Aug. 14, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:17:57
3789 Google Memo: Aftermath | Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux
What can be learned from Google's firing of James Damore and the hostile response to the discussion of Google’s current diversity initiatives? Dr. Jordan Peterson joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the intense backlash to James Damore's Google diversity memo, the reaction to their respective interviews, biological differences between different human beings, Marxists using outcome inequality to push for totalitarianism and the problem when people stop communicating. Dr. Jordan Peterson is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist and the author of “Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief.”Website: http://www.jordanbpeterson.comYouTube: http://www.youtube.com/JordanPetersonVideosTwitter: https://twitter.com/jordanbpetersonBook: http://www.fdrurl.com/Maps-of-MeaningSelf-Authoring Course: http://www.selfauthoring.comYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molling from Freedom, Maine Radio, back with a good friend, Dr.
Jordan Peterson. He's a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist, and the author of Maps, meaning the architecture of belief, and other books.
I'm going to run through his contacts.
We'll put them in the links to the show, jordanbpeterson.com.
YouTube.com slash Jordan Peterson videos.
Twitter.com slash Jordan B. Peterson.
Please subscribe to that, of course.
And, as we talked about in the last show, the self-authoring course, self-authoring with the American Spelling dot com.
Dr. Peterson, thanks so much for taking the time today.
My pleasure. Good to see you again.
So it looks like the culture wars are moving into Silicon Valley.
There was, of course, a seismic explosion across the cultural landscape with a fellow that you and I both actually interviewed first, you first and then me, which was interesting that he chose not to reach out to any of the mainstream media.
And his...
I guess it's been called a manifesto, it's been called a screed, but it's a fairly tightly reasoned and scientifically well-sourced document.
I wonder if you could give the sort of psychological perspective on how little of it is controversial for those in the know.
Well, I would say, I'm not even sure if the point is whether or not it's controversial, because scientists can be wrong.
And there's room for a real dispute about the magnitude of differences between men and women, psychobiologically, say.
So, for example, there doesn't seem to be a lot of differences between men and women in terms of actual ability, but there seems to be a fair bit of difference in terms of personality and interest.
But I wouldn't say that the science is settled, but I would also say that's not the point.
The point is that There is credible scientific documentation for every single one of his claims.
So that doesn't make them correct, but it means that he's not just writing a screed, for example, or that he's uninformed, or that what he cited was pseudoscience.
And all of those claims have been widely circulating, along with absolute mischaracterizations of his memos' content.
To the degree that the Atlantic Monthly actually wrote a column stating that the author stated that she'd never seen, I believe it was a female, that she'd never seen a document that had that much public access so chronically mischaracterized and so absurdly mischaracterized.
So it isn't that he's correct that's at issue.
It's that he has a credible viewpoint.
That's the thing. It's a credible viewpoint, and he got fired for expressing it.
And in a reprehensible way, too, because he wrote the damn thing a month ago, right, as a response to a diversity meeting that he had attended, where they asked for responses.
And so it wasn't like he was trying to cause the kind of media spectacle that's actually emerged as a consequence of this.
So, well, it's really something to behold.
And this sort of reminds me, it's a sinister, perhaps a far extrapolation, but it sort of reminds me of Chairman Mao.
When he had the Cultural Revolution, he said, let a thousand flowers of thought bloom.
Come to us with your criticisms of communism.
And then he used that to target people and take them out.
This, you know, tell me all of your thoughts and feelings, and then we're going to use it against you, has a sort of sinister totalitarian history as well.
Well, I really get a kick too out of the response of Google's CEO and YouTube's CEO and Sheryl Sandberg, these people who are so firmly in the top one-tenth of one percent that their unequal positioning is beyond dispute.
This is independent of the merit of that, by the way.
Daring to present themselves as champions of the unfortunate and oppressed.
It's a little bit much.
It's like watching these Ivy League students complaining about oppression while simultaneously doing everything they possibly can to scramble up into the upper echelons of the unequal distribution.
Now, I don't mind that. I don't mind the fact that the distribution is unequal, even though I think that there's danger in that.
But what I really like is people wanting to have it both ways.
They want to have all the privileges of the privileged and all the moral grandeur and stature of the champion of the oppressed.
It's like, guys, that's really pushing your luck too far, you know?
If you're going to be part of the one-tenth of one percent, you could at least leave the oppression to the people who are oppressed.
And there is something to me particularly alarming about the fact that it's Google.
You know, if it's some paving company where they have a whole bunch of social justice warriors, it's like, okay, well, is that really going to affect the kind of paving you're going to get on your driveway?
Probably not much, maybe a little.
I don't know.
No, I don't agree with everything the guy says.
He's got a right to speak it. We asked for feedback.
He's got a right to bring it up.
We invite people to come on and rebut.
We'll have public debates.
We'll bring it all in. I know that you had offered to debate with Google's Diversity Saw or something like that.
I don't think anything came out of that. What a wonderful opportunity to open up a discussion.
You can imagine what became of that. Did she ever respond to this?
No, of course not. You've got your finger on it exactly.
There's actually a space, and this is maybe something we can do a little bit today, there's a space for an intelligent discussion about the group categorization of human beings and about, say, sex differences in sex.
In behavior and personality and their implications socially.
Like, this is actually a really complicated problem.
And the idea that there seems to be this reflexive idea on the increasingly mainstream left, certainly in the radical left, that if there are biological differences between men and women, that means prima facie, that we're doomed to a terribly unequal and unfair society.
And that's an absurd claim.
And in fact, it's actually counterproductive, because what should happen It's so much in keeping with their claim.
They're lying claims for recognition of diversity.
We know from the personality literature and the other literature on individual differences that there are more differences between men, so within the group of men, than there are between men and women.
So there is more diversity within men and within women than there is across men and women.
Alright, so if you want true diversity, you look for diversity at an individual level.
But the radical left is obviously terrified of diversity in its real sense, because as soon as anyone makes any claims that diversity is materially real, so that it's instantiated in biology, To some degree, they have a fit about it and escape into their social constructionist nonsense, claiming that everything has to be a consequence of culture.
And the reason for that is because they are totalitarian inclined.
And the notion would be, well, if everything's inculturated, then we can make men and women into the utopian superhumans of our imagination, right?
We don't have to contend with anything as messy as actual human nature.
It's absolutely appalling.
Well, here's the thing.
I think it's interesting at an academic level to study group differences, whether it's ethnicity or race or whatever.
But fundamentally, we're all busy.
We have lives to lead. So for people who want to study it, I think it's very interesting.
But where it becomes, I think, an issue that we kind of have to get involved in is when group differences are used for the basis of state power, for the basis of state intervention, either in the cultural life or the economic life of the people.
So how are redheaded people doing?
Well, I guess you could look it up if you're really interested, but I don't really care that much because I've got a life to live and most people do.
But that's because redheaded people don't have concentrated political power that they're using to advance their own interests sometimes at the expense of other groups.
So when, you know, as far as how are women doing in tech, I think women should, of course, you know, I've got a daughter, you have a daughter, we want them to have every opportunity known to mankind.
But the problem is, of course, if there are these biological differences that mean that there's going to be some underrepresentation of women in tech on average, Well, that matters if the government has a mandate to make everything equal, because then you have biology warring with political power, and that is never a good combination, because political power cannot undo biology, which means you're going to get an ever-escalation of political power attempting to correct differences which cannot be corrected.
Well, you know, you might be able to correct them.
The question is, at what cost?
The more thoroughly instantiated the biological differences, the more tyranny would be necessary to undo them.
So, you know, it's a matter of, it's a cost-benefit issue to some degree, and You know, it's not unreasonable to point out, especially if you look at places like the Scandinavian countries, that there is quite a bit of assortment in occupation by sex occurring.
And it looks like it's occurring rather naturally.
And whether that's good or bad, we don't know.
But it isn't self-evidently bad.
So women do seem to be predominating increasingly in those fields that have to do with their hypothetically increased interest in people.
And men seem to be dominating in those fields that have to do with their hypothetically increased interest in things.
And there's no reason to assume that that's necessarily bad.
Now, we might be able to have an intelligent discussion about whether having 100% of elementary school teachers be female is actually a good thing for the culture or the vast majority of nurses or the vast majority of engineers being male.
We could have an intelligent discussion about that, but we can't start out and make any progress if we stay within the ideological framework that's being adopted by the radical left.
You know, I was kind of up all night thinking about our conversation because it's very, very disturbing that we're not mature enough as a society to actually have this conversation.
And I was thinking, well, here's the fundamental problem because there's a real problem here.
The problem is that we can perceive and conceive of human beings as individuals and as members of groups.
And it's not self-evident which of those categorical schemes we should use for what purposes.
And we can't say, well, we should always treat people as individuals, even though I strongly, you know, Lean in that direction because of the fact that we also do perceive groups.
So then the question becomes, okay, when is it appropriate to use the individual level of categorization and when is it appropriate to use the group level?
And I can tell you one time it's not appropriate to use the group level.
And that's when the reason that you're doing it is to justify your outdated, stale, and murderous Marxism by substituting identity politics for class warfare, which is exactly what the radical left is doing.
And they're pretending it's a consequence of Of what?
Sympathy for the oppressed.
And I don't buy that for a minute.
I think mostly what it is is vicious and bitter resentment for anyone who's comparatively successful.
And the reason I don't think that it has much to do with the oppressed is because the data on the progress of human beings in the last 150 years is absolutely clear, right?
Since 1895, we've been on an exponential move upwards with regards to the eradication of base-level poverty.
And it's been one of the most miraculous occurrences in all of human history, right?
And all of these oppressed people that the leftists are championing are so much less oppressed than their oppressed ancestors that they're not even in the same category.
So they're not starving.
They're not whipped. They're not enslaved.
They're not dying at 30.
They're not dying in childbirth.
I mean, they're rich by historical standards beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
And yet there's not a peep about that from the radical left.
Well, of course. I mean, the left has said everyone's can are the same.
All inequalities result from exploitation, and the only solution is to use the power of the government to reallocate resources, which is a never-ending escalation to tyranny, as we've seen throughout the 20th century in particular.
If you look at the leftists and you see that the concern for the poor, look at just over the last 20 years, look at two places in the world, India and China.
And in those two countries, literally hundreds of millions of people have got out of dire poverty into the lower middle classes.
In India alone, 50,000 people a month are moving into the middle class.
The result of liberalization of the economy, some free market principles, some private property, some contract enforcement, and the left should be celebrating this if they care about the poor.
It has been the biggest reduction in human poverty throughout all of human history.
They should study that and try to replicate it, but instead they seek to interfere and undermine it.
Instead of supporting Venezuela.
So, you know, the other thing that's interesting or that's worth pointing out is that The left, especially the internationalists among the left, should be, of course, rejoicing about what's happened in India and China.
But the people who are more concerned with national policy, say in the United States, the Democrats, for example, specifically the Democrats, as well as the new Democratic Party in Canada, should also recognize that a fair bit of the progress of the impoverished in India and China has been purchased at the price of the relative decline should also recognize that a fair bit of the progress of the impoverished in India and China
And the working class in North America could use a strong, coherent, non-politically correct, non-identity politics oriented left, like the unions used to be back in the 50s, let's say, or even in the early 60s.
And instead, they've abandoned the actual working class who deserve to have a valid political voice to play identity politics to justify their postmodern neo-Marxism.
And, you know, that cost the Democrats the election.
And good. I'm thrilled about that.
They deserved exactly what they got.
It was theirs for the losing.
Well, and it doesn't seem like they're about to learn any lessons, of course, Jordan.
It looks like they're doing the usual leftist thing, which is to double down on the ideology despite all evidence.
And this, of course, is what they're choosing to do now rather than learn the lessons of last year's election and trying to find a way to reconnect back to the working class, which, again, they used to have.
I have heard of some initiatives among some writers in California, in particular, who've been going to talk to the Democratic National Congress and so forth about Their abandonment of their traditional working class constituents and their overemphasis on identity politics and exactly why that has alienated such a large part of the population.
So they are, by all appearances, in a bubble chamber.
But it's conceivable that, you know, that cracks are starting to appear in the surface.
The loss of that election should have been a very strong wake-up call.
You know, and I think also we can take some heart from what happened in the last week, you know, because Demore is a relatively powerless guy, you know, within the power hierarchy at Google.
And he produced this memo and he got fired for it.
But it's not like there hasn't been a price to pay for that.
There's been a vicious price to pay for that.
And the media coverage has been all over the place, you know, and there's been plenty of misinterpretation of the memo and willful misinterpretation, I would say.
But by the same token, it's not like He's, he, the fact that he's being fired has gone unnoticed and that there's no firestorm following.
You know, I mean, the New York Times called, a New York Times columnist today called for the, called for Pichai, the CEO of Google CI, called for his resignation.
These aren't trivial repercussions.
And so, you know, it's, well, it's a good thing to see.
It's a good thing to see as far as I'm concerned, even though it's messy.
But it does still beg the question about the discussion of sex and identity politics.
It is fascinating because I think what's happened, Jordan, is that the brand of Google has been damaged.
And by that, I don't necessarily mean the brand and the general person just go and type whatever they want into the search box.
But I think it used to be really, really cool to work for Google when this kind of group think, this kind of attack, this kind of infiltration of leftist social justice warriors is revealed – It's going to be, to use that term, kaki, it's going to be considered a negative status symbol, I think, in the long run to work at Google.
That is going to change a lot of people's minds about whether they want to work there or not, because what they've happened is the lid has been lifted.
Now you look into some of the totalitarian mindsets that are going on, some of the intolerance and bigotry that goes on in Google, and smart people who have lots of choices are going to say, well, I could go to work for Google, or I could do my own startup, or I could go work for some other company.
I think that it's going to do a lot of harm because they live on the Pareto principle and that's going to change.
Well, they've also damaged their trust.
You know, it's like so and I agree with you.
I mean, I think people, generally speaking, were very positively predisposed to Google, all things considered.
I mean, because not least because of all the wonderful things that the company has brought us.
But, you know, there was a Harvard Emeritus professor of history who wrote a book called The Wealth and Poverty of Nations and One of his observations was that the only, essentially, I'm paraphrasing, was that the only real natural resource was trust, because trust enabled people to work together cooperatively and to become incredibly productive as a consequence.
And when you violate your customers' trust, especially when you're an information purveyor of the sort that Google is, and you introduce even the idea that there might be bias, then that's extraordinarily dangerous in the long run.
It makes people suspicious.
And suspicious people aren't loyal customers by any stretch of the imagination.
They've got one eye open now.
And, you know, you also, this is an echo of something we discussed just a bit previously, is that it's also going to rub people the wrong way that the most fantastically successful capitalist country in the history of mankind is also playing the social justice violin song extremely loudly.
It's like, okay, guys, just exactly whose side are you on here?
You're going to play the capitalist game, and very, very effectively.
And at the same time, you're going to allow a fifth column to enter your organization, really through human resources, because that's usually where it comes, and also simultaneously pursue these equity aims.
How are you going to do that?
How are you going to do both of those things at the same time?
Because they're logically incommensurate.
The big challenge I think that people are going to face is...
There has been, I think, in political and business leadership and cultural leadership, there has been a lot of appeasement over the last sort of half century.
And because of that appeasement, they have been able to navigate a pretty thorny road relatively easily.
Now, the non-leftists, and again, what do we call them?
I mean, I don't know. The language is the individualist versus the collectivist, whatever we want to call them.
Let's try that. Let's use individualists.
That's good. So the individual is now recognizing that it is the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.
That if you are not going to cause trouble, if you're not going to raise a stink, if you're not going to raise a fuss, you're just going to get plowed under.
The appeasement is...
So that's starting to happen now.
Whereas in the past, I think even 10 years ago, if Google had fired this guy, especially because there wasn't a robust alternative media, it would have gone into the rear view pretty quickly.
But now... They actually have to start thinking about principles other than appeasement because the left has dominated the appeasement racket, the shakedown racket for decades.
Now, business leaders and cultural leaders, political leaders, they're going to actually have to start thinking in terms of principles because appeasement isn't going to work anymore.
Well, that might be the positive take-home message from last week's events, you know, is that you don't get to fire your superbly rated Google engineer for writing down his opinion when asked without getting away from it.
And simultaneously get away with it.
And so that's really a good thing.
Maybe that is a sign of dialogue of some sort opening up.
At least there's equal pressure being applied from both sides, let's say.
And that really is a new thing.
So... The balance of powers is the only way to avoid corruption, I think, in the long run.
But let's talk a little bit about the roots, or in fact, a lot, unabashedly a lot about the roots of, you know, people are seeing the leaves and they're not seeing the roots.
That's sort of the purvey of people like yourself and myself.
I wonder if you could help people to understand how deep the origins of the battle that's going on in the moment go.
Well, they certainly go all the way back to the middle of the 19th century.
I think that's really when it started.
I suppose it started, practically speaking, with the Industrial Revolution and the radical disparities in wealth it produced and the disruption to the sort of stable medieval lifestyle that had reigned before that.
And there's no doubt that there was a tremendous amount of self-evident and horrible poverty associated with rapid urbanization and industrialization.
Now, there was also an unbelievable generation of wealth, and the net outcome of that has been It's incredibly positive for people.
Right, right. Well, exactly.
I mean, that's a consequence of urbanization and also a consequence of the vastly improved web of communication that started to draw attention to those sorts of things.
And, you know, there's no doubt that, and this is a nod to the left, there's no doubt that extremes of inequality make for a shoddy spectacle and that it's something that our society has to figure out how to deal with and isn't very well, but it's also a very complicated problem.
Well, so one of the things that came out of that was agitation for political power for the dispossessed, essentially.
And some of that was, we might say...
Motivated by genuine compassion and concern, I would say that was characteristic of people writing later, like George Orwell in particular, writing in the 30s about the state of coal miners in the northern UK. It's an amazing book.
That's The Road to Wiggin Pier.
And then also more resentful ideologues like Karl Marx, who were looking for a complete revolution in social structure.
But even with the Marxists, say, in the early 20th century, we've got to be a little bit more compassionate towards them than we would be towards today's Marxists.
Because when the Marxist revolutionaries were plotting their revolutions in the Soviet Union, for example, they didn't have a wealth of historical data indicating clearly that what they were doing was genocidal and murderous.
And now that the data is in, it's absolutely crystal clear that the imposition of those ideological structures produces societies that are not only unproductive, but are unfree and then murderous.
And so, to be a Marxist in the early 20th century might have been that you were under the sway of an ideological delusion, but it didn't mean you were willfully blind to the worst tragedies of history.
And to be a Marxist now means precisely that.
And as far as I'm concerned, like, it's okay to be a Marxist in a university, and I don't understand that, because I don't think it's any better to be a Marxist than it is to be a Nazi.
And so, why that's okay is really being a mystery to me.
The headcount of Marxism in the 20th century is more than two and a half times that.
and the idea that, well, I mean, I remember when I was on the debating team way back in the day, I mean, guys would show up with the little Marx thing and the Che Guevara t-shirts and someone had to get into the most ferocious debates with them because it's like you couldn't show up with Hitler and this guy spawned more blood on his hands in many ways.
Yeah, well, what are you supposed to do if you're a Marxist about Stalin and Mao's?
Say, well, oh, sorry, they were deviants.
If I would have been in charge, everything would have gone well.
It's an unbelievably arrogant proposition, and it speaks to a truly malevolent and narcissistic motivation.
So, well, so, okay, so by the 1960s, Marxism was pretty much discredited, certainly by the mid-70s when Solzhenitsyn wrote the Gulag Archipelago, which should be required reading for every citizen in North America, in fact, in the world.
So what happened then, as far as I can tell, is the French intellectuals who were sort of at the forefront of the Marxist movement and also the most recalcitrant with regards to apologizing for the It's transmutation.
And it's progressed apace through the universities ever since.
And we see now the absolute domination of the humanities and much of the social sciences by this unholy alliance, unholy and incoherent alliance between postmodernism, which claims that there are no reliable grand narratives, and neo-Marxism, which is a grand narrative of exactly the kind the postmodernists object to.
So it's not even intellectually coherent.
And so now we have the domination of the universities by what are essentially unrepentant Marxists producing social activists of the type, for example, that were hired as VP of diversity and human resources for Google.
And they're the fifth column within these capitalist organizations.
And the damn capitalists don't seem to have enough sense to push back against the people who are really their mortal enemies.
It's a remarkable spectacle, actually.
Yeah, no, I think that's very...
Sorry, go ahead. Well, so as far as I'm concerned, the universities need to be...
What would you say?
The state of the universities needs to be addressed and repaired.
And we have one tactic in mind for that.
So I'm going to release a website here in about two weeks that will enable students to upload course descriptions Along with the professor's name, the discipline, and the university.
And it's got an AI engine inside it, and it will tell the student whether or not the course is postmodern, neo-Marxist, indoctrination, cult material.
And then leave it up to the student to determine whether or not they want to make that course.
Take that course. And so what I'm hoping is that...
The right way to address the pathological and powerful remnants of this Marxist idiocy, murderous idiocy, is to staunch the flow of new minds into their indoctrination camps.
And I think the best way to do that is through information.
So I'm going to make a video detailing some of the things we're talking about and introduce this website.
So, you know, that's one possible strategy for cleaning this mess up.
Okay. Well, the one factor that always seems to be in common is this thirst for power.
Because Marx, interestingly, everyone thinks Marx was this mad revolutionary.
He considered himself a mere passive descriptive scientist.
He said, well, you've got feudalism, and then it's going to grow into capitalism, and then in and of itself – It is going to grow into communism as the workers revolt, as they're continually exploited, as they end up starving to death and so on.
But of course, the big problem is that workers' wages, particularly in England and in Germany, doubled in the 19th century and things were getting better.
And so what happened was it was supposed to happen on its own.
It never happened. And therefore, the professional revolutionaries stepped in.
And originally, they tried an internationalist movement.
movement.
They took over, of course, in Russia, and they expected it to create a domino effect that all the workers were going to unite, but it didn't work out.
And there was a split in early Marxists between the ones who thought it could be international and the ones like Mussolini, who started out as a diehard Marxist and remained a socialist throughout all of his life until his abrupt end.
Mussolini watched when Italy invaded Tripoli to try and get a hold of Libya.
And when he watched this campaign, he said, wow, the working classes are not responding to any class appeals, but they're really responding to the nationalism appeal.
And I think that's where he wanted to take Marxism, the leftism combined with the nationalism produced both Nazism and fascism.
So the idea that fascism is somehow completely removed from Marxism, it's on the opposite end of the spectrum, is historically and ideologically worse than false.
It is a complete misrepresentation of where fascism came out of, which is just, hey, we're going to gain socialist power by appealing to nationalism rather than class.
Now they're trying to do it according to race and gender, but the end goal is always power.
Well, yeah, the end goal, it's power, but I think there's something even more destructive about it than power, you know?
Because I see this this insane emphasis on group identity as the hallmark of human identity as something that's profoundly in anti-individual and that's really what that's the grounds for my objection to it because I think the West's emphasis on the supremacy and sovereignty of the individual is the greatest idea that the human race has ever come up with fundamentally and I think that The Marxist and identity politics types who object to that are doing something far worse than merely trying to obtain power.
They're trying to bring down the sovereign, what would you say, the most valuable idea that humanity has managed to conjure up so far.
And I think that they're doing that for a couple of reasons.
They're doing that partly because they're resentful of the successful, which is something George Orwell laid out quite nicely in Road to Wake and Pear.
Much to the shock of his socialist colleagues.
And also because they don't want to take any responsibility for the conditions of their actual lives.
So there's a moral laziness that's associated with it, that's allied with the tendency of the postmodern left to become nihilistic, as well as this intense resentment, which is something Nietzsche commented about a lot.
Intense resentment of, what Nietzsche say, of the well-constituted.
And that's part of the insistence that if anyone is successful, it must be because they exploited everyone else.
And the fundamental problem with that, I mean, look, let's make it clear.
There are people who exploit, and there are hierarchies of power.
But when a hierarchy becomes a hierarchy of power, it's actually a tyranny.
Most of the hierarchies in the West are hierarchies of competence.
And the data is quite clear on that because the best predictor of success for individuals in Western hierarchies is number one, intelligence, and number two, conscientiousness.
And so basically what that means is that if you want to determine whether or not someone's going to succeed in a Western hierarchy of authority, Then what you want to know is how smart and hardworking they are.
And what are you going to do? Objective act?
You don't want the smart, hardworking people to rise to the top?
And the fact that... And it's not trivial either.
Like with... With a good combination of general cognitive ability testing and personality testing, you can construct a regression equation that predicts lifetime economic outcome at about.6.
So that counts for 36% of the variance, and that's powerful enough so that if you did random assortment, you'd get 50% of people who are above Average economically and 50% below.
But with a 0.6 correlation, you can get 85% accuracy in predicting who's going to be above average and 15% below.
So it's a very, and the data on this are very clear, and no serious social scientist who knows the literature disputes it.
So, first of all, we've got to be careful to make sure that we don't adopt the radical leftist terminology with regards to hierarchies, because they're not exactly hierarchies of dominance or power.
They're hierarchies of authority.
And you can even see this with what happened to the Google CEO this week.
Because if the radical leftists were right, were correct in their evaluation of society, he would have just fired them more.
Or worse, and nothing at all would have happened to him.
But that's not what happened.
What happened was that the CEO was held up for public appropriation because he made a mistake.
And that indicates as well that he's not in a position of power precisely.
He's in a position of legitimate authority, at least to some degree, and he can be held accountable for his actions.
But this is the great, it's a satanic lure of the left, which is to have you believe that you have more power than you do.
This CEO of Google, I mean, what he did also, we didn't mention this, but I mean, the morale within the company.
The idea that, oh, I'm helping people find information so they can become better versed in their intelligence and argumentation and so on, as opposed to, well, I'm kind of a tool for a leftist narrative that's destroying Western civilization.
They think – they try to tell you you have the power.
You have the power to set prices.
You have the power to control the economy.
You have the power to destroy people who you disagree with because they're irredeemably evil and wrong according to the narrative.
They offer you all of this power, and it is continually reinforced by reality, economic reality, moral reality, motivational reality, that when you take away people's motivation, they tend to become inert.
They offer you all of this power, and it all turns to ash in your hands.
But rather than let it go, because now you're dopamine addicted to the power, you will just pursue it straight into the ground.
Well, it's a very dangerous pathway for a company that prides themselves on the provision of information to wander down.
And I think they're going to pay for it quite dreadfully, as we all will.
I mean, one of the things that really terrifies me about this, and I do believe that this is one of the reasons that the memo has blown up so much, is that Google, of course, is building the algorithms that sort information for us.
And Those algorithms are going to be built according to the biases of the company, for better or for worse.
And to the degree that Google is tilting towards an ideological narrative, they're going to build those algorithms with that narrative into the very mechanical structures that filter our information for us.
And that's really a horrifying thought.
We need to know that the companies that are in charge of the dissemination of information, you could call them information utilities, are actually content neutral or ideologically neutral with regards to content.
Now, it's tricky, right?
Because at the same time, I can sympathize with YouTube's attempts and Google's attempts, say, not to have their platforms utilized for content.
Isis to recruit new and economically disenchanted young men.
And they're not primarily religious, by the way, right?
Because The Economist just did a nice article on that showing that most of what's driving people into the hands of Isis is economic disenchantment and lack of meaning in their lives, which I thought was really cool.
But it's really an appalling thing to think that this large company, under the pressure of being politically correct, is going to risk Producing algorithms that will warp our very perceptions of reality in a particular political direction.
And that's, I think, part of the reason why this has become such a major explosive cause.
It's like, okay, we thought these people were one sort of people.
We thought they stood for the vast dissemination of information.
For the utility of the information.
And all of a sudden we see that they're playing a PC game and they're playing it hard enough to actually fire someone for stating a set of reasonable, if not necessarily correct, opinions.
So yes, it's quite terrifying.
Well, and it does speak to the issue of this increasing compartmentalization of the mental life and moral life within society.
Societies, I mean, obviously, there's some geography, there's some history, but I think most importantly, there should be a shared set of moral beliefs that are hopefully rational and universal and justified, which is why, you know, it's kind of chilling when...
There's no such thing as Canadian identity.
There's no such thing as Canadian values and so on.
Well, I guess if you just view people as a whole as tax livestock, it's kind of a different thing.
But here we're going to see people who go to Google and see no bias whatsoever because that bias matches their bias.
And then they're going to be other people who abandon Google because they recognize particular biases and go elsewhere.
How is there going to be a conversation?
We speak the same language, but where you have so many different meanings to the words.
You talk to somebody who's an individualist and you use the word exploitation.
They may think of an oppressive tax code.
They may think of a totalitarian system.
You go to a leftist and they think Starbucks offering you a job is exploitation.
Which has become so fragmented.
I'm not sure where the common ground is anymore.
And again, as we saw in Charlotte, when we cease to speak, we start to fight in very physical ways.
Well, we also have to, I think, be careful with regards to our characterization of the left.
You know, because I do believe that Look, because of the way that goods distribute themselves in society, so that's the Pareto distribution, and that's the principle that the vast majority of produced goods will end up under the control of and also produced by a very small minority of people.
And it seems to apply across productive disciplines.
You see it most frequently. Its most public form is the distribution of money.
But the distribution of all resources follows the same pattern, the same weird pattern.
And this is the square root of the workers produce half the value.
So you get 10,000 workers, 100 of those workers are going to be producing half the value.
And this is why capitalism works, and this is why the free market produces such wealth, because it allows those people to keep some proportion of what they produce.
And if you take that away, everybody ends up unproductive.
Well, and you see the same thing, say, like, if there's 100 people who record audio recordings and songs, then 10 of them accrue half the audience.
And if there's 100 hockey players scoring goals, then 10 of them score half the goals.
And, like, it really does apply universally across domains where there's human productivity.
Okay, so the advantage to that...
In principle, is that those who can get to do, and that's good for them because they become wealthy and prosperous, but it's good for society because we get to exploit the most productive people.
But the downside is the production of quite a vicious distribution of inequality.
And the problem with that, both on the left and on the right, is on the right, I think the problem is that as inequality increases past some level, and we don't know what the level is, the society tends to destabilize.
And so too much inequality is likely to produce destabilization, and that's not a good thing.
And then on the left, well, the problem is that, well, not everybody who's in the bottom end of the Pareto distribution It's not just, say, that the distribution isn't entirely just, and that's a perfectly reasonable thing to point out as well.
What's unreasonable is to assume that we know how to deal with that problem, because we don't.
And the notion of forced income redistribution or forced redistribution of Let's say authority or power, especially on the basis of race and sex, that's a seriously bad idea.
And any move towards enforced equity, I can't even believe we have a discussion about equity, about equality of outcome.
I can't believe after the 20th century we still have to have a discussion about whether the ideal of equity is pathological or not.
In general, what happens is you will try and sell free stuff to the poor, and the poor end up often getting trapped by that free stuff, as we see reduced class mobility among the welfare state recipients and people who've been in long-term unemployment or anti-employment.
There are like 90 million Americans now.
who are in their prime working years who don't have a job and aren't even bothering to look for one.
So you end up with this permanent and semi-permanent underclass of welfare recipients and this giant net that you've tried to catch the super wealthy with.
They use political influence and tax lawyers to evade and you end up snagging the middle class, hollowing out society, increasing inequality.
And I think that is part of the destabilization that we're seeing.
Well, there's another issue too that goes along with identity politics to some degree here that that this stratification of society is starting to reflect Because, you know, I pointed out earlier that the best predictor of long-term life success economically is intelligence and trait conscientiousness.
But that also means that our culture is stratifying meritocratically.
There's some things about this that we really have to take seriously, and this is where some of the uglier elements of science become germane.
So IQ is a particularly ugly aspect of science, because the IQ Literature reveals that which no one would want to be the case, which is that there are profound and virtually irremediable differences in people's cognitive performance, and that those differences have a very solid biological and heritable basis.
No one wants to hear that.
They don't want to hear that it's biological.
They don't want to hear that it's heritable.
They don't want to hear it's permanent.
They don't want to hear that it's irremediable and that it actually has a practical consequence.
And no wonder they don't want to hear it.
And even worse, they don't want to hear that it differs between genders and ethnicities.
That is, to me, one of the most painful things that I've ever learned in my life is this kind of information.
It is one of the great heartbreaks when it comes to the dream of pure egalitarianism.
And that is, I think, even harder.
It's an even harder pill for people to swallow.
Yeah, well, the gender differences in IQ look relatively trivial, but there are differences in ethnicity that don't look trivial.
The Ashkenazi Jews, for example, have on average a 15-point advantage over the rest of the Caucasian population, which is sufficient to account for their radical over-representation in positions of authority and influence.
And productivity, you know, and I am, to just get me, just so that it's absolutely clear, I am not saying that's a bad thing.
I'm saying there's a real reason for it that no one wants to contend with.
Well, and it's particularly, sorry, for the Ashkenazis, it's particularly focused on language abilities.
And this represents, this reflects their, quote, over-representation, although if you normalize by IQ, it's not the case in the arts, in novel writing, in speech writing, and so on.
Ashkenazi Jews don't have a significantly strong advantage in spatial reasoning, which is one of the reasons why you'll hear a lot about Jewish writers, but not a lot about Jewish engineers.
That talent seems to have spread to the East Asians in particular, who have—this is why, you know, 40% of Google's workforce is East Asian, because there are these biological differences, and this is something that has been so strenuously avoided since, I guess, the bell curve first came out 20-odd years ago— And I think the consequences of avoiding it, it's the old thing, it gives you short-term benefit, but the long-term catastrophes, I think, are still accumulating.
So one of the problems with the stratification is that, okay, so let me give you an example here.
It's illegal in the United States to induct anyone in the armed forces who has an IQ of less than 83%.
And the reason for this is that despite the fact that the armed forces has been desperate for bodies since its inception and is still desperate, and in peacetime and in wartime, and that the armed forces has been used as a social mechanism for moving people out of the underclass into the lower middle class, let's say. So I'm pointing that out just to state that I think that the armed forces, above all, had every reason not to want this to be the case.
They determined after approximately 100 years of study that anyone with an IQ of 83 or less couldn't be trained to do anything that wasn't positively counterproductive in the armed forces.
And that should actually send a shudder of terror through everyone's heart.
An IQ of 83 puts you in the bottom 10% of the population.
That's 1 in 10 people, and we're building a very cognitively complex society.
And in that cognitively complex society, there's less and less room for the gainful employment of people who don't have the capacity to contend with cognitive complexity.
And if the army could train them and increase things and change things, to me, IQ is similar to height.
You know, there's some environmental factors, but you can't make someone taller than their genetics allow as a whole.
And so if the army could change that IQ, they'd have a massive incentive to do so, but nobody knows how to do it on any perpetual basis.
Well, we've also seen repeated attempts By scientists and let's call them biological engineers, biological technical engineers, to try to produce exercises that would increase IQ. And basically the data is pretty clear and it's also dismal.
If you train people on cognitive tasks, complex cognitive tasks, you can generally increase the degree to which they can perform a specific cognitive task immensely.
So with practice, and you see this with video games because they're complex cognitive tasks, you can get unbelievably good at a video game.
Even something like a maze game, which is quite tightly associated with intelligence as a measurement.
Like if you use maze performance as a measurement of IQ, it's pretty tightly associated with IQ. But despite that, That kind of training does not produce an increment in actual IQ and general intelligence.
And even if you train people across a bunch of different cognitive domains intensely, you don't get any generalization to IQ. And that's such a disappointing finding because what you'd really hope, especially with computational technology, is that you could train people intensely to utilize their cognitive resources using specific training exercises and get a general increment.
Just like if you train weights, you're going to get a general increment in strength.
It doesn't happen. So we have a really profound problem that, again, no one's willing to talk about, and that's the cognitive stratification of society.
And of course, that was laid out to some degree in the bell curve back in the 1990s.
But see, on the liberal end, everybody wants to believe that everyone's the same and that you can just train anyone to do everything.
And then on the conservative end, everyone wants to believe that if you just got off your ass and looked for a job, there'd be a position for you.
And unfortunately, that's just simply not the case.
And so there's something about that that Well, I don't have a solution to that, but I at least can point out the problem.
I do think though that more and more people are going to start talking about it simply because...
the amount of labor that can be covered by automation is rising higher and higher on the IQ bell curve.
Now we've got AI legal advice, we've got AI diagnosis in medical issues, we have an enormous amount of encroachment.
If you look at what you and I are doing, we got millions of views combined on our interview with James from Google.
And this, of course, encroaches upon the mainstream media.
And of course, they're fighting back as you would naturally expect them to do.
And so the displacement of the middle class, I think, is only going to increase.
And because the people who've been displaced have been largely voiceless due to perhaps the lack of cognitive ability, lack of access to mainstream media, As AI begins to take over more and more middle-class occupations, I think we're going to start to see a much more robust discussion of this, which is unfair, given how much it's eviscerated the lower classes already.
But it is something that needs to be talked about and I think is going to start becoming more of a topic in the future.
Well, here's a conversation about that that could be had.
See, this is where the left, I think, gets it really wrong.
And I think it's partly because the left...
The radical left is composed of people who are very low in trait conscientiousness.
So they don't really care about work.
But the thing is, that's not so good because it isn't so much that people who are at the bottom of the economic distribution need resources because very few of them are actually in absolute privation.
That's not the issue.
And absolute privation is becoming less of an issue, period, as we get richer and richer.
Distribution's an issue, but absolute privation isn't.
But the issue is going to be Well, what is it that people are going to do with their lives that's productive and meaningful?
And so it might be more reasonable to conceptualize it, let's say from an individualist perspective, as how can we equitably distribute productive work or meaningful engagement, I would like that phrase even better, rather than how should we distribute resources?
You know, because I just think it's solving the wrong problem.
Poverty, modern poverty is only in a small part a consequence of lack of money.
It's a multidimensional phenomenon.
If you're at the bottom of the economic hierarchy, well, there's a higher than normal probability that you'll have a mental illness.
And there's a higher than average probability that you'll have a drug or alcohol problem or a learning disability or something terrible happened in your family or a physical health problem.
It's a multidimensional problem that Places people outside of the possibility of a high-quality life, say.
And the idea that we can just simply solve that by redistributing money, per se, is a testament also to the radical leftist infatuation with precisely what they deride the capitalists for, which is the supremacy of money.
It's a much broader problem than that.
And when you see, one of the things we're going to have to figure out, Stefan, is what the hell are people going to do Now that they actually have leisure.
And that's the same problem as how should you live your life productively and in a high-quality manner.
Of course, that's exacerbated if you're on the lower end of the cognitive distribution.
And there's no need for manual labor, say.
And I'm not deriding the utility value or quality of manual labor.
Quite the contrary. I think it's a perfectly fine calling.
I like doing manual labour myself, even though I'm not fated to have to do that in order to, you know, put bread on the table.
So we have a much bigger problem here than the mere redistribution of wealth.
Well, this is the deal that has been offered to the lower classes, primarily by the left, in return for votes, which is they say, well, we will take your religion, but we will give you money.
And the left's hostility, it's something that I didn't really recognize myself, Jordan, until much more recently.
The left's bottomless rage and contempt against Christianity is something that I think has really eviscerated the soul of the West to the point where people have been emptied out of meaning and filled up with money.
And the net result has been a huge, huge disaster.
I think a disaster whose echolocation we're still trying to get a sense of how deep and wide it goes.
Well, it's not for nothing that Jacques Derrida described Western culture as logocentric and fell logocentric and believed that was pathological.
And the radical left's anti-individualist stance is precisely reflected in their profound contempt for Christianity, their profound and ignorant contempt for Christianity.
So, you know, I had an insightful colleague of mine who said something really interesting the other day about just how How dismissive and contemptuous the left is of the working class.
Because here's the message.
You're so goddamn useless that we have to give you money.
Right. That's a hell of a message, man.
It's like, here's some money.
Don't cause any trouble.
You know, here's some money.
There's no real place for you in the world.
So do whatever you want with it.
And I suppose, what, be grateful for your acquisition of that.
Or, I guess, in parallel to that, Jordan, it's something like, we have so much contempt for your intellectual abilities, we're not going to try and reason with you.
We're just going to bribe you. We're just going to give you stuff.
That is horrendous.
Yes, and we're going to expect you to respond to us as if we're compassionate for doling out to you what it is that you need to survive.
It's just not...
It is contemptuous.
And, you know, the reason that...
It's so interesting to see this happen in the United States, because...
There is some resentment of the 1% with regards to economic disparity, let's say.
But there's a lot more resentment of the intellectual overclass, especially among the sorts of people who were likely to vote for Trump in the last election.
And I think the reason for that is the contempt That the radical left-leaning intellectuals actually do have for working-class people.
You know, and you can see that reflected in their attitude towards Trump supporters, who are, by the way, 50% of the bloody American population.
You know, it's that those people are ignorant, they're stupid, they don't know their best interests, etc., etc.
It's like, well, maybe they're voting against the people that you supported and promoted precisely because they hold attitudes exactly like that.
And being smart in an IQ sense and being wise have no relationship with one another.
There's no evidence that being smarter gives you a better character.
There's no evidence. It makes you faster at whatever you do.
It makes it easier for you to learn.
But it doesn't make you wiser or more stalwart or more courageous or more forthright or more valuable or any of those things.
Not at all. And it can certainly make you intellectually arrogant.
Well, and as state power increases across the West, and as state power—state power still depends upon language rather than force, because it's not totalitarian.
Once you've got totalitarianism, you can just shoot people and drag them off into camps and starve them and beat them and do whatever you want to them.
So it becomes—you still have to maintain the propaganda, but right now, power hangs by the thread of syllables— And so because there's so much power to people who are verbally fluent and people who, you know, have that kind of verbal ability and agility, it draws them.
You know, a lot of people are drawn into trying to use that power.
Politicians and pundits, people on the media who can, you know, wave the wand of their tongues and summon riots or, you know, what they're saying now about what happened in Charlotte.
Suddenly now 63 American Trump supporters are all racists because of a narrative.
That kind of power is very heady.
And I think it's given a lot of power to people who have very high verbal abilities.
I would say low conscientiousness.
That's certainly something that our detractors have been accusing us of.
And it's a real danger, you know?
And it is a real danger, because whenever you have influence of that sort, you have to be very careful about how you wield it.
And I've been thinking, you know, I'm not a real believer in the existence of the alt-right, because I don't think it's not a political movement, and it's certainly not a political movement with power the same way that the organized radical left is with their death grip on the universities.
But I've been thinking, despite that, we can use that categorization for a bit.
It's like, well, what should the so-called alt-right be concentrating on?
And I would say, we don't want to have a war with the leftists.
That's a bad idea.
It's a bad idea to engage in that kind of polarization and demonization, because it's going to make things worse.
What needs to happen is something like, and maybe this is the route forward with regards to individualists, and this is why I've been trying to Create and disseminate a narrative of personal responsibility.
It's like, get your act together, straighten yourself up morally, take responsibility for your life, straighten out your families, find something productive to do, stop lying and doing stupid things, and see if you can live in a manner that would serve as an example to people who might not share your political predispositions.
And I think that's a good thing.
And I also think that the tendency of the people on the so-called alt-right to use humour has also been a really good thing.
Because humour is probably more effective than weaponry.
Satire and joking, you know, it keeps things from descending into violence.
And it keeps everybody above the fray to some degree, because at least...
The humorists are the sorts of people who can laugh at what's happening and detach themselves to some degree.
And so I would really like to see it if those who were opposing the radical leftists didn't turn into the sort of alt-right demons that They're increasingly being characterized by.
Because all we'll do then is repeat the sorts of things that happened, say, back in the 1930s in Germany and in the Soviet Union.
I mean, I'm not concerned about that at the moment to any great degree, because we're not in the midst of an economic catastrophe.
But still, you'd think we could come up with a better pathway than the ones that have already been trodden down.
Well, and I, you know, I'm struggling to hold on to my belief that these issues can be solved with reason, evidence, debate, language, and so on.
People have to show up to the table to debate.
If they show up at your riots with plastic bottles filled with cement and they throw bricks and so on, it's a little tough to win a debate.
The whole point is that if the left isn't going to show up to have conversations, if the left is simply going to attack and ostracize, then things are going to escalate.
I mean, I say this not with any preference.
I would desperately want it to go any other way.
But the left is going to have to show up and have debates.
You know, I'm disappointed that this woman from Google didn't have a chance to debate with you.
What a courageous and wonderful thing and civilization-enhancing thing that would be to do.
Yeah, because we could actually have a serious conversation about the problems.
Yeah.
You know, instead of this polarization.
Sorry, but just to finish, the alt-right, what they're doing is they're looking at the left and saying, well, they win.
They win consistently. They dominate.
They're getting their way. And how do they do it?
Well, they do it through identity politics, through verbal abuse, through propaganda, through random acts of violence.
And the alt-right has been non-violent for the most part.
I mean, there was this fellow in Charlottesville, the driver and so on.
We'll wait to see how that shakes out.
But the violence was occurring at the Trump rallies from the leftists.
It wasn't occurring at the Hillary rallies.
But as long as everyone lets the left win through propaganda, identity politics, through collectivism, then the right at some point is going to say, well, if that's what you have to win, this unilateral disarmament isn't going to work.
And of course, as long as that stuff does work, it's going to be very tempting for people to pursue it.
So, okay, so a couple of things about that.
I think I'm somewhat more optimistic on that front, certainly than I was a year ago.
I mean, first of all, There's been a radical transformation of the formal political landscape of the United States, right?
I mean, the leftists have undergone a terrible routing, at least at the level of the electorate.
Now, you could still say, well, they dominate the micro power structures in many organizations, and I think that's true, but the fact that the elected officialdom, say, has Has the fact that the people who voted rejected the narrative of the left relatively wholesale, I think, is a very positive thing.
And then we also might want to point out that even though my opportunities to debate people who are radically left have been zero because they won't do it.
But the thing is, is that what you and I are doing...
And many other people on YouTube in particular is actually producing a debate.
Not because we're debating people one-on-one because that isn't happening, but because the debate is occurring in the public sphere.
And so, you know, maybe we should be a little bit more optimistic about the possibility of continuing this at the level of discourse.
I mean, again, I think that what happened with the Google memo, I mean, it was obviously appalling that he was fired, as far as I'm concerned.
But I think it was also a terrible tactical error and an impractical maneuver on Google's part.
And I really think they're being called out for it.
You know, and so that's it's hard to say.
It's hard to see how that isn't really good, even though he did get fired.
I mean, it's not like he's being voiceless, for God's sake.
He wrote an article at the Wall Street Journal the other day.
And I mean, and the New York Times, at least the columnist there, has thrown weight behind him.
and lots of scientists have come forward and said at least that he was credible.
So I think that we also might not want to underestimate the power of the gathering opposition to the radical leftist narrative, and maybe also alert ourselves to the possibility that the centrists who have been apologizing for the radical leftists might be waking up to some degree.
You know, it's really easy to get into a warfare mindset, especially when you're peppered on all sides with accusations about your sexism and your racism and your transphobia and your right-wing status.
But if I step back, I think, Jesus, there's been a lot of discussion over the last year, and a lot of it's really intense, and some of these issues do seem to be bubbling up to the surface.
So, you know, maybe if we just hold our ground and keep stating what seemed to be I mean, let's hope so, man. Populations are wholesale being imported into America that generally vote for the left.
And so the sense that the debate is being cheated by the Democrats who want to import populations who are leftists, who don't generally come from cultures with small government, separation of church and state and so on, and no history particular of respect for capitalism, in fact, quite a contempt for it.
So I think from the right, they're saying, okay, well, we don't have a lot of time because at some point we may just – like our preferences for smaller government may just be voted out from under us.
And I think that's the urgency that they're feeling at the moment.
I thought about that a fair bit in Canada because there's – It's definitely the case that immigrants to Canada tend to vote liberal, let's say.
But I think that's partly because of the liberal position on immigration, which is generally pro-immigration, say, across the board, with some modifications.
But the Conservatives have done a bad job of reaching out to immigrants because most immigrant populations are actually socially conservative.
So there's a huge alliance waiting to be made I would say that the typical, say, Southeast Asian immigrant to North America is far more conservative than the typical conservative long-term inhabitant of North America.
So the conservatives have made a mistake, I think, with their ethnocentrism to some degree.
Now, it's complicated because I do believe that there is a limit to the rate at which societies can accept newcomers without forfeiting the stability of their own structure.
I don't think we know what that rate is.
But then, by the same token, I think that it would be very useful for the Conservatives to figure out how to talk to the immigrants to point out that although there are some values that they don't share, there are many, like the sanctity of the family, for example, and the insistence upon marriage and And a much more regulated attitude towards premarital sex and so forth, where the conservatives and the new immigrants are really, they're super tightly aligned.
So I think the conservatives are missing an opportunity there.
I mean, that has been tried in the States to some degree, particularly with the Republicans and the history with the Hispanic population.
But data is hard to find that supports that as a productive strategy.
And what Trump did, of course, arguably, is to win the election by ignoring immigrants and focusing on particularly what they call the flyover country, you know, the people in Pennsylvania who haven't had a job in a generation and so on.
So... If we're going to talk collectivism versus individualism, the kind of individualism that is the foundation of Western societies seems to be peculiar to the West.
And so that, I think, remains the challenge.
And that's a tough thing to get into another culture.
Because every culture, of course, views its own relationship between the individual and the collective as a moral thing.
And morals, as you know, are the hardest thing to shift in another person's mind, which is why...
Radical ideologies so often fasten themselves on moral principles.
So, as you point out, who knows how much can be absorbed without change, but I think we're kind of close to that edge at the moment.
Well, people are certainly reacting as if we are, you know, and I think that that's a canary in the coal mine phenomena.
You can't push unlimited immigration Without facing a backlash.
And at some point the backlash is justifiable, although we don't know at what point that's the case.
You know, and then underlying that, I think, is another complex issue that we can't intelligently discuss that you alluded to, which is, well, is the emphasis on the supremacy of the individual something that is truly Western in its essence?
And if so, why?
What's that grounded in?
And is it truly valuable?
And does it account, for example, for the overwhelming prosperity of the West compared to the rest of the world?
I think you can make a strong case that the answer to that is yes.
And then the next issue is, well, if both those things are true, well, why are they true?
And I would say Christianity, Judeo-Christianity, probably put more broadly.
Is the reason for that.
And then the next issue arises, something like, well, what do you do about the conflict then between our fundamental metaphysical systems, the fundamental metaphysical systems of Christianity, say, versus Islam?
And that's like our absolute rat's nest and an impossible thing to have a civilized discussion about.
Partly because even if you do have a discussion about it, you're instantly threatened and seriously threatened.
So, yeah, so that's, I mean, there's So that's another major problem that's confronting the West that's very difficult to sort out and to clarify.
I mean, my approach to that at the moment, you probably know this, is I've been doing these lectures on the psychological significance of the biblical stories.
And what I'm trying to do is to, for my own purposes, intellectual purposes, but also to the degree that I can communicate it, to return to the metaphysics of The Christian substructure of our culture and to try to find out exactly what the hell it is that's down there.
Is it real? Is it solid?
Can we rely on it?
And if it's made understandable to people again, is it something that can strengthen the spine of the West?
Because I don't see another alternative that isn't rife with conflict and catastrophe.
Now, it's a ridiculous ambition in some sense, but But, you know, whatever, if you can't see another way path, if you can't see another path forward, you choose the one that you could see.
So, and then I think that's part and parcel of this idea that the appropriate thing to do for the people who are appalled by the leftist, collectivist narrative is to live their individualist life properly, deeply, right?
grounded in Western culture that they're conscious of and familiar with and manifest in their day-to-day behaviors and actions in a way that is profoundly respectable if you look at it from the outside.
I don't see a better argument than living correctly, let's say.
Well, and one thing that supports your argument, Jordan, is that I think if I remember rightly, the statistics for immigrants into Canada is that Christian immigrants do five times better.
than non-Christian immigrants, refugees and so on.
like if you're going to come from some place of conflict or some place of danger.
And so the compatibility of Christians from the Middle East or other places is very high.
I mean, Christianity, of course, says that the individual is responsible primarily to the ethics, to the virtues, to the goals, and to God.
The state is often viewed with great suspicion, and rightly so.
Of course, I mean, Christianity was founded on the state throwing Christians to lions, right?
So this idea that you are responsible to your own conscience rather than to a secular power I think is very powerful.
And the other thing, of course, is that Christianity, through the concept of the soul and through the concept of individual excellence, allows for a difference in the conception of what it is to be human that mere materialism doesn't.
Like, the tallest guy and the shortest guy are pretty close in height, but the most moral and the most evil man are in completely different worlds, characterized by the myths of heaven and hell, both before and after death.
And so the grand scope of human consciousness is encapsulated, to me, in the idea of the soul, and mere biological materialism cannot encompass the Pareto principle when it comes to ethics.
Well, that's the argument that's going forward, I suppose, you know.
Well, look, Stefan, we've probably covered plenty of contentious issues for one day.
I'm sure that it'll cause...
I don't know.
Just before we go, I just wanted to get a few comments from you because, you know, I guess you and I have been showing up in the mainstream media always a rather distorted mirror to look into when people comment.
What has your experience been of, I guess, being written up a little bit more, particularly since talking with James from Google?
How's it been for you and what's it been like reviewing some of that stuff?
Well, I was very annoyed today at Business Insider with Steve.
Let's see, what's his name here?
Steve Kovach.
Yeah, who called me a representative of the far right, which I am seriously unhappy about.
Like, seriously unhappy about.
And I've had a couple of exchanges with him that I believe were quite dismissive on his part.
And so that annoyed me.
And the reason it annoys me is because I've spent a very large proportion of my career Both publicly and privately, dealing with the psychological motivations for the actions of the National Socialists, for example, and of Nationalists, period, for that matter.
And I'm certainly no more a friend of the far right than I am a friend of the far left.
And so that really didn't bother me because I took it personally as an insult, because I've been called so many things in the last year that I'm kind of, I wouldn't say immune to it, but at least detached from it.
But what really bothered me about it was that it was an inaccurate characterization and that it was indicative of extreme carelessness on his part or willful mischaracterization, which I think is reprehensible.
So that was annoying.
The rest of it, and I want to know how you feel about this too, is that partly I've learned too, it's like the old Buddhists, there's an old Buddhist story about a guy who encounters a series of disasters that turn out really well in the end and the moral of the story is Well, don't be so sure without some detached contemplation that this is a bad thing.
You know, what's happened to me over the last year is that as I've been attacked more and more, Better and better things have been happening.
And I don't know what to make of that.
It's really a mystery in some sense.
There's a great old line, I think, from a Chinese diplomat.
I think at some point in the mid-20th century, someone asked him, what do you think of the French Revolution?
And he said, it's too soon to tell.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
I honestly have no idea what's good or bad anymore.
I do know that the mainstream media is, I think, not working as hard as they could.
Like when they just sort of skim the titles of videos and say, "Well, I'm just going to quote the titles of videos in order to shock people and make them think negatively of someone." Well, you're not delving into the arguments, you're not looking at the evidence in the same way that some websites stripped James' manifesto of all of its sources and so on.
It's just kind of lazy.
And I don't view us as on the same team.
So to me, never interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake.
And if they characterize you or I or others in negative or hostile ways, and then people listen to us talk, I think it only enhances our credibility and detracts from theirs.
So that's, I think, the best I take.
Part of it is probably the death spiral of the old media, you know, because as their resources become more and more scarce, and the quality of their journalists fall, the reliability of their output wanes.
And that's another Pareto principle example, because very powerful things can fall apart very quickly, because the best people leave very rapidly.
And so, but, so...
So anyways, to answer your question, I'm kind of detached from it.
I'm spectacularly overwhelmed again by what happened this week, by the fact that I had any influence at all on Damore and that his memo has caused such an uproar and that he's sticking to his guns.
You know, I'm just completely taken aback by that.
I can't... Well, I can't believe anything that's happened to me for a whole year.
So I'm in a state of constant, it's like post-traumatic stress disorder, except that a lot of it is positive.
So I'm kind of watching it with open-mouthed amazement.
It's like being in a dream in some sense.
But I'm irritated at mischaracterizations and lies because they're not helping the problem sort themselves out, and that bothers me.
But personally, it's like, well...
We'll wait and see what happens.
The mainstream media is like this.
You've been right in the center of this, too.
What do you make of it? How come?
Why were you in the center of it?
Well, it's funny, you know, Jordan, because to me, the mainstream media is like this big fiery gateway that's terrifying to pass through, and on the other side is a huge number of friendships.
And that to me has been some, because I've met many more friends than enemies through my public life.
And that, the power the media had too, you know, there's an old saying, never go to war with people who buy ink by the barrel full.
But the power that the media had in the past was less, like way back in the day before the internet.
Because, you know, they'd print something bad and then, you know, today's newsprint is tomorrow's fish wrapping and it just passes into, unless somebody wants to go to the old microfilms in the libraries, they're not going to know.
And then there was a time when they had a lot of power because they could write things about you and there was no particular platform with which to rebut.
And so they had a lot of power, and I think they got very used to that kind of power.
But I think over the past year or two or maybe even three, things have changed to the point where if there's mischaracterization that occurs, there's such a platform for rebuttal.
I mean, the videos that you and I do vastly outstrip many of the videos put online by the mainstream media, and so they have lost the power.
They had a little power, then they had a lot of power, and now they have even less power than they had in the beginning, and I think that is quite a rollercoaster for the dopamine systems, and I think it's a bit disorienting.
That's for sure. Well, yeah, it's not obvious at all where the fundamental sources of power now lie, although I do think it's reasonable to point out that they lie a lot more with the individual than they ever did.
And Damore is a good example of that.
What he did, stripped down, was to write down some reasonably well-informed objections to some policies he disagreed with after being subject to those policies and being asked to do so.
That's all he did. Now, you know, you can criticize his political motivations, or you can at least question them.
You can question the integrity of his character.
You know, it's even reasonable to do those things in an investigative sense.
But the fundamental moral of the story is, Jesus Christ, you know, he said what he thought, and look what happened.
And he didn't apologize, and he didn't retreat.
And it isn't obvious to me that he is losing or will lose.
So, hooray!
You know, like, That's really something.
Very encouraging.
And I invite people to look at that as...
Such a positive outcome.
And I can't think of people who've been unjustly attacked who have ended up with disastrous lives.
And there was a lot of talk at the beginning.
He always wrecked his life and so on.
It's like, nope. It is another opportunity to live a more honest life.
Because if you disagreed with Google to that extent, he needed to find another place.
So I want to thank you so much for your time today.
This is, of course, a Sunday for those who don't know.
And I really appreciate Dr.
Peterson taking the time today.
Just a reminder, jordanbpeterson.com, youtube.com slash jordanpetersonvideos, twitter.com slash jordanbpeterson, and selfauthoring.com.
Thank you so much for your time today.
Always such a great pleasure, and I look forward to the comments we'll be receiving from this.
Yeah. Well, thanks for the discussion.
It gives me a chance to think some of these things through again and to try to...
