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June 6, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
05:23
Jordan Peterson: Morals Are Needed for Human Survival
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So, apparently, societies need morality because it's the only way for social groups to survive.
Okay.
Genghis Khan was one of the most successful genetically, right?
Power, political power genetically, was one of the most successful human beings to have ever lived.
Where were his morals?
His genes have survived and flourished.
He's still on the Mongolian currency, for God's sakes.
There's statues all over the place.
Of Genghis Khan.
So this is all just like a fat, hyper-feminine, nice, absolutely zero understanding of history.
Absolutely.
I mean, the Aztecs in South America, Central America, the Aztecs were unbelievably brutal.
They tortured children for their cry and he's happy God.
Cannibals, right?
The Maori.
In New Zealand, cannibals and rapists, right?
What are they talking about?
Morals are needed for human survival.
It's like, genetically, human survival is driven historically, not morally, but historically is driven on violence and rape.
In a state of nature, right?
So, yeah, it's all just very abstract and has no actual practical understanding of history.
Very much.
Precisely the point that you just made, that science has to exist within a moral framework that isn't in itself scientific.
How is it not scientific?
Well, because it's not derived from the scientific process, as you just indicated.
It's not derived from the scientific process.
This is the fact that we are social animals and we need that to exist as a group, right?
Okay, so Jordan Peterson's point is flawless.
You know, I've got my criticism of him when it comes to religion and atheism, but his point here is flawless.
And the fact that...
Brian, the man they call Brian, that he doesn't get it is kind of incomprehensible to me.
You know, morality is supposed to include free speech.
And how is free speech doing these days?
Well, it's being utterly fucking decimated.
I mean, the British police are arresting a thousand people a month for social media posts.
Holy crap.
Absolutely mad.
So the fact that you need something to exist as a group doesn't mean that there's such a thing as morality.
Needing for something to exist as a group.
And how is that morality if it's local?
So you've got group A, you've got group B. They believe different things.
Group A believes they're superior to Group B. Group B believes that they're superior to Group A. Yeah, Islam, I mean, go look at how Islam spread, right?
I mean, the idea that it's all just morals and virtue and being nice to people and binding up people's broken arms and bringing them food, although they've lost an eye.
I mean, I don't even, like, how can you be this completely blind to everything that's going on?
In history and around you.
Like, that's just amazing to me.
But this is privilege, right?
People who grew up in the suburbs who just, oh, everything's so peaceful and nice and lovely.
And it's like, what we have and what we're losing is utterly out of the norm.
It is way off the bell curve of human history.
The relative peace, the high-trust society, the relative peace that I grew up with in society, Absolutely outside the norm.
And then people are like, well, but we need to be nice to each other and we need altruism.
It's like, bro, understand the incredible outlier that you happen to be living in.
The unbelievable outlier that you happen to be living in is not human history at all.
You pointed to the morality of Neanderthals, to the morality of chimpanzees.
They didn't derive that from science.
They don't need to.
That's not how that works.
That's my point.
They don't need to.
That's not how that works.
That's exactly what...
And he said, well, you don't need to.
That's how it works.
And so these people are in complete agreement and pretending to disagree.
Science explains it.
Knowledge science doesn't explain morality.
It doesn't explain how social animals would need to be But we see it, though.
Yeah, but explaining the evolution of morality and explaining morality itself aren't the same thing.
Oh, because you're asking why does this happen?
Yes, that's more accurate.
Because we're social animals and we need to be.
Yeah, but there's more to it than that.
Is there?
Sure, sure, for example.
So we're moral animals that have a sense of the future?
Sure.
Okay, that makes us unique.
Okay, so a sense of the future.
So this is very common among atheists, is to blend and to smudge and to merge what human beings do with what animals do, right?
Which is what this guy did.
Human beings, Neanderthals, which are not specifically Homo sapiens, and chimpanzees.
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