The Queen's University Talk: The Rising Tide of Compelled Speech

[Applause] well welcome everyone i'm assuming that applause was not for me [Laughter] my name is bill flanagan and i'm the dean of law here at queen's university and i'm pleased to welcome all of you here today for the inaugural liberty lecture generously sponsored by greg piazzetsky law 80 a long time and very generous supporter of the law school and greg is here today and i just want to perhaps join me in thanking greg for sponsoring this lecture series [Music] the liberty lecture is intended to explore the meaning of liberty in our contemporary society a subject of rich interest to philosophers political scientists and legal scholars just to name a few and today's liberty lecture is moderated by professor bruce pardee to my right of the faculty of law an expert in a variety of areas including environmental law environmental law and governance ecosystem management climate change water law and university governance our guest today is dr jordan peterson a professor of psychology at the university of toronto and a clinical psychologist his many publications include his recently published book 12 rules for life an antidote to chaos and his research spans a number of topics including the psychology of religion and the modern understanding of creativity and personality i know that today's lecture has generated a great deal of interest as is evident from the pact hall here today it's also generated a certain amount of heat the proposed topic the rising tide of compelled speech in canada is for many a controversial one and i know that many of you in the audience will hold widely divergent views i fully support your opportunity to be heard and should you wish challenge the speakers to defend their positions i know that today's speakers likewise share this conviction and will welcome your comments and questions as might be appropriate for a lecture series named after liberty i believe it is also important for me to affirm at the outset that the core values of the faculty of law end of queens university include academic freedom and respectful dialogue among those with differing views this includes providing our speakers with the opportunity to be heard and providing all of you with the opportunity to respond in a respectful environment free from any harassment or any attempts to shut down the conversation so it is in this spirit of free and respectful academic exchange that i am pleased to launcher this new lecture series welcome again and welcome to our guest and i look forward to our discussion thank you thank you bill welcome and thank you for coming i would like to underline what bill said which is that this event would not have happened without the initiative and support of greg piazzewski so greg thank you very much as well before we start i would like to thank some people uh from the faculty of law diane butler adam blake galapa and christina yulian for their help in putting this together i would also like to acknowledge the support help and generous assistance of several people around the university lisa plato and event services david patterson and the campus security office you have been professional helpful straightforward and i thank you very much for making this possible i would also like to return to dean flanagan's observation about the importance of this moment and to acknowledge the role that both dean flanagan and principal wolf have played in enhancing the reputation of this university in terms of its commitment to academic freedom and academic debate they have reflected an unflinching commitment to those ideas as principal wolf said on his blog informed respectful debate is central to academia and gentlemen i salute your academic statesmanship thank you very much [Music] so we're going to proceed as follows uh the first thing i would like to say is that in the hall behind you afterwards there will be some of jordan's books on sale 12 um what's the title again 12 rules for life 12 12 rules for life i want to get to 12 what it was right that's not 12 steps it's 12 rules right um we are going to proceed as follows jordan and i are going to have a conversation for half an hour maybe 40 minutes and then we are going to throw the floor open to questions we'll describe what kinds of questions that you should ask later on when we get to that stage but our topic is the rising tide of compelled speech in canada i am going to take just a couple of minutes to give us some context and set it up and then i'll ask jordan to tell us what he thinks you may have seen the cbc production of the tudors the story of king henry viii in one episode the king has condemned thomas more to death for refusing to say that the king is the head of the church of england moore is in his cell awaiting execution a friend comes to him to plead with him to say what it is the king wants to hear moore says he cannot do that for he does not believe it to be true in exasperation the friend says you don't have to believe it you just have to say it when your brain makes that kind of calculation you know you are under the thumb of a tyrant and thomas moore lost his head the tide of compelled speech in canada is rising the law society ontario has introduced a new policy that requires each lawyer to develop a statement of principles which endorses and acknowledges an obligation to promote certain values the ontario human rights commission says that under the human rights code failing to address somebody by their preferred pronoun will constitute discrimination for which you may be investigated and prosecuted the elementary teachers federation of ontario has introduced new curriculum to require teachers to teach elementary students about white privilege and the federal summer grants program requires applicants to attest to the values that the government believes in they don't have to believe it [Music] [Applause] [Applause] more [Applause] oh [Applause] [Music] [Applause] where is security well that's pure narcissism at work by the way you don't want to hijack to hijack an event like this that other people put time and effort into and to use they their their civility of the crowd and the civility of the organizers as an excuse to blatantly yell out your ill informed opinions is no way to conduct a civil dialogue it's absolutely appalling the people who do that should be embarrassed [Music] i guess i would also say that as students and as faculty members you shouldn't put up with it there's no way that you should allow people who are doing this to hijack your educational opportunities and to bend and twist the functions and the structures of the university it's it's not a good thing not in any way at all i would say that was a very disgraceful display fundamentally so let's let's stick with it why why do you think people are afraid of free speech well you know people develop an ideological view of the world because they don't want to think through things in real detail and they're aided and embedded in that endeavor by their pathological professors who are feeding them what would i say an oversimplified an oversimplified radical view of the world that in my estimation is fundamentally based in in resentment not that there's no reason for say a left-wing view of the world and we can get to that later it's it's easy virtue you know you can stand up in front of 900 people with your placard and your and your screeching and you can you can declaim to the entire audience your fundamental moral superiority you can tell everyone at once that they're all beneath you and you're standing for the right thing and absolutely none of that is earned you know like what the heck what the hell was that there's it's seriously man there's just it's just complete misbehavior it's embarrassing and the fact that people the people who do that don't have enough sense to go hide their head and shame just tells you how badly socialized they are and how terribly educated they are and the thing is the thing that's so awful is that there are professors and educators who promote that they say well that's how you change the world it's like it is how you change the world but it's certainly not how you make it better you make it worse clearly you know there's no comfort in that and and there's nothing about it this impressive it's no it's no better in some sense than a two-year-old having a tantrum on the floor it shows as far as i'm concerned it approximate the same level of psychosocial development so when the fact that that this is happening continually universities is it's it it truly makes me embarrassed to be associated with the university and now i say that with great displeasure because you know i've been working for great universities for a very long time and the university is an absolutely remarkable institution you know it's survived for a thousand years and and to see it to see it brought down by by people whose behavior would be out of place at a four-year-old's birthday party is is something something abysmal to behold so so what about the actions of government now because it is government after all that is the source of this compelled speech as law as well as other ways in which they seek to restrict speech but the compelled speech is the most egregious form of violation of family progression so tell us about that well i've been trying to i've been trying to sort this out because you know if you're a clinician i would say one of the problems you always have when you're dealing with behavior that's gone astray is to understand at what level of analysis you should address it you know is it a theological problem is it a philosophical problem is it a psychological problem is it social is it economic like these are very complicated questions is it a trivial issue is it an issue of rights is it is it something else the people who put in the bill c-16 for example and its associated legislation make the claim that it's it's a legislative move that's facilitated by nothing but compassion and desire to expand the domain of of of let's say of of rights and freedoms and you know there's nothing wrong in principle with expanding the domain of rights and freedoms except of course for every right and for every freedom there's an attendant responsibility and obligation so you have to keep that in mind when i looked at bill c-16 and the legislation that surrounded it especially that was written by the ontario human rights commission the policies that surrounded it and also the policies that gave rise to the social justice tribunals named social justice tribunals appallingly enough that that that gave rise to those tribunals in ontario the things i read just made my hair stand on end you know the social justice tribunals have the right to place themselves outside of legal outside of jurisprudential precedence it's like what the hell is that it's really you're going to make the case the only way i think that you could justify doing that is that if you tortured yourself into the ideological proposition that english common law is somehow an oppressive branch of the patriarchy and because of that you have every right and even obligation to place yourself outside of its structure of precedent but we don't want to place ourselves outside of the structure of precedent of english common law i can tell you that it's it's one of the supreme achievements of the human race it's it's produced societies that are as free and as productive as any societies have ever been anywhere on the planet and certainly are now and to to dare to state that you would place yourself outside of that president that's the sort of thing that made my hair stand on end and and there were other elements of the policies that were equally reprehensible not least their complete incoherence of formulation you know i couldn't understand some of it like i don't understand for example with regards to the gender propositions how it can be that you can be anywhere on the gender spectrum which by the way is not a spectrum technically and it actually matters which words you use if you're writing law you can be anywhere or nowhere on that spectrum like i don't know what that means and i don't believe that the people who wrote it know what it means either and you don't write things that you don't understand into the damn law you don't do that because the law unfolds in society and it tangles people up as it unfolds and it's no joke when that happens so you'll be very very careful when you're writing law and you certainly don't want to write law to push forward your ideological commitments especially in the face of precedent because precedent is what keeps law from degenerating into ideology essentially and so well and so to answer your question you know more more more fundamentally i don't believe that this argument has ever been about the rights of transgender people i think that it's an attempt by the radical left ideologues to push their ideological agenda forward using using they're using attempts to manipulate the linguistic domain and i'm not willing to seed the linguistic domain because i don't think there are any more anything more important than the words that you use and then when the government says well you should start using these words you should start thinking hard about your damn government because your words are no different than your thoughts and your thoughts orient yourself your thoughts orient you in the world and if someone's going to tell you what it is that you have to think then they're going to disorient you in the world and i wouldn't recommend that because there's lots of terrible things that can happen to you and if you're disoriented you're going to run into a very large number of them so that's how it looks to me so but about the ideological context of this seems like something has changed yes because if you think back decades earlier liberals were the champions of free speech yes it was the conservatives at a certain moment in time who were the censors you know they they sought to curb blasphemy and obscenity sedition and so on and and the liberals said no free speech is the way we want to go and yet today that has flipped uh if you if you look back to what left leaning officials and authorities and and and figures said let me just give you one quote this is samuel gompers who is the founder of the american federation of labor in 1886 he said this he said the freedom of speech has been granted to the people in order that they may say the things which sorry misquoted that have not been granted to the people in order that they may say the things which please and which are based upon accepted thought but the right to say the things which displease the right to say the things which may convey the new and yet unexpected thoughts the right to say things even though they do are wrong now that is not a sentiment now carried on by the left in today what has happened well again i see that it's a consequence of continual agitation by i would say a minority of of the left radical left in particular and those are people who aren't marxist slash neil marxist in their fundamental ideological orientation and have joined that in an unholy union with the worst of french post-modernism and and there they push it forward ideological certainty and the thing that the thing that's really distressing about that is that if you know anything about the history of oppressed people let's say much as i hate to engage in that particular form of dialogue under the current conditions it's pretty obvious that it's freedom of speech is is a freedom that's particularly important for people who don't have anything else right it's if you're supporting freedom of speech you're not supporting the status quo i mean just think about let's let's use the logic of the radical leftists and assume that society is a tyrannical hierarchy and the people at the top have the upper hand in everything including access to communication these people are not your friends [Music] you'll see you know that's that that and mark my words that's the sounds of the barbarians pounding at the gates right yeah that's all i'll tell you again too that use of in kuwait what would you call it in kuwait sensation is the best formulation of their argument and there's not much difference between knocking on the doors and knocking on you so keep that in mind it's not amusing there's nothing to it there's nothing for it the thing that's also quite appalling is that there's no evidence whatsoever that the people who are conducting these protests know what it is that they're protesting against you know i was in i i i was in the midst of a discussion attempting to make the case that it's freedom of speech that's that is what people who have nothing still have right so if you look at the tyrannical structure of our society let's say the people at the top have access to means of communication everyone knows that it's the people at the bottom who have the right to say what they think however badly they say it that enables them to get a toehold into the system and to and to make their suffering known that's what freedom of speech is for and so like what's the protest against that and i'll tell you you know that the radical neo-marxist types they speak the language of power and that's what they're speaking right now and if you want to live in a world where everyone speaks the language of power then just let them do what they're doing and see what happens i wouldn't recommend it it's not a pretty road and you're all in a position you're on a situation in your life now where you have to make decisions about these sorts of things like is this the sort of institution that you want this to be now one of the uh one of the arguments against what you said about the pronouns was that well after all all you're being asked to do is to say something that is reasonable it's not unreasonable to address somebody by the pronoun that they prefer and yet if you think of any kind of speech which is prescribed imagine a statute that said people shall use the words hello and please and thank you in their conversations that statute is untenable yes because it now requires people to use certain words in their conversations even if those words are reasonable themselves so that is not the question and it was not your case you were making that using a pronoun was unreasonable in itself do i have that correct well yeah first of all there's a couple of things i'd like to say about that now i looked at the process by which the ontario government formulated its legislation with regards to the pronouns and the consultation process they used and the consultation process was deeply flawed they contacted activists and say let's activists of the trans community okay well there's a couple of things i'd like to say about that the first is there is no trans community right trans people are as diverse as any other group of people and to the idea that somehow because of one of their attributes they constitute a homogenous group is a well you think that that would be a falsehood that the people who are concerned about treating groups of people adequately would be loath to to put forward but even more importantly there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the activist types are actually representatives of any of the communities that they hypothetically activate on behalf of it's like they're not elected they're not appointed they don't poll they do this they say look here's a group it's a minority group and it's oppressed i'm a member of that group and therefore i stand for the group it's like actually no you don't you don't stand for your group you maybe stand for yourself you know i don't stand for men and i don't understand for white men i'm not i'm not entitled to speak on their behalf and so the idea that it's the trans community that wanted this is a completely unsustainable idea it's certainly unproven i've had like 40 letters from trans people since i started to engage in this call it this chaotic battle and only one of them was mildly critical of what i was doing all the other ones and there aren't that many trans people you know so to get 40 letters is actually quite a few i'm not saying that this is a scientific poll but it's at least as scientific as the process by which the ontario government generated its legislation and and i'm not and i'm not generating legislation and what these people said to a person was i didn't ask to be the newest whipping boy for the radical post-modernists all it's done is made my life more difficult you know the basic letter would say well i'm transitioning from one gender to the other and it's very difficult and i'm not sure that it's the right thing to do and this has made the process spectacularly more difficult on all fronts it's like and these people don't speak for me and just because they say they do that doesn't mean they do and so the other thing that we seem to have swallowed as a society is this crazy notion that well first of all that we should be portioned up into our different minority groups which i think is a return to tribalism and unbelievably dangerous i can't really think of anything more dangerous than that and then we've swallowed the idea that if you identify yourself as a member of a minority group and then you bring forward a grievance you have to be treated as if you're a valid representative of that group it's like well why in the world would we do that it's guilt i suppose maybe that's part of it or i think it's mostly guilt you don't want to stand up and say well you know who died and made you king so to speak you know and can we can we uh stay on that logic for a moment the the idea so this this compelled speech material seems to insist treating people not as individuals but as members of groups to either blame them or to favor them as a member of a group if we take that logic and extend it you know that the group identity thing becomes intersectionality where you're not just belonging to one group but you're also of these characteristics spin that out for us what what what is the logic of that where does it lead us to well okay so the first thing i would say to everyone in in the room is is i don't think and this is why i decided to do what what i did right from the beginning you know is that i don't want to play the group identity game i don't want to construe the world in those terms and i'm not going to use terminology that would require me to formulate my thoughts in that manner i think it's a terrible catastrophe to divide us all up into our tribal entities i don't see anything positive about that at all so i just don't want to go there and then second i would say and maybe this is even more relevant you you may or may not have heard about intersectionality but intersectionality is a new development on the radical left and i think it's actually if i wasn't so intent upon seriousness in these matters i would be constantly laughing about intersectionality and the reason for that is that it's the radical left has discovered its own achilles heel so look what's the problem with dividing us up into groups well there's many and and the descent into tribalism is not least among them but the next is that well it turns out that we don't fit into one group any of us we fit into multiple groups and it's not obvious at all which of those groups should take should be of paramount importance you know there's a racial group and an ethnic ethnic group and there's groups of intelligence and there's groups of temperament there's groups of attractiveness and there's groups of wealth and you can multiply them really indefinitely and i do mean indefinitely because you can categorize a finite number of entities a virtually infinite number of ways and so the intersectionalists discovered this they said well there's there's let's say there's latinos and there's and there's asians it's like okay well wait a minute there's male and female latinos and there's male and female asians so so do we treat is is the division into two enough or do we need a division into four well and then well then there's socioeconomic class of male and female asians and male and female latinos and and you can keep fractionating the groups and technically without end and you actually see this happening in real time so to speak as the as the acronym for the lgbt activists continues to expand really without end and see what's at the bottom of intersectionality and this i suspect will be discovered eventually by the radical leftists if they get that far is that you have to fractionate the groups right down to the individual and that's what western culture discussed and articulated discovered and articulated over the last 5 000 years it's like oh right the group isn't the paramount division it's the individual because unless you treat each person like an individual you're not taking all the intersections into account and so it's extraordinarily it's extraordinarily comedic but it also isn't as if it's treating everyone as they're an individual as if they're an individual is an instant solution that will bring us to utopia you know it's it's like winston churchill said of democracy right it's it's essentially the least terrible approach we have and life isn't the sort of problem that is amenable to an instantaneous utopian solution but our best bet is to meet each other with the desire for peace and productivity on this on the stage that enables individual interaction because then we meet soul to soul so to speak we also meet in a domain that we bear responsibility for as individuals and that's also extremely important right you should be responsible for what you say you should have to suffer the consequences of what you say not least so that you learn and so the individual is paramount as far as i'm concerned i think that's the fundamental principle of western civilization now it's not only the west that has come across that discovery but i think we've done the best job so far of articulating it and so we don't want to lose that because the alternative isn't a multicultural utopia the alternative is a descent into tribal barbarism and and there are people who would be just as happy if that happened but i would susp suggest that it's not a destiny that an awake person would would would long for yeah do you feel like taking some questions do you feel like taking some questions from the floor sure all right so we're going to have questions and we'd like you to participate in this conversation now um please do ask a question we welcome you up to say what you'd like if there is a preamble to the question that's fairly short then so be it but please do ask a question we're not actually inviting speeches and we do primarily want to hear what jordan has to say so feel free to line up at the two microphones we'll take one at a time go ahead sir uh so first of all thank you so much for being here i really enjoyed it um [Music] and uh second i'm this ties into my question i just last week my free speech coalition at bishops university was officially ratified and i would love to invite you to be our first guest speaker if that's at all possible um oh thank you um and my question pertains to this um for dr peterson what would you consider the most under discussed or overlooked ideas and topics that you think should be discussed in the club because i know we're looking for controversial ideas that we think are maybe not as discussed as much as they should be well that that's a that's a difficult question i would say that it isn't obvious to me that on university campuses at the present time or in the education system in general we've done a good job of taking stock of the advantages and disadvantages of our current socio-political systems now and i think there's enough data so that we can start having intelligent conversations so one thing i would recommend to you all if you're interested is a book i just finished reading it it's called the great leveler the great leveler by walter scheidel and it's a discussion of inequality and it's a very intelligent book so one of so inequality as you may or may not know is rife throughout human societies right and that's the case in the present day and it's been the case historically but it's also the case in animal societies by every measure so inequality is the rule of life let's say and that doesn't mean it's not an ethical catastrophe i'm not saying that i'm just saying that the fact of inequality cannot be laid at the feet of the west or of capitalism or or really of any human construction for that matter one of the things scheidel did was to investigate empirically the relationship between inequality and the pole of government so because let's say if you if you surveyed a very large number of states you could determine whether this the governments were left-wing or right-wing and then you could you could do a compilation of inequality coefficients and you could find out if left-wing governments had any any ability to ameliorate inequality just as an empirical question and the answer that scheidel generated was no there's no difference whatsoever in the inequality coefficients in left and right wing states and what that points to is a much more fundamental problem and scheidel in his book also points out that the only known historical forces that limit inequality or that reduce inequality are war revolution and pestilence it doesn't look like it's easily under under human control and so you know the marxists talked about inequality and the fact that capital tends to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people which is sort of true except that the people at the top tend to rotate a lot more quickly than the communists and the marxists ever presumed but it doesn't look like that's a consequence of capitalism it looks like it's a much deeper process and capitalism at least well it's shoveling money and resources up to the top also does lift the bottom very very quickly you know and this is something we need to have a serious discussion about in the university so like one because we shouldn't be doing this we should be partying in the streets and here's one reason why do you know that the level of absolute poverty in the world fell by 50 between the year 2000 and the year 2012. you know that was three years faster than the most optimistic u.n projection considered it was the fastest decline in absolute poverty that the world has ever seen and like that's a big deal you know about there's hundreds of thousands of people a week right now that are being connected to the power grid and almost everybody has access to high-speed computation and the the these struggling economies in africa have for the last four years being the fastest growing economies in the world you know there's almost no absolute privation left there aren't people starving except for political reasons we're at a point where obesity is a worse worst problem than starvation you know and and now i also think that a lot of that was purchased at the cost of the of the dreams and hopes of the working class in the west you know i think what we did in some sense for about a 30-year period was sacrificed the aspirations of the western working class to alleviate poverty in india and china and in southeast asia and it looks like that might have been a really good deal although it was a little bit hard on the working-class people and that has to be taken into account but we're not having discussions of this sort of universities it's like we're stuck in 1980 or maybe in 1960 we haven't updated our models to take into account the new and often extraordinarily positive realities and we're tearing ourselves apart in the west with this identity politics idiocy at the same time the things are getting better and better faster and faster than they ever have by a huge margin in the history of mankind so it's like it's time to wake up and throw off the depression of the cold war and and and to look around and see what's what's available in front of us and what we could accomplish that would be much better than well than this yeah so [Music] i i am told that there are developments outside i'm sorry for the noise the uh will they're doing the best they can uh yes ma'am um hi so mr peterson you've said that you're at most one of your utmost priorities is the pursuit of truth um could you just clarify what truth you mean when you're presented with a situation where you have to or you're being asked to refer to someone to their preferred pronouns is it is it a truth that you see is it their truth is your truth to me the issue isn't the request of the individual to be addressed in a certain manner it's the compulsion of that by law so when these issues get conflated constantly look i've dealt with all sorts of people in my life a much broader range of people than most people ever encounter in the course of their entire lives and i'm perfectly capable of deciding how to treat someone on a one-to-one basis but when the demand for for terminology becomes part of the legal system i don't care what the rationale is it's not happening as far as i'm concerned and people say well we're pushing it forward because of compassion and maybe you could stop just being such a mean professor it's like why should i believe that you know what the hell you're doing with your compelling laws you're willing to you're willing to move past a legal line in the sand that's been drawn for let's say 700 years you do not write compelled speech into the legislation oh but we're doing it with the best of intents yeah no you're not so these issues have to be separate look if this was about transgender rights it would have disappeared in september of 2016. it's not about transgender rights and everyone knows it so this is not about transgender rights what these what these people are doing outside it's about something far deeper than that so can we ask the question this way can we say don't doesn't everybody have the right the liberty to decide how to present themselves you know how to be who they want to be what to wear you know what what gender to call themselves and the answer is yes everybody has the liberty to do that but everybody else has liberty too and the liberty to do that doesn't mean they have the right to compel other people to agree with it in other words liberty is not the right to demand that the world validate the choices that you've made you have your choices you have the freedom to make the choices and everybody else has the freedom to make their choices too and to approve or disapprove or to call you this or they call you that in other words liberty is a two-way street and everybody has it and the fact that you've made choices doesn't mean everybody else doesn't have the same ability to make the same choices back back mike please go ahead hi um that was loud i just want to thank you for being here i'm really big fan and um i have a bad habit of making or uh getting into arguments with a lot of radical leftists and the most common argument they present to me generally is bill c-16 only covers the ontario human rights code so those are protected areas under the ontario human rights code such as universities elementary schools etc i was just wondering um how you would combat this argument seeing as their argument is generally um they're only dealing with vulnerable groups such as young students and um it's still bad enough it doesn't matter they say well it's it's restricted in scope yeah it's not restricted enough look i mean here's a couple of facts okay so when i first made my videos about bill c-16 one of the things that i suggested was that the act of making the video itself could well have been illegal and of course people immediately accused me of fear-mongering and perhaps with reason it's not always easy to understand the full intent of a new piece of legislation surrounding policies but i can tell you one thing when the lawyers at the university of toronto read through the new legislation and the surrounding policies they also decided that what i was doing might have been transgressing the law and that's why they wrote me two letters telling me to stop okay so that's fact number one okay fact number two two words lindsey shepherd [Music] okay so let's say for the argument that i'm a paranoid megalomaniac and that i'm a bigot and all of the other things that people have decided that i might be okay well i'll tell you what in my paranoid megalomania i never envisioned a situation where a teaching assistant a 22 year old teaching assistant at a major canadian university would be hauled in front of a quasi-mayoist inquisition and have to record it because she dared to show five minutes of a video from a mainstream news program run by public television funded by the government of ontario so paranoid as i was let's say it isn't obvious that i was paranoid enough so and i don't see that i don't see how either of those examples can be disputed you know it wasn't like the university of toronto wrote me two letters without thinking about it they went and consulted their high-powered lawyers and the lawyers reviewed the policies in the legislation and they thought oh dr peterson he might be contravening that legislation it's like it was a weird paradoxical gift to me that they sent out those two letters telling me to stop because it was instant proof that what i was doing was um i wouldn't say right because god only knows about that but at least that my interpretation of the bill and its intent was correct so can we just make this observation that that that response to jordan's critique of c-16 the one that went oh he's overreacting nobody's going to be punished or sent to jail for this is silly in this sense remember every single legal rule there is is a legal rule only because it is backed with the monopolistic violence of the state they're really there's no such thing as a rule without punishment so if if for example there's a no parking sign what the parking sign says oh by the way please don't park here but there are no tickets well people are going to park because that's not really a rule so if you have a rule in the human rights code and if you breach it if that's discrimination well then true that the first thing that happens to you is not going to be thrown in jail but there's a process a series of steps right the first one might be a mediation or an investigation and then there might be a fine and then if you don't pay the fine then your wages might be garnished or you might be ordered to fix it but believe me if you refuse and refuse and refuse and refuse that order will become a court order and then if you don't obey the court order you'll be in contempt of court and then that will lead to arrest and imprisonment so every single rule in the human rights code is effectively enforced with the most severe violence the state has even though it's not actually practiced most of the time because most people obey when we we also don't want to underestimate i don't know how many of you have had the pleasure of being dragged before a board that investigates your behavior but i would tell you that even if you don't end up paying a fine or in jail there's nothing particularly pleasant about the process itself it's enough you know you wonder why people don't speak up and i can tell you one of the reasons they don't speak up is because merely being dragged in front of a board of inquiry innocent or guilty is enough to pretty much do you in for a whole year like if you're a sensible person and you're concerned with propriety and and and you want to maintain the stability of your life and your reputation is important to you perhaps because of the the stability of your family depends on it to be investigated for such things as a punishment all of its own it's no it's no pleasant business and many of you will experience that i would i would equate being investigated by a non-punitive board let's say with these punishments that bruce described quite far down the distance i would equate that to having a fairly serious disease in terms of its in terms of its psychological and physical impact i would also say you know no i won't i won't say it as embarrassing as what's happening out there is for queen's university i think what it does is show how important we're doing here is and how weak those people are so thank you first of all [Music] um in terms of my question i think most people here believe that it's extremely important in everything that we're doing to speak our mind to speak freely that's why we're here but um in terms of practicality there's a lot of things that get our in the way of our lives with students you know we have our gpa to look out for a job uh prospective so um in terms of practicality what are kind of maybe your tips and your perspective on the steps that students can take to kind of speak their mind um while not sacrificing kind of you know their future perspectives well i can tell you a couple of things that are very practical don't write in your essays what you think the professor wants to hear there's absolutely no excuse whatsoever for doing that now first of all most professors even those who have descended into a state of ideological possession let's say most of them still have enough character to grade an essay that's well written properly so you're actually taking less of a risk than you would think by stating what you have to state but look if you start practicing when you're in university when the stakes are rather low pandering to the audience let's say and saying what you think will get you by you're going to train yourself to do that and what that means is you're going to train yourself in the falsification of your character and your character is the only thing you have to guide you through life you know people dream of riches and they dream of luxury and all of that but that's a thin defense against the harsh realities of the world you have your character and so what you do when you go to university is you learn to say what you think as clearly as you can and to take the slings and arrows that come along with that not in an arrogant manner right because like what the hell do you know you know so you've got plenty to learn but you want to formulate your thoughts carefully you want to write what you think well why because when you're writing you're thinking you're laying out the arguments that you're going to use to structure your existence in the world throughout your entire life and if you start to twist and bend those for expedient reasons you're going to warp your soul and i mean i could talk about that neurophysiologically if you want to you know you become what you practice you automate what you practice so if you automate expedient speech for the sake of short-term gain then that's what you're going to produce you're going to produce expedient speech for short-term gain well god help you if you do that like there is nothing that you will possibly do in your entire life that will serve you better than to get control of your voice in university and obviously you do that by reading right you read great people you do that by writing what you think you stay true to yourself while you write what you think and you take the risks and you gain the benefits that go along with that you learn to stand up and speak and to listen carefully and that makes you a negotiator of unparalleled power and if you're a negotiator of unparalleled power there's nothing in the world that won't open itself up to you so that's what you're doing in university and if you find professors who who reject that and there's fewer of them than you might think then it's your sacred obligation to stand up for yourself against that because it's going to happen to you throughout your whole life and you might as well start practicing how to do it right now so that's how it looks to me yeah there's an old saying that i i write [Music] i write in order to know what i think and you'll note how compelled speech interferes in that process yes so the idea that you have to write what your professor wants is a form of compelled speech it's like it i really do believe that this is a fundamental issue as a therapist say when i'm trying to help someone set their life straight i do my best not to compel their speech and the reason for that is quite clear it's like you have your destiny with all its attendant triumphants and sufferings and it's on your shoulders i don't want to tell you how to think i don't want to tell you how to think because i do not know how you should think you have to figure that out for yourself and and then you have to bear the responsibility for that and it you you're a terribly arrogant fool if you dare to tell someone else how it is that they should conduct themselves through life now i mean having said that well obviously i say well you should tell the truth or at least you shouldn't lie but that's not a dictate of of of pro of of action so to speak it's a dictator process it's like well you can't you shouldn't interfere with the mechanism that allows you to solve all the problems that you will face in your life and you come to university maybe to prepare for a tr for a for a profession you know and to set yourself up economically but to set yourself economic up economically properly i don't care what your profession is going to be there is no one who is more powerful than someone who can communicate it doesn't matter what the field it doesn't matter if you're a plumber or a politician if you can formulate your thoughts clearly if you can conduct yourself honorably in your action and your speech if you're articulate and careful then the the world opens itself up to you you have an unlimited horizon of possibility so thank you very much uh thank you both for coming but firstly i'd like to thank everyone in the room who has not devolved into the hysteria we see outside they would prefer that we lost our sanity and that our society would fracture into the nonsense we see so by sitting here being as patient as you are this is how we keep our academy this is how we keep our society thank you [Applause] [Music] my question is a simple one uh we see more and more of this new language i call of leftism intersectionality equity diversity inclusion and we see people from all political and philosophical stripes adopting this new vernacular is this in any way dignifying that as a position is this dignifying the philosophical bases of these words do people recognize that when they use these these words that they're making that somehow a truth that we all ought to accept i don't should we or should we not i don't think people do recognize that again you know i'd like to reiterate the reason i made those videos to begin with was because i don't i was unwilling to see the linguistic territory as soon as you think it's already happening to some degree so imagine that we just define the socio-political landscape in terms of identity politics which is happening very rapidly in fact we're compelled to do so right so um well then then what happens is you get activity on the identity politics front on the left and on the right the left says well the oppressed shall rise and take their rightful place and the right says yeah over my dead body and probably years too so as soon as we play the identity politics game that's where we're at and we start playing it by accepting the terminology you know already i find myself stumbling when i use the word sex instead of gender and that's not good like i have to consciously overcome a resistance to use the word sex instead of gender because you know i'm actually quite an agreeable person and it actually pains me to to go against the crowd let's say you know i'm not temperamentally suited for it precisely strangely enough and so i feel the compulsion to use this kind of language welling up inside of me just to be to be nice i suppose you know but i know where identity politics leads it leads to the gulag it leads to the concentration camps it leads to blood in the streets we don't need that here we're doing pretty well so we could leave it uh hi professor peterson uh i studied history for the duration of my degree and i think it's just sickeningly ironic that the people who uh are using their free speech want to take away your free speech and furthermore that they can't see the irony of the situation of how tyrannical they're being uh my question is however um i've noticed from a lot of what you've talked about and i've been watching you since your rise in 2016 2016. um and i know that you're a christian and i don't want to divulge into that but i i notice a lot of this sort of north american protestant work ethic in in uh in your lessons like you know uh self-redemption and to be your own person like we've been talking about that the last like hour and a half i suppose and um in a ever rising tide where people are rather in the western world where it's becoming increasingly rather decreasingly christian and specifically is yeah decreasingly religious and specifically decreasingly christian how can you uh what do you think is the best suggestion in order to be able to uphold those such important values that have been across the world uh from american cultural influence since the end of the second world war i apologize for the long questions no no it's fine you know people have asked me repeatedly about my religious views and i've answered them in a variety of different ways but they say do you believe in god let's say and my response to that always is well i don't know what you mean when you ask me that question so i don't know how to answer it i don't know what you mean by believe but i can tell you something that i believe and i would say this is a way of speaking symbolically i do believe so i was thinking the other day a week ago i was thinking about this i had this little fantasy that entered my mind i was thinking about saint joseph's oratorio in montreal and saint joseph's oratorio is a very large religious building it's one of the biggest cathedral-like structures in the world and it's set on the hill on mount royal and it's set up where it can catch the sun you know so it's an image of the heavenly city on the hill right it's an image of the structures that we strive to create that's what it is in independent of its specifically christian or religious function that's what it stands for symbolically okay so it's the city on the hill it's it's what we're striving towards when we walk uphill in life okay now the way the the oratorio is structured there's hundreds of steps leading to it up front and in the early part of the 20th century a lot of people who had physical disabilities came there and they struggled up the step on their crutches and many of them left their crutches in the oratorio you can see hundreds of them if you go there it's quite an interesting site and i was thinking about that and i was thinking about what that meant and this is what it means it means that you know everyone has their disabilities let's say and i know that some people are far more terribly affected than other people i'm perfectly aware of that but the question is what do you do about that and what you do is you you set yourself up on your damn crutches and you struggle up the bloody hill that's what you do and you struggle up the hill towards the kingdom of god that's what you do because the alternative is to descend into the abyss that's the alternative and then so to say well do you believe it's like i believe that you should struggle uphill towards the city of god on your crutches that's what you should do that's the opposite of the descent into the abyss and so that's that's at the foundation of our civilization that idea well argue with it if you will see if you can figure out why that's not an acceptable idea maybe you should help someone struggle up the hill perhaps you should you know you can lend a hand to someone although you don't want to take the burden away from them entirely because there's something noble about struggling up the damn hill right there's something that's adventure that's the call to proper being it's like well we don't need to forget this you know we don't need to forget it the universities have been there since time immemorial to try to push that idea forward through the generations and everyone needs to know that idea that's what gives your life not happiness forget about that if it comes well great accept it dignity nobility character truth responsibility beauty those are the things to aim for honor too i would say honor uh thank you very much and i hope when all this is done i hope you take a nice long big vacation because i think you really deserve it hello um dr peterson first thank you for coming and um so i'm chinese my parents grew up in the cultural revolution of china so i took particular attention when you mentioned in multiple occasions comparing what's happening in the west right now to miles china and i i agree and it's pretty obvious the connection between their ideology the identity politics and the oppression versus oppressed viewpoints but my question is mostly about how they're promoting the political agenda i mean i see that the political agenda the philosophy behind the political agenda are very similar but at the same time i see a shocking similarity in the way that they're promoting that political agenda specifically back in back in the cultural revolution anyone who dared to say anything that it's not fully for the movement was classified as anti-revolutionary just as now who anyone who dare to say anything that goes remotely not fully aligned with whatever they want to promote is classified as hate speech although it has nothing to do with hating anybody so since the same thing is happening here and in miles china what would you say what what do you think is the connection between the philosophy and their idiotic oversimplifying and tyrannical way of of trying to promoting it well the first thing the first thing we should make clear is that there is such a thing as hate speech right like let's not be naive about this and you can use words to inflame and words can be very dangerous tools and people use them in hateful manners all the time that's not the issue that's obvious the issue is whether or not you should regulate that and even more importantly whether the state should regulate it and the reason that's an issue is because who's going to define it i'll tell you who's going to define hate speech it's the people who are doing that that are going to define hate speech and right now they're defining you sitting in here as hate speech i mean that's exactly what's going on while we sit here it's like who would be interested in defining the parameters of hate speech here's the answer the people that you would least want to have adopt that responsibility and and hate speech it's like let's say i was interviewed a while back and the journalist asked me well why should your right to offend trump someone's right to be secure it's like okay well let's say i'm talking to one person and you might say well i don't have the right to offend them it's like all right what if i'm talking to ten people do i have the right to offend one of those people when i speak to them what if it's a thousand people look you can't you can't have a conversation about something serious without offense like if i'm thinking about something serious like i offend myself you know and i seriously mean that i really mean that so like if i'm laying out a set of hypotheses for example about a complex social a social problem i might lay out 20 hypothesis and maybe two of them i think god i hope that's not true but like maybe it is true you know sometimes you discover things as a social scientist that you wish weren't true and those are usually the things that you've discovered that are actually true right because they violate your assumptions so you can't even think if you're not willing to offend yourself that's what thinking does if you're ever talking something wouldn't be serious if it didn't have the possibility of frightening and offending people that's kind of how that's kind of like the definition of seriousness it's like well we can only talk about things that no one ever gets upset about it's like well then it's like you're trapped in an elevator for for the rest of infinity listening to nothing but music that's and that's a kind of hell man if you're gonna think and also if you're gonna speak you're gonna you're gonna offend people you're gonna go after their deepest presuppositions and your own as well you're gonna shatter them at times it's gonna be brutal absolutely brutal and you all know that because every single one of you has had a serious conversation with someone that you love and the probability that that was an easy conversation and that either of you escaped without offense and terror is zero if you haven't had a conversation like that well well you're not human right i mean right because everyone has conversations like that all the time except when they run from them which is most of the time and no bloody wonder you know real conversations are there's nothing worse than a real conversation except the war that you have if you don't have the conversation that's basically how it goes i just want to underline i just want to underline jordan's first point which is really that it's a very dangerous thing any legal rule that relies on some kind of reasonableness because reasonableness lies in the eyes of the beholder i mean those people out there think that you guys are uttering hate speech they think that you guys should be the one who are arrested and just imagine if they were the ones who had the reins of government power just all very well to think of hate speech as a reasonable idea but as soon as you give up the control about what that means you're liable to run into a real trouble next hello mister hello mr peterson my name's zachary milligan uh first off i'd just like to start by to actually thank you for all the hardship and troubles you've endured for standing up for our rights and being a part of this debate i come from a dairy farm in napanee rural raised conservatively and my question is in the face of when we have a social situation so divisive when you genuinely believe what you're doing is the right thing in this particular instance since you have experience with it what would you say is there a more effective i don't want to say an easy way to reach out for them but what do you think's the best way to try and talk some sense into those folks outside in a one-on-one setting so so the first thing is is i don't necessarily that i i don't necessarily think that what i'm doing is the right thing because you know you have to be careful when you make a claim like that but i can tell you one thing i'm not going to let anyone stand in the way of me trying to figure out what the right thing is that's the thing [Applause] and then i would say we're doing exactly what we should be doing right now in this discussion it's it's just exactly right right i mean admittedly we have to talk over the noise but that's really not that big a catastrophe and everybody in here is comporting themselves in a reasonable manner and we're trying to struggle our way through the topics and we're we're asking questions and we're trying to have a genuine dialogue about them and that's what we've got we've got we've got three things we've got negotiation we've got slavery and we've got tyranny and those are your choices and so this is negotiation right that's public discourse and the reason that freedom of speech thought is obviously important everyone can understand that you might say well you don't need to speak freely because you can think who's going to get inside your head but the problem with that is that that's not it you can't think very well because there you are in your little world you know with all your biases and your ignorance you're wrong about so many things and you're going to learn it really painfully and and then maybe you can trot out some of the things you think erroneously and ignorantly and other people will give you a tap on the side of the head instead of running you over with a freight train right they'll give you a little tap on the side of the head and maybe you'll walk away a little smarter and that's why freedom of speech is so important is because a lot of thinking especially about things that are beyond you for whatever reason have to take place publicly as we stumble around towards an adequate formulation of the problems that beset us so i would say well in this book i wrote i have a rule it's i think it's rule 8 which is tell the truth or at least don't lie i would say well that's another reasonable a reasonable way to start approaching the situation is it's not so easy to tell the truth because like what do you know you know you can't come out and say well here's the truth but i know what one thing you can do which is when you know that what you're saying is a lie by your own standards you cannot say it and you can have a consultation with yourself and you can try to learn to say those things that make you strong instead of saying those things that make you weak and you you contribute to the health of the public dialogue in an incalculable manner that way and this is another issue that pertains to the dignity and importance of the individual how you conduct yourself in your life is way more important than you think and i mean i think that that's a daunting idea because you know let's say you're nihilistic and life is meaningless well what's the payoff for that i think well there's no payoff it's like well yeah there is you have no responsibility that's a pretty decent payoff i mean you have to pay the price of meaninglessness but it doesn't matter what you do well we'll flip that over and say no no sorry you're wrong your life is meaningful it's way more meaningful than you think but you have to bear responsibility for your thoughts and your actions it's like you'll there'll be plenty of meaning in that well that if you understand that properly that will that will cleave you to the depths of your soul and maybe you learn to speak carefully and to act carefully and that will have a beneficial effect on everyone around you far more you're far more powerful in the place you stand in the place you sit and stand than you think and i think everyone has an intimation of that and if you don't think that's true then try treating people around you as if it's not true try treating people that you know in your life as if they don't matter and just see what kind of response you get people are not going to be happy with you not in any sense whatsoever you'll you'll ruin all your relationships you have to treat people as if they matter and maybe you have to treat them as if they matter because maybe they do and that goes for you too and so if you matter then you should act like you matter and that's a very that's a very daunting proposition that's for sure and as a foot as a as just a footnote to that let's just observe this in legal terms there are only two categories of actions voluntary and involuntary don't let anybody tell you otherwise either you're choosing on your own and and handling the consequences or the government is telling you what to do those are the only two possibilities you sirs at the back go ahead hello doc hello dr peterson i would like to recall the part in your conversation in which you mentioned how the radical left switched from the 1960s and 70s to being back when they were pro free speech and their recent um opposition to it i know i know that you often mention their obsession with power at least among them um yes at least among their more marxist types i was one wondering if perhaps they think that now that now is the opportunity where they can consolidate their power and if they do so successfully that it will become the morality of our civilization for the next thousand years like christianity was when rome adopted it is that from what you've seen um would you say that that's about that that's close to the way they're if that's close to their strategy well it's hard to exactly understand the strategy of an ideology you know because all the people who were outside were were united in some sense under the umbrella of an idea and an idea is a living thing i mean it's embedded in living tissue and it's distributed in a fragmentary manner across the mob let's say and each person in the mob always only only possesses a fragment of the ideology because the full neo-marxist let's say the full neo-marxist post-modernist doctrine is quite complex and and but when you get the mob together then it acts under the dictate of the ideology and the question then is well what does the ideology want and i would say well it wants what its formulator says it wants and darada for example whose head trickster of the post-modernists regarded the western society as phallicocentric right and not that meant was male dominant male dominated that's the fellow fellas part and then logocentric well that refers to the word logos which means is the root word of logic but is also the is also the the person of christ essentially the logos and so and the purpose of the post-modern critique was to demolish that well fair enough my sense with people is especially if they're if they've written things down and thought them through that they're actually aiming for what they say they're aiming for well if you if you buy the idea that the west is a male-dominated tyranny essentially a patriarchal tyranny and that your moral duty is to tear it down well then that's what you're doing and then you might say well what's going to what is going to be erected on its ashes well that's where things get complicated you know the first question might be are the people who wish to tear it down builders or are they just destroyers and my strong sentiment is that they're primarily destroyers now you might say well why do people wish to destroy well it's because they're hurt by life and they're resentful and resentful people become vengeful and vengeful people become dangerous and there's no shortage of motivation to make things worse you know the school shooters make things worse people make things worse now you know maybe lurking in the rhetoric is this appeal to an egalitarian utopia but we've tried egalitarian utopias already we sacrificed 100 million people to egalitarian utopias and we have yet to produce one and so my sense is the corpse is stacked up high enough to constitute proof so it's destruction mostly that motivates it as far as i can tell masquerading as compassion [Applause] thank you for that question next please dr peterson professor party thank you both for being here today um when political scientists and what i've studied is totalitarian regimes i'm sorry i'm going to move this a little bit i feel weird totalitarian regimes i've studied i've tried to look at the iranian revolution and the islamic republic in iran and i've argued how the shia islam that is teached in the islamic republic is very close to a totalitarian regime but now i live in a country where my ideas are considered controversial if you believe in god if you believe in family if you believe in having responsibility and traditional values i feel ostracized by the community here i came from ufc university of calgary over there i didn't feel this way there was more welcoming here i feel marginalized and i do feel alone and when i see this it disgusts me that here they can do this but i couldn't go to their events and do anything i'd have to shut up there'd be a disciplinary committee for me but for them they can break windows to god knows how old this building is and it's okay for them to do that so my question to you is now being here experiencing this i'm starting to second guess that maybe the totalitarian islamic regime that i was so you know talking about and critical of back in iran isn't so bad when i have a choice between having to be here and be oppressed and be there and at least have my ideas be okay with the regime so my argument is if this free speech and the arguments you guys are making here doesn't work would that not be the next step for people to go towards totalitarianism if dialogue fails then isn't force of arms the only thing left how can people compromise when they don't want to talk when they want to yell thank you [Applause] i i think you make a very good point i i don't think we should fool ourselves this is about force and it is it's almost a dare to suggest that that certain elements are not allowed to enforce their view of the world and that speaking contrary to it isn't an affront to those values and they won't shut you down i mean that that is what is at stake we we are we are we are no longer really in a situation where this will all be resolved through sort of gentle reasonable civil dialogue that that happens on the side but it's not real anymore it's not really where the fight is happening this is a an imposition of the force of the state and it is skewed it is skewed a certain way and we are getting to the point where a certain kind of language a certain kind of dialogue is is approved and all right and a certain kind is not and that is the campaign that is going on that this is all part of and i have to say that that your presence here and and your endorsement of this kind of event is the kind of thing that has the major pushback to that trend but the trend is continuing and is a very dangerous one and uh this is a a difficult moment in the life of this country would you would you say jordan so so some some comments about about your career let's say okay so you're a young man and you've got lots of years ahead of you so you know you want to prepare for the war and not for the battle right okay because there's going to be many battles for you personally and perhaps politically and all of that and so you want to make yourself as articulate and educated as you can and you want to have patience i would say that there's no cause for despair you know i believe that the the people who are attempting to radicalize our society and to transform it into a battleground of identity politics are in a distinct minority and i think that i think that there's no reason to assume that we can't push the devil back into the into the bottle so to speak to push the genie back into the bottle and so don't despair now from a personal perspective it's like you've got lots of things to learn and you've got lots of things to say and to write and you're going to find now and then that you're imposed upon in a manner that you don't find tolerable right you think i can't live like this right it's going to distress you and well then then you've come across your moral conundrum right it's specific to you and then you have to that's when you have to grow up and think strategically it's like you decide are you willing to live under those conditions if you're not then you develop a strategy it's like okay i'm going to i'm going to fight this i'm going to fight it carefully intelligently thoughtfully on multiple fronts and i'm not going to back down now you don't make that decision lightly you know most things you should let blow by you because there's not that much of you and there's lots of things but now and then you'll find a stumbling block that you can't get over because it hurts you like it damages your soul that's the right way to think about it well then that's the time for you to put your education to use you know and you'll be able to do that i mean you don't want to underestimate the utility of of deep forthright speech i don't believe that anything can stand in its way you have the courage of your convictions but don't give way to despair like this battle is by no means over no by no means and it isn't even obvious that the bad guys are winning so to speak you know i mean here we are we're having this talk the university came out forthrightly in favor of free speech rave for that [Music] you know and so far all the questions today have been thoughtful and intelligent you seem like informed people it's like don't underestimate your strength and so and mcmaster just published a set of guidelines governing this sort of behavior so that it will no longer be acceptable to disrupt perfectly reasonable proceedings on university campuses um in and so that so that discussions like this can continue properly i mean there's definitely a place for uh give and take and for informed opposition let's say but there's a difference between informed opposition and child childish grandstanding and i think people know the difference between that so don't don't be desperate about it pick your battles a little courage goes a long way right because other people see it and there's a there is i think a silent majority out there that is silent and is scared but if they see courage from somebody they respond to it well i i think you described lawyers in a way that appealed to me once he said i think i know that's rare but [Laughter] you said lawyers i think these are the words you said lawyers are difficult and emotionally stable and it's the combination of those two things the willingness to be difficult but not to be emotional about it don't don't don't wed your emotions to the fight take a step back engage in it say what you think be courageous but don't get wrapped up in it don't be emotional about it but you know retain your strengths for the long haul well you know one of the things i've learned strategically and this is really worth thinking about too is that when you're engaged in a public dispute like this it's not obvious when things are going your way you know you think well this protest is not such a good thing it's like i wouldn't be so sure about that you know what's happened to me in the last 18 months is that virtually every time that i've been attacked and some of the attacks have been quite well i wouldn't say brutal because we haven't got to that thank god but they've certainly been um they've taken me aback you know it's not it's it's not a straightforward thing to be in a hall with this happened at mcmaster with a hundred people yelling at you and blaring air horns and all of that but that wasn't a bad thing as it turned out because it was filmed and it was put on youtube and it was terrible for the people who protested you know it wasn't good and so you got to detach yourself too you know if you say what you think and you're careful about it it's going to have some short-term effects and it's going to have some medium-term effects and it's going to have some long-term effects and one of the things that you need to do i would say and this is an element of courage is you have to have faith that the medium to long-term consequences of you saying what you have to say as clearly as possible is going to be positive and you have to act on that supposition you don't know right you can't know that that's the existential leap of faith is you you can't know but you act anyway and my experience has been that you don't want to you don't want to make judgment too quickly because it's not always clear when things are going your way so and you know you might stand up in a class and say something that people react negatively to and you might get pilloried for that by some people but you never know who you're touching in the crowd and you don't know how that's going to unfold across time now that might be a defining moment in someone else's life to watch you stand up and say what you have to say so don't underestimate the power of truth and courage really so thank you honestly they should be thankful at how civil and how peaceful you guys are they should be thankful they shouldn't be angry i regret to say we probably have time for probably just a couple more questions so let's go to the back hi um so my question is uh directed at dr peterson um i've been watching your lectures online for a while and um you talk a lot come a little closer to the bike sorry all right you speak a lot about that's better as you speak a lot about character archetypes and uh narrative and the importance of the jungian idea of the personal narrative um i i'm having trouble formulating this into a question but i guess with the idea of archetypes in mind are you familiar with benui mandelbrot's idea of fractal patterns and if so what do you think and if is there a connection there maybe to be found well there seems to be a metaphorical connection in that the the great is is reproduced in the small and that's certainly an idea that permeates let's say religious and theological speculation you know there's an idea that here's an idea that it's like the idea of the genie which is the same word as genius you know the genie is something of unimaginable power that's constrained in a very small space and that's kind of what a person is like you know we have this affinity we have this connection to the infinite we have this connection to the divine but we're but it's constrained within within our frames right and we have to act out the the divine narrative in the confines of our own life and so there is this overarching reality which is something like the for the fourth right confrontation with the catastrophe of life right and but that has to be made personal you know so that that's one of jung's i would say deepest ideas is that the archetypal has to be made personal in your own life and so you take the generic pattern and you personalize it and then the infinite and the finite meet and that's the perfect combination and there's something about that that's well unutterably profound i would say and and and as true as anything can be and i think people know this at a very deep level because you do know when you're struggling to go to sleep at night and your conscience is bothering you and you think through the things that you did in the day and the week you'll take solace in the things that you did that were noble and true and you and you can you can breathe a sigh of relief that you're not completely corrupt and lost and then you can sleep it's like everyone knows this well we need to know it consciously right and that's part of the process of making the archetypal personal and that's part of what the religious process is supposed to be about is to outline the the archetypal pattern and then to say look you have to meditate on this and you have to figure out how to make it true in the confines of your own life and that gives see the reason that works i think is because there's no doubt that your life is tragic and there's no doubt that you have a malevolent element and that you'll be touched by betrayal and all those terrible things but there's a nobility about you too and that nobility might be sufficient to transcend your limitations and i would say that your life is a struggle to determine if that might be the case and that's the act of faith and i also do believe i was asked today by a south african journalist if i'm the ultimate pessimist or the ultimate optimist you know and i would say in some ways i am the ultimate pessimist i know i think as much as i can tolerate how terrible life can be but i do believe that the human spirit can overcome that catastrophe and can rise out of it and i think the universities are that that idea expressed in stone and tradition it's a great idea everyone needs the idea especially people who are young you know your life is you know that your life is going to be difficult it's like no one can say well it's going to be easy but you might say well do you want it to be easy what's in it for you if it's easy well no you want it to be difficult and worthwhile and you want to be the sort of person that can manage that and that's what you should be that's what you should be encouraged to be at university and and that's what the universities are for so well that's the archetypal and the personal i would say yeah thank you very much this will uh this will have to be our last question go ahead sir in recent time uh i would probably identify the most recent u.s election as the turning point for this and that's i'm saying that as an american citizen this is my first time living in canada um i've noticed that public discourse is taken to elevate fascism as the ultimate evil and maybe rightfully so you know there are many horrific things committed by fascist states in the 20th century and you see people you know like facebook cover photos like bash the fast you see stickers on laptops this machine kills fascists it is you know there's this big like backlash against fascism and the horrors that it caused but in spite of that you don't see the same reaction to the horrors and the genocide that were caused by socialist and communist states in the 20th century you do not you see people who virtue signal endlessly about how horrible the holocaust was about how awful these things were and then just hand wave away the famine genocide of the ukraine the great leap forward they think these things are inconsequential or even necessary sacrifices for the rise of the greater good of socialism or communism and i personally find that morally reprehensible and i can't understand where that where that comes in how you can stand there and be so opposed to this genocide let's say that this genocide is somehow just oh it's not a problem and why do you think that how do you think that disconnect happens how do you think people can um convince themselves of that and why do you think that happens it's a great question um you know i have my house is covered with with art from the soviet era and i have a lot of reasons for that part of it is to remind me of what happened part of it is to watch the struggle between the art and the propaganda on the canvases sort of in real time you know i'm very interested in that but i would never decorate my house with nazi regalia you know and you think well why is that exactly it's not like i don't know that what happened in the communist regimes was utterly reprehensible why is it and perhaps it's not acceptable to have you know socialist realist paintings in your house but it's certainly more acceptable or it seems that way than to have paintings from the nazi era let's say so then you think well why is that exactly and i think you know back in 1918 at the dawn of the russian revolution when europe was in flames and in runes and the monarchical societies were collapsing and the industrial revolution was in full force and there were terrible there was terrible poverty and terrible inequality the dream of universal brotherhood was a compelling dream the dream of egalitarianism and and and and maybe maybe who knows how much of it was motivated by genuine benevolence some at least it's very difficult to see that the nazi the nazi phenomena was ever generated by any genuine benevolence that's very difficult to to make a case for um so maybe you can forgive the the socialist the communist utopians a hundred years ago because they didn't know what they were getting in for people had warned them dostoevsky warned them nietzsche warned them but but still and then the other thing too is the problem of inequality it's like the problem of inequality is a real problem and it doesn't go away like it's very difficult when you walk down bloor street for example in toronto and you see homeless people alcoholics and drug addicts who are struggling and the mentally ill who are on the street and they're in their little domain of hell it's it's really difficult for that to not tear at your heartstrings and say well isn't the world an unjust place or an unfair place which it is and so you can see the never-ending wellsprings of motivation to support the oppressed and i think the fact that the the communist the communist dogma at least had that as part of its initiating ethos is partly what seems to make it forgivable i also think it's easier for people to identify why fascism is wrong we can say look racial superiority no okay it's pretty simple right it's three words you can really get it but but but equality of outcome it's like that's really wrong it's really wrong but it's not so obvious why right it isn't you you can't just say equality of outcome no and have everyone clap because it isn't as well and that's the thing it's really difficult to it's difficult to isolate the pathological elements in radical left-wing thought because they're not self-evidently pathological like there's this old cliche um from each according to his ability to each according to his need it's like yeah that sounds pretty good we have needs it's like let's have them fulfilled and well you have an ability well like manifest it it's like well it doesn't work in practice in fact it's murderous in practice and it's a great catastrophe in some sense that it's murderous in practice so i just think it's maybe part of it is it's just a hell of a lot harder to learn why it's wrong that combined with you know the genuine outpouring of compassion for the oppressed and and which is like who's for poverty no one right and and inequality is a painful reality it's painful for everyone you know even people who are self-righteous about their their status let's say in in the depths of their soul the struggling of the fact of the struggling still rips at them and so it's a more difficult lesson for us to learn so yeah thank you [Applause] to those people lined up with the mics i sorry for leaving you hanging i'm sure we could go on uh all night if we had the time um but we must call this to a close i would like to salute you for your patience and your dedication in the face of the noise from outside very nicely done well done yes as you uh as you no doubt are aware professor peterson has written an international bestseller it's called 12 rules for life there are some for sale in the hall now before you go let me just say this you have participated in what i would consider to be an important step in the life of this university and for that we should thank you so thank you for coming and thank you for your support professor peterson uh may be the most important intellectual voice in this country today and i would like to thank him very much for coming so good night be safe i just have sorry i just have one small thing to say hold on i would i would very much like to stay and talk with a bunch of you and i generally do that but i can't do it today because i have to go back to toronto and i'm going to australia tomorrow so i don't i can't do that even though i would like to so i have to run off and then i have to drive back to toronto and but despite that thank you very much for coming and for being patient and all of that yeah [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [ __ ] my simplicity [Music] [Applause] now [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [ __ ] white supremacy [Applause] haven't really chosen where i'm at with him i've been looking at his points and looking at the protest points and i'm not really sure um i just think it's interesting that he's drawing this sort of crowd and that you know what's happening here is happening i think that really says something about participation in queens we're here to protest uh jordan peterson being given a platform at queen's university um jordan peterson aside from not knowing what he's talking about vis-a-vis the law uh peterson tends to incite hatred wherever he goes it's not a discussion about which toppings you like on pizza it's a discussion about which people should be considered human which people we should respect and that's not a debate that should happen anywhere [Music] love that they are here having this of course because clearly they don't agree with what he has to say so they're showing it but uh i have seen a lot of people you know call for them to be canceled they are shouting that daniel wolf should be ashamed of himself for allowing this to happen and that i i just think is wrong uh i don't know it seems like we have a lot of very angry people here because someone's expressing an idea different than their own and here at a university i kind of thought that was the point please thank you would you like a uh one more would you like a delicious pepsi cola i'm good okay same goes for yourself okay it's refreshing it takes bravery to save that hate is unacceptable guys yeah like really they broke the [ __ ] window out in there jesus christ crazy crazy

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,312,705

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, Queen's University, jordanbpeterson, lecture, free speech, personality, philosophy, social justice, 12 rules for life, right wing, left wing, social justice warrior, truth, religion, christianity, political correctness, diversity, inclusivity, neomarxism, postmodernism, bruce pardy

Id: MwdYpMS8s28

Length: 106min 20sec (6380 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/yukongold44]

Yeah sure, just post this at 2am. Not like I have important stuff to do tomorrow or anything...

[u/Nerdfighter45]

Status Report: About twenty minutes into it, it's pretty solid. People should give it a listen.

[u/DearSalt5]

Too late for the event, but still worth looking at... people who insist that those who dismiss Peterson must listen to and read him at length are compelled, I should think, to read this (all things considered, pretty succinct) analysis of his work.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve

It's going to be a... challenging read for his supporters, but Peterson himself insists on difficult conversations, so I trust it will be read carefully and duly considered.

It's a bit long, but again, if those who aren't Peterson fans are being exhorted to listen to several hours of YouTube videos and read his self-help book before we "judge" him, his fans might want to diligently dig into the above and give it a fair shake.

[u/Sum_Yung_Gy]

1:38:00 "Racial superiority - no. It's pretty simple" - Jordan B. Peterson

Yeah, sounds like a racist, white supremacist Nazi to me...