I'm part of a small team of people founding a new university in Savannah, Georgia.

I'm the president of that new institution.

I'm here today at Cambridge University and Ancient, a gust and beautiful institution.

And I have the great pleasure today to have with me Dr Jordan Peterson, professor of psychology of the University of Toronto, and I think it is safe to say, an un ignore a ble figure of our time.

Jordan.

It's a real pleasure to have you here today.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Pleasure to be here this unbelievable place.

Jordan and I are going to talk today about what he has called the inflection point.

And my hope is that that conversation will lead us into a discussion of the possibilities for cultural renewal.

Indeed, the possibilities for the the renewal, the renaissance of a more fully human culture.

I think you've called that the inflection point were called our cultural temporal moment to kind of inflection point.

When we start there, what is the inflection point?

Well, I think we're deciding.

We're trying to decide if there's such a thing as a direction to move forward to into the future.

That's what it looks like to me.

I mean, on the one hand, we're making tremendous technological progress in all sorts of directions simultaneously, and that seems to be having mostly positive effects, especially economically, especially on a global scale.

And another hand we seem more confused about are the foundations of our culture and the potential directions that were moving in.

Then we have bean for a while on DATs seems especially acute in educational institutions, and that seems to be a consequence of the constant cultural critique that's being generated, I would say mostly on them on the postmodern inch edge of the academic.

What would you say, academic, uh, territory.

So So we're trying to figure out what's next.

What?

What do we have to offer to students?

All of that.

I know that this yesterday was published the 50th anniversary edition of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago with a forward that you've forward written by you, which I think you described the writing of is one of the greatest owners of your life.

If I got that right, it's academic.

Now, I suppose the question I have there is is why is that so important?

Well, the book was important because it was the first.

It was the first work that succeeded in undermining the Marxist project from a moral and an intellectual perspective simultaneously, I mean, other people had pointed out the terror of the Soviet enterprise Malcolm Muggeridge and George Orwell, among others, often people on the left, interestingly enough, but it was always possible, right up until the end of the 19 sixties, for the people who held on to that collectivist utopian dream in the West to rationalize what had happened in the Soviet Union, partly by sweeping it under the rug but also partly by while using the old adage that you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, It became obvious by the end of the 19 sixties that the omelet wasn't very well prepared and that millions of eggs, so to speak, to be labor a metaphor had bean broken.

And so when soldier knits and wrote his great book, um, it became impossible for anyone who was willing to be part of the cultural moment to ignore the fact that something had gone dreadfully sideways and that it couldn't be attributed merely to a cult of personality or to some abnormality that wasn't intrinsically part of the doctor in itself.

And so that was partly what soldier soldier knits and revealed about the Soviet Union as such, but at the same time, the evidence that precisely the same thing had been happening in places like Maoist, China, perhaps to even a larger degree, while undoubtedly to a larger degree and then in Cambodia and all the other places where Marxism produced utterly murderous consequences.

Um and so that was the book that did that, and it made Marxism morally repugnant, you know, it was also one of the events that catalyzed the transformation of Marxism into identity politics, as far as I'm concerned, because a lot of the people who held the the victim victimizer narrative as sacrosanct that that was the appropriate way to look at the world, to divide people into identity groups of whatever form, and then to see history as the battle between them history, the present and the future that trends that transmuted especially in France.

Because even though the Marxists had bean unmasked, the murderous nous of the doctrine had be not masked.

That didn't the people who held that doctor we're still looking for the easiest lateral move.

And so that was one of the driving forces for the development of postmodernism, not the only one, the postmodernists that are also figured out something or run across something that really is an intractable problem.

They ran across the problem of categorization and that that actually happened in multiple disciplines at the same time, including artificial intelligence and psychology, people realize start to realize about in the early sixties it was probably under the pressure of the A.

I types that it was very difficult to perceive the world because objects aren't just there for the looking, because every object is made of sub objects and his part of, ah, higher order structure of objects and defining what constitutes the appropriate boundary to put around a phenomenon so that it could be perceivable as an object turns out to be a virtually impossible task.

We're not sure how it can be managed, and so the that realization of the intrinsic complexity of things led to a crisis.

I would say, an intellectual crisis, which was well, if there's a near infinite number of ways to perceive a finite set of entities, how is it that you can call anyone interpretation either can, ah, nickel or valuable.

And that's part of the post modern skepticism, Let's say of meta narratives, and it's actually a reasonable critique.

The problem is, as far as I'm concerned, that what the postmodernists did was used that problem, which is a genuine problem, uh, as a critique of the structure of the West.

And then instead of addressing the problem directly, which is, well, the world is very complex.

But we do in fact perceive it, and they're actually our value structures.

They just circumvented that and popped back into a bastardized form of mark.

The bastardized form of Marxism that we see today is identity politics, and that's being extraordinarily destructive to the university's.

Well, let's let's let's talk about that a bit more because it seems to me that it would be a great shame if people were to think that your you're writing this forward to souls in its skin was simply the document, something as a historic phenomenon as essentially important as that historic documentation is, it seems to me that what is of interest to you is not simply to shed light on the terrors, the 100 million slaughtered in the course of the various communist revolutions of the 20th century.

Those various ideologies motivated by Marxism and other other forms of philosophical ideology.

But because it seems to me that you take what was present in that philosophically, ideologically, still to be at work in, in there to have been, as it were reborn in the West.

And so, I suppose, what I'd like to ask you voters, what are the what are the characteristics of the the Marxist ideology that led to those get that that that very obvious death and destruction, which in in a subtler way, you see to be am I right to say, you see, to be at work in the West Side like it seems to be very important that we have a a deep sense of what the the governing assumptions of our culture, our or it's hard to transcend them.

Yeah, well, that is exactly the issue, because the question is whether or not the past is over.

I mean, there's a more exact Marxist philosopher named Richard Wolf who challenged me recently on YouTube to a debate and really the answer that I posted was this forward and he accused me of being stuck in the past.

You know, it's wealthy, you know.

The wall fell in 1989 and the horrors of the Soviet era are over.

And we we we can't paint.

We can't eternally tar Marxism with the brush of these past events.

I mean, as if these events are over or a Ziff 50 years is sufficient time to forget about the corpses.

But that's his idea, you know.

And to me, it's the same idea that you might put forward if you were a neo Nazi by saying that Well, you know how all that happened.

Back in 1945 the fundamental doctrine was sound, and we can't allow our judgment about thes eternal truths manifested in the national socialist doctrine to be forever tainted by some unfortunate historical events.

And I think that that's just well, I don't even know what to say about it.

I mean, one of the telling things about his comments was that he only talked about the Soviet Union and not all the other terrible places, that the same doctrine had been implemented with equally murderous effects.

And so that was quite the argument by evasion.

But what I tried to do in the forward and in my thinking in general is I'm always trying to get to the bottom of things what's at the bottom.

And it seems to me that what happened if you look at what happened in the Russian Revolution like the first thing you want to do is give the devil his due, okay?

And the way you do that is by pointing out that hierarchical structures we'll start even before that.

People have problems that have to be solved.

Life is a sequence of problems that have to be solved.

If you don't solve the problems that life puts forward, you suffer and you die.

So assuming that you don't want those two outcomes, then there are problems you have to solve, and so you have to set it aim.

And the aim is to solve the problem.

And then because we're social creatures, we have to solve the problems by organizing collectively and the way we do that, Generally speaking in relationship to a name is to produce a hierarchy.

And the reason for that is that if you have a problem and you want it to be solved and you get a variety of people working on it.

You're soon going to discover that some people are much better at solving the problem than others, and that will inevitably produce a hierarchy.

And it should.

Because then the even the structure of authority is is in sync with the aim.

And they miss valuable because it's a problem that everybody agrees that is an actual problem.

So you're going to get hierarchical organizations, and you should.

Now the problem with that is that as soon as you produce a hierarchical organization, two things happened.

One is that a small minority of the people do almost all the creative work.

That's the parade of principle, and the other is that the benefits of the hierarchy flow disproportionately to a small number of people at the top.

So that's another manifestation of the pre to principal.

And it is something that Marks pointed out, although he blamed it on capitalism, which, which is a big mistake, even if you're concerned.

For those the hierarchy dispossess is so you produce a hierarchy.

Both the work, the work flows from a minority of people and the benefits flow to a minority people.

And those might not be the same people, by the way, right, because hierarchies aren't perfect in their ability to distribute resources as a consequence of productive effort.

That's part of the problem with higher organizations.

But then what the hierarchy does is produce a layer of the dispossessed that stack up at the bottom near zero, and it's the majority.

It's always the majority.

So that's the price you pay for hierarchies.

Now what the left does this say?

Look at the dispossessed and keep the hierarchy flexible enough so that it can twist and Bandon transform unnecessary, but also so that the dispossessed don't fall so close to zero that a.

That they're done there in misery be that the talents they might possess can't be utilized and see that the whole structure doesn't become so untenable that it destroys itself because of the inequality.

Perfectly reasonable propositions.

And so then you could say, Well, there's a certain number of people on the left who are genuinely motivated by concern about dispossession as well.

It's the dispossessed, of course.

Fine.

So that's to give the devil his due.

And so then you might say, Well, there was moral reasons.

There were moral reasons for at least a subset of those who were involved in the Russian revolution to be involved.

They were interested in helping the dispossessed.

But there's a problem, and this is the problem of the left.

There's a problems on the right as well.

The problem on the right is once the hierarchy is established.

Those who dominate the top have every right to overstate the moral virtue of the hierarchy because it privileges them in particular on the left.

The problem is, is that it's not easy to distinguish between care for the dispossessed and hatred for those who occupy positions of well, you could say authority.

The leftists would say power.

You could also say competence, which I think is more to the case or ability.

It's not easy to distinguish care for the dispossessed from hatred for those who occupy the preeminent positions in the hierarchy and if its power than its hatred for power.

But if its competence and it is competence, if the hierarchy is functional, then it's hatred for the competent.

Okay, then you say All right, so those are the two competing motivations care for the dispossessed and hatred for the Let's say, competent.

Let's play that out historically speaking and see which is the more powerful force.

While that got played out very rapidly in the Russian Revolution and what happened was even if there was a minority and perhaps even a majority, Although there wasn't but perhaps even the majority of those who truly cared for the dispossessed, those who hated the competent slaughtered them.

It turned out that the hatred was a much more potent, uh, geopolitical force than the compassion.

And then another twist occurred to because the narrative was bourgeoisie against proletariat, Let's say.

And so that's those at the uppermost pinnacle of the hierarchy against those who have the dispossessed.

And that was also the historical narrative.

And then it was the right and responsibility of those who were oppressed to rise up.

But that ran into another problem, which is basically the problem that the that the postmodernists, especially on the feminist site, have now identified his intersectionality.

It's like, well, turns out that you're you can't so easily be placed into one group.

In fact, this is the perception problem that we talked about before there's a very large number of groups you could be placed in.

It might be an unlimited number of groups, in fact, and so then, if you're motivated primarily by hatred and your your desire is to produce is much mayhem is possible.

You can take any given person, and you can analyze the multiple groups that they belong to.

And then you can find one group in which they're the oppressor, and then because there's no excuse whatsoever for the oppression, even if there's one dimension of your identity along which you're an oppressor, that you're grist for the for the for the bone crushing mill of the of the Soviet work camp.

And that's exactly what happened.

And so, as the Soviet Revolution progressed, Maur and more people got thrown into the cauldron.

Let's say the Socialists, the students, the religious people, the old, the the old original revolutionary Stellan had all them killed because there was some.

And if it wasn't you that was guilty because of your group membership, they just expanded the capacity that the parameters of the idea of group well, you're not an oppressor.

But your grandfather was a landowner.

Well, that's good enough that's that's that's your class that sets.

And so that's sufficient justification to throw you to the wolves as well.

And so what you saw is this just unbelievable expansion of murderous nous driven by the twin improper pre suppositions that you could define people by their group identity and that history was best conceptualized as a battle between the fortunate, the unfortunate Longo's group identities.