FULL INTERVIEW: Dr Jordan Peterson on COVID hysteria and the culture wars

Jordan Peterson welcome to Australia now tell me what are your impressions of the country post pandemic well it's open again so that's nice um I like coming here I'm very gratified that I've been received positively I had a huge crowd in Brisbane 10 000 people and there's a bigger one bigger show coming up in Sydney I think there's 13 000 there so those are the biggest audiences that that have attended my shows single shows and so that's very interesting to see no nothing really on the protest front I saw a bit of Buzz online before I came here that there were people on the more radical left side that were going to show me just exactly how unwelcome I was here but so far unsurprisingly they haven't managed to organize themselves so so the last time I was here too it's a very impressive country uh and and today I'm here in in uh camera speaking with parliamentarians and that was quite surprising to me that that I was invited and that there were a large number of people in attendance that's a surprising and I would say at least somewhat courageous act it wouldn't it's not clear to me at all that that would happen in Canada for example and do you find conservative politicians including ours are crying out for some direction in how to communicate the message and how to stop apologizing and actually you know conservatives are pretty good at implementing that's their strength even on the temperamental side but on the vision front there they're not that good and that's partly what even makes them conservative because if you're a conservative you you don't need a vision in some sense because what you tend to do is walk the tried and true path and in some sense that's a replacement for a vision or it's a traditional vision and the disadvantage you have I would say on that front is that when people push you in relationship to your traditional Vision you may not be able to articulate it well so someone might object to someone who's conservative it's like well defend marriage it's like well people think well I thought we already agreed on that I don't know how to defend that it's an institution that's been around for all intents and purposes forever it's part of the general consensus of value even too articulated to that degree is is rare and so conservatives are often taken aback especially when those questions are also accompanied by a moral accusation like well you know it's nothing but a patriarchal Institution and it's also easy to make conservatives feel guilty because they're conscientious and so if you tell a conservative you're not doing your duty they think oh well I'm not I'm trying to do my duty but instead of losing strategy is that why the lifts March through the institutions has been so successful because conservatives haven't had that boldness and and belief in their value system well I think it's also because the challenge is actually quite it's quite realistically corrosive so we could start with the observation that all human social institutions whether they're micro marriage say or macro political or economic are corrupted by the corruption of power so when someone drives the assault against an institution forward on the basis of the claim that it's nothing but Power difficult to differentiate that because and because you're guilt prone as a conservative you think well yeah these institutions are corrupted by power to some degree well then that's the rub it's like well yeah to some degree to say that our institutions are corrupted by the temptation of power is a very different claim than that those institutions are founded on nothing but the will to power and that's the fundamental radical what would you say left this claim and that's not an easy claim to defend against because I might say like I could confront you with this I could say well what's the opposite what's the opposite of the will to power and you think well I don't know well that's a problem and it is a problem it's a very it's a very difficult technical problem uh I think by the way just just for the sake of continuing the argument that it's this it's the spirit of voluntary play that's the antithesis of the spirit of power and I think that functional Human Relationships that are self-sustaining and productive and generous reciprocal are when they're optimized based on the spirit of play and that's the opposite of the spirit of tyranny as well but that's it took me like 30 years to be able to figure out how to articulate that and so if you're pushed back into a corner with your rather inarticulate but deeply embodied conservative beliefs it's not evident at all that you have either the ability or the temperament to transform that traditional belief into a compelling forward-looking Vision so that's very hard on conservatives and I have been struck by the degree to which The Vision on the Centrist front is not neither compelling nor coherent it's it's not especially in the face of this tremendously pointed accusatory assault it's all about power and the only reason you don't see that is because of your privilege it's like well you have privilege I mean you're in a good position but do you not have privilege well what do you mean privilege exactly did you earn it well can you even earn privilege is there such a thing as earning it well these are all questions that have been thrown up by people who are subsidized to do nothing but cause trouble as a consequence of their Envy but how does that contrast with say a belief system that's centered on political correctness because that's quite easy to articulate and understand those sort of belief systems well it's also it's also an effective call to a very base motivation so if you put for the proposition that it's all about power then and that those who have more power have it because they have essentially stolen it well then all sorts of things are now open up for you it's like well anyone who has more than you of anything is a thief that's a that's quite the proposition it's very convenient for you you're justified in stealing it back in fact you might be more morally obligated to do so you have a convenient place to put the problem of evil and it's certainly not within you it allows you to act on your envy and boy you want to be careful of adopting a belief system that allows you to act on your Envy because Envy is a very very very corrosive motivational Force knowing if if no one can have anything more than anyone else no one can have anything at all because everything is never going to be absolutely equitably distributed and yet so much of what we see now is trying to manufacture Equity it's not about equality uh it's about having Equitable outcomes and that seems to be something that's illogical but yet it's an ideal that's held up it's attractive too in some sense right because if you're and it it's attractive in a instinctive way in some sense if you're walking down the street and you see someone who's homeless it's going to produce a stirring of conscience right at least you feel well that's unfortunate you might think there but for the grace of God you're going to think wouldn't it be better if Society was constituted so that such things did not occur you might think that person has been victimized and oppressed and it certainly might be the case in their particular case and so that sets you that sets you up with a moral conundrum and if you if you're given an easy explanation for that that also appeals to your base motives then you're very likely to jump at it and maybe even to apply it to yourself and so it's it's easy to make that Viewpoint attractive and that's it takes education to make that Viewpoint not attractive so I mean I think that almost all societies that have become successful have done so by by educating themselves in some real sense out of a instinctive instinctive false compassion and envy and because those are there at hand they're they always have to be what would you say they always have to be pushed back against they all always have to be differentiated so what's the difference between wealth and Theft well someone might not come up with that idea on their own but once it's presented to them especially to a young person especially given that the system is not fair in the ultimate sense it presents a very difficult conundrum especially also because some people do have more than others because they're Psychopathic and manipulative Machiavellian and and and uh and they don't play fair so for me the miracle is that there are any societies at all where that isn't the case all the time where the tyrants just aren't Victorious and one of the things I really like about the ethos of the West is that I think the central ethos of the West is precisely the spirit that moves effectively against tyranny is not the cause of tyranny now that doesn't mean there are tyrannical elements of the West because of course there are but what I'm very afraid of on the on the radical front is that to the degree that the radicals even want what they want they're pursuing an advantage that's so counterproductive that if they were victorious it would destroy the very thing they purport to support oh absolutely well your good friend Douglas Murray's written about this war on the west how do we Prevail in the age of unreason you tell the only way to Prevail is to tell a better story right and you need a better story than the Marxist story and I think the story of meaning through responsibility is a better story and it's a core it you might think about it as the it's certainly the core Christian story meaning through responsibility I mean I suppose responsibility extended to the ultimate degree is something like voluntary self-sacrifice to the highest good it's something like that because to take responsibility means to forego immediate gratification in the service of something longer term and higher right it literally means that's a sacrificial it's a sacrificial gesture to take responsibility and the ultimate sacrifice is the sacrifice of the self to the highest good and that's exemplified by the image of the of the crucifixion it's exemplified by the passion story and that's the central sacrifice upon which our cultures are founded it's even literally the case I was in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem recently with Jonathan pajo and that was the first Christian church and it's hypothetically founded on the very spot where Christ was crucified and so the church is the church marks the point of optimal sacrifice and so then the church becomes the center of the community so the center of the church is the point of self-sacrifice the church is the center of the community that's what happened in Jerusalem when it was refounded by the emperor Constantine's mother and then that became the literal model for the establishment of towns and cities throughout Europe This is literally how the culture was founded and the that that Divine sacrifice is the voluntary adoption of ultimate responsibility and that's the correct story and so and we're not we haven't we don't know that we don't know that that's the central story not consciously we're we're struggling towards making that conscious and and for this I believe that for the culture to be set back up on its foundations we're going to have to return to the origins and know the place for the first time in in Elliot's T.S eliot's words now you um have an enormous impact with young men and I speak to mothers of young men and so many of them whatever their political persuasion are really concerned about the crisis amongst boys the the anti-male sentiment that we hear so much about in popular culture toxic masculinity male privilege all these sort of negative messages how do we count to that what would be your message part of what you do is you counter that in the home first to the degree that a mother might be motivated by a resentful quasi-feminist ethos that's going to manifest itself in her son's life it's like well I I I don't I'm antagonistic to the patriarchy okay so what do you mean by that are you the patriarch is that a manifestation of the central Spirit of masculinity or or what is it because if it's not that then what is it well let's say it's that well your son's masculine so how do you think your attitude towards masculinity is going to work for him you're going to treat him like he's a baby patriarchal oppressor or that his ambition is part of the force that rapes and pillages the planet and that's sort of that idea sort of lurking at the basis of all your interactions with him you think that's going to go well that's the devouring mother from the Freudian perspective that's not going to go well and so it's good to remember if you're a mother when you talk about the patriarchy you're talking about your son but even in boys schools even in education centers that are supposed to be devoted to good outcomes for boys there is just so much unrelenting messaging about toxic masculinity and male privilege I just wonder what impact does that have on young men growing up we know what impact it has on them they just drop out why wouldn't they because so imagine they're actually ethical their boys are ethical in their fundamental orientation so then they hear that their desire to engage in rough and tumble play their desire to to point and shoot at things for example which is deeply masculine deeply human for that matter because we point and shoot and aim at things that's that's our entire physiological platform we're hunting creatures and and and that all so your ambition is nothing but a manifestation of the corrupt and oppressive patriarchy and as he said you're part of the force that destroys the planet if you have a shred of ethical sense and you're a young man that's just going to stop you it's going to just demotivate you and in some sense that's the purpose because women who are afraid of men confuse competence with power and then they believe that the road to peace is the antagonism to power and because they don't discriminate between power and competence they become antagonistic to their son's competence and then well then then they reap exactly what they sow they end up with incompetent boys and well why what went wrong it's like well how about you discouraged every sign of competence every chance you had I read this account a while back woman author in the United States whose name I don't remember talked about just how difficult it was to stop her son from from playing with guns he said well I I took every gun out of the house or even anything that remotely looked like a gun and that boy you know he'd take the toothbrush and shoot the cat with it and how appalling is that it's like oh you're quite the monster aren't you you saw something manifest into your son that was so deep this desire to point and shoot let's say that despite your best efforts you couldn't crush it and then you didn't even notice that you were spending all that time trying to crush it and it was so deep that you couldn't and you still regarded what you were doing as a virtue it's like boy your son he certainly needs a new mother that's for sure so I worry though so about girls because academically they're doing much better from preschool all the way a little rough on you know the health front exactly on the mental health front and I wonder being told you're a victim that you've got you're oppressed even though if you live in the west what does that do to the female psych of a young woman growing up definitely it definitely increases the degree to which young women are anxious and depressed because it makes themselves conscious and we know the more you think about yourself the more unhappy you are and it's actually it's such a striking phenomenon that if you look at this statistically there's almost no difference between self-conscious thoughts so thoughts that involve I let's say and suffering from the ravages of negative emotion like emotion and depression and so this obsessive self-centeredness narrow self-centeredness just makes all of that suffering much much worse so clearly that's clearly the case and a victim is someone to whom things constantly happen involuntarily and and if you construe yourself as a victim rather than as an actor let's say then as an actor of your own destiny then you put yourself in a situation where you're constantly under what your body responds to as stress so that's clearly no good and then I think it there's another Factor that's many other factors that are confusing young women confusion on the sexual front the idea that if you're properly liberated then the entire gamut of sexual Freedom opens itself up to you and that that's how life should work it's just that's there's that's just not true at all at all it's especially not true for women I mean I've been toying with the idea and I think this might be right that it's the capacity to say no that gives young women status that's actually the base so imagine that young women are competing for young men of status so then the question is and maybe they're at a disadvantage because they want higher status males right so that puts them at a perennial disadvantage and there's some truth in that so then what do the women have as a buttress against that status differential and I would say all they have is the ability to say no because when you say no as a young woman to a desirable young man you're saying I have something to offer you that won't just be given away despite the fact that you're of high status and so you blow that apart in the name of sexual freedom I think you deprive young women of all their you deprive them of all their status it's not like the young men don't know that they know that perfectly well they respect young women who say no they might complain and Cavill and carp about it but but when push comes to shove and the data on this are quite clear well it seems a lot of the women's Liberation movement of late the sexual Liberation and that you spoke about that it seems to Advantage men more than women well no no it doesn't because they get the sex without the results yeah yeah but it doesn't disadvantage men it disadvantages are very small proportion of hyper-successful and increasingly predatory men because it disadvantages most men because what happens is that when the sexual constraints are lifted off women they all migrate to a very small percentage of men five percent maybe and then those men have an almost unlimited field of sexual access and so you could say that's a benefit to them but it's not because it trains them to be manipulative Machiavellian instrumental Psychopaths because all they're doing is pursuing a string of pleasure-based hedonistic short-term relationships that's bad training if you want to be a reciprocal human being and if you want to learn how to participate in a real relationship so and then it's catastrophe for the women because none of those men are incentivized to to form anything that approximates a long-term relationship and then the rest of the men are left with nothing yeah so that's that's disastrous disastrous yeah it's a disastrous these Trends were saying it was very interesting in the midterms to see some polling showing that unmarried women are becoming a significant voting block for the Democrats uh something like two in three vote Democrat now why do you think that is why is it that married men and married women are gravitating towards the Republicans and unmarried women according to these exit polls are opting for the Democrats why it's unmarried women is harder to parse out why it's women is relatively easy to understand I look technically with one of my students at what predicted politically correct belief and one of the big predictors was feminine temperament but over and above feminine temperament was being female so there is a tilt towards the left that seems to characterize femininity and you might ask yourself why so let's imagine for a moment one source of the intrinsically female ethos all right so women have to be infant centered in fact I think women's nervous systems are optimized for the mother infant dyad and not for individual women so women are more sensitive to negative emotion now there's a bunch of reasons for that their women are more vulnerable sexually and physically so that it would be make sense for them to be more responsive to threat but then you could add an additional layer which is well yeah they also have to take primary responsibility for a very dependent infants and so it would make sense for someone whose life is characterized by that intense dependent dyadic relationship to be more sensitive to negative emotion okay and so what would that mean well it would mean in part to be prone to defending the infant well that's that's culture in some sense so on the woke side imagine for the instinctive female ethos here's the world there are three categories that's all three categories infant caretaker of infant predator that's it so you're either an infant like a university student who's victimized or you're a caretaker like a university administrator who's infantilizing the University students or you're a predator well and if you're a predator No Quarter is given so it's a necessary ethos because if you have an infant you should bloody well be alert for predators and if you're false positive say well that's a predator and it isn't oh well you've protected your baby might be a little hard on the Predator right so it's okay if you err in the direction of over sensitivity to predation signs I think that's the fundamental female ethos and when that's manifest politically well you see Sympathy for the more Progressive causes that transform the world in in some sense into infant and Predator well is that Trend more evident in unmarried women I mean it's evident in Australia as well under 35 women are more likely to be single than not so we're going into motherhood later there's a lot more who are childless and I wonder if that's substituting one for this yes it is it is substituting I think I think what happens to most women when they have an infant is they start understanding that oh that's an infant all these all these other quasi-infants they're not infants they start to be able to distinguish and we have to ask ourselves seriously with that instinct towards bonding and protection if it isn't given its Target how does it manifest itself in the political and economic sphere and while I think we're seeing that is that well if you don't have the proper Focus for your infant oriented ethos you you construe the world within the confines of that ethos and it isn't obvious to me at all we don't know this of course so women have entered into the political Arena on Mouse in the last say 50 years something like that they become a political force we don't know if the female ethos scales right so if the female ethos is intimate especially in relationships say to the infant mother diet but maybe in with regard to personal relationship as well as well that might have a a scalability limit so Ben Shapiro told me well I run my family like it's a communist Utopia it's to each according to his need from each according to his ability well that doesn't scale and isn't obvious to me that that instinctive female ethos scales politically now you might say well of course it counts like no no no no no no no no no don't let's not get the card before the horse here human beings are the only creatures who can scale their social organizations the way we manage it and that scaling is a consequence of the manner in which men interact with one another that's the whole claim of those who criticize the patriarchy that masculine ethos scales now it's a bit impersonal it's a bit distant it doesn't have the same intimate nature as say the mother infant Bond but there's no evidence at all that that Central feminine ethos scales now we're experimenting with that can it scale it's like well do we transform the world into infants and caretakers and predators and if we do that is that going to sustain itself I would say the evidence isn't very it's not obvious to me that that's either scalable or iterable it's a deep problem and it's one that no one will address well yeah these are the sort of issues we don't really discuss in any meaningful way that the trends we're seeing whether they're desirable and you've spoken about the the rates of depression the rates of suicide we're seeing in these prosperous peaceful Nations which should be you know Heaven on Earth and yet there's this deep um identity crisis yeah where is that come from is it that lack of responsibility lack of meaning in life I think it's I think it is that to a large degree it's it's a consequence of something like a pathologically prolonged immaturity because I do think that the meaning that sustains and that iterates and unified socially is based on an ethos of responsibility that's the advantage to maturity and and you can certainly put forward the question well why should you grow up that's the Eternal question of Peter Pan and I think the answer to that is because all things considered it's much better to grow up well what does better mean it's a better game it's more sustainable it's more social uniting it's more productive it's more generous all of that and and I don't think we're I don't think we know that well enough consciously we can't communicate that or haven't been able to communicate that effectively to young people certainly for a long time it's at least since the early 60s that there's been anything like a cultural consensus that that even should be communicated to young people and then you know you have the corporate dollars chasing the childhood and teenage Market teenagers have disposable income they're a target of a lot of messaging and so the elevation of adolescence to something like an ideal has also been driven by corporate interests and people often I remember when I was a teenager people would say these are the best years of your life and I looked around at my friends and I thought God I hope not because nobody I know is the least bit happy we have this elevation of this immature adolescent unfinished identity as the apotheosis right and it's all downhill from when you're 16. it's like God that's a dismal View and and I also don't believe that it's true it's it's fundamentally false and it's very demoralizing for young people because if they can't see in any advantage in being an adult or if there is no advantage why would you bother growing up and certainly men who are bailing out of the Enterprise on Mars that's their attitude it's like well I don't want to play that game I'll just I'm done you're not going to reward me for taking on responsibility you're going to punish me for doing so it's like I'll just go play video games with my friends now you are very popular in the Muslim Community as well which I was surprised to learn you've got a lot of uh readers and listeners in that Community but you cop some criticism because you had a message about um Muslims coming together getting over that sectarian divide why do you think there was a strong reaction to that there was well I think it was a bit unsophisticated what I did so I think there were some grounds for the criticism what I was what I was trying to put forth and have been trying to put forth in my say Interfaith dialogue is look Jews Christians Muslims if you think each other the enemy you're not paying attention you got bigger fish to fry if you think other people of the book are your primary competitors you're living you're living in a dream world because the the woke atheistic reductionist materialists pose a way greater threat to the Integrity of your religious Traditions than other people of the book let's say and so and then I was also trying to make the case in that message to Muslims that the proper Jihad might be something like get your house in order right you've got sectarian divides within your own Community well why don't you Rectify them and if you want to advertise Islam as the saving doctrine of the world then be a Muslim so compelling that people are voluntarily inclined to imitate you that's the right Jihad and that's what I was attempting to communicate you know in a rather awkward way and because I did it somewhat awkwardly it got criticized as high-handed but it was okay it went fine it didn't interfere with my attempts to continue speaking and I also think it was motivated to some degree because there are Muslim leaders who are irritated about the fact that I'm popular among Muslim young people because I'm not a Muslim and so that's annoying and just like it's annoying to the Christians that I won't come out and Proclaim my Christian faith let's say um they'd rather it was someone from within the community but C'est La Vie you know I'm the ethical Outsider in an archetypal sense and that's how it is do you feel a sense of responsibility given your popularity in in the Muslim Community to Muslim women because their plight is very different to women in the west um seeing right now in Iran and Uprising amongst women who are fighting against the hijab laws we know really Muslim majority countries women don't have equal rights like we enjoy in the west do you feel any sense of responsibility there to um perhaps speak up on on their behalf as well well I have been reaching out to protesters in the in Iran I we haven't been able to arrange a podcast so far unfortunately for a variety of reasons logistic and otherwise I've been doing what I can since I've been back on Twitter to retweet messages from Iran when I have the opportunity to do that I would say my responsibility where's the center of my responsibility I believe that policy that re relies on compulsion is bad policy and I don't think that forcing women to behave in a certain way forcing them is an optimal strategy I mean we do know for example that one of the best predictors of socioeconomic development in a in a emerging economy is the rights according to women and that's very interesting and I would say that's probably because perhaps because that's something like an indicator of how open the culture is to novel and revolutionary ideas if you can't tolerate your own women the probability that you'll be able to experiment with the ideas that might lead to creative renovation is extremely low and so it looks to me like the extension of education and the right to engage in voluntary associations to women is overwhelmingly a net good now I say that also understanding that the more traditionalist communities which include many Muslim communities are leery of that notion of freedom from tyranny becoming extended to the point where it's well everything goes because that's where We've Ended up in the west and that's just not a good idea I did a seminar in Exodus recently with a number of Scholars which the daily wire plus is releasing tomorrow on the 25th of November and people might find that interesting one of the things that we discussed in that regard was what God told Moses to tell the Tyrant pharaoh and you this is a civil rights rallying cry let my people go everyone knows that phrase but that isn't what God Said he said two things he said let my people go so that they may serve me in the wilderness right and that's actually the second half of that is just as important as the first half because to be completely free from constraint you might think well that's the absence of tyranny it's like well it is but it's but it it's also the presence of the desert you know the Israelites get lost in the desert they're aimless they're wandering they don't know which way is up well that's freedom without principle that's freedom without without the rules of the game being properly intact to serve God in the wilderness is to move from the compulsion of tyranny to a principled motive being and then the question Rises what's the optimal principle mode of being and part of that's examined in The Exodus story as well it's part of the mystery that the entire biblical Corpus is trying to solve but it's not just it's not hedonic freedom to pursue every momentary whim and when the traditionalists conservatives and let's say Muslim traditionalists Orthodox Jews traditional Christian thinkers look at the hedonistic tilt of the liberal West they can't separate that from the Clarion call let's say to free women from their oppression and you can understand that because proper freedom isn't hedonistic whim that's just chaos that's two that's immaturity of a radical sword it's not self-maintaining or self-advancing it isn't the basis for a stable society and the traditionalists have every reason to view that push from the West the idiot West with extreme skepticism and that also means that in some sense the radicals who advocate for for radical Freedom are their own worst enemies because they give Freedom itself the kind of bad name that enables the more tyrannical conservative types say on the religious front plenty of ethical justification to maintain their iron grip I've been watching kamani on Twitter and he's an anti-chaos guy you know the strength of the state and why is that attractive well it's partly attractive because people look at the hedonistic immaturity of the West and they think well that doesn't look like a solution and they're right so then well then you have a complex question well what's the proper solution what does it mean to follow the dictates of the highest Spirit as you sojourn through the Wilderness it's like well conservatives better figure out what that means because that's the message they need to deliver to Lead the Way Forward properly to be the proper antithesis to the utopian hedonistic globalists let's say and that plays into how you became well known around the world because you warned about the excesses of the trans movement about this submission um to to language not seeding linguistic territory to radicals and what you've warned about just a few years ago are you shocked by how far we've come since then I mean did you think it would become that advanced the excesses of the of the you saw it coming well I told the Senate that if they confused confused young people about their sex they would produce a psychogenic epidemic there's a literature on such things going back 300 years and so imagine that there are a subset of ten young female adolescents so women hit puberty younger than men so they're not as they're not as mature when the burden of adult sexuality descends upon them and women are very harshly judged for their appearance much more so than men although men are very harshly judged for their what would perceive proclivity for productive generosity let's say so there's harshness on both sides but women definitely bear the brunt of that on the physical attractiveness side and so girls are more prone to negative emotion than boys for reasons we've already discussed and a lot of that's body centered and a lot of girls really struggle with that and it makes them anxious and depressed and and and wondering about their identity which you should wonder about when you're transforming from a child into an adult obviously you're going to worry about your identity well a lot of those young women are barely hanging on so what do you do confuse them further so what's the consequence well a number of them just they're just done they just descend into utter mad chaos and you produce an epidemic well I knew that was coming it was absolutely crystal clear I told the first trans activists who opposed me you think I'm your enemy I'm not I just know that what you're doing will not even work by your own standards I know it and we are seeing these D transitioners already yeah and there's a thousand lawsuits against the Tavistock clinic in the UK and I do wonder I mean is this some Modern form of gay conversion therapy because a lot of these kids are confused and they're gay and they're being told no you're not gay you know the world's capital for for sex change therapy probably Iran yeah because you can't be gay but you can be friends right well that's worth thinking about for about five years yeah no kidding that's really so like who would have ever guessed that that was going to happen right that's so miraculously surreal but yeah it's a huge problem sure if you're uh if you're a confused adolescent adolescent one of the potential sources of your confusion is say your homosexual proclivity well that's going to add to your doubt about the viability of your biological form it's like well on under the surgeon's knife for you oh it's a complete catastrophe it's a catastrophe but it has so captured the culture I mean up until recently until Elon Musk took over Twitter and reinstated your account we'll talk about that but you couldn't even State certain biological facts on Twitter without being permanently banned I mean this is uh things that are very much mainstream thought are almost taboo to say in the media or social media how does how do conservatives how do people believe in biological fact fight back against this um that's generally a local question right because usually when a problem like this makes itself manifest it makes itself manifest in the particulars of your life so maybe you have a child who's now exhibiting signs of gender confusion because of what they've been taught at school well now you've got yourself a problem so how do you solve it well who sits on your school board is it you or is it the person to whom you've abdicated responsibility because you were so cynical about the political process that you never participated so here's a rule all the political responsibility you abdicate will be will be will be gathered up and used against you by those who are tyrannical right well so do we maintain our civic responsibility in the west no so what happened well the petty tyrants gathered all the power to themselves and now you have a problem your child is deeply and suicidally Confused and being aided and abetted in that confusion by people equally confused and also malevolent well now you got yourself problem what do you do about that well who knows you take your child out of school do you start to fight against the school board do you learn to be articulate do you adopt your civic responsibility do you take politics more seriously do you stop thinking that the domain of ideas is only for Eggheads you know there's lots of soul-searching that needs to go on when you see this sort of twist in your Society but the conservatives have for a long time almost vacated the field when it comes to the so-called culture wars and we have seen the left's March it's not just through Academia anymore it's in private institutions it's in corporations Hollywood is it far too advanced for there to be a correction or a reversal no there will eventually be a reversal the question is how much intervening damage are we willing to sustain before that Correctional occurs and the answer is you know people say well the pendulum swings back it's like yeah sometimes when it swings back it has Razor's Edge and it takes a lot of people with it when it's swinging you know Venezuela will eventually correct course but how many people will die as a consequence so that's just not that's not a useful solution what's the solution do you have something to say that you're not saying if if you do then it's your fault this is your fault it's your problem and you might say well I'm too afraid to talk it's like fair enough how afraid are you not to talk you know people say to me frequently they compliment me on my bravery and I think you don't understand I'm not brave I don't I don't like conflict I'm way more afraid of losing control of my tongue than I am of the consequences of saying what I have to say because I know what happens when we allow other people to control our tongues it's not good it's not good it's hell itself and so of course it's Troublesome to suffer the slings and arrows of Outrageous Fortune when you say what you have to say it's like that's fine try not saying what you have to say well that'll be okay in the moments like yeah in the moment but unfortunately your whole life isn't in the moment no but you can understand like I I think I can understand why people still hesitate whether they're someone with profile or someone who's just on a Facebook page and they don't want to State even a very mainstream opinion that's not Progressive because there's a real cost there and is the cost worth saying what you feel um well that's one of the fundamental questions of life is that well so we have a sense in the west there's a Doctrine Doctrine in the West very Central Doctrine It's associated with the idea of logos and the Divine word the truth will set you free well true or false you might say well if I say the truth I'm going to get into trouble fair enough but if you abide by the LIE and so one of the things you can do instantly is disabuse yourself of the notion that there's a zero trouble pathway it's like you're in trouble both ways like real trouble you get to pick your trouble that's all you've got you get to pick your trouble now in in my situation the situation my family has been in we've been subject to intense attempts at cancellation dozens of times some of them have ridiculous intensity and duration and we've learned that if we had been careful and so that's important um I I do my best not to say things that I believe are false and so generally it's been very difficult for those who want to counsel me to actually point to something I said to manage the cancellation and so that's that's been very helpful that's a matter of stepping carefully but we've also discovered that if we can tolerate the strain without an apology let's say without backtracking it will inevitably reverse not not just not work that's the Streisand Effect right but reverse so the people who've come after me most harshly in some sense Kathy Newman say on Channel 4 which was kind of comical and then Helen Lewis for I believe it was GQ I think that interview has 50 million views and so she did everything she could to lay Serpentine traps for me and it was very stressful and very high intensity dance because if I would have said the wrong thing all the moral virtue would have accrued to her and I would have been done but the consequence instead was that she was my best friend just like Kathy Newman was and so you might say well if you say what you have to say and I would would say Don't just shoot your mouth off in cautiously there's no sense getting fired stupidly and leaving your family to starve you have to be strategic about these things be a lifetime commitment not a momentary whim that now you're going to you know Bumble out the truth it might be a little late for that in your situation right but you have to decide in your life you have to decide are you better served by the truth or by the LIE of silence or deception and those are your options that's it that's all you've got and I believe that it isn't even so much that I believe that the truth will set you free although I do I know for certain that it's adherence to the lie that produces the totalitarian tyranny of hell I know that for certain the core of the totalitarian state is the LIE and then the degree to which you participated now with your silence or your outright falsehoods is the degree to which you are an avatar of the spirit of the totalitarian tyranny and and that's if you have if you have any degree of insight at all you see well that's that's a that's something hellish that thing that has dominion over you that temptation to lie that's that's the spirit that rules over hell well you should be way more afraid of that like and I mean like infinitely more afraid of that the truth might strip you bare but but if you fall under the Dominion of the of the ruler of the pathway to Hell there is literally nothing worse than that and he might say well that's hyperbole it's like really it is a 100 million dead under Mao hyperbole I don't think so well with what right now this uh fascinating phenomenon world's richest man saying he wants to restore truth to Twitter trust to Twitter it's the Public Square now it's that's how people communicate fine news you were personally impacted by Twitter's uh left leaning sensorious ways you've now been restored what impact do you think Twitter becoming an even playing field will have for who knows I mean I'm hoping I know people who know Elon Musk very well who've worked for him and their and these are very able people to say the least and they're they really admire him he has the ability to do exactly what he did he went into Twitter and he said he's a good Observer of The Prado principle a small minority of people do all the productive works like all you people you're gone and he just does it it's like and everybody who's whiny and complaining whines and complains about that and no doubt some people who were doing a credible job were also let go because it's a pretty broad swath let's say but he's got rid of 75 percent of the people and Twitter is still working with record traffic right exactly and so I think he will and apparently he's also put the boots to the people who are track trafficking in child sexual exploitation already incredible right no kidding no kidding in incredible in two ways incredible that he did it but even more incredible that he could do it that fast and that it hadn't been done right right so and musk also it seems to me that the evidence is quite clear that he not only has a pretty good eye but he is capable of learning so he'll experiment and he'll learn from his experiments and we'll see if he can clean up Twitter that's tough I'm afraid deeply afraid that virtualization enables psychopathy and that that might be a fatal problem socially as we move towards a more virtualized world it's not easy to keep the Machiavellian Psychopathic narcissistic sadists under control they're a small proportion of the population but it's all about them and their short-term needs and they'll do anything to make those Paramount it looks to me that when we virtualize the world we take all the constraints off those people and that's not good so for example on social media all the hand all the powers in the hands of the accusers wow that's not good you know believe all women it's like yeah fair enough except it's believed most women as soon as it's all it's like yeah what about the Psychopaths well they don't exist it's like oh you wouldn't believe you wouldn't say that if you ever met one so if you think that all people who are malevolent are only victims you're naive and fortunate and you better wake up because one of these days someone like that's going to come and knock on your door and you are going to be one sorry person soul and it's very difficult to keep that five percent of the population regulated all their regulation is external because they have no internal regulation and I don't see that we have any ability to regulate that online and we reward it right we reward it with attention we monetize it this could be see I actually think that's what's driving polarization I don't think polarization is real in some sense I think it's it's all driven by undue attention paid to dark tetrad Machiavellian narcissistic Psychopathic sadists and and that's polluting because they communicate in an untrammeled manner in the virtual world and because we're so virtualized we think that's how the world is it isn't but but we're reacting to it as if it is oh definitely oh yeah anywhere anywhere where there's a lot of public attention available yeah yeah politics entertainment media anywhere where people have the privilege of being in the public eye yeah yeah that's exactly the Psychopaths will invade that for sure now that doesn't mean that all the people in those Industries have that characteristic I would say that's a lurking Temptation for people who have a talent in that direction right because every temperament is going to come with its own Temptations and to be a person like you say although I'm not saying about this about you necessarily although it's probably true about you too is that you're very likely to be extroverted and disagreeable if you weren't extroverted you wouldn't want you wouldn't have that verbal fluency and you wouldn't be comfortable in the public eye and if you weren't disagreeable you wouldn't challenge people okay so what's the problem with being extroverted disagreeable well it tilts you towards narcissism now there are ways that can be regulated maybe you're in enmeshed in good social uh uh Arrangements right so you have a husband say who helps keep you sane and children and friends and they help box you in and maybe you're conscientious and and and so there are there are and like I said every temperamental variant has its attendant Temptations but it's definitely the case that social media Rewards extra disagreeable extroverted people and it also disinhibits all the Temptations that are associated with that it's not good and the research on this is becoming quite clear by the way so we know that uh female hyper users of Instagram are also their sadistic Machiavellian Psychopathic and narcissistic and they optimize for short-term mating strategies so they're promiscuous and that's a marker for anti-social Behavior so anti-social people broadly speaking have more sexual partners they start engaging in sex earlier they're more callous in their utilization of themselves than others and so would you call that toxic femininity is there a such thing as toxicity we know what toxic femininity is it's the female version of anti-social behavior is reputation savaging yeah gossip innuendo backbiting and females are very females can be very good at that now men can do that too and they do especially on social media but it's definitely the case that social media enables female anti-social type Behavior clearly and so it scales we're talking about you know whether the feminine ethos scales feminine pathology scales magnificently on social media and so God only knows what the consequence of that's going to be you know and you know that's part of cancel culture it's like well we can't confront you directly but we can sure take you out behind the scenes and that's everyone familiar with Junior High culture among teenage girls knows what that's like absolutely one last question um on climate change because you gave that brilliant speech um I just want to know how um well I want to ask about the psychology around climate change activism because it's become an issue of morality as opposed to practicality and how again do conservatives combat this notion that if you're not doing everything you can to slash emissions then you're morally uh compromised right you don't care about the planet well you ask more intelligent questions it's like well what do you mean care about the planet first of all that's pretty vague it's like you really think that all of our problems can be reduced to excess carbon dioxide production we have other problems well here's the problem 20 million people die a year because of indoor pollution well is that a problem a way bigger problem than climate change by the looks of it it's a big enough problem well if not there's others lots of children are still starving we could provide them with nutrition at a fraction of the cost that we're planning to expend not doing a very good job of mediating our carbon output I think the central issue for conservatives is to stop allowing the radicals to exploit you on the guilt front it's like no you're you're not moral because you're you think that the apocalypse that confronts this can be reduced to a single variable that you know what the variable is because that's how wise you are and that you know what the solution to that is end off also it's the apocalypse is all carbon dioxide and the Cure is end all fossil fuels is that that's what you think is it you know what that means that means you don't think it doesn't mean you're moral it certainly doesn't mean that I'm immoral if I oppose you there's way we've got way bigger fish to fry than than problems on the carbon dioxide front and yet you look at the U.N you look at right global leaders this seems to be the number one priority and we are seeing entire that's all that Psychopathic virtue signaling poll driven I know how these politicians operate they operate on the basis of they abdicate responsibility to idiot opinion polls and so they they stupidly sample public whim and then craft their policy to magnify their attractiveness to that whim it's so appalling I know perfectly well that that's what crafted covid policy in Canada during the pandemic it wasn't science I I know the people who were advising the people who are making the policies it's like was that any of that science no it was all opinion pool it was like what really yeah it was all opinion poor but does that scare you that there's that polling would show that that these illiberal policies that the human rights breaches were so popular yeah well people were afraid and they stampeded you know and what happened was we fall prey to the first actor phenomena so there was a pandemic and it was an Unbound problem how serious is this no one knows so it's an apocalypse right an apocalypse I suppose is a problem of unspecifiable significance it's a new apocalypse what do we do about that everything we can what does that mean well we don't know so then the Chinese totalitarians ACT first lock everyone down it's like oh we better lock everyone down brilliant you know have you looked at the death tolls in Sweden during the pandemic they're among the lowest in the European Union uh well much better that's right they don't have access deaths because they didn't destroy their Health Care system not stopping the pandemic it's just it's appalling it's appalling it was another another indication of the collapse of of sophisticated policy making into um a virtue signaling unidimensional problem it's like it's all about covid it's like yeah really not heart disease not cancer not chronic illness not the socialization of children not the education of children not the supply chain not in the maintenance of the economy not unemployment not the ballooning of the debt none of that it's just covet right now and isn't it so interesting that because it's just covid we get all the power yeah well you know excuse me if I'm a bit skeptical of your motivations and we can see still see the same thing unfolding in China they're just doubling down they still have a zero covid tolerance policy it's like great it's exactly what you'd expect from the Chinese Communist party do you think what we did during covert could Usher in our version of a social credit system oh yes definitely yeah yeah and that is highly probable and that it will be accepted by many people because again no they won't notice even yeah you can't believe how much people don't know these things when I went to the UK I talked to some people from the house of Lourdes this is within the last six months the most astute of the people sitting in the House of Lords had only become aware of the woke movement in the last 18 months oh yes you just can't believe how much this is not on people's radar not someone like you can't believe that at all because it's on your radar all the time that's not you live in a world that's on The Cutting Edge of this sort of thing it's like people have no idea it's like well why not have a digital passport I mean you know how convenient like fair enough and you can understand that wouldn't it be nice if we could pay for everything with our phones it's like wouldn't it be nice if the central government who's woke oriented and makes carbon dioxide remediation the priority knows exactly what you spend on everything so they can Target you tax wise with Precision it's like oh think about that it's like yeah yeah you sure didn't and oh yes it's highly probable it'll be in a miracle if we if we escape from that you can see these signs of this everywhere you know when you go through airports now there's a lot of automated barriers you show your passports like well these are automated barriers what if you can't go through them well that's the situation for many people in China it's like what are you going to do you can argue with the machine like you just cannot imagine how screwed you are there isn't it's way worse than anything Kafka ever imagined because at least with Kafka there was bureaucrats faceless though they may have been they were at least Still Human once the machines can lock you out you are in such trouble and we're speeding towards that with uh with an immense lack of of care Jordan Peterson always a pleasure thank you so much for joining me thank you very much for the interview

Channel: Sky News Australia

Views: 2,164,173

Keywords: 6316247432112, fblink, msn, opinion, politics, ritapanahi, world, yt

Id: gfGOSpg9Pds

Length: 64min 25sec (3865 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 28 2022