Postmodernism and Cultural Marxism | Jordan B Peterson

I don't think that you can understand the current situation properly without considering the role that post-modernism plays in this because post-modernism in many ways especially as its played out politically is the new skin that the old Marxism now inhabits so you could think that there's there's a postmodern philosophy which we'll talk about a bit that really came into its vogue in the 1970s after classic Marxism especially of the economic type had been so thoroughly discredited that no one but an absolute reprobate could could could could support it publicly anymore even the French intellectuals had to admit that communism was a bad deal by the by the end of the 1960s and what happened was that there they played a sleight-of-hand game in some sense and rebranded themselves under the postmodern guys and that's where identity politics came from and so and then that spread like wildfire from France especially into the u.s. through Yale University through the English department there and then everywhere and and so what happened was you know there was this idea that the Marxists had put forth that the natural landscape of economic landscape is a battle and it's a battle between the proletariat the working class and the bourgeois and that the that the economic systems were doomed to continue to enslave people and to keep them poor and downtrodden unless there was a radical economic transformation that was predicated on something more like equity policy and then that was put into place in many many places as you no doubt know throughout the 20th century with absolute absolutely murderous results it was the most destructive economic and political doctrine I think that was has ever been invented by mankind and that includes National Socialism because the the absolute magnitude of the havoc wreaked by the communist systems exceeded that week by Hitler and and that's I mean Hitler didn't have quite as long as long a time to pull his stunts off quite as effectively but it was a catastrophic system and one of the things that's quite interesting that the full breadth of that catastrophe has is not something that students are well taught in our current educational system which has always made me very suspicious for example the students I teach usually know nothing at all about what happened in the Soviet Union under Stalin between say nineteen Stalin and Lenin between 1919 and 1959 they have no idea that millions tens of millions of people were killed and far more tortured and and brutalized by that particular regime to say nothing of Mao so look what happened was that by the end of the 1960s the evidence that communism was a catastrophic failure was so overwhelming that even the French intellectuals and we'll return to them later like the because the French have a very long lasting and powerful public intellectual tradition and so intellectuals there are very influential even the French intellectuals like Sartre jean-paul Sartre the famous philosopher had to admit by the end of the 1960s that the the stell inist communist Maoist experiment and all of its variants not just those particular dictators but all of its variants was an absolute catastrophic failure and then what happened was the post modernists came onto the scene and they were all Marxists but they couldn't be Marxists anymore because you couldn't be a Marxist and claim that you were human being by the end of the 1960s and so they started to play a sleight of hand and instead of pitting the proletariat the working class against the bourgeoisie they started to pit the oppressor the oppressed against the oppressor and that opened up the avenue to identifying any number of groups as oppressed and oppressor and to continue the same narrative under a different name it was no longer specifically about economics it was about power and everything to the post modernist is about power and that's actually why they're so dangerous because if you're engaged in a discussion with someone who believes in nothing but power all they are motivated to do is to accrue all the power to them because what else is there there's no logic there's no investigation there's no negotiation there's no dialogue there's no discussion there's no meeting of minds and Consensus there's power and so since the 1970s under the guise of post-modernism we've seen the rapid expansion of identity politics throughout the universities it came it's come to dominate all of the humanities which are which are dead as far as I can tell and a huge proportion of the social scientists sciences and we've been publicly funding extremely radical postmodern leftist thinkers who are hell-bent on demolishing the fundamental substructure of Western civilization and that's no that's no paranoid delusion that's that's that's their self admitted goal and I've identified not only me obviously but one of the main players in this entire drama is a French philosopher named Jacques Derrida who was who I think most transiently formulated the anti Western philosophy that is being pursued so assiduously by the radical left and I think it's dangers cannot be I don't think its dangers can be overstated and I also don't think the degree to which it's already infiltrated our culture can be overstated I mean the the people who hold this doctrine this radical postmodern communitarian doctrine that that makes racial identity or sexual identity or gender identity or some kind of group identity paramount they've got control over most low to mid-level bureaucratic structures and many governments as well but but even in the United States where you know a lot of the governmental institutions have swung back to the Republican side the postmodernist types have infiltrated bureaucratic organizations at the mid to upper level and that's actually what they're trained to do by their activist professors in university and if you want proof of that you can just go on to the websites of women's studies groups for example because they're some of the top offenders and just look at what they say well but that's the issue is that caring for someone or for a group of people is a very complicated thing and it doesn't always mean be compassionate and feel sorry for them because they're downtrodden it's not good enough like a lot of the structures that we've put in place to to help people over the long run are rather harsh in their operations in the short term I mean so the the values that are associated with trait conscientiousness for example which are reasonably good predictors are more conservative leaving political beliefs aren't warm fuzzy virtues they're cold hard judgmental virtues they're the demands for performance for example that go along in the workplace but if you if you want to take care of an infant who's crying you want warm instantaneous impulsive compassion because there's a problem and it needs to be solved right now and you have the solution right the baby is too hot the baby is too cold the baby needs to be fed you can fix that right now if you're dealing with with systemic problems of poverty for example or trying to determine how to how to produce more opportunity for everyone to benefit from everyone's abilities you have to use a hell of a lot more than compassion to get there and so to think of a community in the positive sense as being driven by nothing but empathy which is really one of the central arguments of the of the postmodern types that at least that's what's driving some of their argumentation is it's an absurd proposition so it's not so much that they confuse the two things is that they fail to differentiate the concepts to begin with it's a it's very very difficult to build functional structures that help people thrive individually and socially over long periods of time and merely being empathetic man that's just going to get you nowhere a three-year-old is empathetic and I'm not dismissing that empathy is important but as a problem-solving mechanism if it has very very limited utility and collectivism the difference being from my understanding fascism was made to control the individual Marx's was more control of means of production socialism or means of controlling the fruits of production if I'm not mistaken and I think we've seen the destructive nature of collectivism in destroying the individual right well I think that's argh that's actually the point in large part of me Derrida for example coined a term he called fell logos centrism which he regarded as the central axiomatic position of the of the West a that not only the Enlightenment West but also the Christian or judeo-christian for that matter West prior to the Enlightenment Derrida went after the tradition running through judeo-christianity through modernism and the and the and the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and criticized that and that was the idea that and he was critical of this it's the presupposition that culture is first male-dominated which is a presupposition that I take great exception to because it's a radical oversimplification of the historical story to the degree that that culture was male-dominated it was only dominated by a very small number of males most males were serfs or soldiers or cannon fodder for that matter or coal miners dreadfully toiling away for their work certainly as oppressed as as women were in general by the absolute poverty of the conditions you know up till 1895 the average person in the Western world lived on a dollar a day in today's money right so I mean you don't have to go very back back very far in time before you find everyone oppressed but not by the socio-cultural system merely by the by the absolute what insane difficulty of life itself well so Derrida described wet the West is male-dominated which i think is a is a it's something to take serious issue with as as a blatant claim it's not differentiated enough or sophisticated enough and he also said it with logos centric and that partly means logic but there's a deeper meaning to logos because logos is also the second person of the Chris Trinity and Derrida knew that perfectly well and so his criticism Derrida was a smart man make no mistake about it and loss of the things he said were correct like one of the propositions he laid forth was that there is a near infinite number of ways of interpreting any situation or any text which happens to be technically true and that's being discovered in all sorts of fields including artificial intelligence so the central claim that he begins with is actually true and it's not surprising that it it had such a powerful effect in the humanities because it's actually an extraordinarily powerful and and undermining idea but he but but he took it much far he took that idea in directions that I don't think it should have gone in at all but the logo centric idea is that his criticism of the idea of the logo centric society is a deep criticism of the idea that the individual as a speaking force as a communicative force is the appropriate highest value upon which a culture should be built he took that apart and criticized it and and so that's that's a deeper criticism I would say even than Marxist criticism which was mostly about unequal power relationships Derrida went deeper than that and that the post modernists that occupy the universities are anti individual right down to the right down to the bedrock and so that's partly why they push collectivism to such a degree they don't give a damn who you are they care what your group identity is and that's that okay so here's the claim and there's actually people who do this professionally by the way they analyze businesses and other organizations by these strategies and these are often these people they call themselves diversity consultants for example okay so here's the claim imagine that you take a hierarchy of some sort like a law firm a big law firm then what you do is you analyze the hierarchical structure of the law firm then you break down the representation of the people in the law firm by their identity categories so how many men how many women how many transsexuals but then you don't stop there a-and this is actually part of the technical problem with the approach you divide them by race you divide them by ethnicity you divide them by sexual identity okay so imagine there we've got six categories already six or seven categories now of course obviously race is further divisible as is ethnicity as our such things as attractiveness right so there's there's all sorts of ways of dividing people into groups axiomatically and there's no self-evident way of determining which of those group divisions should be superordinate and that's partly how the leftist the radical leftist can keep gerrymandering the game because they can just keep playing games with the group category categories in any case you take the organization you take the bottom hierarchy and you say the bottom rung and you say okay well is it 50% men and 50% women and if the answer to that is no then you make the claim that the reason for that is because of systemic oppression and prejudice oppression prejudice bigotry and usually misogyny then you make the case that the people who are organizing the organization are bigoted and misogynist even if it's not consciously unconsciously so that's the unconscious bias aspect then you put forward a plan that can include quotas and increasingly will be to ensure that that hierarchical level is now equal in proportional representation to the population itself now of course conveniently you also get to determine which population you're going to compare it to because that's one of the ways that you get to keep the power when you're doing this you get to decide which groups people are going to be identified with even though there's a near infinite way number of ways people could be divided into groups and you get to decide which population you're going to compare it to so you can keep everybody unstable and off off kilter permanently with that sort of approach well then you so then you you go into the organization and you you make anti unconscious bias training for which there is zero scientific forth for the utility of which there is zero evidence for the utility of that intervention from a scientific perspective in fact some of the scientific evidence suggest that if you make unconscious bias training mandatory you make prejudice worse and maybe that's because people don't like to be called bigots and misogynists and to be put through retraining in a mandatory way okay so then you do that you do that an analysis at each rung of the organization now you might say why do you do that well the putative reason is equity now equity and equality of opportunity are not the same thing if you hear someone author the word equity either they don't know what they're talking about and they're ignorant beyond their they're ignorant in a manner that makes it inappropriate for them to engage in a conversation about it or they are the enemy of any they are the enemy of anyone who holds the tenants of individuality dear because equity means equality of outcome and so the real postmodern radicals are using community to mean equity and equity to mean equality of outcome and so then they get to divide up the groups into whatever groups they feel are the groups that should be people should be divided into now and then they get to go make their claims of oppression and misogyny and bigotry and all of that and one of the huge advantages that accrues to them in doing that and since it's all about power is power and that's the game that's being played out and that's happening unbelievably quickly it's the equity issue is something that it's absolutely unbelievable to me how rapidly people have started to talk about equity and to actually think that that's a reasonable goal now the alternative is to let people sort themselves out more or less in a free-market manner allowing for the possibility that there are genuine differences between people in intelligence temperament and interest and for which and the notion that those things differ and that a tremendous amount of that difference is a consequence of biological underlying and underlying biological reality is overwhelming and the humanities types the postmodern eyes types they know they lost the scientific battle over this the whole idea that people are a blank slate and then everyone's equal at birth and then everything that makes people differ is a consequence of socialization that bloody ideas being dead among anybody who's reasonably educated as a scientist that's been dead since I would say mid 60's dead it's not no one even talks about it but among these postmodernist types man they don't give a damn for fact that in fact facts for them are merely whatever the current power hierarchy uses to justify their acquisition of power the people who are animated by the postmodern ethos are not generally in and of themselves thoroughly possessed postmodern Philosopher's first of all they don't know enough about post-modernism or its underlying Marxism to to make that claim imagine that the philosophy has an impetus it has a it has a core tendency to move in a given direction as a body of ideas a coherent body of ideas and then imagine that it's represented in fragments among people who find its tenets palatable so most student radicals for example are not a hundred percent committed post modernists they're probably like ten percent committed post modernists when they're not being foolish with their mob they're out being normal people but you get a mob together that's animated by that postmodern ethos then the collective spirit that animates the mob has that power seeking proclivity and that antipathy towards Western ideals that we've been discussing I think it's what makes that different let's say from from what was happening in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Russian Revolution is that there was a organized group of conspirators Lenin at the head whose goal was to overthrow the monarchy and to seize power and that isn't what's happening here there isn't an organized group of people who are getting together and saying well you're going to lead the assault on Western civilization and we're going to produce a new government out of the runes it's nothing that explicit and articulate it but the end result is much the same and and it's happening well I think it's already demolished the universities so I think I think actually irreparably I think whatever the universities are going to be in 15 years especially on the humanities end will bear almost no resemblance to what the universities are now right that what the purpose of those so-called disciplines is to produce radical postmodern activists who will reshape the political and economic structure in fact that's part of the coursework it's like that's what they do the discipline isn't based on the acquisition of abstract knowledge they're activist disciplines and you know I use women's studies as as the core example because I think it's most obvious with women's studies although all the ethnic gender studies pseudo disciplines that have emerged in the universities over the last thirty years are all bastard children of exactly the same enterprise but even more appalling Lee that ethos has moved out into disciplines that at one point had some genuine value anthropology that's a good one sociology social work education education is done the faculties of Education are so corrupt that it's almost unimaginable they might even be worse than as a as a as a societal segment they might even be worse than the Women's Studies groups because they're they've seized the educational systems I mean I've just been reviewing the Ontario Teachers Federation ETF oh I think it is EFT Oh education Federation I'm sorry I can't remember the acronym does matter it's a document that's produced by the Maine Teachers organization in Ontario and I've just been starting to review their curriculum for children from kindergarten to grade eight it's pure social justice post-modernism Jesus they even teach kids to and here's how you interpret a book if you're a postmodernist like a fiction book you don't read the book and try to understand what utility might be extracted add out of it to guide you in your life that's the old system the new system is you read the book and you analyze it in terms of whose societal position of power it justifies so you look for who the supremacists is in the text could be it could be the author it could be the characters it doesn't matter you read the text as if all it does is reflect on the current corrupt power structure that obtains in current society and that's that's that's the beginnings of literary criticism under the social justice regime and none of this is subtle these people have gone way beyond subtle you know we have social justice tribunals in Ontario there are named that and the the educators in Ontario the teachers have already decided that the goal of the education system is to indoctrinate children from kindergarten from kindergarten into a radical postmodern leftist communitarian equity oriented ethos that's what they're doing they're even subsuming the teaching of mathematics and science under that umbrella and none of this is subtle man you just go online and download the documents and read them and if you read them critically and carefully well you did since I've been really looking into this which would be since last September really starting to look at it from a legislative and policy level I mean the first thing I came across was the ontario human Commission Ontario Human Rights Commission website which is an absolute travesty those people are so dangerous it's almost you almost can't believe it that's a that the Ontario Human Rights Commission it should be abolished it's a very subversive and dangerous organization as are the human rights tribunals those things are dangerous the Ontario Institute for the studies of education that bloody thing is a fifth column the people who the people who are who are producing the educators that emerge from that Institute they should be put on trial for treason like it's serious stuff and the idea that the purpose of education is to it's to get them well they're young you know in kindergarten so that this radical postmodern Marxist ideology can be so thoroughly inculcate among people when they're young that they have no chance of escaping from it and that's what's happening in the education systems it's unbelievable you know every day I come across new policy statements of this sort that that make my jaw drop it's like as Canadians were so accustomed to our political system working that we don't pay any attention to it and so when you when you ring the bell and say hey there's a problem people think no there's not this is Canada for Christ's sake there's no problems here you must be insane right and that's the right thing for them to think of course when I started talking about Bill c16 back in October the first wave of public response was something like this professor is ah like a demagogue who's what exaggerating the danger because of his own problems and for whatever what reputation might accrue to him and the funny thing about that criticism is that was the right criticism right because when someone stands up in a country that functions and says hey guys there's something really rotten going on here the first thing you should do is assume that that person has gone off the rails but the problem is that I haven't gone off the rails that's the problem the problem is the problems that I'm pointing to they're real like a look I talked over the last two weeks three weeks to prod to I would say you know if you imagine Canada's top 20 journalists mostly in print I talked to ten of them they're all terrified of speaking out about such things say as cultural appropriation these are the manger in Canada they're already censoring themselves with regards to what they'll print and if they don't censor themselves their editors will and these aren't like these aren't low-level people these are people who have massive reputations and you'd think that that would be sufficient you'd think to protect them from being mobbed but they're they're terrified well the tolerance issue is interesting because what tolerance means is I'm stupid and flawed and so are you so I'll make you deal you don't harass me too much about my stupidity and flaws and I'll try to leave you the hell alone too and that's a pretty good deal for everybody so that's that's the tolerance issue right it's we're all flawed and if we demand too much of one another in terms of perfection and unique unity of belief or even unity of thought or even coherence of thought then we're going to end up permanently at each other's throats so we should just try not to make unnecessary enemies that's tolerance and it's it's a good it's a good principle the diversity issue the taller and taller antennas that's not tolerance that's refusal to take responsibility for mature discrimination and discrimination is also become a dirty word it's like there's no difference between discrimination and thinking they're the same thing now you might say well what about unfair discrimination it's like well that's a whole different issue it's like if you have person a and person B and they're both equally qualified for a job there's something wrong if you let something other than their qualifications determine whether or not they should get the job I mean there's no one debates that seriously anymore you know so if somebody doesn't get a job because of their race everybody says well you know the hell's wrong with you you're not taking advantage of the person's talent you're you're doing society a disservice and you're hurting individuals unnecessarily you shouldn't do that it's like okay fine we all agreed about that back in like 1965 that's covered so but the idea that anything goes with regards to tolerance and lack of discrimination that's an entirely different thing that does not mean that all people are the same or that all abilities are the same or that everything is of equal value and so there's there's a big difference between tolerance and nihilism and so lots of people say tolerance when they mean well anything goes I can do whatever I want I don't have to be responsible for anything I don't have to think and there's no difference between people no matter how they act it's like sorry that's not a philosophy man that's a recipe for chaos and disaster and then the diversity thing it's like oh I see we need more black people on our board because all black people think the same way that's how we're going to play this is it we're not going to be able to think so so it's such a pernicious philosophy because it's predicated on the idea that the way someone thinks is inextricably tied with their group identity well that's what the bloody racists used to think you know well no we're not going to invite let's say Iranians into our culture because all those Iranians think the same way well I thought that was what racism was and so the idea that unless you have your bloody board of governors say or you're the middle strata of your organization arranged so that every single group has equitable representation you don't get a diverse range of opinions it's so first of all that's just technically wrong because it isn't racial and ethnic and gender diversity that gives you diverse opinions that's just an idiotic that's just a I don't know how you could be I can't understand how you could be so uninformed historically and technically that that argument would make sense to you but apart from that it's clearly see the bloody post modernists they're they're always criticizing what they call bio biological essentialism so if I say well look you know on average women have a different set of interests on than men which they do by the way and that's not socio-cultural they say well that's biological essentialism that's wrong but then when it comes to race they're perfectly willing to say oh well you have to have an equitable representation of all the different races because otherwise you won't get the proper diversity of opinions it's like whoa hold on a sec is race a biological construct and this and you don't get the bloody diverse opinions without them emerging from this underlying biological construct how is that not biological essentialism and it's biological essentialism of the worst type it's having said all that I would also caution people against making the assumption that what the radical post modernists say they're after has anything to do with what they're actually after because they're not after equity they're not after tolerance they're not anybody's friend not at all they're power they're after power and that's it and they use all this compassion language which is like you scratch you just have to scratch the surface of that you find out how fast that vanishes they use all this compassion language and I'm on the side of the oppressed all of that posturing it does nothing but mask the underlying drive to power and it nuts in keeping with their own damn philosophy because for the post modernists there is nothing but power but there's an idea that emerged in the West and the idea is that the state is regulated by the ethic of the individual and so that the individual has intrinsic value and that value is predicated on the recognition of the individuals capacity to generate order out of chaos and that's the identity with God that was was implanted so to speak in human beings at the beginning of time according to our founding let's call the mythologies there's something about that that's that's right now if we lose that we're going to suffer for it man we're going to suffer for it and I like I've studied totalitarianism for a long time I know what happens when things take a viciously communitarian twist it is not pretty and you know people think our society is more even the radical leftists who criticize it think that our society is more bust and in impervious to subversion and danger than it actually is it's actually not it's actually we could lose it a hell of a lot more easily than we think and it's got all sorts of flaws and like criticized away but with a bit of gratitude that would be nice it's got all sorts of flaws but we don't have anything better to put in its place and when we've tried we tried a couple of different variations in the 20th century man and that did not go very well now if people want to bring that back it's either because they don't know what happened and they probably don't because generally speaking people are people's historical education is so dreadfully inadequate that it's actually it's like a crime or they don't care and what they're aiming for is trouble and neither of those things are good so you know I've been watching this politically correct thing developed for three decades you know it's it's popped its head up here and there it happened really in the 1990s in the early 1990s but then it sort of faded away to some degree but right now man its back with a vengeance you know in Bill c16 in Canada that's going to pass and that is the first piece of legislation ever put in place in Canada that compels speech and the justice minister curses on her head the Justice Minister is refusing to and and her coterie of minions are refusing to implement on a perfectly reasonable amendment that was proposed by by senator Don Platt to in to reword the Canadian Bill of Rights to ensure that Bill c16 doesn't interfere with free speech and they refused to do it why because equity trumps everything equality trumps everything it is and that's that's that's not good to put it simply that is not good and so so people need to wake up and see what's happening and they need to start watching what their children are being taught that that that the new policies of the of the Ontario Teachers Federation as I said I've got the acronym wrong those would be scrapped I would tell people do not send your children to public schools if you're going to send them to public schools you better bloody well keep an eye on what they're being taught and I would say that's that's particularly true for communities of relatively conservative immigrants and minorities you know I mean historically they've been aligned to say more with the Liberal Party in Canada because of its more tolerant attitude towards immigration it's like it's time for those relatively socially conservative ethnic immigration communities to wake up and realize that the people that they thought were their allies are not their allies at all so now we're going too far down this road it's not a good idea and it's happening a lot faster than people think so it's time for people to wake up Jesus you know I've talked to the Conservatives the leadership many of the people who ran for the leadership federally I talked to the provincial conservatives in Ontario the provincial conservatives were too afraid to have me come and talk to their caucus think about that if they think on to because you know their their theory if this is Patrick Brown strategy is if they just shut the hell up and hide the corner Kathleen Wynne will flame out and they'll win the election it's like well maybe and maybe not but that's no strategy of courage it's like the conservative types even the Liberals the classic liberals have to get out there and say look what's happening on the radical end of the political spectrum that is not good we need to do something about it but they're too afraid that the Conservatives are afraid that they will be targeted as individuals mobbed by the social justice warriors online and taken out and so they they don't say anything naughty it's not even the social conservatives who won't say anything it's like mainstream liberals who won't say anything well as soon as people so now the journalists are censoring themselves they've already told me that the politicians are censoring themselves it's like what the hell what's going on and it's and and what's really awful about it is it's a very small minority of people who are basically producing this movement forward probably more than about 5% of the population so and the other thing that's so interesting is if you push back against them hard they just fold I can't even get the social justice types to debate me they won't do it now they don't believe in debate so why would they debate they only believe in power but like when I went to Queen's University to talk to the law students there about Bill c16 from what I gathered all of the law professors were invited to debate me now think about it I'm not a bloody lawyer I know law professor I'm talking about legislation like a good lawyer should have been able to come out and just have twisted me into noughts and sent me home in a cast and they couldn't find a single bloody professor to come out there so Bruce party who's a professor had to come out and play devil's advocate so they're not there's no debate there there's no discussion so this small minority they're well situated they have a philosophically driven agenda there they're motivated personally by resentment and power but there aren't that many of them and they're bloody cowardly and if you face them down they'll run away so I would say we should face them down before they continue to wreak the kind of havoc that they're already wreaking on our society and we could certainly start with Kathleen Wynne and her coterie of of radical post modernists so she'd chase every single liberal every single provincial liberal should be taken out of the ontario legislation in the next election that would be a good outcome that would be a message it's like don't muck about with the structure of the family there's a start so yeah well but the thing is people are afraid so the Conservatives won't come out even the Conservatives won't even come out and be conservative so one of the things I've talked to them about I think I talked to five of the people who were involved in leadership convention was if you guys are afraid to be conservative you've already lost you're done like you're just playing out an empty game and they are that's the policy that pursuing Patrick Brown will come out and like what the hell Kathleen Wynne's she should be hanging on once one finger if that woman had an ounce of integrity she would have resigned when her popularity fell below 10% but she doesn't and no one will take her on with regards to that so it's not good I can tell you one thing that I've experienced if you're not happy with the kind of policies that your company is putting in place or the bureaucracy that you work in or your government or any of those things if you're not happy about it and you wait the probability that you'll become more unhappy is extraordinarily high if you come out and say something early on you're taking a risk but if you say something and you don't apologize and you and you hold your damn position you can chase the back that's been my experience you don't apologize you know and you don't soften what you have to say but as far as I can tell you've got a choice you can wait around until things get worse and you're weaker and you can wait till you're taken out or you can stand up now and say what you have to say with a reasonable chance of success that's how it looks to me a very small proportion of extremely radical people have managed to grip the the steering mechanisms of our of our of our large-scale social structures like we're we asleep and the answer is yeah that you you fall asleep and things are too good for too long so it's time to wake up man it's and it's time to notice that the Liberals that we're letting are not liberals they're not even they're not even socialists they're way the hell to the left of that and so how did that happen no one expected that oh yeah that wasn't real communism yeah we've seen a great example of that in Venezuela where they put everybody on the kind of weight-loss plan that's made the average citizen lose 20 pounds everyone's starving in Venezuela it's like hey look another example of what wasn't real communism so I know what that means I've thought about that for years what when someone says that wasn't real communism here's what it means I am so narcissistic and arrogant and so convinced of the rightness of my ideology and of my moral purity that if I was the dictator of a communist state the Utopia would have come in as promised that's what it means that wasn't real communism that's what that means so whenever when anyone ever says that you think oh boy I've got your number now I know what you think of yourself you think that had you been Stalin that there wouldn't have been so much blood it's like you think again besides if you would have been the positive Stalin let's say one of the- Stalin's would have come along and killed you real quick so don't be hypothesizing down that road too quickly that's what they were the useful idiots and then you know and Stalin killed all the old guard all of them looks like you guys you've done your part all you are now is annoying and threatening it's like we'll just line you up and shoot you you know Solzhenitsyn has done a perfectly fine job of documenting Lenin and Stalin essential similarity of character you know because people say oh well the role Lenin was on now it actually would have been a good one but it was perverted by Stalin it's like oh no Stalin was Lenin slightly more evil twin and Lenin trained him anyways because he'd set Stellan out to do all his dirty work and Stalin learned how to do that real well so there's no saying oh yeah well it was a good idea to begin with and Lenin was on the right track but then it was a cult of personality it's like no sorry guys that isn't going to wash

Channel: Ruminate

Views: 764,467

Rating: 4.7845049 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan B Peterson, Postmodernism, Cultural Marxism, Communism, ideology, Collectivism, Social Justice

Id: wLoG9zBvvLQ

Length: 43min 47sec (2627 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Hyperboreanisch]

If I'm getting the gist of this as an explanation of postmodernism's origins, here is a good shorter video by Stephen Hicks (since this one is so long). I'd recommend Explaining Postmodernism by him.

[u/makawan]

He's actually very careful not to use the term "Cultural Marxism"

...also, identity politics wasn't invented by "...the french post modernists" - it was invented by a lady named Barbara Smith who is from Boston.