Morality in the 21st Century: Jordan Peterson

BBC Radio 4 - Morality in the 21st Century, Episode 2: Jordan Peterson

"‘You've even hit the Chinese press with the wonderful headline: Jordan Peterson, in comparing humans to lobsters, has scored a victory over feminism, or somesuch.’

‘It’s not a very likely headline.’

‘I think, you know, to have produced a headline like that in the Chinese press tells us that you are somewhat unusual. Well, I would love if I may to ask you to retrace the journey that led to those subjects that began if I'm not mistaken by the big question you asked, which is what leads ordinary human beings to be participants in great acts of evil? It began, I think, with your reflections on the Holocaust, non communist Russia. What led from there to individual psychology?’

‘Well, I was obsessed with the cold war situation, the general insanity of the cold war situation which hasn't entirely resolved right?... The insanity of it was something that obsessed me. And I actually attempted to answer what I think was a postmodern question. That's how I look at it now. The Soviet types, and the, and the fascists, the Nazis, but we'll leave them out of this for now, had a particular story about the world. About what people were like and about where we should be headed. And the West had another story.

And I was very curious, were these just two equally arbitrary, entirely socially constructed stories at odds with one another, playing themselves out competitively, let's say with an approximately equal probability of victory on each side? Or was one story correct? And it wasn't obvious which one of those was going to be correct. And I think I went into it with an open mind, an exploratory mind.

What I found, as far as I'm concerned, is that the story of the West which is predicated on the primacy of individual sovereignty and grounded in a mythological representation of that, was not by any stretch of the imagination, arbitrary There was something about it that was correct. Correct metaphorically and correct pragmatically...

We have a neuro psychological system that's specialized for operation in the domain of order, unexplored territory, if you want to think about it from a biological perspective, but we have an entirely different neuro psychological system that operates when we don't know what we're doing, and in the domain of chaos or the unknown, and it seems to be associated primarily with right hemisphere function, linked to the emotional operations deep emotional operations, that the Russian neural psychologists identified as the orienting reflex.

And so the sense of meaning seems to emerge as a consequence of getting the balance between the known and the unknown. So if everything around you is [already] explored, then there's no reason to even be awake, everything is already taken care of, it's already been transformed into an automatized algorithm, even neurologically, there's no reason for you to be there.

And if everything is unknown, it's unbearable, like it will damage you psycho, physiologically, that's what happens when you are traumatized is too much becomes unknown at once. And so there's these border conditions of stratification and terror.

But in the middle of that, there's this domain that's associated with the experience of meaning. I think it's the same experience that you get when you listen to music with its balance of chaos and order, and the instinct of meaning…

What leads to authoritarian totalitarian state, the desire to eliminate the unknown and just live within a known… I think this was the intuition of Milton. When Milton described the satanic rebellion 400 years ago, it looked to me like that was a precursor, a symbolic precursor to the idea of the rise of totalitarian states. It's also embedded in the story of the Tower of Babel. And human beings build these massive structures that are what envision to reach to the heavens right to reach to the sky to replace everything, they're imposing order on on nature, which means essentially denying human freedom… something Dostoyevsky pointed out very carefully is that it's not obvious that that's what people want. We might want to contend with the unknown. Like there's an adventure in life that's independent of the security and maybe even set in opposition to the security and Dostoyevsky's take was that we were much happier and Kirkegaard as well, engaging in that adventure.’…

‘Is that what people find exciting about your work that you are giving them back a sense of responsibility, and hence of the possibility of life being that kind of adventure, in which you encounter meaning through your struggle with the unknown?’

‘That's, that's what it looks like to me. Like it's a retelling of the of the most ancient story, right, which is the hero's story, essentially. The confrontation with the dragon, let's say. And I think people know that. And I think they know their conscience tells them when they're not undertaking the struggle properly. And when, when I'm talking to audiences now, and they're about 60% men, I would say, between the ages of 20 and 40, although the demographics are are changing, as the talks continue.

And I talked to them about responsibility, and the fact that they have to look out for themselves and their family and their community and that they leave a hole in the world that's non trivial if they don't take on that responsibility and burden. The place is silent. Absolutely silent, and it happens every time. And it's it's the call to adventure. It's, in a sense, it's the same call that Abraham experienced when he was living in his mother's basement essentially, you know, 80 years old and had never gone out into the world. It's like, get the hell out there, there are things to do. You know, and and I think-’

‘It was actually, it was Moses who was 80 but-’

‘Well Abraham was, Abraham was, how old was Abraham?’

‘He was about 65.’

‘Okay, okay, well, he still spent too much time at home’…

‘You have succeeded in delivering what many might call a religious vision where religions themselves have failed in this very secular world. That's very interesting.’...

'A friend of mine, Jonathan Pageau said you accept death to stop being a slave to death, which is a pretty nice tension...

I'm a clinician, you know. Clinicians know, this isn't an issue of question. This is the problem with uneducated and foolish people make claims that are far outside their domain of competence. If someone's anxious and depressed, you do not over protect them. It makes it worse. Like, there isn't a clinical school in existence that disputes that as a fundamental axiom.

The way that you make people stronger is by helping them voluntarily confront what they're afraid of and avoiding. Behaviorists know that. Existentialists know that. The humanists know that. The psychoanalysts know that. It's the one thread apart from getting your story straight that runs through all the great clinical schools.

And the universities in the guise of protecting the mental health of their students are doing exactly the opposite. It's inexcusable. What the universities are doing is inexcusable on about seven different dimensions. They have a mass that the universities are corrupting the culture. It's, it's terrible. And they're doing it in part with all of this hyper protective idiocy, as well as their ideological indoctrinations.

And their lowering of academic standards and their continual raising of tuition fees. And the invitation especially in the US to take on unsustainable burdens of student debt with no escape through bankruptcy laws, their generation of a top heavy administrative structure, their inability to teach students to read or to write or to think or to speak.

It's, it's. I'm absolutely appalled as a member of the university about what's happened with the universities. I do believe like most Republicans in the United States now that the universities do more harm than good’

‘What about the claim that you might do more harm than good? In other words, it's clear that you have millions of very, very devoted followers. And that you could, and perhaps do sway their emotions and their feelings about life very powerfully. Do you, and of course, the more influential you are, the more potentially dangerous you can become, and there’s certainly people who see you as a threat to the view they have constructed of the world’

‘Well, I am a threat to the radical Marxist types. I am not on their side, in the least. I'm absolutely shell shocked by the fact that we've managed to agree collectively that what the Nazis did was unacceptable and being unable, partly because of the refusal of the intellectuals to contend with the problem, we've been absolutely unable or unwilling to draw the same lines on the radical left. I think there's no excuse for that. After the hundreds of, hundred million corpses we piled up in the 20th century.

So I am not an ally of the radical left. And so if they see me as a threat, then so much the better.

With regards to my potential effects, let's say you get the fans you deserve. Okay. So this is what happens to me when I walk around now in the world. Wherever I go, it doesn't matter if it's Australia or the United States or Canada, or England. Or Holland, for that matter. If I go out in the street, this is what happens every day.

Young person comes up to me, sometimes not so young, and says: I've been listening to your lectures. Can I give you a hug? They've really helped me. All the time. They don't come up and give me some political sermon. You know, none of that. It's just that they say: look, I was in a dark place, whatever that dark place might have been. And I'm really trying to get myself together.

And so. That's fine. That's what I want to have happen. People think, well, I'm doing more harm than good. Well, the people who think that have the motivation to think that. They don't have any evidence that it's the case…

Thinking about the people who are watching me as followers, is, it's not right conceptually. Because I don't know if you're following, so to speak someone and they're saying to you, establish your own territory, get your act together, start with what you can control. Well, in what way are they followers precisely? It's more like they're imitators of a, they're imitators of an individualistic creed, let's say. And, and I don't see that as fundamentally political. I see that as fundamentally theological’"