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Oct. 19, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin

01:47:09

20171019_Thu_iP2WlfTiohw

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c bradley thompson

06:21

dave rubin

17:43

jordan b peterson

49:44

onkar ghate

18:31

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Speaker	Time	Text
c bradley thompson ▲ ● ▼		Well, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
		I'm Brad Thompson, and I have the distinct honor to be the Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism.
		It is my pleasure to welcome you here this afternoon to our John W. Pope Lecture Series.
		This event is being live-streamed, and I would also like to welcome our live-stream audience from around the world.
		Before we begin today's event, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank publicly the sponsors of this event.
		The John W. Pope Foundation has generously supported this lecture series for a decade.
		I'd also like to thank our co-sponsors, the Ayn Rand Institute and the Rubin Report.
		Just a word quickly about the Ayn Rand Institute.
		It promotes the works of Ayn Rand and her philosophy of objectivism, the philosophy of reason, rational self-interest, and individualism.
		It has distributed millions of copies of Rand's novels, Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged, to teachers and students, and it runs one of the world's largest essay contests.
		And now a word about the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism.
		The Clemson Institute is America's first and best-known academic center dedicated to exploring the moral foundations of a free society.
		And it is Clemson's premier academic center providing students with a great books education in philosophy, literature, and politics.
		Our Lyceum Scholars Program is now recognized as one of the most innovative and important undergraduate programs in the United States.
		As many of you know, free thought and free speech are under assault on America's college campuses.
		I would like to remind the students here with us today that the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism
		stands four square in defense of your freedom of thought and speech.
		Applause And now to our main event.
		Let me introduce our panelists.
		Dave Rubin, sitting in the middle, is a talk show host, comedian, and TV personality.
		The host of the popular YouTube talk show, The Rubin Report.
		Dave regularly addresses big ideas such as free speech, political correctness, and religion.
		Among many other high-profile guests on his show, Dave has interviewed Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Larry Elder, and
		maybe most importantly, Clemson's very own Professor Brandon Turner.
		Dr. Jordan Peterson, sitting closest to me, has been in his life a dishwasher, gas jockey, bartender, short order cook,
		beekeeper, oil derrick, bit retipper, plywood mill laborer, railway line worker,
		a clinical psychologist, and a consultant to the UN Secretary General.
unidentified		Thank you.
c bradley thompson ▲ ● ▼		In more recent years, he took a demotion To be a professor of psychology at Harvard University and now at the University of Toronto.
		He is the author of the now classic book, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief.
		And this January, he will publish 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos.
		For those of you who follow Dr. Peterson on YouTube, You know that he has become something of an academic rock star in recent years and is considered by many, maybe me most of all, to be one of North America's most influential public intellectuals.
		Dr. Gatte, sitting on the far side, is a senior fellow and a philosopher in residence at the Ayn Rand Institute in California.
		He has taught philosophy for over 10 years at the Institute's Objectivist Academic Center, and he has published several essays on Rand's fiction and philosophy.
		Dr. Gatte is one of the world's leading scholars of Ayn Rand's philosophy, and he is a contributing author to the Institute's most recent book, Defending Free Speech.
		Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in giving a rousing, and I mean a rousing Clemson welcome to our panelists.
unidentified		Applause.
unidentified		All right, we will accept that as rousing.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Are you guys all right with that for rousing?
		I was a little worried at first because when he said free speech and we got like one clap over there, you guys were kind of looking at me.
		Are we for free speech?
		We are.
		This is a...
		We're for it, right?
		We're for free speech.
unidentified		Okay.
unidentified		I'm very excited to be here.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I was wandering around campus all day long.
		I don't know if you guys are following me on Twitter.
		I saw a squirrel outside the library garbage can eating an Oreo.
		And I walked around for another hour, and then he was eating another Oreo when I came back.
		And I thought, there's something special happening here.
		So I'm very excited.
		There's squirrels eating Oreos.
		We got these guys.
		They know their stuff.
		Where's Morgan, by the way, who I was tweeting with earlier?
		Where's Morgan?
		Morgan over there, she normally only wears sorority shirts and Nike shorts, but she dressed up in regular people clothes to be here.
		That's pretty good.
		Give her a round of applause.
unidentified		That's...
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I also was going to wear a sorority shirt and shorts, but then they made me put this on.
		I I'm very excited to talk to you guys.
		We've got about an hour and a half, which I know is going to fly by.
		The university, the administration, was great, too, because we're doing a free speech thing here, and they gave me a list of topics we're allowed to talk about, so... Let's see what we can find.
		Oh, by the way, I also saw that outside there were a couple Nazis out there, so thank you for those of you that punched them, because you've got to be...
		Punching Nazis.
		Just a joke, people.
		There were no Nazis outside.
		I know Twitter is ablaze right now.
		Oh, God, you heard Reuben.
		The Nazis showed up.
		All right.
unidentified		Okay.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		We're going to talk about free speech, and we want this to be a conversation.
		So we're going to do about 45, and then you guys will jump in with a Q&A at the end of that.
		So I think first off, to kick this thing off, The fact that we even have to do talks about free speech these days seems sort of tragically ironic or hilarious or depressing, depending on which way you want to look at it.
		Anything that we're going to say up here, I'm pretty sure you're not going to hear anything racist and you're not going to hear anything homophobic.
		I mean, I'm gay married.
		I'm not even gay, I just did it to prove a point.
		And what you are going to hear is people expressing their views.
		And that is simply the most important thing that you can do as a college student.
		That you guys get to not only learn from great people, one of them sitting right there, and I've had him on my
		show, but you get to express what you think and learn how to
		think.
		And these two gentlemen are quite good at explaining how they think.
		So first, Jordan, I'll start with you.
		The fact that we even have to do this, that we can't do a talk perhaps on maps of meaning, although that's going to be sort of part of what you talk about, that we have to talk about free speech in and of itself.
		Does that sort of show you what a precarious position it's in?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think what it shows me is just exactly how powerful ideas are.
		You know, people have the misbegotten notion that the strange things that are happening in our societies in Canada and North America and in the Western world in general are somehow academic issues that only affect people in colleges and universities.
		And nothing could be farther from the truth than that.
		No, it's just that the wars between different sets of ideas manifest themselves first in the colleges and the universities before they wend their way out into the general public.
		And this is a war of ideas at an extraordinarily deep level.
		It's not political.
		It's not philosophical, even.
		I think it's really at the level of religious thought, which is one level below, say, it's the substructure of philosophical thought in some sense.
		And it has to do with the place that is deemed appropriate for the individual versus the group in the world, in being itself.
		The postmodern claim, postmodern neo-Marxist claim, let's say, because there's an unholy alliance between those two branches of pathological thought, in my estimation, their conclusion is that the individual is, first of all, nothing but a concatenation of cultural and biological forces with heavy emphasis on the cultural, no real capacity for free will, no separate identity from the group identity, and therefore really of little value or merit or significance.
		And to me, that's anathema.
		I think I've pronounced that right.
		I've probably only read it.
		Because the West is founded on the principle that the individual is sovereign, and that is not a trivial idea.
		It means that we've recognized, and much death went into this realization.
		That's the thing that's important to understand.
		We've realized that states that are not, in the final analysis, subordinate to the to the spiritual and intellectual supremacy of the free individual are doomed to dissolution or tyranny.
		And I think that it's very difficult to make a stronger moral and philosophical claim than that one.
		Now, it's a frightening claim, because it means that each individual is of value, and also that what the individual does matters.
		And that's actually quite a terrifying proposition, because it means that your moral errors actually have some ontological weight, I would say.
		They actually affect the structure of reality itself in a profound manner.
		To contemplate that deeply, especially in the light of the horrors, say, that individual actions allowed or contributed to in the 20th century is a very terrifying proposition.
		So this is no lightweight, this is no realm of lightweight consideration.
		But make no mistake about it, we're in one vicious war about the structure of reality, and I hope that The classic virtues and values are able to organize themselves and articulate themselves so that young people can understand what they are and so that this thing can turn out properly.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well I think talking about this in the frame of a war is sort of an interesting way because it seems to me, we chatted with about 30 students earlier today, and what everything seemed to be coming back to was about learning how to think so that you don't have to silence your opponents.
		And it seems that this is the place, right?
		This is the place where you guys are right now.
		This is the place where you're supposed to learn how to think so that if someone says something, That is counter to what you believe, that you now can think your way out of it, show them what the truth is.
		What has happened to that, the ability to know what you think and own your own mind?
onkar ghate ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, I think that goes to the initial question you were asking of, aren't we in a weird circumstance now that no one is really on the side or very few people on the side of free speech?
		But if you go... Jordan brought up, which I think is really important, ideas are powerful.
		So if you look historically, authorities have tried to control ideas because they're so powerful.
		Most societies have never had freedom of speech.
		And even when you look in the West, I mean, the first...
		The comprehensive philosopher, Plato, has a system in which you don't have freedom of speech.
		And it's because he doesn't think most people can reason.
		They're not autonomous in that kind of way.
		So he has a philosopher kings who are at the top.
		They can think.
		They can reason.
		So they have full freedom.
		But the people underneath don't.
		And it was a radical idea that came as a result of the Enlightenment, I think, of the individual.
		Each individual has within them the power to control their own mind.
		to direct their own thinking and to reach knowledge.
		So just as it was a radical idea in the way the American founders framed it of the pursuit of happiness, there's also the issue of the pursuit of truth.
		And that each individual is capable of doing that.
		He might default, he might not really be pursuing it, but he's capable of doing that.
		But the only way that he can do that is if he's free.
		And that means no authorities hemming him in and telling him, You can't look at that.
		You can't hear this person.
		You can't investigate this in the way they tried to him in Galileo and say, no, you cannot do this.
		You're under house arrest.
		No more investigation.
		You have to be free to do that.
		But you have to have to really value free speech.
		You have to have this view of yourself that I'm capable of doing this.
		I'm worthy of doing this.
		And I demand my freedom.
		And I'm not going to submit to any authority telling me what to do.
		And even, like if you put in Albert Einstein, like Plato's idea of a philosopher king, at the top of government, I would not submit to him telling me, well don't look at Holocaust deniers because it's all irrational.
		I think it is all irrational.
		But I need to make up that opinion or belief for myself.
		If I want to look and read some Holocaust deniers, I have to be free to do that, to look at it and say, oh no, this is all garbage.
		It's all irrational.
		I won't look at it.
		So the value of free speech comes from a conception of yourself as a pursuer of truth.
		And I think the postmodernists, who I call the anti-Enlightenment crowd, are driving into people that you're not capable of that.
		And you won't value free speech if you really think you're not capable of it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so really knowing what you think and why you think it is really the key to this whole operation.
		It's interesting you brought up Holocaust deniers.
		We did an event a couple months back at University of Arizona and I looked in the crowd and I saw the diversity that the left loves.
		I saw diversity of color.
		And sexuality and all that stuff.
		And I said, that's not really the diversity that I care about.
		I care about diversity of thought.
		I said, well, for example, how many Nazis are here?
		And actually, someone in the back raised their hand and said that they were a Nazi.
		And then they started going on about Holocaust denial.
		I said, you know what?
		Hang tight.
		We'll honor some free speech.
		When we get to the Q&A, we'll give you the first question.
		So then we got to the Q&A, and I threw it to her.
		And she was going on and on about Auschwitz, whatever I had.
		Michael Shermer was there, who I'm sure many of you guys know from Skeptic Magazine, and he debunks a lot of this stuff and he clearly explained to her why she was wrong.
		Now, of course, She doesn't come around.
		No one's going to come around.
		But I thought it was a great example of what free speech is, that we let her share her ideas.
		Everyone in the audience kind of looked at her like, this is nutty.
		And we honored free speech.
		An interesting little caveat to this, as I mentioned to you guys earlier, she was trans, which is kind of, how often do you meet a trans Holocaust denier?
		That was pretty good.
		Hitler loved those trans people, didn't he?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		I wanted to pick up on something that Ankur said.
		There's this idea that the reason that we need the right to free speech is because, let's say, of the nobility of the human spirit.
		And there's an element that about that that's true, but there's a more important and
		more practical reason that has more to do with the stupidity and the ignorance of the
		human spirit.
		And so I'm going to kind of come at this from two places.
		Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst, said that the fool was the precursor to the savior from a mythological perspective.
		You can see an echo of that in the idea that comedians tell the truth, right?
		And that the jester in the king's court is the only one, because he's beneath contempt, he's the only one that can actually say what's true.
		And so that's the sort of thing that Jung meant.
		But it's also the case that The reason the fool is the precursor to the savior is because when you first start to think, you have to express yourself badly and as if you're ignorant, because you don't know how to talk or think, and you are ignorant.
		And so what that means is that if you're not allowed to think badly, And then you can't think at all.
		You can never learn to think at all.
		And so that's part of why the restrictions on free speech are so indefensible.
		Because everyone starts out foolish and ignorant.
		And part of the Enlightenment idea, and I would say even more deeply rooted ideas before that, that had been developing for centuries, is that people are at least capable of moving towards Enlightenment.
		Even though they're not there, and they never will be there, it's possible to stumble forward towards Enlightenment.
		And you can't also do that just by thinking by yourself, because you're just not smart enough to think by yourself.
		And so free speech isn't merely the right to criticize those in power, and it's often viewed that way.
		And it's not also only the right to say what you think, it is actually the right to think!
		Because even what we're doing right now is thinking, you know?
		So, like, I'm talking to you guys, and you might say, well, you're not involved in the conversation.
		But that's not true, because I'm watching you to see if I'm on the right wavelength, you know?
		If my words are hitting their intended target.
		And I'm trying to make sure that I construct my language so that the communicative intent is where I want it to be.
		And that's all a process of active thought.
		And that's what clarifies your spirit and improves your behavior.
		and ennobles you across time.
		And so, it isn't that free speech is a value.
		It's not that.
		It's a canonical value.
		Without that, all the other values that we hold dear, that people have fought so hard to, and so, in such an unlikely manner, to preserve and produce, That all disappears, and you end up with a populace that is not only afraid to say what they think, but that doesn't even know what they think, because they haven't been allowed to stumble around in the dark, like human beings have to do, in order to find some tiny fragment of light.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, as I sit here between two Canadians... You motherfucking Canadians!
		As I sit here between two Canadians, I wonder, you know, the protections, the extra protections that we have in the United States because of the First Amendment, the tradition based in classical liberalism and true freedoms and freedoms of speech.
		You guys don't have all of that in Canada.
		And I think it's partly what has gotten you into some hot water, of course.
		Do you see us sort of whittling that away here?
unidentified		I guess the answer... I guess I know your answer, but... Yes.
onkar ghate ▲ ● ▼		And I think it's... Okay, moving on.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Jordan!
onkar ghate ▲ ● ▼		So, a place like Canada, in its constitution, has nominal protection for free speech, but it's subordinate to other, it can be trumped all the time.
		What's significant about the U.S.
		is the First Amendment, because the Bill of Rights, now there was the argument of, do we want to enumerate certain rights, because it implies that the other rights aren't important, but I think it was crucially important that these rights got enumerated, because when a government starts, and when the culture starts moving in a different direction, What the first amendment it has become the Constitution meant these are the powers.
		granted to government, it can't do anything else.
		And now it's much more looked at.
		Government can do anything except what is explicitly forbidden to it.
		And the First Amendment forbids interference with religion, it's freedom of speech, freedom of the press.
		So that's why I think it's better in other places than, here than in other countries.
		But the same forces that have eroded it considerably in Europe and in Canada are at work in the US, but it's harder for them to get around the First Amendment.
		But what is, I think, what's prophesizing the direction we're going to go in is that people don't understand the meaning of the First Amendment.
		They break it up into little clauses.
		Even the religion, it's the free exercise and the establishment clause, and it's It should be viewed as a package of what it's trying to do is protect intellectual freedom.
		And it's specifying crucial aspects of that about religion, about freedom of speech, about freedom of the press, of assembly, right to petition government.
		And this is what the founders, and I think particularly Jefferson and Madison, were trying to do.
		is protect intellectual freedom.
		And that's what you have to understand.
		That's what you have to value.
		And if you really understand it, it has all kinds of repercussions.
		To put one controversial one in, I think if you really understand intellectual freedom, public universities are a violation of it.
		In the same way establishing religion, that's really problematic and against intellectual freedom.
		Establishment in other areas, like in the university setting, creates all kinds of
		problems.
		Part of the battle in the US is just on this, because I think it's irresolvable.
		But that's, I mean, we can get into that kind of issue if you want.
		But yeah, so it's, there's unique things about the US, but I think it's moving in a direction that everybody else
		has moved in.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		How much of the problem here is that we've allowed everything to become political?
		We talked about this a little bit this afternoon, that everything now, so politics obviously, and it's just on everyone's feed all day long, talking about Trump and whatever else is going on, but now it's seeping into sports with the anthem, and it's seeping into Hollywood with everything going on with Harvey Weinstein, that everything has now become political, and I think that that is actually causing people On one hand, I view it as good because it's making people think and re-evaluate.
		But on the other hand, this endless onslaught of politics, I don't think is good.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's a symptom.
		And I don't think it's precisely a political symptom.
		It's a symptom of deep discontent.
		At very fundamental levels of the cognitive and perceptual structure that unites us.
		You know, you could say, if you were a Jungian, you'd say there are active forces at work in the collective unconscious once again.
		The collective unconscious, I guess, one way of looking at it is that it's the set of assumptions that we share that we don't know how to articulate.
		You know, and we certainly have any number of those because we're far more complex than we can fully understand.
		So, we know all sorts of things that we don't know we know.
		I mean, one of the things that people tell me quite regularly is that they like watching what I'm doing because I help them find the words to describe things that they already know.
		You know, and that's actually a hallmark of archetypal thinking.
		It's that we already do think this way.
		We think in a human way, and a particularly human way.
		And we need to be able to articulate that.
		But this battle that's going on between, let's say, the supremacy of group and individual identity, that reaches its tendrils up into everything.
		And it's a symptom of the depth of the problem, in some sense.
		It's also part of the spiral, you know, that is undoing things and pitting people against one another, but I see it as symptomatic.
		It's very difficult often when something is happening to specify the correct level of analysis, right?
		I mean, some of you know that I got involved publicly in the sort of thing that we're discussing now, because I voiced my opposition to a piece of Canadian legislation that purported to do nothing but extend some of the Charter rights to people whose gender identity didn't fit into the standard binary categories, which in some sense is a... I'm not going to call it a trivial
		Matter because I don't think it is but it's kind of a small country and it's it's a side issue in many ways But that isn't how it was treated like there was something about that issue that was emblematic of something far deeper and I was trying to figure out exactly what the right level of analysis was and I think that part of the reason that people have been Paying attention to what I've been saying is because I got the level of analysis right, and they knew that there was more going on underneath the surface than met the eye.
		Everyone has that feeling, I would say, at the moment.
		And it is this, are we going to allow ourselves to be defined by our group membership?
		And if we are, then...
		Well, what are we going to do with the people who aren't in our groups?
		Just for starters.
		And if we're defined by our group membership, like, which group?
		Because most of us can be thrown into an innumerable set of groups.
		And what does that mean for your dignity as an individual, or your value to the state, or to other individuals?
		These are major problems and major issues, and I can't help but see behind the post-modernist mask an absolute hatred of especially successful individuality, and that it's fundamentally motivated by something like a Hellish resentment, it's something like that.
		And that's the right language, too.
		And it's insanely dangerous, and we'd better be careful, because the insane danger may manifest itself, and we're going to be very unhappy if it does.
		It has in many other places, and many other times.
		And so, it would be good if we had enough sense to remember what we're about, and pick up the proper The proper pieces again and put everything back together.
		That would be very good.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and what's interesting, it's not just dangerous in the outward ways that we know it's all dangerous, when, you know, they're burning down universities, when Ben Shapiro, who's a, you know, he's a conservative thinker.
		That's really it.
		This isn't even the level of Milo.
		This is just an average conservative thinker.
		He's a quite good one.
		But, you know, people were saying, well, it was a success, Berkeley.
		You know, there was only one ATM broken and only three windows or something, and it cost them 600 grand.
		To secure it, to keep it safe.
		But I'm curious, I'll kick it to you guys for a second here.
		How many of you have just censored yourselves that there are times when something comes up that you want to post on Facebook or on Twitter or something else that you don't post just because you don't want to deal with it?
		Yeah, I mean that's pretty much everybody.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		Some of that might just be good sense.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Touche.
		How many of you have secret Pepe accounts?
		Oh wow, I got a hand back there!
		That's a rare moment of a frogman outing himself.
		Alright, there we go.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		It's not secret now.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You must find it funny that the Pepe thing has taken off.
		People think you sound like Kermit the Frog, and Pepe has become huge.
		It's a real frog thing right now.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I know.
		That's one of these things that I just can't figure out at all.
		I made a video last year where I wore a frog hat.
		partly because people had been comparing me to Kermit which I suppose as far as satirical Insults go is about as good as they get so and I do actually sound a lot like him which is actually rather appalling so You know, I wore this frog hat that this Indian carver I knew, Native American carver I knew, and I know very well, had given me.
		And he told me that the frog, for them, was an indicator of environmental degradation.
		And, of course, the frog is precisely that, because it lives in the water and on land.
		And it has very sensitive skin.
		And so if the frogs disappear in the wetlands, then that's not a good sign.
		And so I wore this hat.
		Yeah, and I think I started it out with that Kermit song about not being easy, being green, something like that.
		And then I realized, as soon as I posted it, I realized that this frog that my friend had carved for me had red lips.
		And somebody tweeted that that was the same frog as Pepe, and I thought, oh my god, I've just done myself in completely.
		But the string of coincidences that surrounded that were so intense that I still have no idea what to make of it.
		So many bizarre things have happened, well, around me, but to me in the last year that I'm still recovering from it, and probably will be for about a decade.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Ironically, that frog day was the same day that Alex Jones said that the government's making frogs gay.
unidentified		So there's something weird going on.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		The self-censorship thing, I want you to hit on that a little bit.
onkar ghate ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I want to talk about the self-censorship thing, because I think it's a real phenomenon, but you need to distinguish certain things.
		You can be morally self-censoring yourself, or you're just intellectually afraid to speak out.
		And the solution for that is just to summon the courage to speak out.
		We're not in any kind of unique circumstance where it's hard to speak out today for proper truth and proper values, but it was easy before.
		Go back in American history.
		The abolitionists.
		They were vilified for speaking out against slavery.
		But you have to distinguish, is it social and moral criticism?
		People won't want to associate with them.
		You're going to lose friends.
		I know that's happened to you.
		That's one level.
		It's another level, and the abolitionists, I mean, often were worried about this.
		You're going to be beaten up.
		Or maybe even killed.
		That is a wholly different level.
		And that is a level where the government should be protecting.
		So you asked earlier about what's happening to free speech in America.
		There is no free speech in regard to Islam.
		I really think that.
		So when there's self-censorship in regard to Islam, it's because the government won't protect the individuals who are willing to speak.
		And I mean, this happened with Rushdie.
		It happened with the Danish cartoon crisis.
		If newspapers don't reprint the cartoons when it's so clearly news, and if part of what they say and part of what they said is, look, we're scared of being attacked, of bombed.
		The government is not going to protect us.
		They're not going after the instigators of this.
		That's self-censorship where government has clear responsibility.
		But there's other kinds of what people describe as self-censorship, where the solution is not the government needs to protect your rights, it's you need to summon the moral and intellectual courage to speak out on these issues, even if people are going to go after you.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		What would you say to people who would say, well, don't inflame people?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would say, first of all, you know, that you don't want to make unnecessary enemies, right?
		There's nothing wrong with prudence.
		So you want to choose your words carefully.
		But, you know, part of wisdom is knowing what to be afraid of.
		And many times, many, many times in your life, Perhaps with every important choice you make, you've got terror on one side and terror on the other.
		There's no way forward that doesn't involve risk.
		See, there's a big problem with self-censorship.
		And that is that every time you fail to express who and what you are in an articulated manner, you first of all lose an opportunity to know yourself better.
		And that's not good, because you have to pilot yourself through life, and life is a very Dangerous and treacherous enterprise and if you don't know yourself well Then you won't pilot yourself well, and you will be hurt more often than you need to be and that is not trivial But the other thing is is that you also weaken yourself, and I'm speaking as a clinical psychologist here And I don't think there's any doubt about this is that you know
		Your mind is basically wired up in many, many different ways to determine what constitutes a valid threat.
		And that's not an easy thing to figure out.
		Like, if you wake up in the morning and your side is sore, you know, does that mean you pulled a muscle or does it mean you have cancer?
		It's like, you don't know.
		You can't tell.
		It's very difficult to determine exactly how threatening a threat is.
		And one of the ways that your brain figures that out is to watch you.
		And it assumes that if you move away from something, if you retreat from something, it assumes that the thing that you're retreating from is bigger than you and that you're smaller than it.
		And so it makes you just that much more existentially weak and frightened.
		And so when you have something to say and you don't say it, then not only do you miss an opportunity to articulate yourself properly, which is really fundamentally necessary, but you tell yourself right down to the level of your soul that there's less of you than there could be.
		And that makes the next retreat even more likely.
		And so you can easily initiate a positive feedback loop, where you retreat, and you get a little smaller, and your enemy gets a little bigger, and then you retreat again, and you get a little smaller, and your enemy gets a little bigger, and then you're at a point where, even under each time you retreat... for success in life, it's a recipe for Cowering in the corner and freezing.
		And so, you know, you might be afraid to say what you have to say.
		And you might have every reason to be afraid.
		But you should even be more afraid of not saying what you have to say.
		Because the consequences of that, as they accrue over the long term, are... They'll undermine everything for you.
		They'll undermine your faith in yourself.
		They'll undermine your family.
		They'll undermine your society.
		That is not a place you want to go.
		So...
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and we can take that to a very personal level for you guys.
		I mean, when I do these events at colleges, one of the questions that I always get asked, and I'm guessing we're going to probably get asked it in a few minutes, is, well, I have a professor who disagrees with me, or he's into all of this postmodern stuff, and I don't want to speak my mind because it's going to affect my grade.
		And I used to say, a couple years ago when I was doing this, I used to say to them, well, probably you should just suck it up, get the grade, and get out.
		And I actually completely disagree with that now because if you guys now will silence yourselves, it doesn't suddenly magically get easier when you're in the real world and you have a job and a spouse and kids and all these other worries.
		So in a weird way, it kind of sucks for you now and you want to get out and you want to get a good grade so you can get the good job and you can have all the things that you want in your life.
		But I think you're totally right, that it will never get easier.
		It will just be a constant whittling away at your ability to ever do it.
		So if you think it's not easy now, it ain't gonna get easy.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		Well, and every time, this is something else you need to know, and there's a very solid literature on this, is that, you know, one of the most ancient ideas that human beings have had is that In some manner, our spirits speak being into existence, you know?
		It's like the hallmark of consciousness, and it's one of the reasons that individuals are valuable.
		And it's a very deep idea, and a very necessary idea, and I believe one that's fundamentally true.
		But it carries with it certain more mortal perils, you might say.
		If you falsify your speech in the service of a proximal goal, you corrupt your soul.
		And, or I could say more technically, that you damage your psyche.
		Those are very similar ideas.
		But the evidence for that is crystal clear.
		You know, because what happens to people who say things they don't believe, is they come to believe the things they say.
		And the reason for that is, we talked a little earlier about the fact that a lot of You is unarticulated, right?
		And so there are things you know, but you don't know that you know them, and you don't know how to talk about them.
		And so then what you do is you decide that to reach a proximal goal, like getting a good grade, well, you have to say what the professor wants.
		So you write out an essay, you know, there's no soul in it, and you feel sick while you're writing it, and you're not interested in it, and you feel small, which are all hints from your being that you shouldn't be doing that, but you do it anyways.
		And then, at the end, you've got two choices, like, You're either a liar and a coward, or you believe what you wrote.
		And there's plenty of psychological evidence for this.
		What people do is decide that they believe what they wrote.
		Because it's less painful than noting that you're a liar and a coward.
		And not only that, you've articulated a counter-argument.
		And so, your original conviction remains unarticulated, and the counter-argument is articulated.
		So you've built yourself your own enemy.
		And you will pay for that.
		You pay for that with a diminishment of your character.
		And your character is what sustains you through life.
		You don't have, in any fundamental sense, you don't have anything else, because that's the thing that enables you to master the continual onslaught of chaos and uncertainty that you will be faced with for your entire life.
		You do not pollute your character.
		You pay for it.
		And so does everyone else.
		And if it goes far enough, then everyone else pays horribly for it.
		And it's the lesson of the 20th century.
		So, don't do that.
		And if you do that at university, it's like a mortal sin.
		It runs absolutely contrary to the spirit of the institution.
		It is precisely the opposite to... It's the absolute polar opposite to why you're here.
		Do not do it!
		And it's also a kind of... It's a kind of...
		Second-rate cynicism, because even though there is a fair bit of rot in the academic institutions, most of the time, if you write an articulate essay that the professor doesn't agree with, you will not be punished with a failing grade.
		It's very rare that that actually happens.
		Now, there is the odd professor who's so damn corrupt that that's going to be the case, but I've talked to lots of students and counseled them to write down what they think, and their grade generally surprises them quite spectacularly, because they're invested in the damn essay, and so they do the work, right?
		And they put a little passion into it, and they're not bored by it or made sick by what they're producing.
		And then they end up with a grade that's far better than they think.
		So, you know, often it's a, well, I'm going to take the easy route out, but I'm going to justify it by relating it to my career progress.
		It's like, really, guys?
		That's pretty pathetic.
		Seriously, it's pathetic.
		And I don't mean to be morally judgmental.
		I mean that it's pathetic in that what it will do is make you weak and craven.
		And probably you don't want that.
		Why would you want that when you could be strong and forthright instead?
		That's a way better choice.
		Don't say things that you don't believe, and especially don't write things that you don't agree with.
		It's a bad idea.
		It's a terrible idea.
		So don't do that.
		Ever.
		Ever.
onkar ghate ▲ ● ▼		It goes back to the issue that you were bringing up, which I definitely agree with, that speech and thought go together.
		And the totalitarians knew this.
		This is why in Soviet Russia, they would parade everybody into meetings where you had to espouse the dogma.
		Most people didn't believe it, but the totalitarians knew that it does something internally to the person to make them speak things they don't agree with.
		Over and over and over.
		It's very, very corrupting.
		And to do that to yourself when you're not being forced to do it is crazy.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So everything that you're talking about really is about the individual.
		I mean, we've sort of hovered around this, that this really comes down to the individual, the capacity of you to control your own mind, understand your own thoughts, how do you think, versus the collective.
		I know you're big on this concept.
		What's the best advice you could give to college students about how to avoid collectivism?
		Because it's thriving on college campuses, which is why we're in this position in the first place.
onkar ghate ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I think one of the things, there's a lot to say here, one of the things is to recognize how often you're being pushed in a collectivist direction.
		And it's not always obvious, but I think part of what makes collectivism collectivism is a determinism.
		So the reason you're a member of a collective, of a group, and that that's integral to your identity, is because it's all the same forces shaping every member of
		the group.
		But that means there's no individuals in it.
		You're all shaped by factors outside of you, antecedent to you,
		whether it's viewed as your race, your gender, your culture.
		I mean, multiculturalism was one of the main doctrines the postmodernists pushed.
		And the whole perspective was, you're a product of your ethnicity.
		And ethnicity was a blend of your race, of your culture, which is ideas and traditions and so on.
		This is what someone's a product of.
		This is how you have to look at yourself, how you should look at other people.
		And what is never there, never mentioned, Because they're all determinists.
		But what about the choices I make, the control I have over my own mind and my own life?
		What about the whole issue of it's a self-made character?
		Aristotle called it, you have a nature and then you have a second nature.
		And the second nature is the nature you create as a result of your choices.
		What about that?
		And you're never taught that because most people today, for various reasons, are determinists.
		And it's to recognize I'm in that environment, and if I reject that, then I have to pay attention to things about myself that nobody is telling me to pay attention to.
		And that's the root of individuality.
		If there is an individual, it's the choices and thinking you engage in, you initiate, you pursue, you sustain, and you're capable of doing that, even if everybody's telling you, no, you're just a product of all outside forces.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And what's particularly interesting about this, of course, is that if you were to judge everyone by their skin color or by their sexuality or by their religion or whatever else, that actually is prejudice.
		I mean, these are often the people who are claiming that everyone is a bigot and a homophobe and a racist and now a white supremacist and the rest of that.
		But if you look at someone and you think, well, because you're a woman, you have to think this way, or because you're black, you have to think this way, or you're white, so you have to think this way, That is prejudging.
		That is actually what the essence of prejudice is.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		Even to define diversity in the way that it's being defined, it's not only technically incorrect, I do believe that it's racist and misogynist.
		Or sexist, not misogynist.
		And the reason for that is that there are different...
		You can break people up into groups in various ways, and one of the consequences of breaking them up in some ways is that you break them up in ways so that there's a difference between group A and group B. There's an actual difference.
		Maybe it's a difference in wealth, or who knows?
		Because it depends on how you break them up.
		But the scientific evidence on this is clear as well.
		Even if you take the relatively large differences that exist between some groups.
		So here's an example.
		There's actually quite a large difference between men and women in terms of what their intrinsic interests are.
		This is something James Damore tried to point out and was pilloried for it.
		But the evidence is very strong.
		On average, women are more interested in people, and on average, men are more interested in things.
		And that's a fairly large difference as far as those sorts of differences go.
		But there's still more overlap between men and women than there are differences.
		And so the idea that you get diversity by selecting a cross-group identity is technically wrong, because there's more diversity within any group than there is between any two groups.
		It's wrong!
		It's wrong!
		But it's worse than that.
		It's morally wrong, because you're making the assumption that...
		There's an old racist assumption that the group defines the content of the spirit.
		It's like, there isn't a more racist claim than that.
		There's not a more sexist claim than that, that I know what you're like because I know something about your external features.
		It's like, how the hell did we ever get to the place where we thought that had something to do with diversity?
		It's anti-diversity in the most profound way.
		It's absolutely insulting to a person who regards himself or herself as an individual, to be judged in that manner, and to be constantly harangued for bigotry, for opposing the evil trinity of equity, diversity, and inclusivity.
		It's a miracle of inversion that that can even be the case, and I would say, We need to know how to identify the radical leftists, let's say, and separate them from the liberals.
		And liberals are very bad at that.
		They're very bad at doing that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I'm trying!
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		So I would say, those three words, if you hear people mouth those words, equity, diversity, inclusivity, you know, you know who you're dealing with.
		And you should step away from that, because it's not acceptable.
		It's a mask of virtue.
		That's it.
		And underneath it is something that's truly awful.
		And it's incumbent on liberal types to start to draw a line between their classic liberal beliefs and these terrible post-modern neo-Marxist ideas that have a pedigree of genocide behind them.
unidentified		Well, you know what?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I think we want to get to the Q&A because we were all saying before how that often is the most enjoyable part of this whole thing.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So how about give these guys a round of applause?
unidentified		Applause.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So we've got two mics right here, right up in the front.
		So if you guys want to just come on down and you can even say mean things to us and we will not have you escorted out.
		And all we ask is that you kind of keep it a little bit brief because obviously we want to get to as many of you guys as possible.
unidentified		Hello, my name is Helen.
		Dr. Peterson, I just have to say thank you for everything that you've done.
		I've been following your work for about a year, and I showed it to my father and feel, in many ways, as though you have helped me sort of save my dad from the belly of the whale.
		Yeah, he, at 60 years old, is in the best physical and spiritual shape of his life since reading Maps of Meaning, so I'm just, I feel indebted.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		Hey, my pleasure, man.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		Man, that's a great story.
unidentified		Yes.
		And this question can be for both of you.
		Is there something about the archetypes that drive the collective psyche of the West that is universally non-transferable?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		How do you mean universally non-transferable?
unidentified		Unique, I guess you could say.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		I would say the articulation of it is unique, but not the archetypes.
		Like the archetypes, this is sort of pertinent to something Dave said earlier about, and Ankara as well, about the causal forces at work.
		You know, in a materialistic world, there's culture and nature.
		But in the archetypal world, there's three elements.
		There's culture, that's generally symbolized with masculine symbolism, and there's nature, generally feminine.
		But there's a third factor, and that's often symbolized as the Sun.
		And that's the factor that's associated with conscious choice and free will.
		And we don't know what to do with that in our scientific materialistic models.
		But that trinity, let's say, of masculine, feminine, and the third factor, as far as I can tell, that's universal.
		Now, it's articulated to a different degree in different cultures, and I think that one of the things that makes the West unique is that that third factor has been articulated most completely in the West.
		One of the other things I think that's been articulated in the West, perhaps more so than in other places, is the distinction between good and evil.
		And I think that those are two major philosophical advantages, and they're actually part of what grounds our political system.
		So the archetypes, they're the same.
		But the expression and philosophical articulation is, I would say, relatively unique in the West.
unidentified		Why do you think the West was able to do that in such a unique way?
unidentified		Divine providence?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		I can't say.
		I don't know.
		I mean, the thing is, if you think about this from a biological perspective, you know, Many Western ideas have spread everywhere very rapidly, you know, and it just may be that the West happened to get there first with regards to the historical time frame.
		We're only talking, you know, a few dozen centuries, something like that, and from a biological perspective, that's nothing, right?
		It's like we got there two minutes before the next people got there.
		That's all.
		I don't know.
		I can't say other than that.
unidentified		Okay, thank you so much.
		Hi, my name is Cody Brantley.
		First of all, thank you all for being here.
		Dave, I respect the work that you do with the Rubin Report so much.
		Although, this right here, I don't care what the commenter says.
		What?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		They love the beard!
unidentified		You gotta get rid of it, I'm sorry.
unidentified		Are you getting beard criticism?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they usually love the beard.
		Ah, bearded guy said keep the beard.
		Brandon Beard?
		The professor said keep the beard.
unidentified		All right.
		Maybe it's just me.
		Hashtag keep the beard.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		The beard has a Twitter account.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		There's nothing I can do.
unidentified		It's already trending.
		It's already trending.
		I guess this is for all of you.
		Which do you think is more dangerous for free speech?
		Is it the censoring of yourselves?
		You mentioned this a bit.
		Is it the censoring of yourselves or is it censorship from At the moment, I believe it's self-censorship.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Look, there's a lot of things wrong with our government at the moment.
		There's a lot of reasons that I talk about limited government all the time, and I want to get the power of your life back to you, and we should have states' rights, and not everything should be done by the federal government.
		I'm not even going to go into Trump or any of that.
		That is secondary to what I see happening because I do this every day now, and I talk to people like you, and I see constantly people are afraid to say what they think in the freest country in the history of the world.
		The incredible American experiment that has brought more people here from every corner of Earth, and all it is is an experiment, and it's worked pretty damn well.
		For a couple hundred years.
		And yes, are there problems?
		Do we have real issues?
		Of course.
		There's nothing perfect.
		You know, I think a lot of people on the left right now, they want to manage everything.
		They think they can perfect the system.
		And then it'll suddenly be magically wonderful for everyone at all times.
		Except we're the problem with the system.
		We're not perfect.
		That's part of being human.
		So for me, And for the conversations that I have every week and when I go out and I meet people, I mean, the fact that every single one of you basically raised your hand when I asked you self-censor.
		And I'm guessing none of the things that you were going to post on Facebook were going to be truly evil or racist or any of that stuff.
		But you're silencing yourselves, and then I think Jordan's answer on why that is corrosive to you as a human being, I think that's much more dangerous.
		But I'm happy to hear from you guys.
onkar ghate ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I definitely agree with that.
		It's self-censorship and it's, I think over the long term you get the government you've earned.
		So if we're as citizens are unwilling to speak up and defend freedom of speech on particular issues where we're self-censoring and on the whole value of freedom of speech, You can't blame the government that, well, it doesn't uphold it because it doesn't think we want it.
		It would be a very different situation if 90% of Americans were demanding freedom of speech and the government was doing nothing about it.
		Then you might say, well, OK, the problem is we need to change government.
		But that's not what is happening right now.
		So I definitely think it's the former.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		You might say there's an external tyrant.
		That's trying to make you into a slave.
		And there's an internal tyrant that's trying to make you into a slave.
		And every time you allow the internal tyrant to win, you make it stronger.
		And again, I mean that technically.
		Because your mind is composed, in some sense, of competing systems.
		And which of those systems dominates depends on which system gets rewarded.
		And so if the tyrant says, Silence.
		And you agree, then that system wins, and it gets a little bit stronger.
		And the part that got defeated gets a little bit weaker.
		And so, you don't want to do that to yourself.
		Unless you want to be a slave that's beholden to a tyrant, and to have that constitute your inner life.
		You don't want that, unless that's what you want.
		I would say think that through very carefully, because you don't want to be a slave to your own tyrant.
		That's hell, and it's a bad place to go to.
unidentified		Thank you.
		Dr. Peterson, so you've suggested that the proper university trains one to become articulate.
		And if I understand it right, a corrupted university would compel you to make arguments that you didn't really believe in and you'd fail to become articulate.
		If you were, suppose, the victim of a corrupted university, where should one defer to, or go to, to learn to become articulate?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		Well, I really think the best way that you can learn to be articulate is to write.
		When I talk to students, I actually have a little guide to writing on my webpage, and one of the things it says... Writing an essay is actually a spiritual journey.
		And I mean that most seriously.
		You know, if you're bored writing an essay, it's because you're writing it wrong.
		At minimum, you should be terrified.
		Hopefully, you should be at least interested.
		Because if you haven't picked a topic that grips you, about which you have something to say and need to say, then you've picked the wrong topic.
		And the act of writing is—it is the act of bringing something new into being, and you want to bring the right thing into being.
		You don't want to bring a monster, a misshapen monster, into being.
		And believe me, I've read lots of undergraduate essays that were misshapen monsters, that's for sure.
		So if you want to be articulate, you do some writing, because that's hard thinking.
		And then you read geniuses.
		You can actually read geniuses for free, which is quite remarkable, right?
		You go on Amazon, and anything that's more than 50 years old you can download on your Kindle for like one cent.
		And so, if you're not being educated by your professors, and that's actually very common, You can educate yourself.
		That's what a library is for.
		In fact, if you go to university, really, what a university is, is a place where society rewards you with an identity so that you could become educated if you had a mind to.
		And a lot of it is something you have to do yourself.
		But you can find out who to read.
		They're great writers.
		They're not great because they're part of an oppressive, patriarchal structure.
		They're great because they tell you things that if you don't know, you are going to be in very much trouble.
		And there's just an unlimited number of resources like that.
		So, you know, go to your classes, get your grades, get your accreditation.
		Don't sacrifice your soul to do it.
		And at the same time, read what you should read.
		Read those people that have been universally regarded as great, because they're regarded in that manner because they're actually great.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm writing my first book right now, and I think I just decided I'm not letting you look at the first draft.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That is the key.
unidentified		Okay, so this is kind of aimed at all of you, but mainly Dr. Peterson.
		Why is it, do you think, that Marxism is such a rooted ideology compared to things like classical liberalism or all of these other Well, that's a good question.
		Like, this thing's been around since the mid-1800s, and it's taken over almost everything, especially
		college campuses.
		Why do you think that is?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's a good question.
		I mean, I think the first communists, let's say, the Russians, let's say, for the sake
		of argument, they were much less reprehensible philosophically than today's Marxists.
		And the reason for that was, well, they had a utopian vision, and not that that's necessarily a good thing, but they didn't necessarily know that it was a bad thing, right?
		And so, and the old aristocratic European structure was crumbling, and there'd been a terrible war, and, you know, the czarist regime was Well, compared to the communist regime, it was heaven on earth.
		But, you know, it had its problems.
		And so, even as Nietzsche said, you know, that communism would be worth it as an experiment.
		But he also said, and this was in Will to Power, that hundreds of millions of people would die as a consequence, which is one of the most remarkable prophecies, I think, that have ever been uttered by anyone, ever.
		Okay, so it's attractive, it's utopian, but then there's the dark side of it, right?
		Which means everyone who has more than you got it by stealing it from you.
		And that, it really appeals to the Cain-like...
		element of the human spirit, right?
		Everyone who has more than me got it in a manner that was corrupt, and that justifies not only my envy, but my actions to level the field, so to speak, you know?
		And to look virtuous while doing it.
		And so, there's a tremendous philosophy of resentment that I think is driven now also by a very pathological, anti-human It's not like we're not doing some stupid things to the planet, like what we're doing to the oceans, for example, is reprehensible beyond comprehension.
		But, you know, I've heard environmentalists state quite straightforwardly that human beings are a cancer on the planet.
		It's like, if someone says that to you, you know, you should move away from that person very, very quickly, because that statement is genocidal in its spiritual origin.
		And so I think there's a whole...
		Cluster of unexamined motives of resentment that primarily drive the resurgence of the Marxism.
		But it's also a consequence of the poor, the biased education that our children receive.
		You know, they know a bit about the Second World War and about the Nazis.
		But they don't know anything about what happened in the Soviet Union and China.
		Like, often in universities, and I teach a personality course, it's like, that's not where you should be learning about the six million Ukrainians who died of starvation in the 1930s.
		But most of my students have never heard of any of that!
		It's like, what the hell?
		We fought a whole Cold War about that!
		We damn near annihilated the planet because of it!
		And all of a sudden it's, well, it's an inconvenient for the Neo-Marxists to notice that That the regimes of Stalin and Mao were brutal beyond comprehension.
		So how about if we don't talk about it?
		So there's lots of corruption that's driving this, but a huge part of it is resentment.
		And I think the worst emotions are resentment.
		The worst actions are resentment.
		Deceit and arrogance.
		And you get those three working together, boy, you got a force that you better be careful with.
unidentified		Do you think it's dying off?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		Or going away?
unidentified		What's that?
		Do you think Marxism is dying off or going away at all?
		Or do you think it's getting stronger?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		I think that what's happened is that it's transmutated into this postmodernism and identity politics, which was really, really devious.
		Really devious.
		And that was a consequence of the French intellectuals, mostly Derrida and Foucault.
		But it's not going away.
		What's happened instead is that it's taken a new strategic tack, and it's one that no one really envisioned.
		What it's doing is taking over the administration of mid-level bureaucracies everywhere.
		So it's not so much a threat at the highest level of political organization, but That isn't necessarily where much of the power over individuals resides.
		It resides in these smaller political...
		Sub-political structures, like school boards, for example.
		Or, in Canada right now, our law society in Ontario has made it mandatory for lawyers to produce a statement of principles that they provide a template for.
		They tell you what your damn statement of principles should be.
		And they're basically equity, diversity, and inclusivity statements.
		And if you don't write out your statement of principles, declaiming your agreement with these principles,
		and simultaneously, essentially admitting that you're a racist, then you don't get your license.
		So we're fighting a big war about that right now in Ontario.
		We might even win.
		It looks like we might win, you never know.
		But, and it's also partly because ordinary people are too complacent about the mid-level bureaucrats
		rule over them, you know.
		We're willing to allow those relatively small positions of power to be taken over by groups that are very good at doing that sort of thing.
		We need to wake up to that because it's seriously not good.
		It's very difficult to fight back against.
		Thank you.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		All right, we got a ton, so let's just keep rolling here.
		All right, I'll keep the beard.
		I can see it.
unidentified		Thank you.
		20 years ago, if you grew up in a small southern town and you're interested in a not popular idea,
		such as Marxism or Buddhism or whatever, what you could do is go to your local library, read the two books by Karl
		Marx there, and then talk to your uncle, a mechanic, or your high school civics teacher about those ideas.
		And you either think, huh, I've got something here.
		Let me go to university and work on it.
		Or maybe I was wrong about this and get back to the standard path most people take.
		And now we have the rise of the information age, So on the one hand, you can get every great work of
		literature that's 50 years or older for $0.01.
		But on the other hand, you have all these echo chambers, dark holes on Reddit and 4chan, where if you don't espouse everything that one particular group says, then you're immediately banned and have no voice.
		Because of this, we have so many people that when you go home for Thanksgiving, you don't want to talk about the election with your uncle because, you know, it's a life or death thing.
		And on this group, you know that, you know, I need to hit him with a bike lock instead of talking with him about what's going on.
		I think we need to come back to the point where we talk to our uncle and our high school civics teacher about these things and pull ourselves a little bit away.
		And because you guys, I know, talk about these things, what are some actionable baby steps that we can take As students, as citizens, as people in the workforce, to make it okay to talk about politics and religion and how much we make and all these things that matter.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would say five words.
		Twitter is not real life.
		That really... Yeah.
		This is real life.
		This right here is real life.
		You are real people in front of us.
		We're real people in front of you.
		You know, I'm sure some of you guys know I took all of August off, and I did not look at a screen.
		I locked my phone in a safe, and I was working on my book, and I was just living like a regular person used to 10 years ago.
		And I found that I was more patient, even when I was online at the supermarket, that I was looking at the cashier instead of just, you know, whatever the hell I was doing.
		I was going to say Snapchatting.
		I don't even have it anymore.
		But that stuff is not real.
		There is value to it.
		It helped create revolutions.
		Tahrir Square in Egypt had a lot to do with the online world.
		I mean, there's incredible value to it, but it's becoming crazy.
		Twitter particularly is becoming insane.
		So you can spend a lot of time on Reddit and 4chan fighting with anonymous people.
		I mean, most of these people are anime foxes, pink foxes.
		If a guy in a pink fox hat was running across the street and told you to go fuck yourself,
		I'm pretty sure you wouldn't engage.
		What did you just say to me?
		We're gonna sit down and work this thing out.
		No.
		But for some reason, smart people, people smarter than me are sitting online arguing with anonymous crazy people.
		And by the way, I think there's some value in anonymity online.
		I think there's reasons that it can be good, as I just said, the Egypt thing.
		But that stuff is not all real.
		You know what's real?
		Sitting down with your uncle and the other things that you mentioned.
		And do the best you can at it.
		And I say that as someone that can stare at my phone half the day.
		So we all got to get better at it.
		But I think that's the best answer on that one.
onkar ghate ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, we talked a little bit about this.
		I'm not on social media for that reason.
		And I think part of what one needs to learn is that communication is a two-way process and that thinking takes time.
		You have to really think what you're saying.
		I mean, you were talking about writing an essay.
		The idea to me that people are online and in 15 seconds they have a 200-character retort to something as though they've thought about what the other person has said.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		He thinks Twitter's 200 characters.
unidentified		This is a guy who's truly not online.
unidentified		Yeah, 140.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		144.
onkar ghate ▲ ● ▼		40.
		That's not what thinking looks like.
		And if you're not willing to listen to the other person, even when you disagree with them, and even when you think they're crazy, and you're not trying to get at, but is there anything animating them?
		Is there anything that they're concerned about?
		Any problem that they're trying to solve?
		For instance, I'm very anti-Trump, but I will listen to the people who are pro-Trump or voted for.
		I'm trying to get at what exactly is it that you're interested in.
		What is driving you?
		But that takes time and effort.
		And if you're not willing to put that in, you're not actually interested in thinking or in communicating.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		I think that comment you make about listening is really the key.
		One good way to engage in political discussion is to find someone that you don't agree with, which obviously isn't that difficult, and ask them, like, why do you believe that?
		And not like, why do you believe that?
		That's not a question.
		Because they actually have a reason for believing what they believe.
		And, you know, people love to be questioned in a genuine way, because they love to be listened to.
		People insanely love to be listened to, because they need to express themselves and think.
		And questioning is a wonderful way to engage in a political conversation.
		I mean, imagine you came up to a penguin, and you could ask it what it was like, and it could tell you.
		You'd think, wow, that'd be pretty interesting.
		I could find out about penguins.
		So you can find someone with some strange set of beliefs, and you could ask them why they believe it, and they'll actually tell you.
		And most of the time, that's insanely fascinating.
		You know, it is very much like interrogating some kind of bizarre form of animal life.
		Not that you're not an equally bizarre form of animal life.
		But... And often the other thing that's so interesting is that if you really listen to people...
		It's very, very likely that they will tell you something you didn't know.
		Even if they tell you 50 things you think are ridiculous, if you really engage them in conversation, you'll come away with something that you didn't know.
		And that's a treasure, man, because, hey, now all of a sudden you know something that you didn't know!
		What a good deal!
		And so questioning, honest, not arrogant.
		It's like, okay, you don't agree with me, but that doesn't mean that you're the devil incarnate.
		Probably.
unidentified		So everyone has something to teach you, and sometimes that's an example of what not to say.
		But I guess the thing is, like you said before, instead of these negative feedback loops, we have to set up a positive feedback loop.
		So you start by talking to the penguin guy, because he's easy and non-threatening.
		Then after that, you go to the next level up, and sooner or later, if you keep doing that, then you'll be strong enough, like the guy with the fear of elevators, to go out and talk to the guy on the street.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I realize that I probably opened the gates of hell when I mocked the pink foxes.
		Did I say fox?
		Was it a fox?
		So let me just look in the camera.
		I'm sorry, you people are wonderful.
		Please leave me alone.
unidentified		Hi.
		So I have two questions that are connected.
		The first one, Dr. Gatti, you said that there's a difference between morally self-censoring, and that's a direct quote, versus intellectually speaking out or the government censoring someone's thought.
		So why does there have to be a difference is my question, and I guess this is addressed to both you and Dr. Peterson, and can you clarify that difference more concretely?
		Because to me it seemed like that was approaching Kind of tiptoeing around a concession to free speech, or a concession to censoring free speech in that this, if this line is not clearly defined, you could very easily, or you could say, I suppose, that something is an example of moral censorship as opposed to the other kind of intellectual censorship.
		And then relatedly, a common reason for censorship, I think, that we see on college campuses is this idea of, well, there are people who have more privilege, there are people who have less privilege, and if a person in a higher state of privilege says something to a person with lower privilege due to that privilege that the person in the higher position has, it can be seen as offensive because they don't understand those experiences of the person with lower privilege, and say if, you know, we classically hear the example of the white, cis, het male, heterosexual male talking down to
		You know, say the black trans woman, whatever, whichever, you know, kinds of oppression you'd like to identify.
		That can be seen as problematic because this person with more privilege does not have the same experience, does not have the same understanding of what it's like to be this person.
		And hence, that's an example of why free speech can be censored for that person.
		So, I guess to restate, one, could you clarify the difference between those two ideas?
		And two, where is their relationship?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Just real quick before you answer that, just so you guys know, we weren't going to do this, but I think maybe we will, just because I feel good about you guys.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		We're going to sacrifice a white heterosexual man at the end of this, right here on this table.
unidentified		I'm ready.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It could be any of you.
		All right, you.
		You're in.
		You raise your hand first.
		Okay.
onkar ghate ▲ ● ▼		Take it away.
		I was putting intellectual and moral self-censorship together.
		So you can be scared because you're going to be morally attacked.
		You're a bad person for voicing or holding those views.
		Or you can just be intellectually attacked.
		You're a stupid person.
		If that's all the opposition is, then what you should be doing is holding fast to what you truly think and what you truly believe and what you truly value.
		You should be speaking out for that.
		I was contrasting that to when, because the term self-censorship is used in that context, and it's used in the context where a person's right to speak is actually no longer protected by the government.
		And I think in regard to Islam, that is the case, that people rightly fear for their lives to speak out on this issue.
		And that means physically killed.
		I mean, I've done events with Flemming Rose, who was the editor of the Danish cartoons, and I've worn a bulletproof vest.
		That's a very different context than someone's going to tell me I'm stupid or someone's going to tell me I'm a bad person.
		And I get that criticism that I'm stupid and a bad person all the time.
		I work at the Ayn Rand Institute.
		There's many people who love Ayn Rand.
		There's many people who hate Ayn Rand and think she's the stupidest person in the 20th century.
		She's evil.
		She advocates selfishness.
		That, everyone knows, is evil.
		I get that kind of opposition.
		And if I cowered to that opposition, It would shrink my soul.
		If I cower and I'm afraid to speak about Islam and we decide we're not going to do an event because someone would blow us up, that's a very different form.
		And that, one, is the government's responsibility to say, no, we will protect you.
		We will do whatever we can to protect Rushdie, protect the Danish cartoonists, to protect the Garland event in Texas where they're drawing the Prophet Muhammad.
		That's the responsibility of the government.
		So those were the two categories I was distinguishing.
		On the issue of privileges, I don't think it's a valid concept.
		It's used to intimidate morally.
		There is an issue there that, a part of what came up in the other question, that you want to really try to communicate with another person.
		You should be sensitive to the issue that someone can have very different experiences than you, very different circumstances, grown up in a different culture, in a different kind of family, that makes differences for how they think about things, what they've been exposed to or not.
		And that, in terms of communicating, you should be sensitive to the issue.
		It's not an issue of power or privilege.
		It's just an issue of different context.
		And that is relevant to communication.
		And you really should be thinking.
		And you can unknowingly insult people.
		But that's not an issue of don't talk to people as a result.
		It's rather talk in a constructive, genuine way with people.
		And it's part of what should be interesting about a university.
		You meet all kinds of people with all kinds of different views, backgrounds, that you can learn from.
		But the whole postmodern view is, it's kind of collective subjectivism, that this person grew up in this group, this person grew up in this group, and they can't communicate because they live in different realities.
		That, I think, is totally wrong.
		You live in one reality and you can have different experiences in it, and what you're trying to do is learn from each other.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Alright, there's a ton of you, so we'll try to keep it a little briefer.
unidentified		Hey guys, I'm Dr. Peterson, huge fan, Dave as well, keep the beard.
		And Dr. Gotti, thank you for coming too.
		One of the biggest threats against free speech is the heckler's veto.
		We've seen this with Milo at Berkeley and Ann Coulter as well and Charles Murray at Middlebury.
		I wanted to ask, why do you guys think the mainstream media is often reluctant to shine a light or condemn the use of the heckler's veto by groups like Antifa?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it's pretty simple, actually.
		They don't want to be called racist.
		They don't want these tactics that have effectively silenced so many of you guys who are not racist in the first place.
		They don't want it to be turned on them.
		So they've created an intellectual hostage situation.
		And I would say the simplest answer, if you want to stop these people, you know what you do?
		I've done events.
		I did UCLA with Milo.
		And a bunch of kids created a human wall.
		So they're not against walls, they just don't like Trump's wall.
		But you know what?
		You know what?
		You want to silence him?
		Don't show up.
		He will disappear like Voldemort.
		It will just go.
		But instead, the more you burn these things down, you silence these people, he and whoever else, and I'm not even making this personally about Milo, but any of these people will be stronger after.
		Are they more known or less known after?
		Always more.
		So let them speak and usually, if they're bad ideas, they'll crumble on their own.
unidentified		Thank you.
		Hi, my question is on media responsibility.
		So we talk a lot about that in many of my classes, and we look at how media distorts reality into complete fabrications at some points.
		And I'm even conducting a psychology experiment on what you would call fake news.
		But with the First Amendment, we have freedom of press and freedom of speech.
		But with Trump's recent tweets, It's been called into question media regulation.
		So I was wondering how you feel about that.
		Where do you draw the line between freedom of press and the press complete outright lies sometimes?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, for me on this one, I mean, look, you can say whatever you want.
		It doesn't mean that there aren't repercussions.
		So if the media is blatantly saying false things, well, we actually do have libel laws.
		We do have slander laws.
		I'm for those laws.
		You know, something like Gawker that was violating Hulk Hogan's right to privacy, well, guess what happened?
		They got destroyed.
		I have no problem with that.
		You have a right to privacy.
		You have a right to free speech.
		You don't have a right to not have repercussions happen.
		Uh, when you speak.
		Um, as for Trump, look, you know, he has, look, his Twitter is obviously ridiculous, and he can, the thing is, he has the same right to free speech as the rest of us do.
		Now, if he was trying to pass laws to stop it, to stop press from doing some of these things, and he actually did tweet something the other day about taking NBC's license away.
		Now, I'm obviously not for that, but he didn't try to pass a law about it yet.
		And thankfully, we still do have three branches of government.
		They don't really work the way they're supposed to.
		But in a lot of ways, Trump hasn't been able to get a lot of the things that he's wanted done, because the system actually is working at the moment.
		So you have free speech, and Trump has it too, and so does NBC.
		And I'd love to read your paper, because I think it's THE topic, actually, related to this whole thing.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		I think part of what's happened to the press, too, is a consequence of The postmodernist insistence on identity politics and the relativism of truth, because within that universe, the world is sort of portrayed as a battleground between identity groups, each of which are only motivated by power.
		And if you buy into that, then you can abandon any commitment to the truth, because there is no truth.
		And that removes the moral responsibility of journalists to do anything but utter their opinion, their temperamental political opinion.
		And so it's convenient.
		I mean, and it's certainly the case, I would say, that in my lifetime I've seen a substantial
		decline in the quality of print journalism and television news, like quite pronounced.
		I think that's partly why YouTube has become such a phenomenon among young people.
		They're actually rather sick of that and would like to get some information.
		But I think it's part of this underlying war that we talked about earlier.
		And the press seem to increasingly regard themselves as opinion shapers or something
		Content providers and opinion shapers, you know?
		God, two horrible phrases, instead of people who are trying to get a handle on what's going on and communicate it to the rest of the world, which really is what journalists were doing, I would say, before the 1980s.
		I mean, that is really what they did, at least for a while.
unidentified		So... Yeah.
		Thank you.
		My question is on a similar note.
		The value of free speech seems to have fallen out of favor with these postmodernists, simply because, for lack of a better term, it's just too confusing for them.
		That it provides more confusion than solutions.
		And their proposition is to burn away what has been before, simply for the sake of doing something new, because in their estimation of things, it's not working at present.
		Now, whether they convict that through power games or language games or, I don't know, deleting the right people off Facebook, it seems to be that elimination is what they're trying to do with speech.
		And in some of your previous lectures on free speech, you've talked about the differentiation between speech proper and then truth speech, speech that actually contains something to move forward with.
		So my question is, can A method of discernment for what is true be externalized from the individual.
		Is there really a reliable method of verification for what is true outside of somebody's own subjective experience?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think science is one method of reliable verification, and it clearly works.
		I mean, here we are.
		The electricity is on and everything.
		It's self-evidently true in some sense, but I do believe that—and this probably goes along with the arguments we were talking about earlier with regards to that third element of human character—I do believe that you have the power to discern truth.
		Like, you have to learn to develop it.
		But if you didn't have that, like, how could you live?
		You wouldn't be able to distinguish between the kind of enacted falsehood that would kill you and the sort of thing that would facilitate your movement through time and space.
		Like, you are a rational creature, and it's deeper than that, because you're a creature, I think, who partakes in the process of creation, but you certainly Have the capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood
		It needs to be developed and you can be fooled and you can make mistakes and all of that
		But you wouldn't be able to live in a world of regularities if you didn't have that capacity. So
unidentified		Well, if I may add something I know we're in a rush But I think I think it comes to the line of the intoxication
		of group psychology versus having individual conviction I mean, how is an individual, especially one that's already swayed by, say, you know, jargon about the proletariat, how are they supposed to have a moment
		where they can realize the difference between having a truthful conviction versus having a conviction
		delivered for them and spoken for them.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		Well, alright, so Solzhenitsyn talked about this a fair bit in the Gulag Archipelago,
		you know, when he was trying to retool his character, because he realized in himself,
		he realized that he himself was one of the tyrannical forces that produced the conditions that
		that landed him in the work camps.
		So he's willing to take personal responsibility for it.
		And he said that the first thing he did was sort of go over his life memories with a fine-tooth comb and try to identify times where he had done something that he knew to be wrong.
		Now, sometimes you might do something and you don't know whether it's right or wrong.
		You know, so let's say you're ignorant and you might be making a mistake, but you don't know.
		But, and I think this is a universal human experience, people know People know sometimes that what they're saying isn't true.
		And people know sometimes that what they're doing is wrong.
		And they state the untruth, and they do what's wrong anyways.
		And one thing you can do is stop doing that.
		That isn't the same as telling the truth, exactly.
		It's ceasing to utter and enact falsehoods.
		And you can define the things.
		That's what's interesting about that.
		It's a game you play with yourself.
		It's like, well, for some reason, I know that what I'm about to do is wrong.
		Stop doing that.
		And you clean up your vision, right?
		That's a matter of taking the beam out of your eye.
		You clean up your vision.
		And as you do that progressively, and Solzhenitsyn is an excellent example of this, Your capacity to discern truth from falsehood grows.
		And that means that your capacity to operate effectively in the world grows, because there's no real difference between those things.
		So, I would say, the place you start... This is why, you know, it's become an internet meme.
		I tell people to clean up their rooms.
		To put themselves in order.
		If you're in disorder, And you know that there are things you could do, that were even small, that would improve that to some degree.
		Do them, and then keep doing them.
		And that works across time.
		It's also humble, you know, in the sense of proper humility.
		Start where you are.
		Fix the things that you can fix.
		Quit saying things you know that make you weak and that are lies.
		And if you do that for a reasonable period of time, it will transform you completely.
		So, and anyone can do that, I believe.
		Anyone can do that.
		You can start wherever you happen to be.
		So, thank you.
unidentified		Hi.
		Thank you all for coming here.
		So, my question is maybe primarily addressed to Dr. Peterson, but really to all of you.
		So, I completely agree with what you said about diversity, in the sense that, I mean, the way people seem to think of it now, it's at best annoying, and at worst, it's actively destructive, right?
		But the thing is, I don't see it as a kind of neo-Marxist, post-modernist plot, really.
		I mean, what I see around me is people who think that they are really, you know, making the next advance in civil rights, right?
		For instance, I mean, a lot of people seem to think that, you know, certain class of people are just disadvantaged and, you know, we should sort of give them a leg up and, you know, help them get to the, you know, the level of the other groups and so on, right?
		And it really seems to come back to the grand narrative for the last few decades, which has been that We've been identifying various forms of oppression in our society and then, you know, remedying them, right?
		And the thing is, I mean, that narrative is actually quite right in many ways.
		Like I, you know, I think it was a good thing that racial minorities got the same civil rights.
		I think it's a good thing that, you know, we allowed gay marriage and so on.
		But then how do you explain to people that their pet causes are now mostly harmful rather than helpful?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's a great question.
		I mean, first of all, If you take someone who's been affected, let's say, by postmodern discourse, and you pull them out of their group, you find that they're a fragmentary representation of that narrative.
		Nobody who professes Marxism is the full embodiment of Marxism.
		In order to get the full embodiment of Marxism, you need a pretty good-sized mob.
		And then the mob will be possessed by the spirit of Marxism, right?
		Because all the fragments come together, and then the mob will act out the idea.
		And so, it's certainly possible, and highly probable, And this is what I always try to remember when people have been demonstrating against me at my public experiences, that if you remove those people from the group context, they're like 10% postmodern neo-Marxists and 90% decent people.
		And, of course, they're motivated by all sorts of things, some of which are actually good.
		Fewer good things than they usually think, because people are a lot darker than they usually know, you know, in spirit and orientation.
		But it is very, very difficult to distinguish, what would you call it, corrupt ideological possession from genuine compassion, let's say.
		And it is, of course, the case that equality of opportunity is a wonderful thing to pursue, and that everyone suffers if everyone's capacity to contribute to the collective is somehow impeded.
		I don't think anybody disagrees with that unless they're really
		extreme ethnocentric types, you know, and whatever, they can think whatever they want.
		But I think that A. in many ways it's gone too far,
		and B. that the motivations that are stated as the conscious motivations
		are not sufficiently differentiated.
		There's way more going on than meets the eye.
		And the reason I think that especially is because the universities appear to have become so corrupt.
		The humanities, like, the disciplines are corrupt.
		Women's studies is corrupt beyond belief.
		To think about Western civilization, Primarily as an oppressive patriarchy.
		First of all, that's a mythological idea, and it's a very unidimensional idea.
		It's just not a good idea!
unidentified		Like, compared to what, exactly?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		Compared to a hypothetical ideal?
		Well, okay.
		But compared to any other civilization that has ever existed anywhere?
		No, it's not going anywhere, that idea.
		So, yes, you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
		And there have been many things, positive things, I would say, that the left has contributed to the political debate.
		Workers' rights, for example, especially in the early 20th century.
		That was very, very positive, all things considered.
		And there's place for left-wing viewpoints.
		Not at the expense of other viewpoints.
		That's the thing.
unidentified		Dr. Peterson, it seems as though young adults in the West are stuck in a sense of prolonged childhood.
unidentified		And I'm wondering, first of all, if you agree with that statement, and second of all, what you think the causes behind that might be.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, I would say there's an unholy conspiracy that that is propagated in part by the universities, which is that you can come to university and extend your adolescence and maintain your irresponsibility for a socially sanctioned four-year period while we vacuum up your future earnings.
		Okay.
		Okay, so that's not good.
		That's not good.
		It's a bargain with the devil, fundamentally.
		And so there's that.
		And then, the next thing is, and I think this is a demographic issue, I mean, to the degree, let's say, that adolescence has become extended.
		Well, let's assume that that's just correct for the moment, although I think you can have a reasonable debate about that.
		I think there are other important reasons.
		One might be that parents are older and older when they have kids.
		And so, that makes a difference.
		When you're young and careless and you have kids, you're not going to hover over them as if they're the most precious things in the world.
		And then, maybe you only have one kid.
		So you're 40, and like, it was a hell of a thing to have that kid.
		And it's the only kid you're gonna have.
		And so, you've put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak.
		And the probability that because you're also older and more conservative that you're going to be hyper-protective under the guise of involvement is very high.
		And then you don't have siblings!
		Like, you need siblings to pound you out on a fairly regular basis so that you understand that you're not the center of the world.
		And siblings are probably better at that than anyone else, right?
		Because if you're narcissistic among siblings, like, good luck to you!
		And so, you know, there's been dramatic changes in the familial structure over the last three decades, and I would say older parenting.
		The smaller size of families are massive sociological and psychological transformations, and we really don't know what their long-term consequence is.
		And then I also think, in some ways, it's certainly more difficult for young people to enter adult careers in a straightforward manner than it was in the 60s, let's say.
		One of the great fears of the 60s radicals was that they were going to have to have the same great job for their entire life.
		It's like, looking back, it's such a ridiculous fear.
		It's like, that's what you were afraid of, right?
		You were going to have a high-paying corporate job that was stable and secure.
		It's like, man, the man really had you.
		I really had you at that point!
		And with you guys, the future, although rich in indescribable ways, is also weirdly uncertain for people, say, between 18 and 22.
		It seems like it's harder to catalyze an identity than it was because of the fluidity of the culture.
		And, like, you have great opportunities, remarkable opportunities, but they're not precisely stable in the way that they were for quite a while after World War II.
		So that's what it looks like to me anyways.
		Thank you.
unidentified		Good evening.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		Dr. Peterson made the argument that you have to be allowed to be wrong in order to learn how to be right.
		But I'd like to ask about the flip side of that coin, the permission to be right.
		Archetypal example of this would be, let's say, Galileo.
		And my question would be, what is today's Galileo?
		Something that is true, but in danger of being suppressed.
		To each of you, if you care to answer.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That's a good one.
onkar ghate ▲ ● ▼		There's a lot, I think.
		The whole attack on the West requires a different worldview.
		But it requires burying under mounds of... Ayn Rand talked about this in regard to capitalism, but I think it's true in regard to the whole history of the West.
		It needs to be buried 10 feet underground so that people are not aware of what actually happened, what all the arguments were.
		Someone brought up that we're Canadians.
		I don't think it's an accident.
		Often immigrants have a different perspective on the country than people living there do.
		And take just, for instance, the First Amendment.
		There's a whole long intellectual history of what led to the First Amendment that, from my experience, nobody knows.
		What does the separation of church and state mean?
		I talked to America.
		Nobody can give me any answer of what it actually, where it came from, why it's in the First Amendment, why Jefferson thought this was one of his three great achievements.
		It was the University of Virginia Declaration of Independence and separating church and state, the Statue of Religious Freedoms in Virginia, which is part of the model for the First Amendment.
		So there's so much about the whole, the ideas that produced the West.
		that no one learns in school today, and you're actively discouraged from pursuing.
		So there's such a tremendous amount of knowledge that I think philosophical, moral, and cultural
		about the West that has been lost.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I'll jump off that one and say that just a simple ability to be proud of being an American, I think,
		is being undermined right now.
		I was in D.C.
		last week, and I live in L.A., where I'm pretty sure it's illegal to have an American flag.
		And, you know, I was in D.C., and there were flags everywhere, and I actually really liked it.
		It didn't mean that these people had unbridled patriotism and were going to bow down to the government all the time.
		I think in many cases it actually meant that they wanted limited government and they wanted liberty.
		And that's why they were proud to display the flag.
		But that concept that you can be proud of this experiment of America that, as I said earlier, has done more good for more people.
		Everyone still wants to come here.
		Any of you guys looking to get out of here?
		Anyone looking to get out of America right now?
		Yeah.
		Nobody.
		And the people that hate America the most are the same people who want us to have open borders, I guess, so they can share in the horrors of America.
		None of the things that they're throwing at us make sense.
		And I think actually being proud of it, not blindly proud, but being proud of this incredible experiment, it is sort of shamed in the media in general.
		And it's something that I'm very proud of.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼		I would say the closest... There's two examples that come to mind that I think are reminiscent of the Galileo experience.
		One is the suppression of research on psychedelics in the late 60s.
		It's not surprising it happened, but it was a mistake, in my estimation.
		And it was a mistake that was predicated on the same kind of fear.
		And then I would also say that we're in danger of...
		Making research into the biological basis of gender differences, let's say, unpalatable.
		And you saw that happening with James Damore.
		I read James Damore's memo pretty carefully, and for a non-biologist, it's not exactly true.
		Because he had some biological training.
		I mean, he summarized the literature pretty accurately.
		And it's really a big mistake to not attend carefully to the actual differences between men and women.
		Because freedom, by definition, would be a state in which those differences – that's diversity, let's say – where those differences were allowed to express themselves, and maybe even celebrated.
		And I think that is happening to some degree, but those would be two areas.
		I think the biologists are in real trouble.
		The social justice warriors are going to go after them.
		They're already doing that.
		If you know anything about evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology, and there's plenty to know, it demonstrates quite clearly that all of the claims of the radical social constructionists are just wrong.
		Right, it's been proven.
		That's why they're taking the political route now, is that they got stomped in the intellectual community.
		No reasonable scientist has entertained a radical social constructionist view of human beings since, I would say, probably...
		It probably started to collapse in the early 60s, but by 1980 it wasn't even an issue.
		Obviously, there are tremendous genetic factors that influence behavior and that make up differences between men and women, not least.
		Thank you.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		All right, you know, we're going to take one more.
		Can you give us a big finish?
		You feel good about this question?
unidentified		Yeah, I mean, I can try to give you a good finish.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, all right, big finish.
		Here we go.
		Yeah, sorry guys.
		We'll hang out for a little bit after.
		And I'm going to try to get drunk here later, so if you guys know where to go, hopefully they'll join me.
unidentified		Early on in the talk, Dr. Gatte, you talked about the existence of public universities being a contradiction to the idea of the First Amendment.
		I guess that extends as well to just generally public education.
		Do you think that's an issue that's solvable in the foreseeable future, or is that sort
		of the final obstacle that will pass in the future?
onkar ghate ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think it's a final issue, because I think even the founders didn't understand
		this issue.
		So if you think of the religious clauses and why they're formulated like that, it's the government can't interfere with free exercise of religion.
		That means me in my private life, if I want to practice a particular religion, it can't ban that I can't wear a yarmulke or something like that.
		So it can't.
		But it can establish.
		And that meant government support and funding.
		For a particular religious viewpoint, even if other people were still allowed to practice their other religions, it was you're favoring one, giving one a leg up, and you're taking money from other people to support ideas that they don't want to support.
		And then what, I mean, part of the argument was when you have an established church like that, then people want to get their hands on it and try to control it.
		And so, and it's all through political coercive means.
		And that is a good argument for why you have... But if you think of it in terms of intellectual freedom, it should pertain to the whole intellectual world.
		That you have free exercise, you can set up whatever schools you want to teach what you want, but the government can't establish.
		It can't establish in any intellectual realm.
		It has no interest in promoting certain ideas, religious or secular.
		But the moment you have public schools and public universities, the government has to be in that business.
		There's no getting around it.
		And then you have all kinds of Warfare about who's going to control the public universities, the public schools, who's going to write the textbooks, are we going to put evolution or not in the textbook.
		It becomes a whole political battle.
		But the reason it is a political battle, because you've given government this power to fund these kinds of things.
		And when the government controls the purse strings, it controls ideas.
		People don't recognize that, but it is And it's the same argument in regard to church
		as applies to every intellectual issue.
		And it's much more important in education, I think.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, thank you guys for coming out.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		This has been a great.
unidentified		This is what it's all about, guys.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So take these ideas if you like them and fight for whatever you believe and let me know where we're going later.
c bradley thompson ▲ ● ▼		So just before we leave, let me... I've just got a few things I want to say.
		The first is that like Ankar Ghate and Jordan Peterson, I too am a Canadian.
		And after today's event, I've realized what the biggest difference is between Canadians and Americans.
		Namely, Canadians self-censor.
		We don't swear in public.
		For all the students in this room, if you have enjoyed hearing the ideas that you've
		heard today, if you are interested in an education that uses a great books approach to studying
		the history of liberty, capitalism, the American founding, and the principles of moral character,
		Please come and see us at the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism.
		We're in 329 Serene Hall, and I'd love to meet with any of you students.
		The next thing I want to say is that for, again, for all the students who are here today, I am really happy for you.
		I really am.
		And the reason I'm happy for you is because you've just had the experience of witnessing three really great minds, and you've had the opportunity to see great minds at work as they think out loud.
		And that's a very rare opportunity, and I'm delighted that we've been able to provide that for you.

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