Joe Rogan Experience #877 — Jordan Peterson Transcript

Transcript

0:00 All right, we're live. In Canada, Canada is very different than the United States. I love Canada. And people have been posting today all the atrocities that Castro committed during his regime to sort of show how preposterous. 50 bucks a pint. What we mean by gender pronouns is not just he and she, Like, you're compelled to use, how many, what is the number of them now?

3:18 On top of that, you have animal kin. Or elf. Got to get on Tumblr. It's part of postmodernism. Maybe it's postmodernism more than anything else. What do you mean by it's all about power? Well, one of the most awful elements of it, I think, is the idea that individuals should be people to be categorized according to their group identity, because that was interfering with

6:42 and then the social justice warrior types and the lefties, they pretty much wiped out or raped and froze to death all of their competent farmers. of that category, and then you and the rest of the guilty members of that category are as long yeah and the others are always other group members right and somehow their their discourse is it's a slightly different situation, I suppose. But the idea that as a member of a culture,

9:51 One in five social scientists claims to be a Marxist. is that the Marxist ideas are actually quite attractive if you're an intellectual, and if and then how those legislation was transformed into endless genocide, essentially, especially in France, they switched and started to talk about power and to talk about group identity. It was like a are very attractive to compassionate

13:01 Like my students, and that's partly because they're taught so badly in schools, is they have And the to compassionate intellectuals, people that without really looking at what the potential I mean, everybody puts up boundaries, and you have to do that. It's an extension of the word kin. but it falls apart under minimal examination. So here's something to think about for everyone who thinks that equality of an outcome is a good idea. It's like,

15:56 is actually an attempt to render the world more unequal. So, it's so thoughtless. it's now considered a form of because it implies that people who are poor don't work hard. Also environmental factors, what communities you grow up into, what you're being exposed to. You're either on the left or you're on the right, and there's very few on the right.

18:24 which I think is just a mask to enforce a kind of ideological homogeneity, will think in a female way. you don't care at all about coherence and identity are the same There's a big difference between women being forced out of tech Explain that, if you could, the Scandinavia issue, because it's very interesting what they've done over there and what the results have been.

21:18 You don't get rid of them, you maximize them. You could say that that's actually okay, And if you set the environment up so that each child is supportive, because it allows the genuine differences between people to manifest themselves. These people who are pushing equity, which is equality of outcome, Is it we're supposed to stop that? Is that also a sign of oppression?

23:44 Well, it's typical of ideological conversation, because It's also partly because men do all the horrible, dangerous jobs, the ones where there's a high chance of dying. measured en masse Why is this so rare amongst professors? sketch out the shapes of the continents. resolution. It's hard to go from a low resolution representation to a high resolution representation.

26:29 tremendous amount of cognitive effort. And sometimes you don't even know what you don't feel like you know something and people like that because they don't like the i the feeling that Tenure's an issue and also not competing in the marketplace, not being in the workforce, And I think something like that's happened in the universities, I mean, if it's 50% Liberals and 50% Conservatives, no problem.

29:14 That's one of the things that temperamentally distinguishes liberals from conservatives. this, it's not as true in the hard sciences. Now, I didn't expect any. He said that the scientific consensus for the last four... because he was a historian of medicine, because the university regarded that as against the university policies But on the one hand, I got two letters of warning from the university

32:29 Well, that's a good question. If you say that, you're a bad person. We should alter language. We shouldn't give up the distinction. And this is one of the things that you've said. One of the things that you don't like about this And here's the other distinction. It's the whole point. because you get an infinite number of categories out of that. And that's what's happening already online. One of my favorite stories came out of an all-girls university in Massachusetts

36:00 I think it was Wellesley. There's a chaos in between categories that's made of an infinite multiplicity. It's like, well, the claim is, well, I'm marginalized. individual that's marginalized. You know, so for example, it's clearly the case that when a child is socialized, there's pros and cons to that. And we know that. And so then when you start to concentrate on the marginalized,

39:29 Well, that's actually what Jacques Derrida said. marginalizing doesn't mean that you shouldn't have a society and it doesn't mean that the only reason categorization, the purpose of society What we have right now is a flawed system. At least they're bloody well playing a game that, you know, pretty much everybody has access to. along and everything should be equal. The problem is it defies human nature. It defies the 200,000, 300,000 years of DNA that we have bouncing around inside of our bodies that demand certain types of behavior.

43:11 which is quite comical. I mean, one of the things that our research indicated, research on political in that if you want. And that's the don't agree with them, not interacting with them, but almost immediately insulting them, are denouncing the idea that psychology, for example, might have anything to do with sex Well, one of the differences is that personality and clinical psychology isn't a corrupt enterprise,

46:24 historical perspective. We can't measure them as well as we would like to. The implicit association test is a good example of that. novelty response. So I mean, most people in a given racial group are far more familiar with actually a part of something like this, right? But the people that they're consulting with to implement these sorts of programs

49:45 multiple measures and all those measures need to say the same thing so if you're going to accuse there's no such thing as facts anyways so there's look in canada here here's something before they're allowed to serve on the committee. The Justice Minister. Qualifications. The university says, finally, just run with it. Yeah, it was started by a woman who said exactly that.

52:38 and then the other person And not only are they willing to take advice from them and not disavow them, despite their support for violent means of social revolution, I just don't understand how no one has, there's no rational thinking involved in the administration Then you're going to calm down. Then I'm going to encroach again right to the point where you start to protest. Then I'm going to stop. Then I'm going to wait. Then you're going to calm down.

54:38 and you'll have done it one step at a time. battalion. It's a very interesting book. So these were middle-aged German men. So they were raised was by all accounts a pretty decent guy. middle of fields and shooting them in the back of the head. And they were physically ill during most And then, well, They didn't stop. controlling the way people communicate,

57:37 against them. And you know, we're approaching a situation, and this has already happened, I think, in Trump's rise to power is that people are sick of this oversimplification Yeah, it is just starting. that by their mere existence, being just just by person with a home in the suburbs well and it's also extremely annoying emancipated. They were serfs until about 30 years before that. They were serfs. They were basically

1:00:32 Okay, so now the intellectuals come in and say, property is theft, success is oppression. Whoa. for English newspapers, exactly what was going on in the Soviet Union. is a good explanation unless it's too simple. But you know, somewhere like Yale. same time well yeah yale is a great example because Yale was one of, It was like, well, it turned out it was you,

1:04:02 You play with death, for example, and decay and horror. There's nothing wrong with Mexicans. just relax about this stuff and you know not don't put restrictions on what people wear for halloween And I think he did. You're not making this safe. to be confronted by i would say often horrible ideas you want to learn about history you think Stay home with your mom.

1:06:58 And what I try to do in the class is to teach my students that had they been in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and you happen to be one of And they say, well, I don't really even know how to shake someone's hand. You don't make the world and its horrors smaller. Because that's better than engaging in real combat. You make them hard and strong. That's the archetype of a modern university.

1:09:41 It really popped up in the 1990s, It went underground is more accurate. It's crazy. when there was a feminist paradise uh and that would be like noble savage mode of living where So they're pointing to one unsuccessful society so the basic claim is that Western civilization And you can marry that with modern post-modernism and their goal is to restructure the patriarchy.

1:13:00 that's predicated on nothing but oppression. Oh, well, that doesn't matter. things would have gone a lot better. it seems based on revenge. It seems based on revenge for awkward upbringings, social Most of the things you do, all of the things you the perfect examples of that's the dark side of ideological possession. They all form some sort of a groupthink.

1:16:07 And people who look at it now and they say it's social change, And people don't do the reading. And it's really disconcerting to someone who has children. You can get, you could educate yourself. a university doesn't mean it is. that people can't get elsewhere is accreditation. I'm sure you do. There's also a gigantic financial stake, the amount of money that you're...

1:19:05 You cannot declare bankruptcy on student loans. Individuals can. Is that the way to do it? Yeah, and we're talking about hundreds of thousands for four or five years. Longer than you order you go after your Marxist professors ask them it's a difficult book to read. It's a very difficult book to read. It's a very And it's the unthinking adherence to compassion is the highest moral virtue.

1:22:32 Yeah, it was a multivariate analysis of the income disparity between men and women. And what he found out was that You should get paid more if you're putting your limbs on the line. It was 40 bloody below up there, and they'd be wrestling pipe in the middle of the bush. Right. Those are very difficult jobs I'm sorry, And I got accused of that twice in the last two months because I don't want to use these compelled pronouns.

1:25:15 So what's happening is the law is already such that not using one of these made-up pronouns is a crime, Yes. Because if you hadn't done that, there's a lot of people who wouldn't be aware of how insidious and what you were describing earlier, the creep. These are serious press articles. ran contrary to my views and their basic theme was something like why doesn't the mean professor

1:27:46 apart from the first two weeks have been positive. Well, that's great. What you've done in your lot of forums where you can do that and speak for, I mean, they're all like an hour long, and in really bare-bones form, because YouTube was cute cat videos, you know, because for the first time in human history, a lecture can have the same reach and the same

1:29:40 is there's only one reason that people are watching them. You know, the people who are popular I believe you're right, and I think the Internet in general And I think that's a part of the problem with ideologies in general is that instead of thinking for yourself, you subscribe to a predetermined pattern of behavior and you lock in like, this is what I'm supposed to believe. This is what I'm

1:31:49 I think these people, they have the potential to be at least informed. is now being deemed unacceptable and and they're alienated issue with that. She's a feminist, and calls herself the factual feminist and she pushes back against it. not at all as far as they're concerned that's just another power game on your part That's going to unfold over the next 20 years.

1:34:43 I mean... Yes, as we all were, yes. debate which which I thought was really interesting because if I would have play at the same time. out noticing that saying, well, God, this is so biased, I can hardly believe it, which is exactly and let the faculty have a war about what's important. is, in a sense, branching out away from just a university and teaching online?

1:38:19 more accessible, more reasonable. Yeah. And it's entirely possible that what we're looking at is the future of education. Maybe. It could be. It could be. I mean, I've been spending a lot of time in the last month or so we discussed It's like, that's a lot different. 9,000 subscribers that took me about two years three years to build and one of my ambitions

1:39:57 while I was being warned and cautioned by the university I could do a whole series on archetypal biblical stories. I believe that. And I put it on over his house. He runs a podcast and we played with it for about an hour and a audio over it, but rather you could have three-dimensional things where you could show a city, a village, a mountain range.

1:42:30 I mean, you have, I don't know how many people on YouTube have a larger subscriber base than you, What was the— No, I was doing some work around my office when I was listening to one of yours, human beings have only been reading, roughly speaking, It wouldn't be difficult at all to extract the audio from any of these YouTube videos And I said, look, I've got a million people who've watched my videos.

1:44:57 But it's something I'm, well, I'm doing it actively right now, here's the exams you take them only 15 of the people pass. Why only 15%? Why would you limit the number? It's just a proxy for difficulty. You get to take it a number of times, but you have to you have to hit threshold. not only did she send him, she sent him text saying, do you have condoms? Come on over. We're going to do this. But because they were intoxicated, he was the one that was the rapist, which is insane.

1:48:13 Yes. So I have these YouTube videos up. And I said, well, I didn't know because it's not that easy to, and one of them, the Future Authoring Program, helps people write out a plan for their life. Then it asks you to write for 15 minutes about your vision for your life. And so it's like you get to design a little heaven to strive for and a little hell to avoid and then you write for

1:51:30 apart from the fact that it's a very good program, but there's also the possibility for the net Please describe this. which is why everyone's lined up in rows and why there are bells. articulate their own plan. You actually neurologically rewire people then they change you. So that's S-E-L-F, authoring, like writing a book, self-authoring.com. who stood for objective truth and freedom of expression.

1:55:02 It's a stage that the developmental psychologist Jean Pi Piaget, called the messianic stage, I mean it in the sense that Alexander Solzhenitsyn said when he analyzed the Soviet Union. Because you're complicated bad people, that they should look inward and sort themselves out properly. And I think we've given and when you pull that memory up to mind, if you still have an

1:57:22 or future so they could be traumatic things they could be uncertain things, past, present, or future. So they could be traumatic things, they could be uncertain things, because when you go somewhere and you act, And that decreases the existential load on you, and then divide each of those, that might be, say, It's not that uncommon for students to write 15,000 words in their autobiography.

1:59:24 Well, you might say, well do you remember your past well you might It's like, okay, you need to take that apart. there are obstacles in your environment. It's like, look out! Don't go there! Don't go there! really help with that. So you're reorganizing your brain when you write autobiographically. I mean, maybe if you're 80 and you're going over a well-spent life,

2:01:46 You're trapped in the past. that a lot of people have with education, Exactly. scientists. We didn't have science until about 500 years ago, so the idea that the tells you is what things are. And I got this partly from reading Jean Piaget. And then that has to be good for you and your family and society and the world right now and next week and In between that, there's a place, a place that's meaningful, where you're partly stabilized and partly curious, and you're operating in a manner that increases your scope of

2:05:53 orchestral composition and all the instruments are doing different things at different levels, and then we take the most true things about 10 other people's lives, And his archetypal mode of being is true speech. because they made fun of him for being bald. Right. Well, that was the problem that humanity was trying to solve that show, I would say, how that morality that was fundamentally tribal to begin with

2:09:32 I mean, how... because obviously these fictional characters were thought up by single people. have decided that there's a core story that has a certain structure and certain technological artifacts that human beings have ever made. limitation and all of that of that as the gerrymandering of a religious process. Like, look at this discussion that we're having

2:13:21 spirit is an amalgam of the information that you've encountered. A lot of that's articulated wisdom. little painful, I was kind of attached to that concept, but I'll let it go, I'll let it burn off, She got rich by telling the story properly. You know, and the second volume of Harry Potter, down. And in doing that, you free the These stories, they come up everywhere.

2:15:26 and part of the reason all this weird chaos is emerging, this is a consequence of Nietzsche's because and and live by these laws, as you were saying, of stacking on these ideas. and healthy? How redemptive and rejuvenating would that be? And I would say the answer to that is So sometimes you learn something minor. human beings transform. And we don't know

2:18:53 Now we do know what happens if you let go of them too badly. I understand that. is because there is a distinction constitutes better and we're all aware of that harmonious state that's achieved in community to go exercise in the morning. That's what the story's about, There's a very dogmatic and very simplistic view of what God wants. And conservatives, technically speaking, tend to marshal themselves on the sides of the

2:22:25 there's always this tension, and there's a tension in people. It's like, you have to believe things, something that deeply appeals to young people In a sense, they meet. you are when what you do doesn't work. And no matter where you go, order and chaos exist. And to see, and with your capacity to articulate. And forever, forever, really That the major deities that mankind have produced Marduk from up for the Mesopotamians and Osiris or Horus

2:25:25 That's how you adopt your responsibility as a citizen. That's how you live a proper life. And a proper life, I know what a proper life is, because I've thought about this The truth is the antidote to suffering. You can't, look, we can go back to the Harry Potter example. Ideologies work because an ideology is a parasite on top of a religious substructure.

2:27:50 Those are the two representatives of the patriarchy, And it stops it from being an oversimplification, because it says to you, story has got the balance between positive and negative always correct. Is that in many ways like a lot of people who are anti-Western capitalism are also the That's so important. of of of the state how about the fact that people knew the damn dikes weren't going to hold?

2:30:26 Well, a storm won't wipe out the city. Our infrastructure has decayed. Over and over and over and over and over. knowledge structures. And there's a very old story, and this goes all the way back to the Tower of There's nothing that needs to be left outside of what we know. Well, it's a problem. fourth member of the Trinity, but the and then they have this hierarchy of saints who are sort of like gods,

2:33:57 So if you're looking for something to represent the ultimate in complexity, They're an expression of how it is that we must live in order to live. If you walk down in some of the seedier areas in L.A., you'll see people in hell, no problem. let's call it, psychogeography place as it is a physical place. In fact, it's real i've been discussing this a lot recently because people like to talk about the concept of apocalypse, that we're headed towards an impending apocalypse.

2:36:31 And it's here at the micro level. the time too there's never a situation that's so bad that there isn't something you can do to make force against tyranny and authoritarianism. It isn't an alternative political structure. That's the countervailing force It's like, this isn't going in a good direction. for these actions and for your protests? Intelligence and moral wisdom aren't the same thing.

2:40:01 who had very serious personality disorders, One time I had this client. present herself in a more normal manner so that people wouldn't shy away from her boyfriend that was always tormenting my client she lived in absolute hell but she had this dog the streets during deinstitutionalization. Like, they were lifers, and they couldn't be let back out on the streets during deinstitutionalization.

2:42:34 there was someone worse off than her and believe me that wasn't easy to find and that maybe she because my goal was, I'm not saying those goddamn pronouns. which, by the way, you can do if you use your imagination a bit. I thought, okay, fine, I get it. So how is it that we should live so that we don't do that again? I'll take responsibility for what I say.

2:45:23 and altered the criminal code. carefully, believe me, and they decided that, oh, it was not only illegal to not use these compelled because I teach all my undergraduate courses from January to May, but the idea that I wouldn't be teaching in January, It's happened to other professors. because for sure their legal team crafted those letters. it's because the cost of having me not teach them would now be too high.

2:48:45 It's like sort yourself out. very important advice. And I think this has been one of my favorite podcasts ever. Jordan Peterson Videos. Yep.