Jordan Peterson Meets Maajid Nawaz | Interview In Full | LBC

Joran thank you for joining me thank you for the invitation um it's it's with somewhat a particular interest that I wanted to speak to you because a lot of what you've been through with the response to your work I have some empathy for but let me begin with this you're known for providing advice to young men on line many of whom are listening to your messages and if I could distill the poor message that you advise young men to pay attention to it's that they could be far more than they currently are could you define that for me please well people have an unspecified potential for development educationally obviously with regards to the skills they have but also in relationship to their character and it's it's much it's much more encouraging for people I think to concentrate on who they could be rather than who they are especially when they're young because they still have most of their life ahead of them and and they're not everything they could be yet and so to tell people even something like well you should feel good about yourself the way you are is like well that there's something there that's seriously lacking because there's so much more that you could be that you need to be and that you should be aiming at the thing your the problem with being okay the way you are is that you don't have a goal then and people need to have a goal in order to to come to terms with their life why is that controversial that doesn't sound controversial to me but it has been met with some controversy in one of you want somebody I mean somebody was speaking to you at one stage and yeah they said well you know I think it's working into and nobody ever told you that why has this become oh well that's a very good question I mean I think I think it's something like this we've been convinced let's say at many levels of our society primarily by university LED indoctrination that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy and that if a young man takes his place in that world attempts to move ahead and say attempts to pursue an ambition then he's following this tyrannical patriarchal route and that there's something reprehensible about that that he's contributing to the oppression of others or to the destruction of the planet if you take the environmentalist route and so there's been this terrible pall cast on achievement related ambition even if it's in the service of character development and it's it's partly because we have this unit dimensional view of our culture as a patriarchy as fundamentally tyrannical and and and and that's being pushed extraordinarily hard and it's very demoralizing to people it's a far more demoralizing than then people generally realize and I actually think the demoralization is part of the underground reason that that narrative is being put forward so it's and the fact that the universities are participating in that is so appalling to me that I can barely formulate my thoughts on it properly I can see you feel passionately about it so so what you're saying is now yeah now here we have a we have a common understanding when it comes to looking at issues that relate to young men that there's a bit of a crisis of masculinity so in the United Kingdom one of the biggest killers of young men is suicide now that's not because young women don't try and kill themselves as much as young men it's at young men when they try and kill themselves what they've realized when they study this is that they are more decisive yeah they use lethal means when women commit suicide attempt suicide more often but men are much more effective at ensuring that they die I mean have you looked at what does that tell you about young men and women depression well men are more aggressive than women statistically speaking which is why the overwhelming majority of people in prison are men so because the most aggressive people are men and so men are more likely to use violent means when they do something that's violent like like damaging means and so you see this in domestic domestic violence statistics as well women are more likely to hit their husbands than the reverse from what you've studied oh yeah the statistics on this are quite clear but of course men are more likely to use high levels of force so and it's part of innate aggressiveness and you know you might say well what's your evidence that that's an 8 it's like well there's endless evidence that it's you innate although of course these things are modified by by cultural phenomena I'm particularly interested in the suicide though because yeah I mean I that's a result of depression now is that depression a consequence of this crisis in masculinity young men not knowing how to be a man in the modern age well it's a good question and if so is the antidote to simply reinforce some of the traditional some would say of course toxic masculinity of so the traditional roles of men which haven't seemed to have I mean they haven't seemed to necessarily have been a hundred percent correct in the way you know historically men have treated others especially women well the thing is I don't even I don't like that narrative I think it's I think it's an appalling way of viewing history I mean look the way that history lays itself out to me the first issue is that for most of human history the the common person had a pretty damn rough life it was hand to mouth and so if you look in the Western world in 1895 the average person lived on less than a dollar a day in today's money which is below the current UN guidelines for abject poverty and so that's only a hundred and forty years ago essentially and so you could argue about who had it worse men or women that's rather futile argument my sense I mean men were shipped off to war in droves that wasn't particularly pleasant they did almost all the absolutely catastrophic ly dangerous work and so you know that was rough but of course women had it rough too man lots of them died in childbirth you know and lots of them if they had children if they didn't die in childbirth their children died before they were a year old and and life was brutally difficult and people didn't live to be that old and so my essential reading of history is that our ancestors were pretty viciously oppressed by the basic conditions of life and that essentially what they did in response was to cooperate with one another to try to make things the least amount of dismal possible through a division of labor yes and and yes and I mean it isn't as if it was only in 1960 when the feminists had their way that men finally woke up and loved their partners that isn't how things worked and so this narrative of the universal oppression has reached so deeply into our culture that we have to take it for granted that the fundamental way of viewing history is was men against women and men it's like women were very different a hundred and thirty years ago they didn't have reliable birth control that's a really big deal they didn't have reliable toilet facilities that's actually a big problem they didn't have any way of dealing with menstruation that was efficient that didn't even occur until like the 1930s and wasn't in really widespread used till the 1970s like these are big technological changes and we write that all out of history and say well the reason that women had such a dismal timeless because men were oppressing them it's like sorry no that's not an appropriate way of looking at the past and move to the suicide is even that you have depression then what is in your view causing the biggest killer of young men in in the UK well there's lots of there's lots of reasons for depression you know it's a very complicated phenomena but it's certainly the case that many people have issues of depression because they're they're aimless no to the degree that their depression isn't being caused by endogenous factors medical factors because that's often a problem and and it takes careful diagnosis to tear those things apart but people need a purpose in their life you know because life is difficult it's life is suffering you know according to our great religious traditions and it says that's an essential truth and in order to cope with that suffering properly you have to have a noble purpose in your life and if you associate the pursuit of that noble purpose with with fortification of the oppressive patriarchy then you take the you take the legs out from underneath people who are trying to make their way in the world and that's that's happening to young men in droves you know it's it's yes I would say in droves and it's not a good thing and it is definitely facilitated by the postmodern neo-marxist doctrines that are rife in the universities which make the assumption that our society is fundamentally tyrannical in its essential nature I mean it's partly tyrannical because every society is corrupt to some degree and power plays a larger role in movement up a hierarchy than might be optimal right because no system is perfect but we do pretty damn well our societies are pretty free and everyone very few people are hungry most people have decent levels of shelter and decent freedom we can walk on the streets in safety we can aggregate to in crowds without anything terrible happening and to me these are miracles because that's not the case in most of the world yeah I I first saw we you and I you know I've been aware of your work mainly online and we've communicated a few times online but I first saw you speak and this is ironic in the interview I referenced earlier and that's the caffeine human yes interview on channel 4 because to this point you've mentioned yes Society there are many many many reasons why life is difficult and one of them is oppression but there are many other reasons so to this point like dozens of other reasons need Kathy Newman raise the wage the gender wage gap we and your answer struck me as being somewhat similar that one of the elements for one of the reasons for this wage gap could be unreasonable prejudice that's sure but that you said there are many other reasons now she she didn't take that well no her attitude was if you don't think the wage gap is caused by the prejudice of powerful white men then you're a bad person which is just that's her implicit argument and that's just not a good argument I mean Warren Farrell who's a very interesting character wrote a book called why men earn more and he actually wrote it for his daughters because he was trying to figure out how they could maximize their earning potential across their life it's bad I mean he wrote it for popular consumption as well but he identifies all sorts of reasons why men make more money and so and they don't make that much more money so you don't need that many reasons to account for it but here men take more dangerous jobs men are more likely to move men work longer hours and if you work 14% longer hours you make 44 percent money 40% 44% more money the return is nonlinear so men tend to work in industries that are scalable so women prefer care jobs you know or or that's not exactly right most of the people who are in human care jobs are female but the problem with those jobs is they don't scale you know you can't take care of 10,000 people but you can you can provide electronic resources to 10,000 people so there's all these complicated reasons why men and women differ in their pay including for example that women are more agreeable than men and agreeable people aren't as good at negotiating on their own behalf with regards to salaries and that women tend to bail out of high-level positions in their 30s so that they can have kids which is a perfectly reasonable choice but that has to be all obliterated because the fundamental truth of the matter is that the West is an oppressive patriarchy and all differences between groups are to be attributed to oppression so we can't even have a discussion about that if somebody is fundamentally misunderstood this multivariate analysis to why there could be a gender pay gap how would they go about attempting to close this gap if they wanted to well I don't know I don't know the first question is it just like should the gap be closed the gap is also a very complicated thing you know there's there's a disproportionate number of extremely high paid men but they're a tiny minority but they skew the statistics as well so are you talking about the median person or are you talking about the average person because the average is the wrong statistic because it includes that tiny proportion of people who make an incredible amount of money and almost all of them are men and like should that should so the first question is does the gap exist and the answer is well that's a lot more complicated than you think and a univariate analysis isn't going to reveal it the second is if it does exist like why does it well univariate uni means one and it very it means variable and so if you're not thinking about things in a differentiated manner you take your ideology whatever that is and you and it has a cause say oppression and then you say what oppression is causing this this this disequilibrium it's like well it's possible and no doubt somewhat true but there's many many other factors that have to be considered especially if you're going to address it seriously you know and and we're not capable in the least of having serious conversations of this sort you know I never hear when people are worried about differential representation of men and women in occupations I never hear people women let's say that who are concerned about this or the leftist who are concerned about this complaining about the fact that 99% of the bricklayers are men but they are you can go on the US Department of Labor site and you can rank order occupations by gender and there's the the heavy trades are overwhelmingly male represented those are hard grueling difficult jobs they tend to pay quite well it's like why aren't why why don't we see the radical leftist types who are beating the beating the drum for equality concentrating on the disproportionate number of men who occupied trades positions well those aren't the high-end high status jobs and apparently those are the only ones that matter but there's no reason that they matter what about the disproportionate number of men in prison are we gonna do gender equation for prison cells I've heard feminist scholars seriously proposed that by the way which is to me it's just it's a sign of absolute insanity and if somebody wants it to go about I mean the parts of this pay gap that is that is related to an unfair prejudice against women you concede that parts of it may well be but maybe yeah if some I don't think the evidence for that is strong actually if you do the controls you actually find that in in many situations now especially for young single people women have a wage advantage not a disadvantage that may that may change as they continue oh no oh yes well the the motherhood issue is a killer right that and that's something that our society needs to sort out but we don't know how these life-giving not a kid well well that's it it's hard on the heart on your career progression yeah what about paternity leave does that fix the motherhood is you know well because I did I don't think but it isn't obvious how we can equate the demands of childcare across the genders or that we should or that people actually want that now this is muddy water because we don't know precisely my sense is that the primary burden for childcare for for for infants well during pregnancy obviously but for the year after and maybe the year and a half after is gonna fall disproportionately on women because they're it's easier for women to take care of infants than it is for men to take care of yeah that's actually a factor and breastfeeding actually turns out to be extraordinarily important for children's development well I've just something I have a one-year-old he's actually now 14 and I want to see that's what we did she took time yeah to breastfeed while I focused on this job right here yeah well you know partly what you do in that situation I think is that for the first year the man takes care of the mother and the mother takes care of the baby now it's an optional thing with ya whereby after that year the father also has an option to take off time yeah after the year after the breastfeeding may not be as crucial and then looks after the child so that mother doesn't take too much time away from work yeah is that an option you'd be prepared to consider as well I think that's well I think that's an option that couples have to discuss it's up to the couple to determine how to do this but these things are very complicated so there's a study a while back that showed men imagine you're getting a group of women to rate the photographs of men for attractiveness and then imagine that you're testing the hypothesis that one of the things that women might find attractive in men is their willingness to share domestic duties and so then you show men you show the women pictures of men engaged in typical domestic activities like vacuuming or doing the dishes or you show them engaged in typical masculine activities say like mowing the lawn or fixing something outside the women reliably reliably rate the men who are doing male typical behaviors as more sexually attractive so these things are complicated you know and we think well we can if everyone had good will and we just split the tasks equally then everything would work out it's like don't be so sure about that well here's that here's an interesting issue that's never talked about with regards to gender equality so and this is this is a very well documented fact if you look across societies women made a cross and up socioeconomic status hierarchies so a woman will date and marry someone who makes the same amount of money for her or more alright so and that that's true regardless of the egalitarian nature of the society it holds true in Scandinavia as well because you might say well that's because of women's lower socioeconomic position but you can equate for that you don't get rid of the phenomena so one of the things that's driving the aggregation of wealth into fewer and fewer hands is the proclivity of well-off women only to wear marry men who were as well-off as they are or greater men will marry across and down socioeconomic status hierarchies so if we're gonna enforce equality does that mean that we don't allow women to marry men who are richer than them we're gonna equate for that dare I say that most men know this in their gut yes they certainly do which is why they're driven to attain status and yeah what you're saying is also these days I mean even here on in this interview well received with some controversy so Kathy Newman in that interview that I referenced push back at you in a way that sent the interview viral and that's how I first came across yeah and then I started looking into and of course that that's what brings us here but there are it's not just the way in which Kathy didn't receive your views well it's the way in which online certain teams emerged for example this one I recently saw placing a photograph of you next to Adolphe Hitler in the headline of the article you know you're a that was for word magazine they took they took that photograph down by the way yeah but I mean it went up in that yes it certainly did I want to explore that first clinical psychologist speak to me about the psychology of people receiving your views and immediately going to the analogy of Hitler oh yeah well that's that's very straightforward and it happens to me all the time but it's understandable I am NOT a fan of the radical left and I'm not a fan of the understandable they do it or it's understandable you one can analyze what they do well both both I mean the reason the reason that they do it is because let's say that you you or have adopted a postmodern Marxist view of the world and you think that dividing people into their collective identities and viewing the world as a battleground between interest groups is the appropriate way of looking at the world and unreasonable that's what a reasonable person would do and I come along and say look not only is that unreasonable but it's very much akin to these dark murderous doctrines that did tens of millions of people in in the 20th century okay but you hold that viewpoint now you have you know you you don't have very many options under those circumstances if I'm reasonable you have to contend with my argument if I'm not reasonable then you can just category me can't categorize me is not reasonable and ignore me and the best way to categorize me as not reasonable is to assume that I'm on the farthest end of the political spectrum away from you as possible along with the reprehensible Nazis and the alt-right types and just assume that that's me the problem is it's not me and if it was me I would have been taken down two years ago and the proof that it's not me is that I have 300 hours of lectures online from my entire academic career and I haven't said a single thing that every anyone has ever found that's even remotely associated with a radical right-wing viewpoint and quite the contrary I don't like identity politics at all and I don't care if the leftists are doing it or the right-wingers are doing it it's reprehensible in my estimation all right now people say well you go out after the left wingers more it's like well yeah because they dominate the universities and that isn't my opinion that's well documented people that say things that are against the standard narrative one would assume when hearing sorry I don't know one these people who are making these analogies assume when they hear you speak that you'll somehow more against the left than the right as you've just mentioned so what are your views on what's commonly called the alt-right and where do you stand regarding the all right because all the other things well the old right the all right to the degree that it exists it's not a very well-documented phenomena no one really has any idea how many what proportion of the population has leanings yeah well nice I think you see that more in Europe now than you do in North America by the way yeah yeah well did you know the my immigrant crisis here is precipitated a fair bit of that and it's not so intense in North America so the old right types are also identity politics players so they they adopt the collectivist viewpoint which is that the best way of defining people is by their group identity the left its narrative is well there's a there's a dominant group and that would be like white males fundamentally and they should give up power because they've been oppressive and and it would only be fair if if resources were distributed more equitably and the right-wingers say yeah yeah I get the collectivist thing we should identify with our groups I'm going to identify with my groups and so let's assume these are what right right wing white supremacist types they think fine I'll identify with my damn group but I'm not giving up any power and my sense of playing identity politics is my goddamn group is gonna win and yours is gonna lose and so but if you play identity politics you're gonna get both of those responses the left say well that's it that's reprehensible it's like yeah but what's reprehensible about it is the playing of the identity politics it's reprehensible across the entire spectrum the antidote to that the antidote to that is the antidote that the West discovered like 2,000 years ago which is look we need a low-resolution general narrative to construe the structure of existential reality we have to orient ourselves with a with a story that's too simple but basically hits things correctly the story in the West is the individual is sovereign the important thing about you and me isn't the fact that you're Muslim or I'm you know nominally Christian or that we have a different ethnicity those are things that are real but the fundamental thing is whether or not we can encounter one another as individuals outside our group and and communicate and negotiate and compete and cooperate in peace that's the fundamental thing and that's that that's the right antidote to collectivist identity politics is that the individual is sovereign and free societies all around the world and there aren't very many of them are all predicated on the implicit assumption that the individual is sovereign and that that's the appropriate categorical approach and the universities are doing everything they possibly can to reverse that moving to universities i've often defined identity politics as the trumping of individual rights by group identity yeah that's exactly what it is um and you're first I suppose the first way in which you captured the world's attention was that University and that's what I want to talk about yeah because the c16 law in Canada was being proposed and what I think many people that are cross-examining you and your views are confusing is what exactly you are opposed to yeah they think I'm opposed to transgender rights yeah and of course your stance on this including the stance of Lindsay Shepard yes you should have shot you to the public public I know so speak to us a bit about that and exactly contextualize for us what it is precisely that you were being that you were opposed to well bill c16 purported to do nothing but extend human rights provisions to an excluded group let's say to the transgender and non gender binary types and and that was the federal legislation had also made it a hate crime to to to discriminate or harass essentially so now then the question is well what exactly do you mean by discriminate harass and why exactly is that a hate crime under the Criminal Code well there was an answer to that the answer was well this bill will be interpreted in light of the policies generated by the Ontario Human Rights Commission very large set of policies now the Ontario Human Rights Commission is a radically leftist organization I think it's the most dangerous organization in Canada although you could debate that and they said are all sorts of policies about how this these LED this legislation was going to be interpreted and the federal government linked to their website to state that bill 16 C 16 would be interpreted in light of those guidelines so I went and read all the policies well one of the policies was that if you didn't use the preferred pronouns of a given group that you could be charged essentially with a hate crime and I thought no talk about transgender people yeah and so there's all these pronouns that have come up there's 70 different sets of pronouns approximately - - hypothetically describe people who don't fit anywhere on the gender spectrum which is also something that I don't really understand I don't understand that conceptually like okay so now I'm comin is compelled under Canadian law to use the pronoun of another individuals choice pipe on pain of law and I thought well no that's not acceptable it's one thing to put limits on what a person can't say like say with hate speech laws which I also don't agree with by the way but that's a different argument I think it's a narrower argument but to compel me to use a certain content when I'm formulating my thoughts or my actions under threat of legislative action I thought no what's happened there is the government has introduced compelled speech legislation into the private sphere it's never happened in the history of English common law and so I said there's no way I'm abiding by that I don't care what your damn rationale is we're compassionate it's like no you're not no you're not you're playing this radical collectivist left-wing game you're trying to gain linguistic you're trying to gain linguistic supremacy in the in the area of public discourse you're doing that using compassion as a guise and you're pulling the wool over people's eyes and you're not going to do it with me could that same rush now be used for in the UK Holocaust denial isn't illegal yet the people that deny the Holocaust has seen as crackpots Germany it's illegal the rationale that was used to put this law forward in Canada do you see it do you see any form of similarity between those that would suggest for example in the name of compassion that Holocaust denial should become a crime yeah well it is a crime in Canada actually it has been since the 1980s and I think that was a dreadful mistake and it's not be still hearing it's not here but no that's that's good I'm glad to hear that it's not like there's no such thing as hate speech it's not like there's no such thing as reprehensible hateful speech obviously those things exist that's not the issue you're always balancing risk so one risk is you let crackpots utter hate hateful dialogue risk number one risk number two is you hand over to the state the definition of hate and the ability to police the speech of individuals that's risk two for me risk too far outweighs risk one partly because if you let the damn crackpots have their say most reasonable people listen to them assume they're crackpots and that's the end of it this is a traditional English exactly that's exactly option two there you know basically the state deciding what you can or cannot say Indiana's hate speak to me about Lindsey Shepard or what happens to her oh well you know okay so when I took my stance against Bill c16 the first thing that happened was a variety of left-wing lawyers came out of the woodwork and said you're exaggerating the danger now luckily the university immediately sent me two letters telling me I should stop saying what I was saying see I made the videos criticizing the bill and I said when I made the videos that they were probably illegal that was probably an illegal act to make the videos criticizing the legislation no but it was law and prayer in provincial law still it hadn't become federal law so the legal framework was already there hmm so you know people said well you're exaggerating the danger you won't be hauled off to jail which by the way is not true because if the Ontario Human Rights Commission fine finds you guilty of harassment and find you or subject you to forestry education and you refuse to do it it's tossed into the normal legal system and then if you don't listen to the normal legal system you're found guilty of contempt and of court and then you can be jailed so so it's perfectly jail is a perfectly possible outcome all right so I said well I think this is probably illegal what I was doing and the left-wing Laura type said oh you're just exaggerating the danger you know you're a radical you're exaggerating the danger but the University had their lawyers review what I was doing and they immediately concluded that I was probably breaking the law too and under the provisions of the Ontario Human Rights Commission the same dreadful organization if you're an employer in Ontario you are as legally responsible for the utterances of your employees whether you know about the utterance or not whether or not they made it when they were working for you or in their free time and whether or not they intended any offence so the University read that and thought oh well we have to stop Peterson because we're on the hook for his utterances and what he's doing might be illegal so they sent me two letters telling me to stop which was horrible because my job was on the line but which was good because I said well this is how the law is constituted and that was immediate proof and then a few months later this graduate student 22 year old graduate student Lane named Lindsay Shepard at Wilfrid Laurier University dared to show a five-minute clip of a public television show where I was debating bill c16 a very mainstream public television show exactly the same kind of discussion we're having now and she was hauled in front of a Maoist in position consisting of two of her half-wit professors from the communications department radical Marxists both and an administrator from the university of wilfred laurier university who was hired to persecute students in this particular situation oh well they told her that she was in violation of Canadian law for fundamentally absolutely absolutely and she had this sense to record this and well there was complicated reasons for that but she she made the recording public and it was well it went viral it was the biggest scandal that ever hit a Canadian University then will or my little you know appleís take your that I'm either Hitler or Milo you know police because these left-wing radical types can't even get to them insults straight it's like really I'm like Milo you Napoles or Hitler you know what kind of thinking is that and first of all to use the casual comparison to someone like Hitler I think that's an appalling ethical crime you you use that accusation under very very specific circumstances when something extraordinary extraordinarily sir dangerous has happened because otherwise you risk diluting the currency of the comparison and that's the last thing you should do if you care about such things as yes although she's a super tough person man and she bounced back like mad now the wilfred laurier setup they apologized to her formally they set up a panel to reconstitute wilfred laurier as policy on free speech but last week the only two professors on the panel who were Pro free speech resigned because the university had watered down its policies so much that it was pointless for them to consider they didn't learn a damn thing even though it was the biggest councillor here in Canadian University we've been discussing so far about the law compelling people to use pronouns certain pronouns over others but if I was sitting here in front of you as a chat transgendered male to female or female to male and we began the conversation at the beginning of the conversation you stumbled and called me he or she and I was perhaps identifying the other way around and then if I had said to you please I'd rather go by she how would you respond to that on a personal level well it would depend on the situation but the way I have responded to that because I've had a number of conversations with transgendered individuals is that I use whatever pronoun seems to go along with the persona that they're projecting publicly it's the simplest thing to do now if we were if you would respect that yeah yeah yeah but but with it with them with a more contentious pronouns G and er er and that sort of thing that's a whole different issue because the question there is well exactly what is it that you're doing when you're asking me to use those words like are you are you compelling me to play your particular ideological game or is this actually a matter of some personal identity that's important to you those things are not obvious and so in a situation like that the first thing I'd have to do is to try to figure out just exactly what was going on in the situation and that's not simple and so there have been no foregone conclusion that I would address you by the pronouns of your choice the first thing I'd want to find out is is that just a narcissistic power play because that's actually the most likely outcome so oh but you all right so so but if it was a simple he or she and they made a request of you you would respect that request on an individual level yeah that way because I've watched myself in those situations and that seems to be how it turns out speak to me about you you're on the record saying that liberalism and conservativism through psychometric testing can be explained through certain psychological profiles what sorts of psychological profiles make a liberal versus a consent yeah yeah and what are the values of both people vote their temperament now it doesn't account for everything there's there's lots of influences on voting patterns but temperament is certainly one of them well conservatives are people who are high in trait conscientiousness which breaks down into industriousness and orderliness they're particularly orderly on the conscientiousness dimension and they're low in another trait which is openness and openness is the trait that predicts creativity philosophical literary artistic aesthetic creativity and lateral thinking so conservatives are not creative by temperament but they're conscientious and conscientiousness is a good predictor of life success in managerial administrative domains so you might think that the conservative is a person who's adapted for hierarchy where the roles are well defined and so are the proper actions will conservative will slot him or herself into that and then play out the defined roles and be successful at that the downside to conservatism is well what happens when those roles or that hierarchy is no longer functional and then that's when the liberal temperament actually kicks in properly so liberals are high in trade openness and so that's the creativity dimension so they're more likely to be artists and and creative people in general but they're also more likely to be entrepreneurs in the economic domain so the advantage to being a liberal is that you're more adapted when things are changing rapidly so so the liberals generate things and the conservatives implement things I'm interested in the way in which if the hegemony shifts yeah at the moment for example you're saying liberals have the hegemony in the academia in in the cultural and artistic spheres of life and influence especially in your with your domain where you're working you have lots of areas and audiences you speak to liberals are pretty much in charge in universities so does the hegemony affect that because in that sense a conservative in that environment would be an insurgent who's not working within the system yeah yeah well it's concise explained that it isn't often the case that you get hierarchies that are completely dominated by liberal types and of course the reference a kind of what's popularly conceived of as an outright media outlet Breitbart often takes the view that because they say that politics is downstream from culture yeah they're encouraging conservatives to get involved in defining culture yeah now again can that be explained through the hegemony shift in the fact that conservatives are currently they perceive themselves as insurgents or yeah please explain it it's a it's a good question all right we haven't been in a situation that I know of that where these things have been studied in depth it isn't generally the case that liberals dominate entire hierarchies that isn't generally how it works because the hierarchies are usually set up so that conservatives fill up the hierarchies it's in the nature of hierarchy something happened in the universities and it's not obvious what to allow whole swathes of disciplines the humanities in particular but also the social sciences to become almost completely dominated by well not liberals exactly but people on the Left because I think we should kind of use liberal to just signify the people in the center right well there is in Canada as well between them okay so so the people on the humanities and social sciences are dominated overwhelmingly by people on the left and so all of a sudden now you have a left-wing hierarchy while no one knows what to do about that it's like what what do you mean a left-wing hierarchy that's not supposed to happen but it has happened and so and well and the consequence of that is that well this this particular collectivist view is being promoted as the only way of looking at the world in university I was interviewed by a New York Times journalist last week and she said she took a literary literature degree at Columbia and she wasn't very happy about that by the way she thought it was an expensive waste of time interestingly enough a very bright girl and she said that she didn't even know until after she graduated that there was any way of reading literature except through a postmodern lens and the postmodern lens basically is well the intent of the author is irrelevant all that really matters is that you take the literary work and you deconstruct it to find out which power hierarchy its author is essentially supporting and which when he's or she is is excluding it's like well that's all there is to literature it's like well that isn't all there is to literature it's an appalling way of treating art it's appalling way of treating in the political landscape as well what about free speech because of course that's something you've said earlier in many interviews actually is I mean it's core to your value set now free speech when it came to what in America are referred to as liberals let's call them left-wing but the Berkeley kind of you know campus protests back in the 60s against censorship against McCarthyism and that was driven primarily by free speech but the axis of interest around defending free speech seems to have shifted from the left and now conservatives are often using in some cases populist abusing lied say this this value of free speech to hide behind it for with which to advocate for their for their their own views well well I think what's happened it's actually something deep that's happened back in the early 60s that the campus leftist still existed in a classically liberal milieu so the notion of freedom of speech was sort of self-evident as a truth but we've we've deviated so far from that now that like within the collectivist framework there is no right to free speech because there's no such thing as free speech not even technically it's not even technically possible all there are are utterances that further your attempt to dominate in the name of your group and so when that when the radical leftist look at the political dialogue they don't see people attempting to express their free ideas as individuals they see power players in a group fostered landscape playing their power games and so they say well when we're restricting free speech on campuses or that's what we're accused of we're not restricting free speech we're protecting the rights of oppressed minorities free speech isn't a game within the post-modern collectivist landscape you have to you have to approach the world from the perspective of the notion of individual sovereignty and individual citizenship to even think of free speech as a possibility because what free speech is is the is the attempt on the part of sovereign individuals to orient themselves in the world can you succinctly tell me why you think it's such an important value long speech because I do think that free speech is the mechanism by which sovereign individuals attempt orient themselves in the world it's how they contend with things they don't yet understand they think it through they say well what is thought well thought is something that takes place in your head in private it's like no it's not first of all most people can't really think thinking is hard that's well at least that's where you often that's where you formulate your ideas because most people think by talking it's certainly where you test them right so thought is actually a public it's actually a public process and so now then you might think well what do you need thought for you need thought so that you can figure out how to do something when you don't know what to do and you need thought to set things right when they've gone wrong so that's to revitalize the state or to revitalize pathological hierarchies that's the tufa to constitute confront the unknown and to restructure the state that's the purpose of freedom of speech and this individual is sovereign and and and performs both those activities you have to leave the individual alone with regards to their capacity for speech or you interfere with those functions and then you stop people from adapting to the unknown and you let the state ossify because there's no process to update it there's a challenge here with what you just said and that is a challenge of boundaries you've met that test once in the case of faith golde accurate to say you d platformed faith Cody and if not how would you describe it and also how would you define the boundaries around free speech and oh is that even important to you oh it's absolutely important I mean you know one of the things I've been arguing for lately is that the the reasonable leftists because I do believe there are reasonable leftists who are genuinely concerned for the dispossessed who need to be cared for let's say do you need someone to express concern for them they need to draw boundaries around their doctors and the doctrines of the radical left given that we know the radical left can become pathologically dangerous and they've refused to do so partly because of technical problems I would say it's hard to do it with regards to drawing the boundaries around around shared discourse let's say on the right he was no Nazi was she no so why did you draw that boundary there and exclude her from a platform and and what is your criteria for drawing boundaries around the right it's it's something that's a good question I mean I think the fundamental criteria for drawing boundaries around the rights or claims of rational racial or ethnic superiority that seems to me to be the place where conservatism degenerates into something approximating ethno nationalist fascism it's something like that and when someone approaches that border too closely well that's that's has to be that judgment unfortunately has to be made on a case by case and situation by situation analysis which makes it very very very tricky but there's the rule of thumb many ways with faith what happened was that well we had this free speech rally rally in favor of free speech and it was it was planned for just after the Charlottesville debacle and she was actually covering that and what happened was she was interviewed by a podcast that had ties with the daily stormer which is a known Nazi site and she went on there yes she was aware of that yes no look I'm not absolutely certain of that because it's a while ago but I believe that she was aware of that and I also believe that she was warned not to do it by her employer okay now and then what happened on the interview was that she she didn't ask the interlocutors questions of sufficient intensity given her ethical positioning as an inquiring journalist she was too friendly with them and so the consequence of that was that she was fired by rebel media now rebel media is at least a conservative organization right and so they well right well well that's the thing is that and so this was a very tricky situation and so well then she was she was she was scheduled to speak on our platform our on our free speech rally and so we asked her if she's willing to business for example it told me Robinson had a gig on rebel media so if you're if you're fired by rebel media because you're suspected to be too close to people further to the right then I mean that that's not a good place to be well I don't even know if they fired faith because they they suspected that she was too close to the right I think they fired her because they thought she had and an error in judgment that couldn't be forgiven given their stance as a journalistic organization and when the panelists all of us reviewed what had happened carefully we came to the same conclusion and so it was a bitter conclusion it's not like we weren't aware of the irony you know we were perfectly aware of the irony so but we made a judgment call and that was in the immediate aftermath mouth of Charlottesville and so there was no way out of that situation without catastrophe of one form or another she was she was punished for a mistake yes you forgive her in the future it depends I've already forgiven her in Italy you know the practical sense not in a in a religious or you know personal sense I mean for example would you share a platform with her in the future I would I would say I would have to look very carefully at the particulars of the platform and then decide last question for you thank you for your patience yeah one of the the great political footballs of our of our times in the way which involves a the left let's say the populist left as well as the populist right is the question of Islam in the West you've described yourself as a nominal Christian yes and then you of course you describe yourself as speaking to somebody who is openly identifies as a Muslim where do you stand in this great question of Islam in the West the role of Muslims in the West integration extremism and some of the challenges around the values such as free speech I'm thinking for example blasphemy in the Sharlee yeah massacre Yance and all of the issues that arise from that including for example some of the populist left's perhaps defense of some of these issues in the favor of Islamist Muslims and some of the populist rights animosity towards the presence of Muslims in the West have you thought much about this question yeah but not enough you know because it's a question that answer properly I have to know a lot more about Islam than I know and and but but but here's here would be my questions ok first of all I'm not willing to sue assume axiomatically that all belief systems are commensurate with Western democracy and the reason I'm not willing to assume that is because there are hardly any Western democracies so the belief systems of most of world aren't commensurate with Western democracy so the rule of thumb shouldn't be well people from all cultures are just as likely to support Western democratic ideals it's like no obviously not because those like those ideals only are present in a tiny minority of countries we don't know how they got to be present there now I would suggest that some of that has to do with the judeo-christian emphasis on on the sovereignty of the individual and but also more technically maybe in Christian societies on the division between the church and the state now and that's a division that isn't formally expressed in Islam and so I don't know I have a hard time conceptualizing Islam because I can't figure out if it's fundamentally religious or if it's fundamentally political or maybe it's an amalgam of both in a manner that it's not easy for a westerner to to identify so I I have some sympathy towards people who are curious about whether Islam has a tilt towards totalizing like other doctrines have a tilt towards totalizing and I would say the evidence for that is that it isn't obvious that Islamic countries have been able to give rise to sustainable western-style democracies with fundamental emphasis on individual rights and responsibilities so so it's an open question but you know the the people tend to think well the ethic the individual rights / responsibility ethic of the West is somehow self-evident and that's right it's agreed upon by people broadly throughout the world it's like I don't see it that way I don't think that's the case now the way forward as far as I'm concerned is to begin the process of the various serious discussions that are necessary between Christians Jews and Muslims essentially because I do believe this is fundamentally a religious issue about how those systems of belief are commensurate whether they can coexist in the same space how that might be negotiated what that would mean theologically and metaphorically and you know that dialogue I don't think that dialogue has even really begun well let me say to you that as a Muslim speaking you know I invite you to have that perfectly happy to have that dialog with you there's some of what you said that some I think we could explore a lot further in another venue given the appropriate so well I hope we can do that absolutely well thank you very much Jordan Peterson thank you for joining thank you very much for the opportunity nice talking with you [Music]

Channel: LBC

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Keywords: LBC, LBC973, politics, UK Politics, talk radio, talk, radio, news, lbc, interviews, debate, conversation, jordan peterson, maajid nawaz, jordan peterson cathy newman, jordan peterson joe rogan, jordan peterson motivation, maajid nawaz debate, maajid nawaz lbc, maajid nawaz cartoon film, Maajid Nawaz, Maajid Nawaz interview, Maajid Nawaz lbc, Jordan Peterson lbc, lbc live, watch lbc, interview, politics news, uk politics live, live debate, Brexit, boris johnson, Iain Dale, Nick Ferrari

Id: IMBfT38xbhU

Length: 49min 15sec (2955 seconds)

Published: Tue May 22 2018