, someone ought to do something.
	And that went on for quite a period of time.
	It took me a little while to catch on that when they were saying someone, they meant me.
	Or when they said someone, it meant not them.
	And I did learn that I'd listened to their suggestion and their idea.
	And when they told me then someone ought to do something, I would agree with them.
	And say, someone ought to.
	And I know where you can find that someone.
	And they would look at me with a questioning look and say, well, who?
	And I would say, look in the mirror and you will find that very someone that you're looking for.
	And until you do look in the mirror, you will never find that someone who ought to do something.
	And that was a...
	It actually worked.
	It actually got people, it motivated people to actually think about what they were saying and think about what they were doing and what they wanted to do.
	I could go on and on about the lessons that I learned The rewarding actions and activities and the successes that we enjoyed with the landowners.
	But tonight, I know there's someone who has a far broader, far deeper understanding, understanding of the importance of civic engagement, the understanding and also the Thoughts and knowledge of how to help find people to find their voice and to become influential.
	Tonight we are honored to have that individual here tonight.
	He is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.
	He is a clinical psychologist.
	He is bringing knowledge and insight of humanity to tens of thousands of people through his online activities and his free university lectures.
	And I'll tell you, I'm not one to generally watch university lectures, let alone lectures on psychology.
	But I started watching his lectures on maps of meaning.
	And I was astonished.
	The first one was like two and a half hours in length.
	And I watched the first five of them.
	And I think it was the first five of them was a, well, part of it.
	Over ten hours.
	I'm not going to get into all the details over ten hours.
	But these lectures was ten hours of breaking down In dissecting and understanding a story, the story of Pinocchio.
	Now, I found that amazing that I could watch these lectures first.
	But, you know, I know the story of Pinocchio.
	It wasn't that Interesting to me as a kid.
	And it certainly wouldn't have taken me 10 hours to describe the story to anybody else.
	But anyway, yeah, so that's just as a side.
	If you want to really watch something I find interesting.
	But I also first came across this individual years ago, I'm an avid watcher of TVO's agenda with Steve Pakin.
	Gets into a lot of provincial policy and I find Steve Pakin a very credible journalist.
	And often this fellow would be on Steve Pakin's agenda show and I would watch with interest when he was there.
	So, but in my estimation, This gentleman is one of Canada's foremost thinkers and with a very significant twist.
	He has a courage and a conviction to speak out against some of those falsehoods of conventional wisdom and political correctness.
	I know he has much to offer, a lot of wisdom, And it is my pleasure to welcome to Carlton Place and to Lanark County Dr.
	Jordan B. Peterson to join us tonight.
	Thank you.
	Everybody can hear me?
	There we go.
	Thank you, Mr.
	Hillier, for the introduction and also for the invitation.
	Not everyone will invite me places, so it's nice when an invitation shows up.
	And when I'm actually allowed to speak, that's also good.
	I have a habit of not preparing my talks until really the last minute.
	And I mean, that's not exactly true because I've been thinking about what I'm going to talk to you about tonight for a very long time.
	But I really only got the title for this talk firmly in place about half an hour ago.
	And one of the things I like to do when I'm speaking to people is to tell them what I'm thinking about.
	Not what I've already thought about, you know?
	And certainly not what I know, but what I'm thinking about.
	What I'm trying to figure out.
	and so one of the things that's happened to me over the last year somewhat surprisingly is that I've been invited to speak in front of a lot of conservative groups and a lot of them were conservative groups that were composed of young people and that was interesting you know because conservatism isn't something that's necessarily all that easy to sell to young people because they tend not to be that conservative to begin with and conservatism also tends to
	have quite a lot to do with things that you shouldn't do instead of things that you might be allowed to do and so there's a restrictive element of it that's also perhaps less attractive to young people than it might be people do tend to get more conservative as they get older as their personalities shift and so but what I saw was very interesting because I saw,
	and this was particularly true of young men, and I haven't quite puzzled that out yet, but, you know, I would talk about what was going on in the universities, and what I thought might constitute a reasonable antidote to that, and that was, not only in the universities,
	but also politically, and that was both the adoption of responsibility instead of the incredible and constant stress that's being placed on rights and also the responsibility of the citizen to speak forward what he or she believed to be true or at least to not speak what they knew to be false which is at least a good place to start and One of the things I found so remarkable was that this was actually a saleable message to young people.
	And that surprised me because, you know, you wouldn't necessarily think that you would turn a lot of lights on in a young audience by talking to people about truth and responsibility.
	I think if you went to a marketing agency and told them that that was going to be your political message to young people, they would tell you to go back and, you know, Flesh out another plan.
	Sketch out another plan.
	But maybe young people have been talked to enough about rights for maybe about the next 15 decades.
	That's what I would think.
	And so maybe there's a hunger arising among young people for something that has a little bit more respectability, let's say, and a little bit more depth than the constant emphasis on Doing whatever you want, whenever you want.
	Let's put it that way.
	The thing about that, and the thing about rights in general, the idea of rights, is that rights don't really give you much direction, right?
	They tell you what you are, in principle, allowed to do, but they don't really tell you what you should do, and it actually turns out that you need to know what you should do, because you need to do something, right?
	People are active, and our lives don't have any meaning without Something to do and something that you should do.
	It can't just be something that you want to do.
	That's too shallow.
	There's no deep meaning.
	There's no enduring.
	There's no sustaining meaning in that.
	It's just impulsiveness.
	And maybe that's okay in some sense.
	Maybe that's entertaining.
	And maybe it's impulsively exciting and fun.
	And there's some utility in that for life.
	But life is a very difficult...
	Journey, let's say, it involves a lot of suffering and it involves a lot of heavy existential weight and you need to be able to put something of value up against that so that you can withstand your life and you can stand up with some dignity and you can contribute to your community and you can feel that you're a worthwhile person.
	You know, in spite of all the things that you're doing wrong and in spite of all the problems that you have.
	And so then people need to know what they should do.
	And one of the things they should do is take responsibility.
	And another thing they should do is try to tell the truth.
	Because those two things help them live proper lives and then help society organize itself properly.
	And that's good.
	That's good for everyone.
	So...
	and so it turns out that when you tell young people that they're pretty damn happy about that and so one of the things I thought I would do tonight is talk about what conservatives might have to offer to young people as a saleable message you know, because the other thing I've learned over the last year and this was quite Revealing, let's put it that way.
	I'll start with a briefer story, just as a little intro to this.
	In the last three weeks, some of you may know that there was quite a political storm that emerged, particularly among journalists, over the issue of cultural appropriation.
	A number of journalists got in real trouble for transgressing the politically correct norms in relationship to cultural appropriation, a tremendously ill-defined and Let's call it pathological concept.
	We could start with that.
	But the thing that was so interesting, and I think I probably talked to 10 of Canada's top 20 journalists.
	That would be a reasonable estimate.
	Most of them in print, but not all of them.
	Every single one of them told me that they were censoring themselves.
	Now you think about that, man.
	That's no joke.
	In a country like this, and these people, you think, well, if anyone has power, they have power.
	It's like, well, they don't really have power.
	They have competence and influence, and that's not the same thing as power.
	And they're bloody afraid of being hung out to dry if they say the wrong thing.
	You think about where our damn country is when the ten most powerful journalists in the country are afraid to write and say what they think.
	That's not a good thing, man.
	That's not a good thing.
	I don't care what it is that they want to say or think.
	the fact that they're not only did they tell me that they were censoring themselves and that they felt that they would be hung out to dry if they said the wrong thing but they also told me that they were being censored by their editors and so you know in a country that has A great tradition,
	right, and a tradition that's much longer than this country has been around, of freedom and free speech and free press, for us to be in a situation now where our major journalists are afraid that if they misstep inappropriately in this newfound political landmine, that they're going to be done.
	That is not good, right?
	That's a bad diagnostic sign.
	Okay, well I said that story was a little intro to the other story I was going to tell you.
	And then, so, I've been fortunate enough over the last several months to meet not the majority of the people who ran for the leadership of the Federal Conservative Party, but most of them, including the people, the person who, Andrew, who recently won.
	And they all told me the same thing, which was also interesting, was that the Conservatives were afraid to be Conservative, and for exactly the same reason.
	They were afraid that if they put forward Valid conservative perspectives that they would be isolated and mobbed and taken down and and that made them censor themselves and not be willing to speak up and I thought and I told each of them when we discussed this the same thing was if you guys are afraid to talk you've already lost you might as well just pack up and go home it's done now you know as a psychologist Look,
	I gotta say, I'm not making a case for conservatism.
	I'm not here to make a political case, right?
	I'm here to make a philosophical and psychological case.
	And I think that's what I've been doing all along.
	It has political implications.
	So I'm not saying that you should be conservative, or that conservative is the only way to be, because I actually don't believe that, for a variety of reasons.
	One of the reasons is that I know that political belief is determined in large part by temperament and personality and that's very strongly biologically influenced and so conservatives tend to be lower in openness which is a trait associated with creativity and higher in conscientiousness which is a trait associated with industriousness and orderliness they tend to make good managers and administrators and lawyers they tend to make good conservative business types that's that's their forte that's their niche and that's a valid place to be and a valid
	thing to be and you know conservatives aren't so good at being entrepreneurial and they're not so good at being artistic and creative that's not their niche that's more the niche of the liberal end of the spectrum and as far as I'm concerned for the political system to function properly you need proper representation for all the temperamental types and they need to be engaged in dialogue So,
	but the thing is, is that when the conservatives are saying, well, you know, especially when they're perhaps thinking about leading the damn party, let's say, that they're worried about speaking their mind in a conservative manner, that's just not a good thing.
	That means that something's gone wrong with our political system, and seriously wrong.
	You know, and the other thing, another thing that I've noticed is, you know, when this all...
	some of you may know and some of you may not know that I made a couple of videos back September 27th I woke up one night because I couldn't sleep and I thought I usually go and write if I can't sleep because I've got something to figure out but I've been playing with YouTube videos I've been putting my lectures online since 2013 and by last April they had about a million views and so I thought wow that's That's really something, man.
	You know, like you write a book and you sell a million copies, you're one happy character.
	And I thought, a million views is a very large number of views.
	It really tuned me in to the fact that YouTube was something completely other than what I thought it was.
	But anyways, that night I thought, oh...
	I'll get up and make a video instead of writing it down.
	And this was a video about Bill C-16, which by the way, the Senate just passed.
	Right?
	Half the Conservatives voted for it.
	Despite the fact that the Justice Minister was presented with an amendment that clearly indicated that Bill C-16 would not infringe upon free speech and refused to consider the amendment.
	So, that's where we are.
	There's compelled speech.
	It's now the law in Canada.
	It isn't yet, but it's going to be very soon.
	And half the Conservatives voted for that damn bill.
	And I can tell you too, you know, people have gone after me for being, you know, anti-transgender and bigoted and phobic and all that nonsense that the left tends to hurl at people.
	It's not the case.
	I read that damn legislation.
	And I read the policies surrounding it.
	And I know perfectly well That the way it's formulated right now, it will do more harm to the people it purports to protect than good.
	That'll take about ten years to unfold, but it's so incoherent, and the principles upon which that legislation and its surrounding policies are based are so paradoxical and contradictory that they will act themselves out, because that's what happens with paradoxical beliefs, and tangle people up like them in that.
	Tangle people Up in them like mad.
	And we'll see that happen over the next decade.
	And it's partly because the people who put Bill C-16 forward, especially with regards to its surrounding policies, the ones that are detailed out on the Ontario Human Rights Commission website, don't give a damn about transgender people as far as I'm concerned.
	There's another agenda at work that's driving their entire political force forward, and the transgender types were just flavor of the month, right?
	They were poster boys for moving this post-modern agenda forward.
	And so the fact that the legislation isn't going to do them any good, do the transgendered people any good, isn't going to stop the people who put the legislation forward.
	So, anyways, I made these videos and I put them on YouTube and, well, to say they caused a storm is somewhat of an understatement.
	I mean, it's just been, I just, I don't even know what to think about.
	It's completely And absolutely surreal what's happened to me as a consequence of that.
	I mean, I don't know how many people have watched those original videos like 350,000 and I think now about 50 million people have watched videos associated with this sequence of events that I'm describing which is just 350,000 people watched The testimony that I gave before the Senate on Bill C-16, you bloody well know that the apocalypse is close when 350,000 people around the world watch a Canadian Senate hearing.
	It's like, really?
	I mean, really?
	What's going on, man?
	So anyways, you know, so you know I said well the journalists are nervous and the and the and the conservatives are nervous and and Well, then you know when I when I put myself out and made these videos Which I really didn't expect to attract much attention at all I just assumed that I was going to clarify what I was thinking a little bit, and, you know, and see what happened.
	I'm kind of a curious person.
	That'll teach me.
	But I'm kind of a curious person, and so...
	But then, you know, I also experienced firsthand what happens when you do something like that.
	Now, I got nailed, right?
	Especially for about three months, things were pretty up in the air.
	The university sent me two letters telling me that it was so funny because I made this video and I said, you know, under this new legislation, making this video, criticizing this legislation is probably illegal.
	And so then people, of course, reacted to me.
	as if I was scaremongering which by the way was the right response when you hear someone in a stable society stand up and say excuse me there's something rotten at the base here and it's affecting the manner in which the legislation that our country is producing is being rolled forth when they say that you should think that person is probably a charlatan and has something wrong with them because look the culture works pretty good the country has worked really well for a long period of time and so the logical initial response should be Yeah, you think there's a fundamental problem.
	Why shouldn't we just assume that there's a fundamental problem with you?
	And one of the ways that you determine that is you throw things at the person metaphorically and see if any of them stick, right?
	So, you know, I was a bigot and a homophobe and a transphobe and a racist.
	That one, I don't know where the hell that one came from.
	I think it was because I criticized the two, what would you call, reprehensible women who started the Black Lives Matter movement in Toronto.
	It isn't because they're black, it's because they're reprehensible.
	Black or white, man.
	If you're reprehensible, you're reprehensible.
	That's sort of the definition of not being racist, right?
	So...
	Anyways, so...
	so there were a couple of demonstrations and then the press jumped on me to some degree they didn't do too bad a job I didn't think and then the university thankfully wrote two letters saying that what I was doing was probably illegal and that it violated the Ontario Human Rights Commission's policies and probably the university's policies as well as far as they were concerned which really wasn't the case and the letters also contained a number of untruths which I detailed because I read them on YouTube too which is actually quite helpful and handy that you know if someone writes
	me a letter that purports to lay out a set of facts, then I can just read it.
	I don't even have to comment on it.
	I can read it and let people make up their own minds, which they did.
	So, well, and so my job was in doubt.
	But the fact that the university went after me actually turned out to be extremely helpful, right?
	Because I had said, look, under the provisions of this new legislation, and legislation like this that's already in place in Canada, What I am doing criticizing this bill is probably illegal.
	And everyone said, no, you're crazy.
	You know, there's something wrong with you.
	You're a scaremonger and a rabble rouser and all of that.
	And then the university wrote a letter saying, what you did violated the university policy and probably the Ontario Human Rights Commission's policies and the law.
	And I thought, great!
	You had your lawyers take a look at it.
	I couldn't have asked for a more stronger statement.
	A stronger statement in support of what I had said especially because it certainly wasn't written in support of what I'd said so and then the journalists started to pay attention to what I had actually looked at and they read it and they thought oh hey look at that that Ontario Human Rights Commission website policy mess is actually quite a nest of spiders just like he said and so it turns out that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark and that's just not so good and so like this is a good country man that's why people want to come here it's one of the best countries in the world maybe it's
	The best country in the world.
	I mean, we don't want to get too high on our horse about that, and God, aren't we fortunate?
	But it's a pretty good place, you know?
	But it's not what it used to be.
	And the people who are running it are not who you think they are.
	So, for example, provincially, let's take it, the title that the people who follow Kathleen Wynne have is liberal.
	They are not liberals.
	They are radicals and they're radicals of a sort.
	I used to work for the NDP when I was a kid back in the 70s and the people who are influential in Kathleen Wynne's government and who are making the sort of policies that I regard as particularly reprehensible are the kind of radical leftists That the NDP working class socialists that I knew in the 1970s would have regarded as the unacceptable fringe of the socialist party.
	And they have now defined themselves as centrist liberals.
	They are not.
	And what they're doing is not centrist and it's not liberal.
	And so that's another thing for the conservative party to start thinking about because you have a whole bunch of liberals you could go out there and capture because they've been abandoned by their own party.
	and that's for sure and it's something that should be taken advantage of because well, we need some conservatives and we need some socialists and maybe we need some liberals and the liberals and the conservatives are getting damn scarce among the people who actually make policy not only at the provincial and federal level but also at the top end of mid-level administrations everywhere as well and that's not accidental it's partly because unbeknownst to the majority of society for the last 30 years the damn universities have been doing nothing but training and
	targeted training radical leftist activists and if you don't believe that you just go on the web and look up like 10 women's studies programs and read what they say.
	You don't have to listen to me.
	I don't want you to believe me.
	You just go out there and find it for yourself.
	And there, the activism is devoted to a certain key set of ends.
	And one of them, for example, here's a word to remember.
	Equity.
	Okay.
	That's replaced equality of opportunity.
	It's like, okay, equality of opportunity.
	That's a tough one to bring about.
	You know, you need a fair bit of government intervention to bring about equality of opportunity.
	Maybe it's a noble goal.
	It's a tough one to attain.
	But equity.
	Equity means equality of outcome and you're seeing equity everywhere and that's what it means and so the people who are pushing this radical agenda are pushing things that are inimical to our traditions and practices of governance.
	You know, the Ontario social justice tribunals, because we have social justice tribunals in Ontario, they don't even deign now to hide the damn name.
	The social justice tribunals are allowed to suspend standard jurisprudential practice in the pursuit of their aims.
	It says that right in their policies.
	Well, you think about that.
	Really?
	That's written in your policies?
	You can just dispense with classic jurisprudential tradition?
	So what does that mean?
	It means you can do any damn thing you want.
	And so those are the sorts of, I would say, subversive and fifth column-like organizations that are sprouting up in our society everywhere.
	It's not a good thing.
	And so, look.
	When someone stands up and says there's something wrong, the first thing you should ask is, what makes...
	Why should I assume that you know what the hell you're talking about?
	That's a good question.
	Well...
	You investigate it, and you find out whether or not the person does know what they're talking about.
	And on the issue that I'm describing to you tonight, as far as I can tell, I know what I'm talking about.
	Now, people have been on my case about this in a very serious way for quite a long time.
	And so far, they haven't made any inroads into my arguments.
	And most of the time, they're too damn cowardly to debate me, which is also something that's really interesting, because I put out public calls constantly.
	If you want to debate about gender and sex, you just bring it on.
	Because that actually happens to be an area of expertise for me, and I know the damn literature.
	And if you want to come out and make your case that all the differences between men and women are socially Constructed, culturally constructed, or that they're just a personal whim, which, by the way, is exactly what's written into the policies surrounding Bill C-16, then you come out and make that case publicly and see how well it stands up.
	And I know how well it'll stand up.
	Because that kind of thinking was defeated in the scientific realm back in the 1960s in the universities.
	And what that meant was that the radicals who wanted to keep promoting precisely that kind of view just circumvented the entire scientific process and started to implement their demands for their particular viewpoint from a practical policy, administrative and legislative perspective, knowing full well that they had lost 100% on the empirical and the scientific front.
	And now what they do instead is criticize the scientific endeavor itself because it failed to produce the results that they assumed would be the case.
	So, there's plenty that's rotten in the state of Denmark.
	And I'm embarrassed to state that a tremendous amount of that stems from the universities.
	And they're in bad shape.
	Do not send your children to the humanities.
	Right?
	They're corrupt.
	They won't learn to think because the postmodernists don't believe in thinking.
	They won't learn logic because the post-modernists believe that logic is one of the tools that the oppressive patriarchy uses to sustain its oppressive patriarchy.
	Oppressive, patriarchal nature.
	They won't learn to write.
	Well, that's because teaching people to write takes a tremendous amount of effort, and perhaps they're not so much interested in teaching people to formulate their own thoughts precisely and carefully as they are interested in producing cult-like clones to go out and do their activist work, which is precisely what they state on their website.
	So, you know, things are not so pretty.
	And it's very embarrassing, as a member of the academy, to come before a group of public citizens and say, you've been betrayed by your institutions of higher learning.
	It's sad.
	It's sad.
	And it's not good.
	And you know, you think, well, it's just the university.
	It's just an ivory tower.
	It's like, think again, man.
	What happens in the universities happens everywhere five years later.
	So, it's no mere ivory tower issue.
	So, okay, so...
	A couple of weeks ago, a couple of months ago, I did this lecture in Vancouver called a left-wing case for free speech because you can actually make a left-wing case for free speech pretty easily, right?
	It's like, obviously some people have more influence and authority than others and just as obviously it's harder for the people with less influence and authority to make their case known So clearly they need to be able to make their case.
	So that's the left-wing case for free speech.
	It's fairly straightforward.
	I thought it needed to be made because, especially on the radical left, people seem to have forgotten that free speech was actually their most, what, welcome friend, and enabled them to do whatever good things they did manage to do over the last hundred years, but I made a left-wing case, and so that was easy and reasonably entertaining, and you can watch that on YouTube if you want.
	And so tonight what I thought I'd do, as a counterpart to that, is lay out what I believe might be some tenets for a viable 21st century conservatism.
	And these are ideas that I'm playing with, so I'm gonna...
	I wrote down about 12 of them.
	I don't know if we'll get through all of them, but we can start with a few.
	And this is what the Conservatives could be selling to the public.
	Now, what seems to me to be happening instead at the moment is, as Kathleen Wynne flames out, not nearly fast enough in my opinion, The attitude among conservatives at the provincial party seems to be something, well, let's just go, like, go, let's go cluster in a corner and not do anything too stupid because maybe she'll burn herself out so badly that we'll just win the next election and we won't have to, you know, do anything that will put us at risk.
	And I'm not being cynical about that.
	I can understand The utility of that policy, although I think it's a bad policy.
	And I think it's a bad policy because there are some things that seriously need to be said about Kathleen Wynne and her government.
	And I can tell you one noble aim for the provincial conservatives for the next election would be to Decimate the provincial Liberals.
	Not one should be left.
	What's her popularity at right now?
	Under 10%?
	If she had a shred of integrity, she would have already resigned.
	So, anyways, there's a goal for the Conservatives.
	No Liberals sitting after the 2018 election.
	That would send a message to the social justice warrior types.
	It would also send a message to the centrists, who should actually be occupying the positions of power in the Liberal Party, that if you allow yourself to be taken over by a radical fringe, you're going to get decimated at the polls.
	So, you know, that might be an exciting message to sell young people.
	Get out there.
	Knock on some doors.
	See if you can take the social justice warriors out at the top before they do more damage than they've already done.
	She's got another year to do plenty of damage, and you can be sure that she's going to do plenty more damage in that year.
	So, okay, what else?
	Here's some things you might think about if you're a conservative.
	These things have become...
	What would you say?
	People are afraid to say them.
	Here's the first one.
	The fundamental assumptions of Western civilization are valid.
	How about that?
	You know, it's not...
	You think it's an accident?
	Oh, here's how you find out, okay?
	Which countries do people want to move away from?
	Hey, not ours!
	Which countries do people want to move to?
	Ours!
	Guess what?
	They work better!
	And it's not because we went around the world stealing everything we could get our hands on.
	It's because we got certain fundamental assumptions right Thank God for that, after thousands and thousands of years of trying.
	And because of that, we've managed to establish a set of civilizations that are shining lights in the world.
	You know, now, you can be pretty damn filthy and still be a shining light in this world, right?
	Because if you look around the world at the state of governance in most places, it's like the most pathological, corrupt and vicious thugs rule.
	And to stand out as an illuminated light against that background isn't so difficult.
	But nonetheless, you know, we're as good as it's got.
	And unless we can come up with something better, we should be very careful about messing around with that.
	So why don't we start with the assumption that we're doing something right.
	One of the things we're doing right, for example, is that we actually value the individual, right?
	The individual has intrinsic value in Western societies.
	Do you know how long it took people to formulate that as an idea?
	And how unlikely that idea is that poor you, you know, useless, powerless you, with all your damn faults, you're actually worth something.
	You're worth something to the point that the law has to respect you.
	God, we don't want to abandon that for some half-witted collectivism which we're doing as rapidly as possible because one of the things that characterizes the radical left types is they don't give a damn about you as an individual or about individuals at all.
	You're black or you're white or you're Latino or you're transsexual or you're homosexual or whatever.
	You're a group.
	You're a member of a group.
	And the only thing that matters is the group.
	Well, I can tell you If the only thing that matters is the group, you bloody well don't matter very much.
	And then you've got to ask yourself just exactly what sort of people are trying to set things up so it is that the individual doesn't matter very much.
	Well, it's the sort of people to whom the individual doesn't matter very much.
	And I might suggest that you don't elect them.
	And that when they attempt to take power that you do everything you can to stop them.
	Okay, so that's assumption number one.
	Assumption number two.
	Peaceful social being is preferable to isolation and to war.
	In consequence, it justly and rightly demands some sacrifice of individual impulse and idiosyncrasy.
	Okay, so, you want to live alone in the bush?
	You're going to starve to death and be eaten by black flies.
	It's not a good solution.
	Okay, so you have to cooperate with other people, and that means you can't get to be your whimsical self 100% of the time.
	It means that most of you has to be sacrificed so that you can be approximately like everyone else.
	Now, that's a real sacrifice, right?
	It might even be a sacrifice of some of the unique qualities that everyone needs from you.
	Socialization costs.
	But the advantage of it is, well, we get to exist.
	Look, we can all sit together in this hall, and no one has their hands around each other's throats.
	And we're talking about serious things.
	Okay, man, that's worth something.
	And what it's worth, in part, is you don't get to be whatever spectacularly colored creature you want to be all the time.
	You have to do what you can to be normal and predictable and it's not like normal and predictable is the highest virtue because it's not and being more than normal and being unique and creative and contributing in that way is extraordinarily important but the fundamental point is that social being requires the sacrifice of a certain amount of individual idiosyncrasy and that's a fundamentally conservative claim it's like You should do what everyone else does,
	unless you have a really good reason to vary.
	It's a good rule.
	It's like, you do what people have done throughout time.
	You grow up, you find a partner, you establish a stable relationship, you get a job, you make yourself useful, you have some children, you do something productive and interesting with your spare time, and you try to act like a respectable human being.
	That's what you do.
	That's a conservative ethos.
	And if you're If you have something spectacular about you that needs to be revealed to the world, then break some rules, man.
	Go right ahead.
	I'm dead serious about that.
	But most of the time you don't.
	And even if you happen to be a special person, and you might be, 90% of you still isn't special.
	So most of the time you're still going to be following the rules.
	And the rules aren't there to oppress.
	They're there to keep us at...
	They're there to keep us away from each other's throats.
	Because human beings are very warlike.
	And we're very...
	Competitive and we're very aggressive and if we are fortunate enough to have woven together a social fabric that basically renders us peaceful and cooperative we should try disrupting that at our great peril because The general rule for human existence throughout the centuries has been turmoil and war.
	And we don't have that here.
	And so thank God for that.
	And it's worth a bit of a sacrifice.
	Next.
	Equality.
	Equity.
	Equity.
	That's worse, right?
	Equity means Equality of outcome.
	It means that every single organization has 50% women and 50% men.
	Doesn't matter whether the men and women differ in their intrinsic preferences, which, by the way, they do.
	The scientific literature on that is completely clear.
	It was established by the early 90s.
	It was established in the Scandinavian countries, where they've done most to flatten out the socio-economic differential say between men and women didn't get rid of the differences between men and women in fact they became exaggerated the biggest personality differences in the world between men and women are in Scandinavia just as the biggest differences in interest between men and women are in Scandinavia Because when you get rid of the sociocultural differences between men and women, the biological differences don't disappear.
	They maximize.
	How else could it be?
	And as I said, the literature on that is clear, and the way that the postmodernist radicals react to that is by criticizing the scientific method itself.
	on their computers, which only work of course because the scientific method actually works.
	So you hear the egalitarian clarion call everywhere.
	Everything should be equal.
	Everything should be equally distributed.
	We should strive for equity.
	It's like, wrong!
	Especially if you're a conservative.
	Wrong!
	What we want are just hierarchies of competence.
	Not everyone's a neurosurgeon.
	You know, if your father has a brain tumor, you probably want a hierarchy of competence for neurosurgeons, so you can pick the one that's the best, so that he might not die.
	That's what a hierarchy of competence is for.
	For the postmodernists, there's no hierarchy that isn't based on power.
	Well, because they think the world runs on power.
	And that's why they're willing to use power to get what they want.
	Because it's the only thing they believe in.
	But a valid hierarchy of competence.
	It's, God, we need those things, man.
	We need the best plumbers.
	We need the best contractors.
	We need the best...
	We need the best carpenters.
	We need the best lecturers.
	There has to be a hierarchy of quality, not only so that we know who the best are and can reward them properly, but so that we can reward them so they keep being the best.
	It's like, you know, if you have a great educator, if you have a great leader, If you have a great thinker, you want to reward them so they keep thinking and they keep educating so they can tell you something.
	It's not a reward for their intrinsic being.
	It's a calculated move on your part to suck everything out of them that's valuable as fast as you can.
	That's what a hierarchy of competence is for.
	And the idea that hierarchies of competence don't exist is it's so cynical.
	It's such a pathologically cynical idea.
	And it's actually quite patently untrue because here's an interesting tidbit from the psychological literature.
	Let's say you want to determine what the best predictors are for lifetime success in a Western society.
	Well, what would you hope for?
	How about intelligence?
	There would be a good one.
	Let's hope the smart people occupy more positions of complexity.
	Right?
	Because they're smarter!
	Would you want it any other way?
	Okay, and that's great.
	The number one predictor of accomplishment in Western societies is intelligence.
	So that means the system works.
	What's the number two predictor?
	Conscientiousness.
	Well, what's that?
	It's a trait marker for hard work.
	So who gets ahead?
	Smart people who work hard.
	Now, that doesn't account for every bit of the difference between people in terms of their hierarchical structure, because hierarchies aren't perfect.
	They're corrupt.
	People get to the top sometimes because they're psychopathic, although, believe me, a hell of a lot less than you think.
	Because a psychopath has to keep moving from place to place, because once he reveals himself as deceitful and untrustworthy, he has to go find new suckers to fleece.
	So the idea that, you know, there's no distinction between a CEO and a psychopath, it's like, that's only made by someone who knows nothing about psychopaths, B knows nothing about CEOs and C has something fundamental against the entire capitalist structure because it's simply not true.
	Corrupt, sometimes, greedy, sometimes, short-sighted, sometimes running companies that are doing their best to auger themselves into the ground and so, you know, it's bad people running a dying organization.
	But generally speaking, it's not the case.
	Our hierarchies of competence are reasonably functional.
	And not only are they functional, they're valuable.
	We need to know who the competent people are, and we need to reward them.
	And even more importantly, we need to tell young people, hey, there's some hierarchies of competence out there.
	Like, a thousand of them.
	Go be a plumber, man.
	But be a good one, you know?
	Be an honest one.
	Be...
	I had a plumber once, you know?
	It was the night before we were putting drywall in our house.
	We were redoing our house.
	He had put in all the plastic piping, you know.
	And I was going to test the joints.
	They're supposed to be glued together with this pipe glue, right?
	And I told him I had to test the joints.
	And he said, Well, you don't have to test my joints.
	They never leak.
	And I thought, Yeah!
	That's okay.
	How about if I test them?
	So I went up on the third floor and filled the pipes with water capping them in the basement like you're supposed to and like half an hour later I had two inches of water in the basement there were 30 leaking joints that was the night before the drywallers were supposed to show up so well so he wasn't particularly competent that's the point of that story but even more so he had put a bunch of the plastic pipe outside Where the drywall would be.
	So it would have been sticking through the wall.
	So I spent a frenetic night, you know, sawing through plastic pipe and re-gluing joints so that my...
	well, so that the drywallers could come in.
	What's the point?
	If you're going to be a plumber, man, be a good plumber!
	Because otherwise all you do is go out there and cause trouble.
	We don't need people to cause more trouble.
	We need people to solve problems.
	You know, and so you can be a tradesman, and you can make a lot of money as a tradesperson.
	It's a bloody, reliable, honourable, forthright, productive way of making a living.
	And there is a hell of a lot of difference between a working man who knows what he's doing and one who doesn't, both in terms of skill and ethics, right?
	And you work with someone who knows what they're doing, it's a bloody pleasure.
	They tell you what they're going to do, they tell you how much it will cost, they go and do it, it works, and you pay them.
	Perfect.
	Everyone's happy.
	And that's what happens when you have genuine hierarchies of competence.
	And so you listen to these panderers of egalitarianism and equity, and they fail to recognize completely that there are differences in rank between people.
	It's not such a terrible thing, man.
	Maybe you wouldn't be a great lawyer.
	Like, it's certainly possible.
	Most people aren't.
	But that doesn't mean there isn't something you could be great at.
	There's lots of hierarchies to attempt to climb, and if you fail in one, Go try in another!
	But the point is, you're still trying to aim for the top, and what the hell are you gonna do if you don't try to aim for the top?
	You know?
	Flap about uselessly and whine about your life?
	It's not helpful!
	It'll just make you miserable.
	You're not reliable to anyone.
	You can't help out in a crisis.
	It's like, so you tell young people, and this is another message for conservatives, like, I don't care what you're going to do, but go out there and make something of yourself for God's sake.
	Be an honest person and work and get to the top of whatever it is that you want to get to the top of.
	You know, and stand up for yourself like a respectable human being and be a bit of a light on the world instead of a blight.
	You know?
	And you can tell young people that and they haven't been told that by anyone now.
	And so the young men are so hungry for that that it's painful to watch.
	They're so relieved when someone finally comes up and says, hey, you know, You get your act together a bit, discipline yourself, see if you can learn to tell the truth, concentrate on something for a year or two, you could be a bloody world-beater!
	They think, really?
	That's possible?
	Wow, that would be interesting!
	That might make life worth living!
	It's like, yeah, it might!
	So why don't you go do it?
	That's what the damn universities were supposed to be teaching people, and they've forgotten that.
	I went to Harvard a month ago, a month and a half, I used to teach there.
	And I talked to a bunch of students, you know, and I told them, it's not easy to get into Harvard, you know?
	Like, you're a valedictorian, if you're at Harvard.
	And not only are you a valedictorian, you're way better than most people at at least two other things, or you don't get in.
	And so, like, it's, I don't know what the acceptance rate is, like 5%, and believe me, not everybody applies, so it's a very selective school.
	And so why am I saying that?
	It's like, These are high-quality kids.
	So I told them what I just told you.
	It's like, here you are at Harvard.
	It's like, get yourself educated, man.
	Read some books.
	Learn to talk.
	Learn to think.
	Make yourself into something.
	Get the hell out there and make the world that put you here happy that you were put there in that great institution.
	You know...
	And they came up to me afterwards and said, God, I wish someone would have told us that when we were in our first year.
	It's like, Jesus, why didn't someone tell them that?
	For God's sake, it's supposed to be the greatest university in the world.
	Is it so difficult to figure that out?
	Well, it is if that isn't what you want to have happen in the university.
	You want to make cringing milk sops who whine about being victims while they're going to Ivy League institutions.
	Jesus, it's pathetic.
	There's an old idea from Carl Jung.
	I really like this idea.
	It's a rough one, man.
	It's like a psychotherapeutic scalpel.
	Let's say someone's doing something to you you don't understand.
	It's producing nothing but misery as an outcome.
	You think, what the hell is your motivation?
	They won't tell you.
	Maybe they don't know.
	So Carl Jung's advice was, look at the outcome.
	And infer the motivation.
	Okay, so you produce a generation of students privileged beyond belief in comparison to the rest of, like, struggling humanity in all of history.
	You put them in Ivy League schools and they come out thinking that they're members of an oppressed group and victims.
	It's like, well, why would you, why would anyone, why would that happen?
	And the answer is, well, that's what the people who taught them wanted to turn them into.
	And then you might think, well, did they do that because they cared for them?
	It seems bloody unlikely to me.
	You take this great raw material, right?
	I mean, it's taken a lot of work to make an institution like the University of Toronto or like Harvard.
	We've been working on that for thousands of years.
	And you invite people in, you think, God, we selected you so carefully because we think you could be a world-beater.
	And then what we do is, we don't teach you how to think, we don't teach you how to speak, we don't get you to read great books, and we convince you that you're a victim and that your culture is corrupt.
	It's like, great!
	Well, those people are no friends of those institutions, I can tell you that, and they're even less friends of those students.
	So hierarchies of competence are desirable, and they should be promoted.
	So none of this idiot, egalitarian equity.
	It's not good for anyone.
	First of all, it's impossible.
	Second, it would be murderous to impose.
	But third, even if it succeeded, It would fail.
	As fast as it succeeded, that would be how fast it would fail.
	Why would you strive for anything if there was no up to strive for?
	If everything's flat and equal, well, when you're starving or dying, then everyone's equal.
	And believe me, the egalitarian totalitarians who dominated the 20th century knew perfectly well how to make people equal.
	And they made them equal in gulag work camps and in starvation.
	And I'm sure we could attain that if we wanted to.
	So, alright.
	Next.
	Borders are reasonable!
	how about that the law is the border that stops someone from stealing your laptop top.
	And if it's an Apple laptop, well, it's the sort of laptop that a social justice warrior would carry.
	And then the social justice warrior is going to be very irritated if you happen to purloin their laptop.
	And then you might point out to them, you know, it's a border that protects you from having that thing taken.
	And they say, well, the border should be open.
	It's okay, man, no problem.
	You hand over that laptop right now.
	And everything else you own, too.
	If you don't like borders, and you can get rid of the damn walls in your house, and you don't need doors on your bedroom either, and we can keep an eye on you whenever we want, And so much for borders.
	One of the things that really differs between liberals and conservatives, between the left and the right, The right likes tight borders between things.
	It's part of being conscientious.
	At every level.
	Conceptually, sexually, familially, provincially, nationally.
	The right says, look, let's keep the borders between things pretty distinct.
	And the left says, yeah, maybe not because some of those borders are in the wrong place and a little bit more free flow of information wouldn't be a bad thing.
	And the thing is, they're right, but so are the conservatives.
	And that's why you have to talk.
	It's like, well, we've got some borders.
	That's a good thing.
	Maybe some of them need to be moved around a little bit.
	And that's what the political dialogue is for.
	But that doesn't mean that borders themselves are a bad idea.
	They're a great idea.
	Because without borders, everything mashes into the same untenable state of undifferentiated chaos.
	And you can't live in that.
	And so the people who are trying to tear down the borders conceptually, politically, and practically, what they want is the chaos that that would bring.
	They either want that or they're too foolish to know that their pursuits will produce that.
	So let's be a little bit clear that if you stand up and say, yeah, borders, they're okay.
	They've got their problems, but they're okay.
	That doesn't make you...
	A bigot beyond redemption.
	It just makes you someone with some sense.
	And it's actually okay to be someone with some sense.
	Limits on immigration are also reasonable.
	Well, we need to figure out what those limits are.
	And that's what the bloody political dialogue is for.
	But the fact that it should be limited to some degree is also reasonable.
	Otherwise, why not just open the borders and let everybody come in?
	Well, the reason you don't do that is because...
	A complex system cannot tolerate extensive transformation over too short a period of time.
	Now, you want immigrants to come in, especially if they're the sorts of immigrants who are likely to contribute properly to the success of your polity, and lots of immigrants do that.
	I mean, I think the vast majority, for example, of entrepreneurs in the United States come from the Indian subcontinent, so great, you know?
	Bring them over.
	They're highly educated.
	They're extraordinarily productive.
	They make lots of new businesses.
	And then they pump money like mad back in India.
	Good deal!
	But that doesn't mean that we have a our arms are open to everyone immigration policy because it's complete rubbish.
	All that means is you're not thinking about it.
	So here's a coda to that for conservatives.
	Here's something.
	I've been thinking about this a lot lately.
	It should not be assumed that citizens of societies that have not evolved functional individual rights predicated polities will hold values in keeping with such polities.
	So we could say, look, There are a lot of countries in the world that are not governed well.
	The vast majority of them, right?
	And they've been not governed well forever.
	And to me, that means that there's something wrong with the values that are held collectively by the people who've established those polities.
	Well, you shouldn't be naive and assume that merely because you move them to a new country, they're going to let their innate democratic longings flourish.
	It doesn't work that way.
	So if you stand up and say, "Look, you know, let's be a little cautious." Let's make sure that we don't transform our society so rapidly that we lose what we have.
	Let's be careful about that.
	That doesn't mean that you're a morally reprehensible demon.
	It just means that you're conservative.
	And it's a reasonable position to hold.
	So there's no sense in apologizing for it.
	Now that doesn't mean you get to, like...
	Hide your bigotry under a mask of moral virtue, you know?
	The discrimination issue is quite clear as far as I'm concerned, so that's associated with bigotry.
	If you have two people who are applying for a job, you should pick the one that's most qualified and not pay any attention to any of the other attributes of the person that have nothing to do with the job.
	Okay!
	Right.
	I think, basically, I think we figured that out in about 1965.
	Now, we're not doing it perfectly, you know, but it's not that much later than 1965, and our society, particularly in Canada, is pretty damn open.
	You can come in here, and if you work hard, and if you're fortunate, you don't get sick, and God smiles on you, so to speak, you can be successful.
	There's still prejudice, unreasonable prejudice and discrimination, but our society is not, as the Radical egalitarian equity promoters have it.
	Structurally racist, bigoted and misogynistic.
	No!
	Not only that, just so you know, there is a review, there is a recent review published, and I mean recent, 2017, looking at that damn literature on unconscious bias.
	And I knew the literature to begin with.
	There is no evidence that unconscious bias can be measured properly, Not reliably.
	There's also no evidence whatsoever that if you do measure it, and you can't very well, that it does any better job of predicting actual, say, bias and prejudice than just tests of attitude.
	So the notion that our culture is somehow structurally misogynistic and racist, and the reason for that is because of the unconscious bias of the monsters who are running it is Well, maybe it's not wrong, but I can tell you one thing about it.
	It is not a scientifically justifiable proposition, and that's what it's being passed off as.
	And I place that firmly at the feet of the social psychologists, which social psychology happens to be a fairly corrupt discipline, by the way, and the people who invented the implicit association test, which measures unconscious bias, because they have not come out publicly to the degree that they should have, and said, our test Which was for experimental purposes, is being misused politically.
	You know, your damn judges now, because of federal fiat, have to undergo mandatory unconscious bias retraining before they can sit on the bench.
	And so you don't think that's political re-education.
	It's because you're not paying attention.
	And there's zero evidence that it does what it's supposed to.
	And I would also recommend to all of you, if you happen to be in a workplace that introduces diversity training or unconscious bias training as a mandatory Requirement?
	You tell them in no uncertain terms that you are not participating in a process that deems you bigoted and misogynistic without evidence of that being the case.
	And if you trot off to the training, then you've just agreed that that's who you are.
	And believe me, once you've agreed to that man, you'll be agreeing to a bunch of things you don't want to agree soon afterwards.
	So it's time just to put a stop to that.
	Enough of that.
	None of that unconscious bias retraining.
	especially not the mandatory type.
	People should be paid so that they are able and willing to perform socially useful and desirable duties.
	Okay, so, the radical leftists, they react to me this way.
	They say, well, you hold a position of privilege and power.
	And I think, first, you don't know a goddamn thing about me, and you have no idea how I got to my position of privilege and power.
	And it was no birthright, I can tell you that.
	I was a small, like, Thick-glassed, intellectual, non...
	What do you call that?
	Athletic child.
	I was a year younger than my peers.
	I suffered plenty of...
	What would you say?
	Trouble for my loud mouth and my intellect when I was growing up, you know?
	I had my struggles.
	I'm not complaining about it.
	The point is, is that...
	You can't attribute privilege to a class of people.
	You know, and you can't attribute power to people who happen to occupy a position of competence and authority either.
	There's some possibility that they occupy that because they worked hard and were fortunate, let's not forget about that, and had some good social support and didn't have some horrible disease, thank God.
	But you can't just...
	Make the case that the position is there as a reward.
	It's not there as a reward at all.
	It's there as a consequence of the person offering something valuable to those who want to pay for it.
	And the reason you pay for them isn't to reward them.
	It isn't so that you give them a pat on the back and say, well, you're a good person and, you know, you deserve this position.
	It's because you're saying to them, produce.
	We find what you're producing of value.
	And so we're going to give you what you need in order to be motivated to keep doing it.
	But it's not because we like you.
	It's not because we respect your rights.
	It has nothing to do with equity.
	It's we're trying to get every goddamn thing we can from you as fast as possible.
	And we're going to pay you to do it.
	And so people deserve their damn pay.
	And the reason they deserve it isn't because it's a reward.
	It's because that's how you get productive people to do things that are difficult and time-consuming and that perhaps they wouldn't do on their own accord.
	To continue doing them so you can benefit from it.
	So the whole notion that, you know, we're awarding positions of privilege to oppressive patriarchal types, it's like, we just have to get rid of that.
	Enough of that.
	That's nonsense.
	It's absolute nonsense.
	And the other thing, too, is, you know, it's only been 30, 40 years, 50 years.
	Since women had reliable birth control, right?
	And were able to enter the workforce en masse.
	I'll tell you, man, we've produced a cultural revolution in like 50 years.
	Women are everywhere.
	It's like how bloody fast do you expect something like that to go?
	And what makes you think that pushing it really hard is going to make it go any better?
	I mean, as far as I can tell, we managed that transition about as well as we possibly could have.
	We're still sorting out the details.
	But the fact that, you know, this is coming very rapidly down the pipes, the fact that half of our corporate board members aren't women is not indicative of the fact that we live in an unconsciously biased, misogynistic, patriarchal society.
	Sorry.
	Wrong.
	Not correct.
	And so we shouldn't be allowing, and this is happening very, very rapidly.
	You can be sure Kathleen Wynne is going to be putting this in his policy as rapidly as she possibly can.
	These equity demands to ensure that there's proportional representation of every gender, every sex, every race, every ethnicity, at every level of every organization.
	It's like, really?
	We're going to do that by governmental fiat?
	It's like, that's not a society I want to live in, I tell you.
	I'm quite certain that if you lived in that society for any length of time, you'd learn very rapidly that it isn't a society that you'd want to be part of either.
	Citizens have the inalienable right to benefit from the results of their own honest labor.
	That's a good one.
	Yes.
	That's a conservative truism.
	You know?
	Why?
	Well, it isn't because you're good-hearted and you want them to have money.
	It's because...
	They'll work if you let them benefit from the work, and you want them to work, because if they work, then they do things that you need.
	It's as simple as that.
	It's self-interest, and it's the right kind of self-interest.
	So, if you work hard, it's like, great, have your money!
	You know, and you hear people all the time talking about how corrupt our society is, and how The 1%, you know, occupies this pinnacle position.
	You know, the 1% turns over pretty damn fast, just so you know it.
	So you have about a 10% chance of spending at least one year in the top 1% chance during your life.
	I think that's right.
	I think it's 10%.
	It might be higher than that.
	But it's fast.
	The 1% is stable as a phenomena, but it turns over very rapidly in terms of who occupies it.
	And it's the same in every society.
	The wealth is always distributed inequitably.
	It's a natural law.
	You can look it up.
	It was discovered by a guy named Wilfred Pareto back in the late 1800s.
	Goods tend to distribute themselves inequitably.
	It can be a problem.
	But it doesn't mean that there's something fundamentally corrupt about the social structure that's driving it in that direction.
	Like, you don't want Some filthy rich geniuses lying around?
	Like, maybe you do.
	I mean, look at what Elon Musk is doing, for God's sake.
	Maybe he should have ten times as much money as he has.
	He's gonna launch a rocket every five days to Mars in the next ten years.
	Right?
	He wants to wipe out fossil fuel cars.
	And he might do it.
	He wants to revolutionize the transportation system.
	And he might do it.
	He wants to put us on the damn solar grid with his new batteries, and he might do it.
	It's like, oh no, he has a couple of billion dollars.
	Well, God only knows what he's going to produce with that.
	It's like, so, obviously there's going to be some corrupt, there's going to be some corrupt rich Plutocrats who do nothing but smoke cigars and snort cocaine, they're not going to live very long anyways.
	But there's lots of people out there who have the money they have because they would really like to do interesting and creative things with it, not because they're interested in gathering more, you know, paper money to stuff in their mattress and to feel the smooth delight of gold coins between their fingers before they go to bed.
	Like, what kind of attitude is that towards people who've made their fortune?
	You know, you think that about Steve Jobs?
	You think that about Bill Gates?
	I mean, good God!
	I don't know how...
	Those people made a lot of money, but man!
	Thank God they were around, you know?
	They've given us some tools that are just absolutely unbelievable!
	So, you know, maybe we could leave the jealousy of the successful behind for a while and notice now and then that some of the people who got to where they are actually deserve to get to where they are and we should be thankful that they exist.
	That would be nice.
	A little gratitude.
	And that's a good conservative value too.
	It is more noble to teach young people about responsibilities than about rights.
	That's a good conservative message.
	It's like you have a son, you know, or you have a daughter, and you say, bloody well, grow up, stand on your own two feet, make something of yourself.
	Right?
	So that I can be proud of you when you come over.
	And so that maybe you're useful in a crisis.
	It's like, pick up your damn load, and shoulder it, and do something useful.
	And forget about your damn rights for a while.
	You can think about what it is that you should be doing to benefit yourself and your family and society.
	And you'll find some purpose in your life because of that.
	And so, well, that's a counterposition to the perpetrators of the endless rights Buffet, right?
	Well, as long as we give you enough rights, you're going to be what?
	Free?
	You're going to be happy?
	It's like, yeah, sure.
	You'll drown in a sea of chaos.
	And that's what's happening to people now, too.
	So, and that's why young people are so hungry to have someone talk to them about responsibilities.
	Here's another one.
	Radical change should be viewed with suspicion.
	Particularly in a time of radical change.
	Okay.
	There's never been a time in the history of the world where things are changing as fast as they are now.
	And not only are they changing fast, the rate at which they're changing is increasing.
	Like, we're moving fast forward at such a rate that it's unbelievable.
	You can't even keep up.
	I don't care what discipline you're in.
	It's like it's not so bad to have some people Putting their feet in the ground, they're digging their heels in and say, look, we got a lot to swallow already.
	We got a lot to chew on and digest.
	Let's not muck about with everything that's worked so far.
	What has worked?
	It's not such a bad idea for people to have long-term families, right?
	We could say, let's try to support the family.
	We could even say, let's try to support the traditional family.
	Why?
	Well, maybe boys and girls need role models of each sex.
	I know that's a terrible thing to say, but it is possible.
	It's certainly the case, too, that intact two-parent families Have children that thrive more than broken families.
	And broken families are a catastrophe for everyone.
	Now you might say, well, I shouldn't stay with someone that I don't get along with.
	And it's like, yeah, yeah, fair enough.
	Except that there's no one that you're ever going to find to stay with that you're going to get along with all of the time.
	Especially in your shoddy condition.
	And so you're lucky that anybody will...
	You're lucky that anybody will put up with you for a week, much less your whole life.
	It's like the point of marriage is to tough it out.
	And you don't tough it out for your happiness.
	That's not what you're in there for.
	You tough it out so that you have someone to tie the rope of your life together with it.
	You have a chance to tie the rope of your life together with the rope of someone else's life and to make it strong and to make a place that children can have some security and some encouragement and thereby contribute to the future.
	And pay for the miracle of your birth and your own raising.
	That's why you get married.
	And there's no reason that conservatives can't stand up and say, look, we're willing to tolerate alternative family arrangements, but when you start making the claim that the traditional family unit is just another construct, and that it's not something fundamental to our polity, it's like, you've taken your damn argument too far.
	First of all, you have no evidence whatsoever for that claim.
	And there's plenty of counter-evidence.
	So, you know, one of the things the post-modernists basically say is, you know, every time you stand up for something, you're also standing against something.
	It's like, yeah, that's true.
	But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't stand up for things.
	And I think if there is something that conservatives could agree on, that we could stand up for, it's the nuclear family.
	Now, exactly how that's going to play out, I don't exactly know.
	it's not anything to be ashamed of to say, well, it kind of looks like that structure's worked quite well for the entire duration of mankind and so maybe we mess with it at our peril.
	Here's another one.
	The government, local and distant, should leave people to their own devices as much as possible.
	Why?
	Well, part of it's just humility.
	It's like, I'd rather that there was a million of you out there making your own stupid mistakes so that maybe a thousand of you can get it right.
	than for one of you to impose their view on everyone and risk getting it catastrophically wrong for everyone at the same time and that's really the alternative like if you're a social scientist like I mean an actual scientist I don't mean a bloody ideologue one of the things that you learn very rapidly is you know you do a simple experiment you think you're going to predict some element of human behavior so here's my hypothesis I'm going to put people in this experimental situation and this is what they're going to do and then you run the experiment and they don't do that They do something completely different.
	You find out that even though what you have them do is really simple, you don't have a clue what they're up to.
	And that's just a tiny little controlled experiment about one little tiny thing.
	And you're wrong.
	It's like, One of the great advantages to conservative philosophy is that it's humble.
	It's humble from the perspective of social experimentation.
	It's not like everything's great and we should just continue going the way we're going.
	It's like, well, everything isn't as broken as it might be and I'm kind of stupid and blind and all I have is a bat and probably hitting it isn't going to make it any better.
	All I'll do is shatter it.
	And so the conservative says, It's working.
	Be quiet.
	Sneak away.
	Maybe it'll keep working.
	And that's a perfectly reasonable perspective.
	Now obviously sometimes things have to change, but the conservative can come up and say, don't be thinking that you have so much evidence that what you're doing is right, or that it will have the outcome that you expected.
	I'll tell you a quick story.
	This was told to me by a woman named Joan McCord, who was one of the World's first female criminologist, by the way, a PhD from Temple University, a genius level person.
	Tremendous integrity.
	Tough, tough, tough person.
	She did a study in a place called Somerville in the United States in Massachusetts in the 1930s.
	Famous study.
	And so here was the deal.
	They'd identified a bunch of inner-city kids in rough neighborhoods and felt, you know, that they were more likely to be on a criminal track.
	Criminal, anti-social, under-educated, alcohol, you know, the whole dismal, wretched, underclass phenomena thing was going on.
	And so they thought, well, let's do an intervention.
	Let's set up programs to help these kids and see if we can change their developmental pathway.
	They designed a fine study, man.
	They had the kids...
	I'll get the details wrong, but I got the story right.
	They had the kids...
	They made them more literate.
	They educated them more.
	They had their parents take training courses.
	They did social skills training.
	Like, they did all sorts of things to try to make the kids' lives turn out better.
	And, to top it all off, because the kids were stuck in the inner city, They took them all out to summer camp for a couple of weeks a year.
	And so they could get away from the city and, you know, enjoy the countryside and have a little bit of a vacation, a little taste of a higher quality life, yeah.
	So, great!
	Everyone's thrilled with the damn program.
	The kids are having a great time at camp.
	The counselors are thrilled.
	The psychologists, they think they're doing a wonderful job.
	Great!
	It's working beautifully.
	Except, then they did the data analysis.
	Guess what happened?
	The kids in the treatment group, there was a control group, right, that didn't get all this special treatment, randomly assigned.
	It was a very nice experiment.
	The kids in the treatment group did worse on virtually everything that was measured.
	Worse!
	Why?
	Don't put antisocial kids together in the same camp for two weeks during the year.
	Right!
	Right!
	Because what happens is that the bad kids teach the slightly less bad kids to be worse.
	It's a well-documented phenomena.
	That's why what happens in prisons happens in prisons.
	What we do with criminals is the worst thing you could possibly do to criminals if you don't want them to continue to be criminals.
	Except for the fact that you keep them in there until they're old enough, generally speaking, so they're less likely to engage in criminal activity.
	But what was learned from the Somerville study was, don't be so sure your good intentions are going to produce the results that you intend, because they probably won't.
	And they probably won't for reasons that you never even imagined.
	And the other one was, Don't group bad kids with good kids on the assumption that the good kids will make the bad kids better.
	Because that isn't what happens.
	What happens is the reverse.
	If you put two or three bad kids with a bunch of good kids, then the good kids get worse.
	The bad kids don't get better.
	Very well documented social science finding.
	Well, the reason I'm telling you the Somerville story is because, God, who could argue with that study, right?
	It's like, These kids were poor.
	They were struggling.
	It's like you want to lift them up.
	You want to make their life better.
	You do this wonderful, expensive, well-motivated experiment.
	And then you run the damn data analysis and you find out that there was one thing wrong with your social intervention philosophy that you didn't understand and you actually made it worse.
	Well, that's a...
	And so Joan McCord, she spent much of the rest of her life going around telling social scientists, when you run a social experiment, Politicians, the same thing.
	When do you run a social experiment, especially on a large number of people, especially without their consent, then gather the data and do the follow-up study.
	Because it's highly probable that you'll find that what you did didn't work, or maybe it even worked backwards.
	And you'll never know that unless you do the study.
	And so what people took away from that, the social interventionist types took away from that was, whatever you do with your social intervention policy, don't run the study.
	Right.
	Right.
	That was the wrong lesson, by the way.
	Okay, and this is what I would close with for the Conservatives.
	This is a nice one.
	I really like this.
	We hear a lot about the sins of the West.
	And they're manifold.
	Because people are corrupt and our societies are corrupt.
	But you have to think about it in terms of relative corruption rather than absolute corruption.
	It's like, well, you know...
	Your family is not perfect.
	But there are worse families.
	Compared to the perfect family, your family isn't looking so good.
	But compared to other families, maybe it's not looking so bad at all.
	Okay, so how do we judge our political system?
	Well, we don't judge it by the dreamlike, ill-informed, ideologically motivated, pathological utopias of the radical left.
	Or the radical right, for that matter.
	We saw what happened in the 20th century when you do that.
	That is a very, very bad idea.
	And you know, there were tens of millions of people that died in the 20th century demonstrating just how bad an idea that was.
	And you'd think we would have learned that, but we didn't.
	What you do instead is you take a look at your country and you think, okay, how is it doing compared to other countries?
	Other actual, real countries?
	And maybe you look at a variety of different indicators, because that's what you do if you're careful.
	And if it happens to be hovering up near the top, then you think, well, Might be just the grace of God.
	Might be just good fortune.
	But it is possible that we've got something right.
	And that we shouldn't muck around with it too much.
	And that we should have some gratitude for it.
	Instead of assuming that the proper comparison is whatever heaven that you happen to be able to dream up that you would love to impose on other people without their cooperation and without their will.
	And that's what the bloody social utopians are selling us.
	And they're doing everything they can to implement and institute that as rapidly as possible.
	It's like, enough of that.
	We've had enough of that.
	The reason I got into this to begin with is because I started studying totalitarianism when I was about 13, but I really started to study it when I was about 22.
	And I spent like 15, 20,000 hours reading and writing about totalitarianism.
	Three hours a day for 15 years.
	That was the first book I wrote.
	It just about bloody well killed me.
	It's horrible stuff.
	And you know, I was curious about what the hell had happened, not only in Nazi Germany, but then in Stalinist Russia and Maoist China and in the Cold War.
	It's like, what the hell were we up to?
	Why were we doing all of that?
	I was trying to figure it out.
	It's not a pretty sight.
	Well, a lot of that's driven by this insane utopian vision.
	It's not a place we want to go.
	We want to accept the flaws in our system with some humility and some desire to improve things.
	But good God, you know, the 20th century was a dreadful bloodbath.
	It was a horrific hundred years.
	And we should have learned.
	We should have learned.
	Arrogant utopia turns into hell.
	That's what we should have learned.
	And yet we have people, plenty arrogant, purveying utopias left and right and saying, hey, look, the utopia hasn't come yet, and the reason for that is you're a misogynistic bigot.
	And if you don't believe that, and I can't measure it by asking you, or even note any observable behavior on your part, then I'm going to infer it, or I'll give you an unconscious bias test that doesn't even measure what it's supposed to measure.
	So you're a damn misogynist and a bigot, whether you know it or not, Whether you want to be or not, and whether or not the evidence suggests that you are or not.
	So no, we're not going to sell out our society to utopians of that sort.
	And so I would say to people who want to be conservative, first of all, you have every right to be conservative.
	And there's nothing wrong with you for being conservative.
	And second, it's like, it's time to get the hell organized and push back and get that 5% of hyper-educated, resentful, utopian dreamers who would like to bring the whole goddamn civilization to its knees out of the systems of power.
	It's not the same country it was 10 years ago.
	We need to wake up and we need to stop this from happening.
	I would say, these are more practical circumstances.
	The Ontario Human Rights Commission?
	That thing has to go.
	The social justice tribunals?
	I mean it, man.
	That thing has to go.
	That thing has to go.
	We need to pay a lot more attention to what the faculties of education are teaching teachers because they are transforming the elementary school and the junior high school and high school systems into nothing but propaganda machines for radical postmodernist doctrine.
	And if you don't believe me, you just go look it up on the web and see what they're attempting to Impose.
	And so that's got to stop, right?
	OISE, the Ontario Institute for the Studies of Education.
	That is not a good place.
	They need to be held accountable for what they're doing.
	They're supposed to be studying how to educate children more effectively and faster and cheaper and better.
	And that isn't what they're doing.
	They're producing people of the most radical and resentful sort to get a handle on the minds of children as young as they possibly can.
	And that's the doctrine.
	I'm not making this up.
	It's actually quite intelligent if that's what it is that you're aiming for.
	And that's got to come to a stop.
	I don't know.
	There's more that needs to be done too.
	The whole bloody human rights Establishment has to be retooled because it's working at counter purposes to itself.
	It was probably a mistake back in the...
	When was it?
	It was probably a mistake to introduce the damn bill of rights into Canada to begin with.
	It was probably a legislative error that we're paying desperately for now.
	But anyways, those are more specific things and those are more opinions of mine.
	So you can take them or leave them, as far as I'm concerned.
	But these 12 points that I made, as far as I can tell, you know, those are reasons to be conservative.
	And they're not reasons to be ashamed of it.
	And if you're afraid of speaking your mind as a conservative, well, stumble a bit.
	Make a few mistakes, man.
	You're going to make some mistakes.
	You're probably, you know, not as articulate as you might be.
	And believe me, there's lots of things you need to know.
	But if you start saying what you think carefully, people will correct you and you'll get better at it.
	And you better start doing it because the situation that we're in, I think it's worse than it looks.
	That's how it looks to me.
	So...
	Anyways, that's all I've got to say about that.
	So thank you for the invitation.
	We're going to open up for questions and hopefully some answers as well.
	So if anybody has anything, we only have one microphone, so you'll have to stand up.
	I'd like you to speak.
	Loudly and clearly so we can all hear and also state your name and where you're from.
	I'm Kevin Harper, a doctor of Lakefield, and my question pertains to what your position is on separation of church and state with regards to maintaining church and state, recognizing the fundamentals and my question pertains to what your position is on separation of church and state with regards to maintaining church and state, recognizing the fundamentals of Western society
	Sure, yeah, sure.
	Ask an easy question.
	So, the question essentially was what my opinion was about the separation of church and state, the nature of the separation of church and state, given the hypothesis that our society is grounded in a broader Structure, moral structure, let's say, that has something like a theologically predicated philosophical basis.
	It's something like that.
	The first thing I would say is, if you...
	That is a very hard question to answer, and I'm doing this series in Toronto right now on...
	It's called The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories.
	And it's an answer to that question.
	But it's long.
	It's like 40 hours, you know.
	And it's like the Maps of Meaning program that Mr.
	Hillier was referring to before.
	It's extraordinarily complicated.
	And I mean, I think the right approach to that is to say something like that.
	Something like, There are things that are Caesar's and there are things that are God's and you should keep those things apart.
	That's worked in the West.
	Now, the problem with that answer is it doesn't precisely describe the proper interrelationship between the two.
	But I don't think that's actually a political issue.
	I think that the way that that's properly bridged is through the ethic of the individual.
	It's like your religious belief should be of the sort that guides you to be an honest, decent, productive, respectable person who's aiming at the good.
	And then if you do that, then the political issues will take care of themselves.
	Not magically, but because we'll organize ourselves politically as that sort of people and do the right things.
	And so I think the connection between the church and the state is through the individual.
	That's how it should work.
	And I think that's why it's kind of worked in the West.
	You know, getting that church-state separation thing right, that's really difficult.
	It's not good when they collapse into one another because you instantly get the rise of, like, totalitarian theocracies.
	We all know how much fun they are.
	So, yeah.
	Maybe I'll just...
	Listen, understand, what we're going to do, just to make this work, if you do have a question, why don't you come up to the front, I'll hand over the microphone to you, and then you can, everybody can hear the question clearly.
	And then we'll pass the microphone back.
	Right?
	I'm Brian Doyle, Doyle Salewski.
	Some people here may have heard of me.
	I warn you, I took Psychology 100 at McGill.
	This exceeded my expectations.
	Thank you very much.
	And I speak also with my wife.
	The only thing I would point out is I don't see much diversity in the crowd.
	And I have a black Somali Muslim IT director who's simpatico with me on our ideals, beliefs, policies, etc.
	And if I'd known, I would have brought him here as my guest.
	And he's a wonderful guy.
	And we have many, many solid talks together.
	And that's probably the one thing that's missing here tonight.
	Okay, just wanted to make that point.
	Yeah, well, look, that's something else I'd like to suggest to conservatives.
	Now, you know, I've interacted with a very diverse range of people, partly because I'm a clinical psychologist, and I've done a lot of different things with different people in my life, and so, I can speak about this particular issue with a modicum of authority.
	See, in Canada what's happened is that we've left the minority immigrants to the Liberals.
	That was a bad idea.
	Now the reason for that is because the Liberals have a more liberal immigration policy and a lot of them are like really, really, what would you say?
	Grateful.
	to the liberals, often to Trudeau, personally, I mean the older Trudeau, personally, because he opened the door and let them in, and it's hard to shake that.
	But here's something that's very cool for conservatives to know.
	You think you're conservative, man.
	You should go talk to immigrants.
	They're so conservative, they make you look like social justice warriors.
	Right?
	So there's a real conversation.
	There's a real conversation to be had with immigrants and minorities in Canada.
	Sorry, especially the immigrant minorities.
	And that is, look, We would have been a little bit more restrictive in the past about our immigration policies and I can understand why that might Mark us out as enemies to you.
	But one of the things you have to understand is that the bedrock values that I have are much closer to the bedrock values that you have than the people that you're voting for.
	And you know, the minority immigrants in Ontario, in particular, are starting to figure this out, especially with regards to Kathleen Wynne's education policies, because they notice the tilt of those policies, and they notice that they're not in keeping with their often extremely conservative Traditions and so I would say the right thing for conservatives to do is like start telling the minority immigrants that you're actually their friends now that means to establish an intelligent immigration policy and that's a very difficult thing to do and to begin
	a real dialogue about that with immigrant communities, you know who are often, by the way, very interested in protecting what they found here and not having it disrupted in any particularly terrible way I mean, there's, you know, radicals everywhere, but Most of the immigrants who come here, they're pretty damn happy to be here.
	So the Conservatives should be out there extending a real hand, especially, I would say, especially to the moderate Muslims.
	It's a big mistake not to do that.
	There's lots of moderate Muslims.
	There are people who they're not enchanted by the theocratic totalitarians, and they're looking for a way to develop a bridge between Islam and the West.
	That's no easy thing.
	I'm not even sure it can be done.
	But there are people of goodwill in our country who would like to have that happen, and the Conservatives could be talking to them And extending a hand.
	It's going to help on the voting front as well.
	There's no loss in it.
	There's absolutely no loss in it.
	All you have to do is knock and say, hey, those people that you're supporting, they don't share any of your values.
	Have you noticed that?
	They'll wake up and they'll see it.
	And then they'll say, well, you know, maybe we have more in common with the traditional conservatives in Canada than we thought.
	It wouldn't be a difficult message to get out there.
	So, yep.
	I'm just going to follow up on that comment from Brian for a moment.
	And I think it's important to recognize the historical change and shift that has happened with immigration in this country.
	A long, long period of time.
	This country was built and developed on immigrants to rural areas.
	That's our history.
	That's where all our settlement programs were to bring new immigrants to rural areas.
	That's fundamentally shifted in the last number of decades.
	New immigration to this country is to our significant urban centres.
	That's where it's happening.
	Walking through Carleton Place is going to be a very different image than walking through Toronto or Ottawa.
	I'm very pleased to see the number of people that we have out here, the diversity of age and the diversity of people.
	But we just don't have a lot of immigrants in rural Ontario.
	So, anyway. - Aside from the policies, like the anyway. - Aside from the policies, like the actual concrete policies, like the actual concrete issues that people
	I wanted to know what you thought the root causes, strictly from a psychological perspective, that would derive a lot of these predominantly young, like early and mid-twenties, like far, far left people, to really be so unreasonable and anti-establishment, like militarized in their to really be so unreasonable and anti-establishment, like militarized in their thinking, and essentially to have such a negative view on the world and to see all these problems that other people would never have noticed if they had not coined all
	Just strictly, and men and women specifically, strictly from, like, you know, what would derive someone you think to think that way?
	Well we kind of know some of the answers to that.
	I don't want to make too grandiose a claim but I've done some research with my graduate students on political correctness per se because we've been interested in the personality predictors of political belief.
	It really does turn out that you vote your personality far more than you think because like what you think is that you look at the world and there's a landscape of facts and you view the facts objectively and you derive your conclusions.
	The thing is, it doesn't really work that way because there's just too damn many facts, right?
	And so, you can't even really get an unbiased sample of them.
	What happens is that your personality works as a filtering mechanism so that certain things stand out for you more than other things.
	And so, some things stand out more for the people on the radical left and some things stand out for people who are liberal and some things stand out for people who are conservative.
	And then everyone says, well look, I'm looking at the facts, and I'm drawing this conclusion.
	It's like, yeah, but what you don't understand is you're not looking at the same set of facts, and you can't even, and that's why you have to actually engage in dialogue with other people, because they'll expose you to their set of facts.
	I'm not saying that facts don't exist, or that they're relativistic, or anything like that.
	One of the things we found out about the politically correct types is that they're high in a trait called agreeableness.
	Now, you might think, really?
	That isn't what I would have guessed.
	But agreeableness is a maternal trait.
	And women are higher in agreeableness than men.
	That's cross-cultural.
	And that difference really seems to start manifesting itself primarily at puberty.
	Agreeableness is likely the trait that stops you from throwing your baby out the window at three in the morning when it's had colic for three hours and you haven't had any sleep and you're not in very good shape and you just got laid off.
	It's like it's a very very tight bonding mechanism.
	And so what happens?
	It's primarily driven by what you might describe as compassion.
	Now, compassion is great for dealing with infants.
	And maybe it's great for dealing with hurt people and really elderly people.
	You know?
	It's good for taking care of people who can't take care of themselves.
	But it's not a great doctrine to be building a political system on.
	And so one of the things that happens with the more politically correct types by temperament is that they suffer from an excess of impulsive compassion.
	And they assume that if there's an inequitable distribution of anything that the people who are at the bottom are all victims who should be treated like infants and that everyone at the top is a vicious snake-like predator.
	And that's hardwired in some sense.
	It's a very popular story.
	Yeah, of course.
	Of course, and it's an easy story to sell, and there's some truth in it.
	But some truth isn't the same as all the truth.
	And so, what you see, at least in part, is undifferentiated empathy.
	And that's not a virtue.
	It's not a virtue.
	You have to think.
	You can't just feel.
	You have to think.
	You know, even when you're taking care of kids, Part of what you're doing is being compassionate.
	But if you're too compassionate towards your kids, then you do everything for them.
	And if you do everything for them, then they grow up useless and they never leave and they hate you.
	And they hate everything else too.
	It's a bad idea.
	And so, you use compassion judiciously.
	You know, there's a rule if you're working in a place like a nursing home.
	And the rule is, it's a harsh rule.
	Do not do anything for the people that you're taking care of that they can do for themselves.
	And so if they have to struggle to feed themselves, you don't bloody well intervene and feed them.
	You let them maintain their damn independence.
	And you have to be a hard-hearted bastard to do that.
	You know, to watch someone struggle like that.
	But you're furthering their medium to long-term independence and development.
	And you do the same thing with your children.
	Treating your children like they're endless permanent victims is a very bad idea.
	And I think that's part of what's also being taught.
	We also know that The kids who are more likely to be rabidly politically correct, one of the reasons that they're more likely to be that way is because they were taught to be that way.
	We found that even exposure to a single lecture, a single lecture that was associated with the politically correct dogmatic structure was enough to tilt people in that direction.
	So, there's a temperamental proclivity, and then there's failure of education to address that, and then there's the exacerbation and exaggeration by the people who are trying to produce, like, activists by proxy.
	You know, one of the most appalling things I saw, for example, at McMaster, when I went to McMaster and got You know, yelled down by profanity, shouting people who had the bloody gall to hide behind a banner that had a hammer and sickle on it, for God's sake.
	You know, if the Nazis would have been out there with their swastika, there would have been hell to pay, but because it was the hammer and sickle, it's like, it's okay.
	There's nothing wrong with being a communist.
	It's like, sorry about the 200 million dead people, folks.
	So they're out there, you know, hiding behind this banner.
	None of the people who were teaching them were out there.
	They bailed out of the damn discussion, right?
	Because there were four people who were supposed to talk with me there.
	They all vanished.
	They leave these student proxies to go out there and do their dirty work.
	It's really contemptible.
	So you can lay a fair bit of the blame at the feet of the people who are supposed to be educating them, but that are instead indoctrinating them.
	So that's what it looks like to me.
	Hi, I just have a question regarding the extreme Latin use of language.
	We oftentimes focus in on the fact that they try to restrict our use of language, but I also see nowadays that there's a focus on redefining key terms within our language.
	Put the microphone a little closer.
	Sorry.
	trying to redefine key terms of language.
	And by way of example, I would say genocide, a term which has got a lot of historical significance, it's a very powerful term.
	It's now been broadened.
	I do it with my opinion between all the world.
	And there are other things that are wrong, but it probably is not a problem.
	Thank you very much.
	to restrict language. - Yeah.
	Sorry, I wasn't ignoring you.
	I had just made a whole lexicon of politically correct words today in the car, and I wanted to read it, but unfortunately I can't find it.
	So yeah, not only do they redefine, but they also produce new words, neologisms constantly.
	And one of the things I want to do is I'm going to make a video.
	I'm going to collect all these words.
	I'm going to do it properly.
	I'm going to go through a very large corpus of postmodern work.
	I'm going to pull out the buzzwords.
	I'm gonna rank order them in terms of their frequency and then I'm gonna make a video for parents and for freshmen and with a checklist it says you go through the courses and if there's one of these words you check them off this list and if there's more than you know if you if the course scores more than five out of whatever on this list then don't take that course unless you want to join the cult And so,
	yeah, really, because I've thought about this, you know, because one of the things I proposed, it's a kind of a radical solution, and I probably proposed it when I was a little more angry than I should have been, and I thought, one of the things the provincial government should do is cut the funding to higher education by 25%, and let the goddamn intellectuals fight among themselves.
	until they straighten out the university hierarchies and decide which disciplines are valid and which aren't.
	Now, there's a problem with that.
	Well, there's a problem, a couple of problems with that is that first of all, it would wreak havoc with the universities and that's not a good idea.
	The second is, you gotta watch it when you're trying to control the free exchange of academic ideas by top-down fiat, right?
	Because It's another one of those radical social experiments that might go wrong and probably will.
	Because it might be you that decides what shouldn't be taught in universities now, but God only knows who it's going to be in three or four years, right?
	So it's a problem.
	But I think one of the things that should be done is that people should be educated so that they can determine which of these courses are like that and which professors, and then just stop attending the classes.
	Now that's happening anyways, by the way, because the enrollment in the humanities has plummeted since the 1960s.
	And the humanities are at the core of the university.
	Make no mistake about it.
	If the humanities goes, the universities are done.
	But, so, they're already destroying their own market viability, even though they keep bringing more and more people into the universities and colleges.
	But I think that needs to be accelerated.
	What has to happen is that the post-modernist radical types need to be cut off at the source.
	Students need to stop going to their classes.
	And so that means that high school students and freshmen And the parents of those people need to know what to look out for.
	And so, yes, I'm very cognizant of their use of language.
	It's also why I oppose Bill C-16.
	It's like, I'm not going to say words that other people demand that I say.
	I'm not going to do that.
	And the reason that I'm not going to do that is because there isn't anything more important to me than the fact that I No, I haven't got that right.
	There's nothing more important to me than the responsibility I have to utter the words that I believe to be true.
	I'm not using someone else's words.
	And Bill C-16, by the way, which your Senate so delightfully passed today, makes compelled speech part of the Canadian legal system.
	A threshold has been crossed.
	And, you know, it's to help the transgendered people.
	It's like, no, it's not.
	That's not why it happened.
	So, you don't cede the language game to your political enemies.
	You do not allow them to force you to use their terminology.
	As soon as they do that, you lose.
	So, and that was what Bill C-16 was about for me.
	And there was something cool about that, too.
	It was very surprising, you know, because What should have happened was that no one paid any damn attention to the videos I made at all.
	That's what should have happened.
	Or the next thing that should have happened is, you know, there was 15 minute flurry about it and then everybody went back to their business.
	That didn't happen either.
	What happened was an inordinate amount of attention congregated around this issue.
	And I've been trying to figure out why ever since.
	It's like, wow, you know.
	Something's rotten in the state of Denmark.
	There's something strange going on here.
	And it certainly wasn't because what I was talking about was about transgender issues.
	Because important or unimportant as they may be, at best they're a side issue, right?
	It just isn't something that affects enough people to be of any requisite seriousness.
	So why all the attention?
	Well, it's because there's something real going on underneath it.
	And a lot of that is a fight over language.
	That's why Derrida, you know, Jacques Derrida.
	He criticized Western culture.
	He's the head trickster of the postmodernists.
	Phalogocentric, that's our culture.
	The logos, that's speech.
	And these people who are passing these bills, they are no friends of free speech.
	They're no friends of free thought.
	They want to put restrictions on it because they already know what's right.
	And if you disagree, it isn't that you disagree.
	It's that you're wrong and you should shut the hell up.
	And if you don't want to, we're going to figure out how to do it.
	And so that's the sort of people who are obtaining positions of power in our mid-level bureaucracies and higher.
	And it's really not a good thing.
	That is not the sort of people that you want to be running things.
	And some of that's because we've abdicated our responsibility to run things.
	The competent people have abdicated their responsibility to run things themselves.
	You know, they've abandoned politics and they don't serve on the school boards and they don't run their own churches and, you know, they leave that to other people.
	It's like it's not a good idea because it's the wrong sort of people who step in to do that.
	So, yep. - Joyce Farrell.
	I'm building on the language.
	The accountant place, it's almost considered a suburb of Ottawa now, and you can see the steam rising from Ottawa and accountant place over the issue of language.
	CRTC is comprised of 98% French Canadians.
	And that doesn't sit well with the rest of the 76% of the population that are anglophone and others.
	I wondered if you had some feedback on how this can be improved, because bilingualism really, in my opinion, is a farce.
	It was merely a means of looking out When you get 98% of one particular department in the federal government that is totally French Canadian, then this is not an equitable situation.
	And it is most unfair, and when it's discussed with somebody, Okay, well that's also a really hard question.
	See a lot of in my way of thinking a lot of the entrance of the idea of group rights into the Canadian polity was a consequence of our attempt to sew the country together when the separatist movement was at its peak and We did sew the country together twice, right?
	I mean it damn near fell apart and that probably wouldn't have been a good thing.
	So, but we paid a price for it and the price we paid was that we let the specter of group rights enter our common law polity essentially.
	And a lot of what's happening now is the price that we're paying for that.
	Having Given that diagnosis, I don't have any cure to offer.
	I don't know what can be done about that.
	My suspicions are it's the kind of problem that has to be solved at a micro level, you know.
	But I don't know enough about the specific issue to offer anything other than that.
	I understand why you'd find that frustrating.
	I've thought similar things about the way the federal government is constituted.
	On the other hand, we managed to keep the country together.
	And there was a sacrifice to be made for that.
	So...
	Apart from saying, you know, I get the problem.
	I don't have anything to offer on that.
	So...
	Yep.
	So I'm actually only going to take one more question because I'm tired enough so that I'm probably going to say something stupid and since this is taped, well, you know, you've got to watch that because you don't want to say any more stupid things than necessary.
	A little uncomfortable talking to you because some of what you said really made me a little uncomfortable, but I think that's what we have to do.
	We have to be uncomfortable some of the time.
	When you talked about don't send your kids to take humanities, I kind of went, what are you talking about?
	That's crazy.
	I think what you're saying is the way that's structured now, it's...
	There's dangers.
	So I guess my question is, where do we go to get the critical thinking skills that we need?
	How do we develop them?
	You said you want high school students and parents to be aware of what the problems are.
	Where are they going to get these critical thinking skills and develop a certain resilience to the changing world around them?
	So where would you direct this to go?
	Well, the first thing I should say is I'm a great admirer of the humanities and of the universities.
	I mean, the humanities, you learn to be a citizen through the humanities.
	The humanities are at the core of Western culture.
	If they go, we're in trouble.
	So the problem is that what's manifesting itself as the humanities in the universities is no longer the humanities.
	It's something almost virtually the opposite of that.
	And so when I tell people not to go to humanities courses in the universities, it's with a very heavy heart, believe me.
	Now the question is, where do you go instead?
	Well, that's a good question.
	You can always read.
	You know, one of the things that's really cool about Amazon is all the great books are free.
	They're literally free.
	You can go download them on your Kindle for nothing.
	The copyright has expired and people have been putting electronic versions online.
	So the great books of the Western world and even many of the great books of the 20th century are now available completely for free.
	Well, so you can read them.
	There's lots of information to be garnered now on YouTube, and that's really going to explode over the next 10 years.
	And I mean, one of the things I want to work on, probably over the next 10 years, is to set up a humanities university online.
	And when I'm starting to work, I already have some programs online.
	They're called Self-authoring programs and they help people write and partly we designed them to help people learn to write as well as to help them write about themselves so the self-authoring programs help people write an autobiography and analyze their personality faults and virtues and lay out a future for themselves and when we've had students do that do the future authoring program it's so cool what happened was that The probability that they would stay in school went up by about 30%.
	But something even cooler happened.
	It worked best for the worst performing students.
	So, we did a lot of it in Holland, at a business school called Erasmus.
	There's a school of management, Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University.
	And we ran several, I think it's about 10,000 people through the Future Authoring Program now.
	And what happened, if you looked at the academic performance of the students, the Dutch women, the native Dutch women, We're at the pinnacle.
	And then it was the Dutch men below them.
	Now, the women were in a minority and they were probably a little more highly selected, right?
	So maybe that accounted for the performance gap.
	And then underneath that there was female non-Western ethnic minority immigrants.
	And then below that were male non-Western ethnic minority immigrants.
	And there was a massive gap between the Dutch women and the male non-Western minority immigrants.
	Like a performance gap of about 80%.
	A massive gap.
	Within two years after writing the future authoring program, the male non-ethnic western minority students passed the Dutch students.
	Yeah, and some of them didn't even remember that they had done the future authoring exercise.
	And we replicated that at Mohawk College just a while back.
	Same thing, the young men who went to Mohawk College, they did this exercise in the summer just before they went to college.
	They only took about an hour to write out their future.
	It's not that long to think about your whole future.
	And what happened was that the young men who had the worst grades in school, who were in non-career oriented trajectories, had a retention improvement of about 40%.
	So yeah, so that was just like, we were just thrilled about that.
	So the reason I'm telling you all of this story, apart from the fact that it's vaguely interesting, is that we are experimenting with technologies to teach people how to write.
	Now normally the way you're taught how to write is by having someone edit your writing.
	But that's prohibitively expensive.
	I don't think it can be transformed in something that's available on a mass basis.
	And so what we're trying to do is to break down the process of writing into its requisite steps.
	That's kind of what behavioral psychologists do.
	We've done that already a bit with this essay writing format.
	And then to sort of teach people what the mechanics of writing actually are, and then maybe to try to figure out how to crowdsource editing, so that many, many people can participate in the process.
	But we'd like to set up an online humanities university over the next ten years.
	And since the universities have abandoned their intellectual property, there's no reason not to just move in and take it, as far as I can tell.
	So, that's the plan.
	Okay, okay.
	Well, thank you.
	Thank you very much for coming out and listening to me.
	And, you know, it was quite interesting and all of that.
	And so it was a pleasure to have spoken for you.
	Hey, my pleasure, man.
	A big hand for Dr.
	Jordan Peterson.

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