Modern Times - Camille Paglia

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[3] I've really been trying to understand the underlying psychology of postmodernism and its relationship with neo -Marxism, and then the spread of that into the universities and the effect on the culture.

[4] like to start with is a description of your understanding of that, because like I've presented to the people who are listening to me, my understanding of it.

[5] I interviewed Stephen Hicks recently, and he wrote an interesting book called Explaining Postmodernism, which I liked quite a bit.

[6] It's been criticized for being too right -wing, although I don't think he's right -wing at all.

[7] I think maybe you could characterize him as middle -of -the -road conservative, but I would say he's more like a classic liberal.

[8] But I'm really curious about your views about, well, Well, what post -modernism is, first of all, I know you've identified it with the general tricksters, Derrida and Lacan and Foucault and Foucault in particular you've talked about, but I'd like to know what you think about post -modernism and also why you think it's been so attractive to people.

[9] Well, my explanation is that there is no authentic 1960s point of view in any of the elite universities, but rather the most liberated mind.

[10] of my generation of the 1960 did not go on to graduate school.

[11] I witnessed this with my own eyes.

[12] I saw genuine Marxists at my college, which was the State University of New York at Binghamton, upstate New York, Harper College, which had a huge cohort of very radical downstate New York Jews, in fact the Harper used to be called Berkeley East.

[13] So I saw genuine passionate Marxist with my own eyes.

[14] They were not wordchoppers.

[15] choppers.

[16] They were not snide postmodernness.

[17] They were in your face aggressive.

[18] They used the language of the people.

[19] They had a populist energy.

[20] They dressed working class.

[21] They were non -materialistic.

[22] These are people who lived by their own convictions.

[23] They were against the graduate schools.

[24] When I went on to graduate school and it became known that I was going to go to Yale, I was confronted by a leader of the radicals on campus.

[25] in broad daylight in front of everyone who denounced me for, he said, grad school is not where it's happening.

[26] You don't, you don't do that.

[27] If you have to go to graduate school, you should go to Buffalo.

[28] Now, I had applied to the SUNY Buffalo because the great leftist critic Leslie Friedler was there, who had a huge impact on me. He created identity politics, but without its present distortions, right?

[29] And Norman Holland, the psychoanalytic critic was there.

[30] I would have been very happy to have gone on to Buffalo, but I needed the library at Yale, so I continued on to Yale.

[31] There were no radicals in the graduate schools, from 1968 to 72 when I was there.

[32] There were only one radical, Todd Gitlin, went on to have a career success.

[33] The actual radicals of the 1960s either went off, dropped out of college and went off to create communes, right?

[34] Or they were taking acid and destroyed their brains.

[35] Now, I have also written about that.

[36] The destruction of the minds, okay, of the most talented members of my generation.

[37] through LSD.

[38] It was going on all around me. So what's happened is the actual legacy of the 60s got truncated.

[39] The idea that these post -structurists and post -modernists are heirs of the 1960s revolution is an absolute crock.

[40] What they represent, as Foucault shows, Foucault said that the biggest influence on his thinking was Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which was a post -World War II play, written in Pennsylvania, Paris that was about the disillusionment and nihilism experienced after Hitler went through, occupied France, and all of Europe was in ruins.

[41] It had nothing to do, what's in Winnie -Fer -Ga -Doh has nothing to do with the authentic legacy of the 1960s, which was about genuine multiculturalism, a movement toward India, toward Hinduism, a transformation of consciousness through psychedelics, which I did not take, but which I identify with totally, through the music, et cetera, right?

[42] It was a turn toward the body, it was a turn toward sensory experience, okay, not this word -chopping thing and this, like, cynical removal from actual experience, right?

[43] That French import, okay, came in, okay, to the graduate schools.

[44] It did not affect any genuine 1960s person.

[45] The real 1960s revolution was about Jung.

[46] It was about a way of seeing the cosmos in mythological terms, right?

[47] The Jungian contribution went on into the New Age movement.

[48] movements of the 1970s aside from the universities.

[49] So who took over the universities were these careerists.

[50] I saw them with my own eyes.

[51] I saw what happened.

[52] I was at Yale when Derrida was being shipped over to address the students, the grad students and the faculty.

[53] And I said to a fellow student, after hearing one of these guys speak, it wasn't Derrida, it was another one of the theorists.

[54] I said, they are like high.

[55] priests murmuring to each other.

[56] This was an elitist form from the start.

[57] It was not progressive, it was not revolutionary, it was reactionary.

[58] It was a desperate attempt to hold on to what had happened before the 1960s sensory revolution.

[59] This postmodernist thing, this trashing, okay, of the text, this encouragement, okay, of a superior and destructive attitude toward the work of art. We're going through it, okay, primly with red pen in hand, finding all the evidence of sexism, check, racism, check, homophobia, check.

[60] That is not the empathic, emotional, sensory -based revolution of the 1960s.

[61] I am sick and tired of these people claiming any kind of mantle from the 1960s.

[62] They're frauds.

[63] These people are, what happened in the 1970s was a collapse of the job market in academia.

[64] All right.

[65] All of a sudden, the jobs were scarce.

[66] And this thing was there, the new and improved and shiny thing, okay, to be a theorist.

[67] People seized on it, okay?

[68] It was institutionalized, right?

[69] And it's an enormous betrayal of the 1960s.

[70] Okay, so that, you touched on this idea of the destruction of the work of art. You know, and one of the things I really liked about reading Nietzsche was his discussion of Rizantamal, right, of resentment.

[71] And it seems to me that a tremendous amount of the mode of power that drives, the postmodernist, let's call it, it's not a revolution, transformation, seems to me to be driven by resentment about virtually anything that has any, well, what would you say, any merit of competence or aesthetic quality?

[72] And I don't know if that's, it seems to me that that's partly rooted in the academics' disdain for the business world, which I think is driven by their relative economic inequality, because most people who are as intelligent as academics are from a pure IQ point of view, make more money in the private sphere, and so I think that drives some of it.

[73] But there also seems to be this, there's a destruction, an aim for destruction of the aesthetic quality of the literary or artistic work.

[74] It's reduction to nothing but some kind of power game.

[75] And then surrounding that, the reduction of everything to something that approximates a power game, which I can't help but identifying with jealousy and resentment as a fundamental motivator.

[76] Does that seem reasonable to you?

[77] These professors who allege that art is nothing but an ideological movement by one elite against another group, these people are Philistines.

[78] They're philistines.

[79] They're middlebrow, hopelessly middlebrow.

[80] They have no sense of beauty.

[81] They have no sense of the aesthetic.

[82] Now Marxism does indeed assert this.

[83] Marxism tries to reconfigure the universe in terms of materialism.

[84] It does not recognize any kind of spiritual dimension.

[85] Now, I'm an atheist, but I see the great world religions as enormous works of art as the best way to understand the universe in a man's place in it.

[86] I find them enormously moving.

[87] They're like enormous poems.

[88] What I have called for, the true revolution would have been to make the core curriculum of world education, the world, the great religions of the world.

[89] I feel that is the only way to achieve understanding, and it's also a way to present the aesthetic.

[90] I feel that the real 60's vision was about exaltation, elevation, cosmic consciousness, all of these things were rejected by these midgets, intellectual midgets, who seized on to Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault.

[91] It's an, and I, my career has been in the art schools, my entire career, beginning of Benetton College.

[92] So I represent a challenge to this from the perspective of art, right?

[93] It is an absolute nonsense, okay, as post -structuralism maintains, that reality is mediated by language, by words, everything that we can know, including gender.

[94] It's absolutely madness because I'm teaching students whose majors are ceramics, okay, or dance, okay, who are jazz musicians, who understand reality in terms of the body, sensory activation.

[95] See, what happened was something was going on in the art world as well.

[96] I identify with Andy Warhol in pop art. That was what was going on during my years in college.

[97] Everything about Andy Warhol was like, wow, admiration, wow.

[98] What happened immediately after that in the arts, in 1970s, was this collapse into a snide sort of postmodernism also.

[99] This happened in the art world, right?

[100] And it was an utter misunderstanding of culture, it seems to me, by that movement in the art world.

[101] That is, oppositional art, in my view, is dead.

[102] What postmodernism is, isn't it a pathetic attempt to continue the old heroism of the avant -garde?

[103] The avant -garde was genuinely heroic from the early 19th century, where we're talking about the Courbet, the realists, we're talking about Monet and the impressions, people who genuinely suffered for their radical ideas.

[104] these are innovations and so on.

[105] Going right down to Picasso and down to Jackson Pollock who truly suffered for his art. It was only after his death, that suddenly the market was created for abstract art. Pop art killed the avant -garde.

[106] The idea that the avant -garde continues is an absolute delusion of the contemporary art world, which feels that they must attack, attack, attack, challenge the simplistic beliefs of the Hoy -Piloi.

[107] It's somehow the art, what, excuse me, from the moment, okay, Andy Warhol went through and embraced the popular media, instead of having the opposition to it, the serious artists have had, okay?

[108] That was the end of oppositional art, okay?

[109] So we have been going on now for 50 years, the postmodernism and academia, hand in hand, with the stupidity infantilism that masquerades as, you know, as important art at galleries everywhere.

[110] There's incredible, incredible, you know, its mechanism of, of, you know, contemporary art, pushing things that are so hopelessly derivative.

[111] And with this idea that once again that the art world somehow has a superior view of reality.

[112] The authentic leftism is populist, okay?

[113] It is based in working class style, working class language, working class direct emotion in an openness and brusings of speech, not this fancy contorted jargon of the pseudo -leftist of academe, who are frauds, these people, these people who manage to, manage to rise at the top at Berkeley at Harvard at Princeton okay the idea of these people are radical they are career people they're corporate types okay who like who succeeded in and they love the institutional context they know how to manipulate the bureaucracy which is totally invaded and usurped okay the you know the academic everywhere okay these people are company players they could have done well in any any field okay they love to sit in endless committees they love bureaucratic regulation and so on there's not That one leftist, okay, an American academe, raised his or her voice against obscene growth of tuition costs which have bankrupted a whole generation of young people.

[114] Not one voice, okay, to challenge that invasion by the bureaucrats, okay?

[115] Absolute fascist bureaucrats, okay?

[116] They're like a cancerist, okay?

[117] There are so many of them.

[118] The faculty have completely lost any power in American academia, okay?

[119] It's a scandal what has happened.

[120] And they deserve the president's servitude that they're in right now, because they never protested.

[121] My first job at Bennington College, in 1976, I was there, when there was an uprising by the faculty against encroachment by the Board of Trustees and the President.

[122] And it was a huge thing, it was reported on the New York Times and so on, and we pushed that president out, okay?

[123] And there's not been a single uprising of that kind against encroachment by the trustees and by the administrations.

[124] And all these decades, passive, slaves, slaves, They deserve their slavery.

[125] Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

[126] I've thought the same thing about university professors for a long time, is that they get exactly what they deserve because they never stand up and say no. And the fact that in the United States, it's not quite as bad in Canada, I wouldn't say, but the fact that the students have been essentially handed a bill of indentured servitude here for their student loans is absolutely beyond comprehension.

[127] You know, it seems to me that the bureaucracy has basically conspired to determine how to pick the pockets of the students' future earnings, right?

[128] And they do that by offering them an extended adolescence with no quality control, something like that.

[129] So it's a real bargain with the devil.

[130] And it's a total abandonment of any kind of education actually in history and culture.

[131] It's gone along with it.

[132] That is the transformation into a cafeteria kind of a menu.

[133] Okay, we can pick this course, or that course, or this course without any kind of guidance from the university about a central core curriculum that teaches you history.

[134] and chronology and introduces you to the basics.

[135] Because our professors are such prima donnas, they can only teach in their little areas.

[136] So we have this total fragmentation.

[137] The great art history survey courses are being abandoned steadily.

[138] Why?

[139] Because graduate students are not trained to see the great narratives because we are taught now that narratives are false.

[140] Okay, so that's another issue that I'd like to bring up because one of the things I cannot figure out is the alliance between the postmodernists and the neo -Marxists.

[141] I can't understand the causal relationship there because tell me if you disagree with this, okay, because I'm a psychologist, not a sociologist, and so I'm dabbling in things that are outside of my field of expertise, and there is some danger in that.

[142] But the central postmodernist claim seems to me that because there's a near infinite number of ways to interpret a complex set of phenomena, which actually happens to be the case, that you can't make a case that any of those modes of interpretation are canonical.

[143] And so if they're not canonical, if that canonical element isn't based in some kind of reality, then it serves some other master.

[144] And so the master that it hypothetically serves for the postmodernist is nothing but power, because that seems to be everything that they believe in.

[145] They don't believe in competence.

[146] They don't believe in authority.

[147] They don't seem to believe in an objective world because everything is language mediated.

[148] So it's an extraordinarily cynical perspective.

[149] that because there's an infinite number of interpretations, none of them are canonical, you can attribute it everything to power and dominance.

[150] Okay, so that seemed like a reasonable summary of the...

[151] Yes, exactly.

[152] It's a radical relativism.

[153] Okay, it's a radical relativism.

[154] Now, but the strange thing is despite...

[155] Okay, and so what goes along with that is the demolition of grand narratives.

[156] So that would be associated, for example, with the rejection of thinkers like Jung and Eric Neumann, because, of course, they're foundational thinkers in relationship to the idea that there are embodied grand narratives.

[157] That's never touched.

[158] But then, despite the fact that the grand narrative is rejected, there's a neo -Marxism that's tightly, tightly allied with postmodernism that also seems to shade into this strange identity politics.

[159] And I don't, two things, I don't understand the causal relationship there.

[160] Like the skeptical part of me thinks that post -modernism was an intellectual, intellectual camouflage for the continuation of the kind of pathological Marxism that produced the Soviet Union, and that has no independent existence as an intellectual field whatsoever.

[161] But I still can't understand how the postmodernists can make the no grand narrative claim, but then immerse themselves in this grand narrative without anyone pointing out the evident contradictions.

[162] Like, I don't understand that.

[163] So what do you think about that?

[164] Well, I can only speak about literary professors, really, and they seem to me, almost universally in the U .S. to be very naive.

[165] They seem to know nothing about actual history, political science, or economics.

[166] It is simply an attitude.

[167] They have an attitude.

[168] Marxism becomes simply a badge by which they telegraph their solidarity with a working class that they have nothing to do with.

[169] And generally nothing but contempt.

[170] Yes, and the thing is that the campus.

[171] leftists are almost notorious for their rather snobbish treatment of staff.

[172] I mean, they don't have any rapport with the actual working class members of the infrastructure, the janitor, the janitors, and even the secretaries.

[173] There's a kind of high and mighty aristocracy.

[174] These are just, these are people who have wandered into the English department.

[175] And we're products of a time when, during the new criticism, when history, when history both history and psychology had been excluded.

[176] I mean, my ambition was, I mean, I love the new criticism, as a style of textual analysis.

[177] And the new criticism had multiple interpretations that were possible and that were encouraged.

[178] In fact, one of the great projects was Made in Max series, 20th century views.

[179] When you had all these books, I adored them in college.

[180] It was about Jane Austen or about Emily Bronte or about Wordsworth, and they were collections of alternate views of the same thing.

[181] The idea that there were no alternate views, and there was no relativistic, situational kind of an interpretive approach is nonsense, okay, about, but the point was we needed to restore history to literary study, okay, and we needed to add psychology to it because there was great animus against Freud.

[182] When I arrived in graduate school, in fact, I actually went into the director of graduate studies and protested the way Freud and Freudian were used as negative terms, okay, in a sneering way by the very wasp professors, right?

[183] So we need to dance, and actually it seemed like we were moving there, in the early 1970s was a great period of psychobiography about political figures, okay, and so I thought it's happening, and all of a sudden it all got short -circuited by this arrival, you know, of post -structuralism and postmodernism in the 1970s, right?

[184] So I feel I'm an old historicist, okay, not a new historicist, so I think new historicism was an absolute scam, right?

[185] And it's like, it's just a way, it's like tweezers.

[186] You like just, you pick a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of that, you make a little tiny salad, and somehow this atomized thing, right, is supposed to mean something.

[187] It's all to me very superficial, very cynical, very distance.

[188] I like, I am the product, okay, of old historicism, of German philology.

[189] And it's how my first choice of a profession when I was a child was Egyptology, archaeology.

[190] Everything I ever think about or say, is related to an enormous time scheme, okay, from antiquity, and indeed from the Stone Age, right?

[191] And that is the problem with these people.

[192] They're maleducated.

[193] The postmodernist and academic Marxists, okay, are maleducated, embarrassingly so, okay?

[194] They know nothing before the present.

[195] Foucault is absolutely a joke before the Enlightenment, okay?

[196] Perhaps he might be useful to people to talk about what happened after neoclassicism, which, by the way, he failed to notice.

[197] A lot of what he was talking about, it turns out to be simply the hangover of neoclassicism.

[198] This is how ignorant that man was.

[199] I mean, he was not talented as a researcher.

[200] He knew absolutely nothing.

[201] He knew nothing about antiquity.

[202] How can you make any kind of large mechanism to analyze Western culture without knowing about classical antiquity?

[203] He did not see anything.

[204] This was a person who had no business making large theoretical statements about anything.

[205] Well, maybe part of it is that if you generate an intelligible doctrine of radical relativism, then there is no reason to assume that there are distinctions between categories of knowledge or between different levels of quality of knowledge, right?

[206] So I've seen the same thing in the psychology departments, although we have the, what would you call it, the luxury of being bounded, at least to some degree by the empirical method and by biology, right?

[207] It's one of the things that keeps most of the branches of science.

[208] psychology relatively sane, you know, because the real world is actually built into it to some degree.

[209] But if you accept the postmodernist claim of radical relativism, then you completely demolish the idea that there are quality levels that are associated with education because everything becomes the same.

[210] And that seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable justification for maintaining ignorance.

[211] You know, like Foucault, I actually found him the most readable of the Lacan Derada Foucault triad.

[212] You can read Foucault.

[213] I read Foucault.

[214] I read Madness in civilization in a couple of us other books.

[215] And I thought they were painfully obvious.

[216] You know, the idea that mental disorder is in part of social construct is self -evident to anybody who has even a smattering of psychiatric training.

[217] I mean, the real narrow medical types tend to to think of a mental disorder, let's say, as something that might be purely biological.

[218] They have a pure disease model, but nobody who's a sophisticated thinker ever thinks that.

[219] It's a partly because medicine is a brand of engineering, not a brand of science, because it's associated with health, and the diagnostic categories are hybrids between physiological observation and sociocultural condition.

[220] Everyone knows that.

[221] And so when I read Madness and Civilization, I thought, well, that's not radical.

[222] That's just bloody self -evident.

[223] But...

[224] Well, you know, Foucault, you know, Foucault's admirers actually think that he began, you know, the entire turn toward a sociological, you know, grounding of modern psychology.

[225] The social psychology was well launched in the 1920s for example the levels of ignorance that these people who think Foucault is so original have not read Dirkheim they've not read Max Weber they've not read Irving Goughman okay so in other words to me for everything in Foucault seemed obvious okay because I had read the sources from which he was borrowing without attribution so I mean again I know these people I mean I've met in some cases you know them in graduate school people who went on to become these these these admirers of Foucaulte on Derrida.

[226] And I know what their training was.

[227] Their training was purely within the English department.

[228] That's all they ever knew.

[229] They never made any research outside of that, right?

[230] So the idea, so Foucault is simply this ease, a mechanism, it's like a little tiny kit by which they can approach everything in culture, and then, and then the, but the contortions of language, the deliberate, labyrinthing, elitist language at the same time as pretending to be a leftist, okay, this is one of the biggest frauds ever in practice.

[231] So I got a story to tell you that you might like, because I I've thought a lot about that use of language, you know, because language can be used as camouflage.

[232] And so here's the story.

[233] I think I got this from Robert Sapolsky.

[234] So he was talking about zebras.

[235] And zebras, of course, have stripes, and hypothetically that's associated with camouflage.

[236] But it's not a straightforward association because zebras are black and white and they're on the veldt along with the lions.

[237] The lions are camouflaged because they are grass colored, but the bloody zebras are black and white.

[238] You can see them like 15 miles away.

[239] So, okay, so biologists go out to study zebras, and they're, like, making notes on a zebra, and they watch it, and then they look down at their notes, and then they look up, and they think, oh -oh, I don't know which zebra I was looking at.

[240] So the camouflage is actually against the herd, because a zebra's a herd animal, not an individual.

[241] And so the black and white stripes break up the animal against the herd, so you can't identify it.

[242] So this was a quandary for the biologists, so they did one of two things.

[243] One was drive a jeep up to the zebra herd and use a dab of race.

[244] paint and dab the haunch of the zebra or tag it with an ear tag like he used for cattle the lions would kill it so as soon as it became identifiable the predator yes the predators could organize their hunt around that identify about animal that's why you know there's the old idea that lions and predators take down the weak animals but they don't they take down the identifiable animals so that's the thing is if you stick your damn head up you get picked off by the predators and so one of the things that academics seem to do is congregate together in herd -like entities, and then they share a language, right, and the language unites them and also keeps them as long as they share the same set of linguistic tools among themselves, they know that there isn't anybody in the coterie that's going to attack them or destabilize the entire herd.

[245] And that seems to me to account for that impenetrable use of language.

[246] It's group protection strategy, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the search for It's the search for security within a system and not the desire to expand the system.

[247] So true, and to me it's blatantly careerist, because it was about advancement, and it was also about the claim that somehow they have special expertise.

[248] This is a special technical language.

[249] No one else can understand it, only we can.

[250] But what's absurd about it, absolutely ludicrous, all right, is that these people, these American academics, are imitating the contorted language of French translations from the French.

[251] when Lacan is translated into English there's a contortion there what he was trying to do in French was to break up the neoclassical formulations that descended from Racine there was something that was going on there was a sabotage of the French language going on that was necessary in France, not necessary in English we have this long tradition of poetry going back to Shakespeare and Chaucer we have our own language far more vital than the French Oh, yeah, the French constrain their language all the time by bureaucracies.

[252] The absurdity in the amateurism, okay, of American academics, okay, trying to imitate, okay, a translation of Lacan, okay, when La Caut is doing something in France that is absolutely not necessary and indeed wrong to be doing in English.

[253] All right.

[254] So the utter cynical abandonment, okay, of the great tradition of, you know, of the English department.

[255] And I felt that the true radicalism was not about adding on other departments.

[256] So we have African -American studies and women's studies and so on.

[257] The true radicalism would have been to shatter the departmental structure.

[258] That's what I wanted.

[259] I feel that was the authentic revolutionary in 1960s thing to do.

[260] To blend all the literature studies together, to make easier, to make an interdisciplinary kind of organization closer to the British model where a person can pursue related subjects, overlapping subjects, subjects, these departmental models, okay, are, were, to me, totalitarian to begin with, separating language into fiefdoms, and what this did to create the women's studies department absolutely out of the air, just snap your fingers and create women studies.

[261] The English department had taken a century to develop, okay, it was a huge argument within it, and all of a sudden to create a department with a politicized agenda from the start, by people without any training whatever in that field.

[262] What should be the parameters of the field?

[263] What should be the requirements of that field?

[264] How about biology?

[265] If you're going to be discussing gender, that should have been a number one requirement as part of any women's studies department or program.

[266] But no, okay, it was all hands off.

[267] It was just the administrators wanted to solve a public relations problem.

[268] They had a situation with very few women faculty nationwide at a time when the women's movement had just started up.

[269] The spotlight of attention was on them.

[270] They needed women faculty fast.

[271] They needed the women's subject on the agenda fast.

[272] So they just like, poof, let there be women's studies.

[273] And now we'll just hire some women, usually from English departments, here and there, and we'll just throw them together.

[274] You invent it.

[275] You say what it is.

[276] So that's why women's studies got frozen at a certain point of ideology, of the early 1970s.

[277] I was already in revolt from it.

[278] I was a precursor in terms of my endorsement of feminism, before even now was created, but I couldn't even have a conversation with any of these women.

[279] They were hysterical about the subject of biology.

[280] They knew nothing about hormones, right?

[281] I mean, I probably gotten fistfights over this.

[282] People were so convinced that biology had nothing whatever to do with gender differences.

[283] See, that also seems to me to be related to the postmodern emphasis on power.

[284] Yes.

[285] Because there's something terrible underground going on there, and that is, and I think this is the sort of thing that was reflected in the Soviet Union too, especially in the 20s when there was this idea, a radical idea, that you could remake human beings entirely, right?

[286] Because they had no essential nature.

[287] And so if your fundamental hypothesis is that nothing exists except power, and you believe that, then that also gives you the right, in some sense, to exercise your power at the creation of the kind of humanity that your utopian vision envisions.

[288] And then that has no...

[289] And that also seems to me to justify the postmodern insistence that everything is only a linguistic construct.

[290] It again goes down to the notion of power which Derrida and Foucault and Lacan are so bloody obsessed with.

[291] And so it seems to me what they're trying to do is to take all the potential power for the creation of human beings to themselves without any bounding conditions whatsoever, right?

[292] There's no history, there's no biology, and everything is a fluid culture that can be manipulated at will.

[293] And so, I mean, in Canada, there are terrible arguments right now about biological essential.

[294] Let's say, and one of the things that happened, which was something I objected to precisely a year ago, is that the social constructionist view of human identity has been built now into Canadian law.

[295] So there's an insistence that biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity, very independently with no causal relationship between any of the levels.

[296] And so that's in the law, and not only is it in the law, it's being taught everywhere.

[297] It's being taught in the armed forces.

[298] It's being taught in the police.

[299] to the elementary school kids and the junior high school kids.

[300] And underneath it all, I see this terrible striving for arbitrary power that's associated with this crazy utopianism.

[301] But I still don't exactly understand it.

[302] I don't understand what seems to be the hatred that motivates it, that you see bubbling up, for example, in identity politics and in the desire to do nothing but, let's say, demolish the patriarchy.

[303] It kind of reminds me, and this is something else I wanted to talk to you about, You know, and you're an admirer of Eric Neumann and of Carl Jung.

[304] Yeah, and the Neumann connection is really interesting, because I think he's a bloody genius.

[305] I really like The Great Mother is a great book, and really a great warning that book, and also the origins and history of consciousness.

[306] One of my most influential books, yeah.

[307] Yeah, well, that's so interesting.

[308] I read an essay that you wrote.

[309] I don't remember when it was.

[310] The lecture I gave on Neumann at the NYU, yes.

[311] Yes, it's always been staggering to me that that book hasn't had the impact that it should have had.

[312] I mean, Jung himself, in the preface, to that book, wrote that that was the book that he wished that he would have written.

[313] It's very much associated with young symbols of transformation, and it was a major influence on my book Maps of Meaning, which was an attempt to outline the universal archetypes that are portrayed in the kind of religious structures that you put forward.

[314] But the thing that I really see happening, and you can tell me what you think about this, in Neumann's book, Consciousness, which is masculine, symbolically masculine, for a variety of reasons, is viewed as rising up against the countervailing force of tragedy from an underlying feminine, symbolically feminine unconsciousness, right?

[315] And it's something that can always be pulled back into that unconsciousness.

[316] That would be the microcosm of that would be the Freudian Edipal mother familial dynamic, where the mother is so overprotective and all -encompassing that she interferes with the development of the competence, not only of her sons, but also of her daughters, of her children in general.

[317] And it seems to me that that's the dynamic that's being played out in our society right now is that there's this, and it's related in some way that I don't understand to this, to this insistence that all forms of masculine authority are nothing by tyrannical power.

[318] So the symbolic representation is tyrannical father with no appreciation for the benevolent father and benevolent mother with no appreciation whatsoever for the tyrannical mother, right?

[319] And that's that, because I thought of ideologies as fragmentary mythologies.

[320] That's where they get their archetypal and psychological power, right?

[321] And so in a balanced representation, you have the terrible mother and the great mother, as Neumann laid out so nicely, and you have the terrible father and the great father.

[322] So that's the fact that culture mangles you half to death, well, it's also promoting you and developing you.

[323] You have to see that as balanced, and then you have the heroic and adversarial individual.

[324] But in the postmodern world, and this seems to be something that's increasingly seeping out into the culture at large, you have nothing but the tyrannical father, nothing but the destructive force of masculine consciousness, and nothing but the benevolent, benevolent great mother.

[325] And it's an appalling ideology, and it seems to me that it's sucking the vitality, which is exactly what you would expect symbolically, it's sucking the vitality of our culture.

[326] You see that with the increasing demolition of young men, and not only young men, in terms of their academic performance, which, like they're falling way behind in elementary school, way behind in junior high, and bailing out of the universities like mad.

[327] And so, and I...

[328] Well, the public school education has become completely permeated by this kind of anti -male propaganda.

[329] I mean, to me, public schools are just a form of imprisonment right now.

[330] They're particularly destructive to young men who have a lot of physical energy.

[331] Now, you know, I identify as transgender, okay, myself, okay, but I do not, I do not require the entire world to alter itself, okay, to fit my particular self -image.

[332] I do believe in the power of hormones.

[333] I believe that men exist and women exist and they are biologically different.

[334] I think that, I think there is no cure for the culture's ills right now, except if men start standing up, okay, and demanding that they be respected as men again.

[335] Okay, so I got a question about that.

[336] So, so one of the things, we did a research project a year ago, trying to figure out, if there was such a thing as political correctness from a psychometric perspective, to find out if the loose aggregation of beliefs actually clumped together statistically.

[337] And we actually found two factors, which I won't go into.

[338] But then we looked at things that predicted adherence to that politically correct creed.

[339] And there were a couple that were surprising.

[340] One was being female was a predictor.

[341] The personality attributes associated with femininity, so that would be agreeableness and higher levels of negative emotion, were also both independent predictors.

[342] so were symptoms of personality disorder, which I thought was really important, because part of what I see happening is that, like, I think that women whose relationship with men has been seriously pathologized cannot distinguish between male authority and competence and male tyrannical power.

[343] Like they fail to differentiate, because all they see is the oppressive male.

[344] And they may have had experiences that their experiences with men might have been rough enough so that that differentiation never occurred.

[345] It has to occur, and you have to have a lot of experience with men and good men, too, before that will occur.

[346] But it seems to me that we're also increasingly dominated by a view of masculinity that's mostly characteristic of women who have terrible personality disorders and who are unable to have healthy relationships with men.

[347] Now, but here's the problem.

[348] You know, this is something my wife has pointed out too.

[349] She said, well, men are going to have to stand up for themselves, but here's the problem.

[350] I know how to stand up to a man who's unfairly trespassing against me. And the reason I know that is because the parameters for my resistance are quite well defined, which is we talk, we argue, we push, and then it becomes physical.

[351] Right?

[352] Like if we move beyond the boundaries of civil discourse, we know what the next step is.

[353] Okay, that's forbidden in discourse with women.

[354] And so I don't think that men can control crazy women.

[355] I don't think, I really don't believe it.

[356] I think that they have to throw their hands up in, in, in what, in, it's not even disbelief.

[357] It's that the cultural, there's no step forward that you can take under those circumstances, because if the man is offensive enough and crazy enough, the reaction becomes physical right away, or at least the threat is there.

[358] And when men are talking to each other in any serious manner, that underlying threat of physicality is always there, especially if it's a real conversation and keeps the thing civilized to some degree.

[359] You know, if you're talking to a man who wouldn't fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you're talking to someone to whom you have absolutely no respect.

[360] But I can't see any way.

[361] For example, there's a woman in Toronto who's been organizing this movement, let's say, against me and some other people who are going to do a free speech event, and she managed to organize quite effectively.

[362] and she's quite offensive, you might say.

[363] She compared us to Nazis, for example, which, you know, publicly, using the swastika, which wasn't really something I was all that fond of.

[364] But I'm defenseless against that kind of female insanity because the techniques that I would use against a man who was employing those tactics are forbidden to me. So I don't know, like it seems to me that it isn't men that have to stand up and say enough of this, even though that is what they should do.

[365] It seems to me that it's sane women who have to stand up against their crazy sisters and say, look, enough of that, enough man -hating, enough pathology, enough bringing disgrace on us as a gender.

[366] But the problem there, and then I'll stop my little tirade, is that most of the women I know who are sane are busy doing sane things, right?

[367] They're off, they have their career, they have their family, they're quite occupied, and they don't seem to have the time or maybe even the interest to go after their crazy.

[368] harpy sisters, and so I don't...

[369] Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[370] You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description.

[371] Dr. Peterson's self -development programs, self -authoring, can be found at self -authoring .com.

[372] I've really been trying to understand the underlying psychology of post -modernism and its relationship with neo -Marxism, and then the spread of that into the universities and the effect on the culture.

[373] And what I would like to start with is a description of your understanding of that, because like I've presented to the people who are listening to me, my understanding of it.

[374] I interviewed Stephen Hicks recently, and he wrote an interesting book called Explaining Postmodernism, which I liked quite a bit.

[375] It's been criticized for being too right -wing, although I don't think he's right -wing at all.

[376] I think maybe you could characterize him as middle -of -the -road conservative, but I would say he's more like a classic liberal.

[377] But I'm really curious about your views about, well, what postmodernism is, first of all.

[378] I know you've identified it with the general tricksters, Derrida and Lacan and Foucault and Foucault in particular you've talked about, but I'd like to know what you think about postmodernism and also why you think it's been so attractive to people.

[379] Well, my explanation is that there is no authentic 1960s point of view in any of the elite universities, but rather the most liberated minds of my generation of the 1960 did not go on to graduate school.

[380] I witnessed this with my own eyes.

[381] I saw genuine Marxists at my college, which was the State University of New York at Binghamton, upstate New York, Harper College, which had a huge cohort of very radical downstate New York Jews, okay, who, in fact the Harper used to be called Berkeley East.

[382] So I saw genuine passionate Marxist.

[383] with my own eyes.

[384] They were not word choppers.

[385] They were not snide postmodernists.

[386] They were in your face aggressive.

[387] They used the language of the people.

[388] They had a populist energy.

[389] They dressed working class.

[390] They were non -materialistic.

[391] These are people who lived by their own convictions.

[392] They were against the graduate schools.

[393] When I went on to graduate school and it became known that I was going to go to Yale, I was confronted.

[394] by a leader of the radicals on campus, in broad daylight in front of everyone, who denounced me for, he said, grad school is not where it's happening.

[395] You don't do that.

[396] If you have to go to graduate school, you should go to Buffalo.

[397] Now, I had applied to the Sunni Buffalo because the great leftist critic Leslie Friedler was there who had a huge impact on me. He created identity politics, but without its present distortions.

[398] And Norman Holland, the psychoanalytic critic was there.

[399] I would have been very happy to have gone on to but I needed the library at Yale, so I continued on to Yale.

[400] There were no radicals in the graduate schools from 1968 to 72 when I was there.

[401] There were only one radical, Todd Gitlin, went on to have a career success.

[402] The actual radicals of the 1960s either went off, dropped out of college and went off to create communes, or they were taking acid and destroyed their brains.

[403] Now, I have also written about that.

[404] the destruction of the minds, okay, of the most talented members of my generation through LSD.

[405] It was going out all around me, right?

[406] So what's happened is the actual legacy of the 60s got truncated.

[407] The idea that these post -structurists and post -modernists are heirs of the 1960s revolution is an absolute crock, okay?

[408] What they represent, as Foucault shows, Foucault said, okay, that the biggest influence on his thinking, okay, was Samuel Beckett's way for Godot, which was a post -World War II play written in Paris that was about the disillusionment and nihilism experienced after Hitler went through, occupied France, all of Europe was in ruins.

[409] It had nothing to do, what's in, waiting for Godot, has nothing to do with the authentic legacy of the 1960s, which was about genuine multiculturalism, a movement toward India, toward Hinduism, a transformation of consciousness through psychedelics, which I did not.

[410] not take, but which I identify with totally, through the music, et cetera, all right?

[411] It was a turn toward the body.

[412] It was a turn toward sensory experience, okay, not this word -chopping thing and this like cynical removal from actual experience, right?

[413] That French import, okay, came in, okay, to the graduate schools.

[414] It did not affect any genuine 1960s person.

[415] The real 1960s revolution was about Jung.

[416] It was about a way of seeing the cosmos in mythological terms, right?

[417] The Jungian contribution went on into the New Age movement of the 1970s, aside from the universities.

[418] So who took over the universities were these careerists.

[419] I saw them with my own eyes.

[420] I saw what happened.

[421] I was at Yale when Derrida was being shipped over to address the students, the grad students, and the faculty.

[422] And I said to a fellow student, after hearing one of these guys speak, it wasn't Derridae.

[423] It was another one of the theorists.

[424] I said they are like high priests murmuring to each other.

[425] This was an elitist form from the start, okay?

[426] It was not progressive, it was not revolutionary, it was reactionary, it was a desperate attempt to hold on to what had happened before the 1960s sensory revolution.

[427] This postmodernist thing, okay, this trashing, okay, of the text, this, this, this, this, this encouragement, okay, of a superior and destructive attitude toward the work of art. We're going through it, okay, primly, with red pen in hand, finding all the evidence of sexism, check, racism, check, homophobia, check.

[428] That is not the empathic, emotional, sensory -based revolution of the 1960s.

[429] I am sick and tired of these people claiming any kind of mantle from the 1960s.

[430] They're frauds.

[431] These people are, what happened in the 1970s was a collapse of the job market in academe.

[432] All of a sudden, jobs were scarce.

[433] And this thing was there, the new and improved and shiny thing, to be a theorist.

[434] People seized on it.

[435] It was institutionalized.

[436] And it's an enormous betrayal of the 1960s.

[437] Okay, so that, you touched on this idea of the destruction of the work of art. And one of the things I really liked about reading Nietzsche was his discussion of Rizantamol, right, of resentment.

[438] And it seems to me that a tremendous amount of the mode of power that drives the postmodernist, let's call it, it's not a revolution, transformation, seems to me to be driven by resentment about virtually anything that has any, well, what would you say, any merit of competence or aesthetic quality.

[439] And I don't know if that's, it seems to me that that's partly rooted in the academics' disdain for the business world, which I think is driven by their relative economic and economic and, equality because most people who are as intelligent as academics are from a pure IQ point of view make more money in the private sphere.

[440] And so I think that drives some of it.

[441] But there also seems to be this, there's a destruction, an aim for destruction of the aesthetic quality of the literary or artistic work.

[442] It's reduction to nothing but some kind of power game.

[443] And then surrounding that, the reduction of everything to something that approximates a power game, which I can't help but identifying with jealousy and resentment as a fundamental motivator.

[444] Does that seem reasonable to you?

[445] These professors, okay, who allege that art is nothing, okay, but an ideological movement by one elite, okay, against another group, right?

[446] These people are Philistines, okay?

[447] They're philistines, they're middlebrow, hopelessly middlebrow.

[448] They have no sense of beauty.

[449] They have no sense of the aesthetic.

[450] Now Marxism does indeed be, assert this, okay, Marxism tries to reconfigure the universe in terms of materialism.

[451] It sees, it does not recognize any kind of spiritual dimension.

[452] Now, I'm an atheist, but I see the great world religions as enormous works of art, as the, as the best way to understand the universe in a man's place in it.

[453] I find them enormously moving.

[454] They're like enormous poems, and what I have called for, the true revolution, would have been to make the core curriculum of world education, the world, the great religions of the world.

[455] I feel that is the only way to achieve understanding, and it's also a way to present the aesthetic.

[456] I feel that the real 60s vision was about exaltation, elevation, cosmic consciousness, all of these things.

[457] We're rejected by these midgets, intellectual midgets, who seized on.

[458] Montel Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault.

[459] My career has been in the art schools, my entire career, beginning of Benetton College.

[460] So I represent a challenge to this from the perspective of art. It is an absolute nonsense, okay, as post -structuralism maintains, that reality is mediated by language, by words, everything that we can know, including gender.

[461] It's absolutely madness, because I'm teaching students whose majors are ceramics, okay, or dance, who are jazz musicians who understand reality in terms of the body, sensory activation.

[462] See what happened was something was going on in the art world as well.

[463] I identify with Andy Warhol in pop art. That was what was going on during my years in college.

[464] Everything about Andy Warhol was like, wow, admiration, wow.

[465] What happened immediately after that in the arts, in 1970s, was this collapse into a snide sort of postmodernism, Also, this happened in the art world, all right?

[466] And it was an utter misunderstanding of culture, it seems to me, by that movement in the art world.

[467] That is, oppositional art, in my view, is dead.

[468] What postmodernism is, isn't it a pathetic attempt to continue the old heroism of the avant -garde?

[469] The avant -garde was genuinely heroic from the early 19th century, where we're talking about, you know, the Courbet, the realists, we're talking about Monet and the impression, people who genuinely suffered for their radical ideas, their innovations and so on.

[470] Going right down to Picasso and down to Jackson Pollack who truly suffered for his art. It was only after his death, that suddenly the market was created for abstract art. Pop art killed the avant -garde.

[471] The idea that the avant -garde continues is an absolute delusion of the contemporary art world, which feels that they must attack, attack, attack, challenge the simplistic beliefs.

[472] of the hoi -poly, okay, it's somehow the art, what, excuse me, okay, from the moment, okay, Andy Warhol went through and embraced the popular media, instead of having the opposition to it, the serious artists have had, okay?

[473] That was the end of oppositional art, okay?

[474] So we have been going on now for 50 years, the postmodernism and academia, hand in hand, with the stupidity infantilism that masquerades as, you know, as important art at galleries everywhere.

[475] this incredible, incredible, you know, its mechanism of contemporary art, of pushing things that are so hopelessly derivative.

[476] And with this idea, once again, that the art world sometimes is a superior view of reality.

[477] The authentic leftism is populist, okay?

[478] It is based in working -class style, working -class language, working -class direct emotion in an openness and brusings of speech, not this fancy, contorted jargon of the pseudo -leftist of academe, who are frauds, these people, these people who manage to rise to the top at Berkeley, at Harvard, at Princeton, okay?

[479] The idea of these people are radical.

[480] They are career people.

[481] They're corporate types, okay, who succeeded in.

[482] They love the institutional context.

[483] They know how to manipulate the bureaucracy, which has totally invaded and usurped, okay?

[484] The, you know, the academic everywhere, okay?

[485] These people are company players.

[486] They could have done well in any field, okay?

[487] They love to sit in endless committees.

[488] They love bureaucratic regulation and so on.

[489] There's not one leftist, okay, an American academic academe, raised his or her voice against obscene growth of tuition costs which have bankrupted a whole generation of young people.

[490] Not one voice, okay, to challenge that invasion by the bureaucrats, okay?

[491] Absolutely fascist bureaucrats, okay?

[492] They're like a cancerist, okay?

[493] There are so many of them.

[494] The faculty have completely lost any power in American academic academic.

[495] It's a scandal what has happened.

[496] And they deserve the President's servitude that they're in right now, because they never protested.

[497] My first job at Bennington College, in 1976, I was there, when there was an uprising by the faculty against encroachment by the Board of Trustees and the President.

[498] And it was a huge thing, it was reported on the New York Times and so on, and we pushed that president out.

[499] And there's not been a single uprising of that kind against encroachment by the trustees and by the administrations.

[500] and all these decades, passive, slaves, slaves, they deserve their slavery.

[501] Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

[502] I've thought the same thing about university professors for a long time is that they get exactly what they deserve because they never stand up and say no. And the fact that in the United States, it's not quite as bad in Canada, I wouldn't say, but the fact that the students have been essentially handed a bill of indentured servitude here for their student loans is absolutely beyond comprehension.

[503] You know, it seems to me that the bureaucracy has basically conspired to determine how to pick the pockets of the students' future earnings, right?

[504] And they do that by offering them an extended adolescence with no quality control, something like that.

[505] So it's a real bargain with the devil.

[506] And it told the abandonment of any kind of education, actually, in history and culture.

[507] It's gone along with it.

[508] That is the transformation into a cafeteria kind of a menu.

[509] We can pick this course or that course or this course without any kind of guidance.

[510] from the university about a central core curriculum that teaches you history and chronology and introduces you to the basics.

[511] Because our professors are such prima donnas, they can only teach in their little areas.

[512] So we have this total fragmentation.

[513] The great art history survey courses are being abandoned, steadily.

[514] Why?

[515] Because graduate students are not trained to see the great narratives, because we are taught now that narratives are false.

[516] Okay, so that's another issue that I'd like to bring up, Because one of the things I cannot figure out is the alliance between the postmodernists and the neo -Marxists.

[517] I can't understand the causal relationship there because tell me if you disagree with this, okay, because I'm a psychologist, not a sociologist, and so I'm dabbling in things that are outside of my field of expertise, and there is some danger in that.

[518] But the central postmodernist claim seems to me that because there's a near -infinite number of ways to interpret a complex set of phenomena, which actually happens to be the case, that you can't make a case that any of those modes of interpretation are canonical.

[519] And so if they're not canonical, if that canonical element isn't based in some kind of reality, then it serves some other master.

[520] And so the master that it hypothetically serves for the postmodernists is nothing but power, because that seems to be everything that they believe in.

[521] They don't believe in competence.

[522] They don't believe in authority.

[523] They don't seem to believe in an objective world because everything is language mediated.

[524] So it's an extraordinarily cynical perspective that because there's an infinite number of interpretations, none of them are canonical, you can attribute it everything to power and dominance.

[525] Okay, so that seems like a reasonable summary of the postmodern.

[526] Yes, exactly.

[527] Okay, it's a radical relativism.

[528] Okay, it's a radical relativism.

[529] Now, but the strange thing is despite, okay, and so what goes along with that is the demolition of grand narratives.

[530] So that would be associated, for example, with the rejection of thinkers like Jung and Eric Neumann, because, of course, they're foundational thinkers in relationship to the idea that there are embodied grand narratives.

[531] That's never touched.

[532] But then despite the fact that the grand narrative is rejected, there's a neo -Marxism that's tightly, tightly allied with postmodernism that also seems to shade into this strange identity politics.

[533] And I don't, two things, I don't understand the causal relationship there.

[534] Like the skeptical part of me thinks that postmodernism was a, was an intellectual, it's intellectual camouflage for the continuation of the kind of pathological Marxism that produced the Soviet Union and that has no independent existence as an intellectual field whatsoever.

[535] But I still can't understand how the postmodernists can make the no grand narrative claim, but then immerse themselves in this grand narrative without anyone pointing out the evident contradictions.

[536] Like, I don't understand that.

[537] So what do you think about that?

[538] Well, I can only speak about literary professors, really, and they seem to me, almost universally in the U .S., to be very naive.

[539] They seem to know nothing about actual history, political science, or economic.

[540] It is simply an attitude.

[541] They have an attitude.

[542] Marxism becomes simply a badge by which they telegraph their solidarity with a working class that they have nothing to do with.

[543] And generally nothing but contempt.

[544] Yes, and the thing is that the campus leftists are almost notorious for their rather snobbish treatment of staff.

[545] They don't have any rapport with the actual working class members of the infrastructure, the janitor, the janitors, and even the secretaries.

[546] There's a kind of high and mighty aristocracy.

[547] These are people who have wandered into the English department and were products of a time during the new criticism, when history, both history and psychology had been excluded.

[548] My ambition was, I mean, I love the new criticism as a style of textual analysis, and the new criticism had been multiple interpretations, okay, that were possible, okay, and that were encouraged.

[549] In fact, one of the, you know, one of the great projects was made in Max series, 20th century views.

[550] When you had at least some books, I adored them in college.

[551] It was about Jane Austen or about, you know, Emily Bronte, or about Wordsworth, and they were collections of alternate views of the same thing.

[552] The idea that there were no alternate views, and there was no relativistic, situational kind of an interpretive approach is nonsense, okay, about, but the point was, we know.

[553] We needed to restore history to literary study, and we needed to add psychology to it because there was great animus against Freud.

[554] When I arrived in graduate school, in fact, I actually went into the director of graduate studies and protested the way Freud and Freudian were used as negative terms, in a sneering way by the very waspher professors.

[555] So we needed to have, and actually it seemed like we were moving there, in the early 1970s was a great period of psychobiography about political figures.

[556] So I thought it's happening, and all of a sudden it all got short -circuited by this arrival of post -structuralism and post -modernism in the 1970s.

[557] So I feel I'm an old historicist, not a new historicist, so I think new historicism is an absolute scam, right?

[558] And it's like, it's just a way, it's like tweezers, you like just, you pick a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of that, you make a little tiny salad, okay, and somehow this atomized thing, okay, is supposed to mean something.

[559] It's all to me very superficial, very cynical, very distance.

[560] I like, I am the product, okay, of old historicism, of German philology.

[561] My first choice of a profession when I was a child was Egyptology, archaeology.

[562] Everything I ever think about or say is related to an enormous time scheme, okay, from antiquity, and indeed from the Stone Age, right?

[563] And that is the problem with these people.

[564] They're maleducated.

[565] The postmodernist and academic Marxists, okay, are maleducated, embarrassingly so, okay?

[566] They know nothing before the present.

[567] Foucault is absolutely a joke before the Enlightenment, okay?

[568] Perhaps he might be useful to people to talk about what happened.

[569] after neoclassicism, which by the way he failed to notice, okay?

[570] A lot of what he was talking about, it turns out to be simply the hangover of neoclassicism.

[571] This is how ignorant that man was.

[572] I mean, he was not talented as a researcher.

[573] He knew absolutely nothing, okay?

[574] He knew nothing about antiquity.

[575] How can you make any kind of large structure, large mechanism to analyze Western culture without knowing about classical antiquity?

[576] He did not see anything.

[577] This was a person who had no business making large theoretical statements about anything.

[578] Well, maybe part of it is that if you generate an intelligible doctrine of radical relativism, then there is no reason to assume that there are distinctions between categories of knowledge or between different levels of quality of knowledge, right?

[579] So I've seen the same thing in the psychology departments, although we have the, what would you call it, the luxury of being bounded at least to some degree by the empirical method and by biology.

[580] It's one of the things that keeps most of the branches of psychology relatively sane, because the real world is actually built into it to some degree.

[581] But if you accept the postmodernist claim of radical relativism, then you completely demolish the idea that there are quality levels that are associated with education because everything becomes the same.

[582] And that seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable justification for maintaining ignorance.

[583] You know, like Foucault, I actually found him the most readable of the Lacan Derada Foucault triad.

[584] You can read Foucault.

[585] I read Madness and Civilization in a couple of us other books, and I thought they were painfully obvious.

[586] You know, the idea that mental disorder is in part a social construct is self -evident to anybody who has even a smattering of psychiatric training.

[587] I mean, the real narrow medical types tend to think of a mental disorder, let's say, as something that might be purely biological.

[588] They have a pure disease model, but nobody's who's a sophisticated thinker ever thinks that.

[589] It's a, partly because medicine is a brand of engineering, not a brand of science, because it's associated with health, and the diagnostic categories are hybrids between physiological observation and sociocultural condition.

[590] Everyone knows that.

[591] And so when I read Madness and Civilization, I thought, well, that's not radical.

[592] That's just bloody self -evident.

[593] Well, you know, Foucault's admirers actually think that he began, you know, the entire turn toward a sociological, you know, grounding of modern psychology.

[594] The social psychology was well launched in the 1920s, for example.

[595] The levels of ignorance, these people who think Foucault is so original have not read Dirkheim, they've not read Max Weber, they've not read Irving Goughman.

[596] In other words, to me, everything in Foucaulte seemed obvious, because I had read the sources from which he was borrowing without attribution.

[597] So I mean, again, I know these people, I mean, in some cases, knew them in graduate school, people who went on to become these, these admirers of Foucault, Lecon, Derrida.

[598] And I know what their training was.

[599] Their training was purely within the English department.

[600] That's all they ever knew.

[601] They never made any research outside of that, right?

[602] So the idea, so Foucault is simply this ease, a mechanism.

[603] It's like a little tiny kit by which they can approach everything in culture.

[604] And then, and then the contortions of language, the deliberate, labyrinthing, elitist language at the same time as pretending to be a leftist, okay?

[605] This is one of the biggest frauds ever in practice.

[606] So I got a story to tell you that you might like, because I've thought a lot about that use of language, you know, because language can be used as camouflage.

[607] And so here's the story.

[608] I think I got this from Robert Sapolsky.

[609] So he was talking about zebras.

[610] And zebras, of course, have stripes, and hypothetically that's associated with camouflage.

[611] But it's not a straightforward association because zebras are black and white and they're on the veldt along with the lions.

[612] The lions are camouflaged because they are grass colored, but the bloody zebras are black and white.

[613] white, you can see them like 15 miles away.

[614] So, okay, so biologists go out to study zebras, and they're, like, making notes on a zebra, and they watch it, and then they look down at their notes, and then they look up, and they think, oh, oh, I don't know which zebra I was looking at.

[615] So the camouflage is actually against the herd, because a zebra is a herd animal, not an individual.

[616] And so the black and white stripes break up the animal against the herd, so you can't identify it.

[617] So this was a quandary for the biologist, so they did one of two things.

[618] One was drive a jeep up to the zebra herd and use a dab of red paint and dab the haunt of the zebra or tag it with an ear tag like you used for cattle.

[619] The lions would kill it.

[620] So as soon as it became identifiable, the predators, yes, the predators could organize their hunt around that identify animal.

[621] That's why there's the old idea that lions and predators take down the weak animals, but they don't.

[622] They take down the identifiable animals.

[623] So that's the thing, is if you stick your damn head up, you get picked off by the predators.

[624] And so one of the things that academics seem to do is congregate together in herd -like entities, and then they share a language, right?

[625] And the language unites them and also keeps them, as long as they share the same set of linguistic tools among themselves, they know that there isn't anybody in the coterie that's going to attack them or destabilize the entire herd.

[626] And that seems to me to account for that impenetrable use.

[627] of language.

[628] It's group protection strategy and it has absolutely nothing to do with the search for, it's the search for security within a system and not the desire to expand the system.

[629] So true.

[630] But to me it's blatantly careerist because it was about advancement and it was also about the claim that somehow they have like special expertise.

[631] This is a special technical language.

[632] No one else can understand it.

[633] Only only we can.

[634] But what's absurd about it, absolutely ludicrous, all right, is that these people, these American academics are imitating the contorted language of French translations from the French.

[635] When Lacan is translated into English, there's a contortion there.

[636] What he was trying to do in French was to break up, okay, the neoclassical formulations that descended from Racine.

[637] There was something that was going on, there was a sabotage of the French language going on that was necessary in France, not necessary in English.

[638] We have this long tradition of poetry going back to Shakespeare and Chaucer.

[639] We have our own language far more vital than the French.

[640] Oh, yeah, the French constrain their language all the time by bureaucracy.

[641] The absurdity in amateurism, okay, of American academics, okay, trying to imitate, okay, a translation of Lacan, okay, when Lacan is doing something in France that is absolutely not necessary and indeed wrong to be doing in English, all right?

[642] The utter cynical abandonment of the great tradition of the English departments.

[643] And I felt that the true radicalism was not about adding on other departments.

[644] So we have African American studies and women's studies and so on.

[645] The true radicalism would have been to shatter the departmental structure.

[646] That's what I wanted.

[647] I feel that was the authentic revolutionary 1960s thing to do.

[648] To blend all the literature studies together.

[649] to make easier, to make an interdisciplinary kind of organization, you know, closer to the British model where a person can pursue related subjects, overlapping subjects.

[650] These departmental models, okay, are, were, to me, totalitarian to begin with, separating language into fiefdoms.

[651] And what this did to create women's studies department absolutely out of the air, to snap your fingers and create women studies.

[652] The English department had taken a century to develop, It was a huge argument within it.

[653] And all of a sudden to create a department with a politicized agenda from the start by people without any training whatever in that field, what should be the parameters of the field, what should be the requirements of that field?

[654] How about biology, if you're going to be discussing gender, that should have been a number one requirement, as part of any women's studies department or program.

[655] But no, okay, it was all hands off.

[656] It was just the administrators wanted to solve a public relations problem.

[657] They had a situation with very few women faculty, nationwide, at a time when the women's movement had just started up.

[658] The spotlight of attention was on them.

[659] They needed women faculty fast.

[660] They needed the women's subject on the agenda fast.

[661] So they just like, poof, let there be women's studies.

[662] And now we'll just hire some women, usually from English departments, here and there, and we'll just throw them together.

[663] You invent it.

[664] You say what it is.

[665] So that's why women's studies got frozen at a certain point of ideology of the early 1970s.

[666] I was already in revolt from it.

[667] I was a precursor in terms of my endorsement of feminism before even now was created.

[668] But I couldn't even have a conversation with any of these women.

[669] They were hysterical about the subject of biology.

[670] They knew nothing about hormones.

[671] I mean, I probably got in fistfights over this.

[672] People were so convinced that biology had nothing whatever to do with gender differences.

[673] See, that also seems to me to be related to the post -modern emphasis on power because there's something terrible underground going on there and that is, and I think this is the sort of thing that was reflected in the Soviet Union too, especially in the 20s when there was this idea, a radical idea, that you could remake human beings entirely, right?

[674] Because they had no essential nature.

[675] And so if your fundamental hypothesis is that nothing exists except power, and you believe that, then that also gives you the right in some sense to exercise your power at the creation of the kind of humanity that your utopian vision envisions.

[676] And that also seems to me to justify the postmodern insistence that everything is only a linguistic construct.

[677] It again goes down to the notion of power which Derrida and Foucault and Lacan are so bloody obsessed with.

[678] And so it seems to me what they're trying to do is to take all the potential power for the creation of human beings to themselves without any bounding conditions whatsoever, right?

[679] There's no history, there's no biology, And everything is a fluid culture that can be manipulated at will.

[680] And so, I mean, in Canada, there are terrible arguments right now about biological essentialism, let's say.

[681] And one of the things that happened, which was something I objected to precisely a year ago, is that the social constructionist view of human identity has been built now into Canadian law.

[682] So there's an insistence that biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity, very independently with no causal relationship between any of the levels.

[683] And so that's in the law, and not only is it in the law, it's being taught everywhere.

[684] It's being taught in the armed forces.

[685] It's being taught in the police.

[686] It's being taught to the elementary school kids and the junior high school kids.

[687] And underneath it all, I see this terrible striving for arbitrary power that's associated with this crazy utopianism.

[688] But I still don't exactly understand it.

[689] I don't understand what seems to be the hatred that motivates it, that you see.

[690] bubbling up, for example, in identity politics and in the desire to do nothing, but let's say, demolish the patriarchy, it kind of reminds me, and this is something else I wanted to talk to you about, you know, and you're an admirer of Eric Neumann and of Carol You.

[691] Yeah, and that's, the Neumann connection is really interesting, because I think he's a bloody genius.

[692] I really like The Great Mother is a great book, and really a great warning that book, and also the origins and history of consciousness.

[693] One of my most influential books, yeah.

[694] Yeah, that's so interesting.

[695] I read an essay that you wrote, I don't remember when it was.

[696] The lecture I gave on Neumann at the NYU, yes.

[697] Yes, it's always been staggering to me that that book hasn't had the impact that it should have had.

[698] I mean, Jung himself, in the preface to that book, wrote that that was the book that he wished that he would have written.

[699] It's very much associated with Jung's symbols of transformation, and it was a major influence on my book, Maps of Meaning, which was an attempt to outline the universal archetypes that are portrayed in the kind of religious structures that you put forward.

[700] But the thing that I really see happening, and you can tell me what you think about this, in Neumann's book, Consciousness, which is masculine, symbolically masculine, for a variety of reasons, is viewed as rising up against the countervailing force of tragedy from an underlying feminine, symbolically feminine unconsciousness, right?

[701] And it's something that can always be pulled back into that unconsciousness.

[702] That would be the microcosm of that would be the Freudian Oedipo Mother familial dynamic, where the mother is so over -protective and all -encompassing that she interferes with the development of the competence not only of her sons but also of her daughters, of her children in general.

[703] And it seems to me that that's the dynamic that's being played out in our society right now is that there's this, and it's related in some way that I don't understand to this insistence that all forms of masculine authority are nothing by tyrannical power.

[704] So the symbolic representation is tyrannical father with no appreciation for the benevolent father and benevolent mother with no appreciation whatsoever for the tyrannical mother right and that's that because I thought of ideologies as fragmentary mythologies that's where they get their archetypal and psychological power right and so in a balanced representation you have the terrible mother and the great mother as Noyman laid out so nicely and you have the terrible father and the great father so that's the fact that culture mangles you have to death well it's also promoting you and developing you you have to see that as bad And then you have the heroic and adversarial individual.

[705] But in the postmodern world, and this seems to be something that's increasingly Seeping out into the culture at large, you have nothing but the tyrannical father, nothing but the destructive force of masculine consciousness, and nothing but the benevolent great mother.

[706] And it's an appalling ideology and it seems to me that it's sucking the vitality, which is exactly what you would expect symbolically.

[707] It's sucking the vitality of our culture.

[708] You see that with the increasing demolition of young men, and not only young men, in terms of their academic performance, which, like, they're falling way behind in elementary school, way behind in junior high, and bailing out of the universities like mad.

[709] And so, and I...

[710] Well, the public school education has become completely permeated by this kind of anti -male propaganda.

[711] I mean, to me, public schools are just a form of imprisonment, you know, right now, they're particularly destructive to young men who have a lot of physical energy.

[712] Now, you know, I identify as transgender, okay, myself, but I do not require the entire world to alter itself, okay, to fit my particular self -image.

[713] I do believe in the power of hormones.

[714] I believe that men exist and women exist, and they are biologically different.

[715] I think that, I think there is no cure for the culture's ills right now, except if men start standing up, okay, and demanding that they be respected as, meant again.

[716] Okay, so I got a question about that.

[717] So one of the things, we did a research project a year ago trying to figure out if there was such a thing as political correctness from a psychometric perspective to find out if the loose aggregation of beliefs actually clumped together statistically and we actually found two factors which I won't go into, but then we looked at things that predicted adherence to that politically correct creed and there were a couple that were surprising.

[718] One was being female was a predictor.

[719] The personality attributes associated with femininity so that would be agreeableness and higher levels of negative emotion were also both independent predictors but so were symptoms of personality disorder which I thought was really important because part of what I see happening is that like I think that women whose relationship with men have has been seriously pathologized cannot distinguish between male authority and competence and male tyrannical power like they fail to differentiate because all they see is the oppressive male and then they may have had experience that their experiences with men might have been rough enough so that that differentiation never occurred because it has to occur and you have to have a lot of experience with men and good men too before that will occur but it seems to me that we're also increasingly dominated by a view of masculinity that's mostly characteristic of women who have terrible personality disorders and who are unable to have healthy relationships with men now but here's the problem you know this is something my wife has pointed out too she said, well, men are going to have to stand up for themselves, but here's the problem.

[720] I know how to stand up to a man who's unfairly trespassing against me. And the reason I know that is because the parameters for my resistance are quite well defined, which is we talk, we argue, we push, and then it becomes physical, right?

[721] Like if we move beyond the boundaries of civil discourse, we know what the next step is.

[722] Okay, that's forbidden in discourse with women.

[723] And so I don't think that men can control crazy women.

[724] I really don't believe it.

[725] I think that they have to throw their hands up in what?

[726] It's not even disbelief.

[727] It's that the cultural, there's no step forward that you can take under those circumstances because if the man is offensive enough and crazy enough, the reaction becomes physical right away, or at least the threat is there.

[728] And when men are talking to each other in any serious manner, That underlying threat of physicality is always there, especially if it's a real conversation and keeps the thing civilized to some degree.

[729] You know, if you're talking to a man who wouldn't fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you're talking to someone to whom you have absolutely no respect.

[730] But I can't see any way.

[731] For example, there's a woman in Toronto who's been organizing this movement, let's say, against me and some other people who are going to do a free speech event, and she managed to organize quite effectively, and she's quite offensive, you might say.

[732] She compared us to Nazis, for example, which, you know, publicly, using the swastika, which wasn't really something I was all that fond of.

[733] But I'm defenseless against that kind of female insanity because the techniques that I would use against a man who was employing those tactics are forbidden to me. So I don't know, like it seems to me that it isn't men that have to stand up and say enough of this, even though that is what they should do, it seems to me that it's sane women who have to stand up against their crazy sisters and say, look, enough of that, enough man -hating, enough pathology, enough bringing disgrace on us as a gender.

[734] But the problem there, and then I'll stop my little tirade, is that most of the women I know who are sane are busy doing sane things, right?

[735] They're off, they have their career, they have their family, they're quite occupied, and they don't seem to have the time or maybe even the interest to go.

[736] after their crazy harpy sisters and so I don't see any regulating force for that terrible femininity and it seems to me to be invading the culture and undermining the the masculine power of the culture in a way that's I think fatal I really do believe that I too I too believe these are there's a symptomatic of the decline of Western culture and we and it will just go down flat I don't think people realize that you know masculinity still exists okay in the world as a code among jihadists, and when you have passionate masculinity, circling the borders like the Huns and the Vandals during the Roman Empire, that's what I see.

[737] I see this culture rotting from within and disemboweling itself, literally.

[738] Now, I have an overview of why we're having these problems.

[739] And it comes from the fact that I'm the product of an immigrant family.

[740] All four of my grandparents and my mother were born in Italy.

[741] So I remember from my earliest years in this factory town in upstate New York, where my relatives came to work in the shoe factory.

[742] I can remember still, the life of the agrarian era, which was for most of human history, the agrarian era, where there was the world of men and the world of women.

[743] And the sexes had very little to do with each other.

[744] Each had power and status in its own realm.

[745] And they laughed at each other, in essence.

[746] The women had enormous power.

[747] In fact, the old women ruled, not the young, beautiful, woman like today.

[748] But the older you were, the more you had control over everyone, including the mating and marriage.

[749] There were no doctors, so the old women were like midwives and knew all the ins and outs of this inherited knowledge about pregnancy and all these other things.

[750] I can remember this and the joy that women had with each other all day long, cooking with each other, companions to each other, talking, conversing.

[751] My mother remembered as a small child in Italy when it was time to do the laundry they would take the laundry up the mount up the hill to the fountain Ilsorgo okay and do it by hand they would sing they would picnic and so on all right and we get a glimpse of that in the odyssey when Odysseus is is thrown up naked on the shores of Faisha all right and he hears the sound of women young women laughing and singing and it's Nozicaa the princess bringing the women to do the laundry where he's exactly the same thing right so there was a each each gender had its own hierarchy, its own values, its own way of talking, and the sex is rarely intersected.

[752] Like I can remember in my childhood, on a holiday typical, it could be a Christmas, it could be a Thanksgiving, whatever.

[753] Women would be cooking all day long.

[754] Everyone would sit down to eat.

[755] And then after that, the women would retire en masse to the kitchen and the men would go, I would look at the window and see all the men.

[756] The men would be all outside.

[757] Usually gather on the car.

[758] At a time when cars didn't work as well as they do today, with the hood up, okay?

[759] And the men would be standing with their hands on their hips like that, everyone's staring at the engine.

[760] And I went, that's how I learned, okay?

[761] Men were refreshing themselves by studying something technical and mechanical after being with the women, okay, you know, during the dinner, okay, and so all of these problems of today are the direct consequence of women's emancipation and freedom from housework, thanks to capitalism, okay, which made it possible for women to have jobs outside the home for the very first time, in the 19th century no longer to be dependent on a husband or father or brother right and so this great great thing that's happened to us that allowing us to be totally self -supporting independent agents has produced all this animosity between men and women because the women women feel unhappy women today wherever I go whether it's Italy or Brazil or England or America or Toronto okay the the upper middle class professional women are all unhappy, miserable, and they don't know why they're unhappy.

[762] They want to blame it on men, okay?

[763] Men must change.

[764] Men must become more like women.

[765] No, that is the wrong way to go, okay?

[766] It's when men are men, okay, and understand themselves as men, are secure as men.

[767] Then you're going to be happier.

[768] Yeah, well, there's nothing more dangerous than a weak man. Yeah, absolutely, okay, especially all these quizzlings, okay, spouting feminist rhetoric.

[769] When I hear that, okay, it makes me sick.

[770] But here's the point.

[771] Men and women have never worked side by side ever.

[772] Maybe on the farms, okay, when you were like, maybe one person's in the potato field, the other ones over here in the tomato, during tomatoes, or whatever, okay?

[773] You had families working side by side, exhausted with each other, no time to have any clash of this.

[774] It was a collaborative effort on farms and so on.

[775] Never, in all of human history, have men and women been working side by side.

[776] And women are now the pressure about Silicon Valley.

[777] They're all so sexist.

[778] Oh, they don't allow women in and so on.

[779] The men are being men in Silicon Valley, all right, and so on.

[780] Especially the engineers.

[781] And the women are demanding that, oh, this is terrible.

[782] You're being sick.

[783] Maybe the sexes, okay, have their own particular form of rhetoric, their own particular form of identity.

[784] Okay, maybe, okay, we need to re -examine, okay, this business about, you know, maybe we have to perhaps accept some degree of tension and conflict between the sexes, okay, in a work environment.

[785] I don't mean harassment.

[786] I'm talking about women feeling disrespectful how somehow their opinions when they express them are not taking seriously or even Hillary Clinton is complaining when women write something online she's attacked immediately and so well everyone's attacked online what are you talking about the world is tough the world is competitive identity is honed by conflict the idea that there should be no conflict that we have to be in this bath of approbation yes well that's the devouring mother That's right.

[787] It's absolutely infantile.

[788] I mean, okay, so a couple of things there.

[789] Well, the first thing is that the agreeableness trait that divides men and women most...

[790] There's three things that divide women and men most particularly from the psychometric perspective.

[791] One is that women are more agreeable than men.

[792] And so that seems to be the primary maternal dimension, as far as I can tell.

[793] It's associated with a desire to avoid conflict, but it's associated with interpersonal closeness, compassion, politeness.

[794] Women are reliably higher than men, especially in the same.

[795] Scandinavian countries and in the countries where egalitarianism has progressed the farthest.

[796] So that's where the difference is maximized, which is one of the things James D 'Amor pointed out quite correctly in his infamous Google memo.

[797] Women are higher in negative emotion, so that's anxiety and emotional pain.

[798] That difference is approximately the same size.

[799] And again, that maximizes in egalitarian societies, which is extremely interesting.

[800] And then the biggest difference is the difference in interest between people and things.

[801] And so women are more interested in people and men are more interested in things, which goes along quite nicely with your car anecdote.

[802] But the thing about men interacting with men again is that it isn't that they respect each other's viewpoints.

[803] That's not exactly right.

[804] What happens with a man, and I know a lot of men that I would regard as remarkably tough people for one reason or another, and everything you do with them is a form of combat.

[805] Like if you want your viewpoint taken seriously, often you have to yell them.

[806] down and like they're not going to stop talking unless you start talking over them, you know, and it's, it's not like men are automatically giving respect to other men because that just doesn't happen.

[807] It's that the combat is there and it's expected.

[808] And one of the problems, and so this is part of the reason why I think men are baiting out of so much of academia and maybe the academic world in general, and maybe the world in general, is that men actually don't have any idea how to compete with women.

[809] Because the problem is, is that if you understand, unleash yourself completely, then you're an absolute bully.

[810] And there's no doubt about that.

[811] Because if men unleash themselves on other men, that can be pretty goddamn brutal, especially for the men that are really tough.

[812] And so that just doesn't happen with women ever.

[813] So you can't unleash yourself completely.

[814] If you win, you're a bully.

[815] If you lose, well, you're just bloody pathetic.

[816] So how the hell are you supposed to play a game like that?

[817] You know, so I've worked with lots of women in law firms in Canada, for example, and high achieving women, like really remarkable people, I would say.

[818] And they're often nonplussed, I would say, by the attitude of the men in the law firm, because they would like to see everyone pulling together because they're all part of the same team.

[819] Whereas the men are like at each other's throats in a cooperative way, because they want the law firm to succeed, but they want to be the person who's at the top of the success hierarchy, right?

[820] And that doesn't jive well with the more competitive or cooperative ethos that's part and parcel of agreeableness.

[821] And so we don't really have any idea how to integrate male and female dominance hierarchies.

[822] Exactly.

[823] That's exactly right.

[824] This is why I love this show, Real Housewives, which is where Gora Saddam Scorns.

[825] And just last night, okay, I was watching an episode where the women were at each other, okay, at a party and recounting.

[826] but I said this to you, but you said this to me, and you know, and the men got, we got together there and said, well, this is the way they communicate, you know, with each other.

[827] And, you know, men, we men, okay, just will have a fist fight, and we'll, and ten minutes later, we're going to have a beer at the bar, next to each other.

[828] And so, and I have observed that my entire life.

[829] My daughter, my daughter used to be really irritated about that, because she, like most people was the target of feminine conspiratorial bullying at one.

[830] She's no pushover, my daughter, so it wasn't like this was a continual thing or that she didn't know what to do about it.

[831] But she had observed these girls conspiring against her and then blackening her name on Facebook, which is part and parcel of the typical female bullying routine, which is often reputation demolition, right?

[832] There's a good literature on that.

[833] And then she'd watch what would happen if my brother or my son would have a dispute with his friends, you know, and maybe they were drinking and there was a dispute.

[834] They'd have a fight and then the next day they were friends again.

[835] And that's another thing that's strange is that men have a way of bringing a conflict to a head and resolving it, right?

[836] And that it isn't obvious to me that women have that same, perhaps you might call it luxury, but it's also the case that men don't know what to do when they get into a conflict with a woman because what the hell are you supposed to do, you know?

[837] Mostly what you're supposed to do is avoid it.

[838] Well, I've seen, you know, I don't know whether this crosses into other countries, but that there's a certain kind of taunting and teasing that men, boys do with each other that toughens them, okay, and where they don't take things seriously, but a girl's feelings become extremely hurt if she hears something that is very tough, you know, sarcastic against her.

[839] So I mean, I do feel that there are profound differences between the sexes in terms of emotions, in terms of communication patterns.

[840] My father used to say that he could never follow women's conversations.

[841] He said women don't even finish sentences.

[842] The women understand immediately what the other woman is saying.

[843] And the way women tend to be more interested, or have been traditionally, more interested in soap operas.

[844] It's not just that the women were home without jobs.

[845] It's that, honestly, I believe that soap opera does reflect, does mirror the way women talk to each other.

[846] These communication patterns have been built up through women, the world of women, okay, which was, it made sense there was a division of labor, okay?

[847] It wasn't sexism against women that there was a division of labor.

[848] The men went off to hunt and did the dangerous things.

[849] The women stayed around the hearth because you had pregnant women, nursing women, older women, okay, they were cooking and so on.

[850] So I feel that these communication patterns that we're talking about have been built up, okay, over the centuries.

[851] And the men had to toughen each other, okay, to go out.

[852] The hunting parties of Native Americans, you know, they could be gone for two weeks.

[853] And when the temperature was below zero, many of them died.

[854] The idea that somehow, oh, any kind of separation of the sexes or different spheres of the sexes is inherently sexist.

[855] Yeah, and inherently driven by a power dynamic.

[856] The answer to all of this, okay, everything that we're talking about, okay, is education into early history, okay?

[857] Until people understand the Stone Age, the nomadic period, the agrarian era, and how culture, how civilization built up, okay, in Mesopotamia, the great irrigation projects, or in Egypt, where you had for the first centralized government authority became necessary, okay, to master these, you had a situation where an environmentally, you know, difficult situation like the deserts of Mesopotamia or the peculiar character of Egyptian geography where you can only have a little tiny, fertile line along the edges of the Nile, okay, and otherwise desert lands.

[858] So the civilization and authority, okay, right, as not necessarily about power grabbing, but about organization to achieve something for the good of the people as a whole.

[859] Yeah, see, well, that's exactly the symbolism of the great father.

[860] By reducing all hierarchy to power, okay, and selfish power, okay?

[861] It is utterly naive, it's ignorant.

[862] So I say education has to be totally reconstituted.

[863] constituted, including public education, to begin in the most distant past, so our young people today who know nothing about how the world was created that they inhabit, okay, can understand, okay, what marvelous, technological paradise they live in, and it's the product of capitalism, the product of individual innovation, it's the product, most of it's the product of a Western tradition that everyone wants to trash now, etc. If you begin in the past and show, it also talk about war, because the war is the one thing that wakes people up, as we see.

[864] War is the reality principle.

[865] And as we may see.

[866] Yes, okay.

[867] War is the reality principle.

[868] My father and all, in five of my uncles went to World War II.

[869] You know, my father was part of the force that landed in Japan, okay.

[870] He's a paratrooper, you know, at the time of the Japanese surrender.

[871] And my couple uncles got shot up and so on.

[872] When you have the reality of war, when people see the reality of the horrors of war, Berlin burned, you know, to a crisp and.

[873] and so on, starvation, all kinds, then you understand, okay, this marvelous mechanism that brings water, you know, to the kitchen, and you flip on a light, the electricity kind of fast.

[874] I know, well, for me, like, and I suppose it's because I have somewhat of a depressive temperament.

[875] I mean, one thing that staggers me on a consistent basis is the fact that anything ever works.

[876] I mean, because it's so unlikely, you know, to be in a situation where our electronic communications work, where our electric grid works, and it works all the time, right?

[877] It works 100 % of the time, and the reason for that is that there are mostly men out there who are breaking themselves into pieces, repairing this thing, which just falls apart all the time.

[878] Absolutely.

[879] I said this in the Monk debate, okay, in Toronto several years ago.

[880] I said that there's the invisible, all these, these, you know, these elitist, you know, professors sneering at men.

[881] It's men who are maintaining everything around us.

[882] This invisible army, which feminists don't notice, nothing would work to work for the end.

[883] Or regard as oppressive, which is, you know, like a professor is someone who's standing on a hill surrounded by a wall, which is surrounded by another wall, which is surrounded by another wall, like it's walls all the way down, who stands up there and says, I'm brave and independent.

[884] It's like you've got this protected area that's so unlikely, it's so absolutely unlikely.

[885] And the fact that people aren't on their knees in gratitude all the time for the fact that we have central heating and air conditioning and pure water and reliable food.

[886] It's just, it's so, it is, it's absolutely unbelievable.

[887] People used to die for the water supply, okay, was contaminated with cholera, for heaven's sakes, right?

[888] People don't understand, okay, they have clean water, fresh milk, fresh orange juice, all of these things, these are marvelous.

[889] And all of the time.

[890] All of the time.

[891] Western culture is heading, okay, because we are so dependent on this, on this invisible infrastructure, we're heading for an absolute catastrophe.

[892] when jihadists figure out how to paralyze the power grid.

[893] The entire culture will be chaotic.

[894] You'll have mobs in the street, okay?

[895] Within three days, when suddenly the food supply is interrupted and there's no way to communicate.

[896] There'll be like a robber, I mean, that is the way Western culture is going to collapse, okay?

[897] And it won't take much.

[898] Single points of failure.

[899] Because we are so interconnected, and now we are so dependent on communications and computers, I used to predict for years it would be an asteroid hitting there, if you have another ice age.

[900] Do you know how the solar flares work?

[901] So back in, this happens about once every century, so back about 1880, and I don't remember the exact year, there was a significant enough solar flare, so that produces an electromagnetic pulse, like a hydrogen bomb, because the sun is a hydrogen bomb, and electromagnetic pulse will emerge from the sun and wave across the earth, and it produces huge spikes in electrical, electrical current along anything that's electronic and it'll burn them out.

[902] It lit telegraph operators on fire in the 1800s.

[903] Wow.

[904] One of those things took out the Quebec power grid in 1985 and knocked out the whole northeast corridor.

[905] And so they figure those things are about one in a century event.

[906] But those single, I have my brother -in -law who's a very smart guy, he designed the chip in the iPhone.

[907] We were talking about political issues the last time I went and saw him in San Francisco.

[908] And his notion was that all that the government should be doing right now is stress testing our infrastructure the same way they stress test the banks because we're so full of these single points of failure that and I think you're absolutely right luckily we've been what would you call invaded by stupid terrorists instead of smart terrorists because a smart terrorist could do an unbelievable amount of damage in a very short period of time so and it's just God's good graces that that hasn't happened yet and so what will happen is that it's the men okay the men will reconstruct civilization while the women power in the houses and have the men go out and do all the dirty work.

[909] That's what's going to happen again.

[910] Only men will bring civilization back again.

[911] So what, okay, so now a couple of things.

[912] So the universities, I mean, I've proposed, although it's something that's probably beyond my power, that what should happen is that the universities, the real content of the universities should be stolen back from the universities because they're not making use of their intellectual property and that something should be started online that would constitute a genuine university.

[913] The problem is the accreditation issue, but I don't think that's an unsolvable problem.

[914] But do you see, like all these people who have these postmodern neo -Marxist agendas are completely embedded inside the universities.

[915] Oh, absolutely.

[916] And the point is, over the last 25 years, I have received constant mail from people dropping out of the graduate schools, right, or giving up altogether on any idea of being a college professor.

[917] So what's happened is that the most talented and independent thinking people have avoided in the school.

[918] So we're now, who we have are the compliant, the servile, okay, the people who are currently in the university and hiring their successors, okay, are maleducated themselves, okay?

[919] I mean, I, one of the first letters I received in the early 90s, I'll never forget it, was from a woman who was now painting houses in Missouri and said she had been part of the comparative literature graduate program at, you know, at Berkeley, and that she finally had to drop out because she said every time she would express, enthusiasm for what they were reading, the people looked at her as if she had somehow created an offense.

[920] In other words, enthusiasm for art, the very things you need as a teacher in the classroom, okay, were being trained out.

[921] Yeah, well, the thing is, if you respect art and literature, that means that you implicitly accept a hierarchy of quality, right?

[922] And that, of course, contradicts the fundamental tenets of the postmodern doctrine, which is that there are no hierarchies of quality.

[923] You know, you talked a little bit earlier about the idea that, you referred again to the idea that everything is associated with power.

[924] And that's the thing that I can't, that's the thing that I can't help but associate with a kind of personality pathology.

[925] Like, you know, from a psychometric perspective, the best predictors of long -term success in our society are intelligence, IQ, which you can measure very accurately, and trait conscientiousness, which actually is a real testament to the culture, right?

[926] Because what you'd hope is that the smart people who work hard are the people who advance.

[927] It isn't like they deserve it exactly.

[928] That isn't what I mean.

[929] It's that if the culture is harnessing the productive power of individuals properly, then it should differentially reward people who are smart and conscientious because they're going to do a bunch of really interesting work for the rest of us.

[930] And that's very well -established finding.

[931] It's as good as any finding in the social sciences.

[932] But despite that, and despite the fact that everything works, which is a goddamn miracle of sorts, there is this consistent story that we live in a patriarchy, that it's only oppressive, that it's done nothing but oppressed women since the beginning of time, which is also something that just boggles my mind, you know?

[933] Like, I know that...

[934] Men have sacrificed for women and children, including their lives, okay, for thousands of years.

[935] Yes, there's been brutality, but the brutality is in the minority, okay?

[936] Yes, this sick portrayal of human history is nothing but male oppression and female victimage.

[937] This is a way to permanently ensure the infantilization of women.

[938] Yes.

[939] Yes.

[940] Well, and you know, you can even make the case from a purely logical perspective.

[941] So here's an interesting fact.

[942] So most of the people who abused their children were abused as children.

[943] But most of the people who were abused as children don't abuse their children.

[944] Right.

[945] So if you look at the population of abusers, they were all abused.

[946] so you can say abuse causes abuse but that's not a good idea because you have a specific sample there right it's not a random sample what happens is that abuse dampens out over the centuries it doesn't propagate itself and that's obvious because if there was if the hypothesis of essential male tyranny was true it would spread exponentially through the population in like three generations and there wouldn't be an exception at all and so what happens is even when there is a tilt towards tyranny let's say in the family or even in the society that regresses back to something that's far more benign very, very rapidly.

[947] And you see this, so...

[948] To me, one of the biggest unexamined issues is the transition from the great extended family of old, into the nuclear family.

[949] And I do feel that Freud is the best analyst of the particular kind of claustrophobic cell of the modern nuclear family.

[950] It could be that human beings were never intended, okay, to be trapped in a house, with their parents.

[951] They extended families, you had your aunts and grandparents and cousins, all of whom helped form your identity.

[952] So one's identity was a member of a community rather than in this like hothouse environment.

[953] So I think that a lot of current issues, including this sudden spate of transgender claims and so on, a lot of these things are coming from this unstable in cell, it's a truly a prison cell of a nuclear family.

[954] Two parents perhaps cannot give all the knowledge of life to the young.

[955] And so I think there are all kinds of sexual issues, you know, that are generated by it.

[956] But with the, you know, psychology today is now simply a matter, a practical matter.

[957] People come in, you know, the psychologist in the United States deals with your present problem.

[958] Let's not go into the distant past, okay.

[959] Let's just deal with our present problem, which obviously you would We have forms of communication.

[960] We need to like fix this and then you'll be fine.

[961] As a consequence, there's a complete absence of any kind of analysis of your experiences as a child with your parents, you know, with your siblings and so on, how that might relate to your current sexual identity issues, whether it's transgender or whether it's homosexuality.

[962] You cannot possibly ask about any genesis of homosexuality today, okay?

[963] Because that is automatically defined as homophobic.

[964] Well, excuse me, every single, as an openly gay, you know, the person myself, every gay person I know, okay?

[965] There's some story there, okay, seems to be in childhood.

[966] Not only that, there's a strange similarity of the storylines of all of my friends who are gay, okay?

[967] There's the same pattern that had to do with blurred borderlines between a son and his mother and so on.

[968] I'm not blaming the mother, okay?

[969] I'm not blaming the mother at all.

[970] What I see as a dynamic going on in the bourgeois house of the nuclear family, where you had sometimes a distant father, a father who was present but not really engaged, and a mother who made the son her companion in some way.

[971] Often the mother has great imagination and flare, and they had a shared thing.

[972] And I mean, the idea that homosexuality has nothing whatever to do with your family life is nonsense.

[973] Well, it's also completely, well, that's another thing.

[974] And I got a lot of trouble in Canada for my opposition to Bill C -16, which was a bill that had to do with transgender rights.

[975] And I didn't really give a damn about the transgender right issue.

[976] That had nothing to do with it.

[977] What bothered me was that there was an issue of compelled speech because you were required by the Ontario Human Rights Commission to use the pronouns of the person's choice, right?

[978] Otherwise...

[979] And that is absolutely Orwellian.

[980] That's right.

[981] That is absolutely intolerable.

[982] You know, I have said, I said years ago, okay, that my book, Sexual Personi, which was like a 700 -page book, I said that is the biggest sex change in history because I, with my transgender issues, all right, to look to the magnificent construction of English, okay?

[983] It was the English language, okay, that I seized on to gain my identity and my power as a person, right?

[984] And therefore, any intrusion into English, someone trying to tell me how to use English, this great gift, okay, to me, this is absolutely obscene and evil, okay?

[985] For any government to try to dictate to us how we're going to use this magnificent instrument of English.

[986] Yes, absolutely.

[987] Absolutely.

[988] And that was for me the breaking point because I believed, well, and I think that that's associated with the idea of the Logos in the West, you know, because that's a deep mythological idea, that the Logos is the thing that brings order out of chaos through communicative speech, and that that's tightly aligned with your soul.

[989] And I don't care if you're an atheist or a believer.

[990] It doesn't matter.

[991] It's still the right language.

[992] And that no one has any right whatsoever under any circumstances to trespass against that.

[993] And so, but that's okay, because that's law in Canada now.

[994] And so, but, okay, so now back to your, let's see, you were making a point about, oh, yes, okay, because it's interesting to look at these things from, obviously, from multiple perspectives, which is another thing ideologues don't do, right, because for them, everything is one cause.

[995] That's how you can tell when you're dealing with someone who's ideologically possessed is they make everything attributable to a single cause like power.

[996] So, but, so one of the things that's happened with the nuclear family that's quite interesting too, is that parents are older and they have fewer children.

[997] So you could imagine that that hot house environment in some sense has been exaggerated for a bunch of reasons.

[998] One is, well, your child is a lot more valuable to you if you're older and you only have one or two, right?

[999] Because you're not going to get another chance.

[1000] First of all, you might have had some trouble having the child to begin with.

[1001] And you're not going to get another chance.

[1002] So you've got all your eggs are in one basket, so to speak.

[1003] And then, of course, children don't have the number of siblings they used to have.

[1004] And one of the things that's really useful about having siblings is that they keep you in your place, right?

[1005] They're primary socialization agents.

[1006] And, I mean, that can be brutal.

[1007] And that's reflected, say, in the story of Cain and Abel, you know, that that internal household dynamic with siblings can really become murderous.

[1008] And that has to be kept under control.

[1009] But I think the hot house flower person who's incapable of tolerating any job, or any testing, any dominance hierarchy testing of the sort that you said that men do.

[1010] Part of that's the consequence of being raised by older parents who have excess resources, who have no siblings, because the child is then, of course, special.

[1011] And that specialness, well, there seems to be an inverse relationship between that specialness that's protected and the person's robustness and resilience.

[1012] And then that's cotton to, or not cotton to, that's pandered to.

[1013] the universities which insist upon setting up a situation where no one is ever offended by anything any of the time and that's something I also can't understand at all because let me just say that's a huge point you just made okay because it's the upper middle class of the professional class okay who postpones having the children okay because they go to law school they go to medical school and they have the children after they're settled okay in a job okay so they're the ones okay who have injected this this hypersensitive bourgeois code into the universities.

[1014] Now my parents were 20 when they married and 21 when they had me. My father went to college on the GI Bill, getting out of World War II.

[1015] So when I was born, my father was still in college and was sweeping floors and so on.

[1016] I am the product of young parents.

[1017] And nature wants, actually, young parents, right?

[1018] Because pregnancy is quicker, it's safer, okay, and so on and my parents had the energy to you know this useful energy that can -do spirit that came out of World War II and so on I'm a product of that then then my only other sibling was born 14 years later okay my father at this point was a college professor okay all right so she had completely different parents than I did so she has very excellent manners and so she's completely different okay all right and I have all this like the energy I mean my parents were just a lot of their teens but now today we have this situation no and it's considered heresy to raise this issue okay that you have have young women are told okay there's one future for you you are future leader okay you must you must move forward okay four years of college and then perhaps some professional class all right so it may be the women young women's bodies are signaling okay that they want to be another's maybe maybe there are signals coming from the body right of maybe now wanting this this this system of education that was devised for men, that's being funneled along, channel along, in this mechanism, all right?

[1019] So young women, you know, feel unhappy, they don't know why, they feel, they have no sense of identity.

[1020] If they want to marry and drop out of college, and have a baby, they would be treated as traitors to their class.

[1021] What?

[1022] You are a future leader.

[1023] Have a baby, only working class women would do that.

[1024] Now, what I find working class women, okay, in general, okay, far more rounded as personalities, They express themselves forcefully, they have body language that takes up space, okay?

[1025] A man says something to them in the street, they are right back in their face and so on.

[1026] It's the bourgeois girls, okay, who are taught, they're special, okay?

[1027] Who have to postpone actual life, okay, for all these years.

[1028] You see, these are the girls who are who misjudged the fraternity party's setting.

[1029] These are the girls who like run for parental protection and handholding on the committee, investigating what went on their date, and so on and so forth.

[1030] So, yes, I think that you have located, that's very interesting, the idea that these young girls, who are so sensitive in college, so unable to handle their sex life, are the product of older parents because they went through the professional career track, right?

[1031] Yes, and they have not had the experience of the, you know, competitiveness, you know, and teasing of other siblings.

[1032] And they don't know how to how to...

[1033] Well, also, you know, the thing about young parents is they don't care as much as older parents.

[1034] And that actually turns out to be better, because what you really want for your children is minimum necessary intervention, right?

[1035] And the developmental literature is actually quite clear on this.

[1036] So if you're at home with your child, the best role that you can play is to be there, but not to be interacting with the child all the time.

[1037] The child should be off doing whatever it is the children do, which generally is playing with other children, right, without it being mediated also by screens and technology, because that's how they formulate their identity.

[1038] And that's how they learn to play joint games with other people And the parent is supposed to be there as a recourse for the child When they go out a little bit farther than they can tolerate And they have to come back and get some security And so but that isn't what that's especially not what happens to single children Because they're basically raised as miniature adults So when I wonder too like how much of the antipathy towards These are dark musings and I would say how much of the antipathy towards men that's being generated by say college age women is deep repugnance for the role that they've been designed and a disappointment with the men for who you know like you think of those is it Carpathian um or or uh I can't remember the culture the basic marital routine was to ride into the village and grab the bride and run away with her on a horse right it's like the like the motorcycle gang member who rips the two naive woman out of a girl out of the bosom of her family.

[1039] With the same white women, it's like an ancient myth.

[1040] There used to be bride stealing.

[1041] It was quite widespread.

[1042] Right.

[1043] So I kind of wonder if part of the reason that modern university age women aren't so angry is because that fundamental feminine role is actually being denied to them and they're objecting to that at a really, really fundamental level, like a level of primitive outrage.

[1044] Well, what's happened is the chaos that my generation of 1960s, bequeathed through the sexual revolution.

[1045] When I arrived in college in 1964, the colleges were still acting in local parenthis in place of a parent.

[1046] So at my dormitory, all women's dormitory, we women had to sign in at 11 o 'clock at night.

[1047] The men could run free the entire night.

[1048] So it was my generation of women that rose up and said, give us the same freedom as men have.

[1049] And the colleges replied, no, the world is dangerous.

[1050] You could be raped.

[1051] We have to protect you against.

[1052] And what we said, okay, was give us the freedom to risk rape.

[1053] Okay, and so that what, today's women don't understand, it's a freedom that you want, the same freedom that gay men have.

[1054] When they go and they pick up a stranger someplace, they know it's dangerous, they know they could end up beaten up or killed, okay, but they find it hot.

[1055] If you want freedom, if you want equality, okay, then you have to start behaving like a man. So what we did is, is we gave freedom to these young women for several generations, but my generation had been raised in a far more resilient and robust culture.

[1056] We had the strength, okay, to know what we wanted and to fight for what we wanted.

[1057] These young women have been raised in this protective, terribly protected ways.

[1058] So I think in some strange, you know, fashion, that all these demands for intrusion from these, you know, Stalinist committees, sexually, you know, investigating dates and so on, it's a way to re -institute, okay, the rules that might be.

[1059] generation throughout the window.

[1060] So I think these young women are desperate.

[1061] Not only that, but I have spoken out very strongly in a piece I wrote for Time Magazine, that is in my most recent book, the raising the drinking age in this country, okay, from 18 to 21, okay, has had a direct result, okay, in these disasters of binge drinking fraternity parties because to let college students the way we could go out as freshmen have a beer, sit in a protected adult environment, learn how to discourse with the opposite sex, in a safe environment, right, and so on.

[1062] And now today, okay, because of the stupid rule that young people can't even buy a drink, okay, in a bar until they're 21, we have these fraternity parties that are like, it's a caveman era.

[1063] Well, of course, in this modern age, this advantage is men, okay?

[1064] Men want to hook up, men want to have sex.

[1065] Women don't understand what men want.

[1066] You know, women are like put out because they're hoping that maybe the man will continue to be interested in the, them, okay?

[1067] The man just wants experience, okay, that the hormones drive toward, to me, I've theorized, okay, that the, you know, that the sex drive in men is intertwined with with haunted pursuit, okay?

[1068] Yes, yes.

[1069] I feel absolutely this is what women don't understand, okay, and if women understood what I understand from my transgender perspective, all right, these women on the streets, okay, you know, I'm, obviously, you know, Madonna, you know, admirer and you know I and I support pornography and prostitution so I don't want what I'm about to say to seem conservative is it it isn't okay what I'm saying is the women on the street young women okay who are about who are jogging okay with no bra on okay short shorts and have and have earbuds in their ears okay just jogging along like as I said these women do not understand the nature of the human mind they do not understand the nature of psychosis okay and this intertwining them talking about came of the the hunt -and -pursuit thing, okay?

[1070] They're triggering a hunt thing, just what you have talked about in terms of the zebra herd, they are triggering the hunt, okay, impulse, okay, in psychotic men, okay?

[1071] There goes a very appetizing and totally oblivious animal, bouncing along here, okay?

[1072] We're in a period now where psychosis is not understood at all, Young women have had no exposure to movies like psycho, the kind of rapist serial murderer thing and so on, the kind of strange dynamic that has to do with an assault on the mother imago in the mind of the psychotic.

[1073] But I think that there's an incredible naivete.

[1074] These young women are emerging and going to college and in this incredible dinetian environment of an orgiastic sexual experience, fraternity houses, they're completely unprepared for it, right?

[1075] And so you're getting all this outrage.

[1076] So feminist rhetoric has gotten more and more extreme in his portrayal of men as evil.

[1077] But in fact, okay, what we have is a chaos.

[1078] It's a chaos in the sexual realm.

[1079] The girls have not been told anything real in terms of biological substratum to sexual activity.

[1080] No, and there's full of lies about what constitutes consent, too.

[1081] Exactly.

[1082] And it's become something that's essentially portrayed linguistically as a sense.

[1083] sequence of progressive contracts, which, you know, is, it's, well, I think, you know, I've thought for a while that we're living in the delusional fantasy of a naive 13 -year -old girl.

[1084] That's basically sums up our culture.

[1085] And I look at all these sexual rules that permeate the, the academia.

[1086] And I think two things.

[1087] The first thing I think is, well, I know because I was an alcohol researcher for a long time, and you know that 50 % of violent crimes are directly attributable to alcohol.

[1088] So if you're murdered, there's about a 50 % chance that you're drunk and about a 50 % chance that the person who kills you is drunk.

[1089] And alcohol is the only drug that we know that actually amplifies aggression.

[1090] It does that in laboratory situations.

[1091] Plus, it's a great disinhibitor, right?

[1092] So what alcohol does is it, it doesn't make you oblivious to the future consequences of your action.

[1093] Because if you ask someone who's drunk about the consequences of something stupid, they can tell you what the consequences are.

[1094] But it makes you not care.

[1095] And it does that because it's technically an anxiolytic, like barbiturates or like benzodiazepines, and it also has an activating property for many people who drink, so it's a stimulant and an anxiolytic at the same time, and a very, very potent, it's very potent for both of them.

[1096] And, you know, we put young people together and douse them in alcohol, right, at the binge drinking level, and then, which also interferes with memory consolidation, which of course makes things much more complex, and then we're surprised when there are sexual misadventures.

[1097] And, you know, and then it's also attributed almost purely to the predatory element that's part and parcel of masculinity, but a tremendous amount of that is also naivety and stupidity.

[1098] You know, because we expect, like, 18 -year -old guys, especially the ones that haven't been successful with girls, which is like 85 % of them, because the successful men are a very small percentage of men.

[1099] The 85 % who haven't been successful with men or with women, they don't know what the hell they're doing at all.

[1100] Right, and part of the reason they're getting drunk is to garner up enough courage to actually make in advance, you know, because I think another thing that women don't understand, especially with regards to young men, is just exactly how petrifying attractive woman who's of, say, somewhat higher status actually is to a young guy.

[1101] And there's lots of guys that write me constantly and people that I've worked with that are so terrified of women, they can't even talk to them.

[1102] It's very, very common.

[1103] Well, you know, I take a very firm position, which is that I want college administrations to stay totally out of the social lives of the students, right?

[1104] If a crime is committed, it should be reported to the police.

[1105] I've been writing that for 25 years now, right?

[1106] But it's not the business of any college administration to take any notice, okay, of what the students say to each other, say to each other, as well as do with each other, okay?

[1107] I want it to totally stop.

[1108] It is fascism of the worst time.

[1109] Yeah, I agree.

[1110] Well, I think it's fascism.

[1111] of the worst kind, because it's a new kind of fascism.

[1112] You know, it's partly generated by legislation.

[1113] So like the Title IX memo that was written in 2011, I recently got a copy of that goddamn thing.

[1114] That was one polluting bit of legislation.

[1115] That was that memo basically told universities that unless they set up a parallel court system, they were going to be denied federal funding.

[1116] It is absolutely unbelievable.

[1117] Incredible.

[1118] And the leftists are supporting this.

[1119] I know, I know.

[1120] And this shows there is no authentic campus leftism.

[1121] I'm sorry, it's a fraud.

[1122] I mean, the faculty should be fighting the administrations on this.

[1123] Yeah, tooth and nails.

[1124] Fighting that federal regulation of, you know, how we're supposed to behave on campus?

[1125] Well, how can you be so naive and foolish to think that taking an organization like the university, which already has plenty to do, and forcing it to become a pseudo -legal system, that parallels the legal system could possibly be anything but utterly catastrophic.

[1126] It would mean you would have to know absolutely nothing about the legal system and about the tremendous period of evolution that produced what's actually a stellar system and an adversarial system that protects the rights of the accused and of the victim and to replace that with an ad hoc bureaucracy that has pretty much essentially the same degree of power as the court system with absolutely none of the training and none of the guarantees.

[1127] The kangaroo courts.

[1128] There are kangaroo courts.

[1129] That piece that I wrote about date rape, it was in January 1991 Newsday, got the most controversial thing I ever wrote in my entire career.

[1130] I attacked the entire thing, and demanded the colleges stand back and get out of the social ways of the students, so on, and people, the reaction, people tried to call, they called the president of my university, tried to get me fired.

[1131] You can believe the hysteria, okay?

[1132] I can believe it.

[1133] Yeah, yeah, it will, yes, you could believe it.

[1134] Anything that says to women, that they should be responsible for their own choices is regarded as reactionary?

[1135] Are they kidding me?

[1136] This is such a betrayal of authentic feminism in my view.

[1137] Well, it's the ultimate betrayal of authentic feminism because it's an invitation of all the things that you might be paranoid about with regards to the patriarchy back into your life, right?

[1138] It's an insistence that the most intrusive part of the tyrannical king come and take control over the most intimate details of your life.

[1139] Incredible.

[1140] And the assumption is that that's going to make your life better rather than worse, right?

[1141] And not to mention this idea of the stages of verbal consent, as if your impulses base in the body have anything to do with words and so on.

[1142] I mean, that's the whole point is, you know, about sex, okay, is to abandon, okay, that, you know, that part of the brain that's so, you know, and it trampled with words.

[1143] I mean, there's, you see these.

[1144] It's actually a marker of lack of social ability to have to do that, because if you're sophisticated, it's not like if you're dancing with someone, it's not like you call out the moves, right?

[1145] If you have to do that, well, you're, you're more worse than a neophyte, right?

[1146] You're an awkward neophyte, and anybody with any sense should get the hell away from you.

[1147] And so if you're reduced to the point where you have to verbally negotiate every element of intimate interaction, then...

[1148] What a downer.

[1149] Oh, my God.

[1150] Yes, but what an unbelievably, what would you call it, naive and pathological view of the manner in which human beings interact?

[1151] There's no sophistication in that.

[1152] Well, what I'm worried about also in this age of social media, I've noticed as a teacher in the classroom, that the young people are so used to communicating now by cell phone, okay, by iPhone.

[1153] that they're losing body language and facial expressions, okay, which I think is going to compound the problem with these dating encounters, okay?

[1154] Because the ability to read the human face and to read little tiny inflections of emotion.

[1155] I think my generation got that from looking at great foreign films with their long takes, so you'd have Jean Moreau and Catherine de Nose, okay, in like a potential romantic encounters.

[1156] And you could see the tiniest little, little inflections, that signal communication or sexual readiness or irony or skepticism or distance or whatever.

[1157] So the inability to read other people's intentions, I think this is going to be a disaster.

[1158] I just noticed how year by year the students are becoming much more flat affect.

[1159] And they themselves complain that they'll sit in the same room with someone and be texting to each other.

[1160] Yeah, well, there's a piece of evidence, too, that supports that to some degree.

[1161] So women with brothers are less likely to get raped.

[1162] Aha.

[1163] And the reason for that is that they've learned that nonverbal language deeply, right?

[1164] And they can spot the...

[1165] Not only that, okay, but I have noticed, okay, in my career, okay, that women who have many brothers, okay, are very good, okay, as administrators and as business people, okay, all right?

[1166] because they don't take men seriously, okay?

[1167] They regard, they saw their brothers, they think their brothers are jokes, okay?

[1168] But they know how to control men, okay, while they still like men, okay?

[1169] They admire men, right?

[1170] So this is something that I have seen, you know, repeatedly.

[1171] Yeah, well, so that would be also reflective of the problem of fewer and fewer siblings.

[1172] Yes, that's right, okay, yeah.

[1173] Yeah, yeah.

[1174] I've noticed this in publishing, okay, that the women who have the job of publicists, okay, and rise to the top as manager of publicity, their ability to take charge of men and they're humor at men.

[1175] Yes.

[1176] And they have great relationships with men, because they don't have the sense of resentment and worry and anxiety and so on.

[1177] They don't see men as aggressors, okay?

[1178] And I think that's another thing too, is that as feminism moved into its present, a system of ideology, it has tended to denigrate motherhood as a lesser order of human experience, and to enshrine, of course, abortion.

[1179] Now, I am 100 % of abortion rights.

[1180] I belong to Planned Parenthood for years until I finally rejected it as a branch of the Democratic Party, my own party, and so on.

[1181] But as motherhood became excluded, as feminism became obsessed, okay, with the professional woman, okay?

[1182] I feel that the lessons that mothers learn have been lost, okay, to feminism, okay?

[1183] which is, okay, that if the mothers who bear boy children, okay, understand the fragility of men, the fragility of boys, they understand it, they don't see boys and men as a menace, they understand the greater strength of women, okay?

[1184] So there's this tendness, you know, and connectedness between the mother and the boy child, okay, when motherhood is part of the experience, okay, of women who are discussing gender.

[1185] So what we have today is that this gender ideology has risen up on campuses where all none of the girls, none of the students have married, none of them have had children, okay, and you have women, some of them have had children, but a lot of them are lesbians or like professional women and so on, okay?

[1186] So this whole tenderness and forgiveness and encouragement that women do to boys, okay, they don't understand, this hypersensitivity of boys is not understood, okay?

[1187] Instead, boys are seen as somehow more privileged, okay, and somehow, you know, their energy level is interpreted as aggression, okay?

[1188] Potential violence and so on, okay, right?

[1189] So I think that, that what we would do the better, okay, if we would have, I have proposed, okay, that colleges should allow, the moment a woman is entered, okay, she has entrance to that college for life, okay, and that she should be free to, to leave, okay, to have babies when she, when her body wants that babies when it's healthy to have them, okay, and then return, have the occasional course, okay, build up credits and fathers, I mean, you might be able to do it as well, and so on, to get married women, women with children into the classroom.

[1190] The moment that happens, it's happened after World War II, okay, where you've had a lot of married guys in the classroom, okay, and so on, not yet that many women, the experience of a married person with a family, okay, talking about gender, But most of the gender stuff would be laughed out of the room, okay, if you had a real mother in there who had experienced, you know, childbirth and had, had, and it was raising boys and so on.

[1191] So I think that's also, you know, something that has led to this, this incredible, you know, artificiality and hysteria, okay, of feminist rhetoric.

[1192] There's another strange element to that, which is that on the one hand, the radical feminist types, the neo -Marxist, post -modernists, are very much opposed to the patriarchy, let's say, and that's that unidimensional ideological representation of our culture.

[1193] It has never existed.

[1194] I mean, perhaps the word can be applied to Republican Rome, and that's it.

[1195] Well, and maybe it could be applied usefully to certain kinds of tyranny, but not to a society that's actually functional.

[1196] Victorian England, arguably, other than that, to use the word patriarchy in that slap -dash way, so amateurist, it just shows people know nothing about history, whatever, have done no reading.

[1197] So what confuses me about that is that despite the fact that the patriarch is viewed as this essentially evil entity and that's associated with the masculine energy that built this oppressive structure, the antithesis of that, which would actually be feminine, as far as I can tell, which is tightly associated with care and with child rearing, is also denigrated.

[1198] So it's like the only proper role for women to adopt is a patriarchal role, despite the fact that the patriarchy is something that's entirely corrupt.

[1199] So the hypothesis seems to be that the patriarchy would be just fine if women ran it.

[1200] So no changes.

[1201] It would just be a transformation of leadership, and somehow that would rectify the fundamental problem even though it's hypothetically supposed to be structural.

[1202] Okay, so I'm going to close with something.

[1203] So you know, there are elements in my character that are optimistic.

[1204] You know, I've looked, for example, I work for a UN committee and on the relationship between economic development and sustainability and I found out a variety of things that were very optimistic, like the fact that you know, the UN set out to have poverty between 2000 and 2015 worldwide and actually hit that by about 2010, right?

[1205] So We're in that period of the fastest transformation of the bottom strata of the world's population into something approximating middle class that's ever occurred.

[1206] And there's all these great technological innovations on the horizon.

[1207] And it looks to me like things could go extraordinarily well if we were careful.

[1208] But I'm not optimistic.

[1209] And maybe that's me. I'm pessimistic because I also see that there's five or six things happening, all of which appear at the level of catastrophe that are all happening at the same time.

[1210] And so one of the things that I'd like to ask you is like, what do you see happening in the next 10 years in the universities or in culture at large?

[1211] And I mean, you just put forward a proposal for the universities for the treatment of women, which I think is a very interesting one because women do have a different time frame than men.

[1212] But like, what the hell is the proper way forward?

[1213] I've been encouraging young men to tell the truth and to take responsibility.

[1214] And there's a huge market for that message.

[1215] But I'm not convinced by any stretch of the imagination that it's in that.

[1216] What, like, when you look forward and you try to be optimistic, what the hell do you see?

[1217] Well, in the largest, you know, scale, I'm concerned about the future of Western culture because as a student of history, it looks too much to me like ancient Rome, okay, which became over -expanded, which became, it was at the mercy of bureaucratic creep, okay?

[1218] I can imagine one of them.

[1219] Yes, right.

[1220] And Roman identity eventually got blurred, okay, in its incorporation of so many different cultures, which at first seemed like a healthy kind of multiculturalism, but eventually it over -expanded and simply collapse of its own way.

[1221] So I am concerned about the, you know, whether Western culture is in a rapid decline.

[1222] I think it would be very easy because we are, you know, so interconnected and so over -complexed.

[1223] very easy to bring it to ruin.

[1224] It would only take one major natural disaster to do that.

[1225] But the universities themselves, I mean, I think people are all of a sudden in the United States much more attentive to issues of political correctness because of the riots at Berkeley, which was the capital free speech.

[1226] I mean, the free speech movement happened in the spring before I entered college in 1964.

[1227] It's one of the great principles and inspirational stories in my entire life.

[1228] Mario Savio's assertion of the supremacy, of free thought and free speech.

[1229] So I think that perhaps we might just have turned a corner, but it's gonna take a very, very long time for the university to be reformed.

[1230] I feel that the cafeteria menu of the university curriculum has to be abandoned.

[1231] We must return to historical courses that begin in the earliest period, the Stone Age and Antiquity, in order to give perspective, you know, to our, to our present analysis of our present culture, I want 50 to 75 % of college administrators fired, okay, and the money be transferred over, okay, to faculty, into libraries, and to instruction, okay?

[1232] I think that, you know, obviously, the way things are being, people are being trained right now, including at the public school level, okay, is, I think the public school level has gone to hell, okay?

[1233] When my, when my mother came, you know, came to the United States, the age of six, the old public school system was still very strict.

[1234] And therefore, she had excellent education, you know, and got all A's in her, even though she started out not speaking English, spoke without an accent, et cetera.

[1235] Okay, so today, this kind of feel -good public school education, which is a form of ideology in indoctrination right now.

[1236] It's all about no bullying, okay, and not about anything.

[1237] And not even seriously about no bullying.

[1238] Yes, yeah.

[1239] So I can tell, in my own students, I mean, I've been teaching for 46 years.

[1240] So I can tell this slow degradation of public school education, okay, to the point now that the students have absolutely no sense of world geography, of world history, okay?

[1241] They know absolutely not, they don't know anything about wars, okay, and the reality, the barbaric reality of most of human history, okay, and what a...

[1242] That's triggering.

[1243] Yeah, right.

[1244] What a fantastic culture we live in and so on.

[1245] Now, identity politics itself has just got to stop.

[1246] I mean, it was important once, okay?

[1247] I was a rebel against the WASP, you know, hegemony, okay, white Anglo -Saxon Protestant hegemony in American culture.

[1248] It was suffocating.

[1249] I was raised in the 1950s, when wasps controlled corporations and education and politics and so on.

[1250] So identity politics was necessary once, okay, We asserted gay rights, with Stonewell Rebellion of 1969, we assert we asserted, okay, the women's rights with the rebirth of second -wave feminism in the late 1960s, okay?

[1251] But there's endless, okay, preoccupation with a fragmented identity, we must return to the authentic 1960s vision, which is about identity coming from consciousness, which transcends gender, which transcends all these divisions of race, and ethnicity, okay, and ethnicity, okay, Consciousness itself, okay, right?

[1252] There's no sense of that any longer.

[1253] That's what the 1960s saw.

[1254] Well, I see that as a complete abandonment of personal responsibility because that consciousness, I think, symbolically, and I got a lot of this from Jung and also from Eric Neumann.

[1255] I mean, that's the great logos of the West, right?

[1256] That's the transcendent principle, which is respect for the primacy of individual consciousness.

[1257] And what goes along with that primarily isn't individual rights, although that's built into it.

[1258] I mean, that's the reason we have individual rights is for respect for that.

[1259] But the responsibility that comes along with being an individual instead of the member of some group, especially a victimized group, which is like the assure, I wrote an article with one of my students who had toured the mass gravesites in the former Yugoslavia, you know, and had been exposed to that sort of thing.

[1260] And one of the things that our research indicated was that the best predictor of genocide is victimization on the part of the group that produces the genocide, right?

[1261] a sense of, an accelerated sense of victimization, and then it's, well, we get them before they get us.

[1262] So, and everyone's being taught now that they're a victim.

[1263] And then no one seems to have any sense that, you know, that's part of the essential tragedy of being, that life is suffering, and that and that the world rests on a foundation of suffering.

[1264] It's nothing to take personally, and something to take responsibility for instead of blaming and resentment and all of the things that have polluted our universities and our culture.

[1265] Well, there also was the abandonment, okay, of the, you know, of the canon, okay, people, you know, asserted that the canon was the product of bias and, again, of, you know, of a, you know, provincial elitism and so on.

[1266] But in point of fact, as a student of history of the arts, okay, I can assure people that the canon, okay, overwhelmingly so, is, is the result of what artists have determined, okay?

[1267] We say a work is important as canonical because artists following it, okay, we're influenced by it.

[1268] We have this, like, beautiful cascading tradition of influence, all right?

[1269] So it's another part of the Philistinism, okay, of current education, to believe that there are these external reasons, okay, for why a work lasts, why a work, you know, written 500 years ago or a thousand years ago, has global relevance.

[1270] As if it's some sort of political conspiracy that's based on power.

[1271] As if anybody could even manage that, no matter how nefarious they were.

[1272] But also, we in the 60s had the idea, okay, that there was like this human, human sensibility, that transcendent, individual, nations, and so on, right?

[1273] And that there was this like rubric, you know, cosmic consciousness, okay?

[1274] This sense of the universe as a whole, and to see the human being.

[1275] in relationship to great eternal principles of life and death, mortality, and so on.

[1276] Whereas, you know, Marxism is blind.

[1277] Marxism is very narrow.

[1278] All it sees is society.

[1279] It sees nothing beyond society.

[1280] It doesn't see nature.

[1281] I mean, it's absolutely mad.

[1282] How you can have a system being taught in universities, right?

[1283] Which thinks that this tiny thing of society, compared to the enormity and beauty of nature, It should take all of our, you know, absorb all of our energy and attention.

[1284] So, I mean, I just think that there's like a parochialism, a provincialism, you know, now a kind of, you know, systematized elitism in our current education has just got to be rooted out.

[1285] And I want to return to basics, great simplicities.

[1286] All these faculty members teaching their little tiny courses that have to have to do with their own specialty.

[1287] That's got to stop.

[1288] People can pursue whatever they want in their private research as scholars, certainly that's necessary, but they must teach in the core curriculum.

[1289] And people must decide what is crucial for an educated person to know.

[1290] I do want a multicultural, I do want a global curriculum.

[1291] I want all the cultures taught, okay?

[1292] This is not the answer.

[1293] Marxism, this neo -Marxism in the universities, is simply, it's lazy, it's a lazy way to assert multiculturalism, without actually doing the research and the study of other cultures.

[1294] Okay.

[1295] That's a good one to close on.

[1296] We agreed on everything.

[1297] I knew this.

[1298] I knew it.

[1299] All right.

[1300] Thank you very much.

[1301] To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, the link to which can be found in the description of this episode.

[1302] Dr. Peterson's self -development programs can be found at self -authoring .com.