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Nov. 22, 2017 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:52:32
Campus Indoctrination: The Parasitization of Myth
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Thank you.
Thank you.
We're going to be starting soon.
All right, so first of all, thank everybody for coming.
I really appreciate seeing all of your faces here.
It makes me happy, and it's kind of a sign that we're in the process of reclaiming sanity on our campus, that you guys all showed up to this.
So thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm just going to lay some quick ground rules for the event.
So first of all, I want to thank Center for Study of Liberal Democracy, Leadership Institute, and Undergrad Political Theory Association for all their support.
After this, I'm going to give the mic over to Professor Avramenko, and he's going to announce Dr.
Peterson.
Photography is allowed, but no flash photography, please.
No signs are allowed besides a regular sheet of paper.
Peterson is going to speak until 8 p.m., after which we will have a short Q&A until 8.30, and everybody's going to line up on this side.
I will be holding the microphone.
Actually, we might not be able to use the microphone since we only have one.
Okay, we should have a microphone for questions starting at 8.
I'll have you all line up down here.
And we will be over at about 8.30.
And after the Q&A event, you guys are all free to leave.
So thank you very much.
Here's Professor Avramenko.
Well, good evening and welcome to our talk today, which is called Political Indoctrination on Campus.
I am Richard Avamanco, Associate Professor of Political Science and Co-Director with John Sharpless, distinguished gentleman right here from the History Department.
We are the co-directors of the Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy.
The Center, along with the Young Americans for Liberty and the Undergraduate Political Theory Association, organized this lecture today.
If you'd like to be in the loop regarding other events, you can look us up on the intertubes.
And like I said, our talk today is called Political Indoctrination on Campus, and I'm grateful to welcome Dr.
Jordan Peterson as our speaker this evening.
Dr.
Peterson is professor of psychology and clinical psychologist from Toronto, Canada.
He cut his teeth as a professor of psychology at Harvard University and now is a professor at the University of Toronto where Hopefully he enjoys the full protection of a robust tenure policy.
He's the author of two books, Maps of Meaning, which is on my nightstand right now, and Twelve Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos.
Dr.
Peterson is also the author or co-author of over a hundred scientific articles on issues such as alcoholism, aggression, and the neurology of political consciousness, as I understand the titles, because I didn't read a hundred articles.
In 2013, Dr.
Peterson began recording his lectures, Personality and its Transformations, Maps of Meaning, the Architecture of Belief, and uploading them to YouTube, which have been very popular.
I will admit publicly that I listened to many of his podcasts this past summer while on long training runs.
They don't do much for pace, but they keep you going for a long time.
Dr.
Peterson made something of a public splash in 2016 when he made a couple of YouTube videos criticizing Canada's Bill C-16, which adds gender expression and identity as a protected class under the Canadian Human Rights Act.
Dr.
Peterson argued that a person could be prosecuted for refusing to use preferred pronouns.
A similar law has recently been passed in California, which of course raises the issue of forced speech and the First Amendment.
After these videos, Dr.
Peterson acquired some notoriety.
His YouTube channel has gathered more than 450,000 subscribers, and his videos have received more than 25 million views as of October 2017.
His classroom lectures on mythology were turned into a wildly popular 13-part TV series on TV Ontario.
Dr.
Peterson also has a biblical lecture series on Tuesday evenings, which are almost always sold out, and if any reason to move back to Toronto for me, that would be one of them.
Finally, I learned that, like me, Dr.
Peterson hails from Alberta.
I assume he's a right-thinking man and thus an Edmonton Oilers fan.
Ladies and gentlemen, Dr.
Peterson.
Thank you very much for inviting me.
Can you hear me at the back?
Yeah, it's good?
Alright.
Well, we might as well get right into this.
So...
I want to go as deeply underneath the problem as I can possibly manage tonight.
So I'm going to marry some of my ideas about what you might describe as the grammatical structure of belief with some more overtly political analysis concentrating on What actually what constitutes ideology because one of the things that I've been trying to figure out and I guess this is part of my attempt to wrestle with some of the actual problems that the postmodernists
pose because I don't mean as people or as thinkers I mean conceptually because you always have to give the devil his due so to speak and there are elements of postmodern thought like the idea that there's an infinite number of interpretations for any finite set of facts That actually happened to be true and they're quite problematic and it's for good reasons as well as bad reasons that postmodernism has become such a dominant strain of thought.
And so it's necessary to take it seriously.
And I've been trying to...
One of the things I've been trying to figure out is, is there a reasonable way of distinguishing a philosophy from an ideology?
And the postmodernist answer to that is basically no.
That it's ideology all the way down, like the turtles all the way down.
You never escape from the grip of your...
Of your viewpoint in some sense, and there's some truth in that, but there's not enough truth, that's the thing.
And one of the hallmarks, I would say, of both post-modern and ideological thinking is the proclivity to reduce very complex phenomena to single causes.
But anyways, so we're going to go underneath things as far as we possibly can.
So the first thing that I'd like to point out is, or like to discuss, is the actual problem that we're That we're all trying to solve in some sense, including the ideologues who claim to have the, let's say, interests of either the working class or the oppressed uppermost in their imagination, in their heart, or in their intellectual concerns.
And there's absolutely no doubt that There is oppression and and that there's no shortage of suffering in the world and I do think that's not only the fundamental problem but also the fundamental reality of the world and and This is an existential theme and it was developed at least to some degree by Martin Heidegger and Heidegger had a concept that he called thrownness which is an interesting an interesting idea and Throneness is a brief
description of the arbitrary nature of human being, or even of being itself.
And the arbitrary nature, it can be, the word he used for that, which is a German word, can be translated in other ways.
It can be translated as Abandon or dereliction or dejection, which obviously are much harsher words than mere thrownness.
Thrownness is more of a detached term, but what it means is that it's a characteristic of human conscious experience to be underpinned by arbitrary realities that have nothing to do in some sense with your choice as a being and so Some of the elements of being thrown are that you're born at a certain time rather than a different time.
That seems like it's an irrational fact.
That's how Jung would describe it, Carl Jung.
It's an irrational fact because there's no real way of accounting for it from a causal perspective, not subjectively speaking.
And you're born a certain race and you're born with a certain level of intelligence let's say although that can be impaired certainly with enough effort and You're born in a certain culture with a certain language and at a certain socioeconomic in a certain socioeconomic class and with a certain degree of attractiveness and those are things that are all handed to you in some sense they they make up the in some sense they make up the axiomatic structure of your being and some of them are advantageous and others
are disadvantageous and you're stuck with them and that really is a problem partly because life in and of itself is a problem and a problem of suffering but also because it seems quite evident that Or at least that you could make a strong case that the talents and catastrophes of life are by no means equally distributed.
And so in some sense there seems to be an intrinsic, we might regard it from the perspective of the standards of human justice and perhaps human mercy as well, as something intrinsically unfair or unjust about the structure of existence itself.
Now I like the existentialist take on that because What the existentialists do is attribute that inequality and injustice and say unfairness to the structure of being itself and pose that as the central problem of life and I find that very realistic.
I like this painting by Van Gogh.
I think it does a very good job of expressing that.
He's an old man and he's obviously sorrowful and you know he's not rich as you can tell by his shoes and like it's rough and he's a nexus of Oppression and perhaps a nexus of oppression in that he may have served as an oppressor, but also someone who's suffering and oppressed as a consequence of the conditions of his life.
And so then the question might be, well, why is life like that?
And what might be done about it?
And that's where the differences really start to arise.
So we can start from the perspective of the fact that life presents a universal problem to those of us who are alive and conscious.
Now, there are various, what would you call the meta-theories that account for the existence of this suffering.
My interpretation of the story of Genesis, essentially, which in some sense describes the introduction of suffering into the world, is that What seems to happen in the story of Genesis is that human beings originally emerge as a mythological representation, so it's a deep fictional representation.
That's one way of thinking about it, keeping in mind, as you might, that fiction can be more true than truth, which is partly why we're so attracted to it.
Because fiction distills truth and presents it in a much more concentrated form than a mere description of everyday reality.
And in the Genesis story, there seems to be an association between the development of vision and self-consciousness and the awareness of death and the awareness of good and evil.
Those things happen pretty much at exactly the same time.
And the consequence of that awareness of that self-consciousness is a dawning awareness of vulnerability.
You remember in the story of Genesis when Adam and Eve opened their eyes or have their eyes opened as a consequence of falling prey to temptation.
The scales fall from their eyes and they realize that they're naked and then they immediately cover themselves up and of course the question is what does it mean to realize that you're naked and there's a variety of complex quest answers to that one is that well if you're naked a common nightmare is to be naked in front of a crowd and The reason that that's a nightmare is because, well, people don't like to have their full vulnerability exposed to the judgmental eye of the crowd.
And for good reason.
Like everybody has, what would you say, maybe an inbuilt sense of shame about their fundamental inadequacy in relationship to the difficulties of life.
And so the story of Genesis, which I think is a foundational story.
Well, I don't think it's a foundational story.
It's obviously a foundational story.
A foundational story of Western culture.
Suggest that it's mankind's knowledge of its own nature that leads to, not only to suffering, but to work.
You know, because once you realize that you're vulnerable and that that vulnerability never really goes away, you always have to prepare for the future.
Because even if you solve the problems that are right in front of you this moment, that doesn't mean that you've solved the plethora of problems that are likely to pop up for you tomorrow and next week and next month and next year.
And that in some sense are beyond your ability to finally solve.
So, but there's a different viewpoint I think that comes out of The Marxist perspective, and I'm going to talk to you about Marxism and postmodernism, both of which I regard as variant strands of the same ideology.
And as I said, I'll define why I think they're ideological.
And the thing that strikes me so clearly about the Marxist perspective is that the finger is always pointed at inadequate social order as the root cause of suffering.
And that just seems to me to be I don't know.
It's so naive that it's difficult to understand why people can possibly fall for it.
Maybe it's partly because there's some hope embedded in it, right?
There's an idea that, well, suffering might be transcended if we could just organize our societies properly, but It seems to me, number one, that that's highly unlikely, and number two, as Dostoevsky pointed out, even if we did organize our society so that no one had anything to worry about from a material perspective,
so everyone, let's say, had enough bread and shelter, that we're the kind of insane creatures that would blow that apart and fragment that sort of static Utopian perfection just so something strange and interesting might happen and I think that's a really that's a really devastating critique and you know Dostoevsky formulated that back in the late 1800s he had thought through the consequences of communist utopia before it even manifested itself as a political force and I think put his finger on exactly
at least one of its primary weaknesses so you know If we were delivered from suffering, it's not necessarily clear that we would be happy about that because one of the things that does characterize human beings is this intense desire for experience that transcends the normative, you know, and people will go out and look for difficult things to do just for the sake of doing difficult things.
They climb mountains and they engage in extreme sports and they put their lives in danger and There's no technical reason for that, and it doesn't seem like a very intelligent thing to do from the pure perspective of self-preservation, but we're certainly capable of it.
And the problem, the Marxists seem to lay the reason for suffering at the foot of inadequate social structure, but they go farther than that.
They also describe the social structure as it exists, and this is where the idea of the patriarchy is derived, as far as I'm concerned, as something that is necessarily...
An upper class or an oppressive class against the oppressed class and what the people who fit in those different categories can vary with classic Marxism It was the rich against the poor or the poor against the rich right the bourgeoisie against the proletariat and that's being transformed I would say by the post-modernists using a fairly Self-evident sleight of hand into identity politics where the oppressed oppressor narrative just takes
different forms according to the identity that happens to be plugged into the same ideational structure.
And what seems to happen as a consequence of that, I mean, there's pretty good data about this with regards to the genesis of intense intergroup conflict.
One of the things that predicts intense intergroup conflict, like the conflict in Rwanda, and certainly also happened in Nazi Germany, is that genocidal activities are often marketed as preemptive strikes against an oppressor class, right?
And so that would have been the Jews in Germany and in Rwanda.
The same narrative emerged.
It's very common to dichotomize the society as oppressor and oppressed and then for the oppressed to rise up and take out the so-called oppressors even before anything of any particular violence occurs because of this enhanced sense of victimization and the moral high ground that it seems to provide.
The logic being something like if we're being oppressed then we have every right to To defend ourselves, so to speak, even against threats that are only in some way imaginary.
Now, I don't want to get too cut and dried about that because, you know, it certainly is the case that there isn't a political or economic system in the entire world that lacks corruption.
And so the idea that the social structure is in part...
Corrupt enough so that everyone who is embodied in that social structure doesn't necessarily have an equal chance to Manifest their gifts say and rise to the top is certainly true because human beings are completely incapable of producing perfect social structures for a variety of reasons our own blindness the fact that we inherit structures that we don't really understand that are all demented and bent in one way or another and so There's always an element of truth to critical claims that if we just got our act together better
from a social perspective that everything would be more fair and just.
But to say that is not to simultaneously justify the claim that all the reasons that human beings are suffering and that life is unfair and unjust is because the social structure is corrupt and oppressive.
You've got to think in multivariate terms if you have any degree of intelligence at all.
And for any complex phenomena, there's generally a multitude of causes and they are not easy to differentiate.
I mean, that's partly what social scientists do, is to take a look at a complex outcome, suffering certainly being one of those, and to look at the potential contributors of a multitude of factors.
Now, it's very difficult because those factors are not easy to categorize and they overlap and so on and so forth, but you have to be pretty What would you say?
Motivated and stupid, I would say, both at the same time, to use a univariate hypothesis to account for a complex phenomena.
I don't care what the phenomena is.
And so that's another hallmark of ideological thinking, is that the causal story collapses into a single dimension.
You see that often in psychopathology, too, where You know, people who get obsessive about something can't shake, like, a particular idea that possesses them.
Paranoid people are like that.
And people who have eating disorders, especially anorexia, are like that as their entire value structure collapses into the dimension of thin equals beautiful and good.
And it's very rigid and black and white, and it does them absolutely no good.
So now, some of the problems with the Marxist perspective seems to be that...
Victimhood, a sense of enhanced victimhood tends to produce an intense sense of resentment, and that's a very bad idea because resentment is a very toxic and violent emotion.
It's also very ungrateful, which is one of the things I would really say about especially the radical left student types, especially at Ivy League universities.
I mean, it's really quite a spectacle to see people at places like Yale come out and agitate As a consequence of the realization of their own oppression, when by any reasonable standard, current or historical, they're probably in the top one one hundredth of a percent, perhaps better than that, of all the people who have ever lived anywhere, ever.
And so it's really quite staggering to me that the top.001% can express their resentment about the top.0001% in such strident terms without noticing that exactly the same claims of privilege apply to them by all you have to do is Transform the bin in which you're doing the privileged comparisons, and that becomes immediately self-evident.
And, you know, the fact that as Americans, let's say, or as North Americans, since I'm a Canadian, that we're staggeringly privileged compared to the rest of the world is certainly a consequence of what you might describe as the arbitrariness of our political borders.
And so but to forget that when you're claiming a particular brand of oppression for yourself seems to me to be very ungrateful at the least and certainly motivated let's say politically because I think it justifies your expression of hatred for those that tiny fraction of people who are still better off than you and also a degree of historical ignorance that's absolutely staggering in its magnitude and a complete indictment of our education system which should be indicted in every possible way.
Now the Marxists might claim to their benefit, let's say, With this worldview of class struggle as being the primary driver of human history and the well-off socioeconomically because that's pretty much the only way they define well-off which is also something I take great objection to because there's lots of hierarchies in the world and there are many important hierarchies and not all of them can be reduced to socioeconomic
status by any stretch of the imagination.
Imagine if you were 80 years old and you had 20 million dollars, you know, You might be perfectly happy to get rid of all that money if you could be 18 again.
And one of the best predictors of wealth in North America is actually age, because young people haven't actually had much time to make money, whereas old people have had quite a bit of time.
But the problem with being old and rich is that you're still old.
And that actually turns out to be quite a serious problem because no matter how rich you are, you eventually die.
And so the money has a very delimited effect with regards to addressing the fundamental problems of the suffering of life.
And we know perfectly well from the empirical perspective that once you have enough money so that the bill collectors aren't chasing you around, essentially, Something like the beginnings of a middle-class existence or maybe the upper end of the working class, then additional money has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on your psychological well-being.
And that's actually an indication of the limitations of material comfort, let's say, as a medication for the suffering that's attendant on life.
It's another thing that's very weak.
about the Marxists and I think very interestingly contradictory because they're very anti-capital in their structure but they're so damn materialistic that it's absolutely mind-boggling because the Marxists are actually more convinced that money is useful than most capitalists as far as I can tell because they believe that that money is in fact the solution to all life's problems the problem is is that just the right people don't have the money and I think that's a staggeringly naive perspective because there's many There's many problems in life
that money just cannot solve, and there's a fair number of them that it actually makes worse.
So, anyways, having said all that, you could also still make the case, I used to work for a socialist party in Canada when I was a kid, about the time I was 14 until the time I was about 17 before I figured out What was wrong not so much with socialism per se but with ideology per se and I actually admired the socialist leaders that I had the fortune to be introduced to because at that point they were very much Voice
for the working class.
A lot of union leaders and people like that, you know, they're classic democratic socialists on the labor end of the distribution.
It's absolutely necessary for labor and the working class to have a political voice, something the Democrats might keep in mind.
So, and maybe they wouldn't lose their elections quite so frequently.
No, I really think it's appalling, you know, because it's necessary for the working class to have a political voice.
So, and to have that transformed into identity politics is a real catastrophe.
Anyways, I think that the people that I met, many of them were genuinely concerned with the problems of the working class and, you know, more power to them.
And so I think there are people on the left who genuinely are trying to make a difference for people who...
Could use a fair shot at opportunity in life, but at the same time I noticed that a tremendous number of the people, especially the lower-end worker, party worker, protester types, were more peevish and resentful than good-hearted and kind.
It was about that time that I came across George Orwell's famous critique of left-wing thinking in the UK, in a book called Road to Wiggin Pier, where he basically made the claim that The socialists that he knew, especially the middle class ones, didn't give a damn about the poor, they just hated the rich.
And that's, I mean, that is something worth thinking about for a very long period of time, because hatred actually turns out to be a very powerful motivation, you know, and...
If you think about the sorts of things that happened in the Soviet Union and all these places that were supposed to be workers' paradises, if you look at the outcome and you had to infer whether it was goodness of heart and kind-heartedness and care for the working man that produced the genocides Outright bitter resentment and hatred, it's a lot easier to draw a causal path from the negative emotion to the outcome than from the positive, kind-hearted benevolence to the outcome.
You just don't get gulags out of benevolence.
That's just not how it works.
So I think the bloody historical evidence is clear.
Although I have read the most convoluted, pathological, pathetic, Twisted rationalizations of what happened today in Stalinist Russia that you could possibly manufacture.
It's as if a stack of corpses that would reach halfway to the moon isn't enough evidence for the pathology of a certain form of belief.
So, well, some people can't be convinced by anyone's death but their own, I suppose.
So, you know, now I want to talk about postmodernism a little bit.
Well, it seems to me that's Michel Foucault in the middle and a more reprehensible individual you could hardly ever discover or even dream up, no matter how twisted your imagination.
Foucault and Derrida, I would say, there's more, but I would say they're the two architects of the post-modernist movement.
And in brief, I think what they did was, in the late 60s and early 70s, they were avowed Marxists.
Way, way after anyone with any shred of ethical decency had stopped being a Marxist.
By that time, even Jean-Paul Sartre had woken up enough to figure out that the Soviets hadn't Ushered in the kingdom of heaven.
You know, he had evidence stretching back 45 years that he could have attended to if he would have been willing to open his eyes.
Talk about bad faith, which was his ethical critique, essentially.
It's something quite staggering.
The post-modernists knew that they were pretty much done with regards to pushing their classic Marxism by the late 60s and the early 70s because the evidence that Stalinists Russia and not only Stalinist certainly Lenin was no no saint by any stretch of the imagination that the killing certainly got underway while he was still alive and and continued after Stalin was dead as well although perhaps with not the same degree of brutality and efficiency and then there was of course Maoist China where the estimates you
know nobody knows how many people died under Mao but the estimates are Run as high as 100 million people, which actually turns out to be quite a few people, and the fact that we can't keep count accurately, you know, without an error margin of something in the tens of millions just tells you exactly how horrible the situation was.
They transformed the Marxist dialogue of rich versus poor into oppressed versus oppressor and Foucault in particular who never fit in anywhere and who was an outcast in many ways and a bitter one and a suicidal one his entire life did everything he possibly could with his staggering IQ to figure out every treacherous way possible to undermine the structure that wouldn't accept him in all his peculiarity And it's no wonder because there would be no way of making a structure that could possibly function if it was composed of people who
were as peculiar, bitter, and resentful as Michel Foucault.
So you couldn't imagine this functioning society that would be composed of individuals with his particular makeup.
In any case, he did put his brain to work trying to figure out a how to resurrect Marxism under a new guise, let's say, and b how to justify The fact that it wasn't his problem that he was an outsider it was actually everyone else's problem and he did a pretty damn good job of that and laid the groundwork for this for the what would you call it the rise of the marginalized against the center and Derrida's thinking is very much the same you know Derrida
even though Foucault and Derrida hated each other and and regarded each other as intellectual charlatans which was about the only thing either of them was ever really correct about so Derrida was also, and Derrida in some ways is even a more treacherous thinker because he makes the claim in some sense that like a political system has a center around which the majority congregate, let's say.
It's quite similar to Foucault's analysis and that There are people who are outside the category system and then, which is obviously true because no matter how you categorize people, there are certain people inside the category and certain people outside.
That's actually why you categorize things, right?
Because if every category holds every entity, then every cognitive operation is infinitely complex.
You can't manage that way.
To categorize you have to include and exclude.
It's in the very nature of categorization and you can't just scrap categorization because without simplification and categorization you actually can't function in the world.
You just die, right?
You die of excess stress.
It's something like something like that happens to schizophrenic people because their category systems break down and they're completely incapable of functioning in the world as a consequence of that.
Anyways Derrida and Foucault as well went a step farther, and this is one of the incredibly crooked elements of their thinking, I think, another sleight of hand, which was, well, category systems exclude, political systems exclude, economic systems exclude, any hierarchy of value excludes, obviously, because if there's a hierarchy of value, some things are more valuable than others, and the less valuable things are excluded, because otherwise it wouldn't be a hierarchy of value.
But the next claim they essentially make is that the reason that those hierarchies of value are constructed isn't to produce whatever it is that's of value, but to exclude and to maintain the structure of power that's intrinsic to the hierarchy of value.
And that's an unbelievably crooked claim because there are multiple reasons why a hierarchy of value might be put into place.
There are hierarchies of beauty and there's hierarchies of competence, hierarchies of intelligence and attractiveness and athletic ability and musical talent.
There's multiple hierarchies and in order for those things to exist at a high order, in order for us to laud What would you say musical genius we have to excuse all the people we have to exclude all the people who can only squawk their clarinet from the hierarchy because otherwise you don't have any music and there's no up and there's no direction and so to claim that the purpose of the hierarchy is to exclude is unbelievably crooked and it's a central claim for both for
both Foucault and and Derrida it's one of those sleights of hands that people don't quite notice but that have absolutely catastrophic effects Now, for Foucault and Derrida, here's how you could imagine their world, essentially.
You know, for the philosopher Hobbes, life was nasty, brutish, and short, and people were at each other's throats in the state of nature, right?
But Hobbes really thought about that as the chaos of individuals.
And he believed that a central authority had to exert force in order to organize that intrinsic chaos so that some degree of peace could reign.
It's kind of the opposite of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theory, which was that human beings were intrinsically good and the state, the government, was intrinsically bad and that all of what made people evil derived from the state.
I would say if you put Hobbes and Rousseau together, you actually get the truth, even though they do seem to be coming at it from opposite perspectives, because people are actually good and evil, and social structures are also good and evil, and you know, it's paradoxical, and we don't like paradoxical categories, but that's still how it is.
What Foucault and Derrida and the postmodernists did was that they kind of added the collective element to that so their Hobbesian world isn't a world of individuals struggling against one another in the initial state of warlike nature.
It's groups of individuals bound by whatever their identity happens to be struggling against each other for power because in the postmodern In the neo-Marxist universe, there's nothing but power.
And there's a variety of reasons for that.
Partly, it's because the postmodernists don't admit that there are any standards outside of arbitrary opinion, essentially.
They don't really believe in the real world, which is why they can generate critiques of science, for example, which is increasingly characterized as nothing but part of the Eurocentric patriarchy's what would you call desire to impose their power structure on the rest of the world despite the fact that it also makes planes fly and computers operate and and well you know yeah exactly so and it's a rare bloody Social justice warrior that doesn't have an iPhone or
a Android that wouldn't work if quantum mechanics wasn't actually correct because the fact that quantum mechanics is correct is one of the reasons why these unbelievably highly developed pieces of technology actually function.
So they bitch and whine about the patriarchal underpinnings of Eurocentric science and use the gadgets all the time to aggregate to complain about it.
So...
It's really pretty appalling.
So anyways, the world view of the post-modern neo-Marxists is that everybody is basically not an individual because that's really a fiction and Eurocentric patriarchal fiction at that but a member of whatever their identity group happens to be and there's no real possibility of communication between identity groups hence phenomena like cultural appropriation And so it's a war of all groups against all groups and it's all it's nothing but a struggle for power and there's
no higher order ethic to be referred to because for the postmodernists there is no such thing as a higher order ethic there's no such thing as a uniting narrative that's that's a hallmark of their thinking now of course that doesn't work out in practice because without an ethic or a higher order value There isn't anything you can do with your life because you keep undermining yourself.
If everything's just a whim and subjective, and there's no hierarchy of values, then what the hell do you do when you get up in the morning?
If one thing isn't better than the other, you might as well just lay there and smother yourself with a pillow.
It'd be a lot easier than opening your eyes and struggling in the world.
So it's completely, it's a self-defeating philosophy, and I think that's part of the reason why it's more or less self-evident that it's a mask for the continuation of Marxism, because at least Marxism has, as one of its advantages, a direction.
It's an ethic, right?
You have something to struggle against, even though what you're struggling against is certainly one of the things that you actually rely on, and second, something that You have to oversimplify in a very ungrateful and resentful way to justify fighting against it to begin with.
And that's especially true in Western cultures because as pathological as they certainly are, which is approximately as pathological as all of you are, they're a lot less pathological than almost everything that's ever happened and pretty much Everything that's currently happening elsewhere in the world.
And you can kind of tell that by the fact that people tend to immigrate to the West rather than the reverse.
Now, you know, the postmodern neo-Marxists would have an answer to that, which would be the only reason the West functions is because it's raped the rest of humanity and the planet.
But, you know, the less said about that, the better.
And Marx was wrong about this, too.
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
That actually wasn't true.
They lost their food.
Yeah.
You might see that happening again in Venezuela, where the middle class are having a hard time getting toilet paper, which is a lot less funny than it sounds.
They lost their families.
That's good.
They lost their land.
They lost their freedom.
They lost their right to exist without pain.
They lost their right to honestly suffer and talk about it, which is a terrible thing to lose.
And then they lost their lives.
So that was wrong.
And he can smile all he want about it, but it wasn't very cute.
This is nice.
I saw this on Twitter today.
When Karl Marx died in 1883 the average Englishman was three times richer than he was when Marx was born in 1818.
That's world GDP per person in 1990 international dollars and you see that there's an unbelievable spike that happened at about 1895 which was Let's put it this way.
It was precisely and exactly the opposite of what the Marxists predicted.
But, you know, when your predictions fail and you're an ideologue, you just gerrymander the axioms of your theory because otherwise you'd have to drop the damn thing and then you're plunged into a state of existential chaos, which is no joke, and you have to reformulate yourself.
So, you know, you don't want to underestimate the difficulty of doing that, but...
But it's still relatively amusing, especially when you consider that that unbelievable increase in gross domestic product per person actually happened despite the best efforts of the Marxists to prevent it from happening.
And so God only knows where we would be if 120 million people weren't sacrificed painfully and pointlessly in the 20th century to this idiot god of socialist utopia that turned out to be murderous beyond comprehension.
Post-modernism, an attitude of skepticism, irony toward skepticism towards everything but post-modernism, I might add.
Irony toward rejection of grand narratives.
That's a lot bigger a problem than you think because actually the things that unite people are grand narratives.
You know, a narrative is a As a cognitive structure that orients you towards an ideal.
That's what a narrative is.
You know, if you go see a movie, which is a narrative, the hero is up to something.
First of all, there's a hero because why the hell go to the movie otherwise?
You don't want to watch a bunch of people bumble around randomly.
There's no...
you're not interested in that at all.
You want to see someone who has a problem to solve and who is applying an ethic to the solution of that problem.
It can be a bad ethic.
That would be an anti-hero, right?
It could be a pathological ethic.
That's a good object lesson anyways, but it's certainly an ethic.
And so it's grand narratives that unite people.
And when the postmodernists become skeptical about the grand narratives, what that essentially means is that they're demolishing the hyper-truths, I would say, the fictions, the true fictions that unite us as people and stop us from being at each other's throats, enable us to compete And to cooperate in a peaceful and productive manner at least some of the time, which is a miracle in and of itself and should be regarded as such, right?
I mean, we're so blind in the West to the miraculous nature of our culture that it's, well, it's a consequence of being privileged, let's say, although I hate that word.
We could call it fortunate.
You know, when Ayaan Hirsi Ali came to Holland, one of the things that really struck me when I read her book, Infidel, she was very taken aback by the fact that you could stop by a bus stop, and there'd be a little digital display there that said when the bus was coming, and when the digital display said the bus was coming, then the bus would show up.
And she just couldn't accustom herself to that.
It was like an existential...
produced existential terror.
And it's no wonder, because you just think about how bloody impossible that is.
That's impossible.
I mean, the Dutch could manage it, because they manage, you know, a dozen impossible things before breakfast.
They live underwater, for God's sake.
So...
But, you know, she was also absolutely amazed that you could go ask policemen for help and they wouldn't just hurt you and take all your money.
And that is also another form of miracle, the kind of thing that we just take for granted.
Skepticism towards ideologies and universalism.
Well, we can scrap the ideology part, including objective notions of reason, human nature, social progress, absolute truth, and objective reality.
And it's an unbelievably corrosive system of thought because...
First of all, it defines hierarchy as power, and that's actually technically wrong.
Even Frans de Waal, who's been studying chimpanzee hierarchies, has established quite clearly that the most brutal and powerful alpha chimp is not the one who establishes the most stable dominance hierarchies, or let's call them social hierarchies, because the brutal tyrant chimp gets torn apart by two subordinate chimps three-quarters As strong as him as soon as he turns a blind eye.
The more stable hierarchies, even among chimps, are ones that are governed by someone, you know, a chimp that's got some physical power and some capacity for intimidation.
Who's perfectly capable of establishing reciprocal relationships with other male and female chimps so that he's got friends and allies around him.
It stabilizes his rules, so to speak.
So the idea that hierarchies in functioning societies are primarily a consequence of power is cynical beyond belief apart from being wrong.
So and it also destroys the idea of a hierarchy of competence which I really think is one of the reasons for the theory to begin with because we know even from the empirical data that in Western societies the best two predictors of long-term life success are intelligence and conscientiousness and they do a pretty good job of predicting long-term life success accounting for about 25 to 30 percent of the variance which is a lot by social science standards and it's kind of a testament to the integrity of our societies that
complex jobs tend to be filled by intelligent hard-working people and thank God for that because who the hell do you want running them?
You don't want to be doing that randomly most of those things are incredibly complex and difficult and so you better have Discipline people who are willing to work 60 hours a week and who are super smart governing those things or the lights go off and they should be off right now because it's impossible to keep a power grid functioning.
It's not like it, it's not like entropy isn't trying to tear it to bits at every second, right?
There are thousands of people out there working madly to stop this thing from doing what it should be doing, which is to fail.
And so, competence is everywhere.
I mean, you think about how many competent people have to be working behind the scenes so that you can all come here, you know, in your leisure, fundamentally, and sit for two hours peacefully in a lecture.
It's absolutely beyond belief.
So I think that they were after the destruction of the idea of competence itself and we're walking down that road very very rapidly as well as trying to destroy the idea of the world and that's part of the, what would you call it, the attempt to insist that there's no such thing outside the text, which was one of Derrida's great statements, there's no such thing outside the text.
What he meant by that in some sense was everything is interpretation, and there is a manner in which that's true, but it's not the kind of final truth that the postmodernists like to think it is.
They're a little too tangled up in language, so and that's not a good thing.
So here's where we're at with regards to the To the spread of post-modern neo-Marxist ideas and these are, see I've been trying, you know how you can identify the right-wingers you don't want to hang around with because they talk about white supremacy and maybe they have a swastika.
It's like that's a little sign saying if you're a conservative move away from those people and most conservatives do that, you know, in the aftermath of Charlottesville for example Shapiro immediately distanced himself from the radical right and William Buckley did the same thing in the 1960s, 1970s, when he divorced himself from the John Birch Society.
Conservatives are pretty good at putting borders around things.
In fact, that's a good definition of a conservative.
I'm serious.
I'm serious.
Like, conservatives like to have borders around things, whereas liberals think, well, if you have too many borders, information can't flow.
And that's true.
And the conservatives say, no borders, chaos.
And the Liberals say, too many borders, stagnation.
And those are both right, so you have to argue about how thick the borders should be.
But anyways, Liberals have a hell of a time drawing borders and that means they can't separate themselves from the radical leftists who have absolutely no interest whatsoever in sustaining the genuine Liberals.
They just use them as useful idiots.
To take a phrase from the Soviet Union.
And here are the hallmarks, I think, of the pathological left.
I think that if someone is pushing this quaternity on you, then you should be very suspicious of them in every possible way, and you should resist it as much as you possibly can.
Diversity, inclusivity, well, you know, those are the minor demons of the radical left, let's say.
Equity?
It's like, no!
We're not going there.
That's equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.
And equality of outcome, I'll tell you why in a bit, is an absolutely pathological idea.
There's nothing about it that's good, it's impossible to implement, it's fundamentally motivated by resentment, and it's a lie.
So I like the fact that those three make the acronym DIE, though, because that seems to be approximately appropriate.
And then the worst of the bunch is white privilege, because as far as I'm concerned, there's absolutely no difference between that statement and an outright racist slur.
They're the same thing.
So, and it's quite straightforward.
Why?
It doesn't take a bloody genius to figure this out.
I mean, what constitutes racism?
It's the ascription of the hypothetical qualities of a group to all the individuals who compose that group.
So, white privilege.
It's like...
Even the people who are interested in intersectionality, you'd think, would have some problem with that.
It's like, what about all the poor white people?
Well, they're more privileged than the poor people who aren't white, I suppose.
But, you know, that's a pretty bloody weak argument in my estimation.
And to call it privilege is also something.
And to associate it with race per se is also something extraordinarily interesting.
And we'll get into that a little bit.
So let's talk about diversity.
Okay, well first of all we have to define it.
You know and Jonathan Haidt has been trying to define it as diversity of opinion.
I think it might be useful to define it as diversity of personality because there's actually more variability and personality within groups of people regardless of the groups than there is between groups of people.
So that should be said again.
There's more variability within groups of people than between groups of people.
And to state otherwise is to state something that is, in fact, categorically racist.
Because if I said, well, there's more difference between groups of people than within groups, then I'm saying that each racial group is an entity unto itself, which could be true, but happens to actually not be.
So the diversity definition is really quite interesting and right now that's being defined by race, sex or gender, sexual orientation and disability, although there's a very large number of other potential dimensions of difference that could be included in the list of oppressed versus oppressor.
That's actually why intersectionality has emerged, you know, because people figured out, well, you know, you're having a harder time if you're black, let's say, And you're having a harder time if you're a woman, depending on how you define harder time.
But you're even having a harder time if you're a black woman.
There's an intersection there.
It's like, okay, fine.
Well, where are we going to stop with the intersections?
I figured out the other day, if each of those categories could be differentiated into a hundred subunits, you know, who knows how many there are, with gender or sex, there's an infinite number of them, apparently.
Then you need six dimensions before you're down to one in a billion.
So six dimensions of intersectionality brings you down to the level of the individual, which is the flaw in, what would you call it, identity politics theory manifesting itself as an internal contradiction.
So I think that's very funny.
If you push intersectionality to its final Frontier you break down everyone to the level of the individual which is actually what I think Western culture figured out about 4,000 years ago is that the ultimate minority is the individual and the only and the fairest society is one where individuals are allowed to rise to the level of their ability Because how what are you going to do you're going to co vary out all their differences?
It's impossible.
It's technically impossible.
There's a Given postmodern logic itself, there's an infinite number of ways to categorize a finite number of facts.
So how are you going to determine which dimensions of difference are the ones that should be adjusted for the individual?
Since there's an unlimited number of dimensions of variability.
Intelligence, height, attractiveness, age, personality.
There's five dimensions of personality.
Socioeconomic class, right?
Degree of historical oppression.
You know, that can be seriously multiplied endlessly.
So what are you going to do?
Control for all those?
It's like good luck.
That's never going to happen.
And then diversity in the service of what exactly?
You know, the idea that a group of people that's racially diverse is better at problem solving than a group of people who isn't.
There isn't a shred of evidence to support that idea.
It's a presupposition, a supposition.
And it also brings you back to something like racial essentialism, right?
I mean, so in every possible way, logically and practically, it's a non-starter.
And I think the diversity issue is irrelevant anyways because I think the fundamental reason that the postmodern neo-Marxist push diversity is because it's another way that they can attack the power structure that they regard as patriarchal and oppressive.
Say, well, it's in the service of the working class and the oppressed.
It's like we already covered that a little bit with regards to the Marxist claims to be working on the side of the working class when in fact what really happened was that many of them perhaps most were killed and the ones that weren't killed were certainly at least made extraordinarily miserable which maybe is even better than killing them if you're particularly malevolent Today and see one of the things that's happening that's quite pathological is and very interesting is that the postmodernists and
this is I think a direct consequence of training of activists in universities and universities have more to be ashamed of than you could list in a two-hour lecture.
I think someone estimated today that about 4,000 colleges and universities will go bankrupt in the US in the next 10 years and as far as I'm concerned the faster the better.
So So the Toronto District School Board announced recently that it will now give priority to the hiring of diverse staff, especially in racialized backgrounds.
Why in?
I don't know.
I suspect it's because the people who wrote the damn policy are functionally illiterate.
But you'd certainly think that if you looked at the intelligence of their policies.
And so, what's that priority to the hiring of diverse staff, especially in racialized backgrounds?
What the hell did that mean?
I tweeted that if you weren't going to hire straight, white, cis, I guess cisgendered is the same thing, but we use it just because it's such a hateful phrase.
If you're not going to hire straight cisgendered men as teachers, why the hell do you let them into the faculties of education to begin with?
You might as well just exclude them before they waste four years on your, what would you call them, ideologically rigid pseudo-educational nonsense.
Equity.
This is something I really like.
There's the little happy thing.
Equality of opportunity on the left versus equity on the right.
You see the little kid gets to lift up and eat the apple.
Isn't that lovely?
But what happens really in equity is that everyone gets to have exactly the same depth of grave.
And they're perfectly equal when they're six feet under.
And if you don't believe that, then you can look at what happened in the Ukraine in the 1930s during the Holomodor when the Russians decided that Where the Soviets decided that it was perfectly reasonable to ascribe class guilt to the successful farmers and wipe them out and then starved six million Ukrainians to death, thus establishing a certain equality.
This woman, I remind this is the Shakespeare quote.
I think it's from Richard III, but I'm not exactly sure.
One can smile and smile and smile and still be a villain.
And you know, she's a lovely-looking old grandmotherly type of creature, but that doesn't mean that everything that she did wasn't pathological beyond belief.
And it was her, what would you call them, Second-rate pseudo-intellectual opinionated meanderings that produced the concept of white privilege.
And what she did was make a list of all the ways that she felt that she was particularly privileged in society.
That was her bloody methodology.
And that's the sort of methodology that these pseudo-disciplines that have invaded the universities get away with because the rest of the faculty are too damn timid to stand up and say, the emperor has no clothes.
Better stand up and say something about it pretty soon because you can bloody well be sure that they're coming for the physicians and the evolutionary biologists and psychologists next.
And they're not weak and they're well organized.
So it's a very terrible thing.
So anyways, these papers rely on personal examples because we know how methodologically rigorous that is of unearned advantage as...
But that whole methodology thing, that rigorous methodology, that's just another manifestation of the Eurocentric patriarchy.
So you don't have to be concerned about your damn methodology when you have your personal experience to rely on.
And so here's the privileges.
I can if I wish to arrange, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and which I would want to live.
I can be pretty sure that my neighbours in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me unless they know that I'm the author of the fundamental paper on white privilege.
I can go shopping alone most of the time pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
It's like well the first thing is is a lot of those so-called privileges are just the consequence of living in a reasonably civilized society and apply to pretty much everyone.
And the second thing is is that there's no reason to associate this with race.
That's another one of these absolutely pathological sleights of hand.
How about we call it majority privilege?
You think that's not the case for the majority members of every society that's ever functioned, that's actually been functional?
Obviously there's a majority advantage.
If there wasn't a bloody majority advantage, people wouldn't make societies.
The whole point of making a society is so that the people within the society have the advantages.
So now you might say, well, when people are being integrated into this society, they should be given those advantages or provided with those advantages when they join the club, so to speak, as rapidly as possible.
And obviously that's the case.
But to attribute this level of civility and safety to some hypothetical construct like white privilege is, well, it's exactly what you'd expect from people whose response to the idea of methodology is that that's just a social construct like everything else is.
There's the class enemies from the Ukraine, the kulaks, right?
They were the farmers who were productive in the 1920s and before, had recently emerged from the peasant class.
They were all rounded up and shot and raped and robbed and then sent to Siberia to freeze to death or to die of some infectious disease because to them Guilt was attributed as a consequence of their membership of a class, and I can tell you if there are people around you that are attributing guilt to you because of your membership in a class, they are not your friends.
In fact, they're the friends of no one, and they're contributing to this intense state of political polarization and racial disharmony that seems to me to be expanding at an exponential rate.
It's not good.
I really like this juxtaposition of pictures.
So when the Soviets collectivized the farms in The Ukraine, they took all the grain that the Ukrainians had produced, which wasn't very much because they'd collectivized the farms, and they shipped it all to the cities.
And then the rule was that if you were a starving Ukrainian woman who had children and you went out in the field and you picked up individual half-rotten bits of grain to feed your kids, that that was an offense punishable by death.
You were supposed to turn that in to the local authorities so they could ship that to the city too.
So on the one hand, you have Nice picture here of the bags of grain that were heroically going into the cities and on the other hand you have a picture of the bodies that were the cost of doing precisely that.
So let's look at the failures of this system.
Well, you could list them forever.
The death of the kulaks.
That was right off the bat, which is why I use it.
It was very, very early in the collectivization process.
Then the Ukrainian famine, which, I mean, I don't know how often that's taught in high schools in the United States and Canada, but I would suspect never is the answer to that.
The rise of the gulag state, because it turned out that the bloody Soviet Union couldn't function unless they enslaved everybody and made them work.
The death of tens of millions, it's uncountable, the 56 crackdown on Hungary, the 68 invasion of Czechoslovakia, not to mention the whole Cold War that put the whole goddamn world at risk from 1962 to 1989, and that still is rearing its ugly head with our current dispute with North Korea, which is the last remaining, let's call it gulag-like Soviet state.
So there's the death counts, perhaps.
That's a relatively conservative estimate.
8 to 61 million in the Soviet Union.
It's quite a margin of error, wouldn't you say?
That's the Red Terror, the Great Purge, the national operations of the NKVD, later the KGB. The Great Purge in Mongolia.
Soviet killings during World War II. The People's Republic of China.
Land reform.
Land reform.
That's how you...
That's what you call it when you take land that grows food and turn it into land that's just full of corpses.
That's land reform.
And the suppression of counter-revolutionaries.
The Great Leap Forward.
That was a good one.
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
Cambodia and the killing fields.
And then a list of other countries.
Every single place where these pathological ideas were put into practice became what you might describe as the literal equivalent of hell on earth so rapidly that it was a kind of miracle in and of itself.
And yet we still, you know, what is it?
One out of five social scientists in American universities regard themselves as Marxists.
It's like, what the hell?
Really?
Really?
What is going on with that?
I don't understand that in the least.
You know, I don't understand why That pathological ideology that's so murderous, so intensely murderous, and so closely tied to the genocides from a causal perspective cannot have accreted to it the same, what would you call, unutterable...
Unutterable state that Nazism has accrued to itself.
What's going on?
Why don't we see it that way?
I don't understand that.
I mean, maybe it's because of the hypothetical universal utopia that the damn Soviets were aiming at.
Maybe you could get away with that in 1895.
Or maybe after World War I when things were brutal and the monarchies of Europe were collapsing and everything was chaotic.
You didn't know that your utopian ideas were gonna result in an absolute catastrophe.
But it's a hundred years after that now, almost to the day.
And the evidence is clearly in.
I'm a Marxist.
You're just jealous because you don't make as much as a bloody investment banker.
So that's why you're a bloody Marxist!
If you were paid four times as much, you'd be a capitalist so fast it would make your head spin.
I'm going to talk for 15 more minutes because we started a little late and I do want to get through this.
So what's the problem?
Well, we already discussed it and I want to show you a different way of conceptualizing it.
This is based on some of the work that I've done on archetypes, and I think of archetypes as imagistic representations of the axioms of thought.
That's a reasonable way of, or maybe of the axioms of being itself.
There are categories of being.
Pain is a category of being, for example.
Suffering, limitation, finitude.
Those are all categories of being.
They're very realistic.
They're the fundamental elements of existence, essentially.
It's different in some sense than a materialist viewpoint, you know, because the materialists make the claim, and perfectly reasonable in some sense, that the fundamental realities are material.
They're only the fundamental realities in some sense if you define them that way not that that isn't useful and not that you can't derive objective truth that's pragmatically useful from that but the fundamental realities of life have a lot more to do with motivation and emotion especially with regards to suffering and so that is the unsolved problem of human existence and we talked about the different ways of conceptualizing that and I want to walk you quickly through some of my thinking about the true roots of of
suffering and human vulnerability and I think of this as an antidote to ideological possession I think that this is the fundamental map of religious belief and I'll walk you through it very quickly and that what happens what happens in the case of an ideology is an ideology takes a fragment of a religious belief system And expands it up into a totality and has its mode of power because it draws on these underlying religious slash archetypal narratives for its power.
So, for example, you know, the idea of the future socialist utopia is very, very similar to the idea of the kingdom of heaven on earth.
It was always, you know, that's a cardinal element of the three western Major religions.
So here's a way of conceptualizing existence and each of these levels of conceptualization have their own symbolic representations and you can see these What portrayed consistently throughout the narratives that we use to guide our existence, even the ones that we don't understand explicitly, they come up in movies and in books and in myths and in the stories we tell each other and in our dreams and our imagination constantly.
So they're really the categories of the imagination.
And so, the first category, and the one that's most difficult to understand, I called the dragon of chaos.
It's sort of the outermost circle.
That's a good illustration of it.
The dragon is a very common symbol worldwide, and an anthropologist slash biologist who I recently read called it a snake cat bird which I really liked and he thought about it as an amalgam of the of the idea of predator you know because our tree-dwelling ancestors and after that were basically preyed on by birds of prey by predatory cats and by snakes and so well and God only knows how much how many times fire did them in as well so a
fire-breathing tree cat Tree snake bird is a very good representation of the category of everything that's out there in the unknown that can do you in and that become elaborated over the course of time into the idea of the dragon that hoards gold or that hoards virgins for that matter the idea being that human beings are half prey and half predator and so that We have to make a representation of that which exists beyond our comprehension that can do us in.
And so that's the dragon of chaos, let's say.
But also come to understand that confronting that voluntarily is the appropriate way to gather new information and to survive.
And that's really the fundamental human story.
The fundamental human story is to go boldly where no one has gone before.
And what you encounter are the terrible Dragons that exist beyond your field of comprehension.
And if you can manage that forthrightly, then you gather the kind of information and riches that enables you to develop yourself characterologically and to benefit your community.
That's the fundamental story of mankind, the fundamental positive story.
And that's the underpinning of the hero mythology, which is a lovely antidote to ideological presupposition.
So that's the outermost reality, you would say.
That's the unknown unknowns that Donald Rumsfeld referred to.
And nested inside that are the terrible things about life that you actually encounter.
They're not the hypothetical things that might get you.
They're the actual things that you encounter that you don't know.
And some of those are positive and some of those are negative, you know.
And that can even flip because sometimes your life is turned upside down by, let's say, by a rejection from someone you love.
Which would be a good example of the terrible mother.
That's the great mother on the outer ring.
But that can mature you and make you wake up as well.
And so the encounter with the things that transcend your, what would you call it, your competence are also things that can make you grow and mature.
So you can think of the great mother as nature and the great father as culture and the individual as the person who's enveloped by culture and by nature.
When you move to the fringes of your culture you encounter nature itself and that's the case let's say geographically but it's also the case conceptually, right?
If you're the master of a field of endeavor, which is a geographical metaphor, you move towards the fringes so that you can stand on the unknown, encounter something that's new, transform what's new into inhabitable territory, and extend the dimension of human capacity.
And so it works on a practical geographical level of representation, but also on a on an abstract level and so you can also think about it as a person on an island in an ocean that's a good way of thinking about the human condition except the person has two elements and the island has two elements and so does the ocean and the person's two elements are classically speaking the good and evil that wars in their heart because it isn't so self-evident exactly where your enemy is and it
might be the class structure that's oppressing you but it might be the snake in your own heart And it's certainly the case that if you read people like Viktor Frankl and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, just to take a start, who were very perspicacious interpreters of the catastrophes of Nazism and the Soviet Union, both of their conclusions was the fundamental problem with both of those systems is that the individuals within the systems allowed themselves to be corrupted by what was in their own hearts.
And so one of the things that's absolutely horrible, I think, about the Marxist And post-modernist viewpoint is that it doesn't attribute any of the pathology that's all all projected onto the social world to the individual him or herself and you might say well that's where the fundamental battle takes place and I would also say that the idea that existence is a battle between good and evil and it's the battle of the soul is a consequence of the symbolic realization of Western civilization that the evil that has to be
confronted most forthrightly is actually the evil that obtains to the individual and that it's primarily an ethical issue at the individual level And that's what you take responsibility for.
If you forget that, you project it onto other people.
You take no responsibility for it.
And you end up thinking that you're the good guy.
And you probably shouldn't think that.
Because if you thought for about 15 minutes about all the stupid things that you've done in your life, and malevolent things as well, you could figure out for yourself quite quickly that the probability that you're the saint and that everyone else is the villain is only an indication of precisely how villainous you are.
So and then with regards to the social structure, well obviously it's pathological and tyrannical and corrupt and deceitful.
You know, it's partly a structure of the dead and people are corrupt to some degree and willfully blind.
And so that's an archetypal truth.
That's part of the thrownness that we discussed earlier.
You have this infrastructure that surrounds you both physical and conceptual and you're its beneficiary and its victim.
It's partly pathological and corrupt.
It's always been that way and you're damn lucky that it isn't just purely corrupt because that's frequently the case and so what your job is not to whine about the fact that it's corrupt that's self-evident your job is to straighten yourself up enough so that you can straighten up the culture and that's the old motif of rescuing your father from the belly of the whale let's say which is part of the necessary Process by which people become fully developed individuals what you're supposed to be doing in university and the humanities You
don't just study the great ideas of Western culture You just you study the pathology of history and know that it's about you and then maybe you try to culture yourself and discipline yourself to the point where you have enough of an internal ethic so that when you take your place in the patriarchy For lack of a better word, you're going to be a force for good rather than a force for evil.
And then maybe the damn thing tilts a bit towards the good instead of the catastrophe.
And then maybe you've done something that's worthwhile.
And then nature, well...
You know, it's very easy to romanticize nature, especially if you're a city dweller who's never had to, you know, wander out in the northern woods in the middle of the summer and get eaten by black flies and mosquitoes, starving to death while trying to track down an animal.
It's very easy to romanticize nature.
Of course, cancer and other diseases tend to disabuse you of the pure beauty of nature.
And nature is a very destructive force.
It's against us all the time as well as for us.
Another thing that's really not well balanced in our society is the anti-humanism that's become part and parcel of radical discussions everywhere.
Human beings are regarded as a cancer on the planet, to quote the What was that?
The Club of Rome.
Worrying about the population explosion and we're all guilty because we're destroying things as fast as we can possibly manage.
It's like, Jesus, everything around us is always trying to kill us.
Most of the time we're just trying to stay alive.
I mean, we're not perfect.
We're corrupt and so are social structures and people get greedy and careless.
But it's not like nature's all shining, wonderful young lady waiting in the wilderness to embrace us positively.
It's the old hag that's going to kill you every possible way.
And you need to defend yourself against that.
And you know, human beings have only been in a position since 1960, since we ever had any conceptualization of our potential to change the planet on a planetary scale.
It's been like four generations.
You know back in the 1890s Thomas Huxley was commissioned by the English Parliament to investigate the carrying capacity of the oceans and he was a great biologist His report was that there were so damn many fish in the ocean that every human being could fish every day for the rest of his life and catch everything he possibly could and we wouldn't put a dent in it And that's only 120 years ago.
We only woke up to the fact that we became a planetary force in 1960.
It's like, what the hell do you expect from people?
You know, we're trying to get ourselves together as fast as we can.
And it might be decent of us to stop with the anti-human rhetoric, which is only going to lead to a bad end.
You know, if human beings are nothing but a cancer on the planet, then it's the bloody hero who obliterates them, isn't it?
Because it's the hero who gets rid of cancer.
I know people watch the school shooters and the mass shooters and they think, well what is it that motivates people like that?
Which they can figure out in about half an hour if they did the proper reading.
Just read what they wrote.
Human beings are a cancer on the planet.
Being is evil intrinsically.
I'm going to take out everything I can to show my displeasure with the structure of reality and then I'm going to shoot myself just to show you how little I care.
And if you can't understand that, then you haven't looked very deeply into your own heart because there could be a time in your life, believe me, where something terrible enough happens to you so that you'll be able to understand that perfectly.
There's a Christian representation of the same thing, right?
So the great mother's on the outside, that's nature, and then the father's in the middle and In that representation, which I really like, that's from the 13th century, you see God the Father, who's a representation of culture, holding the suffering individual who simultaneously transcends his suffering.
That's the goal, to be the suffering individual who simultaneously transcends his suffering.
That's why all those people on the inside of the open virgin, which is what that sculpture is called, are gazing at that image because they're trying to figure out what the hell it means.
Well, people have been gazing at it for 2,000 years trying to figure out what it means and one of the things that you can be sure of is that that story and what that image represents is absolutely central to the integrity of Western civilization.
Five more minutes.
Five more minutes.
This is an image of, I would call it the patriarchy, and it's a lovely image.
It's God the Father, and he's assimilated to the Son because, well, because consciousness, which is associated with light, is the builder of culture.
He rules over the walled city, and so he's the centering idea, you might say, that unites a culture.
That's another way of looking at it.
And he's got two hands.
I describe them as security and tyranny.
All together order.
And you know, if you're in a university, the U of T students complain about this all the time.
There's 60,000 U of T students, right?
They feel like numbers.
They feel ignored.
And no wonder, because they're numbers and they are ignored.
It's no wonder they didn't feel that way.
You know, and there's huge classes of 1,200 people and they get lost and they think, God, that's a pretty evil structure and uncaring.
It's like, yeah, that's exactly right.
But by the same token, you know, you get to purchase four years of intellectual freedom and you have all these people who could at least in principle teach you something and you get an identity out of the deal and if you have half a bit of sense, you're in the library trying to read great things and maybe you're not quite as dopey and useless when you come out as you were when you went in.
And so it takes with one hand and gives with the other and you got to understand that about your position in relationship to society It crushes you and molds you at the same time It limits you and furthers your capability at the same time and it's up to you to determine how to establish a harmonious and productive relationship with that because that's one of the fundamental demands of life That sort of splits into these two things That's the king
who devours his son.
I love that picture.
And that's, well, that's a society that's become tyrannical, right?
And the son of the king is the thing that regenerates the king.
The king's old and he's blind and he's stupid and he's corrupt and he has a son and the son is lively and awake and alert and can see.
And if the father's...
Not pathological.
Then he tries to make the sun strong so that the sun can grow up and revitalize the culture.
And if he's a tyrant, well, then he devours him and then he gets old and corrupt and everything goes into chaos.
And then there's the benevolent king who's got that properly balanced and you see in this picture he's got a globe in his hand with a cross on top of it and that's Means the same thing that that other symbolic image did, which is that the proper society supports the suffering individual in his or her attempts to transcend their suffering and attain a proper ethical perspective.
And then the son of the father is the hero.
That's Hercules.
I really like that picture.
So Hercules goes out into the darkness and he's got this container and maybe you can think of that container as a cultural artifact, you know, because the culture protects you from chaos and Then the question is, what are you supposed to do with that protection?
And the answer is you're supposed to wear the garb of the lion, right?
That's the king of the beasts.
So that's supposed to be you.
And you're supposed to go out there into the darkness with your bloody eyes open so you can discover what's in the darkness and share it with everyone else.
And he's got a club there in his hands and the club is covered with eyes.
Those are eyes, not barbs.
And what that means is that you should bloody well pay attention and that, well, the other Element of that that's not expressed in that image is that you should also speak carefully.
Pay attention and speak carefully and then you're the proper son of the proper father and you can keep things functioning.
And that makes you into this, right?
So the city is always threatened.
It's always corrupt and threatened.
And there's always something outside that's going to take it down.
Always.
And that's what's represented by the dragon.
That little twist in its tail is something that represents infinity.
And the courageous individual goes out of the damaged city to confront the dragon of chaos and to gain something valuable as a consequence.
And that's what human beings are supposed to do.
That's our destiny.
That's our soul.
That's a better way of thinking about it.
And some of that terrible dragon is just the catastrophe and suffering of life and our continual attempts to transcend it.
But a tremendous amount of it is also the malevolence and the evil that exists in our own hearts and in society and perhaps to some degree even in the world itself.
You're supposed to Wake up and strengthen yourself and stand up properly and fortify yourself so that you're a light that can shine in the darkness and that's something that can withstand malevolence and tragedy.
And what's your alternative?
You're gonna let life crush you and make you weak and make you resentful and bitter and then murderous?
You'll take out your rage on everyone you can and it'll only be limited by your capacity to obtain power.
That's not a good thing.
And so it's this way or a way that leads directly to hell.
And we've certainly seen that plenty of times in the last hundred years.
And you'd think we might have learned our lesson.
But it takes a lot for people to learn.
And we're in danger of repeating exactly the same mistakes again.
So, you know, it's one thing to complain about the political polarization, and it's another thing to point fingers at the post-modernists and the neo-Marxists, even though they roundly deserve it in my estimation.
It's another thing to try to figure out what the proper alternative is, and the proper alternative is not, in my estimation, Contribute to political polarization.
It's not good and it's not that the radical right is the solution to the radical left.
It's just another catastrophe.
And the only solution that I've been able to figure out, and this is as a consequence of much reading and much thinking, is that It's up to the individuals in our society to sort themselves out and to strengthen themselves and to become wise and alert and to shoulder the responsibility of being and the demand, the ethical demand to push back malevolence in their own hearts and in their society.
And I also believe that You know it's very difficult for people to respect themselves because they're weak and vulnerable and pathetic and malevolent and so it's no and they're not what they could be and they know it and so it's no wonder that people don't respect themselves and some of that's nature and some of that's culture and some of its individual weakness But one of the things that I've learned,
and it's about the only optimistic thought I've ever come across, is that if you have enough courage to forthrightly accept the fact that you're vulnerable and malevolent and you're willing to do something about it to overcome it, you can develop enough respect for yourself so that the terrible weight of being will not make you malevolent and corrupt.
And I don't think that you have anything better to aim for unless you want blood in the streets and a pathetic life.
And so you might as well straighten up and get your act together and maybe we've got some chance of getting through this intermediary period of chaos that we all face and make something better out of it instead of something worse.
So that's what I have to say about that.
So thank you.
Thank you.
has agreed to do 30 minutes of question and answer still so if you have a question to ask I ask that you please line up over here.
So I should just unplug it or shut off the recording?
Okay.
Oh yes, yes, right.
I'll repeat your question.
Thank you.
Okay, so I heard that you decided not to do your website thing to analyze the postmodernist courses and you said that you thought that it would contribute more to polarization.
I had lunch with a friend of mine earlier today who I hadn't seen in seven years, who was on the radical left and would probably be a victim of that kind of thing if he were to be successful in that, her and many of her colleagues would, let's say, be shut out of the universities.
So that seems right to me.
That's a bad way to go.
But what do you think of as the alternative?
You talked to a lot of people who are sort of in your intellectual orbit who are kind of fellow travelers.
Do you think the answer is to talk to people who are further away from you?
And if you try to do that, I'm sure many people later would be reluctant to talk to you.
Yeah, you might say that.
Reluctant would be one way of putting it.
Yeah, so the question is, I had thought about making a website.
Well, the website was actually made.
Because, you know, if I'm trying to decide whether to do something, usually what I do, because it's really hard to figure out if you should do something just hypothetically, right?
So one of the ways to figure out if you should do something is to do it almost completely and then it's there and then you're actually thinking about something real and I talked to a bunch of people about it after it was built and thought that I wasn't sure it would cause more, that would do more good than harm, so I put it on hiatus.
Now, you know, one of the unfortunate things that happened was that the University of Toronto Faculty Association accused me of making this website, you know, on the basis of things I'd said about three or four months ago without talking to me about it because why would they talk to one of their faculty members Being the Faculty Association.
And, you know, so I would, as I said, I was wavering back and forth about whether not to do this.
And then they came out and attacked me.
And the problem with that is that now if I say I'm not going to do it, it looks like they won.
And first of all, I don't see this as a win-loss situation.
I don't like it to be construed that way.
But the truth of the matter is that when the Faculty Association came out and said that You know, it would be wrong for me to do it.
My first response was, yeah, well, you bastards, I'll be doing it now.
You can be sure of that.
But that's not a good...
That's not how to think, right?
That's how to react.
And so you don't do that.
You have your little emotional meltdown and then you think for like a month and you get people to talk to and you try to come at it from a level-headed perspective.
So...
I don't know.
I probably have most luck with YouTube videos and I have a book coming out.
I'm supposed to bring a flyer for all of you, but you know, I forgot.
So, like I always do.
So, and hopefully that'll be helpful because it's about individual responsibility fundamentally and truth in particular, which I think is What would you say?
Well, if you want to adapt to reality, which is kind of what you have to do, then falsifying it is probably not the most effective strategy, as far as I can tell.
And it's certainly the case that if you allow yourself to speak bent words, that you'll end up with a bent character, and then God help you.
So, you know, I talked tonight about what I think are the words that are most dangerous, diversity, equity, Inclusivity, white privilege.
So maybe, you know, the people who are watching the videos can think about how they might want to orient themselves in relationship to the mid-level bureaucrats in particular who are pushing this sort of thing forward with as much force as they can possibly manage.
So, we'll see.
That's the plan at the moment.
Yep.
She didn't say she would watch one of your biblical act videos.
Maybe she'll come around.
You never know.
Hello?
Hi.
You touched on a really important point, interestingly, at the beginning of the lecture, which is kind of where the post-Marxist, or at least the ones you left, put off from insanity, so to speak.
I was wondering if you could talk about, or speak, the post-Marxist ideas that are not the cookie-cutter ones, that have not equipped the left and the leftist students like they have today.
I'm talking about people like Miguel Lujan, Though they are, some of them, steeped in Marxism, they do have validity in the sense that though we have this from Heidegger, there are power hierarchies and structures, though admittedly not all powerful, that do define human interactions, that do dominate people, and that do, in a sense, or at least in their words, alienate people from themselves.
Probably the most prominent paper is The Medium is the Message, which is what Luhan talked about, which is the production of new technologies.
The technology itself and the content it produces, we can think of newspaper articles in a newspaper.
The distribution of newspapers is itself content as well, and how that defines Well, the first thing is that it's not particularly useful necessarily to conceptualize them as power structures because there are structures with multiple purposes and there are multiple structures and so collapsing it to power is a very bad idea.
The second is that we're in a...
Human beings are in a constant state of alienation from the world and from what they produce.
If you had to define human beings, that would be the definition.
Those creatures that are in a constant state of alienation from themselves, culture and the world.
Now, why that is exactly, I don't know.
I think it has something to do with the fact that we're self-conscious.
But it's an existential reality rather than an indication of the pathology of a given cultural construction.
You know, that's one of the reasons I really like, well, Heidegger in part, but the existentialists in general, they just throw that out in front of you and say, look, Yes, of course you have those problems.
It's always been that way.
The ancient Egyptians had a God that represented the corruption of the state and the corrupting influence that produced that corruption.
That was set.
The word set eventually becomes the word Satan.
I mean, we've known this The Mesopotamians knew this.
They had a god, Kingu, who was the king of the monsters, out of whose blood human beings were made.
It's like the idea that we're alienated from what we create.
It's like, yeah, right, absolutely, that's true.
So get up and do something about it.
You know, it's not like you're unique in your subjugation to the pathology of culture.
And it's also not the case that culture is only pathological.
That's the other thing that's so...
It's so disturbing.
I mean, you have glasses on.
That's a good thing.
You don't bump into walls.
You know, and so, and that's a cultural artifact.
You know, and I'd be dead six times over if it wasn't for various medical interventions.
And so, you know, leavening the fact that you're oppressed with a little bit of gratitude is a really wonderful thing.
And one of the things that just staggers me about the radical fringe that's That's characterized by these ideas that we discussed tonight.
They have absolutely no gratitude for anything.
And that's really something remarkable.
You know, what did Nietzsche say?
Human being is intolerable unless he has two things.
Cleanliness and gratitude.
Or maybe they manage the first count, although not always.
But they certainly...
Sorry about that.
But they certainly don't manage the second.
So...
Yep.
Dr.
Beeson, I wanted to bring up an article written in the day of the Cardinal in the campus newspapers published this morning.
A letter to the editor by an arm of the student government, the Legislative Affairs Committee, in which they make several claims, which I think But I think
this could be extended to all types of speech in which the radical legacy I wouldn't say I'm hiding behind the banner of free speech precisely.
So that would be the first error in that.
I don't think that you can characterize what I'm doing as hiding.
It isn't exactly self-evident that the right to free speech has protected me.
I would say a certain amount of good fortune, a certain amount of caution with my words, And a tremendous amount of public support is what's protected me.
I also think that the ideological types who pen those pieces of nonsense have a common, what a constant theme is.
Anyone who disagrees with them is pathological in some manner and uses the right of free speech to exercise that pathology.
Well, you know, no.
That's just, that's, sorry, that's not the case.
It's not the case.
And, you know, most of what's been leveled at me in terms of slurs are they're low resolution and ill-informed.
You know, I'm a transphobe.
I'm a bigot.
What else?
I'm a racist.
I'm a Nazi, that's a good one.
I've been teaching about Nazism for 30 years, you know, trying to tell people that they probably would have been Nazis had they been in Germany during the 1930s, and actually trying to convince them of that, which is something that you might need a trigger warning for before you enter the class.
You know, so it's palpably absurd, but it doesn't matter because if the war of ideas is about power, it doesn't matter whether you represent either side with any degree of accuracy.
It's just part of the Hobbesian nightmare and, you know, whoever spins the best story wins.
So, yeah, anyways, I've been weirdly fortunate because every time the radicals have come after me, and they really came after me last October, It's reversed every single time.
So, and I'm not counting on that to continue, but it's been rather blackly comical as it's been occurring.
So these articles, it's like, as far as I'm concerned, they're a dime a dozen.
I don't even have to read them anymore.
That's the thing about reading something an ideologue writes.
You just have to look at the first sentence and infer the rest.
You know, it's true, man.
It's actually, this is one of the things that Solzhenitsyn did a brilliant job of analyzing in the Gulag Archipelago.
He said, that's the consequence of turning your God-given soul over to human dogma.
You're just a puppet for these ideas that are operating behind the scenes.
You think you have the ideas.
It's like, think again.
They have you and they're doing with you what the ideas want to have done with you.
And when they're done with you, they'll discard you, you can be sure.
And you'll be lucky if there's anything left of you when that happens.
So, and the universities are absolutely complicit in this.
They take young people whose minds are, who are looking for an identity and no wonder.
And they teach them this algorithmic idiocy that anyone with any brain could learn in a week.
The dictums and dogma of the oppression versus oppressed narrative.
God, it's unbelievable.
You know, a decent chatbot could write most of the postmodern papers.
That's why, that's why they, that's why the typical humanities, 80% of humanities papers now garners zero citations.
Which means the only person who ever reads them is the person who wrote them and even they don't do a very good job of reading them.
So, yeah.
Well, for starters, now I feel kind of terrible for writing that article.
You know, I have to give credit for credit as I do.
It was co-written with others, and I would have hoped it would have come across as more of a thoughtful critique.
Are you actually serious?
Yeah.
Well, I'm sorry I was a little hard on you.
Actually, I would say I'm more hard on your professors, so...
It's fine, I'm going for punishment, but anyway...
It's very brave of you to be standing there, by the way.
My question isn't about that, but more about identity.
Really what you see then in the sense of thrownness is it's a consequence of human nature.
Human nature creates hierarchies, and hierarchies exclude, or groups exclude, and it's necessary to sort.
But what we see with a lot of the sorting is that it's arbitrary, and that it's not the arbitrariness of nature, but rather the arbitrariness of structures of society.
Maybe nature lends itself to the creation of arbitrary structures within society.
I think that's fair.
Then people self-identify with these categories, and these categories may be outdated or Based on old understandings are ultimately lead to greater estrangement.
So the question is how do people reckon with the parts of their identity that may or may not contribute to environments where people feel more estranged, more alone?
That's why you get educated.
It's to separate the wheat from the chaff.
You know, because you're a historical creature, right?
I mean, it's outside of you and inside of you.
And some of it's dead and corrupt, as you just said.
And estranges for no reason, no functional reason, counter-productively.
But until you understand the structures, for better or for worse, you're in no position to do anything but make them worse, fundamentally.
The purpose of a liberal education is not to turn you into an avatar of capitalism.
Or of democracy for that matter.
The purpose of a liberal education is to enable you to comprehend the history in which you're embedded and then to act as an agent to reconstruct and revitalize that hierarchy.
But that's a serious matter.
Like at 18, say, and right out of high school with no experience whatsoever in life and no real education, you're in absolutely no position whatsoever to be protesting about the structure of the Western world.
It's like, no.
Sorry.
You know, your observations about the fact that people are alienated by structures, like, absolutely, of course, and it does sort, and it sorts harshly.
And of course, because you're young, you tend to be sorted near the bottom, except that I would point out that you're young, and there's really something to that.
You know, and you might think that you have no power because of that, but I could say, well, you have all the power that youth gives you, and that's not trivial.
So, power doesn't lie where it's obvious, you know, it really doesn't.
And people have more power than they think, but they squander it.
And they often squander it on ideology, when they're not just wasting their time.
So, anyways, it was very brave of you to stand up and ask me a question and to take all that criticism.
I have kind of a non-secretive religious question.
I phrased it carefully.
The proposition of agnostic atheism that there is no literal god in the objective universe, or at least no god humans would be interested in, is intellectually hard to assail.
Still, there is good evidence that religious behavior is an advantage produced by natural selection.
Do you think that self-critically acting in a way as if God exists is sufficient to leverage evolutionary wisdom, or must a religion's articles of faith be believed and defended in the same manner as literal facts?
That's a good question.
One of the things that I read when I was reading Carl Jung, he made this claim, which I really liked, was that whatever sits atop your pinnacle of value is functionally equivalent to God.
That's good.
That's really smart.
Like, it's smarter than it sounds, which is the case with most of the things that Jung wrote, because it actually does turn out that our category systems are not so much about subdividing the material world into its appropriate entities, but about carving up our experience into categories of tools and obstacles so that we can attain certain valued goals.
And so we're always directing our action towards the attainment of a goal.
And so that means we're immersed in a value structure.
And so Jung's point was whatever sits at the pinnacle of your value structure serves the function of God.
Now you might have a fragmented value structure, which means in some sense that you're psychologically polytheistic.
And the problem with that is that then you're a house divided amongst itself.
You're pulling in multiple directions simultaneously.
Impulsive people are like that, right?
And they don't understand themselves because one day they go left and the other day they go right and, you know, they have no control over themselves at all.
Now you said, well, there's no objective God and that seems to be a reasonable hypothesis.
The question then I suppose becomes to what degree our subjective experience is real and that's a matter of definition.
I think the religious impulse is an inevitable consequence of the fact that it's necessary for people to live inside hierarchies of value and that we feel a sense of awe The sense of awe we feel with regards to the highest values is not distinguishable from the existence of the value itself.
Now and there's real advantages to the idea of a detached God in some sense and one of the things I've learned about archaic concepts of sovereignty is that detaching the idea of ethics itself and ethical power from the holder of power is an extraordinarily useful thing to do because otherwise the king becomes the embodiment of the God And then the king can do no wrong, then you have a tyrant.
If the idea of power and sovereignty is detached from the individual and set up as a higher virtue that even the sovereign is responsible to, then the sovereign, at least in principle, can never put himself forward as absolute.
And you can think about that just as a development of human's capacity to abstract, right?
We can abstract the idea of sovereignty.
We can abstract the idea of ethics and virtue.
We can hypothesize that as an ideal.
We can embody it as a personality.
It's actually quite useful because it's something we have to act out.
Now you might say, well, what relationship does that have to, you know, to the existence of something transcendent in the religious sense outside of that abstract conceptualization?
And the answer to that is we don't know.
If you familiarize yourself with the writings of people who've had profound religious experiences, it's chronically the case that they describe encountering something that transcends them, and that they describe it as more real than anything they've ever encountered.
Now, whether or not that constitutes proof depends on how you define proof.
So, I'm not making a case for it one way or another.
But, I mean, Jung himself, I mean, when he talked about God, when he was being careful, he didn't talk about God.
He talked about the God image in man.
And he was careful never to formally state that the fact that there's an image of the ideal in the soul, let's say, an archetype, That that provided concrete proof that such an ideal existed, you know, in some transcendent manner.
But the world's a weird place, and it's not something I would rule out.
So it's not like we understand the world very well.
And the materialists, you know, they try to encapsulate the entire world within the materialist philosophy, and like more power to them, it's been an unbelievably successful tool.
But we haven't cracked consciousness in the least.
And there is something about consciousness that's world-creating.
And there's something transcendent about consciousness.
And it also seems capable of a kind of infinite expansion.
And it isn't obvious why any of that is the case.
Not obvious at all.
So...
Yep.
Hello.
Okay.
Well, I share your criticism of these postmodern philosophers, but I don't think we.
Even before they were writing their stuff, we had people who write up the World War II, a lot of these critical theories about taking Marxism, criticizing Marxism itself, and they were influential on a lot of the student radicals in the People like Herbert Marcuse and stuff like that.
Those ideas seem to give rise to intersectionality and a lot of equity in a lot of these other ideas.
They don't really see eye to eye with post-modernism because they're objective realities.
Objective reality, but they think that truth is held by minorities and they need to rebel against the majority to express their own truth.
Well, okay, so two things.
I mean, there's been a number of attempts to revise Marxist theory, right?
And so you pointed to one, that's the cultural theorists, and that was after World War II, when it became painfully obvious, at least to the first round of people who were oriented towards the radical left, but opened their eyes that there was something rotten in the state of the Soviet Union.
And so they did their best to revamp the central doctrines of Marxism using Freudian theory and so forth.
And as you said, they were very influential among the student radicals of the 60s, and it was them that gave birth to the modern crop of, say, postmodern neo-Marxists.
I think that, you know, I couldn't cover all of that, obviously, in one lecture, but your point is well taken.
Now, you ended that with a different question.
So, but I don't remember exactly what that question was.
Oh, like, there's just these people will recognize Oh, yes.
Well, look, I mean, look.
The ultimate minority is the individual.
And the individual always stands in opposition with his or her truth to that of the mob.
So, that's true.
It's that it's very frequently the case that truth is held by something outside the general consensus.
Now, falsehood is too, right?
So, I mean, if you have a structure that's reasonably functional, Like a little walled city and you have a hundred people outside yelling about how pathological it is 99 of them would make it worse and one of them has something useful to say and so you can't just dispense with the minority so to speak because the majority of the minority is going to be wrong in their opposition because the one person in the minority who isn't wrong is absolutely vital And that's the tension.
That's always the tension between the group.
That's partly...
The mythological hero really has two roles.
One is to go out and conquer the dragon of darkness and to gather information and to disseminate it.
But the second role, which is equally important, is To stand up against the corrupt culture, which is what Horace does, for example, in the ancient Egyptian stories.
Demolish what's corrupt and then rebuild something in the aftermath.
You do that psychologically too, you know, because you have an interpretive structure through which you view the world.
And now and then you run into something that's like a minority a fact that doesn't fit and but it's but it's actually a fact it indicates that part of you needs to die and Encounter chaos and reconstitute yourself and that's why there is this dynamism between the group and the individual and also why the individual is held in The West to be a power, let's say, that's superordinate to the state.
The state has to recognize the validity of the individual because the individual does, in the final analysis, hold the redemptive truth.
But to put that in minority groups, that's a whole different issue.
That's a sleight of hand as far as I'm concerned.
All right.
All right.
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