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  • thank you all for coming.

  • Um, I'm going to begin by introducing Jordan Peterson, and then I will talk a little bit about how this event is going to work, and then we'll get underway.

  • So Jordan Peterson has been called Quote one of the most important thinkers to emerge on the world stage for many years by the Spectator.

  • He has been a dishwasher, gas jockey, bartender, short order cook, beekeeper, oil, derrick bit re, tipper plywood, mill laborer and railway line worker.

  • He's taught mythology, toe lawyers, doctors and businessmen.

  • Consulted for the U.

  • N.

  • Secretary general's high level Panel on Sustainable development, helped his clinical clients manage depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety and schizophrenia.

  • Served as an advisor to senior partners of major law firms.

  • Identified thousands of promising entrepreneurs on six different continents and lectured extensively in North America and Europe.

  • He has flown a hammerhead role in a carbon fibre stunt plane.

  • Piloted a mahogany racing sailboat around Alcatraz Island, explored in Arizona Meteorite crater with a group of astronauts, built a Native American longhouse on the upper floor of his Toronto home and been inducted into the coastal Pacific clock.

  • Walk a walk Tribe Malcolm Gladwell discussed psychology with him while researching his books.

  • Norman Deutsch is a good friend and collaborator.

  • Thriller writer Greg Hurwitz employed several of his quote valuable things as a plot feature in his number one international bestseller, Orphan X, and he worked with Jim Balsillie, former R.

  • I M CEO, on a project for the U.

  • N secretary general with his students and colleagues, Dr Peterson has published more than 100 scientific papers transforming the modern understanding of personality and revolutionized the psychology of religion with his now classic book Maps of Meaning.

  • The Architecture of Belief.

  • As a Harvard professor, he was nominated for the prestigious Levinson Teaching Prize and is regarded by his current University of Toronto students as one of three truly life changing teachers.

  • Dr Peterson is a core of most viewed writer and values and principles and parenting and education.

  • He has innumerable Twitter followers and Facebook followers.

  • His YouTube channel now has about a 1,000,000 subscribers, and his classroom lectures on mythology were turned into a popular 13 part TV series on TV Ontario.

  • Dr Peterson's online self help program, the self authoring suite, has been featured in O the Oprah magazine, on CBC radio and on NPR's national website.

  • It has helped over 150,000 people resolve the problems of their past and radically improved their future without further ado, please join me in welcoming Dr Jordan Peterson to laugh.

  • Okay, So the way this is going to work is that I'm going to have a conversation with Dr Peterson for 90 minutes.

  • And then there is going to be a 90 minute Q and A.

  • This event is being video recorded and will be published online for noncommercial non advertising purposes.

  • Um, during the q and a session when you were handed a microphone, Please speak directly into it.

  • Our viewers on YouTube will appreciate it.

  • And finally, I am a moderator between Professor Peterson and the audience, but also a biased participant in this conversation.

  • Okay, well, it's a relief that's all over.

  • Okay, so, um, I thought we would start things off with this.

  • I assume that many in the audience are curious but relatively unfamiliar with you, or have heard a lot about you without ever reading or listening to you.

  • So I thought we might start with you introducing yourself to the audience and maybe telling them some of the main things that you think they might be interested in knowing about you.

  • Well, I guess the most relevant detail is that I spent about 15 years writing this and I worked on it about three hours a day, every day during that period of time.

  • Um, at at the same time I was finishing off my doctor and I started lecturing at Harvard, but I was doing that continually and thinking about it continually and reading the material that I needed to read in order to write the book continually as well.

  • I didn't realize until more recently that what I was doing was at the heart of the postmodern conundrum.

  • I would say I was very much obsessed by the events of the Cold War.

  • For reasons I don't exactly understand.

  • I had a lot of dreams about nuclear annihilation for years on end.

  • It wasn't that uncommon to be obsessed by that when I grew up.

  • I mean, because it was a preoccupation of everyone who was my age.

  • I suppose there there were lots of years, probably between 1962 I would say, probably in 1985 where people were pretty convinced that the probability of a nuclear war was high, much higher now than people considered.

  • Now, Um, and I was curious about this.

  • I was curious about why everyone wasn't obsessed about this all the time.

  • First of all, because it seemed like the fundamental issue that two armed camps were pointing something in excess of 25,000 hydrogen bombs each at each other.

  • I couldn't understand how anybody could concentrate on anything other than that, since it seems so utterly insane.

  • Um, and I was curious what was going on exactly was this one, Nick.

  • The explanation was that there's a very large number of ways that human beings could organize themselves in society like a large number of games that we could hypothetically play.

  • And they're all equally arbitrary and in an equally arbitrary universe, and that the Communists had decided to play one kind of game, and the West and the Western free market Democratic types have had decided to play another game, and it was all arbitrary in some sense.

  • And so that's what I was trying to figure out was what the hell was going on with this conflict And was it merely a battle between two hypothetically, equally valid interpretations of the world, drawn from a set of extraordinary, large potential interpretations, which I think would be essentially a postmodernist take on it?

  • And I think I went into the problem neutrally in that I didn't think I knew what the answer Waas.

  • And also so lots of times when you talk to people who think or wouldn't you talk to people who write, they have an idea, and it's right.

  • And then they write whatever they're writing to justify the idea.

  • That's how they look at it.

  • But it's not a good way to write a good way to write and think it's have a problem and then try to solve it right to actually solve it, not to demonstrate that you're a priori commitment is true.

  • And you know, one of the signs I would say that my a priori commitments weren't the purpose for the writing was that I walked away from that 15 year project with a view of the world that was completely different than the view that I had going in and learned all sorts of things, especially about the role of narrative and and religious thinking in life.

  • That I have no idea was possible when I started.

  • And a lot of that was a consequence of reading the great people who I read deeply.

  • You know, I read well, all the great works of Friedrich Nietzsche in the great works of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and most of you guys collected works, everything that had been published up to that point, and a very large swath of the relevant clinical literature, the great clinicians of the 20th century and a huge stack of neuroscience and et cetera, et cetera.

  • Because I was reading constantly during this time.

  • And, um, I realized some things that I think are true.

  • The Communists were wrong.

  • They weren't and not just a little bit wrong and not wrong in some arbitrary way.

  • They were playing a game that human beings cannot play without descending into a murderous catastrophe.

  • And there's something about what we've done in the West.

  • That's correct.

  • And it's hard complicated because our cognitive structures, that's one way of thinking about it or our socio political arrangements there.

  • Actually, they actually parallel one another in an important way, aren't are grounded in a strange set of axioms, and the axioms aren't rational.

  • Precisely.

  • It's more like their narrative, their narrative axioms, their stories.

  • And the story of the West is that the individual is sovereign over the group and that that's the solution to tribalism.

  • And I think that's the correct solution now what that means metaphysically, because it's it's also embedded in our religious doctrines, right?

  • Because especially in Christianity, although not exclusively to Christianity, the individual is sovereign, the suffering individualist sovereign.

  • And there's something about that that's true, at least psychologically.

  • And I don't know what that might mean metaphysically, because who the hell knows what anything means?

  • Metaphysically, right?

  • I mean, your your knowledge runs out at some point.

  • Anyways, I worked all these ideas out, and then I taught for a long time courses that were based on the ideas and the courses were very impactful.

  • I would say they have the same impact on the people that I was teaching as walking through the material had on me and well, it was out of that that all of this political controversy arose.

  • I mean, I was never focused on political controversy, even though I'm interested in politics, and I thought it many points in my life about a political career.

  • I always put it aside for a psychological and philosophical career, I would say, and but But things started to shift badly in Canada over the last five years, and our government dared to implement legislation that compelled speech.

  • And one of the things that I had learned when I was doing all this background investigation was that there isn't a higher value than free speech.

  • It isn't free speech.

  • It's not the right way of thinking about because it's free thought.

  • And even that's not the right way of thinking about it, because thought is the precursor to action and life.

  • So there's no difference between free speech and free life.

  • And I was just not willing to put up with restrictions on my free life.

  • And so I made some videos pointing out the pathology of this doctrine and the fact that the government had radically overreached.

  • It's it's appropriate limits and well, then, you know, Well, maybe you don't know, but I've been enveloped in continual scandal since for 18 months as a consequence, which to me as a clinician indicates that I got my damn diagnosis, right?

  • Right.

  • It's not about pronouns.

  • It's about something a lot deeper than that.

  • And I stand by that.

  • I believe that it's the case.

  • And I don't think that we would all be here tonight if that wasn't the situation.

  • So So I wanted my first or my next question, um, to be about Lafayette.

  • And so I thought I would read a couple of Facebook posts that certain students who are critical of you read in the lead up to this event and just ask you to respond to them.

  • Okay, so this is a student writing Lafayette College.

  • I'm utterly disappointed that you're allowing this to take place on our campus.

  • I thought we went through this last semester with roaming millennial.

  • Inviting hateful speakers who make wildly unsubstantiated claims is not going to fly with the student body.

  • I get it.

  • The mill Siri's events are private and not endorsed by the college.

  • But you absolutely have the power to make a statement on this.

  • The fact that you're not is an embarrassment to our community.

  • If you believe this man is a legitimate source of knowledge because he has a degree in clinical psychology fuel free to ask our psychology department faculty and counseling center staff about the validity of his claims.

  • I'm certain they would not endorse this speaker.

  • Do better in all caps.

  • For those of you unfamiliar Jordan Peterson is known for denouncing the me to movement, claiming that women are in no way marginalized in the West, arguing against the existence of gender neutral pronouns, arguing against gun control in the U.

  • S.

  • And claiming that identity, politics and social justice movements are part of a devious Marxist agenda.

  • And then another student responded.

  • And this is briefer College.

  • Conservatives know that if they bring in a speaker who was willing to blatantly insult a portion of the audience and the lives get angry enough about this for good reason, then they may get an op ed written about them in The New York Times.

  • As a result, there are a whole group of hacks like Milo and Peterson, who get famous and invited purely for their promise to miss gender trans students and advocate provocative but ultimately toothless arguments about social Darwinist race theory.

  • What I'm saying is that you have every right to be pissed Jordan Peterson is, Ah, harmful moron, but no the but know that you being pissed is also 100% at the point of why he was invited.

  • He's not a conservative.

  • He's just a guy who's mildly racist enough to offend college liberals and therefore secure winds for the cultural right, comparatively mild stuff.

  • It's the chattering buzz of ideologically possessed demons, so there's nothing in it that's that's not entirely predictable.

  • That's that's one of the things you know you notice when you're talking to people.

  • If you if you want to find out whether the person is there are the ideology, is there.

  • You listen to see if you're hearing anything that someone else of the same ideological mindset couldn't have told you.

  • You know, like I've had thousands of conversations with people because I've spent 20 years as a clinical psychologist, and one of the things I've learned about people is that there are unbelievably interesting.

  • If you get someone to sit down and you move past the superficial, which you can actually do quite rapidly, they'll tell you all sorts of things that only they know that air unbelievably enlightening about their own peculiar problems about the way they look at the world about their their idiosyncratic, familial dynamics, like just fascinating personal stuff.

  • It's the stuff of great novels, you know, and just this is ordinary people.

  • I don't really think there is an ordinary person.

  • Exactly.

  • There's there's the facade of ordinary nous, but behind that people are very rarely ordinary.

  • And so their conversations air almost instantaneously fascinating.

  • And one of the one of the guidelines that I used in my clinical practice constantly was like I had this sense.

  • I probably learned this mostly from Carl Rogers was that if the conversation wasn't really interesting, then we weren't doing anything that was therapeutically useful, but the interesting.

  • All of the interesting elements of it were very, very personal.

  • And so to replace this.

  • And I learned this mostly from from Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

  • In his detailed analysis of what I would call ideological possession I talked to, he talked about people he met in the gulag camps who were under the sway of of rigid communist orthodoxy and noted very clearly that it was like there was a crank in some sense on the side of their head and you could just crank the crank and out would come the ideological dogma, and it's all entirely predictable, and people who are in a situation like that don't understand that they're possessed by an idea rights Carl Young said.

  • People don't have ideas, ideas have people.

  • It's like so there's nothing in that that's anything other than exactly what you would predict.

  • And then there's a deeper issue, too, and this is one that I think has bedeviled me ever since I made my initial videos, which is the rat.

  • It's impossible for those on the radical left to admit that anyone who opposes what they're doing might be reasonable, because what that would mean would be that you could be reasonable and opposed the radical left.

  • And that would imply that what the radical left was doing wasn't reasonable.

  • And so instead of dealing with the fact that I actually happen to be quite reasonable, the attempt is to assume that anyone who objects must be part of the radical right.

  • It's like, well, actually, no.

  • There's lots of space between the radical left and the radical right.

  • There's the moderate reasonable left, for example, and you and then there's the center And then there's the moderate, reasonable right.

  • And then there's the far right.

  • And then there's the extreme right.

  • All of that exists in opposition to the radical left, but it's very convenient for the radicals on the left to say, Oh, well, you don't buy our doctrine And and and then to immediately make the presupposition that you must be the most Highness example of that entire array of potential objection.

  • It's like, Yeah, well, whatever you know, it's just not a viable stance.

  • And so, but it's convenient.

  • And it it's a bad thing because it drives polarization.

  • Not a bad thing, but it also.

  • It doesn't address the issue.

  • So one of the things that I've been thinking about deeply over the last couple of weeks and plan to right about here is a mystery for all of you.

  • I don't care what your political background isn't.

  • It isn't like I'm anti left.

  • I made videos documenting this.

  • I know why there's a left wing.

  • There's a left wing because inequality is a problem.

  • That's a way worst problem than the radical leftists like to admit, because you can't lay it at the feet of capitalism and the free market.

  • Inequality is a way worse problem than that, but it's definitely a problem.

  • And because inequality is problem, you need part of the political structure to speak up to the.

  • For the people who end up a raid at the bottom of hierarchies, it's crucial someone has to speak for them.

  • That's the place of the left.

  • But then But then, consider this so we can get Weaken State that the right speaks for hierarchy and the left speaks on behalf of those who are oppressed by inequality.

  • Good.

  • We need that dialogue.

  • The radical left.

  • Okay, we know from 20th century history that things can go too far on the right.

  • No one disputes that and that things can go too far on the left.

  • And we also know that when things go too far, it's seriously not good, right?

  • So when things went to four on the right, then we had 100 and 20 million people die in the Second World War.

  • And when things went too far on the left, we had God only knows how many people murdered as a consequence of internal repression.

  • At least 100 million, and we risk putting the entire planet, we risk putting the planet into flames.

  • OK, so that's the consequence.

  • All right, So now, in the aftermath of World War Two, let's say we've come to some sort of sociological agreement.

  • I would say that you can identify the radical right wingers when people make claims of racial superiority.

  • You put them in a box, you say, Well, you're outside of acceptable political discourse.

  • And so you saw that with Will William F.

  • Buckley in the sixties, when he started his conservative review, he dissociated himself from the David Duke types.

  • And you saw it more recently with people, for example, like Ben Shapiro, who immediately distanced himself from the Charlottesville types.

  • Okay, so now we kind of have a sense of where you've crossed the damn line in your ethno nationalism, right?

  • As soon as you move into the racial superiority domain, ethnic superiority domain, it's like, No, you've got to be dangerous.

  • All right, here's a question.

  • Where the hell do you cross the line on the left?

  • Exactly.

  • Well, the answer is, who knows?

  • Well, that's not a very good answer.

  • I would say it's incumbent.

  • It's incumbent on people in the center and in the moderate left to say Look, things can go too far on the left and here's how we know that's happened and that hasn't happened at all.

  • Now I think there's a reason for that.

  • I think there's a technical reason, as well as a motivational reason to technical reasons.

  • It's harder for people on the left to draw boundaries because people on the left aren't boundary drawing types.

  • They're boundary dissolving types, temperamentally speaking.

  • So that's a problem.

  • The second problem is it doesn't look to me like there is a smoking pistol on the left.

  • That's his obvious as racial superiority, doctrines, you know, it's like they're in Canada.

  • There's a lot of push for this triumvirate of radical ideas diversity, inclusivity and equity, which diversity?

  • It's like, Well, who's against that?

  • It's like being against poverty inclusivity While yes, of course, we want people included equity.

  • That's a more bitter pill to swallow, because that's equality of oh, coming for me.

  • That's a marker.

  • It's like if you're talking about equality of outcome, you've gone too far, and if you're talking about diversity, inclusivity and equality of outcome equity, then you've gone too far, and you might disagree.

  • You might disagree.

  • That's fine, disagree.

  • If that isn't the marker for going too far, then what's the marker?

  • Because obviously you can go too far, and obviously that's not good.

  • And to close on that, I would also say to the people on the moderate left, If you want your doctrines to have purchase and to continue to speak for the for those who stack up at the bottom of inevitable hierarchies, then you owe it to yourself to disassociate yourself from the dangerous radicals because otherwise they invalidate your ideas.

  • And that doesn't seem to be You think the Democrats might have learned that in the last election, but they haven't They haven't learned that.

  • So So that's my spiel about those comments, I guess.

  • Okay, okay, so you've changed the lives of many young people and adults in this country in the endless fear in the West.

  • In the world, you have a massive following.

  • My girlfriend's parents call you Uncle Jordan, for example.

  • On the other hand, and this is just a fact tons of people on the left, as we've just seen because of your power and also your frontal attack on a lot of their views, hate you and viciously caricature you.

  • Then there are these other figures, like Jonathan Height and Robbie George.

  • They have a lot in common with you.

  • They're respected academics there, at least relatively well known outside academia.

  • They share your critiques of the humanities of student activists of trends in Western culture.

  • They don't have nearly the following that you do, but they also aren't as hated or viciously caricaturing.

  • Moreover, they may have changed the minds of more people on college campuses.

  • That is, people on campuses who have some sympathy for left activists or who may agree with much of what you say but react negatively to confrontation and harsh criticism.

  • Height has appealed the such individuals by taking the Dale Carnegie win.

  • Friends and influence people approach.

  • So my questions are first you agree with this dichotomy.

  • Second, did you consciously choose one path over the other end of So why?

  • Well, I mean with height, for example, with more power to him.

  • As far as I'm concerned, you know, he he has a different temperament than me.

  • He's he's more introverted.

  • He's less volatile.

  • I would say he's probably more agreeable or more polite anyways.

  • And I think that what he's doing is extremely effective, especially from the perspective of very carefully documenting the empirical facts about the the ideological what the ideological, the increasingly left leaning ideological tilt of campuses, which is something that needs to be explored on empirical ground.

  • So, um so, like I said, more power to him and there's nothing wrong with being reasonable, I guess.

  • And then you asked, Well, is that the right pathway for me?

  • It's like, Well, apparently not.

  • Um, no.

  • What happened when I made my initial videos was that, you know, I had I had spoke.

  • I talked to people a lot.

  • I've worked with people a lot about negotiation.

  • It's one of the things that I specialized in.

  • I would say in my clinical and consulting practice was teaching people how to negotiate, and I could tell you some things about negotiating that you might find interesting and useful.

  • The first is you can't negotiate from a position of weakness, so all of you who are going to be developing your career's in the future.

  • You need to understand that if you want to push your career forward.

  • Well, first of all, that you do in fact, have to push it forward because if you're competent and silent, you will be ignored.

  • And you know that's rough, because you might think, well, people should reward you because you're confident.

  • And yes, of course they should.

  • But if you're competent in silent, then you're just not.

  • You're not a problem.

  • You're just part of the background that's keeping everything functioning.

  • And so if you want to develop your career in terms of promotion, say, and salary is like, you have to be confident and you have to be strategic and to be strategic when you negotiate for a new position or for a new salary, you have to be able to say, If you don't give me what I want, then something you don't like will happen to you and what that means.

  • It's not a physical threat.

  • It's it's that you have an option, you know.

  • So you have your CV, your resume and order, right.

  • You're educated and competent and desirable to people.

  • Outside of your immediate job, you're willing to instantly put yourself on in the job market and undergo the stress of finding a new position and undergoing interviews and all of that.

  • And you have that all planned out so that when you go talk to the person that you're negotiating with with regards to your celery, you're credible and you see because they it's very seldom that you're talking to the person who's at the top of the pecking order.

  • Let's say what you need to do that with them is to tell them a story that they can tell to their boss to make you not a problem.

  • And one a good story is Look, we really need this person because they're hyper competent and they have a better offer like, well, then you're gonna win the negotiation.

  • But if you go in there with no power, well, you're gonna lose, obviously.

  • So the first thing that you need to know if you're going to negotiate is that you have to be able to say no.

  • And what no means is that you're not going to do it.

  • And when I made the videos about Bill see 16 I thought it through and I thought, There's no damn way I'm following this law.

  • I don't care what happens.

  • And I didn't say that lightly.

  • I thought it through.

  • I thought, Okay, well, let's assume the worst case scenario in the worst case scenario would be that a student would report me to the on terror Human Rights Commission and then they would do an investigation and they would find me guilty because the on terror Human Rights Commission finds 99% of the people brought to it guilty because that's what totalitarians do.

  • And then I would refuse to pay the finer, cooperate with whatever the re education they would put me through, would be, and then that would move to civil court.

  • And then I would be fine for contempt.

  • And then it would you know.

  • Then the whole legal catastrophe would unfold.

  • And I thought while I could either do that or I could allow the government to regulate my speech, it's like, Nope, that's not happening.

  • So you might think about that as confrontational and it is confrontational.

  • It's like there isn't a goddamn thing that can be done to me to make me allow the government to compel my speech.

  • That's not happening.

  • And the reason for that I believe the reason for that is because I spent decades studying totalitarian ism.

  • It's not good.

  • And the way the totalitarian states develop is that people give up their right to be there, right to to exist with their own thoughts.

  • They lie.

  • They that's what happens is that individuals, the individual's sacrifice, their own souls to the dictates of the state.

  • And then everything goes badly sideways.

  • It's like when you think how much evidence for that do we need?

  • You know, you're looking at 1/4 of a 1,000,000,000 deaths like, isn't that enough?

  • Well, the people that I read who were profound Victor Frankel is a good example for beginners if you want to read about this sort of thing.

  • You wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning and Frankel, and also sold units and in a variety of other commentators as well, who really looked into what happened in in in both of Nazi Germany and and in the in the communist states?

  • Their conclusion was universal.

  • Is that the lies of the state, the lies and tyranny of the state are aided and abetted by the moral sacrifice of the individual.

  • It's not talk down.

  • The Nazis were telling you what to do and you're all innocent and obey.

  • That's not how it works, is you.

  • You falsify your you're being bit by bit and you end up where you don't want to be, and that's a bad idea.

  • And if you're interested in that, there's a great book called Ordinary Men.

  • You read that and you won't be the same person afterwards, so I would beware of reading it.

  • But it's a story about these policemen in Germany.

  • So they were middle aged guys, you know, when they bean.

  • They grew up and were socialized before the Nazis came to power.

  • So they're just your typical middle class policeman.

  • And they were brought into Poland after the Nazis had marched through and, um, and charged with keeping order in the occupied state.

  • And they knew their commander knew that it was going to be brutal because they were in war, a war time.

  • And they regard the Jews, for example, as enemies.

  • So there was going to be a fair bit of rounding up with all of that with all of what that implied.

  • And the commander told the policeman that they could go home if they wanted to.

  • That they didn't have to participate in this.

  • And then what ordinary men does this document document their transformation from ordinary policemen?

  • The sort of people that you know, two guys who were taking naked pregnant women out into the middle of fields and shooting them in the back of the head and the documents one step at a time.

  • How an ordinary person turns into someone like that.

  • You think, Well, we don't want that sort of thing to happen anymore.

  • Well, then you don't want to be that sort of person.

  • That's how it's fixed.

  • And if you're not gonna be that sort of person, then you don't take the first steps because the first steps lead you down a pathway that, at least in principle, you don't want to go.

  • So while I think part of what makes me combative say, compared to someone like height is that I spent years looking at the worst things there are to look at and I've learned from that and I've learned, certainly learned things that I won't do and one of the miss I won't let the government regulate my speech.

  • It's a mistake.

  • I don't care what compassionate principles hypothetically motivate that move.

  • It was an unprecedented in English common law that move it was all burried under this leftist compassion, which is mostly it's mostly it lie.

  • So I have reasons, I think, other than those that motivate someone like Jonathan Height to be particularly passionate about this issue.

  • So on the subject of totalitarian ism, um, I wanted to do something very quickly.

  • So I'm guessing that even though most people in the room have negative views of both men, they have amore, intensely negative view of Hitler than of Stalin.

  • I'm guessing almost everyone in the room has a far more negative, visceral reaction to the swastika than to the hammer and sickle.

  • Some of the protesters at your event at McMaster University stood behind a banner with a hammer and sickle.

  • You've said that a hammer and sickle is no funnier than a swastika that quote the reprehensible, the reprehensible ideologies that are based in fundamental Marxism killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.

  • Unquote, I've discussed this proposition with numerous people in recent months, and almost no one seems to buy it.

  • No one disputes the body count under Socialist regimes.

  • Few dispute that Stalin was a vicious murderer roughly on par with Hitler.

  • In moral terms, most think that communism should not be tried again.

  • In other words, they share your critique of the argument that previous communist experiments did not represent proper communism and that proper communism should be tried.

  • Nevertheless, they still disagree with you that we should react as negatively to the hammer and sickle as we do to the swastika.

  • Why?

  • Because they say the two ideologies are not morally comparable.

  • National socialism is much worse morally than Marxism or Marxism Leninism.

  • So what do you say to this?

  • Well, I would say the first thing is that it's highly probable that you were talking to intellectuals.

  • Students.

  • Well, we'll call them butting in.

  • It's it is a It is a mystery.

  • You know, it is a mystery because it is the case that there is something about the Nazi doctrine that seems to have a visceral impact that that the Communist Doc doctor doesn't have.

  • And I said when I opened my remarks tonight that it might be the issue of racial superiority.

  • You know, it's it's something single that you can put your finger on.

  • Where is what's happening on the left?

  • That's horrifying is murky.

  • It might even be multi dimensional, like maybe there isn't a single radical leftist idea that's murderous, like the racial superiority doctrine.

  • Maybe it's a combination of three.

  • Or maybe it's some set of four out of 10 who knows so And because of that, it doesn't seem, is repugnant.

  • And there was also a universal izing tendency among the communists that seemed to be less morally reprehensible than the ethno nationalism of the Nazis.

  • So, you know, you think if you go back to 1914 it's complicated.

  • But if you go back to say 1918 at the time of the Russian Revolution, it's not like the Communists knew that their attempts to bring about the socialist utopia would be doomed to absolute murderous catastrophe.

  • Right?

  • They were.

  • They were working in in ignorance.

  • Now it's not that simple, because by that time Dostoevsky had already written the devil's the Possessed, and he outlined very, very clearly what he thought would happen if people like that got the reins of power and Nietzsche had done the same thing in his writing, so people knew that There was something toxic, let's say and deadly about the doctrine, but it hadn't been played out on the world stage.

  • But now it's like, Well, this is why I said what I said at the beginning.

  • Fine, no, if I don't know exactly how to make the moral distinction.

  • But it's a distinction that has to be made.

  • I think that people who apologize who say something like I think I think that that it's virtually I don't know if it's as reprehensible to say that given ethnic group should be consigned to the fire and to say that wasn't real communism, but their damn close.

  • And when I hear someone say that wasn't real communism, I know what they mean.

  • What they mean was, if I was the dictator in Stellan Shoes, I personally would have brought in the utopia.

  • That's what that statement means, and or it means a kn ignorance of history that's so utterly appalling.

  • That huh, that any political statement made on behalf of that person whatsoever should immediately be followed by a paroxysm of extreme embarrassment.

  • I just I just want to be clear that these students were conceding that they don't agree that they share your critique.

  • They don't share it enough.

  • Okay, fair enough.

  • I just wanted to make that clear so they would more or less agree with what you just said.

  • I think about, um, it's not okay to say those regimes weren't proper communism and the proper communism should be tried.

  • They still dispute, though, that socialism as an ideology is on par with Nazism.

  • So I just wanted to make well, we could say communism.

  • Let's say we could say radical leftist ideology.

  • As I said already there are reasons for the left and the right wing right.

  • The right wing stands for hierarchy, and the left wing stands for the for those who are displaced by hierarchy, right on endless problem.

  • But that doesn't mean that still leaves it in the camp of the people speaking on behalf of egalitarianism, to figure out just what the hell went wrong and to take some responsibility for it.

  • You know, it's no joke, and we see these things play out continually.

  • Still, look at what happened to Venezuela.

  • Here's a fun story.

  • Do you know that it is now illegal for physicians to list list starvation as the cause of death for a Venezuelan child in a hospital.

  • That's how they're dealing with the fact of starvation, right?

  • Just make it illegal to have that diagnosed as your cause of death that will solve the problem.

  • It's like, you know, we have a group of of well meaning socialists in Canada who just produced something called Leap manifesto a couple of years ago, and it's a pretty radical.

  • It's a pretty radical document.

  • They're trying to move our Socialist Party, the NDP New Democratic Party, towards the acceptance of this leap manifesto, which doesn't look like it's going to happen.

  • But they were all radical promoters of the Venezuelan government before everything went like badly sideways.

  • You know, I think the average Venezuelan now has lost £17.

  • That's not because they were put on a voluntary dieting program, right.

  • It's not good.

  • And so if you're tilting towards the left and you're temperamentally inclined that way and half the population is, then you have an ethical problem on your on your hands, which is how do you segregate yourself from the radical policies that produced the catastrophes of the 20th century?

  • And you can't just say well That's not my problem.

  • It's like, Well, okay, if it's not your problem now, it's certainly might become your problem in the future.

  • So when I would say it's actually everybody's problem in the aftermath of the 20th century, it's everybody's problem.

  • So So it's It's it's It's complicated, like there is Ah, genuine desert.

  • Like I worked for a Socialist party for quite a while when I was a kid.

  • You know, when I saw both sides of it, I saw some very, very admirable people.

  • I was privy for, for a variety of chance reasons, to the leadership of the Socialist Party in Canada, at the provincial and announced level, I met the people who ran the provinces, some of the provinces and who ran the party.

  • And a lot of them were really admirable people, like they'd spent their whole life, I would say, working on behalf of the working class, you know, So they're genuine labor leaders and and and And there was also a lot done in Canada on the left.

  • Looks like it was actually pretty good standard work week.

  • You know that the establishment of pensions, the introduction of our health care system which I would say probably overall works better than the American system, although not at the upper end.

  • Um, and they were working hard on behalf of people who had working class lives.

  • But then I also encountered the sort of low level activist types, and I didn't have any respect for them at all.

  • I just thought they were peevish in resentful and irritable, and that those two things exist in a very uneasy coalition on the West.

  • There's care for the poor and hatred for the successful, and those two things aren't the same at all.

  • And it looks to me like one of the things that really happened when the Communist doctors were brought into play.

  • And it also, by the way, we did the multinational experiment right?

  • It doesn't matter where you put these policies into play.

  • The same bloody outcome occurred.

  • Didn't matter whether it was Russia or China or Cambodia or Vietnam, or to pick a random African country or Cuba or Venezuela, for that matter.

  • It was an unmitigated catastrophe, and so to me, that's experiment plus replication enough, enough, well, that has to be dealt with.

  • And it's not in the intellectual left in the West has been absolutely appalling in their silence on the communist catastrophe.

  • Like for my students, a lot of my students really haven't heard about anything that happened in the Soviet Union in any detail.

  • Until they take my personality class in the second year of university.

  • It's like, What, What?

  • The health?

  • Why are they learning about that in a personality class in the second year of university?

  • That's not That should be first and foremost in their in their historical knowledge.

  • What happened in the 20th century was almost fatal.

  • What happened?

  • And we still haven't completely recovered from it, right?

  • I think.

  • Isn't your president Donald Trump going to talk to, like, insane totalitarian number one some time here in the near future?

  • But that's still a Soviet air estate.

  • Those people are armed to the teeth, you know.

  • They have the weapon, They they have weaponry that could easily take you out.

  • And so we're not.

  • I don't know if you know.

  • Do you know what happens if you blast a single hydrogen bomb 100 miles above the United States?

  • Just one.

  • You lose all your electronics, right?

  • They're all done.

  • Tractors cars, trains, subways, computers, phones, all of the burnout.

  • And that's it.

  • So we're not done with this yet.

  • And and the Korean State, North Korea as an emblematic representative of the Communist catastrophe and everyone there starves.

  • There's millions of people died 20 years ago, has had not got any better.

  • So it's not like it's not like we solved this problem.

  • And there's a deafening silence on the intellectual side of the spectrum with regards to what happened on the egalitarian left, and there's no excuse for it.

  • So, so somewhat related.

  • Lee.

  • I think it's fair to say that even though you have criticized segments of both the left Social justice warriors and the right the altar right, you're critical commentary over the last year and 1/2 has focused significantly Maur on the left than on the right.

  • A lot of people I've talked to here at Lafayette at Lafayette take issue with that, They say that were so far from a Marxist takeover of our culture and political institutions that, to suggest otherwise is to engage in a classic kind of right wing exaggeration and hysteria that we've seen before in Western countries.

  • In the early to mid 20th century, They also say, and this is important to them, that the nationalist authoritarian right poses more of a threat to freedom of the individual than the left does today, as it has in the West since the early 20th century.

  • They argue that the left may have sway in the academy and large segments of the media that nationalist right parties, figures and movements with authoritarian tendencies have risen, become potent and often been victorious in recent years.

  • And they point to Trump Brexit the National Front.

  • Pointing to Trump is rather pointless.

  • I mean, I don't know what Trump is, but to think of him as a figure of the radical right is a little on the absurd side.

  • So I mean were polarizing.

  • And so who God only knows where the ultimate danger will come from.

  • If it's the ethno nationalists on the right, or if it's the radical leftists on the left, who knows, right?

  • I suspect to some degree, that's a matter of happenstance.

  • I mean, that's what you'd expect if you looked at 20th century history, but I emerged out of the academy and the academy like there aren't right wing people in the academy not to speak of that's completely that's thoroughly documented.

  • And it's certainly not the case in a country like Canada.

  • That's no threat whatsoever in Canada from from the radical right.

  • It's like, I don't know if he rounded up everybody who was on the radical right in Canada.

  • You might be able to scrape up like, what, three or 4000 people, if you really like.

  • If you really worked at it, you know, So I just don't see that, at least in my own country.

  • That's just a non issue.

  • It's a non starter.

  • I mean, the last time there was any kind of radical right wingers in Canada was probably in Quebec in the 19 fifties and maybe from the 19 thirties to the 19 fifties.

  • But it's never been a political issue.

  • What about the F D?

  • Or the Italian?

  • I can't remember the name of the Italian party, um, the National Front in France.

  • Where would you put?

  • Would you?

  • Oh, well, I mean, you're in Europe.

  • It's more.

  • There's more polarization, I would say.

  • But the Europeans also have problems that we don't have, You know, they've bean, they've bean struggling with the consequences of non ending violence in the Middle East and the wave of refugees that has emerged as a consequence of that.

  • And so the situation in Europe is different.

  • And I would say there is MME.

  • Or movement and activity on the right.

  • So, but and you know, I'm not a admirers of identity politics while and that's for the reasons I brought up to begin with, think that you have to decide conceptually, psychologically, familiarly and socially what your vision of a human being is.

  • And if your vision of human being is essentially tribal so that you're defined by your collective identity in some manner, then you're going to play identity politics on the left, you're gonna play identity politics on the right.

  • It's like, Well, I think the identity politics types on the left pose a bigger threat in my country.

  • It's not so obvious in your country because you guys, your political landscape is more balanced, I would say, than ours.

  • If the radical right posed a threat to the academy, which they most decidedly do not, then I would be just as upset about that, and so I think again it's It's part and parcel of the radical left, failure to take or the lefts in general, failure to take responsibility for the Radicals.

  • It's like, Oh, well, why aren't you criticizing equally on both sides?

  • Well, that the threat doesn't exist equally on both sides, not in my country.

  • So I think identity politics is murderous game, no matter who plays it, you know, on on the left, it's well, we've already talked about that.

  • So what's wrong on the right?

  • Well, you stand up and wave your flag and talk about your ethnic identity or your racial identity, and you take pride in that.

  • It's like, What the hell did that have to do with you, you goddamn loser?

  • You know, it's like you're you're one of the great heroes of the past, are you?

  • That's why you're standing up and waving your flag.

  • It's no, you're not.

  • You're you're identifying with your group because you don't have anything of your own to offer.

  • And so it's pathetic.

  • And I've said that many times and in my lectures to, and people know this.

  • If they've actually watched my university lectures, I spend a tremendous amount of time and have for 30 years convincing my students that if they had bean in Nazi Germany, there was a very high probability that rather than being Oskar Schindler and rescuing the Jews, they would have been a Nazi persecutor.

  • Because there's like five Oskar Schindler's and like many 1,000,000 Nazis, so you can do the math for yourself.

  • And if you don't think that if you think that you would have been one of the few heroes, then you're either someone truly remarkable or you're unbelievably diluted.

  • And so I would suspect that you're in the unbelievably diluted camp because truly remarkable people are rare.

  • And I've really have really seen this in the last year or two because one of the things I have noted, like I knew that people were timid, you know, and I knew why it's dangerous to stick your head up above the rest.

  • I mean, it's predator avoidance strategy to keep your head down, and I mean that technically, it truly is.

  • To blend in with the crowd is a predator avoidance strategy.

  • That's what fish do in schools of fish, like it's very low level behavior.

  • And if you stick your head up, there's some real danger, and the advantage to that is that people are pretty civilized and they go along with the group, and that's that's a good thing because you know, we should be civilized and go along with the group.

  • But it's a really bad thing when the group goes sideways and I've had many people, colleagues and but many other people to say, Wow, really, we agree with what you're doing, but we can't really take the risk of standing up and saying so It's like, Well, now and then, so most people fall into that camp.

  • When I went to Queens University a month ago and was subject to that chilling demonstration, I would say where the radicals climbed up into the stained glass window window wells and pounded, You know, unendingly for 90 minutes.

  • While we were all inside, I had a professor right be the day before and say, Look, my wife and I work at the university, really support what what you're doing, but we can't even risk coming to the talk, because what if the students see and complaint?

  • It's like, Well, yeah, there's courage for you, man.

  • There's courage for you, you know and so, but that's par for the course, and it's it's unsurprising to some degree, but well, but anyways, on the right, it's like it's an excuse by people on the left.

  • Not to take the things that I'm saying seriously, that's what it is.

  • It's like, Wow, he's not attacking the right a cz much.

  • It's like, Well, they're not after me.

  • They're not trying to close down my speech, so I took that personally.

  • So how did being right wingers coming after me?

  • Well, it would have been the same thing.

  • So it's a foolish objection, I think.

  • Uh, for decades, ethnic groups have, on average, scored significantly differently on I Q tests.

  • According to psychology professor Richard Hare, whom you int

thank you all for coming.

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喬丹-彼得森的講座和問答(拉斐特學院的米爾系列)。 (Lecture and Q&A with Jordan Peterson (The Mill Series at Lafayette College))

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    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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