Live with Jordan Peterson and Will Witt! | Interviews

to it hello everyone my name is Will wit we have a very special guest today we are joined by Dr GE B Peterson how are you doing today I'm doing well how are you I'm great I'm great uh professor at University of Toronto and recent presenter of our prageru video titled fix yourself which now has I think just a little bit over 3 million views that's incredible yeah well I'm I'm I'm amazed at the response on YouTube to what I've been talking about it's quite remarkable yeah and for those people who haven't seen the video yet uh how could you tell our audience how does does one go about fixing themselves well I would say the first thing you have to do is decide that you actually want to fix yourself you know I mean one of the truisms of Clinical Psychology is that in order for a client to make progress when he or she has trouble in in life the will to make things better has to be there and I guess the other thing that has to happen is that people have to decide to tell the truth because it's very difficult to straighten out your life unless you have a decent relationship with the truth it only makes sense right because you're dealing with reality and if you want reality to work for you then you have to admit to its existence and I mean that's harsh I understand why people have trouble with that but it doesn't help so aim high tell the truth that's pretty good start and how does fixing yourself help fix the world and other people around you well it stops you from it it it opens up the possibility that you can find a meaningful path in life and if you can then you have something worth living for and you need something worth living for because life is difficult life is tragic and it's also touched by malevolence you know people are very bad to each other they're bad to themselves as well and so life is intrinsically very difficult and suffering is built into the structure of existence and if you have something worth living for then you can you can rise above that and you won't become bitter and resentful and then you can work on being productive and reliable be already good thing work on your reciprocal relationships with other people and try to put them right then you can help your family and then maybe if you can get all that put together and clue in and make yourself into a productive citizen then you could actually be of benefit to your community and if everyone did that then well things would move in a very positive direction Direction very rapidly mhm and so oh continue well none of this is easy either it's like you know people I I tell people sort of tongue and cheek to clean up the room that's become a bit of an internet meme and you know you think well how is that going to change the world it's like well first of all that is part of the world it's an actual part that you have control over and if you do it you'll find it's a lot more difficult than you think and that the effects are much more far-reaching than you think and you also won't hurt anyone when you're doing it which is also a good thing so enough demonstrating against other people who are making the world a bad place that's my feeling that doesn't mean there's no utility in political action that's not the point the point is is that you should do what you can with what you have at hand and see where that takes you because it will definitely take you to the next place and so that's worth doing and so dealing with fixing yourself and fixing the world's Problems by fixing yourself that somewhat relates to the # me too movement where uh people have to be better what do you think of the hash Meo movement I think that it's a manifestation of a society that's very confused about its sexual morality so on the one hand ever since the 1960s I would say ever since birth control was developed in a really fundamental way ever since the pill we've had this idea which I would consider a kind of Illusion or perhaps even a delusion that any form of sexual gratification at any time is acceptable there should be untrammeled sexual expression but the problem with that is is that you can't divorce you can't turn sex into a casual impulsive pleasure it doesn't work because it's not a casual impulsive pleasure it's something that affects every aspect of the way that you exist and if you try to turn it into a casual impulse of pleasure and take the strictures off it then all hell breaks loose and so we see the very people I would say the particularly the people on the radical left who've been pushing for constant sexual freedom for 50 years being the most reactive to the fact that it turns out that consent is a very difficult process for example and that human relationships have to be regulated so that sex doesn't enter the conversation when it's not warranted and so to me it's just a symptom of something far deeper partly our confusion about what sexual roles are now that we have reliable birth control pills reliable birth control and partly a much deeper confusion about how men and women should interact with one another and also some some bitterness and hatred in it from men to women and from women to men I mean there is certainly a subset of men a small subset of men who are sect serial sexual predators but and you know they might victimize hundreds of people like that doctor who went after all the gymnasts you know but the fact that there's a tiny minority of men who engage in such activity doesn't mean that that's characteristic of all men any more than the fact that a tiny minority of the criminals are responsible for almost all of the crimes means that all men are criminal so but we're not capable of having a mature conversation about any of this in our society yeah definitely and so with the radical left you have third white feminist modern feminism what do you think is their end goal really do they want gender equality or are they looking for gender superiority I don't think they're looking for either I think they're looking for a means to take their resentment out on the world and and are very good at using compassion as a GU I don't see anything in the farle that's productive I don't think they're aiming at anything like like well whatever gender equality would mean I don't even know what that would mean for them mostly it means something like equity which is an absolutely if you think that Equity is a good idea which would be the insurance that every single strata of every organization whatsoever precisely matches the demographic of the general population on every conceivable axis of measurement if you think that that's a good goal you there's so much you don't know that there isn't even any place to start talking to you definitely and so um I'm not sure well actually we watched the video before we started about that mic video that came out where they're talking about how you are the new father of the far right asent uh looks like they basically took 5 minutes and did no homework on what you actually believe in and they get a lot of the values that you stand for wrong what would you say are the main values that you do stand for and what do you think you're trying to achieve well what I'm what I trying to achieve is to make individuals lives better that's what I'm trying to achieve I've also called attention to the Pathology of the far left because I think that things have become so extreme on the far left for example that they've already demolished the humanities in the universities and that that that destructive um pattern is starting to spread out into the broader community and I think there's going to be hell to pay for that so I've been reluctantly drawn into Political discussions but I'm a clinical psychologist and my goal for 30 years has been to pull people away from political ideology because I think that there's having a being possessed by a political ideology is reprehensible it's an abandonment of your individual responsibility it's the giving over of your god-given soul in Alexander soljan Hon's words to Human dogma and I don't care whether that's on the right or the left it's not acceptable that's why I've been trying to tell people to drop the ideological idiocy the the identity politics that plagues both the radical right and the radical left and to concentrate on developing themselves as stalwart and honest and responsible individuals because I think that's the right way forward and I think the West has always known that it's what defines the West is the in individual sovereignty the individual is the Cornerstone of the state not the other way around like the identity politicians insist and I've got no patience for that there's no excuse for it it's it's a very bad it's a very dangerous set of ideas whether it emerges on the left or the right and if you even have the least familiarity with 20th century history then you would know that and if you don't then well if you don't know anything about 20th century history then you should certainly stay the hell out of the political sphere because you're too ignorant to do anything other than wander around like a bull in a china shop so but I've receiv thousands of letters from people and everywhere I go now people and I'm not bragging about this because I don't regard these as my ideas but you know I am a clinical psychologist and I've been bringing the ideas of great clinicians to a much wider audience and people are telling me in droves that you know they're straightening out their lives they're paying more attention to their relationships they're concentrating more on their careers they're trying to tell the truth and that it's got them out of very very dark places and so I'm thrilled about that it makes all of the flak that goes along with this which is unbelievably intense um I wouldn't say bearable it isn't even that it makes it deeply rewarding so you know it's fine and if people on the radical left want to attack me they're going to find out what they've already found out is that with each time I'm attacked unjustly then the number of people who start to listen to what I'm saying grows and so you know Bring It On You weasels exactly uh in the video they talk about your ideas with concerning White Privilege how is white privilege a myth well it's because the whole use of the term is just a racist lie you know the idea is well we can call attention to White Privilege and we'll we'll raise up the oppressed it's like well first of all why in the world should I think that you're interested in raising up the oppressed what makes you like St Teresa of the universe why shouldn't I be skeptical of your means especially if you're a identity politics collectivist so I don't buy your initial premise that you're doing this on behalf of the oppressed as George Orwell said many um leather patched Tweed wearing socialists don't like poor they just hate the rich that's not the same thing at all and then to to to identify a group and this is the more pricious element to identify an entire population by their group identity and then to tell them that they're responsible in some quasi criminal way for the bloody horrors of the past and that they have to pay for them as individuals now despite not having committed those crimes is as reprehensible as anything I've encountered in my studies of totalitarianism and I know where that sort of thing leads because that's exactly what the Soviets did in the early in the mid te in the 1900s they had this cor conception of class guilt and the consequence of that was absolutely and in MA China as well class guilt is if you think that class guilt is a good idea then you've gone beyond the political pale as far as I'm concerned means you either don't know history at all or you do know and you're willfully or you do know and you don't care and I don't care which of those three categories you're in there's no excuse for what you're doing I have absolutely no patience whatsoever for anyone who talks about Equity it's an appalling idea and white privilege that's even worse there's nothing more racist and that statement you know there's this idea on the left that well you can't be racist unless you have power well that's real convenient for the whiny resentful dangerous hyper collectivist leftists that are pushing this PA pathological agenda forward and they're doing immense damage by doing it so there's they shouldn't be there's no excuse for it none there's a huge difference between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity yeah a difference between freedom and tyranny that's the difference exactly Thomas said it well he said if you give bureaucratic organizations enough power to impose equality of outcome you have simultaneously given them enough power so that they will certainly become tyrannies and I think that's a very good formulation exactly as well in the video they talk about um cultural Marxism and your ideas about postmodernism they say that is a right-wing conspiracy theory would you tell our audience why that's not the case well first of all it's not like I invented postmodernism yeah and the idea that the postmodernists are allied with the Marxist that's just a straightforward observation it's not me inventing that I mean Jonathan height and his heterodox Academy have identif ified the um overwhelming dominance of radical left wing Wingers among in the humanities in the universities this is not some paranoid scheme on my part so the idea the fact that the idea that these are my ideas is just Preposterous dareda himself who is the leader in some sense of the postmodernists along with Fuko knew perfectly well and stated quite forthrightly that his his philosophy was a transformation of Marxism and postmodern neomarxism is the is the defining philosophy of the humanities and the universities there's no question about that it's not no one even debates that so the idea that this is my idea that's some sort of paranoid philosophy it's like go look at 12 women's studies websites and see what they say and decide for yourself if it's a paranoid conspiracy I mean the fundamental um aim is to identify Western culture as a heteronormative uh cisnormative felo Centric tyrannical patriarchy and to dismantle it right from the bottom up including its most fundamental conceptions including those of gender it's like I'm not inventing this it's like you don't invent something that you read that someone else wrote you just read it and like I said if people don't believe it it's like go do your own research it's like read a read a dozen women studies websites you'll figure it out soon enough for yourself so it's a Preposterous claim do you think that universities are Beyond saving at this point yes yes is there any way to bring them back to their original intention making something approximating seven fatal errors each of one Each of which is sufficient enough to bring them down on its own so they're bureaucratically overloaded they're so they're administratively topheavy they're burdened down by impossible legislation that's requiring that they produce quasi judicial system systems within them to regulate such things as the sexual behavior of students the price of education is probably 10 times what it should be for a proper return um students aren't being taught to write properly or read properly or speak properly the value of a a degree is plummeting 80% of Humanity's papers have zero citations um students in the United States in particular are burdened with massive amounts of debt while they prolong their adolescent stupidly and transform themselves into indentured servants that's a lot of mistakes plus the universities have allowed the Sciences to become Tangled Up with these reprehensible ethics committees who do nothing but produce bureaucratic obfuscation and litter the pathway of researchers with obstacles that are unnecessary and counterproductive that's a lot of mistakes and that that says nothing about the fact that the humanities which is the dead core the core of the University like the the living soul of the University has become completely dominated by postmodern neo-marxists who teach their students to be nihilistic resentful and depressed so yeah I think the universities are in trouble they're in serious trouble well with all those mistakes I mean that sounds pretty horrible classic media yeah which is in a death spiral much of its own making is there a way to bring the universities back at all or is it yeah maybe incoming students could stop taking courses that are taught by postmodern neo-marxist indoctrinator you know the Market's going to have to decide and hopefully people will educate themselves enough so that they know that if they enter a course where people are talking about diversity inclusivity gender White Privilege um or Equity that they're not being educated they're being indoctrinated they should leave those classes in droves and if the supply of students dried up then perhaps the universities could be salvaged but I can't see any other way forward so you still think it's worth it for a high schooler who just graduated to still go to university I think if you can well if you can avoid the post-modern indoctrination it's getting pretty hard in most humanties disciplines The Sciences are still in pretty good shape so I would say if you're going to go to university you should tilt towards the stem end of the of the of the study distribution because if the discipline is grounded in science it's much less likely to be taken over by the toxic toxic indoctrinator so but law law faculties of Education they're all pretty much they're in Dire Straits faculties of Education social work they're they're beyond hope as far as I can tell yeah definitely let me let me ask you where do you think that Western civilization's values actually come from they come from well there's a variety of sources there some of them are instantiated out of biolog iCal level I mean and increasingly ethologists and animal behaviors are laying out the fundamental biological structure for an emergent ethic which includes Fair Play There's increasing evidence among in among that being acred by animal researchers for example who are studying rats that rats have a pretty good grasp on the idea of fair play and even to some degree trading you see it emerging in the dominance hierarchy structures of complex animals like wolves or so there's a biological basis uh like like there is a biological basis for language and then on top of that there's a sociocultural overlay a lot of that's consequence of mutual imitation and then on top of that there's a layer of Storytelling and drama and then on top of that there's a layer of custom and and codified law and philosophy all of those contribute and there but there's a central ethic at the core of a functional society and that Central ethic involves recognition of the necessity of speaking the truth and something like willingness to engage in reciprocal actions so none of that's arbitrary it's not morally relative it's none of that that's all nonsense that postmodern um moral relativism as far as I'm concerned serious academics have already demonstrated the falsity of those claims so hopefully we'll figure that out before um the universities do themselves in completely hopefully um let me ask you about your book The 12 rules for life amazing amazing read um if you could give people watching One lesson from all any 12 of your rules which one would it be if I had to pick one of the rules treat yourself like your someone respon that you have that you're responsible for helping that's a good one and why that a hand you know well you know there's lots of things that aren't so good about you you know partly because you're human and partly because you have the capacity for evil embedded deep inside of you you know it's not surprising people don't take care of themselves but it'd be real good if you could treat yourself like you're someone who has something to offer to the world because you do and you know the world's a dark place as far as I'm concerned but people have a Light Within them and if you can let that light if you can bring that light forth then you can make the darkness a little bit a little bit less dark and and terrifying and you should do that it'd be good for you it'd be good for your family be good for your community be good for the structure of being itself you know and so part of the reason I think that what I've done has become popular is because I have a very dark vision of the world but a very positive Vision allied with that which is that as dark as the darkness is and it's even darker than you think the light that you can bring to bear on that is more powerful than you can imagine and so that's a really good thing to know and I think you can know it instead of just believing it and that's better do you believe that your book and rules apply to women as well as they do to men oh definitely you know people have said well my what I've been describing and the message so to speak that I've been delivering which which I would say is more in in the course of Education rather than any message it's not like I tell people what to do I explain things to them that great psychologists have discovered and they draw their own conclusions but you know most of my audience on YouTube has been men but most of the people who watch YouTube videos are men so there's a baseline problem but increasingly especially since this book came out my public um speaking engagements which were again probably to begin with about 8020 men have shifted now till they're almost 5050 men and women so I think it's I really think it's just a matter of uh the demographics of YouTube now it might be that men young men are more desperate for the sort of of things that I'm saying but I'm not convinced of that I suspect that in a year or so assuming nothing goes horribly wrong um that that most of the time when I go out and speak it'll be 50% women and 50% men I suspect the population will get older too as the book attracts an audience that wouldn't normally encounter things on YouTube so okay fair enough and I have I have one last question for you actually are you optimistic or pessimistic about Western Civilization as a whole both like I think I mean the possibility for catastrophe is always at hand right that's why the apocalypse is an archetypal story but I think that with Good Will and the willingness to and the desire to make things better rather than worse and the willingness to tell the truth and act forthrightly that we could do things in the next 30 Years that are absolutely unimaginable I think we could truly end world hunger I think we could rid the planet of its major contagious diseases I think we could offer educational opportunities to virtually everyone I think the future is unlimited um but by the same token I think that we're in a state of crisis at the moment with regards to our fundamental values and that that could bring us down very rapidly so I'm hoping that people will collectively decide that up is better than down and that honesty is better than dishonesty and that responsibility is better than ideological possession and I think that if enough people decide that then we can tilt the entire we can tilt the entire Enterprise towards heaven and Away From Hell well let's say let's say worst case scenario Western Civilization does fall what would what would happen then oh I'm I'm not in any position to speculate about that I mean um we can't sustain the population we have on the the planet now without the technological sophistication that only a well-functioning society can maintain so it would be utterly catastrophic so so perhaps it would be best if we don't go there what do you think is the number one threat facing Western Civilization right now that we should look to fix or change corruption dishonesty I think that's the number one threat to every society you know corrupt societies are poor it's as simple as that that doesn't mean every poor Society is corrupt it doesn't mean that every Rich Society is honest but corrupt societies are certainly poor and there are no societies that stay Rich that are crooked it just doesn't work just doesn't happen so there's no human there's no natural resource of more value than honesty between people it means that you can trade with them it means you can cooperate with them it means that you can compete with them and that everyone knows what's going on and everyone knows what the rules of the game are and so it's dishonesty and Corruption is the biggest threat and I would say that starts locally which is why I try to encourage people to understand why it's so dangerous to say things that you don't believe you you you you corrupt the structure of being when you do that and and unless that's what you want I would suggest that you don't do it I agree with that completely well everyone thank you so much for watching we're here today with Jordan B Peterson uh thank you so much go check out the mic video that was posted and let us know what you think about that if it's true or not um and thank you very much I appreciate it have a good one guys thank you you bet thanks guys thank you