Jordan Peterson: The radical Left is guilt-tripping the West into oblivion

totalitarian systems are ruled by a sort of singular top-down Tyrant Hitler Stalin Lennon it's like no a totalitarian state is ruled by the LIE hello and welcome to offscript my name is Stephen Edgington how do you win the culture War what lessons can we learn from Soviet dissidents I sat down with Dr Jordan Peterson to discuss these questions and more thank you very much Dr Peterson for joining us my pleasure has the right lost the culture War we'll see we'll see the right locks vision they play a rear guard game they don't have a compelling story to tell young people and because they're conscientious conservatives are conscientious it's easy to hoist them on the patard of guilt and the psychopathic narcissists of the radical left are unbelievably good at that and so the the conservative types are set back on their heels in a big way and they don't know how to articulate their own principles partly because like if you're a conservative you don't really articulate your principles you just go about your business right you think well we'll just do things the way they have been done if they're working and we'll go attend to our business and we won't think too much conceptually and we'll you know act practically and so if you go listen to the Republicans for example I went to the Republican Governors association meeting and it wasn't inspiring but the governors would present their policies sort of at the level of practical intervention they're very practical people and that's fine except it doesn't work well against the messianism of the left so the conservatives are in a position where they just get dragged towards the left one step at a time and they're they're also terrible strategists so for example in the United States the education system the public education system eats half of the state budget half in New York it's thirty thousand dollars a year to educate the typical student so you imagine that means they're spending near a million dollars a year to educate the typical class of 30 to not educate the typical loss of 30 people it's just beyond comprehension 99 of the donations that are made by the teachers union politically go to the Democrats and the Bloody Department of Education the faculties of Education have a hammer lock on teacher certification right so they have the worst students who go into education for the worst motives and then they have the worst professors and researchers teaching them and the faculties of Education have done nothing but damage for the last 60 years and the Republicans are too Daft to notice that they've turned the entire culture over to the faculties of Education so it's no bloody wonder the conservatives lose like as strategists their 10th rate and they're not Visionaries now they have traditional right on their side and that's a big deal but you know that can be overthrown by assiduous effort on the part of the radicals and especially the psychopathic radicals they thrive in chaos so they're more than willing to turn the whole Apple card upside down in the hopes that they'll be able to scrounge among the runes and dance in the flames it's this issue of how to fight back against this authoritarianism that I'm curious to talk about for this next hour or so maybe longer we'll see but um one issue recently has been debanking so in Canada a couple of years ago during the trucker protest you saw truckers whose bank accounts were closed down they were removed pioneered that here absolutely well I think the Chinese probably pioneered it could be the Canadians at least among Democratic countries well exactly and in the UK recently Nigel farage has had issues with certain Banks refusing to offer him Services other politicians on the right have had the same thing and the conservatives have said in the UK you know they're warning the people who are celebrating this this could happen to you those are the useful idiots the useful idiots always think this will never happen to me you see this in the Dead with the Democrats in the U.S so I just interviewed Robert F Kennedy who junior who in principle is a Democrat so they took down the interview and that just shocked me because it's a presidential campaign and the lefties squawked and moaned and bitched for like three years about Russian collusion all of which turned out to be a complete bloody lie because they were interfering with the election and now YouTube can censor a presidential candidate mid-election and there isn't a peep from the left and the reason for that is they think well Kennedy's not a real Democrat without noticing for a second that the definition of real Democrat is going to get increasingly narrow as we move forward and that's already happened you know and I tried for years talking to the Democrats probably three dozen senators and congressmen alike always asking them the same question I asked Robert Kennedy this too when does the left go too far and to a man or woman they were either unwilling or unable to answer that question and so well so here we are with this increasing the increasing normalization of censorship and counseling and that this by the way is also a technique that's used by dark tetrad types right it's the female equivalent of anti-social Behavior right so men who are anti-social tend to use physical aggression but females who are anti-social tend to use reputation destruction and denigration gossip and behind the scenes maneuvering and that's unbelievable now men can do that too and will and do especially online but that's enabled by the by the corporations you know the media corporations who who are in control of Social Media communication so yeah people think well as long as it's only happening to Kennedy it's like have it your way dimwits now this culture or so-called has been going on for a long time now fairly long time you've been at the center for for years and years and years and you've really experienced some terrible abuse and uh and really I don't know how you went you know went through all of that and came out as you are today when you look back to the Soviet Union other authoritarian regimes obviously there were a certain distance within those regimes and I want to talk about them and how they coped with some of the most terrible experiences now obviously you're not you're not in a gulag you're not you're not in Auschwitz so you know there's a sort of different level isn't there but um what do you do when you know that things aren't going to get better so let's say you're a Soviet dissident and there's just no hope do you survive do you fight what do you do in that situation well everything you do in life is a matter of faith and why would I say that you know the atheist materialist types the Skeptics will say well Faith just means that you believe in things that aren't there it's like that isn't what it means that's that's a 13 year old critique of religious belief a why a smart 13 year old's critique of religious belief it means that you you stake your fate on some set of propositions now the thing is is that you do stake your fate on some set of propositions because you have to act in spite of your ultimate ignorance so in the final analysis you have to move forward in ignorance and you move forward in ignorance by assuming the utility of either a stable set of principles or and there can be Alternatives or by wavering well here's one principle say what you need to save your skin in the moment or to gain advantage and that means that you have faith in the power of deception it means that you have faith in the power of the LIE right right well we know who the Eternal ruler of the kingdom of the LIE is or you can have faith in the truth and that means to have faith in the truth means that you act in accordance with the assumption that whatever happens if you tell the truth is by definition the best thing that could possibly happen and that means independent of the short-term consequences for you now you're stuck with that anyways because if you decide to lie you're making the assumption that escaping scot-free or obtaining an undeserved advantage will pay off over the long run all things considered and you have no evidence for that at all you know when everyone knows this you can do something stupid to get out of a jam and get away with it but the chickens come home to roost and virtually everyone knows that so you're going to evince Faith in one strategy or another or you're going to lie sometimes and tell the truth other times and I wouldn't recommend that at all because all that does is make you one confused person so you're playing both ends against the middle when Christ comes back in the Book of Revelation he says the worst form of hell is reserved for the people who play both ends against the middle who sit on the fence right so that's worth knowing and so if you are wise and you have any sense and a certain degree of Courage then you say what you have to say and you you let the devil take the hindmost and so that's what you do if you're a dissident you make your bloody decision and I've seen this I just talked to Douglas Murray about this this week you know about because Murray is notable for his courage and courageous people are actually quite rare much rarer than I even thought even though I knew they were rare I didn't know we're as rare as they are but Murray says what he thinks and to help with the consequences so to speak but he was also convinced that there is no better path forward than saying what he thinks and we took that apart to some degree I mean first of all if you say what you think what happens to you is you're happening if you engage in a lie that's not you God only knows what it is and what you're serving so if you lie to get your way it's not your way that you get it's the way of the lie and if you think that's a good idea go try it and then you think well what's your evidence that's a good idea have you ever lied to yourself and have that work how about you lie to your intimate partner you think that's going to work out or your family members or you lie to your business partners or your customers that's going to work is it who thinks that no one thinks that people will still do it and they'll pretend that it's okay but no one with an Iota sense ever thinks that that no one says to their child well you know son the best way forward in every situation is to just figure out what the other person wants to hear from you and tell them and if you can lie to get yourself out of a jam well what the hell you might as well do it because that's what sensible people do nobody says that you know people might act it out but No One Believes it and it is a matter of belief so if you're a dissident you say what you think and you think and I think you know I could either have a false reality on my side or I could have the closest approximation to the truth that I can manage yeah I'll pick the louder thank you very much and if that means I have to stand up against my idiot governments like I'm way more afraid of the LIE than I am of Trudeau but just looking throughout history at some of those dissidents in the Soviet Union for example and one of those people that you very much promote and have made far more well-known I think among many younger people with children it's and then you know his famous book the gulag archipelago and everything else why do you think so few people in the west know about these dissidents in the Soviet Union well because our education system in the west has been gripped by the delusion since the second world war that authoritarianism was a purely a right-wing phenomenon which is of course to call that delusional you know there was Stalin there was Lenin there was Mao there was Paul Potts I mean how many goddamn examples do you need so obviously there's left-wing authoritarianism but the game on the left is that well that doesn't really exist or that was a misapplication of a perfectly functional Theory I asked a friend of mine a Jewish guy why so many Jewish people in the Soviet Union were attracted to Communism and he said because it offered the possibility of universal Brotherhood you know and that that's the difference between say Fascism and it's more explicit forms and communism is that communism at least says we could all be brothers right and that's an attractive Doctrine and I suppose at the time of the Russian Revolution it wasn't self-evident that that idea was doomed to failure now it's bloody well self-evident now if evidence means anything at all to you but it there's that attraction in the Communist doctrine of equality which is sort of what we want in our families and then Universal Brotherhood which is a paradisal dream I suppose um of course in the bowels of the Communists conceptual structure are policies that are absolutely 100 percent murderously counterproductive but they sound good too like from each according to his ability to each according to his need you know it sounds paradisal it means well everybody could have their needs met of course you instantly entangle yourself in well what is a need and whose need is deemed Paramount and that's complete bloody hell and then well who defines ability and how do you know when someone's contributing to the limits of their ability right because they can still stand up so you know there's there are these glossy attractive slogans slogan by the way that's derived from two Welsh words slewag and garam and that means Battle Cry of the Dead right so these these slogans that appeal to people who know nothing who are thoughtless who are motivated to some degree by their compassion in the case let's say of the useful idiots and and then motivated by the desire to use compassion as a camouflage by the more Psychopathic types but it sounds good and the left can claim well you know it was a really good idea and look at all the Terrible Things capitalism does and capitalism does concentrate power and wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people which it does but so does every other economic system ever invented or discovered so it's not you know attributable to capitalism and so that combined with this promise of universal Brotherhood and the desire of the radical leftists to overthrow the capitalist Endeavor means that the faculties of Education produce teachers who are who know nothing about what actually happened in the 20th century because they don't know anything about anything at all and even if they did know would be inclined to downplay it or to excuse it with you know hand waving like well that wasn't real communism so let's focus we've got the dissonance on one hand who are very very rare in the system but what about the majority of the population and let's focus on them for a moment particularly in the Soviet Union maybe you can talk about other authoritarian regimes in the 20th century as well but how did the majority of the population react to say Soviet propaganda maoist propaganda Nazi propaganda and what was the aim of that propaganda they formulated it and propagated it and lived by it and and distributed it like it's a misapprehension we like to think that totalitarian systems are ruled by a sort of singular top-down Tyrant Hitler Stalin Lenin it's like no a totalitarian state is ruled by the LIE and the LIE is the principle of governance and everyone who lies is complicit in maintenance of the state and so you know the Soviet joke we pretend to work they pretend to pay us and so the a totalitarian state isn't the freedom-loving masses pining for uh Deliverance out of the desert but oppressed by the thumb of Stalin it's every single person lying about absolutely everything to themselves and everyone they love 100 of the time and so and sometimes that lie is just silence so I've been looking at the Book of Jonah I'm going to open my new book with this chapter so Jonah as far as we know is just minding his own business and then here's a voice it's the voice of conscience because that's established by this time in the biblical Corpus it's the voice of conscience and it says you know that City Nineveh that's actually a city of foreigners by the way and enemies of the Israelite so not a city that Jonah would necessarily be uh sympathetic to words or vice versa God says you know that city of Nineveh and Jonah says yeah yeah well they've fallen off the rails in a serious way and I'm thinking about taking them out and so I want you to go there and tell them of my intentions and of their transgressions and Jonah thinks I don't give a damn about the inhabitants of Nineveh they're the enemies of Israel anyways and that's a city of like 120 000 people and why the hell would they listen to me and if I go to Nineveh well that's going to be a very difficult voyage and the probability of a dismal end for me is very very high and so how about no so he jumps on a boat and goes in the opposite direction and uh as anybody sensible would and as most people always do and so that's fine except now the storms come and the waves start to rise and the wind starts to blow and uh the ship is in danger of capsizing and so that's what happens when you hold your tongue when you've been told to say something and so the sailors who are rather superstitious lot think there must be someone on this boat who isn't in the good graces of the gods they serve and so they start to go through the passenger list and ask everybody and Jonah admits that he had a direct commandment which he broke and that he's the guy to blame and so the sailors have to throw them overboard and they don't actually do this out of Cruelty they do this out of necessity and so well so now Jonah has run away from his conscience and he's put the ship in danger and now he's drowning and you think well that's pretty bad because he's going to die but that's not bad enough because the next thing that happens is a creature from the abyss itself comes up from the bottom of reality and takes them and it's jaws and takes them all the way down to Hell and it is Hell he's three days down there just like Christ having hell right and there are explicit references to the bottom of the ocean being held in the Book of Jonah so this isn't my imagination and so what does that mean it means if you hold your tongue when you have something to say not only do you put everyone else in danger on the ship and not only do you end up like in a place where you might die but then something will happen to you so terrible that you'll wish that death would have taken you and so now Jonah's at the bottom of the ocean baking away because he didn't say what he was called upon to say and he repents and says all right you know I've learned my lesson now that I've been in Hell itself I'll go to Nineveh as you command it and so the whale goes up to the shore and spits them out and away he goes and then he goes to Nineveh and he tells them what he has to tell them and they actually repent oddly enough and don't destroy him maybe because he has the courage of his conviction by this point and God spares the city from destruction well that's what that story means so you hold your tongue when you have something to say at your peril and that's a sin of omission right and people are easy are willing to pass that off you know why do I have to put my neck out it's like hey man part of the reason is you're putting your neck out no matter what you do people don't understand that eh but the most extraordinary thing is that there are some people who do tell the truth during these terrible races well you know in in when Lord and Abraham go to visit Sodom Abraham Bargains with God because God's going to take Sodom out and uh Abraham says because God says Ah the whole City's corrupt and Abraham says well you mean what do you mean the whole city you mean everybody and God says yeah pretty much and Abraham says well if there's 40 men there that aren't corrupt will you spare the city God says yeah okay and then Abraham says well how about 30 and God says you're pushing your luck but yes and then he says 20 and finally he Bargains God down to 10. right and what that means is that I think what it means is that if 10 people can still tell the truth There's Hope once you get below that if it's none well then you're in hell right and then then you know the the what the fire and brimstone will definitely rain down on your city that's comedians right The Comedians they can tell the truth and if there's doesn't have to be very many people who can still put their head up above the parapet and say here's something funny and true you know very few people so let's talk about some of those cases that and I think they're really interesting shows and it's and there's someone I'm sure you know a lot about maybe you can talk about what inspired him and what happened to him but also he took responsibility for his condition you know when he was in the gulag nitzen had every reason to be a victim because the reason he was in the gulag was because of Hitler and Stellan and so if you need someone to blame man those are two credible perpetrators but solzhenitzen asked himself he saw two things he saw in the prison camps that there were religious believers who conducted themselves nobly under impossible conditions and that was really that really made him think and then he realized too that the the prisoners were running the camps right so people were enslaved by their own slavishness and then he started to think well maybe the way I lived my life had something to do with why I ended up here and by doing that he did what Dostoevsky recommended people do Dostoevsky said every man is responsible not only for everything that happens to him but for everything that happens to everyone else now that's a crazy thing to say but but not exactly and the reason for that is if you followed the gospel injunction let's say if you were perfect like your father in Heaven is perfect how much better would the world be and the answer is you don't know like if you were the most glittering shining example that you could possibly be how much good could you do and the answer again well that's what your life's for is to find that out and so the fact that things are shaking and rocking how much your sin is associated with the fact that everything shakes and rocks is a completely open question and I think the world is actually constituted so that everything that happens is every individual's fault you know it's a and that goes along with the idea that each person has a spark of the divine within them that shouldn't be hidden that that you hide to your peril into the Peril of the world now it's a strange metaphysical idea but that doesn't really bother me because life is no shortage of strange so even more perhaps extraordinary than the story of shows in its and maybe you disagree with this is the case of Hans and Sophie show the siblings in Nazi Germany they were only teenagers at the time who were part of the white rose movement and they printed these leaflets that were very much criticizing the Nazi regime at a time when very very very few Germans were willing to do that very few German adults were willing to do that but they were willing to do that they were Christian they had deep deeply held moral beliefs and the way that they died they perhaps people speculate we don't know why they did it in the end but they they handed out these leaflets in a school and they did it in a very obvious way and the janitor at the school dobbed them in and sent them to the the SS and and and they were they were killed very very quickly by the for a kangaroo court and everything else can you talk about their case what makes them special how did they as children react in a way that we would find so inspirational when so many of their adults around them failed in that sense well tracing out the causal Pathway to courage is not a simple thing right I mean I've seen people who've LED lives of bitter misery by any standard who did everything they could to be good people despite that you know and if you had they become Psychopathic criminals the sociologists would have said well of course look at the conditions of their existence but I've met people who've been brutalized beyond comprehension who decided nonetheless that they would aim up tell the truth now why are people capable of that that's an eternal mystery you know the judeo-christian doctrine is that we have free will and I think that's true now that doesn't mean I understand it and I know that the relationship between Free Will and determinism is complex and that's certain aspects of our action are explicable in a deterministic manner but not in the final analysis partly the reason for that is that a deterministic organism can't compute the transforming Horizon of the future so because the future is actually unpredictable so a deterministic mechanism can't adapt to it but in any case people make their choices and God only knows how early you start doing them it's very early You Know Carl Jung when he was talking about the edible complex so for Freud the edible complex in some ways was top down right so a mother would be a smothering mother would offer too much dependence and overwhelm her child but for Jung it was more like a dance of agreement and so imagine a six-year-old in bed and maybe he has I don't know maybe he's a bit dehydrated so he's got a headache but really he's upset because he didn't do his homework and his mom comes downstairs and maybe she's a bit Lonesome because she's had a scrap with her husband for the 50th time that week and she thinks you know what I wouldn't mind having the company and the kid thinks I wouldn't mind not going to school today and the kid says mom you know my head sort of hurts and the mum says well dear you know Maybe you don't need to go to school today and the kid thinks about really I don't want to go to school because I didn't do my homework and the mom thinks really I want the kid home because I'm lonesome and they both think yeah we just won't say that part out loud right and so is the kid making a moral choice yeah we start making moral choices God only knows how early unbelievably early you know terrifyingly early I would say and you know why do some people end up courageous when so many don't it's easier it's easier not to be you know it's easier to cut corners and not bear your responsibility not take the opportunities that manifest themselves to you not pay for your sins in the moment it's easier and so there's a thousand or a million ways that you can be dishonest but some people you know they're Paragons a virtue and we've argued about that forever that Calvinists thought that was predestination right it's the grace of God I don't know how to explain it it looks like choice to me you know when they in the famous picture of God reaching down to Adam and the Vatican on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel you see God reaching down and you see Adam reaching up although not with a lot of effort really sort of lingerously but but the existence is constituted in that manner is that things offer themselves to us but we have the choice about whether to receive them and some people decide to stretch their hands out with a bit more effort and humility and some people decide to take the easier path do you think it's in a human psyche to resist tyranny and does the number of dissidents vary across different cultures so say in Nazi Germany were there fewer or more dissidents than in the Soviet Union did it vary in maoist China I don't I don't think we know although I would say that in free societies free societies are only free to the degree that everyone is a dissident right because the freedom is maintained by people's trivial decisions to to engage in truthful interactions in trade and in the relationships with each other and so free people are are truth-speaking dissonance there's no difference between that and being free so it's when that starts to become silenced that things start to tilt in the tyrannical or the chaotic Direction now it seems to me that the Bedrock provided by The judeo-christian Narrative Corpus is a necessary precondition for that not least because that Corpus has is its Central proposition that the spirit of the truth is the highest principle right it's a proposition and not only is that the highest principle but that's core to our nature in the in the most in the ultimate sense and part of our divine obligation and I don't see how you can dispense with that notion without dispensing with the whole damn ballgame now of course that's what Nietzsche thought too right I mean he believed that the consequences of the death of God would be nihilism and totalitarianism or that we would discover our own values but that the psychoanalysts pretty much killed off that Theory are there any lessons that we can learn from those dissidents in the 20th century well sojnitzen you know it it was a it was something he cited I believe one man who doesn't lie can bring down a tyranny it's like well that's how everyone always brings down a tyranny that's how you bring down The Tyranny you use against yourself that's how you bring down the Tyranny you use against your wife you tell the truth so do you want to learn that lesson well social Nets and put the boots to the Soviet Union I mean he wasn't alone but he was a major contributor let's say you know Reagan was a contributor Pope was a contributor those would be the main three I would say and that was in large part because they didn't lie and falsehood cannot withstand the truth well that's an axiom of faith and it's an existential it's a strange thing eh because this is again why the notion that you can Orient your life by mere attention to the facts is erroneous it's like well is it the fact of the matter that if you lived your life by truth that that would be optimal and the answer is you have to run the simulation to find out it's not computable a priority there's no way of deriving the moral before the story is told and that's what you do in your life that's the existential conundrum in some ways that's what you're thrown into existence to determine you know how do you best make your way forward well you pay your money and you take your chances and this is something I'm trying to stress in this new book I'm writing is you will have faith in something now it might be a multitude of contradictory things which just makes you apotheistic a polytheistic Pagan but there's no non-faith root so and then the question emerges well you know what would a wise person best have faith in and I think it's the truth partly because how are you going to orient yourself to the world with a false map how's that going to work it's not going to work and you might think well I can falsify it now and then take a shortcut it's like uh not without falsifying your relationship with yourself not without polluting the water from which the Well from which you draw water it hasn't how it works do you think that your work as someone who is very high profile talking about these issues and being part of that so-called resistance to this woke tyranny to not find sorry for not using a better word than that but um has that been successful in inspiring others I mean and I'm interested in what you think about the success of these other resistance movements that have been around the world in Canada there was the trucker protests in in the Netherlands there was the farmers in the UK we've had lots of you know radical feminists who are arguing yes um some of the gender stuff so so do you do you think that your role has been in any way effective in that within those movements and do you think that those movements those movements themselves have been effective well I know that it's been effective to some degree within those movements because I've been in touch with the people who've organized those movements and they've told me that so um and you know I spoke remotely at the truckers protest and was in contact with the truckers while they were protesting partly on the Strategic front and so and the same was true in the Netherlands to a somewhat lesser degree so um and then on the more on the broader public front well I know that this is successful I mean that's why my wife and I keep traveling because you know if you looked at my life online you'd think that I was being harried to death non-stop by you know radical narcissistic Psychopaths but that actually only occurs online wherever I go in the world it's not like that at all I have one bad encounter in about 5 000 encounters and all the rest of them are hyper positive people are extremely polite to me they they always behave the same way I guess there's three categories there's the person who's who's been hurt at some point and who has recovered to some degree or is in the process of recovering that would be the bulk of the people that stopped me there'd be the people who have been interested in what I say but feel compelled to tell me that they don't agree with everything I say which I you know I that's sort of a response that always sort of flabbergasts me because it's like well what makes you think I would expect that and also why are you telling me that you know and I think it's because they want to play both sides against the middle but that's a very small minority of people I don't think more than about one in a hundred do that and then you know now and then I run into somebody who's uh usually has never listened to a thing I've said but who thinks they know what I'm up to or maybe me now and then someone who actually does and knows not happy about it but um all the interactions I have with people are positive and I know that it's had an effect because I've sold 10 million books and so and you know everywhere we go in the world Tammy and I we sell out Arenas of three to ten thousand people and I'm always talking about the same thing which is really the adoption of responsibility in the fundamental sense and I know that it's helped and we can tell by going to these shows that it's helped because everyone says that it's helped you know and that's the testimony of hundreds of thousands of people now so because there's two levels isn't there in terms of helping people there's on that there's in their individual lives do they tell the truth do they lie and there's the political level of can you change this policy the vaccine mandates Etc that I suppose the trucker protesters were less successful in oh they were pretty successful they were pretty successful the The kovid Tyranny collapse pretty precipitously after the trucker Convoy and they caused the collapse of the conservative leadership and you know the conservatives in Canada at that point were pretty damn wishy-washy and playing both sides against the middle and the new leader is a lot more has a lot more of a spine by all appearances we'll see to what degree he's handled to death by the political consultant types but um do you see a distinction between those two those two oh definitely things though I mean you know the person when the political or are they linked in some way well you can't be a real leader without having your act together on the personal front and for me the fundamental theater of action is the individual which is why I'm a psychologist and not a political scientist or an economist or a sociologist or a politician for that matter like I think that I mean I was concerned throughout my whole life with the existence of malevolence and that's a spiritual problem malevolence evil and it's addressed at the individual level and so that's always been my primary focus of concern once I learned that that really was a psychological issue rather than a political issue I think you have to get your psychological house in order before you can be even remotely effective politically in in the fundamental sense otherwise you're just a tool of of ideology or your own ego and so I'm much more interested in operating at the psychological level than at the political level although I do engage in some political discussion you know to to Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's also means to some degree to give Caesar has do right and we're political as well as psychological and we have political responsibilities and so and it's necessary to translate the individual ethical ethos into appropriate policy but you can't do that unless you can tell the truth and you can't be a good leader unless you're capable of listening and and you have the humility that would go along with that so I've thought about a political career in Canada multiple times but first of all I don't speak French and so that's a problem I could learn but I haven't so that would be an impediment and second uh I think I'm probably more effective doing what I'm doing than I could be in any political role in Canada isn't the ironic thing that throughout this interview we've talked about dissidents we've talked about resisting sort of woke tyranny but the woke people see themselves as resistors they see themselves as distance maybe disagree with that but during the 2016 Trump election there was this term the resistance that's how they saw themselves so do you think they genuinely believe themselves to be resisting against this conservative Elite well I think some of them do and some of them don't I mean the real pathological types they just use all of that as as maneuvering is there a coping mechanism or well no I think that there's there's endless reasons for people to view themselves as victims you know I mean we are in the land of corporate Giants right in in a major way and they're multinational and it isn't obvious at all that they act they often act in not in our best interests I mean that's certainly the case for the pharmaceutical companies obviously which is why their alliance with the radical left is quite the bloody Miracle um and so and it is the case as I said before that in the capitalist systems power and wealth accrue in the hands of fewer and fewer people now that's true of every economic system it's part of a much broader problem than the problem of capitalism but it's easy for people to feel that they're put at an unfair disadvantage by extant power structures and to the degree that those power structures are in fact corrupt and based on power they have a valid complaint now the question is what do you do with that complaint I mean you could regard yourself as especially and narcissistically victimized and therefore deserving of some sort of special redress or you could try to do something about it and also to understand your own role in propagating that power Dynamic right well they hold themselves up against these vast evil Concepts like white supremacy so they say they're fighting white supremacy they're fighting this homophobia they're fighting this transphobia that is endemic and systemic across Society across the elites do you see a comparison between that and how the Soviet revolutionaries leninist types believed themselves to be fighting against that Elite and well if they did believe that I mean they were powermongers in the final analysis and I mean people like Lennon and Stellan just said whatever they needed to say to get as firm a grip on power absolute power as they could possibly manage but look one of the canonical variants of the universal hero myth is David and Goliath right and the reason for that is that the hero always does two two things the hero confronts chaos and what is terrifying and generates order that's one that's the dragon fight fundamentally but the hero also slays the oppressive Giant and rekindles Society right so takes out the evil King you see that in in the story of The Lion King for example right and takes out the evil Uncle which is a very common variant and the reason for that is that social hierarchies ossify and tilt towards power and so that's also part of the critique of the Left Right is but the left always goes too far the radicals they say it's nothing but Power it's like no it's not nothing but Power the fact that power corrupts the social Enterprise and the psyche for that matter does not mean that power is the fundamental motivating principle and that's actually of extreme import I actually think play is the fundamental motivating principle not power I think the antithesis of power is play and free play in particular and it's a much more effective means of adaptation and much more enjoyable than the naked expression of power but but people are inclined in an in their attempts to manifest an unsophisticated heroism that's a good way of thinking about it too you know oppose the man and then also to assume that the mere complaint especially public which is the equivalent of praying in public by the way just the mere public display of your rejection your objection constitutes sufficient moral effort and of course the idiot universities are absolutely complicit in putting that message forward it's like everybody should be an activist it's like really that's your solution for the world's woes is to train potentially competent young people to parade their whiny moral virtue publicly oh that's there's nothing in that that's positive go out there and do something fix something fix something something real and you know what that's what I've been attempting to that pathway is what I've been attempting to outline to my Watchers and viewers and lots of people are trying that and it works and then they're thrilled about it because then they have something real and that's way better it's way better so the the propagandists always subvert the mythological to the ideological always and so there's always the Ring of truth about their pronouncements you know I'm standing up against the man well you should be but you know the judeo-christian revolution in in many ways if you think about it psychologically was the notion that the Tyrant you face most morally is the one that lurks in Your Heart Right is the removal of the it's the removal of malevolence from the external world it's the continual removal of it so as the idea of God progresses you see the idea of God moving from the god whose manifestations in nature produce awe to the god whose voice is revealed Within um primarily in the voice of conscience so it's a psychologization of the idea of the Divine same thing happens on them on the malevolence front it's like well what's evil well a predator a wolf a snake a raptor right a dragon that's an amalgam of all those things that's evil what's evil your tribal enemy what's evil uh you're betraying brother what's evil your self-betrayal what's evil the spirit of evil that lurks within you yeah that's it that's the most sophisticated representation and you could also argue and you know it's a debatable point but I think it's true that the way you fight external tyranny most effectively is by having defeated the Tyrant that lurks within and then acting in accordance with that because then your words and your actions speak of your having overcome the devil and his Temptations in the desert you know when Christ is in the desert trying to conceptualize the nature of his kingdom Satan appears to him and says you could have the world and everything in it you could be a political Master you could be a king you could be the emperor in in the worldly sense and Christ thinks what does he think that's not good enough that's not right well you can manipulate maneuver on the power front you know and you can end up ruling over hell as it turns out if you do that but you can end up ruling or you can try to put your house in order and then you inherit the Kingdom instead of the world you know when people think that's a Superstition but that's because they don't understand what the story means so there's this idea that you should lay up treasure in heaven where it doesn't rust what does that mean well let's say you and I have an honest conversation we've done that before right you interviewed me three years ago two years ago okay and you didn't play any tricks okay so what was the consequence of that well it did well okay what does that mean that it did well people were interested okay and so we got a lot of viewers and and how and what was the consequence for you I suppose it made me feel proud of my work okay oh well that's a good thing right to make you feel like you're doing something worthwhile all right and then when you asked me to do this interview I said yes all right so so why did that work well it's because you comported yourself without treachery as a journalist so you accrued you accrued something genuine on the reputational front Okay well moths can't devour that and rust can't destroy it right time doesn't Decay it quite the contrary you store your genuine treasure in your genuine reputation right right this is why you have to treat other people properly like they're you because they are in the in the most fundamental sense well so that's part of the Kingdom of Heaven is that it's immutable to Earthly degradation well what does that mean well psychologically it means that we figured out a long time ago that there's no better place to store future wealth than in your reputation because then everybody wants to be around you and they want to interact with you and they offer you opportunities and if you fall on Hard Times they're there to help you because they trust you it's like everyone I know that's truly successful I'll give you an example so I saw this in the professoriate continually there were two types of Professor especially in relationship to the graduate students there were the professors who had time for their graduate students and who were extraordinarily generous with their ideas and with publication credit and so these were people you'd go talk to them my supervisor Robert peel was one of these he always had time and he was never less than forthcoming with his creative ideas and then if we published he would assign credit where it was due and put himself appropriately in the background when that was requisite so what did that mean well first of all it meant that he was a never-ending font of ideas because he'd give them away and that indicated to himself that he had faith in the source of his ideas and the reward that he received by giving away his ideas produced the flourishing of the system within him that produced ideas see because what happens is that if there's a part of you your neural architecture that can generate ideas well if you reward that it grows so if you give away your ideas and you get positive feedback as a consequence that well will deepen and and broaden right and so what how could that possibly be to your disadvantage it's very different than a narrowly self-serving this was my goddamn idea I'm going to be first author on the paper and don't you dare steal my idea well those people I just saw them over time they'd get to the point where they literally wouldn't have an idea and then they'd even be grasping more tightly to the ideas that they had well that's not that's not a wise strategy that's going back to the idea of the dissidence versus the sort of masses of who who were able to accept and willing to accept that that lie that the regime perpetuated and I'm I'm fascinated and I know that you are as well with those people who chose the completely opposite path to what you just mentioned I.E the evil people the tyrannical people the people who headed these regimes the stalins the Hitlers the mouse there is this idea in history of Great Men the great men of history do you think that this theory is legitimate do people make these huge influences on the societies around them or do you believe in the alternative Theory which is that they are working merely within the bounds of the masses within the bounds of the sort of flow of History if you like well I would say that a great man in some ways gives voice to the the present so there's a dynamic relationship between that greatness and the social surround but it it's certainly true as far as I'm concerned that everything is moved forward as a consequence of individual effort on every front that's why I think the individual is the right level of conceptualization and Analysis and so are there great individuals well obviously and they're on the Forefront of development right they have the and you know one of the great advantages of our communicative ability is that we can all share in the benefits of that Stellar Edge adaptation in all directions simultaneously you know so that's a great thing and I think that people are called upon to act in accordance with that conceptualization I think everyone has it within them has something I think everyone has something for lack of a better term Divine about them and that they have something to bring into the world that no one else can bring in that without which the world is lesser and and often profoundly lesser so that along with that Divine value that we have we all have a Divine responsibility and the upside of that is that that's where meaning is to be found right this is another thing that I've been successful at communicating to young men in particular it's like well why be responsible because it's meaningful well why do you need that well you're going to suffer there buddy you better have something to rely on when the storms come or they'll take you out or you'll wish you were dead we're all fascinated in these individuals who have changed and moved history I think you know you can walk in any City around the world and you'll see statues of these Great Men whether they're local people national heroes figures or even more evil figures like Lenin and Stalin and as someone who's interested in history as someone who loves reading biographies reading about people like Bismarck who were utterly demonic in their actions in incredible humor I don't know how much I don't know if you studied him but you should if you haven't um I I get the sense that the great men of history that era may have ended and you look at the leaders today and you just see mediocrity so that's a good example so maybe maybe you disagree with me yeah no they're still around there's lots of them you know no they're still around there may not be the political leaders but they may be in other areas so you say musk and Rogan those those are two very specific people yeah I've met lots of great people you know who who are shoulder and their weight and doing it properly and and thank God for that yeah politically less so why are we churning out these leaders like macron like Biden like Trudeau what's what's where does this phenomenon come from because they seem so uniform across the West probably because there are methods of communication were unable to distinguish wheat from chaff for a long long time I think that might be changing with long-form political dialogue because it's a lot harder to hide if you have to talk for two and a half hours so you know the sound bite the the the TV in particular lent itself to to a kind of brainless momentary glibness and attractiveness right and partly because TV well it had a very narrow bandwidth it was extremely expensive per minute um everything had to be reduced to a sound bite and it really stressed a certain kind of physical attractiveness and so none of that helped at all um but those you know that period of time is probably coming to an end we'll see it's interesting because social media has really shown a light on our politicians in a way that we haven't experienced in the past so people like Bismarck people like Caesar these were Mysteries to the general public people did not know what was going on in their private lives they barely knew anything about them beyond what their propaganda was telling them or beyond what the Press at the time or whatever the the oral communication was telling them about these people so do you think that that is one area where there's been a huge difference between the past and now and where we can see our leaders in a very different way do you think that sort of bubble has been burst well we'll see we'll see I I I I suspect it might have been because I do think like I've seen over the last two years in particular three years particularly in Canada in the U.S that many political types are turning away from the Legacy Media and its emphasis on appearance to the new media and its ability to deliver content and I think it will differentially reward people who are the real thing it's very hard to be fake for two and a half hours on YouTube in a spontaneous conversation you know and I think the people who are inclined to be fake won't even do those interviews because they'll just exhaust themselves so I think that's a very positive development now you know the sensorial tyrants might have a word or two to say about that I mean YouTube took down my interview with Robert Kennedy which I'm very unimpressed by given that it was they did that during an active presidential campaign and I think that was a traitorous Act so but but nonetheless you know there's lots of other avenues for communication and the sensors haven't been able to shut down genuine dialogue and in fact quite the contrary I mean Rogan in particular he's a fascinating phenomenon because he did what he did pretty much by himself right he's got his producer there's two of them and all Rogan did was ask stupid questions you know but for me you're as interesting as Rogan I suppose I mean I'm 23 I was a young man when I read your books you know you may have guessed but I you know I think you um changed my life in a way in terms of what the advice that you were giving and and as I said I find individuals fascinating so I want to ask a question about you for just for a moment um since 2016 how do you think your life has changed how do you think you have changed how how has your outlook towards the world changed well my life was flipped upside down in many ways because I had to give up my professorship and my research Enterprise and I'd put a lot of time and effort into those and I would I like doing them and I was good at it and uh I particularly the research Enterprise collapsed entirely now I've been able to duplicate the teaching Enterprise on a much broader scale so and that's been extraordinarily useful and fulfilling and much better so there's no net loss there but the research Enterprise that was a real loss and then my clinical practice became impossible too and that really still irritates the hell out of me because I knew those people extremely well and we were getting places you know we had a real relationship sometimes one that had lasted a decade and it just blew up plus you know the College of psychologists has been on my case ever since 2016 and they're costing me ninety thousand dollars a month in legal bills which I'm also not very impressed by and uh and every single allegation they brought against me uh is not only unwarranted but absurd and procedurally incompetent to a degree that's almost unimaginable so that was annoying um there were a lot of harrowing experiences that went along with what's unfolded over the last seven years particularly in the first four or five years because every week month something like that there'd be some new scandal generally fulminated by some journalist who was narcissistic whose sole goal in interview was to trap me into saying something that would demolish my reputation to their renown and every time that happened things were unstable for weeks or months even but It reversed and now we've learned that it reverses so it's much less worrisome now and so that's one thing that's one way I'm Different is that I know now that if you're careful and you get attacked and you hold fast that the net outcome will be positive if you can tolerate the intermediary disruption so that's a very useful thing to know so now if you know something someone scurrilous says something potentially reputation devastating my family has learned just to watch and wait and watch it flip around because it is the case that the people who went after me most pathologically did me the most good and that isn't something I didn't know that I didn't know that's how the world worked that and that that's part of the reason why you can welcome assault you know because you need to know what your attitude is right you need to know what your attitude is towards tragedy and your attitude towards tragedy is that you should bear it with hope because well what else are you going to do you're going to you're going to descend into the pit of victimhood I mean even if the world has been stacked up unfairly on top of you well construing yourself as a helpless victim and becoming bitter and resentful and then murderous and then genocidal that's not helpful it just turns tragedy into hell so you're called upon to maintain Faith and Hope in the face of the existential catastrophe of existence and then with regards to malevolence as well you know do you embrace your enemy I suppose if you were a master you could do that so there are advantages of suffering there are ways of there are ways of making it a hell of a lot worse than it has to be at least you know advantages of suffering that's a tough one you know I was very very ill and in a a level of pain that I didn't even know was possible for like two and a half years and we're talking about physical illness for people who aren't aware of your yeah yeah and at any point during that time if there would have been an off switch I would have just flicked it and you know you could say well did you learn anything and the answer is yes but I would also say I think I could have learned it in less than two and a half years you know I'm very leery of saying suffering justifies itself in the wisdom that it produces I think there are wise and unwise ways of responding to suffering and I think that it can take you down a peg or two and force you to recalibrate but I think it's a you have to be cautious in making the hard and fast rule that you know all suffering redounds to our benefit do you feel you've become more cynical and pessimistic around about the world if that was possible no no I don't think so I mean I'm more struck down by amazement with regards to the depths of malevolent stupidity that are possible the comical malevolent stupidity is a never-ending source of like surreal amazement but you know by the same token I've met some great people who are doing great things and I think I don't think falsehood can triumph over truth so I'm not pessimistic at all or not more pessimistic I mean I've always had a rather dark view of things I mean I studied atrocity for decades before anything blew up around me on the political scene you know and we could talk about that for a bit too I mean you know people sometimes tell me you know they laud me in relationship to my bravery and I don't really appreciate that in some ways it's not like I take offense to it that isn't what I mean I just don't think it's right it's like when bill c-16 came up people wondered why I made such a big deal out of it and the reason for me well first of all I knew what it was going to do and it's done exactly what I knew it would do in in the detail I knew it would produce a psychological epidemic I said that to the Senate I could see it just as clearly as could be and I knew that it was part and parcel of the process of the Restriction of speech and so those were the grounds on which I objected to it and you might say well why did I object to it and the answer is I'm way more afraid of losing my tongue to the Tyrant than of anything the government or the woke radicals could possibly do to me because I know how people get corrupted and if you have any sense at all if you know how people get corrupted you'll be way more afraid of that than anything else and so for me it's well why do I say what I think because I know that the alternative is hell and it's not like I think that I know that like I know it as much as you could possibly know anything I've watched that in my clinical practice for decades I saw it unfold in my personal life in all sorts of ways I see it work in the political world you lie at your peril you have no idea what you'll pay for that and what everyone else will too it isn't just that you take yourself to hell as you drag everyone along with you not good not good as individuals we all have to make choices about what we talk about obviously online for example and I may have opinions that I can't share because let's say I would lose my job or I would be arrested or I would get completely canceled so is that me lying by by not revealing certain opinions that I have or am I just being practical well you don't have to see what you think about absolutely everything every second you have a right to privacy and it's reasonable to be discreet I don't think you should make unnecessary enemies you know and then after that well um if you falsify what you believe explicitly that's a big mistake like I would say you can make a blanket you can just lay a blanket prohibition over that do not lie and what there's a I could Define that do not say things that you know according to your own standards of Truth are false not circumvents all the moral relativistic arguments it's like everyone knows the difference between saying something they believe to be true and something they know to be false okay so don't do that now there's going to be edge cases when you don't know it's like well maybe those are places you should you know explore carefully or just shut the hell up about and then there's the more complex situations where you could say something but you believe that it might be unwise under the circumstances and I would say well those are very complex moral cases so you might you might say well look I'm a teacher and I can't oppose the school board because I have four kids and and my wife stays at home and we're solely dependent on my income so it's the duty I owe my wife and my children compared to the duty I owe my profession and my society and that's a real conflict of Duty it's a genuine conflict of Duty and the ethical pathway forward is not crystal clear in the manner that someone could specify from the outside okay so if I have someone like that my clinical practice I say well look you're going to be called upon to make very fine moral judgments so you better make yourself into the person that can do that and how do you do that well you do that first of all by ceasing lying right because then you sharpen your vision and then you'll be able to be in a situation where you can decide in a given circumstance which pathway forward is the most appropriate morally now part of the reason this is a crucial point is that part of the reason that you should be careful with what you say is because well there's no difference between speaking and thinking and if you muddy the conceptual Waters and you find yourself in a tight spot you'll be too blind to think and then you'll be in trouble and you know and not just the sort of trouble that can cause death that trouble too but worse so if you know that and and you've thought that through it's like oh I see I can't lie because if I lie I falsify the process that enables me to abide by the truth when the challenge arises you think oh that seems rather self-evident I should be careful because or else and I know that I know that and I also know that if you are careful with what you say especially that you don't lie but also that you practice saying what you have to say when the time is right then your vision gets sharper and the world improves around you and the opportunities multiply and and everything works out for you much better even though it's complex but and for everyone else much better that's how the world works in The Pursuit Of Truth and I suppose in the pursuit against Injustice do you think that people can get caught up in rabbit holes and I'm just going to expand on that what I mean by that we've just made a documentary about Canada there are so many things going on here as you know that are terrible and should be investigated and fought back against but if I spent my entire life and every single day investigating these terrible injustices and justices around the world we've got these phones next to us right now and we look at Twitter I don't know what you do but I look at Twitter all the time and I and this can lead to a certain amount of depression and and and and anger really and I I remember during the pandemic my Grandad he was in a his wife my grandmother was who sadly passed away but she was in a home and he was by himself for the first time in almost in 60 years and they were separated and he was alone and I remember he was watching the news all the time because he was interested he's a curious guy but it was making him severely depressed and I said to him don't watch the news don't do it and I and it's the same thing with Twitter you know if you're obsessively looking at this stuff do you think there's a danger that you can over expose yourself to these things even though that these things are terrible and they're going on but what I'm I suppose what I'm trying to say is do we all need a bit of a break from social media and from looking at those things you know with your grandfather you you put your finger on something particularly relevant he was alone well so part of the way we buttress ourselves against idiosyncratic Obsession let's say is by surrounding ourselves with other people you know someone you have an intimate relationship with your family your circle of friends your business compatriots because they will in balancing all those things you can find a kind of Harmony right and like a musical Harmony and that would be a state of play actually and and that will help you decide when you veered too far you know in one obsessive Direction so that you know you're a one-trick pony or a or or you're you're just you're beating the same drum over and over and part part you buttress yourself against that by putting yourself in a broader community so that the people in that community tap you into alignment continually so so Mental Health is ill-conceived and the psychologists are partly to blame for that because we think of mental health as something that's subjective and internal but it's not it's the harmonious balancing of a network of relationships to yourself but also to other people and it's the harmony that's the health and so you can Veer off in a disharmonious direction and it's counterproductive you know when you you can tell it's counterproductive even because doing so makes you less able to act positively against those things that are disturbing you right so you have to reserve your strength that's another reason why perhaps you can't say everything you think all the time it's like well you have to prioritize and and you know how do you prioritize well that's that's what a religious narrative is for fundamentally because a religious narrative is a narrative of prioritization first things first and well that's wisdom and that's complicated so yes you can fall down rabbit holes and especially when you're attached to information sources and you're kind of an information omnivore as well you know so and I'm just curious as to whether you think that you ever dabble down a rabbit hole too much I mean I know for me taking a break from Twitter can be one of the most you know brilliant relaxing things I can do and particularly in somewhere like Canada where you can go out on a hike and you can just see nature and it's just you know the contrast between that and sitting at my desk scrolling yeah well I think probably so I derive most of most information I get from two sources three sources I suppose books because I read a lot of books in the podcast I do and they're usually associated with the book and then Twitter keeps me abreast of the the goings-on of the culture so it's news can that become too much well yes and am I susceptible to that probably particularly when I'm tired you know because you're less able to regulate or I am less able to regulate the pull of information if I'm tired and Twitter of course feeds you information that's it's it doesn't end a book at least ends a newspaper you can read the whole thing Twitter it's like the newspaper that never ends and it's the algorithm that's tailored to you it's not just a newspaper that anyone can can read it's specifically for you and what you look at and what you like and what you read yeah well Twitter Twitter is a little better than than other some other social media Platforms in that regard because you pick the people you follow so but you know you're pointing to what's essentially the danger of being open to information I mean one of the advantages to being conservative is conservatives put up boundaries right they tend not to be flooded by an excess of information people who are more who hire an openness to experience tend more to be liberal by the way they're very pro-information but the problem with information is that too much information is indistinguishable from chaos so and and that can destabilize you and it is tricky these things are very tricky to manage and they're designed to be tricky to manage so you know we're all learning as we go and have I made mistakes on that front no doubt it's easy to go on a Twitter binge it's another difference again from from perhaps you in the past when Twitter didn't exist even you know back in the 1990s when you're writing your first book um can you see that difference how is that how has that manifested itself you know the Twitter age versus the I suppose book age well for a long time I didn't pay much attention to the news like I probably didn't watch news to any great degree from like 1985 to I don't know whenever these things came along you know what's that 2010 or something yeah and I I didn't really suffer from not watching the news I mean I read The Economist I read certain magazines that sort of kept me abreast of the macro Trends let's say and that seemed to be sufficient now It's Tricky Twitter is very tricky because I do run this podcast and you know I do two a week and that's a lot and I have to pick the right people for the conversations and a lot of that's a consequence of using Twitter you know because I can see what's hot and what needs to be addressed and so to the degree that I've become a journalist which is to quite a degree given the podcast Twitter isn't optional it's how I sample the culture now you know is it a biased sample probably but it's as unbiased as I can manage to make it and I do a lot of research reading and still an awful lot of writing so I want to finish the interview if you don't mind on one last topic and that is the United Kingdom where obviously a British paper one of my favorite videos from you as well you guys are over here doing documentary on Canada well it seems the Canadian media doesn't want to do it hey man Canada is a way more peculiar place than Canadians think and and it's it's the fact that Canada has become an object of international interest is like when the hell did that happen you know the world's upside down when Canada when Canadian politics are interesting it's like what the hell is going on and I think that people can see how the degeneration of our nation into a Banana Republic outside of Canada far more accurately than people inside Canada understand people inside Canada have no idea what a devastating blow to Canada's International reputation the seizure of the bank accounts was they just don't know they think oh they deserved it it's like you have no idea what that signaled to the rest of the world right that Canada did that yeah Canada of course was born out of the British Empire and those British colonists a lot of them Scottish actually and Irish not just English who were coming out to the Frontiers and expanding that Empire what do you think was special about Britain was it special and why it probably did the most effective job of any modern state of translating The Narrative structure of the judeo-christian biblical Corpus into policy and it did that partly explicitly in its parliamentary structure but it also did it even more wisely with its common law tradition I mean English common law is a complete bloody Miracle bottom-up law I mean God what a what a phenomenal accomplishment and so yes I think that makes Britain singular and worthy of tremendous admiration you know these these the the anti-oppression people in the in the U.S who decry the UK colonialists in particular for their oppressive policies are spitting in the face of the only political system that ever successfully controlled slavery and not only practically because of the British Navy on the high seas but also metaphysically and politically like the British it was the British who decided hands down that slavery was wrong and then did something about it and that was documented historical reality the reason for that is because the British parliamentarians were called to their conscience by English Evangelical Christians essentially that Wilberforce in particular who said by the doctrines that you claim to regard as holy this should not stand and therefore can't and Britain did that you know and the Brits as well even in relationship to the Empire it was at the same period of time that the Brits were already deciding that colonial rule in India had to be aimed towards the emancipation of the Indian people and their elevation as responsible individuals to the realm of sovereign citizenship and that's an amazing thing for an Empire to conclude you know and you can be cynical about the lag of time it took but it didn't take that long and India's doing pretty damn well you know and I think that the British bequested their gift of governance all around the world and that's not fluke and they deserve credit for it and it would be a catastrophe for Great Britain to fall down the rabbit hole of self-abnegation and not realize that it's an amazing place I mean there's no U.S without the UK I mean the Americans like to think that you know the tradition of freedom in the U.S is the American Revolution it's complete bloody nonsense and we knew that in Canada because we knew that what the Americans did in their Revolution was fight for the rights of Englishmen right and that is what they did and that doesn't take away from the American Revolution but it links what happened in the U.S to you know a historical progression that had gone on for centuries before that and that was Unstoppable right and that was the Revelation in the political space of the judeo-christian Revelation fundamentally as far as I can tell the American Revolution is fascinating because you had those amazing people who wrote the Constitution the founding fathers who were making who were having these debates about English common law versus that French Revolutionary philosophy you've got Thomas Jefferson you have Hamilton and this is the contrast isn't it or do you agree with me that this is the contrast between that English system that as you just praised upon and that French Revolutionary system throughout history and do you think those are the two sort of splits in history it it that that's a huge part of the split and that part of it is and that's I think the French degenerate in the direction of luciferian intellectual presumption top down the elite can determine rationality can rule well first of all rationality makes a very very bad Master a very good servant but a very bad Master yeah and and a lot of the centralizing tendency that's characteristic of the EU can be laid at the foot of the same spirit that motivated the French the French revolutionaries and we all know how that ended and not well and so you know I see the French Revolution in itself as a reflection of something deeper which is the continuing manifestation of the spirit of Cain let's say it's a resentful intellect essentially and it's the same spirit that produces the Tower of Babel in the biblical Corpus and this overweening intellectual pretension and and and worship of the of the self-serving intellect um that that's a very very old problem much older than even the French Revolution but it's certainly a manifestation of the same thing whereas the Brit system is bottom up you know and the respect for the common man isn't an empty phrase in Great Britain and you can tell that when you go there I mean I love that country it's a great country it it's a country that's suffering from far too much guilt at the moment which I suppose in some ways is even a testament to its moral soundness you know but but nonetheless unfortunate you see the same thing in the Netherlands you know I went and talked to a lot of intellectuals in the Netherlands and they say well we're not even sure we have a culture you know when I come to the Netherlands from Canada and I think I don't even I can't see for a second how you could even possibly presume that what the hell do you mean you should come to Northern Alberta if you want to see a place that doesn't have a culture it's 50 bloody years old you know scraped out of the Bush yesterday not this amazing Amsterdam in particular in the Netherlands it's like the UK it's complete bloody Miracle out country that's why it's so upsetting to see what's happening on the Dutch farmer protest front although they may get the last laugh yet so Dr Jordan Peterson thank you very much for joining us thank you very much for coming over here and talking to me

Channel: The Telegraph

Views: 995,677

Keywords: Telegraph, News, jordan peterson, jordan peterson speech, jordan peterson motivation, free speech, justin trudeau, jordan peterson clips, joe rogan, jordan peterson interview, inspiration, motivational speeches, jordan b peterson, jordan peterson podcast, karl marx, jordan peterson interview new, jordan peterson debate, freedom of speech, dr peterson, jordan peterson 2023, elon musk, ww2, philosophy, world war 2, adolf hitler, jordan peterson stalin, communism, marxism, Stalin

Id: 2v8lq_vnklI

Length: 86min 1sec (5161 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2023