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March 26, 2018 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
44:02
The Peterson Pathology

Richard Spencer and Peter Gast take a deep dive into Jordan Peterson's article "On The So-Called Jewish Question." https://jordanbpeterson.com/psychology/on-the-so-called-jewish-question/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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I was perusing Twitter this morning, and lo and behold, what a wonderful surprise.
Jordan B. Peterson, the man, the most dangerous intellectual in America, tweeted at me.
This is what he said.
He said, some facts for at Richard B. Spencer and his followers to consider.
I guess I should say it in his voice.
Some facts.
No.
And his followers to consider deeply, I hope.
And then he links to an article which he wrote, because I'm not already in enough trouble.
On the Jewish question.
So I think this would be a great opportunity to do another Cuxplaining.
I'm here with my friend Peter, and we are going to engage in a close reading of a text from the conservative movement.
This is a bit of a different one.
This is not quite from the movement conservatism, but we can also talk about the Jewish question, HBD, IQ, etc.
There's a lot of issues with this.
Yes, but I would say this, just to spoil the whole thing, just in case no one is going to listen to this long.
Jordan Peterson has weirdly affirmed a great deal of...
What came to be known as HBD, that is Human Biodiversity.
You could call it race realism if you want.
He has actually affirmed these things in an attempt to dissolve the Jewish question.
So very interesting, but let's actually give it a close reading.
So first off, let's just start with the title.
On the so-called, quote...
So he scare quotes it and he puts a so-called.
First off, let's just start with the title itself.
The idea that this is some, you know, absurd thing that arose with the alt-right Twitter and 4chan in 2015 or something.
The Jewish question has been one of the most central questions for Jews and for Gentiles.
Literally, there was an essay by Karl Marx.
Right.
It was not invented by 4chan.
Almost every major thinker and figure has sounded off on the Jewish question in some way, to some degree of complexity, to some degree of bigotry, if you want.
But it's a question that everyone has had to confront.
Okay.
So I'm reading from Jordan Peterson.
The players of identity politics on the far right continue ever so pathologically to beat the anti-Semitic drum, pointing to the over-representation of Jews in positions of authority, competence, and influence, including revolutionary movements.
I'm called upon sometimes publicly, sometimes in social media platforms, to comment on such matters and criticize when I hesitate to do so.
And get criticized, I guess, when I hesitate to do so.
Although God only knows why I should hesitate, smiley face.
I don't know why he's using emoji.
Who knows?
So let's take apart the far-right's claims.
This is a far-right fever pitch thing.
Also, the ever-so-pathologically.
That is funny.
I love how some things are pathological, but other things that, say, conservatives or liberals or whatever obsess about...
Yeah, this is a real psychological move, isn't it?
I mean, it's worth almost commenting on that.
He is a trained psychologist, yes.
We should put anyone who talks about the Jews and perhaps send them to a therapist first.
Well, you know, wasn't it...
Wasn't it Sigmund Freud?
Actually, this is sort of a deep cut, but wasn't it even Sigmund Freud who said, we need Carl Jung at the forefront of psychoanalysis because he's not a Jew?
Well, yes.
Also, there's a degree to which the Jews need anti-Semitism.
You could say pathologically.
I mean, this is one of the things that Kevin MacDonald has talked about.
I think it's absolutely true.
Jews need a sense of hatred in order to maintain ethnic cohesion.
They have to be othered.
The trajectory of Jewish history is not becoming Gentiles.
The celebrations of Purim, Hanukkah, I could go on, are basically celebrations of not being Gentile, resisting the Gentiles, of not intermarriage.
There are many debates among Jews that sometimes spill over about the problems of intermarriage.
Probably the most prominent example was in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, where he goes to meet Annie's family.
And there's a slide and all of a sudden he pictures himself in the full beard and orthodox wear because he feels othered to that extent.
Yeah.
He's taking a shishka as well.
First, psychologically speaking, why do the reactionary conspiracy theorists even bother?
This is a straightforward matter.
If you're misguided enough to play identity politics, whether on the left or the right, then you require a victim, in the right-wing case, European culture or some variant, and a perpetrator, Jews.
Otherwise, you can't play the game.
A YouTube video I made explicating the rules can be found here.
So first off, and I'm going to get to this a little bit further down, but I think I'll just say this now.
I don't know what Jordan Peterson, in terms of his criticism of identity politics itself, not necessarily just the alt-right or white identitarians, and then also this, they need a victim, they need a villain, too.
I mean, this is all politics.
This is Carl Schmitt 101.
Not even Carl Schmitt.
I mean, it's Aristotle.
I mean, we are a—and it's human nature.
Human beings are social animals.
We come together as societies.
There's an us and a them.
When he criticizes identity politics, all he wants is another identity politics.
So he wants a Canadian civic nationalism.
He's almost kind of a vicarious American at this point.
To talk about that Canadian-ness for a second.
I actually think he has not read probably the greatest Canadian philosopher of the last century, which was George Grant.
Justin Trudeau.
No.
George Grant, who was a deep Nietzschean and Heideggerian thinker, who was also in his mind a Christian, but who viewed Canada as an opposition to the United States.
Yeah.
And as one who, when America put its nuclear...
missiles in Canada lost its sovereignty, essentially.
And that's true in a very deep way.
And Peterson, in his way, is just acting as sort of the good satrap of American liberalism in a lot of ways.
He's not a Tory.
He's not anything like that.
He's not noticeable from the Canadian tradition.
But I would say this actually really strongly.
All politics is identity politics.
There is no politics outside of us versus them, or there's no point of politics.
I don't know what to say.
You read the Iliad.
It's like the Achaeans versus the Trojans.
Right.
But there's no...
Politics, again, is about the community making an order, also determining territory, boundaries, us versus them, who's in and who's out.
Again, to denounce identity politics in itself, what he's denouncing, of course, is...
And he can attack the left, but it's denouncing white identity politics, which is a kind of...
Again, white nationalism occurs within the modern American state, and it's actually opposed to the general system.
So he's opposing this.
And at the end of the day, as well, it's one thing to go after the left.
Low-hanging fruit identity politics of the University of California, Berkeley.
Yeah, we all pretty much see that as rather silly.
But he's now directly attacking the one dissident group in the United States that is roundly attacked.
That has no power.
Yeah, that has very little power.
And it's basically at the hands of Silicon Valley and the government and so on, is actually being suppressed.
I mean, we're not being thrown into prison, although I'm gonna worry what I train my Basset Hound to do or do that.
Gregory Conti was thrown into prison after doing nothing wrong.
He's facing charges.
But no, we're not being just rounded up and summarily executed at this point.
But the fact is he is attacking the system's own boogeyman.
That doesn't mean he's right or wrong, but it doesn't mean he's exactly right.
Richard, you're right.
Look, all politics is identity politics, and actually to call it identity politics is a bad way of thinking, because when you think about politics, what does it come from?
It comes from the Greek, the polis, the things of the city.
And when the Greeks said that, they meant the things of a particular people.
They were not talking about an abstraction, or even an abstract city, but they were a real...
Yes.
Politics is identity.
It's not identity politics.
Politics is politics.
Politics is identity politics.
Identity politics doesn't exist because it is politics.
Right.
Okay.
Once you determine to play, however, you benefit in a number of ways.
Oh yes, I'm reaping the benefits of playing identity politics.
Yeah, this is so easy.
I mean, I'm beloved everywhere.
It's amazing.
You can claim, this is Jordan Peterson again, you can claim responsibility for the accomplishments of your group you feel racially, ethnically akin to without actually having to accomplish anything yourself.
That's convenient.
You can identify with the hypothetical victimization of that group and feel sorry.
for yourself and pleased at your compassion simultaneously.
Another unearned victory.
You can simplify your world.
Thank you, Ayn Rand.
Yeah, exactly.
You can simplify your world radically as well.
All the problems you face now have a cause and a single one.
Okay, let me back up because lots of straw men here.
First off, I find it rather fascinating that we're hearing all these arguments against the alt-right, identitarians, etc.
coming from non-anarcho-capitalist and non-radical individualist, but who are making anarcho-capitalist Randian This is Rand.
I mean, she might not have been the first one to say it, but she's the most prominent person to make this argument.
This radical individualism that Jordan Peterson, who I don't think is an anarcho-capitalist of any kind, but is basically calling upon hyper-liberalism, basically.
He's going to out-liberal us by talking this way.
Let me say this.
He's making a rather glib and convenient argument by just identifying, say, nationalism or a sense of togetherness with just pure resentment.
And it's only a negative.
It's never a positive.
Right.
So you're a total loser, but then you say, oh yeah, no, really?
I'm Mozart because I'm white.
Not even your most debased 1.0 tattoo-wearing skinhead thinks he's Mozart because he's white.
So, I mean, this is just a completely stupid...
The fact is, one has pride.
What one resonates with...
European history.
One has pride standing before Notre Dame Cathedral because one sees it as something to admire but as a challenge, as something that...
My people did this.
The expression of yourself.
Yeah.
Pride is such a...
And taking pride in a collective achievement is just such a natural aspect to all humans.
The idea that we would demean this is just...
It's simply stupid.
It's anti-human.
And it's just radically out of touch.
It's the kind of thing you would expect from an autistic Randian.
And if you were to take Peterson's argument to its full expression, it's to say, you shouldn't be proud of your family.
And that's the full expression that Rand took it to.
And it's true, because look, you think about it.
This is going into real libertarian autism, but it's true.
When you go into it, it's like, when you're a baby, you're in...
Individuality is evolving as you grow older.
You go from walking and having...
Slight consciousness to having a full consciousness.
But that's all in the context of you having been born in a family.
And as Aristotle said, being born a social creature.
Because, you know, as Aristotle said, man alone is either a beast or a god.
And I don't think Peterson is imploring us to be gods.
No, it's completely insane.
And then the other thing is that, yeah, you should ask Jordan Peterson, are you proud of your own son's achievements?
But then also, or your grandfather's achievements.
And then also you could ask, are you proud of Canada's achievements?
Of course he is.
I can't believe...
Are you proud of Western civilization?
Right.
Which, again, for them, the heritage of Western civilization is radical individualism and atomization to the point that you cannot be proud of European glory.
Right, this sows the seas of the left's own critique of Western civilization, actually.
They're actually giving the enemies of the West a lot of credit in this sense.
They're allowing them the ammunition to defeat them.
They agree with their basic assumptions.
Yes.
Anyway.
Another unearned victory.
All the problems you face now have a cause, and a single one, so you can dispense with the unpleasant difficulty of thinking things through in detail.
Bonus, furthermore, and most reprehensibly, these are all in italics, much like Rod Dreher.
Overuses italics.
Ray, yes.
You now have someone to hate, and what's worse, with a good conscience.
So your unrecognized resentment and cowardly and incompetent failure to deal with the world forthrightly can find a target, and you can feel morally superior in your consequent persecution.
See Germany.
Nazis, for further evidence and information.
Oh, good.
A historical reference to the Nazis.
Right.
Well, one, I would say, well, while Jordan...
Well, Dr. Peterson, why did you object to the transsexuals on your campus?
Why make it a big issue?
He claims that he doesn't object to them.
He claims that he objects to the totalitarian bureaucracy forcing him to speak to them with their chosen pronouns.
So he's kind of having his cake and eating it, too.
Everyone was so excited about that sick burn of a...
BBC reporter or whomever it was.
I wasn't terribly impressed by it.
First off, it's easy.
But secondly, he's not even making a radical, in the proper sense of the word, rooted claim for, no, you have a sex.
You were born with a sex.
You are a man.
You are a woman, whether you like it or not.
I'm not going to call you she when you have a penis.
He didn't make that claim.
He's making this, you know, weak, limp, conservative, well, the government shouldn't force me to call you.
Who cares what the government's telling you to do?
The question is whether it's right or not.
And, you know, I don't know.
It's just all this stuff.
The other thing, just this straw man argument, A, of we have one single enemy.
You know, sure, there are some people who engage in conspiracy thinking, in the worst sense of that term, and just think that, oh, yeah, everything would be right with the world were it not for Jews.
Jews called male powder and baldness.
But that, again, sure, you might be able to find, like, two people like that, but It's just a stupid straw man.
You know, the whole point of my, I mean, I'm just speaking from my perspective, but I could say this from anyone, most everyone who's a leader in the alt-right, the whole point is that we're opening up discourse to this world of thinking racially, asking the Jewish question as opposed to avoiding it.
The idea that we are diminishing discourse is absolutely insane.
We are living in a thought prison and we are widening discourse.
And people like Jordan Peterson now is coming out and being like, you can't talk about that because you're just saying that because you can't clean up your own room.
This is not serious in addressing the Jewish question and what is the alt-right.
Also, the deeper point that I would make is that people like Peterson and others want to say, oh, you're identity politics.
You're just like the left.
That's actually not true.
One, because what we do...
It attacks the superstructure of multiculturalism.
When you think of multiculturalism, it is basically like a St. Catherine's wheel.
The spoke of which is hatred of white people, hatred of Western civilization, hatred of European achievement.
If you embrace that, you don't become your enemy.
If you embrace that, you can be part of it.
The generic left will accept, to a degree, Black nationalism, certainly BLM, because it's part of that collective, the core of which is anti-white.
You don't have white consciousness.
No.
So, yeah.
And, yeah, no, this is...
Again, you...
Everything is the opposite of what they say.
People like Peterson and other classical liberals are actually just another side of the leftist liberal hegemonic discourse in the world.
They're not challenging it like we are.
Exactly.
They're part of the collective because they are undermining white identity.
But they're doing it in the name of Western civilization.
Anyway.
Second, okay, then we're back to Peterson.
Second, in what manner, if any, are such claims true?
Well, Jews are genuinely overrepresented in positions of authority, competence, and influence.
Ooh, he went there.
New York Jews in particular snap up a disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes, and Jews are disproportionately eligible for admission at elite universities.
We're going to go into that, where they, along with Asians, tend to be discriminated against.
No.
Asians, yes.
Jews know it's possible that we should be happy about this rather than annoyed.
Is the fact that smart people are working hard for a mutual advancement really something to feel upset about?
What exactly is the preferable alternative?
In any case, the radical identity politics right-wingers regard such accomplishment as evidence of a conspiracy.
It hardly needs to be said that although conspiracies do occasionally occur, conspiracy theories are the lowest form of intellectualism.
Is there another, more credible explanation?
Yes.
Okay.
Before we go into the university question, at which, at these universities, Jews are discriminated against.
I'm not so sure about that.
First off, let's actually...
We'll discuss this first point, which is that he acknowledges that Jews are overrepresented.
First off, that in itself is actually a dangerous claim.
If you say they're overrepresented at CNN, you're an anti-Semite.
Why are you noticing this?
What's wrong with you?
What pathology are you suffering from?
I believe Steve Saylor talked about this.
The sin of noticing.
Yes, the sin of noticing.
Exactly.
First off, that is in itself politically incorrect.
Secondly, he's admitting...
And he'll go to this in this next subsection of a higher than average Ashkenazi IQ.
So he is basically admitting to HBD or race realism, you can say.
So here we go.
The significantly higher than average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews.
See this article in The Economist, blah, blah, blah.
And he actually links to Gregory Cochran, which is great.
Consider that IQ is the most powerful single determinant of long-term socioeconomic success.
Okay.
I mean, I guess I should praise him here.
He is going Steve Saylor.
He is already doing things.
He's not doing the full Saylor.
No, not the full Saylor, but a half Saylor.
He is like, that was a beautiful half Saylor.
She landed it perfectly.
She's up for the bronze this year.
Yes, he's pulled off the half sailor.
Consider also that the effect of a mean or average difference in IQ is dramatically increased at the tails of the distribution, so that a 10 to 15 point difference produces increasingly large inequalities in group representation in proportion to the degree that a given job requires higher general cognitive ability.
Yeah, there's tails of the bell curve are in a way more important.
It's actually interesting when we think about East Asians or women, they have a narrower bell curve.
So men have a broader bell curve in the sense that men will disproportionately make up, say, the homeless, the lunatics, the total imbeciles, the so on.
Men overwhelmingly make up the great geniuses, the great artists, the great leaders, the great politicians, the great businessmen, etc.
Actually, this is a funny moment, but most people don't think of it.
Men also make up the great chefs.
Yes.
No, no, no.
Literally, when most people think like women are some of the best cooks, but actually when you look at it, some of the best chefs in the world, it's a male-dominated profession.
Right.
Also, simply put, if a very complex job or role requires an IQ of 145, that's a very high IQ, three standard deviations above the mean, and characteristic of less than 1% of the general population.
We're talking philosophy professors and high-level software engineers.
Then a group with a higher average IQ will be exceptionally overrepresented in such enterprises.
Okay, I don't really disagree with anything from that paragraph, and I would praise Jordan Peterson for saying these things.
It is interesting to remember, just on a pure...
When you write the same things, you're condemned.
I'm evil, yeah.
Or Jared Taylor, certainly.
This sounds a lot like Sailor.
It's kind of a half Sailor, a half Taylor.
And so on.
You know, I would say that one interesting thing about this is that Jews, it's not just IQ.
Jews are kind of asymmetrical in a way that whites are not.
Jews excel at verbal intelligence.
They fail often at visual intelligence or mathematics, on average, of course.
Asians are actually the exact opposite.
Asians do not excel verbally.
In terms of spatial intelligence, they will actually excel quite a bit.
And you can even see this in art.
Semitic art in general is non-representational.
It is decorative.
It does not possess that.
Truly European quality.
So is Jordan Peterson's art, by the way, which is awful.
Sorry.
To bring in some of the work of Kevin MacDonald, actually, briefly, there's also, amongst Jews, amongst the Jewish people, there's a higher amount of...
Social cohesion.
No question.
Than there is amongst whites.
And this has an evolutionary explanation.
Part of this is that when we as your, when our ancestors, you know, moved into Europe, moved into, actually.
You can even microscope this.
Look at Greece, for instance.
When the Achaeans or Mycenaeans moved in there, there were such tall mountain ranges.
It was a breeding ground for individualism, in a way.
It was a breeding ground for very tribalistic notions, but that understood each other as having their own and competing against someone else, but in a way that wasn't the same way for Yangtze River, Chinese civilization, or Mohenjo-Daro, or other places in India.
Recent evolution, when you think of the Jews that...
Experienced the ghetto.
Experienced particular occupations that were owned to them, namely money lending.
Actually even experienced the Romans, who destroyed their temple.
Yeah, who crushed them twice.
But yeah, it's...
It's a different, a certain type of Jew evolved in the sense of Jews that were able to survive these, you know, we are a foreign body within another culture.
A certain type of Jew is going to survive that.
What is one of the greatest Jewish stories?
The Babylonian captivity.
Right.
Of course, you know, when they were removed to Babylon under the...
Second Babylonian Empire, I believe it was, and were later freed by the Persians.
But again, this goes to talk about a level of group cohesion that actually we don't see in our own people, for better or for worse.
No, we certainly don't see it in the alt-right.
Okay, let's do this.
Let's go back a little bit, because he goes on to this openness to experience.
We'll get back to it.
But first off, I need to address this idea, which is that, you know, why are there...
There's so many Jews at Harvard.
Well, it's no secret.
They're all smart.
Okay, this is actually not true.
And, you know, Jordan Peterson just doesn't want to actually go from, you know, one more level down in terms of his analysis.
The fact is, Jews are, and this was proven in a remarkable essay called The Myth of American Meritocracy by Ron Unz.
Who is Jewish.
Who happens to be Jewish.
but has actually been very critical of Zionism, American foreign policy, and Jews in America.
But the fact is, I mean, again, these facts that UNS is bringing up really can't be disputed.
The fact is, Jews are even taking into account the higher than average white IQ of Ashkenazi.
They Let's compare them to Asians, which is actually what UNS does.
Let me just read some money quotes here from the UNS article.
The Jewish levels for Yale and Columbia were also at 25%, while white Gentiles were at 22%.
So you'll often see these statistics of whites making up half the college or 45% of these.
The upper-level places, Ivies, Stanford, Duke, some other ones thrown in there.
UChicago.
the places, also, these places matter more.
Not that there aren't other good colleges, but it's, these are the people who are going to staff the bureaucracies, who are going to staff the law firms, staff CNN, and so on.
White Gentiles are effectively making up 25% of these bodies.
We are radically underrepresented, and Jews are making up 25%, whereas the African American is brought usually to somewhere around their demographic level in the country at 12%.
In fact, this is unspeaking, if we aggregate the reported enrollment figures, we discover that 4% of all college-age American Jews are currently enrolled in the Ivy League.
4% of college-age Jews are in the Ivy League compared to just 1% of Asians and about 0.1% of whites of Christian background.
Now, here it goes.
But suppose these estimates are correct, these estimates in terms of average IQ of Asians, which is around the 106, I believe.
Average Ashkenazi IQ is 115.
Again, they have different profiles within that.
But if we assume these estimates, and Asians are overall, indeed, twice as likely as Jews to rank among America's highest performing students.
I'll read that again.
Asians are twice as likely as Jews to rank among America's highest performing students.
We must also consider that America's Asian population is far larger in size, representing roughly 5% of college Asians.
Therefore, assuming an admission system based on...
The strictest objective meritocracy.
We would expect our elite academic institutions to contain nearly five Asians for every Jew.
But instead, the Jews are far more numerous, in some important cases by almost a factor of two.
So Asians are outnumbered by Jews, but yet they should be outnumbering Jews.
This raises obvious suspicions about the fairness of the Ivy League admission process.
So what else is this besides, on one hand, structural racism on the behalf of Jews and or ethnic nepotism on behalf of admissions officers?
What else is it?
Because it's not what Jordan Peterson is arguing, which is, He's selective with HBD facts.
He wants to say that, yes...
You know, Jews have a high IQ, and of course that's why they're smart.
But he wants to ignore the facts, which are the ethnic nepotism and other facts that Ron Uns brings up.
He wants to ignore those facts and focus on others.
Right.
Openness to experience is one of the five cardinal personality traits.
Wikipedia will fill you with blah, blah, blah.
Openness to experience often has been considered the reflection of general cognitive ability or intelligence and personality.
It's what you are referring to when you describe someone as thoughtful, smart, artistic, or philosophical.
People with high IQs tend overwhelmingly to be higher in trait openness to experience.
Okay, I don't fully disagree with that.
However, I think this is kind of getting at...
So, look, all this is is a higher IQ attempt to say that people who believe in racialism are dumb.
Right.
And that's actually not true for a variety of reasons.
Well, I can see it kind of being true and untrue in the sense that your average...
Your average normie, let's say someone of a middling IQ, what do they really seek in life?
They seek companionship.
They seek security.
They seek some fun thrown into the fact that their lives are structured and repetitive.
They seek recognition from their peers.
Yeah, and recognition from their peers.
And it is a lot of, you could say, middle-class normie people who don't want a bunch of refugees coming into their Idaho town.
They fear illegal immigration because, again, it's a disruptive force for their lives.
And so you could say, okay, they're racist in that sense.
But again, what we're dealing with with the rise of the alt-right is that to a very large degree.
It is an angst over demographic change and American change, no question.
But also in terms of the intellectual leaders of the alt-right, it actually, it's not based on just...
I would say that when you're thinking about major figures, we're all cognitively open and philosophical.
We're open to these bigger ideas.
This gets at Jordan Peterson's fundamental problem with this, is that before we even think about the argument, he's basically trying to close off debate with one blog entry.
This is something I was thinking about earlier today, Richard, which is that...
You know, for so many people in the modern world, the personal is political.
And by that, what I mean is, what's the most common argument you hear against being an alt-right or whatever?
It's like, well, you know, didn't you meet a nice black person?
Or didn't you meet, you know...
Or were you mugged?
And therefore, this is a pathological response.
No, no, but in a deeper...
Didn't you...
It's like, Richard, both of us have met minorities or whoever that we get along with just fine.
But what we in the alt-right, it's actually the opposite of that.
It's the fact that it's a tragedy that our people are being replaced on the macro level.
It's the fact that politics is happening above us.
The liberal wants to take the politics to be part of the personal because that is how it operates.
It is ultimately an individualistic notion which understands itself within only the individual experience.
Which is like, oh, I met this person.
They must be fine.
It's whatever.
I can't conceive of being anything beyond that.
But we in the alt-right realize that, look...
Like, we can go out here in lovely, you know, swiple Alexandria and meet a lot of nice people.
Actually, you can meet a lot of talented 10th people, talented 10th African Americans or, you know, Indians or whatever.
But that's not the issue.
The issue is the fact that our people are dying and our people are being replaced on the macro level.
And we have empathy.
Wait, wait, wait.
Again...
You know, they say we're making the personal political.
It's actually the opposite.
We are actually disregarding the personal in a way to talk about the ultimate aim.
Right, but then at the same time, we have empathy for our people.
I mean, very few...
Well, I shouldn't say that, actually.
There is a kind of version...
on IQ and data.
And you could actually criticize them for being mean-spirited in the sense of, oh, look at how dumb these blacks are.
Look at all this crime and so on.
But if you really are an identitarian, it fundamentally means that you have a great capacity for empathy.
You care not only about, say, You know, talking about the big ideas or talking about Kevin MacDonald, but you care about the person suffering from the opioid crisis.
And if you can't do both...
And look, some people are better things than others.
I'm more on the let's talk about ideas end, obviously.
We're doing this podcast.
Other people are more on the let's talk about the opioid crisis end.
Sure, but there's divisional labor.
But if you don't have both in your soul, then you're really not going to be a part of this.
No, I mean, that is my...
Larger point there, which is that a lot of these people, Peterson here is doing a very horrible thing where it's like, oh, you can't meet a smart whoever.
That's not the point.
The point of the fact is we realize the macro demographic changes going on in our world, and we seek to confront them.
So anyway, let's go back to Peterson's essay.
So this is part C. I'm reading from Peterson.
The relationship between openness to experience and political liberalism.
Political affiliation is importantly associated with personality.
Conservatives, right-wingers, tend to be high in conscientiousness, particularly in the conscientiousness aspect of orderliness, room cleaning, I guess, and low in openness to experience, while liberals, left-wingers, tend to have the reverse pattern and high openness to experience.
The story is somewhat more complicated.
So basically, he's saying that because Jews are so smart, they're going to
I think this is also—there's probably some— They are overrepresented in the mass media.
They are overrepresented in basically the culture industry, the creation of ideology.
I'm actually not sitting here as some, you know, debased, resentful guy being like, oh, God, you know, my life sucks because of these guys.
No, these are facts.
These are simply facts.
And you have to explain why they are so interested in getting control, in being part of the infrastructure of the organs of culture and mass media and thought.
construction and the left in general.
Jews are radically overrepresented behind the scenes in the civil rights movement.
Their story is not always told by Hollywood, interestingly, they're overrepresented in Hollywood.
Why are they Even taking into account higher verbal intelligence, why are they so interested in this?
And how are they able to gain this kind of foothold in these all-powerful institutions if it is not institutional racism on behalf of Jews?
Yeah, and the one thing I would add to that, Richard, is that I believe Dr. Peterson is engaging...
Of course, I should preface this by saying, you know, I'm more open to anti-enlightenment thought than maybe you are, Richard, but I do think Dr. Peterson is engaging in a certain scientistic...
And when I say scientistic, I don't mean scientific.
Scientism is a term used to mean to use the trappings of science to overlay things that are actually not scientific.
When you say that, of course Jews are more liberal because they have higher IQ, you're using in a way the trappings of very true science as it relates to IQ and other such things to explain something where there is actually no correlation.
You're pretending to say...
Here's the facts, ma 'am, to quote whatever.
You're saying here's the facts, but those actually aren't the facts.
You're using it to spin a narrative.
You're using it in a very scientistic way.
Right.
But it's not accurate at all.
You're using a false sense of science to shore up an argument against what is true, actually.
Alright, let's bring it to a close here.
So, what's the story?
No conspiracy.
Get it?
No conspiracy in bold.
He's kind of...
He's getting kind of authoritative.
I've never written anything like that, using bold just to basically hammer things.
This reminds me of Dreyer.
Yeah.
Jewish people are overrepresented in positions of competence and authority because, as a group, they have a higher mean IQ.
Again, that is a...
Not a PC statement, but again, the point is that he's really missing the larger point.
The effect of this group difference, approximately the difference between the typical high school student and the typical state college student, is magnified for occupations interests that require high general cognitive ability.
Equal overrepresentation may also occur in political movements associated with the left, because high IQ is associated with openness to experience.
Okay, we already went into this stuff.
There is no evidence whatsoever that Ashkenazi Jews are overrepresented in any occupation's interests for reasons other than intelligence and the associated effects of intelligence on personality and political belief.
Thus, this is in bold, no conspiratorial claims based on ethic identity need to be given credence B-T-F-O, yes.
No.
This, again, he is...
Let's also just keep in mind that this is an attempt to shut down discourse.
Like, no conspiracy involved.
No conspiracy.
And again, while he does so, he's giving off these glimmers of truth, actually.
Which is interesting.
Like, this is what's interesting about this piece, to sum up, is that he...
Okay, this person is...
far more influential than you or I are right now.
He's, you know, again, I've had my big media blast, which are, you know, kind of, you know, We're big and go up and down and so on.
But right now, he has been on a six-month media blast.
He has been everywhere.
He gets tons of views on YouTube.
His book is in Barnes& Noble.
He can speak at colleges without Antifa.
Well, that's not actually true.
To his credit, he was attacked by Antifa.
But he's invited to colleges.
He's invited by bigger institutions.
He can do more successful college talks.
No question.
He is no question winning right now.
And whatever we want to say about this article, he is missing a tremendous amount.
He is conceding a tremendous amount, which is interesting.
No, without a doubt.
The only thing I will say there, Richard, is that despite the fact that he's conceding these things...
We should keep in mind what the facts are.
The facts are actually on the side of the alt-right.
When you're talking about Jewish privilege, it's not as if we're some sort of knuckle-dragging lunatics that are like, yeah, Jews cause male pattern baldness or something.
We're noticing a trend and we're noticing a fact that is very real.
And it's been real.
Throughout the history of Western civilization.
And that is really all we're arguing.
It has nothing to do with national socialism or anything like that.
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