The Importance of Being Ethical, with Jordan Peterson

If you're the Prime Minister of Canada, the man is a villain, but if you're a Conservative, especially a young Conservative, chances are you'll think of him as a hero.

jordan

peterson

on uncommon knowledge now welcome to uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson in 2016, the trudeau government enacted legislation making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of quotes gender expression close quotes

jordan

peterson

a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto objected, in particular, he flatly refused to use politically correct gender pronouns, said it in videos and it went viral. In 2017 he started a podcast series called The Psychological Meaning of Bible Stories which has been viewed by millions of people In 2018 he published a book 12 Rules for Life An Antidote to Chaos which became an international bestseller Last year he published another bestseller beyond order 12 more rules for life and then he quit the university of toronto he will come to that to devote himself to speaking and podcasting jordan peterson welcome thank you thank you you should know by the way that we are filming today as part of the classical liberalism seminar at Stanford , okay, asks one, the February protest of Canadian truckers, they are protesting against the coveted restrictions, some of them blocking border crossings, some of them snarling at the capital city of Ottawa, a quote and then a video clip, here it is the quote you made in a message you recorded for the protesters.

I would like to congratulate you all for your diligence and work in achieving what you have under difficult conditions and also for keeping your head in a way that has been a model for everyone. Close quote now the clip you have to stop people. Ottawans do not deserve to be harassed in their own neighborhoods, they do not deserve to be confronted with the inherent violence of a swastika waving on a street corner or a Confederate flag or insults and taunts just because they are wearing a mask. That's not who Canada, who Canadians are okay, so it's hard to even look at it here.

Here's the first question: how is it possible that discourse in a large democracy has become so polarized that Jordan Peterson and the Prime Minister look at the exact same set of events and come to opposite conclusions about them, well, he's lying and I'm lying. No. That's a big part of the problem. I don't think he ever says a word that's true from what I've observed. everything is stage performance, you have created a persona, you have a particular instrumental goal in mind and everything is subordinated to serving, why what is the motivation? The same motivation that is generally typical of narcissistic people, which is to be credited with moral virtue in the absence of the work necessary to achieve it, okay, in playing a role, you know, the swastika thing, is really false about the Canadians, we're really going to be worried about the Nazis in Canada because I had protests, for example, where people accuse.

Me about attracting Nazis in the first place, that simply doesn't exist in Canada, there is no Nazi tradition and I don't know anyone in Canada who has ever met someone who has met someone who was Canadian, who and who was a Nazi, etc. that's a non-starter, so when that kind of thing is dragged into the conversation from the beginning, you know that Canadians shouldn't be subjected to the inherent violence of a swastika in the first place, it's not even obvious what that one was doing in the first place. swastika. There is reasonable evidence to suggest that the person waving it was a plant or someone who was making the comment that that was what was characteristic of the government, not what they believe, now no one knows because the history around that event .

It's complicated and it's not like there were credible journalists who were going there to investigate in depth, but using that and the issue of the Confederate flag is exactly the same, you know the story in Canada, our prime minister implemented the emergency law. So the question was why, so I went on Twitter when this was trending and I read at least 5,000 Twitter comments to try to get an idea that they were people who supported Trudeau in his request for the emergency law and I was trying to figure it out. Okay, well, what do you think is happening and the story seems to be?

And this is what I can say and maybe I'm wrong. The story was something like making America great again. Conservative far-right Republicans were trying. to destabilize Canadian democracy, so my question was: what makes you think, first of all, that they care about Canada and their democracy and, secondly, why in the world would they do that? You need a motive for a crime like that and that was the same When the cbc insisted that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which is subsidized by the Liberals to the tune of $1.2 billion a year, insisted that most of the money the truckers collected was financed from abroad, if it wasn't the damn Russians then it was the American conservatives and it all turned out to be a complete lie and so good that it's right-wing Republicans trying to destabilize Canadian democracy why no one has an answer for that because what's in it for them and then okay, three days later, the emergency law was lifted I thought, okay, now what are they going to do with that, what could be the possible reason for that and the reason was good, that just shows how effective it was, we had this coup ready that was apparently funded by the Americans and our prime minister acted so bluntly that we only needed to be under the restrictions of the emergency law for three days, okay, I don't even know what kind Of the world I exist where those things happen, then, and then, Canadians, why Canadians?

Buy this to the extent that you do and I think you are faced with a difficult decision because in my country for 150 years you could trust the basic institutions, you could trust the government, it didn't matter what political party ran it, you could trust the political parties, from the socialists over the conservatives, the socialists were mostly unions and were trying to give a voice to the working class and honestly, the media could be trusted, even the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation It was a reliable source of news. that's true now, so Canadians are

being

asked to make a difficult choice or they were in the trucker convoy situation and the election went well, or all of their institutions are almost hopelessly corrupt or the truckers were funded by American Republicans right-wing, well, both.

Those are absurd, you might as well choose the one that is least detrimental to your sense of security, so I think that's what Canadians mostly did. I will return to Canada's universities, Jordan Peterson and the National Post, this past March. I imagined myself teaching and researching at the University of Toronto full time until they had to move my skeleton out of my office, yeah, instead you quit, why, well, it was impossible to go back, I mean, I couldn't think straight. clarity about what to do. on the professional front for a long time because I was sick, but when I started to recover and looked at the situation first, there was just no turning back.

I'm too well-known and too provocative, I guess I've never thought about it. of myself that way, but it seems to have turned out that way. I couldn't just go back to the classroom and then there were other problems too. There is no way I would be writing a diversity, inclusion, and equity statement for a grant I wouldn't make. I can't imagine the circumstances under which I would do that and that is absolutely crucial now in Canada and increasingly in the US. To get any type of research grant, you have to write a diversity statement and it has to be the type correct statement.

I read the National Science and Engineering Research Councils FAQ on how to prepare a diversity statement and you couldn't, you couldn't write a more ideologically reprehensible document if you set out with the intention of writing a reprehensible document. and then there's no way I can get funding for my research and then for my students, what the hell chance do they have of getting hired in an academic environment today? Those of you who served on faculty hiring committees know perfectly well, your basic decision from the beginning. it's okay who we eliminate because you have too many candidates and that's why you're looking for reasons to get rid of people and I don't mean that as a criticism even it's just a reality and any hint of scandal of any kind is Well we have 10 other people we could See, why would we bother with the problem?

So I just couldn't see my students having any future and then I also thought, well, I can go lecture wherever I want and with whoever I want. audiences of virtually any size and without restrictions of any kind, why would I ever teach a small class in college again? You don't know, I didn't like that because I did like it, but not all I could see were disadvantages and besides it was impossible, so that's how it was. Because? Again, on the national post, what exactly am I supposed to do when I encounter a graduate student or a young professor hired for diversity reasons?

I manifest instant skepticism. What a slap. The ideology of diversity is not a friend of peace and tolerance. It is absolutely and completely the enemy of competition and justice I quote what happened how the woke came about we can also get to this in a moment universities in fact university faculty survey after survey about party affiliation in this country I am sure it is the same in Canada, university professors have been on the left for a long time, but this awakening is something new, what is the transmission mechanism, what happened and how did it happen in a small number of single digit years, yeah, well that's it a tough question, you know, I mean.

I have tried to point out the essential elements of what could be described as political correctness or wokeness and I have done so in several ways. I had a student, for example, this is a quite promising line of research. Her name was Christine Brophy. her name, um, we, the first thing we wanted to know was if there really is such a thing as political correctness or wokeness, right, because it's vague, can you identify it? Yes, yes, and I said it psychometrically because psychologists for 40 years have been trying to do it. One of the things psychologists have been struggling with is construct validation; that's the technical problem: how do you know, when you present a concept, whether it has any relation to some underlying reality, and therefore can you think through whether there is such a thing as emotional?

Intelligence Is there something called self-esteem? Is there something called political correctness? So the proper answer is what we don't know, but there are ways to find out, and one of the ways to find out is: Do you want to? To see if the construct assesses something that is unique and does so in a way that is separate from other similar constructs in a revealing and important way, there is a whole methodological theory that should inform your efforts to answer such questions. For example, if you are a doctor, you may want to differentiate between depression and anxiety by keeping the concepts importantly separate so that they have functional utility but also taking into account the overlap because they are both negative emotions, for example, it is part of mapping epistemological, etc.

We asked a large number of people a large number of political questions trying to oversample questions that had been presented in the media and in the public sphere as indicative of politically correct beliefs and then did the appropriate statistical analysis to see if the questions are linked. and therefore they are united if question a is politically correct, let's say you answer it positively and question b is politically correct and you answer it positively, if there is a high correlation between those two questions, then you think they are evaluating some i underlying. I don't have to tell you all this, but you already know this: if you know anything about statistics, then you know that there is something underlying that holds them together and we identified a set of beliefs that were observable or identifiable, easily identifiable as politically correct, so ask for it to exist, then the question is where does it come from and we haven't done an empirical analysis of that, but I think if you're reasonably familiar with the history of ideas, you can see two streams, two broad streams, one is postmodern. current that basically emerged from literary criticism and is based on what I think is actually a fundamental and valid criticism, which is that it is very, very difficult to design a description of the world without that description

being

informed by some structure of values ​​that It's in The Core of the Useful of Postmodern Criticism I think it's the core of it and in fact I think I don't believe you can look at the world except through a structure of values.

TheThe question then is, what is the structure? of value and also what do you mean by structural value and that's where the postmodernists went wrong and where I think our whole society went wrong because the radical left types who were simultaneously postmodern turned to Marxism to answer that question and said, well, we organize our perceptions as a consequence of the will to power and I think it is a horrible doctrine. I think it's technically incorrect for all sorts of reasons we could go into, partly because power, yes power, is my ability to force you to do things against your own interest or your own desire maybe I can organize my interactions social on the basis of that will to express power.

I think it is a very unstable means of social organization and that is why the notion that it is power that structures our relationships. I think it's where is the evidence for that? There is no evidence of that. It's wrong, but that's what we assume and that's what universities teach by and. great, but is it a kind of recurring temptation? Although I'm just thinking now Gibbons says Rome falls because Christianity rises somewhat soft somehow by some horrible historical accident misplaced power Nietzsche beyond good and evil Christian belief attacks Christianity specifically but again is drawn to the power to will and then of course we don't have to talk about uh hitler and marx of nuremberg and marx so there's something there's something you're a psychologist which means you spend a lot of time probing human nature there's a kind of recurring temptation, in other words, it doesn't make sense to me that this thing that has devastated these great and magnificent institutions, these universities that our grandparents and great-grandparents sacrificed to give money to these magnificent citadels of learning, this corruption, is going to end. wait.

It makes no sense that it emerged from literary criticism. It doesn't make sense to me to assume that the English departments suddenly took control unless they are onto something. Yes, they know it. You know what I mean? No, they're onto something. They are in something like that. That is why in my previous comments I emphasized what I believe is at the heart of postmodern criticism. I don't think you can look at the world except through a value structure and English, so you think through how Why is literary criticism so relevant or became so relevant and so powerful and I think we see the world through a narrative framework and if that is true and we could talk a little about that, what do I mean? that I think you need a mechanism to prioritize your attention and because attention is a finite resource and it's expensive, then you have to prioritize it and there is no difference between prioritizing your attention and imposing a value structure, they are the same thing and then I think that the mechanisms What we use to prioritize our attention are stories and that means that the people who criticize our stories actually have a lot more power than you think because they are actually criticizing the mechanism through which we look at the world and, therefore, the world. post-social.

The modernists would say, look, you even look at the scientific world through a value-laden lens and I think yes, they're right, but what they're not right about is that the lens is one of power and now, for someone like Nietzsche, The thing about a word like power is that you can expand the boundaries of the word to encompass virtually any phenomenon you want and that's why I tried to define power as my willingness to use compulsion on you or other people because power can be power of authority. it can be competition, I don't mean any of that, I mean you don't get what you need to do what you want, I can tell you exactly coercion and, uh, and I think Marxist types see the willingness to use coercion as the motivation. force of human history and that really says something because it means that it is the fundamental motivation and uh, that's a very caustic criticism and it's easy to get people up on that, you know, one of the things that you see about the capitalists because I have been I am surprised to see the CEOs of large corporations like turning around in front of these dei activists.

I think well, what the hell is wrong with you guys? They know they are not even using their privilege and why. Well, it's not very powerful, yeah. You're the CEO of a major corporation, you can't even stand some interns who have this ideology, it's like it's doing you a lot of good, so why would you produce a fifth column within your organization that completely opposes everything? this way? in which business is done and the capitalist enterprise as such and an answer would be well, we don't think much about the ideas, well, maybe you should and you know you can be cynical about it and say well, it's just a gloss to keep. the capitalist enterprise goes along while appearing to meet the new

ethical

demands of the new

ethical

reality, which I think is also a bad argument, but the most important thing is that the people are guilty and the radicals who accuse us all historically and as individuals . of being motivated by nothing more than the desire for power strikes a chord, especially with people who are conscientious, you know, because if you're a conscientious person and someone comes up to you and says, like, a small crowd of 30 people said, you know you can be a little more careful with what you say and do on the racist and sexist front, etc., you probably think, well, I'm not perfect, I could probably be a little more careful and there's no doubt that people have been oppressed in the past. and there's also no doubt that in some sense I'm the undeserving beneficiary of a historical atrocity and so, you know, maybe I should look at myself and that's weaponizing guilt and it's very effective and it's not surprising, but it's not It's useful, so you know.

There is a resentment that drives this as a corrosive resentment that is capable of turning guilt into a weapon and it is very difficult for people to bear it. Listen, I asked my friends what question they would most like me to hear. Most of them would like to hear me ask you and they were all. I said the same thing and then I found you on a video saying that a few years ago people often asked me if I believe in God. I don't like that question, so I won't ask that question, but the role you just talked about is values. so here's a question, i want to hear how you think about this.

This is a question that seems like philosophy 101 to me, although I have to admit that there are other people who simply see no traction in this. My late friend Christopher Hitchens. I just dismissed this and here is the question: if there is no standard, we do not have to rise to call it god, but if there is no objective standard of reason outside and above ourselves, if everything is just matter, how can we think ? doing science this is c.s lewis this is c.s lewis and hitchens I just thought this didn't make any sense but I'm sorry c.s lewis if I buy scientific cosmology as a whole, it means that only everything that exists is what we can perceive through our senses, then not only that I can't fit into religion I can't even fit into science if minds depend totally on brains and brains on biochemistry and the long-term biochemistry of the mindless flow of atoms I can't understand how the thinking of minds should have more meaning than the sound of the wind in the trees, you feel that too, yeah, well that's a complicated problem.

First of all, I think that I don't believe that science is possible outside of a comprehensive Judeo-Christian ethic, so, for example, Don't believe that you can be a scientist without believing as an axiom of faith that the truth will make you free or that it will make us free, so we don't know the conditions under which science is possible, you know, and we tend to overestimate its epistemology. power has only existed, I mean, you can trace it back to the Greeks if you want, but in a formal sense it has only existed for about five centuries and it has only flourished for a very short period of time and it is perfectly reasonable to assume that there were particular preconditions that made their rise and rise possible, it is a historical phenomenon, yes, it happened at a specific moment in time, and at least for particular reasons, yes, and I think one of the conditions, well, there are many of them.

For example, there is intense insistence in the Christian tradition that the mind of God is in some sense knowable. Yes, so we could say well the structure of the cosmos and you have to believe that that is the case before you embark. In a scientific endeavor you have to believe that there is some relationship between the logic of logos, let's say, but logos is a much broader concept than logic, that's for sure, you have to believe that there is some relationship between that and the structure of the cosmos, You have to believe that the search for truth is itself an ethical good because otherwise why would you bother?

You have to believe that there is an ethical good and those are not scientific, those are not scientific questions, that's why I think the arguments of people like Hitchens are weak, it's like, Hitchens Dawkins, people like that, they have a metaphysics that you do not know and you assume that metaphysics is evidence, sorry guys, it is not really evident and you assume that it can be derived from observations of empirical reality and the answer to that is no, there will be axioms of your system of perception that they can't be derived from the contents of your perceptual system and you might think that's not very scientific and I would say we'll take it up with Roger Penrose and see what he thinks because I just talked to him for about three hours about partly about This topic, let's say the role of consciousness and the structure of consciousness, and it is by no means obvious that materialist reductionists have the correct theory about the nature of consciousness and it is not surprising that it is as if we do not understand the relationship between consciousness and being at all, so you know these are difficult questions, well, they are the most difficult, the difficult question for consciousness researchers is, why? their consciousness rather than why we are not simply unconscious mechanisms acting deterministically.

They call that the hard question. I don't think that's the difficult question. I think the difficult question is what is the relationship between consciousness and the self itself and why not. I can't understand what it means for something to be in the absence of any consciousness of that being, so when we say being, there is a component of consciousness implicit in the idea of ​​being itself, consciousness is integrally linked to being in some mysterious way. . and I also don't think that the most sophisticated scientists are necessarily reductionist materialists, like going as far as you can with that, no problem, it's clear that if you can reduce and take into account deterministically, there's no problem, but don't be thinking that that explains everything because I don't think there's any evidence that it does, from science to politics to dating.

Jordan Peterson, this is a tweet from last month, does more than just axiomatic acceptance of the divine value of the individual. makes slavery a self-evident rule, well that's a good one, yeah, yeah, well, you know, it was my friend jordan peterson who tweeted it after, yeah, yeah, well, yeah, I was thinking, I was thinking , wait, I want to give you, I'm going to put you in august company here, okay, that's you, here's gk chesterton, the declaration of independence bases all rights on the fact that god created all men equal, there is no basis for democracy except in the divine origin of man, so these are very similar thoughts and the The idea here is that if we cannot do science without some notion, can I call it if I divided it?

Well, let's just say the Judeo-Christians, no, no, the divine, the divine, technically, it's okay, oh, can you be okay? That might tide us over a bit. An awkward hook here talking about disgusting things like religion, but if we can't do science without a notion of the divine, can we engage in self-government? No, no, no, well, one of the things that I've been talking to my audience about is this right to freedom of expression and how it could be conceptualized because you can think of it as a right among other rights, let's say it's just one of a list of rights and you can also think that rights are granted to you, say in some sense by the social contract and so what is a different theory to the notion that rights originate in some underlying religious insistence on the divine value of the individual? the problem with the right there are a lot of problems with rights, among other arguments about rights I do not believe that freedom of expression is a right among other rights.

I think I don't think there is any difference between freedom of expression and it has to be free because if it's not free you don't think, so imagine, above all, you have to think about difficult things because why think any other way if everything goes well you have no problem when you have a problem you have to think and if you have a problem the thinking is going to be problematic because you are going to think things that bother you and bothering other people is part of the need it is part of what will necessarily happen if you are thinking um, I just wish you said something that would just stop me, I'm sorry because I actuallyI stopped so completely that I missed a bit of what followed I just want to repeat it there is no difference between speech and thought if you have freedom of thought you must have freedom of speech that's the argument yes yes okay well I'll unpack that first and then I'll come back to the another, well there are a lot of reasons for this I mean, first of all you mainly think in words, now people also think in pictures, but I'm not going to go into that, we'll just leave that aside, but we mainly think in words , so we use a mechanism that is sociologically. we construct the world of speech to organize our own psyche and we do it with speech and basically when you believe that there are two components that are internal in a sense, when you think you have a problem, you ask yourself a question and then the answers appear. the theater of your imagination usually verbally, so it would be like the revealing element of thought. and that is very much prayer in some fundamental sense because it is very mysterious, you know the fact that you can ask yourself a question and then you can generate answers, It's like, well, why did you have the question?

If you can generate the answers, if the answers are. simply there and where the answers come from. Well, you can give a materialist explanation to an extraordinarily limited degree, but phenomenologically it is still the case that you ask a question in speech and receive an answer in speech. Now it can also be an image. forget about that then the next question is what do you do once you get the answer and the answer is good if you can think then you use inner speech to analyze the answer which is what you do for example you encourage your students What to do if they're writing an essay, you know they're laying out a proposition and then you're hoping that they can take the proposition apart and essentially, if so, what they're doing is transforming themselves into talking avatars, avatars of two different points of view, so you have the speaker for the proposition and then you have the critic and maybe you establish the dialogue between them and that constitutes the body of the essay and you have to be very sophisticated to handle that because it means that you have to divide yourself in some sense. in two avatars that are opposites and then you have to allow yourself to be the battle space between them and people have to be trained to do that that's what universities are supposed to do it's really difficult what people generally do instead that's what talking to other people is about and that's how they organize talking to other people and then the reason you have the right to free speech is not so you can say whatever you want to get a hedonistic advantage, which is a way If you think about it you just understand, you have the right to say whatever you want, you have the right to do whatever you want, you know, subject to certain limitations, so it's like it's a hedonic freedom, it's like no, that's not why you have the right to freedom of expression, you have a right to freedom of expression because the entire society depends on this, its ability to adapt to the changing horizon of the future depends on the free thought of the individuals that make it up, it is like a free market in a certain sense it is a free market argument in relation to thought we have to calculate this transformative horizon well, how do we do it well by consciously engaging with the possibility? well, how do we do it right?

It is mediated through speech, so societies that are going to function for a reasonable period of time have to abandon their citizens must stupidly deal alone with complexity so that, from that stupid tense struggle that is offensive and difficult and disturbing, we may collectively grope for truth before taking steps to implement those truths before they have been proven, and so on. It's possible that that's the free speech argument, the divinity argument, while you are that locus of consciousness, that's what you are most fundamentally and the reason why it's associated with divinity, it's a very, very question. very complicated, but part of the reason I described this in my series on the biblical in the biblical series on genesis is at the beginning of genesis, for example, so imagine this divinity of individuals rooted in the narrative conception that is An integral part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, you have God at the beginning of time in whose image men and women are made acting as the agent who transforms the chaos of potential into the habitable reality that is good and he uses the word the divine word logos to do that and what that implies is that there is more to the word that is truthful than that. but the word that is truthful is the word that extracts habitable order from chaos and that is what characterizes human beings, that capacity and I think yes, that is correct, and then you could ask if you think I would say, well, That's what your culture is based on.

So you could say: I don't think it's fair to say what you want, but try to act, try to base your personal relationships on any conception other than that and see what happens. You know people are so desperate to be treated that way. is your main motivation: you want other people to treat you as if you have something to say and that it is worth paying attention to. You know that you have the opportunity to express yourself no matter how bad you do and if they are willing to do so. We will give you their attention and time to help you clarify that there is nothing you want more than that and if you try to structure your social relationships on any other basis then that intrinsic respect for their intrinsic value is going to fail, okay?

We've talked about college students, kids, a couple of Gallup statistics, the share of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation among Americans over 76, just seven percent, 93 percent of the old claim to have a religious affiliation, the youngest group Gallup tested are Americans between 26 and 41. almost a third claim to have no religious affiliation item one item two I'm reasonably sure this is the same in Canada, at least in the east In Canada, but certainly in the United States, survey after survey after survey shows that young people are much more open. to socialism or at least to uh what we would say more not just left of center but political objectives further to the left, they are the ones who most fervently support this by the way, this is a reversal of the Reagan years in the years 80, when children were more conservative than elders, that is not the case from time to time we add my personal observation, which is that during covid during the lockdowns, for me personally, almost more shocking than any other aspect was the indolence , the passivity of children, uh, except that it was established. very, very early, that if you are young you are not at any serious risk of this, you will get sick, maybe it will be the flu, but you are more likely to die in a car accident until you are 20 or so. you're going to die of greed that set in immediately and the universities closed and made kids take exams or take their classes on Zoom and I couldn't detect any pushback, no kids were talking trying to put down the man in general, they were like yeah, teacher.

Dr. Frankenstein likes Igors, so this is all really bad news, why do you think the first part of that question is importantly related to the second part? Well, I was hoping to be setting that up as the question for you, yeah, yeah, fair enough, in other words, uh, I guess let's just say that this is extremely raw and it feels even more raw now that I've heard you talk to So much sophistication for a while now, but here's the crew, the crude point, the crude suspicion is that if you don't have some notion of the transcendent, if you don't have some notion of the divine, then you'll believe anything damn, yeah, yeah , of course, I think that's true, and that's what the children are doing, yeah, well, I mean Dostoevsky's comment on that was that if there is no God, everything is permitted, you know, and he did an excellent job of analyze that in crime and punishment and the brothers Karamazov, uh, and I think it's true, I think if you don't believe in anything you'll fall for anything and I really think that's the case and you know you could say well, what do you mean? ?

You mentioned before that people like to ask me if I believe in God. and I always think well, who are you to ask that question? First, you have some notion of what you mean by believe, which you believe is accurate because you know what it means to believe, so you have an a priori theory about belief and now you are asking me if my belief in God fits into your priory theory. How about we start by questioning your theory of priory belief? Because I don't even know what you mean by believe and neither do you, especially when we ask. such a deep question because you know if you believe in God there are two mysteries there well three you believe in God all three are subject to questioning I think people act according to what they believe and so when people ask me if I believe in God I They generally say that I act as if God exists or I try to act as if God exists and they are not very happy about it because they want me to comply with the implicit rules of their question, which is: What do you believe? the religious view as a pseudoscientific description of the structure of reality is like well, I don't even know how to answer that question because it's so poorly formulated that I can't understand it, do you think there's something divine?

Let's try to define the divine here. We can do it for a moment. Most of us have the feeling that literary stories differ in their depth. I don't think it's an unjustified proposition. Some stories are superficial and some are deep. Some stories are deep. ephemeral and some move you deeply, whatever that means, it's a metaphor, but we understand what it means imagine that there are layers of literary depth and one way to conceptualize the layers of literary depth is that the deeper an idea is, other ideas depend on it. right and then you have fundamental ideas that are fundamental because if you shake that idea you shake all the ideas that depend on them and then I would say that the realm of the divine is the realm of the most fundamental ideas and you don't come to believe in that or not because the alternative is to say well, all ideas have the same value, okay, then try to act and you can't because you can't act unless you prioritize your beliefs and if you prioritize them, you arrange them in a hierarchy and if you organize them in a hierarchy You accept the notion of depth and that is something prohibited when we use the language of the divine, we are talking about the deepest ideas and that is why I believe that the notion that each individual is characterized by a consciousness that transforms the horizon of the future into the present , it's a divine idea, it's so profound and our cultures necessarily I think functional cultures are necessarily based on that idea, so I don't think it's just a Western idea.

I don't think you can have a functional culture that in some sense doesn't exemplify that idea because it interferes with the coping mechanism itself by not allowing free expression, you know, and you can be like my prime minister and you can say well, I really admire the Chinese Communist Party because when it comes to environmental issues they do things and I don't think I could begin to tell you how many things are wrong with that statement. It would take like 15 years to tell you why you are an inexcusably narcissistic idiot, but we can start simply if you know what you are doing and you have power, if you know what you are doing, maybe you can be more efficient in your exercise of control over movement towards that goal, let's say for a minute you know what you're doing right, maybe if you have power then you're pretty efficient, fair man, what happens when you don't know what you're doing?

How about then where do you go because that means? Has your ideology failed you and do you have a mechanism to operate when you don't know what you are doing right? Not because we always know what we are doing because we are totalitarians and we have a complete theory of everything and don't say anything to the contrary or we have it all figured out, yeah except when you don't so what do we do in free societies when we don't know What we're doing? We let people talk. and outside of that babble of that noise and American culture is particularly notable in this sense, you have this immense diversity of opinions, most of which are completely useless and some of which are absolutely redemptive and one of the things that is so notable as a Canadian observer your culture in particular is that you know you guys veer off in strange directions quite often and things seem pretty unstable and then there's a glimmer of hope somewhere that breaks into a whole new mode of adaptation and you move away from new and that just happens over and over again and that's a consequence of real diversity of real diversity and it's definitely a consequence of freedom of association and freedom of expression because it allows all of that, sure, okay, that's optimistic and I always want to finish a show.

On a positive note here, but I'm not ready to show it to you, so I want tokeep that and put an end to the optimism you mentioned. Trudeau and Trudeau's admiration for the Chinese Communist Party. Ray Dalio, billionaire on China. Empires grow when they are productive and financially sound. more than they spend and increase assets faster than their liabilities objectively compare China in the US on these measures and the fundamentals clearly favor China close quote now this is jordan peterson writing about communism in his introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of the gulag archipelago The anniversary of the publication of that in the West will take place next year Jordan Peterson No political experiment has been attempted so widely with so many disparate people in so many different countries and failed so completely and catastrophically How many tests do we need?

Why do we keep avoiding it? our eyes of truth now i have one i'm setting this up because i think the next quote is quite beautiful and i really want to see what you do with it ray dalio gives voice to this persistent temptation jordan peter says why why are we still tempted and dostoyevsky in the legend of the great inquisitor the great inquisitor speaks to christ and says to christ you are very wrong to receive your bread from us the people will clearly see that we take their bread to give it back to them and they will be very happy to have it, thus we will free them from their greatest anxiety and torture: having to decide freely for themselves.

There has never been anything more unbearable to the human race than personal freedom. Close appointment, it's too difficult. Dr. Peterson, it's too hard that Canada has had a good run, the United States has had a good run, but sustaining free societies over decades and generations is too hard for human nature to bear. No, you're not supposed to agree with that. Well, two. two things you know, the first is that man does not live on bread alone, so that's the first answer and the second is with respect to the difficulty, well, the only thing more difficult than openly dealing with existence is not doing it.

I am not for a moment suggesting that this is not difficult, I mean that part of what the Western religious tradition has done in religious traditions in general to some extent is to try to give people the support of the divine in their endeavors. incalculably difficult to deal with the unknown, let's say the unknowable, you must know that if you are ethically oriented in the most fundamental sense then, in a sense, you have the strength of God on your side and then perhaps you can prevail despite the difficulty and I think that's, I think that's right.

I think it's true, so you can ask yourself. I try to ask these questions seriously. You know, and I would also say that I have been driven to my religious beliefs, as it is out of necessity, not desire, what do you want? have your side when you're dealing with the unknowable future and its whims, how about truth, how about beauty, how about justice, you want allies, those are powerful allies, that's what college is supposed to teach to the young people, it's like you need some allies, man? while how about the search for truth? Well then scientists have their say and I would say on the economic front.

Well, how about free trade between autonomous individuals? Free trade of valuable goods between autonomous individuals. That's not such a bad thing. on your side these eternal truths and then we can say perhaps that well, there is a set of eternal truths, but they are all eternal truths, so they share something in common, some good in common, all good things share some good in common , well, what is the good? that they share something in common, well, for all intents and purposes, that is God and you could say well, I don't believe in that it's like well, I don't know what you mean, you don't believe that good exists, you don't I don't believe that it exists the supreme good.

I'm not trying to make any ontological claims about an old man living in heaven, although I think it's a much more sophisticated concept than people generally believe. That's not my point. What I mean is that you do have it. a belief system, whether you know it or not, is a system of ethics, whether you know it or not, or there is something deep down that unifies it or it is not unified, which means that you are aimless, hopeless, depressed, anxious and confused because those are the only other options and maybe you don't know what that unifying belief is but that doesn't mean it's not there it just means you don't know what it is and that's why I'm trying to figure out what it is I know I can give you a couple Give examples very, very briefly because I won't, so I already mentioned genesis, the story in genesis associates God with the force process that generates habitable order from chaos and attributes that nature in some sense to human beings um in the next part of the story in the story of Adam and Eve, God is what people unconsciously walk with in the garden, so Adam doesn't because now he's ashamed and he doesn't walk with God anymore, but So, what? what is God?

Well, that's what you walk around with when you're not self-aware, so it's an interesting idea and then you have the god who manifests himself in, say, the story of Noah, and that's the intuition that hard times are coming. and you better put your house in order and think well that brings you that intuition well certainly sometimes if you have any sense it is like well what is the nature of intuition is that a spirit that encourages you well obviously because there you are acting and then you are acting according to a pattern, it is a spirit that animates you and then there is the story of the tower of babel, what is god?

Well god is that which you replace at your own risk because everything will collapse, that is the tower of Babel, well is it true or not? You think about it for a week, especially from that point of view, you think, oh, definitely, if we put something wrong at the top, like Stalin, for example, then watch out, we've done it plenty of times. In the 20th century, I think you know that Milton conceptualized Lucifer as something like the spirit of unbridled intellectual arrogance, it's something like Lucifer is the light bearer and he's involved in a conflict with God trying to replace the divine and that It's pretty explicit in the story and I.

Look at that and I think it's a poetic insight into the battle between secular intelligence and religious structure that is Milton's prodroma and what he sees happening is that the intellect has become so arrogant that it will try to replace the divine. and rule hell I think so, well that's the man from the Soviet Union, that's Mao, that's China, we know we have our theory, it's total, we've solved the problem and nothing is going to change just enough if you want to rule hell and You think well, these societies are successful. As far as I'm concerned, a rather strange definition of success.

You want to be successful like China. You know, that's why it's true that man doesn't live by bread alone. You meet a rich slave who has no life. question and again I'm going to take a moment to set this up and I'm going to fumble I'm going to feel my way towards it I'm going to stumble towards this question but here I am, I'm finding myself Thinking about Canada in the 1970s is part of this, but I know American history better and in the 1970s everything goes wrong economic stagnation loss of morale in this country because we lose in the Watergate scandal in Vietnam we are on the defensive while the sodium soviets advance in Africa, Latin America and then in the 1980s in all the twists and turns and we went from 1979 and the Soviet Union in the national humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis and this Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to 1989, a decade, just 10 years later, the Berlin Wall falls, so the The issue here is the loss of free speech, the corruption of universities, the rise of China, which is in many ways a more formidable opponent than the Soviet Union.

In every way you could argue that we are in a worse position. Now we were in the '70s, so what I want to know is: are you talking to those few who have eyes to see and ears to hear? Do you think we are capable? Are you hoping to push for another type of restoration or is it Jordan Peterson? the fascinating, eloquent, compelling champion of a lost cause, well, I mean, when I spit, I spent a lot of time at the various universities that I was associated with studying motivation for atrocity because I was very curious about it as a psychologist, not as a sociologist or as an economic economist or a political scientist you are an Auschwitz guard okay, what motivates you as an individual and I wanted to understand it well enough to be able to understand how you could do that? because one answer is well, that kind of behavior is so far beyond the pale that it is completely incomprehensible, it is just a manifestation of, let's say, intense psychopathy and a normal person can't even imagine it and I think not, that evidence really does not suggest that because it is not obvious that all the people involved in the Nazi movement, for example, were criminally pathological, that they were deviations as would be incomprehensible deviations from the norm.

It would be wonderful to think that and it would make the world much simpler, but I think the evidence mostly suggests that it can't be achieved. Ordinary people do that kind of thing and maybe even enjoy it, and that's pretty scary, so I tried to understand it and I think I did to some extent, although we can't go into that to a large extent, that's a consequence. Envy is the spirit of Cain, I would say if you had to sum it up in one sentence, but that's not the problem, the problem is how to prevent it from happening again and because that's what we're supposed to be focusing on.

Let's say after World War II we never forget it, which should mean something like what if we don't do this again? So my question was: how can we do better to make sure we don't walk? down that path again and my conclusion was that because it was not because it was fundamentally a question of individual psychology, more fundamentally, more than economics, more than sociology, all of that is the cure, individual people have to act as ethically as may be possible. they're powerful or else, so I've been trying to convince people to do that, I guess, or to present not to convince them exactly, but to present an argument about why that's necessary and why it's up to them, It's like no, this is going on. you don't have to understand this this problem is you you don't do it right it's not going to work and so how do you do it right?

You start with what you have under control in your own life because where else are you? you're going to start, look for yourself, get your house in order, don't worry about someone else following the satanic path and that's what activists do all the time, right, it's you, it's corporations like it's someone more, no, it's you and me. I think that's also fundamental to Judeo-Christian doctrine is that it's you, it's up to you, redemption is an individual matter and so my hope is that if enough people take themselves seriously enough, then we won't end up in hell because we certainly could. a high probability and nor do I think that you could be or would be motivated enough to put your house in order to the necessary extent simply by being attracted, say, by the potential utopia that could arise as a consequence of that would be a vision of heaven, Let's say no, you must also be terrified of hell, I guess well, there's no such thing, it's like just because you haven't been there doesn't mean there's no such thing, it's like you've been there.

It would be quite naive to think that there is no such thing as how much evidence is needed and how it is produced. Well, it comes about at least partially as a result of the sins of men, and I think that's true, so I go around and talk. I tell people: look, not only is there more to you than you know, there is more to you than you can imagine, you have an ethical responsibility to act in that light and you could claim that you don't believe it, but I would say that Your whole culture is based on that belief and to the extent that you are an active member of that culture and a believer in its structure, then you believe it, you may not be very good at believing it, you may be full of conflict and doubt and you may not be able to articulate but it is still right at the base of your culture this notion of what the divine sovereign individual is which is not what your culture is based on that idea the logos inherent in each person is something more than that ever I have seen a credible argument made to show that it is more than that, you know you can say that the rights are attributed to you by the state, it's like I'm sorry, it's a weak argument because the state depends on your actions, so you know how to believe that you have to believe that the state is the entity and that individuals are simply subordinated in some fundamental sense to the state, it's like no, the state is dependent on the individual to exactly the same degree, so we are the active agent of the state in some sense where the eye that sees the state This is the talking mouth of the state because the state is dead without the individuals that compose it.

Can you fool the incoming freshman next year? University of Toronto Stanford University. 18 year old kids coming into this. We have gone through three years ofconcealment. I won't rehearse. not at all one sentence, what would you tell them, what would you tell them when they start college at the age of 18 or 19? the restorative, the redemptive prayer, what should they do, do not think that your ambition is corrupt, you know, because that is part of the message now human beings we are a cancer on the planet we are heading towards an environmental apocalypse the entire historical structure is no more what atrocity, etc., anyone with any ethical objective will simply withdraw, you don't want to manifest any ambition to support the patriarchal structure to exploit the environment you have to crush yourself you shouldn't even have children it's like no, there's no excuse for that there's no excuse for That's what I saw a professor at an event like this come out and tout this damn environmentally friendly house that he built and, you know, fair enough, it was a pretty interesting house, but not everyone had the four million dollars that it cost him. build it and I'm not criticizing his money, it's even like he had some good money for him, he built a house, okay, but then to tout that as a moral virtue, well, you're pushing him there and then he reached out to everyone the children and said, "You know my wife and me." We decided that we are only going to have one child and I think that is one of the most ethical things.

We possibly could have done that and I highly recommend you do the same. I thought you son of a bitch would stand in front of these young men. Many of these children were children of first-generation immigrants from China and he showed all these images. Do you know about those terrible factories in China, those endless rows of sterile mechanisms that subordinated all the Chinese people to this terrible, you know, capitalist machine and I thought you don't understand that half the audience is looking at those factories and thinking it's a hell? Much better than fighting in the mud under Mao, man, so I don't know where I thought I was, but going out in front of all those kids and basically telling them that the entire human enterprise is so fucking corrupt that the best thing they could do is to limit your multiplication and think of yourself as a scholar and an educator, I just said something by the way, it was quite awkward and he stomped off the stage, but that is not a message for young people.

There is no excuse for that you think well you know that we are going to destroy the planet we have to do this we have to demoralize the young people so that they are ethical it is as if, really that is your theory you are going to demoralize the young people so that they are ethical that is your In theory, you should go and think about it for a year and I'm passionate about this. You know, because you have no idea how many people are killing you. You have no idea. I see people everywhere in the world who are so demoralized. especially young people especially young people with a conscience because they have been told from a young age that there is nothing for them but corruption and power it's like how the hell do you expect them to react?

You know I shouldn't do anything, man. you already know dr. jordan peterson on what was the phrase the sovereign individual divine sovereign individual thank you for your uncommon knowledge the hoover institution and the fox nation i am peter robinson you