The Importance of Being Ethical, with Jordan Peterson

if you're the prime minister of canada the man is a villain but if you're a conservative particularly a young conservative it's very likely you think of him as a hero jordan peterson on uncommon knowledge now [Music] welcome to uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson in 2016 the trudeau government enacted legislation making it illegal to discriminate on the ground of quote gender expression close quote jordan peterson a clinical psychologist at the university of toronto objected in particular he flatly refused to use politically correct gender pronouns said so in videos and went viral in 2017 he began a series of podcasts called the psychological significance of biblical stories that has been viewed by millions in 2018 he published a book 12 rules for life an antidote to chaos that became an international bestseller last year he published another bestseller beyond order 12 more rules for life and then he resigned from the university of toronto will come to that to devote himself to lectures and podcasts jordan peterson welcome thank you thank you i should know by the way that we're filming today as part of the classical liberalism seminar at stanford all right question one the february protest by canadian truckers they're protesting coveted restrictions some of them block border crossings some of them snarl the capital city of ottawa a quotation then a video clip here's the quotation you in a message you taped for the protesters i'd like to commend all of you for your diligence and work on accomplishing what you have under trying conditions and also for keeping your heads in a way that's been a model for the entire world close quote now the clip it has to stop the people of ottawa don't deserve to be harassed in their own neighborhoods they don't deserve to be confronted with the inherent violence of a swastika flying on a street corner or a confederate flag or the insults and jeers just because they're wearing a mask that's not who canada who canadians are all right so here's the here's hard to even look at him here's the first question how can discourse in a great democracy have become so polarized that jordan peterson and the prime minister look at exactly the same set of events and come to opposite conclusions about them well he's lying and i'm not so that's a big part of the that's a big part of the issue i don't believe that he ever says a word that's true from what i've been able to observe it's all stage acting he's crafted a persona he has a particular instrumental goal in mind and everything is subordinated to serve that why what's the motivation uh the same motivation that generally that's generally typical of people who are narcissistic which is to be accredited with moral virtue in the absence of the work necessary to actually attain it all right from playing a role from you know the swastika thing it's like really just untrue about canadians really we're going to be worried about nazis in canada because i had protests for example where people accuse me of attracting nazis first of all that just isn't a thing in canada there isn't a nazi tradition and i don't know anyone in canada who's ever met anyone who's met someone who was canadian who and who was a nazi and so that's just a non-starter and so when that sort of thing gets dragged into the conversation right off the bat you know the canadians shouldn't be subjected to the inherent violence of a swastika first of all it's not even obvious what that swastika was doing there there's a there's reasonable evidence to suggest that the person who was waving it was either a plant or someone who was making the comment that that was what was characteristic of the government not of what they believe now no one knows because the story around that event is messy and uh it's not like there were credible journalists who were going in there to investigate thoroughly but to use that uh and the confederate the confederate flag issue is exactly the same thing you know the story in canada the our prime minister implemented the emergencies act and so the question was why and so i went on twitter when this was trending and read at least 5 000 twitter comments to try to get a sense these were people who were supporting trudeau in his application the emergencies act and i was trying to figure out okay well what what do they believes happening and the story seem to be and this is as far as i can tell and maybe i'm wrong uh the story was something like make america great again conservative republicans on the you know pretty far right were attempting to destabilize canadian democracy and so my question was well what makes you think they care first of all about canada and its democracy and second why in the world would they possibly do that you need a motive for a crime like that and that was at the same time the cbc was insisting the canadian broadcasting corporation which is subsidized by the liberals to the tune of 1.2 billion dollars a year was insisting that most of the money that the truckers raised was foreign financed if it wasn't the bloody russians then it was the american conservatives and so that all turned out to be a complete lie and so fine it's uh republican right-wingers trying to destabilize canadian democracy why no one has an answer for that because what's in it for them and then okay three days later the emergency act was lifted i thought okay now what are they going to make of that what could the possibly be the rationale for that and the rationale was well that just shows you how effective he was we had this coup ready to go that was financed by americans apparently and our prime minister acted so forthrightly that we only needed to be under the strictures of the emergency act for three days it's like okay i don't even know what sort of world i exist in where those things are happening so and then canadians why do canadians buy this to the degree they do and i think they're faced with a hard choice because in my country for 150 years you could trust the basic institutions you could trust the government didn't matter what political party was running it you could trust the political parties right from the socialists over the conservatives the socialists were mostly union types and they were trying to give the working class a voice and honestly so um you could trust the the media even the canadian broadcasting corporation was a reliable source of news you none of that's true now and so canadians are asked to make a hard choice or were in the truckers convoy uh situation and the choice was well either all your institutions are almost irretrievably corrupt or the truckers were financed by like right-wing republican-americans well both of those are preposterous you might as well take the one that's least disruptive to your entire sense of security and so i think that's what canadians did mostly all right i'll come back to canada universities jordan peterson and the national post this past march quote i'd envision teaching and researching at the university of toronto full-time until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office yeah yeah instead you retired why well it was impossible to go back i mean i i couldn't think clearly about what i should do on the professional front for a long time because i was ill but when i started to recover and looked at the situation first of all there was just no going back um i'm too well known and too provocative i suppose i've never really thought of myself that way but it seems to have turned out that way i couldn't just return to the classroom and then there were other problems too there's no bloody way i'm writing a diversity inclusivity and equity statement for a grant i wouldn't i can't imagine the circumstances under which i would do that and that's absolutely crucial now in canada and increasingly in the u.s to get any sort of research grant you you have to write a diversity statement and it has to be the right kind of statement i read the national sciences and engineering research councils frequently asked questions about how to prepare a diversity statement and you couldn't you couldn't write a more reprehensible document from the ideological perspective if you set out with the intent purpose of writing a reprehensible document and so there's no way i could get funding for my research and then my students what bloody chance do they have of being hired in an academic environment today you know perfectly well those of you who sat on faculty hiring committees your basic decision right off the bat is okay who do we eliminate because you have way too many candidates and so you're searching for reasons to get rid of people and i'm not saying this as a criticism even it's just a reality and any whiff of scandal of any sort it's like well we have 10 other people we could look at why would we bother with the trouble and so i just couldn't see my students having any future and and then i also thought well i can go lecture wherever i want to whoever i want with virtually any size audience with no restrictions whatsoever why would i go back to teaching a small class at university you know not that i didn't like that because i did like it but not all i could see were disadvantages plus it was impossible so that was why so again from you in the national post just exactly what am i supposed to do when i meet a graduate student or a young professor hired on diversity grounds manifest instant skepticism what a slap in the face the diversity ideology is no friend to peace and tolerance it is absolutely and completely the enemy of competence and justice close quote what happened how did wokeness we can come to this in a moment too universities at the fact university faculty poll after poll of party affiliation in this country i'm sure it's the same in canada the university faculty been to the left for a long time but this wokeness is something new what's the transmission mechanism what happened and how did it happen in still a small single digit number of years yeah well that's a tough question you know i mean i've tried to put my finger on the essential elements of what you might describe as political correctness or wokeness and i've done that a variety of ways i had a student for example this is quite a promising line of research her name christine brophy was was her name um we the first thing we wanted to find out was well is there really such a thing as political correctness or wokeness right because it's vague can you identify it yeah yeah and i i meant that psychometrically because psychologists for 40 years have been trying to one of the things that psychologists have been wrestling with is construct validation that's the technical problem is how do you know when you put a concept forward whether it bears any relationship to some underlying reality and so you can think of well is there such a thing as emotional intelligence is there such a thing as self-esteem is there such a thing as political correctness and so the proper answer that is what we don't know but there are ways of finding out and so one of the ways you find out is you want to see if the construct assesses something that's unique and that it does that in a manner that's separate from other similar constructs in a in a revealing and important way there's a whole theory of of methodology that goes that should inform your efforts to answer such questions so for example if you're a clinician you might want to differentiate between depression and anxiety keeping the concepts importantly separate so they have functional utility but also accounting for the overlap because they're both negative emotions for example it's it's part of epistemological mapping and so we asked a large number of people a very large number of political questions trying to oversample questions that had been put forward in the media and in the public sphere as indicative of politically correct beliefs and then we did the appropriate statistical analysis to see if the questions hung together and so they hang together if question a is politically correct let's say you answer it positively and question b is politically correct and you answer it positively if there's a large correlation between those two questions then you think well they're assessing some underlying i don't have to tell you all this but you know this if you know anything about statistics then you know that there's something underlying that's holding them together and we identified a set of beliefs that were observable or identifiable easily identifiable as politically correct so then the question so that it exists then the question is where does it come from and we haven't done empirical analysis of that but i think if you're reasonably familiar with the history of ideas you can see two streams two broad streams one is a postmodern stream that basically emerged out of literary criticism and it's predicated on what i think is actually a fundamental and a valid critique which is that it's very very difficult to lay out a description of the world without that description being informed by some value structure that's that's at the core of what's useful about the postmodern critique i think that's at the core of it and i actually happen to believe that i don't think you can look at the world except through a structure of value the question then is well what is the structure of value and also what do you mean by a structure value and that's where the post-modernists went wrong and where i think our whole society went wrong because the radical left types who were simultaneously postmodern turned to marxism to answer that question and said well we organize our perceptions as a consequence of the will to power and i think that is an appalling doctrine i think it's technically incorrect for all sorts of reasons that we could get into partly because power if power is my ability to compel you to do things against your own interest or your in your own desire maybe i can organize my social interactions on the basis of that willingness to express power i think that's a very unstable means of social organization and so the notion that it's it's power that structures our relations i think it's where's your evidence for that there's no evidence for that it's wrong and but but that's what we assumed and that's what universities teach by and large but is it kind of a recurrent temptation though i'm just thinking now gibbons says rome falls because christianity rises something soft somehow by some horrible historical accident misplaced power nietzsche beyond good and evil christianity belief he attacks christianity specifically but again he's drawn to power to the will and then of course we don't have to talk about uh hitler and the the nuremberg marx and marx so so there's something there's something you're a psychologist which means that you spend a lot of time plumbing human nature there's a kind of recurrent temptation there in other words it makes no sense to me that this thing that has raged through these great magnificent institutions these universities that our grandparents and great parent grandparents sacrificed to give money to and to these magnificent citadels of learning this corruption goes wait it makes no sense that it emerged from lit crit it makes no sense to me to suppose that english departments suddenly took over well unless they're on to something yeah they are you know what i mean no they are on to something they are onto something this is why i emphasized in in my previous remarks what i think is at the core of the post-modern critique um i don't think you can look at the world except through a structure of value and the the english and so you think well how did the why is literary criticism so relevant well or become so relevant and so powerful and i think well i believe that we see the world through a narrative framework and so that if that's true and we could talk a little bit about that what i mean by that i think you need a mechanism to prioritize your attention and to because attention is a finite resource and it's costly so you have to prioritize it and there's no difference between prioritizing your attention and imposing a value structure those are the same thing and then i think that the mechanisms that we use to prioritize our attention are stories and that means that the people who criticize our stories actually have way more power than you think because they're actually criticizing the mechanism through which we look at the world and so the post-modernist would say look you even look at the scientific world through a value-laden lens and i think yeah you do they're right but what they're not right about is that the lens is one of power and now for someone like nietzsche the thing about a word like power is you can expand the thing the borders of the word to encompass virtually any phenomena you want and so that's why i tried to define power as my willingness to use compulsion on you or other people because power can be authority power can be competence i don't mean any of that i mean you don't get what you to do what you want i get to tell you coercion exactly and uh and i do think the marxist types view the willingness to use coercion as the driving force of human history and that's really saying something because that means it's the fundamental motivation and uh that's a very caustic criticism and it's easy to put people back on their heels about that you know one of the things you see about capitalists because i've been stunned to see the ceos of major corporations like roll over in front of these dei activists i think well what the hell's wrong with you people you know you're not even making use of your privilege and why are you um well it's not very powerful if you're the ceo of a major corporation you can't even withstand some interns who have dei ideology it's like it's doing you a lot of good and so and why would you produce a fifth column within your organization that's completely opposed to the entire manner in which you do business and the capitalist enterprise as such and one answer would be well we don't think much about ideas it's like well maybe you should and and you know you can be cynical about it and say well it's just a gloss to keep the capitalist enterprise going while appearing to to meet you know the new demands of of ethical of the new ethical reality which i think is a bad argument too but more importantly it's that people are guilty and the the radicals who accuse us all historically and as individuals of being motivated by nothing but the desire for power strike a chord especially in people who are conscientious you know because if you're a conscientious person and someone comes to you and says like a little mob of 30 people says you know you can be a little more careful in what you say and do on the racist front and the sexist front etc you're likely to think well i'm not perfect i probably could be a little more careful and it's no doubt that people have been oppressed in the past and it's also no doubt that in some sense i'm the undeserving beneficiary of historical atrocity and so you know maybe i should look to myself and that's weaponization of guilt and it's very effective and it's not surprising but it's not helpful so you know so so there's a resentment that drives this like a corrosive resentment that's able to weaponize guilt and it's very difficult for people to withstand it listen i asked friends what one question they'd most like me to hear most like to hear me ask you and it was everybody said the same thing and then i came across you on a video saying a few years ago people often ask me if i believe in god i don't like that question so i i won't ask that question but the role you just talked about values so here's a question i want to hear how you think about this this this is a question that strikes me as philosophy 101 although i have to admit there are other people who just see that see no traction in this one at all my late friend christopher hitchens just batted this one away and here's the question if there is no standard we don't have to rise to the calling it god but if there's no objective standard of reason outside and above ourselves if everything is just matter how can we think how can we do science this is c.s lewis this is c.s lewis and hitchens just thought this made no sense at all but i feel it c.s lewis if i swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole meaning only all that exists is what we can perceive through our senses then not only can i not fit in religion i cannot even fit in science if minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry and biochemistry in the long run on the meaningless flux of the atoms i cannot understand how the thought of minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees you feel that one as well yeah well that's a complicated problem that um first of all i do believe that i don't think science is possible outside of an encompassing judeo-christian ethic so for example i don't think you can be a scientist without believing as an axiom of faith that truth will set you free or that will set us free so we don't know the conditions under which science is possible you know and we tend to overestimate its epistemological potency it's only been around i mean you can stretch it back to the greeks if you're inclined but in a formal sense it's only been around for about five centuries and it's only thrived for a very short period of time and it's perfectly reasonable to assume that there were particular preconditions that made its rise and ascendancy possible it is a historical phenomenon yes it happened at a specific moment in time right and for and at least for particular reasons yeah and i think one of the conditions well there's a bunch of them one is for example there there's an intense insistence in the christian tradition that the mind of god in some sense is knowable yes so we could say well the structure of the cosmos and you have to believe that that's the case before you're going to embark on a scientific endeavor you have to believe that there's some relationship between logos logic let's say but logos is a much broader concept than logic that's for sure you have to believe that there's some relationship between that and the structure of the cosmos you have to believe that the pursuit of truth is in itself an ethical good because why would you otherwise bother you have to believe that there is such a thing as an ethical good and those aren't scientific those are not scientific questions which is why i think the arguments of people like hitchens are weak it's like yeah hitchens dawkins people like that they have a metaphysic which they don't know and they assume that metaphysic is self-evidence like well sorry guys it's actually not self-evident and they assume that it can be derived from the observations of empirical reality and the answer to that is no there's going to be axioms of your perceptual system that aren't derivable from the contents of your perceptual system and you might think well that's not very scientific and i would say well take it up with roger penrose and see what he thinks because i just talked to him for like three hours about partly about this topic about say the role of consciousness and and the structure of consciousness and it's by no means obvious that the materialist reductionists have the correct theory about the nature of consciousness and not surprisingly it's like we we don't understand the relationship between consciousness and being at all and so they're you know these are hard hard questions well they're the hardest the hard question for consciousness researchers is uh why is their consciousness rather than why aren't we just unconscious mechanisms acting deterministically they call that the hard question i don't think that is the hard question i think the hard question is what's the relationship between consciousness and being itself and because i don't i can't understand what it means for something to be in the absence of some awareness of that being so when we say being there's an awareness component implicit in the in the idea of being itself consciousness is integrally tied up with being in some mysterious manner and so and i also don't believe that the the most sophisticated scientists are by necessity reductionist materialists like get as far as you can with that no problem it's it's occam's razor clear if you can reduce and account deterministically no problem but don't be thinking that accounts for everything because i don't think there's any evidence that it does uh from science to um to politics to quotations jordan peterson this is a tweet of just last month does anything other than the axiomatic acceptance of the divine value of the individual makes slavery a self-evident rule right good that's a good one yeah yeah well you know it's my friend jordan peterson who tweeted it afterwards yeah yeah well yeah i was thinking about i was thinking hold on i want to give you i'm going to put you in an august company here okay that's you here's gk chesterton the declaration of independence bases all rights on the fact that god created all men equal there is no basis for democracy except in the divine origin of man so these are very similar thoughts and the notion here is that if we can't do science without some notion am i allowed to call it if the divi well just let's just say the judeo christians no no the divine divine technically okay oh can you all right that might get us off a slightly uncomfortable hook here talking about icky stuff like religion but so if we can't do science without a notion of the divine can we engage in self-government no no no well one of the things i've been talking to my audience about is the this right to free speech and and how that might be conceptualized because you can think about it as a right among other rights let's say so it's just one of a list of rights and you can also think of rights as being granted to you let's say in some sense by the social contract and so uh which is a different theory say than the notion that rights originate in some underlying religious insistence of the divine value of the individual the problem with the right there's a bunch of problems with the rights among other rights argument i don't think free speech is a right among other rights i think that i don't think there's any difference between free speech and and it has to be free because if it's not free it's not thought so imagine mostly you have to think about hard things because why think otherwise if everything's going all right you don't have a problem when you have a problem you have to think and if you have a problem the thinking is going to be troublesome because you're going to think things that upset yourself and upset other people it's part of the necessity it's part of what will necessarily happen if you're thinking um i just want you said something that just stopped me sorry because i actually stopped me so completely cold that i missed a little bit of what followed i just want to repeat it there is no difference between speech and thought if you have free thought you must have free speech that's the argument yeah yeah okay well i'll unpack that first and then return to the other one well there's a bunch of reasons for that i mean first of all mostly you think in words now people also think in images but i'm not going to go into that we'll just leave that aside but mostly we think in words and so we use a mechanism that's sociologically constructed the world of speech to organize our own psyches and we do that with speech and basically when you think there's two components to it that are internal in a sense when you think you have a problem so you ask yourself a question and then answers appear in the theater of your imagination generally verbally so that'd be like the revelatory element of thought and that's very much prayer like in some fundamental sense because it's very mysterious you know the fact that you can pose yourself a question and then you can generate answers it's like well why did you have the question if you can generate the answers if the answers are just there and where do the answers come from well you can give a materialist account to some extraordinarily limited degree but phenomenologically it's still the case that you pose a question to yourself in speech and you receive an answer in speech now it can also be an image forget about that well then the next question is what do you do once you receive the answer and the answer is well if you can think then you use internal speech to dissect the answer which is what you do for example you encourage your students to do if they're writing an essay you know they lay out a proposition and then you hope they can take the proposition apart and essentially if they are what they're doing is they're transforming themselves into avatars speaking avatars of two different viewpoints so you have the speaker for the proposition and then you have the critic and maybe you lay out the dialogue between them and that constitutes the body of the essay and you have to be bloody sophisticated to manage that because it means that you have to divide yourself in some sense into two avatars that are oppositional and then you have to allow yourself to be the battle space between them that and people have to be trained to do that that's what universities are supposed to do it's really hard what people generally do instead of that is talk to other people and that's how they they organize themselves by talking to other people and then the reason you have the right to free speech isn't so that you can just say whatever you want to gain a hedonistic advantage which is one way of thinking about it you just get you have a right to say whatever you want like you have a right to do what you want you know subject to certain limitations so it's like it's a hedonic freedom it's like no that's not why you have a right free speech you have a right to free speech because the entire entirety of society depends on this depends for its ability to adapt to the changing horizon of the future on the free thought of the individuals who compose it it's like a free market in some sense it's a free market argument in relationship to thought we have to compute this transforming horizon well how do we do that well by consciously engaging with possibility well how do we do that well it's mediated through speech so societies that are going to function over any reasonable amount of time have to leave their citizens alone to grapple stupidly with complexity so that out of that stupid grappling fraught grappling that that's offensive and difficult and and and upsetting we can grope towards the truth collectively before taking the steps to implement those truths before they've been tested and so so then you might so that's the free speech argument the divinity argument is while you are that locus of consciousness that's what you are most fundamentally and the reason that's associated with divinity that's a very very complicated question but part of the reason i outlined this in my series on the biblical on the biblical series on genesis is at the beginning of genesis for example so imagine this divinity of the individuals rooted in the narrative conception that's part and parcel of the judeo-christian tradition you have god at the beginning of time in whose image men and women women are made acting as the agent that transforms the chaos of potential into the habitable reality that is good and he uses the word the divine word logos to do that and what that implies is that the word that's truthful there's more to it than that but the word that is truthful is the word that extracts habitable order out of chaos and that's what characterizes human beings that capability and i think yeah that's right so and then you might ask do you believe that i would say well that's what your culture is based on so you might say i don't believe that it's like fair enough say what you want but try acting try basing your personal relationships on any other conception than that and see what happens you know people are so desperate to be treated in that manner that it's their primary motivation you want other people to treat you as if you have something to say that you're worth attending to you know that you you have the opportunity to express yourself no matter how badly you do it and if they're willing to grant you their attention and time to help you straighten that out there isn't anything you want more than that and if you try to structure your social relationships on any other basis then that intrinsic respect for their intrinsic value it's going to fail okay we've talked about faculty students the kids couple of statistics according to gallup the proportion of americans who claim no religious affiliation among americans over 76 years old just seven percent 93 percent of the old stirs claim a religious affiliation the youngest group that gallup tested is americans between 26 and 41. almost a third claim no religious affiliation item one item two i'm reasonably certain this is the same in canada at least in eastern canada but certainly in the united states poll after poll after poll shows that young people are far more open to socialism or to at least to uh what we would say farther not just left of center but farther left political aims they're the ones who most fervently support this by the way this is an inversion from the reagan years in the 80s when the kids were more conservative than the older that's not the case now and then we add my personal observation which is that during covid during the lockdowns to me personally almost more shocking than any other aspect was the supineness the passivity of the kids uh except for it was established very very early that if you're young you're at no serious risk of this you'll get sick perhaps it'll be a flu but you're more likely to die in a car accident up to the age of 20 something than you are to die of covet that got established right away and universities shut down and they made kids take exams on or take their classes on zoom and i could detect no pushback no kid was talking trying to diss the man in general they were saying yes master it like igors to dr frankenstein so this is all really bad news why do you why do you think the first part of that question is importantly related to the second part well i was sort of hoping that that i was kind of setting that up as the question for you yeah yeah fair enough fair enough in other words uh i'm i guess let's just just state it that this is this is extremely crude and it feels even cruder now that i've listened to you talk with such a sophistication for a while now but here's the crew the crude point the crude suspicion is that if you don't have some notion of the transcendent if you don't have some notion of the divine then you'll believe any damn thing yeah yeah right i think that's right and that's what the kids are doing yeah well i mean dostoevsky's comment on that was if there's no god everything is permitted you know and he did a lovely job of analyzing that in well in crime and punishment and the brothers karamazov uh and i think it's true i think you'll if you believe nothing you'll fall for anything and i really do believe that's the case and you know you might say well what what do you mean you mentioned earlier that people like to ask me if i believe in god and i always think well who are you to be asking that question first of all you have some notion of what you mean by believe that you think is just accurate because you know what believe means and so you have a a priory theory about belief and now you're asking me if my belief in god fits into your a priory theory it's how about we start by questioning your a priory theory of belief because i don't even know what you mean by believe and neither do you especially when we're asking a question that profound because it you know do you believe in god there's two mysteries there well three you believe god all three of those are subject to question i think people act out what they believe and so when people ask me if i believe in god i say generally that i act as if god exists or i try to act as if god exists and they're not very happy about that because they want me to abide by the rules of the implicit rules of their question which is no do you believe in the religious view as a pseudo-scientific description of the structure of reality it's like well i don't even know how to answer that question because it's so badly formulated i can't get a handle on it do you believe that there's something divine well let's try to define divine here we can do that for for a moment most of us have some sense that literary stories differ in their depth that that i don't think that's an unwarranted proposition some stories are shallow and some stories are deep some stories are ephemeral and some move you deeply whatever that means it's a metaphor but we understand what it means imagine there are layers of literary depth and one way of conceptualizing the layers of literary depth is that the deeper an idea is the more idea other ideas depend on it right and so you have fundamental ideas that are fundamental because if you shake that idea you shake all the ideas that are dependent on them and then i would say well the realm of the divine is the realm of the most fundamental ideas and you don't get to believe in that or not because the alternative is to say well all ideas are equal in value it's like okay well try acting then and you can't because you can't act unless you prioritize your beliefs and if you prioritize them you arrange them into a hierarchy and if you arrange them into a hierarchy you accept the notion of depth and so that's a no-go when we use language of the divine we're talking about the deepest ideas and so i believe that the notion that each individual is characterized by a consciousness that transforms the horizon of the future into the present that's a divine idea it's so deep and our cultures necessarily i think functional cultures are necessarily predicated on that idea so i don't just think it's a western idea i don't think you can have a functional culture that in some sense doesn't instantiate that idea because you interfere with the mechanism of adaptation itself by not allowing it free expression you know and you can be like my prime minister and you can say well i really admire the chinese communist party because when it comes to environmental issues they get things done and i think i i couldn't begin to tell you how many things are wrong with that statement it would take like 15 years to tell you why you're uh an inexcusably narcissistic idiot but we can start like simply if you know what you're doing and you have power if you know what you're doing maybe you can be more efficient in your exercise of in your control over movement towards that goal let's just assume for a minute that you do know what you're doing well maybe if you have power then you're efficient fair enough man what about when you don't know what you're doing how about then where do you turn because what that means is your ideology failed you and do you have a mechanism for for operating when you don't know what you're doing well no because we always know what we're doing because we're totalitarian and we have a complete theory of everything and don't say anything to the contrary or else we've got it all wrapped up yeah except when you don't and so what do we do in free societies when we don't know what we're doing well we let people talk and out of that babble out of that noise and american culture is particularly remarkable in this regard you have this immense diversity of opinions most of which are completely useless and some of which are absolutely redemptive and one of the things that's so remarkable as a canadian observing your culture in particular is that you know you guys veer off in weird directions fairly frequently and things look pretty unstable and then there's some glimmer of hope somewhere that bursts forward in in a whole new mode of adaptation and away you go again and that just happens over and over and over and that's a consequence of real diversity of real diversity and it's definitely a consequence of like freedom of association and freedom of speech because it enables all that sure so all right that's optimistic and i'm always like to end a show on an up note here but not quite ready to show you so i want to hold that put a pin in the optimism you mentioned trudeau and trudeau's admiration for the chinese communist party ray dalio billionaire on china empires rise when they're productive financially sound earn more than they spend and increase assets faster than their liabilities objectively compare china in the u.s on these measures and the fundamentals clearly favor china close quote now this is jordan peterson writing about communism in your introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of the gulag archipelago the 50th anniversary of the publication of that in the west takes place next year jordan peterson no political experiment has been tried so widely with so many disparate people in so many different countries and failed so absolutely and catastrophically how much proof do we need why do we still avert our eyes from the truth now i have one i'm setting this up because this next quotation i think is actually quite beautiful and i really want to see what you do with it ray dalio gives voice to this persistent temptation jordan peter says why why do we still feel tempted and dostoyevsky in the legend of the grand inquisitor the grand inquisitor is speaking to christ and he says to christ you're all wrong receiving their bread from us the people will clearly see that we take the bread from them to give it back to them and they will be only too glad to have it so as we will deliver them from their greatest anxiety and torture that of having to decide freely for themselves never was there anything more unbearable to the human race than personal freedom close quote it's too hard dr peterson it's just too hard canada had a good run the united states had a good run but sustaining free societies across the decades and across the generations is just too hard for human nature to bear no you're not supposed to agree with that well two two things you know the first thing is that man does not live by bread alone so that's the first rejoinder and the second is with regards to difficulty well the only thing more difficult than contending forthrightly with existence is failing to do so i'm i'm not suggesting for a moment that this isn't difficult i mean part of the what the western religious tradition has done in religious traditions in general to some degree is to try to provide people with support from what's divine in their incalculably difficult efforts to deal with the unknown let's say the unknowable know that if you orient yourself ethically in the most fundamental sense then in some sense you have the force of god on your side and then maybe you can prevail despite the difficulty and i think that's i think that's right i i think it's i think that's true so and you can ask yourself i try to ask these questions seriously you know and i would also say that i've been driven to my religious beliefs such as it is by necessity not by desire what do you want to have on your side when you're contending with the unknowable future and it's vagaries how about truth how about beauty how about justice you want allies those are powerful allies that's what the university is supposed to be teaching young people it's like you need some allies man whilst how about the pursuit of truth well then the scientists have their say and i would say on the economic front well how about the free trade between autonomous individuals the free trade of goods of value between autonomous individuals that's not such a bad thing to have on your side these eternal verities and then we can say perhaps that well there is a set of eternal verities but they're all eternal verity so they share something in common some good in common all good things share some good in common well what is the good that they share in common well for all intents and purposes that's god and you might say well i don't believe in that it's like well i don't know what you mean you don't believe there's any such thing as good you don't believe there's any such thing as ultimate good i'm not trying to make some ontological claim about an old man living in the sky although i think that's a lot more sophisticated concept than people generally realize that's not my point my point is you do have a belief system whether you know it or not it's a system of ethics whether you know it or not there's either something at the bottom that unifies it or it's not unified which means you're aimless and hopeless and depressed and anxious and confused because those are the only other options and maybe you don't know what that unifying belief is but that doesn't mean that it's not there it just means you don't know what it is and so i'm trying to puzzle out what it is you know i've i can give you a couple of examples very very briefly because i won't so i already mentioned the genesis the story in genesis it associates god with the force process that generates habitable order out of chaos and attributes that nature in some sense to human beings um in the next part of the story in the story of adam and eve god is what people walk with unself-consciously in the garden so adam doesn't because he's now ashamed and he doesn't walk with god anymore but so what is god well that's what you walk with when you're unself-conscious so that's an interesting idea and then you have the god that manifests itself himself let's say in the story of noah and that's the that's the intuition that hard times are coming and that you better get your house in order and you think well does that lead you that intuition well certainly sometimes if you have any sense it's like well what's the nature of the intuition is that a spirit that animates you well obviously because there you are acting and so you're acting out a pattern it's a spirit that animates you and so and then there's the story of the tower of babel what's god there well god is that which you replace at your peril because everything will come tumbling down that's the tower of babel it's like well is that true or not you think about that for a week especially in that light you think oh definitely if we put the wrong thing at the top like stalin for example then look out and we've done that a bunch of times in the 20th century i think you know milton conceptualized lucifer as something like the spirit of unbridled intellectual arrogance it's something like lucifer is the lightbringer and he is engaged in a conflict with god attempting to replace the divine and that's pretty explicit in the story and i look at that and i think oh that's a poetic intuition of the of the battle between secular the secular intelligencia and the religious structure that's milton's pro-droma and what he sees happening is the intellect has become so arrogant that it will attempt to replace the divine and rule over hell i think yeah well that's the soviet union man that's mao is china we know we know we've got our theory it's total we've solved the problem and nothing's going to change fair enough if you want to rule over hell and you think well these societies are successful pretty odd definition of success as far as i'm concerned you want to be successful like china you know that's why it's true that man does not live by bread alone you know a wealthy slave that's no life man last question and again i'm going to take a moment to set this up and i'm going to fumble i'm going to grope toward it i'm going to stumble along toward this question but here's i'm i'm finding myself thinking back to the 1970s canada is part of this but i know the american story better and in the 1970s everything goes wrong economics stagnation loss of morale in this country because we lose in vietnam watergate scandal we're on the defensive as the sodium soviets advance in africa latin america and then in the 1980s at all turns and we go from 1979 and the soviet in the national humiliation of the iranian hostage crisis and this soviet invasion of afghanistan to 1989 one decade just 10 years later the berlin wall comes down so the question here is the loss of freedom of speech the corruption of the universities the rise of china which is in all kinds of ways a more formidable opponent than the soviet union was in all kinds of ways one could argue that we're in a worse position now than we were in the 70s and so what i want to know is are you speaking to those few who have eyes to see and ears to hear do you believe that we are capable do you hope to prompt another kind of restoration or is jordan peterson the fascinating eloquent compelling champion of a lost cause well i mean when i spit i spent a lot of time at the various universities i was associated with studying motivation for atrocity because i was very curious about that as a psychologist not not as a sociologist or an economic economist or a political scientist you're an auschwitz guard okay what's motivating you as an individual and i wanted to understand it well enough so that i could understand how i could do that because one answer to that is well that sort of behavior is so far beyond the pale that it's completely incomprehensible it's just a manifestation of say like intense psychopathy and a normal person can't even imagine it and i think nah that evidence doesn't really suggest that because it isn't obvious that all the people involved in the nazi movement for example were criminally pathological that they were deviations like what would incomprehensible deviations from the norm it'd be lovely to think that and it would make the world a lot simpler but i think the evidence mostly suggests that no you can get ordinary people to do that sort of thing and maybe even to enjoy it and so that's pretty bloody terrifying and so i tried to understand that and i think i did to some degree although we can't go into that a fair bit of that's a consequence of envy it's the spirit of cain i would say if you had to sum it up in a phrase but um that isn't the issue the issue is how do you stop it from happening again and because that's supposed to be what we're concentrating on let's say in the aftermath of the second world war never forget which should mean something like how about we don't do this again and so my my question was well how do we how do we best go about that ensuring we don't walk down that road again and my conclusion was that's an because it wasn't because it was fundamentally an issue of individual psychology most fundamentally more than economics more than sociology all of that it's the cure is individual people have to they have to act as ethically as they are powerful or else and so i've been trying to convince people to do that i suppose or to put forward not to convince them precisely but to put forward an argument about why that's necessary and why it's on them it's like no this is on you you don't you gotta understand this this problem it's you you don't get it right it isn't gonna work and so how do you do that well you start with what you have under control in your own life because where else are you going to start you look to yourself put your house in order don't be worried about some other person walking the satanic path and that's what activists do all the time right it's you it's the corporations like it's someone else no no it's you and i think that's also fundamental to the judeo-christian doctrine is that it's you it's on you redemption's an individual matter and so my hope is that if enough people take themselves with enough seriousness then we won't end up in hell because we certainly could it's it's a high probability and so and i also don't think that you can be or you can be motivated enough to put your house in order to the degree that's necessary merely by being attracted let's say to the potential utopia that might emerge as a consequence of that so that'd be a vision of heaven let's say no you need to also be terrified of hell i think well there's no such thing it's like just because you haven't been there doesn't mean there's no such thing it's like you have to be pretty bloody naive to think there's no such thing like how much evidence do you need and how does it come about well it comes about at least in partial consequence of the sins of men and i think that's true so i go around and i talk to people i say look there's there's not only more to you than you know there's more to you than you can imagine you have an ethical responsibility to act in that light and you might claim not to believe that but i would say well your whole culture is predicated on that belief and insofar as you are an active member of that culture and a believer in its structure then you believe it you might not be very good at believing it you might be full of conflict and doubt and you might not be able to articulate it but it's still right at the bedrock of your culture this notion of what the divine sovereign individual is that not what your culture is predicated on that idea the logos inherent in each person it's something other than that i've never seen a credible argument made to show that it's anything other than that you know you can say well rights are attributed to you by the state it's like sorry that's a weak argument because the state's dependent on your actions so you know to believe that you have to believe that the state is the entity and that individuals are just subordinate in some fundamental sense to the state it's like no the state is dependent on the individual to exactly the same degree so we're the active agent of the state in some sense where the seeing eye of the state this the speaking mouth of the state because the state's dead without the individuals that compose it can you con incoming freshman next year university of toronto stanford university 18 year old kids coming into this we've been through three years of covert i won't rehearse at all one sentence what would you what would you what would you say to them as they begin university at the age of 18 or 19. the restorative the redemptive sentence what should they do don't be thinking your ambition is corrupt you know because that's part of the message now human beings we're a cancer on the planet we're headed for an environmental apocalypse the entire historical structure is nothing but atrocity etc etc anyone with any ethical aim whatsoever is just going to pull back you don't want to manifest any ambition support the patriarchal structure exploit the environment you've got to crush yourself down you shouldn't even have any children it's like no there's no excuse for that there's zero excuse for that i saw a professor at an event something like this he came out and trumpeted this bloody environmentally friendly house he built and you know fair enough man it was a it was a pretty interesting house but not everybody had the four million dollars that that it took him to build it and i'm not criticizing his money even it's like he's had some money good for him he built a house okay but then to trumpet that as a moral virtue well you're pushing it there and then he came out to all the kids and he said you know my wife and i decided that we're only going to have one child and i think that's one of the most ethical things we could have possibly done and i would strongly encourage you to do the same i thought you son of a you get up in front of these young people a lot of these kids were children of first generation immigrants from china and and he showed all these images you know of these terrible factories in china these endless rows of sterile mechanism that were subordinating all the chinese people to this terrible you know capitalist machine and i thought you don't understand half the audience is looking at those factories and thinking that's a hell of a lot better than struggling through the mud under mao buddy and so he i don't know where he thought he was but to come out in front of all those kids and basically tell them that the whole human enterprise is so goddamn corrupt that the best thing they could possibly do is limit their multiplication and to think of himself as a scholar and an educator it was just i did say something by the way it was rather uncomfortable and he stomped off the stage but that's no message for young people that's no there's no excuse for that you think well you know we're going to destroy the planet we have to do this we have to demoralize the youth to be ethical it's like yeah really that's your theory you're gonna demoralize young people to be ethical that's your theory it's like you should go and think about that for like a year and i'm passionate about this you know because you have no idea how many people that's killing you have no idea i see people everywhere all over the world they're so demoralized especially young people especially young people with a conscience because they've been told since they were little that there's nothing to them but corruption and power it's like how the hell do you expect them to react you know they well i shouldn't do anything man you know dr jordan peterson on the what was the phrase the divine sovereign individual sovereign individual thank you for uncommon knowledge the hoover institution and fox nation i'm peter robinson [Music] you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 10,740,451

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Peter Robinson, Uncommon Knowledge, anti-woke, woke, ethics

Id: DcA5TotAkhs

Length: 62min 52sec (3772 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 29 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/LTlurkerFTredditor]

Boy, I am never gonna take benzodiazepines.

JP's brain is oatmeal. He never made much sense, but at least he wasn't weepy all the time. Now he's just a blithering idiot. How can anyone "look up" to this weirdo? How pathetic does one have to be to see this guy as a role model?

[u/Shallt3ar]

Jordan Peterson talking like he doesn't know any nazis but also using nazi rhetoric and complaining about cultural bolshevists marxists all the time.

E: Seems like he cries shortly after 1:01:30

[u/zeoNoeN]

Feels like Jordan Peterson has become the braindamaged version of Rick Sanchez

[u/Independent_Falcon58]

"It's all stage acting. He's crafted a persona, he has a particular instrumental goal in mind, and everything is subordinated to serve that."

What a great description of Jordan.

[u/Signature_Sea]

"I don't believe he has ever said a word that's true. He crafts a persona and everything he says is said with that in mind."

"Why, with what motivation is that?"

"The same motivation of people that are typically narcissistic. That is to be accredited with moral virtue in the absence of work necessary to actually attain it... He's playing a role."

Talk about projection.

[u/Striking_Language253]

Interesting that this was recorded on April 20. Was that about the time he started cancelling his appearances?

[u/SemioticWeapons]

No one is saying don't participate in the world were saying let's build a better world and update the systems.

He says we should seek power and wealth but if we do but have different goals then it's bad.

He chrips the teacher that got wealthy and built an environmentally friendly home. If the teacher just bought a luxury item he would be fine with it.