If you're the prime minister of Canada, the man is a villain, but if you're a conservative particularly a young conservative, it's very likely you think of him as a hero.
Jordan Pederson on uncommon knowledge. Now, welcome to uncommon knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson in 2016, the Trudeau government enacted legislation, making it illegal to discriminate on the ground of quote, gender expression, close, quote, Jordan Pederson, a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto objected.
In particular, he flatly refused to use politically correct. Gender pronouns said, so in videos and went viral in 2017. He began a series of podcasts called. The psychological significance of biblical stories that has been viewed by millions in 2018. He published a book, 12 rules for life, an antidote to chaos that became an international bestseller. Last year. He published another bestseller Beyond order, 12 more rules for life.
And then he resigned from the University of Toronto will come to that to devote himself to lectures and podcasts Jordan Pederson. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. I should note by the way that we are filming today is part of the Classical liberalism seminar at Stanford. All right, question 1, the February, protests by Canadian truckers. Hmm, the protesting covid restrictions, some of them block border, crossings some of them, snarl, the capital city of Ottawa a quotation.
Then a video clip. Here's the quotation, you in a message, you taped for the protesters. I'd like to commend all of you for your diligence and work on accomplishing, what you have under trying conditions and also for keeping your heads in a way that's been a model for the entire world. Close quote. Now the clip,
It has to stop.
If people have Ottowa
don't deserve to be harassed in their own
neighborhoods.
They deserve to be confronted
with the inherent violence
of a swastika.
Flying on a street
corner or Confederate flag.
Or the insults and jeers just because they're wearing a mask.
That's not who Canada and Canadians are. All right. So, here's the here's, the hardly even look at him. Your, here's the first question.
How can discourse in a great democracy, have become so polarized, that Jordan Pederson. And the Prime Minister look at exactly the same set of events and come to opposite conclusions
about them. Well, he's
lying and I'm not.
So that's a big part of the that's a big part of the issue. I don't believe that he ever says a word. That's true.
From what I've been able to observe. It's all staged acting. He's crafted a Persona. He has a particular instrumental, goal in mind and everything is subordinated to serve that.
Why what's the
motivation?
The same motivation that generally, that's generally typical of people who are narcissistic, which is to be accredited with moral virtue in the absence of the work necessary to actually attain it.
All right, from playing a role
from you know, the swastika thing. It's like really Justin's about Canadians, really. We're going to be worried about Nazis in Canada because I had protests for example where people accused me of attracting Nazis.
Well, that just isn't a thing in Canada. There isn't a Nazi tradition. And I don't know anyone in Canada. Who's ever met anyone who's met someone who was Canadian who and who was a Nazi? And so that's just a non-starter. And so when that sort of thing gets dragged into the conversation right off the bat, you know, the Canadian shouldn't be subjected to the inherent violence of a swastika. First of all, it's not even obvious what that swastika was doing there. There's a there's reasonable evidence to suggest that the person who was waving it was either a plant.
Or someone who is making the comment that that was what was characteristic of the government not of what they believe. Now, no one knows because the story around that event is messy and it's not like there were credible journalists who were going in there to investigate thoroughly. But to use that. And the Confederate, the Confederate flag issue is exactly the same thing, you know, the story in Canada.
There are prime minister implemented, the emergencies act. And so the question was, why? And so I went on Twitter when this was trending and read, at least 5,000 Twitter comments to try to get a sense. These were people who are supporting Trudeau in his application. The emergencies act. I was trying to figure out. Okay. Well, what, what do they believe is happening? And the story seemed to be, and this is, as far as I can tell, and maybe I'm wrong. The story was something like
Make America great again. Conservative Republicans on the you know, pretty far right were attempting to destabilize Canadian democracy. And so my question was well what makes you think they care? First of all, about Canada and its democracy and second, why in the world would they possibly do that? You need a motive for a crime like that. And that was at the same time. The CBC was insisting, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which is subsidized by the
Liberals to the tune of 1.2 billion dollars a year was insisting that most of the money that the trucker's raised was foreign financed. If it wasn't the bloody Russians than it was the American conservatives. And so that all turned out to be a complete lie and so fine. It's Republican right-wingers trying to destabilize Canadian democracy. Why no one has an answer for that? Because what's in it for them and then, okay, three days later. The emergency Act was lifted and I thought, okay.
Now, what are they going to make of that? What could the possibly be the rationale for that? And the rationale was well that just shows you how effective he was. We had this coup ready to go. That was financed by Americans apparently and our prime minister acted. So forthrightly that we only needed to be under the strictures of the emergency act for three days. It's like okay. I don't even know what sort of world I exist in where those things are happening. So and then Canadians.
Why do Canadians by this to the degree, they do and I think they're faced with a hard choice because in my country for 150 years, you could trust the basic institutions. You could trust, the government doesn't matter. What political party was running it. You could trust the political parties right? From the Socialists over the conservatives. The Socialists were mostly Union types and they were trying to give the working class of voice and honestly, so you could trust the media, even the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was a reliable source of news.
You none of that's true. Now and so Canadians are asked to make a hard choice or were in the trucker's Convoy situation, and the choice was
well, either all your institutions are almost irretrievably, corrupt or the trucker's were financed by like right-wing, Republican Americans. Well, both of those are Preposterous, you might as well take the one that's least disruptive to your entire sense of security. And so I think that's what Canadians did mostly. All right,
I'll come back to Canada universities, Jordan Pederson and the national post this past March, quote. I'd Envision teaching and
Teaching at the University of Toronto full-time, until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office. Yeah, instead you
retired. Why. Well, it was impossible to go back. I mean, I couldn't think clearly about what I should do on professional front for a long time because I was Ill. But when I started to recover and looked at the situation, first of all, there was just no going back. I'm too well known and too provocative I suppose.
I've never really thought of myself that way, but it seems to have turned out that way. I couldn't just returned to the classroom and then there are other problems too. There's no bloody way. I'm writing a diversity, inclusivity and Equity statement for a grant. I wouldn't, I can't imagine the circumstances under, which I would do that, and that's absolutely crucial. Now, in Canada and increasingly in the u.s. To get any sort of research, Grant, you have to write a diversity statement and it has
Be the right kind of statement. I read the national sciences and Engineering research. Council's frequently asked questions about how to prepare a diversity statement. And you couldn't, you couldn't write a more reprehensible document from the ideological perspective. If you set out with the intention purpose of writing, a reprehensible document. And so, there's no way I could get funding for my research. And then my students, what bloody chance do they have of being hired in an academic environment today, you know.
Perfectly. Well, those of you who sat on faculty hiring committees, your basic decision right off the bat is. Okay. Who do we eliminate? Because you have way too many candidates. And so you're searching for reasons to get rid of people. And I'm not saying this as a criticism, even it's just a reality and any whiff of Scandal of any sort. It's like well, we have 10 other people. We could look at. Why would we bother with the trouble? And so I just couldn't see my students having any future. And
and then, I also thought,
Well, I can go lecture wherever I want to whoever I want with virtually any size audience with no restrictions whatsoever. Why would I go back to teaching a small class at University? You know, not that. I didn't like that because I did like it, but
Not all I could see were disadvantages, plus it was impossible. So, that was
why. So, again, from you in the National Post, just exactly what am I supposed to do, when I meet a graduate student or a young Professor hired on diversity, grounds manifest, instant skepticism. What a slap in the face. The diversity ideologies is no friend to peace and tolerance. It is absolutely and completely the enemy of competence and justice.
Close quote.
What happened? How did woke - we can come to this in a moment to universities have fact University faculty poll after poll of party affiliation in this country. I'm sure it's the same in Canada. The University faculty been to the left for a long time. But this woke -
is something new. What's the transmission mechanism? What happened? And how did it happen in still a small single digit number of
years? Yeah. Well, that's a tough question. You know, I mean
I've tried to put my finger on the Essential Elements of what you might describe as political correctness or woke Ness. And I've done that. A variety of ways. I had a student. For example, this is quite a promising, line of research are named. Christine. Brophy, was her name.
The first thing we wanted to find out was, well, is there really such a thing as political correctness or will notice right? Because it's vague and you identify? Yeah, and I meant that psychometrically because psychologists for 40 years have been trying to one of the things that psychologists have been wrestling with is construct validity in. That's the technical problem. Is, how do you know when you put a concept forward? Whether it Bears any relationship to some underlying reality? And so you can
You have. Well, is there such a thing as emotional intelligence, is there such a thing as self-esteem is there such a thing as political correctness? And so the proper answer that is what we don't know, but there are ways of finding out. And so one of the ways you find out is you want to see if the construct assess is something that's unique and that it does that in a manner, that separate from other similar constructs in a revealing an important way. There's a whole theory
of
Meth.
Dodo elegy. That goes that should inform your efforts to answer such questions. So for example, if your clinician you might want to differentiate between depression and anxiety keeping the concepts importantly separate. So they have functional utility but also accounting for the overlap because they're both negative emotions, for example, it's part of epistemological mapping. And so we asked a large number of people, a very large number of political questions.
Trying to over sample questions that had been put forward in the media and in the public sphere as indicative of politically, correct beliefs. And then we did the appropriate statistical analysis to see if the questions hung together. And so, they hang together. If question a is politically, correct. Let's say you answered positively in question. Be as politically, correct? And you answered positively, if there's a large correlation, between those two questions, then you think, well, they're assessing some, underlying I don't have
To tell you all this but you know this if you know anything about statistics then you know that there's something underlying that's holding them together and we identified a set of beliefs that were.
Observable are identifiable easily identifiable as politically. Correct. So then the question, so that it exists, then the question is, where does it come from? And we haven't done empirical analysis of that. But I think if you're reasonably familiar with the history of ideas, you can see two streams to Broad streams. One is a postmodern stream that basically emerged out of literary criticism and it's predicated on what I think is actually a fundamental and a valid critique, which is
Tom.
It's very, very difficult to lay out a description of the world without that description being informed by some value structure. That's that's at the core of what's useful about the postmodern critique. I think that's at the core of it. And I actually happen to believe that, I don't think you can look at the world except through a structure of value. The question then is well. What is the structure of value? And also, what do you mean by a structure value? And that's where the post modernists.
Wrong. And where I think our whole society went wrong because the radical left types, who are simple taneous, Lee postmodern turned to Marxism to answer that question and said, well, we organize our perceptions as a consequence of the will to power. And I think that is an appalling Doctrine. I think it's technically incorrect, for all sorts of reasons that we could get into partly because power, if power is my ability to compel you to do things against your own interest, or
Or even your own desire, maybe I can organize my social interactions on the basis of that willingness to express power. I think that's a very unstable means of social organization. And so the notion that it's its power, that structures are relations. I think it's, where's your evidence for that? There's no evidence to that it's wrong and but but that's what we assumed and that's what universities teach by and
large. What is the kind of a recurrent Temptation that? I'm just thinking. Now Gibbons?
Is Rome Falls because Christianity, Rises something soft somehow by some horrible historical accident, misplaced power Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil Christianity, belief. He attacks Christianity is specifically, but again, he's drawn to power to the will and to the point. And then of course, we don't have to talk about Hitler and the Nuremberg marks and marks. So there's something there's something.
Nothing, you're a psychologist, which means that you've spent a lot of time, Plumbing, human nature. There's a kind of recurrent Temptation there. In other words. It makes no sense to me that this thing that has raged through these great magnificent institutions, these universities that are grandparents and great parents, grandparents sacrifice to give money to Intuit these magnificent citadel's of learning.
This corruption goes wait, it makes no sense that it emerged from lit crit. It makes no sense to me to suppose that English departments suddenly took over. Well unless they're onto something. Yeah,
they are there. But I mean, no, they are on to something. They are onto something. This is why I emphasize in my previous remarks. What I think is at the core of the postmodern critique. I don't think you can look at the world except through a structure of value and the English. And so you think well how
The why is literary criticism so relevant? Well become so relevant and so powerful and I think well, I believe that we see the world through a narrative framework.
And so that if that's true and we could talk a little bit about that. What I mean by that, I think you need a mechanism to prioritize your attention and two because attention is a finite resource and it's costly. So you have to prioritize it and there's no difference between prioritizing your attention and imposing a value structure. Those are the same thing. And then I think that the mechanisms that we use to prioritize our Attention our stories, and that means that the people who criticize our stories actually have way more power than you think, because they're actually
I think the mechanism through which we look at the world. And so the postmodernist would say, look you even look at the scientific world through a value-laden lens and I think, yeah, you do, they're right, but what they're not right about is that the lens is one of power. And now for someone like Nietzsche the thing about a word, like power is, you can expand the thing. The borders of the word to Encompass, virtually any phenomena you want. And so that's why I tried to Define power as my willingness to use.
Is compulsion on you or other people because power can be Authority. A power can be competence. I don't mean any of that. I mean, you don't get what you to do, what you want. I get to tell you cores. Exactly. And and I do think the Marxist types view, the willingness to use coercion as the driving force of human history, and that's really saying something because that means it's the fundamental motivation and that's a very caustic criticism and it's easy to put people back on their heels about that, you know.
Of the things you see about capitalist because I mean stunned to see the CEOs of major corporations like rollover in front of these D EI activists. I think what the hell's wrong with you people, you know, you're not even making use of your privilege and why are you? Well, it's not very powerful. If you're the CEO of a major corporation. You can't even withstand some interns who have de ideology. It's like it's doing you a lot of good. And so and why would you produce a fifth column Within?
Your organization that's completely opposed to the entire manner in which you do business and the capitalist Enterprise as such and one answer would be. Well, we don't think much about ideas and it's like well, maybe you should and and you know, you can be cynical about it and say well it's just gloss to keep the capitalist Enterprise going well appearing to to meet you know, the new demands of ethical of the new ethical reality, which I think is a bad argument, too.
But more importantly, it's that people are guilty and the radicals who accuse us all historically, and as individuals of being motivated by nothing, but the desire for power strike, a chord, especially in people who are conscientious, you know, because if you're a conscientious person, and someone comes to you and says, like a little mob of 30 people says, you know, you could be a little more careful in what you say and do on the races.
Front in the sexist. Front etcetera. You're likely to think. Well.
I'm not perfect. I probably could be a little more careful and it's no doubt that people have been oppressed in the past and it's also no doubt that in some sense. I'm the undeserving beneficiary of historical atrocity. And so, you know, maybe I should look to myself and that's weaponization of guilt and it's very effective and it's not surprising, but it's not helpful. So, you know, so there's a resentment that drives this like a corrosive resentment that's able to weaponize.
And it's very difficult for people to withstand
it. Listen. I asked friends what one question, they most like me to hear you most like to hear me ask you and it was everybody said the same thing and then I came across you on a video saying a few years ago, people often ask me if I believe in God, I don't like that question. So I won't ask that question, but the role you've just talked about values. So here's a question. I want to hear how you think
Bout this, this is a question. That strikes me as philosophy, 101. Although I have to admit, there are other people who just see that. See, no traction in this one at all. My late friend, Christopher Hitchens. Just batted this one away. And here's the question. If there is no standard, we don't have to rise to the calling it God, but if there's no objective standard of Reason, outside and above ourselves, if everything is just matter.
How can we think, how can we do science c.s.? Lewis? This is c.s. Lewis and Hitchens. Just thought this made no sense at all. But I feel it. C.s., Lewis. If I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, meaning only all that exists. Is what we can perceive through our senses then, not only, can I not fit in religion. I cannot even fit in science in mines, are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry and
Oh, chemistry. In the long, run on the meaningless flux of the atoms. I cannot understand how the thought of Mines should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. Hmm, you feel that one as well?
Yeah. Well that's a complicated problem. Now, first of all, I do believe that I don't think science is possible outside of an encompassing judeo Christian ethic. So, for example, I don't think you can be a scientist without believing as an axiom of faith.
If that truth will set you free or that will set us free. So, we don't know the conditions under which science is possible. And we tend to overestimate its epistemological potency. It's only being around. I mean, you can stretch it back to the Greeks if you're inclined, but in a formal sense, it's only been around for about five centuries and it's only thrived for a very short period of time and it's perfectly reasonable to assume that there were particular preconditions that made its rise and ascendency possible. It is a historical
phenomenon. Yeah, it
Bend at a specific moment in time, right? And for at least a year is one of the condition
reasons. Yeah, I think one of the conditions, while there's a bunch of them. One is, for example, there is an intense insistence in the Christian tradition, that the mind of God in some senses. Knowable. Yes, so we could say well, the structure of the cosmos and you have to believe that that's the case before you're going to embark on a scientific Endeavor. You have to believe that there's some relationship between logos logic. Let's say, but logos is a much.
Broader concept that logic. That's for sure. You have to believe that there's some relationship between out in the structure of the cosmos. You have to believe that the pursuit of Truth is in itself, an ethical good, because why would you otherwise bother you have to believe that there is such a thing, as an ethical good and those aren't scientist. Those are not scientific questions, which is why I think the arguments of people like Hitchens are week. It's like yeah, Hitchens. Dawkins people like that. They have a metaphysic which they don't know and they assume that.
Physical self evidence like well, sorry, guys, it's ABS actually, not self-evident and they assume that it can be derived from the observations of empirical reality. And the answer to that is no, there's going to be axioms of your perceptual system that aren't derivable from the contents of your perceptual system. And you might think well, that's not very scientific. And I would say we'll take it up with Roger Penrose and see what he thinks because I just talked to him for like three hours about partly about this topic. About say the rule.
Of Consciousness and and the structure of Consciousness, and it's by no means obvious that the materialist reductionists have the correct theory about the nature of Consciousness and not surprisingly. It's like we don't understand the relationship between Consciousness and being at all. And so there, you know, these are hard hard questions. What are the hardest of the hard question for Consciousness? Researchers is, why is their Consciousness rather than why aren't? We just unconscious mechanisms acting deterministically, they call that a hard question.
I don't think that is the hard question. I think the hard question is, what's the relationship between Consciousness and being itself? And because I don't, I can't understand what it means for something to be in the absence of some awareness of that being. So, when we say being, there's an awareness component implicit in the, in the idea of being at self-consciousness, is integrally tied up with being in some mysterious Manner. And so, and I also don't believe that the most
Sophisticated scientists are by necessity reductionist materialists. Like get as far as you can with that. No problem. It's it's Occam's razor clear. If you can reduce and account deterministically, no problem, but don't be thinking that accounts for everything because I don't think there's any evidence that it
does from science to politics to quotations. Jordan Pederson. This is a tweet of just last month. Does anything other than the axiomatic acceptance of the
Fine. Value of the individual makes slavery. A self-evident, right? Good. That's a good one. A yeah. Well, you know, there's my friend Jordan Pederson who tweeted it
after. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. I was thinking about I was thinking,
hold on. I want to give you, I'm just going to put you in a gust company here. Okay, that's you. Here's g, k Chesterton, the Declaration of Independence basis, All rights. On the fact that God created all men equal. There is no basis for democracy except in the
Fine origin of man. So these are very similar thoughts and the notion here is that if we can't do science without some notion. Am I allowed to call it? If the device will
just judeo Christian?
So if we can't do science without a notion of the Divine, can we engage in self government?
No, no, no. Well, one of the things I've been talking to my audience about is the this right to free speech and how that might be conceptualized because you can think about it as a right among other rights. Let's say so it's just one of a list of Rights and you can also think of rights as being granted to you. Let's say in some sense by the social contract and so,
Which is a different Theory say than the notion that rights originated in some underlying religious insistence of the Divine value of the individual. The problem with the right. There's a bunch of problems with the rights among other rights argument. I don't think free speech is a right among other rights. I think that
I don't think there's any difference between free speech and thought.
And it has to be free because if it's not free, it's not thought. So imagine mostly F think about hard things because why think otherwise if everything's going all right, you don't have a problem.
When you have a problem, you have to think. And if you have a problem, the thinking is going to be Troublesome because you're going to think things that upset yourself and upset other people. It's part of the necessity. It's part of what will necessarily happen if you're thinking, okay. I just want to recap. You said something that just stopped me.
Sorry, because they actually start themselves. Stop me. So completely cold that I missed a little bit of what followed. I just want to repeat it. There is no difference between speech and thought, if you don't have free thought.
Must have free speech.
Well, that's the arc. Yeah. Okay. Well long past that first and then return to the other ones. Well, there's a bunch of reasons for that. I mean, first of all, mostly you think in words. Now, people also think in images, but I'm not going to go into that. We'll just leave that aside, but mostly we think in words and so we use mechanism that's sociologically, constructed the world of speech.
to organize our own psyches, and we do that with speech and basically
When you think there's two components to it, that are internal in a sense when you think you have a problem, so you ask yourself a question and then answers appear in the theater of your imagination generally verbally, so that'd be like the revelatory element of thought. And that's very much prayer like in some fundamental sense because it's very mysterious, you know, the fact that you can pose yourself a question and then you can generate answers. It's like well, why did he have the question if you can generate the
Oz, if the answers are just there and where do the answers come from? Well, you can give a materialist account to some extraordinarily limited degree. But phenomenologically, it's still the case that you posed, a question to yourself in speech, and you receive an answer in speech. Now, it can also be an image forget about that. Well then the next question is, what do you do? Once you receive that answer? And the answer is, well, if you can think then you use internal speech to dissect, the answer, which is what you do for example.
Example, you encourage your students to do if they're writing an essay, you know, they lay out a proposition and then you hope they can take the proposition apart. And essentially, if they are what they're doing is they're transforming themselves into avatars speaking avatars of two different viewpoints. So you have the speaker for the proposition and then you have the critic and maybe you lay out the dialogue between them and that constitutes the body of the essay and you have to be bloody sophisticated to manage that because it means that you have to divide.
Yourself in some sense into two avatars that are oppositional and then you have to allow yourself to be the battle space between them and people have to be trained to do that. That's what universities are supposed to do. It's really hard. What people generally do, instead of that is talk to other people, and that's how they, they organize themselves by talking to other people. And then, the reason you have the right to free speech isn't so that you can just say whatever you want to gain a hedonistic.
Vantage which is one way of thinking about you. Just get, you have a right to say whatever you want. Like you have a right to do what you want, you know, subject to certain limitations. So it's like it's a hedonic Freedom. It's like no that's not why you have a right to free speech. You have a right to free speech because the entire entirety of society depends on Depends for its ability to adapt to the changing Horizon of the future. On the free thought of the
Dividuals, who compose it. It's like a free market in some sense. It's a free market argument in relationship to thought we have to compute this transforming Horizon. Well, how do we do that? Well by consciously engaging with possibility. Well, how do we do that? Well, it's mediated through speech. So societies that are going to function over any reasonable amount of time, have to leave their citizens alone to Grapple stupidly with complexity so that out of that.
Stupid grappling fraught grappling that that's offensive and difficult and and and upsetting we can grope towards the truth collectively before taking the steps to implement those truths before they've been tested. And so so then you might, so that's the Free Speech argument. The Divinity argument is
Well, you are that locus of Consciousness. That's what you are most fundamentally and the reason that's associated with divinity. That's a very, very complicated question. But part of the reason I outlined this in my series on the biblical biblical series on Genesis, is at the beginning of Genesis, for example, so imagine this Divinity of the individuals rooted in the narrative conception that's part and parcel of the judeo Christian tradition. You have God at the beginning of time in whose image.
Men and women. Women are made acting as the agent that transforms the chaos of potential into the habitable reality. That is good. And he uses the word, the Divine word logos to do that. And what that implies is that
The word that's truthful. There's more to it than that, but the word that is truthful, is the word that extracts habitable order out of chaos, and that's what characterizes human beings that capability and I think, yeah.
That's right. So and and then you might ask, do you believe that I would say well,
That's what your culture is based on. So you might say, I don't believe that. It's like fair enough. Say what you want, but try acting.
Try basing your personal relationships on any other conception than that and see what happens. You know, people are so desperate to be treated in that manner. That it's their primary motivation. You want other people to treat you as if you have something to say that you're worth, attending to you know, that you you have the opportunity to express yourself, no matter how badly you do it. And if there are willing to Grant, you their attention and time.
To help you straighten that out. There isn't anything you want more than that. And if you try to structure your social relationships on any other basis than that intrinsic, respect for their intrinsic value. It's going to fail.
Okay, we've talked about faculty.
Students, the kids a couple of Statistics according to Gallup, the proportion of Americans, who claim no religious affiliation.
Among Americans. Over 76 years old, just 7% 93% of the oldsters.
Claim a religious affiliation, the youngest group that Gallup tested is Americans between 26 and 41.
Almost a third claim. No religious affiliation, item1 item2. I'm reasonably certain. This is the same in Canada, at least in Eastern Canada, but certainly in the United States poll after poll, after poll.
Shows that young people are far more open to Socialism or two, at least two, what we would say, farther not just left of center. But farther left political aims. They're the ones who most fervently support this. By the way, this is an inversion from the Reagan years in the 80s when the kids were more conservative than the older, that's not the case now. And then, we add my personal observation, which is that during covid during the lockdown.
Me personally, almost more shocking than any, other aspect was the supine - the passivity of the kids except for it was established very very early that if you're young you're at no serious risk of this, you'll get sick. Perhaps it'll be a flu, but you're more likely to die in a car accident, up to the age of 20, something, then you are to die of covid that God established right away.
And universities shut down and they made kids take exams on or take their classes on zoom and I could detect, no pushback. No kid was talking till trying to diss the man in general. They were saying yes. Master it like Igor's to dr. Frankenstein.
So this is all really bad news,
40. Why do you think the first part of that question is importantly related to the second
part.
Well, I was sort of hoping that, that I was kind of setting that up as the question for you to answer. Yeah, yeah,
fair enough, fair enough. In other
words. I'm, I guess, let's just just state it. That this is, this is extremely crude, and it feels even crude or now that I've listened to you talk with such the sophistication for a while now, but here's the crew, the crude point, the crude suspicion is that if you don't have some notion of the Transcendent, if you don't have some notion of the Divine, then you'll believe
any damn thing. Yeah. Yeah, right. I think that's
right.
And that's what the kids are doing. Yeah. Well, I mean Dusty house keys comment on that was, if there's no God, everything is permitted, you know, and he did a lovely job of analyzing that in, well, in crime and punishment and the brothers karamasoff. And I think it's true. I think you'll if you believe nothing, you'll fall for anything, and I really do believe that's the case. And you know, you might say, well, what what do you mean you mentioned earlier that people like to ask me if I believe in God and I was think well.
Who are you to be asking that question? First of all, you have some notion of what you mean by believe that you think is just accurate because you know what believe means. And so you have a, a priori theory about belief and now you're asking me if my belief in God, fits into your a priori Theory. It's how about we start by questioning your a priori theory of belief because I don't even know what you mean by believe and neither. Do you especially when we're asking a question that
Profound because it, you know, do you believe in God? There's two Mysteries. There were three you believe God. All three of those are subject to question. I think people act out what they believe and so when people ask me if I believe in God, I say generally that I act as if God exists or I try to act as if God exists and they're not very happy about that because they want me to abide by the rules of the implicit rules.
Our question, which is no. Do you believe
in the religious view
as a pseudo scientific description of the structure reality? It's like, well,
I don't even know how to answer that question because it's so badly. Formulated. I can't get a handle on it.
Do you believe that there's something Divine? Well, let's try to Define divine. Here. We can do that for a moment. Most of us have some sense that literary stories differ in their depth. That's that I don't think that's an unwarranted proposition. Some stories are shallow and some stories are deep. Some stories are ephemeral and some move you deeply, whatever. That means. It's a metaphor, but we understand what it means. Imagine. There are layers of literary depth and one way of
Conceptualizing. The layers of literary depth, is that the deeper and idea is the more idea, other ideas depend on it.
Right? And so you have fundamental ideas that are fundamental, because if you shake that idea, you shake all the ideas that are dependent on them. And then I would say, well, the realm of the Divine is the realm of the most fundamental ideas and you don't get to believe in that or not because the alternative is to say, well, all ideas are equal in value. It's like, okay. Well, try acting then and you can't, because you can't act unless you prioritize your beliefs, and if you prioritize them, you arrange them into a hierarchy. And if you arrange them into a hierarchy,
You accept the notion of depth. And so that's a no-go. When we use language of the Divine. We were talking about the deepest ideas. And so I believe that the notion that each individual.
Is characterized by a Consciousness that transforms The Horizon of the future into the present. That's a Divine idea. It's so deep and our culture's necessarily I think functional cultures are necessarily predicated on that idea. So I don't just think it's a western idea. I don't think you can have a functional culture that in some sense, doesn't instantiate that idea. Because you interfere with the mechanism of adaptation Itself by not allowing it free expression.
You know, and you can be like my prime minister and you can say, well, I really admire the Chinese Communist party because when it comes to environmental issues they get things done. And I think I couldn't begin to tell you how many things are wrong with that statement. It would take like 15 years to tell you why you're an inexcusable e narcissistic, idiot, but we can start like simply if you know what you're doing and you have power. If you know what you're doing. Maybe you can be more.
Efficient in your exercise of in your control over movement towards that goal. Let's just assume for a minute that you do know what you're doing. Well, maybe if you have power, then you're efficient. Fair enough, man.
What about when you don't know what you're doing? How about then? Where do you turn? Because what that means is your ideologies failed you. And do you have a mechanism for for operating when you don't know what you're doing. Well, no, because we always know what we're doing because we're totalitarian and we have a complete theory of everything and don't say anything to the contrary or else. We've got it all wrapped up. Yeah, except when you don't. And so what do we do in free societies? When we don't know what we're doing.
We let people talk and out of that Babble out of that noise and American culture is particularly remarkable. In this regard. You have this immense diversity of opinions. Most of which are completely useless, and some of which are absolutely Redemptive and one of the things that's so remarkable. As a Canadian, observing your culture in particular is that, you know, you guys Veer off in weird directions, fairly frequently and things look pretty unstable and then there's some glimmer of hope somewhere.
That bursts forward in a whole new mode of adaptation and Away you go again and that just happens over and over and over. And that's a consequence of real diversity of real diversity. And it's definitely a consequence of like freedom of Association and freedom of speech because it enables all that George.
So,
All right, that's optimistic. And I'm always like to move and to show on an up, note here, but not quite ready to show you. So I want to hold that put a pin in the optimism. You mentioned Trudeau and Trudeau's admiration for the Chinese Communist Party. Ray. Dalio billionaire on China Empires rise, when they're productive financially sound earned more than they spent. An increase assets faster than their liabilities objectively compare China. When the US on these measures in the fundamentals, clearly favored China.
Close quote. Now, this is Jordan Peterson writing about communism in your introduction, to the 50th anniversary edition of the gulag archipelago.
The 50th anniversary of the publication of that, in the west takes place next year, Jordan Pederson. No political experiment has been tried. So widely with so many disparate people in so many different countries and failed. So, absolutely and catastrophically. How much proof do we need? Why do we still avert our eyes from the truth? Now? I have one I'm setting this up because
this next quotation I think is actually quite beautiful and I really want to see what you do with it.
Ray dalio gives voice to this persistent. Temptation. Jordan Peter says why why do we still feel tempted and Dostoevsky in the legend of the grand Inquisitor? The grand Inquisitor is speaking to Christ and he says to Christ you're all wrong receiving their bread from us. The people will clearly see that we take the bread from them to give it back to them, and they will be only too glad to have it. So as
He will deliver them from their greatest anxiety and torture that of having to decide freely for themselves. Never. Was there anything more unbearable to the human race than personal freedom? Close quote.
It's too hard. Dr. Peterson. It's just too hard. Canada, had a good run. The United States had a good run, but sustaining free societies across the decades and across the generations is just too hard for human nature to Bear. Mmm.
No, you're not supposed to agree with
that. Well, two things, you know, the first thing is, that man does not live by bread alone. So that's the first rejoined, her and the second is
With regards to difficulty. Well, the only thing more difficult than contending forthrightly with existence is failing to do, so, I'm not suggesting for a moment that this isn't difficult mean, part of the, what the Western religious tradition has done and religious traditions in general. To some degree, is to try to provide people with support, from What's divine in their incalculably, difficult efforts to deal with.
Donald let's say the unknowable know that if you Orient yourself, ethically in the most fundamental sense, then in some sense, you have the force of God on your side and then maybe you can Prevail despite the difficulty. And I think that's I think that's right. I think it's I think that's true. So and you can ask yourself.
I try to ask these questions seriously, you know, when I would also say that I've been driven to my religious beliefs such as it is, by necessity, not by desire. What do you want to have on your side? When you're contending with the unknowable future and it's vagaries. How about truth? How about beauty? How about Justice? You want allies? Those are powerful allies. That's what the university supposed to be teaching young people. It's like you need some allies, man. Whilst how about the pursuit of Truth?
Well, then the scientists have their say and I would say on the economic front. Well, how about the free trade between autonomous individuals? The free trade of goods of value between autonomous individuals, that's not such a bad thing to have on your side, these Eternal verities. And then we could say perhaps that well there is a set of Eternal verities but they're all Eternal verities. So they share something in common, some good in common, all good things, share some good in common. Well, what is the good that they share in common? Well,
For all intents and purposes.
That's God and you might say well, I don't believe in thats like well, I don't know what you mean. You don't believe there's any such thing as good. You don't believe there's any such thing as ultimate good. I'm going to try to make some ontological Claim about an old man living in the sky. Although I think that's a lot more sophisticated concept than people generally realize. That's not my point. My point is, you do have a belief system, whether you know it or not. It's a system of Ethics, whether you know, it or not. There's either something at the bottom that unifies it or
Not unified. Which means you're aimless and hopeless and depressed and anxious and confused because those are the only other options and maybe you don't know what that unifying belief is, but that doesn't mean that it's not there. It just means you don't know what it is. And so I'm trying to puzzle out what it is. You know, I've I could give you a couple of examples. Very very briefly because I won't. So I already mentioned the Genesis the story in Genesis, it dissociates God with the
Force process that generates habitable order out of chaos and attributes that nature in some sense to human beings. In the next part of the story. In the story of Adam and Eve, God is what people walk with unselfconsciously in the garden. So Adam doesn't because he's now ashamed and he doesn't walk with God anymore. But, so what is god? Well, that's what you walk with when you're on.
Self-conscious. So that's an interesting idea. And then you have the god that manifests itself himself. Let's say in the story of Noah, and that's the, that's the intuition that hard times are coming and that you better get your house in order and you think, well, does that lead you that intuition? Well, certainly sometimes if you have any sense, it's like, well, what's the nature of the intuition? Is that a spirit that animates you? Well, obviously, because they're you are acting and so you're
Acting out a pattern. It's a spirit that animates you. And so and then there's the story of the Tower of Babel. What's God, their? Well, God, is that which you replace at your peril because everything will come tumbling down. That's the Tower of Babel. It's like, well, is that true or not? You think about that for a week, especially in that light? You think old definitely if we put the wrong thing at the top like Stalin for example, then look out.
And we've done that a bunch of times in the 20th century. I think, you know, Milton conceptualize Lucifer as something like this Spirit of unbridled intellectual arrogance. It's something like the Lucifer's, the lightbringer, and he is engaged in a conflict with God, attempting to replace the Divine. That's pretty explicit in the story. And I look at that and I think, oh, that's a poetic intuition of the
Of the battle between secular the secular Intelligentsia and the religious structure. That's Milton's prodromal. And what he sees happening is the intellect is become so arrogant that will attempt to replace the Divine and rule over. Hell, I think. Yeah. Well, that's the Soviet Union man. That's maoist China. We know, we know we've got our Theory, it's total.
We've solved the problem and nothing's going to change. Fair enough if you want to rule over hell and you think well, these societies are successful, pretty odd definition to success. As far as I'm concerned, you want to be successful like China, you know, that's why it's true. That man does not live by bread alone, you know, a wealthy slave. That's no life, man. Last
question.
And again, I'm going to take a moment to set this up and I'm going to Fumble. I'm going to grow toward it. I'm going to stumble along toward this question. But here's I'm finding myself thinking back to the 1970s Canada's part of this, but I know the American story better and in the 1970s, everything goes wrong economic stagnation loss of morale in this country because we lose in Vietnam, Watergate scandal.
We're on the defensive as the sodium Soviets advance in Africa, Latin America and then in the 1980s at all terms and we go from 1979 and the Soviet and the national humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to 1989. One decade, just Ten Years Later. The Berlin Wall comes down.
so the question here is the loss of freedom of speech, the corruption of the University's, the rise of China, which is in all kinds of ways, a more formidable opponent, than the Soviet Union was
In all kinds of ways.
One could argue that. We're in a worse position now than we were in the 70s. And so what I want to know is
Are you speaking to those few who have eyes to see and ears to hear?
Do you believe that we are capable? Do you hope to prompt another kind of restoration?
for is Jordan Pederson, the fascinating eloquent compelling champion of a lost
cause
well, I mean, when I say, I spent a lot of time at the various universities, I was associated with studying motivation for atrocity because I was very curious about that as a psychologist. Not a, not as a sociologist, or an economic Economist, or a political scientist. You're in our Suites guard. Okay, what's motivating? You as an individual and I wanted to understand it well enough so that I could understand how I could do that. Because one answer to that is
Well, that sort of behavior so far beyond the pale that it's completely incomprehensible. It's just a manifestation of say, like intent psychopathy and normal person, can't even imagine it. And I think now that evidence doesn't really suggest that because it isn't obvious that all the people involved in the Nazi movement. For example, were criminally pathological that they were deviations like
What would in comprehensible deviations from the norm would be lovely to think that and it would make the world a lot simpler, but I think the evidence mostly suggest that know you can get Ordinary People to do that sort of thing and maybe even to enjoy it. And so that's pretty bloody terrifying. And so I tried to understand that and I think I did to some degree. Although we can't go into that. A fair bit of that's a consequence of Envy. It's the spirit of Cain. I would say if you had to sum it up in a phrase, but
That isn't the issue. The issue is. How do you stop it from happening again?
And because that's supposed to be what we're concentrating on. Let's say, in the aftermath of the second world war, never forget, which should mean something. Like, how about we don't do this again. And so my my question was, well, how do we, how do we best go about that ensuring? We don't walk down that road again. And my conclusion was that's an because it wasn't because it was fundamentally an issue of individual psychology. Most fundamentally more than economics, more than sociology, all of that. It's
The Cure is individual.
People have to.
They have to act as ethically as they are powerful or else. And so I've been trying to convince people to do that. I suppose or to put forward not to convince them precisely but to put forward an argument about why that's necessary and why it's on them. It's like no this is on you. You don't you got to understand this this problem. It's you you don't get it. Right. It isn't going to work. And so, how do you do that? Well, you start with what you have under control in your own life, because where else you going to start? You look to.
Of put your house in order. Don't be worried about some other person walking this satanic path. And that's what activists do all the time, right? It's you it's the corporations like it's someone else. No, no,
To you, and I think that's also fundamental to the judeo Christian doctrine, is that it's you, it's on you redemptions and individual matter. And so my hope is that if enough people take themselves with enough seriousness, then we won't end up in hell.
Because we certainly could.
It's a high probability. And so and I also don't think that you can be or you can be motivated enough to put your house in order to the degree. That's necessary, merely by being attracted. Let's say to the potential Utopia, that might emerge as a consequence of that. So that be a vision of Heaven. Let's say no, you need to also be terrified of Hell, think, well. There's no such thing. It's like just because you haven't been there, doesn't mean there's
No, such thing. Like you have to be pretty bloody naive to think. There's no such thing. How much evidence do you need?
And how does it come about?
Well.
It comes about at least in partial consequence of the sins of men and I think that's true. So I go around and I talk to people, I say look there's there's not only more to you than you know, there's more to you than you can. Imagine, you have an ethical responsibility to act in that light. And you might claim not to believe that but I would say well your whole culture is predicated on that belief and insofar as you are an active member of that culture and a believer in it.
Structure. Then you believe it. You might not be very good at believing it. You might be full of conflict in doubt and you might not be able to articulate it, but it's still right at the Bedrock of your culture. This notion of what the Divine sovereign individual is that not what your culture is predicated on, that idea, the logos inherent in each person. It's something. Other than that. I've never seen a credible argument made to show that it's anything. Other than that, you know, you can say well rights.
Are attributed to you by the state. It's like, sorry that's a weak argument, because the state's dependent on your action. So, you know, to believe that you have to believe that the state is The Entity and that individuals are just subordinate in some fundamental sense to the state. It's like, no, the state is dependent on the individual to exactly the same degree. So,
Were the active agent of the state in some sense where the Seeing Eye of the state? This speaking mouth of the state? Because the state's dad without the individuals that compose. It. Can you
incoming freshmen next year, University of Toronto Stanford University, 18 year old kids coming into this. We've been through three years of covid. I won't rehearse it all.
One sentence. What would you? What would you what would you say to them as they begin University at the age of 18 or 19?
What's the restorative? The Redemptive sentence? What should they
do?
Don't be Thinkin. Your ambition is corrupt.
You know, because that's part of the message. Now, human beings were a cancer on the planet. We're headed for an environmental apocalypse. The entire historical structure is nothing but atrocity, etc. Etc. Anyone with any ethical aim whatsoever is just going to pull back. You don't want to manifest any ambition, support the patriarchal structure exploit the environment, you got to crush yourself down. You shouldn't even have any children. It's like no there's no excuse for that. There is zero. Excuse for that. I saw a professor.
At an event, something like this. He came out and trumpeted this. Bloody environmentally friendly house. He built. And, you know, fair enough, man. It was a, it was a pretty interesting house, but not everybody had the four million dollars that, that, it took him to build it. And I'm not criticizing his money even, it's like, he's had some money good for him. He built a house. Okay, but then to trumpet out as a moral virtue. Well, you're pushing it there. And then he came out to all the kids and he said, you know, my wife and I decided that we were only going to have one child.
And I think that's one of the most ethical things we could have possibly done and I would strongly encourage you to do the same. I thought you son of a bitch you get up in front of these young people. A lot of these kids were children of first-generation immigrants from China and and he showed all these images, you know, of these terrible factories in China. These endless rows of sterile mechanism that were subordinating all the Chinese people to this terrible, you know, capitalist machine. And I thought you don't understand half the audience.
And this is looking at those factories and thinking that's a hell of a lot better than struggling through the mud under Mal buddy. And so, I don't know where he thought he was, but to come out in front of all those kids, and basically tell them that the whole human Enterprise is so goddamn corrupt at the best thing they could possibly, do is limit their multiplication. And to think of himself as a scholar and educator. It was just, I did say something. By the way, it was rather uncomfortable and he stomped off the stage, but that's no message for young people. That's not theirs.
No, excuse for that. And you think well, I, you know, we're going to destroy the planet, we have to do this. We have to demoralize the youth, to be ethical. It's like yeah, really? That's your theory. You're going to demoralize young people to be ethical. That's your theory. So you should go home and think about that for like a year and I'm passionate about this, you know, because
You have no idea how many people that's killing.
You have no idea. I see people everywhere all over the world is so demoralized, especially young people, especially young people with a conscience because they've been told since they were little that there's nothing to them, but corruption and power. It's like, how the hell do you expect them to react? You know, they
well I shouldn't do anything, man, you know.
Dr. Jordan Pederson on the what was the phrase? The Divine sovereign
individual,
sovereign individual. Thank you.
Uncommon knowledge, the Hoover institution and Fox Nation. I'm Peter Robinson.
