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July 24, 2017 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

01:45:41

2017/05/13: Freedom of Speech: Not Just Another Value

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	Jordan Peterson, psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, but no, University of Toronto.
	Been there some years.
	SAFS got involved because we were sent the letters That Dr.
	Peterson's Dean and then Vice-Provo, I believe, had sent him and they worried us tremendously as people concerned about academic freedom.
	And the integrity of teaching.
	The letters warned Dr.
	Peterson to stop saying publicly that he would refuse requests to use non-gendered or additional pronouns.
	And this is, for us, was a very serious matter, a very serious incursion on the freedom of teachers to teach as they will.
	Teaching has a lot to do with the rapport.
	Between the professor and the student, classroom dynamics and the honesty and sincerity that teaching requires, we thought were infringed by these orders, especially orders coming from deans and department heads.
	And so we wrote letters to the University of Toronto about this.
	So we're very privileged to have Dr.
	Peterson with us today to talk to us about these things, maybe also some more theoretical and abstract things than his own particular case.
	He's going to talk to us about why freedom of speech is not just another value.
	Dr.
	Dr. Peterson, thanks.
	So I thought I'd start.
	I'm going to approach this from three directions, or in three sections.
	I thought I'd start by just letting you know why I was objecting specifically to Bill C-16.
	I made three videos in late September, and one of them criticized Bill C-16, and one of them criticized the University of Toronto administration's Human Resources people's decision to make so-called unconscious anti-bias training mandatory for their HR staff, which I thought was and still think was reprehensible.
	And I don't even remember what the other one was about, but it doesn't really matter.
	It was the first one, the one on Bill C-16 that caused most of the furor, surprisingly enough.
	And I said I wouldn't use the made up what I consider neologisms that purport to describe the status of people whose sexual identity is ambiguous.
	Because that isn't how it looked to me.
	It looked to me like these words like Z and Zur and so forth were the linguistic vanguard of an intellectual movement that I would say detest is probably the right description.
	And that's this strange blend of postmodernism and Marxism that has emerged to occupy the bulk of the humanities and a good chunk of the social sciences.
	So that was the first thing, is that I'm not using those words.
	That was the first thing.
	That was personal, right?
	Is that that's not a form of linguistic game that I'm willing to play.
	And I have my reasons for that.
	The second was I regard any legislation that compels people to use a certain kind of language as a very dangerous, first of all, a dangerous piece of legislation directly, but also a very dangerous precedent.
	I mean, there are limits on free speech that are already reasonably well instantiated in the law.
	You can't incite a crime.
	You can't Threaten someone bodily in a believable manner.
	You can't libel someone.
	We already have reasonable restrictions on what you can't say, but we've never had legislation that required you to use a certain language except in certain commercial applications.
	So, for example, if you sell tobacco, you have to put a warning on it.
	But the United States Supreme Court decided, I believe it was in the 1940s, that similar attempts to compel speech On the part of individuals in non-commercial settings was unconstitutional and I know that that doesn't have any direct bearing on Canadian law,
	but certainly the principle does and then I was also very See one of the problems with a piece of legislation and this is I suppose the problem with interpreting a text as the postmodernists would say is that it's not easy to get the level of interpretation right, right?
	Interpreting a text you can look at the you can look at the letters and That happens with biblical interpretation very often.
	You can look at the individual words, you can look at the phrases, you can look at the sentences, you can look at the paragraphs, you can look at the work as a whole, and then you also have to look at the context within which the work is being interpreted in order to come up with an interpretation of anything that's complex.
	And so when you see a piece of legislation, it isn't obvious what the legislation is actually intended to do, despite what it's purported to do, and it isn't obvious What level of analysis to pick when you're going to criticize it.
	And in some ways, Bill C-16, you could regard it as innocuous, just as an extension of rights that have already been granted to certain, let's say, protected groups.
	Although I'm not so thrilled about the whole notion of ascribing rights to groups to begin with.
	We're already far down that path.
	And, you know, I've been accused of making a mountain out of a molehill.
	But, happily enough, the University of Toronto, after I made the videos, immediately produced two letters that were informed by their legal department's wisdom, stating that what I had done with the video was perhaps in conflict with the University Ethical guidelines if you forget the ones that had to do with freedom of expression and that they might that my actions and even in making the video might have violated that the tenants of the Ontario Human Rights Act
	as its or the at least as it's interpreted by the Ontario Human Rights Commission and so that helped put to rest any suggestion that I was actually scaremongering because as soon as I As soon as I made the videos, the legal department at the U of T immediately validated my fears, and so that was a perverse effect of the letters they sent to me.
	So, the other thing that I, there was other elements of the legislation that I object to and objected to and still do, and if you read the policies, Within which the legislation will be interpreted as the federal justice website indicated that it would be interpreted within the policies that the Ontario Human Rights Commission has already established.
	Of course, there's close crosstalk between Ontario and the federal government because the Liberals are in power in both, and the radical end of the Liberal Party is in power in both situations.
	And it turns out that it's illegal for, like, you're liable as an employer, for example, if any of your employees say anything that can be construed as harassment say on the grounds of sexual or gender identity even if what they say has unintended consequences And even if you don't know that they said it and so that kind of legislation I just think is just absolutely reprehensible and then because it's designed to cast the
	broadest possible net to catch the most fish and it's clearly being implemented by people who are not precisely pro-employer let's put it that way and then there's another little ugly secret hidden underneath the policies and That's manifest most clearly in the form of what's come to be known as the gender unicorn,
	which I would recommend that you look up, which is an animated character designed to indoctrinate small children into the social constructionist worldview, which claims that biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity vary independently, which they most certainly do not.
	And that's what I said in the video.
	That's partly why I've been accused of, say, being a transphobe.
	And I also complained that the university was taking policy advice from the people who started Black Lives Matter.
	And I don't have anything against Black Lives Matter particularly, but the two people who started it are not the sorts of individuals, let's say, that the university should be basing its policy decisions, the advice They shouldn't be taking advice from those people with regards to their policy, and apparently that makes me a racist.
	So the first part of the argument about what happened with my videos was actually whether or not I was racist and transphobic and all of that.
	But the point that I was making, the technical, specific technical point, was that the claim that those four phenomena vary independently was just patently false.
	And it is, by any reasonable definition of false.
	And I know that it's part of a much broader propaganda exercise, as evidenced by the gender unicorn, for example, which gets children to indicate on four sliders their sex assigned at birth, their gender identity, their gender expression and their sexual proclivity.
	You can look at the animation or at the cartoon and decide for yourself by its graphic style what age people it's aimed at.
	So, is this a bill to protect transsexual rights or is it a bill to further a postmodern neo-Marxist agenda?
	Well, God only knows, but as far as I'm concerned, having analyzed the context within which this Bill arose and within which it will be interpreted.
	I'm going to go for the furthering the postmodern neo-Marxist agenda until that's thoroughly disproved.
	I would also like to inform you that I've had plenty of letters from transgender people, at least 30, and only one of them was critical of what I'm doing because they claim, as have many of the people I've talked to, that the idea that a group of activists can self-nominate as the representatives of a given group and then speak for them as if they have a homogeneous voice is absolutely absurd and it is
	completely ridiculous and most of the transsexual people that have been contacting me have said the same thing which is these people don't speak for me I wish they'd shut up because they're doing a lot more harm than good and I don't buy what they're doing anyways.
	So you know I think that the claim of the activist types to speak on behalf of the groups that they purport to represent is weak at best and I don't know why we ever assume that it that their representation is valid except that we're afraid to Criticize that particular presupposition.
	You know, I mean, there's nothing more ridiculous than assuming that because someone is black that they speak for black people.
	I mean, I can't think of anything that's more particularly indicative of a fundamentally racist attitude than that.
	You know, well, those people, they're all the same.
	It's like, yeah, well, sorry, it doesn't work out that way.
	So I wanted to clarify all that so that you know, you have a little bit clearer idea about why I was doing what I was doing.
	People have asked, so to speak, why I chose to die on that particular hill, and the answer is every massive conflict of ideas, let's say, manifests itself in the minute, and that's why it's often difficult to gain any headway,
	because no matter where you draw the line, it's arbitrary and subject to criticism, and the fact that this happens to be about Gender-neutral pronouns regarding transgender people to me is just more or less an accident it could have been about almost any number of other things and but I would also like to suggest that what should have happened with what I did was that nothing right I made some videos that was relatively obscure academic and I made some videos in my private time
	that were you know pretty badly produced because they're just amateur and I I was trying to straighten out my thinking about a couple of issues, the anti-unconscious bias training for example, and also this legislative mess, and obviously it struck a major chord, and that to me is indication that my original supposition was correct, and that there was far more going on under the surface than there was at the surface.
	I mean, you know, like I said, it's very difficult to pick the proper level of analysis.
	But one of the ways you justify your choice is by observing the impact of your choice of level of analysis and seeing if the consequences are commensurate with your original hypothesis.
	And I thought, well, just because people say they're doing one thing with a piece of legislation doesn't mean that that's what they're doing.
	And, of course, a piece of legislation is a hydra in any case.
	It does all sorts of things that people don't intend it to do.
	that's a little background and I'll leave the background at that and then I'll talk to you now from a practical perspective why I believe that the idea of freedom of speech is not just another value among other values and I would say that the the simplest reason for that is that speech isn't precisely a mechanism it's a it's a process it's a it's a it's a it's a generative process Speech,
	free speech is the process by which all ideas are generated.
	And I want to make it clear why I believe that to be the case with speech specifically, because you might say, well, no, that's thought.
	But I don't think that's right, because the thing is that thought is a far more collective enterprise than people generally understand.
	First of all, Most of the thoughts you have aren't your thoughts.
	I don't remember who it was that said that everyone is the unconscious exponent of a dead philosopher, but that's definitely the case.
	The very linguistic mechanisms by which we formulate our grip on the world are collective constructs.
	In some cases almost entirely because creative thought is far rarer than people generally presume and what that means is that when we're speaking and when we're thinking we're usually using if not clichés which is very frequently the case as you know perfectly well if you've ever graded a particularly bad undergraduate essay but even among more sophisticated people it's generally the case that they're acting as avatars of ideas that they did not produce And so,
	that doesn't mean they can't further the ideas, but the point is that, you know, we're born into a linguistically mediated culture and it's mediated at all of the multiple levels of analysis that I already described and We're shaped in the way that we view the world with regards to the input that we receive that's collective.
	We learn language from other people.
	We use the words that other people use.
	We use the phrases that other people use.
	It's an intensely collective exercise, but even more specifically, so that's from a general perspective, let's say, but even more specifically, the problem with thinking Is that you're a very narrow channel, right?
	I mean, there's a lot of world and there isn't very much of you.
	And that means that there's a lot more that you filter out than there is that you take in.
	And your filtering is very, very intensive.
	It's dependent to some degree on your embodiment.
	It's dependent to some degree far more than people generally realize on your motivations and your temperament, which is a topic we'll return to.
	And then it's further narrowed by Your position in society and by the people that you have around you and by your particular domain of expertise or lack thereof.
	And then there are sets of darker motivations as well that blind you to certain things that you should be able to see but either don't or won't.
	And so the problem with thinking is that A, you're a narrow channel, B, you're not very good at it, and C, you're incredibly biased and there isn't much you can do about that except Listen and talk to other people.
	Because they're, I mean, they're not the only source of correction, but they're a pretty intense source of correction.
	And I mean, we're blasting corrective information at each other all the time, right?
	I mean, even in a situation like this, which you could think of as a monologue, but isn't.
	It's a dialogue.
	The reason I'm watching all of you is to see, you know, Are you paying attention?
	And if not, I'd better adjust what I'm saying.
	Do your facial expressions indicate that you're understanding what I'm saying and following it?
	Maybe you're nodding, your eyes are open, you know, in some specific way.
	You're actually facing me, your eyes are on me.
	I can read your facial expressions, which is always why I'm looking at individuals in the audience, and I'm constantly calibrating what I'm saying, if it's a dynamic conversation, to ensure that the information flow is maximized.
	the reason I look at your eyes is because I can tell where they're pointing and the reason I look at your face is because you're broadcasting motivational and emotional information non-stop at me while I'm speaking and so even in a situation like this which like I said is more monologue than than otherwise there's a tremendous amount of corrective information continually flowing between speaker and listener and if that stops you know if If you hear a speaker who's detached from the audience,
	often someone who's reading, for example, it's much more difficult to listen to them, as everyone knows.
	And that's because there's a deadness about reading something in front of an audience.
	And I think the reason for that is that that living, let's call it spirit, isn't manifesting itself in the same manner as it is when the speech is both spontaneous and self-correcting.
	The thing about free speech is that I'm not a free speech advocate, let's say.
	I'm a true speech advocate, which is to say that I believe that people should say what they believe to be true.
	I think that's your obligation.
	It's also your right, but it comes with an obligation.
	But I don't believe that true speech is possible without free speech, because you're just not very good at thinking, and so you have to stumble around when you're first formulating ideas, and wander into territory that's not necessarily productive, and manifest your biases.
	In short, you have to be a fool.
	And the only way that you improve upon that performance is by, well first of all, stumbling through it to begin with, and then second, By observing carefully what sort of reactions you're getting and having a dialogue around it so that you can start to sharpen up your ideas and improve their focus and find out where you've made a mistake and all of those things.
	So a lot of What's necessary with regards to thinking is the freedom to make mistakes because what are you going to do it right the first time?
	I don't think so and you know that's why for Carl Jung for example the fool was a mythological precursor to the to the hero the trickster is a mythological precursor to the hero because unless you're willing to stumble around badly to begin with you know and to be a fool when you first start doing something which is always the case when you're learning something new then you're not going to make any progress and so practically speaking Free speech has to be as untrammeled as possible so that people can be wrong and they can be biased and they can still express their opinions including
	their darker ones and then allow themselves to be subject partly to improvement by the world because if you say things that are too stupid and then act them out, the world smacks you a good one.
	But there's also the social intermediaries, the other people that you're communicating with who will also do the same thing.
	We're always broadcasting information at each other constantly trying to shape each other's behavior and what we're trying to do is to bring forth from other people that which we would like to see them manifest and so there's an implicit ideal as well that people are broadcasting at each other all the time and there's tremendous social pressure generally speaking to manifest that implicit ideal as closely as possible because otherwise people Disapprove of you or lack interest in what you're saying or criticize
	you and so on and you have to be allowed to be Exposed to that kind of corrective feedback because otherwise you drift and and you become subject to your own idiosyncratic insanity and I mean I've seen that very many times in my clinical practice because Well, first of all, I have some isolated people that come to see me, and all they do is talk.
	I just listen.
	I mean, because they don't have anyone else around, and they need someone to run their narrative by to keep their minds organized.
	They can't do it themselves.
	And they can't do it without listening to themselves talk, even, because for most people, talking is how they think.
	And talking socially is even more how they think.
	And I mean that literally.
	I don't mean that metaphorically.
	And I think that's true for almost everyone.
	You know, I mean, There are people who are trained academically who can actually think, but to think you have to divide yourself into sub-personalities, I suppose, each of which has a differing opinion, a well-elucidated differing opinion, and then you have to let those different elements of your personality have an internal dialogue, and you have to draw conclusions from that.
	It's very, very difficult for people to do that, and we radically overestimate the degree to which they do.
	Jung said at one point that people don't think so much as as thoughts appear in their head and they believe them, which I think is a much more accurate way of describing the general, because true thought is not only that the thoughts arise in your mind, it's that you look at the thought and then you critique it, right?
	You have to separate yourself from the thought and decide whether or not it's valuable.
	That's more like an editing function and You know, it takes a long time to be a good editor, a tremendous amount of time, and it just doesn't happen, generally speaking.
	So, well, so I would say, well, without free speech, there's no true thought.
	And then you might say, well, who the hell cares whether or not we think?
	And I think the answer to that is fairly straightforward.
	I mean, you might think it's so obvious that it doesn't need explanation, but there are very few things that are so obvious they don't need explanation.
	So the reason you think is so that the world doesn't smack you as hard as it might, fundamentally, you know, and I really mean this technically because the way that people evolved the capacity for thought was that the prefrontal cortex, which mediates a lot of voluntary linguistic ability, actually emerged over the course of evolutionary history out of the motor cortex.
	And so that's a very interesting thing to understand because it means that You know animals basically think by moving and the problem with that is if you think by moving and you make the wrong move then you're dead.
	Whereas what human beings can do is they can generate fictional avatars of themselves in fictional worlds and they can run the avatars as simulations and the ones that get killed they don't express in behavior.
	And I mean you could do that with words too although people you know originally would have done it mostly with images they do the same thing with drama.
	And so the reason that you think, and I think it was George, was it Alfred North Whitehead that said this, I think, but I'm not absolutely sure.
	The reason you think is so that your thoughts can die instead of you.
	And that's a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant phrase, and absolutely the case.
	So if you think properly, Then you kill off the ideas that if you acted out would kill you or at least cause you suffering or perhaps cause suffering to the people around you and since it's more or less obvious a priori that suffering is worse than not suffering under most circumstances it seems reasonable to act in a manner that will minimize it to the degree that that's possible and so you need clarity of thought because that helps guide you through a world that's enshrouded
	in fog and full of sharp objects and If you don't want to stumble into them and impale yourself, then you should have sharp vision and sharp capacity to communicate.
	You know, that's one of the things I tell students when I'm trying to teach them to write, because no one ever tells them why they should learn to write.
	It's like, you learn to write so you can think, and you learn to think so that the world doesn't treat you any more harshly than it absolutely has to.
	And that's no joke.
	You know, and if you're a person who's been around a bit, you see very rapidly that people who sharpen their arguments properly and can articulate their position and defend it are always always the people who are most successful and most compelling and that and that change the way structures function and and that also help things continue in the proper path when they're running down the proper path it's no joke to be articulate and to be able to think there isn't anything that's more powerful than that and that's a good
	segue into the second or the third part of what I wanted to talk to you about see Since I made those videos, I've become, I guess the word is popular, on, yeah, well, in many ways.
	By about November, by the end of November last year, there were more than 200 newspaper articles about the consequences of the videos that I'd produced.
	And those were like in-press, printed articles.
	I'm not talking about anything that happened on YouTube.
	YouTube is a very strange phenomenon, let me tell you.
	It's far more powerful than you think.
	So, just as an aside, I was on a program last week Hosted by a guy named Joe Rogan.
	I don't know how many of you know who Joe Rogan is.
	Joe Rogan gets 1.2 billion downloads of his podcasts a year.
	You just think about that.
	Like, that's absolutely unparalleled.
	And everybody under 30 is getting their news from either Facebook or from YouTube.
	The old conventional media sources, they're dead.
	They're so dead you can hardly believe it.
	so YouTube and one of the reasons I'm bringing it up is because YouTube is the first platform that's produced for people the capacity to make the spoken word as far-reaching and permanent as the written word right that's a complete cultural revolution it's the first time it's ever happened I mean it wouldn't have to be YouTube it just turns out that that's the platform that got there first but it's a big deal and anyways The
	reason that I became popular, I think, was partly because of the political, philosophical videos that I made, but then when people came to my website to watch them, they stayed, generally speaking, to watch the lectures that I'd been posting on there since 2013.
	Those were derived from work I did on a book called Maps of Meaning which I published in 1999 and see what I was trying to do with that book was to sort something out that was very complex and that was when I was growing up and the Cold War was raging I couldn't understand precisely why we had divided into two armed camps around our respective ideological positions Either why those ideological positions were so important that people would risk the
	destruction of the world to protect them, let's say, or why it was those two particular ideologies, or whether or not this was just a difference of opinion, right, which would be, that would be a more postmodern view, is there's multiple ways that you can organize societies.
	In the West we happen to organize our society one way, but that's one of a plethora of potential ways of organizing society, and let's say the Communists had decided to organize their society another way, and Human beings are infinitely malleable, and so, you know, the social structures that we occupy are arbitrary in some sense, and matter of opinion, and maybe collective opinion, but nonetheless still a matter of opinion.
	And I thought, well, is it the case that the values that we hold to be true in the West are merely based upon opinion?
	And so I started to investigate that, and the conclusion that I came to as a consequence of hitting the question from multiple different perspectives was that that was not a reasonable way of formulating of interpreting the evidence and so I looked at evidence from neuropsychology and neuroscience mostly Based at least in part on the work of someone named Jeffrey Gray,
	who was a very good psychologist, very interested in anxiety.
	I looked at general behavioral psychology, looked at literature, and I looked at mythology.
	And I could see a pattern emerging across all of those, which I think is a nice way of determining whether or not something exists.
	Like it's one thing to see a pattern in one set of data, But if you can see the same pattern in another set that's quite historically distinct from the first, and then see the same pattern in another set, and then another set, then the probability that that's a spurious pattern starts to decrease quite radically.
	And so I don't think the pattern was spurious.
	And so I'm going to tell you what I think I What would you say?
	Extracted.
	This is very complicated and makes a difficult transition in the talk.
	So, I'm going to read something first.
	This is from the Gospel of John.
	It's one of the most famous lines in the Bible.
	In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
	It's a very strange idea, from a cosmological perspective, because it posits that there's something conscious or cognitive about the origin, that there's a necessary cognitive element to the origin.
	I think about that essentially as something associated with consciousness.
	And of course, we don't really understand the relationship between consciousness and being.
	We don't understand consciousness at all.
	But it seems integrally associated at least with our individual beings because one of the things that we seem to not doubt is that we are in fact conscious and that so are other people and if I treat someone as if they're not conscious, well they tend not to be very happy about that.
	They'll certainly object to it.
	So despite what we might say we believe, we certainly act as if we regard all other human beings as conscious.
	And the consciousness is a prerequisite for the existence of their experience.
	Anyway, so that there's this emphasis in this book that is at the root of our culture that there's something about verbal communication in particular that has to be regarded as foundational.
	And I think that's actually to some degree in keeping with the postmodernist claims that everything is a language game.
	Let's say that everything is constructed by language.
	Now, I don't believe that everything is constructed by language, but I'm just pointing that out because you can take this particular perspective and you can look at it from a variety of different intellectual sources and still derive an analog of the claim from it.
	So, I want you to keep that in the back of your mind for a moment.
	Now, that idea that the word was there at the beginning of creation, that's a very, very old idea.
	It's older than the Judeo-Christian context from which I extracted it.
	So, for example, in Egypt, there was a god named Peta.
	Who's a major god.
	I may be pronouncing that wrong.
	But as far as the Egyptians were concerned, he was the original creator.
	And he created as a consequence of thinking, but more specifically as a consequence of speaking.
	So again, there was this idea that there was this primacy of speaking as a force that brings being into existence.
	And then you see the same thing in the Mesopotamian context.
	Their creation myth was called the Enuma Elish.
	And there's a god in that story.
	And that story apparently is one of the places from which the creation story in the Bible was extracted.
	The god is named Marduk, and Marduk is a god that fights chaos and creates the world out of the consequences.
	And he has a variety of different attributes, one of which his head is ringed with eyes so he can see in all directions.
	So there's very much emphasis among the Mesopotamians on the primacy of attention, let's say.
	But he can also speak magic words and It's the fact that he's equipped with this massive capacity for attention and the ability to speak magic words that enables him to go and fight the Dragon of Chaos, roughly speaking, and to cut her into pieces and make up the world.
	One of Marduk's names, for example, is he who makes ingenious things out of the combat with Tiamat.
	And Tiamat is this primordial goddess of chaos that represents the sort of the formless proto-matter of things From which consciousness extracts structure.
	That's one way of thinking about it.
	So that idea is quite widespread.
	In fact, it's an idea that informs mythological structures everywhere, as far as I can tell.
	There's this idea that there's a dynamic between what you know and what you don't know.
	You can think about those as different domains of reality, what you know and what you don't know.
	And the thing that mediates between what you know and what you don't know It's this thing that has the attribute of spoken wisdom.
	It's something like that.
	That's a very complicated idea.
	It's very difficult to understand.
	It's extraordinarily difficult to understand, but I can give you some sense of it.
	It's a phenomenological idea, I suppose.
	Imagine that you...
	I don't know, maybe you have it.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Maybe you're a medical student, a pre-med student, right?
	You want to go to medical school and so you're busily beetling away on your courses.
	You're doing all right, you know.
	Then you go take the MCAT and you score at the say 20th percentile, which of course 20% of people do.
	And that will come as quite a shock to you, no doubt, because you go in there in the world that you understand and in that world You're competent let's say to become a medical doctor and when you open the envelope and you look at the number then well then your world crumbles and collapses and what it collapses into I would say is equivalent to this formless chaos that the ancients believed was the ground of being and it's this place where confusion reigns right
	in fact the word for the Chaos that God orders with the word at the beginning of Genesis is often translated as chaos or confusion.
	Now when you think, well, you've formulated a world that you inhabit with a particular linguistic rational logical structure, it's predicated on certain axioms of belief, like that you're competent to be a medical doctor, and then you receive a piece of information that makes not only Your present understanding of yourself, no longer relevant or correct, but also your past understanding of yourself and also your future.
	Poof!
	Gone!
	Right?
	Well, gone where?
	Gone into what?
	Well, gone into chaos, roughly speaking.
	And then you're in very rough shape as a consequence of that.
	And if you do manage to lever yourself out of that chaotic condition that you now find yourself in, you're going to essentially do it with thought and dialogue.
	Because you're going to talk to people.
	What did I do wrong?
	What's wrong with the way I thought?
	How could I have been so misled by what I believe?
	What should I do now?
	Who actually am I? All of that is a way of reconstructing yourself from the ashes, so to speak.
	I would say that, and you do that with speech, and you do that with true speech.
	And so true speech is what redeems you from the chaos of unstructured being.
	And so then that's another thing to think about for a moment.
	And then I'm going to bring up this final piece and we can think about it too.
	So I've been trying to figure out how these ideas came to be.
	Because they came to be over a very long period of time.
	So the god Marduk, for example, he was assembled, you could say, as the empires of the ancient Middle East, as the tribal people of the ancient Middle East came together and they each had their own deities that represented their highest values.
	And when they came together, those deities had to be amalgamated.
	And so tribe A has its highest value and tribe B has its highest value and they're embodied.
	That's the deity element.
	and they come together and then the deities in some sense have to have a war to figure out who's the top god and so if you assemble a few hundred tribes out of that comes a conceptualization of the top god that was Marduk for example in Mesopotamia and he usually absorbs the names of all the previous gods and as he sort of emerged as the king of a hierarchy and so so you think about this if you think about the expression of the deity as the projection of the highest ideal of the tribe And that's something
	that's been worked out over perhaps millennia, especially with people who have an oral tradition.
	And then you bring those different tribes together, what happens is the highest ideals in their embodied form have what you could think of metaphorically as a war.
	And the war of gods in heaven, by the way, is a very ancient and widespread mythological motif.
	And out of that war arises what you might describe as a meta-value.
	And so the meta-value would be the highest value among a set of values.
	And the question would be, well, what would that value be?
	What would that highest value be?
	Is there something about it that's recognizable and, say, somewhat constant, so that if you took 100 tribes here and amalgamated their ideals, and you took 100 tribes here and amalgamated their ideals, if the two sets of amalgamations would have a structural similarity to one another?
	And as far as I can tell, the answer to that is yes.
	And it's a logical answer because you'd expect structural similarity if you extract out a common element from a very large number of constituent representatives.
	So, for example, if you take a large number of female faces and average them, so I'm not talking about the average face, I'm talking about the averaged face.
	It's not the same thing.
	The averaged female face is attractive, and so is the averaged male face.
	And so, because it kind of constitutes the central human form and if you take 64 women and you extract out an averaged face and you take another 64, you get the same face.
	Well, maybe it takes more than 64, but you get the point.
	And so, well, so I was thinking about how that process came to be.
	I decided to look at it even like to go back farther in time to try to understand How it is that we formulated our values per se, especially given that at some point we weren't linguistic creatures at all, right?
	We separated from the common ancestors between us and chimpanzees about six million years ago.
	Sometime during that six million year process, we started to be able to imitate ourselves first and then represent ourselves in image and action And then only after that to start to articulate ourselves.
	And so a lot of the knowledge that we have is grounded in our embodiment, but also in the shaping of that embodiment across extraordinary long periods of time.
	So like there's an implicit way of being in your form, in your embodied form, but more importantly there's an implicit way of being that's a consequence of the fact that we've existed within hierarchical social structures for far longer than we were even sharing a common ancestor say with great apes so that's for maybe hundreds of millions of years with regards to being embedded in a hierarchy so then the question is something like well
	if we're embedded in a hierarchy and we have been forever that's about 350 million years by the way is there a set of attributes that tends reliably to move you up the hierarchy Because if there is, you see, going up the hierarchy increases the probability of reproductive success.
	So there's actually nothing more important to determine over the course of 350 million years inside a hierarchy than how it is that you ratchet yourself up the hierarchy reliably.
	And you could think about that in some sense as the source of ideals.
	Here's a kind of a concrete way of thinking about that.
	You know, if you get a hundred men together, They're going to organize themselves into a hierarchical structure.
	They have to, or they're going to stay chaotic and fight.
	That's the other alternative.
	But the way that the people who are going to rise to the top, they might rise to the top because of their sheer physical prowess and power, but they also might rise to the top because they're very competent at certain things.
	And it's as if all the men are going to get together and vote, and maybe that would actually happen, to determine who best embodies the spirit of the group and who should be granted leadership.
	And in an evolutionary context, by the way, that would also help ensure that that person would propagate their genes into the next generation.
	And it's not a trivial effect, especially among men.
	It's a big effect, because roughly speaking, half of all men are not reproductively successful.
	So there's a wicked culling Let's say among men.
	Well, you can see this among chimpanzees as well.
	They have dominance hierarchies.
	Some sort of chimps rise to the top.
	And you might think, well, that's the, like, caveman chimp who's best at pounding out all the rivals.
	But it turns out that that's not exactly the case.
	And Frans de Waal has done a very good job of detailing this with his work on chimpanzees in particular.
	And he's found that the power-hungry tyrant sort of chimp can rule for a while, but he tends to have a very unstable kingdom.
	And the reason for that is he's not very good at mutually grooming, he's not good at socially connecting with other males, and he isn't popular among the females and doesn't attend to the young, essentially.
	And so what happens is even if he's like the meanest, toughest guy on the block, two subordinate chimps team up, they make friends, they groom each other, and they have each other's backs, and then one day he's having an off day because he ate too many fermented bananas the night before, Like they just tear them into pieces and chimps are unbelievably strong and unbelievably brutal.
	They seem to have absolutely no internal regulation whatsoever of their aggression.
	That all seems to be manifested outside in terms of dominance hierarchy control and we know that because they go on raiding parties into other chimp territories and when they find chimps that aren't part of their hierarchy they just rip them into pieces.
	And so, that's a scary thing if you think about our similarity with chimpanzees, because we like to think we have internal controls over our aggression.
	But it's not so bloody obvious, I can tell you that.
	Anyways, what de Waal found was that it's actually chimps that are more, you might say, humane.
	Although, chimpane?
	I don't know what the equivalent is.
	Let's say humane, that manage to produce hierarchies that are more stable and actually manage to stay alive on top of them for much longer periods of time.
	And he thinks about that as the emergence of an implicit morality, right?
	It's a morality that's acted out.
	So then you think, well, there are different ways of climbing up a hierarchy.
	There are worse and better ways.
	The better ways allow you to live longer in a more stable hierarchy.
	And the evolutionary payoff for that is that you leave more descendants.
	And so the hierarchy itself becomes a very powerful shaping mechanism that determines how it is that people are going to adapt because it's the primary method of selection.
	So there's an ethic in there.
	There's an ethic that emerges from the social interactions, but that's rapidly transformed into a biological selection device.
	And so we're selected.
	And that's especially true among human beings, because with chimps, the females are indiscriminate maters, which is to say that a female chimp in heat will mate with any male chimp.
	Now, the dominant males chase the subordinate males away, so they're still more likely to leave offspring than the subordinates, but it's not because of the females.
	But human females are different.
	Human females exert choice and quite brutal choice, you might put it that way.
	They're very choosy and it's one of the things that seems to have distinguished us from chimpanzees.
	And what roughly seems to happen is that the male dominance hierarchy elects men to the higher, say, rungs of the hierarchy and then the females peel from the top.
	And so that means that what you can say is that human beings are the consequence of intense male dominance competition.
	It's not necessarily dominance, but it's competition for the upper rungs of the hierarchy mediated by female selection.
	And so that's produced, as far as I can tell, a powerful pattern of behavior.
	Now, the question is, what's that pattern of behavior?
	I would say, well, it's encapsulated in mythology in two forms.
	And the question is, well, who should lead?
	Let's say that's the question.
	Who should lead?
	That is the question.
	Who should be sovereign?
	Or maybe when it becomes abstracted, what should be sovereign?
	Because the first question from an evolutionary perspective is who should be sovereign?
	But once you can abstract, then the principle of sovereignty can be detached from the leader and become a principle all on its own.
	And that might be first expressed in mythological or imagistic form, dramatic form, like the good guys versus the bad guys, or good versus evil.
	We could say it like that.
	But obviously it's embodied and acted out far before it's extracted and turned into an abstracted representation.
	Well, what seems to have happened is...
	So one of the common themes, for example, in mythology is what's roughly been described as a hero myth, and a hero myth Involves someone who's part of a demolished community, a community under threat.
	The threat's usually signified by something vaguely, like a dragon.
	And the dragon comes out.
	It's eternal.
	It comes out to attack the village.
	The hero comes out and confronts the dragon and then frees the virgin, for example, or gets the gold.
	And to me, that's a very, very, well, that is a very old story.
	It's in the Enume Lish, for example.
	It's the story at the basis of very many What would you call it?
	Widely dispersed myths around the world.
	The dragon, for example, is a very common symbol.
	I think the reason for that is, it's so complicated, but I think the reason for that is something like this, is that human beings learned to understand over time that the most reliable leader was the person who could step outside the structure when it was damaged to confront something that was chaotic and dangerous, in whatever form that might be, and then to bring something valuable back as a consequence.
	And you see that principle being elevated continually in mythological stories like the Enum Elish, for example, where the main hero Marduk is elevated among the other gods and is characterized by this intense capacity for vision, which the Egyptians also worshipped in the form of Horus.
	And this capacity to speak, which has this ability to formulate and reshape the world.
	Well, that's the thing, is that it's as if what we've discovered as a species, in some sense, is that the person that should lead, the thing that should be sovereign, is the thing that can Step outside the structured order, incorporate something new and dangerous, and then produce something valuable out of it.
	That's one phase.
	Another phase, another hero myth, is the person who criticizes the power elite when it becomes corrupt and points out the corruption and then restructures the society.
	That happens in the prophetic books, for example, continually in the Old Testament, because you could think that the Historical enemies of humanity are twofold in some sense one is the chaos that comes from outside and that disrupts the standard order that needs to be dealt with and the other is the chaos that comes in the inside when when our institutions and hierarchies become corrupt and then the thing that transforms that is the thing that has enough courage either to stand up against the chaos or to say something about the
	corrupt institutions and what's happened as far as I can tell is that over time Those principles have been extracted out from this much more embodied domain and raised to the principle of highest sovereignty.
	Now, one of the things that happened in Egypt was called the democratization of Osiris and Horus.
	What seems to happen, and this is what happened in Egypt, is that the power to manifest that sovereignty Let's say, is first only regarded as an attribute of the sovereign, the king.
	And the king is actually only king insofar as he can manifest that.
	So in Mesopotamia, you're only emperor if you were a good Marduk.
	You'd go out on New Year's Day and reenact the entire cosmogony.
	And you had to be a good representative of Marduk, otherwise you didn't deserve your sovereignty.
	And in Egypt, unless you were a good avatar, let's say, of Horus and Osiris, the combination, then you didn't get to be pharaoh.
	So you were embodying this principle, this principle of sovereignty.
	And what happened in Egypt was that, first of all, the principle of sovereignty, the images of sovereignty, could only be used by the pharaoh, and then it became the aristocracy.
	And then what seemed to happen after that, they were using the symbols, what seemed to happen after that, this was maybe a transmutation, in part via the Greeks, and in part via the Jews, is that the idea that that sovereignty that was inherent in the Pharaoh and then in the aristocracy was actually something that could be attributed to everyone that was human and that was I think that that that manifested itself most completely in some sense at the beginning of the Christian era because there was an emphasis then on
	the idea that every single individual carried within them a spark of the divine let's say and that was the proper source of sovereignty and And so then the question is, well, what is that source of the divine?
	And that's why I read you that section from John to begin with, because the source of the divinity is the capacity to speak and transmute the world as a consequence of speaking, and that's the proper principle of sovereignty.
	And as far as I can tell, it's also the reason why in the West people have an inviolable right.
	The reason they have an inviolable right is because our society figured out, and based on these unbelievably deep antecedents, precedents, that each individual had the capacity to contribute something to the group without which the group would be less.
	It's something like that.
	And so you're regarded at the base of our law as the avatar, that's exactly right, as the avatar of a divine principle.
	And that divine principle is the capacity to use your speech to give order to the chaos of the world and to criticize structures of order that have become corrupted, reformulate them.
	And so you have this territory that surrounds you that's inviolate.
	It's something about you that transcends even the reach of the law, which is a very strange thing, you know, because in our societies, even if you're a murderer, even if everyone knows it, you still have inviolable rights.
	You think, of all the things that are unlikely to have emerged as a concept, that's got to be like number one.
	It's been a very long, long struggle for human beings to understand that we embody this principle, let's say, that continually generates the world out of chaos and revitalizes it when it becomes corrupt and dead.
	And that's, as far as I can tell, and that's what's expressed in John, is that there isn't any difference between that and the capacity To carefully articulate the nature of your experience to other people and then to respond to the corrective feedback.
	That's the way that human beings progress through the world and that's the ultimate principle that should be at the top of what I think of as the set of all human dominance hierarchies, right?
	Something will move you up a hierarchy.
	Something slightly different will move you up a different hierarchy.
	You take a huge set of hierarchies and say, well, what's the principle that's going to work best across all those hierarchies?
	It's something like the capacity to speak the truth.
	And so that's how it looks to me.
	And that's why I think, apart from the practical reasons that are already described, I know that's a tremendous amount of information to process, and I hope that made some sense.
	It's a very difficult thing to boil down In a short period of time, I mean I've been trying to do that for like 30 years to get it coherent enough to represent it in a short period of time, but there's the practical issue which is that's how we encounter what we don't understand and turn it into Habitable space and how we communicate about it and reach consensus but then there's something much deeper underneath that which is that we know that and we know it really really deeply the whole human race has been
	aiming at that for God only knows how long but it's it's hundreds of thousands of years certainly and it might be far longer than that and so it's not a principle that we can dispense with and assume that we'll construct something okay in its absence because it's actually An expression of the fundamental nature of human beings.
	And we mess with that at our extreme peril.
	And as far as I can tell, that's exactly what we're doing now.
	So that's part of the reason why I objected to Bill C-16.
	Because I don't think that it's reasonable for government authorities to put their goddamn words into their citizens' mouths.
	As simple as that.
	I think there isn't There's almost nothing you could embark on that would be more dangerous than that.
	And the fact that this had to do with, purportedly, had to do with the rights of a small minority of people, I think is a complete sideshow.
	I think it's almost irrelevant in relationship to the broader context, and I think that if that wasn't the case, Then there wouldn't have been any furor whatsoever about what I said, because who the hell cares what I have to say?
	So, anyways, that's my take on it.
	So that's all I've got to say.
	So you mentioned the form of dialogues When you were giving the lecture, you mentioned that you're not, in fact, engaging in a monologue, because by looking and seeing our reactions, you're constantly modifying your speech.
	I was wondering if you could speak out, because I'm probably the only millennial in this room.
	No, no, no.
	One more.
	One more.
	But as someone who's kind of grown up in the internet and who in fact has social media, do you think sites like Facebook and not so much Twitter, but basically Facebook, do they stop this dialogue?
	Or what are the ramifications of such things if people are communicating with each other without really being in the same room?
	What for you is lost?
	I think it's sort of analogous to the danger of derivatives in the financial market you know because like a derivative is something that can amplify the degree to which the market moves right because it's an abstraction from the underlying reality so it's more powerful for good and it's more powerful for evil and I would say so to speak you know if you're thinking about it metaphorically well it's an amplifier and that can be a good thing but it can also be a bad thing and I think it does often amplify The proclivity
	of people to disappear into a self-reflective bubble, and that's aided by the algorithms that feed to you what you want to see.
	We don't know exactly what that's going to do.
	It's a very dangerous thing, because we're building an unconscious into the Internet, and no one's going to understand how it works, because it gets more and more complex, especially when AI kicks in in a big way, because you can't understand how those systems work, even though they work.
	And the problem with that unconscious in the internet is it filters information.
	And you don't know what the filtering is.
	I mean, you don't know what your own filtering is, you know, because you're not conscious of your underlying processes.
	But this adds a whole new dimension to it.
	And the fact that it's self-fulfilling in some sense increases the probability of positive feedback loops that will go out of control.
	So do you think that it kind of locks you into your own...
	maybe the story of your life because I'm not a freak person not a frequent social media user but I see it as you know people posting about their selves there are the relationships and do you think it creates constant feedback loop that it's kind of like I'm thinking about it's not what it is it's the guy that looks narcissus narcissus looking at your own reflection in the mirror and that you are in fact
	well I think what happens is that you're not allowing other I think that is a danger I
	I also think though is that you also fall prone to the implicit narcissism of all the other Facebook users and well because people generally post glowing reviews of their own life and you know to some degree that's understandable because who wants to be subject to a constant barrage of misery I mean there's reasons that people do it they post themselves when they're having fun when they're doing something spectacular but That also means that you're being blasted all the time
	by these endless images of other people having a far better time of life than you are.
	And so I think that we do know that there is some evidence that more exposure to Facebook means more depression.
	Now it's hard to pull out correlation and causality there, but then in the political sphere you have the same problem because You're not being fed an unbiased sample of information, and your own initial biases are multiplied by the algorithms that select for you what you're going to look at.
	And we have no idea what the consequence of that is.
	Thank you very much.
	Incidentally, I have a question that concerns something similar.
	But I'm talking about the real face-to-face conversation.
	You said how important it is for you as a speaker to get the feedback of your audience.
	Now, having grown up in East Germany, we have learned to look with no expression whatsoever at the most outrageous, stupid things.
	Because the consequences of, like, rolling your eyes when they were talking about Us being well ahead economically of the West would be just very negative.
	So we didn't do that.
	And I see something very similar happening here in especially certain political lectures.
	So if somebody tells you that what you are doing or tells an audience what you are doing is horrible and I'm in that audience, I wouldn't roll my eyes because I know what the consequences are.
	Now, of course, in...
	Those are microaggressions.
	Yeah.
	Really, I'm not kidding.
	I mean, that's exactly what it is.
	Eye-rolling, in particular, is a sign of contempt.
	Exactly.
	But, of course, if I never do that to you, you now get the impression that what you say is just wonderful.
	So you don't get the critical feedback that is, as you pointed out rightly, very important for you.
	Yes.
	And of course that goes both ways.
	It's actually one of the fundamental defences of free speech is that if you constrain it you're depriving people of corrective feedback and that's a very bad thing because people cannot maintain sanity in isolation.
	You outsource your sanity to other people.
	If you're vaguely socially acceptable What that means is people can tolerate having you around and then they will provide you with corrective feedback and as long as you react to that you don't have to worry about being sane because they'll keep you that way and you might think well no you can manage your sanity by yourself but No.
	It's too complex.
	You can't.
	It's not possible.
	So the problem is not just inhibiting free speech, but also inhibiting natural reaction to speech.
	Absolutely.
	Well, and the spontaneous reactions, right?
	Because a lot of those facial gestures, those aren't precisely conscious.
	And that's actually good, because they're untrammeled expressions of your initial instincts, something like that.
	You know, it's like having dogs around.
	You know, if you're agitated and upset, the dog will get all nervous.
	It's like, well, you can trust that.
	The dog doesn't have an agenda.
	You know, and people are like that in their initial responses, too, because that doesn't mean they're correct, but at least it means that it's not mediated by, like, an ideological bias, or not so straightforwardly.
	Just before we hear from Eva, I wanted to mention that we let our hypothesis die in our stead.
	It's Karl Popper, one of my favorite philosophers.
	Right, Popper, yes.
	I was just talking to you.
	First of all, I want to thank you for a most interesting presentation and on a line which a lot of us here haven't heard before.
	So I thank you for that.
	And there are two things that I wanted to ask you about.
	One, the concept that you've enunciated of the emergence over an extremely long period of time of the idea that we all have somewhat of the divine in us, which I suppose also implies that we have somewhat of the opposite as well.
	Yeah, it does imply that.
	Leads directly to The idea of individual rights versus group rights.
	Yes.
	And a lot of the troubles that all of us here face is that we have become the target of these group demands for group rights rather than individual rights, us all attaining or not that That march towards the hierarchies of society based on our own efforts and our own performances and so on.
	So that's one, but that's also the other side of another thing that you've raised, which one rarely hears in any of these kinds of meetings, the biological basis of our behavior.
	And I was really interested to hear you bring this into the discussion because it has seemed to me over the years, and I've been Around this business since the 60s, I think, when all the troubles seem to have started, is that a lot of the feminism nonsense is involved with the denial of differences between males and females.
	A lot of the problems with the performance and affirmative action and so on is the denial that there may be biological bases to some of the performance differences that we see in various fields of activity around the world.
	And also this idea that we can decide what gender we are tomorrow morning.
	I must say, I've never heard of this.
	What did you call it?
	The gender unicorn.
	Hey, look it up, man.
	It's very instructive.
	And the idea that five-year-olds and six-year-olds will be subjected to this is positively alarming.
	So I just ask you to comment on all this.
	Yeah, well, they call that biological essentialism, right?
	And so that's a curse word, essentially, right?
	And again, that's partly why I objected to the legislation and surrounding policy, because it doesn't allow for a biological influence, which is preposterous in my estimation.
	I mean, the biology actually It's much more useful than people even realize.
	So, you know, one of the things we were talking about earlier today was, say, the distinction between conservatives and liberals.
	I can tell you one of the things that produces right-wing authoritarianism, it's very interesting, and you wouldn't guess this in a million years, prevalence of infectious disease.
	So there was a great paper published three years ago.
	It was brilliant.
	Prevalence of infectious disease.
	So it was published in a journal called PLAWS One.
	And these researchers were interested in this hypothesis called the behavioral immune system.
	And so you know very frequently when heretofore isolated human groups come into contact that either one group or the other dies.
	Like maybe all of them or virtually all of them.
	That's essentially what happened to the Native Americans when the Spaniards hit.
	Central America right because they didn't have any built-in immunity to smallpox or chickenpox or mumps or measles and like successive epidemics just wipe them out the estimates vary but it could be as high as 95 percent and so it appears as though the the border idea the idea of thick borders let's say which is a fundamentally conservative idea the liberals want open borders and a lot of information flow and the conservatives want closed borders and More restriction and protection at
	every level of the conceptual hierarchy.
	It's not just political borders.
	It's borders around everything.
	But that seems to be tightly associated, at least in part, with the prevalence of infectious disease, both at the country level and at the local level within countries.
	And the correlation is like 0.7.
	It's not trivial, and it's not with governmental authoritarian attitudes.
	It's with individual authoritarian attitudes In the locales where the infectious diseases are prevalent.
	And it seems to be associated with the emotion of disgust.
	So Hitler wasn't afraid of the Jews.
	Conservatives aren't afraid of others.
	That isn't how it works.
	They're disgusted.
	That's not the same thing.
	It's associated with a personality trait called orderliness.
	And so, once this has been sorted out by psychologists over about the last 10 years, let's say, and when I was plowing through the literature and Working on the relationship between disgust sensitivity and personality, I happened to reread Hitler's table talk, which was a collection of his spontaneous speeches collected at dinner time, lunch times, by secretaries from 1939 to 1942.
	And once I knew this other information, it just leapt out at me, you know, so Hitler was Admirer of willpower.
	That makes him a conscientious type of person.
	Very obsessed with order.
	Washed his hands continually.
	Was hyper clean.
	And disgust sensitive.
	And his primary metaphor for the German people was a body.
	Aryan body.
	Pure body under assault by parasites.
	Pure disgust and contamination language.
	And it's mediated by disgust sensitivity, and that's one of the things that predicts that kind of right-wing, close-the-border attitude, and that's also heightened in places where infectious diseases are a real problem.
	So if you want to eliminate right-wing authoritarianism, it actually looks like one of the things you could do is promote public health programs everywhere to rid the world to the degree that that's possible of infectious diseases.
	Well, you know, you want to impede the flow between people if there's infectious diseases everywhere, obviously.
	And that manifests itself in political attitudes.
	So there's, the biology reaches way deeper than people are willing to, like to assume.
	But some of the things that it tells us are unbelievably useful to know.
	I mean, terrible to know in some sense, but useful to know.
	And so, and like DeWaal's work on The stability of primate hierarchy is incredibly important.
	I mean, he's been looking at the emergence of proto-morality among chimpanzees, and that seems to be driven in large part by the dominance hierarchy structure.
	It's not exactly a dominance hierarchy either, that's probably not exactly the right way to think about it, because, you know, dominance implies pure power, but lots of human hierarchies aren't dominance hierarchies at all, they're competence hierarchies or something like that, so it's very different.
	I'm a libertarian, so I'm in favor of freedom, but unlike a lot of libertarians, I don't think that there's kind of a natural affinity to freedom among human beings, that evolution has actually trained us to be conformists much more than freedom-loving individualists.
	Absolutely.
	And as a result of that, I mean, because in our evolutionary history, it was often much more important to row all in the same direction.
	The clan, you know, the roughly related, genetically related clans that were roaming, it was much more important to row in the same direction than to row in the right direction.
	As long as you didn't row off the cliff or run off the cliff.
	That would be bad, but as long as you were muddling through, it was better for everyone to be in the same, and so therefore we evolved to be very much conformists, and people like you, and to a lesser extent the rest of us in this room, are the disruptors.
	We're the ones who are non-conformists, we're the ones who say, hey wait a minute, that doesn't sound right to me, and we're the ones who want to lead society back to chaos, the state of chaos, where everyone's got their own Little little view of how things should go instead of following the leader and just doing what everyone else does and That's why people like you attract to me to my way of thinking that's why people like you attract such a visceral You know angry reaction is that you're you're leading us back into chaos
	and if we don't all ignore you and shut you down and you know we're all going to be you know in this state where The clan is fighting amongst each other instead of rowing in the same direction.
	I mean, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
	Well, I think certainly one of the things I've learned, see, I already knew before all this happened that people were primarily conforming.
	I actually don't have much of a problem with that because most of the time the tradition is correct.
	But sometimes it's not correct at all.
	That's the problem, is that So, you know, one of the things I always tell my clients and my students, for that matter, is you should do what everyone else does, unless you have a really good reason to vary.
	And one of the things I learned from Jung, Carl Jung, was that, and if you do vary, you should try to only do it in a couple of directions, because you probably can't handle doing it more than that.
	It's just too much, too much psychologically.
	But, you know, the problem is that sometimes the group is rowing off a cliff.
	And then, you know, that's partly why the individual, in some sense, is the eternal savior of the group, because the group has the aspect of sheep, let's say, and the sheep are doing fine.
	They've got the whole herd thing going for them.
	It decreases the risk of individual predation.
	They've got all their nervous systems in tune, so there's real utility in the herd.
	But they're also subject to all the problems that herds have, like herd panic.
	And so that's not good enough.
	That's what human beings figured out, was that being part of the herd, although necessary, isn't good enough.
	There has to be a balance between the tradition, the old dead tradition, and the revivifying force of the living, essentially.
	Those are actually how the gods split up in Egypt, because Horus was roughly a representation of the living, and Osiris was roughly a representation of the dead.
	And it was the combination of those two that made up the sovereign.
	Very intelligent, dramatic political philosophy.
	But one of the things I have seen since September is, I mean, I knew that people were conformists, but I really had no idea to what degree that was true.
	You know, like, I mean, I've got very, very few letters of support from people who are academics, for example.
	And they, I get secret reports, really.
	You know, people will come and say, well, we agree with what you're doing, but we wish you could be a little nicer about it, which...
	Which, you know, it's a funny thing for people to say because it implies that if they did what I was doing, they would do a better job.
	You know, which is fine, but, you know, you can always try it out and see how it goes.
	When I gave talks in the 80s and 90s on climate equity, one of the most common comments I would get after the thing's over and people are kind of milling around and shaking their hand is, I agree with everything you said, but I would never say it.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, well, it's no wonder.
	It's not surprising, you know.
	I mean, there are real reasons not to stick out from the herd.
	If you mark a zebra so that you can identify it against the herd, the lions will kill it.
	Right, and that's, man, I tell you, knowing that, because they can't organize their hunt unless they can identify the individual.
	That's right.
	Well, they're camouflaged against the herd, zebras.
	So, man, that's worth knowing.
	It explains a lot, that.
	Oh, sorry.
	Thanks very much for elaborating very compellingly the fundamental significance of thought and speech, which are almost impossible at our point in development to separate.
	And the trance issue Which is the particularity that isn't very important.
	You know, I would agree with you.
	But I'm a sex researcher, so people are going to ask me.
	The trance issue, I think, is an appropriate lightning rod for social constructionism.
	And, you know, as a researcher in this field, I can tell you that John Money was wrong.
	Kids are in tabula rasa.
	And, you know, Mickey Diamond was right.
	Now you're in trouble.
	The presence of police officers here was actually a very interesting underscoring of the power of thought and speech.
	And the millennial issue of the Internet reminds us that we don't choose our audience.
	In the Internet, you're basically exposed to the world and you're Tendency to self-center, to avert being trolled is probably great.
	At any rate, that's just background.
	My colleagues are going to, my colleague Ken Zucker, one of your colleagues at the University of Toronto, was recently fired for his departure from common wisdom.
	And it wasn't much of a departure, and in fact he represents common wisdom on the trance phenomena.
	Having said all that, my colleagues are going to ask you two questions.
	Ask me two questions.
	If he met Joan, who was, you know, transfeminine, okay, you know, male to female transsexual, would you refer to her as Joan?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	It's simpler.
	And the other issue is, amidst all the garbage and the hype and the let's reassign a three-year-old and, you know, stuff that I think all of us would regard as nonsense, Some of us in this room deal with trans individuals every day.
	You know, like some gay individuals, that's just the way they emerged in life.
	They're genuine.
	They're not particularly begging special privilege.
	My colleagues are going to say, would you, you know, you'd call her Joan, and would you accord her authenticity or reality, or is she socially constructing herself, or was she born that way?
	Well, the devil's always in the details.
	You know, I mean, one of the things that's emerging right now, although this is a fringe viewpoint, is like, imagine that you're dating while you're prejudiced.
	Because people's prejudices shine forth most clearly in their choice of partners, right?
	People's prejudices shine forth most brightly in their choice of sexual partners, right?
	We prefer young people, generally speaking.
	We prefer healthy people.
	We prefer people of our own race.
	We prefer people of our own religion.
	We prefer the highest performing individuals we can get our hands on, generally speaking.
	And so all that's deeply prejudicial.
	And one of the things that's emerging, I wouldn't say in the trans community, because there isn't such a thing as far as I can tell, but among certain individuals is they're dubious of your right to choose your sexual partner based on their genitalia, let's say, because that's a form of discrimination.
	So, yeah, well, you know, look, I can tell you, in Huxley's Brave New World, and this is worth thinking about, you didn't get to...
	It was a social faux pas to turn down a sexual request, because it's discriminatory.
	It's like...
	Well, it is discriminatory.
	Really, I'm not kidding, man.
	It's the deepest form of discrimination.
	You know, you're basically saying...
	Yes, exactly.
	That's exactly it.
	And that's what you had to do in Huxley's Brave New World.
	And you also weren't allowed to have a...
	Long-term monogamous relationship because the exclusionary element of that was regarded as prejudicial, which it is.
	That's the thing.
	That's the thing.
	And so the question is, well, I could say, well, I wouldn't discriminate.
	It's like, well, it depends on exactly what you mean by discriminate.
	And then, of course, the argument is about exactly what right I have to discriminate.
	And increasingly, the answer is none.
	We've already sacrificed freedom of assembly.
	We're pretty much on the way to sacrificing freedom of speech.
	It's a logical conclusion to all of this that...
	On those issues, I think we're very much on the same page.
	I'm going to be asked by colleagues and graduates, what is your view of the authenticity that is someone who says, look, I've always identified as the opposite gender, now I feel much better that I've transitioned.
	Yes, well that's a part that I'm more skeptical about because the evidence isn't all that clear that people do feel better when they transition.
	So, but it's, look, it's, yes it is.
	First of all, there's, the fact that there are categories doesn't mean there aren't exceptions.
	Okay, there's exceptions.
	Now, what those exceptions signify, well that's generally to be dealt with on an individual to individual basis.
	And that's fine with me.
	You know, I'm a clinician.
	I've dealt with all sorts of people who don't...
	And who fits in the categories?
	Nobody.
	Like, to become socialized, what you do is you mangle your square peg into a round hole.
	And I mean, for some people, that's obviously far more of a sacrifice than for others.
	But, you know, social being demands...
	What would you call restriction of your, at least of your individuality in all sorts of different aspects.
	And for some people that's much more of a sacrifice than others.
	The question is, what does the existence of the exception imply for the general case?
	And I believe that if you're a post-modernist and a Marxist underneath that, it supplies the excuse to take down the category of gender.
	And why would you do that?
	Well, it's a category used by the oppressive patriarchy to continue its To continue its pathological power-seeking.
	There's a distinction between, you know, leave me alone, I want to get on with my life, versus I'm going to dismiss the category so that there's room for me.
	Yes, precisely.
	Or I'm going to dismiss the category on behalf of someone else who I claim to speak for, which is even more commonly the case.
	This is a general environment where oppression and identity are the currency of status and advantage.
	Yes, right, right.
	Well, and I just don't see that it's going to be all that useful.
	Kids are confused enough when they're growing up.
	I think to add gender confusion to that, which we're doing very, very rapidly, is going to destroy 15 people for everyone it saves.
	It might be more than that.
	Because there's plenty of confused people out there.
	I would say, like, what, two out of 30, something like that, are just barely clinging on to the edges of reality.
	And they're looking for Acceptance and transmutation wherever they can find it.
	And confusing them further isn't going to help.
	And these people that were transitioning young, there's going to be one hell of a kickback from that, I can tell you, when they hit adulthood.
	Let me just follow up on Grant Brown's question.
	Jordan is among the top five or top ten professors in North America during the past year who's been a lightning rod.
	A target of collective efforts at humiliation and being disgraced.
	And my question is essentially, if you could give as parsimonious an answer as you can.
	Which generally isn't very parsimonious.
	I've noticed, yes.
	Of why you?
	And it's a remarkable phenomenon when somebody is demonized to the extent that you have been in mainstream media.
	I was reading just lately, I picked up in a car mechanic's office, a copy of Toronto Life.
	Oh yeah, they did a nice hatchet job.
	By a kind of wide-eyed reporter.
	You know, he doesn't seem like a demon.
	You know, he seems like a kind of nice guy.
	He even seems a little bit on the left.
	But he must be a demon there somewhere.
	So the question is just, as briefly as you can, why you?
	Because I said there was something I wouldn't do.
	Right?
	I mean, because, like, all these massive ideas, as I said, they manifest themselves in micro-examples.
	You know, many micro-examples, but they're micro-examples.
	And so, there's always a certain amount of arbitrariness when you decide to not go along with it.
	And the arbitrariness is like, well, I said that I wouldn't use these words, for example, and had a rationale for it.
	And then people test you out when you Put up your hand.
	They test you out.
	They think, well, are you just a monster?
	Well, let's throw a bunch of monster words at you and see if they stick.
	See if you can defend yourself, because that's a really good way of finding out whether you're actually a monster.
	And so that was the first, let's say, two months of all of this, was me just sort of fending off these different accusations.
	Now, I was fortunate in many ways.
	I was fortunate in that In the first demonstrations that followed the videos that the people who were supporting me behaved reasonably well compared to the people who weren't.
	You could think about that as somewhat dependent on chance.
	Not entirely, but things could have gone badly the other way.
	And also I was protected by the fact that I already had About 400 hours of videos online and so virtually everything I had said to students in the last, well, over the span of 30 years really, but particularly in the last five years was all recorded.
	And so if anybody wanted to find out if I was a monster, all they had to do was go through the painful process of listening to what I had to say.
	And there were no smoking guns buried in there, which is significant given that there were 200 hours of it.
	You know, you'd think there'd be something in there that I said that could have been taken out of context that would have really walloped me a good one, but so far nobody seems to have extracted one.
	So, and I also think that I guess the next reason would be I didn't just, apart from saying there was something specific I wouldn't do, which like brings the abstraction down to a point of reality, right?
	It's a line.
	That makes it real, rather than just an abstract critique.
	I think the other thing that happened was that people came to my website because of the political material, but that isn't where they stopped.
	They started listening to what I had to say, and I think that what I have to say is actually revolutionary.
	So, and I think people have a sense of that.
	I mean, it looks like it.
	As far as I can tell, the response seems to indicate that.
	And you know, I shared some of that with you today, that the idea that some of our values are grounded in In phenomena that are far more primordial, let's say, than our mere opinion.
	Like, that's a big deal if there's anything about it that's true.
	And I mean, I don't know, but I've been trying to puzzle this out for a long time.
	And it seems to cohere.
	And when people try to apply the principles that I've been discussing in their lives, it makes their lives better.
	And it's so interesting, too, because I've been going around speaking publicly, and most of my audience is men, interestingly enough, even in the live talks.
	And all I've been doing with the men, basically, is talking to them about saying what's true and adopting responsibility, and they're so bloody hungry for that, that it's just mind-boggling, which is something really curious and interesting to me, because that's not a saleable message, because I'm basically saying,
	well, find the heaviest load you can Conceive of and try to pick it up and while you're doing that, you know, try to engage in the least amount of deceit as possible and that that's also a pathway out of suffering, you know, for people in general.
	Well, it's so interesting to see how unbelievably positively the people who are following this are responding to that.
	It's I've been talking to a lot of the potential leaders of the Conservative Party, and one of the things I've told them repeatedly is, you guys have something to sell young people for the first time that I can remember, and that's responsibility.
	The left is selling freedom and rights.
	It's like, well, yeah, where's the other half of the story?
	Freedom, you know, that's freedom to drown.
	I mean, I've got nothing against freedom, obviously, but There's no rights without responsibilities, and there's no freedom without tradition, so somebody's got to tell the other half of the story.
	Dr.
	Peterson, three more questions, is that okay?
	We don't want to wear you down.
	Sure.
	Okay.
	You're too late for that.
	Thanks a lot, Jordan.
	I'm remembering a conversation we had about a month ago in a little cafe in Ottawa.
	Some of the issues we discussed then brought up again today.
	We didn't resolve anything, I think, ultimately, and I doubt if we ever will.
	And it seems to me the real problem is something you mentioned today, and we could go a little further with it.
	It's a question that's Pontius Pilate's question, the first postmodernist.
	What is truth?
	And it was taken up many times by Nietzsche in the genealogy of morals, where all truth is interpretation.
	And of course, this is not the case with Nietzsche and anybody who follows him, as you pointed out, because that's somebody else's truth, that there is no truth, and therefore, what do you do with that?
	And you're into the problem of the Cretan liar.
	But here is the problem for me, even with your talk, which is, as usual, brilliant, and I think grounded and In tremendous amount of factual information.
	I was asked once, after a book of mine came out, which was contested hotly by many people, what gave me the right to think I had the truth?
	This was an interviewer in Toronto for a Random House thing.
	And why did I think what I was saying was true?
	Who was I to say that I had the truth?
	And I said, I don't have the truth.
	And I had to come up with some explanation, quickly, in some kind of phrase, and it just occurred to me, I said, all I have is this, credible verisimilitude.
	What is credible verisimilitude?
	He wanted to know.
	I said, A, it depends on gathering as much evidence as you possibly can, even if you have to counter your own biases.
	You just said with the least amount of deceit or self-indulgence as possible.
	And the second factor is common sense, which seems to be not so common these days.
	So if you can put evidence and common sense together and at the same time try and marshal and monitor your own proclivities, I went right, but that was hard with my book because I was left before I could go right.
	And I had to make that decision.
	Do I want to go right and lose all my friends?
	Or do I want to stay left and, you know, have cat men and join my friends and so on?
	I had to go right because that's what the evidence told me against my own desires.
	So honesty, if you can manage it, Evidence and common sense.
	But here's the problem.
	Truth.
	It's still there.
	How do you get from credible verisimilitude to truth?
	Where is the bridge?
	How do you get there?
	Nobody can say that, ultimately.
	Yes.
	The problem, I think, you can say certain things are true.
	Certain dates, etc.
	Certain things have happened.
	Certain men have suffered as a result of feminism.
	All this is true.
	But where truth seems to founder is when you enter the realm of cause.
	Who has the truth to explain why feminism developed in the way it did or why climate warming or global warming developed in the way it did?
	We can point out the facts.
	This is wrong.
	This is happening.
	But when you get out of the Element, the region of events and into the region of the causes.
	That's the bridge, the gap from credible verisimilitude to truth.
	And I frankly don't know how to manage that.
	So the conclusion I'm coming to is a little bit different from your conclusion.
	It's not the one that I want to come to and I would like to resist it.
	But the conclusion I'm coming to is, quite simply, we're fucked.
	Yes, but that's always been true, right?
	The apocalypse is always...
	That's why the apocalypse is eternal, because the world's always coming to an end.
	And it's actually true, in small ways and in great ways.
	I mean, with regards to your ideas about truth, I would say that like language, truth is more like a process.
	And I would say it's a process that you actually embody rather than conceptualize abstractly.
	One of the ways I've thought about it is that if you're seeking the truth, then what you don't know is more important to you than what you know.
	And that's a fundamental orientation, right?
	I mean, what I've been doing since September, and I've had friends who've been helping me with this, but I think I've been doing this for a long time, is I'm trying to figure out where I'm wrong.
	I'm watching the audience to see if I'm making a mistake.
	I'm listening to my friends who are watching my YouTube videos telling me when I'm a little too angry, maybe, or maybe too pompous, or too noisy, or, you know, all the different ways that you can fail in front of an audience.
	I'm listening to them, I'm listening to the comments, And I'm trying to modify myself accordingly.
	You know, and so you live in error and strive towards the truth, and it's in that striving that the truth is most accurately embodied.
	But then I would also say one other thing, and this is what I like about the existentialists, is that, you know, there's a kind of emphasis on pragmatic truth among the existentialists, because they claim that your truth is something that you should act out, not merely hold, because to act out is to believe it.
	It's a definition, right?
	It's not precisely a proposition, it's a definition.
	I found some things that I was confident enough in to risk acting out and so that's what I'm doing to the best of my ability and then I'm watching what happens and I'm watching what happens if other people act out the propositions and as far as I can tell so far so good I mean I don't I wouldn't say that my position right now is to be what would you envied it's very stressful I mean since September I
	basically be in the position of any mistake is fatal for all intents and purposes you know and that's very stressful to be that hyper vigilant and but by the same token I The public response to what I've been doing has been overwhelmingly positive.
	You know, I've only got three pieces of hate mail, which just staggers me, you know.
	And the comments on YouTube, for example, are like 50 to 1 positive.
	I mean, yeah, maybe it's a biased sample.
	I can't tell but but and the other thing you know I've been trying to rip holes in the ideas that I presented to you today for really like with all my intellectual capability for as long as Every time I lecture, I'm trying to do the same thing.
	It's like, is there something in this that I haven't got right?
	Because I was trying to look for a rock at the bottom of things, you know?
	And partly why I decided that I wasn't going to use those damn words is because I think the rock at the bottom of things is...
	Honest speech.
	I really believe that.
	It seems to me to be right.
	And that's good enough.
	So I'll act that out and see what happens as best I can.
	I mean, I'm not claiming to be...
	I'm not claiming to be any more honest than anyone else.
	You know, seriously, I'm not.
	That's a big claim to make.
	You better watch your bloody step if you're going to say that.
	But that doesn't mean I don't believe that honest speech is the pathway to redemption, because I do believe that.
	So, I know that's strange language, but, you know, that's still, it's the most accurate language for that kind of conceptualization.
	So-- Jan, and then David.
	And then we'll thank our speaker for the question.
	During your presentation, your emphasis has always been on the truth.
	I mean, the man who strays from the group to find the truth and comes back to it, etc.
	His emphasis has been throughout on truth.
	And my question is this.
	I take it that truth is a necessary condition for an idea being important at some level.
	It's not at all obvious that it's a sufficient condition.
	I mean, some truths are surely uninteresting, boring, and others are really important, and in particular, ideas about value.
	Now, I'm not sure whether you wanted to classify claims about value as being susceptible of truth or falsity.
	Sort of been a long-standing question in the philosophical world about which is the right thing to say about those.
	If we suppose that we include those It would be a way of obscuring the contrast I'm going to make, which is surely we need an additional variable, which is the value of these ideas.
	I was wondering whether you were supposing that you had at least implicitly Some kind of general criterion of value of that kind that applies in your theory?
	Yes.
	Or whether that's open-ended?
	No, I have a criteria.
	Because, I mean, that's a fundamental question.
	And I am talking about values rather than empirical facts of which there are an infinity, right?
	It's the application of the facts to the problems of life that's the problem.
	Because there's a lot of facts.
	But I would say, and I got this partly from Piaget, because one of the things that Jean Piaget was trying to do was to understand, he was actually trying to mediate between religion and science.
	That's what drove his entire intellectual career.
	And he came up with this idea of the equilibrated state, which is an idea I really like.
	Imagine two teams of five people pursuing a goal.
	It's the same goal for both teams, but team A has been forcibly compelled to attain the goal and team B is doing it voluntarily.
	His proposition was that in a race that was even all other things considered, that the team that was composed of voluntary participants would outperform the team that was compelled.
	And I believe that.
	And he basically said, it's enforcement costs that make the difference.
	And that's a compelling argument for me.
	And so I've been expanding on that partly.
	It's like Piaget via Jung, I would say, is the intellectual pathway.
	It's like the proper aim for value is something like what's good for me in a way that's good for me tomorrow and next week and next month and next year, because time frame matters a lot.
	So that's a serious constraint.
	And then what's good for me now, and the future me, in a way that's also good for the other people around me, if that's possible, and then also broader society, if that's possible, across multiple time frames.
	And that's sort of like the ultimate equilibrated state.
	And so that's a hypothetical ideal, obviously.
	I'm not sure that answers the question in the following way.
	Why can't there be an indefinite number of things which are good by that same criterion, but different, lots of them?
	We don't, it seems to me, arrive at a sort of single criterion of anything by using that, do we?
	Well, no, but I think...
	I think it's a criterion that filters out, to be sure, but it seems to me that it leaves a whole lot of it in, and that's interesting, and I think that's a good thing myself, but certainly it's not obvious that that wouldn't be true.
	I think there's commonalities among the set of solutions.
	That's basically, that's the proposition that I'm putting forward, is that there are, and I think those would be akin to Jung's archetypes.
	There are commonalities across the sets of solutions.
	And so, and they're reflective of people's, I would say, basic nature, roughly speaking.
	I mean, it's partly why human beings that are isolated and have been forever can learn to trade with one another, for example, because they can.
	And so there are constraints built into that requirement that I just described.
	that weed out most solutions which is also I think the answer to the postmodern dilemma which is well because you're kind of posing it which is well how do you know there isn't an indefinite number of solutions and I would say because the the constraints on the solution space are so intense that very few variants manage because if you make a big mistake you're dead or people or people gang up on you or like you know you either run into the world headlong and perish Or you transgress against your
	fellow people and they're not very happy about that.
	And so the set of solutions that allows you to simultaneously exist in the world and in the social world for a reasonable length of time, I think there's a very limited number of solutions to that problem.
	It just seems to me that you're implicitly constraining the set of things in your universe in a way that seems to me to be much too restrictive.
	There's even lots of things that are not problems.
	Quick response.
	What's that?
	Quick response?
	Well, the only thing I can say is that I think there's a set of solutions that's bounded in some manner, even though it may be quite large, but there's still a pattern to be detected among...
	It's like the pattern that you can detect that unites everything that's musical.
	You know, there's something, although there's very diverse forms of music, there's something that emerges from all those forms that allows you to generate the category, and I think the same is the case with ethical behavior, even though it's subject to the constraints of time and place as well.
	Well, thanks very much, Jordan.
	This was really a great presentation that you've done.
	I wanted to end with some encouragement.
	First of all, I've looked at the extent of your coverage on YouTube, and one of my areas is digital media and journalism.
	And it's incredibly impressive, as you probably already know.
	So the level of influence that you have is really incredible.
	And that's a good thing, because that brings me to my second point.
	I've watched a lot of your stuff, and you're not embarrassing for those of us who hold similar views.
	Great, great, that's good.
	I mean that in an excellent way.
	I am definitely hearing you.
	In fact, I mean, there are a lot of people who espouse similar views, and they give me shivers.
	They make me sick to my stomach a bit.
	But you have embarrassed us, me.
	And that's good.
	And secondly, I've seen that you have moderated even your approach as, I mean, saying the same things, but you've become even more erudite in the way that you present your arguments.
	And I really appreciate the effort that you're putting into this, because the number of places that you've been and the number of shows that you've appeared on, I know must be very taxing.
	And so I want to just acknowledge that you're doing this not for your own good.
	And I really appreciate the effort that you're putting into this, because this is a lot of personal effort that you've expended, and I really appreciate it.
	Thank you.
	Yes.
	And this is the question.
	The question is, I've heard, sorry everyone, but the question is this.
	I keep hearing people say, and these are my colleagues who are cowards, incidentally, who say, if only he were nicer.
	And you've mentioned that already.
	Do you really think that, and honestly, this is the question then, do we need to be nicer?
	Do you need to be nicer?
	What really, just a response to that, if you would.
	I need to be nicer when it's necessary to be nice and not nicer when it isn't, and I need to learn to distinguish those more carefully, continually more carefully, and hypothetically I'm getting better at it.
	The fact that my job isn't at stake at the moment actually does take some of the agitation pressure off.
	You know, I mean at the beginning of this I was quite embattled, let's say, and also less Accustomed to this crazy sequence of events and so you know I didn't know exactly what I was doing not that I do now but I'm and I'm more resigned to it in some sense as well and I'm not trying to present myself as you know I don't regard what's happened to me as any sort of calamity even though it's very complicated but
	it has its own momentum and and I That's okay, I guess.
	But I'm trying to weave my way through this with the least amount of enmity possible, right?
	But that's something you have to continually feel out.
	And hopefully that's working better.

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