The Lie of Relative Morality | Dr. Jordan Peterson #CLIP

it strikes me a lot of young people and i think this is enormous to do their credit and goes to heart i think of what you're saying they're told that all morality is relative they don't live that way they're actually looking for truth aren't they well if you live that way everyone hates you you know but that's the creed that oh yes yes but that's a good example of how you who you are can be out of sync of with how you represent yourself it's like i was walking through the with i was walking through these ideas with the audience last night it's like well how do we treat each other when things work you know and how do you treat yourself well first of all you have to treat yourself like you matter because if you don't then you don't take care of yourself and you become vengeful and and and cruel and you you take you take it out on people around you and you're not a positive force none of that's good so you suffer more and so does everyone around you and there's a malevolence that enters into it none of that's good so that's what happens if you don't treat yourself like you matter and then what happens if you don't treat other people like they matter well you lie to them you cheat them you steal you you enter into impulsive relationships with them they can't trust you that doesn't go anywhere they don't like you you you end up alone at best and maybe like in incarcerated at worst like that doesn't work and so you watch the people around you who thrive regardless of what they say they act out the proposition that everyone matters and then you have a functional society and i think okay well if if if when you act out the proposition that everyone matters you have a functional society maybe that's evidence that that proposition is true it's like i think it's i think it's true i think the idea that the individual has a spark of divinity within him or her i think there isn't a more true way of saying that and if you act that out well this is goes back to the idea that you brought up about potential which is also something i've discussed with my audience is a lot it's like we don't act like we live in a material reality we act like we face a landscape of potential an external landscape of potential with an internal reservoir of potential that's how we act and then we call each other out on it we say things like well you're not living up to your potential in person's goal so yeah well i know it's like well what do you mean by that what do you mean by that well you mean there's more to you than meets the eye even though it's not measurable right it's not tangible it's just possibility but everyone acts as that as though that's a reality and we all act as if we all act as if we make choices about what reality to bring into being we we punish ourselves for our moral errors and and other people as well we act out this this ethic that puts us each at the center of being as active participants in the world that we want to bring forward everyone acts that way and if we don't then things go to hell instantly so it's like well what do we believe this is the argument i've had with people like sam harris the atheist types it's like yeah you think you're atheist man it's like you're christian judeo-christian let's say to the core you just don't understand it you just don't realize it and it's understandable but it's not helpful this idea that you put forward of a spark of divinity in every human being surely lies at the heart of the miracle of western freedom the idea that every individual has worth and dignity and standing it's the idea that killed slavery right slavery is the greatest human rights movement of all times so successful that it obliterated the idea that it was all right to keep slaves let alone change the law it changed the way the world thought even though there are even evil people who still keep slaves and and here's a rub it was plainly led by people of profound christian faith there's no other way of putting it anyone who honestly honestly and that's truthfully looks at the history of that period can't get away from it but because it doesn't suit the modern left's narrative it's airbrushed out doesn't that in itself say something profound about our willingness to try and distort truth to suit our objectives it's hard to say what what what it what it speaks of you know it's it's it's hard it's like the the whitewashing of what happened in the in the in the soviet states you know in the communist states in the 20th century i mean anybody who goes through that literature with any degree of care comes away traumatized right shell-shocked it's just it's it's it's everything the nazis did on a larger scale it's horrifying and yet i see with my students 50 or 60 million people who dared to disagree died oh well at minimum it was in their own culture it was something in their own society don't know in the soviet union the estimates range from 20 to 60 million and in maoist china the estimates are as much as a hundred million are our kids taught this in school not at all in universities very i think you see their societies they just prefer something the modern fight in it seems to me in many ways is between what might be called freedom and faith fairness and equality equality sounds terrific yep but we've actually seen what happens in societies where they set a quality up as the ultimate goal they became terrible places how did that happen well i think it sounds good yeah well that's i think that's also part of the the whitewashing is we can't understand how one of our primary moral intuitions which might be fairness let's say can transform itself into something so utterly murderous when it's played out on a large political stage and i think because we don't understand that i mean look there's reasons to be on the left there are temperamental reasons first so a lot of your political preference is influenced let's say by your temperament and a lot of your temperament is influenced by biological factors so there are temperamental reasons to be on the left people who are on the left tend to be higher in creativity and lower in conscientiousness for example those are the two best predictors but there's also practical reasons to be on the left and one of the practical reasons are that human societies which tend to be hierarchical like all animal societies or almost all animal societies produce inequality as they go about their business and inequality is actually quite painful no one likes it nobody no rich capitalist walks down a busy urban street and sees a starving homeless person who's clearly mentally ill suffering madly and thinks that even that inequality is okay no one thinks that no one's for poverty right and so we have this moral intuition that would be better if the downtrodden were lifted up and it's difficult to discriminate between that and an inequality narrative and so i think part of the reason that we can't face the the lesson of the 20th century is because it's the left that mostly has to face the lesson and they don't know how to reconcile their deep intuitions about the injustice of inequality with the fact that when you put that doctrine at work into into operation as a political tool you instantly stack up millions of corpses we don't know what to do with that and so we just avoid it and that's well and then of course we risk replicating it which is not a good that's not a good uh tactical move well that's the problem if we don't learn from history we're destined to repeat it i entirely accept and some australians might be surprised by this they say no i can't understand a lefty's perspective i think i can i can understand the nobility of wanting to ensure that everyone is respected as a full member of the hand of the human family of our culture and our society but this is where it gets so tricky and it's where i think many young people are starting to wake up they're being sold a pup do you have that expression in canada no no zelda pup no sold a dad you know it's not a sound idea right that many of the things that sound attractive don't necessarily work so perhaps we need to be arguing the case for freedom and fairness which will produce at least a high degree of equality of opportunity rather than arguing for equality which history tells us tends to severely erode freely yeah well it's it's it's a harder sale though because but it's it's easy to appeal to compassion immediately thoughtlessly right and since that's such an instantaneously positive moral virtue and you don't need sophisticated argumentation to buttress it it's a lot more difficult to make a cold analytical case that the the proposition freedom first let's say freedom and responsibility first lifts the bottom up better it's a cold argument and it requires rationality to parse through so it's a harder sale i would argue though it's not just rationality it's history if you bring rationality and honesty to the study of history i think i think the the the the case is actually quite complicated i think it is fact i think it's open and shut i think it's it's well there's a book that i've just been reading that i would recommend um by a man named walter scheidel and he wrote a book called uh the great leveler which i really like it's an empirical analysis of inequality and he had his research questions were something like well what what is the phenomena of inequality to what can you attribute it and what if anything can we do to ameliorate it okay so the first answer is something akin to what i wrote in the first rule in my book 12 rules for life which is well you can't lay hierarchy and inequality at the feet of western civilization or capitalism we're done with that argument that's wrong animal societies are hierarchical and they produce unequal distributions and there's evidence for that in the biological realm going back a third of a billion years and that's happened for so long that your nervous system has primarily adapted to it so it's a deep reality and blaming it on capitalism it's like no you

Channel: John Anderson Media

Views: 138,788

Keywords: John Anderson, John Anderson Conversation, Interview, John Anderson Interview, Policy debate, public policy, public debate, John Anderson Direct, Direct, Conversations, Jordan Peterson, Humanity

Id: 1UJ_KLqumPo

Length: 10min 5sec (605 seconds)

Published: Mon May 30 2022