Jordan Peterson explains his BIG DIFFERENCE with AYN RAND

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 structures so if you think about Christianity for example you think about Christianity psychologically 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 or 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 are 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 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 their 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 or something like Eurocentric neo colonialism something like that

Channel: Returning Lobster

Views: 230,999

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Id: 5k4qCk6E_GI

Length: 5min 31sec (331 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 22 2019