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  • way wanted to start off this boy, the you introducing yourself a little bit telling us about your general work particularly.

  • You've talked a lot about faculty freedom recently, and I'm wondering if you think you want to talk a little bit about what you see as the ideal relationship between a university and its faculty members.

  • I think in many ways the best thing for the university to do with its faculty members is to leave them alone, and I mean that in the best possible way.

  • I mean, that was actually one of the things I taught here from 93 to 98 1 of the things and I have the same relationship, I would say with the university at University of Toronto is that the university's go to a tremendous amount of trouble to identify promising people in terms of their research capability from all over the world.

  • And generally speaking, if you identify promising people, your best bet as a manager is too.

  • Stay out of their way now and to remove obstacles from there from there from their movement forward, and I think that the universities do a credible job of that.

  • Although my sense over the last few decades as being that increasingly, there are more impediments placed in the path of research.

  • For example, I've seen that with the multiplication of the powers of institutional review boards, for example, ethics committees, which have vastly overreached, they're they're they're they're reasonable powers and they slow things down.

  • And that's a big mistake.

  • If you're dealing with people who are are conducting research into important topics, then you want to do everything you possibly can to let them move forward as rapidly as possible.

  • In what ways do you think these institutional review boards of these ethics committees have particularly damage the process or the speed of research research?

  • Do you think there are times like you have any examples in mind of when you think they've overreached their power?

  • Well, they they regulate that one's not on.

  • Okay, well, find it here, Look.

  • Okay, you can hear me, which, at least in principle, should be an improvement.

  • Yeah, well, I mean oh, yes, that's much better.

  • In the social sciences, for example, the institutional review boards insist upon reviewing the use of questionnaires in research, which I think is it's It's not helpful questionnaires aren't dangerous, and they have no real policies set in place to determine the difference between injuries, research and the normal dangers that people expose them.

  • Tell cells onto on a daily basis.

  • So Andi have.

  • Certainly the institutional review boards have certainly slowed down the work in my lab, for example, and made it much more onerous.

  • We have to do a tremendous amount of writing and justification for the studies long before they're even undertaken, and then also to do a fair bit of paperwork to keep up with the documentation.

  • And I don't find that the least bit use one.

  • I know that in the United States, the institutional review boards domains of power being cut back now because of complaints primarily, if I remember correctly primary from the primarily from the granting agencies because they're adding to the the unnecessary expense that's associated with research.

  • So in the university, should the university administration fundamentally exists to serve the faculty and students and probably the students first in the faculty second.

  • But increasingly, I see that the administration is multiplying out of control, and that's quite well documented in terms of overall cost and some of that's driven by legislation.

  • It so it's not.

  • It's not something that's necessarily intrinsic to the administration itself, but that's one of the things that's driving the spiraling up ever, ever upward spiraling of tuition costs.

  • So, aside from Research Ethics Board's institutional review boards, ethics committees, do you think that there are other ways that the administration has interfered with your work particularly use recently come under fire by some administration at the University of Toronto for certain controversial views you hold you mentioned that you think the administration's primary obligation should be to its students, and then it should also service faculty.

  • Do you see the administration using that mission properly when they try to talk to faculty about certain statements that they have made?

  • Or do you think that's also an overreach of their power?

  • Well, I think it reflects a more general societal confusion about just exactly what our priorities are.

  • I made a video back in September stating my objections to the mandated use of a certain category of pronoun that I object to, mostly on the grounds that I felt that the government had no right compelling people's speech and also because personally I didn't want to use The pronouns that were being put forward by people I regard is holding a philosophical and political ethos that I find really, really quite detestable.

  • And I made a video about that and mansion during the video that the act of making the video had probably become had arguably become illegal in Ontario, in the province I'm from and was about to become illegal federally with some new legislation, and that it likely violated the the code of conduct that characterized the university with regards to its inclusiveness.

  • Policies and university promptly validated my concerns by sending me to letters telling me to stop making such statements because they violated the university's code of conduct and also the relevant human rights legislation in Ontario and and in the federal government and one of the I.

  • I felt that the reason that the university did that was because they have faced a certain amount of public pressure from people at the University of Toronto when that would be mostly.

  • Most of that pressure came from people I would regard as the professional activist types, and the university said that they had received many letters accusing me of making the University of Toronto and unsafe space, which is the sort of language that immediately makes you know that you're dealing with people who are ideologically possessed.

  • But they also.

  • But they failed to note at the same time that they had received hundreds, perhaps thousands, of letters as well as a 10,000 signature petition supporting my stance.

  • And so I think, when the administration uh when the administration regards its duty, it's fundamental duty to promote some illusory notion of safety and then also is willing to falsify the facts on the ground by omission that they have definitely overstepped their boundaries.

  • And I would say that, uh, they were they were put back.

  • They were set back on their heels.

  • Let's put it that way by a very strident outpouring, strident, powerful outpouring of public opinion in Canada.

  • That was, although that was good for me because I got two letters.

  • And generally, if you're dealing with human resources professionals than three letters is the warning, and then the next step is something more serious.

  • I'm curious you mentioned the term safe space in particular for university, and I want you to link this back to this idea that university administration should be serving students first and faculty second.

  • So do you think that the administration has some sort of compelling mandate to make sure that students feel safe?

  • No, they haven't.

  • They have exactly the reverse mandate.

  • There's nothing safe about being educated.

  • If you want to be safe, stay home.

  • The things that you need to be educated about our terrible things almost always.

  • If you study history properly, it's terrible.

  • If you study literature properly, it's terrible.

  • If you study psychology properly, all of these fields of endeavor teach you the painful things that you need to know to understand what human beings in society or like.

  • And so the idea.

  • First of all, the idea that university should be a safe space is absolutely preposterous.

  • But it's also preposterous for more, more, I would say immediate reason.

  • So one of the one of the there's a few things that we know is as clinical psychologist, see as as a field and also as practitioners with regards to how to treat people who suffer, let's say, from an excess of anxiety and what you do with people who suffer from an excess of anxiety is exposed them to the very things that they're afraid of or sometimes disgusted by.

  • And you have.

  • You helped them voluntarily exposed themselves to such things, and that doesn't make the world safer.

  • It makes them braver and more competent.

  • And so the notion that you serve students safety concerns even by shielding them from things that they don't wish to encounter.

  • There's there's absolutely I can't think of a single possible valid reason why you would ever undertake such an endeavor.

  • I think it's really need to talk about it in the abstract.

  • But the particular concern that perhaps a lot of students and a lot of members of the community have with your case is the particular pronoun usage issue.

  • So in that instance, I'm wondering if you think there's a really harm.

  • So if someone comes to you, one of your students, let's say and would really feel more comfortable engaging with the deep, troubling historical or psychological or whatever field truths if you refer to the student with certain pronouns, do you really think that's a necessary place where they need that?

  • You know, severe exposure?

  • What do you think there is some sort of harm by calling them the pronoun that they will.

  • I think I think it's fundamentally a fabricated issue.

  • It's being fabricated for political reasons.

  • I know the history of the relevant legislation in Ontario, and initially the legislation was basically predicated on the idea that gender identity was a social construct and that there were going to be protections put in place for people whose gender identity had switched so that they weren't subject to harassment or discrimination.

  • And there's no utility in subjecting people too counterproductive discrimination.

  • And I would consider discrimination counterproductive when the discrimination occurs for reasons that aren't relevant to the task at hand because we discriminate all the time.

  • But the government ran the policies by a relatively select group of activists and transformed it into, ah, a piece of policy legislation that no one in their right mind would abide by or could abide by for that matter and reduced, for example, the idea of human identity to something that basically transforms on a subjective whim.

  • And so I don't buy any of that.

  • I don't I don't think that that's what identity is.

  • I don't think it's fundamentally self generated.

  • It might be so seo, culturally constructed to some degree and then the most certainly is.

  • But the idea that your identity is solely your choice and that you have the right to inflict that on other people is absolutely preposterous.

  • Most people grow out of that idea when they're two years of age, and I mean that technically, because we know that when Children hit about three years of age, they're able to start playing social games, and that's when they start learning that that identity is, Ah is at minimum a socially negotiated phenomena now, okay, so apart from that, there's no agreement whatsoever on the set of pronounce that will be used.

  • And then they've multiplied beyond anybody's anybody's imagination, I would say, including the people who formulated the legislation.

  • And then there's the fact that you don't refer to people by their pronouns anyways.

  • Their third person pronouns and so I don't call you he when we're talking, I might refer to you as he if I was talking about you with someone else.

  • So most of the time, it's a moot point anyways.

  • But Dr Peterson, in the cases where does matter, right?

  • Certainly you could envision.

  • Let's not talk so much about federal policy, but perhaps like in an actual, like personal, day to day setting, do you think there's a harms and perhaps you can disagree with, like the philosophical principle, the theoretical truth of whether or not identity can change subjectively wind to win?

  • But if someone comes up to me and says, You know, I want to be referred to as this, even if I adopt some sort of you that I don't really think fundamentally on a pure theoretical level, they have an understanding of identity.

  • Do does that do I then choose to harm them or potentially upset them by sticking to my belief about what their identity is?

  • Well, the first thing you'd have to establish is whether or not that would actually constitute heart.

  • That's the claim.

  • And the person might say, Well, you're harming me.

  • But that doesn't provide evidence that you are people.

  • People presume very often that they're harmed by things that they're not harmed by it all s.

  • So I don't think that the mere claim that someone thinks that the way I would address the might harm them gives them the right to enforce by legislation.

  • The content of my speech that just doesn't run, that doesn't that doesn't work.

  • And, you know, here's something else that's worth noting from a more practical perspective.

  • I mean, I've received letters from about 30 trans people, and that's actually a lot because there aren't that many people.

  • And these are people who, by and large we're very serious about their transformations and all.

  • But one of them agreed with what I was doing, saying, first of all, that they never asked to be represented by the activists who claimed to be representing them.

  • Know.

  • So here's a proposition, right?

  • So imagine that there's a group of people and that somebody is a member of that group of people.

  • And then that person stands forth as a member of that group and says, because I'm a member of that group, I speak for all those people.

  • It's like actually, no, you don't the mere fact that you're the member of a group that doesn't give you any right whatsoever to speak on behalf of that group, you need to have legitimacy as a representative, and I don't I think that that you can hardly imagine a more pernicious example say of racism, then to presume that if someone is black, they speak on behalf of all black people.

  • All black people are homogeneous.

  • They all believe exactly the same thing.

  • Therefore, if you talk to or met one of them you've talked to or met them all with respect, Dr Peterson, I think I'm referring to cases where the actual people in front of you are telling you, though, that they want to.

  • They want to represent themselves a certain way, right, so we can talk about whether or not the activist community is accurately representing actual communities.

  • But I'm wondering, you mentioned, you don't think like a self report of like, Oh, this is harming me or I would not be comfortable interacting with you unless, you know X happened would not be an accurate way of describing riel harm.

  • Are there better metrics we have for real harm if someone comes up to me and they say, Oh, you know, when that they're feeling too warm in this room, we should leave, you know, do I say, Ah, no, like you don't know how warm you are.

  • That's not something you can know for yourself.

  • That's just a self report.

  • Well, it would depend on what they were asking other people to do.

  • And I don't I don't believe that people have the right to impose restrictions on what not so much restrictions on what I'm allowed to say.

  • But to determine the content of my speech, that's an entirely different thing.

  • And so if it's a matter of the legal principle of whether or not I'm free to determine the content of my speech or the hypothetical discomfort of a hypothetical person because no one's actually asked me this yet, then I'm going to go with the freedom from compelled speech partly again, because I think that the idea that the government or any other institution should regulate the content of your speech is absolutely it's intolerable.

  • I think you have a strong legal argument, right?

  • So the government probably shouldn't mandate this, that I'm sure a lot of people might agree with that.

  • I'm still curious, though, in this hypothetical scenario that a student did or a person did approach you and they told you they would be harmed or they would be uncomfortable unless you refer to them with a certain pronoun.

  • What would you do?

  • Well, I really have a hard time answering questions like that because they're asked in the hypothetical it could Second, it could be good.

  • But my sense because I'm a condition is that I generally handle those sorts of things at the level of actual detail.

  • S O.

  • I would say it would depend on the person.

  • It would depend on the situation.

  • It would depend on why they asked me.

  • It would depend on how they asked me.

  • It would depend on what I thought they were trying to accomplish by the request.

  • It would.

  • It would depend on whether or not they were filming me.

  • Well, they were asking me.

  • It would depend on whether they asked me in my office or in the hallway.

  • No, I can tell the difference between a genuine plea for understanding and a bit of political theater or political manipulation.

  • Now, when I've dealt with people who have made all sorts of requests of me, believe me, because I've had a clinical practice for about 20 years, and my experience with with the range of human behavior is, I would say, extraordinarily extensive.

  • And so I've made all sorts of adjustments to the way I interact with people.

  • So I can't say exactly what I would do in a given situation because I firmly believe that the devil is in the details.

  • But I haven't been making Ah case about a specific interaction that I had actually experienced or or or or experienced.

  • I've been making a case of philosophical, fundamentally a philosophical case and and secondarily a political case, and I think that I've made the case properly.

  • But you would say that you recognize the difference between a like legal responsibility to do something versus it's sort of an individual personal choice.

  • I should do something.

  • Sometimes I recognize that.

  • I mean, sometimes the legal and the philosophical and the personal issue are all the same.

  • It's simpler when that's the case, but I also think that the issue is essentially a red herring.

  • I mean, look, since I made that video for one reason or another, things that I've been saying have become quite popular and and not as controversial as you might think.

  • Most of what I've accrued so far is being support, and the reason for that has very little to do with the issue of pro Now the pronoun issue and the pronoun controversy is a pointer to something that's a lot larger.

  • And that's why this issue has had legs.

  • I'm not here because people are interested in my views on pronounce.

  • Now I happen to put my foot down, so to speak, at a particular place, because it's very frequently the case that if you're engaged in a complex philosophical dispute, which is the case for our society in general, that in order to make A to make a statement about it, you have to make a statement in relationship to an actual cause.

  • So you have to draw the line somewhere.

  • And people have asked me, Why did you pick the pronoun hill to die on?

  • My answer to that generally is a I didn't die and B, you have to and B, you have to you have to pick something riel two to enter into the debate.

  • So, for example, if I would have just made another video decrying political correctness, that would have gone nowhere at all.

  • But I said that there was something I wouldn't do, and one of the things I won't do is use the maid upwards of postmodern neo Marxists who are playing a particular game with gender identity.

  • That's an extension of their particular reprehensible philosophy.

  • And if that happens to mean that, I have to engage in discussions about whether or not if, ah, you know, if a suffering and confused person who's had a who's had a very troubled pathway through life came and asked me politely if I would go out of my way to accommodate them.

  • I think that I don't think that those issues actually belong on the same in the same.

  • They're not the same category of issue, so so I don't see that there's well, I guess that's enough said about that all right, transition a little bit.

  • So you mentioned sort of post modernism and new Marxism.

  • In fact, in a statement of McMaster University, you claimed that an expression of that the protests that you see at your events are an expression of a philosophy that's grounded partly in post modernism and partly in Marxism.

  • Was that me first?

  • And secondly, how would you say that these movements are characterized in those ways?

  • Well, it McMaster it meant that some of the protesters came with came and hid behind a banner that had a hammer and sickle on it, you know.

  • So you see, the funny thing is, the funny thing is, is that people laugh about that, and I understand perfectly well what you're laughing.

  • But I can tell you, you wouldn't have laughed if it would have been a swastika.

  • And it's no, no, it's no funnier that it was a hammer and sickle.

  • You know that the reprehensible ideologies that are based in fundamental Marxism killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century, and they're still apologists.

  • One in five social scientists identifies as a Marxist.

  • It's like, really, really, that's really that's really where we're gonna take this.

  • Is it?

  • After the bloody 20th century, we're going to say, Well, that wasn't really communism or something foolish like that, even though we had multiple examples of exactly what happens when those doctors are let loose in the world.

  • And so what?

  • What happened in the 19 sixties?

  • In the late 19 sixties?

  • As far as I can tell when this happened, mostly in France, which is probably produced the most reprehensible coterie of public intellectuals that any country has ever managed is that in a in the in the late 19 sixties, when all the student activists had decided that the Marxist revolution wasn't going to occur in the Western world and and had finally also realized that apologizing for the Soviet for the Soviet system was just not gonna fly anymore, Given, given the tens of millions of bodies that had stacked up that they performed a what I would call a philosophical sleight of hand and transformed the class war into, ah into, ah, identity, politics, politics, war and that became extraordinarily popular, mostly transmitted through people like Shaq.

  • Derrida, who became an absolute darling of the Yale English department and had his pernicious doctrines spread throughout North America partly as a consequence of his invasion of Yale.

  • And what happened with what happened with the postmodernists is they kept on peddling their their their their their murderous breed of political doctrine under a new guys and resentful people all over the world fell for it, and I don't I don't consider that acceptable, you know, one of the things I've learned.

  • For example, I teach my students in my second year personality class about what happened in the Soviet Union in the Gulag Archipelago on I Use Soldier Nixon has an exemplar, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, as an exemplar of existential psychology because I think he's actually the wisest of the existential psychologists, even though he was primarily a history and literary figure.

  • While most of the students don't even know what happened in the Soviet Union, why is that, exactly?

  • And the reason for that is that radical leftist ideologue intellectuals in the West have never properly apologized for the role for the role they played in the in the absolute murderous nous of the of the 20th century.

  • S O students don't even know about it so they can come out to McMaster behind there.

  • They're damnable poster with the hammer and sickle on it and act like they're virtuous.

  • Using that calling.

  • Do you think that trend was only sort of significant to that specific McMaster incident?

  • Or do you see this type of ideology influencing campus protests beyond McMaster in general?

  • Well, I think the I think that that part of it's it's everywhere.

  • It's It's not just in campus protests.

  • I mean, the campuses are are are overrun in large part with disciplines that have, in my estimation, no valid reason to exist.

  • I think disciplines like women's studies should be defunded any of the activist disciplines who act who who's primarily primary role is the overthrow of of, for example, of the patriarchy, which is about as ill defined a concept as you could possibly formulate that it's enough.

  • We've done enough public funding of that sort of thing we're providing.

  • We're providing full time, destructive employment for people who are doing nothing but causing trouble.

  • And there's nothing you would say that because you think that these departments are causing harm or could have the potential to cause harm that university administrations to defund them right?

  • So why don't they fund?

  • Who the hell cares?

  • What I think about that isn't why I think that they should be defunded at all.

  • Okay, I think they should be defunded because what they promote has zero intellectual credibility.

  • Their research methods don't qualify as research methods.

  • Their publications, 80% of humanity's publications, now garner zero citations.

  • That's not very many citations on bits for so in a little trick, as far as I can tell, is what happens is that people write something that no one will read.

  • They know perfectly well that no one will read it.

  • They circulated around their their tiny group of compatriots, who occupy the same little little but a little area on the intellectual spectrum so that it's peer reviewed that is published by major journals who sell it at inflated prices to libraries who squirreled away, too.

  • And on Lee, increase the noise to signal ratio in relationship to the sum total of human knowledge.

  • And it's a scam from top to bottom.

  • So and you know what one of you's things and let me give you an example.

  • So here's one of the things that really bothered me about what was going on on Ontario, and this is happening everywhere, and I made I made this claim when I made my first video, since we have to get into this so that the technical claim in the Ontario legislate legislation now and this is how this has already happened in New York.

  • By the way, this is not only a Canadian thing, it's happening in Australia.

  • It's happening in New Zealand.

  • It's happening everywhere.

  • Here is the claim.

  • There's biological sex.

  • There's gender identity.

  • There's gender expression and their sexual proclivity, and they very independently.

  • That's the technical claim.

  • It's built into the Canadian law.

  • That's not true.

  • Not not.

  • Not a bit of that is true.

  • The correlation between biological sex and gender identity exceeds 0.99 It's virtually perfect.

  • It's the very definition of non independent.

  • So you think almost everyone who's biologically male identifies as biologically male.

  • Almost everyone who identifies is biologically male dresses and acts male.

  • That's the gender identity element.

  • And almost everybody who is biologically male, who identifies as male who dresses as male is in fact heterosexual.

  • Those things are incredibly tightly late, but the technical claim in the legislation is that they very independently wrong Now.

  • I got in trouble for saying that because what people claimed was that I was denying the existence of people who don't fit neatly into the gender category.

  • Doing it all went 01 or whatever the percentage.

  • Maybe that wouldn't fall neatly under suit.

  • Suddenly there were a perfect correlation that would work.

  • But if there's not, it would seem, perhaps, that you're excluding certain people, right?

  • So if most people tend to identify a certain way, but there is that point.

  • No one, that's not I'm not.

  • I wasn't ever denying their existence.

  • So I was denying the validity of the claim that those four levels of analysis existed independently of one another, which they don't.

  • It's a false claim and the reason that the the radical social constructionists who pursuing this line of reasoning, which is completely discredited As far as I'm concerned, I don't think it's any better than claiming that the world is flat.

  • The reason that they're pursuing it legally is because they know perfectly well that they've lost the scientific discussion.

  • Mean I debated someone on Canadian public television who had the gall to say that the no, the scientific consensus over the last four decades was that there was no biological differences between men and women.

  • I mean, and that was one of the things that was so absolutely absurd about that.

  • And there were many things that were absurd about.

  • It was that I was in trouble with the university at that point, and he wasn't.

  • It's like first of all that is that is not the scientific consensus of the last four decades and and the idea that there are no biological differences between men and women.

  • It's the sort of thing you hear that it just makes your jaw drop.

  • Now what?

  • What you could say is that if you took all the dimensions along, which men and women very and there's a substantial number of them that the substantial overlap between men and women on almost all of the dimensions now that's not particularly true with chromosomal identity, although there are some exceptions, like with personality, for example, and I happen to be somewhat of an expert on personality.

  • There are market differences between men and women, but the overlap exceeds the difference.

  • So, for example, women are hiring agreeableness.

  • And you might say, Well, that's so seo culturally constructed.

  • But it turns out that it isn't because if you look across cultures and you, you look at the cultures that have moved most forward with, um with gender equality provisions at the social and political lead levels, and that would be the Scandinavian countries.

  • The differences in personality between women, men and women maximize in those countries, and these are tiny studies.

  • These air studies that involve tens of thousands of people and that have been well replicated by Siri's of independent researchers.

  • And so with her with her.

  • If you add the personality differences between men and women across all the personality traits, you could almost perfectly segregate men from women.

  • And that has nothing that that doesn't take into account the obvious things like arm angle and hip with hip hip with compared to waste with and shoulder with an upper body strength and height and weight and the biochemical differences.

  • And I mean, it's It's so preposterous that is beyond It's beyond conception to me that we're actually even discussing it.

  • But I was making a specific claim, which is the law says these four levels of analysis very independently.

  • The only reason they're associated with one another is for cultural reasons, no wrong.

  • And you don't get to put fallacious scientific truths into the law not, or if you're going to do that, then I'm not going to abide by that particular law.

  • I'm going to object to it, which is exactly what I should be doing.

  • So do you think that a necessary premise for us to accept tohave a law like that, a law that extends protections to these groups is that these identities are independent from each other, fully independent.

  • No one could we accept, like if they had just justified it, as we know that these aren't fully independent.

  • But we think there are other good reasons to provide these protections.

  • Would you be?

  • Would your stands on the law change?

  • Well, the law, as it's currently formulated, doesn't.

  • In fact, it undermines the protection that these sorts of groups have bean pursuing its seeking for years.

  • So let's say Let's take that.

  • Let's let's accept the proposition that he's very independently or or that they're only socio culturally constructed.

  • Okay, So where does that leave your discussion of homosexuality?

  • So if if the fundamentalist Christians say, Well, if if homosexuality is nothing but a sociocultural construct, then why do we have to put up with it perfectly valid argument?

  • They say, Well, no, you know, people.

  • People are born into their sexual proclivity.

  • Now I'm not saying that they are not because I'm not making either of those courses.

  • What I am pointing out is that the legislation and policies of that sort, as currently formulated, actually undermined the very arguments that many of the activist groups have been using to promote the fact that they were that they're deserving.

  • Let's say that they're deserving of their of their non standard identity, that the non standard identity is justifiable.

  • If your sexual proclivity is nothing but a whim, then why should I put up with it?

  • No, it's perfectly reasonable for me to say no.

  • Well, we'll just reshape it because you're in your infinitely malleable Now you know it.

  • It isn't exactly.

  • We don't exactly know the degree to which such things as, let's say, sexual identity and sexual proclivity are biologically predicated or socio culturally and Stan she ate.

  • But when you when you put forward legislation that insists on one to the exclusion of the other, you better be careful because you're going to be hooked, hooked in your own news.

  • And so when I read through the legislation and the policies that surrounded that, I thought, This isn't going to protect the people that it's supposed to protect, but it doesn't matter because the legislation was never designed to protect people.

  • It was designed to advance a certain kind of political agenda, which is partly why I'm object objecting to it.

  • So I'm not willing in the slightest to presume that just because activist groups with this postmodern Neil Marxist ethic stand up and say, Well, we're on the side of the oppressed that that makes them a on the side of the oppressed or be virtuous.

  • I don't buy either of those arguments.

  • I don't think they stand for what they say they stand for.

  • I don't think they're promoting a doctrine that's going to do what they claim it will do.

  • I don't believe that they're good and the rest of the world bad.

  • I don't buy their oppressor victim dichotomy.

  • I don't admire their philosophical position.

  • I think they don't know anything about history or if they do know anything about history than their malevolent for pursuing exactly the same policies that led us into terrible situations before.

  • So in what ways do you think the policies that are being advocated?

  • Maybe you could talk a bit about the particular harms you think that this Canadian bill would have.

  • Even if we don't accept the theoretical or political or historical rationale for the bill, could it be that it still produces good consequences or do you think that there's even a consequential ist argument against this sort of bill, and if so, what do you think?

  • The letters that I received from the transsexual people I described indicated instantly that it's not producing positive positive effects at all, they said after saying.

  • Well, our political views aren't homogeneous, and we don't like being treated as if they were and these activists don't speak for us.

  • They say, Look, most of us would just like to be a little bit more invisible if we could.

  • And all this terrible concentration on preferred pronouns and an identification of transsexual people has made our lives a living hell Well and no wonder, because it's hard to imagine you're imagine that you are having real trouble with your gender identity.

  • You know, when you're a six foot one guy and you want to transform yourself into a woman, it is gonna be hard enough for you to be quasi invisible in a socially acceptable way without a bunch of people who purport to be speaking on your behalf, making this like issue du jour for their political reasons.

  • And that's exactly what the letter writers have been telling me.

  • so So No, I don't I don't see that.

  • I mean, the legislation is was incoherent as originally formulated, then it was made worse by its shopping before activist groups.

  • There's no evidence whatsoever that will have the outcomes that the that the people who formulated it hypothetically desire because I don't believe that they desire the best possible outcome.

  • Anyways, the people look, the people who are formulating these sorts of policy state quite forthrightly.

  • So, for example, if you go look at women's studies websites, they state quite forthrightly that their aim is the destruction of the patriarchy.

  • Whatever the hell that is, you know what I mean?

  • And that that's a good indication of the level of intellectual sophistication that goes into this sort of thinking.

  • What is this patriarchy, exactly?

  • Well, what is it exactly?

  • I mean, if we're gonna talk about it, it's it's it's male domination of everything and nothing but oppression like really, that's how we're gonna define our society.

  • Is it compared to what society?

  • Exactly where people be more free than they are?

  • For example, in this country, that doesn't mean they're perfectly free, but you forget that that's never going to happen.

  • It's like, Well, this is an oppressive place compared to my hype, the hypothetical utopia that I would produce if I happen to be, you know, Stalin for a week.

  • And I said advise, as I've already pointed out, if you were the hypothetical altruistic utopian of your imagination, then the people right behind you and your bloody revolution would stab you to death in your bed, and you wouldn't get to make your decisions for the benefit of anyone ever anyways.

  • So how do you think progress should be made in a world where we are freer than we have ever been?

  • Do you think we like?

  • When are there changes at a desirable to be made?

  • And how would you want to see them implemented, if not through policy or through activism, the way that certain groups currently are primitive back?

  • You know, this happened in the sixties, as far as I can tell that we've got this misbegotten idea that the way to conduct yourself as ah responsible human being was to hold placards up to protest, to change the viewpoints of other people and thereby usher in the utopia.

  • It's like I think I think that's all appalling.

  • I think it's appalling, and I think it's absolutely.

  • It's absolutely absurd that students are taught that that's the way to conduct themselves in the world.

  • First of all, if you're 19 or 20 or 21 you nobody will know anything.

  • You haven't done anything.

  • You don't know anything about history.

  • You haven't read anything.

  • You haven't supported yourself for any length of time.

  • You've been entirely dependent on your state and on your family for the for the brief few years of your existence.

  • And the idea that you have enough wisdom to determine how society should be reconstructed when you're sitting in the absolute lap of luxury, protected by by by processes that you don't understand is absolutely I mean, it's well, okay, so that's a bad Let's call that a bad idea.

  • Sure, Shall we wait?

  • And then the idea that what you should do to change the world is to find people who you disagree with an shake paper on sticks at them and call them names is also and it's that you do that before you gloat for hair.

  • I'll tell you how serious the activists are.

  • This is something That's just unbelievably comical as far as I'm concerned.

  • So some of you may know that I participated in a debate on free speech.

  • So called debate at free speech that the University of Toronto hosted.

  • It turned into a forum and whatever that is.

  • But it's certainly not a debate, but one of the things I did when I was talking to the university administration was to suggest how they might deal with the possibility of protesters.

  • And so I said, Well, that's easy.

  • I know how you can have absolutely zero protesters.

  • Um, I have it in the morning.

  • They won't get out of bed in the tent.

  • So we had it at nine o'clock in the morning And there was one MPP meant member of Parliament, who showed up to handouts and pamphlets.

  • Not a single protester.

  • So it's like if you want a controversial speaker on campus, just have it at seven in the morning.

  • You won't get a protester within 50 yards of it because they'll still be sleeping off last night's party and alcohol induced hangover.

  • So So you know, and the question was what I think people should do.

  • And I'll tell you something that's being very interesting to me, and I can see it reflected here.

  • The first thing I've noticed is that when I started putting my videos on YouTube, which was about three years ago, I noticed that about 85% of the people that were watching them were men.

  • And I thought, That's pretty weird because about 80% of my students are women, you know, because manner bailing out of universities like mad.

  • And there won't be one in the social sciences humanity's left in 10 years.

  • But, you know, nobody seems particularly worried about that.

  • You go look that up online if you want, and look at the enrollment curves and just project them 10 years old into the future.

  • And I've been following that for about 20 years.

  • But one of the things but online.

  • So it was 85% man, I thought, Wow, that's really weird and strange.

  • And then I made these political videos and then it's popped up to 91% men, and then I've noticed in the audience is that I'm going to talk to that.

  • It's almost all men now Just look around here.

  • It's like what it's going to be 90% guys in this audience.

  • And I thought, What the hell is going on?

  • It's weird.

  • And I noticed that at the first free speech debate at the University of Toronto I made a point of it.

  • I walked into the room and I thought, Wow, these are all men.

  • So I had the men stand up in the women's stand up.

  • I used that as an example of the fact that maybe men and women have different interests.

  • It was, you know, just a nad heart demonstration.

  • But it's really being born out by the demographic analysis of my viewers.

  • And I have, you know, seven not eight million views or something like that now, So it's a pretty big population.

  • I've been talking nonstop about personal responsibility and about the fact that if you want to change the world, you should bloody well get your act together and quit whining and sniveling about how horrible everything isn't about how people will be more rights and more privileges.

  • And for some reason, that seems to be a message that's really resonating among young men.

  • And I think the reason for that.

  • First of all, I think young women have enough to do when So that's perhaps part of the reason why the message isn't is necessary for them.

  • They're trying to juggle career.

  • They're trying to figure out how to have a family, and they don't really have any question about whether or not that's useful and proper.

  • So they're off doing that and whatever else they're doing.

  • But young men seem to have more of a choice about that, and many of them are essentially bailing out.

  • And it's partly because I think they've been well punished for their virtues.

  • And so I talked to young guys in particular about adopting some responsibility and trying to straighten out their lives and to bear the load of being properly and forthrightly moved through existence and to become a credit to themselves in their community.

  • And that's what you should do.

  • Instead of waving cards, it's someone telling them to behave more property because you're morally superior to them.

  • So and for some reason that message, which is it's a really it's not the sort of message that you would expect to sell right is the exactly the opposite of something that you would consider salable But my experience is being that the young man in particular are so bloody desperate for that message that they can hardly stand themselves.

  • And and it's no wonder, because it's a call to it's a call to proper being.

  • It's a called heroic being, and it's a call for people to adopt their individual responsibility and to straighten themselves out and to find out what they could be like if they took on the burdens of existence like like respectable, well educated, articulate, powerful people.

  • And that's steps to the benefit of everyone and so well.

  • So that's where the responsibility lies.

  • And I'm not interested in.

  • I've thought for many, many years, decades really about having a political career.

  • I mean, I was interested in a political career when I was 13 and so every five years or so, I've probably revisited that.

  • But every time I revisited, I came to the same conclusion, which was that that the work that I was doing that was focused on a philosophy of individual responsibility.

  • I'm trying to identify how that philosophy had emerged in the West over thousands of years was more important than any possible political action could be, and I still don't regard what I'm doing as political in any sense of the word.

  • I think it's.

  • I think it's philosophical most accurately, and there's an element of the theological and so so so.

  • I think it's individual responsibility and the meaning of life is to be found in the adoption of individual responsibility, and that's what the university should be teaching people.

  • So, Dr Peterson, you mentioned these ideas of responsibility, of virtue of respect.

  • You've, I think, detailed what you think students shouldn't do in these examples of, like, protests and these examples of certain types of activist tactics.

  • What advice would you have for students?

  • How can students make the changes that they want to make particularly?

  • Do you have any advice for students here?

  • Yeah, read great books.

  • Really, Man, you've got this four year period that has been carved out of your lives by society.

  • They it's given you an identity like a high quality identity and freedom at the same time.

  • And you're not gonna get that again.

  • In your life, you've got a you've got a respectable identity university student and complete freedom associated without her.

  • As near as you're ever gonna get And you've got these unbelievable libraries that are full of the writings of people who are who are intelligent and articulate beyond comprehension.

  • And, you know, and you can go there and you can learn all this and you might think, Well, why should you learn it?

  • Well, you learn it to get a job or you learn to get good grades or you learn it to get a degree.

  • And that's all nonsense.

  • It's nonsense.

  • The reason that you come to university to be educated is because there is nothing more powerful than someone who is articulate and who can think and speak its power.

  • And I mean power of the best sort, its authority and influence and respectability and competence.

  • And so you come to university to craft your highest skill, and your highest skill is to be found in articulated speech.

  • And if you're if you're if you're a master at formulating your arguments, you win everything.

  • And better than that, when we win everything, everyone around you wins, too, because to transform yourself into let's consider you consider your transformation to something approximating the logos.

  • It means you shine a light on the whole world.

  • Well, there's nothing more exciting to do than that.

  • There's nothing better you can possibly do and to think that you're coming to university to be trained to have a job.

  • It's like, Great.

  • That's a hell of a lot better than being unemployed and covered with Cheeto dust while you're snacking away in front of your video game in the basement.

  • But it's not.

  • It's not a and I don't have anything against video games, by the way that it.

  • But it's hardly a triumphant call to to being in the world, and that's what university should be calling forth.

  • It's like God, you people, you you know, I I know what Harvard students air like.

  • I taught here for five years.

  • You people are spectacular, your spectacular.

  • You're you're all capable of being world beaters.

  • You transform yourself into something that's articulated and sensible and grounded in history and knowledgeable and wise man.

  • You could do anything you want and hopefully, anything you want for good, because if you have any sense, everything you want to do would be for the good, because there's nothing more compelling or meaningful or or useful in combating the tragedy of life than to them to struggle with all your soul on behalf of the good.

  • And the universities have forgot Matt.

  • It's why everyone's bailing out of the humanities and they should.

  • The humanities are corrupt and they're corrupt because they're not telling students this.

  • It's a bloody obvious.

  • It's like learning to think, learn to speak, learn to read.

  • It makes you a superpower, an individual superpower.

  • You have you and I don't understand why that isn't just told to students.

  • It's not that hard to understand and everyone wants to hear.

  • It's like, really, I could do that.

  • I could do that's like Yeah, really, you could do that.

  • And the whole society around you is labored for really thousands of years to provide every single one of you with this spirit tacular opportunity that you have well, you're undergraduates and graduate students here.

  • They're just everyone's just pray that you would come here and manifest everything that you could manifest, and that's what you should be doing.

  • Instead of waving placards and complaining about how your oppressed, for God's sake, you see these Yale students complaining about their oppression, It's just it just leaves me aghast It's like while we're against the ruling class.

  • It's like No, no, no, Your baby ruling class members.

  • You're young.

  • The only reason you're not rich is because you're young.

  • You know, that's the best.

  • Really, That's the If you look at the 1% even the dreaded 1%.

  • You know, most of those people are old.

  • Why?

  • Well, when you progress through life, if you're reasonably successful, you trade in your promising youth for your wealthy old age.

  • But you're still bloody old.

  • Were you when you trade it when you trade your youth for that?

  • Like if you factor age out of the economic equation, things look a lot different.

  • Well, of course, older people have more money.

  • If they have any sense, they've been collecting it for their whole life.

  • Is that somehow unfair?

  • It's not unfair unless you wanna wanna be poverty stricken when you're 70 and you and you don't want to be poverty stricken part poverty stricken when you're 70.

  • So I just don't understand what's happened to the university's.

  • I can't believe that you're not told when you come the first day.

  • Look, man, you're out.

  • You're here on a heroic mission you're going to take your capacity to articulate yourself to levels that air undreamed of you're gonna come out of here unstoppable.

  • You're going to be able to do anything you want.

  • I think that's what you're here for.

  • Instead, y

way wanted to start off this boy, the you introducing yourself a little bit telling us about your general work particularly.

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2017/04/10:哈佛講座。後現代主義與慈悲的面具 (2017/04/10: Harvard Talk: Postmodernism & the Mask of Compassion)

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    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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