Douglas Murray in conversation with Jordan Peterson

hello I'm Douglas Murray here for unheard and I'm delighted today to be joined by dr. Jordan Peterson [Music] so Jordan we've been spending some time together recently on stage talking among other things about God but today I wondered if we pivot to politics and the one thing in particular which has been on my mind which I know has been on your mind which is the issue of where politics goes wrong where the right goes wrong in politics and where the left goes wrong in politics you probably start with the right but we can see some of that more clearly the cliff edge is more vertiginous it seems what are your thoughts on that currently of where the right of politics gets to go wrong well I think that we have been able to box in the the the more unfortunate elements of the right and that's probably a consequence mostly of moral deliberations undertaken after World War two so we've seemed to have come to a pretty general consensus I would say that claims of ethnic or or racial superiority place you outside the realm of acceptable political discourse that that's that Cliff place where we're where dialogue degenerates into conflict inevitably I think the right the the classic errors of the right are to fail to attend sufficiently to the tendency for hierarchies to degenerate into corruption because of willful blindness and rigidity and and of course that's something that the left takes the right to task for generally speaking so there's there's that there's the hard line which is ethnic I didn't let Nick identity as as a mark of superiority and then there's a looser line where there's where there's also error I think the right errors in the same way that the left does when they play identity politics so you know generally the way that we're conceptualizing the political landscape is right to left as a distribution but there's a another axis which is probably collectivist versus individualist and there's collectivist left-wingers and this collectivist right wingers and insofar as the left wingers and the right wingers are collectivist then they're wrong and you see that on the right with their claims of ethnic and national superiority say do you hear some of that coming back more I don't know the thing is you know there's a lot of noise in the press especially on the left especially as you move towards the radical left about the alt right but I have a hard time putting my finger on exactly who these alright people are you know if you look at the radical left it's obvious that they have a stranglehold I would say on the universities especially the humanities and social sciences and that one of the consequences of that is that the doctrine that that those entities has been producing is spilling over into society to a large degree and there's there's a lot of noise about the old right but I can't figure out who the alt-right people are there's anyone met them well you know what happens in the United States I think is that anything that smacks of support for Trump is immediately associated with the old right but this situation in the United States is way more complicated than that because the Americans have been split 50% Democrat and 50% Republican like as close to 50% as it can possibly be for four decades and so I don't see that the election of Trump indicates the rise of something approximating even right-wing populism in the United States it's more complicated in Europe because the the border and immigration issues are much harder topics in Europe and I do think that it seems to me that there is a rise of ethno nationalist parties on on the farther reaches of the right something like that yeah but it's it's it's so difficult to get accurate information now perversely enough that it's very difficult to evaluate one of the strange things about about the whole alt-right thing is that is the extent to which it's and it's a way to avoid facing up to the reality that half the country voted for Donald Trump it seems to be some kind of coping mechanism and I noticed a little while ago when you were doing Bill Maher's show you mentioned when you got onto the panel bit that perhaps you went down a level underneath the one that the panel wanted to talk about which was just riffing on the awfulness of Donald Trump then you think you rightly pointed out that now we can all play that the game of who can be rudest that Donald Trump but you tried to go down to the level of what would you do if you took the president away from the people who voted for him by indictment or whatever it would be whatever the mechanism and they seem utterly baffled by your question well they were stunned at the fact that someone would pose that question I mean I thought i sat there and I thought about that for a long time whether I've asked that question because I knew I was jumping out of the game that they were all playing it's like well you have to live with these people and and do you really think they're all so stupid is that really your theory about why Trump was elected and and the Maher the whole Maher phenomena is quite interesting because he interviewed ben shapiro a while after that and you know took everyone including shapiro to task for the absolute stupidity of the catastrophe of trump without ever reflecting on the fact that clearly in the united states the liberal left lost the election Trump didn't win everyone thought Hillary was going to win she had it in the bag and if she wouldn't have played identity politics she only needed 70,000 additional votes if she wouldn't have played at identity politics she would have won and Maher when he when he went after Shapiro took no responsibility whatsoever of the failures of the liberal left it was all well the stupidity of the people who voted for Trump and my sense because I've talked to many many people who voted for Trump is that it isn't like people on them on the center-right and the right the Republican end of the distribution were overwhelmingly impressed with what Trump had to offer but they were willing to take that was the risk that they were willing to take and it was partly because they're so by by the by the identity politics that the Democrats have descended into and they have nothing else to offer the Democrats its identity politics or nothing do you think it's an extent I mean the Trump brexit phenomenon is often uncomfortably put together there are lots of things that make them different but one of the things that makes them similar is this attempt by people to push away any attempt to explain what has happened to come up with reason after reason other than the possibility that half of the people have a different view of politics and there seems to be some kind of coping mechanism going on that to keep pushing away that realization that your own side has got some some fundamental misunderstanding yeah well it's easier it's well I think it's very easy for people who don't want to evaluate their own beliefs to assume that everything that the other side is saying is a consequence of their personal moral failings and any well their ignorance and their malevolence basically and it's not helpful especially it's not helpful I think it's unhelpful in the United States because it isn't obvious to me that the underlying dynamic has already changed that much given that it's been 50/50 for for twenty years and it was 50/50 in the last election so the the old right may be very very hard to depend down or find and anyone who would be a member of it would be able to get a lot of publicity and so it has in some ways a couple of people who'd identified never had more coverage than they have by being identified in this way but I sense there's something there are there are things that are murmuring under the discussion on the right it seems to me that that me at any rate very very very worried and the one that I started and noticed a little while ago was probably in the last year or so it was the the increase of people QA sometimes you know meet-and-greet sort of things after after speeches where I found almost always there was at least one person you asked me about IQ now that had never happened until it never happened until about a year or two ago I never got asked about that for a long time I saw said I it's not my thing I don't know about it I don't that's why I haven't discussed it but it was always a something that you should look into it you know and I've never quite put my finger on why I was uncomfortable about it other than the fact that I knew that somebody who raised it first was somebody I was innately suspicious of well there is a there is a danger on the right that the identity politics danger because the right we'll play identity politics different than the left the leftist theory is well we should all segregate ourselves into our identity groups and then those who are the oppressor groups should repent and feel terrible for their oppressive acts and and step aside and that's one way of playing identity politics but another way of playing identity politics is to hell with you I will pick my identity group based on race or ethnicity whatever it is that that I feel most comfortable with since that's the game and then I'll play to win and my sense is that there will be plenty of people attracted to the identity politics game that you win and you know the people who've gone after me from the right wing have basically gone after me for exactly that reason they say Peterson stresses individuality and individual responsibility but fails entirely to appreciate the fact that we do manifest ourselves in groups which is exactly the same thing to left the radical leftist argue and that it's necessary for those of us who wish to preserve our culture etc to group together in our homogenous group and act collectively to what what do you say take our territory back something like that and and that's very much a fascist perspective fundamentally but it's if if the fundamental game is identity politics it isn't obvious why the logical choice is to lose so now you know I when I discuss this tell people that the whole idea that you should view the world through the lens that makes your collective identity paramount is a pathological game no matter who's playing it and it because it produces a reversion to divisive tribalism and small diverse tribes of people mostly fight but why do you think the IQ and the IQ differentials question has become a sort of such a edged issue for some people why that one well the IQ literature in general is a is a what would you call it it's an ethical nightmare I think that the right-wingers who are using IQ as a lever use it to buttress claims of ethnic and group superiority yeah and of course that's partly why the left the possibility that that might occur is partly why the left has objected to you could say IQ research since well probably for the last thirty years it's interesting though you know because when the IQ tests were first developed they were developed in France and then they were used in England for years by my left leaning leaning parties to screen and and this was part of a conscious plan to produce upward social mobility the idea that you could objectively assess intellectual prowess allowed the selection of let's call them deserving poor using the Victorian or the Edwardian terminology that you could identify people who were of great intellectual promise amongst the working class and pull them up into the educated middle class or elite and that that would be of benefit to them and everyone else but the problem with IQ tests is that they do produce group differences and that's unbelievably complicated and horrible and it's complicated because it isn't obvious how you should group people if you're going to do group analysis of IQ so for example there's more genetic diversity among Africans than there is among the remaining the rip all the other human populations so exactly who you put people in the bin of how do you how you put people in the bin of black Caucasian and Asian let's say to which are generally regarded as the three major racial groups that's far from obvious and so that's a basic scientific conundrum that's right at the bottom of the of the of the IQ problem but if you use the typical groupings you do get ethnic differences and and that starts to become extremely problematic because the question then is why and with the answer to that is we don't know and some of them like so so you think well the most commonly discussed ethnic differences is the propensity for people who are defined as black the way that Americans define black to perform more poorly on standardized tests but and so then the accusation is that the tests are somehow biased or that there's socio-economic factors at work or perhaps at the bottom of the desirability hierarchy that there are biological factors at work and no one has nailed any of that down if if you if you if you give those if you give that data credence then it leaves you with the terrible question of what do you do about those differences and how do you conceptualize them but and and you could it can also be used as a justification for a kind of racial hierarchy but then if you reverse it you know you you see the reverse problem emerging with the issue of Ashkenazi Jews because they're over-represented in in most positions of competence let's say and Authority radically over-represented especially at the top and unless you're willing to pause it something like IQ differential that will account for it you have to come up with a conspiratorial theory and so with IQ this is the thing about IQ research is that no matter how you interpret it your bay Stickley screwed and it's partly because the facts of the world don't necessarily line up with our a priori moral desires because of what we would really like would be for there to be no important difference as an important function across all the groups that people are put in or identify with but it doesn't work out that way one of the problems that I've been thinking about it for a while it's it's it's such an edge issue and it's as I said I've sort of fear it coming in somehow to much more mainstream position unless there's an attitude taken towards it obviously it seems that there isn't it simple the left has been trying for a long time and other people have to just keep it away as you say since the bell curve at least them for time before that just keep it away as a discussion it's obviously bubbling away and so it seems so you have to find some some attitude towards it other than what the fundamental problem is is that the best predictor of long-term life outcome is IQ that's a real problem now it's not that great a predictor that's the first thing is that the the if you're optimistic about IQ you would say that it predicts about 25 percent in the variation in the variance of long term life outcome and then other factors like conscientiousness which is the next best predictor it's big five trait accounts for about 9 percent 10 percent something like that so the two best predictors combined only account for 35% of the difference in in life outcome leaving 65% for other factors which is quite a lot so those factors could include things like Prejudice and in and and and and systemic bias and so forth and but a lot of it's also luck and health and all the things that determine whether you fall off the edge of the world the problem with IQ is that there's no damn way it's going away and people say well IQ it's not really good measure of intelligence it's like sorry people this is where it gets truly ugly because the there is no phenomena in social science in social sciences period that is on firmer statistical and conceptual footing than IQ we know and there's no more there's no phenomena that's more robust no matter if you give people tasks that involve abstraction if you give people a set of tasks tests that that assess obstruction and then you measure their average score on the set of tests of abstraction and then you rank order them you have an IQ measure that's all you have to do it's no real not any real different that the measure is no different than your average performance across across the set of tasks that require abstraction the the problem as I say so we'll come back to each time is the manner in which people want to use the data or the ends to which they wish to sort of find it useful the first thing is obviously that this is it would seem to me to be obviously becoming a way in which some people on the right are trying to come back with very ugly ideas and very ugly prejudices of their own second is that it strikes me that this the over emphasis on IQ by some people are not saying why everyone is I'm not saying to neglect the literature but the overemphasis among other things makes this error of thinking that intelligence is is where the only important trait in human being well I think the problem there is not exactly so much the definition of intelligence as the only important what would you say defining characteristic of human beings but to conflate intelligence with value or moral virtue and worth right yes worth that that's the really pernicious element is that there's an underlying assumption that if there are differences in people with regards to IQ somehow there are differences in their worth and there are differences in their economic worth you know so but that doesn't mean that there are differences in their intrinsic worth and that's something that has to be very very carefully laid out the the novelist Ian McEwan once once said that all all readers have to at some point contend with the awkward fact that some of the nicest people they know have never read a book right right well okay so so we could let's let's go into the IQ thing more more more terribly so IQ test produce ethnic differences and then you might say well that constitutes is a sign of bias it's like ok if that was true then IQ test would would under when you using them to predict real-life performance within groups they would under predict the real-life performance of the ethnic groups where IQ scores are lower but they don't so there's no evidence of bias in terms of prediction now you could say well that means the whole system is rigged the IQ system is rigged and the life outcome system is rigged and that would be basically the position of the egalitarian left it's like fair enough that could be the case but but there's another ugly thing that lurks here - is it well let's say that you decide that the way that you're going to deal with the fact that there are ethnic differences in IQ in the literature is that you're gonna throw IQ out completely and and not bother with it and sometimes universities are starting to do this because they're throwing away tests like the SAT and people say that these standardized tests are not IQ tests but that's because they don't know what the hell they're talking about because they are absolutely and clearly IQ tests because any test that tests a reasonable set of questions of abstraction that you get a total score from or an average is an IQ test so people can wave their hands about that all they want but that just means they don't know what the hell they're talking about all right so let's say we decide just to scrap the idea of IQ well here's a problem as our society this is actually a problem that Charles Murray and Herrnstein talked about in the bell curve it was never really mentioned though because it's actually an argument that the left should be very sensitive to we are producing our hierarchies are increasingly IQ predicated and so what's happening is that the dispossessed that the left hypothetically is concerned about and and genuinely concerned about to the degree that there's genuine and proper engagement on the left because it's the proper role of the left is that if you don't take differences in cognitive function into account you are going to miss what's going to dis possess most people over the next 30 or 40 years because we're producing a cognitive hierarchy and increasingly the spoils of the hierarchy are going to people who are in the cognitive stratosphere so to speak especially because it's one thing to be really smart it gives you an edge in a complex society especially one that's changing very rapidly like ours but if you're really smart and you know how to use a computer you are so far ahead of people that it's like you're a member of a different species and if you don't think that that's going to be the the fundamental problem of the coming age let's say then you're not very awake I suppose just to wrap up this this issue and for the time being that the the thing I've been trying to work out my own you know disturbance about this issue for a while and I suppose I recently managed to to hone it down to this that it's not that I think that it should be ignored I don't think it can be denied but that I suppose one of the things that makes me so uncomfortable at the IQ thing is that I can foresee if the people who are most interested in it keep pushing it like this I see some terrible concatenation of nightmares because of course this isn't happening in a vacuum it's also in my view happening at a point when let me put it this way the concept of the sanctity of the individual whether you define that in a religious context or in the kind of secular religious context in which some of us currently hold this idea at the time always the notion of the sanctity of the individual is sort of eroding in a society the combination of that happening at the same time as an obsession with IQ in the century ahead of us just has the potential for a catastrophe of 20th century proportions and that's the reason why I just fear that if this isn't dealt with in a reasonable way it comes at us in the most unreasonable way imaginable somewhere down the line well I think that that's a genuine concern that there's going to be elements of it that are coming are going to come out as at us in an unreasonable way I mean look look what's happened at Harvard you know I mean one of the things that's happened there and the Asians of course are the wild card in this whole enterprise because the the affirmative action policies in the u.s. hypothetically were set up at least in part to to bring minority so-called minority it's not like Asians are a minority but to bring minority people sure but it turns out that if you use unbiased selection processes then you over select for Asians so you over select for Asians and Jews it's like oh my god this is why they're now discovering that hamed's had to come up with these techniques to try to downgrade yeah an agent sure sure one grading them on the personnel personality well and that well I'm the funny thing too is it's not it's not that they're downgrading them on personality because they don't use objective personality measures which they could use because one of the things that's really cool about the big five especially measures of conscientiousness is measures of conscientiousness do not produce ethnic differences so one of the ways of putting together a selection battery that's objective let's say which would be which would mean both blind to peripheral characteristics such as race but also capable of predicting the desired outcomes so that's what I mean by objective is to produce a battery of tests that blends cognitive assessment with with genuine personality assessment and actually it's so interesting because in the United American context you're actually bound to do that by law if you're selecting employees because you're bound to use the most valid and reliable current method of selection that that that's that's instantiated into law and the American Psychological Association has stated firmly that the proper way to do that is to use a balance of cognitive tests and personality tests but but virtually no one does that for all sorts of extremely complicated and absurd reasons but if you now then you might say well we can't use the cognitive tests because they produce ethnic differences and you can moderate that by interleaving personality which is one way of dealing with it we're going to use something else it's like okay you're gonna use something else well it turns out that whatever else you use is more biased than the thing you're fleeing from and that's what's manifesting itself at Harvard well we'll use our subjective judgment and you know the Harvard people have been hand waving about the fact that they're bloody admission criteria are so sophisticated that you can't capture them with mere quantitative analysis this is the latest one after trying to make sure nobody had accessed them yeah they were actually doing that's right we're so sophisticated that we couldn't possibly quantify it it's like that's not sophisticated that's prejudice at every single stage Harvard University in this case the Asian students have brought every single stage they've done everything they can to cover over the actual fact that they are themselves being biased yes yes sure and so so what's happening is that you know wherever subjectivity is allowed to enter into the equation the Asians are downgraded as a consequence of personality which isn't personality it's actually the subjective sense that the evaluators produce when they read through the applications and they know that the applicant is Asian and it wasn't even and without even meeting Africa judging the person on racial characteristics without having met yes there's a variety of things that are appalling about that and one of them of course is the denial of the opportunity to attend a top-tier university like Harvard for the students who were qualified to attend the Asian students but there's another element to this that's also equally pernicious and in some sense more self-serving like if you set up your society properly and this is the equality of opportunity doctrine it's in everyone's best interest to exploit the talented maximally right because in every domain of productive endeavor a small proportion of people do most of the productive work and so you you want to take advantage of those people those one and a thousand people are one in ten thousand people who are mathematically gifted for example or gifted in whatever way they happen to be gifted and so if you don't select your top tier candidates so let's say the Asian students in in the case of Harvard then Society doesn't get a chance to exploit them properly and everyone ends up poorer apart from the fact that each individual doesn't get their opportunity there's a social cost here to that's not trivial and then of course the other thing is the other issue is is that the the criteria are seen to be inequitable because they actually are and that produces a terrible amount of cynicism about the institution's themselves so the horror of objective testing is that it it's biased and that the more profound horror is that no matter what you replace it with you replace it with something that's even more biased so it's like well good luck thinking your way out of that conundrum in your Munk debate in Canada recently you got into a fascinating subject which I want to turn to which is the question of if we are an agreement on where the right goes wrong racial difference being made the sole most important thing exacerbation of such differences and so on the vertiginous fall that we can all identify that can happen to the extremes of the right if we identify that you I think quite rightly said to your debate opponents there where is it that the left goes wrong and rather like your conversation with a panel on Bill Maher about Trump voters absolutely nobody was able to even understand what you were starting to get at and nobody picked you up on it so I wonder if there's a question that just went no just evaporated and it seems to me that they were speaking in London we've had massive changes on the political left in this country in the last two years this question of where the left goes wrong seems to me crucial question so they devised well it's absolutely crucial yeah and it's it's a question that that intellectuals in particular I would say are a terrible fault for not addressing over the last virtually a hundred years because the intellectuals roughly speaking have been complicit in failure to define the excesses of the left well I think it's partly because intellectuals tend to be left-leaning so the best predictor for leaning left is a trait called openness which is associated to some degree cognitive ability but more importantly with creativity and so left-leaning people don't like boundaries between things and which is also why I think the left-leaning people can't draw boundaries within their own domain they don't like borders why as we can certainly tell I mean they'd rather have the borders open well why because the more open the borders are between things the more opportunity there is for information flow and left-leaning open people like information flow they think well the net benefit of free information flow is positive it's like fair enough but but that doesn't mean that there should be no barriers between things which is the conservative perspective because many of the many of the forms of information it's not only information that flows across open borders it's all sorts of things that flow across open borders and so and and things get muddy and confused if there's no conceptual differences between people and so there's an argument between the right and the left about how where the borders should be and how porous they should be and that's an argument that always has to occur the problem on the left is that clearly clearly absolutely indisputably if the right can go too far and the evidence for that is the catastrophe like the catastrophe of our switz the catastrophe of the Nazis after all that death and suffering is evidence of wrong which is accepted by the left then equal evidence exists that that can happen on the left in fact perhaps even more evidence and and if you don't think the evidence is credible then there's something wrong with you this this something has gone wrong from the 20th century and is still going wrong on this I think I've said to you before that there seems to be this presumption still if this is a political center but if you take one steps of political right say by wanting to have lower taxes that makes you right-wing and beyond that it's just a tea genus hurtle down to Nazism it's it's lower taxes all right nuts ISM yes and on the left of the spectrum it's possible to step left be on the left run left keep running and the end of the running never includes the gulag never never never not and not in the education systems either no one knows about it when my students at the University of Toronto the first time they hear about what happened in the Soviet Union is in my personality class it's like well what the hell first of all really in a personality class I mean the reason I bring it up is because Solzhenitsyn drew an existential link between the failure of the individual psyche and the propensity for people to engage in the great lie and the and the creation of these totalitarian states so I view it as an extension of existential psychology and philosophy and that's how that's how I slotted into my classes but the students otherwise don't know it's like oh really we had a hundred million corpses pile up and damn near put the entire planet to the torch because of the tension between the west and and the radical left and well we're just going to put that sweep that under the rug like it never happened it's like well what ok so then it's very easy to be extremely annoyed about this and either even morally outraged and it's hard to avoid the temptation but there is actually a technical problem here I think and it's one that that the right is perhaps just as incapable of solving and and and this is the issue that you brought up it's like ok exactly when do things go too far on the left and the answer is we don't know and it might be because there isn't a single issue on the left that marks out the degeneration into pathological ideology like claims of racial difference that that that support the notion of superiority do on the right so I maybe it's a maybe it's a pathological combination of five good ideas something like that like I believe now that there's a nexus of ideas that mark out the left as to extreme diversity inclusivity equity it's kind of like a mantra white privilege that's not a phrase that I'm very fond of and and claims of and and exaggerated claims of systemic races it's something like that so as well as as well as what would you call the the the verbiage around the oppressive patriarchy Jesus you know that's a complicated box and there's an interaction between all those terms because well you can make a case for diversity like is it should all elementary school teachers be women well perhaps not should all nurses be women perhaps not should all plumbers be men well perhaps not like you you might only have fairness when you have more female engineers yes well that that well and and and to what to what if we're going to have a society where men and women are competing on a roughly equal basis do we do we want a situation where all the engineers are men perhaps not but I mean I don't know the answer to these questions because it because choice matters so each of these individual leftist propositions has a domain of reasonableness about it and then it goes too far and then the aggregation of them also goes too far but we can't tell when and what makes it harder it seems to me is is the issue of motive but you know the the late Robert conquest on is you know one of the great historians of the nightmare that happened in Russia in the 20th century was once asked late in life about this issue of the intrinsic evil of the to totalitarianism of the twentieth century and I mean he even conquest founded him it's hard to put his finger on it but said in some way the Nazis do seem worse and I've often thought about this and I think the one thing you can't avoid it comes down to is there is some kind of intrinsic feeling that remains that whereas the Nazi regime gets it wrong for horrible and the worst possible reasons somehow every single time that the Communists had control of a country and turned it into dust it was somehow the product of good intention well there's a universalism about the communist ethos that isn't definitely isn't there on the Nazi side because the Nazi claim is this is for us and definitely not for you and so the exclusionary principle is built right into the beginning we're already right at the beginning whereas on the Communist side at least in principle if not in reality the the coming utopia was for everyone and and there was the song of the brotherhood of man and the idea that people could be included regardless of their origin so so that that's that seems like part of it is that there's an evil built into the principle itself that the Nazis that ran with that is absent with the with the Communists but the truth of the matter is to some degree that it didn't matter because the tally of bodies was equivalent on both sides of the equation and so even if the there there's the lack of a certain toxic principle at the outset of the communist doctor and it doesn't make it one whit less catastrophic and it might even be worse in some sense because you can't put your finger on it now my sense is that the a line crossed on the left is equality of outcome and and it's part of the identity politics pathology there's something wrong with first of all there's something wrong with construing the world as if your group identity is paramount that that's bad that's that's a non-starter now it's not so easy to exactly say why funnily enough circles that is being pushed currently on the left but it will as you said before benefit the right parts of the right immune oh definitely definitely and because there's just no reason for the right not to capitalize on that it's perfectly unbelievable own goal that's being created a horrific go opening down the road yes all cheer Cup well as soon as you allow as soon as you say well yes your your your group identity is paramount then you allow people who say well not only is it paramount is it's it's superior well that that's not that much of a transformation of the perspective especially when you're also saying to certain groups that you should be playing to lose it's like well because anyone sensible is going to look at that and say well why shouldn't I play to win if if group identity is paramount why shouldn't my group just win those those people you can identify as being on the far right these days and the people that are a few people that have got this massive press attention from being called alright you notice one thing in particular them when they flirt with the dangers of fascism if they flirt you can see it when they're when they're caught on video they they like to drop in terms that resonate in they flirt with fashion they flirt with an arts ism and this is rightly something we pick up on and where our ears are attuned to it in London where we're sitting last week on morning television chat show a young woman who was invited on got into a row with a presenter and he was portraying her because because he supported Trump and she was anti Trump he said well you know since you loved Obama so much said I didn't love Obama she says and she said I'm a communist I didn't love Obama I'm literally a communist you idiot and this as we speak has become not just enormous ly popular but giggles them on the left in this country and and and I'm not talking about the far left I'm talking about the left right up to and involved with her Majesty's opposition I'm literally a communist has just been made into a t-shirt by a group on the left and they're selling it and this this in an era when we've been endlessly told you know the only thing you do if you see a fascist is to punch them in the face and and there seems to be as I've always have a supply and demand problem with the fascists yes there aren't enough yes for the demand there seems to be to find them but yet here you have live on television I'm literally a communist and it's unimaginable we all know it's unimaginable that somebody would say I'm literally a fascist on TV and everyone would find it wonderful and everyone would make I'm literally a fascist t-shirt so this this 20th century era this educational error seems to me to be having real world yes it's consequence no it it means that it means that we learned half the lesson we sort of learned half the lesson of the 20th century right and and well thank God we sort of learned half the lesson but the other half has not been learned and that's not acceptable not in the least acceptable yeah the idea that you can come well you know the data in the United States indicates that one out of five social science professors are self-proclaimed Marxists it's like you're a Marxist really like seriously you're yeah not only am i a Marxist it's one of the things that makes me morally virtuous well what about the 20th century well that wasn't real communism it's like and I know I know what that means it's it's the most arrogant possible statement what it means is that well you know those people who tried it before they didn't really have the same nuanced understanding of the sophistication of Karl Marx's revelation that I have or the moral character that I have so that if I had been placed in charge let's say of the Russian Revolution the utopia that was only a couple of decades away that's what it means that I once wrote about this with Eric Hobsbawm the famous left-wing historian who just shortly before his death was asked in an interview by Michael Ignatieff that if if it took another 20 million dead to have achieved full communism when the state he wanted would it have been worth it and he replied yes would have been worth it again unimaginable that that this could happen in the opposite direction but particularly unimaginable still this this this idea even after the 20th century that these Marxists literally a communist people still a standing on the piles of tens of millions of skulls saying a bit more violence and we might yet get to utopia yes an extra one murder away from utopia one more murder away from utopia well you know and the way that the leftist defend themselves is by saying things like well what about all the deaths created by capitalism you're not factoring them into the equation and then of course the problem there is that most systems manifest themselves in various forms of bloody excess and so how you tally up the bodies depends on where you draw the boundaries around your conceptual systems and and you know if you include the entire history of the Western expansion into the new world say over the last four hundred years and you decide that that's a manifestation of Western capitalism let's say then well the Tally's I suppose looks somewhat they look different and the very least you can say that the number of people raised out of poverty by capitalism is significantly higher well people aged out of poverty this is this is this is I think there's something crucial about that because one of the things that we will have to contend with is something like that which is that every system is in some sense a system of oppression and bloodshed but some of them also produce a modicum of wealth and happiness and I would say that that's the proper defense of what what has been established as a consequence of the primacy of the individual in the conceptual schemes of the West is our bloody oppressive system at least produces some modicum of wealth and well-being whereas the communist system produced if you if you're optimistic communists No More Deaths which I believe is wrong but zero wealth and a tremendous amount of collateral destruction and so it could easily be that we're in a position where all we have to choose from is horrible systems some of which do some things right now and then and that would be our system that would be the Western system and I think there's plenty of evidence for that to a crewing evidence because what's happening right now across the world is that as the the idea of individual sovereignty and associated property rights and freedom of choice and so forth are increasingly instantiated in developing countries those countries are moving away from conditions of abysmal poverty at a staggering rate and so like the right-wing types have to admit that hierarchies do dis possess and and that they have their element elements of brutality about even if they're functional hierarchies even if their competence predicated they dispossessed people this is the cognitive problem in large part that's going to be devilís over the next 20 years but I mean at least there are fewer people starving now there are more people being lifted out of absolute poverty child mortality rates you know child mortality rates in Africa now match those in Europe in 1950 it's like that's cause for celebration and we have halved the number of people in absolute poverty since the beginning of the millennium and and so I I think we have to grow up and be realistic and say well I guess there are all human systems of governance and organization are pathological in some to some degree but some of them are minimally functional as well an optimistic pessimistic note on ways to finish thank you thank you [Music] you

Channel: UnHerd

Views: 1,343,590

Rating: 4.8858576 out of 5

Keywords: Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson

Id: JK-l2tgMQRQ

Length: 48min 13sec (2893 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 04 2018