The Downfall of the Ivy League | Victor Davis Hanson | EP 325

[Music] I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump started the development of literacy across the entire world illiteracy was the norm the pastor's home was the first school and every morning it would begin with singing the Christian faith is a singing religion probably 80 percent of Scripps memorization today exists only because of what is sung this is amazing here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the Press of Johan Gutenberg science and religion are opposing forces in the world but historically that has not been the case now the book is available to everyone from Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to to civilization itself it is the most influential book in all history and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that if you're looking to facilitate people's ability to make positive changes in their own life there is nothing you can do that's more helpful to that than to make them literate and if you want to help them understand who they are in the deepest sense over and above the superficial attractions of tribalism let's say you have to educate them deeply in this historical uh uh realm that requires the acquisition of explicit knowledge about the central nature of the human being and so that was the proper role of the universities for years it was as I Envision it our role was twofold that we were going to teach a math of the inductive method as opposed to the deductive method so that people when they looked at The Human Experience via art or literature or history they would look at Exempla and then they would come to a general overriding conclusion that took it took the evidence rather than say I have an idea and I'm going to cherry pick the evidence that was one thing we taught the socratic inductive medicine the other was we had to give them some kind of Arsenal or or realm of knowledge or reference points so that was some of some of the things that are more pragmatic since the humanities were able to do they were able to give a person a whole reference of knowledge so that they didn't have to live out and learn something by wrote or by they had an example [Music] hello everyone I have a guest today that I've wanted to talk to for a long time Dr Victor Davis Hansen he is the Martin and Illy Anderson senior fellow at the Hoover Institution with his focus in the classics and military history he's an accomplished academic professor and author he's taught at Stanford Hillsdale College the U.S Naval Academy at Pepperdine University his books many of them 26 I believe include the second world wars the end of Sparta the soul of battle Carnage and culture and a case for Trump in 2019 but I think we'll start today with a discussion about citizenship I'll just make a couple of comments you know one of the things I've noticed over the last I suppose the span of my life really is that during my lifetime the word citizenship seem or citizen seem to be replaced by the word consumer which I always thought was a bad replacement given that citizen has this you know it's got a stalwart and traditional and and dignified connotation that the word consumer seems to lack entirely well you wrote a whole book about citizenship recently and so I thought we might weave our way through that and you contrast citizens with pre-citizens the book by the way is called the dying citizen how Progressive Elites tribalism and globalism are destroying the idea of America and you start that book off well first of all decrying that that destruction but also contrasting the modern idea of citizenship of Citizen with the pre-modern idea of say uh peasant or or resident or tribe and so let's delve into that a little bit yeah I mean the idea of citizenship's pretty recent in the long history of civilization it appeared somewhere around 700 BC in rural Greece and swept pretty quickly but and so by the fifth century there were 1500 city-states and what it was was the first time that citizens were self-governing and that meant that they were they were pretty clearly defined they made up their own militias they adjudicated the circumstances under which they would go to war they voted for their own officials they and more importantly they had property rights they could pass on property I think that was a catalyst for citizenship the right of inheritance that the estate couldn't expropriate or own property from the individual and I and then that long Odyssey uh brought us to of course the founding of the United States and there were clear distinctions between a resident that happened to live in the United States in a citizen a citizen alone could vote a citizen alone could hold office a citizen alone could leave uh the boundaries and come back into the United States on his own volition a citizen alone was eligible for uh Federal services or in Most states and the citizen served in the military I don't think any of those still apply those distinctions between a resident and a citizen with the exception of holding office and that's under assault I know here in California people who are not just not non-citizens but here illegally can vote say in a Berkeley School Board election and now there's efforts to make sure that people can run for office who are not citizen sit non-citizens serve in the military non-citizens actually can go across the border with greater facility than you or I could probably and so we are a nation we've never had this before of 50 million people in the United States that were born in a foreign country of different statuses some were legal residents some are illegal residents some are citizens some common are migrants back and forth and that's the highest in actual numbers and in percentages of the population and unfortunately it comes into time when we the hosts have lost confidence in the traditional Melting Pot of assimilation integration in her marriage and so we're starting to revert to a pre-civilizational tribalism I think large swaths of the United States are tribal now okay so let's let's let's start approaching that anthropologically and psychologically so 600 BC something like that you seem to get something like a transformation of the idea of the tribe which actually wouldn't have been an idea right A Tribe isn't an idea a tribe is a natural offshoot of our primate Heritage that's a good way of thinking about it and a tribe would have been something like an extended kin group and there was that was bound together by our our our primate social biology somewhat akin to a chimpanzee troop or maybe a bonobo troop and then as we became more capable of abstract formal form formalization that idea of or that reality of tribal membership got transmuted into something that actually had stable properties and that would be the idea of a citizen and so you get a layer of abstraction on top of that that starts to lay out technically and explicitly what it means to be the member of a group and then along with that you get a set of Rights and responsibilities that are associated with that group but also the possibility of expanded both expanded and limited membership that's also formalized and so as as the Greeks did with so many things they took something that was part and parcel of our biological proclivity so that proclivity for kinship and tribalism and turn it into an explicit philosophical notion and out of that I suppose develop both the idea of intrinsic human rights and human responsibilities and that was all tied up in the notion of citizenship and even now when you hear people talk about citizenship they concentrate a lot more about the rights on the right than on the responsibilities they do the big breakthrough was that person replaced their primary allegiance to either someone that had Blood Ties or looked like them or the same Locale and they transferred that to an abstraction of the state and what that meant was for the first time there was a an embryonic sense of meritocracy you know and you can really see it today I I've traveled almost I think to every Middle East Country except Iran and I'm always curious when I was in Libya or Egypt or Tunisia why they don't work even given some countries have enormous natural resources and I always would hear a refrain well you know we we hire our first cousin or we hire our second cousin that there that there is still a tribal loyalty and what's tragic about the United States is that meritocracy and that multiracial what became a multi-racial multi-religious uh body politic was United by a primary allegiance to the idea of America where people you know where they enriched America with their food or their fashion or their art other music and that made American culturally rich but they didn't in Port Mexican ideas of constitutional government such as they were or they didn't bring in Russian ideas of individual liberty they they didn't touch the core and that core United us and now we can see that that's no longer true that people are re-tribalizing and they're starting to identify with either their Ken group or their ethnic group or their religious group and uh what's scary now in the United States is that we've seen when you have a geographical Force multiplier and we're starting to see that with red blue migration it's it's sort of analogous to what happened in 18 the 1850s where there was a Mason-Dixon line so to speak of a very different culture that bifurcated from the north and if this continues I think we're going to see a a sort of a traditionalist America that claims that it follows the founding principles in red states of limited government less regulation small Taxation and the idea of a citizen giving up their primary allegiance to the state versus the Blue State model California Illinois New York in which a a number of identity politics groups or special interest groups all Lobby for influence and you can see what happens in the LA City Council hot mic scene where all of these Latino Council people got caught on a hot mic where they were explicitly defining the new idea of a citizen and that was that their primary identity group was at war with people from Oaxaca it was at war with blacks it was at war with gays and they were angry because of their representation was not demographically proportional to their numbers in the population so they said and I think that was a future for the country and it's what's going on in California in the present [Music] the current administration's New Year's goals are to tax spend and turn a blind eye to inflation if this is at odds with your goals if you are tired of the government playing games with your savings and your retirement plans then you need to get in touch with the experts at Birch gold today for over 5 000 years gold has withstood inflation geopolitical turmoil and stock market crashes with help from the experts at Birch gold you can own gold and attack sheltered retirement account Birch gold makes it easy to convert an IRA or 401K into an IRA in Precious Metals just text Jordan to 989898 to claim your free info kit on gold and then talk to one of their precious metals Specialists Birch gold will hold your hand through the entire process text Jordan to 989898 and protect yourself with gold today with an A plus rating with the Better Business Bureau thousands of happy customers and countless 5 Star reviews you can trust Birch gold to help protect your savings text Jordan to 989898 today [Music] yeah so you worry about uh what what you might describe as a reversion to this more implicit tribalism that's predicated on well it would be predicated on religious Identity or skin color or linguistic Identity or perhaps shared philosophical identity although that would be rarer and that that's the counterposition to this more abstractive notion of citizenship so let's delve into that for a minute because I think we could lay forth the proposition that unless there's a higher order principle that unites people either psychologically or socially then they're disunited and if they're disunited they're anxious and confused and aimless and conflict-bladen like the natural state of human beings in the absence of a unifying principle isn't peace it's war and so then we might ask is there a unifying Transcendent principle that's valid that isn't just another narrative you know because the postmodern critique is that all unifying narratives are what would you call it expressions of arbitrary power and dominate nation and I don't really think that's true I don't think that's true of Western societies and the reason I think that's technically untrue is because there's an idea in Western society that I think is fundamentally what's logo spaced it's partly Greek and it's partly judeo-christian that the individual is the proper level of analysis in some real sense and that the individual has intrinsic worth and dignity but more but there's more to it than that is that it's necessary for the um for that intrinsic dignity and worth of the individual to be recognized and set apart by law in some sense honored by law because the individual has something to offer to the group and that's the uniqueness of their being let's say and that if you allow people to be free or encourage their freedom then they can trade that uniqueness with everyone else and freely and that in that trade is to be found both peace and let's say like and abundance and I think that principle isn't merely another narrative I think that is the predicate both of peace and of of economic well-being and so but conservatives and okay okay dude I I think you comment on all that or another way of putting it is the United States was based on an idea of a quality of opportunity that because we're not born equal or we have different life experiences or we inherit or don't inherit or we're healthy or we're long-lived or not we don't try to even that out in terms of economic recompense we just let people follow their own trajectories and then we have other methods to appeal to their magnaminity so the philanthropic the religious uh the humanism we have all these ways that if people do better than other people we allow them to be creative and to try to bring back give back to the society or at least use their talents even if it's profit-minded to build a better Bridge or a dam rather than the alternate which is the strain in western civilization it starts actually the Socialist impulse starts with the Greeks there is a strain of that with the pythagoreans but the other idea and that's what we're I think fighting now is the woke equality of result that we're going to appoint some platonic Guardians and give them Untold power and then their Infinite Wisdom they're going to do two things they're going to force people to be equal what they call Equity and they're never going to be subject to the consequences of their own ideology because they they need special exemptions given their enormous responsibilities and their talent and so what we see now is this by Coastal Elite in the United States is starting to mandate behaviors and principles and issues and policies that they themselves would never follow and would have no intention of following and it's based on that every single person has an innate right to be the same as another person or was that Aristotle said once a man in democracy and he feared this feels that he's equal in voting with another man then he feels by extension he should be equal in all other aspects of his life and that was what that was the philosophical worry about democracy that it was so it always evolved to a more radical form of equality I think we're now at the end stage where almost everybody feels they have a grievance against the state and therefore they're they're entitled to compensatory or Repertory money or or land uh here in California when we were discussing reparations suddenly people were bidding in in the Oakland City Council and suggesting that they were owed eight hundred thousand dollars uh and they had a grievance apparently even though they were six Generations Away From Slavery and maybe four from uh they were in the fourth generation of the Civil Rights Movement they had grievances against people who had never had slaves in California had for example had never been a slave state but it was that mentality um and you know a lot of people warned us about this tocqueville said the problem that we would face in the United States is that most people innately would rather be poorer and equal than all better off but some more better off than others and he felt that if that well that's that was that would be a very dangerous uh development I think we're pretty much there now yeah well that's I suppose to some degree why there's an injunction against covetness covetousness in the uh in the Ten Commandments you know that you're not supposed to covet or envy your your neighbor's donkey or his wife or his house and yeah I mean part of the reason for that is that if no one can have anything more than anyone else then no one can have anything at all and that's generally been the state of humanity for the longest reaches of human history it it looks very much like if we're going to allow a rising tide to raise all boats we have to allow some people to rise faster than others in multiple dimensions and so and I don't see any way out of that and certainly not the case that these hypothetically egalitarian systems of governance like communism ever produced anything that had less of a Pareto distribution or an unequal distribution than capitalist societies I mean everyone was much poorer but the rich were still much richer than everyone else and there's also something in there you talked about identity and I've watch this happen on the um what would you call it inevitable consequences of pathological uh thought front so the the leftists who are pushing for equality of outcome insisted that if there were differences in socioeconomic outcome that you could identify by group then that was a prior evidence of systemic oppression let's say but they fell astray of a certain peculiarity with regards to group identity which is that group identity is actually infinitely fragmentable and so out of the initial identity political theorists you got the intersectionalists who made the case that while you were oppressed let's say if you were Latino and you were oppressed if you were female but the joint interaction between Latino and female made you even more specially oppressed and then you could add gay to that or whatever other and so and what you see happening on multiple fronts in consequence is that the Litany of potential ethnic groups increases the number of them and then the number of interactions increases and that increases exponentially as you add more identity categories and what that essentially means is that the problem of computing Equity starts to become technically impossible because every single person's identity is so complex on the intersectional front that there isn't even a hypothetical way of deciding whether any given socioeconomic outcome is Equitable and so when I walked through that I thought well Western culture to actually solved that problem several thousand years ago by pointing out that the appropriate level of analysis is the individual because the individual has a unique identity that is in some sense a consequence of older multiplicitous group identities but singularly what would you say singularly representative of each individual and so then you let individuals compete and cooperate in a fair market and that's the best possible way of moving towards the right balance between equity and wealth that's what it looks like I think that's that's right and you can see that where this leads to it it's logical that you would end up with a ward Churchill or Elizabeth Warren that by needs would fabricate a victimized identity she was the first quote-unquote a Native American professor of law at Harvard on that basis alone and then on the other realm when you start to replace class interest or economic status with race then the left really hit on something I think it was it was really Barack Obama in between 2009 and 2016. he took a rather ossified word diversity and he recalibrated to mean we're not going to look for victims on the basis of their income anymore because that's mutable in fact Marxism never worked in the United States because this free market capitalism and a lot of free land in the 19th century was always a movement of upward mobility and therefore you would never have a continually oppressed class in fact today people go up and down out of out and in of the middle and the upper middle classes so what I think Obama did was he redefined race in America is not a binary between 88 percent white and 12 percent black but he came up with this word diversity that replaced class differentiation or class oppressions or class Grievances and he said it's 30 percent of the population is we're going to call them non-white and therefore they're diverse and then where we ended up it was this ridiculous situation where to take a caricature you have Meghan Markle The Duchess who was half black lamenting to Oprah Winfrey who is a multi-billionaire about their shared grievances as being non-whites or Lebron James complaining and so that was a very brilliant thing the left did because once they made race the Arbiter of Oppression and being the oppressed and the victimized then class didn't matter anymore and now we have this Elite who says that they're not white in a particular percentage and all of a sudden we don't really care about the circumstances of their home their car their wealth their income it doesn't matter anymore they're going to be Perpetual victims on the basis that they are diverse and the left really massaged that in such a way that I don't think anybody quite knew what was going on until they sprung it on us well there's a real there's a real attraction to a kind of deep narcissism there and I I think I first encountered that probably at Ivy League schools in the U.S so I'm a Canadian and not that familiar with the more differentiated class structure in the U.S and so when I went down to teach at Harvard it was an anthropological adventure for me as well as a let's call it a a research-oriented adventure and an intellectual adventure and uh I didn't understand as much as I do now how what dynamic the Ivy League schools played in the U.S in terms of of ensuring upward mobility and I knew at Harvard I believe it was when I was there in the 90s the estimate was that 40 percent of Harvard undergraduates would be billionaires by the age of 40 and that was you know that was 30 years ago and so that was quite a substantial amount of money then and the whole point is is that if you got into an Ivy League school as soon as you got in you were basically a member of the one percent now you might have been a junior member but you were definitely a member and I thought that was perfectly fine because in some sense because the Ivy Leagues did a damn fine job of merit-based uh selection now it wasn't perfect there were Legacy students for example and you know there was a bit of play in the system there but fundamentally Harvard and the other Ivy Leagues had transformed themselves into from old boys clubs in the 1960s into highly Elite intellectual institutions by the 1990s but then what I saw too and this was so interesting was that being junior members of the one percent with you know almost certain Hallmark of long-term success as a consequence of Ivy League admission wasn't enough for many students and their idiot professors they had to have the label of oppressed uh working for them too so you had these this strange spectacle as far as I was concerned of these unbelievably fortunate ivy league students who were offered an opportunity that well is it really unparalleled in human history not only benefiting as a consequence of being the beneficiaries of this amazing system but simultaneously claiming the status of the poor and oppressed and claiming at the same time to be avatars and representatives of that oppressed group and I thought Jesus you guys like being rich and Powerful in junior form isn't enough for you you have to have all the virtues of the Rich and all the Privileges and opportunities and you have to have all the virtues of the poor and oppressed at the same time it's like that just seems to me to be a bit much and you see that reflected in the people that you're describing who have these this unbelievable wealth and opportunity and who yet put themselves forward as you know canonical victims of an oppressive system I I think we're going to see in our lifetime though the end of the ivy league Stanford Berkeley cattle brand as a mark of entree into the the one percent and by that we're no longer into purport when we had proportional representation in Admissions and hiring that was sort of the the modus operandi until George Floyd So 12 of the student bodies were African-American even if they had on an average 200 points less than Asian students on the s.a.t or we had about 65 percent white Asians were of course treated like Jews in the 1930s they were discriminated against so their numbers would only be about 20 percent or otherwise they would have been 40 and Latinos are about 12 but after George Floyd we went into a radical compensatory or Repertory admission so Stanford where I worked just announced their new class profile it's 23 percent White and out of that 55 54 are women so and you you have about 12 percent white males and the the SAT to accommodate that became optional rather than mandatory but here was what was interesting about some of the statistics they would not allow anybody to have information about how many students that were admitted this year actually took the optional sat they wouldn't release that but they did for some reason release the fact I think they were proud of it that of those very rare students I think it's 0.1 or something who get a perfect score which is almost impossible to do on the SAT in math and in the analysis and of course in English and composition they rejected 70 percent of them 70 wow and so what we're what we're seeing you can see it in free fall because what's happening when you bring a lot of students that were not competitive through K-12 and almost instantly and arbitrarily you declare that they are ivy league students then they go into these classes and then the professors are in this dilemma because they either have to do one of two things one of three things they either have to change radically the curriculum to facilitate people that were not properly prepared and they're doing that some or they're going to have to radically change the grading system uh so that a person who gets would have gotten a d or C gets a b or a and they're doing that in some cases or a few feel that they are going to die on the altar of standards and they're starting to grade according to what people actually earn but when we have 15 000 administrators or administrative staff and sixteen thousand students you can see that we've got kind of a commissar system and many of these are these new diversity Equity inclusions ours and so then if a faculty member does cling to standards cling I guess is a good word then he has a systemic racist pedigree because he's deliberately giving grades lower in this narrative to people of color and the result how it all works out I think in the end is that Silicon Valley and all these people privately when you talk to them they're they're either preferring say a coder from Georgia Tech than from Stanford or themselves they're actually giving tests to people stealthily so if you want to go to work at Google or you want to go at a startup and you come with the Stanford bachelor's degree that no longer is entree anymore because they know that the degree is not competitive with Cal State San Luis Obispo or much left Hillsdale College and so what they're doing is they're they're offering tests themselves or I should say requiring it and so I think in a very brief Yale let in 50 percent of its student body was white I think it was 55 percent females so about 25 percent was white male of that campus and so they've deliberately taken a whole demographic and when you I think you wisely pointed out legacies and athletes so out of that small reduced demographic or many or if not the majority of legacies so what we've done now in the space of three years is pretty much disenfranchised the white working class male who had a chance to go to these Blue Chip universities on the basis of merocratic s.a.t scores or gpas and they're they're no longer on campus anymore they've disappeared in the space of there's no room for them given the demands on this identity profile so so we could def let's let's let's talk technically for a minute um so that everybody can understand what these selection criteria actually means so you could Define a meritocratic selection process technically you could say imagine you have an outcome so you need an outcome first which might be job performance or net lifetime productivity something like that and you can very much argue about what the outcome variable should be but it's generally associated with something like economic productivity and having made that measure that might be income uh might be a number of people you employ in your lifetime might be number of businesses that you generate might be number of creative Enterprises that you engage in there's a variety of different measures of say lifetime productive and creative output and then you could say that you use a meritocratic selection process if you lose a statistical procedure that has been linked to that outcome measure and so you might say for example are there things we can measure that predict lifetime creative or productive capacity and the answer is well yes we actually know what they are so one of them is General cognitive ability which is often assessed with IQ tests or SATs or mcouts or Gres standardized tests and the other is personality with a with a a secondary uh what would you say contributor of interest and so people who are productive have high General cognitive ability which can be assessed quite rapidly they tend to be conscientious which is a personality trait and that makes them good managers and administrators or they tend to be high in openness and that makes them creative entrepreneurs and it also helps to some degree to be somewhat free of negative emotion and those are basically the category of predictors on the interest front you have interest in people versus interest in things and the interesting things types tend to be more frequently male and they tend to pursue the science technology engineering and Mathematics streams and so we actually know how to select people on the basis of Merit we do General cognitive ability testing and personality and interest and you can you can provide a very uh economically valuable service to each individual and to the state at large by selecting according to those criteria because you then select people who can benefit most radically from being put with their peers and from education and the data on this are crystal clear now the alternative I've talked to people like Adrian Wooldridge about this and you touch on it as well in your book on citizenship you might say well what's the alternative to meritocracy and wooldridge's hypothesis was that in the absence of a technical meritocracy you reverted to Dynasty so it's aristocratic transmission of status or nepotism which you talked about already in relationship to kinship and so as soon as you abandoned the Merit principle you open up the grounds in all likelihood to all sorts of corrupt admission processes and so the universities are going to be wrestling without they already are a because one of the ways they discriminate against Asians which is everyone's loss right to not to not maximize our exploitation of the productive and competent Asians let's say the way they discriminate against them is by deeming certain stereotypical Asian personality traits as not appropriate on the personality front and so and they do that to gerrymander the admission criteria's all criteria on the basis of race and and I think they've even in the last two years of all would be on that the old plaint complaint against them was in this tryout of the emissions profile standardized test scores GPA and what they called community service or personality whatever we want to talk about it was amorphous so they would go after Asian students at that with that and they'd say Well they're robotic or yeah they have they're one-dimensional okay but now they've gotten rid of uh all standardized tests and they don't even make any for they don't need to do that anymore so basically they've upped the Asia they have the Asian admissions between 20 and 25 on the principle that they're about 12 percent of the population they won't sue if they're 20 to 25 and they can exclude them any way they want now because there is no sat and there's and what the next Horizon is as you saw at the the I think in Cornell right now there's a big movement to abolish grades and at the new school everybody in New York everybody wants to have an A an automatically at the new school and we're going to we're going to see that because what's happening on these Ivy Leagues very rapidly it's almost amazing at at kind of the speed of light that graduation and admission are now synonymous in other words once you're admitted and that was true to some extent in the past when the we're kind of reverting back to this what you mentioned the old boy gentleman C Ivy League of the 40s or 19th century and now we're saying if you get into Harvard or Yale or Stanford and you can't do the work you have a right to graduate doesn't matter and we will make the necessary adjustments you have to get something for your three hundred thousand dollars in tuition and so why not go so so you can think about it think about it this way you can think about it biologically like I tend to think that uh it's a funny metaphor but I tend to think of whale carcass and here's why so it takes a whale a long time to build up a whole whale body and then if it washes up on the beach there's plenty for everyone to eat for a while and so you see this happening in all sorts of big organizations is that they build a brand in the ivy League's definitely built a brand in the U.S and that brand has tremendous value for a long time because the ivy league admission standards were so high you can be virtually certain that If you hired a graduate they were going to be statistically likely to be top performers and that was all a consequence of the admissions the stringency of admissions policy very little a consequence of the quality of Education by the way it was almost all and all the Business Schools know this too they know perfectly well that a huge proportion of the value they offer prospective employers is a 99th percentile score on the MCAT at admission for their MBA students they bloody well know that I've talked to dozens of them and so for a long time because the IVs were so meritocratic they could justify what they were charging and they could justify their their astringent selection because there was an immense demand for their graduates especially on the financial Industries front right most of the kids that I taught at Harvard strangely enough went off to pursue careers in finance which I thought was kind of a shame you know because Harvard wasn't producing many scientists for example but whatever their cargo cognitive capacity and their work ethic were highly valued by potential employers well so now you have a pool there that's basically a brand right and it's value for the taking and so because the IVs have generated this uh reputation of high quality that can be exploited and what's happening right now is a huge invasion of parasitical exploiters and a huge portion of those are the administrators you said what there's 15 000 administrators at Stanford for sixteen thousand students yes that's hilarious that's hilarious there's no way that can last man so no I mean it's I mean it's very similar to the Russian army uh and it's disastrous year in 1940 latter part of 41 when we had they had so many commissars that were overseeing military operations that had no intrinsic worth other than to impede and supposedly uh make sure that everybody was a proper Marxist lineness that the German Army almost got to Moscow and then of course Stalin stopped it in extremists he said you know what we're going to start getting people like konyev and zhukov and go back to a merit system and what's and what's scats out about the university they're adopting a almost something like the commissar system where we have these intrusive and here in the in California almost every University uh has a diversity oath where a faculty member has to state explicitly what they have done and what they will do to encourage diversity Equity inclusion and every candidate has to make a statement about what they have done in the past and to show their commitment kind of like the loyal Leos as you remember in the United States in the 50s and what it's very this uh destruction of meritocracy is taking on all of the the aspects and the past that were failed so we have a comasar system that failed we had the Loyalty oath that was that was you know it was a war it was a antithetical to meritocracy and then by getting into these on the basis of race it's and then not having to be subject to merocratic Performance standards it's kind of like the British Army in the 19th century or late especially the late 18th century where you could buy a captain and see in fact right to be an officer you had to put up money and the I the irony was one of the reasons of the startling success of the Napoleonic system was that After the Revolution they did have a bureaucratic standard for officer Corps and the marshals of France for were not all aristocratic they were merit-based and the French army ran wild for 15 years on that basis until it was exhausted but the point I'm getting out is if if you thought you couldn't come up with a better system if you planned for years how to destroy this Ivy League brand than uh destroying standardized tests admitting people that could not take the test and perform at a level that would that would be easy I guess you would say admissible at almost anywhere else where else I taught at Cal State Fresno and and Cal State Fresno for 20 years I I taught their those standards at that time are that I was there were the admission standards are more rigorous than the ivy league now everybody had to take the s.a.t you don't have to do that anymore and we never had people we it was it was politically correct but we never had people looking over our shoulder we never had students that would report us for uh on toward language or on woke language or we never had a Dean call us up and said you're late on your your diversity statement and so yeah it is inviting a level of corruption that's the corruption of this system is just because we have these people who are writing these statements and I've seen them and I mean it's it's tragic it's tragic if not pathetic where they're saying and I and when I was eight years old I sat on a bus with people who weren't white or on or on the other hand I was 15 years old somebody called me a name and ever since I've been cognizant of the racist nature of America and nothing none of this has anything to do with being able to teach a classical language or build a bridge or design a coding system and it's it's going to have consequences if it hasn't already I think it already has we'll be back in one moment first we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new series Exodus so the Hebrews created history as we know it you don't get away with anything and so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the Tyrant and violate your conscience without cost you will pay the piper it's going to call you out of that slavery into Freedom even if that pulls you into the desert and we're going to see that there's something else going on here that is far more Cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine the highest [Music] Spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of Freedom against tyranny I want villains to get punished but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price that's such a Christian question well I know that in the ucal system that 75 of applicants for junior faculty positions have their applications rejected on the basis of inadequate Dei statements before their research dossiers are evaluated and so it's well here here I guess is the optimistic side so this tell me what you think about this so I'm starting I'm involved in two new University Enterprises one's at Ralston College in Savannah we're trying to build a Humanities research or Humanities Institute there and we had our first class this year and that went extremely well very very carefully selected students we had an applicant pool of a thousand so that we could choose 25 students and we we screened them in every possible Manner and had a bang-up class and so that's sort of a bricks and mortar institution and we'll see how that goes because that's complicated but I'm going to start an academy my daughter's working on this in November we've got about 30 professors on board now called the Peterson Academy and we hope to drive down the cost of a bachelor's degree we'll start with the humanities and the social sciences to four thousand dollars in total now it's hard to replicate the social element of University and that's a huge part of the university is the new peer group and the people you meet and all of that and the apprenticeship element it's hard to virtualize that but when I hear the sorts of things that you're talking about then what leaps to my mind in in some part is Market opportunity because the fact that students are now paying an insane amount of money hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to an Ivy League Institute that is simultaneously failing to educate them siphoning their future earnings into the pockets of greedy administrators and ever more of them and sabotaging their own brand simultaneously it just looks to me like that is not a sustainable model and you said you know that you believe that the the larger companies for example Google and and other companies that are actually concerned with performance still are going to stop regarding an Ivy League degree as a brand of capability and so that means it'll you know over a 10-year period or 15-year period they're going to Scuttle their own economic model maybe there's also I think there's opportunities for new education I think there is I agree I agree with you entirely there's 650 000 fewer students in America than last year and about two two million fewer than 10 years ago and I mean they say it's demographic but it's not demographic because the country increases by about 2 million people per year and what's happening is uh especially I think with the zoom uh phenomenon during the coveted lockdowns we're getting people like what you and I are doing or what your podcast or the Prager University that offers an alternative for auto die docs and people who want continuing education and then we're getting a big much greater emphasis on vocational education is yeah when the lockdown happened we weren't saved by sociology Majors that were you know take six units over eight years with you know sixty thousand dollars in student loans we needed skilled carpenters and plumbers and electricians and roofers and they pay and real dollars are making more than ever so we're getting a larger group of people who say I don't want to be encumbered by these student loans and I'm going to have a vocational and then as you say the third alternative are these these schools a college like Hillsdale traditionally had about a thousand students I think it's up to sixteen hundred and their dilemma right now as I understand it and I teach there a couple of weeks every year for the last 20 years is they are being flooded by applicants that have not gotten into Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Stanford and they require sat they had already sort of been in terms of academic rigor or admissions rigor comparable to Oberlin or Williams or Amherst but now they've got a real dilemma because they have this traditionalist I think quite deservedly so this idea that they teach the whole person so if you go to Hillsdale College you learn how to shoot and study the Second Amendment you and lift weights up you lift weights absolutely it's a it's a hundred percent 360 degree 24 7 citizenship idea but when you bring all of these people in that are now looking at a Hillsdale because it is merocratic and because it has high standards but many of them are are not in any way conservative and so what do you do if you're Hillsdale when you've I think they have I think they are interviewing them and you you mentioned that's why I thought it was fascinating that you're interviewing your applicants they're interviewing 95 of the people that are applying and they have to now they enforce quite rigorously at Hillsdale and you know we're also in discussion with Hillsdale with regard to potential accreditation for these online courses because I really like the Hillsdale model and you know here here's something to think about too on the on the technology front so you know I learned I spent a lot of time analyzing the relationship between psychological testing and and uh productivity and creativity across the lifespan and so I know a fair bit about that I suppose and one of the things I did learn was that part of the reason the universities have their degrees are valuable is because they they were very careful in terms of meritocratic admission and they also have a hammerlock on accreditation and so once you have an MBA obviously you're accredited as an MBA graduate from a given school and that means you had a certain peer Network and a certain level of intellectual proficiency even to get into the program a certain degree of conscientiousness to rigorously pursue the program and pass and pass it so the value in the universities in large part is is nested inside the accreditation now you could imagine and I don't think this is technically impossible you could imagine a system of blockchained accrediting tests that would be freely available to people you know I I would do this on a for-profit basis but so that if you wanted to claim Bachelor of Arts equivalents with regards to your knowledge of the humanities that you could take a set of objective tests that couldn't be mucked about with by administrators and gain your proxy by that manner so imagine this it's it's an Enterprise that I've envisioned and we're pursuing at the moment imagine I could gain a um uh produce a data set of ten thousand multiple choice questions say in American history you could do that by buying multiple choice tests from high school and University professors all across the country okay now we'd have to administer them to several thousand people and then we could analyze each question with regards to its accuracy as a predictor of general knowledge domain you can do that you can rank order them then imagine you have a program that can randomly pick equivalent level of difficulty questions from that whole set of ten thousand you could set up a system that could produce random tests so they couldn't exactly be faked or cheated easily and you could rank order people in terms of their knowledge domains with regards to those tests and you could blockchain it so it would be completely impenetrable to administrative interference and you could steal the accreditation away from the universities and I think that's that's I can't see any reason at all that that's not technically possible but that that's been raised before in the United States and that's the third rail as far as universities are concerned because I think they suspect that given the state of education today higher education that a person's enter entering SAT score may be static or actually go down after four years right and that the idea that everybody would take an SAT as an exit exam and it's it's quite logical because remember what they said about the sat in the 50s and 60s this was a merocratic device so that people of different backgrounds economically deprived or racially and they didn't go to competitive schools they wouldn't be punished so even though they got they got A's Harvard would say well you got A's from Fresno but it's not the same as Saint Paul's and then they answered back and said but we took the s.a.t test and this student did as well and but when you you get rid of all of that and you say okay you you introduced the s.a.t because you said that there were different levels of Prior education in high schools we want to reintroduce it on the back end because we feel that there's different levels of instruction quality at universities so just as you suspected high schools were upon even quality we now suspect that colleges I.E Stanford Harvard Yale are of uneven quality and we can't the ba would mean nothing just like you said the GPA was mean nothing unless it was coupled with its SAT score so to get a ba everybody has to take the test that you outlined whether you went to school or not and another thing you talked about accreditation if we could just give every student graduating in the United States the choice you can go through the school of education and that's really the Catalyst for wokeness because it it trains all of our K-12 Pub or yeah yeah but you have the alternative of going and get a master's degree for one year in an academic subject in chemistry biology English I think the vast majority of Bas would prefer to go get a master's degree in an academic subject and I think let's talk about that let's talk about that for a minute so and I've talked to Larry Arn about this who's the president of Hillsdale so um from what I understand at the moment about 50 percent of American state budgets are dedicated to education broadly speaking so that's an awful lot of money now interestingly enough and let's say pathologically enough the faculties of Education have a hammerlock on teacher accreditation and that strikes me as absolutely Preposterous it's it's it's a form of Monopoly that's that and there's no excuse whatsoever for it now I've watched faculties of education for 60 years and they are not a credible the faculties of Education are not credible academic institutions by and large they have been responsible for some of the worst frauds ever perpetrated on the buying public so whole word reading is a good example of that the whole bloody self-esteem movement which was a complete catastrophe um the idea of of different learning styles the idea of multiple intelligences Etc we can lay it out all at the foot of the faculties of education and generally they attract pretty damn bad students and there's no evidence whatsoever that their so-called education training produces better teachers they have been 100 percent not only derelict in their duties for like 60 years but they've actually been what they've done has been antithetical to the general research tradition very very low quality research most of it irreproducible most of it based on idiot ideology and definitely not in the public interest so here's an idea how about every governor in the United States just scraps the requirement to have a teaching certificate to be able to teach you wouldn't even need a master's degree could you could say we will open up the teaching profession to anybody who graduated in the top 20 percent of their class and then poof you don't have faculties of Education anymore and you don't have these institutions like if you think about the idea of the Long March through the institutions the place where that's being focused most intently and with most uh efficiency with regards to the propagation of woke ideology is definitely through the faculties of education and the only reason they have a single cent of dollar value is because they have a monopolistic Hammer lock on teacher certification and that should be scrap there's a teacher shortage in the U.S anyways and there's no bloody evidence at all that the faculties of Education have produced teachers who know how to teach we have this orwellian system in the United States in which you can be 18 years old in May in a high school graduating and your teacher has to have a credential and then over the summer you will enroll for the fall in a community college supposedly at a higher level of instruction and the Community College teacher does not need a credential they need to master rate in some cases they can get exemptions so there's no logic to it other than than the the self-interest of the teachers union but I guess what I'm getting at is that one of whether it was the covet lockdown or the George Floyd ignition of the inter or the acceleration of the woke movement we're in really revolutionary times as far as higher education and the economy I don't think is given the smaller pool of applicants and people not choosing Go to con there's no there's no economic rationale to support these universities and their present course and I think there's going to be a radical change radical change I used to talk to people in Silicon Valley and they'd say Victor we know that Stanford doesn't teach very well but they do one they do one Priceless bit of research for us when we hire a Stanford Graduate we know that they had to be very very bright on test scores and GPA and yeah and now if you take that away they have no reason to to tap their graduates since they're not going to learn very much and their admissions are no longer merocratic and so I I don't know yeah well that's and then the other thing that they sold was they they sold one they said to the employer we will train people and you will like them but even if we don't we were so stringent and careful in our admissions you're going to get somebody that's naturally talented but then they also with a wink and a nod so said this to the parent and we're going to get the seons and the children of the elite and we're going to have them all here and so you mentioned the social interaction of a campus experience yeah but they can't even offer that anymore because if you were making your criteria based on gender and race and sexual orientation and not Merit for whatever reason then the chances are that people are not going to at Harvard or Yale or Princeton have a roommate whose father had a corporation that he wanted to work in or a coder all of those ties that they with the wink and an odd sell the parent because they're not they're not even a Clearinghouse for the elite anymore where they make these relationships that last throughout their entire life to their own right benefit and Advantage they can't even sell that so in a very you know just disinterested fashion I don't see what they have to offer anymore to anybody well let's I don't really agree what they let's let's pursue that a little bit farther because there's other points of failure on the University front that we could concentrate on too so as I progressed through the ranks at Harvard and then at the University of Toronto I also watched the multiplication of adjunct faculty and so just so everyone who's listening knows most departments abetted by their administrators but also pursuing a very narrow and foolish self-interest have farmed out a lot of their teaching to so-called adjuncts and so at some places that's 50 percent of the teaching population so now if you're a full professor at a heavy duty research institution you have to conduct research so you need a lab you have to have graduate students who are pursuing original research and you have to teach you have to do a certain amount of administrative work and you're evaluated on the basis of your research your teaching and your administrator of work basically in that order now if you are a full Professor you're in the 10-year stream and you'll be guaranteed a certain degree of job security after putting in your apprenticeship but if you're an Adjunct professor so that's a part-time professor and that's 50 percent of the professors now you don't have a research Enterprise you don't have any graduate students you don't have a permanent offense you don't get paid anything you get just paid an absolute pittance nowhere near enough to live on you and you do 50 of the teaching at the universities now this is very convenient for the administrators because the adjunct faculty have zero political power like zero or less than zero even and they can be fired or dealt with in any manner whatsoever at a moment's notice with no problem and uh as there are more and more adjuncts there are fewer and fewer full-time faculty and so not only are the universities failing to assess the students properly and then group them together in peer groups that would be of some economic utility across time and elevating the tuition fees completely Beyond comprehension at the same time they're also radically decreasing the quality and the influence of the professoriate at precisely the same time as well as not hiring enough of them because administrators have multiplied like rabbits and faculty numbers have remained relatively constant so they're whittling away the quality of the students on the one hand as fast as they possibly can but they're doing exactly the same thing to The Faculty on at least two fronts the Dei front plus the adjunct faculty front and you know I complained about this at the University of Toronto for years I used to tell my colleagues it's like why don't we require that the administration set a cap to adjuncts like 20 percent of the faculty force them to hire more full-time faculty equivalents because that's who should be hired to serve the students properly and uh the response from my colleagues was always something like well you know it's pretty convenient for us to have these adjuncts pick up the excess teaching load we don't want to put too much pressure on the administration I thought that's fine guys that's a hell of a good long-term strategies like good luck with that over 20 years and so here we are now the universities are making I would say 10 fatal errors on the business front not just one they're just there's so many errors that it's almost a it's a it's a miracle of incompetence and I do think it's going to produce a precipitous collapse I do too and I think just in conclusion that this is all done by egalitarians these are people who are very critical of Walmart and the gradations in Pay but in fact there's far greater degrees of inequality and exploitation in the University by so-called liberal people than there are in the in the American workplace that's what's so ironic about it and I I'm speaking as a person who was farming and then was a as an adjunct faculty for for two years and suddenly they made me a tenure track professor and I just noticed I I was teaching the same teaching load but I made three times four times the amount of money and I had benefits and all of a sudden I was allowed to use the Xerox machine which I hadn't been allowed to before and all of a sudden I hadn't changed in anything but um I I for the rest of my teaching career I was very uh sympathetic to these people who lived in their cars and they went from one Community College to State College and they were exploited and this was all done by very very left-wing enlightened people so to speak and that's another story well you said so many things wrong you said something very interesting there like and I just want to call this out so you just said that after you were promoted from like peasant Adjunct professor living in your car so to speak to you know reasonable 10-year stream faculty member you got to use the photocopy machine so this is the level of petty tyranny that these people um what would you say encounter in the University system you're an adjunct faculty you're so far down the bloody social totem pole that it's almost incomprehensible and for someone to implement a rule like just imagine the mindset that it requires to implement a rule which is well our adjunct faculty are of so of so little use that it's perfectly reasonable for the administrators to forbid them from using the photocopier because you know how often people just do that for fun they wouldn't be photocopying like handouts for their students or anything like that they'd just be sitting in their I don't know what playing with the photocopy machine which is exactly what adjuncts do if you don't supervise them 100 of the time and that's a good snapshot of exactly how universities it is treat their adjunct faculty man it's it is beyond pathetic and the fact that it is these hypothetical egalitarians doing it indicates to me that what we're seeing is much more a war on the idea of competence and quality itself than it is any push forward for some hypothetical bloody egalitarian Utopia it's like we'll destroy the universities in the name of egalitarianism and and the universities are participating on mass in their own destruction you know it's it's hard not to sit outside and think you people so to speak you're going to get exactly what you're aiming at and isn't that going to be something yeah I think not that they were I mean I was a big at a point in my life I started a Classical Languages program at a state college for mostly minority students and I felt that it was it gave an enormous advantage to people who had been disadvantaged to master languages archeology History Literature but I don't that was a different era and I don't I can't see that the university is a positive force in society anymore it's pathological almost every bad idea that is reified the United States has its origins in the University whether it's critical legal Theory or critical race Theory or critical penal Theory or you name it it came it came from University I was watching a a clip of a break uh Smash and grab in San Francisco was on YouTube yeah yeah and I and I remember a conversation I had with a professor 20 years ago when he was trying to explain critical legal Theory and he said you know what we're going to change the legal system because the only reason it's against the law to take a candy bar out of a store is because rich white male heterosexual Christians don't need to steal candy bars so they made a law and I said no no no no theft is innate as a as innate to the human species that's pathological you can't have a civilization with theft of any sort and but that idea that was common has filtered down to the street yeah and that's why the universities are they're a drag on the economy they're a drag on the culture their drag on the the collective morality and they either have to be radically changed or destroyed those ideas are so pathological that only a half-rate intellectual could possibly believe them so I studied the development of anti-social behavior in children criminal Behavior a for a long time and so one of the things we found so anti-social behavior is extremely stable and once it's um manifested say it's very very difficult to do anything about it to ameliorate it there's there's virtually no evidence on the psychological front of any successful programs in relationship to the amelioration of anti-social personality and so my research team I didn't run it but it was a research team I was associated with at Mcgill and at the University of Montreal kept pushing back into childhood development to find the origins of anti-social Behavior because you see childhood conduct disorder in children as a precursor to adult criminality and we could push it back we being the broader research community two years of age so at two years of age there's a subset of children there are almost all male about five percent of males who are temperamentally quite predatory in their aggression and so they kick hit bite and steal and if you group kids together in age matched groups the most violent offenders are two years old and the violent two-year-olds are a subset of the two-year-olds and so it you see that kind of an adult life because about one percent of the criminals are responsible for 65 percent of the crimes typical Pareto distribution but you do have a subset of kids who will use predatory aggression as their primary mode of adaptation now it turns out that the vast majority of those two-year-olds are socialized by the age of four but some of them aren't and the ones that aren't get rejected by their peers because who the hell wants to play with someone who kicks hits bites and Steals and then maybe also has Tantrums if they don't get their way that doesn't make you popular it doesn't give you friends and so what happens to those kids is that they fall farther and farther behind in their Social Development because they don't get into the peer networks and they retain their primordial predatory aggression as their Central means of adaptation and so the idea that theft and criminality are a secondary consequence of a pathological social system seems to be well I imagine there are cases where that's true but fundamentally it seems to be flawed right there is a proclivity to predatory aggression that's part and parcel of the panoply of human possibility and most people are socialized out of that so you know the reverse is a kind of bizarre resilianism right that proclaims that every single human being is innately good and it's only the corrupt social system that introduces any pathology into into reality at all and that you know and only an idiot French intellectual could believe that and although they're American acolytes I think what's worrisome about all of what we're talking about is that it's not abstract it has real consequences that filter down and by that I mean it's so ubiquitous the U.S military now uh has lowered physical standards in combat and special forces units to accommodate women that have innately on average not in every case but less physical rigor and strength and they feel there will be no downside they have spent about five million hours going through the ranks collectively to search out uh what Mark milley and Lloyd Allston and their Congressional testimonies characterizes white rage and white supremacy and white privilege and the funny thing about it is they have not met their recruitment standards suddenly none of the three branches and they haven't met there are the academies have not met their enrollment Targets this year and the reason probably and there's no scientific data but I think most people agree is that for one reason or another the military almost like the British who relied on the gurkhas or the Indian army relied on Sikhs You could argue that the U.S army relied on Rural Americans mostly white males and south of the makes in Dixon line in fact if you look at the fatality records in Iraq and Afghanistan they died at about 75 percent of all combat deaths were white males and yet they only made up 35 percent of the population so here were Millie and Austin suggesting that they were going to be proportional on every aspect of the military or a Repertory in fact except they never mentioned the data on the combat dead and so that they essentially have done in the space of just about a year and a half they've told all of these families even though you send your even though you went to Vietnam and even though your son went to the first Gulf War and even though it's a family tradition that you fought your grandson fought in Afghanistan now your great-grandson is going to turn 18. we still suspect that you suffer from White rage and even though you died at Double the numbers of your Rubik we're not going to count that and you and so they've just said we're done we're not going to join go get somebody else from one of these and that's happening everywhere in this country right now is and when you it's not just the military you can see it with the Airlines pilot training you can see it with medical school admissions we used to make a joke in the United States well they're never going to do this where nuclear plant operators are pilots they are yeah right yeah so I think we're getting to a we're going to get we're seeing a civilizations I mean it's like that line in Hemingways The Sun Also Rises when he asks about bankruptcy he said how did you become bankrupt Mike and he said gradually and then suddenly and then suddenly I think yeah yeah right yes right and that's what's I think that's what's happening with the United States we've gone with this woke diversity stuff and now it's it was gradual and now it's just accelerated to the point of suddenly and we're not seeing basic competency in our grid and our transportation system and our education and so I think and the data support that and you know when people measure the United States uh quality of Freedom or business environment vis-a-b other countries we've really we've really fallen down and and uh let's look at the military issue for a minute so the American Military is very interesting institution because it it was it was staggeringly uh meritocratically based and that started more or less in World War One when the U.S military started to use tests of General cognitive ability to select for officer training and the American Military was were Pioneers in meritocratic assessment for for decades they did a lot of the basic research on General cognitive ability and they're a strictly meritocratic and there's some really cool things about that because one of the things it meant so black Americans are disproportionately likely to serve in the armed forces as well which is quite interesting and so the U.S has set up its its um military system not only to be available in Wartime but also to be a means of social progress um in peacetime and then that's been part of explicit policy and so um the military was very good at finding kids who had some ability especially on the officer front and who had some competence and some diligence and then subjecting them to a meritocratic evaluation and and training process and moving them up to socioeconomic hierarchy and so it's it's it's quite remarkable to see that and you know I know a lot of military people and especially at the higher ends of the performance Spectrum they're they're very singular type of person I mean um one guy I know for example a Texas Ranger I I talked to him about when he decided he wanted to be a Texas Ranger and he said he was like five years old eh when he knew he wanted to do something that was military and specialized and he was one of these people who he was only interested in training if it was almost impossible insanely rigorous and strictly meritocratic it's actually what he was looking for right and so one of the problems with producing let's say a military apparatus where you dispense with meritocracy is you cease to attract the very people who you absolutely want to attract right who are unbelievably ambitious with regards to stringent attainment that's especially true for the special forces and so you can imagine that you just decimate the military by excluding the very people who would be likely to thrive temperamentally and practically it's a real catastrophe and so and you've lost the Reagan Foundation just did a poll last year and traditionally 75 percent of Americans had polled they had great confidence in the military now it's 45 and the same is true when we see this what weaponization you know I don't need to get into that big topic of the FBI the CIA we're starting to see that these institutions that we all have revered especially on the conservative side they've completely lost all of their conservative traditional support and they become almost stossy-like in their they've been weaponized and I I feel like so we're starting to see in the private and the public sector everything that worked and made the United States singular and exceptional suddenly I mean we can chart the the Genesis of it goes way back decades but suddenly it's accelerated to such a point and whether we're talking about uh district attorneys in Chicago or Baltimore or San Francisco or Los Angeles laying criminals out the day that they commit a violent offense we're starting to see Society unwind and what we don't realize is this happens a lot uh in Rome there was there was no reason why the Western Empire had to fall in the late 5th Century in the way that the Byzantine Eastern house survived for a thousand years but once you lose confidence in these institutions and once they're no longer bureaucratic and once people's primary allegiances is not any longer to the state everything we've talked about this morning than use the the end result is an implosion very quickly and I think we haven't I think well this put this is a real conundrum for conservatives say maybe we can start to talk about Mr Trump here a little bit because of this so here's the Dilemma that I see with regards to conservatives especially on the populist front and so um Trump was very good at speaking to disaffected working-class Americans and certainly the Democrats abandoned them completely in the hill in the Clinton campaign and had been preparing to do that for years like the idiot champagne socialists have at the universities but in any case Trump was pretty good at talking to working class Americans but here's the danger as far as I'm concerned on the classically conservative front and I don't really know what to do about this it's like the radical leftists have this fundamental proposition which is all institutions are corrupt and predicated on dominance and power and so that's kind of their leap Motif but now you have people like Trump who come in as Outsiders and say you know on the populist front hey everyone on the right on the conservative side we're working class side let's say now um all your institutions are corrupt and basically predicated on uh you know dominance and power and I think well this is a big problem because the conservatives are objecting to the corruption the corruption of the institutions in the manner that you just described they're captured by the woke ideology but the underlying message to people is kind of the same which is our fundamental institutions can no longer be trusted and the problem with beating that drama on the conservative side as far as I can tell is that you add fuel to the fire on the left side and so then you're in the position and we can talk about the role of the humanities and education there you're in the position of asking yourself well if you are a conservative and you're traditionally based but you believe that the institutions have been corrupt how the hell can you plot a pathway forward without falling prey to exaggeration of exactly the concerns that the radical leftists are putting forward because they say the same thing the institutions can't be trusted it's like the spirit of the institutions can be Trust like that I I would maybe differ just in two regards one is I think they used to say the institutions can't be trusted but it was the left that egged on the Russian collusion hoax the laptop hoax the Ping and the alpha Bank hoax and it was a left who said that James Clapper who lied under oath once and John Brennan who lied under oath twice and James Comey who famed Amnesia 245 times under oath and Andrew McCabe who lied four times under oath and Anthony fauci whose latest interrogatory was just a mishmash of I can't remember I don't recall so and they are all iconic in the left so the left is basically said these institutions got so unwieldy and two million people working for the federal government and the regulators uh The Regulators who were not elected alone had the expertise of this huge Byzantine complex because elected officials come and go but the EPA guy is always there and he knows every judge jury executioner legislative judicial uh executive power all in one person mode of operating that the conservative said we've got to break this up we've got to take the FBI office and put it in Kansas City we've got to cut 10 percent of the workforce we've got to make sure that uh HHS we get uh should it shouldn't even be in Washington we've got to get rid of the Department of energy I remember miss Mr Perry the Texas governor said I'm going to get rid of three agencies unfortunately he couldn't remember which ones they were on the debate stage but that's what conservatives were doing but the left is saying well you know just as you have lost confidence because you they're regular over Regulatory and they're intrusive and they are anti-constitutional and they go after the individual we find them now for the first time quite attractive because in our Davos agenda or our great reset agenda uh whether it's mandating green energy or mandating Equity or mandating vaccinations we find these institutions suddenly for the first time in our lives very very attractive and so they've been they've inherited them and adopted them now and it's it's okay okay all right so it is uncounty to watch that I mean one of the most miraculous things I've seen in my lifetime is the insistence by people on the left side of the spectrum that pharmaceutical companies can be trusted so that that's just like you know everything is absolutely upside down when that happens okay but you're now you're pulling out something that's very paradoxical a because on the one hand we've already established the case that this fundamental critique that's emerged from the universities is a critique of institutional reliability and the basic Doctrine is one of powers that all institutions are predicated on the expression of arbitrary power and they can't be trusted especially if you're not in the power elite but but then you say there's a paradoxical side of that which is that at the same time the same people at least with regards to their political and philosophical orientation are increasingly willing to utilize large-scale social institutions to put forward a given agenda I suppose maybe the difference there is that the left is perfectly willing to trust large-scale institutions if the institutions operate under the rubric of their ideological Theory absolutely right so you could make in that case or you can get rid of all this yeah absolutely they get rid of all the Sturm and drag of discussion and the Congress when they take the military over they they worship the chain of command because whether it's transgendered subsidized surgeries or women in combat units they can they can affect social change in an authoritarian chain of command Fiat so everything that makes these institutions skeptical or suspicious to the traditional supporters that they become they've taken away the power of the individual they are commissary like they're ideologically weaponized by the left all of those things make it attractive to the left so it's it's one of the strangest things I think in the history of the country how the right has backed away from all of these investigatory agencies military they don't they don't trust them anymore because they've been they've been I guess their DNA is like a virus has been recalibrated against the individual in traditional America and the left comes in and says we like what they're doing we like their overreach of civil liberties because that's the only way that we can affect these changes that 51 percent of the people don't want and they because they're stupid but when you control Silicon Valley and K-12 in Hollywood now the military and the FBI and the CIA and the doj now we can finally enact change without public support and so I don't know where it's all going to end but the conservatives have backed off in in that vacuum the left is moved in so you know one of the things I really appreciated about reading solution's Gulag archipelago was his insistence that what happened in the Soviet Union was not an aberration in relationship to the set of ideas that made up the Communist utopian Vision but a fulfillment of the what would you call it of the core content that was implicit in the original doctrines right because the apologists on the left constantly and still due to this day say well real communism has never been tried which I think is one of the world's most appalling excuses by the way but independent of that the the real notion was well a system of ideas had been produced it had a certain degree of internal coherence and then if you launch that system into the world it would run algorithmically and produce certain outcomes and it did that in country after country and the problem in some sense with the discussion we're having now is that we're not making a distinction between the they that are putting forward these ideas and the algorithmic yes what would you say impetus of the system of ideas itself right because it's not exactly a shadowy Cabell of conspiracists are operating behind the scenes to bring this about what it is is a set of ideas mostly most of which emerged in France and Germany and then were adopted in the United States that have a certain ethos built into them and the ethos is partly group identity uh predicated right the fundamental predicate is that the most important distinction between people is some element of their group identity and then there are ideas associated with that like all outcomes should be equal or that's evidence of of the dominance of something like arbitrary power and another ethos would be the fundamental motivating principle of the human race is power and domination and so those ideas have an ethos that makes itself known across time and it it elaborates and then it it becomes a system of ideas that possesses individuals and then they act in concert with the ideas but you don't need a formal conspiracy no I think I think you know I think just about just I think I agree in a similar way I think what we're witnessing now is the end stage of of what was wilsonian progressivism part elements of the New Deal the Great Society program all of which could be justified by the left uh to address the needs of the day and maybe to rectify some of the rigidity of the American system but ultimately it was built into them that eventually it would appear in this latest manifestation because uh it it always on the horizon there was the idea that we're we're marching toward Radical egalitarianism by Fiat and that requires a level of coercion that's antithetical to a Democratic Society it's and Plato's gorgeous I think Socrates won at one point says well in Athens they will not be happy until the dogs and the donkeys can vote and what he's trying to say is that each element of expanding the franchise Justified as it was ultimately is going to end into the Absurd because there's no there's always going to be somebody who says that he's he doesn't have the same franchise as someone else it's and I think it's very similar like well that's always the same case I think it's built into this mindset or ideology it's once you through out the Bourbons that was justified then you had the constitutional republic yes and you can see that that was and then you had dent on but ultimately you whether you knew it or not you had a rendezvous with the Jacobins just like them you had a rendezvous with the Mao was right right just like karensky and the minshevx had a rendezvous with Bolshevik it was headed that way until if somebody didn't derail it and I think that's where we are today okay so this allows us to return to a theme we didn't develop enough which is part of the purpose of a true Humanities education is to transmit the difficult to acquire knowledge that actually allows people to become wise enough to forestall that inevitable deterioration towards an idiot and vengeful uh egalitarianism yes right it takes a lot of training now you know you said you had taught ancient languages to exam for example to minority students and people listening might think well what the hell good is that and let me make a case for what good what good that is very briefly because it's a case for the Humanities and you can comment on that well first of all there isn't anything you can do to empower people which is a word I hate more effectively than to teach them how to be deeply literate and historically knowledgeable if you're looking to facilitate people's ability to make positive changes in their own life there is nothing you can do that's more helpful to that than to make them literate and if you want to help them understand who they are in the deepest sense over and above the superficial attractions of tribalism let's say you have to educate them deeply in this historical uh uh realm that requires the acquisition of explicit knowledge about the central nature of the human being and that would be the Distinguished Citizen let's say someone capable of of upholding the responsibilities of a citizen and someone worthy of the rights that are part and parcel of that and without a deep Humanities education all of that disappears because it has to be transmitted explicitly and so that was the proper role of the universities for years it was as I Envision it our role was twofold that we were going to teach a method the inductive method as opposed to the deductive method so that people when they looked at The Human Experience via art or literature or history they would look at Exempla and then they would come to a general overriding conclusion that took it took the evidence rather than say I have an idea and I'm going to cherry-pick the evidence that was one thing that we taught the socratic inductive medicine the other was we had to give them some kind of Arsenal or or realm of knowledge or reference point so I know I used to I used to Xerox maybe 500 terms ionic order or non-composed Mentos anything I could give as an architecture and then we everybody made fun of Multiplex we had mostly essay tests but I always thought there was a value in a multi uh choice test and key dates generals I would always say to the student when you leave right when you leave here I want you to know how far Sparta is from Athens I want you to give me three reasons quickly why the Mycenaean Empire collapsed and it was funny because graduate some of our students would sit in on interviews from ivy league professors and they would ask these questions and these professors I should say abds didn't have the any answers for them they had no practical knowledge and then one student said to me well why are we doing this and I said well it's so that you don't have to repeat every life every life experience that you have you're going to learn what is wise and stupid by experience and often that experience is going to be deleterious to your character your fortune but you don't have to you're fatal yeah you don't have to do that all the time if you think that sometimes people who are right or punished are the more moral a person is the more that he's hated it's not you alone that experiences that you can you don't have to you can find comfort and Antigone or if you can say the racial is not to the Swift then why and how the students came in and he said you know what I'm the best tackle on the team but I never get a chance to play because I don't kiss up and I said then you're old Ajax and what are you going to do about but that's the Dilemma of Ajax and the sofa glim play so that was some of some of the things that are more pragmatic since the humanities were able to do they were able to give a person a whole reference of knowledge so that they didn't have to live out and learn something by wrote or by they had an example and the other thing is it gave them a sense of yeah well not Beauty that's not that's not optional that's not optional for human beings I mean we are linguistic creatures and we require an awful lot of cultural programs I think and every culture knows that and so you you definitely you were definitely in this situation where if we don't inculcate the wisdom of the past into our young people then they are forced to regenerate that wisdom through painful and often fatal experience those are the options and to study history in the humanities is to arm yourself against the Sea of troubles and to become literate and the and that is the core of the universities and the universities have definite gently abandoned that in the favor of this idiot narrative you know here's something you might find interesting so I did a research study with one of my students just before I was basically you know kicked out of the university for being persona non Gratis and uh we we investigated two uh Mysteries the first was was there a coherent set of beliefs that you could describe as politically correct and the way we investigated that was to produce a very large body of political statements and then to find out the degree to which people agreed with them and then to analyze them statistically to see if there were patterns of belief and we found two patterns of belief that were obviously commensurate with the notion of a politically correct set of beliefs and one of them was like a politically correct liberalism and the other was politically correct authoritarianism and there's been quite a bit of research on the psychological front with regards to politically correct authoritarianism in recent years so first of all there is such a thing as politically correct beliefs and there's an authoritarian version but then you might also ask yourself what predicts whether or not people will believe these theories you know what the biggest predictor was this is so horrible it was low verbal intelligence it was more it was more it was a bigger predictor than than verbal intelligence is a predictor of grades or socioeconomic outcome it was 0.45 a correlation whose magnitude you never get in the social science study a walloping effect and then the subsidiary predictors were well being female was one of them being agreeable in temperament which is a feminine personality temperament and then having taken any courses that were essentially propagandistic in nature and so part of the reason that people fall fall for these this simplistic set of ideas is because well they are simple and they they they're very attractive to people who want or require a uni-dimensional view of the world at in light of both of its Simplicity let's say but also its underlying proclivity also to identify a convenient enemy I think that's true I I had a student I I I mentioned it in the dying citizen but I had a student who once said to me well you know this country is very unfair because Wyoming has one Senator I think at the time it was for two hundred thousand 400 000 residents and California at that time we were 30 million now it's 41 but we have to have 15 million people we only get one Senator and I said now why would that be and he said because the founders were not Democratic I said yes but why weren't they fully Democratic and do you have the house was going to be elected every the whole house flips every two years it represents 750 000 people so it is democratic but it's balanced by the Senate that flips every three year I mean one-third only flips every two years you have to be older it uh it represents States it it's the it's America as defined by the individual 50 states not the people that's the house and this then is balanced by the executive and the person was so arrogant because he was so ignorant but he had got this catchphrase in his mind that democ America is a democracy and therefore this sentence not Democratic and then so I was very interested in this and so I went when I was doing the I didn't realize there was a whole body of scholarly literature attacking the Senate from law schools and from political science departments the Senate is sort of the the last Target of the left they're trying to change it there there's a whole body of research showing just how toxic and conservative and anti-liberal it is because it doesn't represent people it represents States and that the representatives in some States senators in some states have larger constituencies in Senate and the other and the Supreme Court has already ruled one man one vote as it pertains to house districts and therefore it must rule that the Senate uh each Senator must be proportionally equal yeah well you know it it's not that look you can see that the idea of a distributed democracy has an instantaneous intuitive appeal it takes a lot of sophisticated thinking before you can understand that there have to be intermediary institutions right and part of the purpose of a Humanities education was to give people that wisdom say look the problem with radical democracy is that it can degenerate into rule by the mob like impulsive rule by the mob and that's the danger of populism for example of an untram so you need intermediary institutions you can kill Socrates they have to be set up vote to kill Socrates by a majority vote on the court or you can vote to kill all the middle Indians on Monday and then decide the next day you don't want to do it and send a ship after the first try ream because the entire assembly is flipped in 24 hours from being murderous to similar murderous and that was what our Founders knew that it was very dangerous but that knowledge is completely absent in this younger generation because they're the the sources of that transmission in history departments or political science departments or government is not there anymore and it's not there at K-12 there is no civic education anymore there's no body of music and art and tradition and literature and poetry that each do their part to make a citizen aware of how unique the system was and so that's what I find really frightening is this Collective Amnesia in this generation as this generation especially uh it's it's it took a long time but this generation is the first that I've been aware of that is completely Amnesia about the past it it hates the past it it feels that history is melodrama yeah those who forget the pastor doomed to repeat it and so that was the role of the University so look we've we've used up our 90 minutes of time here on YouTube we didn't get to talk about Donald Trump too much but maybe we'll have an opportunity to do that again in the future we did Cover a fair bit of territory in relationship to the idea of citizenship and the role of the universities and so I think that was useful and apt and I do believe that you know there are Stellar opportunities on the educational front at the moment as the responsibility for proper education is abdicated by the universities there's an economic opportunity and a conceptual opportunity and you know the U.S is a pretty damn Dynamic place on the entrepreneurial front and it certainly might be the case that new institutions will arise to fill the void that's left by the universities as they collapse and it might be that places like Hillsdale are on the Forefront of that we'll see if that happens um thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today and to all of you who are watching listening on YouTube and Associated podcasts I'm going to talk to Dr Hansen for another half an hour on the daily wire plus platform I like to delve into people's biographies to see how their career got its start and how it developed across time and so we'll delve into that and it's pleasure meeting you sir and thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me and to everyone else today and uh Happy New Year to you and we'll flip over to the Daily wire plus side goodbye everybody who's watching and listening hello everyone I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 2,923,946

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: SUC2Xk2YW9M

Length: 105min 2sec (6302 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 23 2023