Jan. 23, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
13:42
3972 Jordan Peterson and Cathy Newman Debate: An Analysis
A recent debate between Jordan Peterson and Cathy Newman on Channel 4 has taken the internet by storm. Stefan Molyneux offers his perspective on the debate, the endless onslaught of "gotcha" questions, female agreeableness and the importance of preparation. Jordan Peterson debate on the gender pay gap, campus protests and postmodernism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54Your 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
Hope you're doing well. I'm sorry to be getting to this amazing conversation between Jordan Peterson and Cathy Newman, but I was just traveling in New York for a couple of days doing some speeches and meet and greets, so I did get to watch it on the plane on the way home, and I made some notes, and I have a few things to add.
First of all, kudos to both. Dr.
Peterson, I have great respect for. Kathy Newman went in, you know, with, I guess, all her little compiled gotcha questions and assumed that the wrecking ball of leftist rhetoric would work against the master.
And it was like watching one of those kids, they punch...
The clown goes down, comes back up, knocks them back over.
And I'm not going to talk about the big gotchas, which everyone kind of understand, like the free speech gotcha, but there was a couple of things that I wanted to add or flesh out in the interaction that I think will be helpful.
So the first thing I wanted to point out was, I'm telling you this, if I'm ever in a position where I'm debating someone like Jordan Peterson, a master in his field for decades, you will not see me for a month or two because I will be frantically going through everything, trying to figure out the best approach to make an argument.
And it's this lack of preparation that I find astounding.
You know, just I got my little list of gotcha questions and no particular arguments and no research as to how he's answered these questions before and how to counter it.
I mean, this is all public knowledge, public information.
He's very generous with his videos on the internet.
But just this lack of preparation, this overconfidence that the left has, that they're just going to win based on rhetoric and sophistry, that I think is kind of key.
And I really want the left, you know, up your game, figure out what the responses are going to be to the obvious questions and have a better and more elevated conversation as a result.
So she seemed, well she didn't seem, she said, well you know basically it's bad, Dr.
Peterson, that you have A channel wherein you talk a lot as an elder statesman of masculinity, as a father figure to many, as a man, you talk a lot about masculinity.
That seems to attract a disproportionate number of male viewers, and that's divisive.
So, apparently having a male space where men talk about masculinity, that's divisive, that's problematic, that's bad.
Okay, imagine this, to ask the question, to answer it.
Imagine she had Oprah Winfrey on her show, would she say, Oprah, you have a magazine called O, and there is a vastly disproportionate number of women who read that magazine.
It's like virtually all women who read that magazine.
That's really divisive.
They would, oh, we've got a magazine where a woman's talking about women's issues, and women read it, and That's called a community.
But you see, when men get together and talk about masculinity, it's divisive.
It's problematic. And that's just such rampant sexism.
It's almost become like a heartbeat.
You don't know how often you listen to your own heartbeat.
But it's important to notice it and to point it out.
And they did talk about the crisis in masculinity.
It's one of these things that is very abstracted from anything that women do.
And I've talked for many years about women's role in the cycle of violence, but Why is there a crisis in masculinity?
Somehow it's men's fault. And it's like, I don't know, like for me, one possible way of looking at it is saying, well, we have an entire generation of men raised by women.
Maybe that has something to do with the crisis in masculinity.
But no, you see, that might be assigning women agency and responsibility.
Maybe there'd be less of a crisis in masculinity if women chose men who'd stick around and made sure that there were fathers for their sons.
That might be something important, but you can't really talk about that.
Rise of single motherhood, crisis of masculinity.
It's still men's fault, you see, just somehow.
I do like this bit and this is When she says, what gives you the right to talk about?
And there's this long pause.
And it's like, I'm a clinical psychologist.
I mean, it's like, I know that's not an argument, but neither is what gives you the right to.
It's like, nobody needs to give you the right to talk about stuff.
I can't imagine charging up to Einstein and saying, what gives you the right to talk about relativity?
What gives you the right to talk about physics?
I don't even know what to say.
I don't know what to say. So, the question around this disparity, the wage gap stuff, there's a few just points I wanted to add.
You know, you can't get everything across, and I'm not, of course, speaking for Dr.
Peterson, but it's things that I would add.
You can't get everything across in that short amount of time.
But he points out that women score higher on agreeableness.
Now, that's kind of true, of course, right?
But not always, right?
Scoring higher on agreeableness is very hierarchical for women.
So, for instance, if you are a woman and you feel that you're in a lower hierarchical or status position to someone else, then odds are you're going to be more agreeable than a man in the same situation, on average in general.
But if you have power over that person, right?
So if you think of this woman interviewing Oprah, she wouldn't be abrasive and aggressive.
No question, right? So...
If women feel that they are in a lower status or need something from someone or need that person's approval, they can be very agreeable.
But if they feel they have power over you, then they can be very disagreeable.
And if you think about things like nagging, right?
The woman nagging. Well, that's not being agreeable.
Think of how women can use the airstrike of family courts to destroy men's lives if they feel spurned or unhappy in a marriage.
That's not being very agreeable.
So women are very hierarchical.
There's a lot of the big pecking order.
And the fact that she was hammering Dr.
Peterson so hard was part of that, right?
Which is, I haven't watched her other interviews, but I guarantee you that when there's someone on there who's in a politically favored group or a protected group and so on, that she's very obsequious and positive and nice.
You know, women staring up the chain of power are very agreeable.
Women glaring down the chain of power can be very disagreeable.
And if women are so agreeable, why do women spank their children so much?
That's not being very agreeable.
Now, it has become a kind of meme that Cathy was saying.
So what you're saying is, and just attempting to reframe stuff, and that is a very binary kind of thinking.
You have to, you know, to be intelligent, to be nuanced, to really understand issues that are complicated.
And you see this kind of back and forth all the time.
So you say, well, there's this wage gap.
And you say, well, you know, women have children and women choose jobs where there's more feelings and fewer facts and women are less assertive in many ways.
And that explains the wage gap to a large degree.
There's no acknowledgement of that.
There's just another maneuver.
There's a wage gap. Well, here's what explains it.
So you're saying there's no such thing as sexism?
You see how that works?
It's a way of avoiding the empirical facts that have been provided and putting you on the defensive.
Because then what you have to say is, so a woman says, there's a wage gap and it is because of sexism against women.
You say, well, here are all the reasons why the wage gap occurs.
Oh, so you're saying there's no sexism against women?
No, of course there's sexism against women.
And then she feels like she was back and said, well, it's explained by sexism.
You understand that this is kind of the way this stuff works and it's really terrible.
The way to counter that, of course, is to say there is, of course, sexism, but sexism, you can't play mind reading, right?
So if somebody says to me, like, we have this debate, right?
And I say, well, this explains most, if not all, of the wage gap.
I say, well, there's no such, are you saying there's no such thing as sexism?
It's like, I can't read minds.
I can't, no human being can possibly quantify the amount of sexism in the world.
You can't possibly figure out what people's secret, inner, possibly unconscious, unknown thoughts are about gender.
You could ask them, but who knows if they're going to tell you the truth.
So, are you saying there's no such thing as sexism in the world?
Well, see, and this would be interesting too, because If I'm having a debate with a woman, and I say, this explains most of the gender gap, the gender pay gap.
And she says, so you're saying there's no such thing as sexism?
I would say, well, what's interesting is that I just presented you facts and you're coming back at me with feelings, with mind reading and figuring out what people's hidden motivations are.
And that's one of the differences.
Like, I'm bringing you empirical facts, data, and information, well validated, well researched, well publicized.
And you're coming back with me.
Well, what are people's feelings about women?
Can you quantify? Can you tell me people's feelings?
Like, no, I can't. Because we're dealing with facts.
You're not mind-reading.
This mind-reading stuff is like, oh, I can see by the body language.
Anyway, so I think that's...
That is one of the reasons why it's very tough to have these kinds of debates because you constantly get substituted.
Can you read the mind of the world?
Or are you saying there's no such thing as sexism?
It's like, I just gave you a bunch of facts.
We can speculate if we want, but can we actually deal with the facts?
No, we got to drag it back into the realm of feels and all that kind of stuff.
Now, another thing that I found quite interesting was she said, like, it's a very small number of the biggest companies in Great Britain that are run by women.
And of course, why, why, why, right?
Now, Dr. Peterson got into the good explanations, reasonable explanations, and so on.
But one that I would sort of supplement is that It takes a hugely high IQ to end up being in charge of a large corporation or a large organization.
It's very, very high IQ stuff.
And IQ is pretty clear, very clear, in fact, with regards to gender differences, which is that at the very highest levels of IQ, there are virtually no women.
It's just a basic fact.
And at high levels of IQ, very high levels of IQ, men outnumber women like 12 to 1.
And at the very highest levels of IQ, there are virtually no Women.
And so if you need extraordinary high levels of IQ to run one of these organizations, then there are just going to be very few women at that level of IQ. And that explains a good portion of that.
And this is kind of the challenge of dealing with the left, because they've got this hysteria about IQ differences.
You kind of can't bring the clincher to the case and then they say, well, you haven't answered the question.
It's like, well, yeah, but you kind of made answering the question impossible because everybody freaks out about this kind of topic, which is kind of the point, I suppose, as well.
And it was a very interesting and wonderful debate, and kudos to both people.
You know, she hung in there. She had the good grace to be stalled when he pointed out the hypocrisy of not wanting to offend while her being willing to offend him.
She did change the topic a lot, and she did dodge a lot, and the lobster thing was kind of a non sequitur, but, you know, I understand that.
And trying to boil things down is really interesting.
This like, so what you're really saying, so what you're basically saying is boom, right?
And you get this all the time.
And you know it's just a complete reframing of the conversation to fit an internal personal narrative.
And it also shows the echo chamber.
You know, when you are not on the left, you have very difficult debates, because other people have great confidence, they've got all the sophist tricks, they're reinforced by everyone around them.
The fact that a very obvious rebuttal, right, that Dr.
Peterson gave, which doesn't make it any less wonderful and brilliant, but...
When she says, well, what gives you the right to offend people?
And he says, well, you're willing to offend me.
What gives you that right? That's a very obvious rebuttal, and again, brilliant.
But the fact that she's never thought of that or never been asked that shows you what a kind of echo chamber She's living in.
And I think that's really tragic.
We should be exposed to counter ideas.
This is why I find non-leftists in general more interesting.
Because the leftists just aren't challenged that much.
And I think seeing someone with intelligence and with grace and with wisdom and with facts, challenging someone and her having the good grace.
She didn't escalate. She didn't boil over.
She said, I'm just trying to process that.
And he said, I gotcha.
And she had the grace to say, you did.
You kind of did. And so I think that it was a very productive conversation.
I'm glad that they had it. I'm glad it's very popular.
And there's a lot more that I could say about it.
But these were sort of the highlights, I think, that were important during it.
I just wanted to mention as well that there were complaints that she had about so many threats and so on.
Men receive more online threats than women do, but it is part of the white knighting that is endemic to Western, well, the remnants of Western civilization that we care more about threats against women.
Well, there are fewer eggs than sperm in the tribe, and that's sort of the way that it works, but there's an investigation, somebody did sort of an analysis, a text analysis of the tweets aimed at them and found that Dr.
Peterson received 30 times more abuse than Kathy Newman, and It is you know, it is tragic sometimes you know when Women aim to say, well, why is there any of these differences?
And then they keep returning to emotions.
They try and boil things down to dualistic simplicities.
And then they cry victimhood when they're attacked after she went hard at Dr.
Peterson. And she said, you know, I'm glad I'm putting you on edge.
I'm glad I'm making you uncomfortable.
And when you go really hard at someone and then you receive negative feedback and you cry victim, it's really hard to escape these cliches.
I hope we can over time.
I don't want my... My daughter to grow up in a world where these cliches are so common.
But right now, great debate, guys.
Good job. Great job, Dr.
Peterson. Massive props.
And great job for everyone for being interested in this.
I hope we can have more of these kinds of robust debates over time.
