2017/04/10: Harvard Talk: Postmodernism & the Mask of Compassion

Yeah, we wanted to start off just with, uh, you introducing yourself a little bit, telling us about your general work. Particularly, you've talked a lot about faculty freedom recently, and I'm wondering if you think you want to talk a little bit about what you see as the ideal relationship between a university and its faculty members.

I think in many ways, the best thing for the university to do with its faculty members is to leave them alone. And I mean that in the best possible way. I mean, that was actually one of the things I taught here from '93 to '98, and one of the things—and I have the same relationship, I would say, with the University of Toronto—is that the universities go to a tremendous amount of trouble to identify promising people in terms of their research capability from all over the world. Generally speaking, if you identify promising people, your best bet as a manager is to stay out of their way now and to remove obstacles from their movement forward. I think that the universities do a credible job of that, although my sense, uh, over the last few decades has been that increasingly there are more impediments placed in the path of research. For example, I've seen that with the multiplication of the powers of institutional review boards, for example, ethics committees, which have vastly overreached their reasonable powers. They slow things down, and that's a big mistake. If you're dealing with people who are conducting research into important topics, then you want to do everything you possibly can to let them move forward as rapidly as possible.

In what ways do you think these institutional review boards or these ethics committees have particularly damaged the process or the speed of research? Do you think there are times—like, do you have any examples in mind of when you think they've overreached their power?

Well, they regulate—I think your microphone's off, so we will fix it a little. Swit, okay, I got—is that one's not on? Okay, well, let’s find it here. Is that better? Okay, now you can hear me, which at least in principle should be an [laughter] improvement. Yeah, well, I mean, oh yes, that's much better. Yeah, well, in the social sciences, for example, the institutional review boards insist upon reviewing the use of questionnaires in research, which I think is—it’s not helpful. Questionnaires aren't dangerous, and they have no real policies set in place to determine the difference between dangerous research and the normal dangers that people expose themselves to on a daily basis.

So, um, and they've certainly—the institutional review boards have certainly slowed down the work in my lab, for example, and made it much more onerous. We have to do a tremendous amount of writing and justification for the studies long before they're even undertaken, and then also do a fair bit of paperwork to keep up with the documentation. And I don't find that the least bit useful. I know that in the United States, the institutional review boards' domains of power are being cut back now because of complaints, primarily, if I remember correctly, primarily from the granting agencies, because they're adding to the unnecessary expense that's associated with research.

So I mean, the university should—the university administration fundamentally exists to serve the faculty and the students, and probably the students first and the faculty second. But increasingly, I see that the administration is multiplying out of control, and that's quite well documented in terms of overall cost. Some of that’s driven by legislation, so it's not something that's necessarily intrinsic to the administration itself, but that's one of the things that's driving the ever upward spiraling of tuition costs.

Yep, so aside from research ethics boards, institutional review boards, ethics committees, do you think there are other ways that the administration has interfered with your work particularly? You've recently come under fire from some administration at the University of Toronto for certain controversial views you hold. You mentioned that you think the administration's primary obligation should be to its students and then it should also serve its faculty. Do you see the administration using that mission properly when they try to talk to faculty about certain statements that they've made, or do you think that's also an overreach of their power?

Well, I think it reflects a more general societal confusion about just exactly what our priorities are. I made a video back in September stating my objections to the mandated use of a certain category of pronoun that I object to mostly on the grounds that I felt that the government had no right compelling people's speech. Al, because personally, I didn't want to use the pronouns that were being put forward by people I regard as holding a philosophical and political ethos that I find really, really quite detestable. And I made a video about that and mentioned during the video that the act of making the video had arguably become illegal in Ontario, in the province I'm from, and was about to become illegal federally with some new legislation, and that it likely violated the code of conduct that characterized the university with regards to its inclusiveness policies.

The university promptly validated my concerns by sending me two letters telling me to stop making such statements because they violated the university's code of conduct and also the relevant human rights legislation in Ontario and the federal government. One of the— I felt that the reason that the university did that was because they faced a certain amount of public pressure from people at the University of Toronto, and that would be mostly—most of that pressure came from people I would regard as the professional activist types. The university said that they had received many letters accusing me of making the University of Toronto an unsafe space, which is the sort of language that immediately makes you know that you're dealing with people who are ideologically possessed. But they also—but they failed to note at the same time that they had received hundreds, perhaps thousands, of letters as well as a 10,000-signature petition supporting my stance.

And so I think when the administration regards its duty, its fundamental duty, to promote some illusory notion of safety and then also is willing to falsify the facts on the ground by omission, that they have definitely overstepped their boundaries. I would say that they were put back—they were set back on their heels, let’s put it that way, by a very strident outpouring, powerful outpouring of public opinion in Canada. And that was—although that was good for me because I got two letters, and generally if you're dealing with human resources professionals, then three letters is the warning and then the next step is something more serious.

I'm curious, you mentioned the term safe space in particular for a university, and I want you to link this back to this idea that university administration should be serving students first and faculty second. So do you think that the administration has some sort of compelling mandate to make sure that students feel safe?

No, they have the exact reverse mandate. There's nothing safe about being educated. If you want to be safe, stay home. The things that you need to be educated about are terrible things almost always. If you study history properly, it’s terrible. If you study literature properly, it's terrible. If you study psychology properly, all of these fields of endeavor teach you the painful things that you need to know to understand what human beings in society are like. So the idea—first of all, the idea that university should be a safe space is absolutely preposterous.

But it's also preposterous for more immediate reasons. One of the— there’s a few things that we know as clinical psychologists, say as a field and also as practitioners with regards to how to treat people who suffer, let’s say from an excess of anxiety. What you do with people who suffer from an excess of anxiety is expose them to the very things that they're afraid of or sometimes disgusted by, and you help them voluntarily expose themselves to such things. And that doesn't make the world safer; it makes them braver and more competent.

And so the notion that you serve students’ safety concerns even by shielding them from things that they don’t wish to encounter—there’s absolutely—I can't think of a single valid reason why you would ever undertake such an endeavor. I think it's really neat to talk about it in the abstract, but the particular concern that perhaps a lot of students and a lot of members of the community have with your case is the particular pronoun usage issue.

So in that instance, I'm wondering if you think there's a real harm. So if someone comes to you, one of your students, let’s say, and would really feel more comfortable engaging with the deep, troubling historical or psychological or whatever field truths if you refer to the student with certain pronouns, do you really think that's a necessary place where they need that, you know, severe exposure? Or do you think there is some sort of, you know, harm by calling them the pronoun that they would...?

I think it's fundamentally a fabricated issue. It's been fabricated for political reasons. I know the history of the relevant legislation in Ontario, and initially the legislation was basically predicated on the idea that gender identity was a social construct and that there were going to be protections put in place for people whose gender identity had switched so that they weren't subject to harassment or discrimination. There's no utility in subjecting people to counterproductive discrimination, and I would consider discrimination counterproductive when the discrimination occurs for reasons that aren't relevant to the task at hand, because we discriminate all the time.

But the government ran the policies by a relatively select group of activists and transformed it into a piece of policy legislation that no one in their right mind would abide by or could abide by for that matter. And reduced, for example, the idea of human identity to something that basically transforms on a subjective whim. And so I don't buy any of that. I don't think that that's what identity is. I don't think it's fundamentally self-generated. It might be socioculturally constructed to some degree, and most certainly is, but the idea that your identity is solely your choice and that you have the right to inflict that on other people is absolutely preposterous. Most people grow out of that idea when they're two years of age.

I mean that technically, because we know that when children hit about three years of age, they're able to start playing social games, and that's when they start learning that identity is, at minimum, a socially negotiated phenomenon. Now, okay, so apart from that, there's no agreement whatsoever on the set of pronouns that will be used, and they've multiplied beyond anybody's imagination, I would say, including the people who formulated the legislation.

And then there's the fact that you don't refer to people by their pronouns anyways. They're third-person pronouns. And so I don't call you he when we're talking; I might refer to you as he if I was talking about you with someone else. So most of the time, it's a moot point anyways.

Sure, but Dr. Peterson, in the cases where it does matter, right? Certainly, you could envision—let’s not talk so much about federal policy, but perhaps like in an actual, like personal day-to-day setting. Do you think there's a harm? So, perhaps you can disagree with, like, the philosophical principle, the theoretical truth of whether or not identity can change subjectively whim to whim, but if someone comes up to me and says, you know, I want to be referred to as this—even if I adopt some sort of view that I don't really think fundamentally on a pure theoretical level they have an understanding of identity—does that—do I then choose to harm them or potentially upset them by sticking to my belief about what their identity is?

Well, the first thing you'd have to establish is whether or not that would actually constitute harm. That's the claim, and the person might say, well, you're harming me, but that doesn't provide evidence that you are. People presume very often that they're harmed by things that they're not harmed by at all.

So I don't think that someone thinks that the way I would address them might harm them gives them the right to enforce by legislation the content of my speech—that just doesn’t work. And you know, here's something else that's worth noting from a more practical perspective. I've received letters from about 30 trans people, and that's actually a lot because there aren't that many people, and these are people who, by and large, were very serious about their transformations, and all but one of them agreed with what I was doing, saying first of all that they never asked to be represented by the activists who claim to be representing them.

Now, here's a proposition, right? So imagine that there's a group of people and that somebody is a member of that group of people, and then that person stands forth as a member of that group and says, because I'm a member of that group, I speak for all those people. It's like, actually, no, you don't. The mere fact that you're a member of a group doesn't give you any right whatsoever to speak on behalf of that group. You need to have legitimacy as a representative, and I don't—I think that you can hardly imagine a more pernicious example, say, of racism than to presume that if someone is black, they speak on behalf of all black people. All black people are homogeneous; they all believe exactly the same thing. Therefore, if you've talked to or met one of them, you've talked to or met them all.

With respect, Dr. Peterson, I think I'm referring to cases where the actual people in front of you are telling you, though, that they want to represent themselves a certain way, right? So we can talk about whether or not the activist community is accurately representing actual communities, but I’m wondering—you mentioned you don't think like a self-report of like, oh, this is harming me or I would not be comfortable interacting with you unless, you know, X happened, would not be an accurate way of describing real harm. Are there better metrics we have for real harm?

If someone comes up to me and they say, oh, you know, when—like, they're feeling too warm in this room, we should leave. You know, do I say, ah, no, like you don't know how warm you are? That's not something you can know for yourself; that's just a self-report.

Well, it would depend on— they were asking other people to do. And I don't I don't believe that people have the right to impose restrictions on what—not so much restrictions on what I'm allowed to say, but to determine the content of my speech. That's an entirely different thing. And so if it's a matter of the legal principle of whether or not I'm free to determine the content of my speech or the hypothetical discomfort of a hypothetical person—because no one's actually asked me this yet—then I'm going to go with the freedom from compelled speech. Partly again, because I think that the idea that the government or any other institution should regulate the content of your speech is absolutely—it's intolerable.

I think you have a strong legal argument, right? So the government probably should mandate this, that I'm sure a lot of people might agree with that. I'm still curious, though, in this hypothetical scenario that a student did or a person did approach you and they told you they would be harmed or they would be uncomfortable unless you referred to them with a certain pronoun. What would you do?

Well, I really have a hard time answering questions like that because they’re asked in the hypothetical. It could certainly happen, but my sense, because I'm a clinician, is that I generally handle those sorts of things at the level of actual detail. So I would say it would depend on the person; it would depend on the situation; it would depend on why they asked me; it would depend on how they asked me; it would depend on what I thought they were trying to accomplish by the request; it would depend on whether or not they were filming me while they were asking me; it would depend on whether they asked me in my office or in a hallway. You know, I can tell the difference between a genuine plea for understanding and a bit of political theater or political manipulation.

Now, I've dealt with people who've made all sorts of requests of me, believe me, because I've had a clinical practice for about 20 years. My experience with a range of human behavior is, I would say, extraordinarily extensive. And so I've made all sorts of adjustments to the way I interact with people. So I can't say exactly what I would do in a given situation because I firmly believe that the devil is in the details, and I haven't been making a case about a specific interaction that I had actually experienced or, or or—yeah—experienced. I've been making a case—a philosophical, fundamentally a philosophical case, and secondarily a political case. And I think that I've made the case properly.

But you would say that you recognize a difference between a, like, legal responsibility to do something versus a sort of an individual personal choice, I should do something?

Well, sometimes I recognize that. I mean sometimes the legal and the philosophical and the personal issues are all the same. It's simpler when that's the case, but I also think that the issue is essentially a red herring. I mean look, since I made that video, for one reason or another, the things that I've been saying have become quite popular and not as controversial as you might think. Most of what I've accrued so far has been support, and the reason for that has very little to do with the issue of pronouns. The pronoun issue and the pronoun controversy is a pointer to something that’s a lot larger, and that's why this issue has had legs.

I'm not here because people are interested in my views on pronouns. Now, I happen to put my foot down, so to speak, at a particular place because it’s very frequently the case that if you're engaged in a complex philosophical dispute—which is the case for our society in general—that in order to make a statement about it, you have to make a statement in relationship to an actual cause. So you have to draw the line somewhere.

And people have asked me, well, why did you pick the pronoun hill to die on? And my answer to that generally is A, I didn't die; and B, you have to—you have to pick something real to enter into the debate. So, for example, if I would have just made another video decrying political correctness, it would have gone nowhere at all. But I said that there was something I wouldn't do, and one of the things I won’t do is use the made-up words of postmodern neo-Marxists who are playing a particular game with gender identity that's an extension of their particular reprehensible philosophy. And if that happens to mean that I have to engage in discussions about whether or not if a, you know, if a suffering and confused person who's had a very, like, troubled pathway through life came and asked me politely if I would go out of my way to accommodate them, I think that—I don’t think that those issues actually belong on the same—in the same category of issue.

I mean, so I don't see that there’s—well, I guess that's enough said about that.

All right, let's transition a little bit. So you mentioned sort of postmodernism and neo-Marxism. In fact, in a statement at McMaster University, you claimed that an expression that the protests that you see at your events are an expression of a philosophy that's grounded partly in postmodernism and partly in Marxism. What does that mean? First, and secondly, how would you say that these movements are characterized in those ways?

Well, at McMaster, it meant that some of the protesters came and hid behind a banner that had a hammer and sickle on it. You know, hey—the funny thing is, the funny thing is, is that people laugh about that, and I understand perfectly well why you're laughing, but I can tell you, you wouldn't have laughed if it would have been a swastika. And it's no funnier that it was a hammer and sickle. You know, the reprehensible ideologies that are based in fundamental Marxism killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century, and they're still apologists. One in five social scientists identifies as a Marxist? It's like, really? Really? That's really where we're going to take this? Is it, after the bloody 20th century, we're going to say, well that wasn't real communism or something foolish like that, even though we had multiple examples of exactly what happens when those doctrines are let loose in the world.

And so what happened in the 1960s, as far as I can tell—and this happened mostly in France, which has probably produced the most reprehensible of public intellectuals that any country has ever managed—is that in the late 1960s, when all the student activists had decided that the Marxist revolution wasn't going to occur in the western world, and had finally also realized that apologizing for the Soviet system was just not going to fly anymore, given the tens of millions of bodies that had stacked up, they performed a what I would call a philosophical sleight of hand and transformed the class war into an identity politics war.

And that became extraordinarily popular, mostly transmitted through people like Jacques Derrida, who became an absolute darling of the Yale English Department and had his pernicious doctrine spread throughout North America, partly as a consequence of his invasion of Yale. And what happened with the postmodernists is they kept on peddling their murderous breed of political doctrine under a new guise, and resentful people all over the world fell for it. And I don't consider that acceptable.

You know, one of the things I’ve learned, for example, I teach my students in my second-year personality class about what happened in the Soviet Union in the Gulag Archipelago, and I use Solzhenitsyn as an exemplar of existential psychology because I think he's actually the wisest of the existential psychologists, even though he was primarily a historian and a literary figure. Well, most of the students don't even know what happened in the Soviet Union. Well, why is that exactly? And the reason for that is that radical left ideologues, intellectuals in the west, have never properly apologized for the role they played in the absolute murderousness of the 20th century.

And so students don’t even know about it so they can come out to McMaster behind their damnable poster with a hammer and sickle on it and act like they're virtuous.

Do you think that trend was only sort of significant to that specific McMaster incident, or do you see this type of ideology influencing campus protests beyond McMaster in general?

Well, I think that part of it’s everywhere. It’s not just in campus protests. I mean the campuses are overrun, in large part, with disciplines that have, in my estimation, no valid reason to exist. I think disciplines like women’s studies should be defunded. Any of the activist disciplines whose primary role is the overthrow of, for example, the patriarchy, which is about as ill-defined a concept as you could possibly formulate, that’s enough— we’ve done enough public funding of that sort of thing. We’re providing full-time destructive employment for people who are doing nothing but causing trouble and seriously nothing.

Would you say that because you think that these departments are causing harm or could have the potential to cause harm that university administration should defund them?

No, I don’t think they should defund them. Who the hell cares what I think about them? That isn’t why I think they should be defunded at all. Okay? I think they should be defunded because what they promote has zero intellectual credibility. Their research methods don’t qualify as research methods. Their publications—80% of humanities publications now garner zero citations. That’s not very many citations.

And the little trick, as far as I can tell, is what happens is that people write something that no one will read. They know perfectly well that no one will read it; they circulate it around their tiny group of compatriots who occupy the same little area on the intellectual spectrum. So then it’s peer-reviewed, then it’s published by major journals who sell it at inflated prices to libraries who squirrel it away to and only increase the noise to signal ratio in relationship to the sum total of human knowledge. It’s a scam from top to bottom.

So, and you know, here’s an example—well, let me give you an example. So here’s one of the things that really bothered me about what was going on in Ontario, and this is happening everywhere, and I made this claim when I made my first video. Since we have to get into this, so the technical claim in the Ontario legislation now—and this has already happened in New York, by the way. This is not only a Canadian thing; it’s happening in Australia, it’s happening in New Zealand; it’s happening everywhere.

Here’s the claim: There’s biological sex, there’s gender identity, there’s gender expression, and their sexual proclivity, and they vary independently. That’s the technical claim; it’s built into the Canadian law. That's not true; not a bit of that is true. The correlation between biological sex and gender identity exceeds 99%; it's virtually perfect. It's the very definition of non-independence.

So you think almost everyone who’s biologically male identifies as biologically male. Almost everyone who identifies as biologically male dresses and acts male—that's the gender identity element. And almost everybody who is biologically male, who identifies as male, who dresses as male, is in fact heterosexual. Most things are incredibly tightly linked.

But the technical claim in the legislation is that they vary independently. Wrong. Now, I got in trouble for saying that because what people claimed was that I was denying the existence of people who don't fit neatly into the gendered categories 0 or 1, or whatever the percentage may be that wouldn't fall neatly under that core.

So certainly, if there were a perfect correlation, that would work, but if there is not, it would seem perhaps that you're excluding certain people, right? So if most people tend to identify a certain way, but there is that 0.1% that's not...

I'm not —I was never denying their existence. I was denying the validity of the claim that those four levels of analysis existed independently of one another, which they don't. It's a false claim, and the reason that the radical social constructionists who are pursuing this line of reasoning, which is completely discredited as far as I'm concerned—I don't think it’s any better than claiming that the world is flat. The reason that they're pursuing it legally is because they know perfectly well that they lost the scientific discussion.

I mean, I debated someone on Canadian public television who had the goal to say that the scientific consensus over the last four decades was that there were no biological differences between men and women? I mean, and that was one of the things that was so absolutely absurd about that—and there were many things that were absurd about it—was that I was in trouble with the university at that point, and he wasn’t.

It's like, first of all, that is not the scientific consensus of the last four decades. And the idea that there are no biological differences between men and women, it’s the sort of thing you hear that it just makes your jaw drop. Now, what you could say is that if you took all the dimensions along which men and women vary—and there’s a substantial number of them—that there’s substantial overlap between men and women on almost all of the dimensions.

Now, that’s not particularly true with chromosomal identity, although there are some exceptions, like with personality, for example. And I happen to be somewhat of an expert on personality. There are marked differences between men and women, but the overlap exceeds the differences. So, for example, women are higher in agreeableness, and you might say, well, that’s socioculturally constructed, but it turns out that it isn't, because if you look across cultures and you look at the cultures that have moved most forward with gender equality provisions at the social and political levels—and that would be the Scandinavian countries—the differences in personality between men and women maximize in those countries.

And these are tiny studies that involve tens of thousands of people that have been well replicated by a series of independent researchers. And so with per—if you add the personality differences between men and women across all the personality traits, you can almost perfectly segregate men from women. And that has no—that doesn’t take into account the obvious things like arm angle and hip width, hip width compared to waist width, and shoulder width and upper body strength and height and weight and the biochemical differences.

I mean, it’s so preposterous that it’s—it’s beyond conception to me that we’re actually even discussing it. But I was making a specific claim, which is the law says these four levels of analysis vary independently. The only reason they're associated with one another is for cultural reasons. No, wrong. And you don’t get to put fallacious scientific truths into the law!

Not—or if you’re going to do that, then I’m not going to abide by that particular law. I’m going to object to it, which is exactly what I should be doing.

So do you think that a necessary premise for us to accept to have a law like that, a law that extends protections to these groups, is that these identities are independent from each other, fully independent? Or could we accept, like, if they had just justified it as we know that these aren't fully independent but we think there are other good reasons to provide these protections, would your stance on the law change?

Well, the law, as it's currently formulated, doesn't, in fact, it undermines the protection that these sorts of groups have been pursuing and seeking for years. So let’s say—let’s accept the proposition that these vary independently or that they're only socioculturally constructed. Okay, so where does that leave your discussion of homosexuality?

So if the fundamentalist Christians say, well, if homosexuality is nothing but a sociocultural construct, then why do we have to put up with it? It’s a perfectly valid argument. You say, well, no, you know, people are born into their sexual proclivity. Now, I'm not saying that they are not because I'm not making either of those cases. What I am pointing out is that the legislation and policies of that sort, as currently formulated, actually undermine the very arguments that many of the activist groups have been using to promote the fact that they are deserving—let’s say—that they’re deserving of their non-standard identity.

The non-standard identity is justifiable if your sexual proclivity is nothing but a whim, then why should I put up with it? No, it’s perfectly reasonable for me to say, no, well, we’ll just reshape it because you’re infinitely malleable now—you know, it isn’t exactly—we don’t exactly know the degree to which such things as, let’s say, sexual identity and sexual proclivity are biologically predicated or socioculturally instantiated.

But when you put forward legislation that insists on one to the exclusion of the other, you better be careful because you’re going to be hooked in your own noose. And so when I read through the legislation and the policies that surround that, I thought, this isn’t going to protect the people that it’s supposed to protect. But it doesn’t matter because the legislation was never designed to protect people. It was designed to advance a certain kind of political agenda, which is partly why I'm objecting to it.

And I'm not willing in the slightest to presume that just because activist groups with this postmodern neo-Marxist ethic stand up and say, well, we're on the side of the oppressed, that that makes them a—on the side of the oppressed or B, virtuous. I don’t buy either of those arguments. I don’t think they stand for what they say they stand for. I don’t think they’re promoting a doctrine that's going to do what they claim it will do. I don’t believe that they’re good and the rest of the world bad. I don’t buy their oppressor-victim dichotomy. I don't admire their philosophical position; I think they don’t know anything about history.

Or if they do know anything about history, then they're malevolent for pursuing exactly the same policies that led us into terrible situations before.

So in what ways do you think the policies that are being advocated—maybe you could talk a bit about the particular harms you think that this Canadian bill would have, even if we don't accept the theoretical or political or historical rationale for the bill? Could it be that it still produces good consequences, or do you think that there’s even a consequentialist argument against this sort of bill? And if so, what do you think?

The letters that I've received from the transsexual people I described indicate instantly that it's not producing positive effects at all. They said, after saying well, our political views aren't homogeneous, "don’t like being treated as if they were," and these activists don’t speak for us. They say, "Look, most of us would just like to be a little bit more invisible if we could," and all this terrible concentration on preferred pronouns and identification of transsexual people has made our lives a living hell.

Well, and no wonder because it’s hard—imagine you’re—imagine that you are having real trouble with your gender identity, you know, and you’re a six foot one guy, and you want to transform yourself into a woman. It’s going to be hard enough for you to be, you know, quasi-invisible in a social context of people who purport to speak on this like issue for their political reasons. And that's exactly what the letter writers have been telling me. So, so no, I don’t see that—I mean, the legislation was incoherent as originally formulated. Then it was made worse by its shopping around before activist groups. There’s no evidence whatsoever that it’ll have the outcomes that the people who formulated it hypothetically desire because I don’t believe that they desire the possible outcome anyways.

The people—look, the people who are formulating these sorts of policies state quite forthrightly. So for example, if you go look at women's studies websites, they state quite forthrightly that their aim is the destruction of the patriarchy, whatever the hell that is, you know? I mean, and that’s a good indication of the level of intellectual sophistication that goes into this sort of thinking. What is this patriarchy exactly? Well, what is it exactly? I mean, if we’re going to talk about it, it’s male domination of everything and nothing but oppression? It's like, really? That’s how we’re going to define our society? Is it compared to what society exactly? Where have people been more free than they are, for example, in this country?

That doesn’t mean they’re perfectly free, but, you know, forget that. That’s never going to happen. It’s like, well, this is an oppressive place compared to my hypothetical utopia that I would produce if I happened to be, you know, Stalin for a week. And as I've already pointed out, if you were the hypothetical altruistic utopian of your imagination, then the people right behind you in your bloody revolution would stab you to death in your bed and you wouldn’t get to make your decisions for the benefit of anyone anyways.

So how do you think progress should be made in a world where we are freer than we have ever been? Do you think we, like—when are there changes that are desirable to be made, and how would you want to see them implemented, if not through policy or through activism the way that groups currently are promoting?

Well, back, you know, this happened in the 60s as far as I can tell, that we've got this misbegotten idea that the way to conduct yourself as a responsible human being was to hold placards up to protest to change the viewpoints of other people and thereby usher in the utopia. It’s like, I think that's all appalling. I think it’s appalling, and I think it’s absolutely absurd that students are taught that that’s the way to conduct themselves in the world.

First of all, if you’re 19 or 20 or 21, you don’t body well know anything. You haven’t done anything; you don’t know anything about history; you haven't read anything; you haven't supported yourself for any length of time; you've been entirely dependent on your state and on your family for the brief few years of your existence. And the idea that you have enough wisdom to determine how society should be reconstructed when you're sitting in the absolute lap of luxury protected by processes that you don’t understand is absolutely—I mean, it’s okay, so that's a bad—let's call that a bad idea, shall we?

And then, the idea that what you should do to change the world is to find people who you disagree with and shake paper on sticks at them and call them names is also—and you do that before you go out for—here, I’ll tell you how serious the activists are. This is something that’s just unbelievably comical as far as I’m concerned.

So, some of you may know that I participated in a debate on free speech—so-called debate—at free speech that the University of Toronto hosted. It turned into a forum and whatever that is, but it’s certainly not a debate. But one of the things I did when I was talking to the university administration was to suggest how they might deal with the possibility of protesters. So I said, well, that’s easy, I know how you can have absolutely zero protesters. Have it in the morning. They won't get out of bed in a t. So we had it at 9:00 in the morning, and there was one MP, a Member of Parliament, who showed up to hand out some pamphlets. Not a single protester.

So it’s like if you want a controversial speaker on campus, just have it at 7 in the morning; you won't get a protester within 50 yards of it because they’ll still be sleeping off last night's HT and alcohol-induced hangover. So, you know, and the question was what do I think people should do, and I’ll tell you something that’s been very interesting to me, and I can see it reflected here. The first thing I noticed is that when I started putting my videos on YouTube, which was about three years ago, I noticed that about 85% of the people that were watching them were men. And I thought that’s pretty weird because about 80% of my students are women, you know, because men are bailing out of universities like mt, and there won’t be one in the social sciences and humanities left in 10 years.

But, you know, nobody seems particularly worried about that. You can go look that up online if you want, and look at the enrollment curves and just project them 10 years out into the future, and I’ve been following that for about 20 years. But one of the things—but online, it was so—it was 85% men. I thought, wow, that's really weird and strange. And then I made these political videos, and then it’s popped up to 91% men.

And then I’ve noticed in the audiences that I’ve gone to talk to that it’s almost all men. Now just look around here, and it’s like what? It’s got to be 90% guys in this audience. And I thought, what the hell is going on? It’s weird. And I noticed that at the first free speech debate at the University of Toronto. I made a point of it. I walked into the room and I thought, wow, these are all men. So I had the men stand up and the women stand up, and I used that as an example of the fact that maybe men and women have different interests.

It was, you know, just an ad hoc demonstration, but it's really been borne out by the demographic analysis of my viewers, and I have, you know, about eight million views or something like that now. So it’s a pretty big population. I’ve been talking nonstop about personal responsibility and about the fact that if you want to change the world, you should bloody well get your act together and quit whining and sniveling about how horrible everything is and about how people owe you more rights and more privileges.

And for some reason, that seems to be a message that's really resonating among young men, and I think the reason for that—first of all, I think young women have enough to do, and so that’s perhaps part of the reason why the message isn’t as necessary for them. They’re trying to juggle careers; they’re trying to figure out how to have a family, and they don’t really have any question about whether or not that’s useful and proper. So they’re off doing that and whatever else they’re doing.

But young men seem to have more of a choice about that, and many of them are essentially bailing out. And it’s partly because I think they’ve been well punished for their virtues. And so I talked to young guys in particular about adopting some responsibility and trying to straighten out their lives and to bear the load of being properly and to forthrightly move through existence and to become a credit to themselves in their community. And that’s what you should do instead of waving cards at someone telling them to behave more properly because you’re morally superior to them.

So, and for some reason that message—which is, it’s not the sort of message that you would expect to sell, right? It’s the exactly the opposite of something that you would consider saleable, but my experience has been that the young men in particular are so bloody desperate for that message that they can hardly stand themselves. And it’s no wonder because it’s a call to—it's a call to proper being; it's a call to heroic being; and it's a call for people to adopt their individual responsibility and to straighten themselves out and to find out what they could be like if they took on the burdens of existence like respectable, well-educated, articulate, powerful people. And that’s to the benefit of everyone.

Yeah, and so—well, so that's where the responsibility lies. And I'm not interested in—look, I’ve thought for many, many years, decades really, about having a political career. I mean, I was interested in a political career when I was 13, and so every five years or so, I've probably revisited that. But every time I revisited, I came to the same conclusion, which was that the work that I was doing that was focused on a philosophy of individual responsibility and trying to identify how that philosophy had emerged in the west over thousands of years was more important than any possible political action could be. And I still don’t regard what I’m doing as political in any sense of the word. I think it’s philosophical most accurately, and there’s an element of it that’s theological.

So I think it’s individual responsibility, and the meaning of life is to be found in the adoption of individual responsibility, and that’s what the university should be teaching people. So, Dr. Peterson, you mentioned these ideas of responsibility, of virtue, of respect. You’ve, I think, detailed what you think students shouldn’t do in these examples of protests and these examples of certain types of activist tactics. What advice would you have for students? How can students make the changes that they want to make? Particularly, do you have any advice for students here?

Yeah, read great books! Really, man! You’ve got this four-year period that has been carved out of your lives by society. It’s given you an identity—like a high-quality identity—and freedom at the same time, and you’re not going to get that again in your life. You’ve got a respectable identity as University students and complete freedom associated with that, or as near as you’re ever going to get. And you’ve got these unbelievable libraries that are full of the writings of people who are intelligent and articulate beyond comprehension.

And you know, and you can go there and you can learn all this, and you might think, well, why should you learn it? Um, well, you learn it to get a job, or you learn it to get good grades, or you learn it to get a degree, and that’s all nonsense. It’s nonsense. The reason that you come to university to be educated is because there is nothing more powerful than someone who is articulate and who can think and speak—it’s power. And I mean power of the best sort; it’s authority and influence and respectability and competence.

And so you come to university to craft your highest skill, and your highest skill is to be found in articulated speech. And if you’re a master at formulating your arguments, you win everything. And better than that, when you win everything, everyone around you wins too, because to transform yourself into—let's consider your transformation into something approximating the logos means you shine a light on the whole world.

Well, there’s nothing more exciting to do than that! There’s nothing better you can possibly do! And to think that you’re coming to university to be, you know, trained to have a job, it’s like great, that’s a hell of a lot better than being unemployed and covered with Cheeto dust while you’re snacking away in front of your video game in the basement. But it’s not a—and I don’t have anything against video games, by the way—but it’s hardly a triumphant call to being in the world.

And that’s what university should be calling forth. It’s like, God, you people, you—as you know, I know what Harvard students are like; I taught here for five years. You people are spectacular! You’re spectacular! You’re all capable of being world beaters. You transform yourself into something that’s articulated and sensible and grounded in history and knowledgeable and wise. Man, you can do anything you want! And hopefully, anything you want for good, because if you have any sense, everything you want to do would be for the good.

Because there’s nothing more compelling or meaningful or useful in combating the tragedy of life than to struggle with all your soul on behalf of the good. And the universities have forgotten that. It’s why everyone's bailing out of the humanities, and they should—the humanities are corrupt, and they’re corrupt because they're not telling students this. It’s so bloody obvious! It’s like learn to think, learn to speak, learn to read. It makes you a superpower—an individual superpower you have!

And I don't understand why that isn’t just told to students. It’s not that hard to understand, and everyone wants to hear it! It’s like, really? I could do that? I could do that? It’s like, yeah, really, you could do that! And the whole society around you has labored for really thousands of years to provide every single one of you with this spectacular opportunity that you have while you’re undergraduates and graduate students here, man. They’re just—everyone’s just praying that you would come here and manifest everything that you could manifest, and that’s what you should be doing instead of waving placards and complaining about how you’re oppressed, for God's sake!

You see these Yale students complaining about their oppression? It just leaves me aghast! It’s like, well, we’re against the ruling class. It's like, no, no, no, you're baby ruling class members! You're young [applause]. The only reason you're not rich is because you're young! You know, that’s the best—really, that’s the— if you look at the 1%, even the dreaded 1%, you know, most of those people are old.

Why? Well, when you progress through life, if you’re reasonably successful, you trade in your promising youth for your wealthy old age. But you’re still bloody old! Would you trade it? Would you trade your youth for that? Like, if you factor age out of the economic equation, things look a lot different.

Well, of course older people have more money if they have any sense. They've been collecting it for their whole life. Is that somehow unfair? It’s not unfair unless you want to be poverty-stricken when you’re 70. And you don’t want to be poverty-stricken when you’re 70.

So I just don’t understand what’s happened to the universities. I can’t believe that you’re not told when you come the first day, “Look, man, you’re here on a heroic mission. You’re going to take your capacity to articulate yourself to levels that are undreamed of. You’re going to come out of here unstoppable! You’re going to be able to do anything you want!” It’s like, that’s what you're here for. Instead, you’re taught that, well, you know, the world’s a pretty oppressive place and you're probably the bottom of the victim pile, and there’s virtually nothing you can do about it except, you know, deconstruct the patriarchy?

And it’s so weak and so pathetic that universities should be embarrassed that what they’re peddling to students! I'm embarrassed by it! You know, I've gone on public record telling parents, bloody well send your boys to trade school, because at least they'll learn something useful!

And that's a terrible thing for someone like me to say because I do believe that the art of being articulated and educated in the highest possible manner is—there’s nothing that’s better for you and for society! And why are—why have the universities forgotten this? Well, that’s postmodern neo-Marxism for you, you know? That then—the philosophy of intense resentment, and oppression, and group identity? And God, it's just pathetic.

Dr. Peterson, I think a lot of students here would agree with you that one of the main purposes of education at college, particularly at Harvard, is to develop their sense of articulation, their ability to read, their ability to critically think. But then what comes after? Particularly at Harvard, there’s a big discussion on what is a good life? What does it mean to use those skills that we get here? And then we graduate, what do we do from there?

Stop unnecessary suffering. That's what you do! You know, that’s your calling. It’s like, you say, well, what do you do after you graduate? Well, if you graduate articulated and powerful, there will be people giving you so many opportunities, you won’t even be able to keep up with them.

You know, and I’ve worked with very, very competent people in many different domains in my life—hyper-competent people. And I can tell you some very interesting things about hyper-competent people. The first thing is they are not selfish, and they’re not greedy. And one of the great pleasures in their lives is to find people who have the capacity to also be hyper-competent and to open doors for them as rapidly as they can possibly be opened. They delight in that because there are very few things that are more intrinsically meaningful if you’re an accomplished person than to find young people who have the possibility of being accomplished and say, “Hey, look, here’s an opportunity for you.” It’s like, “Go out there, man! Kill it!” Then they go out there and kill it.

You think, right on, man! Here’s another opportunity! Why you go out there and nail that too? And you think, no, no, they’re all hoarding their wealth and they’re not going to share it with anyone? It’s like, that’s absolute complete rubbish! And so you don’t even have to worry about what you’re going to do after you graduate from here if you turn yourself into half of what you could be because people will be dying to offer you every opportunity that you can possibly make use of.

So it's a moot point. The world is always desperately short of people who can think and speak. And you think, well, I—that I won’t be made use of? Well, first of all, you can’t say that if you’re at Harvard, for God's sake! I mean, people already figured out who you are! They’ve already figured it out, and they’re offering you the world on a gold platter. Take it—it’s yours! Take it! It’s like, great, man! Put yourself together and deserve it. That would be great!

And that’s what everyone wants; it’s what your parents want. It’s also what you want. You know, it’s what you want. It’s what men—it’s what women want from men; it’s what men want from women. It’s like for you to be who you could be. And the highest faculty of the human being is articulated speech. It’s the divine faculty, and there is nothing more powerful than that.

There’s nothing that’s even in the same league. And so if you don’t have faith in that, then your priorities are misplaced, and I can’t even understand why you wouldn’t have faith in that being, say, Harvard students, because look where it’s got you already! You know, you’re already sitting on top of the world.

So make—deserve it! Make use of it, right? Go out there and fix things up! That’s what you need to do! There are lots of things that need to be fixed up, and what you want to do is burden yourself with so much responsibility that you can barely stand, and then you’ll get stronger trying to lift it up. And you won’t be asking, what should I be doing with my life? Or what’s the meaning of life? Or any of that; it’ll be self-evident! It’s self-evident! At minimum, you can say there’s more suffering in the world than there should be, and I could probably do something about that. And you can do something about that!

So go do something about it, and then there’ll be less suffering in the world. And then when you’re 80, you can look back on your life and say, well, you know, there’s less suffering in the world than there would have been had I not existed. And you don’t have to even have a sense of ultimate destiny or even any sort of theistic belief to regard that as a positive good!

Like, I think it goes beyond the mere pragmatic utility of addressing the world's ills because I think we do live in a world that has a transcendent reality as well as the reality that we can detect. But even independently of that, it doesn’t matter. It’s like, I mean, this is part of the reason I like people like Bill Gates. He’s a great example. Man, that guy is—he’s after five major diseases at the same time, right? He’s trying to wipe out polio; he’s trying to wipe out, um, malaria.

Yeah, exactly! He’s trying to wipe out malaria. It’s like, well, what should you do with your life? Well, you know, take a look at Bill Gates and see if you could do something like that. That would be good!

So, Dr. Peterson, you talk about this idea of ending unnecessary suffering and this idea of committing one's life to that. At a minimum, I mean, that's just the obvious thing that you could do. A lot of students, I think, accept that premise and view what they're doing as trying to eliminate or reduce unnecessary suffering. And they see activism or other forms of direct service as fulfilling that goal.

Do you simply disagree with the content of what they think the tactic they are using to end unnecessary suffering, or do you think that their motives or their intentions are not even the same as yours?

It’s too public. You know, there’s this old saying from the New Testament about not praying in public, right? And the idea is that if you're going to commune for the higher good, you should do it in private because otherwise, you’re warping your ethic in some sense by demonstrating how virtuous you are to the world. It’s like you go out there with a stick and a sign on it that says, I’m against poverty. It’s like, yeah, no kidding, man! Really? Like who’s for poverty? No one’s for poverty!

So it’s an abdication of responsibility with the mask of social virtue. You want to solve difficult problems? If you figure out how to get along with your brother—the one you’ve been fighting with for five years—or see if you can staple your family back together, see if you can stop fighting with your girlfriend and have a relationship that lasts for more than two weeks. You know, it’s like there are things that you should be doing in the confines of your own life that are private and humble, that would constitute genuine accomplishments, and those are the things that you should attend to.

And no one’s going to come along and say, “Hey, you know, good job! You’re changing the world!” because it’s private, but it’s real. And people don’t do that. And so, no, I don’t trust the activist ethos at all. I think everything about it is superficial, and trendy, and too easy. And it externalizes the blame. The evil is always elsewhere, which is a dreadful mistake to make because the evil isn’t elsewhere. That’s the thing that you understand when you’re wise: the evil is not elsewhere; it's you, because you're not everything you could be.

And so you know, you should work on that before going and telling someone else that maybe they’re not who they should be. So I think it’s—I don’t buy it; it’s too easy, it’s far too easy, and it’s too public, and it’s too self-congratulatory.

And then there's the murderous Marxist element, which, you know, I’m always often inclined to mention.

So certainly I think you’ve identified certain causes where the public element, good or the self-congratulatory virtue of trying to do good could be harmful. But do you think there are cases, for instance, I’m thinking of policy influencing policy—being a policy maker seems like something—public policy could be used to eliminate some unnecessary suffering? But would involve a more public domain?

Something where you are trying to attract followers, trying to attract praise from other people?

Look, if you’ve established yourself in the world as a credible human being, and people are asking you to enter public service because of your accomplishments, then it’s time to do it, right? But before that, it’s a little on the premature side. And if you’re just setting yourself forward as an avatar of an ideology, then there’s nothing to you except—I think of it as the chattering of various forms of demons. It’s like you're not helpful.

And if you—if you look—you want to think, okay, are you fit to lead? Let’s put it that way! Okay, first of all, do you know where you're going? Because that’s actually one of the hallmarks of a leader. A leader knows where he’s going, and maybe other people are also interested in going that way. But the leaders I've met have carved themselves out a personal vision. Right? It’s not some cookie-cutter ideological solution to the ills of the planet. They’ve done a detailed analysis, right? They know what they’re talking about.

And they’re usually people—well, they’ve had a successful relationship; they’ve had a successful family; they have a couple of degrees; they’ve established a business. Like, they’ve made themselves credible in five or six dimensions. Well, then maybe you know enough about the world to dare to mess with its internal mechanisms.

And if you don’t have that kind of in-depth knowledge, then you shouldn’t—you shouldn’t no more work on the economic systems of Western civilization than you should try to adjust the electronic systems of your automobile, because the latter is far less complex than the former. So, of course, there’s utility in policy formulation and in government service and in all of those sorts of things, but you have to have transformed yourself, at least to some degree, into someone who’s actually competent before you should even dare to do such things.

You think, well, I’ve read some Marx, and now I know how to change the world! It’s like that’s a very bad idea because the probability that you’re going to take something complex that doesn’t work too badly and fix it with your idiotic intervention is zero.

So well put! You talked a little bit about this idea of signaling virtue, and one thing that I thought about a lot of activist causes, ones you might characterize as self-congratulatory, seem to emphasize concepts like validation and affirmation. In your experience, either as a professor or as a psychologist, do you think that this is an example of virtue signaling, and perhaps provide, like, a definition of virtue signaling first? Or do you think there is some value in these types of principles or these types of interactions?

I don’t think there’s any value in those principles at all. I mean, I can say, well, I think you’re a really good guy, you know? Yeah, yeah. And I mean, at most that’s a, well, first of all, it’s cheap and easy. That was easy, and now I’m a good guy because, you know, I’m perfectly willing to affirm you. It’s like everyone has a problem, let’s say, with self-affirmation—this is why I hate that word, but I’ll use it temporarily.

This is part of the reason why I’m an admirer of the existential philosophers and psychologists, because one of the points they made is that, well, human beings are flawed creatures. We have tragic lives; we’re very, very vulnerable. And so it’s very easy for us to despise ourselves, and to be—and to have contempt for humanity itself. And there are reasons for that. We’re weak; we’re flawed; we’re malevolent; we don’t last very long; we’re not very attractive; we have we have a litany of faults, both as a species and as individuals.

Well, so you’re stuck with that; that’s just part of being itself. It’s built into the fabric of being. So what do you do about that? Well, you don’t go around waiting for someone to tell you what a good person you are. That’s not—first of all, it’s not believable. It’s not helpful. That doesn’t mean you should be tormenting people into a sense of even more fallibility than they already have; that’s not—clearly, that’s not helpful.

But the way that you develop a sense of respect for yourself, which is a better way of thinking about it—or respect for humanity for that matter—which is much better than thinking about it as an affirmation—is to bear up under the damn load. And then you can recognize yourself as something that’s flawed, but that can tolerate the flaw and that can work towards alleviating it.

And that’s the pathway to the transcendence of tragedy, which is a much—like, compared to affirmation, it’s like you’re giving a starving—you’re giving a thirsty person dust to drink. There’s nothing to it. You know, people have to commit to being in order to withstand their own vulnerability and fragility and essentially flawed nature.

The way that you tolerate that is to—the way you stand up underneath that is to adopt responsibility for it. And then your pathway is clear! Then you can tolerate who you are, and then you won’t hate humanity because people hate humanity. You hear the environmentalists—the radical environmentalists say such things. I’ve heard people say this: the planet would be better off without people on it.

It’s like, well, let’s keep you away from the hydrogen bombs, shall we? You know? And people think that’s a virtuous statement, the planet would be better off without people on it. It’s like, really? That’s what you’re saying? It’s like, I see you don’t think it’s okay to be racially genocidal, but it’s perfectly fine to just wipe out all of them? That’s okay as long as you’re not selective about it!

So we’re nourishing people, we’re nourishing young people on nothing! It’s nothing! It’s like they’re suffering! And no wonder because life is suffering, right? That’s the first thing you learn if you’re on the road to wisdom—life is suffering, right? And is it someone’s fault? Yeah, sure, it’s society’s fault, it’s your fault, it’s Nature’s fault, it’s God’s fault. It’s like, yeah, the fault’s everywhere, man!

So what are you going to do about that? Bear up under it and do something useful, and then you can respect yourself, at least to some degree—at least you’re not contributing to the problem! Yeah, you know? And then maybe you can start to see the beauty in life and the possibility in life and the majesty in life and the incredible capacity of human beings for self-transformation!

Here’s an example: We’ve learned this relatively recently, at a neurobiological level. You know, so there’s been an idea—a psychological idea—that has flowed around for quite a long time, a clinical idea, that you expand your character by aggregating diverse experiences, right? And sort of you journey everywhere to become who you are.

And you can think about that from a Piagetian perspective, a constructivist perspective, and say, well, the more places you journey to in the world, the more information you expose yourself to, and then you take in that information and inform yourself with it, and you develop yourself because you’re more differentiated, and you have a more differentiated view of the world.

It’s like—the basic idea is the world is a pool of information that you can use to construct yourself out of and to construct the world, and that’s a lovely doctrine. And I believe it to be the case, but there’s more to it than that. You know, we know now that if you take someone and you put them in a radically new situation, then new genes turn on in their brain at the micro—at the micro level. New genetic structures code for new proteins and build new structures. It’s like you’re actually a pool of biological possibility, and the only way that you can determine the full extent of that pool—the possibility of that pool—is by pushing yourself out against the world, and that will physiologically transform you.

We have no idea what the limits to that are! We know in clinical psychology that, you know, what you do with people is expose them to the things that they’re afraid of and are avoiding. And you don’t make them less afraid by doing that; you make them braver! That’s why it generalizes, right? They don’t come out saying, oh, the world’s safe. It’s like once you’ve learned that the world is not safe, there is no going back!

That’s the post-traumatic stress disorder conundrum. There’s no going back! But what you can learn is, yes the world is terribly dangerous, far more dangerous than you think, and people are far more malevolent than you likely have the imagination to conceptualize. But there is way more to you than you know.

And if you wouldn’t look for safe spaces and retreat, if you would push out in the world and accept your responsibility and confront your limitations, then you would discover all sorts of things about you that you have no idea about. And then you would transform into something that’s far more than what you are.

And it’s in that process of continual transformation that you’ll actually find the essential meaning of life! So—and again, it’s not like we don’t know this! Everyone knows this! So and the universities in some sense are supposed to remind you of this, but they’ve abdicated their responsibility, as far as I'm concerned! And in many cases are working counterproductively!

They’re trying to teach young people that they’re helpless victims who need to restructure society in order—I don’t know. I can’t even say it anymore; it’s so empty and dead. It’s—you know, I think—I read this in, uh, Elias Canetti in a book called Crowds and Power, and it was one of the things that really stuck in my imagination. He did an etymological analysis of the word slogan and he said that it was derived from the Welsh two words “slag” (S-L-U-A-G-H) and “gar” (G-H-A-I-R-M), and it meant "battle cry of the dead."

And that really struck me because I’ve always had this sense that people mouthing ideologies are the puppets of corpses. It’s something like that—the puppets of corpses of malevolent philosophers, you know? And they speak in dead tones, and they’re not interesting! Like, if you're listening to an ideologue rattle on, you can hardly concentrate on what they’re saying because it's dead! It’s death itself speaking, and it compels zero interest.

So even discussing this sort of thing, I find difficult to even formulate the words because I’m so tired of that kind of—that realm of that realm of discourse. It’s like there are so many tremendous things that are remaining in the world for people to do with—they stop being dead puppets of sick ideas, and it’s appalling to me that it even—and that opposition to that even has to be justified! Our entire civilization is opposition to that!

And so, I mean, we can let it go if we want, but the alternatives are far gloomier than what we have now, I can tell you that! So we can let it all go, and we’re being taught to let it all go. It’s corrupt; it’s rotten right to the roots; it needs to be retooled right to the very concepts that we use! It's like, yeah, what’s going to replace it? What have we got that’s better?

You’ve got nothing that’s better! What we have is something that could be far more than it is if people would just take it to the level that it could be taken to, and everyone wants to hear that! And then—well, that has been a very long answer! This is why 91% of the people that are watching my lectures are men as far as I can tell.

So, Dr. Peterson, I think we have time for one or two more questions, then we might open it up to Q&A. One more question according to Connor. And I want to end with that because you were talking about your experience as a clinical psychologist, and I’m wondering if you have any advice for students on general topics of, like, mental health, wellness at college?

In a lot of ways, I think you have claimed that by finding more purpose, by finding more meaning, by contributing, one can develop more tolerance for oneself, one can develop more self-affirmation. I’m wondering, though, if you think there are cases where there are people with a lot of potential, especially at Harvard, who may doubt their abilities, who may get quite anxious. I'm sure you've interacted with students with clients as a clinician. What advice do you give them, or what do you think college students should know about enhancing their psychological well-being at college?

We've done some research on that topic. I mean, one of the things that really seems to help is to write out your plans for the future. We have a program, an online program called Future Authoring that we’ve used with about 10,000 university students now and raised their grade point average 25% and dropped their dropout rate by about the same.

It particularly works well for men, who are generally underperforming women now. And so that, I think, raises them up, and it also works particularly well for non-Western ethnic minority men, which was also extraordinarily positive, because, you know, that’s well—that was a great unexpected outcome. But in some of it is to aim at something that's worth aiming at.

Yeah! And how do you determine what's worth aiming at? You think, well, okay, here I have my miserable, wretched life. Under what conditions would it justify itself as far as I’m concerned personally? Under what conditions would my life justify itself? And so you think, well, what sort of future would I have to have so that I could say this is worth it? And then that’s what you aim for.

And technically, that works in part because we know that most of the systems that mediate positive emotion in human beings—and so those would be the dopaminergic systems that have their roots in the hypothalamic exploratory centers—are activated in relationship to the pursuit of a goal, not as a consequence of attaining something; that’s a consumatory reward system. But human beings mostly run on incentive reward.

And so it appears that the higher the goal, the more kick you get from noting your progress towards that goal. Now, you have to be careful because you don’t want to pick a goal that’s so impossible that all you ever do is fail in relationship to it. That’s an issue of self-management, right? You want to pick a goal that moves you to the next plateau that you have a reasonable probability—not a certain probability—of attaining. So that's part of it—is to formulate a plan—to decide who it is, what it is that you want to be, who it is that you want to be from a characterological perspective.

And if you're having other problems, well, you know, some of that is when you're talking about clinical end of things, is that again the devil’s in the details, but it’s useful to talk to people! It’s useful to write about what it is that you’re up to! But it’s most worthwhile to organize your life, I would say, and to pick a goal and to aim at it! That’s a very nice way of starting to straighten things out for yourself.

But I mean, I would also say like I’ve had many clients. I often advocate the use of anti-depressants! I mean, people, for example, people have all sorts of physiological problems that compromise their movement forward, and those have to be addressed. I’m not saying that you can lift yourself up by your bootstraps in every possible situation. I know that not to be true! You take whatever interventions you need in order to allow yourself to continue moving forward in the world.

But you know—what do you do to try to set yourself up? Well, have some friends! That’s helpful! Have an intimate relationship! Try to make one that’s reasonably permanent—that’s helpful! Aim at having a family and children! Aim at being useful to the community and turning yourself into something that’s noble and respectable and powerful! And that’ll help you orient yourself when you’re young and because you’ll start to see that you could have a life that was worth living—that you could be—not proud of, that’s the wrong way of thinking about it—but that you could live in a manner that justifies the fragility of being!

That’s the right way to think about it. That’s the right way to think about it because the fragility of being is a very powerful argument against its existence. And that's been recognized by—that was the fundamental ethical dilemma investigated by Dostoievsky, for example, in his play "The Brothers Karamazov." Because Mephistopheles is the mouthpiece of everyone who says being is so fragile, that it should be eradicated because it produces too much suffering. It’s Ivan's argument in the Brothers Karamazov, it's a very powerful argument. Why should any of this be? And the answer is you justify it by how it is that you justify being by how you choose to exist.

And you can choose to exist in a manner that produces absolutely no justification whatsoever for being—quite the contrary. But that's not a pathway that I would recommend. Thank you.

My pleasure!

[Applause]

All right, so we have some questions, I think, from the audience. And I’m just going to read them in order, and you're going to answer them; pretty simple. So our first question we have here reads, I am a postdoc in the psychology department, and I'm very interested in conducting research examining the extent to which highly politically correct individuals are analytical (in parentheses, or not). I am, however, very concerned that this pursuit will potentially prove to be quite damaging to my reputation and that it will likely hinder my chances of obtaining a faculty position. Do you have any advice for me?

Yeah, I talk to faculty members all the time, and they say the same thing: I’ll say what I think when I get my first job, and then they get their first job, and they say, I’ll say what I think when I have tenure. And then they get tenure, and it’s like, 15 years later, 10 years later, and they don’t have anything left to say because they haven’t said anything for the last 10 years! It’s like that’s no way to live, man! That’s no way to live. Do your damn research! Pick the hardest topic you can possibly imagine and pursue it, and state what you believe to be the truth!

And let’s see, there’s a rule—and this is an existential rule, and it’s really worth thinking about because it’s a pointer to a fundamental mode of being. One mode of being involves using your speech strategically, and that’s exactly what this question is about. This person is basically asking, should I use my ability to communicate strategically? And strategically is, should I aim at getting the job I want with my actions? Well, the answer to that is it’s better than not aiming at—that’s one answer, and it’s a reasonable answer.

But here’s a different answer. This is the fundamental dilemma of faith, I would say. The fundamental dilemma of faith is whether or not you should live by the truth. And you determine to live by the truth when you make the decision that if you tell the truth, the outcome is the best possible outcome. You see, that’s an existential decision, right? And it’s predicated on something like faith in the fundamental nature of being, because if you ally yourself to the degree that you can with the truth, then what you’re doing is acting out the proposition that being is structured in the best possible manner.

Because otherwise