Jordan Peterson on the #Metoo Moment

you see the same thing in criminal behavior hardly anyone is a criminal then if you take the fraction of people who are criminals most of them are like 1/2 time criminals right yeah but there's a there's a professional hardcore group that commits all the crimes yeah well it's the same thing with sexual assault and sexual harassment well you don't want to confuse the action of some of the men with all of the men like it's really important to get that distinction right and we're not getting that distinction right now that's what I was gonna ask you is that it you know we it's critical to differentiate among first of all among the offenses surely well you'd hope so and among the perpetrators or alleged perpetrators then yet now there the discussion seems to be turning to you know to almost an attack on the masculinity of Maria you know hierarchies and companies and how is it possible that we don't recognize that what we do most of us but there's that minimum at one end and then there's somebody who's sexually assaulting women physically raping well well some of it is there's a concerted effort on the part of the radical postmodern left to erase the distinction between categories of criminal behavior categories is all we got yeah but the post modernists don't like categories you see that's that's if you go way down in into the into the structure of the current culture wars yeah what you see is that at the very base of it there's two things that the postmodern neo-marxists are they're they're full scale assaulting one is categorization because they believe that the only function of categorization is power the other one is that there's a war on competence because if you admit that there are hierarchical structures that are predicated on competence then it then you have to grapple with the issue of competence and you have to grapple with the issue of valid hierarchy if all hierarchy is power and all power is corrupt and all corrupt power is tyranny then you can't admit to competence but the downside is that there's a terrible price to be paid for that because every value system produces a hierarchy so if you dispense the hierarchy you dispense with the value systems recently you know the the founding director and creative director I think he was Albert Schultz from Soulpepper Theatre Company was the latest in Canada to be accused of what sounds like a pretty wide range of offenses why are women coming forward now about events that happened fifteen or twenty years ago okay well let's let's address that two ways I mean the first there's been an adolescent insistence since the early 60s that sexual behavior can be rule-free now a lot of that was generated as a consequence of the birth control pill right because it was like that's a biological revolution all right all of a sudden women can control their reproductive function in principle question one what does that make women because now there are a new biological entity right yeah and so it's wide open what are women now we don't know the next thing that's wide open is well maybe there are no rules for sex then there's an impulsive part of human human beings it's associated with the sexual drive obviously that would love it if there were no rules governing sexual behavior because then it would be all orgies all the time with no consequences right and so but the problem is is that all of that's untrue because you can't divorce sexuality from emotion you also can't divorce it from responsibility you can't divorce it from family you can't divorce it from respect you can't divorce it from children like it's so central you can't divorce it from power you can't divorce it from tyranny or love like it's it's central and it and it involves all those other things and so there are rules the question is what are the rules and the answer is no one knows so there's gonna be mistakes everywhere all the time where do you draw the line between a sexual invitation and harassment well like a cynic would say anything unwanted is harassment how the hell is the person who's making the offer supposed to distinguish determine that beforehand yeah you you make the offer or the invitation in part to find out whether it's welcome yes and the terrible thing about that in is that it's almost always men who do that right men make the offer and almost always it's rejected and it's almost always rejected even by women who might be interested under some circumstances yeah now the reason for that as far as I can tell is that women bear a much heavier price for sexual activity than men do so they're the ones that are going to say no the problem is is that we need to know exactly where the rules are and we don't in this climate though where we're not sure of the rules we're not sure where the lines are when does a glance become a sexual offense it's a sexual offense right away if it's a microaggression he'll tell people what a microaggression is I think we all hear that now and we're not really sure what it means I'm not anyway a microaggression is any act no matter how subtle that makes the recipient uncomfortable regardless of the intent of the drink right yeah because we're getting away from intent a it's all consequence it's all yet how its received yes yes yes and so so and that's being written into the law very rapidly by the way so we're moving from a legal system where intent matters to a legal system where consequences matter which is really the eradication of the legal system but it doesn't matter because the postmodern radicals who increasingly occupy the law schools believe that Western law is a patriarchal and oppressive tradition and that undermining it and destroying it by doing things like removing due process and insisting on preponderance of evidence and going for consequence rather than intent that's fine because all they're doing is tearing down a page a terrible tyrannical patriarchal structure having never had the fortune to spend any time in an Iranian prison for example they're not very good at distinguishing between what constitutes a tyranny and what constitutes a free society until we figure all this stuff out assuming we will at some point the sexual stuff I'm talking about can ordinary men and ordinary women kids you need to work together a lot of it's emergent self protection you know men say don't ever have a meeting with a woman when the doors closed yeah in fact I've been told that at the University yeah never have a meeting with a student with the door closed it's like I ignore that because there's no damn way I'm doing that but that's that's calm practice I don't know the answer to whether or not men and women can work together on mas because it's not not under the current conditions we don't have the rules right

Channel: National Post

Views: 4,593,747

Keywords: jordan peterson, christie blatchford, metoo, sexual harassment, opinion, news, local-news

Id: g8GSlP2yCD8

Length: 6min 55sec (415 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 24 2018