Dr. Jordan Peterson | Is Neo-Marxism on the rise? | #CLIP

so imagine imagine it's it's russia you're in a village it's 30 years something like that after the serfs have been emancipated there's a few agriculturalists who've managed to produce successful agricultural enterprises and you know maybe they have a couple of cows they have some land they're able to hire a few people and they're raising almost all the food right and so and they're a minority in any village because the hyper productive successful are always a minority so they're minority in every village all right and so and and there's people who are doing worse and then there's a lot of people who aren't doing so well at all and then the communist intellectuals show up and they tell the people who aren't doing so well some of whom are just suffering because of life but some of whom aren't doing well because they've never done anything productive with even a second of their life and the communist intellectuals come in and say you know those guys that are doing so much better than you yeah they actually stole all of that from you and you're morally obligated to go take it back it's like oh man you know after after six cups of mead let's say or let's say 10 or let's say 20 and i'm drunk out of my mind and i've got my cruel buddies with me and we're all resentful right to the core because we've wasted our miserable lives and now we have an opportunity to go like down the street to our wealthy neighbor's house and to rape his daughters and we can do it in the name of good it's like well there's a story you can market and that happened everywhere in the soviet union and so they wiped out the kulaks it's like great and then six million ukrainians starved to death yeah that's right brilliant i'm a farmer brilliant the ukraine was the breadbasket of europe that's what it was then it became a region pathetically unable to feed itself and yet the same sort of world view that gave rise to that we're now being told you use the word neo-marxist many people in australia use the word cultural marxist i've got an old friend who said to me what are you talking about john you know free capitalist australia is not going to let that happen here well qantas airlines took a nice step towards that the other day and they adopted their language policing policies these corporate these corporations who should know far better let these far left fifth columns into their organizations they think they're not going to pay for that they think they're going to stop with some demands for the reconstruction of language not like the demands for reconstruction of language by the way are trivial there may be the most important thing you could possibly demand right i want to reshape the way you speak i want to reshape the way you think it's like well that's okay as long as it doesn't interfere with the bottom line it's like it'll interfere with the bottom line you let that fifth column in it's a warning to corporate people you let that fifth column in man you're gonna regret it you're gonna regret it so and things can turn on a dime you know a very well organized minority even if the majority opposes them and they do a very well organized minority can have an unbelievably pernicious effect on on a organization margaret mead's made that point society's changed direction when a small group of people decide to change its direction that that's the way history works well that's what happened in the universities let's come back um this issue of the redefining of language it seems to me that there are two things that people who want to reshape society in brutal ways do the first is they start to silence good debate either silence it or shut it down or whatever second thing they do is they redefine language so it's very hard to have a debate so diversity actually i mean there's no other way to put it in this country it's rapidly coming to mean a stifling conformity you dare not deviate from the line and you see it with a whole lot of other words that are banded around equality being one of them yep because it's confused the quality of opportunity is confused with the quality of outcome well the initial wedge was equality of opportunity and then that flew and and so well no no it's equality of outcome that's equity and that's i cannot believe how rapidly that idea which is the ultimate and terrible ideas i can't believe how rapidly that spread and how little people criticize it well that's proclaiming acid to uninformed analysis it sounds good if you're feeling carelessly compassionate because you go back to the ukrainian example in destroying the leading edge farmers you actually guaranteed misery for everyone oh on unbelief people were selling human body parts in the ukraine for food you know it was if you were a mother and your children were starving and you went out into the fields after they were harvested and you picked up individual pieces of grain that the harvesters had left and you didn't turn them over to the state that was a capital offense right that's that was and the funny thing is that that was in the glory days of the russian revolution right that wasn't in the late 1950s that wasn't in the 1930s even that was in the 1920s that was right when this started and i think it was i think it was malcolm uggridge who was reporting on that for for a uk newspaper whose name escapes me at the moment he was pointing all of this out you know and no one paid attention no one paid attention towards the end of his life he warned that the west is in danger of eating itself out from within and i wonder whether in fact he wasn't being very appreciative and you and i want to stop that happening for the sake of our young people anything else for the sake of everyone we went down that pathway already we don't need to do it that things history should be like science in the sense that it ought to be objective it ought to be told truthfully it ought not to be used to secure some dominant groups preferred version of society well this is also why see what i've been trying to do about this because i thought this through a long time ago i thought well i don't want to i think the group identity game ends in blood it doesn't matter who plays it left wingers play it blood right wingers play it blood and lots of it not just a little bit you can't play the identity politics game also what do you do instead you you live the mythologically heroic life as an individual that's the right place to work and that's the message of the west as far as i'm concerned is that we figured that out we figured out that the collective identity was not the pinnacle statement that the individual not that collective identities have no value obviously family has value and and and your organizations have value all of that that's not the issue the issue is what's the paramount value what's the metric by which people should be measured and the answer is they should be measured as individuals as if they have a divine soul they should be measured in that manner but it can't be a selfish thing that is to say if i recognize i have worth and dignity i'm obliged to recognize it so you i think you can't recognize that you have intrinsic worth and dignity without also doing without also recognizing it in others and vice versa i don't think that i can recognize the worth of another person without without stumbling on to the idea that i also have to recognize that for myself when do you think well everyone would want that but what people don't because you're also charged with the responsibility of your own care as if you matter that's a big responsibility like it's a lot easier to assume that everything is pointless i mean that's painful and all of that but well you don't bear any responsibility there no one lives that way no no well not not for long not for long well not for long exactly but you know voltaire's biographer wasn't actually voltaire himself it was a lady who wrote his one one of many biographies of him in the 1930s came up with that adage summarizing his views that i may disagree with you but i'll defend to the death your right to say it there's a couple of things implicit in that that seem to be incredibly important so i may disagree with you but you have dignity and standing and worth and a right to put your view that's the first thing i'm respecting the other person oh you should crave it yeah and the second thing it implies is the idea on the table that's important for two reasons one is we need to have a debate about that not attack the person who put it there show some respect for them the second thing is it's only by honest debate that you find the best way forward well that's that's the thing that then that ties back to the discussion we had about the purpose of memory and the purpose of historical education it's like look there's another rule in my book which is rule nine assume that the person that you're listening to knows something you don't well they do the person you're listening to knows some things you don't you can be sure of that now whether or not you can get to them is a different matter but if you do get to them it's a real deal for you that's why you want to listen to the other person's arguments is because you're not everything you could be you don't know the pathway forward with as much clarity as you could and it's possible this is one of the wonderful things that i've had the privilege of experiencing as a clinician you know because people it's like i live inside a dostoyevsky novel as a clinician people come in and they tell me about their lives and i listen to them and they tell me things that are just absolutely beyond belief you know and i learn from my clients constantly they're telling me honestly about their experience they tell me things they wouldn't tell anyone else because i actually listen to them but part of the reason i listen is because i'm desperate to listen it's like there's a possibility i'm going to do something stupid in the next five years that's going to be like fatal and there's some small possibility that if we have a decent discussion that you'll tell me something that will eliminate some of my blindness so that i don't have to fall into that particular pit and if you have a good sensitivity for the depth of the pit then you know you're pretty bloody motivated to avoid it and so and that and and that and that dialogue is it's it's dialogic it's dial logos right it's shared logos it's the way that we redeem ourselves mutually moving forward and it all depends on having the facts on the table as best you're able to establish them not distortions of fact not what you wish would be the case at least your best approximation of what you think to be true and not what you wish for no one because the new version of this seems to be uh if i disagree with what you say i'll paint it as hate speech or um challenging to my notions of diversity and inclusiveness and i'll fight to the death your right to even have your side well that's why hate speech laws are so pernicious it's like and that needs to be taken apart first question is there such a thing as hate speech yes obviously people say terrible things reprehensible things quasi-criminal things even all the time brutal and some of them cause a lot of trouble so the idea that there's hateful speech it's like yeah okay that's self-evident no problem well let's regulate it okay fair enough because it's hateful you know maybe we rather that there wasn't any of it okay no problem who defines hate well we'll worry about that later it's like no you won't that's actually the problem here's the answer to who defines hate those people that you would least want to have define it that would be the inevitable consequence of the legislation because sensible people won't have anything to do with that like people who are power mad will gravitate to that domain to make an ethical case to exercise their controlling power over the language of other people now and i've had journalists say well what makes you think that your right to free speech trumps the right of someone to not be offended and i think that's really the level of our political discourse okay so we'll run a little thought experiment so i'm talking to one person i'm talking to you and the rule is i don't get to offend you okay maybe we can still have a discussion about something difficult but let's say i'm talking to 10 people and about an important thing now i have to make sure that i don't say anything to fight despite the fact that this is an important and contentious issue that i don't say anything that offends even one of those 10 people okay maybe i can even manage that what if i'm talking to a thousand people there's going to be someone in that thousand people there's going to be someone who's offended at the mere fact that i exist so it's an impossible standard it's like well you can't say anything offensive okay fine then you can't say anything okay so what you don't get to say anything because no one should be offended well then you don't get to think well what happens if you don't think well then you can't negotiate your way through the future and you fall into a pit and so does everyone else so that's where that all ends up you can't say offensive things equals you cannot negotiate your way properly through the future equals everyone suffers well that's a bad that's a bad strategy thank you for watching this episode we appreciate your support if you value vital conversations like this one be sure to subscribe to the channel there and also click the notification bell to stay up to date with new releases [Music]

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 831,601

Keywords:

Id: G7e_BaXU3mA

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/FarewellSovereignty]

By the way, this interview is from John Anderson's (former deputy prime minister of Australia) interview series on Youtube. I highly recommend that series in general for thoughtful, reasoned and informative analysis of many topics related to left-wing overreach and the erosion of Western cultural norms and values.

Recently he had on Coleman Hughes (black academic opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement), and he's also had on Douglas Murray, Peter Hitchens, Stephen Hicks (academic who has written books criticising the rise of Postmodernism and Neo-Marxism in academia)

[u/[deleted]]

> "someones going to get offended that I merely exist"

literally when a radical leftist tells white people to shut up just because they are white

[u/Uptonogood]

False. Because there's no neo marxists. Just the same old marxists doing the same old shit they always do.

[u/ClockworkFool]

Is this a recent interview? Last I heard, the guy was still resting up and trying to get well.