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June 28, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
06:17
Jordan Peterson: Overcomplicating His Ethics
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All right.
Thoughts on Jordan Peterson's descent into madness?
No, I do not consider Jordan Peterson to be descending into madness.
There is, this is not particular to Jordan Peterson, but I did watch his debate versus 20 atheists.
This is a big topic, so I'll just touch on it briefly here.
But there is a tendency for smart people to complicate things, to be perceived as smart because you're complicating things.
Like I remember when I was debating, sorry, when I was debating Vosh many years ago, he was like, the Industrial Revolution came about as a result of an incredibly complicated series of events.
It's like, no, it didn't.
It really didn't.
It really didn't.
The Industrial Revolution came about because human slavery and serfdom were ended.
And so the cost of labor became increasingly important.
Therefore, labor-saving devices were implemented.
I mean, if you buy a bunch of slaves, you don't want to implement labor-saving devices, lowers the value of your investment.
So they ended slavery.
That was the foundation.
Because that's the one thing that had never happened before in human history.
And right after you get the Industrial Revolution, it's not that complicated.
So there is this desire to overcomplicate when you have kids, like little kids.
You want to tell them what's real.
You want to tell them what's true.
You want to tell them what's good.
And a lot of the what's real and what's true, they will understand in and of themselves.
What's good is a little less instinctive.
But you need to be, and I talked about this in the spaces yesterday, you need to be able to explain to children what is true and what is real and what is good by starting it by the age of three or four.
And if it's like, you know, it's complicated, a balancing of altruism and consequentialism and majority will and majority rule balanced with the rights of the individual, it's like, forget it.
I mean, kids can't understand it and adults can't be expected to follow it.
You have to be able to stretch down your ethics to people who aren't as smart as you are.
Of course, right?
When I first started working in computers at the age of 11 or 12, it was all command lines and it's like, you know, DQ bang A on tandem and all the grep stuff that goes on on Linux and so on.
Like there are some people who love booting up to a flashing cursor and a black screen of ASCII challenges.
Okay, fine.
But there are lots of people who aren't particularly smart enough or aren't particularly interested enough to get into command line, this, that, or the other.
And so you have GUIs, you have touch screens, and you make the computers easier to use.
And it's the same thing with ethics, right?
If you want your ethics to be adopted by people as a whole, it has to be explainable to children, and it has to be explainable to people less intelligent than you are.
So it is the great temptation of intellectuals to pretend that they're smart because they complicate things and that it's all Aristotelian balance and it's in the mean and there's these considerations and those, but that's not how we teach ethics to children, right?
Don't hit, don't steal, don't lie.
We tell to children.
So you've got to have simple ways of explaining these things.
And I've done all of that for many years.
The purpose of high intelligence is to make complexity understandable to the average or even the below average.
The purpose of high intelligence is to clarify and simplify.
It takes a high degree of intelligence to create a GUI touchscreen interface.
I mean, there's the physics and the engineering of the touchscreen.
There's all of the icon design.
So it takes a high degree of intelligence to create a touchscreen, GUI graphical user interface.
And the reason that you do that is it makes the power of computers accessible to the average person who's not a hobbyist and doesn't like things to be complicated.
The purpose of what I've done for 40 years, 20 in the public eye, is to take philosophy and make it comprehensible and applicable in practical, material, measurable ways to benefit people's lives.
I am the shiny touchscreen GUI interface for philosophy.
And so if you can't break down most of your arguments, I'm not talking about something like disproving simulation theory or arguments for free will, although I really think I would take on the challenge, and maybe I will at some point, to bring those down to people.
But I had a podcast called The ABCs of UPB.
You can find that at FDRpodcast.com.
And this is me explaining rational ethics to a child.
And I'm two or three years old, my daughter, I was explaining UPB to her and she got it no problem.
So I don't know about madness, but I do think that, you know, it depends what when Jordan Peterson is like, well, it depends what you mean by believe.
It was like, well, an idea in your mind that you hold to be true, independent of your consciousness.
Right.
So that should not be super complicated.
It shouldn't be super complicated to explain what reality is, what truth is, and what virtue is.
It should be disarmingly simple.
And if it's not disarmingly simple, you've gone wrong somewhere.
Because we ask children to know what is true, right?
Because when we say, don't lie, we're saying, look, as a little kid, you have the ability to tell what is true and you have the ability to choose whether to tell the truth or to lie.
So we've got to have reality, truth, and morality.
Explainable to little kids.
If we can't explain it to little kids, we can't ask them to follow it, right?
You wouldn't say to a little kid, well, in order to have your dinner, you have to be able to understand quadratic equations or quantum mechanics or something like that.
That would just be cruel.
I mean, dangling, you know, something that they couldn't possibly reach to get.
So I think the great temptation is to dissolve the clarity of incisive rationality into this fog of complexity, and then everybody wanders in and gets lost.
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