Jordan Peterson and Piers Morgan debate Israel-Hamas War | Piers Morgan Uncensored

well I'm joined Now by Dr Jordan Peterson Jordan great to have you back on the program a lot has happened since you were last on just a few weeks ago I want to start by saying that I I'm wrestling with a lot of moral quandaries about this war and I'm hoping that through our conversation today we might get to at least have some clarity about the moral quandaries and see if we can uh work out what we should be thinking about this because I think it's very complicated um and it's got to be nuanced this conversation do you feel any moral quandaries about it well I don't think you can have a war without moral quander I mean a war is the consequence of an unsolvable moral quander and so it's not surprising that the conversation surrounding the war is full of moral quandaries because if if it was straightforward and simple and if there was an easy path forward then there wouldn't be a war and so I mean I'm I can tell you what I think is going on to the degree that you can reduce it to something quickly explicable know I think Iran is desperate because of the tenuous hold on power that the mullers now have in Iran given their own citizens Rebellion I think they see the Abraham Accords which were the most significant step for forward towards peace in the Middle East for like 75 years they see the Abraham Accords as an existential threat this is a last ditch attempt by the Iranian mulas to use the Islam against Jews story to prop up their own dismal Reign and so they rattled the chain of their Hamas puppets and said provoke and they did and their hope is that the Israeli response will be so overwhelming that the Arab world turns against them and maybe even the people who might be inclined to know be swayed by a victim narrative in the west and that the Abraham Accords will fall apart and and that'll be the end of that and that could happen and I'm hoping it won't because I think the Abraham Accords were you know and it it's irritating to me for whatever you you know utility that is is that I think I know in so far as you can know such things that Saudi Arabia would have signed the Abraham Accords 2 years ago if Biden would have moved a little bit more forthrightly on it and I think the reason that he didn't and the Democrats didn't was because they didn't want to give Trump any credit for anything that he had attained in his administration and I think all of that is appalling and you know I see this story of Muslim against Jew being put forward in this propagandistic manner and I think well the Muslim world has to make a choice too because does doesn't look to me like their proper Champions are is the government in Iran you know and and and it's not like the Saudis don't have their flaws and perhaps the rest of the Arab governmental structures but the the Islam World should move in the direction of the Abraham Accords that would be great for everyone we could have a real peace we could have something approximating a union of the abrahamic people and I think the Accord was named extraordinarily well or we could have what we've had for the last 75 years with the Palestinians as Perpetual Canon F you know at the back and call of those for whom having them be Canon foder is useful and so yeah well there's just moral quandaries everywhere there it's a Minefield but that's what I think is the the fundamental reality of the current situation it's a propaganda war and there's a lot at stake on October the 7th Hamas obviously committed a terror attack of appalling magnitude where were you when you first heard about it and what was your instant feeling about it well my instant feeling was to be sickened by it you know it hasn't been that long since I was in Jerusalem and so it was a little closer to me than it might have otherwise been um I'm also more sensitive to any signs of anti-Semitic catastrophe from studying the Holocaust for the length of time that I did and I've always regarded Jews as the canary and the coal mine and I think the reason that the Jews are the Canary and the coal mine is because they're a successful minority you know and if a if a culture can tolerate a successful minority it's pretty damn robust and it's not very resentful and as soon as a culture starts to get resentful the Jews make an easy target because they're a minority and so that's an easy target to begin with but then they're the minority that has the tarity to be successful that really brings the resentful out of the Rat holes and I've seen arise an anti-Semitism online over the last three years it's just stunning to behold on the right and on the left jointly and then well so I was sickened by it but then I was also immediately suspicious of Iran's role and I mean that doesn't require any particular perspicacity on my part I think it's quite obvious but but I that also open up the The Rat's Nest of of the maneuvering the political maneuvering around the Abraham Accords because you know I was very ill when the Abraham Accords were signed and I couldn't or hadn't paid much attention and when I sort of recovered my ability to see again I saw that this remarkable peace process had taken place and I could not understand for the life of me why it wasn't trumpeted on the front page of every newspaper across the world and I also think that Trump's team should have got a Nobel Peace Prize for it I I cannot see how you can possibly make a counterargument to that for all of Trump's flaws and for his administration's flaws this was a major accomplishment and yet and I know the Saudis were behind it you know they didn't sign it but it wouldn't have gone forward without their nod and wink and I know I believe that if Biden would have taken the opportunity and been a bit magnanimous in his response to Trump which he could have been instead of thinking of him as Satan himself that he could have enticed the Saudis into a peace Accord we wouldn't be in this damn situation now and now we're playing it out the hard way you know because the Iranians could win the propaganda war and they've got God only knows how many agents they have in the west you know promoting the kind of social upheaval that we've seen on the streets in the last few weeks and so the narrative could go either way but I'm rooting hard for the for the Abraham Accord SES and I hope they have the courage of their convictions and I hope they can see that their way forward is the most appropriate Way Forward for the good of the Muslim world or what are we going to stay in some 14th century conflict between the fundamentalist Muslim world and the and the Jews Jesus that sounds you know we've had enough of that haven't we you'd think I asked Ben Shapiro what what is the proportionate response to what happened on October 7th and he said there isn't one that there is no proportionate response and there shouldn't be uh I mean that in itself you I asked V ramaswami uh when I interviewed him at the weekend the same question and he was basically inferring the same but he also said that um you know he would happily put the heads of a hundred Hamas leaders on Stakes along the border as a message to people uh not to commit this act I thought that was a a sort of medieval barbaric response to Med medieval barbarism and that I ey for an eye tooth for tooth is not the solution I also believe that Israel has a fundamental right not just to defend itself after what happened but has a duty to protect its people and it has to take that Duty obviously very seriously but if you if your mission statement as they've made clear is to eliminate Hamas completely and Hamas live in the in Gaza surrounded by civilians among civilians you can only do that you can only get rid of Hamas with massive civilian casualties and that's where I have this moral quandry about how much is too much well does Israel get a license to do whatever it wants to eliminate Hamas or should there be a limit and if so what is that limit well I don't think Israel will have a license to do whatever it wants because what will happen inevitably and I I think if I was an Iranian propagandist I would be counting on this let's imagine that Israel moves against Hamas with its usual Effectiveness and they start winning you know in a serious way and the casuales mount well it's a lot easier to take a victim appreciation stance against a power that's clearly winning so Israel can't win without uring losses along the way because the more they manifest their M military superiority the easier it's going to be for those who cast the Palestinians as victims to hold to gain the moral upper hand and so and that doesn't mean I know what Israel should do because I wish I had that wisdom but what I would like to see happen in the best of all possible worlds perhaps would be for the Sines of the Abraham Accords to say to Israel privately first we're not budging and then maybe and then maybe to take a foray into the public and say that it would be lovely to see Saudi Arabia and come out and say you know we're going to continue the Abraham peace Accord process and then Israel could say well if the Abraham Accord holds and we have the probability of expanding it we can take the risk of not being so devastating in our response to Hamas and they could back off but because there'd be there'd be a counter victory in it for them and so as far like I can't see a better pathway forward than that and I think that's a potentially realistic pathway especially because that would also have the side benefit of not allowing Iran to Prevail so that's is that's the best I can do on on how this might proceed in the in the most optimistic possible way and I don't know if that's good enough or not on October the 7th you tweeted give them hell Netanyahu enough is enough and you got some blowback for that as everybody a lot says anything about this were you surprised by the scale of the blowback do you wish you'd phrase that tweet differently do you have any regrets about well you know Twitter is a very complicated social media platform and it's been difficult for me to learn how to use it wisely and I'm not alone in that because it's difficult to be wise on Twitter now what I'm trying to learn is when a tweet is appropriate and when a long form commentary is appropriate and the rule I think is something like the higher the stakes the more likely that the long form commentary is necessary and really it would have been better had I because I did release a YouTube video where I explained some of what we already talked about my sense that yeah yeah and that was well that was received much better let's put it that way but it also gave me a chance to elaborate my argument and so what it highlighted for me and I felt you know I was look I wasn't I was very taken back by what happened in in Israel and I was also appalled because in my estimation it was unnecessary as I said the Abraham Accords could have been extended earlier and maybe this would would it be necessary um and so I I I allowed myself to express some sentiment at that point without providing context and that wasn't as good as providing the context and so and I'm rethinking Twitter overall at the moment about how to use it you know Elon has taken off the character limit and he's also made it possible to distribute video and so it no longer has to be a place where impulsive exchanges can can occur rapidly and I'm trying to reconfigure how I use it I'm much happier with the video now you know I was upset because I had developed somewhat of a Muslim following um on YouTube and I was very happy about that a lot of people on the Islamic side of the world were watching my biblical lectures for example and you know and I've had extensive conversations with Muslims on my YouTube channel and you know I burnt some of that up and I'm not sure I did that well I I would say I'm certain I didn't do that in the most productive Manner and so do I regret it it would have been better to do the long form to to have done the long form to begin with you know and Twitter invites and rewards a certain amount of impulsivity and it wasn't I don't know Pierce I don't know if it's ever time for impulsive action especially when the stakes are serious you know yeah and so no I I I completely get that I was I mean there's no doubt for example that what happened October the 7th was a form of hell for the victims uh and for their families um there's also no doubt that for many living in Gaza for many innocent Palestinians is as we know of the 2 million or so uh residents citizens there they I think it's more than half are of child age and many are very young children and many children are getting killed and as a father I'm sure as like me as a father it is utterly heartbreaking to see so many thousands of children being killed who have nothing obviously to do with this uh again this this comes back to this moral conry I have um you know was interesting when you said enough is enough in that tweet you know some people are already saying even if they're very sympathetic to Israel's need to take out Hamas they're looking at these fairly apocalyptic scenes in Gaza and thinking enough is enough of that you know in other words that this the revenge is already far greater in terms of death toll than the original appalling Terror attacks that again is where I have a moral quandry well the the question is I suppose and I don't purport to have an answer to this is the most effective way of combating Hamas military and part of the answer to that is is the military eradication of Hamas even possible because as I said and we can see it unfolding in real time as Israel is more successful militarily and the casualties Mount the resistance to what they're doing is going to grow yeah and so even if they could take out Hamas militarily which isn't obvious given its interpenetration with the civilian population it all of what's going to be played out is going to be played out on the military front and we can see that in the rising tide let's say of demonstrations around the Western world and I would say those demonstrations are likely to get larger and more effective in precise proportion to Israel success on the military side and so then I would think well is there another way of restraining Hamas and well that's again that brings us back to the Abraham Accords because they were the most promising thing that's happened in seven decades you know and I think it's it's easy to underestimate what a miracle they were the people who formulated the Abraham Accords had to fight the state department they tried to introduce it under Obama to begin with right the in notion was well maybe we could we could start the peace process cess with Israel without putting the Palestinians first and that had been off the table conceptually in the state department as far as I've been informed forever and and then it was proposed during the Obama era and it was rejected and then it was proposed during the beginning of the Trump era and rejected but eventually they They Carried the day and then they did do an end run and I think that actually put I think that was actually good for for the typical Palestinian because it put a tremendous amount of pressure on the Palestinian authorities who are basically tyrants who are more than willing to use their own citizens as canid f it put a lot of pressure on them to actually do something moving moving towards a genuine peace which is why now Iran that's why Iran is so desperate to scuttling Accords I think of course you know so I think the way through ham Hamas all things considered in the medium to long run is to desperately extend the Abraham Accords as rapidly as possible that's not a military Victory but you know when you to do this from the armure when you look at the full history of this conflict the seven decades of of of conflict between Israel and and Palestinians Jonathan Friedland is a is a very good uh respected Jewish journalist uh for the guardian in the UK he wrote a very interesting column the other day saying you know you could argue that both both sides have a just cause here and he said that as a leading Jewish commentator that historically both sides have a just cause and that it's important to remember that and that's why passions run so high it's why people care so much and it's why racing to take sides uh is a mistake in this conflict what do you think of that well I think that you know if there wasn't a lot to be said on both both sides then the conflict wouldn't drag on forever and be unresolvable know I think at some point you do something like cut the gordian knot which I do think to some degree the Abraham Accords had begun to do you know I think it's I don't think Israel's going away but I don't think the pales pal Palestine isn't going away either and so those things have to be accepted I it looks to me like they have to be accepted as on the ground reality now the the problem I've seen continually I don't know is that it's been convenient to use the Palestinians as an irritant to Israel in the west and so the Palestinians have been held hostage you know the people who portray them as innocent victims presume that the Palestinians have been held hostage by the Jews let's say but I would say the Palestinians have been held hostage even more effectively by their own leadership and by those who are perfectly will willing to use use them as the front man the Expendable frontman to irritate Israel in the west well you can't get peace under those circumstances you know and so Palestine is a reality that isn't going to go away and Israel's a reality that isn't going to go away and the Abraham Accords started to recognize that and there was move in the right direction and if that falls apart we're going to be back to where we were yeah 15 years ago except worse the interesting moment for me came when Israel turned off the power and the water um they just were able to do that to 2 million people in Gaza they could turn off the internet and it struck me that that was a very Vivid reminder that Israel effectively controls Gaza it doesn't do so politically but it does in reality and that for many young people in Gaza they know this and they do feel that they've been living in a Perpetual prison camp where their movement is controlled where their access to basic things like water and energy and so on is controlled uh and that until they get the freedom that they crave this can never get resolved but I also understand on the other side that the Israelis feel how can we give freedom to a place that is run by a terror group who are literally committed to the eradication of not only Israel but all Jewish people well you laid out you laid out what are the two sets of valid counter claims I mean there's another complicating Factor too you know you you said that you you know your moral back is up because of the continual toll in civilians in Palestine especially among people who let's say weren't even born when they first came to power and so it's very difficult to look at that and see it as any anything but unjust but then it begs a whole other set of questions too doesn't it it's like well if your government is a totalitarian band of armed criminal thugs what responsibility do you bear for that as as the subjected people and you know it's not like I know the answer to that but you know I see in my own country in Canada that things are slipping and sliding in all sorts of pathological directions and people are letting it happen and if you let that happen long enough well things get very very bad and they have got very very bad in Palestine and the answer to whatever tyranny Israel might be exerting over the Palestinians isn't for the Palestinians to exert even more tyranny over themselves especially not in concert with a third party like Iran who's perfectly willing to sacrifice them at any point and so now and then that question emerges well what responsibility did the Palestinians bear well then I think we start to touch on more metaphysical issues it's like well the Palestinians like all people bear the responsibility to live in truth and to stand up to tyranny in their in their deeds their attention and their deeds and their actions because if you don't you pay for that and so do your children right and then so to your grandchildren so to your great-grandchildren and you know there seems to be something unjust in that in that why did the children suffer and the biblical answer to that has always been well the children suffer for the sins of their forefathers and you might think well it's pretty unfair that the world is set up that way it's like hey it might be unfair but it is set up that way and it does beg the question what responsibility do the people who are living under the thumb of totalitarians have for the fact that they're living under the thumb of totalitarians and the answer isn't none so this is why I'm a psychologist not a politician I no no but it's no but I think I think it's I think it's a really interesting question it's also an interesting question why why won't Arab states around Gaza taking Palestinian refugees I mean these are legitimate questions right well there's a lot of there's a lot of chain and saber rattling about how tyrannical Israel is and of course they're held to a very higher moral standard but you know the prison that is Palestine has walls on sides that aren't Israeli so and that no one is certainly not the progressives will never talk about that and that's partly because you know all the oppressed people are equally morally virtuous and so the fact that the Arabs won't take in the Palestinians you can't even bring that up because of course the Arabs themselves are victims of Western colonialism which is you know one of the most absurd propositions ever set forth by anyone about anything but you know here we are and it is quite a miracle in some ways that that the the multi-dimensional fact of Palestinian enslavement isn't discussed in a much more forthright manner there's many people are building the walls that that make Palestine into whatever prison it is and perhaps the Israelis are playing their role but they're by no means the only actors let's talk about the response of progressives and in particular what's happening on student campuses particularly in America you know I've been stropped by by two things one the horrifying immediate response not just in America but when you saw mobs in Sydney Australia chanting gas the Jews when you saw huge protests by the Israeli Embassy in Kensington and West London near where I live um all celebrating this is all within hours of what happened on October the 7th you saw similar scenes in America um so the gut reaction of many young people appeared to be to be celebrating what had happened and you even had some there was a Cornell uh Professor who you know was heard in public saying how exhilarated he was by what happened and still hasn't been fired um and these are people who've driven this cancel culture for many years now where if you use the wrong pronoun they want you eradicated fired shamed abused and so on um but here if you celebrate the actions of a terrorist organization and killing 1500 people you actually don't lose your job students who beaned pramas rhetoric onto the building at George Wason University they haven't lost their places at that University so even for the most heinous possible thing that you could do which might warrant cancellation the people who've driven cancel culture spare themselves well this shows you how shallow the oppressor oppress oppression oppressor narrative really is oppressed oppressor narrative really is you know George Orwell famously said that the typical middleclass socialists didn't love the poor they just hated the rich and I think the oppressor oppressed narrative gives people moral license to identify the oppressor and to hate them resentfully with a good conscience plus it's also extremely simple-minded you know and this is one of the problems with with what's being taught in universities and even much more broadly than that now the notion is we can view all human social relations and the past itself through a metam Marxist narrative that proclaims that there are only oppressors and victims and that all you have to do to be moral is to be on the side of the victim now the shadow side of that is that once you Proclaim your moral superiority and you're on the side of the victim well number one you don't have to think anymore you just have to identify the two sets of players and number two number two you're moral without effort because all you have to do is feel sorry for the victims and then consequence number three is the oppressor being intrinsically evil can be the target of everything that's resentful and bitter and absolutely Dreadful about you now that's the standard narrative that's being taught on University campuses and the Palestinians play the role of victim and so you can't argue against the Palestinian cause let's say if if you were inclined to without simultaneously having to face the weight of every single person who's adopted the oppressor oppressed narrative upending that and there's no way the university not in the not not the state they're in now there's no way that's going to fly and so and so we see exactly what happened but the narrative is already in place all oppressed people are innocent and virtuous victims well so then when something like this happens and you see the Palestinian victims rise up against their evil Jewish overlords then it's time for celebration you know and we forget entirely that the evil Jewish Overlord story was the same story that the Germans used so successfully and we also forget and this is very interested in relationship to Iran I was reading a book by Stan zag yesterday about turn of the century Vienna just at the end of the Austrian Hungarian Empire and the dawning of the movements that eventually morphed into Nazism in Germany and one of the things V pointed out was that you know if you're a corrupt oppressing psychopath who's hellbent on exploiting the population and you want to deflect that the Jews make a constant positive Universal Target right because they tend to be disproportionately successful and you can just say well you know I'm not the oppressor here it's those successful Jews and that's being played out now that's that's that's the guise that's the disguise of left-wing anti-Semitism I mean so Terri don't hate the Jews we just love their enemies right I mean the the anti-semitic response in the last three weeks has been actually quite terrifying to watch I've got Jewish friends who are literally living in real fear now um some of whom were in Israel at the time and thought well the world will rally behind us and actually very quickly realize that they many cases that wasn't the case in fact the complete opposite uh and then you saw these scenes in dagistan at the airport with a mob literally charging around trying to find any Jewish passengers they could find and it was I mean horrendous but also if you're Jewish this is utterly terrifying and must take you right back to Nazi Germany World War II the Holocaust this never again it it is beginning to happen again well I think we could be heartened in that regard by the counter position though too I mean I would say the the reasonable majority in the western world didn't take that stance still and quite forthrightly I mean even my prime minister Justin Trudeau who virtually never says a true word in his life or makes a he his his actions or concentations of false gestures even you know he was he came out with a pretty forthright statement um decrying what had happened on the Hamas side and that has characterized the leadership of the West in general and so I can certainly understand why the the tiny minority of Jews that do exist in the world are terrified about what's happening you know it it there's there's no reason for catastro atrophic alarm it's you know what I mean it it doesn't look to me like this is going to spiral out of control and I'm not even so certain that in the medium to long run it's going to be the worst possible thing because you know too the other thing that happened is that a lot of the false moral disguise of the progressive types was exposed in a radical way in the last few weeks I mean Harvard for example just took a beating you know I mean first of all Harvard was ranked dead last by fire in terms of it support for free speech and then it was 32 different Harvard groups came out essentially in support of Hamas and then a whole variety of CEOs said they wouldn't accept the Harvard degree as a hiring criteria and Larry Summers came out and said you know the previous president of Harvard that the institution had become so corrupt that it wasn't salvageable then you know the White House Press Secretary decried the actions of the squad who were supporting the Hamas protests you know so we're seeing cracks on the Progressive side because of this that haven't been evident before you know and and Biden himself came out and talked about how important it was to push forward with the Abraham Accords which was something you know I wish he would have done two years ago but better late than never so I can understand why there's tremendous fear and uncertainty but I certainly wouldn't say that all the news is bad let talk about social media for a moment we there's no doubt that the kind of tribalism that we see in modern society fueled by social media has probably never been worse than I've seen it in the last three weeks a constant barrage of often completely fake imagery videos claims counter claims from both sides um but it's just a barrage and I've been really quite shocked by just the scale of it and how little of it appears to even have a semblance of of truth about it what do we do what do we do about this well that highlights that highlights a a a very pronounced danger so you know in the last 15 years we've erected virtual perceptual systems and virtual systems virtual systems of representing reality now if your system of representing reality is not in accord with reality you're delusional and right technically that's what a delusion is and you're going to run into trouble when you try to act in your fantasy and run into the world well these Virtual Worlds that we've erected on top of the real world don't run by the same principles as the real world and that makes them delusional and that delusional element is affecting us very badly in a couple of ways I just heard Jonathan height this morning talk about some of the re research he's reviewing in his new book he shows very clearly that young liberal women the probability that young liberal woman who saturates her life with social media has a mental illness is more than 50% that's how bad it's got yeah it's really bad but that's not the only thing that's going on you see the other thing I've been watching and this is really quite frightening to me is that the problem with online one of the problems with online communication is it disinhibits the narcissists and the Psychopaths and the reason for that is that they can circumvent the normal control systems that obtain in face-to-face interaction yes you know and in face-to-face interaction there's things you will not say or do because you will be held responsible and maybe immediately you can say whatever the hell you want online and you can get away with it too and maybe even be rewarded for it and so we have so you just think about the amount of criminality and quasi criminality online 35% of internet traffic is pornographic and it isn't nice guys that are running that let's put it that way there's an immense amount of online criminality like most people are targeted by online criminals on a pretty regular basis and then we just have the run-ofthe-mill narcissistic Psychopaths who generate Anonymous troll demon accounts who who are spreading misery and sadistic hate as fast as they possibly can and there's no barriers whatsoever to them doing that and so then when something does happen that's contentious let's say the sadistic Psychopaths just make hay out of that right they're spreading their misery as rapidly as they possible possibly can for the lulls and the lulles and to Delight in other people's suffering and the social media companies are naive enough not to regulate that now regulating it's difficult but but it's a conversation we have to have Pierce because I think like if we let the Psychopaths that's 4% of the population whenever they get the upper hand and that happens from time to time Everything Burns I also think that young young people in particular um they are exposed to such relentless dopamine imagery both still pictures videos whatever um and in particular the last three weeks if you're a young person with an impressionable mind and you're getting bombarded with some of the worst imagery imaginable you know babies dead um limbless and so on if you're getting that on your feed all day long which I'm seeing on mine so they must be it can only have an incredibly damaging effect to to I think a young generation already ripped with anxiety ripped with problems about how to deal with the real world and I think a lot of it is they're just seeing so much bad stuff all the time on social media which when I was young you just couldn't see it you would not be able to access this kind of thing you were protected in a way from the reality of things like Warfare um and protected from this kind of imagery yeah well again it's it's a problem of technological Revolution because this new sensory system that we've produced this new system of perception it's a fire hose first of all that's impossible to govern you can never get on top of it it's it's infinite in its scope yeah and then it allows the pathological and the terrible to spread as rapidly as the beneficial and the good and so it is overwhelming it's not just kids that have a hard time with that I mean it's just these Technologies well what do we expect they're insanely powerful and remarkable but carry with it the well they carry with it all of the implications of that insane power on the pathological side and we don't exactly know how to deal with it we don't know how to Reg we haven't evolved the social norms even that regulate online conduct you know I mean when I block people on Twitter let's say I have qualms about it you know well I'm in favor of free speech do I block trolls online and when exactly do I block them you know I've got more direct about that I have a couple of rules you know if you're anonymous if you're anonymous and you're annoying it's like you're done as far as I'm concerned but but that's just the beginnings of the evolution of anything approximating social saying I've wrestled with that because I've blocked I think 11,000 people or whatever it is I can't remember what the latest tally is um I go on little block spurges sometimes but to me there's no contradiction between uh believing passionately in free speech but also allow yourself not to have to listen to it you don't have to listen to what people are saying to you you you have the right in a in a free Democratic Society to say look you're entitled to say whatever you want but I don't actually have to listen to it that's not you're not preventing them from exercising their right to free speech you're just saying I don't want to hear it that's why that's why we have walls like that that's a good example of the difference between the virtual world and the real world you have a house and it has walls and a door and the reason for that is you don't want a random stranger to come in and just yell things at you whenever you know and so what are the walls and the doors on social media well we have no idea because we thought well we'll democratize the Public Square okay so what does that mean it means that any narcissistic psychopath anywhere can say whatever they want to you and everyone you know well you know that's just not going to work it's not going to work there always been criminals and quasi criminals and troublemakers and we have some mechanisms of regulation in the actual world and virtually no re mechanisms of Regulation whatsoever on the v in the virtual world and so yeah it's a it's a tremendous problem and it it is also making it more and more difficult for us to distinguish what's real from what's not real because you don't know when you're being played for a what would you call masochistic Fool by a sadistic psychopath and the answer to that is often often yeah you know frighteningly often and so my sense like I I've proposed this before is like I don't I think social media um Enterprises above a certain size should separate people with verified identities verified by their site not with some universal digital ID separate them from the anonymous types like if the anonymous types want to post no problem but they shouldn't get to post with the actual human beings because there's no responsibility you know and then you say well you know maybe I'm a whistleblower and I'm I'm standing for truth and I don't want to Bear an undue responsibility for telling truth to power it's like my sense online is for every one whistleblower who's genuine who's Anonymous there's 999 Anonymous troll demons who are sadistic right yeah that's not a good ratio you interviewed uh BB Netanyahu quite recently actually a few months ago um a lot of pressure on him internally a lot of criticism uh Hamas released a video uh on Monday of some of the hostages attacking netanyahu's Administration for for not having a ceasefire and so on that was clear propaganda but it also reflects what a lot of people in Israel feel about net Yahoo and the catastrophic failure of security and defense on October the 7th he's resolutely refused to accept any responsibility or to apologize for that do you think he should well I I guess I wouldn't presume to know I mean my observation about that was that you know people said well how could this happen how could the Israeli defense systems be that porous and I would say our defense systems are way more porous than anybody would ever want to think you know it's very very difficult to stop people who are willing to light themselves on fire to singe you and any random person in a civilized society can cause an unbelievable amount of Mayhem and trouble and in order to Forstall that possibility completely which would be impossible in any case we'd have to move towards a surveillance State like China where we're being monitored 100% of the time and then the bloody cure would be worse than the disease it doesn't surprise me that Israel's defense was that poorest I don't think it I don't think it cannot be in a society that's still vaguely free and even if you lock people down Jesus you can still cause a lot of trouble if you're hellbent on doing it so does Net should Netanyahu apologize for the failures of the Israeli defense system in relationship to the Hamas attack I don't know enough to say it isn't obvious to me that it failed any worse than you should expect a system like that that to fail when it's faced by Psychopathic terrorists who are being funded by outside sources who want to do nothing else but cause misery in Mayhem so I interviewed Neta who partly because I wanted to talk to him because I was curious and I was also an admirer of his economic reforms the economic reforms that I think did raise Israel to this position of of pronounced economic power and entrepreneurial capacity that they now possess which also made them a more attractive partner during the Abraham ACC cours because the Israelis had the possibility of offering to the Arabs the sharing of their technology and their entrepreneurial and managerial prowess they had something to offer along with their you know military strength so I thought that was all to the good I don't know enough about Netanyahu and about the intricacies of Israel politics God it's hard enough to keeping track of my own country you know to to dare to to say anything more than that I'm glad I'm not in his shoes how about that that's you know I can't imagine there's anything about that that's that's anything other than abysmally difficult nonstop so let's turn Jordan to the ark conference it's why you're in London and I'm actually in Los Angeles at the moment um The Alliance for responsible citizenship this is your brainchild a huge event a lot of very interesting speakers from all around the world um you've made it clear it's it's driven by a desire to be motivational rather than political explain that well I I've traveled all over the world and met hundreds of thousands of people um in various ways and listened to them and watched them and sampled public sentiment to the degree I was capable and that was overwhelming as we've discussed before I had no idea really like I had a clinical practice and I was pretty damn familiar with a reasonable swath of the scope of human misery but I didn't understand how widespread the sense of demoralization had become especially among young people and and and I got a real taste of that and um I'm tired of the zero some apocalyptic fear-mongering story I don't buy it I don't think any bit of it is useful I think it's extremely convenient who want to use the crisis to acre power to themselves and I think that the leader who motivates with fear is a tyrant and the leader might say well there's something to be afraid of and I would say yeah there's always something to be afraid of you know and does the apocalypse lurk in the future it's like yes that's always been the case so what's ark's premises well there's two one is you have a moral obligation to be optimistic about the future that and that's that's a strange statement right and it's actually a statement of faith because I would say just as you have an obligation to be courageous about the challenges that confront you in the present and and just as that's the best way of dealing with those challenges your default attitude towards the future should be bring it on we can handle it and I would also say that if that is your default at attitude you're much more likely to be successful in your dealings with the future and one of the things I've learned about classic religious or metaphysical faith is that a tremendous proportion of that is the faith that is courage right the courage to confront the unknown in the future with standing up straight with shoulders back right with the presumption that despite our flaws we're intrinsically good despite the misery in the world it's intrinsically good and that that's the relationship we should establish with it so that's the first part of the Ark motivational message and the second part is that part of the way that you face the future in a manner that makes of it the best it could be is to do that responsibly to take responsibility for yourself to put your life together to tell the truth to pursue high order aims to take responsibility for your marital partner and vice versa to do the same with your family your local community your town your city and that's your identity that nested Social Web of obligations that's your identity and and also that the meaning in your life is going to emerge as a consequence of shouldering that responsibility the meaning and the adventure in your life and so confront the future with faith and courage and accept the responsibility that's commensurate with that and that's the way you set the world straight and that's not a political Solution that's a spiritual solution or a psychological solution now it has political ramifications but we're much more interested at ARK and at the AR conference with the with the underlying substrate the substrate about which the culture war is really raging right about the the ultimate nature of reality in some in some way and and how you on how you construe that I think to some degree you have to construe it as a matter of Faith because we're all ignorant and limited in our knowledge and so we have to make first pass approximations at what we're going to presume to be true and so one set of presumptions is open your eyes confront what frightens you move forward stalwartly aim up tell the truth there's no evidence that that's correct but you can start with that as a set of propositions and then you could also make the claim you the claim and I think this is a valid claim you cannot canot be armed better in life other than with that set of propositions and I think that's the Western claim and that's what we're trying to communicate to the degree we can with this AR conference well I think it's an excellent uh an excellent start I mean no more than that let's see how people respond to it I was encouraged actually uh in the last few days by the news breaking here in Hollywood that Disney have decided to put back the release of their new version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves by a year following the huge backclash to the fact that actually it as it wasn't going to have any dwarves in it I think one the rest were going to be fully bodied people male female black white so on and so on taking every possible virtue signaling box and I actually interviewed one of the leading dwarf actors in the world who said how dare they put me out of work like this this is one of the most prized jobs in the world for any dwarf actor being in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and it was a very good point of course that in their surge towards supposed equality they were actually stopping the very people for whom this would have been the number one gig in town from getting that gig but they've now put it back and apparently are going to go back to potentially even using CGI actual dwarves in the movie which seems to me a significant climb down by Disney what do you make of this well I think it's actually it's perversely analogous to the case that we're trying to make at ARC so there is an underlying metaphysical or narrative reality and you can warp and bend that with an ideology but the ideology doesn't map well onto the underlying reality and so that that's and and so how would that play out in the case of Snow White in the 7 to Wars well that's a very old story and some some folktales we have anthropological evidence that some folktales can be up to 10 15,000 years old extremely old well there's a reason that they lay themselves out the way they do it's it's the it's the logic of the narrative world so I can give an example with Snow White well why is Snow White surrounded by dwarves when she reaches the peak of her beauty why is she surrounded by dwarves why do they have to be dwarves and the answer is a stellar young woman finds herself surrounded by dwarfs right that's the universal that's the universal position of an extremely well put together young woman there's going to be men around her who aren't what they could be right they're much smaller than they need to be and why is she waiting for a prince well cuz she's a princess that's why and so you're going to be waiting and this is the Eternal situ situation of women they're they're going to be waiting for not only their match but for maybe for someone that they actually admire and that's not to be found around the dwarfs now you can't just take that and say well let's throw some random diversity people in there it's like the story has a coherence and the coherence transcends easy understanding you know it wouldn't have that magical mythical element that fairy tales have if if the narrative didn't transcend the understanding one of the things we're trying to do with Ark is to remind people that our civilization exists in a metaphysic in a story right it's a Divine story and that the Divine story has its reasons the reasons that transcend reason it's it's where Carl Yung the the famous psychoanalyst he he his notion of the way the world worked in in to simplify it to some degree is there are things that are absolutely beyond our comprehension and then there are things that we understand explicit ly and in detail but there's a border between them so so imagine there's not a cut off line so you go from things you understand completely to things you understand not at all the border is the land of the dream the land of the story The Land of the fantasy the land of myth it's half unknown and mysterious like the lands in The Lord of the Rings and it's half explicit and understandable and it's the place that that the unknown moves through before it becomes explicit our Western philosophical tradition with its Reliance on rights let's say and its insistence upon the Dignity of each individual exists within a dreamlike metaphysic and that is the judeo-christian story now we don't know what to make of that rationally but it fills a gap that and if you tear it out or or transform it into an ideology all that happens is half-formed pathological fantasies take its place and that's what's happening everyone's sees this you know and nature predicted it in the late 1870s or thereabouts you know God will die and the realm of ideology will rise up to take its place and if you think that Christianity or or Judaism was superstitious and insane it's like just wait till you see what replaces it and so that's well exact that's exactly what we're seeing and it's happening very very rapidly and everyone has that sense this art conference the Press coverage has actually been quite interesting because even on the leftwing side I wouldn't say it's been laudatory on the leftwing side but it's been it's been pretty evenhanded and neutral which is quite remarkable and the reason for that I think Pierce is that people are so tired of the Endless diet of nihilistic apocalypse yeah that even those who don't can't see their way out of it rationally hope that something else could be be provided as an alternative Dr Jordan Peterson uh what a fascinating hour thank you very much indeed for joining me and best of luck with the the conference I think it's a great idea it's a great thing to get people with good ideas together even if they're bad ideas actually just debate ideas um and to have a positive theme of how we can make things better not worse get away from nalism get the opposite of nism into the ideology of the world would be a great starting block so I thank you very much indeed my pleasure yeah well it's good to know that it might be courage that's the opposite of nihilism yes absolutely yeah thank you very much hey thank you it's always a pleasure to talk to you pierce

Channel: New York Post

Views: 719,369

Keywords: new york post, ny post, nypost, news, us news, breaking news, world news, latest news, stories, top stories, piers morgan, jordan peterson, israel hamas war, israel hamas war 2023, jordan peterson piers morgan, jordan peterson piers morgan interview, piers morgan and jordan peterson, piers morgan jordan peterson interview, jordan peterson israel, jordan peterson israel hamas war, jordan peterson interview 2023, jordan peterson israel war, jordan peterson interview piers morgan

Id: Nj3z2ZVZy8M

Length: 56min 46sec (3406 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 03 2023