Jordan Peterson: From the Barricades of the Culture Wars

[Music] so I assume you're all here to talk about the early work of Carl Jung and this man's carnivorous diet and the Soviet art he collects um no in all seriousness I'm I'm really excited to be here with you we've never met before your official title is that you are a clinical psychologist and a professor at the University of Toronto you've written two books one called knops meaning and the best-selling twelve rules for life which is currently being translated into 40 languages but this description does not capture what you become which is a kind of phenomenon when I was reading 12 rules for life in a cafe in the locker room of my gym it was sitting out on a bench people were coming up to me and saying this book saved my life and yet there are other people in the country including some of my fellow journalists who insists that you are actually a gateway drug to the far right so I'm excited to be here with you not the mists of you but with the man and I'm hoping we can use this hour or so to talk about your views on meaning on gender on feminism God Higher Education and I'm sure we can solve all of that in under an hour so I want to start with the book twelve rules for life which I'm hoping some of you have read here are some of the messages in that book gender isn't a social construct people should strive for meaning in their lives not happiness life is suffering but there are ways to transcend it stand up straight make your bed now all of this to me seems pretty common sensical and yet i don't think that there is a Canadian in the world that I've read more think pieces about I don't think it's a stretch to say that you are sort of the most loved and loathed public intellectual in the Western world moment so I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about what that's like and your understanding of it you just come from two days in Vancouver where with on an event with Sam Harris talking for over two hours about the question of truth and 5,000 people showed up to those events not exactly a sexy Beyonce concert what's going on how do you understand it and your place in it well I think you don't want to underestimate the role that technological transformation is playing in this you know I've been thinking about YouTube and podcasts quite intensely for about two years so I started putting my university lectures on YouTube in 2013 and I did that for a variety of reasons mostly curiosity because and the drive to learn and I found that if I want to learn a technology the best way to do it is to use it and I'm always learning new technologies because well not that that makes me particularly unique but and I had some success with my lectures on public television in Canada so I did some lectures with a series called Big Ideas on Canadian public television and there's about 200 of those lectures and I did five of them 210 by 200 different people but I did five of them they were regularly in the top ten of the most viewed lectures and so I knew there was some broader market for let's say ideas and I thought well I might as well put my lectures up on YouTube and see what happens and then by April of 2016 I had a million views and I thought huh the only reason people are watching these is because they want to watch them because they're actually really hard and a million of something is a lot if you if you sell a million copies of your book well first of all that never happens right I mean it's very very rare you're very happy you never have your paper scientific papers cited a million times you rarely have a million dollars it's a very large number and I thought well fair enough fair enough and it's of course it's not as uncommon as it once was but it's still a significant number and I didn't really have any way of calibrating that I thought well what am I supposed to do now that I hit a million views how am I supposed to conceptualize that what is this YouTube thing anyways that was once a repository for cute out videos so what does it mean to have a million views on it I thought and so I really started to think about it because you know there were a lot of people commenting as well and they were they were into the lectures and and following them avidly and I thought okay so what is this YouTube exactly I thought well for the first time in human history the spoken word has the same reach as the written word and not only that no leg to publication and no barrier to entry that's a major technological revolution that's a Gutenberg revolution that's a big deal this is a this is a game-changer and then it was soon after that that I discovered the podcast world which is about ten times as big as the YouTube world and the podcast world is also a Gutenberg revolution except it's even more extensive because the problem with books and videos is that you can't do anything else while you're doing them right when you're reading you're reading when you're watching a video you know you can be distracted but you have to pay attention to the video but if you're listening to a podcast you can be driving a forklift or a long-haul truck or you can be exercising or doing the dishes and so what that means is that podcasts free up say two hours a day for people to engage in educational activities that they wouldn't otherwise be able to engage in and that's about one-eighth of people's lives so podcasts hand people one-eighth of their life back to engage in high-level education so then I thought well people actually want to do this there's a massive market for high level intellectual engagement that's much deeper and and and more desperate let's say than anyone suspected we really saw that it out in Vancouver you know I mean the discussion I had with Sam Harris the two discussions we talked about the relationship between facts and values was really there and science and religion more peripherally but the dialogue was conducted at the level I would say approximately at the level of a pretty rigorous PhD defense and we were only supposed to talk for an hour and then go to QA but the crowd didn't want us to stop and so we talked the first night for two and a half hours and the second night for two and a half hours and the crowd was 100% on board the entire time and it and it wasn't because Sam was winning or I was winning neither of us in fact we're trying to win we were trying to learn something and we were actually trying to learn something we weren't just pretending to do that and you know the place erupted at the end and I think one of the things I've realized in the last couple of days as I've been thinking this through is that the narrow band width of TV has made us think we're stupider than we are and so people have a real hunger for deep intellectual dialogue and and that can be met with these new technologies and that has revolutionary significance and that's starting to unfold I wonder about you love to quote this line this Nietzsche line that Oh anyone who has a why to live for can endure almost any how yeah what's your why what is driving you you are the most busy man I mean to get you here you know I think you're like important wherever you were last night in Portland tomorrow like I don't know you're alive frankly right now what is driving you like what what is this relentless Drive what are you pushing toward I'm trying to well when I spent 15 years writing the first book I wrote which is called maps of meaning and it's a it's it's akin to twelve rules to life although it's a much more difficult book the audio version of that book is out now by the way it's been out since June 12th and I would if you like twelve rules or you were interested in it and you could try that I think the audio version is much more accessible because it's a difficult book getting the cadences of the of the sentences right is an aid to comprehension I spent 15 years reading that book about three hours a day writing and a lot more time reading and I was interested in solving a problem which was I was interested in the great atrocities of the 20th century the ones that were committed on the right and the ones that were committed on the left but I was interested in that psychologically and what that meant was had I been there what could have I done to not participate and so that's what I've been trying to figure out how so because for me what happened in Nazi Germany and what happened in the Gulag Archipelago and in Maoist China many places was sufficient definition of hell convincing as well and I wanted to understand what the opposite of that was and not sociologically or politically or economically because I think that in the final analysis those levels of explanation are insufficient but psychologically how is it that you must conduct yourself in the world so that if the opportunity to participate in such things arises you won't and you know when the Holocaust museums went up there was there was a motto that went along with them which was never forget and I thought yeah fair enough but you can't remember what you don't understand and so I wanted to understand it but I wanted to understand it you see when people read history they either read it as a detached observer or they tend to read it as well maybe the heroic the heroic protagonists people like do it imagine that they would be Schindler in Schindler's List but that's wrong so because the probability that you'll be the perpetrator is much higher especially merely the perpetrator who's ensconced in silence when silence is not the appropriate thing so I wanted to having figured out what constituted hell and the pathway to that which would be I suppose the cowardice that produces the cowardice and resentment that produces either complicitous in those events or failure to oppose them when they emerge I wanted to understand what the opposite of that was because I think that's what needs to be learned from what happened in the 20th century and so that's why I wrote maps of meaning was to understand that and to lay out what the opposite was and then that turned out to be extremely helpful to me and then to the people I started to teach about that because it's useful to know what the opposite of hell is and I've been teaching those things to people since 1993 such 25 years and the response from the students has always been the same sort of response that I'm getting now absent some of the negative characterizations let's say which which have emerged that for particular reasons but the students have always said one of two things and this is the vast majority of them this isn't cherry-picked responses it's been the same everywhere they tell me and this is the same response I get from my audiences now too is they say you've given me words to explain things to explain and understand things that are always new to be true or I was in a very dark place for one of the seven reasons that people might be in a dark place alcohol or drugs or failure of relationships or lack of vision or nihilism or or hopelessness or depression or anxiety if you know the pitfalls that people can encounter and I've been developing a vision for my life and trying to adopt responsibility and trying to be careful with what I say and things are way better and that's what drives me so you know it's so interesting watching what's happening because you know you said I'm the most loathed and the most loved man it's like I'm loathed by a very small percentage of very noisy people and so and there are people who either don't or haven't or won't or on taking take a look at what I'm doing partly because it doesn't fit within their conceptual scheme you know whenever I'm interviewed by journalists with with that have the scent of blood in their nose let's say they're they're very willing and able to characterize the situation I find myself in as political but that's because they can't see the world in any other manner than political and the political is a tiny fraction of the world and what I'm doing isn't political it's psychological or philosophical or theological the political element is peripheral and if if people come to the live lectures let's say that's absolutely self-evident there that's not what they're about that isn't why people are there that isn't what they talked to me about afterwards it's fundamentally irrelevant the only reason this ever became political is because in Canada our provincial and federal governments had the unspeakable arrogance to propose compelled speech legislation in a British common law system where that had never been done ever even once and despite the fact that your Supreme Court in 1942 made some such things unconstitutional no that was explained to people here what what actually happened which is that you oppose this law which was going to compel you you say to use preferred pronouns of people that are transgender is that accurate it's it's accurate but partial so there was a there's provincial laws that were already in place to compel this sort of thing but a federal law had been generated and I went and read the policy guidelines within which the federal law was to be interpreted and those were produced by the Ontario Human Rights Commission which is a radical leftist Inquisition fundamentally and they had documented out a very large number of policies that were that it would make anyone sensible hair stand on end if they read them which they didn't but I did and not only did I read them I understood them and having read them and understood them I made videos just one night I got up at about 3:00 in the morning because it was really bothering me for a variety of complicated reasons including the fact that a number of my clinical clients had been bullied into states of ill mental health by radical social justice warriors at their various workplaces and this was long before I was embroiled in any of this controversy by the way so it wasn't a sampling bias and so and at the same and at the same time the university my University had the gall the unmitigated gall to mandate unconscious bias retraining for their Human Resources staff despite the fact that unconscious bias measurements are not reliable or valid even by the testimony of formulators and despite the evidence that there is no there's no data whatsoever lending unconscious bias retraining programs even the vaguest shred of credible outcome so I made these videos and because I was annoyed about this and I thought wow what will happen if I make a video I'm so this is one of the things that I feel or maybe you can answer it for us I feel because of this incident you are often characterized at least in the mainstream press as being transphobic if you had a student come to you and said and they said to you I was born female I now identify as male I want to go I want you to call me by male pronouns would you say yes for that well it would depend on the student and the context and why I thought they were asking me and what I believe their demand actually characterized in all of that because that can be done in a way that's genuine and acceptable in a way that's manipulative and unacceptable and if it was genuine and acceptable then I'd have no problem with it and if it was manipulative and unacceptable then not a chance so and you might think well Who am I to judge well first of all I am a clinical psychologist and I've talked to people for about 25,000 hours and so and I'm responsible for judging how I'm going to use my words I judge it the same way that I judge all the interactions that I have with people which is to the best of my ability and characterized by all the errors that I'm prone to so you know I'm not saying that my judgment would be unerring but I have to live with the consequences so I'm willing to accept the responsibility so but but also to be clear about this that never happened I never refused to call anyone by anything that they had asked me to call them by and so although that's been reported multiple times it's a complete falsehood and it did have nothing to do with the transgender issue as far as I was concerned it it and besides that if it was if it would have only to do with the transgender issue in Canada the probability that this would have had the impact that it had is a zero so that wasn't about that at all it was about something far more far deeper and far more insidious and everyone knew it which is why it didn't go away what should have happened is there should have been a bit of controversy around it maybe even a protest and everyone's attention should have gone away like a week later and that didn't happen even a little bit so there's more going on here then as I knew there's far more going on here then this little bill would have would have revealed one of your rules in 12 rules for life is I hope I'm getting this right choose your words carefully and be ironic if I got that one wrong be precise in your speech okay be precise in your speech which is you know you got it right okay sort of yeah well you have to gist of it that's the crucial thing one of the things that's happened to you in the past two years is that every utterance of yours and Caitlyn alluded to this in her introduction is analyzed maybe manipulated how do you live with that reality well how do you even have the confidence to sort of continue to from my perspective rush into the breach on all sorts of what have become third rail issues knowing that so much of what you say is going to be mischaracterized and then I have a follow-up to that mmm well I mean about 25 years ago thirty years ago maybe 1985 I guess that's how far along ago is that it's long time years yeah I decided that I was going to be very careful with what I said like I noticed when I was thinking through some of these ideas that I already described trying to understand what tilted people towards vengefulness and and and cruelty I was contemplating that personally you know what would tilt me towards that or what did tell me towards that and at the same time I developed what would you call an acute awareness of my speech it was part of it because I'd asked a question me and when you ask yourself a question if it's you really ask a question is you start thinking up the answer whether you want to think it up or not and you and the answer that might you might generate might bear very little resemblance to the answer that you would like to generate and I'd ask myself a question which was well what's the pathway out of this hell let's say and how might I be tangled up in that and one of the things I started to realize was that I wasn't very careful with what I said and that that seemed in some way to be related to that it's not surprising because you know it's not really obvious that the Nazis for example were all that careful about what they said in terms of its relationship to the truth quite the contrary in the same with ideologues in the Soviet Union and so the idea that there was some relationship between carelessness and speech lies and deception and that sort of thing or self aggrandizement or any of the things that you can indulge in if you're careless with your speech and the weakening of your character to the point where you might get tangled up in great and terrible sociological movements that seem to me to be a problem that seemed to me to be reasonable had many people had commented on that like Solzhenitsyn for example can so I started to experience discomfort with what I was saying and what seemed to happen was that I started to realize and could feel it I was reading Carl Rogers at the same time and he actually suggested that psychotherapists pay attention to exactly this sort of thing I started to understand that many of the things I was saying weren't true I didn't really believe them they weren't really my thoughts they didn't make me they made me feel weak when I said them can you give an example okay that's a good question can I give you an example oh maybe I would engage in an argument with someone at a bar on an intellectual issue for the purpose of displaying my intellectual superiority or at least hypothetically displaying it you know so you know sometimes people like to argue and they like to argue because hypothetically they would like to win so you don't mean though that you were mouthing platitude oh sure I was doing that okay oh yes all the time and sometimes they weren't even platitudes you know they might have been things that I picked up in books that weren't cliches but they weren't mine I didn't have any right to them like just because you read something doesn't mean you have a right to it you have to understand it and understanding something that steep means a deep transformation means you have to live it and so just because you know if so fickle concept and you can say it doesn't give you the right to utter it as if it's yours you have to earn that and I was a smart kid and so I my head was full of ideas that I hadn't earned and I could lay them out but that doesn't mean they were mine or me and so there was a falsity in expressing them and so I I couldn't tell for a while because I would say things and part of me would be all critical about what I was saying you don't believe that that's not accurate it's kind of a lie that was saying that to almost everything I said and I took a risk I thought okay I'm going to assume that the part of me that's critical about what I'm saying is right even though that was terrible because it really was often admit I could hardly speak and then I learned to only say things that didn't make me feel weak and then I decided that that's what I was going to do so I've been careful with what I've been saying for a long time but and I'm having a hard time with what you're saying right now because shouldn't the test be I'm only saying things that are true not I'm only saying things that don't make me feel weak what am i misunderstanding in that formulation well you're what you're misunderstanding in part is how do you know the things that you're saying aren't true and I would say one of the ways you know was that they weaken you and you can learn that you can learn to feel that Carl Rogers talked about this a lot in his work in psychotherapy he said that one of the primary roles of a psychotherapist was to be congruent and by by what and what he meant by that was that there was no disjunction between what you felt in a situation let's say and what you said that it was all one piece and that was a an embodied unity not merely a conceptual unity so I really do think that there's there's something to it psychologically weak not weak in terms of power I mean psychologically we okay yeah yeah yeah I mean I mean I mean morally weak I mean weak and character that sort of thing yeah that's what I mean okay yeah and so and so you know I got very careful with what I said and at the same time I was spending a tremendous amount of time writing and so I was very careful with what I wrote so in maps of meaning I think I rewrote every sentence in that book at least 50 times and so that's great and every sentence I yeah are you sure oh yeah that's for sure now you know I take the sentence out and then I write a bunch of variants of it and then I would pick the variant that was best and then I would try to come up with all the arguments I could about why the sentence was stupidly so tell me you still do this yeah I still do this okay did you do that 15 15 versions of every sentence and 12 rules for life also I said 50 Oh 50 excuse me I was more like I meant to be precise in my speech okay listen it was more like 15 with 12 rules for life so it was less but I'm a better writer than I was then so I didn't have to do it quite as often so I kept writing it until I couldn't make the sentences any better that doesn't mean they were good it just meant that I got to the point where if I was rewriting them it wasn't obvious that the rewrite was better than the original sentence so then I had to stop so my question of a few minutes ago was how has knowing that you're going to be intentionally the your words are gonna be sort of intentionally torqued and how has that changed you well it's made me even more careful okay you know it's exaggerated the cake the care but you know I had been quite careful and the evidence for that is quite clear so you know when when all of this political controversy surrounded me and that swirled around me well it still is maybe it's even exaggerated to some degree but it was very intense in Canada for a good six months and people were going over what I had put on YouTube with a fine-tooth comb and there was 200 hours of videos there and you think well with some creative editing and and with motivation in mind you think if you went over 200 hours of someone's lectures you could find a smoking pistol even if you had to chop out a sentence no one found anything and the reason for that was there wasn't anything there that's why they didn't find it and so I would had already been very careful and I discussed all sorts of unbelievably contentious issues you know because my classes were very intense we went with like the maps of meaning class in particular it's like it's you know it get caught it's it's basic presupposition partly what I was trying to do with my students was to convince them that had they been in Nazi Germany in the 1930s they wouldn't have been on the side of the good right that's a hell of a thing to drag people through but it's statistically overwhelmingly likely so it was a very serious class and certainly a place where you could step badly at any given moment you know and I talked about gender differences and and the biological substructure of consciousness and all these things that could easily become politically contentious but as I said there weren't any smoking pistols but now for the last two years I've been even more careful and I have people watching me you know I mean my family watches me and what I'm doing they keep very careful track of it and if I deviate a little bit from what they think I should have from how I should have behaved then they tell me and I have friends who are doing the same thing and I listen to them do you feel that you deviated from how you should behave when you said oh uh I think it was Mishra in the New York Review of Books know that well let me just share what you said which is I'm trying to be precise in my speech but I believe you said you're a sink what did you say that you were if you really abstract ammonia spray and if you were in the room up you yeah so you don't regret that not a bit okay and I'll tell you why okay well look it's really complicated you know I have this I have this friend who's a native Carver and he he's he he comes from a very rough background like way rougher than you think and and maybe some of you have come from rough backgrounds or you know people who've come from them but he comes from a plenty rough background and I started working with him buying his art 15 years ago and he was a survivor of residential schools in Canada and we got pretty close and he helped me design the third floor of my house and and and anyways that the long and short of it was that I got inducted into his family about two year and a half ago this big ceremony up and in a native reservation in northern Vancouver and you know we've been through a lot together and a lot of it's been pretty rough and you know this whatever the hell his name was Mishra sure whatever the hell his name was had the temerity to say that I was Romancing the noble savage it's like watch your step buddy you don't know what the hell you're talking about not even a bit and so had I been a left-leaning what personage and he had made a comment like that there would have been hell to pay so which isn't to say that I'm a right-leaning personage by the way so I don't regret it a bit I think that what he said was absolutely reprehensible and that he should have been called out on it and so I don't regret it at all now people said you know maybe it would have been better for me not to have made that comment it's possible that they're right but I actually thought about it and I thought there's no excuse for that you don't know what you're talking about you're meddling with things you don't understand and you're making a casual aspersion not only on me but on my noble savage friend it's like ya know so speaking of things that people have said sort of to defame you you're currently suing Wilfrid Laurier University because you'll correct me if I'm wrong but I think administrators there in their meeting with Lindsey Shepherd who was a TA who showed a clip of you they sort of interrogated her accusing her of creating a hostile teaching environment for showing a clip of you in her classroom and during that interaction which she recorded they compared you to Hitler no they compared me to Hitler or Milo you nopales excuse me right now it's important and the reason it's important is because look these people to one of the 13 just and just just to finish that question maybe you'll braid this in you are one of the most outspoken champions I would say a free speech right now I would like for you if you can to sort of grapple a bit with being believing in free speech so strongly and yet also suing this university for slander yeah well so first of all they compared me to they said playing a clip of Jordan Peterson was like playing a clip of Hitler or Milo innopolis and I thought well let's go a little easy on the Hitler comparisons there guys we might want to save that for when it's really necessary because you don't you don't use it's it's sacrilegious to use an insult like that except in situations where it's justified it's not appropriate to use a catastrophe like that casually especially when you're doing it under the guise of moral virtue there's no excuse for it and then the second thing is you're a professor both of you get your damn words straight which is it my Hitler and my lowly innopolis seriously those are not the same people in case you didn't notice one of them was the worst barbarian in the 20th century with the possible exception of Stalin and Mao and the other one is is a provocateur trickster who's quite quick on his feet and and and is what would you say is stirring things up in a relatively non problematic way they're not the same creature and so to combine them in a single careless insult during an administrative what would you call investigation which was entirely unwarranted by the way and was predicated on an absolute lie there hadn't been a student complaint as the university admitted there was no excuse for that and if they weren't professors then well it wouldn't have been so bad but they were and the reason that I sued them there's a whole bunch of reasons I mean that the Hitler comparison the Milo u Nautilus comparison were only two of about forty things that they tarred me with and and they're all listed in the deposition and the only reason I brought the lawsuit forward but seven months later something like that was because of what happened with Lindsay Shepard so what happened to her at Lynne's at Wilfred Laurie is absolutely inexcusable everything they did to her was predicated on a lie then the University apologized and so did the professor and then he lied during his his his apology which was a forced apology anyways and therefore a very little utility they were subject to no disciplinary action even though the statutes of the university required it and they made Lindsay Sheppard's life a living hell even after they apologized to her and told her that she did nothing wrong and that they hadn't followed their own procedures so I read her deposition and I actually read it on YouTube where it's got about 500,000 views by the way and I thought you people haven't learned anything you've learned absolutely nothing and so if one lawsuit doesn't convince you maybe two will so and then with regards to free speech it's like free speech is still bounded inside a structure of law and the P these people broke the law or at least that's my claim so I don't see the contradiction there at all you can't just slander someone defame them lie about them you can't incite people to crime there's all sorts of reasonable restrictions on free speech that are already codified essentially in the British common law system so but wilfred laurier learned nothing but this isn't over yet but isn't it creating a chilling effect which is something that those of us cares so much about free speech want to sort of stay away from you could say that these sort of defamation lawsuits are a really really dangerous slippery slope and I'm sort of surprised you don't see it that way well you know I do see it that way which is why I spent seven months thinking about it before I decided to do it but I thought that there's always risk in every decision there's the risk of doing something and there's the risk of not doing something and both of those risks are usually catastrophic in every decision you make in life it's like ice I weighed up the risks and I thought no the risk here of not doing something is greater than the risk of doing something have had they shown any sign look one of the things that wilfred laurier did in the aftermath of this scandal which by the way was the biggest scandal that ever hit a canadian university by a large margin and it was an international scandal I rarely go places where people haven't heard about this and so it was a big deal and they had plenty to learn and they learned nothing they set up a panel hypothetically to clarify their position on free speech and its relationship to inclusivity etc and the only two people on the panel who were advocating for the free speech position resigned in frustration and I know that because I know who they are and so and so well that's just one of the pieces of evidence that they didn't learn anything and then they continue to Street Shepherd continually like her her deposition it's like in it's like a novel of stupidity you know it's like and my sense was had there been any sign whatsoever of let's call it true apology and procedural rectification that she would have left them alone and so would have I but there was zero in fact if anything what they did was double down and go underground here's our apology here's our procedures that's what they showed the world here's how nothing at all has changed it's like no not good enough since we're on the subject of universities you recently said that what universities have done is beyond forgiveness I wonder if you can explain what you mean by that and a second file connected question is should we I'll put it starkly should we abolish universities or all they'll do that themselves okay let's hear a little bit about what they've done that you think renders them beyond forgiveness well they're overwhelmingly administratively top-heavy and and they don't spend any more money on the faculty than they did thirty years ago and the cost of that administrative top heaviness which is well documented not by me by other people and it's been that way it's been accelerating over the last twenty years has been a radical increase in tuition fees especially compared to the radical decrease in price of most things over the last twenty years now so they become administratively top-heavy the way and this is especially true in the United States the way that's being managed is that unsuspecting students are giving given free access to student loans that will cripple them through their 30s in their 40s in a and the universities are enticing them to extend their carefree adolescents for a four-year period at the cost of mortgaging their future earnings in a deal that does not allow for escape through bank see so it's essentially a form of indentured servitude there's no excuse whatsoever for that it means the administrators have learned how to pick the future pockets of their students and and because of because they also view them in some sense as sacred cash cows and fragile let's say because you might wonder why the students are being treated like they're so fragile it's like well we don't want them to drop out now do we and we can't if they drop out then we don't get our hands on their future earnings in a way that they can't escape from and that cripples the economy because the students come out overlaid with debt that they'll never pay off right at the time when they should be at the peak of their ability to take entrepreneurial risks so they can't do that because they're too crippled by debt and so that's absolutely appalling they're gerrymandering the accreditation processes so that the degree no longer has it's credible value they're enabling the activist disciplines which have zero academic credibility whatsoever in my estimation and I'm perfectly willing to defend that claim they're there and by enabling the activist disciplines there they're allowing for the distribution of this absolutely nonsensical view that Western society is fundamentally a patriarchal tyranny which is absurd on at least five dimensions of analysis but is becoming increasingly the thing you have to believe if you're allowed to speak in public well that's what else that's that's a good start that's there they're not teaching students to read critically they're not introducing into great literature they're not teaching them to write it's like the list goes on and on and on do you think in a way that you are a symbol of higher education failure meaning the reason maybe that people are showing up 5,000 people to listen to you it's gonna be 20,000 in London and July is because there aren't that many people who uh neurotically are talking about what it is to live a good life and asking questions about how to live a meaningful one if you would say that in most universities I feel that you would be laughed out of the room well would depend on how you said it and to who but if you say it to students then then they're so happy to listen to you that they hardly stand it because even the most cynical students come to University hoping that there's something there worth learning and the reason that they're exposed to great literature for example because there is such a thing it's not all power claims is because great literature contains the key to wisdom and you need wisdom in order to live without undue suffering so yes I mean so but I do what I say that what's happened to me is a reflection of the failure of the universities it is in part although I did teach this the whole intellectual dark web hmm the fact that people listen to sam harris talk for hours and like i mean all of these these people well i think i think it well i think you know you you want to go for the simple solutions before you go for the complex ones and you want to go for the solutions that are associated with ignorance rather than malevolence first and i would say that we don't want to end or estimate the degree to to which what's happening in YouTube and with podcasts as the consequence of a technological revolution like I've known for years that the universities under serve the community because for some reason we think that university education is for 18 to 22 year olds which is a proposition that's so absurd that it's it's absolutely mind-boggling that everyone anyone ever conceptualized it it's like you know why wouldn't you take university courses throughout your entire life I mean what you stop searching for wisdom when you're 22 I don't think so you don't even start usually until you're like in your mid-20s so I knew the universities were under serving the broader community a long time ago but there wasn't a mechanism whereby that could be rectified apart from say books and of course that that was part of the rectification so I think you don't want to underestimate the technological transformation but then and then I would also say I mean I was teaching this in university you know so it isn't like there isn't anybody in university still teaching this sort of thing there there are plenty of qualified professors who are still doing a good job but they're being pushed out very rapidly and terrified as well by that by the activist disciplines so you speak and write a lot about how masculinity is in crisis what are some of the main signs of it and we'll open it up to questions soon and is Trump a symbol of that crisis or a corrective to it well I don't really think that masculinity is in crisis I think that to the degree that masculinity per se is regarded as toxic that that will produce a crisis which isn't the same thing I think there's a there's a crisis of meaning let's say in our culture but that's not new that's that's been the case for quite a long time but I don't think it's specific to masculinity that's been a story that's kind of aggregated around me and the way that happened was well the people who don't like what I'm saying look at my audience and they say oh well he's speaking mostly to men therefore he must be speaking to men it's like well no the baseline rates for YouTube utilization about 80% male so the fact that most of the people who were watching me on YouTube were male is an artifact to some degree of the fact that most of the people who watch YouTube are male now it may also be that the sorts of things that I'm saying are more pertinent to men although I'm not convinced of that most of my students throughout my university career have been women because psychology is fun you know was is dominated by women to a great degree and ever since I published my book the proportion of people who are coming to my lectures that his female is reliably increasing it's probably up to about 35 35 % I would say now from about probably 20 so I don't think it is a message that's particularly germane to men although it is germane to men and I don't think I don't think that there's a like an independent crisis of masculinity there might be a crisis of concepts of masculinity and I think that's hard on young men in some ways and the reason for that is you know you you're you're you're supposed to be duty-bound as a virtuous person to buy the doctrine of the tyrannical patriarchy it's like well look first of all every hierarchical system tends towards tyranny that's a universal truism and our structures have the same problem obviously and we have to be eternally vigilant so that they don't devolve into tyranny but that doesn't mean that they are tyrannies and always have been and of course also compared to what compared to your hypothetical ideological utopia yes compared to every other society that's ever existed on the planet including most of the ones that exist now definitively not but anyways if you buy the that idiot uni-dimensional idea which is a pathological error and you see your your your culture as a tyrannical patriarchy then you see any attempt to move up that hierarchy has a manifestation of patriarchal tyranny now the problem is is that a lot of the ways that you move up a modern functional hierarchy is through competence and if you take young men it doesn't happen as much with young women for reasons we can go into but if you take young men and you say every manifestation of your desire to move up the hierarchy is nothing but proof of your participation in the tyrannical pipe patriarchy then you tend to demoralize them which is exactly what you're trying to do by the way if you if you take that stance to begin with because I really think that at the bottom of the most of the most of the most pathological manifestations of the collectivist dictum is an assault on the idea of competence itself and that's another unforgivable sin that the university is committed like everything look there's no doubt that human hierarchies are error-prone and they tilt towards tyranny obviously but that doesn't mean that they are unit dimensionally patriarchal tyrannies not they're neither patriarchal nor tyrannies so but that's received wisdom now and to question it means that you're a misogynist fascist so well so I tell young man it's like no no no no no it's like there's something to competence man speaking as a as a woman who has read your book and I'm with you for for so much of it and then you start to lose me when you talk about archetypes the way you talk about archetypes in the book and again forgive me if I'm being slightly imprecise but I'm trying to gloss it for an audience who might not have read it is that in this sort of Jungian archetype a world chaos is feminine order is masculine and the subtitle of your book is an antidote to chaos so as a woman reading that you know I'd like for you to explain to me maybe what I'm missing there because that's when you started to lose me a little bit as a reader why does there need to be an antidote to the feminine in that way well there has to be an antidote to anything that's manifesting itself in excess and it's chaos that's manifesting itself in excess at the moment in our culture and so and so that's what I decided to address in this book and mostly that was because I suppose it was addressed at least in part to younger people and what younger people have to contend with generally speaking is an excess of chaos because they're not very disciplined and so you need to you know we kind of have this idea that while you're free as a child and then you let me see if I can if I can put this properly that you have a certain delightful wonderful positive freedom as a child and then that's given up as you approach adulthood but the truth of the matter is is that you have a lot of potential as a child but none of that is capable of manifesting itself as freedom before you become disciplined and discipline is a matter of the imposition of order and the order is necessary especially for people who are hopeless and nihilistic and lots of people are hopeless and nihilistic way more people than you think and part of that is because no one's ever really encouraged them and so the book is in part a matter of encouragement it's like lay yourself lay a disciplinary structure on yourself get the chaos in in in check and then you can move towards a state that's freer because it's disciplined first like look if you're going to become a concert pianist there's going to be several thousand hours of extraordinarily disciplined practice that's the imposition of order on your potential let's say but what comes out of that is a much grander freedom and so in virtually every freedom that you have in life that's true freedom is purchased at the price of discipline and so because I think that it's it's nihilism and and hopelessness that constitute the major existential threat especially to young people at the moment then I was concentrating on the necessity of discipline and order so and the issue with regards to the metaphysical or symbolic representation of chaos and as feminine well that's a very complex problem and the first thing you have to understand is that there's no a priori supposition that order is preferable to chaos in any fundamental sense they're both constituent elements of reality you can't say ones bad and the others good you can say that they can become unbalanced and that's definitely not good too much chaos is not good obviously too much order is not good equally obviously those are the two extremes that you have to negotiate between and I'm not making a causal claim with regards to the idea that reality is an amalgam of chaos and order I don't think that there is any more accurate way of describing the nature of reality that's the most fundamental maybe not the most fundamental truth but it's certainly there's there's two there's two fundamental truths reality is composed of chaos and order and your role is to mediate between them successfully that's metaphysical and symbolic truth but it's more than that because that's actually how your mind and your brain is organized not only conceptually but emotionally motivationally and physiologically so and I don't really understand how that can be because it isn't obvious to me how the most fundamental elements of reality can be chaos and order but the evidence that that is the case is overwhelming I can give you a quick example which is quite interesting so you have two hemispheres there's a reason for that their fundamental reason for that is that one of them is adapted for things you don't understand that's roughly speaking the right hemisphere and the other is adapted for things that you do understand that's the left hemisphere and so that's a chaos order dichotomy and the fact that you're adapted to that that you're that the very structure of your brain reflects that bifurcation indicates as far as I can tell beyond a shadow of a doubt because it's also characteristic of non-human animals many of them that that differentiation is fundamentally true in some sense now you might ask well why is that conceptualized as masculine versus feminine because it's not male versus female by the way those are not the same thing because one's conceptual that's extraordinarily complicated I think the reason is is that we're social cognitive primates and that our fundamental cognitive categories a priori cognitive categories are masculine its masculine feminine and child it's something like that that's the fundamental structure of reality because we're social creatures and we view reality as something that's essentially social in its nature and then when we started to conceptualize reality outside the social world which wasn't very long ago by the way and which is something that animals virtually don't do at all we use those a priori social categories as filters through which we interpreted the external world and we're sort of stuck with that in some deep sense and you might say well why do we have to be stuck with that it's like well because some things are very difficult to change like if you go watch a story and the characters in this story slaught themselves into those archetypal categories then you'll understand the story and if they don't you won't because your understanding is predicated on an application of the archetypal a Priory's to the story you wouldn't understand it otherwise so you can't get under that there's no under that not not and not to remain human so and I can give you a quick quick example I like to use Disney movies for a variety of reasons mostly because everybody knows them but it's not accidental that the Evil Queen the Evil Queen in Sleeping Beauty is not an accidental character she's the way she is because we understand her and the reason we understand her is because we see the world through the categories that I just laid out and you can say well what do you think she has to be a queen and not a king no if she was an evil king she'd be different she'd be like scar in the Lion King he just as evil man but not the same character right yeah I guess I'm struck that it seems like a lot of your intellectual project is reasserting difference in an age where we're told that everything is the same yeah but it's almost different to say okay well look look I'm sorry to be so blunt but look it's a problem the problem with some of this the problem with some of this some of it's willful blindness but some of it's just ignorance so let me just let me just lay out a couple of things so for example I've been taken to task along let's say with James d'amour who had actually been highly influenced by my videos before he and my classes before he did what he did it Google you know I've studied personality differences between men and women for 25 years and written papers on the topic it's actually an area of expertise of mine and substantial expertise too and not pseudoscience expertise thank you very much I'm not a pseudo scientist so my publication record puts me in the top point 5% of psychologists so I'm not a pseudo scientist by any stretch of the imagination and I have 10,000 citations and that's not a million but it's a lot and a hundred published papers so so let me lay out one of the the personality differences between men and women because it's worth understanding and you might say well there can't be personality differences between men and women because that's anti-feminist it's like no it's not we might have to actually understand that there are differences between men and women so that we can let men and women make the choices they're going to make without without subjecting them to undue manipulation okay so one of the reliable differences between men and women cross culturally is that men are more aggressive than women now what's the evidence for that here's one piece of evidence there are 10 times as many people men in prison and what's that a socio-cultural construct it's like no it's not a socio-cultural construct okay here's another piece of data women try to commit suicide more than men by a lot and that's because women are more prone to depression and anxiety than men are and there's reason for that and that's cross culturally true as well they're more likely to try to commit suicide but men are way more likely to actually commit suicide why because they're more aggressive so they use lethal means okay so now the question is how much more aggressive are men than women and the answer is not very much so the claim that men and women are more the same than different is actually true but this is where you have to know something about statistics to actually understand the way the world works instead of just applying your a priori ideological presupposition to things that are too complex to fit in that rubric so if you if you drew two people out of two people out of a crowd one man and one woman and you had to lay a bet on who was more aggressive and you bet on the woman you'd win 40% of the time okay so that's quite a lot it's not 50% of the time which would be no differences whatsoever but it's quite a lot so there's lots of women who are more aggressive than lots of men so so the the curves overlap a lot so there's way more similarities than differences along the dimension where there's the most difference by the way right but here's the problem you can take small differences at the average of a distribution the distributions move off to the side and then all the actions out the tail so here's the situation you don't care about however how aggressive the average person is it's not that relevant what you care about is who is the most aggressive person out of a hundred take a hundred people and you take the most aggressive person because that's the person you better watch out for and what's the gender men because if you go three standard deviations out from the mean on two curves that overlap but are slightly disjointed then you derive an overwhelming preponderance of the over-represented group and that's why men are about ten times more likely to be in prison it has nothing to do with socialization so and then and and then there are other differences too so it turns out the differences in aggression and agreeableness also predict differences in interest and so it turns out that men are more interested on average then in things then women are and women are more interested in people on average and that's actually the biggest difference that's been measured between men and women it's nothing to do with ability it has to do with interest and so the way that manifests itself is that women are more likely to go into disciplines that are characterized by the care of others and you can tell that by the way occupations are segregating all you have to do is look at the data for like 15 minutes women overwhelmingly dominate healthcare and that's that's accelerating by the way and men dominate engineering let's say and so you say well that's socio-cultural it's like no it's not and here's the proof so so now now what you do because you want to test this hypothesis right it's like and bleed and the other thing that you want to understand is that left-leaning psychologists generated this data and you think well how do you know that that's easy there are no right leaning psychologists except for you well that's what people say you know and so and that's been well documented and so people have published this data despite their ideological proclivities and despite the fact that this is not what they expected to find or what they wanted to find so what you do now is you you stack countries by how egalitarian their social policies are right from the least egalitarian to the most and you say well the Scandinavian countries are the most egalitarian and by the way if we don't agree on that then there's no sense having this discussion at all because we don't agree on what egalitarian means if you don't think that what the Scandinavians have done have has been a move in the direction of egalitarianism then I have no idea what you mean by egalitarianism no you could say well they haven't done it perfectly it's like yeah yeah that's true but it's not relevant to this argument so what you do is you stack countries by how egalitarian their social policies are and then you look at occupational and personality differences between men and women as a function of the country and what you find is as the country becomes more egalitarian the differences between men and women increase they don't decrease and so what that means is that the radical social constructionists are wrong and it's not a few studies with a couple of people done by some half-witted psychologists and some tiny little university it's population level studies that have been published in major journals that have been cited by thousands of people it's not pseudoscience it's not it's not questioned it's not questioned by mainstream psychometricians and personality theorists we figured this out back in like 1995 everyone thought it was settled and so what's the big problem well who knows what the big problem is the outcome is not exactly the same between the genders it's like well who says it has to be and more importantly and this is something to ask yourself constantly just who the hell is going to enforce that and just exactly how are they going to enforce that and believe me it's not going to be in some manner that you like because there are differences between men and women and if you leave them alone those differences manifest themselves in different occupational choices that's the other finding this is a newer one as the societies become more egalitarian the occupational choices between men and women maximize and what that means is that fewer and fewer women go into the STEM fields now no one wanted that no one predicted it no one was hoping for it it actually flew in the face of I would say that most established psychological theories because my presupposition certainly was 20 years ago that what would have happened as we made societies more egalitarian would be that men and women would converge that's not what happened the biological difference is maximized as we eliminated the socio cultural differences and so maybe you don't like that it's like that's fine with me I didn't say I liked it but whether or not I like a piece of data has very little bearing on whether or not I'm labeled to accept it you know I'm trying to look at the damn scientific literature and to draw the conclusions that are necessitated by the data and then you can say well the whole thing is suspect because it's the it's the construction of the patriarchal tyrants who generated the Eurocentric scientific viewpoint it's like you want to have that conversation then go to an activist discipline and have it because it's not the sort of conversation that anyone sensible would engage in so I'd love to open up the room to questions please sensible questions and please keep them short but genuine questions someone with a microphone will find you if you raise your hand yes yeah hi good evening my name is Prater I wanted to understand a little bit of your view more on the fact that not fact but at least observation that over generations and generations all right at least what I have heard and seen from my family I can take up that women being told about that position in the home and men being told that position to work and be a little more aggressive you know the social conditioning so how does that play a role because I don't hear that being a being a dimension of reaching these conclusions I've never claimed that the differences between men and women are 100 percent biologically determined they're biologically influenced the radical constructionists make the opposite claim there are no biological differences between men and women psyche well first of all that's so preposterous that it barely even requires an answer but you might you might specify it a bit and say no there are no biological differences that manifest themselves psychologically and that's not quite as preposterous but it's also incorrect it's obviously the case that all sorts of things about sex sex roles and gender roles let's say are conditioned by socio-cultural mechanisms because human beings are very very plastic and so the manner in which those biological differences manifest themselves in a culture is radically influenced by the nature of the culture but that doesn't mean that the biological influences don't exist so but are you saying should we be countering that sort of traditional like traditional cultural mores yeah at one point you are saying that it's not necessarily biological or inherent if I had to paraphrase it well some of it is yeah but it's very unclear in the way at least maybe one hour is very short and maybe it needs a larger discussion it seems that it's easy to deduce that these are inherent differences which exist and social conditioning wasn't taken as a parameter to its control for by the comparison between societies that have different levels of egalitarianism built into their social structure it's all taken care of in the analysis if the biological differences manifest themselves maximally where the socio-cultural influences to equalize gender are maximal then obviously the biological differences are powerful and profound it's conclusive so it's taken into account in the in in the data analysis so that's why you stack up the countries by by the egalitarian nature of their social policies is to control for the socio-cultural influence and so you know you got to admit because just think it through for a minute it isn't even that what you would have expected theoretically is that the societies that are the least egalitarian would have the biggest differences between men and women and that as the societies got more and more egalitarian those differences would get smaller and maybe and maybe disappear even but that isn't what happened it's exactly the opposite is what happened they maximized in the most egalitarian societies therefore the social constructionist position the radical social constructionist position is wrong it's wrong it's been refuted which is partly why the radical social constructionist have taken that legislative route to impose their viewpoint they lost the scientific war but then well then we can just attack science it's like well it's science itself that's suspect it's like well then quit using your iPhone's well if you're gonna have your convictions man lay them out in your life if you think the scientific process is is its is suspect and tyrannical and oppressive and all that then quit using the products that it produces you don't get to have your cake and eat it too let's go to this young woman right here yeah and then we'll go to you hi my name is Julia and I recently read in the New York Times an article about your comments on forced monogamy what are your comments on how that was perceived by the public and specifically the left great question well I think it was enforced it's so in forced monogamy yeah yeah enforcement first of all that's a technical term by the way that's been used in the anthropological literature for a hundred years and the journalist who was not stupid knew that perfectly well and reported the story the way she reported it despite that but what's even more surreal than that about that story is that if you're going to try to undermine someone's credibility I can do it effectively you should attribute them to them out an extreme view that some person somewhere actually holds okay and so the view that was attributed to me was something like I want to rotate in yes I want to find useless men and distribute women to them at the point of a gun so that they don't become violent it's like no one has ever believed that ever anywhere and certainly environment well right she that's right she wrote a book about that but but so you know it's just absolutely preposterous and and it's preposterous in a bunch of ways because she interviewed me for two days and we talked about that for about two minutes it was a peripheral conversation and it's an anthropological truism generated primarily by scholars on the left just so everyone's clear about it that societies that use monogamy as a social norm which by the way is virtually every human society that's ever existed do that in an attempt to control the aggression that goes along with polygamy it's like oh my god how contentious can you get it's like well how many of you are in monogamous relationships well the majority how is that enforce I think this is a very polyamorous room so so you know it was just it was it was desperate that's what it looked like to me but the problem is it was also desperate and amateurish it's like she could have done a much better job with much less extreme characterization it's like oh yes I want to take women at the point of a gun and distribute them to useless men it's so stupid partly because like if she if she would have been reasonable and she knew this too one of the things I've told men specifically over and over and over and over is if you're being rejected by all the women that you approach it's not the women right so so becomes and so that's because you know these characters who like the guy that mowed down those people in Toronto he ends up blaming women and he's blaming more than women in some sense he's blaming the structure of being for producing women that reject him it's like and so that's part of what makes him violent it's like well what the hell is wrong with him you know he's got it completely backwards if everyone if you - if everyone you talk to is boring it's not them right and so if you're rejected by the opposite sex assuming that you're heterosexual then you're wrong they're not wrong and you've got some work to do man you've got some difficult work to do and there isn't anything that I've been telling let's say young men that's clearer than that you know what the it's actually something I've been criticized by by people on the left because they think I don't take structural inequality for example and so forth it into account sufficiently what I've been telling people is take the responsibility for your failure onto yourself and that certainly applies to well especially when you're trying to formulate relationship and you're getting rejected left right and center it's like that's a hint that you have some work to do now it also might be a hint that you're just young and useless and why do what the hell would any absolutely why the hell would anybody have anything to do with you because you don't have anything to offer you know so but that's rectifiable and part partly even maturity rectifies that but so so not only was that what would you call it accusation surreal and absurd made by a journalist who know perfectly knew perfectly well what I was suggesting and chose to misrepresent it anyways it's actually the opposite that the conclusion that people derived from that is exactly the opposite of what I've been suggesting in particular to young man so it's absolutely preposterous yes the microphone is yes professor Peterson I teach students I teach trans students and I'm asked often to call people singularly they it started probably about four years ago it struck me as very odd I'm 52 and some of them you can tell that it's coming from a very deep place and that's how they feel and they deeply need to be called they some of them my horse sense says that they're kind of enjoying giving me a certain shock and that there's a certain theatrical aspect it's my horse sense that there's a certain a potala bourgeois aspect to it kind of feel it and I'm probably right but I can't know I'm a linguist I'm a person and my general feeling has been whatever they ask just go with it and let's change our usage of the pronouns because we have a lot to do now what you said was interesting you said that the way that you make the difference in deciding these cases is based on the fact that you have psychological training and you can tell what I want to know is for my own elucidation and also because I think many of us wondered but then it kind of went by how do you know now I want to specify I'd rather you didn't recount the whole episode of how ridiculously you were treated amidst that whole controversy sure three quarters of the room knows I sympathize with you I thought it was ridiculous I want to know specifically because I'm a linguist you have psychological training how would you know well if you hear a I'm almost done oh yeah if you hear a tiny bit of skepticism in my voice you're correct hmm however I am open to being convinced based on your training which is immense how would you know which students to discount as opposed to which ones to go along with okay well first of all I wouldn't know right which is part partly why your skepticism is justified but I have to be responsible for what I say based on my willingness to take responsibility for my judgement so I would be willing to do that despite the fact that I might be wrong but having said that in in any reasonable situation I would err on the side of addressing the person in the manner that they requested to be addressed an address but that's not the issue for me the issue is now I'm compelled by law to do so it's like no no I'm doing it not now because it's compelled by law so that's the end of the game far as I'm concerned so because there is no excuse for compelling it by law that's my position and I think I think there's all sorts of reasons for that I don't think it was an isolated legislative move I think it's part and parcel of a whole sequence of legislative moves that have been made and that continue to be made in Canada I think it's an attempt by a certain radical ideological what would you say a certain radical ideology to gain the linguistic upper hand which i think is a terrible thing to do to allow so I had lots of reasons for rejecting the legislation but it had nothing to do with you that's very interesting we're talking about expertise here and my ears pricked up when you talked about how there is a way of thinking that would allow us to decide I know there's a way of thinking that would allow me to decide for me know us to decide for us surely you have a larger mission than just what's going on in your own head and I mean that no I had a perfectly straightforward mission which was there's no damn way I was gonna say those words when I was compelled to by law but that was my mission you weren't trying to model for the rest of us a way of thinking it was really only about you know what was about me in the law that the law the lawmakers had gone too far they'd stepped out of their appropriate territory into the domain of linguistic freedom and as far as I was concerned I was going to put up with that and so if people were happy about that and wanted to follow the example that was fine with them but for me it was something and that was the statement I'm not doing this and then a people can draw their own conclusions from that maybe they want to do it I mean and I've spoken with no shortage of trans people and you know my proclivity has been without exception so far to address them in the manner that seems most socially appropriate under the circumstances now you asked you know you asked a specific question which was do I have special expertise that I might share with other people you're doing Martin Luther and I think that these issues are a little subtler than those and so what do what makes you think that you're doing the kids that are grandstand any favors by going along with Herman because I can't decide which ones those are well my goodness looked fair enough but you have a type 1 and type 2 error problem so one error is that you don't call students what they deserve to be called that's one error and the other error is that you you call students what they want to be called even though they don't deserve it and so what you're trying to do optimally is to minimize both those errors and to do that you have to take a middle route now what you've decided to do and I'm not criticizing it is you've decided to allow for the possibility 100% of one of those errors because you think it's a less significant error and you know you might be right but it's not like you're acting in an error-free manner you've just decided to minimize one form of error at the expense of the other because I would say you're allowing what would you call it attention seeking and somewhat narcissistic undergraduates to gain the upper hand over you in your class now on that's believe me it's not a criticism it's not a criticism I understand why you're just erring on the side of generosity passion one more thing to say but sure I'm not gonna take up any more space ok are you saying that psychological theory has nothing to teach us about this because you're talking around my question your gorgeously articulate you're smarter than me does psychology have anything to teach us or not yes or no I do like this question I don't think that it has anything to teach I don't think it has anything to offer that I could teach you without think so it's just too complicated no no it's not no no it's not that well it is that in part because it's not easy to articulate out the principles the unerring principles by which you would make such a categorical judgment right because those are very situation specific problems you know and it's it's part of the problem of how of how to make a a generic moral truth applied to a very individualistic situation and the problem in the sorts of situations that you're describing is generally the Devils in the details right if you have all these students the ones that you just laid out they vary in their attitude towards their their self professed gender from the ones who are grandstanding to some degree let's say to the ones that are very serious and you have to make a judgement in the moment that is dependent on the variables that present themselves in a very complex way in that situation and I understand why you you took the pathway that you took and it's it's perfectly reasonable to do so my point was that you you don't minimize all the errors by doing so it's fine it's it's still a fine way of approaching it isn't my point was that because of my psychological acumen I would say that the experience that I've derived is that I would be comfortable in making the judgment and taking the consequential risk I'm not saying I'd be correct that's not the same thing at all I'm willing to suffer the consequences of my error that's not the same thing as being right and so if I feel that a student is manipulating me then I'm not gonna go along with it now I might be wrong about that and actually hurt someone who's genuinely asking for something that they need but I'm also what would you say sensitive to the error of allowing manipulation to go unchecked so hi you're back no time and then there could be a two-hour podcast about this on your wonderful podcast which everyone should listen to invite him on ok hands here in the orange and pink scarf Thank You Barry and thank you both for this really interesting conversation which is not like most of the conversations we've had here at the ideas festival is my first one so I have no idea so dr. Pearson there are million questions that I'd like to ask him only gonna ask one obviously I'm a psychologist I'm a social psychologist with the clinical background and the thing that I think I'd like to most hear about right now at this moment is the very noisy small percentage of people who oppose you have you thought about something they might be right about that that they might actually have a point about that you hadn't thought of but you've started to think they might actually have a point I don't know if I've started to think about the point that they have that I didn't think about before I mean people have been characterizing me as right-wing it's like I'm not right-wing so the characterization isn't very helpful and one of the things I do all the time in my public lectures is make a case for the utility of the left so and the case can be made quite rapidly if you're going to pursue things of value in a social environment you're going to produce a hierarchy it's unavoidable because some people are better at whatever it is that you value and so when that lays itself out socially it will produce a hierarchy the hierarchy has its miss that hierarchy has a necessity if you're going to pursue the things of value but it has a risk the risk is that we'll ossify and become corrupt that's risk number one and risk number two is that when you produce the hierarchy you're going to dis possess a number of people because there'll be lots of people in the hierarchy who aren't good at it and they'll be dispossessed so you need a political voice for them that's the left so I make that case over and over now what the right does is say yeah but we still need the hierarchy it's like yes you still need the hierarchy the reason we need the political dialogue is because we need the hierarchy and we can't let it get out of control so we and and the way to balance those two competing necessities isn't by only having the hierarchy or dissolving the hierarchy you have to live with the tension and the way because because the situation keeps shifting so the way you live with the tension is by talking say well here's the current state that the hierarchy needs to be tweaked this much because it's getting too tyrannical and it's dispossessing to many people so we need to tweak it so that it's not as corrupt and so that it's a little bit more open and we have to talk about that all the time and that's what the right and left it's not the only thing they do because they also talk about the necessity of borders that's the other fundamental thing that they do the dialogue has to continue so that we can have the hierarchies and utilize them as tools without allowing them to descend into tyranny ok so I made a case I made a case on on the web I did a talk at the University of British Columbia left-wing case for free speech as if that's so difficult to make I mean that's the sort of case that was made until like 2014 or something like that so the left-leaning types have all sorts of things that are correct to say now the problem is one of the problems of the left but this is and this is another thing that I talk about all the time in my public lectures by the way is we have a problem we know how to put a box around the extremists on the right basically we say oh you're making claims of ethnic or racial superiority you're not part of the conversation anymore what do we do on the left nothing that's not good because there's a there's an issue can the left go too far yes win oh we don't know oh that's not a very good answer now you could say well then it's up to the moderate leftists to figure that out so they can dissociate themselves from the radicals and it is up to them but that's actually not a very good answer either because it's all of our problem it's not centrists don't now how to reliably identify the radical the two radical left right wingers don't know how and it's partly because I think it's actually conceptually more complex like with the radical right you can kind of lay it down to one dimension Oh racial superiority no sorry you're out of the conversation but that's my low but we knew you mentioned before well I didn't say I was fan of Milo no but you called him a prankster well he is a prankster mostly yeah but he's also a racist well possibly yeah I haven't followed met my load that character you know so and it's it's possible that he is I mean it's hard to tell what Milo is exactly he's very complicated and contradictory person destined to implode which is exactly what happened well there's just no way you can be that contradictory a person and manage it it's just not possible he was just too many things happening at the same time for anyone to ever manage so but but on the left you know I don't know what it is I think I think the left becomes toxic one of the things that makes the left unacceptable is demands for equality of outcome it's like no you crossed the line man that's not an acceptable demand and that's increasingly a moderate leftist demand as well now but I don't know I it might be more complex it might be that there's four things that you have to demand on the left that all of a sudden makes what you're doing unacceptable and we don't know what those four things are and so I actually think it's a conceptual problem as well as an ethical problem we don't know how to bind the mint the necessary left so that we don't so that the radicals don't dominate counter productively and if you don't think that the radical leftists can dominate counter productively then well heaven help you know that I agree with that the idea that it's so clear on the right is not clear to me I mean look at look at the Trump administration oh I don't think that it's necessarily applied very clearly but at least conceptually it's worked well we can point it out better mm-hmm so and because of World War two yes yeah that helped quite a lot actually yeah yeah but but the thing is is that the Communist catastrophes does don't seem to have made it any clearer on the last yes and so and now that's another thing that the universities have done that's unacceptable by the way the intellectual class I would say is that it's never come to terms properly with the fact that the intellectual class as a whole was was supportive of the communist experiment and it was an absolutely catastrophic failure on every what measure of analysis people say well that wasn't real communism it's like he really shouldn't ever say that because what it means is this is what it means it's the most arrogant statement that a person can make it means that had I been in the position of Stalin with my proper conceptual Asian conceptualization of the Marxist utopia I would have assured in the Utopia that's what it means and it's like no first of all if you actually were that good spirited and you're not by the way if you were you would have been eliminated so fast after the Revolution occurred that it would have well it would have killed you because that's what happened it's what happened like all the well-meaning people after the Russian Revolution the small minority of people that were genuinely well-meaning they were dead like within two or three years so it wasn't real zero as in zero question zero times zero something one more question really okay yeah I know but several people there can we take a few and he'll answer them shortly like maybe two more okay let's go here and the front row right here yes but make it very very short great mentor great help to me and a lot of people that I've been sharing your work with I have two books here and I would like you to sign them for me okay you can do that yes people do that after I'm sure yes professor Peterson this is a little kin to the question that the young woman over there asked but over if you could get in a self-reflective mode over the course of your life and career to date what could you say honestly to us about where you felt you've been most wrong and what provoked that I've been wrong in your thinking where you said I was wrong about the Big Five personality theory for about five years so I know that's not very interesting but but but I didn't like it at all all it was brute force statistically derived it wasn't theoretically interesting I didn't like it at all but I was wrong about that so so because the science was well done what else have I been wrong about well you asked for profound examples of being wrong and in my field that's actually a profound example because that's that's one of the major theories in the field you're thinking about more interesting examples what have I changed radically oh well I you know when I was a kid I was an avid socialist I was wrong about that but but more but more specifically I was wrong about that because I thought that in that dark that there were questions that I want answered that that doctrine could answer and it wasn't that it was socialism that didn't make it make it make the answers emergent was that it was the wrong level of analysis so that was a major source of error it was sort of the source of error that that the journalists who are going after me are making they think everything's political it's like no it's not there's lots of levels of analysis and the political is one and I learned eventually that the political wasn't the right level of analysis for the questions that I was interested in addressing and that was a major that was a major error took me years to sort that out into and to figure out what the consequence was I was wrong about the significance of religious ideas because when I was a kid I I you know a thirteen or so and I was smart enough at that point to see the contradiction between an evolutionary account of the origin of human beings in a say a scriptural account and so I just dispensed with that in this sort of new atheist move and you know I threw the baby out with the bathwater and I was really wrong about that like profoundly wrong about that and I'm sure I'm wrong about a bunch of other things but I'll figure out what some of those are as we go ahead so that's three things those are big things so you know I'm sure if I thought more I could come up with other examples but those are pretty big things that I was wrong about thank you all so much clearly an hour-and-a-half is not enough with you but thank you so much for your time [Applause]

Channel: The Aspen Institute

Views: 1,744,003

Rating: 4.8425584 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Bari Weiss, Aspen Ideas Festival, Aspen Institute, gender, pronouns, university, psychology, language

Id: v6H2HmKDbZA

Length: 92min 3sec (5523 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 27 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/kodheaven]

Peterson goes over some interesting information and refutes some absurd allegations he's had to put up with like:

• Pseudoscience
• The Enforced Monogomy article
• A gateway "drug" to the alt-right

I think he was quite clear with his answers. He got a little angry at moments but understandable. I do like it when he is precise and elaborates on his answers like he did on this interview.

A must watch IMO.