Jordan Peterson | Full interview with NZ Herald journalist Simon Wilson

[Music] Jordan Peterson welcome to New Zealand I see you're wearing a lobster tie answer a theme you carry with you everywhere these terribly yes you lost me around it'll be on your gravestone I smell doubt it I wonder if I could start by asking you about The Handmaid's Tale yeah the series was very big here both series hit very big here in the last couple of years yeah the message one of the messages of the Handmaid's Tale is that if you're going to stop the advance of feminism you have to repress it do you agree with that it's do you think that's what that story's about no and I think Margaret Atwood had her comeuppance quite badly she wrote that man maids tale because she fell afoul of the radical left in Canada about a year ago and was taken out quite dramatically and so you know the chickens tend to come home to roost and I don't think there's any evidence at all that there's going to be a widespread movement to reel press women because I don't think that there's the desire to do that on the part of men as far as I can tell I certainly don't want to do that do you nevertheless you've had quite a lot to say critically about feminism oh yes lots yes I wonder why you think the consequence of feminism really is worse for men as well as for women then it's flowering well I don't necessarily think the consequence of feminism per se is I mean the idea that now that we have the technological means to do so which is primarily effective representation to the 1960s that the idea that we should open up the economic landscape to talented people of all types is only intelligent and it's clearly the case that if you look worldwide and you look at the statistics that that countries that have the more most advanced legislation with regards to the to the promotion of women women's rights are also overwhelmingly the countries that are more likely to do well economically all of that makes perfect sense and we've done quite a remarkable and wrap a job of roughly equalizing the number of women and men in that who are occupied in general and I think that's all to the good but the the the radical edges of the feminist doctrines are absolutely appalling and mayest and they they bear no academic water whatsoever their their their contemptible in their emphasis on insistence on collectivized Pollock devised identity and the and also their insistence that the West is basically best viewed as an oppressive patriarchy which is simply not true so I've seen I've seen a video of you saying that feminists know radical feminists but feminists have an unconscious wish for brutal male domination doesn't quite square with what you've just told me well one of the things that I'm very curious about is the relative lack of the relative silence on the part of Western feminists about countries that truly are oppressive like Saudi Arabia exactly yeah sorry oh it's exactly answering the question because I'm looking for the psychological reason why there would be much less reaction on the part of the radical feminists to countries that generally are oppressive Oh patriarchy's instead of reacting the way they are to Western countries which genuinely aren't right so to be clear then if the basic preeminence premises of feminism are things like respect for everyone the right to make choices opportunities safety for all quality of life shouldn't be gendered do you presumably believe none of those things should be gendered well it depends on what you mean by equality of life because there's two different kinds of equality I mean there's quality of life quality quality of life well it would be good if it wasn't gendered or a consequence of race or a consequence of ethnicity or any of the things that are fundamentally irrelevant to progressive and productive movement through the world in any any sort of discrimination that's arbitrary so that's not linked to the desired outcome with regards to an organization is counterproductive and I think that virtually every reasonable person already agrees on that and and the problem is is that we know we tend to view any inequality of outcome in the unequal distribution of the fruits of of effort as as indication of systemic oppression and it's not so that's just one of the things that strikes me about the world we live in now is that there are a lot of men who have who are struggling to work out where they fit in and I wonder whether one of the reasons for that is that most boys as we grow up we were given few mechanisms for dealing with being nord or belittled or abused or being told we're wrong or just being left out and we hanker for a world that treats us as we used to be treated as little boys do you think that is a fair summation of a part of the Western world today well I think that men boys are actively discouraged and I think that that's a huge error and one that will eventually backfire on women to the degree that they're also attempting to develop masculine abilities I think they're discouraged because the fundamental axiom of the radical leftists is that the West is an oppressive patriarchy and that all of the negative consequences of that are a consequence of the men's actions and if that's the case then when you see young men attempting to manifest ambition or competitive ambition that sort of thing then it's very easy to punish that or at least not to encourage it and that's not a good thing what am i anyone what I'm asking you is that whether you think that men need help to learn what women have always had to learn which is that you don't get preferred status just because you exist no I don't think men need help to learn that I don't think that men have ever presumed that and I don't think that we have had preferred status just because we exist for men throughout the bulk of history life has been extraordinarily brutal men have had by far the most dangerous jobs they've gone to war they've there they're much less likely to be represented as a group across history is an absurd idea a small percentage of men have been more powerful than men and women but that is not the same as saying that there's been some gender some global gender advantage that's characterized human interaction you don't accept that that smote that advantage that happened to a small group of men was reflected right through society brought down into family groups and if you don't accept that it was it's been affected at each level surely not at each level no I don't think there's any evidence whatsoever that that's the case it's partly the evidence for example is the you have twice as many female relatives as you ancestors as male because the male reproductive success rate is half of that of women so no there is no evidence for that and the idea that you know the the best way to view history as is as an oppressive struggle between men and women is an absolutely appalling way of viewing human interaction to jump from what I've seen but let's let's talk about order and chaos yeah which is the theme one of the big themes in your book order is male fate keep failing masculine man and cows is feminine yeah you quote approvingly the Taoists goal of walking the border between chaos and order right but you're not a test I think you've called your book 12 rules for life an antidote to chaos in other words it's a search for order not a search for walking the border and search for rebalancing order I would say would you say rather than simply a search for order and a rejection of chaos no it's definitely not a rejection of chaos it's a rejection of excess chaos an antidote to chaos though hmm yeah well because it is the matter of walking the line that's the relevant issue so and the next book is called an antidote to order I bet it's called beyond order twelve more rules for life okay order isn't harmony yeah or does the state of fear it's not orders not a state of affairs that's by definition beneficial to everyone no stability yes late societies were ordered feudal societies were yes but obviously a lot of people miss down so I'm wondering whether you would think that if you had called the book how to find a balance between chaos and order if that had been the subtitle there might have been a rather different book yes it would have been less successful book because it's a rather awkward title okay but no I do think that the idea that what we're looking for right now is an antidote to chaos is correct because a lot of people are nihilistic and depressed and they don't have a name and they don't have a place and they don't know where they're going and that's not a good thing I don't think that what we're suffering from in the West right now is an excess of order that isn't my that isn't my observation although that can happen so you've observed rightly in my view that that societies use hierarchies or are hierarchical it's a more reasonable thing to observe I think but I wonder where that the society is also about cooperation that it's about striking the balance that social progress is about how we find and refine and develop that balance classical society for example classical Greek society would have found democracy inconceivable without slaves well a function functioning hierarchies are also predicated on on cooperation like there's no reason to assume it's a it's a Neel Marxist postmodern presumption that the basis of hierarchical competition is power it's not something I believe so neo max is postmodern mod I mean it's a label you can you can throw anything that criticizes you because it can mean anything to anybody yeah what fundamentally means that the basis of hierarchical structures are power and I don't buy that and that is the fundamental claim and it's the fundamental claim of the Marxists and it is the fundamental claim of the postmodernist and it's simply not true I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of what Marxism might have to say to post-modernism and vice-versa because I'm sure you'll agree it's a it's a rabbit hole yeah but what did one to ask you given that society evolves I mentioned from ancient Greece and so on before and why is it useful not to go back to that and look at how societies evolved in your book you go back to lobsters a third of a billion years ago and that's the basis on which you make your you stake your claim that we need to be understanding the role of hierarchies rather than looking at the balance between hierarchy and cooperation well we need to go back to the fundamental biochemistry because we need to understand how important a role our own perceptions of our hierarchical position is in our emotional regulation so we're like you you have a mechanism that's unbelievably ancient and deep very embedded inside your psycho physiology that marks where you are in given hierarchy and it determines how much negative emotion and how much positive emotion you feel and it's not under voluntary control it's one of the fundamental control mechanisms of the brain and the reason I made the case that it was a third of a billion years old was to try to indicate just exactly how widespread and powerful this an ism is and it helps understand for example why people are so hurt by by status reduction because they definitely and also max a difference between you and a lot of others I would I would guess that that you would say that that but that's defining that if it's a third of a billion years old it's hardwired it as you've just explained others would say that actually as humans we have developed cooperative social mechanisms that take us far beyond that and it is far more valuable to look at how we evolved together then to go back to the idea that actually we're simply crustaceans at heart well we we certainly we've certainly determined how to structure or hierarchy so that cooperation plays a much larger role in they do in most animals but that doesn't mean that that's altered our fundamental the fundamental way that our biochemistry interacts with hierarchy and so that the idea the critics of especially the first chapter of my book didn't read it because I wasn't justifying hierarchies I was attempting to point out that we're very sensitive to hierarchical position and that the best way to occupy a position in a hierarchy to move up and to occupy a proper position is to play a careful reciprocal social game and not to use power so you see you do I get in yes could we talk for a moment about me to you've rejected the idea that we should always believe the victim and in a rate well that's what happened in the lynch cases in the 1950s in the United States victim was always beliefs and I was going to say that's fair enough why not accept the situation as being the victim deserves to be treated as if she's telling the truth in our attempts to get at the truth and in doing that we do our best not to revitalize her because that isn't how the adversarial system works and I don't think but why not advocate for that because either serial system is a very effective judicial system and it's certainly the case that among crimes that are falsely reported rape crimes are at the top of the list so there is no believing the victim there's no reason for people to assume that when they enter the criminal justice system that they're going to be treated with kid gloves or treated easily that isn't how it works no that we have a major social issue in this country especially domestic violence is our really big issue most police call-outs in this country are to do with what they call domestic hi yes it's not an issue that we're going to resolve through the traditional ever serial approach of the courts and having been would be they going to be Reaper monsters that would be best addressed by dealing with alcoholism because most of the cause of domestic violence is alcohol-related strongly related yes and so we're not looking at the proper quarters not just look at looking at alcohol it's 50% 50% of violent crimes are a consequence of alcohol intoxication so it's a huge concern course how the police behave how the courts behavior Shirley you're so part of that perhaps okay I wonder whether this is an example of something else that people criticize you for that in talking about Mito and talking about victims and allegations of rape and so on you've moved the debate to an extreme there are false accusations but that's not a very useful is that a very useful place really to I have moved the debate there but I've done mostly is to tell men that they should act honorably in relationship to their sexual relationships with women and I'm quite a traditionalist in that manner and so I think that the best way to regulate sexual behavior in general is to is to return to or to value long-term committed monogamous relationships and that's basically the fundamental solution and you have argued that no very little to do with me too and I haven't commented much about me to when you but when you do and when you have there's a subtext which is a completely different message that you seem to people it's in signals that women are liars but means sexual behavior isn't offensive is neither offensive there is a plot those messages are carried as subject all right what what evidence do you have that's the sort of thing that I've put forward I've said almost nothing about me - except for the danger of believing the victim automatically and that's obviously a danger so I have nothing against the me to movement apart from the fact that it has the proclivity to go too far like most like spontaneous mob movements yes but defining it as the movement that goes too far me doing that that goes too far yes but this why why settle on that as the definition of the meter movement do I having something well okay I asked Twitter about you and this is one of the things Twitter see Peterson is a man telling men to be good people responsible for selves and behavior yep that's all I needed Peterson gives volition back to those who succumbed to victimhood and I think you'd agree with that yeah and I think we'd all say that's a good thing yeah but what I wonder reading the book twelve rules for life is wizz respect the book is a me Bible I can't think of another book of its kind a self-help book or or a religious book for that matter that doesn't include as one of its rules respect for other people you haven't done that and I see miss deliberate I don't think that that's true in the least I mean one of the things that distinguishes my work safe from the work of someone like I Rand is that I make the case considered continually that there's no such thing as atomized individuality and so for example if you're going to treat yourself properly which you should you have to treat yourself as an iterated process across time properly so you today you tomorrow you next week you next month you and your old you're already a community if you're going to treat yourself properly and if you treat yourself properly you're going to take into account your family and you're also going to take into account your community all simultaneously but the right place to start is with the things that worth are within your local control and there's some humility in that it's it certainly has nothing to do with instantaneous self gratification or selfishness you must have been aware it was an unusual thing to do though to not make that point more clearly the other thing that's missing is service yeah most similar books to yours would would find a way to say in there a list of 12 things or whatever the list was would it would include a way that was explicitly about service you say it late in the book when you look at listing a list of principles for living by you say what shall I do with the poor Maine's plight strive through right example to lift his broken heart what that says is you don't help him but you show him what a better person you are so that he'll want a copy you know you show them what a better person is what a better person it's the same thing it's not you know life is right example that you're saying right example in your own personal life I'm better than you and you need to be like me know that you're an example of something that's better and I don't for example and I'm lecturing assume that I'm better than the people that I'm lecturing to which is part of the reason why people respond positively to my lectures I assume that we all have plenty to learn and rule 5 for example in my book which is about raising children is all about service and so is rule 6 which is to clean up your room before you criticize the world and so the idea that the book is somehow a paying to individual individualism in the same way that say in Iran's philosophy is it's just completely inappropriate it could be read that way I think it can be read in all sorts of ways but that's certainly not the aim of it you've called yourself a traditionalist and a conservative in the sense of being aware of my own ignorance and you've quoted your Hippocratic oath first do no harm you make a lot of people very upset and I wonder when I make a small minority of very noisy okay I wonder what a lot of people very happy and I would say that's like ninety five percent of people you don't accept the charge then that that you although you are an advocate for more order that you're actually fermenting chaos that you're quite deliberately fomenting chaos by I'm certainly not deliberately fomenting it because I don't enjoy deliberately fomenting chaos and if that's a consequence of what I'm saying well that's how it goes but even if there's nothing deliberate about that in every interview I've seen you given I've watched a lot of them you never say there's something in that or you're partly right or maybe I went a little far you you never make any of the conciliatory statements that most people might make if if they were trying to reach towards agreement with people for a way for well it depends very much on the interview like if you watch my interviews with Joe Rogan if you watched YouTube videos that have that hour-long forum it's always the case that there's a conciliatory discussion it's just that the traditional media forms which tend to be more adversarial don't allow for that sort of dialogue it's an interesting way to put it as the interviewee and socially at your social scientists you know the world is full with a thousand shades of gray you know but the tenor of what you say consistently is that it's black and white it seems very unscientific to me um I need an example before I can respond to that you don't think the book is full of those examples there's lack of white you know particularly I think there are terrible shades of grey that torment people when I'm asking people for example to take stock of their own lives what that is is a matter of taking a look at what's gray about their lives and trying to divide it into what needs to be sorted out and fixed and what needs to be maintained there's grey everywhere and and and the idea that you need to walk the line between order and chaos is certainly not a description of a world in which there are simple black and white rules because the that line is something that changes alright but I don't read your book as a walking the line I read you a book as a yes return to order and then I think you should read more carefully okay you said last year on NBC News and Toronto the diversity inclusivity equity all of those things together make up a very toxic brew is especially equity okay there's a shot tactic going on in there and sometimes it's not that you will claw it back but many of your followers will say he didn't say that you have to insist on the context he might have been misquoted but I wonder where doesn't misquote okay so that's the quote but I wonder whether there's a clear message it buried and I'm not really even buried in that statement which is that the values of the modern world are terrible and we have to go to war on them no there's a message that there's something extraordinarily dangerous about the combination of the mantra of diversity inclusivity and equity especially equity because it concentrates on equality of outcome and equality of outcome is a it's a it's a failed endeavor in every possible manner philosophically practically historically it's been a complete disaster and that's because it's a logical impossibility and a practical nights are pretty easy to argue that that's a straw man argument but actually we do believe in the equality of opportunity we do accept that a society has a range of I wasn't easy opportunity I was talking about before it's what I'm saying I'm not I'm suggesting that painting society is being fixated on equality of outcome doesn't actually a quarter and I don't think society is fixated on it I think a small minority of very noisy people are fixated on it to the detriment of everyone else there was it's a completely untenable a goal there was a process that happened recently with Alec Minassian who was that the terrible case of the man in Toronto who drive into yes you're in your hometown driving to a crowd of people killed many people hmm you tweeted I'm sorry there's a tweet about you that that suggested could catch you it was your tweet could casual sex necessitate state tyranny missing responsibility has to be enforced somehow and then that became interpreted as Jordan Peterson believes and enforced monogamy that was interpreted by a New York journalist perfectly well that was exactly and then that was interpreted as monogamy should be promoted as the norm with nine years and should you which is what happens now of course it is cultures around the world and it's not a big statement to make us and no it's not at all and what I meant was that if people didn't take individual responsibility for their own sexual propriety that what would happen would be that there would be totalitarian intervention in by the state in order to replace the missing morality yes all right man you also told Joe Rogan if you're a young because you wanted to clarify what you mean if you're a young man and all the women are rejecting you then who's got the problem it's not all the women that's a very bad road to go to yes that for sure I imagine a lot of people would have been very happy to hear you say that I've said it repeatedly in bigdhaas men continually a bright fact that I need to grow up in Excel over a six-month process we had that series of statements from you speaking clearly is one of your 12 rules and I wonder why it is that in a situation like that in many other situations what actually happens is that you sow confusion I don't sow confusion the journalist and interview me so confusion the woman thing wrote why do you think about her misinterpreted in your views so with her it was absolutely clear I spent two days with her and we spent 30 seconds talking about enforcement agha me and she's this very smart woman and she knew exactly what I meant and chose to make that the centerpiece of the article for for I would say to attract attention in a way that was completely an approach you know it's not just the journalist from the New York Times you know that this happens over and over and over because the journalists read each other's journalism what I'm saying with you the follow the fault is sometimes with me I mean it's not like I every I always say everything perfectly but there's there's no it's I mean it's getting dull to read the journalistic accounts because they're just mirror images of everything that's been written over the last year and a half and the same old things there's ten epithets that are generally thrown at me every one that you can possibly think of and people have gone over everything I've said to my students for the last thirty years almost all of which is recorded and found absolutely no evidence for any of that even once I would say that there is a lot online of journalists actually trying to interview serious seriously trying to get towards a proper understanding and that what you just said to me is a very common thing you say I've been over the evidence there is no evidence anywhere it's just me as it's been already I mean it been trying to take me out who've been over the evidence and have not been able to find any last year you said asked what you would say to Justin Trudeau you were Prime Minister and you said you thought for a while and you said dividing people into their tribal groups can do nothing but bear evil fruit in the long time in the long run now wonder if there isn't a very good example of the assumption that the world was properly organized before when really it's always been in tribes always been in classes and in gender groups and in races and the organization of the world in that way has always born evil fruit and I wonder in addition to that whether you recognize that you are one of the world's leaders of identity politics and no I don't think that you are a champion for an identity group what would be the identity group I mean no I think that that's an appalling accusation and I think if you go to my talks for example that there's no evidence that that's the case and it's certainly you suit and they have no evidence that that's my readership and even if it was the case that the predominant people that I'm talking to our men between the ages of 25 and 35 that doesn't make me an identity politician and those people need to be talked to to how does that not make you an identity politician those people fighting and arguing they shouldn't be talked to I'm just I'm just wondering why you would say that you ain't an intellectual leader for that group of people and many others no I I'm not inviting them specifically to what I'm doing that's just how it's turned out and the part of the reason for that is because the YouTube YouTube viewership is 80% male across the board that has nothing to do with me there's a woman's book shop have called the women's bookshop in the city I'm allowed a man it's it's not an exclusive thing it's you wouldn't want to argue that a women's bookshop calling itself that wasn't explicitly feminist because of controls but I don't call my book something that's specifically devoted to man and the vast majority of my students throughout my academic career have been women at least 80% of them and certainly it's a very large proportion of women that are there reading and buying the book so this is just a trope that journalists use your audience is primarily angry young white men it's like okay fine I've talked to about 350,000 people in the last year and there hasn't been one incident one in untoward incident of any sort by any single one of the people who've come to my talks and that's three hundred and fifty thousand people so where is the aggressor you see what you've just done there you took what I see it and took it to an extreme I didn't talk about angry I just said what I mean I accept that the angry side is a very small corner yeah but okay you've got a message that leftist academic student activists transsexuals corporate HR departments of following the what you call the postmodern neo-marxist theories and they will I think you would argue they just they're going to destroy Western civilization I wonder why it has to sound like a plot rather than the great contest of ideas that we enjoy and what isn't part of plot I mean many of the disciplines and the universities especially the Women's Studies disciplines are activist disciplines and they're actively the design promote their it actively designed to promote and to train people to move into organizations and to advance these doctrines and they're it's part of the ideological structure of what they're doing is they change the world and not to understand it make it make it a way you can criticize the left for things like an intolerance of diverse views relativism blindness to tyranny all those things stick to the leave but they also stick to the right just stick to everybody well they aren't they just part of the slow muddy march of history why are you so obsessed about demonizing a particular part of that muddy much I don't think I am obsessed about demonizing it I think I'm obsessed about calling out what's happening in the universities because what's happening in the universities is appalling and so I think the humanities are very rapidly being destroyed I don't think there'll be a man left in the humanities in ten years at the current rate which I don't think is a good thing and I think that we're in danger of losing exactly what the humanities were always what would you say valuable for which is a continuation of a certain kind of conversation that's been enlightening people for perhaps 5,000 years and so I think it's an absolute catastrophe that it's disappearing one is the one of the things you're famous for saying is that you found it difficult to debate with certain types of women yeah because the normal things you would have recourse to if you were debating mean and not available to you and what you meant there was you couldn't hit it it's it's it's known among men that there are limits to the manner in which you can interact and that those limits don't necessarily apply when you're dealing with women especially women of a certain sort and there's no way of regulating that and that's a big problem that's what I meant and I think that it's true it's obvious a lot of women we're surprised to hear that and as well I would have thought a lot of men was surprised to hear that because I my experiences that men don't generally engage in their interactions on the basis of suppressing their anger which is what you're really getting at they don't engage in their interactions on the basis of I've got to moderate and they regulate their behavior so that that anger isn't necessary why you strike me as angry and I wonder why you're angry I guess I'm not sure why I strike you as angry you don't feel angry at the moment mm-hmm not really okay generally no I wouldn't say so I mean most of the places that I go look I can tell you what my life is like you can tell me if you think this would be a life that would make you angry okay everywhere I go I'm stopped by people at least a dozen times a day I would say five times an hour they're often young men but not always almost all of them are exceptionally polite when they approached me they'd like to have a picture they'd like to talk to me and they'd like to tell me why their life is substantially better since they've encountered my work and I've gone to I don't know a dozen countries maybe more 15 countries and talk to at least 10,000 people who've told me that story over and over and so imagine what your life would be like if everywhere you went what people did was come up to you and thank you because what they did helped you not commit suicide and get out of your addiction and stop being alcoholic and take responsibility for your life and try to put your family together and that things are much much better and that they're often in tears it's not something that makes you angry it's something that makes you hurt it's not making you angry now it's hurt it's hurtful to see how much need there is for that in society and how unfortunate is that people need such a small amount of encouragement to lift themselves out of those sorts of places of hell and it is it's it is irritating to me I would say that men in particular young men have been discouraged to the point where that's such a common occurrence when they need so little encouragement to move forward in a productive and progressive direction I accept that what surprises me is that the context of it is a context in which the me is stressed and more traditional questions of how you fit in how you do how you cope with an evolving society rather than build us encouraging people to stand back and go actually the encouraging says that the way society is involving is wrong and we can step back from it and we can't stop it it seems to me there's a nostalgia cyst upon this idea that the Me's at the center of this so I talked to a young man a month ago who stopped his heroin addiction about a year ago and it was as a consequence of watching my lectures and he said he's had 12 of his friends do the same thing and I insist continually that if you're treating yourself properly you're doing it in a way that also benefits your family and also benefits the community there's a strong communitarian ethos in there and it has nothing to do with a what would you call it a focused individualism

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Keywords: NZ Herald, nzherald.co.nz, nz documentaries, new zealand documentaries, short docs, short films, nz news, kiwi news, new zealand news, jordan peterson debate, peterson owns, new zealand jordan peterson, peterson feminist, peterson sjw, jordan peterson interview, joe rogan peterson

Id: wPSdj7QqkKU

Length: 34min 11sec (2051 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 22 2019