Identity Politics & The Marxist Lie of White Privilege | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson | SNC 2017

dr. Pearson's online self-help program the self authoring suite has been featured in O The Oprah Magazine on CBC Radio and on NPR's national website it has been helped it has helped over 150,000 people resolve the problem problems of their past and radically improve their future would you please welcome with me dr. Jordan B Peterson [Applause] thank thanks very much so today's theme is understanding and so what we're going to try to do build building on the last talk is to understand what's been happening I would say under the subsurface of easily perceptible reality and only the world manifests itself at many layers you can tell that when you get into an argument with someone especially someone that you love because partly what you start already you vote is exactly what the argument is about right you need to specify the level of analysis before you can move forward properly and specifying the level of analysis is a very difficult thing so I'm gonna try to specify I'm gonna try to make the case or I'm going to make the case mm-hmm that what we're seeing unfold around us right now in this era of increasing polarization is the consequence of a very serious war of ideas that's really been going on for I suppose a hundred and fifty years and in some ways longer than that and that it's necessary to understand the war of ideas to understand the polarization and maybe to see a road clear to ameliorating it talks entitled identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege and I want to make a very careful case for the bullet of that title because one thing that's useful to note is that there is no question that some people have more privileged than other people in fact you might make the case that every person has more privilege in some manner than any other than every other person so you have to give the devil his due so to speak that's a very important thing when you're dealing with ideas you can't just throw everything away even if it is part of something that you that you feel deeply is runs let's say contrary to you that runs contrary to your deepest moral instincts you have to give it its its place so you can formulate proper arguments so we're going to try to do that as well so we'll start with an analysis of the Marxist worldview and I'm going to try to get to the bottom of it to some degree so for Marx you could history itself could be viewed as a never-ending sequence of battles between the oppressed and the oppressor now Marx was more specific than that because he took an economic view of history a deeply materialistic view of history and believed that people were fundamentally motivated by economic motives I never did buy that because I think one of the problems with that theory is that it doesn't ever answer the question what it is that people value it takes it assumes value implicitly in and associates that with economic well-being but that's by no means obvious it's certainly not psychologically obvious that that's the case and it's not actually how people behave by the way from a psychological perspective so that's a big problem but it doesn't matter it's it's a theory that has at least some hypothetical explanatory power and no shortage of psychological attractiveness that's certainly the case so anyways the basic Marxist ideas I'm sure most of you know is that the social world in life itself is a battle between those who have and those who have who don't have and that the reason that those who have because they take it from those who do not have and that that's the most appropriate way to view history itself I suppose stemming back as far back as you can imagine and that it's also useful to think that way if you want to conceptualize the proper future because the proper future would be one in which that essentially unjust division would be eradicated so that everyone would be equal in some fundamental way and so that there wouldn't be an owning class and a working class let's say now you know I had some sympathy for that viewpoint when I was a kid and I think it does have to do with what the last speaker calls empathy the world's a rough place you know and there's no doubt that some people have it better at some times than other people and some people have it have lives that are so unbearably tragic that it beggars the imagination and other people seem to float through life with Neriah worry although I think that's also exaggerated because no matter how well-off you are economically you're still not really free from the fundamental tragedies of life right here your loved ones still get sick and and struggle through life and you're still subject to aging and eventually to death so it's not like even at the upper end of the distribution you're necessarily protected against the essential tragedy of life and I also think that that's another problem with the Marxist worldview is that it implicitly makes the case that the cause of human suffering is social injustice and and that that's true in some sense in that social injustice can amplify suffering but it's certainly not the cause of suffering the cause of suffering in some sense is life itself and its fundamental limitations and it's really important to make a distinction between those two things because otherwise you can easily be tempted to assume that you could bring the utopian if you only adjusted to sociological conditions properly and there's just no reason to assume that that's a reasonable perspective whatsoever as far as I can tell I think it's actually a form of existential cowardice to assume that because it doesn't grapple with the real problem and the real problem is that well the real problem is as religious people have stated over and over throughout recorded history is that life itself is is suffering that's a fundamental truth I mean it's certainly the truth for example that's well it's a Buddhist truth a fundamental Buddhist truth and it certainly graphically presented in the idea of the crucifixion so and that's a hard pill to swallow it's a bitter pill to swallow and it's comforting I supposed to think that if you just adjusted society properly that all that suffering would go away but there isn't really any evidence that that would occur now mm-hmm I read George Orwell when I was a kid probably about seventeen I wrote read a book called road to Wigan Pier which if you haven't read I would I would seriously recommend it's a it's a it's a great book it's in the same line in some sense as Animal Farm in 1984 although it's more journalistic wait Orwell went to this coal mining town in northern northern UK called Wigan Pier and documented the lives of the working-class coal miners who lived Erin I mean they to call their lives difficult it's like you're not even scratching the surface right I mean they were old by the time they were 40 most of them had no teeth by the time they were thirty they lived in abysmal conditions and the coal miners themselves who of course developed black lung quite early in their life had to crawl through short tunnels three and a half miles just to get to their eight-hour shift and then which was wasn't paid for them that was the commute fundamentally Orwell who was a rather tall man said that after 500 yards he could hardly stand up and of course then they had to I don't know you don't call this crowd crawling it's not exactly walking it's stooping I suppose it's not a normal form of ambulation but in any case they also had to do that after their eight-hour shift and I mean that's just the beginning and so you know Orwell who was he he engaged in the kind of argument that I think it's Bret Weinstein has coined the term steel man you know you can make a straw man out of your opposition which is a very bad idea because it weakens your ability to think but you can also make it steal man out of your opponent and so you even amplify the power of their arguments if you can manage it so that when you formulate a rejoinder the rejoined er is as powerful as it could possibly be and of course this is exactly what Orwell was doing he was saying look like if you had any sense you'd have compassion for these working-class people because their lives are just in almost indescribable brutal and but then you know in the last half of the book he wrote this for the left book club which was a socialist book publishing entity that put out I think a book a month and in the last half of the book he switched to an analysis of what he saw as the failure of of the Labour Party in in in the UK to attract as much attention as much support from the general population as you might predict given the dismal conditions of the working class and he wrote a line in there that I've never forgotten I'd been working for a mildly socialist party in Canada at the time I was about 16 you know Canada has a fairly long history of democratic socialism and and for a long time the democratic socialists were a genuine voice for the working-class the vote and the working-class needs a political voice I mean there's no doubt about that but Orwell but I noticed something when I went to the political conventions and what I noticed was that although many of the leaders that I saw met at that time because I have I had fortunate access for reasons I won't go into actually did seem to be genuinely concerned for the welfare of the working-class the lower level functionaries especially the activist types I didn't trust them when I when I when I met them I didn't like them they seemed to me to be mostly peevish and resentful rather and so they were motivated by something other than I would say sympathy for the working class and or walls or well said in last half of rode to Wigan here that it was obvious that the sort of tweed weary middle-class socialists that was typical of of the English socialists of that period didn't like the poor he just hated the rich and I never forgot that because well because that's what I had observed that I did that's that's what seemed it seemed to catalyze the intuition that I had and articulate fully articulate the intuition I had that there was something rotten in the state of Denmark and that what might be passing for empathy was actually masking something far darker and you know one thing you do if you're a sensible person is you kind of you kind of review you view your own positive motivations with a bit of skepticism you know so if you're running around proclaiming that you're full of empathy for the working class it's always worth giving some consideration to whether there's darker motives underneath your so-called saintly goodness because you know saintly goodness actually happens to be in rather short supply and so if you're laying out a claim to that you better be sure you're right you better be sure you've examined your conscience and of course people you don't people tend not to do that because it's a rather dismal affair examining your conscience and you tend to find out that there's many dark things going under this on under the surface that you'd rather not admit and that's certainly the case in our world right now so I didn't I I knew then at that point and that really removed me from the political sphere completely for I would say 40 years because I learned that I didn't know what the hell I was talking about which is a painful thing to learn but in any case I was quite convinced by orals analysis that there was something other than brotherly compassion motivating the hype the theory that the world could be properly divided into the oppressed and the oppressor and that all of the suffering of humanity could be laid at the feet of that division because there's something convenient about it you know especially if you identify yourself as the oppressed because it gives you a more instantaneous moral stature and it gives you the opportunity to act on that hypothetical moral stature and and then I started to study what happened in the Soviet Union so I'm and I'll tell you about that in a minute but I'd like to contrast a bit the idea this so this would be the classic idea of suffering in the West compared to the Marxist idea and so you know in some sense suffering comes into the world from a mythological or symbolic perspective when Adam and Eve become self conscious in the Garden of Eden they become self conscious they become aware of their own nakedness right and to become aware of your own nakedness is to become aware of you vulnerability that's why people have nightmares about being naked on stage you know and to know that you're naked is also to know to be aware of that is to also understand your limitations in time and space that's also why Adam and Eve developed the knowledge of good and evil at the same time which is a very difficult thing to figure out because you see if you know that you're naked and vulnerable and you know that you can be hurt which is the same thing then you know how to hurt other people and you know that consciously and that's something that characterizes human beings in a way that no animal is characterized no animal has that knowledge to mean animals or predators but they're not cruel now human being can be cruel because a human being knows how he or she himself or herself can be hurt and hurt badly and so you can't become self-conscious of your own vulnerability and and your and your mortality without simultaneously becoming a moral agent essentially and so that I found that very interesting but anyways we all know the story what happens as soon as Adam and Eve have their eyes open and make these terrible discoveries they're they're cast out of paradise I mean and and that's a story about how painful it is to learn something that's deep and true because almost always when you learn something deep and true it's it breaks your current state of complacency and knocks you for a loop and maybe you maybe you recover and maybe you don't and I would say the entire corpus of the biblical works after the fall is an attempt to put Humpty Dumpty back together again that's one way of thinking about it or to return to the Paradise estate or to determine how that might be the case in any case God casts out of and Eve out of paradise and one of the things he says he then he explains to both of them exactly what what their lives are going to consist of and what they're going to consist of is a fair bit of suffering and work knowing for the woman it's it's work related to childbearing in many ways but also a destiny of something approximating subjugation because of her vulnerable state she's going to be under the dominion of the man and and I don't think God necessarily says that is a good thing I mean it's a curse that the whole post-lab Sarah discussion with God is a series of curses and the man man of course he doesn't really get off much easier because God points out that he's going to have to work for his living which is something that only human beings do in some real sense you know we we forego current pleasures in order to what to to to ensure that the future isn't as horrible as it could be that's a reasonable way of putting it and so in that document which I'm making reference to because it's at the cornerstone of the ideas of Western civilization suffering is something that's endemic to life and of course you have a choice about what you're going to do about that one of the things you're supposed to do about that I suppose in principle if you're a Christian is accept that voluntarily which is a which is a very terrible thing to do and that's associated I suppose with the imitation of Christ and with the idea that everyone has a cross to bear it's the idea is that you have to accept that voluntarily right and take individual responsibility for it and that's no joke I mean that's a that's a big that's a hell of a thing to lay at the feet of someone that's vulnerable and mortal you know it's you might think that it's only this sort of burden that a God could take on voluntarily anyway so suffering is built into the structure of existence and there's no one there to blame except the human what original sin I suppose that's one way of thinking about it they the proclivity of human beings to be self conscious and to undermine ourselves constantly it's it's late at the feet of our intrinsic being it's not someone else's fault now you see that also laid out in the story of Cain and Abel which is a remarkable story it's only about a paragraph long it's one of the most amazingly condensed stories that I've ever seen ever come across and Cain really tries to blame his suffering on God know his sacrifices aren't accepted he doesn't really know why this story kind of implies maybe he's not putting his old heart into it you know and he's very angry about that about the fact that he's breaking himself in half you know offering up these vegetables and God is rejecting them and whereas Abel it's like he makes his sacrifices God smiles on them and everybody likes him and you know he's a good guy too which is really annoying because if you're successful you should at least have the decency to be a jerk about it so you know K and K and gos has a little chat with God and he basically says you know what kind of stupid university do you make here I am breaking myself in half with all my sacrifices no offering denying myself pleasure in the present so that I can so that I can regulate the future just like I'm supposed to because it's the sacrificial discovery that's equivalent to this discovery of time that's really something to know and you know God basically tells them that it's his own damn fault that he sacrifices are being rejected and that he's allowed sin to come into his life and in some sense interact with them creatively there's a sexual metaphor in there it's as if cain has invited sin into his house and and and mated with it in some sense and given rise to some monstrous thing that's now possessing him so it's a creative union with with resentment and hatred and and so God basically says well you know why don't you go get your own house in order before you criticize the structure of being and that's exactly what Cain doesn't want to hear and he's not very happy about it in his countenance Falls right and then what does he do he goes off and kills Abel and and then you know and and and and he kills his own ideal so that's a hell of a thing to do to yourself you have to be pretty enraged before you'll destroy your own ideal because your life is basically over at that point and you know God says or Cain says to God after God gets wind of this that his punishment is more than he can bear and then you know the next story is the flood and it's not accidental that those two stories are juxtaposed in that manner because if that way of thinking propagates through the social world which happens to Cain's descendants by the way then all hell breaks loose and everything's washed away and so you know the story set up so interesting that you you have this initial description of the emergence of suffering into the world and then right next the next story is the division of humanity into two warring forces essentially one of which is willing to make the proper sacrifices whatever those happen to be I know and modern people make sacrifices all the time we've just I call it we've transformed it into a psychological reality you know you you make sacrifices so your children can attend attend the University and immigrant families first-generation immigrants sacrifice the possibilities they have their home country for a better life for their children and we all make bargains with the future you know and and that's a particularly human thing to do and sometimes our sacrifices don't seem to be accepted and that can make us very bitter and you know that's the Cain and Abel story is a story of that bitterness and there's a real reason for the bitterness and resentment but the story makes it quite clear that that is not the proper way to react everything everything is washed away if enough people act that way about the structure of reality and so you know thing you might ask yourself too is well how do you know about the Marxist how do you know if most of them had sympathy for the working-class you know maybe that was genuine and how can you distinguish that from resentment of this successful let's say why however whatever means are along whatever dimension that's defined and I would say by the murders so that's how because it seems to me and this is a case that Solzhenitsyn made very very clearly in the Gulag Archipelago which is a book that every high school student in the United States should read and none do so none of them know about any of this and that's an absolute crime and it's a consequence of the I would say leftist domination of the of the education system because it's a crucial document maybe the crucial document of the 20th century and we fought a whole cold war over those issues we put the planet at risk to to lay that genocide aleady ology to rest and we haven't done it and that's worth thinking about but you know all you'd think and so Solzhenitsyn you know he knew that there were that ideas had had other ideas wrapped up inside them in some sense that an idea had a manner of unfolding in time and space in some sense like a computer program once he put it into a computer it it had its its internal logic would reveal itself across time and space inevitably and when the internal logic of Marxism revealed itself then how of millions of people died and you know it'd be okay if it was just maybe you know well it happened in Russia nowhere else but it happened across the Soviet you didn't happened across China it happened in Vietnam it happened in Cambodia it's like how many damn examples do you need before you think that something's rotten in the state of Denmark we still got North Korea to deal with I mean what kind of place is that everyone there are starved what all the way through the 90s essentially it's a monstrous state and it could still embroil us in an absolute catastrophe so anyways as far as I'm concerned the historical evidence is in and that that the idea that the Marxist doctrine is genuinely based on sympathy for the working class is elides it's a history itself has shown that that's false now you know maybe the revolutionaries back in 1917 you know they didn't know they were you know I mean there was trouble in Russia in 1917 right I mean it was an ugly situation and maybe they had they had sufficient justification to assume that their utopian vision was a historical possibility I'm not convinced of that by the way but I think you could make that case I think they were motivated by resentment and hatred right from the beginning but you could make the case that at least they also had the benefit of ignorance but we don't have that now it's like I don't know how much proof you need but you need more proof than the 20th century provided then the next layer of proof is going to be the annihilation of everything because we came very very close to that a number of times especially in the late 20th century so I I'm I'm buying the resentment and hatred story over the we're all possessed by empathy for our fellow suffering human beings story so especially because I don't think that you get to be good just by adopting the proper ideology I don't think that's how it works that's a little bit too simple-minded in my estimation being good in a genuine sense is a very difficult thing you know it means the opposite of being evil and like if you don't think evil exists then you're not awake and the opposite of evil since evil is so attractive is something very very difficult to attain and you don't get to portray yourself as good just because you learned in a week the tenants of let's say postmodern neo-marxist theory which a week is about all it takes to learn them in fact you could probably learn them in an afternoon it was sufficiently propagandistic well so what happened well you know this story I mean it's a terrible story the more you read about what happened in the Soviet Union I'm not as expert in what happened in China although the death the death toll in China was larger than the death toll in the Soviet Union and Mao was an absolute monster well I mean first of all you know the Russians then this is where the story gets interesting this happened right in the 20s you know so the first one of the first thing this that happened after the Russian Revolution they're gonna collectivise agriculture and you know it wasn't that long before that that the Russian the Russian farmers were serfs right there basically slaves for all intents and purposes they've got freed you know 30 years before that something like that nope no time historically speaking and so a couple of them had struck a small percentage of them had struggled up through the serfdom through the post serfdom era and had managed to become competent agriculturalists competent farmers and you know maybe they owned a house and a little bit of livestock and maybe they could even hire someone you know so they're they're the petty petty bourgeoisie and in the hateful communist lingo and and you know the Communists unleashed the full force of their propagandistic nightmare on them and they rounded them all up and raped them and shot them and sent them to Siberia in the middle of the winter with no food and killed them all and killed all the successful farmers in the Ukraine for example and that was an absolute catastrophe and you know it's really interesting to look at the details because all you have to do is imagine a little town if you know anything about little towns you know maybe there's a couple of people whose success puts them ahead above the rest you know and then there's the people in the town who are useless and don't do any work and aren't going to look at the mirror and think that their use listened resentful and cruel they're gonna look in the mirror and say that they're the victims of injustice and that the reason these people are successful is because they're crooked and they've stolen everything and then the Communist Indian intellectuals ride into town and give them an intellectual story that matches their feelings of resentment and all hell breaks loose and that's exactly what happened and you know you don't have to use your imagination very much just to understand how awful that would be and it was even more awful than you think and then of course what happened was because there was no more farmers left who knew how to farm and collectivization was an absolute bloody catastrophe six million Ukrainians died in the 1930s you know and if you went out and pulled your high school students in the United States I bet you you wouldn't find one in 20 who knows about that and you got to think what the hell's going on how can we not know about that it wasn't very long ago you know it was a death toll roughly equivalent to the Holocaust now I mean the Holocaust had its own set of unique horrors but there wasn't it was no what happened to the Ukrainians in the 1930s that was no cakewalk and that was just the beginning right you know and I was kind of blamed on Stella's cult of personality but that was that's a what post hoc rationalization for the catastrophic failure of a resentful ideologies and of course there was the 1956 crackdown on Hungarian the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and despite the what would you say most pious wishes of the bloody Western intellectuals the Russians the Soviets kept doing exactly what they shouldn't have done if they were proper moral agents but the intellectuals generally speaking were to hidebound and arrogant and resentful to notice what was happening in to comment on it with very very very few exceptions Orwell had a hell of a time getting Whig and peer published you know it wasn't the sort of thing that the left book club wanted to hear and it just got worse from there and I mean it's not like people didn't know in the West Malcolm Muggeridge had documented what happened to the Culex pretty nicely in the 1920s because you know it was complicated we might have hoped that the Russian Revolution would succeed and then the Russians were allies in World War two and you know the whole Spanish Civil War messed things up from a conceptual perspective but it wasn't like the intellectuals the intellectuals could have known or well knew other people knew Malcolm Muggeridge knew so it was head burying and in and in a terrible ways right looking the other way when massive crimes were being committed and the intellectuals in the West bear bear particular responsibility for that so anyways look by by the late 1960s however the stories that had come uh noted that come out of the Soviet Union had had began and the historical evidence for their misbehavior had become so overwhelming and so awful that even the most stubborn of idiot French intellectuals had to admit that there was something up right and that would include people like jean-paul sartre who really didn't repudiate the communist party till approximately 1968 he wasn't a card-carrying member but he was certainly a sympathizer and there were no shortage of sympathizers for Marxism among the French intellectuals far longer than there is any moral justification for that and again I attribute that kind of willful blindness not only to a tremendous intellectual arrogance but also to to the unwillingness to cast aside their essential resentment so so what so then you know and there certainly even if it even if communism Marxism wasn't completely dead as a moral force by the 1960s it certainly was dead by 1973 1974 when Solzhenitsyn published to do like archipelago because that was a book of unparalleled moral force and it absolutely demolished whatever moral and intellectual credibility communism had ever had by documenting the causal relationship between the underlying doctrines and the genocide of consequences that followed and they ate and Solzhenitsyn did it in a way that well no one has ever been able to repudiate I mean people will call him a reactionary now and and and cast aspersions on his on his name but that doesn't mean the address the underlying argument because they don't because the cat because it's not addressable and so you know so Smithson took an axe to the to the rotting tree and was one of the forces that that had it fall and you know that was very disturbing to the French intellectual types they weren't the only people who were trying to propagate the remnants of Marxism in in the West there's the Frankfurt School that was made made reference to earlier although I think the post modernists are a much more insidious force than the Frankfurt School because their Marxism is more hidden but they basically pulled off an intellectual sleight of hand which enabled the Western intellectuals many Western intellectuals to continue with their narcissistic resentful utopian visions under a slightly different name and that's where we got post-modernism and that's where we got identity politics and so what's post-modernism exactly and well that's a tricky thing you know it's like defining existentialism or phenomenology or any of these other philosophical movements they're great social transformations and they manifest themselves in many places and to try to reduce them to a set number of principles is a very difficult thing it's it slips out of your hands and so any attempt to define is also an oversimplification but nonetheless we'll proceed with our oversimplification because we have to do that to some degree to think so post-modernism is an attitude of skepticism irony towards and rejection of grand narratives lots of problem it's grand narratives that hold cultures together so it's fine if you reject them and you can also point out that their narratives and you can also point out that they're in some sense grand fictions and I'm an admirer of fiction because fiction can tell you the truth sometimes in a way that fact count right otherwise we wouldn't read fiction there would be no such thing as great literature and so to call something fiction in some sense is not the same as calling it not true and that's a very important distinction to make but they reject grand narratives when that's a problem because it's the grand narratives the unitas it's certainly narratives that orient us as individuals it's shared narratives upon which our society is based and it's great shared narratives that allow us to exist in peace within those narratives so to call those into question is no joke you don't do it trivially and it's no different as far as I'm concerned then playing oppressor or oppressed politics in some sense because the Marxists what they were trying to do was called the grand narrative let's say of Western liberalism and capitalism into question and the post modernists did that under a different guise now there were many factors that led to the rise of post-modernism and I'll talk about some of the other ones but there also reject ideologies and and universalism including objective notions of reason that's a problem human nature that's a problem social progress absolute truth and objective reality well you know that's a long list of things to criticize right so we go were you to walk through that again they criticized the notion of objective reality well you know objective reality is a very very complicated thing and our knowledge of it is approximate at best but to criticize the idea that it exists in and of itself is to is to destabilize us at the afta at the most fundamental possible level and I would say that the the fact that that destabilization is an inevitable consequence of postmodern thinking is actually the reason for the postmodern thinking right because because it's a transformation let's and I'm not inventing the idea that post-modernism is a transformation of Marxism Derrida who I would say is the lead jester who who was running the post modernist circus was it has stated very clearly that his thought was a transformation and development further development of Marxism so well objective notions of reason well unless we share no sense of reason we can't communicate we reject ideas of human nature okay well they did that in the communist countries there's no human nature well what does that mean means I can make you into anything I want that's a big problem you know because it also replaces human nature with someone's theory of human nature and if you think you have a theory of human nature that's as grand as nature itself then you're exactly the sort of arrogant totalitarian that's going to produce the kinds of theories that devastated the Soviet Union and China you just do not know enough you you can't map yourself you don't know enough about other people so even if you have a coherent theory of human nature and it's relatively informed let's say scientifically it's it's fragmentary and partial at best and there's no way that you can predicated an entire political system a social system on that you're just too ignorant so it's a big problem to criticize the idea of human nature and that's where you get the idea of social constructionism in part two which is a which is a terrible terrible force that's invading I would say invading our culture at especially at mid-level bureaucracy level and certainly in the education system you know the idea that all of the elements of our identity are nothing but the consequences of enculturation I mean the under the underlying pathology of that belief is the justification for the people who hold the belief that they have the right to mold human identity in the image that they want to have it molded so it's like the the desire is the precondition for the conclusion and it's a very dangerous thing so no such thing as social progress well that's the same thing as the dissolution of the of the meta-narrative you know if we can't agree on what's good if we can't agree on what we're aiming at then we're completely fractionated and divided because it's shared aim it's a shared vision that unites people and and I mean that technically I mean that's psychologically look our eyes have evolved so that we can tell where each of us is are looking because the one thing we want to know about all the other primates that surround us is what the hell they're up to and one of the ways you figure that out is by looking at their eyes and you see what they're pointing at and if you're in a society everyone's eyes are pointing at the same thing that's what a flag is for is to indicate a union of purpose and if there's a union of purpose then we're all predictable to one another because we know what everybody's up to and that's the same as piece so you fragment that you allow that to disappear you criticize it out of existence and you have an atomized society and an atomized society is a violent chaos it's not an anarchic utopia it's an absolute Qatar strophe I mean you lose that hierarchical organization you know hierarchies which the post modernists criticize non-stop higher he's speaking biologically are at least 350 million years old they're older than trees every animal that's evolved virtually exists within a hierarchy because it's the only way that animals can share a domain a territory without constantly destroying each other and so the attack on the idea of hierarchy you know in the guise of the patriarchy which is so absurd that it's that it's it's it's an idea that's absurd you couldn't invent it if it didn't exist there's no way you could dream it up it's an idea that it's that absurd because the the hierarchical organization of society is something far older than human beings it's a basic truth and to consider that the cause of all human suffering when in fact it's the it's the cure for much human suffering is another indication of the actual motives of the people who are putting the theories forward tear everything down well then everyone's equal everyone's equal when everything is on fire and everyone's starving in the streets you know or at least they're equal in all the important ways so no absolute truth no objective reality well that means that there's no way of determining who is right and wrong in an argument there's no there's no higher authority to to appeal to you know even if you're an atheist a materialist scientific type at least you grip the idea of an objective reality that stands outside your theorizing the post modernists dispensed with all of that and so there's no way of telling who's right and there's no way of telling who's wrong and there's a trend tremendous anarchic consequence of that and the previous speaker referred to that as well as if there's no truth that we all net are nested inside let's say then there's no communication between people because there's nothing that can you can unite us and that's exactly why the world of the post modernists neo-marxist is a Hobbesian nightmare of competing power hierarchies and that's another thing that's so terrible about there theory is there they're absolutely convinced that all hierarchies are a consequence of power now you know power is ill-defined but you might as well just use tyranny because that's the idea about the patriarchy right the patriarchy is a tyrannical hierarchy and so the idea is that human hierarchies are based on nothing but tyrannical power they throw out the idea of competence you know most non tyrannical hierarchies are based on competence not power you define tyranny as a hierarchy that's based on power and not competence and you know the evidence that the hierarchies in the Western world at least are predicated on competence is the fact that the damn lights are on and there isn't rioting in the streets and and the planes stay in the air most of the time and everything functions and people even postmodernists you know they're gonna look for the best brain surgeon if they happen to have cancer that they happen to need an operation they're not going to dispense with the idea of confidence when their life hangs in the balance but when it when it comes to being able to justify their anarchic tendencies and their desire to tear everything apart they'll deny the idea of confidence altogether and you know that worked out that's so terrible it's almost unimaginable because it destroys the concept of value itself right because erect a hierarchy of competency is to say this mode of action is more functionally appropriate at least all you could say better this mode of action is better than this mode of action and if you don't have any distinction between modes of action that are better or worse than you have no direction in your life right because it's that it's the distinction between things in terms of quality that gives direction to your life and that's what gives meaning positive meaning to your life so if you eradicate the competence higher if you blow out the value structure then no one has anything to aim for and all there is is chaos you wonder why people are depressed and why they're nihilistic especially after they go through enough the university trained postmodern training I mean if you understand that and you swallow it then there's no up and there's no down and you know that's another reason why it's so useful to consider the view in genesis of human suffering its intrinsic to the nature of human existence and if you don't have a positive value to set against that right something to struggle for and something to live for that all you have is the suffering well that's not good you know if an animal if the human being has nothing but suffering then what's that going to do to them well they get embittered that's for sure that's what happens to people who don't have any meaning in their life they get embittered and then they get vengeful and then they get murderous and then they get genocide 'el it's not a good thing so Derrida and Foucault and the rest of those French monsters you know they defined hierarchy as power an absolutely pathological sleight of hand they destroyed the idea of hierarchies of competence by undermining the idea of an objective world and these things are all linked together that was a destruction of the idea of competence itself and destruction of the idea of the world everything's interpretation there's no human nature everything socially constructed and you know you see this even in small ways when when the poet there be teaching your kids this in elementary school in no time flat because it's already happening in Canada so you like if it hasn't happened here it's going to and it'll be within the next two or three years they're starting to teach kids postmodern literary criticism as the initial as the initiation into literature appreciation and if you're a postmodern literary critic there's no great works because there's no great if they're great if you say Dostoyevsky is great it's because you're a white supremacist and you you've elevated the the Caucasian literary figures arbitrarily to support the domination of your own power group and the read and if you take Dostoyevsky apart you don't look for what the author meant because there's no author meaning you look for how the author's works supports the power structure in which he was embedded and that's all there is to literature so that's coming along quite nicely so according to the new radicals the Enlightenment inspired ideas that have previously structured our world this is a quote by the way according to the new radicals the Enlightenment inspired ideas that have previously structured our world especially the legal and academic parts of are a fraud perpetrated and perpetuated by white males to consolidate their own power and those who disagree with that statement are not only blind but bigoted the Enlightenment school of an objective and reasoned basis for knowledge merit truth justice and the like is an impossibility objectivity in the sense of standards of judgment that transcend individual perspectives does not exist reason is just another code word for the views of the privileged the enlightenment itself merely replaced one socially constructed view of reality with another mistaken power for knowledge there is nothing but power that's from Daniel Farber and Suzanna sherry beyond all reason it was quoted in the New York Times not but power well then you might think about that one for a minute too because they're you know if you formulate a political doctrine or let's say an ontological or epistemological dr. and even more deeply that says there's nothing but power then what do you do with the people who hypothetically oppose you well obviously you use force on them because there's nothing but power and so if the only reason that they exist and have their positions of privilege is because they've dominated through tyranny and power you're fully justified in using that force against them well especially if that's all there is and that is all there isn't in the postmodern nihilistic Hobbesian nightmare it's it's groups groups of people united by their by their well this is where it gets murky by their group identity whatever that is it's socially constructed when that's convenient there so anyways there's no individuals there's just groups and the groups cannot communicate with one another because there's really no way of engaging in reasoned discourse between groups of disparate origin that's just that's just that's just part of the overarching paper white male patriarchy's justification for holding on to their power claims they've formulated this theory that discourse between different groups as Paul to make the system look less tyrannical than it actually is this is the sort of thing that your kids are being taught in university so identity politics is the division of society into groups which cannot communicate or cooperate well you know this this is a this is a big problem you think well why is this why is this happening exactly like what's going on cuz that's what we're trying to figure out great what's going on well well I talked to you about Marxism I talked to you about the worldview that underlies Marxism which is predicated fundamentally on resentment for differences in the world and Laura mean look we got to take that with a bit of sympathy you know it's not like the world is fair its tragedy ridden it's unfair and there's malevolence everywhere now that's not surprising to those of you who consider themselves Christian I mean that's that's a basic part of the doctrine but that doesn't mean it's palatable I mean people differ in all sorts of important ways that have non-trivial effects on their life outcome then in fact they differ in innumerable ways which is actually part of the technical and methodological problems of post-modernism I mean think about the difference here there's differences you know and you might say well some of these are your own doing and maybe they are and maybe they aren't but a lot of them are let's say gifts of God for lack of a better term Anala G one of the biggest differentiators between people with regards to their long-term success far more important by the way than race is intelligence intelligence has a very powerful biological basis so you know it's it's funny because there's plenty of modern academics who deny the existence of biological intelligence and I think that's because they like to think that they got to their positions by pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps you know there's there's no gratitude in that they don't think well I was given a gift and it's not like I earned it it was part of my was part of my but might the structure of my being the given structure of my being you know you could have a little humility in the face of that well so people differ by intelligence they differ by temperament some people are extroverted some people aren't some people are very very sensitive to negative emotion others are very emotionally stable soompi are compassionate and polite and some people are disagreeable and competitive some people are conscientious and others aren't and some people are creative and all of those have major effects on the way that life unfolds there's there's accidents of geography I mean here we are in the first world well that's a good deal for us isn't it because the infrastructure is in place and it's the arbiters an arbitrary Tunis that to that that the existentialists called thrown this and you can't really attribute that to your own doing it's something to be grateful for and to recognize and the same with regards to your positioning and historical time you want to go back to to like the 1400s and 1300s it seems unlikely I mean people work even in 1890s they worked so damn hard that modern people can hardly even imagine it right I think one day in the life of a frontier pioneer would kill most of us in this room or if it didn't kill us we'd at least wish we were dead well then there's attractiveness attractive people do far better in life and you know it's just no joke to be cursed with with ugliness and and that's a major differentiator and well the youth have advantages over the old right and I mean when you're old maybe you're rich because actually being old is a pretty good predictor of being rich as it turns out given that you've had a whole life to gather up resources but I suspect it's the rare old rich person who wouldn't trade in all their money for a young body so it's not exactly obvious who's got the upper hand there the old person has the fruits of their labor but the young person has the potential of the future and you can't buy that health well you know everybody knows people who are promising in six different ways to basically got cut off at the knees by some you know incomprehensibly arbitrary tragedy and cut their life shorter produced in excess of suffering different sexes have different advantages no women can have children their mo they can have multiple orgasms it's not a trivial thing in the entire course of life no men are bigger and stronger but they die sooner women live about eight years longer that's actually quite an advantage some people are athletic other people are weak some people are born wealthy it's better to be born intelligent way if you're looking at future prediction it's better to be born intelligent than to be born wealthy at least in Western societies some people have an intact family structure and others don't some people have friends some people don't and we differ from an educational perspective those are major dimensions of difference right and they're all really relevant and important and they have a major impact on how our lives unfold across time and the consequence of that is massively unequal distribution of socioeconomic resources now that's not the only measure by which life should be assessed far from it and that's another problem that I have with the radical leftists that even though they're anti-capitalist to the extreme they are also convinced that money solves all of the world's problems and that's just not true there's lots of there's lots of problems that money makes worse and certainly many problems that money can't solve but you know the funny thing is even with all these dimensions of difference the only thing that's really been concentrated on well race is the big one get sexual identity it's a race and gender those seem to be the big three and it's not exactly obvious why it's the one part of this talk that I haven't really been able to crack you know it's like I don't know what the why the focus is there although I do know that the reason that intersectionality has emerged within the postmodernist purposes because the the theorists themselves have started to understand that there's an infinite number of dimensions across which people differ which is actually why the West invented the concept of individuality to begin with because if you have fraction eight groups down to the ultimate ultimate what atomic level you end up with the individual you have to treat the individual as a unique Nexus of factors and so well and so the entry and the logical consequence of intersectionality taken to its final conclusion is the individualism of the West which i think is extraordinarily funny although I'm not sure we're gonna we're gonna make it to the point where we rediscover that but anyways race has become the major issue why race I don't know maybe it aligns most evidently with the oppressor oppressed narrative maybe it's this maybe it's the simplest way that people can be divided apart from sex but it does beg the issue well what do you do with all these other dimensions of the individual difference you know and this also shows you the absolutely appalling scholarship that characterizes so much of the postmodern work you know so look there are all sorts of arbitrary reasons semi arbitrary let's say that determine our our movement up status hierarchies or competence hierarchies as we move through life you know and the other thing to understand is that your position in a combatants hierarchy isn't an award that's given to you because of your intrinsic worth that's the wrong way of thinking about it the reason that you get promoted up a competence hierarchy is because other people want to maximize the value you can produce for society that's why you get paid it's not an award right and so and that's a much better way to think about it because the more most intelligent thing to do even if there are arbitrary reasons for competence differences is to place the most competent people where they can do the best job because that's best for everyone else and if you have to pay them a bit more to motivate them well that's the price you pay for extracting the value that they can give to you and to the other members of society it's not an award it's not altruism it's not it's none of that it's cold-hearted individual and social preservation and it's the right motive its lines everyone's motivations up properly so all right so I'm gonna talk to you now a little bit about white privilege okay because that's the that's the most egregious example of poor scholarship as well as the logical conclusion of the dialogue about race so we're all groups racial groups ethnic groups gender groups we can't talk to each other we're all involved in a power struggle across which there's no communication and the white people roughly speaking have it best and so this is Peggy McIntosh she's all smiles as Shakespeare said you can smile and smile and smile and still be a villain so that's how I looked at this photograph she's a nice friend motherly type but you know that just doesn't cut it when you're talking about things like this she's Associate Director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on women Serg yeah this is a is excerpted from working paper 189 white privilege and male privilege a personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women's studies the working paper contains a longer list of privileges okay well what's her methodology for laying out what constitutes white privilege the papers rely on personal examples of unearned advantage as McIntosh says she experienced in the 1970s and the 1980s you know in in a social science a reasonably well developed social science such as psychology that gives you a failing grade in the first research project you do you know this is at best that's a hypothesis at best right and just it's derived from your it's a weak hypothesis because if you're gonna formulate a hypothesis it can't just be what you think you should go do a little research and inform it even before you get the damn hypothesis generated and then you have to go actually do the testing to see if your hypothesis holds up like we could say well racial discrimination plays some role in an unfair inequality in the West it's like okay probably right for all sorts of reasons well how much exactly like really exactly is it more important than intelligence are less important what about attractiveness do we know do we know how much of the variance in outcomes it it actually produces we need to know these things no no you know it's okay if you're a postmodern especially if you're working in an appalling field like women's studies you can just use your own personal experience and that's good not this is an incredibly influential piece of work she produced this here's the white privilege list I'm not going to go through it completely I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time if I should need to move I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me I can go shopping alone most of the time pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented when I'm told about our national heritage or remote civilization I'm shown that people of my color made it what it is okay methodological critiques first of all we don't know how many instances she's actually providing right because it's a list of so-called privileges but many of them are manifestations of the same underlying so-called privilege so the fact that there's say seven listed here doesn't mean that the understructure of what she's talking about it can actually be enumerated in that manner it's basic social science right that's sort of technology for clarifying what constitutes a measurement device of this sort has been instantiated since the 1960s she doesn't know it she doesn't care neither do any of the people who follow this okay and then let's let's think about this it's like why exactly is this white privilege I don't quite get that why isn't it majority privilege you know like that's really different it's like well you think that's not true if you're Chinese in China so what if what if you're black in a black African country you know or Hispanic in a Hispanic country aren't all these things true well if they're true then it's I mean there might be privilege but we've already established that there is privilege there's differences between people and all the differences aren't fair we've established that while terminology matters well you know it seems to me that these all flow from the mere fact that in any civilization there's a certain amount of homogeneity that constitutes the majority and that the majority is most comfortable in a society that was produced by the majority it's like the definition of civilization so to attribute that to something like systemic racism which is another term I just absolutely despise and which is making headway in Canada like you wouldn't believe so you know what we have a very peaceful country we've had very little racial tension but we're working hard to solve that problem I can tell you so I won't read you the rest of these you can take a look online you know white privilege and male privilege a personal account god of coming to see correspondences through work in women's studies well all this idea of white privilege came out of her working paper like as an academic document it's appalling beyond belief you know and then this is a real failure of the universities because they've allowed these pseudo disciplines to multiply and and they've become unbelievably dominant and it's it's as a member of the Academy I'm deeply ashamed and embarrassed that that's the case like every intellectual in the damn country should apologize for what the universities are doing to society under the guise of these absolutely appalling doctrines based on myth no methodological sophistication whatsoever absolute domination of ideological theory no understanding whatsoever of history it's absolutely embarrassing but you can smile about it and that's the important thing all right so so anyways I gave you a bit of a critique about the idea of white privilege and you know as far as I'm concerned it's just an attempt to what would you say augmenting the postmodern worldview which means you know if we differ across races or ethnicity then we can't communicate and that's an attempt to fragment the society and that's an extension of the marxist desire to uplift the entire structure and start again under the guise of hypothetically of equality and sympathy further well it was at one point let's say the working poor but really driven by a resentment that's really as old as mankind itself that's the right way of thinking about it as far as I could tell and as I said the proof of that is in the genocides you go to think about what you're willing to accept as proof like for me the fact that 40 million 60 million something like that 20 million no one knows were killed in the Soviet Union as these ideas were instantiated that was enough proof that there was something wrong you know and if that's not enough proof for you well then you might ask yourself exactly what it would require to prove your theory wrong how many tens of millions of people would have to die before you would admit that there's something wrong with the way that you're construing the world it's a decent question you know I had a talk on free speech canceled I had a talk on the suppression of free speech at university campuses canceled by a university in August and the people who got it cancelled yeah it was pretty funny all right the people who canceled it came out and had a little after-party and a bunch of them came out a hammer and sickle banner you know because they were communists and you know the media covered that to some degree and like if they would have come out with the swastika there would be the hell to pay but a hammer and sickle man that's everyone's friend it's like bringing your girlfriend a bouquet of roses you know there's nothing wrong with communism apart from the hundred million people it's slaughtered it's like I don't know what the hell's wrong with us you know what I've tried to I've tried to puzzle this out like why it's pretty obvious why the Nazis have a bad name like we really don't have to go into that but it's not so damn obvious why the Communists the Marxists don't have an equally bad name and that students can come out and protest with the hammer and sickle intact and act morally virtuous and people don't recoil from that in any with absolute repugnance which is of course the right right approach it's a very hard thing to figure out so I mean maybe it has something to do with the universal utopian dream it's at least universal where the Nazi utopian dream was so delimited you know there was something more I don't know aggressively evil about it or obviously evil about it maybe it's that but the net consequence was I mean from from the perspective of numbers of people dead and horror and horror in what would you say inflicted on the world it's very difficult to tell the two apart so alright so then the next question is well there's liberals right and i'm a liberal I'm a classic liberal and conservatives have a pretty good time making borders between things it's actually one of the hallmarks of conservative thinking but the left-leaning liberal types aren't very good at that from a temperamental perspective and so you know when back when William F Buckley had made the National Review the John Birchers were trying to affiliate themselves with him and he said no no no you you guys aren't part of what I'm doing you know he cut he drew a line and the same thing happened pretty fast after charlottesville when people like ben shapiro came out and said yeah yeah I'd known Nazis yeah how about no wait supremacists now we're done with that that that's not part of the conservatism that I represent well the Liberals need to do the same damn thing but they're not very good at it so I've got a basic primer here for all the liberals who might be paying attention to this at one point or another how to identify the people from whom they should be rapidly dissociated and this is the terminology equality diversity inclusivity equity that's a bad one that means equality of outcome and that and in that term equality of outcome is nested all the horrors of Marxism and white privilege is another one you know on and you might then I would also say with regards to white privilege let's get it clearly how about we do this how about we decide what actually constitutes racism it's pretty bloody straightforward it's the attribution of a set of attributes to someone based on their skin color and so to say that because you're white and that's actually a quite difficult thing to define that you're somehow characterized by privilege and that that privilege is associated with guilt for for historical crimes that's racism you see to attribute to the individual the characteristics of one of the groups to which they happen to belong in some sense that's the thing we're supposed to be fighting and to talk about white privilege is precisely that it's racist period and obviously self-evidently because well look it's based on race you know and there's the thing is there's so many differences between people there's so many differences between people you can't just do that you can't pull someone out and say well you're the member of this homogeneous category system and I can ignore all your heterogeneity the diversity that the left radical left is always talking about I can ignore all that diversity and I can attribute to you this set of properties including your let's call it class guilt for let for back a lack of a better term if you want a formula that will break your society up in pieces then that's the formula and then you might also understand that the people who derive those formulas that's exactly what their aim so it's not any it's not chance and you might say well do all these neo-marxist types know what they're doing and the answer that is well not not at all no more than every Christian is a theologian or every Muslim understands the full doctrine of Islam that just doesn't happen because we're pretty ignorant so you know you take the typical social justice activist and you pull them out of their mob and it's like you know they're your neighbor's daughter and 80% of the time or 90% of the time there are fully rational human being abiding by the general rules of the state but if you get a hundred of them together in a mob then all the fragmented pieces of the postmodern Doctrine manifest themselves in a unity and then look the hell out because it's the idea that's got the mob and the idea that's got the mob is not an idea that's conducive to the survival of our civilization or a peace so we better bloody well wake up and do something about that you know partly what I've been doing and this is quite interesting this and I'll all stop with this you know for the last year I've been in a very big political battle in Canada and it's by no means over that's beside the point I don't even like being in political battles but sometimes there's no choice but I've been trying to figure out like increasing the polarization which is something I've been accused of obviously isn't helpful it's not working in the United States that's for sure it's not working in Europe it's not working in Canada so it's not a good idea and so and then sometimes to engage in the war at to engage in the war at all the battle of ideas is to it's not to win but to engage it all is to lose because you increase the polarity and so what I've been doing I learned about this when I wrote my first book which was called maps of meaning um I was looking for a third way you know between nihilism and group identification what could what could be an alternative to those two because you need to identify with your group in some sense to have a purpose right that that's being a civilized and socialized person if you lose that then you descend into nihilism and that's not good but nihilism can kill you and group identity can become totalitarianism that's not good what's the alternative so I've been going while on my youtube videos and then in my public statements I've been talking to especially young men because they're the ones that are coming to see me weirdly enough about responsibility and about truth you know and this is something that conservatives need to take note of it's really and I'm gonna talk to the Conservatives in Canada about this or have been to some degree and I think I'm doing doing that again in September but for the first time and that I remember conservative types even centrists because I would regard myself essentially as a centrist have something genuine to sell to young people it's something that no one is selling to them and that's like responsibility responsibility gives your life meaning it's like shoulder your damn bird and stand up quit whining don't be a victim put yourself together contribute to the world accept responsibility speak the truth put the world together don't identify with your damn group and don't put don't perceive yourself as a victim it entitles you to resentful vengeance and it makes you weak why would you want to do that of course you're a damn victim it's built into the structure of reality well that doesn't mean you get to go all it doesn't mean you get to get murderous about it it just makes it worse so you got the motivation like life is hard there's no doubt about that and certainly not fair and in any of multiple dimensions well how are you gonna respond to that you're gonna stand up and be useful you're gonna take that on voluntarily if that's what it means to shoulder the cross you know it means to take on the burden of suffering and malevolence individually and voluntarily while people are dying for that message man you just can't believe how hungry young people are for that message it's absolutely overwhelming so that's that's we have to go back to the individual we have to go back to the individual as the center of the cosmos right that that image of God that the previous speaker talked about that brings order out of chaos through the power of truthful speech that's the core idea of Western civilization and it's the greatest idea that that humanity has ever produced and we can't lose sight of it because if we lose sight of it we're going to lose everything and that with all our technological power losing everything is going to be one awful show so that's all I have to say about that thank [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Sovereign Nations

Views: 759,671

Rating: 4.816206 out of 5

Keywords: Sovereign, Nations, jordan peterson, dr. jordan b. peterson, sovereign nations, sovereign nations conference, snc 2017, marxism, culture, communism, history, race, racism, identity, politics, speech, conference, white privilege, michael o'fallon, trump international dc, new, trump, hotel

Id: ofmuCXRMoSA

Length: 71min 13sec (4273 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 30 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/i_film]

Peterson is not a humanist. Peterson things Pinoccio is a touching story because Geppetto asks the star, an authority outside the realm of earth, to give life to Pinoccio who is a wooden doll. He is VERY sentimental in the core of his arguments, he likes Carl Jung and I really, honestly, cant understand why other people who consider themselves as free thinkers are spending time in debates with him.

[u/NuruYetu]

Contrary to most of the people here I like Peterson as a person. He is one of those few teachers who still try to ground their teachings in philosophical classics and tries to simplify them for a greater public to digest.

But if there's one area where you shouldn't admire him, is when he talks about anything related to postmodernism and Marxism. He strawmans and critiques authors whose arguments he clearly got from distorted secundary sources and doesn't master at all. While it's probably good that he puts a spotlight to worrying trends on Canadian campuses, it's offset by his giant misattributions of those to intellectuals he strawmans and hates without end. If you read the first chapter of his book Maps of Meaning, you can see that this attitude of him comes from a virulent Red Scare which was imprinted on him and which makes him incapable of considering anything related to Marxism in terms that are not absolute black and white.

Younger Peterson often advised his students to not talk about things they don't understand fully. I would have liked Peterson to listen to his younger self. He was unjustly threatened by radicals in his campus, but I am saddened by the character he has evolved into since then. Give me the considerate character with thrilling lessons in personality psychology back please.

[u/startgonow]

Pseudo Religion peddlers shouldn’t be posted into a Humanism sub unless it’s in order to critique it. If you are trying to mock it post it to an atheism sub. If you think he has valid points post it to a Christian sub. Peterson is paid by Praeger YouTube Propoganda channel to create content. Yes I am gatekeeping.