All Episodes
Previous Next
May 15, 2019 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
02:44:57
Marxism: Zizek/Peterson: Official Video
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Thank you.
Thank you.
Good evening and welcome to the Sony Center for Performing Arts.
Please note, during tonight's presentation, video, audio, and flash photography is prohibited, and we have a strict zero-tolerance policy for any heckling or disruptions.
And now, please welcome your host and moderator, President of Ralston College, Dr. Scott.
Stephen Blackwood.
Thank you.
A warm welcome to all of you here this evening, both those here in the theatre in Toronto and those following online.
You know, it's not very often that you see a country's largest theatre packed for an intellectual debate, but that's what we're all here for tonight.
Please join me in welcoming to the stage Dr. Snowden.
Slavoj Zizek and Dr.
Jordan Peterson.
Just a few words of introduction.
There can be few things, I think, now more urgent and necessary in an age of reactionary, partisan allegiance and degraded civil discourse than real thinking about hard questions.
The very premise of tonight's event is that we all participate in the life of thought, not merely opinion or prejudice, but the realm of truth accessed through evidence and argument.
But these two towering figures of different disciplines and domains share more than a commitment to thinking itself.
They are both highly attuned to ideology and the mechanisms of power.
And yet, they are not principally political thinkers.
They are both concerned with more fundamental matters, meaning, truth, freedom.
So it seems to me likely we will see tonight not only deep differences, but also surprising agreement on deep questions.
Dr.
Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher.
He has not one, but two doctoral degrees, one in philosophy, One in philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and a second in psychoanalysis from university...
Let's hear it for psychoanalysis.
From the University of Paris 8.
He is now a professor at the Institute of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and the director of the Burbek Institute for the Humanities at the University of London.
He has published more than three dozen books, many on the most seminal philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries.
He is a dazzling theorist with extraordinary range, a global figure for decades.
he turns again and again with dialectical power to radical questions of emancipation, subjectivity, and art.
Dr. George.
Jordan Peterson is an academic and clinical psychologist.
His doctorate was awarded by McGill University and he was subsequently...
We got some McGill graduates out here.
He was subsequently professor of psychology at Harvard University and then the University of Toronto, where he is today.
The author of two books and well over a hundred academic articles, Dr.
Peterson's intellectual roots likewise lie in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Where his reading of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and above all, Carl Jung inform his interpretation of ancient myths of 20th century totalitarianism and especially his endeavor to counter contemporary nihilism.
His 12 Rules for Life is a global bestseller and his lectures and podcasts are followed by millions around the world.
Zizek and Peterson transcend their titles, their disciplines, and the academy.
Just as this debate, we hope, will transcend purely economic questions by situating those in the frame of happiness, of human flourishing itself.
We're in for quite a night.
A quick word about format.
Each of our debaters will have 30 minutes to make a substantial opening statement, to lay out an argument.
Dr.
Peterson first, followed by Dr.
Zizek.
Each will then have, in the same order, 10 minutes to reply.
I will then moderate 45 minutes or so of questions, many of which will come from you, the audience, both here in Toronto and online.
With that, let's get underway.
Please join me in welcoming Dr.
Jordan Peterson for the first opening statement.
Well, thank you for that insanely enthusiastic welcome for the entire event and also for thank you for that insanely enthusiastic welcome for the entire event and I have to tell you first that this event, and I suppose my life in some sense,
hit a new milestone that I was just made aware of by a stagehand today backstage who informed me that last week the tickets for this event were being scalped hit a new milestone that I was just made aware of by a stagehand today backstage who informed me that last week the So I don't know what to make of that.
that's Thank you.
Alright, so, how did I prepare for this?
I familiarized myself to the degree that it was possible with Slavoj Žižek's work, and that wasn't that possible because he has a lot of work and he's a very original thinker, and this debate was put together in relatively short order.
And what I did instead was return to what I regarded as the original cause of all the trouble, let's say, which was the Communist Manifesto.
And what I attempted to do, because that's Marx, and we're here to talk about Marxism, let's say, and what I tried to do was read it.
And to read something, you don't just Follow the words and follow the meaning, but you take apart the sentences and you ask yourself at this level of phrase and at the level of sentence and at the level of paragraph, is this true?
Are there counter arguments that can be put forward that are credible?
Is this solid Thinking.
And I have to tell you, and I'm not trying to be flippant here, that I have rarely read a tract.
Now, I read it when I was 18.
It was a long time ago, right?
That's 40 years ago.
But I've rarely read a tract that made as many errors per sentence, conceptual errors per sentence, as the Communist Manifesto.
It was quite a miraculous reread.
And it was interesting to think about it psychologically as well, because I've read student papers that were of the same ilk in some sense, although I'm not suggesting that they were of the same level of glittering literary brilliance and polemic quality.
And I also understand that the Communist Manifesto was a call for revolution and not a standard logical argument.
But that notwithstanding, I have some things to say about the authors psychologically.
The first thing is that it doesn't seem to me that either Marx or Engels grappled with one fundamental, with this particular fundamental truth, which is that almost all ideas are wrong.
And so, it doesn't matter if they're your ideas or someone else's ideas, they're probably wrong.
And even if they strike you with the force of brilliance, your job is to assume, first of all, that they're probably wrong, and then to assault them with everything you have in your arsenal and see if they can survive.
And what struck me about the Communist Manifesto was it was akin to something Jung said about typical thinking.
And this was the thinking of people who weren't trained to think.
He said that the typical thinker has a thought, it appears to them like an object might appear in a room.
The thought appears and then they just accept it as true.
They don't go the second step, which is to think about the thinking.
And that's the real essence of critical thinking.
And so that's what you try to teach people in university, is to read a text and to think about it critically, not to destroy the utility of the text, but to separate the wheat from the chaff.
And so what I tried to do when I was reading the Communist Manifesto was to Separate the wheat from the chaff.
And I'm afraid I found some wheat, yes, but mostly chaff.
And I'm going to explain why, hopefully in relatively short order.
So I'm going to outline ten of the fundamental axioms of the Communist Manifesto.
And so these are truths that are basically held as self-evident by the authors.
They're truths that are presented in some sense as unquestioned, and I'm going to question them and tell you why I think they're unreliable.
Now, we should remember that this tract was actually written 170 years ago.
That's a long time ago.
And we have learned a fair bit since then about human nature, about society, about politics, about economics.
There's lots of mysteries left to be solved, but we are slightly wiser, I presume, than we were at one point.
And so you can forgive the authors to some degree for what they didn't know, but that doesn't matter given that the essence of this doctrine is still held as sacrosanct by a large proportion of Academics probably are among the most, what would you call, guilty of that particular sin.
So here's proposition number one.
History is to be viewed primarily as an economic class struggle.
Alright, so let's think about that for a minute.
First of all, the proposition there is that history is primarily to be viewed through an economic lens, and I think that's a debatable proposition, because there are many other motivations that drive human beings than economics, and those have to be taken into account, especially that drive people other than economic competition, like economic cooperation, for example, And so that's a problem.
The other problem is that it's actually not nearly a pessimistic enough description of the actual problem, because history...
This is to give the devil his due.
The idea that one of the driving forces between history is hierarchical struggle is absolutely true.
But the idea that that's actually history is not true, because it's deeper than history.
It's biology itself, because organisms of all sorts organize themselves into hierarchies.
And one of the problems with hierarchies is that they tend to arrange themselves into a winner-take-all situation.
And that is implicit, in some sense, in Marx's thinking, because, of course, Marx believed that in a capitalist society, capital would accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
And that actually is in keeping with the nature of hierarchical organizations.
Now, the problem with that isn't so much the fact of...
So there's accuracy in the accusation that that is an eternal form of motivation for struggle, But it's an underestimation of the seriousness of the problem because it attributes it to the structure of human societies rather than the deeper reality of the existence of hierarchical structures per se, which, as they also characterize the animal kingdom to a large degree, are clearly not only human constructions.
And the idea that there's hierarchical competition among human beings There's evidence for that that goes back at least to the Paleolithic times.
And so that's the next problem.
It's that, well, this ancient problem of hierarchical structure is clearly not attributable to capitalism because it existed long in human history before capitalism existed.
And then it predated human history itself.
So, the question then arises, why would you necessarily, at least implicitly, link the class struggle with capitalism, given that it's a far deeper problem?
And now, you've got to understand that this is a deeper problem for people on the left, not just for people on the right.
It is the case that hierarchical structures dispossess those people who are at the bottom, those creatures who are at the bottom, speaking, say, of animals, but those people who are at the bottom, and that that is a fundamental existential problem.
But the other thing that Marx didn't seem to take into account is that There are far more reasons that human beings struggle than their economic class struggle, even if you build the hierarchical idea into that, which is a more comprehensive way of thinking about it.
Human beings struggle with themselves, with the malevolence that's inside themselves, with the evil that they're capable of doing, with the spiritual and psychological warfare that goes on within them.
And we're also actually always at odds with nature, and this never seems to show up in Marx, and it doesn't show up in Marxism in general.
It's as if nature doesn't exist.
The primary conflict, as far as I'm concerned, or a primary conflict that human beings engage in, is the struggle for life in a cruel and harsh natural world.
And it's as if that doesn't exist in the Marxist domain.
If human beings have a problem, it's because there's a class struggle that's essentially economic.
It's like, no, human beings have problems because we come into the life starving and lonesome, and we have to solve that problem continually, and we make our social arrangements, at least in part, to ameliorate that, as well as to, well, upon occasion, exacerbate it.
And so there's also very little understanding in the Communist Manifesto That any of the, let's say, hierarchical organizations that human beings have put together might have a positive element.
And that's an absolute catastrophe, because hierarchical structures are actually necessary to solve complicated social problems.
We have to organize ourselves in some manner, and you have to give the devil his due.
And so it is the case that hierarchies dispossess people, and that's a big problem.
That's the fundamental problem of inequality.
But it's also the case that hierarchies happen to be a very efficient way of distributing resources.
And it's finally the case that human hierarchies are not fundamentally predicated on power.
And I would say the biological, anthropological data on that are crystal clear.
You don't rise to a position of authority that's reliable in a human society, primarily by exploiting other people.
It's a very unstable means of obtaining power.
So that's a problem.
Well, the people that laugh might do it that way.
Okay, Okay, now another problem that comes up right away is that Marx also assumes that you can think about history as a binary class struggle with clear divisions between, say, the proletariat now another problem that comes up right away is that Marx also assumes
And that's actually a problem because it's not so easy to make a firm division between who's exploiter and who's exploitee, let's say.
Because it's not obvious, like in the case of small shareholders, let's say, whether or not they happen to be part of the oppressed or part of the oppressor.
This actually turned out to be a big problem in the Russian Revolution.
And by big problem, I mean tremendously big problem.
Because it turned out that you could fragment people into multiple identities, and that's a fairly easy thing to do.
And you could usually find some axis along which they were part of the oppressor class.
It might have been a consequence of their education, or it might have been a consequence of the wealth that they strived to accumulate during their life, or it might have been a consequence of the fact that they had parents or grandparents who were educated or rich, or that they were a member of the priesthood, or that they were socialists.
Anyways, the listing of how it was possible for you to be bourgeois instead of proletariat It grew immensely, and that was one of the reasons that the Red Terror claimed all the victims that it claimed.
And so that was a huge problem.
It was probably most exemplified by the demolition of the kulaks, who were basically peasants, peasant farmers, although effective ones, in the Soviet Union.
Who had managed to raise themselves out of serfdom over a period of about 40 years and to gather some degree of material security about them.
And about 1.8 million of them were exiled.
About 400,000 were killed and the net consequence of that Removal of their private property because of their bourgeois status was arguably the death of six million Ukrainians in the famines of the 1930s.
And so the binary class struggle idea, that was a bad idea.
That was a very, very bad idea.
It's also bad in this way, and this is a real sleight of hand that Marx pulls off, is you have a binary class division, Proletariat and bourgeoisie.
And you have an implicit idea that all of the good is on the side of the proletariat, and all of the evil is on the side of the bourgeoisie.
And that's classic group identity thinking.
You know, it's one of the reasons I don't like identity politics is because once you divide people into groups and pit them against one another, it's very easy to assume that all the evil in the world can be attributed to one group, the hypothetical oppressors, and all the good to the other.
And that...
Well, and that's naive beyond comprehension, because it's absolutely foolish to make the presumption that you can identify someone's moral worth with their economic standing.
And that actually turned out to be a real problem as well, because Marx also came up with this idea, which is a crazy idea as far as I can tell, that's a technical term, crazy idea, of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
And that's the next idea that I really stumbled across.
It was like, okay, so what's the problem?
Well, the problem is the capitalists own everything, they own all the means of production, and they're oppressing everyone, and that would be all the workers.
And there's going to be a race to the bottom of wages for the workers as the capitalists strive to extract more and more value from the labor of the proletariat by competing with other capitalists to drive wages downward, which, by the way, didn't happen, partly because wage earners can become scarce, and that actually drives the market value upward.
The fact that that you assume a priori that all the evil can be attributed to the capitalists and all the good that the bourgeoisie and all the good could be attributed to the proletariat meant that you could hypothesize that a dictatorship of the proletariat could come about and that was the The first stage in the communist revolution and remember this is a call for revolution and not just revolution but bloody violent revolution and the overthrow of all overthrowing of all Existence
social structures Anyways,
the problem with that, you see, is that because all the evil isn't divided so easily up into oppressor and oppressed, that when you do establish a dictator of the proletariat to the degree that you can do that, which you actually can't because it's technically impossible and an absurd thing to consider to begin with,
not least because of the problem of centralization, and you have to hypothesize that you can take away all the property of the capitalists You can replace the capitalist class with a minority of proletariats.
How they're going to be chosen isn't exactly clear in the Communist Manifesto.
That none of the people who are from the proletariat class are going to be corrupted by that sudden access to power.
Because they're, well, by definition, good.
So then you have the good people who are running the world, and you also have them centralized so that they can make decisions that are insanely complicated to make.
In fact, impossibly complicated to make.
And so that's a failure conceptually on both dimensions because, first of all, all the proletariat aren't going to be good.
And when you put people in the same position as the evil capitalists, especially if you believe that social pressure is one of the determining factors of human character, which the Marxists certainly believe, then why wouldn't you assume that the proletariat would immediately become as or more corrupt than the capitalists?
Which is, of course, I would say exactly what happened every time this experiment was run.
And then...
The next problem is, well, what makes you think that you can take some system as complicated as, like capitalist free market society, and centralize that, and put decision-making power in the hands of a few people, the mechanisms by...
without specifying the mechanisms by which you're going to choose them.
Like, what makes you think they're going to have the wisdom or the ability to do what the capitalists were doing, Unless you assume, as Marx did, that all of the evil was with the capitalists, and all the good was with the proletariates, and that nothing that capitalists did constituted valid labor,
which is another thing that Marx assumed, which is palpably absurd, because people who are, like, maybe if you're a Dissolute aristocrat from 1830 or earlier, and you run a feudal estate, and all you do is spend your time gambling and chasing prostitutes,
well, then your labor value is zero, but if you're running a business, and it's a successful business, first of all, you're a bloody fool to exploit your workers, because even if you're greedy as sin, because you're not going to extract the maximum amount of labor out of them by doing that, And the notion that you're adding no productive value as a manager rather than a capitalist is absolutely absurd.
All it does is indicate that you either know nothing whatsoever about how an actual business works, or you refuse to know anything about how an actual business works.
So that's...
That's also a big problem.
So, then, the next problem is the criticism of profit.
It's like, well, what's wrong with profit, exactly?
What's the problem with profit?
Well, the idea, from the Marxist perspective, was that profit was theft.
No, but profit, well, can be theft, because crooked people can run companies, and so sometimes profit is theft, but that certainly doesn't mean that it's always theft.
What it means, in part, at least, if the capitalist Is adding value to the corporation, then there's some utility and some fairness in him or her extracting the value of their abstract labor, their thought, their abstract abilities, their ability to manage the company.
And to engage in proper competition and product development and efficiency and the proper treatment of the workers and all of that.
And then if they can create a profit, well, then they have a little bit of security for times that aren't so good, and that seems absolutely bloody necessary as far as I'm concerned.
And then the next thing is, Well, how can you grow if you don't have a profit?
And if you have an enterprise that's valuable and worthwhile, and some enterprises are valuable and worthwhile, then it seems to me that a little bit of profit to help you grow seems to be the right approach.
And then the other issue with profit, and you know this if you've ever run a business, is it's a really useful constraint.
You know, like, it's not enough to have a good idea.
It's not enough to have a good idea and a sales and marketing plan.
And then to implement that, and all of that, that's bloody difficult.
Like, it's not easy to have a good idea.
And it's not easy to come up with a good sales and marketing plan.
And it's not easy to find customers and satisfy them.
And so, if you allow profit to constitute a limitation on what it is that you might reasonably attempt, it provides a good constraint on wasted Labour.
And so most of the things that I've done in my life, even psychologically, that were designed to help people's psychological health, I tried to run on a for-profit basis, and the reason for what that was, apart from the fact that I'm not averse to making a profit, partly so my enterprises can grow, but was also so that there were forms of stupidity that I couldn't engage in because I would be punished by the market enough to eradicate the enterprise.
and so okay and then so the next the next issue This is a weird one.
So Marx and Engels also assume that this The dictatorship of the proletariat, which involves absurd centralization, the overwhelming probability of corruption, and impossible computation, as the proletariat now try to rationally compute the manner in which an entire market economy could run, which cannot be done, because it's far too complicated for anybody to think through.
The next theory is that Somehow, the proletariat dictatorship would become magically hyperproductive.
And there's actually no theory at all about how that's going to happen.
And so I had to infer the theory, and the theory seems to be that once you eradicate the bourgeoisie, because they're evil, and you get rid of their private property, and you You eradicate the profit motive, then all of a sudden, magically, the small percentage of the proletariat who now run the society determine how they can make their productive enterprises productive enough so they become hyperproductive.
Now, and they need to become hyperproductive, For the last error to be logically coherent in relationship to the Marxist theory, which is that at some point the proletariat, the dictatorship of the proletariat, will become so hyperproductive that there will be enough material goods for everyone across all dimensions.
And when that happens, then what people will do is spontaneously engage in meaningful creative labor, which is what they had been alienated from in the capitalist horror show, and the utopia will be magically ushered in.
But there's no indication about how that hyper-productivity is going to come about, and there's also no understanding that Well, that isn't the utopia that is going to suit everyone, because there are great differences between people.
And some people are going to find what they want in love, and some are going to find it in social being, and some are going to find it in conflict and competition.
And some are going to find it in creativity, as Marx pointed out.
But the notion that that will necessarily be the end goal for the utopian state is preposterous.
And then there's the Dostoevskian observation too, which is one not to be taken lightly, which is, what sort of shallow conception of people do you have That makes you think that if you gave people enough bread and cake, in the Dostoevskyian terms, and nothing to do except to busy themselves with the continuity of the species, that they would all of a sudden become peaceful and heavenly.
Dostoevsky's idea was that, you know, we were built for trouble.
And if we were ever handed everything we needed on a silver platter, the first thing we would do is engage in some form of creative destruction, just so something unexpected could happen, just so we could have the adventure of our lives.
And I think there's something to be said for that.
So, and then the last error, let's say, although by no means the last, was this, and this is one of the strangest parts of the Communist Manifesto.
Marx admits, and Engels admit repeatedly in the Communist Manifesto that there has never been a system of production in the history of the world that was as effective at producing material commodities in excess than capitalism.
Like that's...
That's extensively documented in the Communist Manifesto.
And so if your proposition is, look, we've got to get as much material security for everyone as possible, as fast as we can, and capitalism already seems to be doing that at a rate that's unparalleled in human history, wouldn't the logical thing be just to let the damn system play itself out?
I mean, unless you're assuming that the evil capitalists are just going to take All of the flat-screen televisions and put them in one big room and not let anyone else have one.
The logical assumption is that, well, you're already on a road that's supposed to produce the proper material productivity.
And so...
Well, that's ten reasons, as far as I can tell.
And so what I saw in that the Communist Manifesto is, like, seriously flawed in virtually every way it could possibly be flawed.
And also, all in...
Evidence that Marx was the kind of narcissistic thinker who could think.
He was a very intelligent person, and so was Engels.
But what he thought, what he thought, when he thought, was that what he thought was correct.
And he never went to the second stage, which is, wait a second, how could all of this go terribly wrong?
And if you're a thinker, especially a sociological thinker, especially a thinker on the broad scale, a social scientist, for example, one of your moral obligations is to think, you know, you might be wrong about one of your fundamental axioms or two or three or ten.
As a consequence, you have the moral obligation to walk through the damn system and think, well, what if I'm completely wrong here and things invert and go exactly the wrong way?
I just can't understand how anybody could come up with an idea like the dictatorship of the proletariat, especially after advocating its implementation with violent means, which is a direct part of the Communist Manifesto, and actually think,
if they were thinking, if they knew anything about human beings, and the proclivity for malevolence that's part and parcel of the individual human being, that that could do anything but lead to a special form of hell, which is precisely what did happen.
And so I'm going to close, because I have three minutes, with a bit of evidence as well, that Marx also thought that what would happen inevitably as a consequence of capitalism is that rich would get richer and the poor would get poorer.
So there would be inequality.
The first thing I'd like to say is we do not know how to set up a human system of economics without inequality.
No one has ever managed it, including the communists.
And the form of inequality changed.
And it's not obvious by any stretch of imagination that the free market economies of the West have more inequality than the less free economies in the rest of the world.
And the one thing you can say about capitalism is that although it produces inequality, which it absolutely does, it also produces wealth.
And all the other systems don't.
they just produce inequality so here's a few stats Here's a few free market stats, okay?
From 1800 to 2017, income growth adjusted for inflation grew by 40 times for production workers and 16 times for unskilled labor.
Well GDP GDP rose by a factor of about 0.5 from 1 AD to 1800.
So from 1 AD to 1800 AD it was like nothing!
Flat!
And then all of a sudden in the last 217 years there's been this unbelievably upward movement of wealth.
And it doesn't only characterize the tiny percentage of people at the top who, admittedly, do have most of the wealth.
The question is, not only though, what's the inequality, the question is, well, what's happening to the absolutely poor at the bottom?
And the answer to that is, they're getting richer faster now than they ever have in the history of the world.
And we're eradicating poverty.
In countries that have adopted moderate free market policies at a rate that's unparalleled.
So here's an example.
One of the UN millennial goals was to reduce the rate of absolute poverty in the world by 50% between 2000 and 2015.
And they defined that as $1.90 a day.
Pretty low, you know, but you have to start somewhere.
We hit that in 2012, three years ahead of schedule.
And you might be cynical about that and say, well, it's kind of an arbitrary number, but the curves are exactly the same at $3.80 a day and $7.60 a day.
Not as many people have hit that, but the rate of increase towards that is the same.
The bloody UN thinks that we'll be out of poverty defined by $1.90 a day by the year 2030.
It's unparalleled.
And so the rich may be getting richer, but the poor are getting richer too.
That's not the...
Look, I'll leave it at that.
Because I'm out of time.
But one of the...
I'll leave it with this.
The poor are not getting poor under capitalism.
The poor are getting richer under capitalism, by a large margin.
And I'll leave you with one statistic, which is that now, in Africa, the child mortality rate in Africa now is the same as the child mortality rate was in Europe in 1952.
And so that's happened within the span of one lifetime.
And so if you're for the poor, if you're for the poor, if you're actually concerned that the poorest people in the world rise above their starvation levels, then all the evidence suggests that the best way to do that is to implement something approximating a free market economy.
And so, thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Dr.
Peterson.
Dr.
Zizek.
Thank you Okay First, a brief introductory remark.
I cannot but notice the irony of how Peterson and I, the participants in this duel of the century, are both marginalized by the official academic community.
I'm supposed to defend here the left liberal line against neoconservatives.
Really?
Most of the attacks on me are now precisely from left liberals.
Just remember the outcry against my critique of LGBT plus ideology.
And I'm sure that if the leading figures in this field were to be asked if I am fit to stand for them, they would turn in their graves even if they are still alive.
So let me begin by bringing together the three notions from the title.
Happiness, communism, capitalism.
In one exemplary case, China today.
China in the last decades is arguably the greatest economic success story in human history.
Hundreds of millions raised from poverty into middle class existence.
How did China achieved.
The 20th century left was defined by its opposition to the two fundamental tendencies of modernity.
The reign of capital with its aggressive market competition, the authoritarian bureaucratic state power.
Today's China combines these two features in its extreme form.
Strong authoritarian state, wild capitalist dynamics, and It's important to note they do it on behalf of the happiness of the majority of people.
They don't mention communism to legitimize their rule.
They prefer the old Confucian notion of a harmonious society.
But are the Chinese Any happier for all that.
Although even the Dalai Lama justifies Tibetan Buddhism in Western terms of the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain, happiness as a goal of our life is a very problematic notion.
If we learned anything from psychoanalysis, it is that we humans are very creative in sabotaging our pursuit of happiness.
Happiness is a confused notion Basically, it relies on the subject's inability or unreadiness to fully confront the consequences of his, her, their desire.
In our daily lives, we pretend to desire things which we do not really desire, so that ultimately the worst thing that can happen is for us to get what we officially desire.
So I agree that human life of freedom and dignity does not consist just in searching for happiness, no matter how much we spiritualize it, or in the effort to actualize our inner potentials.
We have to find some meaningful cause beyond the mere struggle for pleasurable survival.
However, I would like to add here a couple of First, since we live in a modern era, we cannot simply refer to an unquestionable authority to confer a mission or task on us.
Modernity means that, yes, we should carry the burden.
But the main burden is freedom itself.
We are responsible for our burdens.
Not only are we not allowed cheap excuses for not doing our duty, duty itself should not serve as an excuse.
We are never just instruments of some higher cause.
Once traditional authority loses its substantial power, it is not possible to return to it.
All such returns are today a postmodern fake.
Does Donald Trump stand for traditional values?
No.
His conservativism is a postmodern performance.
A gigantic ego trip.
In this sense...
Of playing with traditional values, of mixing references to them with open obscenities, Trump is the ultimate postmodern president.
If we compare Trump with Bernie Sanders, Trump is a postmodern politician at its purest, while Sanders is rather an old-fashioned moralist.
Conservative thinkers claim that the origin of our crisis is the loss of our reliance on some transcended divinity or higher value.
If we are left to ourselves, if everything is historically conditioned and relative, Then there is nothing preventing us to indulge in our lowest tendencies.
But is this really the lesson to be learned from mob killing, looting and burning on behalf of religion?
It is often claimed that, true or not, religion makes some otherwise bad people do good things.
From today's experience, I think we should rather stick to Steve Weinberg's claim that while without religion, Good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things.
Only something like religion can make good people do bad things.
More than a century ago, in his brother Skaramazov, Dostoevsky warned against the dangers of godless moral nihilism.
If God doesn't exist, then everything is permitted.
The French philosopher André Glucksmann applied Dostoevsky's critique of godless Nihilism to September 11, and the title of his book, Dostoyevsky in Manhattan, suggests, as this title suggests, he couldn't have been more wrong.
The lesson of today's terrorism is that if there is a God, then everything, even blowing up hundreds of innocent bystanders, is permitted to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God.
The same goes also for godless Stalinist communists.
They are the ultimate proof of it.
Everything was permitted to them since they perceived themselves as direct instrument of their divinity, of the historical necessity of progress towards communism.
That's the big problem of ideologies, how to make good decent people do horrible things.
Second, yes, we should carry our burden, accept the suffering that goes with it.
But a danger lurks here, that of a subtle reversal.
Don't fall in love, that's my position, with your suffering.
Never presume that your suffering is in itself a proof of your authenticity.
Renunciation of pleasure can easily turn into pleasure of renunciation itself.
For example, an example not from neoconservatives.
White left liberals love to denigrate their own culture and blame Eurocentrism for our evils.
But it is instantly clear how this self-denigration brings a profit of its own.
Through this renouncing, Of their particular roots, multicultural liberals reserve for themselves the universal position, graciously soliciting others to assert their particular identity.
White multiculturalist liberals embody the lie of identity politics.
Next point.
Jacques Lacan wrote something paradoxical but deeply true, that even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife, that she sleeps with other men, is all true, his jealousy is nonetheless pathological.
The pathological element is the husband's need for jealousy as the only way for him to sustain his identity.
Along the same lines, one could say that even if most of the Nazi claims about Jews They exploit Germans, they seduce German girls, and so on.
Were true, which they were not, of course, their antisemitism would still be a pathological phenomenon, because it ignored the true reason why the Nazis needed antisemitism.
In the Nazi vision, their society, It's an organic whole of harmonious collaboration, so an external intruder is needed to account for divisions and antagonisms.
The same holds for how today, in Europe at least, the anti-immigrant populists deal with the refugees.
The cause of problems which are, I claim, imminent to today's global capitalism is projected onto an external intruder.
Again, even if the reported incident with the refugees, there are great problems, I admit it.
Even all these reports are true.
The populist story about them is a lie.
With antisemitism, we are approaching the topic of telling stories.
Hitler was one of the greatest storytellers of the 20th century.
In the 1920s, Many Germans experienced their situation as a confused mess.
They didn't understand what is happening to them with military defeat, economic crisis, what they perceived as moral decay, and so on.
Hitler provided a story, a plot, which was precisely that of a Jewish plot.
We are in this mess because of the Jews.
That's what I would like to insist on.
We are telling ourselves stories about ourselves in order to acquire a meaningful experience of our lives.
However, this is not enough.
One of the most stupid wisdoms, and they are mostly stupid, is an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard.
Really?
Are you also ready to affirm that Hitler was our enemy because his story was not heard?
The experience that we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing is, and this is what I call ideology, fundamentally a lie.
The truth lies outside in what we do.
In a similar way, the alt-right obsession with cultural Marxism expresses the rejection to confront the fact that the phenomena they criticize as the effect of The cultural Marxist plot, moral degradation, sexual promiscuity, consumerist hedonism, and so on, are the outcome of the imminent dynamic of capitalist societies.
I would like to refer to a classic.
Daniel Bell, Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, written back in 1976, where the author argues that the unbounded drive of modern capitalism undermines the moral foundations of the original Protestant ethics.
And in a new afterword, Bell offers a bracing perspective on contemporary Western societies, revealing the crucial cultural fault lines We face as the 21st century is here.
The turn towards culture as a key component of capitalist reproduction and concomitant to it the commodification of cultural life itself are, I think, crucial moments of capitalist expanded reproduction.
So the term cultural Marxism, I think, plays the same role as that of the Jewish plot in anti-Semitism.
It projects or transposes some immanent Antagonism, however you call it, ambiguity, tension, of our socio-economic life onto an external cause.
In exactly the same way, liberal critics of Trump and alt-right Never seriously asked how our liberal society could give birth to Trump.
In this sense, the image of Donald Trump is also a fetish, the last thing a liberal sees before confronting actual social tensions.
Hegel's motto, evil resides in the gaze which sees evil everywhere, fully applies here.
The very liberal gaze which demonizes Trump is also Evil because it ignores how its own failures opened up the space for Trump's type of patriotic populism.
Next point.
One should stop blaming hedonist egotism for our woes.
The true opposite of egotist self-love is not altruism.
A concern for the common good, but envy, resentment, which makes me act against my own interests.
This is why, as many perspicuous philosophers clearly saw, evil is profoundly spiritual, in some sense more spiritual than goodness.
This is why egalitarianism itself should never be accepted at its face value.
It can well secretly invert the standard renunciation Accomplished to benefit others.
Egalitarianism often de facto means I am ready to renounce something so that others will also not have it.
This is, I think, now comes the problematic part for some of you, maybe, the problem with political correctness.
What appears as its excesses, its regulatory zeal, is, I think, an impotent reaction that masks the reality of a defeat.
My hero is here a black lady, Tarana Burke, who created the MeToo campaign more than a decade ago.
She observed in a recent critical note that in the years since the movement began, it deployed an unwavering obsession with the perpetrators.
MeToo is all too often a genuine protest filtered through resentment.
Should we then drop egalitarianism?
No.
Equality can also mean, and that's the equality I advocate, creating the space for as many as possible individuals to develop their different potentials.
It is, that's my paradoxical claim, it is today's capitalism that equalizes us too much and causes the loss of many talents.
So what about the balance between equality and hierarchy?
Did we really move too much in the direction of equality?
Is there in today's United States really too much equality?
I think a simple overview of the situation points in the opposite direction.
Far from pushing us too far, the left is gradually losing its ground already for decades.
Its trademarks, universal healthcare, free education, and so on, are continuously diminished.
Look at Bernie Sanders, and I don't idealize him, program.
It is just A version of what, half a century ago, in Europe, was simply the predominant social democracy, and it's today decried as a threat to our freedoms, to the American way of life, and so on and so on.
I see no threat to free creativity in this program.
On the contrary, I see healthcare and education and so on as enabling me to focus my life on more important creative issues.
I see equality, this basic equality of chances, as a space for creating differences and, yes, why not, even different, more appropriate Furthermore, I find it very hard to ground today's inequalities,
as they are documented, for example, by Piketty in his book, to ground today's inequalities in different competencies.
Competencies for what?
In totalitarian states, competencies are determined politically.
But market success is also not innocent and neutral as a regulator of the social recognition of competencies.
Let me now briefly deal in a friendly way, I claim, with what became known, sorry for the irony, as the lobster topic.
I'm far from a simple social constructionism here.
I deeply appreciate evolutionary thought.
Of course, we are also natural beings, and our DNA, as we all know, overlaps, I may be wrong, around 99% with that of some monkeys.
This means something.
But nature, I think, we should never forget this, Not a stable hierarchical system, but full of improvisations.
It develops like French cuisine.
A French guy gave me this idea that French The origin of many famous French dishes or drinks is that when they wanted to produce a standard piece of food or drink, something went wrong, but then they realized that this failure can be resolved as success.
They were making cheese in the usual way, but the cheese got rotten and infected, smelling bad, and they said, oh my God, look, we have our own original French cheese.
They were making wine in the usual way.
Then something went wrong with fermentations, and so they began to produce champagne, and so on and so on.
I'm not making just a joke here, because I think that it is exactly like this, and that's the lesson of psychoanalysis, that our sexuality works.
Sexual instincts are, of course, biologically determined.
But look what we humans made out of them.
They are not limited to the mating season.
They can develop into a permanent obsession, sustained by obstacles that demand to be overcome, in short, into a properly metaphysical passion that perturbs the biological rhythm, with twists like endlessly prolonging satisfaction in courtly love, engaging in different perversions, and so on, and so on.
So it's still, yes, biologically conditioned sexuality, but it is, if I may use this term, trans-functionalized.
It becomes a moment of a different Cultural, however you call it, logic.
And I claim the same goes for tradition.
T.S. Eliot, the great conservative, wrote, quote, What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the work of art which preceded it.
The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.
End of quote.
What does this mean?
Let me mention the change enacted by Christianity.
It's not just that in spite of all our natural and cultural differences, the same divine spark dwells in everyone.
But this divine spark enables us to create what Christians call Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit, a community in which hierarchic family values are at some level at least abolished.
Remember Paul's words from Galatians, there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer male and female in Christ.
Democracy extends this logic to the political space.
In spite of all differences in competence, the ultimate decision should stay with all of us.
The wager of democracy is that we should not give all power to competent experts.
It was precisely communists in power who legitimized their rule by posing as fake experts.
And incidentally, I'm far from believing in ordinary People's wisdom.
We often need a master figure to push us out of an inertia.
And I'm not afraid to say that it forces us to be free.
Freedom and responsibility hurt.
They require an effort.
And the highest function of an authentic master is literally to awaken us to our freedom.
We are not spontaneously really free.
Furthermore, I think that social power and authority cannot be directly grounded in competence.
In our human universe, power, in the sense of exerting authority, is something much more mysterious, even irrational.
Kierkegaard, my and everybody's favorite theologist, wrote, if a child says he will obey his father because his father is a competent and good guy, This is an affront to father's authority.
And he applied the same logic to Christ himself.
Christ was justified by the fact of being God's son, not by his competencies or capacities.
As Kierkegaard put it, every good student of theology can put things better than Christ.
There is no such authority in nature.
Lobsters may have hierarchy undoubtedly, but the main guy among them, I don't think he has authority in this sense.
Again, the wager of democracy is that, and that's the subtle thing, not against competence and so on, but that Political power and competence or expertise should be kept apart.
In Stalinism, precisely, they were not kept apart, while already in ancient Greece they knew that they had to be kept apart, which is why their popular weight was even combined with lottery, often.
So where does communism, just to conclude, where does communism enter here?
Why do I still cling to this cursed name when I know and fully admit the 20th century communist project in all its failure, how it failed giving birth to new forms of murderous terror?
Capitalism won, but today, and that's my claim, we can debate about it, The question is, does today's global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms which prevent its indefinite reproduction?
I think there are such antagonisms.
The threat of ecological catastrophe, the consequence of new Techno-scientific developments, especially in biogenetics, and new forms of apartheid.
All these antagonisms concern what Marx called commons, the shared substance of our social being.
First, of course, the commons of external nature.
Threatened by pollution, global warming, and so on.
Now, let me be precise here.
I'm well aware how uncertain analysis and projections are in this domain.
It will be certain only when it will be too late.
And I am well aware of the temptation to engage in precipitous extrapolations.
When I was younger, to give you a critical example, there was in Germany an obsession with Waldsturben, the dying of forests, with predictions that in a couple of decades, Europe will be without forests.
But according to recent estimates, there are now more forest areas in Europe than 100 years or 50 years ago.
But there is nonetheless, I claim, the prospect of a catastrophe here.
Scientific data seems to me at least abandoned enough.
And we should act in a large-scale collective way.
And I also think, this may be critical to some of you, there is a problem with capitalism here for the simple reason that its managers, not because of their evil nature, That's the logic of capitalism.
Care to expand self-reproduction and environmental consequences are simply not part of the game.
This is, again, not a moral reproach.
And incidentally, so that you will not think that I don't know what I'm talking about, in communist countries, those in power were obsessed with expanded reproduction and were not under public control, so the situation was even worse.
So how to act?
First, by admitting we are in a deep mess.
There is no simple democratic solution here.
The idea that people themselves should decide what to do about ecology sounds deep, but it begs an important question.
Even if their comprehension is not distorted by corporate interests, what qualifies them to pass a judgment in such a delicate matter?
The radical measures advocated by some ecologists can themselves trigger new catastrophes.
Let me mention just the idea which is floating around of solar radiation management, the continuous massive dispersal of aerosols into our atmosphere to reflect and absorb sunlight and thus cool the planet.
Can we even imagine how the fragile balance of our Earth functions, and in what unpredictable ways geoengineering can disturb it?
In such times of urgency, when we know we have to act, but don't know how to act, thinking is needed.
Maybe we should turn around a little bit Marx's famous thesis 11.
In our new century, We should say that maybe in the last century we tried all too fast to change the world.
The time has come to step back and interpret it.
The second threat, the commons of internal nature.
With new biogenetic technologies, the creation of a new man in the literal sense of changing human nature becomes a realist prospect.
I mean primarily so-called popularly neural link, the direct link between our brain And digital machines, and then brains among themselves.
This, I think, is the true game changer.
The digitalization of our brain opens up unheard of new possibilities of control.
Directly sharing your experience with your beloved may appear attractive, but what about sharing them with an agency without you even knowing it?
Finally, the common space of humanity itself.
We live in one and the same world which is more and more interconnected, but nonetheless deeply divided.
So how to react to this?
The first and sadly predominant reaction is the one of protective self-enclosure.
The world out there is in a mess.
Let's protect ourselves by all kinds of walls.
It seems that our countries are run relatively well.
But is the mess the so-called roads countries find themselves in not connected to how We interact with them.
Take what is perhaps the ultimate rogue state, Congo.
Warlords who rule provinces there are always dealing with Western companies, selling them minerals.
Where would our computers be without coltan from Congo?
And what about foreign interventions in Iraq and Syria, or by our proxies like Saudi Arabia in Yemen, Here, refugees are created.
A new world order is emerging, a world of...
Can I just finish the page?
Two minutes, literally.
A world of peaceful coexistence of civilizations, But in what way does it function?
Forced marriages and homophobia are okay, just that they are limited to another country which is otherwise fully included into the world market.
This is how refugees again are created.
The second reaction is global capitalism with the human face.
Think about socially responsible corporate figures like Bill Gates or George Soros.
They passionately support LGBT, they advocate charities, and so on.
But even in its extreme form, opening up our borders to the refugees, treating them like one of us, They only provide what in medicine is called a symptomatic treatment.
The solution is not for the rich Western countries to receive all immigrants, but somehow to try to change the situation which creates massive waves of immigration.
And we are complicit in this.
Is such a change a utopia?
No, the true utopia is that we can survive without such a change.
So here I think, I know it's provocative to call this a plea for communism.
I do it a little bit to provoke things.
But what is needed is nonetheless in all these spheres, I claim, ecology, digital control, unity of the world, Capitalist market which does great things, I admit it.
It has to be somehow limited, regulated, and so on.
Before you say it's a utopia, I will tell you, but just think about in what way global market already functions today.
I always thought that neoliberalism is a fake term.
If you look closely, you will see that state plays today more important role than ever precisely in the richest capitalist economies.
So, you know, the market is already limited, but not in the right way, to put it naively.
So, a pessimist conclusion.
What will happen?
In spite of protests here and there, We will probably continue to slide towards some kind of apocalypse, awaiting large catastrophes to awaken us.
So I don't accept any cheap optimism.
When somebody tries to convince me that, in spite of all the problems, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, my instant reply is yes, and it's probably another train coming towards us.
Thank you very much Please don't do this because I really think that I
That's why I hope you, Jordan, agree with it, that's why we are here, engaged in this debate.
Don't take it as a cheap competition.
It may be that, but we are, as you said in your introduction, desperately trying to confront serious problems.
I mean...
For example, when I mentioned China, I didn't mean to celebrate it.
That worries me terribly.
My God, is this our future?
Sorry, sorry for this.
Sorry, please.
Discount take away this from my 10 minutes.
No problem.
Dr.
Dr. Peterson, 10 minutes to you to reply.
So I like to speak extemporaneously, but Dr. Gigi, Zizek's discussion was so complex that there's no way that I can juggle my responses spontaneously.
That's what I wanted to achieve!
Achievement managed, I would say.
So, I heard much of what I heard, I agreed with.
But we can get to that.
I'm going to respond...
Keep that.
Pull out the knife.
Alright.
I heard a criticism of capitalism.
But no real support of Marxism.
And that's an interesting thing, because for me, the terms of the argument were...
Well, there were three terms of the argument, let's say.
There was capitalism, there was Marxism, and there was happiness.
And I would say Dr.
Zizek focused probably more on the problems of capitalism and the problems of happiness than on the utility of Marxism.
And that actually comes as a surprise to me because I presume that much of what I would hear would be a support of something approximating traditional or even a traditional Marxism, which is why I organized the first part of my talk as an attack against Marxism per se.
Okay, so now Zizek points out that there are problems of capitalism.
And I would like to say that I'm perfectly aware that there are problems with capitalism.
I wasn't defending capitalism, actually, in some sense.
I was defending it in comparison to communism, which is not the same thing.
Because as Winston Churchill said about democracy, you know, it's the worst form of government there is, except for all the other forms.
And so, you might say the same thing about capitalism, is that it's the worst form of economic arrangement you could possibly manage, except for every other one that we've ever tried.
And I'm dead serious about that.
I'm not trying to be flippant.
I mean that it isn't obvious to me, and when Dr.
Zizek is speaking in more apocalyptic terms, it isn't obvious to me that we can solve the problems that confront us.
You know, and it's also not a message that I have been purveying that unbridled capitalism per se As an isolated, what would you say, social economic structure actually constitutes the proper answer to the problems that confront us.
So, I haven't made that case in any of the lectures that I've...
anything I've written or any of the lectures that I've done, because I don't believe it to be true.
He said, well, what's the problems with capitalism?
Well, the commodification of cultural life, all life, fair enough.
There's something that isn't exactly right about reducing everything to economic competition.
And capitalism certainly pushes in that direction.
Advertising culture pushes in that direction.
Sales and marketing culture pushes in that direction.
And there's reasons for that, and I have a certain amount of admiration for the necessity of advertisers and salesmen and marketers.
But that doesn't mean that the transformation of all elements of life into commodities in a capitalist sense is the best way forward.
I don't think it is the best way forward.
I think the evidence for that's actually quite clear.
There is, by the way, a relationship.
This is something I didn't point out before.
There is a relationship between wealth and happiness.
It's quite well defined in the psychological literature.
Now, it's not exactly obvious whether the happiness measures are measures of happiness or whether they're measures of the absence of misery.
And my sense is, as a psychometrician who's looked at these scales, that people are more concerned with not being miserable than they are with being happy.
And those are all actually separate emotional states mediated by different psychobiological systems.
It's a technical point, but it's an important one.
There is a relationship between absolute level of income and self-reported lack of misery or happiness.
And it's pretty linear until you hit, I would say, something approximating decent working class income.
And so what seems to happen is that wealth makes you happy as long as it keeps the bill collectors at bay.
Like once you've got to the point where the misery is Staved off as much as it can be by the fact that you're not Absolutely in you're not in absolutely economically dire straits Then adding more money to your life has no relationship whatsoever to your well-being And so it's clear that past a certain minimal point Additional material provision is not sufficient to let's say redeem us individually or socially and it's certainly the case that
the radical Wealth production that characterizes capitalism might produce a fatal threat to the structure of our social systems and our broader ecosystems.
Who knows?
I'm not absolutely convinced of that for a variety of reasons.
I mean, Zizek pointed out, for example, that there are more forests in Europe now than there were a hundred years ago.
There's actually more forests in the entire Northern Hemisphere than there were a hundred years ago.
And the news on the ecological front It's not as dismal as the people who put out the most dismal news would have you think.
And there is some possibility.
That doesn't mean that there aren't elements of it that are dismal.
You know, what we've done to the oceans is definitely something catastrophic.
And we definitely have our problems.
But it is possible that human ingenuity might solve that.
What else?
There are inequalities generated by capitalism, a proclivity towards a shallow materialism, The probability of corruption.
The thing about that for me is those are catastrophes that are part of the struggle for human existence itself and not something to be laid at the feet of any given socio-political system, especially one that seems to be producing a fair modicum of wealth for the poorest section of the population and raising people up to the point where You know, their lives aren't an unending day-to-day struggle for mere survival.
There's some evidence, for example, that if you can get GDP up to about $5,000 per person per year...
Oh, that's GDP. That people start to become concerned about environmental degradation and start to take actions to prevent it.
And so there is some possibility that if we're lucky, we can get the bottom billion or two billion people in the world or three billion as the population grows up to the point where they're wealthy enough so they actually start to care enough about the environment so that we could act collectively to solve environmental problems.
Now, you might say, well, by that time we'll be out of Earth.
You know, we'll have exhausted the resources that are in front of us so desperately that there's no hope of that.
But I would like to remind you of a famous bet between Julian Simon and the biologist at Stanford, Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb.
Ehrlich, who thought we were going to be overpopulated by the year 2000, bet Simon that by the year 2000, commodity prices would have increased dramatically as a consequence of evidence that we were running out of material resources.
They made a famous bet over a 25-year period.
And Ehrlich paid off Simon in the year 2000 because commodity prices went down and not up.
And so there is no solid evidence that the fact that our population is growing and will peak out, by the way, at about 9 billion, there's no solid indication that the consequence of that is that we are, in fact, running out of necessary material resources.
And so it's a danger, but it's not a danger that's proven.
And there is some utility in considering that the addition of several billion more brains to the planet, especially if they were well-nourished brains, as they increasingly are, might help us generate enough problem solvers so that we can stay ahead of the looming ecological catastrophe as our population balloons outwards.
Now, we're going to peak at 9 billion.
It's not much higher than we are now, and it looks like we might be able to manage it.
The other thing is that I didn't hear an alternative really from Dr.
Zizek.
He admitted that the rise to success of the Chinese was in part a consequence of the allowance of market forces and decried the authoritarian tendencies and fair enough, that's exactly it.
It also seemed to me that the social justice group identity processes that Dr.
Zizek was decrying are to me a logical derivation from the oppression narrative that's a fundamental presupposition of Marxism.
So there I never heard a defense of Marxism in that part of his argument as well.
And so for me again, it's to ask what's the alternative?
I also heard an argument for egalitarianism, but I heard it defined as equality of opportunity, not as equality of outcome, which I see as a clearly defined Marxist aim.
I heard an argument for a modified social distribution of wealth, but that's already part and parcel of most modern free-market states, with a wide variation and an appropriate variation of government intervention, all of which constitute their own experiment.
We don't know how much social intervention is necessary to flatten the tendency of hierarchies to become tilted so terribly that only the people at the top have everything and all of the people at the bottom have nothing.
It's a very difficult battle to fight against that profound tendency, much deeper than the tendency of capitalism itself, and we don't exactly know what to do about it.
So we run experiments, and that seems to be working perfectly reasonably.
As far as I can tell.
Let's see.
Well, I'll close with this.
Capitalism in the free market.
Well, that's the worst form of social organization possible, as I said, except for all the others.
There is a positive relationship between economics measured by income and happiness, or psychological well-being, which might be the absence of misery.
I certainly do not believe And the evidence does not suggest that material security is sufficient.
I do believe, however, that insofar as there is a relationship between happiness and material security, that the free market system has demonstrated itself as the most efficient manner to achieve that, and that was actually the terms of the argument.
So thus, if it's capitalism versus Marxism with regards to human happiness, it's still the case that the free market constitutes the clear winner.
And maybe capitalism will not solve our problems.
I actually don't believe that it will.
I've in fact argued that the proper pathway forward is one of individual moral responsibility aimed at the highest good.
It's something for me that's rooted in our underlying Judeo-Christian tradition that insists that each person is sovereign in their own right and a locus of ultimate value.
Which is something that you can accept regardless of your religious presuppositions, and something that you do accept if you participate in a society such as ours.
Even the fact that you vote, that you're charged with that responsibility, is an indication that our society is structured such that we presume that each person is a locus of responsibility and decision-making, of such import that the very stability of the state depends upon the integrity of their The integrity of their character.
And so what I've been suggesting to people is that they adopt as much responsibility as they possibly can in keeping with that, in keeping with their aim at the highest possible good, which to me is something approximating a balance between what's good for you as an individual And what's good for your family in keeping with what's good for you as an individual, and then what's good for society in the larger frame, such that it's also good for you and your family.
And that's a form of an, well, an elaborated, iterated game, a form of elaborated cooperation.
It's a sophisticated way of looking at the ways society could possibly be organized, and I happen to believe that that has to happen at the individual level first, and that's the pathway forward that I see.
And so that's my...
Ten-minute commentary.
I go up.
Yeah, I go up.
Thank you guys.
Thank you, Dr. Peter.
Peterson.
I've already spent a little bit of my time.
I will try to be as short as possible.
So, a couple of remarks and then my final point.
Why I think this self-limitation of Capitalism is needed.
First, about happiness.
Just a couple of remarks.
Jordan, I want to ask you, but isn't it?
Am I dreaming?
I think I'm not.
I remember a couple of years ago, it was reported all around the world, some kind of investigation, percentage of people interviewed in different countries, do they feel happy with their life?
And the shock was that some Scandinavian countries, which we considered social democratic paradise, were very low, while Bangladesh, I think, was close to the top.
Now, I know this logic has a limit.
I don't buy the bullshit of poor people are happy in their world there and so on.
But you know, my argument here is not against you.
My argument here is problematizing Happiness even more.
Look, this may interest you.
I was years ago in, I think, Lithuania, and we debated a report on this in one of my books, when were people in some perverted sense, and this is the critique of the category of happiness for me, happy, and we came to the crazy result.
After the Soviet intervention, Czechoslovakia in 1970s and 80s, Why?
For happiness, first, you should not have too much democracy, because this brings the burden of responsibility.
Happiness means there is another guy out there, you can put all the blame on him.
As the joke went in Czechoslovakia, if there is bad weather, a storm, oh, this communist screwed it up again.
That's one condition of happiness.
The other condition, much more subtle one, is And this was done in Czechoslovakia, those dark times.
Life was relatively moderately good, but not perfect.
Like, there was meat all the time.
Maybe once a month there was not meat in the stores.
It was very good to remind you how happy you are the other times.
Another thing.
They had a paradise which should be at a proper distance, West Germany, affluence.
It was not too far, but not directly accessible, you know?
So maybe in your critique of Communist regimes, I agree with you.
You should more focus on something that I experienced.
You know, don't look only at the terror, ultimately totalitarian regime.
There was a kind of a silent, perverted pact between At least in this late, a little bit more tolerant, but I still oppose them, communist regimes between power and population.
The message was, leave us the power, don't mess with us, and we guarantee you a relatively safe life, employment, private pleasures, private niche, and so on and so on.
So I am not surprised.
But again, this is not for me the argument for the communists, but against happiness.
You know, people said when the wall fell down, what a wonder in Poland.
My God, in Solidarno, which was prohibited a year ago, now triumph at the elections.
Who could imagine this?
Yes, but the true miracle, in a bad sense for me, was four years later, democratically, ex-communists came back to power.
So, you know, again, this is for me not the argument for them, but simply for the, let's call it, corruptive nature of happiness.
So my formula, maybe you would agree with it, is my basic dogma is happiness should be treated as a necessary byproduct.
If you focus on it, you are lost.
It comes as a byproduct of you working for a cause and so on.
That's the basic thing for me.
Second point, maybe we disagree here.
China, of course, the miracle, economic miracle was due to unleashing market reform and so on.
But, and here comes my pessimism.
Some of my liberal friends are telling me, yes, imagine what would they have achieved with also political democratization.
I'm a pessimist here.
No.
They found a perfect formula of how And that's the paradox of China today.
The Communist Party is the best manager of capitalism and protector against workers.
The truly dangerous thing in China today is not to flirt with Western ideas, is to organize trade unions.
This is what worries me.
This perfect combination between unleashing capitalism and Still, the authoritarian rule, or to put it in another way, my worry is that today, all around the world, this eternal marriage between capitalism and democracy is slowly disappearing.
Till now, I admit it.
Capitalism needed from time to time some 10, 20 years of dictatorship.
When things started to improve, democracy returned.
Chile, South Korea, and so on.
I wonder if we are still at that.
Now, just very quickly, your basic point in your introduction.
You know, I almost am tempted to say, The way you presented Communist Manifesto, the simplified image, and so on, it's crazy to say, but on many points I agree with you, and it's a very complex argument.
Marx didn't have, for example, a good theory of how social power exists.
His idea was simply with disappearance of class structure, It's secretly, although he wouldn't have accepted it, a technocratic dream.
Like, by experts, social life will be run as a perfect machine.
Although he was at least aware of the problem, which is why he was so enthusiastic, Marx, about Paris Commune, you know, which was precisely not centralized power.
So I'm not just defending Marx.
I'm saying it was not clear to him.
So let's drop that, maybe I have more interesting things to say.
Ah, another point.
Nonetheless, at one point I'm ready to claim, where did you find this?
This goes maybe for today's politically correct jerks and so on, this egalitarianism.
Passage in his late critique of Gotha program, where Marx directly accesses the problem of equality.
And he dismisses it as a strict bourgeois category.
Explicitly.
Explicitly.
For him, communism is not egalitarianism.
It's, yes, hierarchies, but not based on capitalism.
Okay, I'm not totally defending here Marx.
I'm just saying, Okay, but to conclude, because yes, I want to keep my promise to be a little bit shorter.
You know, I agree with you on many points, but you know what my problem with My problem that I was aiming at, with all the openings I know, we don't know really what is happening with ecology and so on.
Okay, let's take oceans.
You mentioned them.
But isn't it for me, correct me if I'm wrong, and I don't mean this rhetorically, maybe I'm really wrong, but the problem of oceans.
The only way for me is some kind of cooperated international action and so on.
You cannot simply leave it to the market.
That's what I'm saying.
This is the faithful limit that I see.
About this diminishing poverty and so on, I am aware of it.
I tend to agree with it.
But I, at the same time, see so many explosive tensions.
For example, do you know about South Africa?
It's a terrifying situation on the edge of the civil war, to be very brutal.
The only thing that really happened with the end of apartheid is that the old ruling class, I simplify it in grotesque Marxism, was joined by a new black ruling class, which is not doing a good job, so they are trying to play the race card.
It's still the consequence of...
White colonialism and so on and so on.
But tensions are terrifying.
And here I was pleading for not abolishing borders and so on, but this type of, I don't know how to put it, global change, cooperation.
Like, again, the example of Congo that I mentioned.
Forget the killing of that guy Khashoggi.
It's horrible.
But the true nightmare is Yemen today.
I mean, you said somewhere that we should well think without engaging in large-scale reform what the consequences will be.
Okay, very briefly.
I agree with you that the gap of standard Marxism was that the proletarian revolution Will be a place where you do something and you know exactly what you do.
If there is a lesson of the 20th century, is that this tragic logic, you want something maybe good, the result is catastrophic, holds absolutely also for revolutions and so on and so on.
But, like, In spite of all this, and I don't know what forum will it have.
I'm not pleading for a new Leninist party or whatever.
I'm just pleading for new forums of international cooperation and so on.
I agree with you when you said the majority of us is not even really aware of the seriousness of Especially the poor of ecological problems and so on.
And I think, would you agree that the situation is here much more subtle and obscene?
It's that logic that in psychoanalysis is called disavowal, verloignung.
In French, je sais bien, je sais bien, mais comme même.
Ecological problems, but we don't really take them seriously.
And here I see problems, and I don't see an easy way out.
I am a pessimist, if you ask me.
When people say, no, but they are growing, protests are growing, and so on and so on.
Yes, I'm listening to this story from when I was young, you know.
They are growing, and then look what happened.
The mega tragedy is for me, for example, what happened to Syriza.
They were elected for change, whatever, and they become, and I'm not blaming them, they become the perfect executors of austerity program.
So I just see problems.
I'm a pessimist.
And I'm not a radical pessimist.
But you have to...
Maybe here we are different.
I noticed with your final speech, that final moment of your impression, It's very strange because usually Marxists have this stupid optimist anthropology.
Just get rid of capitalist terror and we will all be happy.
My god, I'm much more a pessimist.
I don't believe in human goodness.
I never underestimate evil, never underestimate envy.
I mean, it's part of my nature.
In Slovenia we have a wonderful Story.
A godlike figure comes to a farmer, and I will stop immediately, and asks him, I will do to you whatever you want, just I warn you, I will do twice the same to your neighbor.
You know what Slovene farmer answers?
Fine, take one of my eyes.
You know?
We are in this.
Don't underestimate this.
I don't see any simple clear way out.
Thank you.
Thank you both very much.
It's pretty clear, I think, to all of us that you both have quite a bit to say to each other.
And to ourselves.
And so I think before we jump to some audience questions, I thought it would be nice to give each of you a chance to ask a response or ask a question or two from each other.
So starting with you, Dr.
Peterson.
Maybe you want simply to counterattack.
It wasn't fair to...
Well, I've only...
To do your reply.
I had three questions and two of them are now completely irrelevant.
And so I have one left, I guess.
And I'm not sure that it's a fair question, but maybe it seems to me to be a fair question.
Okay.
You're a strange Marxist to have a discussion with.
Well, but here's why.
This is not an insult by any stretch of the imagination.
I mean, one of the things that struck me when I was looking at your work was that you're, well, first of all, you're a character, you know, and that's an interesting thing.
Is this an insult or not?
It's not an insult.
It's a sign of originality.
And it's a sign of a certain amount of moral courage.
And it's a sign of a certain temperament.
And it makes you humorous and charismatic and attractive.
And I think you appeal to young people the way that outside intellectual rebels appeal to young people.
And so those are all positive things that can be used positively or negatively.
And my question is, like, it seems to me that your reputation, unless I'm very misinformed about this, Is as a strong supporter of Marxist doctrines on the left, or was that?
And so then, my question is, given the originality of your thought, Why is it that you came to presume at some point in your life, perhaps not now and perhaps still, that the promotion of Marxism rather than Zizekism was appropriate?
Because it seems to me that there's enough originality in your body of thought and lateral thinking in the manner in which you approach intellectual ideas that there's just no reason for you to be allied with a doctrine that's 170 years old and that is If capitalism is rife with problems, it's twice as rife with problems as that.
And so you're kind of a mystery to me in that way.
And so that's my question.
Okay.
Very briefly.
I developed systematically in my books critical insights into many traditional Marxist theses, so no doubt here.
You know what I still admire nonetheless in Marx?
Not those simplicities of Communist Manifesto, but I still think that.
His so-called critique of political economy, capital and so on, is a tremendous achievement as a description of the dynamics of capitalist society.
And if you read it closely, Marx is much more ambiguous and open there.
For example, Mentions, for example, apropos what you referred to.
He mentions that law of diminishing return, like why crises will arrive necessarily, poorer, getting poorer.
But then he's honest enough to enumerate seven or eight counter tendencies.
And if you read him closely, you will see that precisely those tendencies prevailed later.
Forget Communist Manifesto.
Go to read his political analysis of its unsurpassable 18th Bremer and so on of the 1848 revolution, which are incredibly complex.
No traces of that class binary there.
Marx deals with middle classes with crucial, lumpenproletariat with the ambiguous role of intellectuals and so on and so on.
But basically what I was pleading for, and I like to put it in paradoxical term, was for a return of From Marx back to Hegel.
I define myself more as a Hegelian.
Why?
Hegel is considered a madman, you know, the guy, absolute knowing, and so on and so on.
No, Hegel is much more modest and open.
The danger in Marxism is for me this Teleological structure.
We are at the zero point, but there is a unique chance of a reversal into a new emancipated society and so on, and the danger here is that of self-instrumentalization.
Proletarian Communist Party is an agent of history which knows the lot of history, to put it, follows them and so on.
That's the catastrophe.
In Hegel, such a position is strictly prohibited.
In Hegel, whenever you act, you err.
So...
You know, there is no position of this pure acting where you know what you are doing and the result will be.
So this would be my main point.
So yes, my formula is kind of...
Ironically, I know Hegel is the greatest idealist, materialist reversal of Marx by turning back to Hegel.
Hegel says in a part that people don't read, introduction forward to philosophy of right, he says explicitly that the whole of Minerva takes off in the evening when there is dusk, So philosophy can just grasp a social order when it's already in its decay.
Philosophy cannot see into the future.
It's radical openness.
We need this openness today.
The tragedy today, maybe we agree here, is that We really don't have a basic, how should I call it, cognitive mapping.
I don't think we have here a clear insight into where we stand, where we are moving and so on and so on.
So I'm much more, again, sincerely of a pessimist.
Can I ask you now a question?
Let me respond and then you can ask me a question.
Yeah, of course.
Sorry.
I don't have anything to quibble about with what you just said.
Well, no, there's not even a but, really.
It's that even if what you said about Marx's more sophisticated thought is true, I think the unfortunate reality is that any support for Marxism, especially Directed towards those who are young is likely to be read as support for the most radical and revolutionary proclivities,
and I would say that as they're outlined in In the document that I described, in the Communist Manifesto, that they're of extraordinary danger.
And so it seems to me that by attempting to, you know, rescue the sheep, you've sort of invited the dragon into the house.
And that seems to me to be dangerous and unfortunate.
Here I can answer you by asking you my question.
Because, you know, Very naively.
First, where did you find the data that I simply don't see?
Okay, let me begin by this.
You designate your, under quotation marks, I'm not characterizing here, enemy or what you are fighting against as sometimes you call it Postmodern neo-Marxism.
I know what you mean.
All this, from political correctness to these excesses of whatever spirit of envy and so on and so on.
Do you think they are really...
Where did you find this data?
I don't know them.
I would ask you here, give me some names or whatever.
Where are the Marxists here?
I don't know any...
Who is a Marxist here?
Show me any big names of political correctness.
I think they fear like a good vampire fears garlic.
This is why they are already the one who is not a Marxist, but at least approaches economic topic, Bernie Sanders.
He's already under attack as white male and all that stuff and so on.
My problem would be with this one.
What you describe as Postmodern neo-Marxism.
Where is really the Marxist element in it?
They are for equality.
Sorry, where?
They are for equality at these cultural struggles, proper names, how do we call each other?
Do you see in them, in political correctness and so on, any genuine will to change society?
I don't see.
I think it's a hyper-moralization.
Hyper-moralization, which is a silent admission of a defeat.
That's my problem.
Why do you call...
Again, it's not a rhetorical question for politely saying you're an idiot, you don't know what you're talking about.
It's simply, I would like to know Because you, and I like this often, when you attack somebody, you say it aggressively, and watch it, read more, tell me, whom?
So I'm asking you now, not read more, I don't advise you, but who are, give me some names and so on, and who are these post-modern, egalitarian, neo-Marxist, and where do you see any kind even of Marxism?
I see in it mostly...
An impotent, an utterly impotent moralisation.
Please, I'm so sorry that that was too long.
No, no, that's no problem.
Well, I mean, organizations like Jonathan Heights, what's it called?
Heterodox Academy.
Heterodox Academy and other organizations like that have documented an absolute dearth of conservative voices in the social sciences and the humanities, and about 25%, according to what I think are reliable surveys, approximately 25% of social scientists in the U.S. identify themselves as Marxists.
And so there's that.
Can you name me one?
I know a couple of Marxists, for example, who does very solid economic work.
David Harvey.
One.
But he writes very serious books of economic analysis and so on and so on.
Then there is the old guy who is far from simplification, Frederick Jansson, and so on.
But they are totally marginalized today.
In this politically correct mainstream, you know, I don't see Well, yeah, your question seemed to me to focus more on the peculiar relationship that I've noticed and that people have disputed between postmodernism and neo-Marxism.
And I see the connection between the postmodernist types and the Marxists Totally agree with you.
But that's precisely a non-Marxist gesture.
Well, I guess that's where we might have a dispute, because I think what happened, especially in France in the 1960s, is as the radical Marxist postmodern types like Derrida and Foucault realized that they were losing the moral battle,
especially after the information came out of the Soviet Union in the manner that it came out that the whole bloody Stalinist the whole Stalinist catastrophe along with the entire Maoist catastrophe that they didn't really have a leg to stand on and instead of revising their notion that human history and this is a Marxist notion should be regarded as the eternal class struggle between the economically deprived and the oppressors they just recast it
And said, well, it's not based on economics, it's based on identity.
But it's still fundamentally oppressor against oppressed.
And to me, that meant that they smuggled the fundamental narrative of Marxism and many of its goals back into the argument without ever admitting that they did so.
Now, I've been criticized, you know, for this supposition because People who are postmodernists say, look, one of the hallmarks of postmodernism is skepticism of metanarratives.
It's like, I know that perfectly well.
And I also know that Marxism is a metanarrative, and so you shouldn't be able to be a postmodernist and a Marxist.
But I still see the union of those two things in the insistence that the best, the appropriate way to look at the world is to view it as the battleground between groups defined by a particular Between individuals defined by a particular group identity, so that the group identity becomes paramount, and then the proper reading is always oppressor versus oppressed.
With a secondary insistence that's very similar to Marx's insistence upon the moral superiority of the proletariat, that the oppressors are by definition, because they're oppressed, morally superior.
And there's the call for Perhaps not revolutionary change, although that comes up above, but change in the structure so that that oppression disappears, so that a certain form of equality comes about.
Now, you argued that Marx wasn't a believer in equality of outcome, and I'm not so sure about that, because his notion of the eventual utopia that would constitute genuine communism was a place where all class divisions were eradicated.
But there's at least...
Well, there's at least an implication that the most important of the hierarchies had disappeared.
And so maybe he had enough sophistication to talk about other forms of hierarchies, but if that's the case, then I can't imagine why he thought that the utopia that would emerge as a consequence of the elimination of economic hierarchies would be a utopia.
Because if there were other forms of hierarchies that still existed, people would be just as contentious about them as they are now.
Like, we have hierarchies of attractiveness, for example, that have nothing to do with economics, or very little to do with economics, and there's no shortage of contention around that, or any other form of ability.
And so, that's why I associate the social justice types who are basically postmodernist with Marx...
They're postmodernists with Marxism.
It's the insistence that you view the world through the narrative of oppressed versus oppressor.
And I think it's a catastrophe.
I think it's a catastrophe.
And you appear to think that it's a catastrophe as well.
Just one sentence and then you can reply.
It's so strange that you mention, for example, somebody like Foucault, who, for me, Are you aware that his main target was Marxism?
Okay, for him represented in...
And his game was never a radical change, and this is what I don't like in this what you call post-modern, let's not call them Marxists, but revolutionaries.
It's this enjoying your own self-marginalization.
The good thing is to be on the margin, you know, like not in the center and so on and so on.
It almost made me nostalgic for old communists who at least had the honesty to say, no, we don't enjoy our marginal position, we want to do something central power.
I find so disgusting.
It's no wonder you don't get invited to lots of places.
No, you know, Foucault for me embodies this logic of revolution, and by revolution he meant any social change series, but small resistances and so on, small marginal places of resistance and so on and so on.
So, okay, but let's maybe drop it here if you want, but since you are replying my question, you should have.
The last word here.
No, I'll stop with that.
Let's move to the next...
We'll get back to these topics, no doubt, as we move forward with the questions, so I'm happy to let that particular issue stop there.
Did you already do your Stalinist manipulation and censor the questions?
Because this program that he described to us through some screens, questions and so on, I think it puts him to the one who decides which questions are, as Stalinists, Putin, are the real voice of the people and so on.
Yes, yes.
Well, hopefully we can trust him.
Let's move on from that.
At heart this evening we're talking about happiness, at least that's the frame of the debate that we have tonight.
And you've both been, in your work and also tonight, very critical of happiness as mere hedonism, pleasure-seeking, or even simply as a feeling.
What does true or deeper human happiness consist of and how is it attained?
You?
I don't care.
Well, first of all, there's something you said five minutes ago or so, I think you were still at the podium, that I agree with profoundly, which is that happiness is a side effect.
It's not a thing in itself.
It's something that comes upon you.
It's like an act of grace in some sense.
I accept even the theological undertone.
Of what you said.
No, no, the category of grace can be used in a perfect eighth sense.
It's one of the deepest categories.
I'm sorry.
Okay, good.
Well, I would think that we could find agreement about that partly because of your psychoanalytic background.
You know perfectly well that we're subject to forces within us that aren't of our voluntary control.
And certainly happiness is one of those because you cannot will yourself to be happy.
You might be able to will yourself to be unhappy, but you can't will yourself to be happy.
There are certain preconditions that have to be met that are quite mysterious in order for you to be happy, and then it happens.
And then maybe, if you're wise, you regard that as a minor incomprehensible miracle that somehow you happen to be in the right place at the right time.
I made the case that the most effective means of pursuing the good life, which is not the same as pursuing happiness, is to adopt something like a stance of maximal responsibility towards the suffering and malevolence in the world.
And I think that that should be pursued primarily as an individual responsibility.
It's not like I don't think that Political and familial larger organizations are necessary, but in the final analysis We each suffer alone in some fundamental sense and we have our own malevolence to contend with in some fundamental sense and the proper beginning of moral behavior which is The proper beginning of the right way to act in the world is to take responsibility for that.
I think you do what you can to conceptualize the highest good that you can conceptualize.
That's the first thing.
To develop a vision of what might be.
And it has to be a personalized vision as well as a universalized vision.
And then You work diligently to ensure that your actions are in keeping with that, and you allow yourself on that pursuit to be informed by the knowledge of your ignorance and the necessity For acting and speaking in truth.
And a fair bit of that, I believe, is derived, I think it's fair to say that that's derived from an underlying Judeo-Christian ethic, and I make no bones about the fact that I think of those stories, metaphysically or philosophically or psychologically, as fundamental to the proper functioning of our society insofar as it can function properly.
And so it's not happiness, it's meaning.
And meaning is to be found in the adoption of responsibility.
And then I'll close with this.
The responsibility is not only to do what you believe to be right.
That's not...
because that's duty.
That's not enough.
That's sort of what the Conservatives put forward as the ultimate virtue, which is duty.
It's not that.
It's that you're acting in a manner that is in accordance with what you believe to be right, but you're doing it in a manner That simultaneously expands your ability to do it, which means that you cannot stay safely ensconced within the confines of your current ethical beliefs.
You have to stand on the edge of what you know and encounter continually the consequences of your ignorance to expand your domain of knowledge and ability so that you're not only acting in an efficient manner, but you're increasing the efficiency and productivity and meaningfulness of what it is that you're Engaged in.
And I think that, and I believe that the psychological evidence supports this, even the neuropsychological evidence is that that's when true happiness descends upon you.
Because it's an indication from the deepest recesses of your psyche, biologically instantiated, That you're in the right place at the right time.
You're doing what you should be doing, but you're doing it in a manner that expands your capacity to do even better things in the future.
And I think that's the deepest human instinct there is.
It's not rational.
It's far deeper than that.
And it's something that's genuine, that exists within us, and that constitutes a proper guide if you don't pervert it with self-deception and deceit.
So that's my perspective.
Thank you.
I'll try, if you're stupid enough to believe me, to be brief.
First, I like very much what you began with, this grace, or whatever we call it, moment of happiness.
And I would like to, would you agree that the same goes for love, I think?
We have in English, and they have it in French, I don't know if in other languages they have it, they use the verb to fall in love, which means it's in this sense, in some sense, a fall, you are surprised, you are shocked.
Authentic love, I think, is something very traumatic even in this sense.
I always like to use this example.
Let's say you live a stupidly happy life.
Maybe one night stand here and there, you drink with friends, then you fall in love passionately.
This is, in some sense, a catastrophe for your life.
All the balance is lost and so on, you know.
That's why Cupid has arrows.
Sorry?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Absolutely.
But where I first, second, surprisingly maybe for you, I agree with your point about Judeo-Christian legacy, for which I am very much attacked, Euro-centric and so on and so on.
You know, I wonder if you would agree with it.
I will try to condense it very much.
You know what's for me?
The deepest, I simplify to the utmost, something unheard of, and I as an atheist accept the spiritual value of it, happens in Christianity.
In other religions you have got up there, we fall from God, and then we try to climb back through spiritual discipline, whatever, training, good deeds, and so on and so on.
The formula of Christianity is a totally different one.
As we philosophers would have put it, you don't climb to God.
You are free in a Christian sense when you discover that.
The distance that separates you from God is inscribed into God Himself.
That's why I agree with those intelligent theologists like my favorite, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who said that this The cross, the crucifixion, is something absolutely unique because in that moment of Eli, Eli, Lama, Shabbat, God, Father, why have you abandoned me?
For a brief moment, symbolically, God himself becomes an atheist in the sense of, you know, you get a gap there.
And that is something so absolutely unique.
It means that You are not simply separated from God.
Your separation from God is part of divinity itself.
And we can then put it also in other terms, maybe closer to you, like that...
That's why for me, happiness is not some blissful unity with highest value.
It's the very struggle, the fall, and so on.
And that's why I hope we both worry about what will this possibility of so-called, I'm horrified with it, what Ray Kurzweil calls singularity and this blissful state.
I prefer not to know, but the final point, very brief.
What I only...
Don't quite get...
Why do you put so much access to this?
We have to begin with a personal change.
I mean, this is also the second, or which one?
I don't remember, forgive me, of your slogans in your book.
You know, first set your house in order, then...
But I have an extremely common sense, naive question here.
But what if in trying to set your house in order, You discover that your house is in this order precisely because the way the society is messed up.
Which doesn't mean, okay, let's forget about my house.
But you can do both at the same time.
And I would even say, I will give you now the ultimate example.
Yourself.
Isn't it that you are so socially active?
Because you realize that.
It's not enough to tell to your patients, set your house in order.
Much of the reason of why they are in disorder, their house, is that there is some crisis in our society and so on and so on.
So, my approach to you benevolent would have been, you know, that joke, tea or coffee, yes please.
Like, individual or social, yes please, because this is obvious in extreme situation.
Like, I hope we agree.
To say to somebody in North Korea, set your house in order.
But I think in some deeper sense, it goes also for our societies.
I'm just repeating what you are telling.
You see some kind of a social crisis, and I don't see clearly why insist so much on this choice.
Because, sorry, just to finish, I will give you an example that I think perfectly does it.
Do we usually deal with ecology?
By this false personalization, you know?
They tell you, ah, what did you do?
Did you put all the Coke cans on the side?
Did you recycle all the paper?
And so, yes, we should do this.
But, you know, like, I... In a way, this is also a very easy way to distract yourself.
Like, you say, okay, I do the recycling show up, you know, I did my duty, let's go on.
So I would just say, why the choice there?
Okay, so, well, so first of all, I have to point out that you have unfairly tasked me with three very difficult questions.
And so I'm hoping that I can...
That's life.
That's life.
As you said, life is a challenge.
So I'm hoping that I have the mental wherewithal to keep them in track and answer them in order, but you can help me if I stray.
I was very interested in your comments about Christ's atheism on the cross, that final moment of atheism.
That's something I'd never thought about in that way.
It's a very interesting thought because it's an unbelievably merciful idea in some sense that the burden of life is so unbearable And you see in the Christian passion, of course, torture, unfair judgment by society, betrayal by friends, and then a low death.
And so that's kind of...
That's about as bad as it gets, right?
Which is why it's an archetypal story, right?
It's about as bad as it gets.
And the story that you describe points out that it's so bad that even God himself might despair about the essential Quality of being.
Right, right.
And so that is merciful in some sense because it does say that there is something that's built into the fabric of existence that tests us so severely in our faith about being itself that even God himself falls prey to the temptation to doubt.
And so that's...
Okay, now...
This is where things get very complicated because I want to use that in part to answer the other questions that you answered.
Look, there's a very large clinical literature that suggests that if you want to develop optimal resilience, what you do is you lay out a pathway towards somewhere better.
Someone comes in, they have a problem, you try to figure out what the problem is, and then you try to figure out what might constitute a solution.
And so you have something approximating a map, right?
And it's a tentative map of how to get from where things aren't so good to where they're better.
And then you have the person go out in the world and confront those things that they're avoiding, that are stopping them from moving towards that higher place.
And there's an archetypal reality to that.
You're in a fallen state, you're attempting to redeem yourself, and there's a process by which that has to occur.
And that process involves voluntary confrontation with what you're afraid of, disgusted by, and inclined to avoid.
And that works!
Every psychological school agrees upon that, is that exposure therapy, the psychoanalysts expose you to the tragedies of your past, you know, and redeem you in that manner.
And the behaviorists expose you to the terrors of the present and redeem you in that manner.
But there's a broad agreement across psychological schools that that works.
And my sense is that...
We're called upon as individuals precisely to do that in our life, is that we are faced by this unbearable reality that you made reference to when you talked about the situation on the cross, is that life itself is fundamentally, and this is a pessimism that we might share, is fundamentally suffering and malevolence.
But, and this is I think where we differ, I believe that the evidence suggests that the light that you discover in your life is proportionate to the amount of the darkness that you're willing to forthrightly confront, and that there's no necessary upper limit to that.
So I think that the good that people are capable of is actually It's a higher good than the evil that people are capable of.
And believe me, I do not say that lightly, given what I know about the evil that people are capable of.
And I believe that the central psychological message of the biblical corpus, fundamentally, is that.
That's why it culminates, in some sense, with the idea that it's necessary to adopt It's necessary to confront the devil and to accept your, what would you say, the unjustness of your tortured mortality.
If you can do that, and that's a challenge, as you just pointed out, that's sufficient to challenge even God himself, that you have the best chance of transcending it and living the kind of life that will set your house in order and everyone's house in order at the same time.
And so I think that's even true in states like North Korea.
And I'm not asking people to foolishly immolate themselves for pointless reasons, you know?
When I'm working with people who are clinically and they have a terrible oppressor who's their boss at work, I don't suggest that they march in and tell them exactly what they think of them and end up on the street.
It's not helpful, you know?
And so the pathway towards adopting individual responsibility happens to be a very individual one.
But I do believe that the best bet for most people is to solve the problems that beset them in their own lives, the ethical problems that beset them, that they know are problems.
And that they can set themselves together well enough so that they can then become capable of addressing larger-scale problems without falling prey to some of the errors that characterize, let's say, over-optimistic and intellectually arrogant ideologues.
Let me close with one thing.
One of my favorite quotes from Carl Jung, it's actually a quote that I used at the beginning of my first book, which was called Maps of Meaning, was that If you take a personal problem seriously enough, you will simultaneously solve a social problem.
And this bears on your point, because it's not like your small family, even the relationship between you and your wife, is immune in some sense to the broader social problems around you.
And so let's say right now there's tremendous tension between men and women in the West, and that's certainly the case, given the divorce rate, let's say, that would be some evidence.
And the later and later ages that people are waiting to enter into permanent relationships.
There's a real tension there.
And then if you do establish a relationship with a woman or a partner, but we'll say a woman in this particular case, You are instantly faced with all of the sociological problems in a microcosm in that relationship, and then if you work those damn problems out, if you can work them out within your relationship, then you can get some insight.
It's not complete insight, but you can get some partial insight into what the problem actually is, and get the diagnosis right, and you've moved some small Measure forward in addressing what might constitute the broader social concern and what's even better?
You're punished for your own goddamn mistakes.
And that's another thing I like about the idea of working locally, is that, you know, if I do broad-scale social experiments and they fail, it's like, well, tough luck for the people for whom they failed.
But if I'm experimenting on myself within the confines of my own relationship and I make a mistake, I'm going to feel the pain.
And that's good, that's just, but it also gives me the possibility of learning.
And so I believe that you do...
Solve what you can about yourself first before you can set your family straight and before you should dare to try to set the world straight.
Otherwise you degenerate into this kind of, you already talked about it, this shallow moralizing.
This, well, I've divided my goddamn coke cans up and now I can spend more money on new packaging at The supermarket, which is exactly what the psychological research indicates that people do if they perform a casual, moral action.
They immediately justify committing a less moral action because they've put themselves in a higher moral place.
And you might, if you were a real pessimist, you'd say, well, that's why they performed the action to begin with.
I think that's often true.
That's associated with that shallow moralizing.
Are we too much in this direction?
Or, again, I will put in my Stalinist terms, would you go as far as to say, who needs the people?
We talk for the people and we know better than the people.
No, because I don't want to take too much of the time for the public, but you know what interests me?
Would you then agree, because this is how Hegel reads the story of the fall, that fall really is Felix's culpa, in the sense that for Hegel, before the fall, we are simply animals.
It's through the fall that you perceive Goodness is what will drag you out of the fall.
So, in this sense, fall is constitutive of the very...
You know, it's not you fall from goodness.
You fall, and that's the dialectical paradox.
Your fall...
Retroactively creates what you fell from, as it were.
And that's the tough lesson for cheap moralists to accept.
But you know where I see, very briefly, maybe a counter question.
What fascinates me, we didn't cover this, I didn't cover this, but...
Speaking about ideology, would you agree?
What fascinates me more and more is not big ideology in the sense of projects and so on.
In our cynical era, people claim, oh, we no longer take them seriously and so on.
And here, for me, social dimensions enter even our intimate space.
Implicit beliefs, ideological presuppositions, why not, which we embody in our most common daily practices.
For example, probably some of you already know it, I will nonetheless repeat a very shortened version.
I was occupied at some point by the structure of toilets in Western Europe.
I noticed this specificity of German toilets where, you know, the sheet doesn't disappear in water, it is there exposed so that you smell it and control it for whatever, and I immediately associated it with German spirit of poetry and reflection and so on.
It's a bad joke, but what I'm saying is that in a sense, and I've spoken with some specialists, I was so intrigued by how do you construct toilets, and they admitted it.
There is no direct utilitarian reason.
It is as if even in something as vulgar as going to the toilet, Ideology in this deeper sense is there.
Another thing that at the same level, I repeat one of my old jokes, that fascinates me intensely, is how it's not just as superficial psychoanalysts claim, we pretend to be moral, to believe, but deeply we are cynical, egotists.
Quite often in today's times, we think that we are free, permissive, and so on.
But secretly we are dominated by an entire pathological, or not even often pathological, structure of prohibitions and so on.
So we may, and this is what interests me so much, precisely in today's time where, and this is how, would you agree, we would explain these simple facts which may appear Weird that how apparently they tell us we live in permissive times.
Take your pleasure, enjoy it.
But at the same time there is probably, so some clinicians are telling me, more frigidity and impotence than ever.
The lesson of psychoanalysis, I hope we agree, is not this vulgar one.
You cannot perform sexually, you go to a psychiatrist, he teaches you how to get rid of authority and so on.
It's a much more complex situation.
And this is what interests me immensely.
All this set of implicit beliefs, how you don't even know, but you...
You know, I will repeat the story that half of you know and you.
My favorite, that Niels Bohr anecdote.
You know, he had a house outside Copenhagen, the...
Quantum physics guy.
And he had a horseshoe, a superstitious, above his door, yes?
And then a friend asked him, but do you believe in it?
Why do you have it there?
And he said, of course not, I'm a scientist.
Why then do you have it there?
Because I was told it works.
The idea is it prevents evil spirits to enter the house.
It works even if you don't believe in it.
That's ideology today.
That's ideology today.
It's fundamental.
Okay, so, so, so, um, I want to solicit from you to tell a joke.
Don't you see this?
I think that people are possessed by ideas that aren't theirs and their personalities that aren't theirs.
And that's the great psychoanalytic insight.
It's not ideas, it's personalities.
It's way worse than ideas.
And some of those personalities might be the ones that are associated with the idea that freedom is found in maximizing hedonistic moment-to-moment pleasure or something like that, which sounds like freedom.
For me, One of the things that I suggest to people is that they watch themselves as if they do not understand who they are or what they're ruled by.
And then notice those times when they're where they should be.
And that's back to our discussion about meaning rather than happiness.
It's like you'll see there are times in your life where You're somewhere or you've done something and all of a sudden you're together.
You're where you should be.
Your conscience is not disturbing you.
You're not proud of what you did because pride is the wrong term, but you understand deeply that you've done something that you should have done.
You might not understand why, you might not even understand what it is.
But the study of that can help elucidate the difference between what actually constitutes you, which is a very difficult thing to discover, and what constitutes the accretion that characterizes you because of the, well, let's say, your intense proclivity for socialized mimicry.
And so, you know, you're, I don't mean you personally, but people are amalgams of everything they've seen and everything they've Every person they've watched and everything they've read.
And to integrate that and to find the truth that constitutes that integration is an incredibly difficult endeavor.
And one of the reasons why in 12 Rules for Life, for example, I suggested that people try to tell the truth or at least don't lie, is because one of the ways, apart from pursuing what appears to you to be meaningful, One of the ways of escaping from that possession by the kind of ideology that you're describing,
which is like an unconscious of unidentified axioms, it's something like that, even though they take personified form, they're like personalities, is to stop saying things you know not to be true.
It's a nice pathway forward.
The original rule was tell the truth.
And I thought, no, that's not any good because you're so biased and limited and ignorant and possessed that you don't know what the truth is and so you can't be asked to tell it.
But everyone does have the experience of being about to say or do something that they know by their own...
They know as deeply as they can know anything about themselves.
That that utterance or action is wrong, and they still do it.
Now my suggestion is, try to stop doing that.
And one of the consequences, well you can try in small ways, like you might not be able to manage it in big ways, but now and then, you know, you're tempted to do something that you know to be wrong, and you could not do it.
And if you practice that, You get better and better at not doing it.
And that means you lie less, and you take the easy route out less, and you pursue hedonic pleasures that cost you in the future less.
You start to straighten yourself out.
You take the beam out of your eye.
That's essentially what you're doing.
And over time, you have some modicum of hope that your vision will clear up and you'll be able to see the proper pathway forward and that's part of the process of redemption and it seems to me to be In your grasp,
you're capable of doing that, you have a conscience, it does inform you from time to time correctly about the difference between good and evil, the consequence, the knowledge, the consequence of the fall that you described, which I think you described in very eloquent terms, and that you can slowly make your way back to the straight and narrow path that's characterized by maximal meaning, but also See, this instinct of meaning is a sophisticated one.
It's not that I'm making a case for the individual, like Ayn Rand makes a case for the individual.
That's not it.
I'm making a case for individual responsibility.
That's not the same thing.
It's like, there is something that's good for you, but it has to also be good for your family.
If it's just good for you, that's not good enough.
And if it's good for you and your family and it's not good for society, then that's not good enough either.
And so the responsibility is to find a pathway that balances these things in a harmonious manner.
I got a lot of this thinking from Jean Piaget and his idea of equilibrated states, right?
You're attempting to find something like a game that everyone is willing to play, that can be played in an iterative manner and not degenerate.
Well, hopefully actually ascend, if that's possible.
Hopefully become a better and better game across time.
And I do believe that you can do that.
I do believe that you can do that if you're guided by truth.
And I do believe that the pathway to that is the phenomenology of meaning.
And then the secondary consequence of that is, if you do that, now and then you might be happy.
And then you should be profoundly grateful, because happiness, as we already agreed upon, is something like a grace.
Basically, sorry.
Again, my pessimism comes here.
I agree with you, but the danger here, here ideology can massively enter.
You describe a nice situation.
You are tempted or ordered or whatever to do something that you know it's wrong.
But so-called totalitarian ideologies step in at this point and try to present to you that the true greatness is to do what you individually think is wrong for the higher course.
You know who says this wonderfully?
Horrible guy.
Heinrich Himmler of SS. No, no, no.
Sorry.
Seriously.
He knew the problem.
German officers must do horrible things.
Kill Jewish.
And his solution was double.
First, to let them know, as he put it somewhere, every idiot...
Idiot.
Okay, ordinary man can do something great, maybe.
Not all sacrifice himself for his country.
But his reply was, his point was, but it takes a truly great man to be ready to lose his soul and to do horrible things for his country.
And I read some good memoirs of relatively honest communists who broke down when they were sent to the countryside famine in early 30s.
And this is what they were told by apparatsik.
You will see horrible things, children starving and so on.
Remember, there is the higher cost, and your highest ethical duty is to overcome this small bourgeois sentimentality.
So here I see the danger of, again my pessimism, false meaning, which can massively cover this false narrative.
Second thing, also the solution by, I wonder if you share this pessimism of mine, another one by Himmler.
You know what was his sacred book I read?
He all the time had a special He has a leather-bound copy in his pocket, Bhavagat Gita.
He said his problem was this one.
He puts it perfectly.
Nazi officers have to do horrible things.
Enable them to do it without themselves becoming horrible beings.
His solution was Oriental wisdom.
To learn to act from distance, I am not really there.
And this was the shock of my life.
Based on this, do you know the book?
I found a book, the guy then wrote many books, Brian Victoria, Zen at War.
It's a shocking book, especially Horrible for many so-called anti-Eurocentrists who claim our monotheism is guilty of everything, we need oriental...
Yeah, but that book is about the...
Apart from a couple of exceptions, the behavior of Zen Buddhist community in Japan in the 30s, early 40s, not only they totally supported Japanese expansion into...
into China.
They even provided properly Zen Buddhist justification for it.
For example, the one, you know who did this?
No, you are not as old as me.
I remember him.
D.T. Suzuki, the great priest.
Yeah, but okay, he was doing this in the 60s, but as a younger guy, He was fully supporting Japanese militarism, and one of his justifications was this one.
The advice of Japanese military to them to support Zen Buddhist training.
Because he says, it's one of the most horrifying things that I've ever read, he said, Sorry, don't take it personally, but let's say an officer orders me, if I were to tell this to you, it would be too obvious, so I pick you, I have to kill you, stab you with my knife.
And he says, if I remain in this illusionary self, then I feel responsible, I kill you.
But he says, if you are enlightened by Zen Buddhism, then you know there is no substantial reality, you become a neutral observer.
of your life, just a flow of phenomena, and you tell yourself, it's not that I'm killing you, but in the cosmic dance of phenomena, my knife is floating and somehow your knife falls.
You know what I'm saying?
I'm not disputing some spiritual greatness of Zen Buddhism.
I'm saying how even the most Enlighten this spiritual experience can serve a terrible cause.
Now, because we're running very quickly out of time and it's clear that this conversation could go for a very long time, I'm going to ask one representative question here and give you each one minute each.
And that is simply this.
Coming from online, what is one thing you hope people will leave this debate with and why?
Jordan.
I hope they leave this debate with a belief in the power of communication between people with different views.
I mean, there is this, there is a growing idea on college campuses, tell me if I go over my minute, that there really is no such thing as free speech because people are that there really is no such thing as free speech because people are only the avatars of their group identity and they have nothing And besides that, there's no communication across boundaries of identity or belief.
You know, that's...
And I think that that's an unbelievably dangerous and pernicious Doctrine.
And I think that people of goodwill, despite their differences, can communicate and they can both come out of that communication improved, even though there might be some dissent and some dissent and some dissent on the way.
And so that's what I would hope people would come out of this.
Thank you.
I will be more concrete, even politically.
There is today, so it appears, this big conflict between all that postmodern stuff that you oppose and this alt-right and so on.
I hope sincerely that We made at least some people to think and to reject this simple opposition.
There are quite reasonable...
The only alternative to alt-right is not political correctness and so on.
And now I'm speaking not for you, but for me.
Please, if you are a leftist, don't feel obliged to be politically correct.
Think.
Think.
Don't be afraid.
Don't be afraid to think.
And especially, would you agree, one great version of not thinking is how immediately, if they don't agree with you, you are labeled a fascist.
But that's the laziness.
People find something they don't agree with, instead of thinking, they think about something we all agree was a bad thing, op, you are a fascist, and so on.
You know, it's not as simple as that.
Even Trump, of whom I'm deeply critical, know, I'm sorry to tell you, yes, he is a catastrophe in the long term and so on, but he is not a fascist.
You make it all too easy.
To play these games.
I just want not a positive result, but to shatter you a little bit, to make you think.
I have always felt that the greatest conversations are unfinished ones.
Please join me in thanking Slavoj ��ižek and Jordan Peterson for a great unfinished conversation.
It's nice that we survived this I mean, no...
Thank you, bye-bye.
Thank you.
I know what happens to do that.
I've got one, and I'm a free warrior, and I get to my friends with the social groups and get back to the best of them.
Alright.
▲
Export Selection