We're especially delighted to welcome you to this

Evening our special program is entitled the meaning and reality of individual sovereignty

with a renowned scholar and best-selling author

Jordan B. Peterson

For those of you who may be new to the independent Institute, you'll find information on us in the printed program that hopefully you received

The independent Institute is a nonprofit nonpartisan

public policy research organization that sponsors in-depth studies of major social and economic issues

The purpose is to bowl the advance peaceful prosperous and free societies

grounded in a commitment to human dignity

In the process we seek robust dialogue of key issues and we stand against efforts to shut down the free exchange of ideas

The results of our work are published as books and form the basis for numerous conference and media programs

Neither seeking nor accepting government funding. We hope that you will join our lighthouse society

Within just a couple years Jordan Peterson has taken the world by storm

Indeed he's become a profound and powerful phenomenon in the midst of the cultural confusion of our age a

A courageous articulate and sparkling champion of free speech

individual liberty personal responsibility

Free markets civic virtue the rule of law and the judeo-christian values that underpin Western civilization

Dr. Peterson has burst onto the public scene with his incisive critiques of political correctness

identity politics

moral relativism

post-modernism and

collectivism and statism on the left and right

Here's just a sampling of the many memorable quotes by him quote

Don't compare yourself with other people

compare yourself with who you were yesterday unquote or

Free speech is not just another value is the foundation of Western civilization

Don't lie about ANYTHING, EVER. lying leads to hell

We have to rediscover the eternal values that... and then live them out

No one gets away with anything ever

So take responsibility for your own life

Now what is remarkable is that such common sense and enduring wisdom

Has been so sadly lacking in the public square

But what is also so astounding and encouraging

is the enormous interest Dr. Peterson is generating globally in restoring first principles

Author the number 1 international bestseller 12 rules for life an antidote to chaos

Jordan Peterson is professor of psychology at the University of Toronto

He is also author of the book maps of meaning the architecture of belief

Plus over 100 scientific papers and he has almost 2 million subscribers to his YouTube channel

His work explores the modern world by combining the hard-won truths of ancient tradition

With the stunning revelations of cutting-edge science

now you can read further details about his background on the program that hopefully you got

But I will just add one additional

note

He's a native of North Western Canada

(in) 2016 he was inducted as an honorary member of the quack-e-to-tell tribe in the Pacific Northwest and

given the name alestalagie

meaning great seeker

Please join me in welcoming Jordan B Peterson

Well, thank you all for coming. it's good to see you here

The meaning and reality of individual sovereignty

That's a fundamental question as far as I'm concerned

Because it's by no means

self-evident

Why?

the idea of individual sovereignty should be

granted the

primacy of place that it

Has been granted or you could say it another way the

The reasons that that proposition have been deemed self-evident are not obvious

so

When I was just backstage, I was looking at the Declaration of Independence, which I do quite regularly make sure that I've got that

especially the introductory

Statements formulated properly and the introductory statements. I won't quote them precisely but

They lay out a series of propositions

And the first is that we hold these truths to be self-evident

and that people are

endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights that

they're equal and that

Government is to govern bike by the consent of individuals and

Those are axiomatic statements, right?

There are this sort of statements that you build a system from you have to accept the statements first before you can build the system

And it's analogous in some sense to Euclidean geometry, right? There's a

Set of axioms and you accept them and then you can build a system, but you have to accept the axioms

But you don't have to accept the axioms. That's the thing and one of the things that's very much worth understanding is that

the current culture war that we're

Embroiled in which really has been going on for in some ways

For thousands of years, but in other ways for

More specifically political ways. I suppose since the rise of Marxism about a hundred and fifty years ago

It depends on how you analyze it whether you think about it as political or psychological because as a psychological phenomena, it's much older

The the proposition that

Those truths that are laid out in the Declaration of Independence are self-evident is

No longer accepted by a large number of people

Let's say in the intellectual academy and I would say that's particularly true of the post modernists. It's also true of the

Marxists and

the post modernists and the Marxists have

United in a very strange

manner because their

Philosophies are not really commensurate with one another the post modernists profess

Skepticism about meta-narratives

large-scale stories that perhaps might

Might serve as uniting

structures for people's own cognitive

Contents but also that unite

groups of people across large swaths of territory they profess

skepticism about the validity of those narratives and yet

well, the problem with that is it leaves you nowhere because if you don't have a

Uniting narrative a uniting story of uniting ethos. You don't have an explanation for

Your existence in the world and you don't have a direction

And that's not helpful

Because you can't live without an explanation for your existence in the world and a direction or if you do live under those conditions

You're bound to be miserable. And the reason you're bound to be miserable is because

And I would say that this is technically true

That almost all the positive emotion that you're going to experience in your life is a consequence of pursuing valuable goals

It's not a consequence of attaining them

It's a consequence of positing them

aiming at them and then observing yourself moving towards them and that... the sense that

accompanies that and we know the neurobiology of this sense actually quite well. the sense of that is one of

Forward movement and engagement and meaning and accomplishment. It's something like that

Hope that's another way of thinking about it. And it's the antidote in some sense to the

flip side of life which is the fact that it's

nasty brutish and short

as Thomas Hobbes put it

And that's inalienable as well

there's no escape from the

limitations and suffering of life

And so in order for that not to become overwhelming and then that can easily become overwhelming and often does in people's lives

Then you need a countervailing

Set of propositions that you can act out and embody

to endow that-

Limitation with worth and that's a not a trivial

Problem. I was just debating... Not really

Slavoj Žižek

about a week ago and

two weeks ago maybe and I was debating him because he had been advertised to me and

many others as sort of the world's foremost Marxist scholar and it turned out that

He really was not much of a Marxist at all. And so I ended up criticizing the communist manifesto

which

Deserves criticism and and then I expected him to defend

it but he didn't and so that was

Sort of

Interesting but non blessing um

But he said something very interesting during that debate and it came all of a sudden it came out of the blue, you know

And I think it was the most

striking part of the entire discussion

And then this is just a strange segue, but I'm trying I want to I need to

Discuss this because it struck me so hard because I think it's such an important point

I'd never thought about it before so he told me something I'd never thought about before at all

He was talking about the Christian passion

and he said that his

Sense was that the most important part of it was

The scene let's say where Christ is crucified and cries out to God that he's been Forsaken

And he said look you gotta think about what that means. I'm paraphrasing him. He said that

the suffering that characterizes individual human life is so intense that even if God Himself

Dane's to undergo it it will test his faith to the point where he will not believe in his own existence

That's really something and I thought wow, that's such a brilliant. That's such a brilliant observation. Is that

Because it's definitely the case, you know, if you if you if you interact with people in any manner, that's the least bit

Below the surface you find out that most people are carrying

A relatively heavy existential burden of one form or another, you know, I mean most people

many people have a physical illness that they're dealing with or a mental illness that they're dealing with and if

You're in a fortunate position where you're not dealing with either of those you probably have a family member that does and if you don't

have either of those you will that's for sure and

And you know, that's just one of many

terrible catastrophes that are

certain to visit you and

That

terrible catastrophe is

A challenge to us in many ways. It's a challenge to us because it forces us to look

deeply for a countervailing meaning that can make sense out of that and then maybe more than makes sense out of it and

And so I've been curious about whether or not that countervailing meaning exists, you know the post modernists

The first thing about them especially the identity politics types

I never know really what to call this group of people because if I call them postmodern

Neo-marxists then I'm accused of being alt right conspiracy theorists and if if I if I call them

Collectivists well that's accurate in some sense

But not not precisely and I could call them identity politics players and that happens on the right and the left but that's the basic

Rubric, I would say that uniting

Idea is that the individual is that... the individual's a fiction

in some sense and the right level of analysis

for...

Society and the political scene and and the economic scene is the group right is

Who you are as an individual is well, first of all, perhaps that's just an illusory category altogether

But who you are is going to be defined

essentially in terms of your group identity

your gender

Your sex that's already 70 different things

Your your that'd be funny if it wasn't true

Your your

Maybe your socioeconomic status your class. That was the original Marxist

Definition of identity right because Marx believed that history was a war between two classes and that your fundamental

Being was established by your class identity

Or it's your

Ethnicity or your race? Those are two other

Fundamental group identities or it's some combination of them all which is

Intersectionality, which is something that sort of devours itself and I've done a little bit of mathematics

It's like if you could imagine that you belong to ten groups, you know ten canonical groups

there's probably like one of you and so if you get intersectional enough

one of the things that happens is that you break the group's all the way down to the level of the individual if you're gonna

take

someone's

group centered peculiarities entirely into account you end up with ends of one and

I actually think that that's what the West figured out thousands of years ago was that if you were gonna take everyone's

Uniqueness into account in the way the intersectionalists appear to want to do with the plethora of group

identities that you end up at the individual and so

But it but there's no

requirement for coherency on the part of the postmodernists and in fact

They believe that coherency is actually I would say something akin to a conspiracy theory. That's part

I'm dead serious. I'm absolutely dead serious about this. It's a it's a conspiracy theory on the part of

the modernists who invented or elaborated the oppressive

Patriarchy that we all exist under which is something akin, I suppose to Marx's

Proletariat versus Bourgeoisie, it's some mishmash of idiocy like that and

But you know, I mean it's there's a question there that that's worth

Answering it's like well

Why do we believe in the individual?

You know the founders of the people who wrote the Declaration of Independence know it's like they justified it

Right. They said we hold these truths as self-evident like that's not an argument

That's just a statement. It's like and it starts a statement like a game in some sense

It's like well, let's assume these things are true and move on from there and see what happens now

They had their reasons, you know, like from a Canadian perspective