Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - Jordan Peterson: Morals Are Needed for Human Survival
Aired: 2025-06-06
Duration: 05:23


=== Morality for Social Survival (05:23) ===

[00:00:00]  So, apparently, societies need morality because it's the only way for social groups to survive.
[00:00:08]  Okay.
[00:00:08]  Genghis Khan was one of the most successful genetically, right?
[00:00:12]  Power, political power genetically, was one of the most successful human beings to have ever lived.
[00:00:17]  Where were his morals?
[00:00:20]  His genes have survived and flourished.
[00:00:22]  He's still on the Mongolian currency, for God's sakes.
[00:00:26]  There's statues all over the place.
[00:00:28]  Of Genghis Khan.
[00:00:31]  So this is all just like a fat, hyper-feminine, nice, absolutely zero understanding of history.
[00:00:41]  Absolutely.
[00:00:42]  I mean, the Aztecs in South America, Central America, the Aztecs were unbelievably brutal.
[00:00:51]  They tortured children for their cry and he's happy God.
[00:00:56]  Cannibals, right?
[00:00:57]  The Maori.
[00:00:58]  In New Zealand, cannibals and rapists, right?
[00:01:02]  What are they talking about?
[00:01:03]  Morals are needed for human survival.
[00:01:05]  It's like, genetically, human survival is driven historically, not morally, but historically is driven on violence and rape.
[00:01:16]  In a state of nature, right?
[00:01:18]  So, yeah, it's all just very abstract and has no actual practical understanding of history.
[00:01:24]  Very much.
[00:01:26]  Precisely the point that you just made, that science has to exist within a moral framework that isn't in itself scientific.
[00:01:31]  How is it not scientific?
[00:01:32]  Well, because it's not derived from the scientific process, as you just indicated.
[00:01:36]  It's not derived from the scientific process.
[00:01:37]  This is the fact that we are social animals and we need that to exist as a group, right?
[00:01:41]  Okay, so Jordan Peterson's point is flawless.
[00:01:44]  You know, I've got my criticism of him when it comes to religion and atheism, but his point here is flawless.
[00:01:51]  And the fact that...
[00:01:53]  Brian, the man they call Brian, that he doesn't get it is kind of incomprehensible to me.
[00:02:07]  You know, morality is supposed to include free speech.
[00:02:11]  And how is free speech doing these days?
[00:02:15]  Well, it's being utterly fucking decimated.
[00:02:17]  I mean, the British police are arresting a thousand people a month for social media posts.
[00:02:26]  Holy crap.
[00:02:28]  Absolutely mad.
[00:02:33]  So the fact that you need something to exist as a group doesn't mean that there's such a thing as morality.
[00:02:43]  Needing for something to exist as a group.
[00:02:47]  And how is that morality if it's local?
[00:02:50]  So you've got group A, you've got group B. They believe different things.
[00:02:54]  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?
[00:03:04]  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.
[00:03:13]  I mean, I don't even, like, how can you be this completely blind to everything that's going on?
[00:03:21]  In history and around you.
[00:03:22]  Like, that's just amazing to me.
[00:03:23]  But this is privilege, right?
[00:03:25]  People who grew up in the suburbs who just, oh, everything's so peaceful and nice and lovely.
[00:03:29]  And it's like, what we have and what we're losing is utterly out of the norm.
[00:03:40]  It is way off the bell curve of human history.
[00:03:43]  The relative peace, the high-trust society, the relative peace that I grew up with in society, Absolutely outside the norm.
[00:03:50]  And then people are like, well, but we need to be nice to each other and we need altruism.
[00:03:53]  It's like, bro, understand the incredible outlier that you happen to be living in.
[00:04:00]  The unbelievable outlier that you happen to be living in is not human history at all.
[00:04:11]  You pointed to the morality of Neanderthals, to the morality of chimpanzees.
[00:04:16]  They didn't derive that from science.
[00:04:18]  They don't need to.
[00:04:18]  That's not how that works.
[00:04:19]  That's my point.
[00:04:20]  They don't need to.
[00:04:21]  That's not how that works.
[00:04:22]  That's exactly what...
[00:04:29]  And he said, well, you don't need to.
[00:04:31]  That's how it works.
[00:04:32]  And so these people are in complete agreement and pretending to disagree.
[00:04:39]  Science explains it.
[00:04:40]  Knowledge science doesn't explain morality.
[00:04:42]  It doesn't explain how social animals would need to be But we see it, though.
[00:04:47]  Yeah, but explaining the evolution of morality and explaining morality itself aren't the same thing.
[00:04:52]  Oh, because you're asking why does this happen?
[00:04:54]  Yes, that's more accurate.
[00:04:56]  Because we're social animals and we need to be.
[00:04:57]  Yeah, but there's more to it than that.
[00:04:58]  Is there?
[00:04:58]  Sure, sure, for example.
[00:04:59]  So we're moral animals that have a sense of the future?
[00:05:02]  Sure.
[00:05:02]  Okay, that makes us unique.
[00:05:05]  Okay, so a sense of the future.
[00:05:06]  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?
[00:05:17]  Which is what this guy did.
[00:05:19]  Human beings, Neanderthals, which are not specifically Homo sapiens, and chimpanzees.