Higher Ed & Our Cultural Inflection Point: JB Peterson/Stephen Blackwood

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I'm Steven Blackwood.
I'm part of a small team of people founding a new university in Savannah, Georgia.
I'm the president of that new institution.
I'm here today at Cambridge University and Ancient, a gust and beautiful institution.
And I have the great pleasure today to have with me Dr Jordan Peterson, professor of psychology of the University of Toronto, and I think it is safe to say, an un ignore a ble figure of our time.
Jordan.
It's a real pleasure to have you here today.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Pleasure to be here this unbelievable place.
Jordan and I are going to talk today about what he has called the inflection point.
And my hope is that that conversation will lead us into a discussion of the possibilities for cultural renewal.
Indeed, the possibilities for the the renewal, the renaissance of a more fully human culture.
I think you've called that the inflection point were called our cultural temporal moment to kind of inflection point.
When we start there, what is the inflection point?
Well, I think we're deciding.
We're trying to decide if there's such a thing as a direction to move forward to into the future.
That's what it looks like to me.
I mean, on the one hand, we're making tremendous technological progress in all sorts of directions simultaneously, and that seems to be having mostly positive effects, especially economically, especially on a global scale.
And another hand we seem more confused about are the foundations of our culture and the potential directions that were moving in.
Then we have bean for a while on DATs seems especially acute in educational institutions, and that seems to be a consequence of the constant cultural critique that's being generated, I would say mostly on them on the postmodern inch edge of the academic.
What would you say, academic, uh, territory.
So So we're trying to figure out what's next.
What?
What do we have to offer to students?
All of that.
I know that this yesterday was published the 50th anniversary edition of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago with a forward that you've forward written by you, which I think you described the writing of is one of the greatest owners of your life.
If I got that right, it's academic.
Now, I suppose the question I have there is is why is that so important?
Well, the book was important because it was the first.
It was the first work that succeeded in undermining the Marxist project from a moral and an intellectual perspective simultaneously, I mean, other people had pointed out the terror of the Soviet enterprise Malcolm Muggeridge and George Orwell, among others, often people on the left, interestingly enough, but it was always possible, right up until the end of the 19 sixties, for the people who held on to that collectivist utopian dream in the West to rationalize what had happened in the Soviet Union, partly by sweeping it under the rug but also partly by while using the old adage that you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, It became obvious by the end of the 19 sixties that the omelet wasn't very well prepared and that millions of eggs, so to speak, to be labor a metaphor had bean broken.
And so when soldier knits and wrote his great book, um, it became impossible for anyone who was willing to be part of the cultural moment to ignore the fact that something had gone dreadfully sideways and that it couldn't be attributed merely to a cult of personality or to some abnormality that wasn't intrinsically part of the doctor in itself.
And so that was partly what soldier soldier knits and revealed about the Soviet Union as such, but at the same time, the evidence that precisely the same thing had been happening in places like Maoist, China, perhaps to even a larger degree, while undoubtedly to a larger degree and then in Cambodia and all the other places where Marxism produced utterly murderous consequences.
Um and so that was the book that did that, and it made Marxism morally repugnant, you know, it was also one of the events that catalyzed the transformation of Marxism into identity politics, as far as I'm concerned, because a lot of the people who held the the victim victimizer narrative as sacrosanct that that was the appropriate way to look at the world, to divide people into identity groups of whatever form, and then to see history as the battle between them history, the present and the future that trends that transmuted especially in France.
Because even though the Marxists had bean unmasked, the murderous nous of the doctrine had be not masked.
That didn't the people who held that doctor we're still looking for the easiest lateral move.
And so that was one of the driving forces for the development of postmodernism, not the only one, the postmodernists that are also figured out something or run across something that really is an intractable problem.
They ran across the problem of categorization and that that actually happened in multiple disciplines at the same time, including artificial intelligence and psychology, people realize start to realize about in the early sixties it was probably under the pressure of the A.
I types that it was very difficult to perceive the world because objects aren't just there for the looking, because every object is made of sub objects and his part of, ah, higher order structure of objects and defining what constitutes the appropriate boundary to put around a phenomenon so that it could be perceivable as an object turns out to be a virtually impossible task.
We're not sure how it can be managed, and so the that realization of the intrinsic complexity of things led to a crisis.
I would say, an intellectual crisis, which was well, if there's a near infinite number of ways to perceive a finite set of entities, how is it that you can call anyone interpretation either can, ah, nickel or valuable.
And that's part of the post modern skepticism, Let's say of meta narratives, and it's actually a reasonable critique.
The problem is, as far as I'm concerned, that what the postmodernists did was used that problem, which is a genuine problem, uh, as a critique of the structure of the West.
And then instead of addressing the problem directly, which is, well, the world is very complex.
But we do in fact perceive it, and they're actually our value structures.
They just circumvented that and popped back into a bastardized form of mark.
The bastardized form of Marxism that we see today is identity politics, and that's being extraordinarily destructive to the university's.
Well, let's let's let's talk about that a bit more because it seems to me that it would be a great shame if people were to think that your you're writing this forward to souls in its skin was simply the document, something as a historic phenomenon as essentially important as that historic documentation is, it seems to me that what is of interest to you is not simply to shed light on the terrors, the 100 million slaughtered in the course of the various communist revolutions of the 20th century.
Those various ideologies motivated by Marxism and other other forms of philosophical ideology.
But because it seems to me that you take what was present in that philosophically, ideologically, still to be at work in, in there to have been, as it were reborn in the West.
And so, I suppose, what I'd like to ask you voters, what are the what are the characteristics of the the Marxist ideology that led to those get that that that very obvious death and destruction, which in in a subtler way, you see to be am I right to say, you see, to be at work in the West Side like it seems to be very important that we have a a deep sense of what the the governing assumptions of our culture, our or it's hard to transcend them.
Yeah, well, that is exactly the issue, because the question is whether or not the past is over.
I mean, there's a more exact Marxist philosopher named Richard Wolf who challenged me recently on YouTube to a debate and really the answer that I posted was this forward and he accused me of being stuck in the past.
You know, it's wealthy, you know.
The wall fell in 1989 and the horrors of the Soviet era are over.
And we we we can't paint.
We can't eternally tar Marxism with the brush of these past events.
I mean, as if these events are over or a Ziff 50 years is sufficient time to forget about the corpses.
But that's his idea, you know.
And to me, it's the same idea that you might put forward if you were a neo Nazi by saying that Well, you know how all that happened.
Back in 1945 the fundamental doctrine was sound, and we can't allow our judgment about thes eternal truths manifested in the national socialist doctrine to be forever tainted by some unfortunate historical events.
And I think that that's just well, I don't even know what to say about it.
I mean, one of the telling things about his comments was that he only talked about the Soviet Union and not all the other terrible places, that the same doctrine had been implemented with equally murderous effects.
And so that was quite the argument by evasion.
But what I tried to do in the forward and in my thinking in general is I'm always trying to get to the bottom of things what's at the bottom.
And it seems to me that what happened if you look at what happened in the Russian Revolution like the first thing you want to do is give the devil his due, okay?
And the way you do that is by pointing out that hierarchical structures we'll start even before that.
People have problems that have to be solved.
Life is a sequence of problems that have to be solved.
If you don't solve the problems that life puts forward, you suffer and you die.
So assuming that you don't want those two outcomes, then there are problems you have to solve, and so you have to set it aim.
And the aim is to solve the problem.
And then because we're social creatures, we have to solve the problems by organizing collectively and the way we do that, Generally speaking in relationship to a name is to produce a hierarchy.
And the reason for that is that if you have a problem and you want it to be solved and you get a variety of people working on it.
You're soon going to discover that some people are much better at solving the problem than others, and that will inevitably produce a hierarchy.
And it should.
Because then the even the structure of authority is is in sync with the aim.
And they miss valuable because it's a problem that everybody agrees that is an actual problem.
So you're going to get hierarchical organizations, and you should.
Now the problem with that is that as soon as you produce a hierarchical organization, two things happened.
One is that a small minority of the people do almost all the creative work.
That's the parade of principle, and the other is that the benefits of the hierarchy flow disproportionately to a small number of people at the top.
So that's another manifestation of the pre to principal.
And it is something that Marks pointed out, although he blamed it on capitalism, which, which is a big mistake, even if you're concerned.
For those the hierarchy dispossess is so you produce a hierarchy.
Both the work, the work flows from a minority of people and the benefits flow to a minority people.
And those might not be the same people, by the way, right, because hierarchies aren't perfect in their ability to distribute resources as a consequence of productive effort.
That's part of the problem with higher organizations.
But then what the hierarchy does is produce a layer of the dispossessed that stack up at the bottom near zero, and it's the majority.
It's always the majority.
So that's the price you pay for hierarchies.
Now what the left does this say?
Look at the dispossessed and keep the hierarchy flexible enough so that it can twist and Bandon transform unnecessary, but also so that the dispossessed don't fall so close to zero that a.
That they're done there in misery be that the talents they might possess can't be utilized and see that the whole structure doesn't become so untenable that it destroys itself because of the inequality.
Perfectly reasonable propositions.
And so then you could say, Well, there's a certain number of people on the left who are genuinely motivated by concern about dispossession as well.
It's the dispossessed, of course.
Fine.
So that's to give the devil his due.
And so then you might say, Well, there was moral reasons.
There were moral reasons for at least a subset of those who were involved in the Russian revolution to be involved.
They were interested in helping the dispossessed.
But there's a problem, and this is the problem of the left.
There's a problems on the right as well.
The problem on the right is once the hierarchy is established.
Those who dominate the top have every right to overstate the moral virtue of the hierarchy because it privileges them in particular on the left.
The problem is, is that it's not easy to distinguish between care for the dispossessed and hatred for those who occupy positions of well, you could say authority.
The leftists would say power.
You could also say competence, which I think is more to the case or ability.
It's not easy to distinguish care for the dispossessed from hatred for those who occupy the preeminent positions in the hierarchy and if its power than its hatred for power.
But if its competence and it is competence, if the hierarchy is functional, then it's hatred for the competent.
Okay, then you say All right, so those are the two competing motivations care for the dispossessed and hatred for the Let's say, competent.
Let's play that out historically speaking and see which is the more powerful force.
While that got played out very rapidly in the Russian Revolution and what happened was even if there was a minority and perhaps even a majority, Although there wasn't but perhaps even the majority of those who truly cared for the dispossessed, those who hated the competent slaughtered them.
It turned out that the hatred was a much more potent, uh, geopolitical force than the compassion.
And then another twist occurred to because the narrative was bourgeoisie against proletariat, Let's say.
And so that's those at the uppermost pinnacle of the hierarchy against those who have the dispossessed.
And that was also the historical narrative.
And then it was the right and responsibility of those who were oppressed to rise up.
But that ran into another problem, which is basically the problem that the that the postmodernists, especially on the feminist site, have now identified his intersectionality.
It's like, well, turns out that you're you can't so easily be placed into one group.
In fact, this is the perception problem that we talked about before there's a very large number of groups you could be placed in.
It might be an unlimited number of groups, in fact, and so then, if you're motivated primarily by hatred and your your desire is to produce is much mayhem is possible.
You can take any given person, and you can analyze the multiple groups that they belong to.
And then you can find one group in which they're the oppressor, and then because there's no excuse whatsoever for the oppression, even if there's one dimension of your identity along which you're an oppressor, that you're grist for the for the for the bone crushing mill of the of the Soviet work camp.
And that's exactly what happened.
And so, as the Soviet Revolution progressed, Maur and more people got thrown into the cauldron.
Let's say the Socialists, the students, the religious people, the old, the the old original revolutionary Stellan had all them killed because there was some.
And if it wasn't you that was guilty because of your group membership, they just expanded the capacity that the parameters of the idea of group well, you're not an oppressor.
But your grandfather was a landowner.
Well, that's good enough that's that's that's your class that sets.
And so that's sufficient justification to throw you to the wolves as well.
And so what you saw is this just unbelievable expansion of murderous nous driven by the twin improper pre suppositions that you could define people by their group identity and that history was best conceptualized as a battle between the fortunate, the unfortunate Longo's group identities.
Yes, if we could pick up that notion of the group identity and the collect what you call the color, that's where the collectivist thinking it seems to me that might be opposed to a kind of robust view of the human individual as the site of responsibility and agency suffering and s.
So it seems to me that what I'd like to ask you about is that is the connection between or the ways in which the collectivist thinking results in the annihilation of all human, particular arat e, whether it's economic or familial.
Or you might say it seems to me that what's going on in the collective is thinking is the absolute enemy of human particular charity and freedom itself the enemy of the idea of the individual, the sovereign individual, which is the central idea of the West, I mean, and that's manifested in the underlying religious structure.
So if you think about Christianity, for example, you think about Christianity psychologically, strip it of its metaphysics, at least for the purposes of the argument.
You see the emergence of the idea of the divine individual as as well as as what, as as part of what's what is part of divinity itself, Right?
As an integral part that's part of the training Terrian idea of the part of of divinity itself.
And that divinity, to me, is the capacity of the individual consciousness to generate order from potential.
So the way I look at people, first of all, so like people who have been criticizing what I'd be doing, I think about my philosophy such as it is not that it's mine as a sort of variant of I'm Rand's ideas of the centrality of the individual individual.
Above all, that's not the issue.
It's a conceptual issue.
Is that what what what category is to be primary and for me, the individuals to be primary And there's a variety of reasons for that.
First of all, the individual is the locus of suffering and also the locus of responsibility.
So those were really the two reasons that the individual has to be made primary, Um, but and the divinity element of the individual.
And this, I think, is coated in our deepest stories.
It's it's really deeply coded in Genesis, particularly in the opening chapters of Opening Verses of Genesis is that what human beings confront in their lives is akin to what God himself confronted at the beginning of time.
And so it's easy for us to believe that we're deterministic creatures like clocks and that it's the past that drives us forward in a deterministic manner into the future.
But I don't believe that's the case.
I actually don't think there's any evidence that that's the case, because people are so complex.
You actually can't predict them as if they're deterministic except in very constrained circumstances.
And so it's a hypothesis, but it's not a very good one.
And although it has its utility, what what what seems to me to be the case?
And I think this is how people conceptualize themselves and how they act towards themselves and towards other people and how our social structures are political structures are constituted is that human beings constantly confront a landscape of possibility, its potential itself.
And we have a belief in the idea of potential.
We have a new idea that there are things that could be a very strange conception of reality because it's not a materialistic conception, because things that could be aren't measurable in any sense, right?
But we certainly act as if they exist, and we all treat each other as if our one of our fundamental ethical requirements is for you to confront that potential properly.
And that would be to live up to your responsibility is you have these gifts and talents and and possibilities that have been granted to you.
And if you fail to make use of them, your talents, let's say then that's a sin of sorts, and that's a religious way of thinking about it.
But it doesn't matter because that's how people treat each other.
If you have a child, for example, or or or a spouse or or friend brother, anyone you care about and you see you have the intuition that they could be making more of themselves and what they have then they are then you're deeply disappointed in that, and the reason you're disappointed in that is because there's a call to us, an existentially call to confront that potential that's that's everywhere that faces us in every direction and to transform it into the most functional inhabitable order possible.
And the way that that is to be done properly is with truth.
And I think that all of those ideas are integral to the Judeo Christian substrate of Western culture, their fundamental ideas.
And so if you put the group before the individual, then all of that disappears.
When you're when you're debating with the radical leftist postmodern types about free speech, you're actually not debating with them about free speech because they don't believe in free speech.
It's not part of their conceptual universe, because for for speech to be free and therefore valuable, the people conducting the conversation have to be sovereign individuals capable of generating independent thought independent of their canonical group identity and reach a consensus through that process of dialogue.
None of that exists in the postmodern world.
All of those preconceptions would be attributed to, well, something like Eurocentric neocolonialism, something like that, it seems to me that wasn't working.
That is a radical dismissal of the possibility that the individual has access to anything at all.
That is to say that that that in the belief in free speech is fundamentally motivated by the by or sustained by the confidence that our discourse, our dialogue, that human thinking itself can reach something stable, that it has a relationship beyond the beyond immediacy.
And that and that and that they're beyond power and beyond power.
It reaches beyond power to truth.
There's no point never having a conversation about anything.
If the conversation itself doesn't have access to something transcends exactly right.
Well, so what happens with this is especially true for people like Fuko and Derrida.
To to some degree is well, the first thing you do is you define the fundamental motivation is power because that's all there is is there's the dominance of one group or the other, and so then the dialogue has to serve power because that's all there is.
And so, yeah, all of that is obliterated.
And and by doing that, actually, the the the postmodernists make it impossible for them to solve the conundrum that validly drove pause postmodernism to begin with.
So the conundrum is infinite set of potential interpretations.
That's a real conundrum.
That's the problem of complexity, right?
And it's really so.
Then the question is, why is there any solution to the problem of complexity?
And this is where issues of moral relativism start to become paramount.
Because if there's no solution to the problem of complexity, then there's no canonical interpretations, and all the interpretations are just, Well, what would you call it?
There?
They're expedient.
They have the expedience of power.
But see my best pathway through that essentially, I think, has come from the developmental psychologist Shawn PJ and P.
J could be considered a neo county in You know, the count's fundamental doctrine was act such that if your action became a universal maxim, that that would be of universal benefit.
And so but P.
J differentiated that and and and and demonstrated how that evolved naturally in the course of the spontaneous maturation of Children through play, it's absolutely brilliant.
So I give you a quick example.
So my granddaughter, who's 14 months old, has just learned a new game, and the game is she plays it with her wooden spoon, and the game is She has the spoon and then she looks at you and then she gives you the spoon and then you take it from her and she lets it go.
And then she watches you and then you give the spoon back and she's very happy to get the spoon back.
She's also very happy to give it to you.
And then she turns to the next person and she gives them the spoon and then she gets it back, and then you can play with her.
And the play is well.
Now.
You, you, you you started to embody the principle of reciprocity, right?
We can trade and it's a repeating game.
It's not one trade.
You don't end up with the spoon, and I don't end up with a spoon.
We both have the spoon some of the time across time, and there's some utility in the exchange itself.
Okay, so she's playing without and thrilled about.
And no wonder, cause it's a walloping, walloping discovery.
And so then you take the spoon from her and maybe you you hold it a little longer than she expects, and that makes her a little nervous, but then you give it back and then she's relieved and that makes her happy.
Or you cover the spoon with your hand.
And then she's a bit confused about where it might be in to show it to her and you give it back and she's happy about that.
Or she reaches out to grab it and you pull it away a little bit and move it back and forth so she has to do a little more effort to get it.
And as long as you don't push that, and it's a bit of a challenge to her both both physically in terms of coordination but also psychologically in terms of delaying gratification.
She also finds that gratifying.
And the reason for that is that you're you're showing how her how robust and resilient, the idea of reciprocity is across sequences of transformations.
And it's just this little thing you do at the table.
You think, Well, that's nothing.
It's like, No, it's something.
And so the PJD an idea is something like, There's a There's an implicit morality that emerges to constrain the infinite set of interpretations, and it has to do with the structure that will maintain reciprocity optimally in the largest, including the largest number of people across the largest amount of time.
And so and so the way that I've been portraying that for the people who've been listening to my lectures is that what you need to take responsibility for yourself as if you care for yourself?
OK, so first we figure out what's yourself.
Well, it's not just you now, because you aren't just you.
Now you're the community of use that extract stretch across time.
So in order for you to take care of yourself properly now you have to learn to play an integrative game with yourself that's sustainable and even potentially improve a ble across time.
And there aren't many games that you can play like that.
So that starts to radically constrained the set of possibilities.
And then it's more constrained than that.
Because not only do you have to play a game with yourself that can repeat across time to minimize suffering, to remove the possibility of death, to allow for the possibility of productive movement in a certain amount of happiness, but you have to do that with other people around you and across time.
And so there's you and the multiple use embedded in your family and the multiplicity of your family members embedded inside a culture and and the extension of that culture across time.
And so for you to act properly than all of those things have to be harmoniously balanced at the same time.
And that radically reduces the set of potential interpretations.
And that's the antidote to the to the chaos of of of, of the infinite array of potential perceptual worlds.
And and well.
And then there are questions that emerge out of that like, Well, what's the best way to play that game?
But we certainly know that reciprocity fair play the spirit of fair play is, is is immensely important to that.
That's what PJ documented, and that that's what we all know, and also that there's something about truth that's absolutely integral to that as well.
So and the postmodernists just they just got the problem right.
But they never went the next steps.
And it's partly because, Well, why is it why is it they had an easy answer at hand that required almost no transformation in their original worldview?
Well, we'll just keep the Marxism will just transform it into something that looks different.
That'll be good enough, minimal change.
So it seems to me that the that the collective the collective is thinking that's at work, in the insistence that only the group matters has the effect of radically annihilating the integrity of the individual, in fact, that maybe even it's it's s, I think I think it's it's a actually, that is a thing, I believe so at the bottom, like, because there's a There's a murderous nous at the bottom of the collectivism that needs to be accounted for.
And so I I see what's at the bottom, and this is partly consequence, say, of the insistence that the West is a patriarchal tyranny.
The desire is it's the cane enable desire.
See.
Kane was jealous of able, not so much because Abel was God's favorite, but because Able deserved to be God's favorite because he had done things right and it's very bitter.
It's very bitter in life to see a gap widening between you and someone else, period.
But it's particularly bitter if you know the gap is widening because the person who is doing well is doing is actually doing good and doing well, and that implies, at least in eradicating the vagaries and randomness of life.
And I'm perfectly aware of those as factors.
It's bad enough to be down, but it's worse to know that you're down because you put yourself down and then you have a choice, which is, Do you do turn against the ideal itself because it becomes so painful to gaze upon it?
Or do you destroy the ideal out of vengeance in spite?
And that's and that's that's a simpler pathway forward than decomposing and deconstructing yourself and being reborn They the Christian idea for lack of a better word is that something has to be sacrificed in order for the potential of the future to be manifest in the best possible way.
There's always a demand for sacrifice.
The question is what should be sacrificed and the answer is you, that's that's it's you that should be sacrificed.
And then the question is, what what part of you and and the answer that is, well, the part of you that's not worthy that needs to be put into the flame that needs to be burnt off and that's a process of death and rebirth.
And if there's lots of you that has become corrupt, then most of what passes through the fire will be burnt off.
And that's terribly painful for people.
It's That's the desert, you know, Imagine that you're that you're essential.
Personality structure is tyrannical, so you're a rigid ideologue, your cast in stone, and so you decide to move from the tyranny you escaped from the tyranny.
Well, where do you end up where you don't end up in the promised land?
You end up in the desert for 40 years, and maybe you die there.
I mean, even Moses did.
So it's out of the frying pan into the fire, that's for sure.
And it's no wonder that people are loath to let go, and then the more tyrannical they've become, the more they've restricted their possibility and all of that, and sold their soul to the dogma of human beings.
Let's say a Social Nixon would describe it, the less there is of them that will be left after everything is stripped bare, and that's a terrifying.
That's a terrifying possibility.
It's much easier to take the other route, and it becomes easier and easier.
And then, well, there are other motivations that pile up a CZ.
Well, bitterness, the hatred that bitterness can because you know you've lost your chance, right?
You had your chance and you've and you've squandered it.
And the and the feeling of that.
I think that's why Cain tells God after he gets caught after his murderous act.
He says that his punishment is more than he could bear because it's the realization of what he's done.
He's destroyed his own ideal, and that's what you do.
If you're a collectivist, you destroy yourself as an individual, and that's all you have.
And so there's There's nothing in that except, I would say, a continually opening pet of hopelessness and despair, and then that drives bitterness and hatred and desire for revenge and all of that.
It's a terrible cycle, and we've seen it play itself out, over and over, and and and we haven't yet precisely learned from that.
So to me it's part of an eternal struggle, You know, it's been outlined as a as a war, in some sense, that's going on in the human psyche since the beginning of time for all intents and purposes, it seems to be joining that your position is is fundamentally a positive one.
It's an affirmation of human dignity, the freedom that dignity demands and an affirmation of the infinite particular arat e of human life.
You would know if one were to contrast the collectivist thinking.
On the one hand, one might call it a kind of abstract rationality is if there's one solution to fit them.
One size fits all kind of talk down logic.
What's on the other side?
What's the What's the antidote to that in the individual?
Yeah, it is particularly, I mean, one of the things I talk about in 12 Rules for Life and this is in my lectures.
This has become a mean, strangely enough, something that's widely distributed on the Web, partly because there's a comical element to it.
It's to clean up your room, and everyone laughs about that because I'm taking that seriously.
It's like, Oh, clean up your room.
Everyone's mother has told them that 1000 times, right, But I tried to explain why it's like, well, you have a bit of chaotic potential right in front of you.
It's in some sense, infinite in its potential and the domain in which you could manipulate.
That might be rather restricted because of the restrictions that are part and parcel of your existence.
But maybe you have your room, and you might think you might have contempt for that.
And so it's a complete bloody catastrophe.
But you don't have to.
You can think, Well, I've got a little It isn't a room, it's a place of potential, and as soon as you know that, then it's It's not your room anymore.
It isn't a room.
The room that you see is your preconception of the space that you inhabit.
What's there is is a fragment of infinity.
That's what's there, and what you see is the is the is the low resolution consequence of your assumption and lazy habit and blindness.
That's your initial room, and you think, Well, no, that's not The room seemed part of what artists do.
For example, when van Gogh paints a room and you look at it glowing, he's trying to show you what's beyond your perception of the room.
And I mean this technically like the way that your visual system is set up is that whenever memory and presumption can can can replace direct perception, it will because it's simpler.
So you literally see what you expect to see.
And if what you see is dull and drab and boring and pointless and and uninspiring, then that's you.
It's not what's there, and what the artist does when he or she re represents that mundane reality is to remind you of what's behind it, the potential that's there.
And so what I'm suggesting to people is that they take the potential that's right in front of them.
It's like, Okay, and here's the rule you're aiming up.
There's something that you could change that you would change that might be a very small thing.
Could Well, that's within the grasp of your power would is within the grasp of your will.
To combine those two things might be very small shift.
You might only be willing to make a very tiny step forward.
It's like, fine, good enough.
Make a tiny step forward, and that makes you a slight bit stronger than you were before.
And then the next step could be slightly larger, and it's It's the path of humility.
It's what people It's what people act out when So there's this cathedral.
It's actually it's not a cathedral.
It's an oratorio in Montreal, I think it's the second largest one in the world.
It's set on a hill at the top of the hill, and there's a huge staircase leading up to it from the bottom of the hill.
And people often who are crippled and who are on crutches and so forth or in wheelchairs, go there and make their way painfully up the hill.
Or maybe they do that on their knees.
And the idea is that they're struggling incrementally up hill, step by step, despite their burdens to reach the city of God on the hill and they're acting out.
That's life.
It's like the the proper aim is the city of God on the hill.
And what is that?
While that's that place that we talked about already, where these levels of responsibility are stacked together harmoniously so that you're acting in your best interest and in your family's best interest and in the world's best interest.
And I would say in the best interests of reality itself, right, assuming that we have some integral role to play in reality to certainly at least true, at the human level.
That's the city of God on the hill that beckons to everyone.
And you move up that you move towards that humbly.
So that's one step at a time, and you do it despite your burden and your suffering.
All of that.
That's all dramatized in that, and it's it's a perfect drama of that.
And would you even say it's not to be, despite your suffering, it's in and through your particular suffering.
We One thing that strikes me about your clean up your room, clean up your room.
Yes, it is the affirmation of the particularity of your life.
One thing that strikes me about deepest in our human experience is that it is infinitely particular mean that you mentioned your your granddaughter.
I mean the the loves, the people, the experiences, the places that were shaped by their not places In the abstract of this, this top down senses.
If there could be the same kinds of clothes and the same kinds of experience for all human beings, that's that's that's the enemy of the very deepest truth of our human experience, which it seems to me is infinitely particular, but not infinitely particular, in the sense of which those particular he's a squall off into nothingness.
Those particulars air precisely our points of access to the transcendent, to the infinite, to the to the T that that's where the reality is.
Yes, yeah, well.
So that's why Young said, that modern man can't see God because they don't look low enough.
Yes, they're not.
They're not paying attention to the importance of the particularities, because eat the particularity is where the pen meets the paper, right?
Yeah, it's just a tiny dot every, like when you're when you're writing, it's It's a dot and then it's extends into a line, and those transform into words and sentences and paragraphs.
But the particular act is where the pen meeting?
Yes, yes, that focal point, right?
That's the center of the cross, by the way.
The same.
Yes, yes.
Well, you mentioned across.
I mean, certainly in the in the in the history of of the West, One of the ways this comes through is on in the East, two in Christian theology is the very notion of the incarnation, you know?
What is that to say?
but that the infinite is in the particular and that they that they are, that they're Cohen here in't, that the infinite in fact has no life except in the particular and the particular itself has a relation to err is comprehended by that very infinite.
So it seems to me that that what is going on there is an affirmation that every particular pretty, no matter how tiny itself is revelatory, of of a transcendent.
And here's what I think it was from the Gospel of Thomas, but I might have this wrong.
The Kingdom of God has spread upon the Earth, but men do not see it announced that that's that infinite.
That's that infinite possibility in each moment of particularity.
And that is what artists that is, what great artists are reminding yourself they'll take a slice of space and time.
Was it money?
Who painted the haystacks?
He went out into the fields in France, and he painted the same haste act, like many, many times under different conditions of lighting and to show how different.
If it's if it's a haystack, it's the same thing.
But it wasn't.
He paid attention to the particularities and So what great artists are trying to do is well, first of all, so imagine the painting.
So it's a painting of a landscape, and so the first thing is that it's it's layers of time because the painter has gone out there and seeing the landscape and then seeing it again and then seeing it again and then seen it again and then seen it again and has to pay attention to the particularities of the light and the color and all of that to represent it properly.
So it's, and the mere fact that he's done that is it's It's the acting out of the idea that in this tiny slice of time and space, there's something worth attending to for an infinite amount of time.
But you can't because you just can't do it.
But you need to know that you couldn't do it, and then it would be worthwhile.
And so the painter encapsulates the landscape and then frames it and says, like look, look through this window at the transcendent.
That's behind the low resolution representation of your assumption, the blindness that the the expedient blindness that you, by necessity, bring to bear to every situation.
Remember what's behind this?
Always remember what's behind this, and that's what art calls us to do.
That's what beauty calls us to do is to make contact with that.
Then you say, Well, the problem with the particularly the problem with the particularly is that it brings suffering.
And the bringing of suffering with particularly, can also allow evil to enter the world, because that particular suffering can engender bitterness and resentment and hatred and all of those things and the desire to destroy.
So the particularity carries with it a tremendous risk and a tremendous burden.
And so the answer.
The question is, well, how do you tolerate the particularity and take advantage of the potential?
And the answer is to make a relationship with the infinite that's behind the particularity.
And that's the fundamental religious idea.
Is, too, if you can maintain the particular T but also stay in contact with what's transcendent and infinite beyond that, then you can.
Then you have the potential strength to tolerate the catastrophe of yes, what's limited.
Yes, and then you get to have your cake and eat it, too.
In principle, yes, yes, I want it returned.
Education in a moment, but But on the way there, as it were, Jordan, I want to ask you, you you've talked about this thing, the inflection point.
What is the inflection point?
And how might it be understood relative to what I would I take to be a very decadent world view in its last gasps.
It seems to be even that many of the frankly simply slanderous attacks on you personal, personally, blatant misrepresentations of the the very plain fact, what you're saying.
It seems to me that there's an animus there.
That is precisely this is an animus there.
But the question is, where is that coming from?
Well, if you look a TTE Derrida, for example, and his critique of the idea of logo centrism, you know, as as that is the central motif of the West, Let's say.
And he and he knew at multiple levels what that critique meant because he knew what logos meant.
Logos means, embodied truth.
And there is, of course, it religious dimension to that.
And so he was criticizing the notion of fowl logo centrism.
And so he was going right at the core of the doctrine of the individual Now the question is, why might someone do that now?
I think the reason for that, fundamentally, is that there's a terrible responsibility that goes along with it.
So imagine that you offered people.
Here's the offer.
Offer one you don't matter.
Yeah, it's a really say the narrowest of materialised.
Few points is you weren't here then you were for a brief period of time, and then you're gone.
And that all washes out in the endless sands of time.
Nothing in your life is significant.
Nothing about humanity is significant.
Nothing about the world itself is significant.
It's all a matter of blind, random chance, and it's all the same.
In the end, who cares?
In a 1,000,000 years, right?
And the price you pay for that is insignificance.
But the advantage that you gain from that is that fundamentally you have no responsibility because nothing you do matters.
And so then there's no moral burden, there's no obligation.
And of course, if you can gather expedient pleasure well, you're deteriorating pointlessly.
Then that's all to the good.
So it's it's a libertinism as well, and that's inviting, obviously, because short term pleasure is by definition, inviting and so you can abandon any pretension to a relationship with the infinite and consider that only a sign of delusion and weakness.
Assume that your life is material and irrelevant.
It doesn't matter, and then you can shrug off all responsibility and pursue short term pleasure.
While there's some real advantages in that, it's very it's a very easy pathway.
The alternative is, as far as I'm concerned, is no, you don't understand.
You are the You are the center of the world as center of the world has many centers, and you do partake in this process of casting the potential of the future into the reality of the present and the past.
That's what your consciousness does, and the quality of what you produce is dependent on your on the ethics of your choice.
Your choice between good and evil in every moment is what determines the course of the world, and that's on you.
It's like, Well, that's deeply meaningful, but it's unbelieving its its ultimate responsibility in the literal sense.
And I think that in order for us to set things right, we have to understand that we we have to take on that burden of ultimate responsibility, as if it's not only as if it's ours, which it is, but as if there isn't anything better that we could do.
And and one of the things that I found so gratifying about the lecture tour that I've been doing is that and why I keep doing it.
The live events in particular because we've done about 100 of them now so far is that when I explained to the audience is and this is especially true, its speed seems to be especially true of men but of young men but not so young even to say, Look, you have you you have an ethical obligation to lift the heaviest load you can possibly conceive of.
And that's the primary call to adventure in life.
And that call to adventure is so worthwhile that justifies the particularity.
Everybody.
It's like lights going.
Oh, I see.
So you need a meaning to set against the suffering and to protect you against that temptation towards malevolence.
You need that well, where's the meaning to be found?
Well, it's not happiness.
It's not short term pleasure.
It's not.
It's not self development, It's not self esteem.
It's none of those things that are so focused on on on the individual psyche.
Either It's literally the stumbling uphill towards the city of God with your burden.
People go well.
That's where the meaning is.
And they know that because they know responsible people.
They know they admire responsible people there.
They already got that say, Well, that's what you should become And they think and normally that that's what you could become because that's what you are in the deepest sense.
Yes, yes.
What would you say that that that that the antidote denialism is meaning?
And if so, you know, I think you described yourself Jordan.
As you've said, I think you're the surfer, not the wave.
And I suppose I want to ask you what is the wave?
Because it seems to me where it a moment of very great cultural potential and it could go any number of ways, but that the very fact of one.
But what one might call the the Jordan Peterson phenomenon Ah, worldwide.
Your book translated into dozens of languages.
Your wreck, Electra Hall's packed, uh, is a sign of a longing, a self conscious longing for for meaning.
How would How would you?
How would you describe what that wave is that that you didn't create, but that you'll start some of its technological?
So So I would say that wave is got multiple levels, so so we could start from we'll start from I would say what's most obvious, and that would be the medium rather than the message.
So I and these people that I've been associated with this intellectual dark Web group where we're in the fortunate position of being early adopters of extraordinarily powerful technologies.
So and the technologies heir to full.
There's there's online video, and then there's podcasts, and so they're technologically revolutionary in a variety of ways.
So online video is revolutionary because it brings something closely akin to a live performance to an infinitely large number of people on demand, permanently.
So then you think, Well, what's the advantage of a book?
Well, it's permanent.
It's relatively low cost.
It's easily distributable, right?
So what?
What's the advantage to online video?
Well, it's it's inexpensive, It's not inexpensive, it's free.
It's far easier to produce than a book like The lag time, from video to publication is the day like we could put this online today instead of the three year lag that a book would require.
And then far more people can watch and listen, then can read, because reading is a minority ability in some sense, really fat.
Rell Rell expert level reading You know that because such a tiny minority of people buy books and people are made uncomfortable by books, they're intimidated by them.
Even if they have the intelligence in principle to do the reading.
It's not part of their cultural milieu.
That's a small minority of people.
And so all of a sudden, online video allows allows the spoken word to have the same impact as the written work.
And that's d