Jordan Peterson and Stephen Blackwood: Our Cultural Inflection Point and Higher Education

[Music] I'm Stephen Blackwood I'm part of a small team of people found in a new University in Savannah Georgia I'm the president of that new institution I'm here today at Cambridge University an ancient August and beautiful institution and I have the great pleasure today to have with me dr. Jordan Peterson professor of psychology of the University of Toronto and I think it is safe to say an unknowable figure of our time Jordan it's a real pleasure to have you here today thank you thanks pleasure to be here this unbelievable place Jordan and I are going to talk today about what he has called the inflection point and my hope is that that conversation will lead us into a discussion of the possibilities for cultural renewal indeed the possibilities for the the renewal the Renaissance of a more fully human culture Jordan I think you've called that the inflection point or called our cultural temporal moment a kind of inflection point where do we start there what is the inflection point well I think we're deciding we're trying to decide if there's such a thing as a direction to move forward to into the future that's what it looks like to me I mean on the one hand we're making tremendous technological progress in all sorts of directions simultaneously and that seems to be having mostly positive effects especially economically especially on a global scale and on the other hand we seem more confused about are the foundations of our culture and the potential directions that we're moving in than we have been for a while and that seems especially acute in educational institutions and that seems to be a consequence of the constant cultural critique that's been generated I would say mostly on the on the postmodern edge edge of the academic what would you say academic territory so so we're trying to figure out what's next when what do we have to offer to students all of that mm-hmm I know that it was that this yesterday was published the 50th anniversary edition of Sol's nichkhun's Gulag Archipelago with a foreword that you've forward written by you which I think you've described the writing of as one of the greatest owners of your life if I got that right academic honor that now I suppose the question I have there is is why is that so important well the book was important because it was the first it was the first work that succeeded in undermining the Marxist project from moral and an intellectual perspective simultaneously I mean other people had pointed out the terror of the Soviet enterprise Malcolm Muggeridge and George Orwell among others often people on the Left interestingly enough but it was always possible right up until the end of the 1960s for the people who held on to that collectivist utopian dream in the West to rationalize what had happened in the Soviet Union partly by sweeping it under the rug but also partly by while using the old adage that you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs it became obvious by the end of the 1960's that the omelet wasn't very well prepared and that millions of eggs so to speak to belabor a metaphor had been broken and so when Solzhenitsyn wrote his great book it became impossible for anyone who was willing to be part of the cultural moment to ignore the fact that something had gone dreadfully sideways and that it couldn't be attributed merely to a cult of personality or to some abnormality that wasn't intrinsically part of the doctrine itself and that was partly what soldier Solzhenitsyn revealed about the Soviet Union as such but at the same time the evidence that precisely the same thing had been happening in places like Maoist China perhaps to even a larger degree well undoubtedly to a larger degree and then in Cambodia and all the other places where Marxism produced utterly murderous consequences and so that was the book that did that and it made Marxism morally repugnant you know it was also one of the events that catalyzed the transformation of Marxism into identity politics as far as I'm concerned because a lot of the people who held the the victim victimizer narrative as sacrosanct that that was the appropriate way to look at the world to divide people into identity groups of whatever form and then to see history as the battle between them history the present and the future that that trends that transmuted especially in France because even though the Marxists had been unmasked the murderous nosov the doctrine had been unmasked that didn't the people who'd held that doctrine were still looking for the easiest lateral move and so that was one of the driving forces for the development of post-modernism not the only one it's the post modernists that are also figured out something or run across something that really is an intractable problem they ran across the problem of categorization and that that actually happened in multiple disciplines at the same time including artificial intelligence and psychology people realized start to realize about in the early 60s and was probably under the pressure of the AI types that it was very difficult to perceive the world because objects aren't just there for the looking because every object is made of sub objects and as part of a higher order structure of objects and defining what constitutes the appropriate boundary to put around a phenomenon so that it can be perceivable as an object turns out to be a virtually impossible task we're not sure how it can be managed and so that realization of the intrinsic complexity of things led to a crisis I would say an intellectual crisis which was well if there's a near infinite number of ways to perceive a finite set of entities how is it that you can call any one interpretation either canonical or valuable and that's part of the postmodern skepticism let's say of meta-narratives and it's actually a reasonable critique the problem is as far as I'm concerned that what the post modernists did was use that problem which is a genuine problem as a critique of the structure of the West and then instead of addressing the problem directly which is well the world is very complex but we do in fact perceive it and they're actually our value structures they just circumvented that and pop back into a bastardized form of mark the bastardized form of Marxism that we see today is identity politics and that's been extraordinarily destructive to the universities well that's well let's talk about that a bit more because it seems to me that that it would be a great shame if people were to think that you're you're writing this forward to souls nichkhun was simply to document something as an historic phenomenon as essentially important as that historic documentation is it seems to me that what is of interest to you is not simply to shed light on the terrors the hundred million slaughtered in the course of the various communist revolutions of the 20th century that those various ideologies motivated by Marxism and other other forms of philosophical ideology but because it seems to me that you take what was present in that philosophically ideologically still to be at work in in or to have been as it were reborn in the West and so I suppose what I'd like to ask you about is what are the what are the characteristics of the Marxist ideology that led to those debt that that that very obvious death and destruction which in in a subtler way you seem to be am i right to say you see to be a war in the West said like it seems to be very important that we have a deep sense of what the the governing assumptions of our culture are or it's hard to transcend them yeah well that is exactly the issue because the question is whether or not the past is over I mean there's a Marx a Marxist philosopher named Richard Wolff who challenged me recently on YouTube to a a debate and really the answer that I posted was this forward and he accused me of being stuck in the past you know it's well the you know the The Wall fell in 1989 and the horrors of the Soviet era are over and we we can't paint we can't eternally tar Marxism with the brush of these past events I mean as if these events are over or as if 50 years is sufficient time to forget about the corpses but that's his idea you know and to me it's the same idea that you might put forward if you were a neo-nazi by saying that well you know all that happened back in 1945 the fundamental doctrine was sound and we can't allow our judgement about these eternal truths manifested in the National Socialist doctrine to be forever tainted by some unfortunate historical events and I think that that's just well I don't even know what to say about it I mean one of the telling things about his comments was that he only talked about the Soviet Union and not all the other terrible places that the same doctrine had been implemented with equally murderous effects and so that was quite the argument by evasion but I what I tried to do in the foreword and in my thinking in general is I'm always trying to get to the bottom of things what's at the bottom and it seems to me that what happened if you look at what happened in the Russian Revolution like the first thing you want to do is give the devil is do ok and the way you do that is by pointing out that hierarchical structures no well we'll start even before that people have problems that have to be solved life is a sequence of problems that have to be solved if you don't solve the problems that life puts forward you suffer and you die so assuming the you don't want those two outcomes then there are problems you have to solve and and so you have to set a name and the aim is to solve the problem and then because we're social creatures we have to solve the problems by organizing collectively and the way we do that generally speaking in relationship to an aim is to produce a hierarchy and the reason for that is that if you have a problem and you want it to be solved and you get a variety of people working on it you're soon going to discover that some people are much better at solving the problem than others and that will inevitably produce a hierarchy and it should because then the even the the structure of authority is is in sync with the aim and the aim is valuable because it's a problem that everybody agrees that is an actual problem so you're going to get hierarchical organizations and you should now the problem with that is that as soon as you produce a hierarchical organization two things happen one is that a small minority of the people do almost all the creative work that's the period of principal and the other is that the benefits of the hierarchy flow disproportionately to a small number of people at the top so and that's another manifestation of the Prix de principle and it is something that Marx pointed out although he blamed it on capitalism which which is a big mistake even if you're concerned for those the hierarchy dispossesses so you produce a hierarchy both the work the work flows from a minority of people and the benefits flow to a minority of people and those might not be the same people by the way right because hierarchies aren't perfect in their ability to distribute resources as a consequence of productive effort that's part of the problem with hierarchical organizations but then what the hierarchy does is produce a layer of the dispossessed that stack up at the bottom near zero and it's the majority it's always the majority so that's the price you pay for hierarchies now what the left does is say look at the dispossessed and keep the hierarchy flexible enough so that it can twist and Bend and transform when necessary but also so that the dispossessed don't fall so close to zero that they that they're done they're in misery B that the talents they might possess can't be utilized and see that the whole structure doesn't become so untenable that it destroys itself because of the inequality perfectly reasonable propositions and so then you could say well there's a certain number of people on the Left who are genuinely motivated by concern about dispossession as well as the dispossessed of course fine so that's to give the devil his due and so then you might say well there was moral reasons there were moral reasons for at least a subset of those who were involved in the Russian Revolution to be involved they were interested in helping the dispossessed but there's a problem and this is the problem of the left there's a problem so on the right as well the problem on the right is once the higher arc is established those who dominate the top have every right to overstate the moral virtue of the hierarchy because it privileges them in particular on the left the problem is is that it's not easy to distinguish between care for the dispossessed and hatred for those who occupy positions of well you could say Authority the leftists would say power you could also say competence which i think is more to the case or ability it's not easy to distinguish care for the dispossessed from hatred for those who occupy the preeminent positions in the hierarchy and if it's power than its hatred for power but if it's competence and it is competence if the hierarchy is functional then its hatred for the competent okay then you say all right so those are the two competing motivations care for the dispossessed and hatred for the let's say competent let's play that out historically speaking and see which is the more powerful force well that got played out very rapidly in the Russian Revolution and what happened was even if there was a a minority and perhaps even a majority although there wasn't but perhaps even a majority of those who truly cared for the dispossessed those who hated the competent slaughtered them it turned out that the hatred was a much more potent geopolitical force than the compassion and then and another twist occurred too because the the narrative was burrs huazi against proletariat let's say and so that's those at the uppermost pinnacle of the hierarchy against those who the dispossessed and that was also the historical narrative and then it was the right and responsibility of those who were oppressed to rise up but that ran into another problem which is basically the problem that the that the the post modernists especially on the feminist side have now identified as intersectionality it's like well turns out that you're you can't so easily be placed into one group like in fact this is the perception problem that we talked about before there's a very large number of groups you could be placed in it might be an unlimited number of groups in fact and so then if you're motivated primarily by hatred and your your your desire is to produce as much mayhem as possible you can take any given person and you can analyze the multiple groups that they belong to and then you can find one group in which they're the oppressor and then because there's no excuse whatsoever for the oppression even if there's one dimension of your identity along which you're an oppressor then your grist for the for the for the bone-crushing mill of the of the Soviet work camp and that's exactly what happened and so as the Soviet revolution progressed more and more people got thrown into the cauldron let's say the Socialists the students the religious people the old the the the old original revolutionary still and had all them killed because there was some and if it wasn't you that was guilty because of your group membership them they just expanded the capacity of the parameters of the idea of group well you're not an imprint lopressor but your grandfather was a landowner well that's good enough that's that's that's your class that's that's and so that's sufficient justification to throw you to the wolves as well and so what you saw is this just unbelievable expansion of murderous Ness driven by the twin improper presuppositions that you could define people by their group identity and that history who was best conceptualized as a battle between the fortunately unfortunate along those group identities yes and if we could pick up that notion of the the group identity and to collect what you call the color that's where the collectivist thinking it seems to me that might be opposed to a kind of robust view of the human individual as the site of responsibility and agency suffering and so it seems to me that what I'd like to ask you about is that is the connection between or the ways in which the collectivist thinking results in the annihilation of all human particularity whether its economic or familial or you might say it seems to me that what's going on in the collectivist thinking is the absolute enemy of human particularity and freedom itself the enemy of the idea of the individual the sovereign individual which is the central idea of the West I mean and that's manifested in the underlying religious structure so if you think about Christianity for example you think about Christianity psychologically and strip it of its metaphysics at least for the purposes of the argument you see the emergence of the idea of the divine individual as as well as as what as as part of what's what as part of divinity itself right as an integral part that's part of the Trinitarian idea the part of of divinity itself and that divinity to me is the capacity of the of individual consciousness to generate order from potential so the way I look at people first of all so like people who have been criticizing what I'd be doing think about my philosophy such as it is not that it's mine as a sort of variant of Iran's ideas of the centrality of the individual individual above all that's not the issue it's a conceptual issue is that what what what category is to be primary and for me the individual is to be primary and there's a variety of reasons for that first of all the individual is the locus of suffering and also the locus of responsibility so those are really the two reasons for that the individual has to be made primary but and and the divinity element of the individual and this I think is coded in our deepest stories it's really deeply coded in in Genesis particularly in the opening chapters of opening verses of Genesis is that what human-beings confront in their lives is akin to what God Himself confronted at the beginning of time and so it's easy for us to believe that were deterministic creatures like clocks and and that it's the past that drives us forward in a deterministic manner into the future but I don't believe that's the case I actually don't think there's any evidence that that's the case because people are so complex you actually can't predict them as if they're deterministic except in in very constrained circumstances and so it's a hypothesis but it's not a very good one and although it has its utility what what what seems to me to be the case and I think this is how people conceptualize themselves and how they act towards themselves and towards other people and how our social structures our political structures are constituted is that human beings constantly confront a landscape of possibility its potential itself and and we have a belief in the idea of potential we have an idea that there are things that could be it's a very strange conception of reality because it's not a materialistic conception because things that could be aren't measurable in any sense right but we certainly act as if they exist and we all treat each other as if our one of our fundamental ethical requirements is for you to confront that potential properly and that would be to live up to your responsibility it is you have these gifts and talents and and possibilities that have been granted to you and if you fail to make use of them your talents let's say then that's a sin of sorts and that's a religious way of thinking about it but it doesn't matter because that's how people treat each other if you have a child for example or a spouse or a friend brother to anyone you care about and you see you have the intuition that they could be making more of themselves and what they have then they are then you're deeply disappointed in that and the reason you're disappointed in that is because there's a call to us an existential call to confront that potential that's everywhere that faces us in every direction and to transform it into the most functional and habitable order possible and the way that that is to be done properly is with truth and and I think that all of those ideas are integral to the judeo-christian substrate of Western culture there are fundamental ideas and so if you put the group before the individual then all of that disappears I guess when you're when you're debating with the radical leftist postmodern types about free speech you're actually not debating with them about free speech because they don't believe in free speech it's not part of their conceptual universe because for for speech to be free and therefore valuable the people conducting the conversation have to be sovereign individuals capable of generating independent thought independent of their canonical group identity and reach a consensus through that process of dialogue none of that exists in the postmodern world all of those preconceptions would be attributed to well something like Eurocentric neo colonialism something like that though seems to me that was the work of that is is a radical dismissal of the possibility that the individual has access to anything at all that is to say that that that in if you don't the belief in free speech is fundamentally motivated by the by or or sustained by the confidence that our discourse our dialogue that human thinking itself can reach something stable that it has a relationship beyond by Beyond immediacy and that and that and that there are beyond power and beyond power really it reaches beyond power to truth there's no point in ever having a conversation about anything if the conversation itself doesn't have access to something transcendent exactly right well so what happens with this is especially true for people like Foucault and Derrida to to some degree is well the first thing you do is you define the fundamental motivation as power because that's all there is is there's the dominance of one group or the other and so then the dialogue has to serve power because that's all there is and so yeah all of that is obliterated and and by doing that actually the the the postmodernists make it impossible for them to solve the conundrum that validly drove pause post-modernism to begin with so the conundrum is infinite set of potential interpretations that's a real conundrum that's the problem of complexity right and and it's real so then the question is well is there any solution to the problem of complexity and this is where issues of moral relativism start to become paramount because if there's no solution to the problem of complexity then there's no canonical interpretations and all the interpretations are just well what would you call it there their expedient they have the expedience of power but see my best pathway through that essentially I think has come from the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget and Piaget could be considered a neo-kantian you know the Kant's fundamental doctrine was act such that if your action became a universal Maxim that that would be of universal benefit and so and but but Piaget differentiated that and and and and demonstrated how that evolves naturally in the course of the spontaneous maturation of children through play it's absolutely brilliant so I can give you a quick example so my granddaughter who's 14 months old has just learned a new game and the game is she plays it with her wooden spoon and the game is she has the spoon and then she looks at you and then she gives you the spoon and then you take it from her and she lets it go and then she watches you and then you give the spoon back and she's very happy to get the spoon back but she's also very happy to give it to you and then she turns to the next person and she gives them the spoon and then she gets it back and then you can play with her and and the play is well now you've you've you've started to embody the principle of reciprocity right we can trade and and it's a repeating game it's not one trade you don't end up with a spoon and I don't end up with the spoon we both have the spoon some of the time across time and there's some utility in the exchange itself okay so she's playing with that and thrilled about wonder cuz it's a walloping walloping discovery and so then you take the spoon from her and maybe you you hold it a little longer than she expects and that makes her a little nervous but then you give it back and then she's relieved and that makes her happy or you cover the spoon with your hand and then she's a bit confused about where it might be and you show it to her and you give it back and she's happy about that or she reaches out to grab it and you pull it away a little bit and move it back and forth so she has to do a little more effort to get it and as long as you don't push that and it's a bit of a challenge to her both both physically in terms of coordination but also psychologically in terms of delay of gratification she also finds that gratifying and and the reason for that is that you're you're showing how her how robust and resilient the idea of reciprocity is across sequences of transformations and it's just this little thing you do at the table you think well that's nothing it's like no it's something and so the PIA jetty an idea is something like there's an if there's an implicit morality that emerges to constrain the infinite set of interpretations and it has to do with the structure that will maintain reciprocity optimally in the largest including the largest number of people across the largest amount of time and so and so the way that I've been portraying that for the people who've been listening to my lectures is that well you need to take responsibility for yourself as if you care for yourself okay so first we figure out what's yourself well it's not just you now because you aren't just you now you're the community of use that extra stretch across time so in order for you to take care of yourself properly now you have to learn to play an inter ativ game with yourself that's sustainable and even potentially improvable across time and there aren't many games that you can play like that so that starts to radically constrain the set of possibilities and then it's more constrained than that because not only do you have to play a game with yourself that can repeat across time to minimize suffering to remove the possibility of death to allow for the possibility of productive movement and a certain amount of happiness but you have to do that with other people around you and across time and so there's you and the multiple use embedded in your family and the multiplicity of your members embedded inside a culture and and the extension of that culture across time and so for you to act properly then all of those things have to be harmoniously balanced at the same time and that radically reduces the set of potential interpretations and that's the antidote to the to the chaos of of the infinite array of potential perceptual worlds and and well and then there are questions that emerge out of that like well what's the best way to play that game but we certainly know that reciprocity fair play the spirit of fair plays is is immensely important to that that's what Piaget documented and that what it's what we all know and also that there's something about truth that's absolutely integral to that as well so and the post modernists just they just they got the problem right but they they never went the next steps and it's partly because well why is it why is it they had an easy answer at hand that required almost no transformation in their original worldview well we'll just keep the Marxism we'll just transform it into something that looks different and that'll be good enough minimal change so it seems to me that the the the collective the collectivist thinking that's at work in the insistence that only the group matters has the effect of radically annihilating the integrity of the individual in fact that maybe even its its asset well I think I think it's it's a actually that isn't saying I believe so at the border like and because there's a there's a murderous 'no sat the bottom of the collectivism that needs to be accounted for and so I see what's at the bottom and this is partly consequence say of the insistence that the West is a patriarchal tyranny the the desire is it's the Cain and Abel desire see Cain was jealous of Abel not so much because Abel was God's favorite but because Abel deserved to be God's favorite because he had done things right and it's very bitter it's very bitter in life to see a gap widening between you and someone else period but it's particularly bitter if you know the gap is widening because the person who is doing well is doing is actually doing good and doing well and that implies at least in eradicating the vagaries and randomness of life and I'm perfectly aware of those as factors it's it's bad enough to be down but it's worse to know that you're down because you've put yourself down and then you have a choice which is do you do turn against the ideal itself because it becomes so painful to gaze upon it or do you destroy the ideal out of vengeance and spite and that's and that's that's a simpler pathway forward than decomposing and deconstructing yourself and being reborn the Christian idea for for lack of a better word is that something has to be sacrificed in order for the potential of the future to be manifest in the best possible way there's always a demand for sacrifice the question is what should be sacrificed and the answer is you that's the answer it's you that should be sacrificed and then the question is well what part of you and and the answer that is well the part of you that's not worthy that needs to be put into the flame that needs to be burnt off and that's a process of death and and rebirth and if there's lots of you that has become corrupt then most of what passes through the fire will be burnt off and that's terribly painful for people it's that's the desert you know imagine that your that your essential personality structure is tyrannical so you're a rigid ideologue you're cast in stone and so you decide to move from the tyranny you escape from the tyranny well where do you end up well you don't end up in the promised land you end up in the desert for 40 years and maybe you die there I mean even Moses did so it's out of the frying pan into the fire that's for sure and it's no wonder that people are loath to to let go and then the more tyrannical they've become the more they've restricted their possibility and all of that and sold their soul to the dogma of human beings let's say a Solzhenitsyn would describe it the less there is of them that will be left after everything is stripped bare and that's a terrifying that's a terrifying possibility it's much easier to take the the root and it becomes easier and easier and then well there are other motivations that pile up as well bitterness the hatred that bitterness can because you know you've lost your chance right you had your chance and you've and you squandered it and that and the feeling of that I think that's why Cain tells God after he gets caught after his murderous act he says that his punishment is more than he can bear because it's the realization of what he's done he's destroyed his own ideal and that's what you do if you're a collectivist you destroy yourself as an individual and that's all you have and so there's there's nothing in that except I would say a continually opening pit of hopelessness and despair and then that drives bitterness and hatred and desire for revenge and all of that it's a terrible cycle and we've seen it play itself out over and over and and and we haven't yet precisely learned from that so to me it's part of an eternal struggle you know it's been outlined as a as a war in some sense that's going on in the human psyche since the beginning of time for all intents and purposes it seems to me Jordan that your position is is fundamentally a positive one it's an affirmation of human dignity the freedom that dignity demands and an affirmation of the infinite particularity of human life you would if one were to contrast the collectivist thinking on the one hand if one might call it a kind of abstract rationality as if there's one solution to fit them one size fits all going to talk down logic what's on the other side what's the what's the antidote to that in the individual yes particularly I mean one of the things I talk about in twelve rules for life and this is my lectures this has become a meme strangely enough something that's widely distributed on the web partly because there's a comical element to it it's to clean up your room and everyone laughs about that because I'm taking that seriously it's like Paul clean up your room everyone's mother has told them that a thousand times right but I try to explain why it's like well you have a bit of chaotic potential right in front of you it's in some sense infinite in its potential and the the domain in which you can manipulate that might be rather restricted because of the restrictions that that are part and parcel of your existence but maybe you have your room and you might think you might have contempt for that and so it's a complete bloody catastrophe but you don't have to you could think well I've got a little it isn't a room it's a place of potential and as soon as you know that then it's it's not your room anymore it isn't a room the room that you see is your preconception of the space that you inhabit what's there is is a fragment of infinity that's what's there and what you see is the is the is the low resolution consequence of your assumption and lazy habit and blindness that's your initial room and you think well no that's not the room see part of what artists do for example when Van Gogh paints a room and you look at it glowing he's trying to show you what's beyond your perception of the room and I mean this technically like the way that your visual system is set up is that whenever memory and presumption can can can replace direct perception it will because it's simpler so you literally see what you expect to see and if what you see is dull and drab and boring and pointless and and and uninspiring then that's you it's not what's there and what the artist does when he or she represents that mundane reality is to remind you of what's behind it the potential that's there and so what I'm suggesting to people is that they take the potential that's right in front of them it's like okay and here's the rule you're aiming up there's something that you could change that you would change that might be a very small thing could well that's within the grasp of your power would is within the grasp of your will to combine those two things might be very small shift you might only be willing to make a very tiny step forward it's like fine good enough make a tiny step forward and that makes you a slight bit stronger than you were before and then the next step can be slightly larger and it's it's the path of humility it's what people it's what people act out when so there's this Cathedral it's actually it's not a Cathedral it's an oratorio in Montreal I think it's the second largest one in the world it's set on a hill at the top of a hill and there's a huge staircase leading up to it from the bottom of the hill and people often who are crippled and who are on crutches and so forth or in wheelchairs go there and make their way painfully up the hill or maybe they do that on their knees and the idea is that they're struggling incrementally uphill step by step despite their burdens to reach the City of God on the hill and they're acting out that's life it's like the the proper aim is the City of God on the hill and what is that well that's that place that we talked about already where these levels of responsibility are stacked together harmoniously so that you're acting in your best interest and in your family's best interest and in and in the world's best interest and I would say in the best interests of reality itself right assuming that we have some integral role to play in reality which is certainly at least true at the human level that's the City of God on the hill that beckons to everyone and you you move up that you move towards that humbly so that's one step at a time and you do it despite your burden and your suffering all of that and that's all dramatized in that and it's it's a perfect drama of that and what do you even say it's not to be despite your suffering it's in and through your particular suffering one thing that strikes me about you clean up your room clean up your room yes the affirmation of the particularity of your life I mean one thing that strikes people deepest in our human experience is that it is infinitely particular I mean that you mentioned your your granddaughter I mean that the the the loves the people the experiences the places that were shaped by they're not places in the abstract this this top-down sense as if there could be that well you know the same kinds of clothes and the same kinds of experience for all human beings it that that that's the enemy of the very deepest truth of our human experience which it seems to me is infinitely particular but not infinitely particular in the sense of which those particular needs to squall off into nothingness those particular czar precisely our points of access to the transcendent to the infinite to the to the to to to to that that's where the reality is yes yeah well that's why you said that modern man can't see God because they don't look low enough yes they're not they're not paying attention to the importance of the particularity x' because if the particularity is where the pen meets the paper right yes and it's just a tiny dot every every like when you're when you're writing it's it's a dot and then it extends into a line and those transform into words and sentences and paragraphs but the particular act is where the pen means yes yes yes that focal point right that's the center of the cross by the way yes same yes yes we mentioned the cross I mean certainly in the in in in in in the in the history of of the West one of the ways this comes through is and in the East to is in Christian theology is the very notion of the Incarnation you know what is that to say but that the the infinite is in the particular and that they that that they are that they are Co inherent that the infinite in fact has no life except in the particular and the particular itself has a relation to or is comprehended by that very infinite and so it seems to me that that what is going on there is an affirmation that every particularity no matter how tiny itself is revelatory of a transcendent and yes I think it was from the Gospel of Thomas but I might have this wrong the kingdom of God is spread upon the earth but men do not see it and that's that that's that infinite that's that infinite possibility in each moment of particularity and that is what artists that is what great artists are reminding us of they'll take a slice of space and time it was it money who painted the haystacks he went out into the fields in France and he painted the same haystack like many many times under different conditions of lighting just to show how different it yes if it's if it's a haystack it's the same thing but it wasn't he attention to the particularity x' and so what great artists are trying to do is well first of all so imagine a painting so it's a painting of a landscape and so the first thing is that it's it's layers of time because the painter has gone out there and seeing the landscape and then seen it again and then seen it again and then seen it again and then seen it again and it has to pay attention to the particularity x' of the light and the color and all of that to represent it properly so it's and and and the mere fact that he's done that is it's it's the acting out of the idea that in this tiny slice of time and space there's something worth attending to for an infinite amount of time but you can't because you just can't do it but you need to know that you could do it and then it would be worthwhile and so the painter encapsulate s' the landscape and then frames it and says like look look through this window at the transcendent that's behind the low-resolution representation of your assumption the blindness that you the expedient blindness that you by necessity bring to bear to every situation remember what's behind this always remember what's behind this and that's what art calls us to do that's what beauty calls us to do is to make contact with that then you say well the problem with the particularly the problem with it particularly is that it brings suffering and the bringing of suffering with particularly can also allow evil to enter the world because that particular suffering can engender bitterness and resentment and hatred and all of those things and the desire to destroy so that particularly carries with it a tremendous risk and a tremendous burden and so the answer the question is well how do you tolerate the particularity and take advantage of the potential and the answer is to make a relationship with the infinite that's behind the particularly and that's the fundamental religious idea is to if you can maintain that particularly but also stay in contact with what's transcendent and infinite beyond that then you can then you have the potential strength to tolerate the catastrophe of yes what's limited yes and then you get to have your cake and eat it too in principle yes yes I want to return to education in a moment but but on the way there as it were Jordan I want to ask you you you've you've talked about this the inflection point what is the inflection point and how might it be understood relative to what I would I take to be a very decadent worldview in its last gasps it seems to me even that many of the frankly simply slanderous attacks on you personal personally blatant misrepresentations of the the very plain fact of what you're saying it seems to me that there's an animus there that is precisely there's an animus there but the question is where is that coming from well we've if you look at Derrida for example and his critique of the idea of logo centrism you know as as the central motif of the West let's say and and he and he knew at multiple levels what that critique meant because he knew what logos meant logos means embodied truth and there is of course a religious dimension to that and so he was criticizing the notion of FAL logo centrism and and so he was going right at the core of the doctrine of the individual now the question is why might someone do that now I think the reason for that fundamentally is that there's a terrible responsibility that goes along with it so imagine that you offered people here's the offer offer one you you don't matter you it's it's a really say the narrowest of materialist viewpoints is you weren't here than you were for a brief period of time and then you're gone and that all washes out in the endless sands of time nothing in your life is significant nothing about humanity is significant nothing about the world itself is significant it's all a matter of blind random chance and it's all the same in the end who cares in a million years right and and the price you pay for that is insignificance but the advantage that you gain from that is that fundamentally you have noticed possibility because nothing you do matters and so then there's no moral burden there's no obligation and of course if you can gather expedient pleasure well your deteriorating pointlessly then that's all to the good so it's it's a libertine ism as well and that's inviting obviously because short-term pleasure is by definition inviting and so you can abandon any pretension to a relationship with the infinite and consider that only a sign of delusion and weakness assume that your life is material and irrelevant it doesn't matter and then you can shrug off all responsibilities and pursue short-term pleasure well there's some real advantages in that it's very it's a very easy pathway the alternative is as far as I'm concerned is note you don't understand you are the you are the center of the world a center of the world it has many centers and you do partake in this process of casting the potential of the future into the reality of the present and the past that's what your consciousness does and the quality of what you produce is dependent on your on the ethics of your choice your choice between good and evil in every moment is what determines the course of the world and that's on you it's like well that's deeply meaningful but it's unbelievable it's in its ultimate responsibility in the literal sense and I think that in order for us to set things right we have to understand that we we have to take on that burden of ultimate responsibility as if it's not only as if it's ours which it is but as if there isn't anything better that we could do and I and one of the things that I found so gratifying about the lecture tour that I've been doing is that my I keep doing it the live events in particular because we've done about a hundred of them now so far is that when I explain to the audiences and this is especially true it's been seems to be especially true of men but of young men but not so young even to say look you you have you you have an ethical obligation to lift the heaviest load you can possibly conceive of that's the primary call to adventure in life and that call to adventure is so worthwhile that it justifies the particularity everybody it's like light school oh I see so you need a meaning to set against the suffering and to protect you against that temptation towards men malevolence you need that well where's the meaning to be found well it's not happiness it's not short-term pleasure it's not it's not self development it's not self esteem it's none of those things that are so focused on on on the individual psyche either it's it's literally the stumbling uphill towards the City of God yes with your burden people go well that's where the meaning is and they know that because they know responsible people they know they admire responsible people they're they already got that say well that's what you should become and they think and normally that that that's what you could become because that's what you are in the deepest sense yes yes would you would you say that that that that the antidote to nihilism is meaning and if so you know I think you've described yourself Jordan as you've said I think you're the surfer not the wave and I suppose I want to ask you what is the wave because it seems to me we're at a moment of very great cultural potential and it could go any number of ways but that the very fact of what one might call the the jordan peterson phenomenon a worldwide you book translated into dozens of languages your reck lecture halls pact is a sign of a longing a self-conscious longing for for meaning how would how would you how would you describe what that wave is that that you didn't create but that you will see some of its technological so so I would say that wave is it's got multiple levels so so we could start from we'll start from I would say what's most obvious and that would be the medium rather than the message so I and these people that I've been associated with this intellectual dark web group where we're in the fortunate position of being early adopters of extraordinarily powerful technologies so and the technologies are twofold there's there's online video and then there's podcasts and and so they're technologically revolutionary in a variety of ways so online video is revolutionary because it brings something closely akin to a live performance to an infinitely large number of people on demand permanently so then you think well what's the advantage of a book well it's permanent it's relatively low-cost it's easily distributable right so well what's the advantage to online video well it's it's inexpensive it's not inexpensive it's free it's far easier to produce than a book like the lag time from video to publication is the day like we could put this online today instead of the three year lag that a book would require and then far more people can watch and listen then can read because reading is a minority ability in some sense really real expert level reading you know that because such a tiny minority of people buy books and people are made uncomfortable by books they're intimidated by them even if they have the intelligence in principle to do the reading it's not part of their cultural milieu that's a small minority of people and so all of a sudden online video allows allows the spoken word to have the same impact as the written word and that's deadly that's a good and Burgh revolution and then with podcasts that's even magnified because you don't have to sit and watch a podcast you can walk around you can exercise you can do the dishes you can you can drive many people who come to my lectures are like long-haul truckers and guys who run forklifts and you know they're in their machinery all day and all they do is listen to podcasts and so all of us and they can listen to the podcasts because more people can listen then can read and may be way more people can listen than can read we have no idea maybe the potential market is ten times as big and so they can do it when they want to they can also do it in private if you read and you're on the subway people can tell you're reading if you're sitting at home and reading well then you're with a book and if you're uncomfortable with a book you think that's pretentious or presumptuous or part of a class that you don't belong to or anything that makes you feel inferior well you can just circumvent that you listen private and so people and people are taking that opportunity like mad and so that's part of the wave let's say that technological revolution in communication that's illustrated that people have far more depth and capacity to concentrate that anyone would have imagined you even see this with Netflix and HBO it used to be on TV there was an idea that well movie was about as long as you could attract people's attention for 90 minutes that's the most the typical person could concentrate for it's like that turned out to be complete rubbish people will follow these incredibly complex like literary level net narratives Breaking Bad for example that has multiple characters following multiple streams of development for four endless hours and they'll binge watch it so we have way more capacity for sustained concentration that we thought and these new bandwidth unlimited technologies are revealing that to us and I happen to be an early adopter of this and so that's that's part one of the wave and then then there's the message part and it has something to do with see our culture for a very long time has articulated out a right of rights you have rights you need to demand them you need to claim them it's like but but that's that's that's half the story and it's not the most salutary half because it turns out that the meaning in your life isn't the consequence of the claiming of rights that rights are in some sense what other people owe you I know there's more to it than that but but it's that in large part well you can just get what you're owed it's like no that's not where you're gonna find your meaning what you're gonna find where you're gonna find your meaning is responsibility which is the other half of the rights responsibility equation and people don't know that this is that the the the the the that what would you call this is where this is where this is the point where things come together properly you need a meaning in your life to forestall the suffering and to make you strong enough to resist malevolence where is the meaning to be found rights impulsive pleasure and happiness no responsibilities oh who would have guessed that it's not part of the narrative because the responsibility narrative even is usually about duty patriotism or something like that which which is okay but it's it's it's an ideological narrative - in its own right this is different it's like no you don't understand is that what makes life worth living is to pick up the tube to to take its catastrophe and embrace it and carry it and to realize through that process who you are so one of the things I figured out in this lecture tour there's this old idea that you go into the abyss it's a Nietzsche an idea that you could gaze into the abyss you gaze long and what you find in the abyss is a monster Tolstoy wrote about that that's the dragon at the bottom of the abyss let's say that's Satan himself for that matter and but if you go into that into that as deeply as you can what you find is you're you find you find you find your your your your fragmented father you know in a comatose condition in a you know in a in a desiccated and and and separated condition and then you Rivera fie that well what does that mean it means something what means that if you look in the darkness you find the light that's one thing it means and that the light really stands out against the darkness but that the light is to be found in the darkness so that's a very interesting thing that's a quest narrative but it means more than that it means something fundamental so we know for example that if you take yourself out of your current state of predictability and safety and you put yourself in a new situation you'll learn right you'll absorb you incorporate new information so that's a cognitive issue but that isn't all that happens what happens is that new genes turn on within you and code for the production of new proteins that happens neurologically new parts of you turn on and so the idea is that if you can move yourself out into the world and push yourself out against a maxim array of challenges more and more of you turn on turns on and - and then the question would be well what would you be if all of you that could be turned on was turned on and the answer would be you would be the resurrection of the ancestral father that's what you would be and so that's why Christ says I am the way and the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father except through me what that means is that if you take on the unbearable burden of being voluntarily then that transforms you into the ancestral father and that's true and so that's unbelievably optimistic because what it it's so interesting because it's it's dark beyond belief rights to say well the world is characterized by suffering and by malevolence of a depth that's virtually beyond comprehension but if you choose to comprehend that what you discover in that is the light that destroys the darkness and that's well that's and that's really something to discover it's it's the it's it's the discovery that there isn't a discovery that's more profound than that that's the search for the Holy Grail or the Philosopher's Stone all of that and isn't that that isn't that the search and indeed the finding that every human being is is made for what I want to ask you Arden is about the role of Education here it seems to me that that what the meaning that people are finding in your work that you can listen to in a podcast you can you can't you can while you're doing a long run drive across the prairies or whatever it may be but it seems to me that that the the deconstruction of our culture by a worldview that has denied the integrity of the individual that has denied the individuals relation to the transcendent to any stable knowing denied the dignity of the individual that that deconstruction is not for no reason that the the postmodern view calls itself deconstruction that has very deconstructive effects in my view in the world it seems to me that the rebirth or the the Renaissance of a more adequate a more fully human culture depends on more than it depends on institutional life we need cultural forms we architecture there's all kinds of a fully a full culture is a complex an infinitely complex structure but I think we've we've as it were deleted out the memory banks in so many profound and so what I'm what I would like to ask you about is the we still have the libraries we still have the libraries well you thank God well thank God for that and that's where I want to turn to education because you say in at one point you say that we need to rescue the treasure trove of the past the trestle we rescue the values of the treasure trove of the past and to integrate them and I suppose did like to ask you about the role the universities are for is to remind people to to lead people to doing that I mean we wandered around Cambridge today and you showed me King's chapel for example which is so beautiful that it's just beyond belief and that's a call right that's it's a call to a mode of being and it's a Socrates believed that all learning was remembering and and it's true in the sense that we just discussed is that through encounter with the tragedy of life and the malevolence of life that that more of you will come to manifest itself but that can be that can be facilitated by your incorporation of the greatness of the past so you say well each great philosopher each great thinker is a fragment of the ultimate ancestral being is a fragment of God the Father let's say and you get a fragment from Nietzsche and you get a fragment from Plato and you get a fragment for Vidkun Stein and you get a fragment from Shakespeare and and and there's something imagine this there's something that makes all those people great it's whatever greatness is and it's broken up apart it's broken up across all of them but if you and if you experience if you're exposed to each of them then you you absorb what's your you're exposed to and have the possibility to imitate and absorb that greatness across it's it's fragmentation across many people and then you can that can come to awaken that within you and that is the purpose of the universities and the reason for that it isn't it isn't something casual it's like well it's it's it's good to be more if you go to university and you take a humanities degree you'll come out more well-rounded you know that's that's not the that's not it's such it's such a weak way of putting it it's that no you wake up and realize who you are and then you're ready to take it it's on your shoulders yes and that's what the universities are here and that's what students do are dying for that yes that's why men are abandoning the universities is because that call isn't there yes well there's no answer to the call you might say that seems to me that the wave is the longing the longing for that call to be answered and it seems to me that their universities have failed us and not only failed exact antithetical to you you might call them the the water main that is distributing a worldview that is corrosive of what is best in the human being well the the the doctrine so one of the fundamental doctrines of the of the collectivist leftists especially on the feminist end of things is the idea that Western culture is a patriarchal tyranny and so first of all we could say well that's inappropriate psychologically because the way that you represent culture archetype is with the tyrant and the wise King and so you can say that there's the tyrant and that's always true but you also have to say that there's the wise king but there's no wise king there's only a tyrant okay and that tyrant is that's all men it's all male and so and so then and so that's a view of history right is that the view of history is that well women have been a primary force of oppression in relationship to women throughout history has been men no idea about the cooperative endeavor of men and women or their mutual desire to lift each other out of misery which is a much more accurate way of representing history and a much more grateful inappropriate way none of that no it's a patriarchal tyranny and men are responsible okay well so where does that leave young men well let's say young men are attempting to manifest competence in the world and to become good people well there's no good and there's no competence there's only power and it's related to the patriarchal tyranny and so that conflation of competence with power which is an absolutely pathological move in my estimation is also the desire to discourage and to devalue and to destroy and partly it's based on fear because the idea would be well a fully-fledged man is nothing but a powerful tyrant and therefore dangerous better to emasculate him completely so is nothing but harmless even though he's useless he can't do anything that's bad who said unbelievably horrifying that's the castrating mother the Freudian castrating mother that's the terrible element of of the of the female body politic that's the evil queen that's the counterpart to the evil king something we never talked about so and that's what's facing young men is that at least they're discouraged from for becoming what they could be at least they're not encouraged but it's worse than that they're actively discouraged and so the universities have become they've become institutions of active discouragement and especially for men and so what's the consequence of that well especially in the humanities and social sciences well it's obvious all you have to do is look at the statistics all the men are leaving there won't be a man left in the humanities and Social Sciences in 15 years at the current rate of of gender transformation of the disciplines and then you see this equally appalling phenomena occurring phenomenon occurring which is that virtually all of the female dominated disciplines are politically correct and I think that the reason for that is that the reasonable women don't know how to regulate the behavior of the unreasonable women the the benevolent queen can't regulate the Evil Queen and that and that hatred for the patriarchy that's the feminist part of the postmodern neo-marxist monster is is has decided that emasculated and weak men are preferable to tyrants and but and those are the only options because there's no such thing as genuine competence what you want to call young men forward to do is to take their place and say look you have you have to understand it's not just about you is the world will be a lesser place without without that which you could reveal to it because of your particularly and that hole that you leave by the absence of your presence is going to be filled with something terrible not just something neutral but something terrible and that's on you and so you you you have a calling that's that's vital and and people people need that they're dying they die yes yes it seems to me that the ideology that's dominant and very much the university is not only just attractive in all these ways but chess boring and that it's patent inadequacy to our deepest human longings male/female of owl of all races and kinds that the deep transcendent longings that we all have that the need for self longing for self knowledge that that ideology is its is is patently inadequate to its satisfaction what I see in young people today many many young people I know you see this in the thousands that you encounter is is they're not interested in fighting some cultural war they simply want to discover the deepest truth of themselves and so I want to ask you a little bit about about the role of Education we talked about the lighting up and that the awakening the encounter with depth and truth you know there's a certain kind of abstract view of Education as though it's a kind of inert process you know you're just sort of downloading into the into the into the mind but in fact the nature of our of our of our the nature of our souls is such that it's an it's a dynamic reality you know the room is not just the room it's the place in which you and you encounter yourself and the in the in the rule of clean up your room but it seems to me that that's what's going on in in in all education at its best and that it's not enough simply for the library to be there there needs the certain mediation of the institution so for example ie we could have the piano and the other side of this room you know we could say well there's a piano you're free to play the piano but I can't play the piano I don't know the chords and the scales I haven't and yet if I if I if I did all that then what I can make happen on the piano is infinitely richer than if I've never learned to play the piano and I suppose I suppose when we talk about rescuing the values of the treasure trove that's discipline as the precondition for freedom yes right which is which is a which is actually a Nietzschean idea at least in part I mean it's older than that it's the apprenticeship idea it's that it's that before before you can be a painter who can paint what's beyond mere memory you you have to inculcate that discipline skill and a lot that is painful repetition and hard grinding work it's the sacrifice of the present for the future but once you manage that then things open up and virtually everything you learn of value is like that's very very very difficult to learn to write and there's arbitrary arbitrary rules that you have to follow and bind yourself to and while you're learning those rules the probability that you have any creative freedom to speak of or any facility with the rules is very low you're you're a rank beginner and and even to some degree whatever creativity you have is going to have to be stifled well you're passing through that that keyhole but if you pass through it then something massive opens up on the other side and it is definitely the case that disciplinary institutions universities are exactly that is their places of guidance and and their places to encourage people to develop the discipline that's necessary to see beyond the discipline I mean that's why we have disciplines right I mean the words aren't there by accident you have to narrow yourself first and then you can broaden outward and so that's and that's part of the process of maturation that part of the that's part of the sacrifice of childhood say in childhood you're nothing but potential but it's not realized and you don't know how to realize it and so then the question is well how do you get to a point where you realize the potential and the answer is you sacrifice almost all of it to a single Direction this is Nietzsche's commentary on the Catholic Church because a great admirer of the Catholic Church despite the fact that he was also a radical critic a critic of Christianity said the count see the thing about the Catholic Church is that it forced everything to be interpreted within a single explanatory framework and that was a discipline and once that discipline was established then the disciplined mind could explode in every direction which is precisely what happened and so and and and that's the thing about growing up is that when you're a teenager and a young adult you have to sacrifice everything you could have been as a child to be the one thing that you're aiming at but then that opens up and the universities are part and parcel of that process and you need the guidance because the the the library is too large to wander through it unaided yes and that and I think that hat comes down to to the question of what you need to what what are the books that can be read to be transformative I mean we you know it's into the the other nests that realizes in that awakens and opens up the self that light that turns those lights on is not just a random otherness I mean you can look at a brick wall all day and never get anything like what we get by looking at the King's chapel that we just came from a few minutes ago that that the the levels of pattern and depths and beauty that are present in that building that's a kind of metaphor for what the most wonderful most for contexts of our own of our own past offered to us you know they're they are lying in the Shelf but when opened up and explored fully they in Ostia they're portals so I suppose a book isn't paper yes that that's that's your memory that's your perception of the book it's a portal yes and and and you know one of the ideas the postmodern idea is that well there's no Canon and if there is a Canon it's only there to support the tyrannical patriarchy because of course the tyrannical patriarchy is the explanation for everything but I've been trying to solve that problem technically with I have a small staff that's trying to produce an educational system online and we've been trying to understand well what is it that makes a book canonical there's actually a technical answer to that so you imagine that books exist in relationship to one another that's a perfectly reasonable post modernist claim by the way books exist in relationship to one another okay well some books have hardly any relationship to other books those are trivial books now they might be undiscovered works of genius that's another possibility if they're recently written but it doesn't matter because you can't separate the wheat from the chaff at present it's too difficult there's too much chaff but if you go back into the past you can rank order books by the degree to which they've influenced other books so it's like citations in some sense and the books that have influenced the largest number of other books are the canonical books and the ultimate canonical book in the West is clearly the biblical corpus because it's influenced virtually everything and so you have to know it because it's implicit in everything else and so you start there and so you have that you have that knowledge at least to some degree and it gives you the foundation the metaphorical foundation the conceptual foundation the mythical foundation that you can use to then well then maybe you can know that now Shakespeare opens up to some degree and now Milton opens up to some degree and Dante opens up to some degree and you think well why should those open up and the answer as well as the social constructionist claim you're at least in part a historical creature well then those books are about you they're the the patterns in those books are the patterns of your perceptions and your actions and without understanding them then you don't know who you are and you can't guide yourself properly through life and so you you you come into university and you encounter experts and they say look this is canonical why because it's had a disproportionate influence on everything else so you need there's something here that you need to know about because it's about you and and it isn't about the you that's here now in some sense it's about the you that can unfold across time in the in the best possible way so each of those works is a call to adventure every painting that's a great painting or a building like the King's chapel if that's not a call to adventure I mean what else could it be we were talking about that so these ancient buildings these great ancient buildings that Europe is littered with these were people would were aiming at something beyond themselves beyond the span of their lifetime they they engaged in the color the collective manifestation of these great works to aim to to participate in aiming something that at something that was beyond them it was a divine aim they had that that will to produce this beauty that transcended centuries you know and maybe the will that produces beauty is always aligned with that which transcends centuries maybe those are the same things in even paintings oil paintings you know they they take a moment in time and they cast it into a permanent form that can be that can be preserved across centuries and so there's something about there's something about the establishing a relationship with eternity that's key to the construction of something that's beautiful and then that in itself becomes a call to a relationship within with eternity so and you need that people hunger for it I'm at the University of Toronto there's the the there's the European Cathedral side of the campus the older part and then there's the modern factory side of the campus and it's soul deadening my building is made out of cinder blocks you know and my my brother-in-law who's his own sort of genius calls that hose about architecture anything could happen there and you could wash it away it's like and it's just it's it's it's I have my students now and then sit in a classroom like that and look at it and tell me how it makes them feel random wires hanging from the ceiling you know nothing but cinder block the cheapest form of construction nothing that's beautiful pure boring dull utilitarianism with these bare shiny desks and terrible fluorescent lighting it's like it's ugly right to the core and it's it's corrosive it eats away at the heart of the university which is about the beauty that's eternal and and that isn't optional it's not impractical it's it's the most practical it's it's it's that upon which the idea of practicality itself is predicated and that's the University and people should be flocking to the universities dying to be educated because they are dying to be educated I have dozens of young men who come to me all the time after my talks and say look they give me a note one did last night here's the note six weeks six months ago I was deeply suicidal I had no reason to live I was completely nihilistic I started watching your lectures I started to adopt a more responsible outlook I realized that that was important I started to try to tell the truth and to put myself together and without that I wouldn't be here and that's a little note and that happens over and over you know and then I go talk to journalists and this happened in Scandinavia it happened with this GQ interview I just did well your message is primarily directed towards you man it's like and there's this judgment about that it's like oh there's a problem with that is there I mean that wasn't the point but that is the audience is what there's something there's something wrong with talking to young men and encouraging them it's like that makes me somehow somehow suspicious the hatred of humanity that is present in that critique is mind blow it's absolutely beyond belief and you think well it's only misogyny it's like no it's not it's like what who are you leaving for the women to have as partners these did demolished and weak whether it's a zero-sum quality of it I mean as if as if as if lifting up any human being is not a good for all of us I mean that's the whole point about the necessity of our care for the oppressed is because they are part of us no you only care about them in groups the individual impressed person is irrelevant it's the group of oppressed people that's relevant and so if you just help one person oh well you see then then that's in that's that that that flies at the heart of the collectivist doctrine you say something very very powerful when you talked about you people should be flocking to the universities in an image that comes to my mind is the image of a fountain and you know people come to the fountain to drink dislike their thirst and and and and it seems to me that we need we need new institutions of higher education that's the fountain of living water yes yes yes Moses that's why Moses is a master of water in the desert yes so we've got a master of stone yes yes yes and one thing that really excites me Jordan is that is that what we see right now in is is this longing there's so many thirsty people it seems to me we simply need to to build new fountains because you know as you say the books are in the library we can we can we can give a rebirth to the past in the form of the hunger and thirst that are in young people simply by feeding it and that it seems to me that that there's a kind of piss cultural passivity particularly when it comes to the university people will say oh well you know you could never do anything about that well you know the universe they're just well you just have to kind of write them off well people have been thousands of universities started over where the students come into the university and they've got this facade of cynicism you that partly because they haven't had great experiences with the educational system and it's no wonder and partly because all the way back to the to the beginning yes I mean you've talked about this in your book the University neuropathy that the what moves in in the whole k-12 educational system in a certain sense was founded with in large part to bring about that collectivist control and to Delta Phi and to annihilate the the the freedom of the individual and so that's that's pretty well ingrained by the time someone comes to university and no wonder they don't like it they don't think they like educational institutions yes well but they're still desperate enough to come and they might say well I'm doing this practically because I need a degree to get a job which is you know as professor it's perfectly reasonable as a as a fragmentary ambition it's it's a good fragmentary ambition but they're they're they're their core is dying for something deeper than that and they're coming they're coming to university the way that you enter a Cathedral properly if you enter it properly they come prayerfully they're hoping but they won't talk to anyone about it they're hoping god I hope that what I need is here and if you provide that then they're just overwhelmed by it and and then they're motivated to to work and to move and to put themselves together because it doesn't take much water to really transform a part surface and these young people they have their cynical facade and it's easy to be intimidated by that because they're they're judgmental in their lectures and in your lectures and maybe they're not paying attention and they're snapping dumb and they're playing with their computers but they're they're is part of them that's at the back listening and hoping that something will emerge that will captivate them and when that happens then well then well then that's when it becomes something absolutely remarkable to be an educator because then you're providing guidance and you're providing the guidance that that's that's well that that's that's the bread that's more than mere material bread and then the students are extraordinary extraordinary rewarding to work with because they're so it's not pleased it's way more than pleased they're so engaged by what's happening that the whole thing comes alive that's that's when it's a great thing to be an educator and it's been great for me to go on this lecture tour because which is why I keep doing it is because every evening it's like that I get twenty five hundred people in an auditorium and I start talking about the things we've been talking about everybody's dead silent and they're locked on to it and it's it's an unbelievably gratifying process and then people come up and say you know oh this has been so useful to me things were so terrible and falling apart in so many ways and like all of a sudden I'm just stacking these things up and putting them together it's so interesting watching the young men who come in and talk to me and it's it's young women as well well nor don't always just so young many of the women come and say thank you very much for what you've done for my son's for example but the men come up and they say it's like they're telling me a secret you know and it's the sort of secret that you'd only tell an intimate friend that you trusted it's like you know man I wasn't doing so well and these are often rough looking guys you know they say look I've been really trying to get my act together you know I've been working it out with my wife and I mean I've been trying to get my relationship with my son straighten out and and here's my father by the way he came along with me and we're getting along just fine and it's really working and they say a hushed voice you know and they say thank you very much and I say great that's so great I'm so thrilled to hear that and they they're telling me that because they're hoping that I would in fact be thrilled to hear that because they want to tell it to someone who would be thrilled to hear it and I am thrilled to hear it because I do believe that that redemption is something that is accomplished at the level of the individual and every time you hear someone say that they that they're a bit oriented themselves properly it's like a bell rings in heaven it's exactly that and so well so well so that's absolutely and chronically overwhelming but it's it's absolutely remarkable to see this to see how much desperation there is for this when I talk to audiences about the relationship between responsibility and meaning they inevitably go dead silent there's not a there's not a rustle there's not a coffee it's like is that the secret is that the secret is that it's the voluntary adoption of responsibility it's like well that's the that's the central message of the West it's like to pick up your cross and bear it you know and everyone's been told that but they don't know what it means because it's not been articulated enough so that it becomes something that's practical it's like yes look at the terrible responsibilities you have right in front of you your family is hurting you're in trouble there's problems in the world it's like all of that's right there and all you have to do is all you have to do is take responsibility for it and then you've got what you need all of a sudden you think oh that's what I needed I didn't know that I thought that was something to avoid it's an impediment to short-term hedonistic pleasure you know and to happiness there's nothing happiness about happy about lifting the suffering of the world onto your shoulders it's like this is way way better that happiness isn't what you feel in the King's chapel it's something so magnificent that happiness pales in comparison and so it's it's it's thin gruel happiness and young people know that they're pursuing hedonistic pleasure and you know no wonder but there's nothing in it that's sustaining and all it does is make you cynical it's like is that's all there is another one-night-stand another another binge party you know and it's not like I have anything against in principle against some of that exuberant youthful hedonism but but it's it's not if look the universities have turned into places of parties why well because that's what the students find best to do there well that's not good but you want to offer them as a reason to not party it's like no you got to understand you come to this class hungover you're not going to be able to get it you're not going to be able to write properly you're gonna pay a price for that hedonism it's like and the price will be too high for you to bear it's like oh well enough hedonism for me then like I've got something important to do that's the way out of that but that that thing that's more important has to be offered and it can be offered so when I've seen it happen over and over to people and it's it's it's extraordinarily good if you're an addict and I've talked to many people who are addicted you need a reason to stop being addicted which means you need something better than the drug well that's what you offer at universities it's something better it's something better than everything else and if you're not offering that then it's all a facade it's all a factory a knowledge factory which is the modern University factory knowledge factory products seems to me and will conclude here I think momentarily it seems to me that that the time is ripe for a radical and beautiful rebirth of a more fully human culture and when I hear you speak Jordan about your lectures and you know what what what moves me deeply is is the the love that you have for the people who come to you and I suppose I want to just conclude on a question about a quote I want to conclude on an optimistic note by by drawing out what's in that love it's that the potential that is that lies in those in each and every individual for deep transformation for a connection to the transcendent and and and and and and and just to talk about that that longing that seems to me that that that longing is overwhelming and if only we can start to can refill the fountains with water or build new fountains that the possibilities are beyond our imagining yeah the point we're at at the moment yeah that's what partly why this is an inflection point too because so many things are transforming the landscape of possibility is opening up to us in a way that it never has partly because of our technological transformations and so the importance of the particularity z' of our ethical choices are becoming more and more mathilde artificial intelligence and it's going to be a reflection of us and so we better make sure that it reflects the part of us that we want reflected and you talked about that care for people as the care for me is predicated on my realization that I prefer heaven to hell having done what I could to explore hell let's say in my academic career and in my private life and in my and in my clinical practice and to see what's there that unnecessary suffering in that malevolence is like well it it would be best to move away from that towards something better that's something I genuinely believe that it's it's it's for the best for everything that we aim up and then when I see someone decide to aim up I think well that's that's something that's one more step away from hell it's not just the it's not just the climbing up the hill painfully towards the city of god it's move away from the abyss and I think it's easier for people to believe in the abyss it was for me to believe in the existence of malevolence and apocalypse and catastrophe I mean all you have to do is study history to believe that think well not that anything but that away from that well away from that is amorphous right it's again it's like Moses leading his people from from the tyranny in Egypt it's like well where are we going well away from that well that's into the desert and that's where we are now well that's not so good but at least it's away from that well that's something but then there's something beyond that it's like well what is it that we're striving towards and and well we can each imagine that in our own way in some sense but I would say what you start locally is like fix up what you can fix up when you see a problem that announces itself to you a small problem that's your problem that you could fix that's your one step you take it yes it seems to be in addition to that that life of the individual we we need to think very broadly about the institutional life that supports all of that individual realization and freedom we need to think about universities when you think about our architecture we need to think about that is to say that that the the whole horizon that lies before us needs to be considered for the fullness of possibility that that it holds and that those possibilities are not realizable simply by you know this individual doing this that ended into doing that but that they also require a kind of it requires that we think about the whole and that we allow to give birth we allow to come into being the kinds of institutional lives institutional life that upon which our realization depends upon which that awakening depends and so it simply can't be simply a matter of about living our lives in a kind of solitary way nobody know what we what to think about what are the fountains on which you know if we're in the desert it seems to me that that okay so we're in the desert it's a it's a it's a lonely and dry place but there are the narrative fragments were there sure that's all the deities that the Israelites come to worship the false idols because the narrative fragments and that is the precisely the moment paradoxically at which we can rediscover ourselves what our what our nature what our longing is for and so it seems to me that we're at a time of astonishing possibility but that we must take it up well hopefully you know when you train graduate students and you train undergraduates you know you orient them towards the truth and then they learn to teach in accordance with that and that and that facilitates the process that we're describing and that they regard the relationship with individual students as a of paramount importance in something noble and the research as well yes yes the awakening of each particular individual at say in an educational institution is precisely what allows them to go on in in 10,000 ways and ten hundred thousand ways throughout their lives to to to transmit and open up those transcendent possibilities Thank You Jordan very much our pleasure

Channel: Ralston College

Views: 60,625

Rating: 4.9183097 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Stephen Blackwood, Ralston College, Higher Education, Inflection Point

Id: m_Aiv6xJxkE

Length: 93min 34sec (5614 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 21 2019