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Dec. 2, 2017 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:19:11
Swedes want to know....
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Yeah, and I'll get right into it.
I work for Svenska Dagblad, which is a newspaper, one of the second largest with daily circulation.
And then I ask sometimes on Twitter and Facebook, what kind of people do you think I should interview?
And your name has come up a lot.
I think you've heard this before.
And then recently I wrote a piece in Quillette about the freedom in Sweden and you shared it on Twitter and Facebook so that's when I mailed you because then I thought perhaps now you will respond and I can get an interview.
Yeah, well, Quillette has really turned out to be quite the platform, man.
I did an interview with Claire Lehman.
I interviewed her, which I haven't released yet, but I will in the next probably two weeks, something like that.
But she's hitting it out of the park as far as I'm concerned.
It kind of reminds me of what magazine like Harper's used to be or at the Atlantic before Before mainstream journalism collapsed virtually completely and became so politicized.
So yeah, Quillette's been really impressive I would just add that it says something like a mother of two or one from Australia and just being fed up with the political correctness of her psychology department, I think it was.
And then she starts Quillette.
And now we're all like sharing in her project from all over the world.
Yeah, it's amazing, eh?
It's really amazing.
And she has really good editorial sense.
She must be really smart, that girl.
Yeah, I would say so too.
But I'll try...
I don't know if you remember...
I'll just begin by asking you about the Sweden case.
I don't know if you remember what the article was about, but I wrote about...
Erik Ringmar is a professor at the political science department and he was forced to include Judith Butler on his literature list.
Oh yeah, right, Judith Butler, yeah, yeah.
Great.
And the course is about modern society and its critics.
So it's basically about the reactionary forces and Left-wing extremist forces during the turn of the last century, so in the early 20th century and late 19th century, and then Judith Butler.
And actually, one of the course, not Eric, but his teaching assistant interviewed Judith Butler, and she said that she disagreed with the method, so she agreed with the professors, that she thought that the academic freedom was more Important than being forced to teach about feminist authors and gender science.
So she was actually on the other side.
Gender science.
Judith Butler is by no means a scientist or even a credible academic as far as I'm concerned.
I think she's a straight-out ideologue.
And the fact that anybody would be forced well first of all forced to include anything on their curriculum I think is absolutely reprehensible It's top-down interference with academic freedom and it's extraordinarily dangerous because once that Precedent is established then you open the door for political interference in the like Like organized political interference from outside the academy and it'll collapse very rapidly.
We saw that happening in Germany and also in the Soviet Union.
That can happen so quickly that people can't It's almost impossible to believe.
Now, we're in this weird situation where the same thing seems to be happening to a large degree within the academy itself.
And what to do about that is by no means obvious.
But I don't think that allowing external control of any sort over the contents of the courses that professors teach is a very, very bad idea.
They have a rule of thumb, they call it, but it's basically much more a rule than a rule of thumb, that at least 40% of all the literature has to be written by women.
Gosh!
Unbelievable!
If you're holding a course, for example, about modern society and its critics with a lot of primary literature from the turn of the century, then you run into a problem because there weren't a lot of women who were authors back then.
You have to be so unbelievably...
I would say resentful.
I really think that's the fundamental issue here.
To push a doctrine, resentful and uninformed, to push a doctrine like that.
Look, it's unbelievably widespread.
So I'll give you an example that's very similar.
Our Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, announced in 2015 that half the cabinet that he put together would be women.
Right the fact that only approximately I think it was 20 to 25 percent of the elected officials were female and so what he basically Admitted as far as I'm concerned art was two things number one.
He was incapable of judging people on their competence Because when you put together something like the cabinet for a country what you do is you find the most competent people period because It's so bizarre that it even has to be said because it actually turns out that the cabinet is important and so to me all he did was default on his his central moral obligation to screen every single one of his members of Parliament with exceeding care and to pick the most qualified
people and his rationale was that it was 2015 you know so and We to reduce competence to Racial ethnic gender identity something like that is an absolutely appalling move Philosophically as well as far as I'm concerned to assume that diversity is somehow represented by group membership There's no evidence for that.
There's absolutely no scientific evidence for that whatsoever.
In fact the scientific evidence suggests quite the contrary which is that There's more variability within groups than there is between groups, which is actually an antidote to the central racist claim, right?
Because the central racist claim is there's more difference between groups than there is difference within them.
And so, you know, you've seen one black person, you've seen them all.
And well, well, and this is we actually have in Sweden, it's called, I think the translation is gender mainstreaming in English.
But it's basically you have to include gender scientific perspectives into all.
and this is happening within all Swedish universities right now.
So you have to include this perspective of gender scientific perspective in all parts of the university.
So it's not just literature lists and courses.
It's also who you're going to recruit, the number of courses.
And we have a goal.
In Sweden, from the government, this is all the government's doing.
We have a goal that I think it's 40% of all the professors by 2020 should be women.
Right, which means that if you're a young man who's entering academia, the probability that you're going to get a job is zero.
Yeah, right and that yeah the same things happening here.
So for example this there are Minister of Science who Was one of the people Let's say selected because of Trudeau's insistence upon gender equity in his cabinet You know, he could have picked a number of women that was proportionate to the number of women elected.
Like, even that I wouldn't have agreed with because I think he should have gone on straight competence and taken on the heavy moral burden of trying to figure out what competence meant.
But no, it had to be 50-50 because I guess that was, you know, this is a very snide thing to say, but that seems to be the level of arithmetic intelligence that he could manifest.
And one of his ministers, our Minister of Science, we have this program called the Canada Research Chairs.
And the Canada Research Chairs were set up so that Canadian universities would have an additional amount of money to hire the most qualified people they possibly could for senior named chair positions.
And the idea was to attract international talent.
Like high level.
Now what has happened because it wasn't very well designed this program was that Canadian universities mostly ended up poaching from each other which was you know relatively counterproductive because it just elevated the salaries of the professors which maybe they deserve rather than bringing in a lot of international talent but men were radically overrepresented in the Canada research chairs Now the Minister of Science is very annoyed about this and thinks that that's a consequence of systemic You know misogyny or some some bloody thing
failing to note entirely see if you look at scientific productivity It's very interesting because and gender the median professor male and female Publish approximately the same amount so the typical but the the Exceptional professors are almost all men Even though the typical male and female can't really be distinguished in academia if you take that tiny subset of hyper productive professors They're almost all male now why
that is is my suspicions are it's that it's pretty straightforward I suspect that the reason it is is because to be a hyper productive in any given field means you have to be absolutely single-minded and Obsessed about it as well as being very intelligent conscientious.
So it's rare, right?
You have to be intelligent and Say 99th percentile conscientious 95th percentile.
So that's hardly anybody right there.
And then you have to have the time available to do nothing whatsoever, but concentrate on your work.
No family, no friends, nothing like that.
If you're going to be at the very top of your profession, because obviously You'll get out-competed otherwise.
Now that's a lot harder for women because well For obvious reasons.
I mean so So the mere fact that most of these people were see the other thing people don't understand is that People can on average be very similar So their distributions, but if you go way out onto the edges of the distribution small differences in the middle can make massive differences at the edge So and that's the kind of phenomena you see where you are selecting the highest qualified people It's a it's an edge of the distribution phenomena.
So here's an example.
This is really cool one So if you look at the overlap between male and female aggression, it's pretty high So if you randomly select a man and a woman from the general population And you bet that the woman was the more aggressive of the two you'd be right 40% of the time which is actually pretty often So but if you go way the hell out to where Let's say you only imprisoned the one in 100 most aggressive people They're all men Even
though on average, you know, it's 60-40 You go out to the 99th percentile.
It's all men, which is why almost all the people in prison are men now So people well, it's it's Yeah, what you're describing in Sweden, that's the death of the universities.
It's another, it's another sign of, like the universities are killing themselves.
They're hiring adjunct professors and not faculty members.
Like I think it's up to 70% in some American universities.
They have no salary, no power, no autonomy, no job security, nothing.
It's, you know, some of these adjuncts teach four or five courses a year and make $25,000.
So I read about one who lived in her car.
They've jacked up tuition to the point where it's unsustainable.
They made it impossible for kids who rack up tuition debt to declare bankruptcy because they've taken that out of the bankruptcy laws.
Now you can take away their driver's license if they don't pay their tuition, their student loan bills.
So it's basically indentured servitude.
The administration has become completely top-heavy.
The Academy is completely infested by these terrible equity ideas that you're laying out.
And the people who are in the radical leftist disciplines, which increasingly are spreading their influence out through the entire universities, are tenured and won't be moved for 25 years.
So as far as I can tell, it's done.
Yeah and I would like to ask you or your take about gender science and all these like ethnic studies and sociology because I was a sociology student back in 2004 and I was 22 years old and so a lot of these perspectives we were taught post-modernism and queer feminism and all these things and I mean I was just starting out as a student But I must
have been wired Fulte because I was very critical about it.
But all those perspectives back then was fringe in Sweden.
So like identity politics or everything that's now in the mainstream was at the institution back then.
And the professors, they are the same.
I mean, and they are now, it's their PhDs and master's students that are taking over the public discourse.
So even though they lost a lot of debates back then, and they still do, like public debates, they're still teaching students year after year after year.
I would like to ask you about that and also about your critique of gender studies.
In Swedish it's called gender science because we turned all this into science.
So, it's not even studies, it's science here.
Yeah, that was a good move on the ideologues part, that's for sure.
Really smart.
So, it's a two-pronged question.
Yeah, well, I think, well, I listed about seven things, I think, that are killing the universities.
I actually think that, like, I've watched major institutions collapse and be privy to the manner in which that occurs.
Like, what happens is that as the Enterprise pathologizes the good people leave the people who have other things that they could do they leave first and those are the most productive and and Talented people as soon as the most productive leave then the bloody thing just spirals downhill because what what's gonna happen you you've you know because the rule is is that within a certain discipline whatever it happens to be the square root of the number of people in the discipline produce half the productive work and So if
a university has, let's say, a thousand professors, 30 of them produce half the publications, right?
Which is staggering, right?
It's staggering.
That's the Pareto distribution or Price's Law.
And those people are often...
Have more opportunities than they know what to do with and so as soon as whatever they're doing becomes unstable It's like they go off and do other things and then the then the institution loses its most productive people and That's it.
It's done.
It can't recover from that and so and the introduction of these so-called science Disciplines that we call studies disciplines You know, it was a market lowering of standards.
It involved a market lowering of academic standards, a blurring of what actually constitute a discipline.
Refusal whatsoever to consider anything methodologically rigorous, because anything goes, including, what do they call that?
Ethnography, which is where you just write a diary essentially about your own experiences That's got this fancy name.
So autoethnography is part of gender science, you know, it's positively Orwellian and And the other thing that's interesting about that is that what's happened is that the people who have these radical viewpoints have been given a permanent sinecure, right?
They're state and tuition sponsored activists who can spend every single moment of their time What I would consider their fifth column agenda.
So we're basically funding a cohort of people whose stated purpose is to demolish the patriarchy You know one of the things Carl Jung said which I really liked and haven't talked about that much is that the unconscious representation of men in the female psyche he called the animus The animus was always in his estimation because of the dream analysis he did and so forth that that although the unconscious representation of a woman in
a man's psyche was an individual woman the unconscious representation of the male psyche in the female unconscious was men as a group and There's a very large number of women and and also some men whose conception of male-ness is has been damaged very badly by their failure to establish any positive relationship with any male whatsoever in their developmental history and then they project this paranoid representation
of what constitutes hierarchical masculinity onto the world and then fight to bring it down and it's and the thing is they're being successful that's the problem is this is This is another one.
I know that you're very popular with a lot of young men, but I was actually introduced to you by a mother or two who's a professor in education, so she's not at home, so to speak, ideologically.
But one thing that's worrying me is that there are certain ideologies that take on religious overtones and I think that feminism has some of those characteristics.
I mean, in Christianity we're all born sinful and we need to come to grips with our sinfulness and in the end only God's grace and forgiveness can redeem us.
In Lutheranism, at least, we can't be forgiven by priests.
He's only God.
Yeah, it's a rough doctrine.
There's no escape.
And I totally sympathize with it, even though I don't in a lot of ways, but I realized that But within feminism, the sin is situated within males instead.
Well, not only within males, but within males as a collective.
The thing about the Christian doctrine that you referred to is that it makes each individual responsible for their own darkness.
Now the Catholics say look that's unbearable and people need to have the slate wiped clean now and then and confession will do that and there's an intermediary and Jung considered that merciful and There's some real power in that argument, you know that the cynical argument is well you can Just wipe the slate clean at any time and you don't have to bear any responsibility But I think that's cynical the Protestants put themselves in a much tougher position because there's no escape But the upside of all of that is that the darkness is to be regarded
as within, not without.
And as soon as you move away from that, then while you're the good person, So is everyone that thinks like you and all the evil is wherever you want to put it and and then as soon as the thing that's really dangerous about that especially if the evil is conceptualized as contemptible and and parasitic and and using disgust related language for example instead of fear related language then the logical Directive is to purify
it and boy, that's That's not good.
And this is something that I think is happening.
I've read a dissertation about how male feminists think about themselves and how they go about having sex, for example.
And one of the men said that his way to approach sex was that he didn't take any initiative because he would defile the whole situation and the woman.
Yeah, well, it's like Andrea Dworkin back in the 70s that horrible she's a horrible creature or Andrea Dworkin and You know she said that if men engaged in sexual behavior with an erect penis that that was That that was equivalent to violence right that was equivalent to rape so I mean I don't even know what to say about that, except that that's exactly what Andrea Dworkin was like.
And she was a real heroine to the radical feminists.
You know, her and...
There was someone else around that period of time, Andrea...
Catherine McKinnon, I think her name was, equally...
Well, I think I read Dworkin in Queers.
Yeah, well, you would have.
I mean, from my perspective as a clinician, those people have clear every indication of serious personality disorders.
And I actually think to some degree that we've made a haven for people who have serious personality pathology in these pseudo-disciplines in the universities.
And, you know, you said something interesting.
You said that...
You know when you went to to took your sociology degree that these were basically fringe views now They're center views in the university, but also implying that they're increasingly dominant views in society And that's the thing is that people think that these are somehow ivory tower arguments But what happens in the universities happens in society five to ten years later?
And so and that's exactly what's happening right now And I think this leads us into the MeToo debate.
Because you have people in Sweden right now.
I think the MeToo phenomenon is much larger in Sweden than in any other country.
I mean, it's dominated the media for one month now.
And every profession has a It has a MeToo sort of article with thousands of women signing on to it.
So the teachers and the lawyers and the doctors.
But one thing that is interesting about this is how the men are handling it.
There are a lot of men writing that I as a man have a responsibility for this happening.
I as a man, as a male, am responsible and I'm guilty.
So there are a lot of articles like that.
And then one of the men that was accused of doing something inappropriate, it was the former party leader for the left radical party, And the thing he had done was not so reprehensible.
He had approached a woman and then she had said no and he had apologized, but then she didn't accept that.
And now he's under an investigation, police investigation.
And we have this sort of witch hunt going on.
I've thought that one of the outcomes of this is that almost all manifestations of male sexuality are going to be brought under legal control.
And he actually wrote an article that said, yes, I'm responsible.
And because I say I'm responsible, I'm better than the majority of men's reactions to this.
So actually he turned the thing that he was being under investigation into because he showed that because he admitted he showed that he was better.
Yeah.
It's very Maoist.
I mean the whole idea was that you were supposed to come to terms with your class guilt and then Confess and then and then indicate that you could be brought back into the ideological fold properly The thing is it's a lot of muddy thinking.
It's like well men should take responsibility for their aggressive sexuality And they should incorporate it right because if you repress it, it just comes out in the most ugly way So I mean part of the idea is that men boys should be socialized like little girls You know, but that's complete rubbish.
In fact, even little girls perhaps shouldn't be socialized like little girls, but whatever.
I mean, that's beside the point.
That aggressive capacity that's associated with sexuality as well, as Freud pointed out so long ago, needs to be integrated within the personality so that it's under control, right?
And then it's the hint of darkness and it's the capacity for malevolence, but it's brought under...
But it's brought under civilized regulation.
And so then you get to have your cake and eat it too, right?
You can be strong and potentially dangerous and mysterious and all of those things that are definitely attractive, that are attractive features of men, not only to women, but also to other men.
So you have to take responsibility for that.
But that doesn't mean that you should identify yourself as the member of a guilty group because of a class-based accusation, right?
That's just...
You're not guilty as the member of a class.
I mean, that's part of the reason that I've been pushing so hard against these postmodern neo-Marxist ideas because one of their essential predicates is that you can be guilty as the member of a class.
And that is...
I don't know if there's a more dangerous idea than that.
There might be because, you know, there's a very large number of extremely dangerous ideas, but that one's up near the top.
Yeah, it's happening to great degree in the United States to lesser so in Canada, but every day there's another You know slew of of Influential men who are being outed for their past sexual misbehavior and you know and that and and that's That's uh,
I don't have much to say about that except that to use that as evidence for the Group-based guilt of men as such Yeah, well, whatever.
Whatever.
It's gonna get a hell of a lot worse before it gets better, I'm afraid.
I think this is also...
I would like to ask you about this as well, because as a man growing up in a country like Sweden, you have to I would say that I think a lot of boys at least are confused what it means to be a man.
And then you have these public figures, adult males, admitting to collective guilt and trying to be sort of the new male which admits to guilt.
The feminist, the good man.
The castrated, fat tomcat of a man resting on top of the warm TV whose, what would you say, moral virtue consists in his harmlessness.
Exactly.
Sad.
And what's the advice to give to?
Because what I find, I see a lot of men trying to find their way and trying to find out what it means to be a man and I think that's a lot of them turns to you and or a person like Jocko Willink that interviewed you and because you're And why do you think that is?
I mean, is it the...
Because it doesn't seem...
You're not sugarcoating life.
You're not giving them...
No.
Well, the funny thing about...
Well, there's a couple of things that I'm doing that are different from what people usually do, you know.
So in the last 20 years, the constant message to young people is...
Self-esteem self-esteem feel good about yourself.
It's like I don't buy that I think that you look at yourself in the mirror and you think Jesus Christ I could be a hell of a lot better than I am Yeah, and so and the thing is there's nothing more complimentary to tell a young person than that it's like Look at you.
You're a wreck.
Grow the hell up.
There's so much more to you than you're manifesting than you can hardly imagine.
It's like, well, you think that's a criticism?
It's like, no, it's not.
It's a great compliment.
It's like, look at how much more you could bring out into the world.
Get your aggression under control.
Strengthen yourself.
Like, take on some responsibility.
See if you have enough bloody courage to tell the truth.
Put your life together.
Stop whining.
The men eat that up because no one's ever told them that which just makes breaks my heart Yeah It's so bad and you know the boys are pulling out of everything.
They're pulling out of university.
They're Pulling out of life.
They're pulling out of marriage And and because of that they're more awkward and Unsophisticated than they would otherwise be and much more prone to make sexual errors some of which are you know predatory malevolence in the small proportion of cases But it's another one of those situations,
you know, like imagine that one in a hundred men are sexual predators Yeah, probably maybe it's one in fifty, but let's go with one in a hundred well They that small proportion commit all of the sexual predation like if you look at criminals It's a Pareto distribution again 5% of the criminals produce something like Well, the overwhelming majority of the crimes, right?
It's a small coterie of specialized people who are responsible for all the criminality.
Lots of people are in prison because they did one highness thing, you know, like they got enraged or drunk and did something violent, but there's the serial criminal types and they're the ones that are they do all they they like we had one guy in Toronto for example who ran a bike theft ring and they finally nailed him and like There weren't any bikes stolen in Toronto after that.
It was just him and his little coterie of, you know, organized bike thieves.
And these guys that are being outed, these serial predators, they are responsible.
Like one predatory guy can prey on, who knows, 500 females, 1,000 females in a lifetime, you know?
So, It almost seems like, I mean, this is a lot of guys, I was one of these guys who sort of turned away from society for a while, like into computer games and like this slacker identity, which is sort of...
I guess it's always been there.
You turn away from all responsibilities and you go to the dream world.
But the opportunities to do this is so much larger now.
Yeah, well, it's the Lost Boys, like in Peter Pan, right?
They're in Neverland and they never grow up.
Peter Pan is their leader.
That's that's the story and it's not surprising because it's easier to do It's easier to occupy yourself trivially than it is to do something difficult.
So like there's a big tendency in that direction to begin with because It's easier to do nothing than to take responsibility.
It's easier to play games than to plan for the future It's easier to be resentful and and angry than it is to be You know to shoulder your vulnerability properly and then when you add on to that The idea that if you go out into the world and try to strive forward that you're nothing but a predatory Patriarch Then well, it's just one more.
It's just the icing on the cake.
You know I had a friend who was like that he pulled back from the world and And because he believed that active masculinity was a pathological force and He poisoned himself terribly because of that and he committed suicide when he was 40 he hooked an exhaust Noah hoes onto his exhaust pipe and gassed himself up in the mountains in Alberta and That was the logical consequence of his self-hatred.
It's like Well, if you're so pathological, why don't you just do yourself in and hiding like that is isn't you know, it's not that's obviously not the full-fledged manifestation of that but But it's it's believe me it's on the road So and so yeah, I've been talking to all these young guys They come to my biblical lectures for example and the message is always the same.
It's like stand the hell up get the hell out there in the world Take local responsibility put yourself together because there's nothing more dangerous than a weak man and the problem is is that we're encouraging men to be weak because We have this pathological idea that there's that strength and Tyranny are the same thing and that's that animus I was talking about earlier the women it's not only women but the feminist types let's say who
Insist upon the pathology of the patriarchy cannot distinguish between competence and power They see everything because they have this vague and Undifferentiated sense of masculinity.
They say they see everything that is associated with authority as Equivalent to tyranny failing to understand completely that authority in a properly functioned society is based on competence They don't believe in competence anyways, you know, that's part of the whole postmodern Yeah, that's just a construct to keep power.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, everything's about power for the bloody postmodernists and that also excuses their use of power.
And this is, I mean in Sweden we have, girls have always outperformed boys in school.
I mean ever since we started having schools in the 19th century, in the middle 19th century, girls have been outperforming boys and being better at sitting Quietly in the classroom, but the last 20-30 years the divide between girls and boys is widening in Sweden.
It's widening in other countries too, but in Sweden it's really...
You guys are ahead of the curve, so congratulations on that.
Some are very proud about this.
I'm not so proud about that.
And actually when you talk to people in Sweden they're more worried about bringing up boys than bringing up girls nowadays because girls they can be girls or they can be like boys.
Yeah exactly.
But boys are a problem.
Because they can't be like girls and they can't be like boys.
Yeah exactly.
Boys should perhaps be more like girls, but they should most definitely not be like boys.
They should not play war, they should not compete so much.
Well, the competition thing is really interesting because yeah the people who are who are hyper cooperative You know regard competition as a positive evil without understand without they have no understanding whatsoever of developmental psychology You know one of the things I really like Jean Piaget and you know one of the most intelligent things he ever said about children's games Competitive games was that the competition is nested inside a higher order structure of cooperation So you think about a hockey game.
We could talk about that because we're Swedes and Canadians.
Exactly.
So you say, well, are the hockey players competing or cooperating?
And the answer is, well, you have to do a microanalysis.
So fundamentally, they're cooperating because they all agree to abide by the same set of rules.
So they occupy the same perceptual space.
They occupy the same value space because the value is score goals and win the game so that provides the overarching frame So fundamentally, they're cooperating now within that they're competing because it's team against team and even within a team it's individuals vying for let's say Athletic supremacy, but it's also more complicated than that because a hockey isn't One game.
It's a sequence of iterated games and the proper strategy is if you're an individual Athlete is to adopt a strategy that makes you a victor across iterated games And that means you have to cooperate with your teammates and even with the with the other team if you're going to sustain your career across time You know so you get honorable very honorable hockey players say like Wayne Gretzky who were Unbelievably stellar in their individual performance,
but also great team players and Inspirations to those who played against them Perfect, you know, so so that's a really good example of well-developed masculinity and that's all shunted off into pathological competition by fools Who are motivated by hatred and resentment and who are willfully blind to the complexities of the situation?
So It's the rise it really is the rise of the like of the of the the goddess of the underworld It's it's it's the right way to think about it I would like to move on to discussing myth and God a little bit, but this is so interesting.
So I'll just ask one more thing, because if you talk to these people about how you can reconstruct homosexuals, can you send them to a straight camp?
I mean, all of them would say that's horrible.
But if you ask about how can you deconstruct and then reconstruct boys and their masculinity, all of them are aboard.
Yeah, well that's part of the interference.
Yeah, so it's a very inconsistent world.
Well, I mean, one of the things I complained about last year with regards to this Bill C-16 legislation in Canada is I said, look, You're instantiating a social constructionist view of gender, gender expression, sexual proclivity, all of these things into the law.
Okay, so it's socially constructed.
Okay, so wake up The Conservatives who have been Opposing homosexuality for the last hundred years have used nothing but social constructionist arguments They basically say well if it's socially constructed or an individual choice which is by the way now instantiated into Canadian law Then why the hell can't you just be reeducated out of it or just drop it if it's just an individual choice?
Well, I tried to say you're You're playing with the fire that will consume you.
But, you know, nobody...
No, I shouldn't say nobody.
These arguments are subtle and they're not easy to follow.
And the problem is that the consequences of producing legislation like that unfold over decades, not minutes.
I don't know, did you see what happened at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada last week, two weeks ago?
Lindsay Shepard, does that ring a bell?
Yeah, I listened to the conversation she recorded Yeah, so here so in Canada now three things are happening the first is Despite the fact that I predicted this and that the only reason my reputation was ever Let's say tarnished was because I predicted that this was going to happen.
I'm still being vilified by people who even Who who are admitting nonetheless that what happened at Wilfrid Laurier was reprehensible?
Okay, so that's one thing the second thing is The people at Laurier who used who accused Lindsay of breaking the Canadian federal and provincial laws are being accused of misinterpreting those laws which they aren't as far as I'm concerned,
but that enables people to save face and Third and most dreadfully a fair number of faculty members and Public commentators are claiming that Rambu Kanna and Pimlot and Joel who were the interlocutors in the Inquisition are the true victims Really?
Oh absolutely because now now that people have been well first of all they were only standing up for trans rights and Second well because they've been the target of substantial criticism.
Let's say like overwhelming criticism Punishing, brutal criticism.
Unending for weeks.
Well, they're now victims.
Because that's just not fair.
And so when the president of Wilfrid Laurier University apologized to Lindsay Shepard, she also said, but you know, I also feel that what has happened to the faculty members in the aftermath of this, faculty members and administrators, was also wrong.
It's like, it's that typical thing, you know, you see this when kids get bullied in schools now, is that the idiot...
Intervenors and their and their Blind humanitarian impulses bring the bully and the victim into the principal's office to discuss it assuming equal equal causal What would you call it?
Responsibility on the part of the victim and the perpetrator and they think that well if they just had a nice talk about it then It could be settled not understanding at all that the bully who's Let's say one of these one in a hundred predator types is just gonna stand on the outside of the school ground and wait for the Victim to come by and just pound the hell out of them because that's how bullies work It's like well we can settle it like reasonable people and it's like Yeah, right.
You're so goddamn naive that, you know, if evil ever popped out and made a face at you, which it likely will, you'd be scared into post-traumatic stress disorder so fast you wouldn't know what hit you.
And I've seen that plenty of times in my clinical practice.
And yeah, all this Lindsay Shepard, that you're now transphobe.
I've written about these issues in Sweden as one of the few that's written about it who's not an activist.
And recently I wrote about how it coincides with autism diagnosis.
I think it's the same in the United States.
I mean, the number of especially young women who's never had any doubts about their gender identity, But then they find like-minded people with problems connecting socially on the internet and then all of a sudden they decide that I'm not a woman, I'm a man.
Most of them have a diagnosis within the autism spectrum.
And to even say this and say that this is something we need to investigate It's sort of transphobic because then you're questioning the motives within the person.
So you're basically saying that maybe it's not a gender identity you're feeling that's faulty, it's something else.
Well, it's going to be worse.
Then you're transphobic.
Yeah, well it's gonna get worse because look here's here's the logical fallacy not all transsexuals have mental illness Yeah, but many people with mental illness are going to be confused about their identity Right so that the pool of people confused about their identity is extraordinarily large Now if you produce a social fad,
which is exactly what we're doing with gender transformation, then everyone who's unstable is going to gravitate very rapidly towards that fad.
That's happened many times with different forms of pathology.
So for example, there's a book called The discovery of the unconscious by an existentialist psychotherapist named Henri Alenbergier, which is a great book, great book.
And he tracks the cyclical recurrence of multiple personality disorder over the last 300 years.
So a case will be reported After everyone forgets about it for a generation or two a case will be reported and then it spreads like wildfire and there's multiple personality everywhere and Then people get skeptical about it and the reports drop off to zero and it goes underground again and then three generations again somebody reports a case history and poof up it comes again and so The there are these and Carl Jung wrote about this a lot.
There are these psychic Epidemics that occur from time to time And the same thing happened for example in the 1980s when there was a huge outcry in the United States in particular about Satanic ritual abuse in daycares and that produced an absolute uproar for like five years and Did you have that?
Yeah, one of the professors here in Uppsala, at Uppsala University, she wrote a book about, and most men of power were in on it in a conspiracy.
Right, right, right.
And even though it was, I mean, it's blatantly, it's crazy.
Yeah.
But it was a gender scientist.
Yeah.
There was a great book called...
Because he was criticized.
It was sort of, yeah, she is actually one of the architects behind our, how we view men's violence against women.
But he also wrote about these satanic rituals that men in power had against children.
But it wasn't in daycare.
It was just like against children everywhere.
Ah, yeah.
Well, there's a great book written in the United States called Satan's Silence by a social worker and a lawyer that investigated that.
Satanic ritual abuse epidemic and it makes the Salem witch hunts look like nothing I mean the longest prison sentences in history were handed out for the hypothetical perpetrators of these satanic ritual abuse They dug under whole towns in places looking for the tunnels where the where the sacrifices were being performed I mean they invented whole new categories of clinical diagnosis late onset female sexual predator Of whom there are zero, right?
That is a category that does not exist.
Unbelievable.
It sounds like a great book, I mean like a great horror movie or something like these satanic circles, but to actually believe in it, it's really crazy.
Yep.
I would like to move on to, if you have time, I would like to move on to the question about religion because I'm really interested in myth and religion and One thing that's I mean, if you call something a myth, then it's probably not alive anymore, perhaps.
I mean, if you're actually calling it a myth, if you really believe in it, you're not believing that it is a myth.
Now we've been studying the Bible scientifically, and so we deconstruct...
My first subject at university was religious studies, and then you deconstruct the Bible and you learn about When everything was written and everything.
But what you're doing right now is you're making the Bible in your Bible lectures, you're making it accessible for people of our age or our epoch.
That's the plan.
Yeah, and people who I don't think wouldn't have naturally turned to the Bible for counsel.
It's just an indication of how surreal the current circumstances really are.
I've been selling out the theatre that I booked in Toronto for these biblical lectures, and it's almost all young men.
They're not that young, you know, they're between say 18 and 30, something like that.
Although, you know, there's women in there, there's older people too, but that's the main audience.
And it's like, well, that's crazy, right?
That's impossible that that's happening.
But it's an attempt to revivify the myth.
So what's your take on why is I asked Richard Dawkins this when I interviewed him.
There are people that are worried about the postmodern challenge to everything, like deconstructing everything.
And so you look for something firm in your life.
And what I see you doing, and I would like to hear your thoughts on it, is that you're trying to bring in Sort of a firmer foothold.
Yes, exactly that.
It's like I'm journeying to the bottom of the ocean to rescue the father from the from the fire-breathing whale.
Like that's exactly it.
It's like the thing is is that when everything shakes Then you look for the foundation Right and to me the foundation the thing the West got right is the divinity of the individual That's right.
It's true.
And it's the myth idea.
This is partly where I had a discussion with Sam Harris, you know, that was quite a difficult discussion.
Two discussions.
I wasn't in the best of physical health when I had them, unfortunately, but that's life.
But When you talk about myth, you know, it sounds like untruth, but I think about it sort of as meta-truth.
It's truer than true in some sense because it consists of abstractions that have guided human behavior properly for forever.
Insofar as human beings have been successful, And even insofar as we define success, it's embedded within these mythological ideas, which are ideas that we act out, essentially, not ideas that we hold or believe or state.
They're ideas that we act out.
And the idea of the divine individual is at the center of our law, which is why, for example, even if you're accused of murder, Even if there's overwhelming evidence against you, you still have value that the state cannot merely trample on.
And that's, well, first of all, it's unbelievable that that's the case, because, you know, the typical barbaric society, let's say, which is what we're trying to reproduce very rapidly, is the one that assumes that if you're accused of something, we might as well just shoot you on the off chance that you're guilty.
That's way easier to adopt that as a principle, and it And it certainly satiates the bloodlust of the mob much more effectively.
The idea that we could have constructed a worldview that put the pathetic, weak, malevolent, insufficient, vulnerable individual at the center of the value structure is just, it's an accomplishment whose grandeur cannot possibly be overstated.
And we are the beneficiaries of that system We live within its protective confines and we're doing everything we possibly can to destroy it as rapidly as possible.
So So Joseph Campbell, which was one of my idols growing up and I read The Hero with a Thousand Faces, listened to his Power of Myth lectures.
Because I mean, as a lot of young men, I loved Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings.
And then you sort of you read his work and you find out that, okay, so George Lucas, he based his He changed his storyline to fit more into the hero's journey story.
And he said that you need sort of a living myth or mythology to have psychological health and to have spiritual health.
You need to live within a sort of a living mythology.
Yes, absolutely.
Well, the mythology tells you who you really are.
Like, you know, you really are a divine son of God.
I mean people people people and you know you actually know that because you feel guilty about not living up to your potential Why in the world would you possibly feel that?
But everyone feels that if they have any sense at all unless they're narcissistic or psychopathic everyone feels that Burden of the perfection to which they have the perfection to which they have not yet aspired nor attained So and that's a testament to the to the overwhelming potential that characterizes each individual That's really what I'm trying to point out in the biblical lectures There's these continual stories about the nature of humanity and the nature of proper being in the face of the tragedy and malevolence
of life and the Bible is Western the Western world's attempt to To formulate that as a comprehensible set of stories and also a set of principles for behavior.
It's the collective struggle of our imagination stretched across tens of thousands of years, maybe hundreds of thousands of years, maybe even more than that, you know, because some of these stories, the story of confronting the malevolent serpent, like, I believe that in one form or another, that story is If you also consider it as something that could be acted out, that story is at least 60 million years old.
So, because Lynn Isbell, this anthropologist at UCLA, has demonstrated quite nicely that our tree-dwelling relatives co-evolved with snakes and our continual battle with snakes and predatory reptiles was part of what gave us our acute vision.
Oh, I hate snakes.
Yeah, well, you know, I have to ask this because this is one of the...
I've seen you answer this question.
Do you believe in God?
And I saw a YouTube video with you when you said that you didn't like the question because you were being boxed in.
And I felt that because one of the things me and my wife have been wrestling with, and we've talked a lot about this, is that What do we mean when we say that we believe in God?
Because in Sweden, to be Swedish, to be Christian, it was sort of what it means today to say that you're Swedish.
So if you said that you were Christian, you were sort of a good family father, you had a lot of values within that.
So you were being like a good Christian man is sort of today when you say you're a good Swedish man, perhaps.
So it used to mean a lot more, but then you had the evangelical Christians criticizing exactly this and saying that you're in lost contact with God, and then they meant it in a much smaller sense.
They tend to confuse the biblical stories with empirical history.
Yeah, and it's not surprising they do that because they're trying to defend their faith against Let's call it the post-modern assault or even the modernist assault for that matter.
I have some sympathy with their motivations But the problem is is that they don't understand that Not all truth is empirical truth.
In fact the fundamental truths as far as I can tell Paradoxically enough are Darwinian and they actually line up with religious truths Which is the point I've been trying to make when I discussed the such issues with people like Sam Harris like Sam is a very very smart guy but he's He worships the intellect.
That's the first thing I would say and the second thing is that I was never able to push him to his solution He'd never let me go there because you know his idea is that we could rationally order Society so that the well-being of people was maximized and you know,
he even said to I think it was I can't remember which interview it was but he said explicitly to the person that he was interviewing that He could sit down right now and come up with a religious system That was much more rational and appropriate than any of the ones that have that have existed to date And I think well, you know, you're falling right into that rationalist utopian Pitfall there.
You're just not that smart.
No one can do that And as soon as you do it, you end up where the socialists like the radical Soviet socialists or the Nazi Utopians ended up.
Wouldn't we all be speaking Esperanto by now then?
Yeah, well, yes, exactly.
It's a much more rational language than Swedish.
Much more.
Most languages are.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it's like, you know, one of the things I really liked about Dostoevsky is that This was in notes from underground.
He He just states it very clearly said, you know The one thing that you cannot claim about the history of the world and he meets the history of being is that it's rational and it isn't that he's criticizing the idea that You could use scientific investigation and rationality to lay out a clear representation of objective reality.
What he's saying is that if you take the terrible suffering and malevolence into account as fundamental realities, that a rationalist perspective is absolutely insufficient to tell the story.
And there's no doubt about that.
Rationality just breaks down in the face of those things.
It hits an obstacle that it cannot contend with.
So you need something else and you know, there's this great image of Christ as Pantocrator very very old image I'm fortunately can't remember which Cathedral it's represented in but it's a great image and I'm having one of them carved for me right now It's so it's a medieval image of Christ and his face is divided into two halves.
So it's very asymmetrical and And one half the eyes are different and the facial expression is different than the other and he's also he's on Portrait on the top of the dome and holding a book.
So the book is sacred, right?
So that's a great idea that the book is sacred That's a great idea man and the idea that the word is sacred but then the picture also represents human beings as creatures with one foot in the In the in the profane and one foot in the sacred or one foot in the finite and one foot in the infinite and I actually think that that's that's empirically true Like we are these weird creatures that are both finite and infinite at the same time and we have experiences of that even like deep religious experiences
psychedelic experiences for that matter Invoke that feeling of that invoke the reality I would say of our connection with the infinite and Now what that infinite is so let's call that God I mean the Christian idea is that that's actually outside of time and space itself Which is quite a grand notion and not the least bit Unsophisticated by the way,
it's a tremendously sophisticated idea that something actually exists outside the fabric of time and space that transcends it that It's there at the beginning and at the end.
That's an unbelievably sophisticated idea And I think that people can experience that and do quite commonly which was why the psychedelic revolution in the 60s was so absolutely potent so these sorts of things can't just be dismissed with some rational sleight of hand and And some discussion of the idea that Christianity, Judeo-Christianity, let's say, is some like primitive set of wish-fulfillment superstitions or some power game.
It's like you just have no depth of scholarship whatsoever if that's what your criticisms are.
And also, I would say when you ask someone, do you believe in God?
I ask myself, if I say that I don't believe in God, what is different within me when I say that I don't believe in God compared to a person that says that he does believe in God?
I mean, if I feel sort of irrational, I wake up or I take a glass of wine and then suddenly I'm overwhelmed with love for humankind or for my fellow man or something like that.
So if I was a person who would say that I believed in God, would that be something, is it something qualitatively different between a person, between me, compared to that person?
Do you understand what I'm saying?
No, no, I haven't quite got that yet.
Like, what is the experience of believing in God and how is that qualitatively different from a person who says that he doesn't believe in God?
Oh yes, I see what you mean.
Well, that is part of the question.
The question is here, well, when someone says, do you believe in God?
No, there's three parts to that question.
The first question is, who is the you to which they are referring?
And that turns out to not be a simple question.
Question.
I mean, Nietzsche did a very good job of taking apart the idea of the I, you know, because he was critiquing Descartes, I think, therefore I am.
And so the first question is, well, who is the you to which you are referring?
The second is, what do you mean by belief?
The third is, what do you mean by God?
It's like, you can't just leap to the assumption that the person asking the question and the person answering the question have the same views on those.
And I think that that's That's part of the reason why I don't like the question.
You know, like I said, well, I act as if I believe in God.
So I would say that's the most fundamental manifestation of faith.
But I could also say I believe and don't believe in God.
And you think, well, you can't think both of those things at the same time.
It's like, well, yeah, that's what you think.
When you're asking something that complicated, Then there's absolutely no reason to assume that you can't have paradoxical responses to it So you could you could even say maybe that the injunction in the Old Testament is something like you should believe and not believe in God Because it's very complicated.
It's it's not it's not by any means a simple question I don't remember his name now, but I think perhaps it was Burkert or something like that.
He said that myth is about reconciling contradictions within the human condition.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, that's what a successful myth does.
And part of the reason that These Ideologies that we've been discussing like feminism have so much power is because they actually draw their motive Force from an underlying religious substrate, but they only tell half the story That's what an ideology is.
So when the feminists say Culture is the tyrannical patriarch.
It's like yeah, that's true But it's also the benevolent wise king so like Then they say, well, it can't be one and the other at the same time.
And the answer is, well, it's a multi-dimensional phenomena that you're encapsulating within a single category.
It can contain contradictions.
In fact, it does.
Because society obviously constrains and And kills you even like you die into your neural configuration because that when you're first born you have more Neural connections than you will ever in your life and most of them die and so so you die into your four-year-old self and then between the ages of 16 and 20 you die into your adult self and So the idea that that the society that you're in is a terrible tyrant
that Shapes you by death is exactly true, but by the same token It's also almost everything that ennobles you and enables you to function in the world and so the the critic critics of the patriarchy say tyranny tyranny tyranny it's like yeah, yeah tyranny but not only tyranny and And they say evil man evil man.
It's like yeah, obviously, but not only evil man not only that and that's why a Genuine mythology and I would put Freudian psychoanalysis in that category because Freud had a very balanced view of the nature of being and Talks about both parts of the paradox at the same time.
You know, it's the dragon and the gold.
It's the terrible devouring mother and the Virgin Mary.
It's the tyrant and the wise king.
It's Christ and Satan.
It's all of those paradoxes stacked on top of one another.
And then the story about how you go about dealing with that.
That's a true religious myth.
Yeah.
And the ideology just takes a part of that and says this is the whole.
I mean, in early Christianity there was a large battle between Manichaeists and the Gnostics and what would turn out to be the Catholic Church, the mainstream Church.
And they said that the evil was, like, the world we live in is created by this other force, the Demiurge.
So they had a very split vision of good and evil, but what you're saying about these ideologies is that basically perhaps it's a new form of...
Theological battle between Gnostics and and people that say that this is we have both sides.
That's a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it, you know, and like Jung tended towards Manichaeism to some degree because he was so struck by say the evils of Nazism and he had a hard time with the idea that Evil was only the absence of good.
And I've thought about that a lot because I'm a great admirer of yoga.
You criticize anything he said at your peril, you know, because he was a great genius.
But I think the Manichaean view is wrong.
I think that what evil is, is the absence of good.
And then it takes on its own life.
I've written about this in my new book quite extensively because I have a book coming out in January called 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos.
I've been trying to take those ideas apart and to grapple with Well with the fact that human beings hate themselves because they're vulnerable and malevolent which which is Original sin, you know, which is something I'm a great believer in I Think it's an unbelievably sophisticated way of looking at the world.
You know that there's something That there was something damaged in the fabric of being itself.
I believe that to be the case.
I think we experience that as human beings and that our ethical obligation is to rectify that and to determine how to rectify that, to overcome the vulnerability and malevolence that, like, the terror of vulnerability and the subjection to malevolence that characterizes our day-to-day existence.
That's our primary mode of proper being in the world.
That seems to me to be correct.
So and again, that's the sort of thing that I've been trying to tell Well those who will listen let's say but it's so far.
It's mostly being young men who are dying for this message like they're they're dying for it, you know It's really God I go to these talks now, you know public talks and where I speak about responsibility and truth and like after the talks there are like a Crowds of mostly young men who line up and say, you know, I was nihilistic.
I was desperate.
I was suicidal.
I was malevolent and resentful and like going bad places and I've started listening to what you've been saying about myth and it's like Brought me out of that horrible hole and that's just one person after another says the same thing, you know, it's and I've had thousands of letters like that and maybe tens of thousands now I can't even begin to keep up with them and Well, thank God for that, you know.
How do you feel personally when so many are turning to you for this counsel or for guidance?
Well, you know, I read this paper a long time ago called Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious, which is one of Jung's, maybe it's his most stellar work.
And it's not a paper you can understand unless you know what it's about and because he talked about the danger of ego inflation That's so so imagine that you're dealing with archetypal ideas and that you can fall prey to the temptation to Assume because you started to understand the ideas and maybe communicate about them that they are somehow yours And then what happens is that can produce a messianic inflation And
so that would characterize someone like Hitler for example And that's it's tantamount to a form of mental illness because what happens is that you take on the Grandeur of the mythological ideas and the archetypal ideas and the power of those ideas as if they were your own creations Well,
that's a very bad idea And so I read I read those that paper after I had a dream where I was Blown by a wind into the top of a cathedral.
I was in this chandelier in this huge cathedral Like say 20 times bigger than st.
Peter's you could hardly even see the walls and I was put up in this At the center of this cathedral right way above the ground and And then I got down somehow because I didn't want to be there and then the wind Dissolved me and blew me back there and I woke up and I thought oh my god,
that's a that's a crazy dream Like it the dream put me at the center of the cross at the center of being and I thought what the hell that's what am I supposed to make of a dream like that it's like it's It's delusional let's say borders on delusional and it was a very powerful dream like I can still I can still see it and I read the relations between the ego and the unconscious at that time and started to understand what was happening is that I was starting to understand what these archetypal ideas meant that the place
of the individual is actually at the crucifix at the center of Reality the point of maximal suffering and the acceptance of that that's all true, but it's not true of me Hmm, right?
It's Everybody is a center of the cosmos Yeah, and and and you so you have to detach yourself as carefully as you can from the archetypal ideas themselves because otherwise you end up identifying with them personally or people identify you with them and that that's That's the ultimate What would you call it the ultimate temptation of pride and No,
that's so I'm I try to be very careful of that and very cognizant of that and And to keep a good eye on my Yeah, it's like this, you know, when the emperors in the Roman Empire, when they wrote in their triumphs, they had a slave behind them telling them, Memento Mori.
Right, exactly, exactly that.
That was his job.
Yes, exactly that.
I really like that idea and I like the idea of reminding yourself about Death to keep humble, keep yourself humble.
It sounds a little...
Well, death and sin.
Because the other thing that you have to, and maybe this is the advantage that the Catholics have over the Protestants, is that the Catholics at least put their sins in front of them constantly, which is very analogous to what you just described.
And I try to be very, very careful about Paying attention to all the things that I'm doing wrong and I have people my family and friends who are helping me do that and and Because it's a strange to call it a strange situation to be in is just barely scraping the surface I would like to ask you at least one more question.
I mean, I could talk to you for hours, but I know you are a busy man.
Yeah, let's do one more question.
We can always talk again.
But the Church of Sweden is our old state church.
It's contemplating replacing the gendered pronouns of their guide for church services and they've already started to replace the Lord and He and Him with God in a lot of places to make the language more inclusive.
Well, the people who are running the church have absolutely no idea about what any of its doctrines mean.
It's as simple as that.
Like, I mean, there is insistence in Christianity on the androgyny of Christ.
And there are elements of God that have been portrayed as feminine, like Sophia, which is wisdom.
But you don't mess with those things.
You don't rewrite them like that.
Not without having your soul tremble and quake at your presumptuousness.
And the idea that you can just casually rewrite these ancient texts, it's like these people who rewrite fairy tales so that they're more in keeping with modern sensibility.
It's like they're so unbelievably intellectually narcissistic that, well, it's positively satanic in its overreach.
And I mean that in the most technical sense.
It's the satanic temptation of the untrammeled and unbound intellect.
It's exactly what Milton warned against in Paradise Lost.
So, it's a complete catastrophe.
All it will do is speed the demolition of the church.
So, and I think that's what it's aimed at, actually.
Because, of course, the church is just a patriarchal construct anyways, and it's oppressive and it's oppressed women forever, despite its insistence that men and women were both made in the image of God.
I think that our church is pretty much doomed when it comes to these issues.
It's more political than a lot of politicians.
Yes, well that's it.
When the church becomes political, it's done.
So, I mean, as I said, I think I've gotten the most out of this interview.
It was really, really informative and really nice talking to you.
Good talking to you too.
And, you know, maybe we can do this again in January if you want to.
One of the things I could do is send you a galley copy of my book if you wanted to.
That would be great because I would really like to review it and then we could perhaps make an...
I could ask you a couple of follow-up questions to your book or something like that.
Yeah, that'd be good because we could get deeper into some of the issues that we discussed.
Yeah, I would really like that.
So I'll publish this on Saturday, this interview.
All right, and I'll send you the recording, okay?
Yeah, thank you.
Okay.
That's great.
Thank you.
All right, you bet.
Very nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
Bye-bye.
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