Lecture: Identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege

Hello everybody, my name is Angelo, and I am your emcee for the evening. On behalf of the UBC Free Speech Club, we would like to welcome you and thank you for attending our third Dr. Jordan B. Peterson event.

Now, I know you're all very excited to hear the man, so I'm going to keep these opening remarks very short. The UBC Free Speech Club is devoted to the sanctity of liberty in our society and the necessity to keep liberty safe from those who want to destroy it.

Within just the year, our club has grown to over a thousand members and is now in the process of incorporation so that we may continue to bring speakers and host events such as this one. None of that would be possible without Dr. Peterson, who has inspired countless students all over North America to start speaking up on their campuses.

In fact, this club sprung up around the same time when Dr. Peterson publicly came out against the Bill C-16 that was just over a year ago. Since then, his philosophy of "cleaning your room" and "sorting yourself out" has bettered and influenced the lives of countless people.

He's an accomplished psychologist, professor, and author. His book, "Maps of Meaning," is an analytical window into the myths and cultures of humankind, and now he has written a new book. It's called "Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos" and is available for pre-order on Amazon with the release date of January 23, 2018.

And on that note, on behalf of the UBC Free Speech Club, we would like to introduce you all to Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.

[Applause]

"Well, thank you very much for that. That's quite something. Alright, there's a house mic, great. I don't need this one. Okay, well then, let's just move it out of the way. Great.

So I'm going to talk to you tonight about the ideological nexus of post-modernism and Marxism, and I want to get into it fairly deeply so you can have a thoughtful talk and then discussion afterwards.

So it's a confusing topic because it's not obvious by any stretch of the imagination why post-modernism and neo-Marxism, or Marxism proper, would be aligned. Post-modernism is an anti-grand narrative philosophical movement, and Marxism is a grand narrative.

So the fact that those two things seem to coexist in the same space definitely needs some explanation. It's a very tricky thing to get to the bottom of, so we won't get to the bottom of it, but we'll get farther to the bottom of it than I've gotten before and hopefully farther than many of you have gotten before.

So let's see what we can figure out here. I'm going to start with some definitions. Hmm, I'll return to them as we continue. You know, with philosophical movements, they're often not named by the major thinkers in the movement; they're sort of named afterwards. The name covers a very large range of ideas, actions, and perceptions.

Like, it's not that easy; people talk about existentialism, for example. It's not that easy to come up with a one-paragraph summary of what constitutes existentialism. My sense of the existentialists is that it's fundamentally a movement that's predicated on the idea, at least in this psychological sense, that Freud tended to attribute human suffering and mental disorder to trauma.

It's more complex than that, but that'll do for a quick overview. But the existentialists thought that there was enough suffering intrinsic in life so that it wasn't insanity that was the question; it was sanity.

It was how was it possible for people to be sane and, let's say, normal, for lack of a better word, given that there was brutality and malevolence intrinsic in life. The fact that you had to rise up as an individual and stand in relation to that is part and parcel of what constitutes existentialism.

There are all sorts of different people who were thinkers who were existentialists, some of them atheistic, some of them deeply religious like Dostoyevsky. But, I'm using that as an example to show you how difficult it is to bring a set of thinkers under one umbrella; you're bound to oversimplify. But we'll go ahead and..."