The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast XX
[0] Okay, so now there's a shock here because essentially in some sense the entity that's going to provide the solution to this very complex problem has arrived on the scene.
[1] But it's quite damaged.
[2] First of all, it's been speaking improperly, right?
[3] So that's an adolescent representation.
[4] So it braves a lot of nonsense.
[5] And it's been corrupted in a variety of ways.
[6] And so, you know, to some degree what that means is that as you mature and you're moving away from your mere marionette.
[7] status, your interaction with society, like Rousseau said, corrupts you in all sorts of ways.
[8] I mean, you're participating in that corruption, but it still happens.
[9] But in the representation in the movie, the truth of the matter is, it doesn't matter if you've been corrupted to some degree, as long as you haven't absolutely sacrificed your capacity for true speech and vision.
[10] So, you know, that's a pretty hopeful message, because Pinocchio is by no means a perfect entity, but he might be good enough.
[11] One of the things that disturbs me constantly about ideological representations of the world, broadly speaking, is that their fundamental danger is that they always contain a too convenient theory of evil and malevolence.
[12] And for me, any theory that locates the fundamental problem of evil somewhere other than inside you is dangerous.
[13] Now, that isn't to say that social structures can't be corrupted and aren't corrupt.
[14] That's an existential problem in and of itself.
[15] It's always the case that our social institutions aren't what they should be and they're outdated and they're predicated to some degree on deceit.
[16] And people who use power can manipulate them sometimes successfully.
[17] That problem never goes away and it never will.
[18] But when the evil can be easily located, somewhere else, then you have every moral right to allow your unexamined motivations to manifest themselves fully because you can punish the evildoers and always remain on the moral side of the fence.
[19] There's a huge attractiveness in that.
[20] I think, I mean, this is something you've explored a lot with the idea from the Solzhenitsyn's idea about the good and evil cutting through the heart of every human being.
[21] Because that, that to me, it really gets to the heart of a lot of what I would call a kind of infantile culture.
[22] I think this is a symptom of, of, of, of, of childishness.
[23] You know, whenever I was learning about literature and, and, and what constituted more sophisticated literature and what didn't, Disney films, childish films, let's take Tolkien, for instance, good people look, sorry, bad people look bad, they look like orcs, they're ugly, and there are villains, and then there are heroes, and they are good, there isn't complexity.
[24] And if you have a more complex novel, like a Mervin Peak novel, where people aren't necessarily, really good or bad.
[25] They're both.
[26] They struggle within themselves and with other people.
[27] That is a mark of a kind of adult novel as opposed to a childish novel, right?
[28] And that's quite an important distinction.
[29] And I think most of the political and ideological battles that I find myself in the middle of, and I'm sure you do as well, are because people are just reducing everything to this binary of good versus evil and putting themselves on the side of good.
[30] It is a very infantile, almost like a caricature of religion.
[31] You know, it's a, it's, it's, it's, And I see it again and again.
[32] We had it in this country with the Brexit vote.
[33] Effectively, what happened in the vote here.
[34] And the reason why it became so toxic and families fell apart.
[35] And you know, you wouldn't believe.
[36] I know it wasn't reported very much elsewhere.
[37] But it was like a kind of ideological civil war here.
[38] But not a very sophisticated one because it came down to this narrative that if you voted to leave the EU, you were evil, racist, stupid.
[39] And if you voted to remain, you were good and progressive and all the rest and noble and virtuous, right?
[40] And of course, there are all sorts of good reasons to have voted.
[41] either way and this kind of caricature and it happens again with what you described you described it as a caricature of of religion and I think that's what an ideology is and this is one of the reasons that I've been inclined let's say to go to have my shot at the rational atheists much as I'm a fan of enlightenment thinking I mean I was convinced as a consequence of reading Jung as primarily but also Dostoevsky and also Nietzsche primarily, and Solzhenitsyn, I would say, as well.
[42] And then biology as well, as I studied that more deeply.
[43] There's no escaping a religious framework.
[44] There's no way out of it.
[45] And if you eliminate it, say as a consequence of rational criticism, what you inevitably produce is it's replacement by, forms of religion that are much less sophisticated.
[46] I mean, well, it's not religion.
[47] It's a fundamentalist, really.
[48] It's like, you know, if I look back to my Catholic upbringing, actually acknowledging your own capacity for sin is at the heart of Catholicism.
[49] That's why we have the confessional.
[50] That's why you sit there and tell this stranger all these things you've done wrong.
[51] Right.
[52] Because it's reckoning with it.
[53] Well, that's far from trivial.
[54] It's unbelievably not trivial.
[55] And because it was so common, like a common part of Catholicism, it can be passed over without notice.
[56] And so the religious structures that we inherited, I'm going to talk about Christianity most specifically because it's the dominant form of, it's the form of religious belief that primarily undergirds our social structures.
[57] It's our operating system.
[58] My producer came up with that term the other day and I thought it was apt.
[59] And it does localize the drama between good and evil inside and makes you responsible for that and makes you, encourages you, let's say, to attend to the ways that you fall short of the ideal.
[60] And when you criticize a structure like that out of existence, you don't criticize the questions that gave rise to it out of existence.
[61] And the questions might be, well, what's the nature of the good?
[62] What's the nature of evil?
[63] Those are religious questions.
[64] What's the purpose of our life?
[65] How do you orient yourself if you're trying to move up, let's say, rather than down?
[66] How should you conduct yourself, et cetera, et cetera?
[67] Those questions don't go away.
[68] And they can't not be answered.
[69] And so the way that a traditional religious structure answers them is in a mysterious way.
[70] It uses ritual.
[71] It uses music.
[72] It uses art. it uses literature, it uses stories, all these things that are outside the realm of easy criticism.
[73] And then some of that's translated into, you know, comprehensible, explicit dogma.
[74] And that's the part that's most susceptible to rational criticism.
[75] What kind of student organizations were they part of?
[76] I think I can speak to that part because it's in the media.
[77] So divest was one of them, Divest Mount A, another one was a black student association.
[78] And the other one, ironically, was the Rose campaign.
[79] It's about the massacre at Polytechnic.
[80] And it means the word to me Polytechnic is the University of Montreal, right?
[81] So every year I commemorate, you know, I participate.
[82] So that one group was that group, saying that I encourage gender violence, sexual violence, through my writing on the blog.
[83] And that was because you Because you were pointing out that such activity is not part and parcel of the central culture in Canada, but an aberration?
[84] I was perhaps talking about, I don't know, honor killing in some places.
[85] So I read the media about a certain young woman who was scheduling and I put a candle, you know, for her memory.
[86] And I wrote something, you know, comment about that.
[87] So that's because I didn't, it's like.
[88] And how is it that you're glorifying sexual violence by doing that exactly?
[89] I have no idea.
[90] I wish I could answer, but I. Okay, so that particular accusation, not only, I've been thinking lately that there are about deception, the use of deception.
[91] And, you know, there are lies that are just about true, but they're just sort of.
[92] They're not quite true, and so you sneak them by because they're close enough to the truth, maybe to pass.
[93] But then there are lies that are the antithesis of the truth, they're antithesis of the truth, right?
[94] They're anti -truths.
[95] And it seems to me that the accusations that you're glorifying sexual violence fall in the antithesis category of untruth.
[96] Not only is it a lie, it's the opposite of the truth.
[97] Yes, but when it's about the blog, I can understand.
[98] I can understand because they don't like it, they're emotional about it, that I can understand.
[99] But when we come to talk about a behavior, a situation, an incident that has never happened, that is a different story.
[100] How do you separate out those two?
[101] I think it all came in the context of the complaints and the situation of the blog.
[102] But I don't know for sure because I remember, I didn't know how it's.
[103] started at the beginning.
[104] But logically, it came when through that, you know, the process of I call it speed mobbing because it was like speed dating.
[105] It was so fast.
[106] So it felt like, how can I say it, all the respect, like having barking dogs coming at you all at once.
[107] Yeah, so how about we call this assault?
[108] Yes.
[109] Yes, absolutely.
[110] Look, I've watched lots of people respond to Twitter mobs over the last four years.
[111] And my experience has been that being mobbed by 20 people on Twitter, especially when an administrative organization then climbs in, that's enough to seriously damage someone.
[112] And most people climb back and apologize as fast as they possibly can.
[113] And it's no wonder, because it's very unnerving and destabilizing.
[114] And so you're someone who is obviously deeply opposed to such things as sexual exploitation, clearly, and assault and the use of arbitrary violence.
[115] And nonetheless, you're targeted by precisely that kind of behavior.
[116] And then it's encouraged in every possible way, as far as I can tell, by the administration, who immediately fold in the most cowardly of possible ways.
[117] And so I just, this is just, it's outrageous.
[118] And I can't understand why there isn't more noise about it.
[119] I can't speak.
[120] I mean, you're the wrong target, clearly.
[121] Thank you.
[122] I can speak for the motivation, but I can speak of not standing up for me. What I see, I saw the whole Canada stood up for me. Like the people writing amazing comments on the GoFundMeCAPE, people donating.
[123] People like, like I'm overwhelmed by that.
[124] I see people standing up and I'm still into the thanking, thanking and I want to thank them if they are listening because I didn't have the time to complete or my personalized thank you, you know, to each one.
[125] So 10 ,000 people support you and 20 people complain and yet the university suspends you.
[126] So like what the hell's up with that exactly?
[127] I mean, how come there's no proportionality of response if the overwhelming body of the population is supportive of what you, of who you are, let's say.
[128] what you've done, which is nothing that deserves the kind of treatment that you've been through, why isn't the university as sensitive to the public opinion supporting you, as they are sensitive to the hypothetical public opinion damning you?
[129] This issue of canceling is so abhorrent to me in a democracy, all of this legislation that focuses on hate speech and limiting what can be said on the internet.
[130] And what's so ironic about it is that, as you might know, John Stuart Mill, you know, one of the fathers of utilitarianism and very often invoked in this current sort of collectivist setting with the, with the mandates, right?
[131] He himself was an advocate for free speech because he said that the problem with squashing free speech.
[132] It's not just that you might learn something new that you didn't know, but you have the opportunity to put your own beliefs under the microscope and to think about new reasons why you might believe or don't believe them.
[133] So even on the metric that a collectivist, arguably, a consequentialist, a utilitarian like John Stuart Mill is using, canceling censorship is not good for humans, let alone democracies that have free speech as one of their fundamental pillars.
[134] Well, the only real rationale for opposing free speech, apart from ignorance, which is that you don't know that free speech isn't just another.
[135] the right and you don't know it's indistinguishable from thought is the conclusion that you've already figured it all out so you don't have to think or you're trying to hide hide something well that that's the other possibility but those two those two things go hand in hand very frequently is that it's very often that people who are trying to hide something justify that to themselves with a kind of totalitarian certainty about their beliefs they double down on them to hide their own moral iniquities.
[136] And so you have to believe that people like Rogan shouldn't be allowed to just have a discussion with whoever they want and wing it.
[137] And do you think that because you think you already know.
[138] If your life is perfect and you're already living in the kingdom of God and then more power to you, you know, maybe you're right and you can shut down free discourse because that heavenly heights have already been scaled.
[139] But I haven't met anyone like that yet.
[140] Most people I know think with not too much thought that there's some things they still have to learn in some ways their lives could be improved.
[141] And how are we going to approach that?
[142] Especially, you want to find out how you're wrong.
[143] You should talk to people who don't agree with you.
[144] Now, maybe 90 % of what they say is not worth attending to.
[145] Could easily be.
[146] Probably the same goes for you.
[147] But 10 % might be just what saves you in the next crisis.
[148] See, that's also an indication there of why people are often unwilling to form a representation with, so to speak, form a relationship with the archetype of the Great Father, because to some degree the archetype is a figure of perfection, and the individual in relationship to that archetype is always pathologically flawed.
[149] And so the embarrassment of that realization, which is exactly what's happening to Pinocchio right now, is often enough to stop people from doing it.
[150] So what that would say, to say what that means in some sense is that in order for you to mature in the fullest possible manner, you have to understand the manner in which you're deeply flawed in relationship to your potential as it might be historically determined.
[151] And that's a very bitter thing to do.
[152] You know, it's much easier, and people do this all the time, to engage in half -witted, formulaic ideological criticisms of the system as a whole.
[153] It's like, you know, the probability that the system is more flawed than you is pretty damn low.
[154] So you might want to start with, you know, getting rid of your donkeys in your tail and stop bringing nonsense before you judge the entire, you know, historical process by which human beings have come into being.
[155] So, anyways, that's kind of what that means.
[156] If this can happen to you, like the lesson here, there's only two lessons here.
[157] Either you're a bad person and you got exactly what you deserved.
[158] Or this can happen to anyone.
[159] And so look the hell out.
[160] I totally agree.
[161] And I tend to stand up for people.
[162] No, I stand up for people in real life, but also on the blog.
[163] I write when something isn't right.
[164] Like, for example, I'm thinking of a situation.
[165] Maybe Dr. Machu Bocote in Montreal, whenever he has stories like being canceled or trying to attempt to cancel.
[166] Or maybe Dr. Gatzad, again, from Montreal.
[167] friends.
[168] I said bravo to the Jewish public library.
[169] Library.
[170] Yeah, because they, they, and even the prime minister of Quebec, I may have opposed saying bravo, the University of Laval as well, you know, saying that academic freedom must be protected, like that academic, I mean, is protected so that, I mean, a recommitment to it, if you see what I mean.
[171] Well, look, the academic, the bulk of the abstract intellectual work in our society goes on at university.
[172] So that's where the cutting edge is.
[173] It's not the only place.
[174] It happens in many places, but it's one of the main places.
[175] It's certainly the main place where training for that is still instituted, apprenticeship for that is still instituted.
[176] And so if that comes under assault, if that's in danger, then what's to protect?
[177] the same thing in the rest of the culture.
[178] If it goes where it's paramount, if it's threatened where it's paramount, it's going to be threatened everywhere.
[179] And that's why people should pay attention to what's happening to you.
[180] And should put as much pressure as they possibly can on the administration at Mount Ellison to reverse their insane decision and to have some courage instead of cowtowing to a tiny minority of students who don't even represent the communities, they purport to represent You know, my guess is if we took those, and it'd be easy enough to find out, but no one will do it.
[181] If we surveyed these student organizations, presented them with your story and surveyed them, I suspect that the vast majority of students within those organizations themselves would be appalled at what's being done to you.
[182] So there's a handful of students who say they represent a tiny proportion of students, but who actually don't, who complained bitterly in the background and used deception to bring administrative force to bear on someone like you.
[183] And somehow that's okay.
[184] And despite the fact that thousands of people express their support for you, the university won't change its mind.
[185] And for what?
[186] To indicate their commitment to what?
[187] To this insane ideology that purports to be anti -racist?
[188] You can see how fair it is in your case.
[189] You know, we're matching an actual.
[190] injustice against a bunch of hypothetical injustices.
[191] Yes, and my take on it was at the beginning that, okay, they chose whatever path.
[192] I've never, I, but now I am like, I'm the target because of all of all this.
[193] If you see what I mean, like, you're a target, not just a target.
[194] You've also been hit.
[195] You're not just a target.
[196] Exactly.
[197] You've been successfully hit.
[198] Exactly.
[199] Like my career, like when you are a researcher, when you are a faculty member, but doing your research or services across the province and the country, your reputation, even if you want to go find another job somewhere else, your reputation is all what you have, right?
[200] Your reputation is done.
[201] Look, the other thing is, you're on hiring committees.
[202] I said on hiring committees.
[203] So here's another rule about hiring committees.
[204] And so given that there's a preponderance of candidates and that there's a preponderance.
[205] of qualified candidates, any and all candidates who show any sign whatsoever of scandal are immediately removed from the PAC.
[206] Because the hiring committees won't tolerate the risk.
[207] So as soon as you've been brushed with scandal, and then here's another question for it, because I've had to think this through, and I'm still not exactly sure what to make of it, I could go back to the University of Toronto.
[208] What about my graduate students?
[209] What bloody chance do they have on the job market?
[210] It doesn't matter about their publication rates.
[211] So let's say they come out with a stellar publication, but they're associated with me. It's like, are they going to find a job?
[212] Well, the answer to that is, perhaps not.
[213] And so what am I supposed to do with that as a moral person?
[214] Am I supposed to not go back to the university?
[215] Because merely being associated with me is enough to increase the probability that my qualified students won't be acceptable to any hiring committee.
[216] These shots are unbelievably effective, even if you can manage them.
[217] And it's not obvious that you can manage them.
[218] I mean, you're still going through this.
[219] you have months to go without gainful employment, you know, and the doubts creep in when you're accused of this sort of thing because anybody with any sense pays attention to accusations, right?
[220] If you're psychopathic to the core, you don't care what other people think.
[221] But if you're a reasonable person, you're modifying your behavior all the time as a consequence of the effect you have on others.
[222] So, well, I'm reprehensible enough.
[223] so an institution that I admired deeply.
[224] And me too.
[225] Yeah.
[226] And the whole Canada, right?
[227] But I want to say something.
[228] You know, some people believe what they read and they do not, you know, question or apply.
[229] Say, let's listen to the other side.
[230] Let's see what happened.
[231] Some even, you know, friends would call my spouse and say, well, even if it has been said, it's too much.
[232] But my spouse will say, she has not said it.
[233] Like so, so they thought, because it's written on such a. way that is so yeah well you know what they say where there's smoke there's fire exactly but let's assume like some people are saying even like the how can I say the punishment or the discipline or is beyond is surrealist disproportionate disproportionate yes and severe which it certainly is yes so what do you do now what are you doing?
[234] I mean, how have you been structuring your life in the aftermath of this?
[235] I've never imagined that we can be working as hard as that without having, you know, being suspended without pay.
[236] Like, I'm very busy in a lot of working, doing what I need to do, relying to emails, thanking people, strategizing, doing things, working, basically on that.
[237] So, like, all that time, I'm not putting it on my research.
[238] I'm not putting it on future courses if I'm still here or on.
[239] So I'm living day by day, but I am fine in the sense that I know, I know who I am.
[240] I know my values.
[241] I know the value of freedom, a free expression for me, academic freedom, slash that are related, right?
[242] That I know for sure.
[243] One of my friends once said the truth doesn't matter anymore because it has been a narrative.
[244] But luckily, there has been amazing journalists who have helped more, I'm not going to be naming, but everyone knows, help more than I can imagine.
[245] Like I felt that, like, you know, those articles fell on me from heaven.
[246] So the narratives has shifted if you see what I mean.
[247] Yeah.
[248] Well, I was fortunate enough to have some of Canada's preeminent journalists, you know, take a second look what I was doing and actually think it through and, you know, come out in support of me. Thank God for that.
[249] And that was definitely a lifesaver repeatedly over time.
[250] So, so thank, you know, absolutely, thank God there are people who still want to know what the actual story is.
[251] All it takes is a few accusations of your far right or alt -right or whatever.
[252] It's there.
[253] You know, any prospective employer can Google that and it comes up and who's going to take the risk?
[254] You know, the accusation is sufficient to damn you.
[255] And that's what the reputation.
[256] You put the finger on the absolute catastrophe of the non -crime hate index.
[257] It's like, well, it's a permanent stain, especially in a technological universe where nothing is ever forgotten, no matter how long the lag.
[258] And it's worse because the government here feels no compunction to address this or to No politician seem to has well I suppose they are well because the strategy is that if you oppose hate speech laws you're obviously a hateful person why else would you oppose hate speech law you know it's the old thing and a politician doesn't want to stand up in parliament to be the one who is seen to be siding with the evil guys the bad guys and you have to make a very very subtle argument to stand up against hate speech laws because you're faced with the problem that there is such a thing as hate speech.
[259] speech.
[260] Obviously.
[261] So when it's pernicious and terrible, it's like, okay.
[262] So you're arguing uphill.
[263] This is again why it's such a bloody miracle that we ever had free speech to begin with.
[264] It's almost inconceivable to me that we managed to generate the baseline presumption of innocence.
[265] That's a miracle.
[266] The fact that you can go bankrupt and start again, that's a miracle.
[267] The idea that you ever had free speech and that that was genuinely the case.
[268] That's a miracle.
[269] And none of this is given the appropriate respect and awe that it deserves because it's so unlikely.
[270] It's hugely unlikely.
[271] I mean, I know in the book I talk a kind of very, very short history of free speech from the ancient Greeks to today.
[272] And the point of that is to accentuate this point that actually the fact that we have it is astonishing and unlikely, so unlikely.
[273] And all the more reason why we need to defend it.
[274] We need to be really, really vigilant about any cracks that appear in this, in this, because it will go away very, very easily, you know, if we don't defend it.
[275] And it's hard, particularly when it comes to the idea of, that's why I wrote a chapter on hate speech, because, and took the other side's view seriously, because just trashing the opposing argument isn't going to help.
[276] We have to talk about it and explain, you know, why it's important, nevertheless.
[277] Well, for one thing, like you say, hateful speech exists.
[278] Let's start from that point.
[279] Let's acknowledge that that hateful speech exists, and it can be hurtful, and it can do damage.
[280] But then the alternative is a state that might in the future be completely unscrupulous that is going to decide for you what you can say.
[281] And those are the things that we have to tackle.
[282] And the other key thing is that no one knows how to define hate speech.
[283] You know, UNESCO, the European Court of Human Rights, they've all agreed there's no way to define hate speech.
[284] Every European country that has hate speech laws has different hate speech.
[285] laws, different definitions, subjective abstract concepts such as hate, such as offence, such as a perception, you know, and these are on the statute books.
[286] And you don't want this stuff on the statute books, because it's all very well.
[287] I mean, I know we talked about the SMP and their hate crime bill.
[288] The defence I'm always running into is people are saying, yes, okay, technically someone could be arrested and imprisoned for saying an offensive joke, technically, yes?
[289] But no one in their right mind.
[290] No jury, no judge is going to, we've got common sense.
[291] It's okay.
[292] Well, that's so myopic.
[293] I mean, because you don't know who's going to be in charge in 10 years time.
[294] You don't know who that judge is going to be.
[295] How can you possibly just...
[296] You can be certain that someone will be in charge that doesn't approve of you and that you don't approve of.
[297] That will certainly happen.
[298] You don't want vague, vague wording on the statute books.
[299] It's going to be exploited at some point, even though, even if it's not today, there's absolutely no way that you can guarantee against future, against the future abuses of that.
[300] And I don't, it is as you say, it's a certainty.
[301] So I'm, I'm, yeah, I think it's actually one of the most important arguments that we should make.
[302] And that, and that we need to, you know, free speech needs to be defended in every successive generation.
[303] It's not something that, you know, you know this.
[304] You get it and then it's there forever.
[305] No, that's not true.
[306] There's something about human nature.
[307] There's something about people in power.
[308] There's something about the way that we are that it will collapse.
[309] It's an edifice that is not secure at any given time.
[310] But it's hard.
[311] It's that thing of being smeared.
[312] The risk is you're going to be smeared.
[313] You're going to be associated with the worst possible kinds of people.
[314] Because, of course, it's only really controversial speech that ever requires protection.
[315] And people are going to say, well, then you must support what these awful people are saying.
[316] and it's hard to make the case, but it's a case that nonetheless has to be made.
[317] And particularly by politicians, I've been incredibly disappointed by the way in which politicians in this country have not made any kind of effort to, if anything, as from what I can see, there are moves even in the English Parliament to push through further hate speech laws.
[318] We should be repealing them, not pushing for them, but no one wants to have the argument.
[319] No one wants to be tainted.
[320] Yeah, well, they get identified one by one and taken out.
[321] That's what happens.
[322] where you get put on a list this is it the identitarian left if that's what we're going to call them I don't know what to call them that's the problem is they're very clever about evading even a label but they like making their lists they like observing and saying you know you you are you are problematic you have sinned and and now they have an electronic trail these are the people that absolutely love going through all of your old tweets and messages and anything they can find and of course the point about that is you can do that to anyone.
[323] There is no one alive who, if you had complete unfettered access to everything they've ever written online or in their emails or text messages, that you couldn't construct a case to damn someone.
[324] It's actually one of the things that's more or less saved me. Is that right?
[325] Well, by the time I made my political statement, which was a philosophical statement or even a spiritual statement, not a political statement, I already had 200 hours of lectures online.
[326] And so essentially everything I'd ever said to students was recorded.
[327] And there wasn't, it wasn't possible to pull out a smoking pistol.
[328] This was very smart.
[329] And also, I mean, but this is why it's also astonishing, I find it unendingly astonishing the way you are mischaracterized because, because it's all there.
[330] Everything you think is out in the open, you've been very, very, very clear and explicit about your point of view.
[331] And so when they try and demonize you and turn you into this thing, people can check and they'll realize that you're, I think what they're doing is they're relying on the reputational damage being a kind of barrier to people even investigating who you really are.
[332] Yeah, well, to some degree that works, but it doesn't really work because what genuinely happens is that, you know, for every person who wouldn't open a lecture because of my reputation, there's three or four who do because they're curious.
[333] And then it has an even more perverse effect on, in some cases, on the true believers because they're primed to find anything I said offensive, but that doesn't happen.
[334] Or maybe they even find it useful.
[335] And then that's not good at all.
[336] It's like, well, he's demonized.
[337] Isn't that interesting when you meet the people, when you get into conversation with the people, and you can see that you're not what they thought you were?
[338] And they don't know quite what to do with that.
[339] And that to me is why another reason why we need more speech, not less.
[340] We need to have the conversations so that people can be disabused of the fantasies that they've been wallowing in.
[341] But I do very much enjoy that when people expect one thing and then they actually speak to me and they don't see that.
[342] There's no evidence of it because it doesn't exist.
[343] Yeah, well, it's interesting to watch that unfold in the public domain too.
[344] I mentioned those two interviews, the Channel 4 interview that's been viral and the interview by Helen Lewis at GQ.
[345] And those interviews basically consists of, consists of nothing but the attempt by the interlocutor to have a conversation with the person that exists in their imagination.
[346] Right.
[347] But what's the point of that?
[348] There's almost no relationship to me at all.
[349] That was particularly the case with, with Kathy Newman.
[350] And it was less so with Helen Lewis, but that was still, that was still essentially the issue.
[351] It's quite reassuring, though, isn't it, that once it's out there, people can see through it you know it's very reassuring is and what's what saved me and this is given me an endless supply of hope i would say is that all i've ever had to do is be it's just show everything it's like here's the situation no edits like this is what happened and every time so far so far you know i haven't been fatally damaged um yeah i mean one of the the things, one of the things I've learned most, I think, since, since Titania kicked off and it became a known thing is I've learnt simply never to trust the perception of someone as constructed in the media or online or, you know, it's never the same person.
[352] I've, I've ended up meeting, coming from the background I did, most of my friends were always on the left.
[353] I didn't really know conservative people, and now I have a lot of friends who are conservatives, you You know, and they're just not this villain that they were made out to be.
[354] And even some famous conservatives who people have said, they're absolute monsters, they're evil, they want to eat babies, basically, or the equivalent, you know, and you get to know them and you realize, oh, my goodness, the perception is so removed from the, so far removed from the reality that even I once had bought into it myself, because everyone's telling you this.
[355] You know, yeah, the same thing is, so I've certainly had that experience repeatedly, repeatedly.
[356] I never trust it now.
[357] Whenever I hear the way people talk about people online, I just, I never trust it.
[358] Unless I know someone personally, I'm never going to trust that again.
[359] I think that's an important lesson for me. There was a report done last December by Civitas, which is a sort of right -leaning think tank, very, very good report on the state of academic freedom in the UK.
[360] And I think they found, you have a look, 83 out of 140 UK universities were found to have some kind of anonymous reporting systems.
[361] So it's, it's, it's very, very widespread.
[362] And, yeah, and it just, it's a huge issue, very, very concerning.
[363] And I think that, as Araf says, I mean, a lot of it may well be well -intentioned.
[364] But I think the point is that it starts off processes and procedures, disciplinary procedures, where, you know, the end result may not be anything at all.
[365] It may just be a few weeks of having to go and, you know, see the chair of your faculty, you'll go to see some committee or you'll have to, you'll have to.
[366] pay trips to HR.
[367] But as a colleague of ours says, you know, if the process is the punishment.
[368] Yeah, exactly.
[369] There's nothing trivial about any of that.
[370] That's awful.
[371] When that happens to someone, it's so awful.
[372] It just does the end.
[373] It takes its toll.
[374] Yeah.
[375] And it puts a shadow on them.
[376] Right.
[377] Right.
[378] And it has a chilling effect as well.
[379] When do you see it happen to one person in your department or your university?
[380] You know, you just watch yourself that you don't say things like that, you know, again, or yourself, you know, what you publish, what you say in meetings, what you say to students, you just become more and more careful.
[381] And another thing I think is that, is that, I mean, Toffield talks about this quite well, which is that one way to terrorise people is not to, not to control them in big things, but to control them in little things, so that tyranny becomes a habit, conformity becomes a habit.
[382] Every time you say something little, you know, some small interactions, you're constantly looking over your shoulder, worrying whether to say this or not.
[383] That, Tockfield said, is the most efficient way to turn people into sheep.
[384] it's also sort of in some sense the ultimate reach of totalitarianism because your life is made out of small things you know big things are rare and seldom and so having to watch that well i'd say to watch your sense of humor for example you know and fair enough you can you can cross the line and an astute person reads the crowd properly and but you see great comedians man they're right on that edge right they're right at the point where they shouldn't be saying what they're saying well some of them far past that line on purpose, you know, but everyone knows.
[385] But to chill that is to take almost all the fun, the dynamic fun out of social interactions, that spirit that's a free spirit and that makes all that partly what makes life worth living.
[386] It's terrible that these things are happening.
[387] And it's more terrible that the universities are doing it.
[388] How shameful.
[389] I will tell you another institution that's sort of been ruined.
[390] and I think Jordan was sort of getting to it, and it sort of gets back to the oboe or the cello player for the New York Phil Harmonic, how do you say that one film is definitively better than the other film?
[391] You know, it is subjective or objective and or subjective, sorry, but you are, you know, so a lot of the answers is sort of make a bad.
[392] better film and you'll get in you'll get on a netflix or make a better film and you'll get into the sundance film festival so i've had five films all turned down from the from the sundance film festival now jordan the way jordan's mind is working is you're thinking well how but how do you know i mean they could no i'm thinking why don't you organize your own damn conservative film festival too, but it could have been, but the, the, the academic in you is thinking, how do we define that?
[393] And as we spoke about earlier, when the guy hits 40 home runs in a season, that's definable.
[394] And when the guy drains 14, three -pointers in a playoff game, that's pretty definable.
[395] But how do we do it with documentaries?
[396] Well, you could, you could make the case with your film that, I mean, it had a reasonable success.
[397] I hope I've got this, right?
[398] It had reasonable success at the box office.
[399] I mean, it had enough success at the box office, so it should have been economically interesting for a place like Netflix or Walmart.
[400] Agreed.
[401] So another system that's sort of been corrupted is you used to be able to go on to the website, Rotten Tomatoes, and literally check the score of the film.
[402] And it's not an exact science, but your film gets a score, and my film gets a score and her film gets a score and it's pretty good.
[403] Now, if you look at no safe spaces, the critics have it under 50%, somewhere 46%.
[404] And the audience has it at 99%.
[405] And I would argue we now must remove the critics from the equation because the critics are so left and so woke that there's nothing, you know, Dennis Prager could make gone with the win tomorrow and it would get under 50 % on Rotten Tomatoes.
[406] So they've screwed up their own, they've corrupted their own system or sort of polluted their own system.
[407] You must now go with the audience because there's two scores.
[408] There's the critic score and then there's what the people thought.
[409] And we now have to throw out the critic.
[410] And by the way, it's a two Street.
[411] One of the, you know, films that would be an Oscar -nominated film that started a young gay black man who was struggling with his sexuality, that'll be 96 % with the critics and 65 with the people.
[412] Well, you know, that's a testable hypothesis.
[413] You could rank order films by discrepancy between critics and audience and then rate them according to their political affiliation.
[414] And you'd have the answer right there.
[415] You could probably, you know, a good status tradition could do that in a day, be a very interesting thing to do because you might be right.
[416] You're right.
[417] You're right.
[418] That's a great point, George.
[419] Yeah, it's very simple.
[420] It's very simple.
[421] It's not only what the theme of the film is.
[422] It's does it have Dennis Prager's name on it?
[423] Take a look at the arc of Clint Eastwood directed films and watch how they shrank in the eyes of the critics over the years since he spoke to the famously spoke to the bar, the empty bar stool at the convention.
[424] I know his film that featured the car and the Asian family next door, which I really liked.
[425] I mean, that's got slammed for racism.
[426] Yeah, Grant Torino, even by some of the actors that were in it, who I thought were extremely ungrateful, that's my personal opinion.
[427] I thought that was a remarkably non -racist film.
[428] I mean, Eastwood was, played a character who was, you know, a standard conservative of the Archie Bunker type essentially, but as he got to know, his neighbors, he placed his allegiance to them over that of his own family, who he saw as becoming morally corrupt.
[429] How in the world that's a racist film is absolutely beyond me. But Jordan, I think you're not factoring in.
[430] You're, there's two factors.
[431] There is what is the film and then who directed the film?
[432] Yes, yes, yes.
[433] So if that film was directed by Mark Ruffalo, there would be no, no issues.
[434] He's a progressive actor, Dennis.
[435] I know you don't know any actors.
[436] You pick the actor that's on, you know, George Clooney.
[437] If George Clooney directed Grand Torino, it'd be 15 points higher, percentage points higher, with the critics.
[438] That's my assertion.
[439] And I've studied it.
[440] And I've studied it.
[441] And I've seen it.
[442] Maybe somebody listening could whip that up because a good graduate student in psychology could do that very quickly.
[443] Maybe I'll have one of my people do that.
[444] That would be fun.
[445] This is one of the things I loved about being a clinician is that I talked to lots of people who were really different than me, like seriously different from me. And if I wasn't learning something from them when I was in discourse with them, it was because I wasn't conducting the discourse properly.
[446] So they taught me invaluable things.
[447] Even if you don't learn truth, even if you don't learn more reasons for why your position was right.
[448] At the very least, you have benefited from a very rigorous mental exercise.
[449] Yeah, well, that helps you.
[450] As you said already, you want to differentiate and assess your own beliefs.
[451] Well, why?
[452] Well, because your beliefs aren't a set of facts at your disposal.
[453] Your beliefs are tools that you use to navigate the world.
[454] And the more finely tuned those tools, the more different.
[455] Like, I have a shed at home, a shop, with all sorts of power tools in it.
[456] And one of the things I learned, because I've renovated houses a number of times, one of the things I've learned is that if the job is difficult, you don't have the right tool.
[457] And then you can go down to Home Depot, which has like 50 ,000 square feet of tools, which is just phenomenal.
[458] And you can find some little gadget that somebody spent half their lifetime advising that makes that job easy.
[459] Well, that's, that's ideas.
[460] Ideas are tools.
[461] They're not, they're not fat.
[462] And you have to sharpen them and take care of them and keep them and differentiate them.
[463] You bet.
[464] You bet.
[465] Maintain them.
[466] You bet.
[467] Metaphor is beautiful.
[468] You know, it seems like, so talking about both the trucker situation and then the Joe Rogan situation, it seems in many respects like intellectuals or elites have gotten us into this mess.
[469] And it's the truckers and the Joe Rogans of the world that are getting us out of it, arguably.
[470] What does this say about education and academia and civil discourse and democracy moving forward?
[471] Well, it says that the highest and the lowest always have to be united.
[472] And what that means in some sense is that, well, I learned that in part from watching Wagner's de Meister singer, the opera, because he, the Liberto, elaborates on that theme in an absolutely stellar manner.
[473] Because in his opera, it's the opera details out the actions of guilds of men.
[474] And so each guild is made out of domain experts.
[475] So one of the heroes is a cobbler who's an expert shoemaker.
[476] You think, well, who cares?
[477] He makes shoes.
[478] It's like, well, you have good shoes.
[479] So that isn't a concern of yours.
[480] But if you didn't, you'd think it was very important.
[481] And if you're a good enough cobbler, you get to sing.
[482] And if you're a good enough singer, you get to elect a master singer.
[483] It's a lovely structured sequence of metaphors.
[484] And so one of the things Wagner did so well in that opera was to point out that true expertise means the differentiation of abstract knowledge all the way down to the point of behavioral implementation.
[485] And it's one thing I really like about being trained as a behavioral psychologist.
[486] I'm very interested in psychoanalytic theory, but it's very abstract.
[487] Existential psychologist.
[488] It's very abstract.
[489] Meaning of life stuff.
[490] It's like, yeah, but where does the rubber hit the road?
[491] Well, the truckers know that, right?
[492] They really know that because they're down there moving goods to people.
[493] They're doing the actual work in the most fine grain manner.
[494] Now, they might have a problem with high order articulation, and it's up to their leaders.
[495] I'm not so sure about that.
[496] I talk to that.
[497] I'm not so sure either.
[498] I challenge every Canadian to get themselves there and talk to some of these truckers.
[499] I think they'd be very surprised.
[500] They don't have trouble with enunciating blunt truths.
[501] But you know, you were pointing to problems among the intellectuals.
[502] Well, the intellectual chattering class is criticizing the truckers.
[503] There's a divorce between the intellectualized framework, ethical framework, and that practical reality that the working class people represent.
[504] And I mean, your observation that the truckers and the Joe Rogans are serving as redemptive agents is a reflection of the idea of the brilliance of individual sovereignty, the notion of individual sovereignty as the basis for political stability.
[505] It's like, well, who should you consult?
[506] Well, not just the people with the ideas, the people who drive the trucks.
[507] Well, why?
[508] Because they're navigating the roads.
[509] They're delivering the goods in the real sense.
[510] and so they know things.
[511] Yeah, you bet.
[512] Well, and they are the people.
[513] They have their families.
[514] Their life is real.
[515] It's not abstracted to the point where the abstractions themselves become a problem.
[516] It seems like they're almost like a litmus test for how we're doing and the things that we're getting wrong and they're showing us in the face.
[517] Look, it's almost like a, you know, like a boil that's finally erupting.
[518] Look, these are the problems, right?
[519] We would have kept silent if you didn't screw things up.
[520] so much.
[521] But now we have real problems.
[522] You're not fixing them.
[523] Well, you saw the same thing with the yellow jackets in France.
[524] It's like corrupt energy policies started to make energy too expensive for ordinary people.
[525] It's like, well, we have to save the planet.
[526] It's like, well, how about not on our backs there, guys?
[527] And so, and we're going to see a lot more of that.
[528] I suspect, especially if the elite types and their utopian schemes, if the elite types with their utopian schemes keep walling themselves off from the people that they hypothetically represent.
[529] This is why the UK jumped out of, this is why the UK voted for Brexit.
[530] It's like the common people thought, no, too abstract, too much of a tower of Babel.
[531] The leaders have got too far away from the people they represent.
[532] And I think they made the right decision.
[533] So more power to Rogan and the truckers.
[534] Okay, so this is very interesting too, because, so Pinocchio ends.
[535] up being a master of fire.
[536] Well, you can think about that as there is a book written a while back by a primatologist who also wrote demonic males, Richard Rangham.
[537] And he talked about the origin of fire.
[538] And as far as Rangham is concerned, we invented fire about two million years ago.
[539] And that enabled us to cook food.
[540] And that enabled us to swap intestinal length for brain.
[541] So if you look at a chimpanzee, you know, chimpanzees are like the ultimate in couch potatoes, right?
[542] They're about this high and they're shaped like this.
[543] They have this huge barrel body.
[544] And the reason they have that is because they eat leaves.
[545] And so they have to spend like eight hours a day eating leaves.
[546] They will eat meat if they can get it.
[547] They have to spend like eight hours a day eating leaves and just chewing them over and over because like leaves, A, they don't want to be eaten, so they're pretty tough and inedible.
[548] And B, they don't have any nutritive quality to speak of.
[549] So the chimpanzee has to spend all of its time chewing, which is rather mindless endeavor, all things considered.
[550] Whereas human beings, two million years ago, were thereabouts invented fire.
[551] And as a consequence of that, we could cook meat.
[552] And meat is incredibly energy rich.
[553] And it's easy to digest once it's cooked.
[554] And so the consequence of the invention of fire was that we're the way we are today.
[555] We could have a brain instead of a gut.
[556] and so the idea that Pinocchio's mastery of fire and it's as something more than merely a means of cooking that's how it started out right but you can think of our entire technological capacity as stemming from the mastery of fire now the other thing you can think of and this is very much worth considering is that Pinocchio masters fire and that turns the whale into a dragon and so the idea there too is that and this is an old idea is that our technological prowess is something that makes nature itself angry and of course you might say well do you believe this and the answer to that is well how many of you have environmentalist leanings and that's exactly the story that you're following because you're still wondering about whether or not mastery of fire was somehow against the natural order and then it will end up in all of our deaths and you know that's a reasonable thing to worry about but not mastering it was going to end up pretty badly too And you were going to talk about the potential proposed legislation in the UK that sort of, I understand, emerged out of all this.
[557] So what's happening on the legislative front?
[558] Well, shall I just say something about that, Araf?
[559] I mean, it's just worth giving you, Araf has mentioned it already, and it's worth giving you a little bit of background to that, Jordan.
[560] It was 2019 that there was roundabout then.
[561] I think it was May 2019.
[562] There was certainly a lot of talk about what had happened to you at Cambridge in.
[563] policy circles and government circles.
[564] And out of those sorts of discussions, I suspect, they're kind of crystallized a manifesto commitment in the Conservative Party manifesto for the December 2019 UK general election, which had a very strong statement about the importance of the university sector, importance of higher education in a post -Brexit economy, and also signalled some concerns about what was going on there, especially on academic freedom.
[565] So that was remarkable to see.
[566] I still remember when I saw that manifesto claim, I thought that's absolutely fantastic.
[567] It looks like they're going to be serious about this.
[568] And indeed, they delivered.
[569] They started drafting a very important piece of legislation.
[570] I think it's really probably one of the first of its kind that is that clear and emphatic in the West.
[571] I think the UK is leading the way on this.
[572] The legislation itself, you know, some people, you know, my own view is.
[573] that it's just a shame that it's had to come to this.
[574] You know, we do not really, we do not want governments stepping into and regulating the intellectual cultures of the university.
[575] Now, that's not what the legislation does.
[576] It just provides a right for academics or visiting speakers who've been disinvited, academics have been fired on fairly, a kind of direct line of appeal to an ombudsman, effectively, an accurate.
[577] called academic freedom champion.
[578] And that's, so there's a kind of quasi -judicial process there, which is going to, would hold in principle open up universities to significant financial liability through fines if they were found to have breached their duty to promote academic freedom and protect the rights of visiting speakers and so on.
[579] So I think, you know, you in principle may may have had a line of appeal to that new post as and when it comes into being.
[580] Now, there's still some problems with the legislation.
[581] For example, I think Araf and I agree that it doesn't go far enough on protecting academics from institutional interference or politicization of curricular content.
[582] You know, for academics, freedom of speech means freedom to teach, freedom to select content and freedom to deliver it as they see fit.
[583] Of course, to some extent, it's a shared institutional enterprise designing curricular.
[584] and so on, but there should be a defeasible presumption that academics can teach what they want to teach and how they want to teach it.
[585] Nevertheless, I mean, I think it will, I think, I hope shift the culture in some of the ways that the Equality's legislation shifted a culture 10 years ago.
[586] And even if it may be imperfect when it gets royal assent, nevertheless, I mean, I think that it will make vice -chancellor's senior university staff throughout the throughout the country sort of sit up and realize that there are consequences to continuing to allow this, this culture to flourish in the universities.
[587] I think it's surreely, it's surreely appropriate that that initiative came from the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge, you know, that it can be traced at least to the offense, perhaps the events that took place there.
[588] It's quite, that's quite something when you, you know, step back and think about it.
[589] Well, I mean, you know, in its, in its defense, I had a conversation with Roger Scruton around about that time who expressed his deep disappointment that the treatment meted out to you.
[590] And he said something quite interesting.
[591] He said when he was in Eastern Europe in the 1980s setting up underground universities in Warsaw -Pact countries, particularly Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, by some kind of strange quirk, although the University of Cambridge wouldn't confer degrees or credentials, it was considered politically too difficult, I think the Divinity Faculty did have some kind of degree conferring power, was able to accredit or recognize a diploma in theology, and that's exactly how Roger got his students, their diplomas, as it were, from the Faculty of Divinity at the university.
[592] So it was, I think from his point of view, it was especially, you know, heartbreaking that things developed as, as they did in early 2019.
[593] But, you know, just to reiterate, I've had no criticisms or from colleagues within the faculty.
[594] I think there's great excitement that that you're coming over and great gratitude to you that you've shown the kind of graciousness and forbearance to, as it were, let bygones be bygones and go ahead with the visit that had been planned back then, which I think you probably wouldn't have been able to do anyway given all the horrible things that started to happen to you, you know, and Tammy Healthwise in 2019.
[595] Yeah, well, like I said, I'm absolutely.
[596] thrilled to be able to do this.
[597] Well, because I seem to be able to do it.
[598] And that's something, but also that I have the opportunity again.
[599] I think you'd have to be a pretentious fool not to take an opportunity like that and be grateful for it.
[600] And like there's mistakes made, you know, and that's that.
[601] But who knows, you know, if the upshot of this all is that the protection for freedom of inquiry and speech in the UK is strengthened.
[602] And maybe that's a model for the West.
[603] Like, well, that's a pretty small price to pay, even though it was, you know, it was unpleasant.
[604] So, I'll say Levy, you know.
[605] So here what happens is that in the midst of this complete chaos, Pinocchio has a choice.
[606] And the choice is he can either save himself, which is a very, very selfish choice, and reduces him to an a historical individual because he has no relationship left with his father.
[607] Or he can put himself at great risk and rescue his father, you know, finish the process, stop his father from drowning.
[608] Your life has changed dramatically.
[609] If you could have taken a route, I guess I'm asking, you know, would you do it again?
[610] But I don't want to ask that in a cliched way.
[611] And maybe it's a stupid question because you just don't know, but are you okay?
[612] Yeah.
[613] I mean, you know, on the one hand, if I think about it logically, would I do it again in a heartbeat?
[614] There are a few things I might do slightly differently, but I'm not even compelled.
[615] You know, I think it went pretty well in light of what the forces in play were.
[616] But, you know, the thing that we've lost is security, right?
[617] The fact is the world.
[618] I mean, people might, you got a settlement from the university, but...
[619] That was a trivial proportion of your future, your mutual future earnings.
[620] It was nothing.
[621] It was enough so you didn't starve to death immediately, but that was all.
[622] Right.
[623] You know, and if I'm honest about it, we were forced to move out of our home to a different city.
[624] We uprooted our children's lives, which was quite disruptive.
[625] But I really don't feel there was any choice.
[626] I don't, you know, if I, if I think about it as a matter of choice, I cannot find the circuit that would have done anything differently.
[627] And I'm not, all I can say is our lives are full of purpose.
[628] And we're doing fine.
[629] The absence of security is something I think about a lot.
[630] But yes, I would say there wasn't any choice, nor should there have been.
[631] been.
[632] And I'm not sorry I made the choices I did in the slightest.
[633] Well, you look good, man. And you look, if you don't mind me saying, you look different than you did when I saw you before.
[634] Well, I'm older now.
[635] Well, but there's a, I've noticed this in my clinical clients, when they integrate their aggression, their faces harden.
[636] And they, they look determined all of a sudden, instead of questioning.
[637] And you look like that more than you did.
[638] Now, some of that's from getting older, but not all of it.
[639] Well, I think, you know, if I'm understanding you correctly, it's probably a lot about, you know, getting catapulted into the big leagues and learning to play that role.
[640] It's, you know, it's trial by fire.
[641] But certainly it's been fascinating.
[642] and I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next.
[643] Famous last words.
[644] Yeah, that's ominous coming from you, Jordan.
[645] Pinocchio dies, and then his father brings him home.
[646] And so because he's rescued his father, the benevolent spirit of nature appears, resurrects him, and turns him into a real human being.
[647] So it's pretty funny, as far as I'm concerned, that the answer to Nietzsche's Greek question manifested itself in the mid -1930s in the form of an animated child's movie.
[648] So, you know, and that's an example.
[649] It's an example of a number of things.
[650] It's an example of how archetypes work.
[651] It's also an example of how artists are on the edge of discovery all the time.
[652] And they discover things they don't even understand.