"A Glitch in the Matrix" - Jordan Peterson, the Intellectual Dark Web & the Mainstream Media

[Music] sometimes there's a glitch in the matrix where the limitations of the old operating system are laid bare and something new pokes through there have been dozens of responses to the jordan peterson channel 4 interview already what makes this one different well i have a pretty unique perspective in october last year i went to toronto to interview jordan peterson at his home you came in from where i came in from london last night i turned the interview into the first full-length documentary about jordan peterson's ideas i was pretty sure he'd soon become a lot more famous and be recognized as one of the most significant public thinkers but i couldn't possibly have predicted how he'd break through to a mass audience a few weeks later peterson did an interview with journalist kathy newman on channel 4 news in the uk a program i worked on as a reporter and producer for 10 years it was a sensation millions watched it online tens of thousands commented an overwhelming majority felt peterson had been unfairly represented [Music] and in the weeks since it hasn't stopped peterson has been asked about it constantly on the most high-profile online shows 12 rules for life so without reading this so what you're saying is there's only 12 things you need to know in life right that's it yeah well yeah yeah this um this interview that you just did with this woman uh kathy newman was that in the uk it was channel 4 uk so what does this glitch say about the state of mainstream media and the culture at large that's my diagnosis of what's actually happening is that people are moving further and further away from what is what thinking actually is and more and more into merely running a script and what does jordan peterson actually think that's so controversial you are misrepresented more than anyone i know in a weird way you are villainized in a weird way where um i can't believe these people are honestly looking at your opinions and coming up with these conclusions i believe this encounter struck such a nerve because it's a cultural watershed moment seen properly as peterson would say it's archetypal in that it contains layers and layers of meaning that go right to the heart of the biggest rifts we're seeing playing out in the culture over the next 50 minutes i'm going to do my best to unpack it from the clash between new and old media this is also why youtube is going to kill tv because television by its nature all of these narrow broadcast technologies they re they rely on forcing the story all the way down to the mythological and archetypal level i thought of ideologies as fragmentary mythologies that's where they get their archetypal and psychological power in the postmodern world and this seems to be something that's increasingly seeping out into the culture at large you have nothing but the tyrannical father nothing but the destructive force of masculine consciousness and nothing but the benevolent benevolent great mother and it's a it's an appalling ideology and it seems to me that it's sucking the vitality which is exactly what you would expect symbolically it's sucking the vitality of our culture and to ask how do we move forward constructively rather than just adding to the polarization i've been a journalist for 16 years in the newsrooms of the bbc in channel 4 and then making documentaries i moved away from the front line of news some time ago and started learning psychology which is what first drew me to jordan peterson from a distance i've started to see the blind spots of the establishment media much more clearly i've spent some of the best years of my working life at channel 4 news and have a huge amount of respect and gratitude to the program but i'm making this film because i feel so strongly that if we can't have open conversations about the kind of topics peterson is raising we're in serious trouble my book went up to number two in on amazon.com in the us the next day right it's number one in canada it's number three in the uk all on amazon i couldn't have asked for more publicity right and so i could also be sitting back and saying well you know she tried to my a person who regarded herself as my ideological opponent tried to go after my philosophy and my reputation on national tv failed brutally and has been taken apart for it it's like this is a good day but i don't regard it as a good day i don't think it's a good day as what do you regard it i think that it's evidence of the instability of the times that we're in it would have been much better for me and for everyone else if what we would have had was a real conversation you said that it's actually a sign of the times where things could go really wrong for all of us really soon yeah we're playing with fire what do you mean by this can you can you elaborate well things go wrong in cultures all the time right you get you get the polarization increases until people start to act it out [Music] peterson is one of a new breed of thinkers made famous almost completely by the internet not the broadcast media part of a powerful new informal network being called the intellectual dark web the mainstream media is based on an old dying model that is being replaced by new media and new technology so quickly that its faults are becoming glaringly obvious fortunately thanks to youtube podcasting and however else you get shows like this one the mainstream media stranglehold on information which really is a stranglehold on your ability to think clearly about the issues of the day is crumbling at an incredible rate now the question is who and what will replace it a few months ago one of my favorite people to sit across this table from eric weinstein came up with the phrase intellectual dark web to describe this eclectic mix of people from sam harris to ben shapiro to his brother brett weinstein to jordan peterson all of whom are figuring out ways to have the important and often dangerous conversations that are completely ignored by the mainstream it's why i would argue that this collection of people are actually more influential at this point than whatever collection of cable news pundits you can come up with if you think i'm being hyperbolic about the growing influence of this group just check the traction that these people get on twitter or facebook compared to our mainstream competitors twitter may not be real life as i say in my twitter bio but it is some barometer of what the zeitgeist is right now what unites this group of thinkers is a sense that the set of ideas that have run western culture for years are breaking down and that the chaos of the moment is the attempt to find new ones it's nearly all happening online part of the problem that we have right now in our culture is trying to diagnose the level at which the discussion should be taking place and i think the reason that this is a tumultuous time is because it actually is a time for discussion of first principles and it's it's that and first principles are virtually at the level of theology right because first principles are the things that you assume and then move forward it's like well what should we assume well the dignity of the human soul let's start with that you can't treat yourself properly without assuming that you can't have a relationship with another person you can't stabilize your family you can't have a functional society so what does it mean for this human soul to have dignity well the part of the idea is that you're participating in creation itself and you do that with your actions in your language and you get to decide whether you're tilting the world a bit more towards heaven or a bit more towards hell and that's actually what you're doing so that's a place where the literal and the metaphorical truth comes together and people are very they're terrified of that idea as they should be because it's a massive responsibility they also argue that the central problem is polarization boosted by social media peterson's work looks at how people are hardwired to see the world differently a lot of what determines your political orientation is biological temperament far more than people realize so for example left-leaning people liberals let's say although that's kind of misnomer but we'll keep with the terminology liberals are high in a trait called openness which is one of the big five personality traits and it's associated with interest in abstraction and interest in aesthetics it's the best predictor of liberal political leaning and they're low in trait conscientiousness which is dutifulness and and orderliness in particular whereas the conservatives are the opposite they're high in conscientiousness they're dutiful and orderly and they're low in openness and that makes them really good managers and administers administrators and often businessmen but not very good entrepreneurs because the entrepreneurs are almost all drawn from the liberal types and so these are really fundamental fundamentally biologically predicated differences and there you might think about them as different sets of of opportunities and limitations and and certainly different ways of screening the world and each of those different temperamental types needs the other type let's call this a diversity issue if you start understanding that the person that you're talking to who doesn't share your political views isn't stupid that's the first thing necessarily they might be but so might you be you know stupidity isn't the differences in intelligence are not the prime determinant of differences in political belief all right so you might be talking to someone who's more conscientious and less creative than you if you're if you happen to be a liberal but that doesn't mean that that person's perspective is not valid and it doesn't mean that they wouldn't outperform you in some domains because they would so one thing to remember is people actually do see the world differently it's not merely that they that they're possessed of of of ill-informed opinions the whole point of the of a democracy is to continue the dialogue between people of different temperamental types so that we don't move so far to the right that everything becomes encapsulated and stone and doesn't move or so far to the left that everything dissolves in a kind of mealy-mouthed chaos and the only way that you can you can navigate between those two shoals is by is through discussion which is why free speech is such an important value it's the thing that keeps the temperamental types from being at each other's throats in the aftermath of the trump election that came as such a shock to most of the media one of the most widely shared analysis pieces was from deep code it describes how the establishment mainstream media perspective based around liberal values of openness and inclusivity he calls the blue church is being challenged by a new web-based insurgency a red religion based on the values of tribalism the culture war of the the 20th century was a decisive success for blue and a effectively a route for red um so what we see first is that red was forced to move into a deeply exploratory phase second that it did this in a context where as it turns out things were changing meaningfully quite significantly in fact from my perspective in a world historical level the emergence of entirely new forms of communication and therefore entirely new forms of sense-making and coherence he concludes that the blue church is in the process of collapse as its dominant ideology can't adapt to changing reality but that a combination of the two sets of values of blue and red is essential we are conscious and effective in the world in groups not as individuals and the ingredients of those groups include aspects that are currently showing up as both red and blue i propose somewhat strongly that neither red nor blue as pure elements contain the ingredients necessary to actually be adaptive to reality um this is a disaster in fact um it's a little bit like um separating the hand and the eye and you the eye can see if the eye takes itself as being the essence of virtue it separates itself from the ability to do the same thing with the hand for most of human history these groups have actually always co-mingled they are necessary that they actually relate to each other in a deeply healthy uh and direct fashion uh their separation into armed camps is extinctionary actually what are the values of red that you think blue needs to integrate or to make or to reintegrate oh oh that's actually pretty easy responsibility i mean we've actually even seen it um the ability to um make a commitment and keep it um which by the way ideologically shows up as either duty or loyalty but those are both ideologies the the deeper sense is that ability um [Music] responsibility both the individual and the group level the ability to actually really make a personal sacrifice on the part of the group that's actually a deeply red value and i don't mean that by the way as politically ideological uh certainly there are people who um are currently part of blue who feel that deeply what i'm saying is that that shows up much much more intensely in red and when you're feeling it in blue you're actually feeling a red value and that's good mixing is crucial because that's very jordan peterson asked to how would you how do you define jordan peterson or do you think the fact that the issue is that he is is not definable within one of those two camps yeah i think that's the point i think that he grasps directly the fact that human beings can only actually make sense of the world by virtue of communication with other human beings and this is all about the notion of admixture that one must have a mixture of of well i mean he uses the mythopoetic to make sense the order order and chaos uh the way the taoist way is the alchemical admixture of order and chaos and that's it like that's how you do it and so if you bias towards orderliness you find yourself in a rigid non-adaptive uh non-creative non-exploratory framework um which will die because the world changes if you bias towards chaos um you you eat your young and evaporate um which also dies for obvious reasons uh and the key is to actually enable these things to be in relationship with each other and vital healthy relationship with each other and i think that's in some sense the essence of what he's focusing on and sort of the core of what he's actually about peterson is hard for the broadcast media to get a handle on because the depth of his thought means he doesn't fit easily into any of their categories the clash with kathy newman was his breakthrough moment where the new world met the old to give the context from kathy newman's side she has to do dozens of interviews each month peterson is hard to get a grip on and he sure as hell looks controversial she's also focused on getting sound bites for a five-minute cut down of the interview for tv not a long conversation for online the interview was ridiculous it was a ridiculous interview and i listened to it or watched it several times i was like this is so strange it's like her determination to turn it into a conflict to it's one of the issues that i have with television shows because they have a very limited amount of time and they're trying to make things as salacious as possible they want to have these sound bites these click bait sound bites and she just went into it incredibly confrontational not trying to find your actual perspective but trying to force you to defend a non non-realistic perspective yes well i was the i was the hypothetical villain of her imagination essentially now this is also why youtube is going to kill tv because television by its nature all of these narrow broadcasts technologies they they rely on forcing the story right because it has to happen now it has to happen in like often in five minutes because they only broadcast five minutes of that interview they did put the whole thing up on youtube to their credit it it it hasn't ceased to amaze me yet i think that they thought that the interview went fine after the interview channel 4 news found themselves at the center of an online storm which included some nasty personal and misogynistic attacks it's understandable that they just wanted it to go away but online is forever and as the center of gravity continues to shift away from traditional media this interview is i would argue a slow motion and continuing car crash for channel 4's credibility so why did it happen partly the limitations of the medium of tv but also because of the institutional political blindness of the mainstream media i've always considered myself of the liberal left but especially since the election of trump i've been trying to understand what happened and i'm convinced that the polarization we're seeing is mainly driven by the shadow side of liberalism in particular where supposedly inclusive social justice liberalism stops being inclusive and secretly judges and despises people that don't think the same way the rebellion of trump and brexit was a direct response as uri harris argues in this article in colette the new gatekeepers of the media have become a new bourgeoisie enforcing a rigid etiquette and using the rights of the oppressed as an excuse to put forward a vision of the kind of society they personally want to live in on the surface level it's about how a narrow social justice worldview embodied by kathy newman in the interview became the new status quo and how this institutional bias of much of the mainstream media means it can't see or understand the forces that are challenging this new consensus the counterculture used to be on the left but once it won the culture war it left space for a new counterculture the biggest manifestation is the red pill phenomena which the mainstream media mistakenly assumes is the same thing as the alt-right i was surprised to just discover the overlap between um what i'm into uh particularly like um greek philosophy and stoicism and the alt-right who i'd always thought of you know if i come across from the tour i thought them as kind of um swivel-eyed bogeymen you know uh completely unpalatable extremists uh in their in their basements and then to discover that um you know a lot of them were a lot of people in stoicism were also really into the alt-right made me wonder what was going on and why people like me were getting radicalized and drawn into it can you explain what stoicism is for um is basically uh an ancient greek philosophy which um was became very popular in the roman empire uh you know with like the emperor marcus aurelius was a stoic for example and it's in some ways like a western form of buddhism it's like a therapy for the emotions it teaches you to take responsibility for your thoughts to take and thereby to take some control over your emotions so in some ways it's putting forward a model of uh strength and integrity and kind of resilience amid adversity and rapid change so for that reason it's become very popular in the last 10 years i i think this is also why from my perspective at least someone like jordan peterson is often looked from the outside as being aligned with the alt-right because he has a similar message but it's but there are crucial differences i think between what we would consider i mean certainly white nationalism would be an essential part of the alt-right i would say of any useful definition and yeah that's that's certainly not characteristic of jordan peterson from my experience no there's there's a crucial difference at least between stoicism and the alt-right uh even though a lot of alt-right is into stoicism in that stoicism and and maybe jordan peterson as well i don't i'm not an expert on him talk about the way to gain strength and maturity and power is internal it's to take responsibility for your own thoughts and feelings whilst i think people sometimes men might look for that sense of power and control externally by um suppressing or or or segregating anyone who they feel threatened by whether that's other colors or other sexualities or or gender so there's a crucial difference there one is about kind of inner integrity uh and and and just kind of um being strong within yourself and the other is about trying to take control through the kind of exterior borders and fences if you see what i mean every public appearance that i've made that's related to the sort of topics that we're discussing is overwhelmingly men it's like it's like 85 to 90 percent and so i thought wow that's weird like what the hell's going on here exactly and then the other thing i've noticed is that i've been talking a lot to the crowds that i've been talking to not about rights but about responsibility right because you can't have the bloody converse why do you do it you can't have the conversation about rights without the conversation about responsibility because your rights are my responsibility that's what they are technically so you just can't have only half of that discussion and we're only having half that discussion the question is well what the hell are you leaving out if you only have that half of the discussion and the answer is well you're leaving out responsibility and then the question is well what are you leaving out if you're leaving out responsibility and the answer might be well maybe you're leaving out the meaning of life that's what it looks like to me it's like here you are suffering away what makes it worthwhile right you know you're completely out you're completely you have no idea what you're you it's almost impossible to describe how bad an idea that is responsibility that's what gives life meaning it's like lift a load then you can tolerate yourself right because look at you're useless easily hurt easily killed why should you have any self-respect that's the story of the fall pick something up and carry it pic make it heavy enough so that you can think yeah well useless as i am at least i could move that from there to there well what's really cool about that is that when i talk to these crowds about this the men's eyes light up and that's very like i've seen that phenomena because i've been talking about this mythological material for a long time and i can see when i'm watching crowds people you know their eyebrows lift their eyes light up because i put something together for them that's what mythological stories do so i'm not taking responsibility for that that's what the stories do so i say the story people go click click click you know when their eyes light up but this responsibility thing that's a whole new order of this is that young men are so hungry for that it is unbelievable it just blows me away it's like really that's what's that's the counterculture grow the hell up and do something useful really i could do that oh i'm so excited by that idea no one ever mentioned that before it's like rights rights rights rights jesus it's it's it's appalling it's it's and and i feel that that's deeply felt by the people who are who are coming out to to listen to these sorts of things too they're they've had enough of that so and they better have because it's it's a non-productive mode of being responsibility man peterson is part of the counterculture but he describes himself as a classic liberal and yet he's frequently described as right wing by the media this is not limited to peterson james damore's infamous google memo was described everywhere as an anti-diversity screed despite him specifically stating he wanted to encourage more diversity in the workplace many believe that the channel 4 interview was a significant moment in exposing this mindset as dogmatic reactionary and fixed so during the interview we see an example of a a delusional framework that is what appears to be largely incapable of perceiving and reacting to reality in real time but much more interesting is what happened afterwards which was the sort of the self-healing and policing mechanism of the larger social consensus of how when how the blue church reactively goes about maintaining the integrity of its frame and so it ended up happening was there was a break in the frame there was a glitch in the matrix the uh mechanisms of the blue church reacted to endeavor to control the frame and to convert it into a way of sense of of uh making sense of the what occurred that still maintained the integrity of its frame do you mean when they tried to characterize it as as sort of abusive trolls and the alt-right hero and all of that exactly exactly to use a military language it was a fallback position that was a reactive almost instinctual and not almost in fact precisely instinctual was that pure habit there was no thoughtfulness or even strategic action there it was if if x then y and in this case y is here's a set of things that one does to re-establish the dominant frame and now we're now we're two levels deep in the first level was a sort of self-evident disaster but then the second level was also a relatively self-evident disaster and there isn't really a third level um in this approach so it ends up happening and this is again you can kind of just think about this from ordinary psychology um this is how delusions fall apart as we try as we might our desire to interpret reality to mean what we want it to mean at the end of the day will always be checked against what reality actually is uh it may be some time you know we're pretty good at at making things up and pretending but eventually reality is reality this isn't to say that peterson is not controversial he's saying things that challenge the most deeply held assumptions of the new establishment narrative i guess the other reason that people are on my case to some degree is because i have made a strong case which i think is fully documented by the scientific literature that there are intrinsic differences say between men and women and i think the evidence and that this is the thing that staggered me is that no serious scientists have debated that for like four decades it's that argument was done by the time i went to graduate school everyone knew that human beings were not a blank slate that biological forces not parameterized the way that we thought and and felt and acted and and valued everyone knew that the fact that this has become somehow debatable again is just especially because it's being done by legislative fiat they're forcing it part of peterson's argument based on years of psychological research is that much of the political conflicts are due to trying to integrate the different political temperaments of men and women we were talking about the relatively the relative evolutionary roles of men and women this is speculative obviously and and because our research did indicate it's tentative research so far that that the the the sgs sjw sort of equality above all else philosophy is more prevalent among women it's predicted by the personality factors that are more common among women so agreeableness and high negative emotion primarily agreeableness but in addition it's also predicted by being female and so i've been thinking about that a lot because well men are bailing out of the humanities like mad and pretty much out of the universities except for stem the women are moving in like mad and they're also moving into the political sphere like mad and this is new right we've never had this happen before and we do know no do not know what the significance of it is it's only 50 years old and so we were thinking about this and so i don't know what you think about this proposition but imagine that the historically speaking it's something like women were responsible for distribution and men were responsible for production something like that and maybe maybe that's only the case really in the tight confines of the immediate family but that doesn't matter because that's most of the evolutionary landscape for human beings anyways what the women does it did was make sure that everybody got enough okay and that seems to me to be one of the things that's driving at least in part the sjw demand for for equity and equality it's like let's make sure everybody has enough it's like well look fair enough you know i mean you can't you can't argue with that but there's there's an antipathy between that and the the reality of differential productivity you know because people really do differ in their productivity i think that the sjw phenomena is different and i think it is associated at least in part with the rise of women to political power and and we don't know what women are like when they have political power because they've never had it i mean there's been queens obviously and that sort of thing there's been female authority figures and females have wielded far more power historically than feminists generally like to admit but this is a different thing and we don't know what what a truly female political philosophy would be like but it might be especially if it's not being well examined and it isn't very sophisticated conceptually it could easily be well let's make sure things are distributed equally well yeah but sorry that's just not gonna do you fly [Music] one of peterson's main influences is the psychologist carl jung jung's psychology was built around the concept of the shadow all the things about ourselves we don't want to accept our anger negativity unconscious judgments and how we need to integrate all those disowned parts to grow i'm convinced that's what's happening on a vast cultural level since leaving channel 4 news i've retrained as a counsellor and started leading personal growth workshops for men and thought a lot about how these unconscious gender dynamics are playing out in the culture one of the central concepts is jung's idea of animus and anima possession how we each have both an inner masculine and feminine essence in a man when he's unconsciously possessed by his feminine side his anima he becomes withdrawn moody and reactive and when a woman is possessed by her male side the animus she becomes aggressive and dominating and how many women are pushed into that by the nature of the modern workplace the kathy newman i know is warm compassionate a successful and talented journalist none of this is criticism of her just the role she was playing in the interview i would say technically and this is might be interesting for people who are interested in jungian psychology if you want to understand what carl jung meant by animus possession which is a very difficult concept then that that interview was a textbook case of having a discussion with someone who is animus possessed life has been moving forward for three and a half billion years and it moves forward in these patterned manners like the dominance hierarchy for example so that's the let's call that the masculine archetype it's part of the masculine archetype in fact jung's proclamation was that the female representation of the male so that's the animus is the dominance hierarchy it's the patriarchy so that's the that's the unconscious archetype which i think is extremely interesting given what's happened say in the women's movement because that's what's projected on to men and and it can be projected in a very negative way it doesn't have to be but it can be and so an animus possessed woman treats a man as if he's the manifestation of the tyrannical patriarchy he's a group he's the group of men yeah the group of bad men actually you watched the jordan peterson kathy newman interview what did you what did you think oh i my whole body contracted and i i felt so sad for womanhood i felt disappointed and i could see how the shadow part of womanhood was acting out i could see how the collective rage was acting through kathy newman and this is what happens is that when that's unowned it's projected blindly onto whatever state wherever it sticks and it was very clear that she already had an agenda and she already had a projection that she was just looking to stick she was she was just looking to have that confirmed so i felt on behalf of women i felt sad and disappointed because we need to have intelligent conversations and i also want to say that this isn't even though the the specific example is the kathy newman jordan peterson interview it's not specific to to kathy newman i think the fact that that interview has resonated with so many people that's been so popular shows that actually something archetypal was going on in that in that interaction and i think as well why it's gone viral is a lot of people watching it recognize those dynamics they're like i've been in conversations like that i've been in this conversation where nothing i say works where nothing i say gets through um so there's something sort of fundamental about about the masculine feminine dynamic that's going on in there what do you think that is i think jordan peterson he's every man kathy newman she's every woman i can tap into that rage like this i i know it in myself and women that say they don't they're just denying it because it is in the collective so in that sense it just highlighted what what's there it's wonderful because here we really get to look at why is this so important why is it so important to listen to to a thinker like jordan peterson and take it seriously and say what can we do with it it's just so obvious that it's needed because if this is where we are if this is where society and culture is is if this is the ability to have an intelligent conversations conversation then we are in trouble i really feel that there is this collective subconscious rage that is just boiling in women and it's coming up in so many ways we see we see in the media and and what's going on is this unowned rage that comes up in in many different ways um and on one hand it needs to come out we need to clear it it needs to be expressed it needs to be acknowledged on the other hand it's not enough this is only like this is breaking the ice so that the next step of evolution can you know consciousness can start coming through and that's what i'm lacking in women it's really to take responsibility for what we do as women in our manipulation in our seduction in our control and and it's so easy for women to say but that's just because we're angry and mended this and patriarchy but it's um it's such a lack of responsibility and this women really need to know i mean that's the the kind of shadow work is the acceptance that we all have shadows that men certainly have a shadow there is a shadow around masculinity but there's also a shadow around femininity and while part of the cultural conversation now is toxic masculinity and everyone knows what you mean by toxic masculinity if you talk about toxic femininity everyone still knows what you mean but you can't have that conversation which is it's it's interesting what is allowed to be said and what is not allowed to be said at the moment and that that i think is is very dangerous that certain topics certain conversations are off are off limits and this is where we see where we see the victim persecutor dynamics activated because women become the become the victims and we make ourselves the victims and we persecute men but in that aggression in that rage and when we are the victims we are in perfect control we become the persecutors because we we say it's all about blame men did this and men need to take responsibility but in that we become the persecutors and it's also very difficult as well because one imagines that that combative attitude is something that has served her well in the past and it's something that she's maybe felt forced into because of the nature of the society that she's operating in so it's a kind of catch-22 situation for for many successful women because they feel that they're pushed to be more masculine and then when they're more masculine they get judged for being more masculine it's it's very sad and and and i can see that dynamics being played out absolutely but i think the only thing we can do is to take responsibility and say okay i'm doing that do i really want to compromise my femininity do i want to compromise my integrity do i want to compromise my gender and play that or is there another way that i can be powerful without being aggressive without playing a power game but resting in my natural power resting in my natural dignity resting in that deep rootedness that we both have in our agendas that when we are at peace with that and when we acknowledge it in ourselves it's there as a natural thing and and this is the thing i don't want to make this personal about kathy newman because it's it's in that potential is in every woman but it's because we are persecuting our own femininity what's being played out that we're doing it to ourselves because we don't trust that it's good enough to be a woman we don't trust that we can have conversations that come from a felt embodied perspective we don't trust that we're connected to truth because these these masculine ways have been have been very strong and women have been denying their own power in my work over many years of working with this i find that very few women grew up in households which really loved admired respected honored cherished the feminine and so there is intrinsically for so many women who've grown up in the i don't know the last hundred years let's say um a kind of devaluation of the feminine that gets taken on and of course and as well as abuse aggression all sorts of things so very many women out of an intelligent strategy to survive develop their masculine side as a defense against that devaluation for the feminine and over time they become very identified with that masculine side the male equivalent is animal possession in anima possession it's the loss of relaxed confidence in groundedness in the masculine and is overwhelmed by his own inner feminine side and it creates a a passive withdrawn moody bitchy complaining not showing up kind of guy which i think is really so much what feminists are angry about i don't see them as really angry about the masculine per se but at the way that males behave and you know i have quite a lot of compassion for that because for myself and most men that i know we weren't really shown how to be as men we didn't really get initiated into it and so and then this strong thing comes from feminism and we feel like it's it's maleness that's wrong and it's not it's not maleness that's wrong i don't even think feminism feminists hate the masculine it's like what the call is really for men is to develop their masculine strength presence courage be relaxed and confident be protective and be strong and under this kind of assault which has come from a lot of animus possessed women a lot of men have retreated and i think gone into feeling guilty about being men and have got become passive indecisive and in that way a kind of feminized man has emerged [Music] those who followed peterson's thought recognize his analysis goes all the way down to the bedrock to the archetypal structures of consciousness itself the thing that i really see happening and you can tell me what you think about this in in neumann's book consciousness which is masculine symbolically masculine for a variety of reasons is is viewed as rising up against the countervailing force of tragedy from an underlying feminine symbolically feminine unconsciousness right and it's something that can always be pulled back into that unconsciousness that would be the microcosm of that would be the freudian eatable mother familial dynamic where the mother is so over uh protective and all-encompassing that she interferes with the development of the competence not only of her sons but also of her daughters of her children in general and it seems to me that that's the dynamic that's being played out in our society right now is that there's this and it's it's related in some way that i don't understand to this to this insistence that all forms of masculine authority are nothing but tyrannical power so the symbolic representation is tyrannical father with no appreciation for the benevolent father and benevolent mother with no appreciation whatsoever for the tyrannical mother right and that's that and because i thought of ideologies as fragmentary mythologies that's where they get their archetypal and psychological power right and so in a balanced representation you have the terrible mother and the great mother as neumann laid out so nicely and you have the terrible father and the great father so that's the fact that culture mangles you half to death well it's also promoting you and developing you you have to see that as balanced and then you have the heroic and adversarial individual but in the post-modern world and this seems to be something that's increasingly seeping out into the culture at large you have nothing but the tyrannical father nothing but the destructive force of masculine consciousness and nothing but the benevolent benevolent great mother and it's a it's an appalling ideology and it seems to me that it's sucking the vitality which is exactly what you would expect symbolically it's sucking the vitality of our culture you see that with the increasing demolition of of young men um and not only young men in terms of their academic performance which like they're falling way behind in elementary school way behind in junior high and bailing out of the universities like mad and so and i well the public school education has become completely permeated by this kind of anti-male propaganda i mean to me public schools are just a form of imprisonment you know right now they're particularly destructive to young men who have a lot of physical energy okay uh now you know i identify as transgender okay myself right but i do not i do not require the entire world to alter itself okay to fit my particular self-image i do believe in the power of hormones i believe that men exist and women exist and they are biologically different i think that i think there is no cure for um the culture's ills right now except if men start standing up okay and demanding that they be respected as men here's the problem you know this is something my wife has pointed out too she said well men are going to have to stand up for themselves but here's the problem i know how to stand up to a man who's who's uh unfairly trespassing against me and the reason i know that is because the parameters for my resistance are quite well defined which is we talk we argue we push and then it becomes physical right like if we move beyond the boundaries of civil discourse we know what the next step is okay that's forbidden in in discourse with women so i don't know like it seems to me that it isn't men that have to stand up and say enough of this even though that is what they should do it seems to me that it's same women who have to stand up against their crazy sisters and say look enough of that enough man-hating enough pathology enough bringing disgrace on us as a as a gender but the problem there and then i'll stop my little tirade is that most of the women i know who are sane are busy doing sane things right they're off they have their career they have their family they're quite occupied and they don't seem to have the time or maybe even the interest to go after their their crazy harpy sisters and so i don't see any regulating force for that that terrible femininity and it seems to me to be invading the culture and undermining the the masculine power of the culture in a way that's i think fatal i really do believe that i i too i too believe that these are there's a symptomatic of the decline of western culture and we and it will just go down flat i don't think people realize that you know masculinity still exists okay in the world as a code among jihadists okay and when you have passionate masculinity okay circling the borders like the huns and the vandals during the roman empire that's what i see i see this culture rotting from within okay and disemboweling itself literally we had this bit of combat let's say it produced a scandal now we actually talk about it yeah no tricks just a conversation and then everybody wins right because i can admit whatever mistakes i made she can admit whatever mistakes she made we can drop the persona so you're saying the polarization that we're seeing right now that we are speaking out it's not in the future we will act out that polarization well if we don't if we keep accelerating it especially if we keep accelerating with lies yeah you know and and this this whole um channel four rats nest is like 90 percent lies maybe more and you know a lot of it's ideologically motivated lies but it doesn't matter it still lies like kathy as i said there was virtually nothing she said in that interview that was actually coming from her like like a deep part of her the soul it was all persona it was all persona and and and all use of words in a in a expedient manner as tools to obtain i think probably probably status dominant status and reputation i mean what advice would you give to people to to navigate this new world the first is uh free your mind be aware of the fact that the habits of the blue church and and how it works um don't work anymore recognize that your way of making sense in the world that used to work don't work and you really really need to set yourself free to begin learning a new child's mind beginner's mind second um this by nature must in fact be exploratory so swim do not make sense prematurely in spite of the fact that the world feels dangerous in spite of the fact that you may want to protect yourself in this dangerous world doing so too quickly does not allow the natural exploratory approach to do what it needs to do really just listen and learn go all the way back down to human base turn inward learn how fear shows up in you learn how not to allow fear to drive the choices that you make learn how to listen to the whole way that all of you perceives what's going on become more integrated with your own body go out into nature spend a lot of time not connected to the chaos that's going on and a lot of time reconnecting yourself with your fundamental capacity to perceive reality in all the different modalities that human beings have the capacity to do then we learn how to use other human beings as allies in figuring out how to make sense of the world i mean that really relearn like we have been abused and constrained by institutional frameworks that remove us from our own native capabilities so relearn that understand how to be a friend and an ally how to have a conversation with somebody where you're really listening closely to get a sense of what their perspective brings to you where you're not obligated to agree with them you're not obligated to move out of what you feel is right to form some new uh consensus reality but where you're actually authentically recognizing that their perspective has some capacity to bring richness to your perspective this by the way is almost exclusively possible in person so what we're doing right now is an okay version of it but we need to be very mindful the fact that linear broadcast is bad and even interactive bandwidth like this is not good enough you know you've got to learn from raw physical and get yourself into places where your consensus reality and your habits are willfully destroyed into human to human conversations and and get as far away from ideology as you can your job is not to know what the fuck is going on your job is to be absolutely certain that you have no idea what the fuck is going on and learn how to feel from raw chaos from raw uncertainty up then and only then are you finally able to begin the journey of beginning to form a collective intelligence in this new environment that's my advice this is why we've created rebel wisdom to host these conversations to try and unpack what's going on and through our workshops and events start to build this collective intelligence for the future to see longer versions of the interviews featured in this film and our full-length documentary about jordan peterson check the rebel wisdom website help us create more films about these subjects by sponsoring us on patreon and come to our events to have these conversations in person you

Channel: Rebel Wisdom

Views: 826,896

Rating: 4.8453355 out of 5

Keywords: jordan peterson, dave rubin, ben shapiro, bret weinstein, rebel wisdom

Id: trhTbEs2GGE

Length: 54min 15sec (3255 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 15 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I only skimmed the doco, man that interview between Jordan and the woman was hilarious. Jordan would make a point and then she would say "so what your saying is insert crazy thing he didnt say". Haha that was bizarre as hell.

[u/warnakey]

This is a pro-Jordan Peterson documentary. The purpose of the documentary is to highlight that we live in a society where people are desperate to ruin other people's lives through humiliation and public ridicule for saying or doing the slightest thing wrong. And what is "wrong"? Anything that doesn't conform to the Left's view of Political Correctness.

In other words, hyperpartisanship and political correctness are precisely the reason that Jordan Peterson is popular. The more extreme the left and right becomes, the more people look for answers from so-called Philosophers and Intellectuals.

The answer is for everyone to calm down immediately.

[u/ptn_]

jordan peterson is a charlatan, snake oil salesman, and surrogate father for sad people