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Nov. 12, 2019 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
57:27
Rex Murphy (REXTV) interviews Jordan Peterson
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About to join me now is probably the world's most famous intellectual, certainly the most famous intellectual to come out of Canada certainly the most famous intellectual to come out of Canada in the last 20 years.
And he will be speaking with me about the role of the university and about his meteoric rise to intellectual and media influence.
Dr.
Jordan Peterson.
Dr.
Peterson, I'm going to start on an incidental thing.
At least it's incidental to me and it's bothered me since you became known as it is now to all the world.
And that was in the very early days of the controversy that came to you when the University of Toronto sent you some military letters that I thought, I've used this word before, insolent, that I thought were against the spirit of the university, that they weren't supporting you, they were actually threatening you.
Yes.
And that said to me that something is beyond a particular controversy.
Something deeper is wrong here, that universities or this university is upside down.
How did you reason that?
How did they get there that they could be so completely unaware of their own position?
Well, I think a lot of it was confusion and And a lack of experience with this sort of thing.
I mean, the University of Toronto is a peaceful place and a rather conservative university, all things considered.
The administration wasn't prepared to handle A controversy of the nature that swirled around me.
They were used to making minor administrative decisions, and when they were put on the spot and forced to defend their fundamental presumptions, let's say, it isn't clear that they were ready and prepared to do so.
Partly because of lack of practice.
It isn't necessarily the case that you climb the administrative chain in a university by engaging in continual philosophical reappraisal of the fundamental presuppositions of a university as an institution.
You know, it's a much more administrative job.
And so, I'm going to say everything I can in favor of the University of Toronto before I say anything contrary.
When I've been put on the spot by journalists and asked to defend, let's say, customs that everyone has always accepted, like marriage, it's very difficult to generate a defense.
For such an institution off the top of your head, let's say, because part of the whole purpose of customs is that everyone accepts them.
You don't think.
They're a reflex.
Well, they are.
They're unstated presuppositions.
And so when you're put on the spot, you don't know what to do.
When I first got the letter, The first letter, and I know how HR departments work.
They send you one letter of warning so that it's documented, and then they send you another so that it's documented, and then they send you a third, and if you haven't ceased by then, well, then they go to the next step, which would be something to do with whatever approximation, determination they might be able to manage.
They document you.
Yes, yes, and they're documenting all the steps, and I told the person who delivered the letter to me, who's a person I actually got along with quite well, That it was full of errors, and it was poorly written, and that they should take it back and write it properly, because I did!
I know.
I followed it.
I know.
And because if they were going to do this, they better do it right, or there was going to be trouble.
And I didn't mean that I was going to cause trouble, necessarily, but that there was going to be trouble.
But they didn't take it back, so I read it on YouTube.
So, and then I did the same thing with the second letter.
And then I met the dean, and after that, and You know, we agreed.
We had quite a congenial discussion, I would say, and we agreed to have a discussion, at least a debate.
It never was a debate.
It was, I don't know what they call those now.
They can't be debates.
They were forums or something like that.
Not a debate about Free speech on campus.
That was the three...
Yeah, I saw that.
It was awful.
Yeah, it was quite the...
But they did do it, which was something, you know.
And I've also heard that behind the scenes, because I have some friends who...
Some colleagues who have some access to administrative decisions, and they believe that the University of Toronto, in the aftermath of all this, has actually...
It reconfirmed its internal commitment to free speech.
And, you know, I don't know how much of that is true, but I'm willing to give them a certain amount of benefit of the doubt.
But it's important to understand that people can be caught unaware.
And the other thing, too, is that they actually did me a bit of a favor, because one of the things I claimed in the YouTube video that I made was that what I was doing by making the video was probably illegal.
Yes, I remember.
And their lawyers basically said that it was probably illegal.
And so that also helped establish my bona fides, let's say, as a reasonable interpreter of the law.
And so it wasn't all bad, although it was extraordinarily stressful, that and the demonstrations that followed.
How is it that in a university, which of all things, obviously it's the exercise of thought, the training of the mind, and therefore the power of expression that comes as a result of those two things, that to say things under the manner of reason and an exercised mind, That's what it is.
So how comes it that on certain issues, the transgender one as well, there's a whole list of them, the politically correct ones, that suddenly not only is language being bent, it's being turned upside down in some cases.
Also, neologisms are floating out there every six seconds with new rules on them.
A word you never heard yesterday is somehow or other prejudice if you say it today.
Yes, or even illegal to use.
Very much.
Like the idea of dead-naming.
The very one I was thinking, the word didn't exist two days ago, and now if you dead-name someone, which is a word that doesn't exist, you're in violation of something or a horrible bigot.
When have we let go of the scraps that kept us either to something like reason, or when have we lost our nerve that when people come to you and they say to you things that you know, not from bias, Our nonsense, that they can't simply be dismissed as nonsense with no peril whatsoever.
Well, you're assuming that we had nerve.
Yeah, sorry.
Well, I mean, you know, some people have nerve.
But one of the things I've learned over the last three years, because really this all started in October of 2016, was that the percentage of people who have nerve is very small.
And vanishingly small.
You know, I've met people.
Douglas Murray has nerve, that's for sure.
Roger Scruton has nerve.
Yes, he has.
Lindsay Shepard has nerve.
Yes, she has.
There's a handful of people that I've met who you can't move.
You know, you're one of them, I would say.
Try.
Well, succeed, I would say.
And I've met a number of journalists who, you know, I've had my fair share of conflict with journalists, that's for sure, I would say.
Talking to journalists is the most stressful thing I've done, apart from talks at university campuses.
Right.
Just to sidetrack that, because it's a very good issue.
Journalism, I've been playing at it from the margins for a long while.
Journalism is very much corrupted.
It is not the media in the middle.
It is, in many cases, wittingly or unwittingly partisan.
It is part of the game that it says it's covering.
Journalism is one of the failing institutions in this society, as much as universities.
Yeah, well, you know, there's technological reasons for that.
You know, journalism as such is under unbelievable pressure from the new technologies, YouTube, podcasts in particular, which of course have also vastly expanded what constitutes journalism.
And so journalists are running scared.
It's very difficult for them to find paying jobs.
Their staffs are shrinking.
The newspapers are in trouble.
Television stations are vanishing.
And so there's increasing desperation, I would say, As well as decreasing professionalism among those who still practice.
And so some of it's the personal failings of the ideologues who happen to be occupying the positions that ideologues occupy.
But some of it's a consequence of these transformations in communication technology that are so vast that they're actually inconceivable.
And I think YouTube, both YouTube and podcasts are great examples of that.
Podcasts even more than YouTube, because YouTube serves billions of people, which is one walloping network.
Yeah.
Podcasts are maybe ten times as popular, and that's all underground.
It's interesting because they don't attract as much attention or as much controversy, maybe because they're more siloed in some sense.
But the journalists are fighting a losing game, and I think as you fight a losing game, I've seen this happen with corporations, you lose your best people first, and then the death spiral begins, and I think we're seeing exactly that.
Mm-hmm.
Then that's exaggerated by this proclivity to polarization that also might be part and parcel of the technological changes.
Let me sweep back to that other word, nerve.
I know, because I follow you, how deep your respect and attention to Alexander Solzhenitsyn is.
If he'll have a hero, obviously he is it.
Now, in the Soviet Union, if Solzhenitsyn writes a small note or something, he gets tossed off into a gulag for nine years or more.
If a man looks the wrong way in China, he can pivot some damn camp, and in Korea we won't even go into it.
In those countries, if you want to say something, even if it's merely innocuous, you really have to have courage.
Solzhenitsyn should be called Stalin.
He had to steal.
Over here, when, okay, we have a trans activist group, let's name the one that's in the thing, and you almost innately know that this is absurd, and you say, well, I don't think I'm going to say that's absurd.
What are we afraid of?
We fight wars and say we gave all our soldiers this, that we would preserve democracy and freedom of speech.
There is no loss If you decide to challenge in terms of any contrast with the totalitarian systems, where if you said something, you really did pay a price.
Worst thing you can do over here is lose a job.
Well, you can be hauled in front of quasi-judicial tribunes as well, and they're certainly willing to do that.
I think the human rights tribunals should, in my opinion, they should be obliterated.
They're a travesty.
Yes, we're setting up these quasi-judicial inquisitions in all sorts of institutions.
And ideologically constituted because I read the biographies of some of the people who were appointed to them.
Yeah.
And no one can be a judge in their own cause.
In this context, it's the cause people judging the causes.
Yeah, precisely.
And look what's happening in British Columbia with this case.
What's the person's name?
Jessica or Jonathan.
I prefer Jonathan.
I think we'll go with Jonathan.
I think we will.
And we'll see if they'll haul us in front of the Interior Human Rights Commission.
We will go together.
Good.
That would be too much to bear, undoubtedly, but it would be interesting.
But no, he's got 16 people.
A good portion of them are immigrant women.
He is insisting that they wax his penis and testicles.
If he's got hair on the first, it's a bit of a worry.
And he's got 16 of them under charge.
And I ask the question, if 16 people are of this mind and one person is of this, which is the more likely to be off?
Yeah, well, it seems irrelevant.
And I mean, it's a consequence, you know.
One of the things I pointed out with Bill C-16 was that it contained multiple internal contradictions, especially in the background policies, which I had read in quite a bit of detail.
They were formulated.
In Ontario, although the federal government removed the link on their website to those policies after I pointed out the fact that that link existed, which I thought was unbelievably underhanded and still believes so.
But Carl Jung once said that internal contradictions are played out in the world as fate, you know, is that...
The thing about propositions, if they're accurate, is that they represent real states of being in the world.
And if you entertain a set of propositions that are internally contradictory, then you're going to run yourself into all sorts of sharp objects and dead ends.
And that's exactly what's happening.
And it...
Every time, and I've thought this really for three years, every time you think that there's no possible way that this can get more absurd, then one more example comes up where it's more absurd.
And I would say the situation in BC is precisely that.
I mean, one of the women that he's persecuting, because I think he and this terrible bureaucracy is persecuting, was an immigrant woman.
I believe she was Muslim.
Who had an aesthetics business in her own home, and as a consequence of the negative publicity, or the publicity and the pressure, she shut down her business.
And God only knows what that means for her family and for her.
And you were asking about courage earlier, you know.
One of the things that...
I have watched quite frequently is the way that people respond to being mobbed on Twitter.
I've almost stopped looking at Twitter.
It's been about three months that I've taken a Twitter hiatus, let's say.
I still post...
I don't even have my password anymore.
I send what I want to post to a third party and they post it because it keeps me out of the...
An antiseptic distance.
That's right, exactly.
And that's exactly the right way of thinking about it.
You know, people...
Civilized people, and I mean that in civilized, socialized people, cannot tolerate being mobbed.
No, they can't.
And there's a reason for that.
You see, you said, with regards to the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, You know, if there's 16 people on one side and one on the other, you might be thinking that the 16 people are right.
More or less.
Right, right.
But then you think of the situation where you've said something on Twitter and, you know, a thousand people mob you publicly.
I mean, your first response is going to be to examine your own conscience and see how you transgressed.
It's not really much different psychologically.
I mean, it's lesser, I suppose, but it's not that much different Then waking up one morning and coming to your door and finding a mob of your neighbors angrily aggregated on your lawn, you know, it's a terrible shock for people, and it really hurts them.
You know, they're often, by all accounts, you know, damaged for lengthy periods of time by this, and their first impulse is to apologize, which is Which is truly the wrong thing.
The right thing to do is to understand that if you haven't done anything wrong, you don't apologize.
Now that's very difficult.
It's very difficult.
And then to wait.
Because if you wait two weeks, people will come to your defense.
But it takes the people who will come to your defense two weeks to get their act together, where it takes the activists who are unbelievably organized 15 seconds to mob you.
Well, there's two points to draw out of there.
First of all, because you have now been almost fire-hosed into the world of celebrity, multimedia, and vast attention.
I've dabbled in a lesser zone for a long while, so you adjust to the kind of swirl.
But what I've never forgotten, and I'm serious, is that people who are not in it at all, my father, or a mechanic down the road, or the doctor over here, doesn't have to be class.
If you haven't had media, and if you haven't adjusted to it, and suddenly your name, and I'm just backing up your point, your name suddenly becomes the center of some Great Twitter snowstorm in pejorative terms and people are speaking of you with the most vulgar responses.
It is a terror.
It isn't to me, because I dismiss it, but people who have not experienced it, it is really, really, really something that it's an unbearable pain.
And they bring it down with club force and the great megaphones of national networks in the States, etc.
You can expunge a person's personality with this kind of brutality.
Yes, well, and it's permanent.
Right, because the record never disappears.
I'll put a personal question to you now.
I know you had been on YouTube, you knew the media in that sense, but you weren't a media person.
In your baptism, harsh as it was, how hard was it in the first couple of weeks for you to find balance and scale?
You may be a clinical psychologist and you are obviously mature.
Oh, I don't think I've ever found balance and scale.
Well, join my club.
I don't believe it.
I mean, I'm here still.
I mean, in that great throbbing moment when all this stuff came in and He hates this one, and your name is flashed all over the world.
That was the first real magnitude of media attack on you.
So even for you, how was that period?
Well, it was dreadful, especially the first couple of months, because the attention was...
Well, it has been since then, but the attention was unbelievably intense.
I mean, there were days upon days where there were reporters lined up coming into the house, one after the other, and that really hasn't stopped.
I mean, it stopped, let's say, in the last Two months since the end of March, however long ago that is, because I've shut myself off because I have some family health trouble that's very serious, but I don't think I've ever Adjusted to it.
What's made it bearable, I would say, and some of it's been very good, you know.
Yeah, I know it has.
I mean, it's taken my life, which was fairly broad.
I had a fairly broad range of experiences, partly because I'm a clinical psychologist, and, you know, it's taken it from good and bad to great and unbearable, and a yo-yo between those states.
What's helped is, well, the first thing is that, you know, I determined right from the beginning that I was going to say carefully what I believed to be true because there wasn't a safer route than that.
It's interesting.
You know, that in the final analysis, it wasn't certain that anything would protect me Better than building the right thing.
Well, whether that would work or not was debatable, but there wasn't a better option.
Yeah, I can understand that.
And I believe that.
You know, I still believe that.
And I think the success of what I've done is an indication of that.
The success of my book, say, which is also absolutely overwhelming.
I mean, it's impossible to Especially, I'm kind of old, you know, I'm just about 60.
And you're white and you're male.
Well, there's all of those things.
You are a bad man.
Yeah, well, the old part, I think, has to do with the ability to adapt.
I'm even older and whiter than men.
Yeah, well, but, you know, it's fulfilled, and the lectures and the podcasts as well.
And the YouTube videos, they've fulfilled a need, which also is something that's very difficult for me to reconcile myself to, you know, I mean, every time I walk down the street, someone stops me, someone stop me on the way here, you know, and as opposed to my treatment at the hand of a minority of journalists, which has been atrocious upon occasion, and academics as well.
The treatment I receive from people in public is so positive that it's almost unbearable.
Let me tell you a personal anecdote that relates to you.
I don't mix my old stuff with family members, but my sister is a non-political kind of person.
And as I say, I don't mix those things.
She called me, and she's out of this world altogether.
She called me about, I don't know, a year ago.
Have you seen Dr.
Jordan?
Do you know Dr.
Jordan?
Lovely stuff.
And she was following the videos, the biblical lectures.
She's a smart, nice woman.
And then, that was one thing.
That was unsolicited.
She's not in the world of publicity.
She doesn't follow fads, but somehow your name got in there, and she's watching these with great attention, great enjoyment, actually.
But the better one, won't be particular.
Friend of mine from home.
Never finished school.
He's about 55, 56, so we're not into the team cohorts.
And he calls me up.
I don't think he's read a book in six years.
And he says, I've been watching this Peterson fellow.
I can't reproduce what he was saying.
It was just that he found such comfort and he found such support.
And my thought when I was hearing this, it was some way to relay it to you in all the ping-pong back and forth that you're going to.
These voices are saying something.
You're doing something really fine for people that I could never project would be receiving the message.
This is also something that's been very difficult to Both understand, and I would say in a strange way, to tolerate, because I've become opened up to the trouble that people have in a way that far exceeds even what I experienced as a clinical psychologist.
You know, last year, my wife and I went to 160 cities.
Yeah, it was, well, we figured we'd better make, hey, while the sun shines.
You're a stronger man than I. Well, you get caught up in the wave of events.
The adrenaline self-supplies.
Well, and it was exciting and worthwhile, and the demand was there.
I enjoy lecturing, and I used the opportunity.
I delivered a different lecture every night, and I used the opportunity to think and to communicate, which of course is what In a manner that I believed would be psychologically helpful, but it was also,
I think, and I don't know exactly what the cumulative effect has been on me, but I had no idea the degree to which People were dying for a word of encouragement.
That's what my friend was about.
I'm speaking back to you now on the same thing.
I know what he was saying.
He had felt no soft brain for a long, long time.
And he was in this camp of the truly neglected.
You're uneducated.
You're not particularly sophisticated.
You got a low-paying job.
Who gives a fuck about you?
And then someone is out there of stature and credibility, and this guy who would never be in your circle, never.
You send an echo ping to him, and he was calling me to say, my God, this is so good.
Allow yourself to feel good.
Yeah, well, the funny thing is that it doesn't feel good.
You know and that might be a reflection of my general state of mind which is very Unsettled at the moment for the reasons that I told you and well Because of all of everything that's happened over the last few years, but to get a taste of the depth of despair that that can be ameliorated with With not much more than,
you know, some words of encouragement, some statement that, you know, you as a human being aren't intrinsically worthless and that you have a spirit worth preserving That the things that you do in your life that you do correctly are important.
It's like people are literally dying for lack of that.
And I mean that.
I mean that honestly.
I don't know how many people have told me.
And these are very hard things to hear.
It's been...
Hundreds of people, because I meet people after each of my lectures, you know, who've told me that they are still alive because they watched my lectures or because they read my book.
And then they usually have a good story to tell, you know, about what sort of hell they happened to be in six months earlier and...
What they did to pull themselves out, and how that's brought their family back together, or helped them advance in their career, or got them out of bed, or stopped them from using heroin, or being alcoholic, and...
Or jumping off and...
Yeah, well, and, you know, all of that is...
I'm...
Is it something that you, at some point, have at least to shield against?
No.
No?
No.
No.
Maybe I can put it in another way.
I meant to ask this a little earlier, but you're already telling me.
When this began, this is an experience, and you set out to the world.
You had maps of meaning.
I also know, without knowing you, that you had spent some considerable time doing actual thinking, which is something people don't do very much.
Yes, obsessively.
You thought, and you thought things through in a way that these generations have almost abandoned.
So you were prepared in that sense.
And you went out and there were certain things you saw wrong or discordant, either in the universities or in the general system.
And you said, I'd like to spread some reason here.
I'd like to talk also about reality and life.
Now, when that began...
I would think everything was fairly sufficient.
What did you learn and how did...
I'll call it a mission, if I may.
How did the mission change over time when you came in contact with the audience that you're now describing?
And what is it that you have learned?
You have done a lot of thought beforehand, you knew where you were at, but when you go out and encounter all of these and all of these individuals, What new came to you?
Well, I would say it isn't obvious to me that the mission itself changed.
I think it's an extension of what I've been doing since 1985 and maybe even before that.
It's just that the scale continued to grow.
I mean, even with my YouTube channel where I put my lectures in rather primitive technological form because I was just using an iPad and, you know, a lapel mic.
Yeah, I remember.
I had a million views by April 2016 and you know that really made me think because I worked with TVO of course and my lectures were popular with big ideas which showcased a number of public intellectuals.
I think I had five lectures in the top 20 or something like that so I knew that there was And I was getting a certain amount of recognition in public for that.
Not a lot, but, you know, enough.
And then from a very wide variety of people, you know, which was quite interesting.
When I hit the million mark on YouTube, I really thought about that because I thought, well, I don't know what to do with that figure.
I don't know how to conceptualize it in context because a million is a lot of people.
It's 20 football stadiums full of people.
It's an overwhelmingly best-selling book.
Yeah.
It's far more people than you'd teach in your life.
And I thought, well, what?
And it wasn't cute cat videos, you know?
And this was back when YouTube was still a developing force, let's say.
Yeah, that's right.
And something to be sort of ignored in some sense because of its humble beginnings.
And it was a very secondary place.
Yes, it was a very secondary place, although that was starting to change.
I thought, what the hell is this YouTube?
What are we doing here?
And then it struck me that while this was a Gutenberg revolution that we were experiencing, that the spoken word was now as permanent and as immediate, more immediate than the printed word, and just as permanent, and with a much larger audience, because more people, as far as I can tell, can listen.
Than can read.
And even with my book, a tremendous percentage of my books have been sold in audio form.
So I really started to think about YouTube at that point, and I suppose that was one of the things that drove me in my foolish curiosity to make those political videos that I made in October, which was the first time I'd ever tried something like that.
And that was in some sense, I wouldn't call it a whim, But, you know, I woke up at three in the morning because I was so irritated about this bill, and its attempt to force a certain type of language usage, and I could see what was behind that quite clearly.
I thought, well, you know, this really is annoying me to death, and often what I would do when something was annoying me to death was get up and write, but I thought, well, I'll make a YouTube video and see what happens.
Well, I certainly saw what happens.
Yeah, you did.
Yeah, yeah, no kidding.
Well, the thing is, you know, you've got a hold of something.
Let's say it's YouTube, and you think you know what it is.
And, you know, you don't.
You don't have any idea what it is, and neither does anyone else, and that's certainly still the case.
We have no idea what these multiple technologies are doing to us, but I can tell you that YouTube It's an overwhelming force and it's becoming more and more powerful day by day.
I've especially seen that in countries, Slovenia was a good example, where no one really trusts the mainstream press.
All the young people do, and not so young either.
Pretty much everybody under 35, I would say.
All they watch is YouTube.
And that's the case all over the world.
And so it's...
I think on my YouTube channel, my videos have been watched 110 million times.
And the total viewership is probably...
Like, because people keep cutting them up and distributing them, which is something else that can be done on YouTube, right?
You can have a dialogue, right, where people edit and make their own commentaries.
The total for that would be at least 500 million.
Dear God.
Yeah, that's for sure.
Dear God.
It's...
Yeah, it's a new...
Well, it's not a new conversation.
It's a new idea of conversation.
I don't even know that it's the word for it.
Yeah, well, it certainly has that conversational aspect that television lacks.
It's very comical to watch an organization like CBC try to adapt itself to YouTube, maybe, because they'll put on a 10-minute clip, and they break all the rules.
They put two 30-second commercials in front of them, which you can't skip.
No one will watch it.
No one will watch it.
What you do with YouTube is you put on a...
Ten-second commercial and you let people skip it after five seconds.
That's the rule.
They break that rule.
Then they don't allow comments.
And so they'll put up something you might want to watch, you know, for ten minutes and they'll get like, you know, 20,000, 30,000 views because they don't take the conventions of the...
No.
They don't take it seriously.
And it's like, you should take YouTube seriously, man.
Well, they also have no intuition for these particular forms and they're also...
This will circle back even to the beginning.
They're wrapped up in certain ideas about things, and they're wrapped up in a certain orientation towards change and politics, that there's only certain corridors that they will walk down, and there are other corridors which you are forbidden to, or it is heresy to even admit that they exist.
Yes, and populations you won't deign to address.
See, one of the things that's interesting about the YouTube stars, you know, like Rogan and, say, Dave Rubin, Is that they don't think their audience is stupid.
That's a good beginning.
And it is.
It is a really good beginning.
It is a very good beginning.
You know, one of the things I've noticed at my lectures is, well, you talked about the gentleman who sent you the email.
You know, he's 55.
He wasn't well educated.
A tremendous number of the people who are coming to my lectures are people in that camp.
They're working class.
Yes.
Often men, but not always.
Women as well, but more men.
And they're long-haul truckers or construction workers and They're listening to three-hour lectures and complex lectures, too.
That's the point.
And it's because they're not stupid.
They're interested in the world.
It also defies a great axiom.
If you were in the television world private or public for 30 years, the idea, if you had an interview, I did a provincial show for years and years.
If you had an interview, you may make it four minutes.
They're not going to watch you for five minutes.
If you had a commentary, can you make it 60 seconds?
The idea that people had an attention span that went beyond four minutes never entered into the world of people in the studio.
No, that's right.
And you put stuff on that has no glitz, it's profound, it can be complex, and it goes on for 60, 70, 80 minutes, and everyone is happy.
Yeah.
I mean, it's all upside down.
They've been operating under wrong assumptions for three decades.
Yeah, well, and Rogan's interviews are three hours long.
Yeah.
You know, and people watch the whole thing or listen to the whole thing.
Let's go back to another area where you really have been on the mark.
I'm saying that personally, and I think you're absolutely correct.
This is not sycophancy.
Some of the stuff that goes on in the university, if I read the course syllabus, if I read some of these real peer reviews, some of the subjects in there are beneath tripe.
Well, that's why they've flourished.
I'm serious.
I'm serious.
I've thought about this a lot.
It's like, what the hell happened?
And here's what happened, is that, you know, the scientific types and the serious scholars, they're a specific sort of person.
They're rather obsessed, the good ones.
Yeah.
The great ones are completely obsessed.
Yeah, and partly mad.
Well, maybe you need a bit of that to be completely obsessed.
I think you are.
And, you know, a minority of scientists produce the majority of the literature.
And it's the same in the humanities and in the social sciences.
And so those are people who are working 70 or 80 hours a week.
All they do is work.
And what they work on is their thing.
And they need to do that because, well, they're on the cutting edge and they want to stay there.
And they have their ambitions for...
Sometimes it's political ambitions, but their stuff never lasts.
The good scholars, some of them are great.
They discover amazing things.
I mean, I've encountered amazing psychological research, you know, that's just… Especially on the physiological end of things, in the general literature, that's just absolutely brilliant beyond belief.
And even the voyage of discovery is a tremendous ecstasy in itself.
Yes, and it's a minority taste in some sense.
And then there's these pseudo-disciplines, which have multiplied since the 1960s, and no one who was serious paid any attention to them.
See, that's what happened.
The serious people were busy doing their serious things, and there was all this...
Yeah, stuff.
Yeah, political activism.
Identity politics, gender stuff.
That's right, that's right, in the, what do they call them, grievance studies departments, you know, and everybody just sort of assumed that they were noisy, but harmless.
But they were not harmless because they were extraordinarily well organized.
And the balance tipped.
You know, it almost tipped in the 90s because there was a big rising of political correctness around 1993.
But then the American economy boomed like mad.
And I think that just kind of took the steam out of the, what would you call it, out of the objections.
But something happened four years ago, something like that.
Five years ago, where the scales tipped.
I think it was a fair part of this, I really like your opinion, is the growth of this, it's an awful philosophy, the idea of identity politics, which carries two great axioms.
That I can only communicate with you if you're of the same tribe as I am.
And if you're teaching me in particular, I can't be taught by you if you're not of my tribe.
But education is actually to receive it from everybody else and take you out of yourself.
And the second thing is the subdivisions of identity politics.
That ridiculous story out in BC is on identity politics, gender politics.
That's roared out into society.
Half the people and half the dinner tables of North America are afraid to bring these subjects up.
It's probably more than half.
And we're being ruled by them.
Yeah.
Well, it doesn't take a very large determined minority to shut down a large and silent majority.
That's unfortunately the rule.
And the identity politics issue, it's a reversion to tribalism.
It is.
And so the miracle actually...
The surprise isn't actually that it's back.
The surprise is that it never went away.
True enough.
And we took the fact that it went away for granted.
And we forgot the reasons that it went away.
We forgot the axioms, right?
We started to lose faith in them, let's say.
And, well, that's partly what I've been trying to fight against and to write about why those rules were necessary and what they meant.
Is part of your project, you know the various words I'm using here, is part of your project a kind of restoration or a reminder that certain markers are fundamental and cannot be moved?
Well, that is the project.
I mean, when I wrote my first book, which took me about 15 years to write, and I spent all my time, except when I was writing scientific papers, And when I was socializing, which I did a fair bit of thinking about that book.
I mean, it was really obsessive thinking, chronic, from the time I woke up till the time I went to bed, unless I was engaged in some other activity that would shut down my mind.
I was trying to understand whether there were...
It was, what, a foundation of stone underneath the presumptions of Western civilization.
And it was really a postmodern book, Maps of Meaning, which I didn't understand, because at the time, being unfamiliar with that lexicon, let's say, There was the terrible Cold War raging and, you know, it wasn't obvious that it wasn't merely a matter of opinion.
You know, you could make that case is that, well, here's your set of Marxist presuppositions, many of which sounded incredibly attractive and which still do.
To some, yeah.
You know, from each according to his ability to each according to his need.
I mean, no one likes to see people with needs unfulfilled.
The problem is that needs multiply without end and ability is limited.
But, you know, you have to start thinking about The world in a harsh and sophisticated way to notice that flaw.
I wanted to analyze that system and the Nazi system to a lesser degree but also that and the Western system to see if there was something at the bottom that was rock-like that wasn't merely arbitrary and I believe that What I discovered,
let's say, or thought through was that we got some things in the West fundamentally correct, and they're correct for biological reasons, which is very important because we've been around a very long time, and biological reasons are very fundamental, but also that that biology reflects some underlying metaphysics as well that we don't understand because we don't understand anything about the fundamental nature of the world.
It's beyond us.
The why.
Yes, the whys and the wherefores for that matter, the purpose, all of that.
The fact that people have religious experiences and that they're easily duplicable and that they seem to be consistent across societies, at least to some degree.
And what I decided then, because I was trying to understand why the world had divided itself up into armed camps that were hell-bent on mutual destruction, right?
Mutual assured destruction.
Right?
The terrible acronym MAD, which was, you know, an insane satanic joke, and why it was so important for us to defend our tribal positions in that manner, and what, if anything, could be done about it?
Like, here's the solution.
We have this terrible tribal warfare that's characteristic of our species, and it's accelerated to a degree that's not sustainable.
What do we do about it?
And the answer that What came to me as a consequence of what I studied was that we try to make ourselves better people.
The solution to tribalism is the elevation of the individual, and the West got that right.
The individual is the atom that begins the entire reaction.
Yes, yes.
And that's why the identity politics makes the individual a simple avatar of the collective.
Right.
And everything that attaches to him is always extrinsic and not essential.
Yes, exactly.
And you strip personality and we're adding up groups and trying to administer justice via a collective.
It's insane.
It's terrible.
It's terrible.
It's so dangerous.
And I heard you on this.
Why do we seek to perpetrate some sort of justice over the generations?
It was one of the worst things in all of history that you would make the son or the daughter carry the sin of their parents.
And now you're seeing it in reparations again.
All the ideas that we thought had been completely wiped out, either enlightenment or the civil logic itself, they're back.
Why are we so easily yielding to this?
I mean, the patterns of correctness and language and people kind and things of that order.
It's an absurdity.
Well, I think some of it is the desire to escape from individual responsibility.
If you can dissolve yourself in the collective, then the impetus isn't on you to act As forthrightly as would otherwise be necessarily the case.
So there's that, and then there's the undeniable attraction of having someone to blame for the miseries of your existence, which are likely manifold.
It's also the comfort of saying, I can start a small war with one tribe and another, and we can play games with each of these blocks.
It won't be a society, it won't be a country, but if you dissolve the collective politics, I mean the real politics, into subcategories of gender, sex, ethnic, religion, and each of these is now claiming a right only as a collective, Everything else falls apart.
You know you're Yeats, and there's no need to quote it.
But again, back to the universities.
If there's one place that can reset balances, it starts with mind.
It starts with the younger mind that will be met with a more mature mind and taught the ways of the mind, how the mind works, what you should read, how you form judgments, how you put contrast over great lengths of time, not today and tomorrow, but 500 years ago.
If you train the minds, then there is a balance, and there's an opportunity to see the world as it really is.
You have to believe in the mind in order to do that.
Well, you know, it goes back to exactly what we were discussing, is that, you know, one of the things I've pointed out to my audiences is that there isn't a debate about who should speak on campuses.
There's a debate about whether free speech exists.
That's a whole different debate.
I know it is.
People don't understand the difference in the severity of those two debates.
Like, if I don't want you to talk, I still might believe that people can talk, and they can exchange opinions, and they can change each other's minds, and even if they're different, the argument that's being put forward on the campuses to stop people from speaking is that There is no such thing as free speech.
All there is is the exchange of the ideas of avatars who are possessed by their group ideology.
Exactly.
And then the logical consequence of that is to refuse to let them speak, because why should you allow the group that you're in direct competition with to have its voice?
And so it's the collectivists, the identity politics types.
It's the very idea of individuality that they're opposed to, that they've dispensed with.
And that goes back to the French, the terrible, the despicable French intellectuals who, in my opinion, were responsible for leading this revolution.
And it got picked up, as always, the most obnoxious and useless ideas, useless in the sense of their intrinsic logic, find the easiest welcome on the campus.
This is the most trendy institution in the world.
Yeah, well, and it came through the Yale English department.
Yes, of all of them, yeah.
Yeah, that's where the French continental ideas made their entrance into North America.
In all your travels and speeches, I know much of it gets small p into politics, because that's the world we're in.
Do you get much chance, because obviously no one could follow you around.
It wouldn't last.
Do you get much chance to expand on The beauties of the culture, I'm thinking of poetry and music and things of this nature, the other side of the academic, the things that sometimes, you know, they sing to the human spirit.
I do, I do.
I mean, that's one of the reasons that I was so motivated to continue the lectures, you know, because we actually put together a sequence of tours.
We didn't plan 160 cities in one go.
I mean, it sort of unfolded.
It's only you and Bono left.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it unfolded across time, you know, because they were so popular, and the popularity didn't seem to be waning, but it was an opportunity to put forward the case for all the wonderful things that we've done, and to express gratitude and amazement at the fact that,
you know, the fact that our city, this city, Toronto, this city works is, for me, and I think this is partly because I've been sensitized so much to To the catastrophes of existence in sort of the collective and the personal sense is that when I go outside and everything works and there's all these people of different colors and creeds and religions walking down the street and it's all peaceful and the lights go on regularly and the power is always working and everything technological is
100% reliable and there's no riots in the street and the probability that you're going to meet with an untimely and painful Death at the hands of someone else is almost nil and that we live for such a long time.
All of this to me is a complete miracle.
It truly is.
And I remind people of the unlikelihood of that constantly in the lectures and ask them to be grateful for the fact that, I mean, you think, you look a hundred years ago in 1919, you just think of what you would have been through in the last six years, right?
The Russian Revolution, The First World War, the Spanish Influenza, just absolute bloody hellish catastrophe, one after the other.
The conception of Nazism was brewing then, too.
Right, right, right, right.
The seeds of the next catastrophe were already at work.
They were.
And also, of course, the same thing with the Russian Revolution, which was bloody enough to begin with, but which certainly accelerated in its brutality as it expanded.
You know, we don't have any of that at the moment.
It's actually the world is more peaceful than it's ever been.
There's no wars in the Western Hemisphere.
That's the first time since the coming of Columbus that the entire Western Hemisphere is free of conflict.
I see frequently on your various sites that you do list up, and that's another great counter.
The environmental crowd, and I don't take them as being pure either.
Some of them are, obviously.
Most of them are not.
They're always having a spectacular, at the high table, a catastrophe.
The world is ending the more.
This is the worst we'll ever be.
We're destroying the planet.
You point out very frequently that certain of the technologies, certain of the advances of this civilization have lifted people out of poverty.
They've put them into new situations.
We have relieved more suffering in some cases, maybe not more than we have caused, but it's a different century.
We should be grateful for things.
Gratitude is in short supply.
Yes, and it's completely absent among the collectivists and the people who play identity politics.
There's no gratitude at all.
And it's so interesting to me to see that because Let's say the professors who lead those movements, they are the most protected people who've ever lived.
It's like they're standing on a hill and around them is a wall and it's four feet away and around them that wall is another wall that's four feet away and another wall and another wall and there's just sequential walls and at this edge of the sequential walls is a huge army and it's powerful.
All of that protects them, absolutely.
And they say, everything is corrupt and going to hell.
And there's just no sense of gratitude whatsoever.
And that's appalling to me because it's so unlikely to occupy a position like that.
And the proper response, although criticism is necessary, obviously, Criticism means, well, this is wrong and this is how we could fix it.
It doesn't mean tear everything down and leave people with nothing.
And that certainly happens to people in universities now.
They come in barely formed and they leave...
Ill-formed.
Yeah, they leave in tatters, you know, and that's...
And it's also true, to go back to where you've referred to it, I've referred to it, there are so many people outside of the higher structures of society that no one is talking to.
That's where Mr.
Trump comes in, and more power to him, for that matter.
He is talking and listening.
I know that's another absolute heresy.
He's not the cause of these things.
He's the result of failures of other and more sophisticated people.
Well, and I think, I have a friend who's working very closely with the Democratic Party in the United States and has been quite effective at doing so and trying to move the party closer to the middle and away from the radicals.
And we discussed this a lot because, you know, I think one of the reasons that the people who hate the Democrats in the United States truly hate them, right, that there's just vitriol there, is because they've proved themselves incapable of generating a candidate who can actually take on Trump.
Yeah.
And I think there's a disappointment, even among the enemies of the Democrats, that's so profound there that it generates precisely this vitriol.
It's like the man is characterized by manifold flaws.
And I'm not saying this in a partisan way.
And the fact that the system works so poorly that a credible, centrist candidate can't be found to To offer himself at least as a viable alternative.
I mean, my poor friend, who I said has been following this and has been deeply involved in the debates, he's just tearing out his hair watching the Democrat debates and watching it degenerate.
Well, he should.
Well, exactly, but it's so sad to see that.
You have a New Age spiritualist who's got to be president of the United States.
You have them dissolving the idea of nationhood.
We will abandon the border.
Anyway, it is such a weak thing.
But the people in the street, the guy who called me about you, that's a class.
And it's a vast class.
And that's the great 50% that has been walked over and is turmoil.
And all of the identity politics and all of those things that get traffic and commerce in conversation in the media, these are irrelevant to them.
Apart from being insulting.
Yes.
And after a while, the social pressure builds it.
And this game that's going on over here will have to close or something breaks.
Yes, yes.
Well, I guess Trump was an attempt to break it.
Brexit was another attempt.
Yeah, that's right.
Brexit was another attempt.
And Australia could illustrate.
I'll let you go with one more question only.
After all that you have done and all the energy, obviously, that it required to do it, have you come at this point to something Fresh in your understanding about what counts and what does not count, how one conducts oneself about the universe, has something new occurred to you or is it a refinement of what you went in with?
I think the fundamental thing that I've learned is that you can speak in the deepest terms imaginable, if you're careful, to an extraordinarily wide range of people and that And that that's desperately needed and that hopefully it's salutary.
It looks like it's salutary.
And so that's hopeful.
The counterpoint to the stress of the last three years has been my observation of the positive consequences of having these sorts of deep As deep as I can make them anyways, philosophical discussions, and to watch thousands of people participate as if it's important.
You know, when I talked to Sam Harris in Dublin about the relationship between facts and values and religion and science, which, you know, is about as academic a topic as you could hope for, we had 10,000 people come to the...
So that's...
The university...
May not be functioning where it's supposed to be functioning, but that doesn't mean that it's not functioning, you know, and it's out there.
Thought will find its place.
Well, that's what it looks like to me, and so that's been unbelievably positive, although very demanding.
Yeah, very.
It's...
Well, and I'm in...
In these interviews and more frequently I've tended to get emotional and the reason for that is the health problems that are plaguing my family, at least in part.
Yes, I understand.
So that makes me more...
Much more fragile than I should otherwise be, despite my exhortations to people to bear their cross.
My friend, I'm a cross for you to bear.
Listen, I thank you greatly for your courtesy, because you obviously didn't have to do this, and I really do admire what you're doing.
And I will say on behalf of the people who will never meet you, that you are a very fine person.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for the support that you've shown me over the last few years.
It was much appreciated.
I would do it 20 times.
Well, I appreciate that very much.
It was a pleasure to meet you.
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