Australia's John Anderson & Dr. Jordan B Peterson: In Conversation

50m read

·Nov 7, 2024

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Well, Dr. Jordan Peterson, welcome to Sydney on your Australian tour. You're talking to packed out houses and the interest is extraordinary. We've had the opportunity to talk personally, and I can understand why.

I want to begin with something that Churchill wrote in the 1930s, and he said this: "One of the signs of a Great Society is the diligence with which it passes culture from one generation to the next. When one generation no longer passes on the things that are dear to it — its heroes and their stories, and its religious faith — it's in effect saying that past is null and void; it's of no value." He goes on to say that it leaves young people feeling a lack of direction and a lack of purpose and opens them to the dictum of Karl Marx that “our people deprived of their history are easily persuaded.” Have we stripped our young people of purpose, and have we left them open to being bullied around?

Well, there are two things about that that I think are really worth laying out. The first is an analysis of the purpose of memory. Now, people think that the purpose of memory is to remember the past, and that's not the purpose of memory. The purpose of memory is to extract out from the past lessons to structure the future. And now, that's the purpose of personal memory. You're done with a memory when you've extracted out the information that you can use to guide yourself properly in the future.

So, if you have a traumatic memory, for example, that's really obsessing you, if you analyze that memory to the point where you've figured out how you put yourself at risk, and you can determine how you might avoid that in the future, then the emotion associated with that goes away. So, memory has a very pragmatic function. Cultural memory is the same thing: we need to extract out stories from our past that structure our future. We need that because, first of all, if you don't have a purpose, life's not just neutral in a meaningless sense; it's that your life becomes characterized by unbearable suffering.

The baseline condition of life is something like unbearable suffering, and what you have to set against that is a noble and worthwhile purpose. Hopefully, your determination of that purpose is buttressed to some degree by the wisdom of the past because you can't conjure something like that up on your own. If you provide people with a nobility of purpose, then they can tolerate the suffering of existence without becoming entirely corrupted by it. Cultures that don't do that — it isn't even so much that they die; it's that cultures that don't do that are dead. They're done. They don't have a story anymore, and they don't have a call to adventure, and then, well, then everyone suffers stupidly as a consequence.

It's a very bad thing. So, Churchill made the same observation that many of the great psychologists and philosophers made in the early part of the 20th century: it's like bringing the story forward and propagating it and making it the most noble possible story, and then you motivate people to transcend themselves, which they need to do. So, yes, he's exactly right in his diagnosis.

Just to stay with him for a moment, he's painted as the great defender of freedom. It's possible that your country, Canada, and certainly my country, Australia, would not have continued as free societies had it not been for that man courageously standing at a time when so few did. He wasn't the inventor of freedom, freedom as we understand it, and I want to unpack that a bit — something very, very few people in very few cultures down through the ages and even today have ever really experienced.

Yes, and partly because we're afraid of it, I would say. I mean, people think of freedom as the ability to implement your whim, and freedom opens up that as a possibility. But sustainable freedom — that isn't what it's about at all. It's primarily about responsibility. It's about determining which load you're going to pick up and carry. That's the proper definition of appropriate freedom. It's not the gratification of instantaneous impulse. It's self-evident that that doesn't work. Two-year-olds do that, and that's why they can't live in the world. They can't organize themselves across time; they can't sacrifice the moment for the future.

The more sophisticated you get, I suppose, in some sense, the more you're able to do that, and then your freedom becomes the freedom to choose the proper responsibilities. And that's also not something that we've been good at communicating to young people. If we talk to them about responsibility, we generally do it in a finger-wagging sort of way. It's like, "Well, you're breaking the rules; you're a bad person." And, well, that may be true because people break the rules and there's no shortage of badness in people. But the proper message for young people is to say, "Well, no, you don't understand. You want to take on responsibility. You want to take on the heaviest load that you can conceive of that you might be able to move because it gives your life nobility and purpose."

That offsets the tragedy, and not only psychologically. Not only does it offset it psychologically because you have a purpose and something to wake up for, right? You face the difficulties of the day, but also because if you face the difficulties of the day properly, you actually ameliorate suffering, not only in the psychological sense, but because you make the world at least a less terrible place. That's something, right? To move things away from hell is something, even if you're not, you know, self-evidently moving forthrightly to heaven. To move things away from the worst they can be is, well, that's a noble goal in and of itself.

Young people are starving for that idea. It's very interesting to watch. As I look at it, it seems to me that Acton had it right: freedom, properly understood, needs to be seen as a negative and as a positive. The negative is a sort of concept of freedom from fear, addiction, persecution, terror, and tyranny in a personal sense, and then freedom to be used to reach your potential. But it seems to me that what's missing is an understanding that freedom exercised within a framework of responsibility — are you doing what you ought? — will guarantee ongoing freedom for yourself and for your neighbors.

Freedom exercised in a way that confuses it with license tends to destroy freedom. In fact, you could even go so far as to say that misunderstood freedom turns out to be its own worst enemy. Well, that's the difficult distinction between freedom of the moment and freedom of freedom with everything taken into account. I'm a real admirer of the work of Jean Piaget, and Piaget is a developmental psychologist.

Few people know he's the world's most well-known developmental psychologist, and few people know that he was actually motivated in his intellectual pursuits by the desire to reconcile science with religion. That was his driving force from the time he was a young man. You wouldn't know that even necessarily by reading his writings because it's implicit rather than explicit in them. He has a different model of what constitutes morality than Freud. Freud's model is combative. It's sort of the super-ego as tyrant, so the super-ego would be the strictures of society.

It'd be the biological impulses and the ego crushed between those, right? So the ego is this thing that's crushed between nature and culture, and so it's a really tense and combative model of the human psyche. There's something about it that's accurate because some of the restrictions that are put on your impulse gratification are imposed on you in a sense tyrannically. But Piaget's perspective was much more optimistic and I think much more accurate.

He noticed that as children organized themselves spontaneously as they developed, especially within the confines of their own spontaneous play, they didn't so much subsume, lurk, or inhibit their dark and aggressive impulses as make them sophisticated and transform them into universally acceptable games. For Piaget, a game that a group of children were playing — that all of them were playing voluntarily and that was going well and that they all wanted to continue playing — was a microcosm of society.

Literally a microcosm of society. The reason the children were playing those games was to practice being productive members of society, and he felt that the appropriate game tended towards what he described as an equilibrated state. An equilibrated state would be a game that you'll play because you've decided it's a good game, but that you can play with others because they've also decided that it's a good game.

So that can work at the individual level and at the familial level and at the social level. If you get all those things working simultaneously, then you have a sustainable enterprise. It's predicated not so much on the inhibition of impulse or on the regulation of it but on the integration of impulses into a pattern of being that gratifies them on a relatively permanent basis.

So, you know, if you want to go to university and become a physician, I think there's a lot of sacrifice of impulsive gratification that goes along with that. But if you become a physician, then it's a noble enterprise. People support you socially, and all the needs that you need to have fulfilled will also be fulfilled by that enterprise.

Well, that's a way better model. And so it's strange that the maximum freedom comes with the adoption of a discipline and then also the adoption of responsibility that frees you up and everyone else around you in the long run. If you explain that to people, especially in this day and age when they've been fed a never-ending diet of idiot rights and freedoms, they're immediately on board with it because they know. I know that most of the meaning that people experience in their life is a consequence of adopting responsibility, so they're starving for that idea to be articulated.

It opens up a whole can of very, very interesting issues. Let's try to pick a couple of. But the first—if I do—it’s evident to me, and I'm enormously encouraged by this because, you know, I'm a passionate Australian. I want this country to be the sort of place that offers opportunities of the sort that I had when I was young. You know, I've had my opportunities, but I look at my kids' generation and wonder what's going to be there for them.

If we keep feeding the sort of thin gruel in reality, the people turning out in vast numbers — every one of your talks in Australia has been oversubscribed massively — tells you they kind of get that.

Well, it’s one of the things that’s so interesting about dealing with archetypal themes. You know, archetypal themes are archetypal because they actually speak of the structure of human experience; that's why they last. And so, human nature and human experience has a pattern.

You don't have the capacity to articulate that pattern as an individual, in part because your life is too short. You just can't figure it out. But the ancient representations of those patterns are everywhere around you. You know some of them in image; you caught on to them automatically; you fall into them.

If you go to a movie, for example, because movies always express archetypal themes. If you hear them articulated, you think, "I knew that; I knew that. I just don't know how to say it." That's the Platonic idea of learning is remembering. Your soul already knows, but it doesn't have the words.

Yeah, and so when people talk to me about watching my lectures, let's say, they say they basically say one of two things. If it's not just a simple thank you, they say one of two things. A third of them say or a quarter of them say, "When I listen to you talk, it's as if you're telling me things that I already know."

It's like, yeah, well, that's exactly right because that's what archetypal stories are — they're the description of what you already know but that can be articulated. And then who you are and how you see yourself and the way you describe yourself all become the same thing.

So, that's wonderful. Then you're not at odds with yourself. You know, and then you have then you're a functioning unity. That makes you much stronger and more indomitable than you would otherwise be.

And then the other thing that people say, and this is more like 3/4 of them, is that they say, "I was in a very dark place. I was addicted; I was drinking too much; I had a fragmented relationship with my fiancée. I wasn’t getting married; things weren’t going very well with my family; my relationship with my father was damaged; I didn’t have any aim; I was wasting my time," some variant of that, some combination of those.

And they said, "Well, hmm, I’ve been watching your lectures. I’ve decided to establish a purpose. I’m trying to tell the truth, and things are way better."

And I've, let’s say, I’ve done maybe eight or nine large-scale public talks in the last two months. So, that's probably 20,000 people, and about half of them, half of them say afterwards to talk to me, so that’s about 7,000 people who have said that to me.

Then people stop me on the street all the time and tell me exactly that story, which is just wonderful. You can't imagine how good it is to be able to go to places you've never been and to have people stop you on the street spontaneously and say, "Look, my life is way better than it was."

It's so good, and I've got like, I don’t know, 35,000 letters from people since last August — it’s more than that; I can’t keep track of them. And it’s exactly the same thing. Like 3/4 to a quarter of them say, "Well, you’ve given me the words to say what I already knew was true, and thank you for that."

I can see that in the audience. It's so interesting because I can lay out a story, and people go like this and say, "They're doing that" all the time. It's like the lights are going on, and that's a really — there’s almost nothing better than that — to watch lights go on when you’re talking to people. It’s like that’s just absolutely fantastic.

But to get this response from people, my father, I have my father. My father is about 80 — he’s 83, I think, 81. He’s 81. I put him in charge of going through my viewer email, which is an overwhelming job, but no, we've had discussions about this constantly.

He’s overwhelmed by the fact that so many people are writing and saying the same thing. It’s like, "I have a purpose, man. My life actually matters. I finally realized that, and I’m putting it into practice."

I’m bearing up under the heaviest load I can imagine, and it’s really helping. It’s like, God, and that’s tens of thousands of responses now, so you couldn’t hope for anything better than that. There’s zero harm in it. Right?

It’s just people putting their lives together; they’re not mucking about with other people, and they’re trying to make broad-scale social transformations about which they have no idea. They're trying to make their immediate environment better, and it's working. It’s like, great!

Well, great. You say there's zero harm in it. I’d say as a form of legislature that there’s an enormous amount of good. Huh? A country is only as strong as the type of people that make it up. To the extent that they’re put together, resilient, and can contribute, you don’t have to ask others to help them. The stronger the nation—

Oh, this is so, yes! And rapidly! I mean, I think I was thinking the other day, some journalist asked me why the audience, why people are responding so positively to what I’m saying, the young men for example. And I thought, "Yeah, that’s a good question."

I said, "Well, I’m actually on their side. I’m pretty happy that I’m really happy that they’re not wasting their lives. I’m really sad to see that people are disenchanted and nihilistic and depressed and anxious and aimless and perverse and vengeful and all of those things. It’s terrible, and then to see people question whether that’s necessary, and then to start to rise out of it — it’s so fun!"

Last night I was after my talk. It’s overwhelming. I don’t usually think about these things, but I was after my talk last night, and all these people line up. You know, they have their 15 seconds with me, and they’re kind of tentative. They’re excited and yet tentative when they come up to talk to me.

Then they have 15 seconds of time to tell me something I’m really listening to them, and they’re hesitant about whether or not to share the good news about their life, you know?

I think it’s often because when people share good news about their life, people don’t necessarily respond positively, you know?

They don’t get encouragement, and people need so little encouragement. It’s just unbelievable. And so there comes something good, and I’m like, "Ah, that’s so good!"

You know, somebody says, "Well, I’m getting along way better with my father. I haven’t seen him for 10 years, and now we get along great."

Then the power of that—you can’t overstate the power of that for individuals to get their life together. The individual is an unbelievably powerful force, and every single person who gets their act together a little bit has the capacity to spread that around them.

It’s a chain reaction, and so it’s a lovely thing to see, and that’s fantastic. My observation of atheists would be they don’t live like atheists; they don’t live as though they really believe they’re just a cosmic accident and there’s no purpose.

Well, most of them. The best of them. I have a lot of respect for the atheists generally because they’ve generally thought a lot more about this situation and struggled with it more than the complacent fundamentalists, you know, who wallpaper over their doubts with overstatements about their belief.

The atheists, you know, the word Isaac means — or Israel — the word Israel means he who struggles with God. It’s like, well, it’s not obvious that it’s not the atheists. You know, they're struggling away. It’s like they’re obsessed with it even.

So they have God more on their mind than the typical person who’s a believer. And so it’s interesting, too, because there’s been this little community developed around my biblical lectures in particular of people who call themselves Christian atheists, which I think is quite remarkable.

So if I lay out the rationale for the Christian ethic, which is something like "Pick up your damn cross and struggle uphill," which is a really good message, they think, "Oh yeah, well, that makes a lot of sense."

It’s like, "Well, I don’t need the metaphysical baggage." It’s like, "Well, maybe you do and maybe you don’t." But even to pick up the practical utility of that idea, which is overwhelming, that’s an excellent start.

So I was going to follow on that then. So it strikes me a lot of young people, and I think this is enormous, to their credit, and guys, the heart, I think of what you’re saying, they’re told that all morality is relative. They don’t live that way; they’re actually looking for truth, don’t they?

Well, if you live that way, everyone hates you, you know? But that’s the creed that—

Oh yes, yes. But that’s a good example of how you who you are can be out of sync with how you represent yourself.

It’s like I was walking through the arc, and I was walking through these ideas with the audience last night. It’s like, "Well, how do we treat each other when things work?” You know? And how do you treat yourself?

Well, first of all, you have to treat yourself like you matter because if you don’t, then you don’t take care of yourself, and you become vengeful and cruel, and you take it out on people around you, and you're not a positive force. None of that’s good, so you suffer more, and so does everyone around you.

There’s a malevolence that enters into it. None of that’s good. So that’s what happens if you don’t treat yourself like you matter. And then what happens if you don’t treat other people like they matter?

Well, you lie to them; you cheat them; you steal; you enter into impulsive relationships with them. They can’t trust you; that doesn’t go anywhere; they don’t like you; you end up alone at best and maybe incarcerated at worst. Like that doesn’t work.

So you watch the people around you who thrive, regardless of what they say; they act out the proposition that everyone matters. And then you have a functional society. I think, "Okay, well, if when you act out the proposition that everyone matters, you have a functional society, maybe that’s evidence that that proposition is true."

I think it’s true; I think the idea that the individual has a spark of divinity within him or her, I think there isn’t a more true way of saying that. And if you act that out, well, this goes back to the idea that you brought up about potential, which is also something I’ve discussed with my audiences a lot.

It’s like we don’t act like we live in a material reality; we act like we face a landscape of potential — an external landscape of potential with an internal reservoir of potential. That’s how we act, and then we call each other out on it.

We say things like, "Well, you’re not living up to your potential," and persons go, "So? Yeah, well, I know." It’s like, "Well, what do you mean by that? What do you mean by that?"

Well, you mean there’s more to you than meets the eye even though it’s not measurable, right? It’s not tangible; it’s just possibility. But everyone acts as if that’s a reality.

We all act as if we make choices about what reality to bring into being. We punish ourselves for our moral errors and other people as well. We act out this ethic that puts us each at the center of being as active participants in the world that we want to bring forward. Everyone acts that way, and if we don’t, then things go to hell instantly.

So it’s like, well, what do we believe? This is the argument I’ve had with people like Sam Harris, the atheist types. It’s like, "Yeah, you think you’re an atheist now? You’re Christian, Judeo-Christian, let’s say, to the core. You just don’t understand it."

You just don’t realize it, and it’s understandable, but it’s not helpful. This idea that you put forward of a spark of divinity in every human being surely lies at the heart of the miracle of Western freedom — the idea that every individual has worth and dignity and standing.

It’s the idea that killed slavery: slavery is the greatest human rights movement of all time, so successful that it obliterated the idea that it was a right to keep slaves, let alone changed the law. It changed the way the world thought, even though there are evil people who still keep slaves.

And here’s the rub: it was plainly led by people of profound Christian faith. There’s no other way of putting it. Anyone who honestly and truthfully looks at the history of that period can’t get away from it.

Yeah, but because it doesn’t suit the modern left’s narrative, it’s airbrushed out. Doesn’t that inner self say something profound about our willingness to try and distort truth?

What it speaks of, you know, it’s hard. It’s like the whitewashing of what happened in the Soviet states — in the communist states in the 20th century. I mean, anybody who goes through that literature with any degree of care comes away traumatized. Shell-shocked.

It’s just, it’s everything the Nazis did on a larger scale. It’s horrifying. Yet I see with my students, you know, 60 million people who dared to disagree died minimum in their own culture.

Mm-hmm. It was something in their own society. Don’t know. In the Soviet Union, the estimates range from 20 to 60 million, and in Mao’s China, the estimates are as much as a hundred million.

There are kids taught this in school, in universities. Why not very? I see their societies. This fight — preface something — the modern fight, in many ways, seems to be between what might be called freedom and fear, dampened fairness.

Yeah, and equality. Equality sounds terrific, yep. But we’ve actually seen what happens in societies where they set equality up as the ultimate goal — they become terrible places. Why doesn’t that happen?

I think this is it sounds good. Yeah, well, I think that’s also part of the whitewashing is we can’t understand how one of our primary moral intuitions, which might be fairness, let’s say, can transform itself into something so utterly murderous when it’s played out on a large political stage.

I think because we don’t understand that, I mean look, there are reasons to be on the left — there are temperamental reasons. First, a lot of your political preference is influenced, let’s say, by your temperament, and a lot of your temperament is influenced by biological factors.

So there are temperamental reasons to be on the left. People who are on the left tend to be higher in creativity and lower in conscientiousness, for example. Those are the two best predictors.

But there are also practical reasons to be on the left. One of the practical reasons is that human societies, which tend to be hierarchical (like all animal societies or almost all animal societies), produce inequality as they go about their business and inequality is actually quite painful.

No one likes it. Nobody, no rich capitalist walks down a busy urban street and sees a starving homeless person, who’s clearly mentally ill, suffering madly and thinks that evening that inequality is okay. No one thinks that.

No one’s for poverty, right? And so we have this moral intuition that it would be better if the downtrodden were lifted up, and it’s difficult to discriminate between that and an equality narrative.

Part of the reason that we can’t face the lesson of the 20th century is because it’s the left that mostly has to face the lesson, and they don’t know how to reconcile their deep intuitions about the injustice of inequality with the fact that when you put that doctrine into operation as a political tool, you instantly stack up millions of corpses. We don’t know what to do with that, and so we just avoid it.

And then, of course, we risk replicating it, which is not good. That’s not a good tactical move.

Well, that’s the problem: if we don’t learn from history, we’re destined to repeat it. I entirely accept, and some Australians might be surprised by this. They say, "No, I can’t understand a lefty’s perspective."

I think I can. I can understand the nobility of wanting to ensure that everyone is respected as a full member of the human family of our culture and our society.

But this is where it gets so tricky, and it’s where I think many young people are starting to wake up: they’re being sold a pup. Do you have that expression in Canada?

No, that’s all the pup.

No, it’s all the DAAD.

Mm-hmm. See, yeah, there’s no sound idea, right? That many of the things that sound attractive don’t necessarily work.

So perhaps we need to be arguing the case for freedom and fairness, which will at least produce a high degree of equality of opportunity, rather than arguing for equality, which history tells us tends to severely erode freedom.

Yeah, well, it’s a harder sale, though, because it’s easy to appeal to compassion immediately thoughtlessly, right?

And there, and since that’s such an instantaneously positive moral virtue and you don’t need sophisticated argumentation to buttress it, it’s a lot more difficult to make a cold and a little case that the proposition of freedom first, let’s say, freedom and responsibility first, lifts the bottom up better.

It’s a cold argument, and it requires rationality to parse through, so it’s a harder sale. I would argue, though, it’s not just rationality, it’s history.

If you bring rationality and honesty to the study of history, I think the case is actually quite compelling.

I think it is too. In fact, I think it’s open and sharp.

I think it’s — well, there’s a book that I’ve just been reading that I would recommend by a man named Walter Scheidel, and he wrote a book called "The Great Leveler," which I really like.

It’s an empirical analysis of inequality, and he had his research questions were something like, "Well, what is the phenomena of inequality, and what can you attribute it? And what, if anything, can we do to ameliorate it?"

Okay, so the first answer is something akin to what I wrote in the first rule in my book "Twelve Rules for Life," which is, well, you can’t lay hierarchy and inequality at the feet of Western civilization or capitalism. We’re done with that argument; that’s wrong.

Animal societies are hierarchical, and they produce unequal distributions. There’s evidence for that in the biological realm going back a third of a billion years, and that’s happened for so long that your nervous system has primarily adapted to it, so it’s a deep reality.

And blaming it on capitalism — it’s like, “No, inequality is a big problem, it’s way worse than Marx thought,” okay, fine. And people tend to stack up as zero, that’s a bad thing because it destabilizes your society.

You have to have people who are so far down in the underclass that they have nothing to lose by flipping the game. That’s a bad idea, and it drives male-on-male homicide as well, and that social science evidence for that is clear.

Alright, so we want to ameliorate inequality to some degree because we don't want people to stack up at zero and destabilize society, and we don’t want young men in particular to become violent.

Fine, so then Scheidel takes another tack. He’s like — his observations, he looked at Neolithic grave sites for signs of inequality, and you see what people are buried with.

In one of his cases, there's 200 people in a grave, and one of them has 190 pounds of gold, and the next richest person has like four ounces of gold, and then everyone else has none.

It’s like so even in these Neolithic societies, inequality was the rule. Hunter-gatherer societies are the same way, except the inequality isn't material because they don't have a surplus — inequalities everywhere.

Okay, so then Scheidel asks two other questions. One is, "Well, how has it generally been reduced?" Pestilence and war. That’s it.

So you can reduce inequality if you demolish everything because that just brings everyone down to zero. But the inequality is less.

Then he does an empirical analysis and asks a very interesting practical question, which is, "Imagine that you totted up the inequality coefficients of the right-wing societies, and you did the same with the left-wing societies. Is there a difference between the inequality coefficients?"

You’d hope yes because you’d hope that what would happen as a consequence of activity on the left would be that something would actually occur to ameliorate inequality. You found no evidence for that whatsoever.

So the left is sensitive to the catastrophe of inequality, let’s say, but their compassion-oriented doctrines designed to ameliorate that on the positive side — there’s plenty of resentment on the left to that, and I don’t want to sweep that under the rug.

Their compassion-oriented policies do not produce an improvement in the equal distribution of goods. So it’s a way bigger problem than we think.

So, and putting into place these thoughtless compassionate doctrines, let’s say, putting them in place again, it’s just gonna produce exactly the same outcomes that were produced all through the 20th century.

We must learn or we’re going to bring the wisdom of the past back to the table of today if we’re to find our way out of the malaise affecting the West, I think, to a better place.

But before we do that, let’s explore that line of thinking.

Let’s go back to freedom. All of the great sages down through the ages — I think you make that point in this fascinating book of yours, "12 Rules for Life."

At least particularly, though the founder of Christianity, I think would say to a person that your personal freedom is the thing you need to get right and sorted first — it’s one by one.

And I’m thinking of young Australians, so I feel so passionately about that as I say this. You know, it’s very easy not to be free; very easy: addiction, fear, anxiety, depression.

All the things lack of discipline, lack of discipline of your whims. Let’s go back to a society which set equality as its goal — Soviet Russia.

And in the pursuit of that equality killed 60 or 70 million. That’s the estimate of those who disagreed, who had a different view, who lost their freedom.

That of those who even announced their own suffering, because in the Soviet Union, if you dared to say that things weren’t going so well for you, then you were instantly a political criminal for announcing your own suffering, because the utopian already arrived.

You understand?

Yeah, and so if you were still suffering, well, obviously there was something wrong with you or something like that.

Well, exactly. Yeah, but let’s come to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. We know a lot about what happened because of him. He became an incredible global figure when I was a young man, and I read his book, “The Gulag Archipelago.”

Here is this man; he describes the horrors of being a political prisoner because he disagrees. He converted. He was originally a supporter of communism; he came to see how evil it was and how oppressive it was.

He was imprisoned for having a different view to the state-ordained insistence that everything was terrific. Huh? And he writes unbelievably that lying on his prison bunk one day, listening to the guards beat up a fellow prisoner, the screams and the yells, he found freedom when he realized the dividing line between good and evil in fact didn’t lie between captor and captive.

In fact, the jailers were captive too — to a system, to a blind ideology, to an inability to trust.

So they were perpetrating the very system that imprisoned them — not between Catholic and Baptist or not between woman and man, not between black and white, but the dividing line between evil actually lies somewhere across every human heart.

Plainly, you believe it’s incredibly important that we understand that.

It comes back to what you said, I think, when it’s framed. We understand it. Well, everyone knows that, everyone knows if they think. Because all they have to do is think about their own transgressions.

I mean, if you ask someone to sit for five minutes and think, "Okay, what mistakes have you made in your life?" It’s like that’ll come up pretty quickly.

And you can even ask people, "What terrible unforgivable mistakes have you made in your life?" To like know about those too. It’s like, no one’s so naive, you know? Unless they’ve really wrestled intensely against themselves, there’s virtually no one so naive to not be able to answer those questions.

So we know that we’ve done things we shouldn’t have done, and we know that we’re not living up to our potential.

I mean, are we doing their children a massive disservice by trying to imply that there’s nothing wrong with them?

Though you need for guilt, no need for shame, no need to come — it’s really all this because the problems — the environment — the problem is that you’ve just got a fixed society fixing institutions?

Well, and then now we all — that will disappear. Psychologists have been — not all psychologists, obviously, but the psychological profession has its neck-deep in this pathology.

It has been beating the self-esteem drum for 50 years: "Oh, no, you’re okay; you should feel good about yourself; you’re fine the way you are." It’s like you think, "Well, that’s a calming message for people." It’s like, "No, it’s not. It’s not at all."

And I watch my audience; it’s like it’s full of people in the audience who think, "I’m suffering a lot more than I think is tenable. A whole bunch of it is my fault. My life is not in the order it should be. I know I’m doing 50 things wrong. It’s like, ‘What the hell’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with the people around me? This is really serious!’"

And some well-meaning person comes up and says, "Oh, you’re okay just the way you are." It’s like, "No one wants that message."

It’s like, "No, I’m not okay the way I am. I’m not okay at all the way I am. I know that."

And so, you know, when I’m speaking—to when I’m speaking now—I say to people, "Oh, you’re nowhere near what you could be." That’s the positive message; it’s like, "Yeah, you’re a mess, but you don’t have to stay that way."

"You're a mess—you know it obviously, you’re suffering away like so much you can barely tolerate it. It’s like that’s okay, you can do something about it."

So yeah, that’s the thing that turns the lights on. It’s like you can do something about it.

So they’re in a freezing prison cell, and the most appalling circumstances half-staff to death, he finds freedom, huh, in himself. He finds something positive and something to live for by first coming to grips with evil and understanding what it is.

Well, the conundrum in then he said too, like, and he underwent the Christian process of Metanoia, which is to go over your life — it’s confession essentially and repentance.

It wasn’t mediated by a religious structure in Solzhenitsyn’s case, but it was exactly the same process, and he knew that perfectly well. I’m not making this up; he said when he was in the prisons, he decided that he was at least in part to blame for his own imprisonment and the imprisonment of everyone around him — that that was his fault, or at least his responsibility.

That he was going to take that on, he said, "The first thing I did was I went over my life with a fine-tooth comb in memory," and his goal was, "Okay, I’m gonna remember everything I did in my life up to now where I did something that I knew to be wrong, and not because of some external authority defining it as wrong, but in relationship to his own conscience," right?

And then he was going to determine if there was some way that could be rectified — now to atone for it — right? To become at one with it again.

And so that was part of the process he undertook. The concluding consequence of that was that he wrote "The Gulag Archipelago," which is an absolutely overwhelming piece that blew the intellectual slats out of the foundation of communism permanently.

Once Solzhenitsyn figured that out, we say — to be trying to gloss over academia seems to be full of people who want to soft pedal right now and reinstate this naive view that if we just create the right institutions, everybody will behave rationally.

We’ll all be equal; everything will be okay.

They want to enforce it.

Yeah, won’t say that, but that’s what they want to do; they want to enforce it.

Yeah, well, I think it’s easy, and it’s only a few short decades since all of that happened.

Yeah, well, are we mad?

Well, we’re characterized by inertia and ignorance. It’s not easy to — it’s not easy to understand history. It’s especially not if you read it properly, you know.

You read I had a client at one point who was an unbelievably naive person; you cannot overestimate her naivety. No matter how hard you tried, her parents taught her that adults were angels literally, and she believed that.

In a strange sense, when I met her, she was in her 20s, and she had this extraordinarily naive view of people and had been hurt. If you’re very naive and you’ve been hurt by someone, you often disintegrate because it blows your world apart; that’s what’s happened to her.

And I said she had a university degree, and I said, "Well, look, like in the liberal arts," I said, "didn’t you read any history?"

She said, "Well, yeah."

I said, "Well, did like — didn’t that disturb the whole 'adults are angels' hypothesis?"

And she said, "Well, I read it, but I just compartmentalized it."

And that gave me the key to what was wrong with her, and we successfully dealt with it.

But I had her to begin her — I had to have her read, oddly enough, because she had to understand malevolence because she had been touched by it, right?

She had to understand it because her naive worldview had been shattered by the hand of malevolence. I had her read a book called "Ordinary Men" by Browning, and it’s a study of these Polish policemen, German policemen who were sent to Poland after the Nazis had marched through Poland.

They were sent to police Poland, and they were decent middle-class guys essentially — most of whom had been hit maturity before Hitler had come to power, so they weren’t indoctrinated Nazis, you know?

Not like the Nazi youth types were, and they had to go to Poland and be policemen under wartime conditions, and they had a very humane commander. He told all of them that they were going to have to do things that would be far more brutal, in all likelihood, than they were normally prepared to do in their role as non-military policemen, but that they could go back to their old job if they wanted to.

So, was it top-down enforcement of an authoritarian ethos? Browning documents their transformation from the guy next door, you know, the policeman next door, into people who were taking naked pregnant women out into fields and shooting them in the back of the head.

And it’s a brutal book because while these men — it’s like it just ruined them to do that to themselves. They were physically ill during the process of transformation, you know?

He does a very good job of documenting how an ordinary person transforms into a Nazi murderer.

And I had to read that. I said, "But don’t you compartmentalize; this is about you, right? This isn’t about someone else."

When you read history, you think, "Well, that’s about someone else." It’s like unless maybe you’re a victim and you identify with the victims, it’s a very rare person who reads history and identifies with the perpetrators.

But unless you read history and identify with the perpetrators, then you don’t understand history at all.

And so who wants to understand that? And I get my students; I said, "Look, I've told them this for 30 years. Here’s something you have to understand: if you were in Nazi Germany, the statistical probability is overwhelming that you would have been a perpetrator."

You think you would have rescued Anne Frank? It’s like, think again. Those people are very, very, very, very rare. They put their lives on the line to do that.

They put their family's lives on the line to do that. You think you’re one of those people? Really?

It’s like that all that means is that you know nothing. You know nothing about yourself; you know nothing about people; you know nothing about politics or economics or history.

It’s a harsh lesson, the truth about Germany in the 1930s. It was probably the most educated society in the world, and seen at that point in time, education alone, cleverness in inverted commas alone, intelligence alone are no social — right, right, right?

So, absolutely, there’s no substitute for character.

So we don’t wonder, you know, Pascal called about the — called — talked of the glory and the scum. To reach our full humanity, it seems to me, we need to understand both intention — I’ll call you the unbelievable scum that lies in terms of our potential at the bottom of every heart, the extraordinary nobility you call at the spark of divinity.

I would say "Made in the image of a mighty creator." You’ve got to hold those things in suspension if you’re to define your real humanity.

In fact, you weigh through other good places, surely, through the valley of darkness.

In the first place, you think, "Well, if it’s possible to be enlightened, why isn’t everyone enlightened?" It’s like, well, you don’t get to paradise; you don’t get to heaven without harrowing hell first.

And who’s going to do that? Like that’s a terrible thing to do. It isn’t even clear that you can survive it.

No, I mean it’s brutally damaging to come to terms with your own proclivity for malevolence, and so people don’t do it, and it’s no wonder.

But the funny thing is, and this is also something that I think that people who have been watching my lectures have been attracted by, especially the young men – it’s like until you know your own problems — until you understand that you’re a monster — until perhaps you even develop that as a capacity, you don’t have the moral force to do good.

So not only is that descent to begin with necessary to scare you straight, right, to make you understand what exactly it is that you’re dealing with, but you don’t even have the strength of character to be good until you understand just exactly what sort of monster you can be.

I have a rule in my book, rule 5: "Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them."

Yeah, rather, it’s a meditation on the monstrousness of parents. It’s like, don’t underestimate yourself, your capability to ruin your children’s lives.

You let them act in a manner that makes you disprove of them, you will take revenge on them in ways you cannot even imagine.

And unless you understand that, you’re not going to be careful enough as a parent, and you're not going to set proper boundaries.

Don’t let your children annoy you; it’s a very bad idea. Now, you know, that means that you should try to regulate your proclivity to be annoyed, and you should try to be civilized and you should talk to your partner, your wife or your husband about your over-sensitivities and foolishness.

But having said that, you need to know who the monster is, and it’s you.

So if we’re washing that wisdom out, I don’t want to sound calm down a tree here. I’m more sympathetic and concerned for what’s happening in our family homes and the environment in which our kids are being raised, and you and I, I mean you're very passionate in your concern for these people.

So we don’t want anyone to think here we’re trying to condemn them — far the opposite, just the opposite.

But if we’re watching this out of the system, what then happens to our kids when they hit institutions, schools, colleges, universities?

Well, we’re going to find out because increasingly, the elementary and the school systems that our kids are going through from say the age of five to the age of eighteen, they’re increasingly occupied by the postmodern neo-Marxist ideologies.

I think we have to learn to identify what those are; that’s a start. I mean, there are buzzwords: diversity, inclusivity, equity.

Equity, that's a no-go zone. Equity, that’s equality of outcome; that’s a preposterous, murderous doctrine masquerading in sheep's clothing.

White privilege, systemic racism, gender, all of those — none of those as individual topics are necessarily off the table, you know, if you can have an intelligent discussion about any of them.

Except equity, because that’s just a no-go zone. But to see those concepts emerge as a network of meaning, you know that you’re in the presence of this pernicious postmodern neo-Marxist doctrine that’s fundamentally ideological at its core, and people need to see that.

They need to understand what that means, and they need to stop it. Now, how they’re going to stop it, they’re going to make a million individual decisions about that.

But at least they could start by identifying it. I’ve suggested to parents in Canada and the U.S. that as soon as teachers talk to their children about diversity, inclusivity, and equity, they suggest to their children that they leave the class because they’re no longer in the educational realm; they’re in the indoctrination realm.

And people aren’t taking that — I wouldn’t say they’re not taking that seriously; it’s not an easy thing to figure out, and it sounds very, very radical to suggest you don’t encourage your children to leave the class.

But I think we’re at that point.

Wonder why universities are not offering high-quality courses in how freedom was secured by Western societies for its individual members and how it might be secured and how you secured fairness from unfairness — those sorts of things are not there.

Hmm, well, some of it I think — some of it has to do with what we’ve been speaking about — is that to address the problem squarely is actually quite daunting.

I mean, the difficulties are manifold. Inequality is real; individual malevolence is real; to constrain it inside yourself is extraordinarily daunting. To read history as a perpetrator is traumatizing; these are hard things.

And then to think through the problems of addressing something like inequality instead of reacting to it in a knee-jerk compassionate manner and implementing policies on that basis that are going to be counterproductive — that’s also extraordinarily difficult.

So there’s difficulty as part of it, and then I would also say, well, we haven’t talked about the resentment that drives the discussion of inequality.

It’s not all — it’s not like everyone on the left is overwhelmed by compassion, and that’s why all these brutal things tend to happen. It’s that they’re also overwhelmed by the same sort of jealousy that Cain had for Abel, and the same sort of murderous impulses that emerge very rapidly as a consequence of that jealousy.

He has more than me; he must be a perpetrator. It’s morally obligatory for me to take him out. That’s an easy message to sell.

I read about how the Communists deep uniscopals caused the Russian countryside. So imagine, imagine it’s Russia. You’re in a village; it’s 30 years, something like that, after the serfs have been emancipated.

There’s a few agriculturalists who’ve managed to produce successful agricultural enterprises, and you know, maybe they have a couple of cows; they have some land; they’re able to hire a few people, and they’re raising almost all the food. Right?

And so, and they’re a minority in any village because the hyper-productive successful are always a minority. So they’re a minority in every village, alright?

And so there’s people who are doing worse, and then there’s a lot of people who aren’t doing so well at all. And then the communist intellectuals show up, and they tell the people who aren’t doing so well, some of whom are just suffering because of life, but some of whom aren’t doing well because they’ve never done anything productive with even a second of their life, and the communist intellectuals come in and say, "You know those guys that are doing so much better than you?

Yeah, they actually stole all of that from you, and you’re morally obligated to go take it back." It’s like, oh man.

You know, after six cups of Mead, let’s say, or let’s say ten or let’s say twenty, and I’m drunk out of my mind, and I’ve got my crew buddies with me, and we’re all resentful, right, to the core because we’ve wasted our miserable lives, and now we have an opportunity to go down the street to our wealthy neighbor’s house and to rape his daughter, and we can do it in the name of good.

It’s like, well there’s a story you can market, and that happened everywhere in the Soviet Union.

So they wiped out the kulaks. It’s like, great, and then six million Ukrainians starve to death.

That’s right! Brilliant! I’m a farmer. The Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe; that’s what it was, then it became a region pathetically unable to feed itself.

Yet the same sort of worldview that gave rise to that we’re now being told. You use the word neo-marxist; many people in Australia use the word cultural Marxist.

I’ve got an old friend who said to me, "What are you talking about, John? You know, free capitalist Australia isn’t going to let that happen here."

Well, quite as Airlines took a nice step toward that the other day, and they adopted their language policing policies.

These corporations who should know far better let these far-left fifth columns into their organizations. They think they’re not going to pay for that?

I think they’re gonna stop with some demands for the reconstruction of language?

Not like the demands for reconstruction of language, by the way, are trivial. They’re maybe the most important thing you could possibly demand, right?

"I want to reshape the way you speak. I want to reshape the way you think."

Like, well, that’s okay as long as it doesn’t interfere with the bottom line.

It’s like, it’ll interfere with the bottom line. You let that fifth column in.

It’s a warning to corporate people — you let that fifth column in, man, you’re gonna regret it. You’re gonna regret it.

So and things can turn on a dime, you know? A very well-organized minority, even if the majority opposes them — and they do — a very well-organized minority can have an unbelievably pernicious effect on organization.

Margaret Meads made that point: societies change directions when a small group of people decide to change its direction. That’s the way history works.

Let’s come back to this issue of the redefining of language. It seems to me that there are two things that people who want to reshape society in brutal ways do.

The first is they start to silence good debate, either silence it or shut it down, whatever. The second thing they do is they redefine language.

So it’s very hard to have a debate. So diversity, actually, I mean, there’s no other way to put it; in this country, it’s rapidly coming to mean a stifling conformity.

You dare not deviate from the line, and you see it with a whole lot of other words that are bandied around — equality being one of them.

Yeah, because it’s confused; equality of opportunity is confused with equality of outcomes.

Well, the initial wedge was equality of opportunity, and then that flew. And so, "Well, no, no — it’s equality of outcome." That’s equity.

And that — I cannot believe how rapidly that idea, which is the ultimate and terrible idea, has spread and how little people criticize it.

Well, that’s because it, too — uninformed analysis. It sounds good if you’re feeling carelessly compassionate because you — you got back to the Ukrainian example. In destroying the leading-edge farmers, you actually guaranteed misery for everyone.

Oh, people were selling human body parts in the Ukraine for food.

You know, it was — if you were a mother and your children were starving, and you went out into the fields after they were harvested and you picked up individual pieces of grain that the harvesters had left, and you didn’t turn them over to the state, that was a capital offense, right?

That was — and the funny thing is that that was in the glory days of the Russian Revolution.

Right? That wasn’t in the like 1950s; that wasn’t in the 1930s even. That was in the 1920s. That was right when this started.

And I think it was Malcolm Muggeridge who was reporting on that for a UK newspaper, whose name escapes me at the moment.

He was pointing all of this out, you know, and no one paid attention. No one paid attention.

Towards the end of his life, he warned that the West is in danger of eating itself out from within, and I wonder whether, in fact, he wasn’t being very appreciative.

And you and I want to stop that happening for the sake of our young people, for the sake of everyone. We went down that pathway already. We’ve seen it.

We need to do it. He fired it — that thing. History should be like science, in the sense that it ought to be objective; it ought to be told truthfully.

It ought not to be used to secure some dominant group's preferred version of society.

This is also why, see, what I’ve been trying to do about this — because I’ve thought this through a long time ago.

Well, I don’t want to — I think the group identity game ends in blood. It doesn’t matter who plays it. Left-wingers play it; blood. Right-wingers play it; blood.

And lots of it, not just a little bit. You can’t play the identity politics game.

Well, so what do you do instead? You live the mythologically heroic life as an individual. That’s the right place to work.

And that’s the message of the West is that we figured that out. We figured out that the collective identity was not the pinnacle statement, that the individual — not the collective.

Identities have no value, obviously; family has value, and organizations have value—all of that, that’s not the issue.

The issue is, what’s the paramount value? What’s the metric by which people should be measured?

And the answer is they should be measured as individuals as if they have a divine soul. That’s the idea of the West.

It’s an unbelievably remarkable idea that individual perfection is to be found in a relationship with spoken truth.

God, that’s the great idea. Well, it’s out of that arises the observation that there’s nothing more central to the hierarchy of rights and obligations as well, let’s say, than freedom of speech.

Yes, it’s absolutely central. That’s why Christ is the word made flesh — the idea is that the perfect individual is the person who speaks truth but also acts out the truth of those words.

It’s very—it’s a proposition whose merit is virtually self-evident when you understand it in that manner. So, yeah, people see assaults on freedom of speech, especially compelled speech.

Well, that’s where I drew the line in my life. It was like purpose — well-held speech legislation in Canada, perhaps that’s why the left is so determined in this country to get Christianity out of the classroom.

But don’t tell us something of the chilling — there’s no doubt that that’s why they’re determined.

I mean, people like Derrida — I mean he called the west Phallocentric, right? Male-dominated logos-centric.

It’s like, that is the West — it’s a logos-centric. Well, if you want to take the West down, you remove the idea of the Divine Word from the substructure of society, so you have to do that.

And this is the level at which this war is being fought; it’s fundamentally a theological war.

Interesting, it is. Famous Waterloo lectures — Blaise Pascal lecture in 1978, Malcolm Muggeridge said the West was in danger of eating itself out from within, and he spoke at great length about this attempt to about how the West was abandoned in Christianity.

It had become a very empty and soulless and financially bankrupt place as a result, but it wouldn’t be the end, he said, despite the attempts to kill it in places like Communist China and Russia.

There will always be people who will fight through to the truth; of course, we can see now three decades on, whatever, that he was absolutely right — closer to four decades on; he was right.

Well, you know that Christianity is spreading faster in Communist China than it did in Rome during its most rapid period of expansion in terms of proportion of people transforming, so Christianity is spreading incredibly quickly in China, which is — who would have guessed that, right?

I mean, that just makes you shake your head. Tell us a little more about your chilling experience.

I mean, Canada and Australia culturally in many ways very alike — if it can happen in Canada, presumably it’s coming here.

Oh, it’s how it’s going to happen here! I think it’s absolutely inevitable.

It’s not that big a move from where you’re already at, and the fact that, well, the Qantas airline thing is a really good example.

The fact that these things are happening and that corporations aren’t standing up in outrage against the introduction of ideas like equity — it’s like, you guys are all primed for this.

Why? Not compelled speech, especially if it’s done for the best of all possible reasons.

I was accused of denying the identities of the oppressed, and it’s like, "Well, for me, that wasn’t the issue at all. The issue was no, look, I’m not an advocate of hate speech laws for the reasons I already described."

Like, who’s gonna define hate? Not the people you want to define it, that would be the inevitable consequence of the legislation.

Because sensible people won’t have anything to do with that. People who are power mad will gravitate to that domain to make an ethical case to exercise their controlling power over the language of other people, no?

And I’ve had journalists say, "Well, what makes you think that your right to free speech trumps the right of someone to not be offended?"

And I think that’s really the level of our political discourse.

Okay, so we’ll run a little thought experiment. So I’m talking to one person; I’m talking to you, and the rule is I don’t get to offend you.

Okay, maybe we can still have a discussion about something difficult. But let's say I’m talking to ten people about an important thing.

Now I have to make sure that I don’t say anything to fight despite the fact that this is an important and contentious issue that I don’t say anything that offends even one of those ten people? Okay, maybe I can even manage that.

What if I’m talking to a thousand people? There’s going to be someone in that thousand people; there’s gonna be someone who’s offended at the mere fact that I exist.

So it’s an impossible standard. It’s like, "Well, you can’t say anything offensive." Okay, fine, then you can’t say anything.

Okay, so what? You don’t get to say anything because no one should be offended?

Well, then you don’t get to think.

Well, then what happens if you don’t think?

Well, then you can’t negotiate your way through the future, and you fall into a pit, and so does everyone else.

So that’s where that all ends up. You can’t say offensive things equals you cannot negotiate your way properly through the future equals everyone suffers.

That’s a bad strategy, and it’s all covered up with, "Well, you know, it’d be better if no one was ever offended."

Who thinks that? You know how naive you have to be to think that?

Now you have to be pathologically naive, which is the kind of naive that you could have grown out of, but you willfully refused to because you weren’t willing to see what was in front of your face, and then you impose that blind naivety on everyone else because you don’t want to allow them to upset your rosy view of yourself in the world.

There’s just no end to how terrible that is.

One of our very astute writers recently made the comment that freedom of speech is the most important freedom because it’s the freedom by which we defend all of our other freedoms.

It strikes me that freedom of speech, though, is most important not for the powerful or for the elite; it’s actually for the minority groups.

A free society, surely, is one that allows those who swim against the tide and have a different perspective the right to do so without fear of mob or state sanction.

I’ve had some personally — well, I gave a talk at the University of British Columbia about a year ago on "It was called a left-wing case for freedom of speech."

It’s like, it’s really easy to make a left-wing case for freedom of speech.

It’s like, well, that’s how it exists — have the opportunity to make their suffering known, right?

Yeah, clearly. I mean, it’s the fact that that argument even has to be made shows you how pathological the radical left has become because it’s clearly the case that freedom of speech is not generally in the interests of the power elite, right?

Because they already have access to what they need to maintain their grip on the world, let’s say, if you look at it that manner.

It’s the people at the bottom of the hierarchy whose right to expression needs to be protected, yeah? If you’re in control of the debate, you don’t need freedom of speech, right?

Right, obviously! So it’s always useful for the dispossessed of freedom of speech issues.

And then the other issue that you wrote, that the writer that you described, brought to the forefront is the idea of the hierarchy of rights.

Now, in our conception of rights in Canada, we’re not willing to assume that any right has priority over any other right.

Now, that doesn’t work out because when the two rights come into conflict with one another, which they do, you have to adjudicate their relative status.

What’s happened in Canada is that equality rights keep trumping everything else, and that’s not good.

There’s actually a good reason why you shouldn’t have a Bill of Rights, and we never should have had one in my estimation.

But whatever — the freedom of speech — you say, "Well, the right to freedom of speech is central because it’s the right by which you defend all the other rights."

Well, that’s why the idea of logos in the West is the most sacred concept, right? Because, oh Christ, do you think about this psychologically?

It’s like Christ is the ideal of perfection. Now, this is independent of any religious discussion or any historical accuracy; it doesn’t matter.

We’re looking at this from the perspective of the analysis of a myth or a story. What Christ represents is the perfect individual, whatever that is.

Now you discuss endlessly what that is. But one of the things the West has settled on is the idea, well, that the perfect individual utters the truthful speech that makes potential into habitable order — does that through truth.

And that’s embedded in the first few sentences in Genesis, for example — when God brings the world into being.

So and the idea that truthful speech that brings the world into being from formless potential also characterizes each person; that’s our form, our fabrication in the image of God.

That’s the idea of the West. It’s an unbelievably remarkable idea that perfection, individual perfection, is to be found in a relationship with spoken truth, God.

That’s the great idea! Well, it’s out of that arises the observation that there’s nothing more central to the hierarchy of rights and obligations, as well let’s say, than freedom of speech.

Yes, it’s absolutely central. That’s why Christ is the word made flesh.

The idea is that the perfect individual is the person who speaks truth but also acts out the truth of those words. It’s very — it’s a proposition whose merit is virtually self-evident when you understand it in that manner.

So, yeah, people — to see assaults on freedom of speech, especially compelled speech — well that’s where I drew the line in my life.

It was like purpose well-held speech legislation in Canada. Perhaps that’s why the left is so determined in this country to get Christianity out of the classroom.

But don’t tell us something of the chilling — there’s no doubt that’s why they’re determined.

I mean people like Derrida — I mean, he called the west phallocentric, right? Male dominated, logos-centric.

It’s like; that is the West. It’s a logos-centric. Well, if you want to take the West down, you remove the idea of the Divine Word from the substructure of society, so you have to do that.

And this is the level at which this war is being fought; it’s fundamentally a theological war.

Interesting. It is famous Waterloo lectures, Blaise Pascal lecture in 1978, Malcolm Muggeridge said the West was in danger of eating itself out from within, and he spoke at great length about this attempt to about how the West was abandoned in Christianity.

It had become a very empty and soulless and financially bankrupt place as a result, but it wouldn’t be the end, he said.

Despite the attempts to kill it in places like Communist China and Russia, there will always be people who will fight through to the truth; of course, we can see now three decades on, whatever, that he was absolutely right.

Closer to four decades on, he was right!

Which is — who would have guessed that, right? I mean that just makes you shake your head.

Tell us a little more about your chilling experience.

I mean, Canada and Australia culturally in many ways are very alike — if it can happen in Canada, presumably it’s coming here.

Oh! It’s how it’s going to happen here! I think it’s absolutely inevitable.

It’s not that big a move from where you’re already at, and the fact that — well, the Qantas airline thing is a really good example.

The fact that these things are happening and that corporations aren’t standing up in outrage against the introduction of ideas like equity — it’s like, you guys are all primed for this.

Why not compelled speech? Especially if it’s done for the best of all possible reasons. I was accused of denying the identities of the oppressed.

It’s like, "Well, for to me that wasn’t the issue at all. The issue was no, look, I’m not an advocate of hate speech laws for the reasons I already described."

Like, who’s gonna define hate? Not the people you want to define it. That would be the inevitable consequence of the legislation because sensible people won’t have anything to do with that.

People who are power mad will gravitate to that domain — to make an ethical case to exercise their controlling power over the language of other people — no?

And I’ve had journalists say, "Well, what makes you think that your right to free speech trumps the right of someone to not be offended?"

And I think that’s really the level of our political discourse.

Okay, so we’ll run a little thought experiment. So I’m talking to one person; I’m talking to you, and the rule is I don’t get to offend you.

Okay, maybe we can still have a discussion about something difficult. But let's say I’m talking to ten people about an important thing.

Now I have to make sure that I don’t say anything to fight despite the fact that this is an important and contentious issue that I don’t say anything that offends even one of those ten people?

Okay, maybe I can even manage that.

What if I’m talking to a thousand people? There’s going to be someone in that thousand people; there’s gonna be someone who’s offended at the mere fact that I exist.

So it’s an impossible standard. It’s like, "Well, you can’t say anything offensive." Okay fine, then you can’t say anything.

Okay, so what? You don’t get to say anything because no one should be offended?

Well then, you don’t get to think.

Well then what happens if you don’t think?

Well then you can’t negotiate your way through the future and you fall into a pit and so does everyone else.

So that’s where that all ends up. You can’t say offensive things equals you cannot negotiate your way properly through the future equals everyone suffers.

That’s a bad strategy and it’s all covered up with, "Well, you know, it’d be better if no one was ever offended."

Who thinks that? You know how naive you have to be to think that?

Now you have to be pathologically naive, which is the kind of naive that you could have grown out of but you willfully refused to because you weren’t willing to see what was in front of your face, and then you impose that blind naivety on everyone else because you don’t want to allow them to upset your rosy view — your rosy view of yourself in the world.