Canceled Math Teacher Speaks Out | EP 248

okay so now you can imagine what's happened is he was on pleasure island and everything went to hell fundamentally and so he jumped into the water to escape from that and that's equivalent to plunging into chaos and so chaos was an escape from pathological tyranny and now he's tried to go home so this is the psyche in its search for maturation runs into an obstacle which is the tyrannical element of the great father that it cannot cope with and it trots home runs home it's a defeat typical part of a hero story is the initial defeat of the hero when he encounters usually either the terrible great father or the terrible great mother so and so this is a retrogressive jung would call this retrogressive restoration of the persona so it's sort of like maybe you're a well-adapted adolescent and you live at home and you're a happy adolescent and everything's good at home and then you go out to try to be an adult and you fail and then when you come back home you try to act like a happy adolescent again but you're not what you are in fact is an unhappy adult and if you move back to the happy adolescent mode of being then it's it's false and pathological you can't go home again another typical motif in literature now the cricket i can't tell you everything about this story i can tell you a couple of strange things about it one is that the cricket is jiminy cricket right and the initials of jiminy cricket are jc and jiminy cricket was a common southern american um mild form of cursing it's the equivalent of jesus christ and so you might think and of course the cricket is pinocchio's conscience and well so then you might ask yourself why in the world would a pejorative mildly pejorative term for jesus christ be applied to a cricket who's guiding a puppet into the water to rescue his father from a whale why would any of that happen and the answer to that is you know why but you can't say why you can't say why you know or what it is that you know but the mere fact that it makes sense and it does is an indication from a union perspective that you're operating at an archetypal level you understand this and so i could say here's an example of why the cricket is a bug well things bug you right we say that things bug me well you should do something about the things that bug you because that's your conscience calling to you it's it's destiny in some sense manifesting itself as an unconscious impulse that really bugs me means if you can you should do something about it because you think about it man there's a lot of things out there that might bug you but lots of them don't but some of them do well why do those bug you and not the other things well that's a complicated question but one potential answer to it is that there's part of your psyche that's oriented towards further development jung would call that the self and that's like the totality of everything that you could be and it's it's it's it's a it's a strange sort of entity in some sense because it's partly potential and it's potential that expands across time but the way that your potential totality calls to you in the present is by placing things in front of you that are your problem and they announce themselves as your problem and they do that by bothering you so then if you pick up the task of fixing the things that bothers you then you find the pathway to further expansion of your personality so and that's what's happening with pinocchio now one of the things that's really interesting about the pinocchio movie that makes it incredibly sophisticated is that despite the fact that the cricket is a avatar of christ so to speak the cricket has things to learn just like pinocchio and so that's very cool because it's so cool it's so sophisticated because it means that you do have a conscience that guides you but until you establish a dialogue with it both you and the conscience are immature you have to establish a conscious dialogue with it and then interact together in a manner that propels your development across time and that'll stop you from being a marionette of forces that would make you a braying donkey who does nothing but slave away in salt mines so okay so pinocchio goes home that doesn't work and that's where we're gonna start here i mean obviously this is starting to bother you as this year you buy into it to begin with and and you're enthusiastic about it to begin with and you attribute that to well the mechanics of the initial uh education let's say um it's it's a it's a group phenomena it capitalizes on empathy it and it sounds benevolent certainly um in fact it's it's the very essence of benevolence in some sense so it's it's it's a it's going to be seductive regardless of whether or not it's correct but you you become uncomfortable with it well the first thing you're uncomfortable with is that you were implicitly asked to produce a falsehood in relationship to your own identity which was yeah when you were asked the question about what you liked about being white and you said that what you said wasn't right exactly or wasn't correct wasn't true it was something that you whipped up on the spot because of the nature of the demand of the situation and you remember that so obviously that's significant i think i was just meeting what i thought was an absurdity with an absurdity you know like i i felt the question was a little bit absurd it's sort of like a hot the premise right the premises what do you call it like how long have you been beating your wife kind of question you know so the premise of whiteness is you're supposed you have to accept the premise in order to answer the question i i really have never been comfortable with the premise period because i don't think that it you know right it takes a lot of presence it takes a lot of presence of mind when you're asked a question to question the question especially when you're the student and it's the teacher that's so to speak it's the authority figure that's posing the question because you immediately have to rebel and you have to do it in an extremely sophisticated way yeah and you know this could get back to the school and i might not have passed the class and you know i'm i'm white so that would have been problematic and why are you why and that would might have had job repercussions or you know promotions or whatever you know you just you realize that to question this question mandatory yeah and to question the question in these circumstances is you know the the risk of that is so much greater than the the triumph of of dismantling the question that you're just not you're never gonna and you may see you may even fail at dismantling the way like your little your little rebellion may lead nowhere and you may be wrong you know which is the hesitation that anyone would have with an objection just that you might be wrong and so of course you're just going to fall on that side of the equation i mean that's what i did some people don't but that would you know no most people do yeah and no wonder right it's hard not like you you outlined a bunch of reasons why it's difficult to you know come up with exactly the right response at that second it's not like it's a question you're prepared for right right and you know i think i think the students do it all the time you know because there's tremendous social cost to challenging any of the assumptions of our anti-racist programming or the the manner in which it's delivered what are the costs for the students um social you know social appropriation um uh you could have you know teachers write recommendations for them if they get a reputation that there's a fear that it could affect their applications um students have have come to me with you know concerns and and examples of papers that they wrote say you know on taking a position that went against the orthodoxy and they've you know suffered a great hit from it and i've i've asked him like are you sure it just wasn't a good paper you know are you sure and then like no i actually cited this this and this and i just took it you know and so i think um i think they're real i think that they're real and there's actually been you know stories that i've that they've brought to me that are you know someone defends capitalism or something and then they have a big talking to after class or something like that which is just well yes i mean how could you possibly defend capitalism while you're going to a 55 000 a year private school right right um i mean what's the probability that your parents are capitalists a hundred percent very high very young so basically you're you're being you're being set to task because you have the goal to defend the very attribute of your parents that enabled you to go to the school in the first place and that of course enabled the school right and it's so it's such an ironic thing that both the administration and most faculty have such contempt for the very thing that makes them have a job you should be talking about ideas based on what make ideas sound or unsound not not the person who's saying them so oh i was seeing situations where um you know white students would make a claim and then that claim was discounted by someone else because of their privilege right they're making of course the white supremacists assumption that there are such things as ideas and that they can be rank in terms of quality and that the purpose of discursive speech is precisely to do such things and etc etc yeah and so the whole solipsistic nature of it i was like this is you can't even have a conversation this is not this is not a way to have a functioning you're not you're not preparing people to function in a in a truly diverging world of ideas it's not well it's it's worse in some sense is that the claim fundamental claim is that there's no such thing as a conversation there's just different discourses of power there's no conversation conversation assumes ideas and the free flow of ideas and the an irrational individual actor and the capacity for logos and and the individual as the central unit and and so on and so forth people who hold the critical race position let's say don't uh it's not that they avoid confrontational conversations they don't believe that there's such a thing as a conversation it's not part of the system so it's a fundamental dispute yeah no that's true i mean and i i and then the little things like i remember talking to a colleague about a nuke about a new hire and then and and she said um i said well well what's he like this new guy and she said well he's like you he's like me well what do you mean by that and she was like oh he's white i was like okay all right you know this is not a person that's a total stranger either and i kind of walked away and like really so okay and you know i also i also hear the objection to my to my objection which is you know see how it feels white man see how it feels to be treated as your race that is it's it's a you know she might have been trying to teach me a lesson in some sense like now you know how it feels but that's not you know okay that's that's a point that you're making but that's not that's not a healthy thing and that's not that's not good because it doesn't actually reduce the sum total of misery in the world yeah i mean yeah um all right so you're starting to get feel disquiet and you actually make this known yes and i i make it known in 2019 i make it known in in 2020 i talk to the assistant head i talk to the head of school you're married i i'm recently married i was i've been married over a year just over a year do you do you have any children no children no children but you are married and okay so i'm just wondering what you have resting on your jaw exactly yeah yeah and i i didn't you know i'm i have to say that you know not having kids is is is a huge part of why i feel like this is happening that i've been able to to stick my neck out um and you know i'm not not um i don't judge anyone for for for balancing their duty to the truth and their duty to their family in whatever way that works for them because both of them are important or to put things at risk you know that's that's a personal choice and that's i can can't speak to any of that but i think it definitely not having mouths to feed and and you know having having some savings from my previous job and and things um being smart with my money and not spending it um unwisely as i have as i had done a decade and a half ago but um i think that that helped me to do what i'm doing all right so how are you being treated by the administrative officials to whom you're registering your objection are you doing that in writing are you doing that in person you know mostly in person and you know i'm not writing anything official i'm i'm in the grumbling in my beard phase i guess i'm in the griping phase uh where i would go and i would say you know this is wrong like why can't we teach you know a broad range of viewpoints why do we always have to teach this ritualistic thing that's just a litany of you know basically far left ideas and you know some of some some of the administration were very sympathetic like even overly so like i remember talking to the assistant had he pulled down a copy of jonathan hate off the off the bookshelf and was like i'd love to teach this in my class when i i really want to make this happen i want to teach you know so you know more more than i was sort of or maybe just modeling it or humoring me or something but he had the book he had the book that's right and he knew the book and he knew he knew where it was on his show i know so like but you know then in public you know or in public in the in front of the community you're not saying nothing about it right so i think there's a tremendous amount of preference falsification still going on there you know well you outlined why i mean yeah you lost your job yeah so you know these are high stakes games and right you make a mistake and and a mistake you you veer outside the the realm of acceptable behavior let's say and what happens well you get disproportionately punished for it and there's a moral element to it too which is well there's no bloody way someone like you should be teaching so not only did we fire you but we're right to do so yeah so and you know that's very hard thing to withstand which is something i also want to talk to you about i mean you know confident though you may be or anyone maybe when your institution sheds you and surrounds that with accusations about the nature of your character if you're not a complete psychopath it tends to strike you to your heart because there's always the possibility that you're wrong right right but i i really i really knew i wasn't because you know coming out there was this meeting and i referred to it in in the article or my essay the self-care through an anti-bias lens meeting which is what kicked off the whole past two months for me it was a it was a meeting where students were ostensibly going to learn how to take care of themselves during the pandemic how to manage their emotions how to take deep breaths and cope with things and in that meeting you know after some some mind relaxing exercises like meditation and and stuff they put up the white supremacy you know aspects of white supremacy culture slide and that's different than the pyramid or this is different than the pyramid and this is you know this is elements of white supremacy right right it's actually um you know they there's different forms of it but essentially you know it's it's fairly common in this in this thing as you know and um yes so here's some professional and transactional relationships versus relationships based on trust care and shared commitments protecting power versus sharing power culture of overworking versus culture of self-care and community care competition and struggle for limited resources versus collaboration and working to share resources that's all white dominant culture so yes yes and so some of the things that were on this particular slide were objectivity individualism um either or thinking right right and uh i know that one there was um you know the the thing that wrangled me the most was right to comfort because you know how how are you giving a self-care workshop where the 200 kids that are in there in this racially segregated workshop are challenged that they might not you know that having imagining that you have a right to comfort is associated with a you know genocidal evil kenneth jones and timo oaken dismantling racism workbook 2001. god only knows what that is but it's everywhere the characteristics of white supremacy culture perfectionism which is an element of conscientiousness which is a fundamental trait sense of urgency defensiveness quantity over quality worship of the written word paternalism either or thinking notice this is all written in words by the way power hoarding fear of open conflict individualism which seems to be run somewhat counter to the fear of open conflict progress is bigger and more objectivity right to comfort yeah it's uh it's quite the grab bag of conceptually unrelated items it's incoherent at every possible level of analysis as well as being it's it's impossible to parody yeah yeah and i i saw it and i you know i had been thinking for a couple months prior to this because there had been some meetings that really upset me and i was thinking well and my head of school had actually said that if i was in an appropriate forum i should feel free to ask questions by this point in the meeting i think maybe 30 minutes in before this popped up other faculty had been saying things in the chat area of the zoo meeting so you know is that anonymous is that anonymous in the zoo no it's it's they were so they were under their own names under their own names yeah um and so i thought well why you know when the when the facilitator mentioned that if you looked at this slide i think she said i think she said you know you might have some white feelings um and i said i just kind of blurted out i didn't i didn't blurt it out angrily i didn't i don't think i was too upset of course you know i i don't know how it was perceived of course but i said well what do you mean but what is a white feeling what is the white feeling and i you know what came back was i think she said something that defensiveness was a white feeling i said well these feelings can belong to people of any race and you know i think that it's i i don't know whether it's i don't understand why it's being attributed to a particular the white people um and you know i had that kind of opened the gates a little bit and kind of broke the ice i think because in the chat other kids started to ask questions there was a debate about whether i should be allowed to ask the question um there was which question do you mean the question about the white feeling question i see there were also some there was a lot of capitalism bashing in the chat and i said you know i believe capitalism is anti-racist since it's done more to to lift people of all races out of poverty um than any any alternative um and you know i wasn't monopolizing the chat i was dropping in little things and there was a lot of activity in the chat and then um the the the facilitator actually went with me and she she explained stuff you know her perspective on it and i thanked her and you know she moved on some more and um i think i i asked another question but i really as as she said later in a meeting about the meeting in front of the whole faculty she felt that i you know i was asking out of curiosity didn't i wasn't you know on a rant or saying it you know to to be antagonistic i think some of the some of my faculty members felt that i was but the facilitator herself didn't feel that way so and she was the one i was talking to so i think that definitely counts that's quite remarkable i would say because it's very difficult in a group like that when you know the implicit ethos to be able to say something that's questioning without having anger build up as a motivation right because you need something to break through your resistance yeah so yeah to be able to say it without upsetting the the uh yeah i mean i was passionate but i wasn't i don't think i was like enraged or anything like that um it's you know i was trying to modulate what i was really upset i was that was the either or thing because i was like well if either or thinking is a is a characteristic of white supremacy well then ibram kennedy's got to be the whitest person in public life because his entire philosophy is so manichaean i mean anyway so but i didn't say that of course because that would have been inflammatory but um what i really wanted to do i've been thinking about an opportunity because i wanted to model for the students that you could ask questions that someone who who was a teacher or someone who was an authority figure could ask a question and it was okay and and did and how did the students react to it was it was phenomenal i mean i was really gratified and that they confirmed that my it confirmed that i was doing the right thing because when things came out in the chat they started to ask a broader range of questions i received the transcript later and you know it was like night and day kids were asking questions like well i don't feel like i'm ignorant just because i'm white or you know i don't like to be reduced to my race and then faculty joined in so several faculty members also started to ask questions um you know and i i don't think the point was that they people they if people even necessarily wanted their questions answered in the forum they just wanted to ask them i you don't know what your question is until you ask exactly like this this that's why i think intent is so it's kind of a silly thing because you never really it's only an ex post facto explanation if you're called on it i think like a true question there may be no intent like it just bubbles out of you if you're if you're truly in a in a conversation i'm not thinking about okay i'm not it's not like i'm plucking this little thing out of the inside of my head and like well i intend this to be you know that's not communication that's not if it's a genuine conversation no you don't have time for that in a genuine conversation no yeah of course not and so you know but i was really gratified i was on a natural high from the experience why well because i felt that i had you know i had done something good like it was just self-evidently good to me like it just when i reflected on it this is a positive thing now one of the my colleagues got very upset with me with my influence on this and um because at one point i did say you know why you know i don't identify as white must i internalize society's delusions about me um which is you know like it's kind of like the neutron bomb to this entire belief system but i i was on i was on a you know i felt like it was something i wanted to put out there so the kids could see it and you know understand you know that maybe this is a point of view you know i'm not saying i'm right i'm i'm asking a question um and you know the the feeling was that this was you know anti-racism some defense yeah like i could do they're not morally obligated to accept these characterizations right which is kind of the whole point of anti-racism is that you're not obligated to accept arbitrary racial categories that are unrelated to the task at hand yeah it should be um but uh you know then a colleague got upset with me and said kind of got on his high horse and and said uh you know i can't believe that i may be mis you know paraphrasing here and if i am sorry but he said i believe you know i can't believe that a member of our you know our one of my colleagues doesn't understand that we are white that we are white since birth i am white since birth that this has carries with it implicit biases that are unavoidable and we must affirm that you know and and that's who that's who we are and that's who i am and i just it kind of interrupted him because i felt like he was kind of making me look i know he's being kind of kind of a jerk so i interrupted him and said i'm sorry you're stereotyping yourself i think it's sad uh and you know that kind of was a very awkward moment because it was in front of students and he said you know he expressed his dismay um and i remained silent and then after the meeting i said i apologized to him i said you know that was unprofessional was it well you know i i unders i felt it i felt that there might have been a better way that i could do it maybe wait till he finished and then asked you know to respond i i i'm i'm also suspicious of my own you know because i i have been somewhat oppositional i'm not exactly like a mr gohan and get along guy with this stuff that i don't always have the best reality check on my own behavior and so i'm you know i i was just saying well okay if i if i did cause offense then you know i i feel like it's okay to apologize and there probably was a better way for me to do this and so i did apologize and you know and thought about it he know nothing against that nothing wrong with that and then he accepted and you know i figured that was that was it and there was a lot of processing after the meeting i think that went on for hours afterwards my phone died it was on my phone and so when i went home um i logged back into the meeting and people were still there talking so i talked to them but i underestimated the effect of this because apparently um some of my some of my comments you know were leaked or made or transmitted to other people that weren't in the meetings people that were in the the bipark meeting you know particularly my mice is a black and indigenous people of color so they were having their separate meeting of faculty and students where they received different content and why was it separate curiosity the rationale as i could as i can understand it is so that the groups that have been marginalized won't be exposed to you know they'll have their own thing so that they're not exposed to the i think the incense and possible insensitivity of the [Music] oppressors that's the best i can understand the rationale um but it wound up happening anyway because i suppose it would be rude of me to point out that that's somewhat paternalistic you know just as a yeah you know observation that's a good one um yeah i mean yeah totally well i guess that is a characteristic of white supremacy culture though paternalism yeah so and i guess it's as long as it's in a good cause then i guess it's forgivable yeah okay so that was how long ago that meeting that was february 24th oh yes okay so things are starting to yeah this year and that was referred to after the fact as the events of wednesday like they couldn't even really it was sort of like 9 11 they couldn't actually they had to come up with a euphemism for it i guess so the events of wednesday and so they had meetings about the events well the office of community engagement coupled with the dean of student life and there there are dean level positions that exerted a lot of effort and energy because i did not make their lives easy um to to address the things that were said and raised in the meeting not just by me but by you know lots of different people and students students you know spoke up as well and faculty and so um what i found it so interesting because the day after the meeting there was an email that was released that said healing resources you know healing resources that will help you come to terms with what happened and the first healing resource on the list was a cnn interview with a poet named damon young um and um damon young uh you know in this interview said things like you know we we need to get rid of all of capitalism we will have to do a carpet bombing not a carpet cleansing of society and it was incredibly radical statements that were i would imagine would be frightening to to many people and that was listed as a healing resource as well as well as long as the carpet bombing only targets the malevolent people well yeah i guess and then things there was a robin d'angelo article that said you know what white people need to be made or kept uncomfortable how can we become more uncomfortable also you know really kind of i would just say racist characterizations of white people in these links things like you know white people have never had to be guests in this country and uh like the irish for example they weren't really white to begin with though so yeah yeah um and so i found this very ironic and then i had a series i had two meetings i had a meeting with my head of high school and the assistant head and i had a meeting with the head of the whole school and then you know i the head of the meeting with the head of high school they called you in at that point yeah i mean what's happening around you is this is growing this is this well yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of agitation there's meetings about meetings there's student diversity council meetings um there are um there's just a lot of agitation in the community i would say uh and and meetings about meetings so some of the things that would happen would be in the week in the end as the week continued there was a faculty meeting about it um i had some advisory circles circle practice was taken away because they felt that it would be the students would be upset if i was a part of it so the investigation is what um well it was it's a it's a practice that we've started this year where activities um where you you put up a slide and you talk about an issue and then everyone has to go around and speak one by one about a question and then you kind of do it around twice and then you know this is to sort of manage discussion um and i've done so you're not you're persona non grata at this now because yeah your toxic influence on the students right or right and so you know i got an email saying you know under current circumstances following yesterday's meeting and you're ruled and what transpired you you know i've asked you to recuse yourself um then you know there were subsequent meetings there was a faculty meeting i think at that faculty meeting a colleague said well this is this could be terrible this could undo everything we've ever taught them which i thought to myself please please i hope so um but uh the uh and there was how are you how are you reacting to all this well i'm on a natural high i mean i i know that i feel like this is something that i finally done to to open up something like some daylight and i all of this churn is going on around me but i'm going about my day i'm teaching my classes i'm you know i i did feel the need to address my classes so i said at the beginning you know i am an anti-racist um you know i want you to feel safe and then i would just sort of teach the class and then i was told not to address it with the class with anyone in the classes with regard to teachers and students in private and public institutions high schools junior highs elementary schools in your state and across your country what what do you see this if anything what does this indicate well i have hopes you know i i feel that if if students can if i if if the type of you know willingness to ask a question it in response to some of these you know what i consider to be indoctrination frankly at other schools and you think that's happening in other schools yeah i mean i it's no question because of the the calls that i've received in the conversations i've had with people all over pennsylvania virginia maryland new jersey you know their their parents are very concerned with their children they've seen it because of the pandemic through their through the zoom zoom classes they've witnessed what's being taught to their kids and they're very very concerned and they have specific receipts to back it up and you know they're sending me curriculum um so you know i i this is not simply a a rarefied independent school problem this is happening at you know school boards and districts all over the country um a lot of it spurred by the you know the george floyd it's killing and the reaction to it um i believe it was taken as an opportunity to you know redress um that with uh misguided yeah an opportunity for what it's like i'm trying to figure out i keep trying to figure out because i've been concerned about this for a long time and uh i still can't get to the bottom of it it's like i don't understand exactly i know there's a resentment element to it but i can't understand exactly what's driving this and and why it's despite the fact that it's clearly the view of a very small minority of people perhaps five percent that's what the survey seemed to indicate i cannot understand why it's making the headway that it's making at the rate that it's making and what it's really aiming at what do you think about that like what's your sense because obviously it's bothering you yeah i think i have a sense why and maybe it's a theory it's not just my theory but it's i've seen it in other places or hinted at other places i think when you sort of you know over the past few decades you have a gradual sort of leaching from the soil of society of sort of a moral sense a moral tradition moral grounding in you know long long religious traditions essentially when they depart from the public sphere it leaves a kind of vacuum and you know wokeness is is a way to sort of sort of paint by numbers moral righteousness and it gives people the sense that they're good people i think people have an almost you know i don't know whether it's evolutionarily based but they have a need to have a moral character and sense of themselves and if and if something comes along which is going to offer that and give you that thing well then there's a there's a tremendous hunger for it so people will adopt it quickly and so you can have you know a very small percentage of the population that's pushing it can have a real powerful outsized influence do you do you have a traditional religious belief of any sort and are you a practicing religious person i am i am it's a really good question i am i was raised catholic and i you know was have lapsed you know i i have a joke that i i use sometimes you know i'm so lapsed i'm prolapsed but uh basically uh i i you know was a functioning agnostic then atheist uh and um but i i don't feel like i really need a lot of god but i do need to have something which is like a conscience like i guess i believe in a conscience i believe in some little mirror of the divine which sort of is is in me it's not like above me or around me but it is within me and so it's sort of like a reflective thing that i can and it's sort of reactivated i guess and as part of this whole experience so i can i can take in the world and the world of reality but i can reflect it against something which is not of this world i don't know how to describe it and then that's pretty good what comes back i'm i'm satisfied with that answer you know like what comes back is something that i should attend to it's something that is the it is it is something important and that is the you know and and now that i feel like i have that or an awareness of that you know it's just like you know ah you know okay like i've got thank god it's been there exactly thank god i want to say thank god but i don't i don't i don't know i don't know that there's a god with a capital g i just know that there's something which is which is not of this world but is in this world my point my principal argument in the book is that uh absolute freedom of speech is always going to be better and in fact by promoting free speech you're doing something to help those very people that you are concerned about so recently the scottish parliament passed a hate crime law that has its supporters and also its detractors and i be interested in your feeling about that now you said i believe in this book if if i remember the statistics correctly that there have been 120 000 incidents of police investigated speech hate crime in britain in how long since yeah that's been over the last five years or so it's it's it's worse than that the statistic i quote is between 2014 and 2019 there are 120 000 recorded incidents of non-crime they call them non-crime hate incidents and this is something which is now routine in the uk i mean obviously i'm going to be talking about the uk and the u.s and canada is a very is a very different kettle of fish i'm sure um and i'm sure a lot of the people who are watching won't be familiar with with the problems we have in the uk of course we don't have constitutional protection for free speech we don't have a first amendment uh we don't have anything like that so we are particularly vulnerable and at the moment unfortunately in the uk uh the police who are uh trained by the college of policing who do issue very specific guidelines about this and anyone can check this because if you go to the government's website on hate crime and hate speech they make very clear what they're talking about what they say is that there are five protected characteristics and these fall into race gender sexuality gender identity and disability um i think i might misquote that but there's one missing but anyway there are five protected characteristics and if a victim and they do use the word victim rather than complainant if a victim perceives that any speech or crime was motivated by hatred towards any of those five protected characteristics then it qualifies as a hate crime if it's criminal if it's not criminal if it's just speech or something like that it qualifies as a non-crime hate incident police will investigate that they will record that and although non-crime incidents don't lead to prosecution they do go on a criminal reference check that many people take we call it a disclosure barring service here so it can affect your employment prospects uh and is that without a trial that was recorded without a trial of course so you get a quasi-criminal record you get something flagged up when you particularly if you're applying for a teaching job say something like that where you're working with children it's very important and you get this thing flagged up so it does have serious ramifications but even beyond that we have hate speech laws which are encoded into the public order act which is one example but the other the main example is the electronic communications act 2003. in this country and i do quote the statistic in the book as well we have roughly uh 3 000 people arrested a year um for um offensive things that they have said online that's that's so in other words nine people a day roughly the police in the uk are arresting and that people in the uk will be familiar with this because if you see the twitter accounts of various police forces various police departments across the country they often put things out like you know make sure you don't say anything offensive or thoughtless online or we will be knocking on your door they say these very kind of frightening things there was a uh a recent police um display outside a supermarket um in the uk it went viral this image it was them next to a big digital billboard and the slogan on the billboard was being offensive is an offense and this was flanked by police officers who were socially distanced but they were there in their masks which made it seem slightly more sinister um they got in a lot of trouble for that because people were saying well being offensive surely isn't a crime um but actually the problem with that is that the police clearly thought it was a crime and they you know they were acting on that basis they'd obviously hadn't just concocted this billboard out of nothing they'd really considered what it should say and more to the point actually they were right in this country you can uh go to prison for jokes for offensive remarks um and people have gone to prison have been arrested uh routinely for for causing offense and of course the notion of offence is incredibly subjective in fact in fact the the legal stipulation in the communications act is that you will have broken the law if the judge and jury deem that you have communicated material that is quote unquote grossly offensive well i don't know how you define that i i i wouldn't also who defines it is the real question as far as i'm concerned i mean i've looked into this legislation to some degree and one of the things that struck me about it was that it seems to be purposefully left up to the hypothetical victim to define offense which has become a subjective reality if if and and you can understand why that might be to some degree because how would you define hate and how would you define offense without especially the latter without making recourse to someone's subjective experience but then of course well we'll delve into that in a moment i should start with the hard question i suppose which is well clearly people can say hateful things and those things can be damaging psychologically and physiologically i suppose if people are stressed enough and the borderline is very difficult to identify um why is it that people shouldn't just assume that you're a mean loudmouth and that they shouldn't pay any attention to you at all because you're concerned about this i mean which is that's the general criticism of critics of of hate speech let's say and so why in the world aren't we aren't the people who are putting this forward just trying to make the world a nicer place what's the big problem here well i think a lot of people do assume that i'm a mean loudmouth i think they assume that about most people who who defend freedom of speech um but and and i'm sure the latter part of your question is is absolutely right insofar as i imagine a lot of the people who are skeptical about free speech are in fact trying to make the world a better place i don't think that's mutually exclusive i mean the the the problem here is that the legislation as it currently stands here means that for instance if you say something critical about me and i perceive that it was motivated by hatred towards me on the basis of my sexuality for instance i could phone the police and that would be recorded uh and would appear on hate crime statistics in this in this country because it's all about perception that word is used about five or six times within the one passage in the in the hate crime legislation the word perception of the victim and again i say victim not complainant which suggests a complete disregard for due process but i suppose we can leave that aside but the most common the most common and the most frightening misconception i have found when it comes to people defending free speech is that they are doing so because they want to have the right to say appalling things about people uh with no comeback whatsoever and they want to go back to some imaginary good old days you know where you could just be casually homophobic and racist and sexist and all the rest of it and no one would call you out for that now i don't know anyone who falls into that category and and most people who are um you know advocating for free speech are doing so precisely because they are aware that in countries where free speech protections are meager minorities tend to suffer the most and in fact there is a a a uh it seems to be a corollary to me that those who are genuinely for free speech are also for equal rights and protecting the vulnerable in society and this perception which i really find unpleasant this perception that if you are standing up for this most foundational of principles of for freedom of speech if you're standing up for that you can only be doing so if you have a nefarious motive i mean what a horribly pessimistic view of of humanity and and it seems to be well it seems to be a direct derivation of the hypothesis for example that all western social organizations particularly western are based on power and are best conceived of as tyrannical and so if that's your view why would you not assume that most use of speech is essentially an exercise of power in the service of tyranny but then why would you assume uh that the government in control of any particular uh country isn't part of that tyranny that you're describing it it seems odd to me to be um mindful of the potential for tyranny but then to outsource all your individual liberties to the state it seems contradictory to me um well i guess the way that that is uh um elided over is by allowing the hypothetical individual victim to define the offense this is the problem though this is i mean the problem i've run into and this is why partly why i appreciated your book is that increasingly people are called upon to defend fundamental assumptions that were so taken for granted that virtually no one has an argument that's fully articulated at hand when no one questions free speech no one has to defend it thoroughly as soon as it's questioned well it becomes an extraordinarily complicated problem the same with gender identity when it's when no one's paying attention to it it's obvious but as soon as you have to think it through it becomes a rat's nest to say the least when i was in the uk a few years ago i saw a number of things that i felt were disturbing um seem to have accepted the omnipresence of cctv cameras to a degree that i found horrifying frankly i don't like cctv cameras i don't like the the message they portray which is that everyone is criminal enough so they should be surveyed all the time and someone needs to be watching i noticed too in london in particular that many buildings had instituted airport level security so that you had to pass through a metal detector and have your bags checked etc while you were moving in and out of buildings and it it struck me as quite horrifying given that as far as i'm concerned great britain and its legal and parliamentary traditions are the epicenter or at the epicenter of western freedoms i mean you could make a case for france i suppose but not a strong one as far as i'm concerned yet this your citizens seem to have accepted this with virtually no problem and now on the heels of that we have this multiplication of of hate crime that's as much a surprise to me as it as it is to you i mean you won't have seen all of the cctv cameras believe apparently they're absolutely everywhere you can't walk anywhere uh in the uk without being potentially monitored um you know i'm not saying someone's watching you all the time but but things are being recorded and digitized um yeah and it's it's interesting to me because i remember back in the uh in the early 2000s when the government was trying to push through its id card scheme and broadly speaking the left were unanimously against it and they didn't like this idea of living in a society where there's someone on the corner saying papers please no one really wanted that but we've become very docile and very accepting of the idea that we need to be coddled and monitored by the state i mean i know there's a recent debate about vaccine passports and people seem very uh blase about this idea that that we might have to have uh our id embedded and encoded onto a card to get anywhere or to do anything so i think there's there's something going on there and it is connected with what you've brought up in terms of hate crime legislation we've just become accustomed i mean you mentioned specifically the problem in scotland and and seriously it relates very closely to what you're saying because the snp who are the only really party with any clout in scotland that's the scottish national party um and it's never a good idea is it when you have one political party which doesn't really have an opposition um they have a reputation for quite nanny state-ish policies you know they they introduced a uh what was it called the named person scheme it didn't go through in the end but they wanted to assign every child born in scotland with a state guardian you know they effectively didn't trust uh the parents to raise their own kids they have other examples you know minimum pricing on alcohol or a ban on two for one pizzas because they don't trust poor people uh not to gain weight um so all sorts of these sorts of policies but in this current hate crime bill which has just sailed through because there's no opposition uh hamza youssef the justice secretary has pushed through he specifically included an element to this bill which says that they can criminalize you for things you say in the privacy of your own home i mean that to me is i mean that's just a given i would have never thought that anyone in this country would not consider that to be an incredible invasion of liberty you can make a strong case for scotland as the uh ground zero for many of the developing many of the concepts that undergird the entire western notion of freedom and to see that emerging in scotland is absolutely stunningly terrifying as far as i'm concerned you think of mel gibson with a face covered in woad shouting freedom as he's executed you know in braveheart you do think of scotland as being associated with it but honestly scotland for some reason and i don't know what it is and it might be to do that it's effectively this one party state it seems to have this incredible sense and they've really bought into this idea uh that unless they can police the thought the thought and speech of their citizens then they will just run up run a mock it's there's another element to that bill i don't know if you know about this there's a specific element on the bill which talks about the public performance of a play so they've effectively said that they will criminalize uh public performances so say if if it can be deemed that those performances were designed to stir up hatred that's the formulation stir up hatred i'm not quite sure what that means necessarily but the when when hamza youssef was questioned about this in parliament he actually said well theoretically a neo-nazi or someone from the far right could get together with a group of actors and put on a play to to recruit people to his cause and as i said at the time you know i don't know any neo-nazis but they're not into amateur dramatics that's not their thing they don't do that they wouldn't get involved and yet he's got this idea in his head that that is a feasible i mean it seems ridiculous but it's not really because the ramifications are quite are quite serious and and it and the way it's just gone through without any opposition really really troubles me i mean there have been modifications i should say in fairness in the initial bill in the initial draft of the bill they had said that you could be criminalized irrespective of intention in other words yes that was terrifying awful and you know if you wrote a play that then stimulated someone to join the file right then you were still responsible whether you intended it or not now the problem is you know with theatrical representation or any kind of artistic representation is sometimes you want to represent the worst aspects of humanity because that's part of drama and literature and all the rest of it i mean you would be there would be no artistic freedom if that went through so unfortunately that element of the bill was modified well and also the attempt to reverse the idea that intent is important is that's even that's even more uh catastrophic it it's always been a miracle to me that our legal system ever became psychologically sophisticated enough so that intent rather than outcome was what mattered because you have to be a sophisticated thinker to see that someone has done damage to someone else but and so the damage is real and marked and and troublesome and costly all of that painful but because the intent wasn't there the severity of the action is dramatically mitigated that's a sign of maturity and sophistication to note that and the fact that it's built into the legal system is nothing short of remarkable and then to remove that and to make the the felt consequences the the arbiter of the reality of the situation is a dreadful assault on the integrity of the law as such as far as i can tell well moreover it's something that everyone in intuitively understands we all understand the difference between murder and manslaughter you know we all understand that intent actually does like you say escalate the the severity of a crime and and and it's and it's it's bigger than that isn't it it's because this like this idea that intention doesn't matter is actually built into so much of this what we call social justice discourse if you think of critical race theory uh it's just a given uh that there are racist structures and you can be racist without intending to be racist and i really do dispute that because i think in order to be racist intention has to be at the heart of that otherwise it's incoherent to me why were you motivated you guys to do no safe spaces and and what exactly is it examining it's examining free speech which alone i mean first of all uh everybody involved in it all the directors the writers the producers were offend fantastic people people i i really admire and uh and adore and originally uh it was with me and then very early on they said would you like to do with adam corolla and uh i i don't know if your uh viewers are able to perceive this but we uh we really do adore each other and um uh respect each other and so the thought of doing this with adam was uh i was excited and it turned out that i had every reason to be excited it's a great chemistry that we have just to hear adam describe how different our backgrounds is is worth the price of admission which he does most of the time when we go public adam why don't you give a brief review of how different our backgrounds are well first our similarities were we're both over six foot and that's where it ends uh dennis is you know a new york he's an east coast guy i grew up in north hollywood california then this is scholar i was put on academic probation at a junior college um dennis likes uh symphonies i like prog rock uh he likes gefilte fish i like philly cheese steaks where does it end dennis uh well what about about the religious difference oh yes he's uh a very religious jew i'm essentially atheist pagan okay so let me out let me ask you another question so when i look at political surveys i see that there's a very limited number of people on the right that you could describe as extremists and there's a very limited number of of people on the left who appear to support the more extremist leftist propositions and so i do believe that in some sense it's more difficult for people on the left to draw distinctions between acceptable leftist ideas than it is for people on the right i mean on the right you draw the line with claims of racial superiority on the left there's there's obviously trouble brewing on the extreme but defining exactly where it is and drawing a border around it is seems to me a relatively complex task and well you asked me why i got in trouble i mean i got in trouble because i said well i'm not sure where to draw the line but that particular law compelling speech with its implicit theory of identity that's gone too far as far as i'm concerned but you know the fact that that caused so much trouble i think is indication of the fact that it's difficult to draw the line and so well i'm interested in both your comments about that well i think you're on to something with the extreme part of the right wing party is pretty definable and i think most reasonable people agree that the farthest right you know jews shooting laser beams into the into the sky and shooting down satellites or whatever crazy stuff comes out of q and on or sort of far-right stuff racial things of that nature um i think we can all agree that that's pretty definable and that most people on the right will not cross that border uh and william buckley helped with that wouldn't you say i would but on the left i feel like there's a much greater sense of well we don't agree with aoc but we're not going to say anything about it or we're not going to define it or or the squad so there's a much more you know i live in california most everyone i work in hollywood everyone's on the left their thing is sort of like we don't like what gavin newsom is doing but he's still our guy and you know we'll go well that's part that's part of this difficulty withdrawing borders like i've had conversations with democrats about the idea of equity for example which is a no-go zone as far as i'm concerned because of its connotations of equality of outcome but they insist generally speaking that most of the people who are using the term equity are really using it as a proxy for equality of opportunity

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 369,094

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, maps of meaning, biblical series, free speech, freedom of speech, biblical lectures, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Karl Jung, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: i0Z84yHCkCc

Length: 62min 26sec (3746 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2022