Lecture and Q&A with Jordan Peterson (The Mill Series at Lafayette College)

[Music] [Music] Thank you all for coming. I'm going to begin by introducing Jordan Peterson, and then I will talk a little bit about how this event is going to work, and then we'll get underway.

So, Jordan Peterson has been called "one of the most important thinkers to emerge on the world stage for many years" by The Spectator. He has been a dishwasher, gas jockey, bartender, short-order cook, beekeeper, oil derrick bid rita, plywood mill laborer, and railway line worker. He's taught mythology to lawyers, doctors, and businessmen, consulted for the UN Secretary General's high-level panel on sustainable development, helped his clinical clients manage depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, and schizophrenia, served as an advisor to senior partners of major law firms, identified thousands of promising entrepreneurs on six different continents, and lectured extensively in North America and Europe.

He has flown a hammerhead roll in a carbon-fiber stunt plane, piloted a mahogany racing sailboat around Alcatraz Island, explored an Arizona meteorite crater with a group of astronauts, and built a Native American longhouse on the upper floor of his Toronto home. He has been inducted into the coastal Pacific Quoc Waka Waka tribe. Malcolm Gladwell discussed psychology with him while researching his books. Norman Doidge is a good friend and collaborator. Thriller writer Greg Hurwitz employed several of his "valuable things" as a plot feature in his number 1 international bestseller, Orphan X. He worked with Jim Balsillie, former RIM CEO, on a project for the UN Secretary General.

With students and colleagues, Dr. Peterson has published more than a hundred scientific papers, transforming the modern understanding of personality, and revolutionized the psychology of religion with his now classic book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. As a Harvard professor, he was nominated for the prestigious Levinson Teaching Prize and is regarded by his current University of Toronto students as one of three truly life-changing teachers. Dr. Peterson is a Cora's most viewed writer and values and principles and Perrin in education. He has innumerable Twitter followers and Facebook followers. His YouTube channel now has about a million subscribers, and his classroom lectures on mythology were turned into a popular 13-part TV series on TV Ontario.

Dr. Peterson's online self-help program, the Self Authoring Suite, has been featured in O, The Oprah Magazine, on CBC Radio, and on NPR's national website. It has helped over 150,000 people resolve the problems of their past and radically improve their future.

Without further ado, please join me in welcoming Dr. Jordan Peterson.

So the way this is going to work is that I'm going to have a conversation with Dr. Peterson for 90 minutes, and then there is going to be a 90-minute Q&A. This event is being video recorded and will be published online for non-commercial, non-advertising purposes. During the Q&A session, when you are handed a microphone, please speak directly into it. Our viewers on YouTube will appreciate it. Finally, I am a moderator between Professor Peterson and the audience, but also a biased participant in this conversation.

Okay, well, it's a relief that's all over!

Okay, so I thought we would start things off with this. I assume that many in the audience are curious but relatively unfamiliar with you, or have heard a lot about you without ever reading or listening to you. So I thought we might start with you introducing yourself to the audience and maybe telling them some of the main things that you think they might be interested in knowing about you.

Well, I guess the most relevant detail is that I spent about 15 years writing this, and I worked on it about three hours a day, every day during that period of time. At the same time, I was finishing off my doctorate, and I started lecturing at Harvard. But I was doing that continually and thinking about it continually and reading the material that I needed to read in order to write the book continually as well.

I didn't realize until more recently that what I was doing was at the heart of the postmodern conundrum. I would say I was very much obsessed by the events of the Cold War for reasons I don't exactly understand. I had a lot of dreams about nuclear annihilation for years on end. I mean, it wasn't that uncommon to be obsessed with that when I grew up, I mean, because it was a preoccupation of everyone who was my age, I suppose. There were lots of years, probably between 1962, I would say, probably in 1985, where people were pretty convinced that the probability of a nuclear war was high. Much higher now than people consider now.

I was curious about this. I was curious about why everyone wasn't obsessed about this all the time, first of all because it seemed like the fundamental issue that two armed camps were pointing something in excess of 25,000 hydrogen bombs each at each other. I couldn't understand how anybody could concentrate on anything other than that since it seems so utterly insane. I was curious what was going on exactly.

Was this one leaked? The explanation was that there's a very large number of ways that human beings could organize themselves in society, like a large number of games that we could hypothetically play, and they're all equally arbitrary in an equally arbitrary universe. The Communists had decided to play one kind of game, and the West, and the Western free-market democratic types had decided to play another game. It was all arbitrary in some sense. That's what I was trying to figure out, was what the hell was going on with this conflict?

Was it merely a battle between two hypothetically equally valid interpretations of the world drawn from a set of extraordinarily large potential interpretations? Which I think would be essentially a postmodernist take on it. I think I went into the problem neutrally in that I didn't think I knew what the answer was.

You know, so lots of times when you talk to people who think, or wouldn't you talk to people who write, they have an idea and it’s right, and then they write whatever they're writing to justify the idea; that's how they look at it. But it's not a good way to write. A good way to write and think is to have a problem and then try to solve it, right? To actually solve it, not to demonstrate that your a priori commitment is true.

One of the signs I would say that my a priori commitments weren't the purpose for the writing was that I walked away from that 15-year project with a view of the world that was completely different than the view that I had going in, and learned all sorts of things, especially about the role of narrative and religious thinking in life, that I had no idea was possible when I started. A lot of that was a consequence of reading the great people who I read deeply.

You know, I read all the great works of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the great works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Most of us collected works and everything that had been published up to that point, and a very large swath of the relevant clinical literature, the great clinicians of the 20th century, and a huge stack of neuroscience, etc., etc., because I was reading constantly during this time.

I realized some things that I think are true. The Communists were wrong; they weren't just a little bit wrong and not wrong in some arbitrary way. They were playing a game that human beings cannot play without descending into a murderous catastrophe. There's something about what we've done in the West that's correct, and it's complicated because our cognitive structures, that's one way of thinking about it, or our socio-political arrangements, they actually parallel one another in an important way. They are grounded in a strange set of axioms, and the axioms aren't rational precisely. It's more like they’re narrative; they’re narrative axioms, they're stories.

The story of the West is that the individual is sovereign over the group, and that that's the solution to tribalism. I think that's the correct solution. Now, what that means metaphysically, because it's also embedded in our religious doctrines, especially in Christianity, although not exclusively to Christianity, the individual is sovereign; the suffering individual is sovereign, and there's something about that that's true at least psychologically.

I don't know what that might mean metaphysically because who the hell knows what anything means metaphysically, right? I mean, your knowledge runs out at some point anyways. I worked all these ideas out, and then I taught for a long time courses that were based on the ideas, and the courses were very impactful, I would say. They had the same impact on the people that I was teaching as walking through the material had on me.

Well, it was out of that that all this political controversy arose. I mean, I was never focused on political controversy, even though I'm interested in politics. I thought at many points in my life about a political career; I always put it aside for a psychological and philosophical career, I would say. But things started to shift badly in Canada over the last five years, and our government dared to implement legislation that compelled speech.

One of the things that I had learned when I was doing all this background investigation was that there isn't a higher value than free speech. It isn't free speech; it's not the right way of thinking about it because it's free thought. And even that's not the right way of thinking about it because thought is the precursor to action and life. So there's no difference between free speech and free life.

I was just not willing to put up with restrictions on my free life, and so I made some videos pointing out the pathology of this doctrine and the fact that the government had radically overreached its appropriate limits. And well then, you know, well and maybe you don't know, but I've been enveloped in continual scandal since for 18 months as a consequence.

Which to me as a clinician indicates that I got my damn diagnosis right, right? It's not about pronouns; it's about something deeper than that. I stand by that. I believe that it's the case, and I don't think that we would all be here tonight if that wasn't the situation.

So, I wanted my first, or my next question, to be about Lafayette. And so I thought I would read a couple of Facebook posts that certain students who are critical of you read in the lead-up to this event and just ask you to respond to them.

Okay, so this is a student writing Lafayette College: "I'm utterly disappointed that you're allowing this to take place on our campus. I thought we went through this last semester with roaming Millenial. Inviting hateful speakers who make wildly unsubstantiated claims is not going to fly with the student body. I get it; the mill series events are private and not endorsed by the college, but you absolutely have the power to make a statement on this. The fact that you're not is an embarrassment to our community. If you believe this man is a legitimate source of knowledge because he has a degree in clinical psychology, feel free to ask our psychology department faculty and counseling center staff about the validity of his claims. I'm certain they would not endorse this speaker. Do better." In all caps!

For those of you unfamiliar, Jordan Peterson is known for denouncing the MeToo movement, claiming that women are in no way marginalized in the West, arguing against the existence of gender-neutral pronouns, arguing against gun control in the US, and claiming that identity politics and social justice movements are part of a devious Marxist agenda.

And then another student responded, and this is briefer: “College conservatives know that if they bring in a speaker who is willing to blatantly insult a portion of the audience, and the libs get angry enough about this for good reason, then they may get an op-ed written about them in The New York Times as a result.

There are a whole group of hacks like Milo and Peterson who get famous and invited purely for their promise to misgender trans students and advocate provocative but ultimately toothless arguments about social Darwinist race theory. What I'm saying is that you have every right to be pissed Jordan Peterson is harmful, but know that you being pissed is also 100% at the point of why he was invited. He's not a conservative; he's just a guy who's mildly racist enough to offend college liberals and therefore secure wins for the cultural right. Comparatively mild stuff; it's the chattering buzz of ideologically possessed demons so there's nothing in it that's not entirely predictable.

That’s one of the things, you notice when you're talking to people if you if you want to find out whether the person is there or the ideology is there, you listen to see if you're hearing anything that someone else of the same ideological mindset couldn't have told you. You know like I've had thousands of conversations with people because I've spent 20 years as a clinical psychologist. One of the things I've learned about people is that they're unbelievably interesting. If you get someone to sit down and you move past the superficial, which you can actually do quite rapidly, they'll tell you all sorts of things that only they know, that are unbelievably enlightening about their own peculiar problems, about the way they look at the world, about their idiosyncratic familial dynamics; like just fascinating personal stuff. It's the stuff of great novels, you know?

And just, and this is ordinary people. I don't really think there is an ordinary person exactly; there’s the facade of ordinariness, but behind that people are very rarely ordinary. And so the conversations are almost instantaneously fascinating. And one of the guidelines that I used in my clinical practice constantly was like I had this sense—I probably learned this mostly from Carl Rogers—that if the conversation wasn't really interesting, then we weren't doing anything that was therapeutically useful.

But all the interesting elements of it were very, very personal. To replace this—and I learned this mostly from Solzhenitsyn in his detailed analysis of what he called ideological possession. I talked to people; he talked about people he met in the Gulag camps who were under the sway of rigid communist orthodoxy and noted very clearly that it was like there was a crank in some sense on the side of their head, and you could just crank the crank, and out would come the ideological dogma, and it's all entirely predictable.

People who are in a situation like that don't understand that they're possessed by an idea, right? Carl Jung said people don't have ideas; ideas have people. It's like so there's nothing in that that's anything other than exactly what you would predict. And then there's a deeper issue, and this is one that I think has bedeviled me ever since I made my initial videos, which is the rally: it's impossible for those on the radical left to admit that anyone who opposes what they're doing might be reasonable. Because what that would mean would be that you could be reasonable and opposed to the radical left. That would imply that what the radical left was doing wasn't reasonable.

So instead of dealing with the fact that I actually happened to be quite reasonable, the attempt is to assume that anyone who objects must be part of the radical right. It's like well actually no, there's lots of space between the radical left and the radical right. There's the moderate reasonable left, for example, and then there's the center, and then there's the moderate reasonable right, and then there's the far right, and then there's the extreme right—all of that exists in opposition to the radical left.

But it's very convenient for the radicals on the left to say oh well you don't buy our doctrine, and then to immediately make the presupposition that you must be the most highest example of that entire array of potential objection. It's like, yeah, well whatever, you know? It's just not a viable stance, and so—but it's convenient. It's a bad thing because it drives polarization, and that's a bad thing, but it also doesn't address the issue.

So one of the things that I’ve been thinking about over the last couple of weeks and plan to write about: here's a mystery for all of you. I don't care what your political background is. It isn't like I'm anti-left. I've made videos documenting this. I know why there's a left wing; there's a left wing because inequality is a problem. It's a way worse problem than the radical leftists liked to admit because you can't lay it at the feet of capitalism and the free market. Inequality is a way worse problem than that.

But it's definitely a problem, and because inequality is a problem, you need part of the political structure to speak up for the people who end up arrayed at the bottom of hierarchies. It's crucial; someone has to speak for them. That’s the place of the left. But then consider this: we can get—we can state that the right speaks for hierarchy and the left speaks on behalf of those who are oppressed by inequality. Good. We need that dialogue.

The radical left... okay, we know from 20th-century history that things can go too far on the right; no one disputes that, and that things can go too far on the left, and we also know that when things go too far it's seriously not good, right? So when things went too far on the right, then we had 120 million people die in the Second World War, and when things went too far on the left we had God only knows how many people murdered as a consequence of internal repression—at least a hundred million. We risk putting the entire planet—we risk putting the planet into flames.

Okay, so that’s the consequence. Alright. So now, in the aftermath of the Second World War, let's say we've come to some sort of sociological agreement. I would say that you can identify the radical right wingers when people make claims of racial superiority; you put them in a box and you say, well, you're outside of acceptable political discourse.

You saw that with William F. Buckley in the 60s when he started his conservative review; he dissociated himself from the David Duke types. You saw it more recently with people for example like Ben Shapiro who immediately distanced himself from the Charlottesville types. Okay, so now we kind of have a sense of where you've crossed the damn line in your ethno-nationalism, right? As soon as you move into the racial superiority domain, it's like no, you've got to be dangerous.

Alright, here’s a question: where the hell do you cross the line on the left exactly? Well, the answer is who knows! Well that's not a very good answer. I would say it's incumbent on people in the center and in the moderate left to say look, things can go too far on the left, and here's how we know that's happened—and that hasn't happened at all!

Now I think there’s a reason for that. I think there’s a technical reason as well as a motivational reason. Two technical reasons: it’s harder for people on the left to draw boundaries because people on the left aren’t boundary-drawing types; they’re boundary-dissolving types temperamentally speaking. So that’s a problem.

The second problem is that it doesn't look to me like there is a smoking pistol on the left that's as obvious as racial superiority doctrines. You know, in Canada, there’s a lot of push for the triumvirate of radical ideas: diversity, inclusivity, and equity. Diversity, it’s like well who’s against that? It’s like being against poverty. Inclusivity, well yes, of course we want people included. Equity—that’s a more bitter pill to swallow, because that’s equality of outcome, and for me that’s a marker.

It’s like if you’re talking about equality of outcome, you’ve gone too far. And if you’re talking about diversity, inclusivity, and equality of outcome, equity, then you’ve gone too far. And you might disagree—that's fine. Disagree. If that isn’t the marker for going too far, then what’s the marker?

Because obviously you can go too far, and obviously that’s not good. To close on that, I would also say to the people on the moderate left, if you want your doctrines to have purchase and to continue to speak for those who stack up at the bottom of inevitable hierarchies, then you owe it to yourself to dissociate yourself from the dangerous radicals because otherwise they invalidate your ideas, and that doesn’t seem to be—you'd think the Democrats might have learned that in the last election, but they haven't. They haven't learned that so well.

So that's my spiel about those comments, I guess. Okay, so you've changed the lives of many young people and adults in this country, in the Anglosphere, in the West, in the world. You have a massive following. My girlfriend's parents call you Uncle Jordan, for example.

On the other hand—and this is just a fact, tons of people on the left, as we've just seen, because of your power and also your frontal attack on a lot of their views, hate you and viciously caricature you. Then there are these other figures like Jonathan Haidt and Robbie George. They have a lot in common with you; they are respected academics, they are at least relatively well-known outside academia.

They share your critiques of the humanities, of student activists, of trends in Western culture. They don't have nearly the following that you do, but they also aren't as hated or viciously caricatured. Moreover, they may have changed the minds of more people on college campuses that is, people on campuses who have some sympathy for left activists or who may agree with much of what you say but react negatively to confrontation and harsh criticism.

Haidt has appealed to such individuals by taking the Dale Carnegie "win friends and influence people" approach. So my questions are, first, do you agree with this dichotomy? Second, did you consciously choose one path over the other? And if so, why?

Well, I mean, with Haidt, for example, more power to him as far as I'm concerned. You know, he has a different temperament than me. He's more introverted, he's less volatile, I would say. He’s probably more agreeable or more polite anyways, and I think that what he's doing is extremely effective, especially from the perspective of very carefully documenting the empirical facts about the ideological—what the ideological, left-leaning ideological tilt of campuses—which is something that needs to be explored on empirical ground.

So, like I said, more power to him, and there's nothing wrong with being reasonable, I guess. And then, you asked, well is that the right pathway for me? It’s like well, apparently not. What happened when I made my initial videos was that I had spoken, I talked to people a lot. I’ve worked with people a lot about negotiation. It’s one of the things that I specialized in, I would say, in my clinical and consulting practice was teaching people how to negotiate.

I can tell you some things about negotiating that you might find interesting and useful. The first is, you can’t negotiate from a position of weakness. So all of you who are going to be developing your careers in the future, you need to understand that if you want to push your career forward—well, first of all, you do in fact have to push it forward, because if you're competent and silent, you will be ignored.

And you know, that's rough because you might think, well people should reward you because you're competent. Yes, of course they should. But if you're competent and silent, then you're just not—you’re not a problem. You're just part of the background that’s keeping everything functioning. And so if you want to develop your career in terms of promotion, say, and salary, you have to be competent and you have to be strategic, and to be strategic when you negotiate for a new position or for a new salary, you have to be able to say if you don’t give me what I want, then something you don’t like will happen to you.

And what that means is, it's not a physical threat; it's that you have an option. You know, so you have your CV, your resume in order, right. You’re educated and competent and desirable to people outside of your immediate job, and you're willing to instantly put yourself on in the job market and undergo the stress of finding a new position and undergoing interviews and all of that, and you have that all planned out.

So that when you go talk to the person that you’re negotiating with with regards to your salary, you're credible, and you see because it’s very seldom that you’re talking to the person who’s at the top of the pecking order, let's say. What you need to do with them is to tell them a story they can tell to their boss to make you not a problem, and one good story is look, we really need this person because they're hyper-competent and they have a better offer. It’s like well then you're going to win the negotiation.

But if you go in there with no power, well you're going to lose obviously. So the first thing that you need to know if you're going to negotiate is that you have to be able to say no. And what no means is that you're not going to do it.

When I made the videos about Bill C-16, I thought it through, and I thought there's no damn way I'm following this law. I don't care what happens. And I didn't say that lightly; I thought it through. I thought, okay well let's assume the worst-case scenario. In the worst-case scenario would be that a student would report me to the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and then they would do an investigation and they would find me guilty because the Ontario Human Rights Commission finds 99% of the people brought to it guilty, because that's what totalitarians do.

Then I would refuse to pay the fine or cooperate with whatever the re-education they would put me through would be, and then that would move to civil court, and then I would be fine for contempt, and then it would, you know, then the whole legal capacity would unfold. And I thought, well I could either do that, or I could allow the government to regulate my speech. It's like nope, that's not happening.

So you might think about that as confrontational, and it is confrontational. It's like there isn't a goddamn thing that can be done to me to make me allow the government to compel my speech. That’s not happening.

The reason for that, I believe, the reason for that is because I spent decades studying totalitarianism. It’s not good, and the way totalitarian states develop is that people give up their right to be—the right to exist with their own thoughts. They lie. That's what happens. Individals sacrifice their own souls to the dictates of the state, and then everything goes badly sideways. It's like—and you think, well how much evidence for that do we need?

You know, you’re looking at a quarter of a billion deaths. It’s like isn’t that enough? Well, the people that I read who were profound—Viktor Frankl is a good example for beginners, if you want to read about this sort of thing. He wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning, and Frankl, and also Solzhenitsyn and a variety of other commentators as well who really looked into what happens both in Nazi Germany and in the communist states, their conclusion was universal, is that the lies of this state, the lies and tyranny of the state are aided and abetted by the moral sacrifice of the individual.

It’s not top-down. The Nazis are telling you what to do and you’re all innocent and obeying; that’s not how it works. You falsify your being bit by bit and you end up where you don’t want to be, and that’s a bad idea. And if you’re interested in that, there’s a great book called Ordinary Man; you read that and you won’t be the same person afterwards. So I would beware of reading it. But it’s a story about these policemen in Germany.

So they were middle-aged guys, you know, and they grew up and were socialized before the Nazis came to power. So they're just your typical middle-class policemen, and they were brought into Poland after the Nazis had marched through and charged with keeping order in the occupied state. They knew their commander knew that it was going to be brutal because they were in wartime, and they regarded the Jews, for example, as enemies.

So there was going to be a fair bit of rounding up with all of what that implied, and the commander told the policemen that they could go home if they wanted to, that they didn't have to participate in this. Then what Ordinary Man does is document the transformation from ordinary policemen—those are the sort of people that you know—two guys who were taking naked pregnant women out into the middle of fields and shooting them in the back of the head. It documents one step at a time how an ordinary person turns into someone like that. You think, well, we don’t want that sort of thing to happen anymore. Well then, you don’t want to be that sort of person.

That’s how it’s fixed. And if you’re not going to be that sort of person, then you don’t take the first steps, because the first steps lead you down a pathway that at least in principle, you don’t want to go.

So, well, I think part of what makes me combat him, compared to someone like Haidt, is that I spent years looking at the worst things there are to look at, and I’ve learned from that, and I've certainly learned things that I won’t do, and one of them is I won’t let the government regulate my speech. It's a mistake. I don't care what compassionate principles hypothetically motivate that move; it was unprecedented in English common law that move, and it was all buried under this leftist compassion, which is mostly a lie.

So I have reasons, I think, other than those that motivate someone like Jonathan Haidt to be particularly passionate about this issue. On the subject of totalitarianism, I wanted to do something very quickly, so I'm guessing that even though most people in the room have negative views of both men, they have a more intensely negative view of Hitler than of Stalin. I'm guessing almost everyone in the room has a far more negative visceral reaction to the swastika than to the hammer and sickle. Some of the protesters at your event at McMaster University stood behind a banner with a hammer and sickle.

You've said that a hammer and sickle is no funnier than a swastika, that "the reprehensible ideologies that are based in fundamental Marxism killed at least a hundred million people in the 20th century." I've discussed this proposition with numerous people in recent months, and almost no one seems to buy it. No one disputes the body count under socialist regimes; few dispute that Stalin was a vicious murderer, roughly on par with Hitler in moral terms. Most think that communism should not be tried again—in other words, they share your critique of the argument that previous communist experiments did not represent proper communism and that proper communism should be tried.

Nevertheless, they still disagree with you that we should react as negatively to the hammer and sickle as we do to the swastika. Why? Because they say the two ideologies are not morally comparable; National Socialism is much worse morally than Marxism or Marxism-Leninism. So what do you say to this?

Well, I would say the first thing is that it’s highly probable that you were talking to intellectuals, students—well, we'll call them budding intellectuals. It is a mystery; you know, it's a mystery because it is the case that there is something about the Nazi doctrine that seems to have a visceral impact that the communist doctrine doesn’t have.

When I said when I opened my remarks tonight that it might be the issue of racial superiority, you know, it’s something single that you can put your finger on whereas what's happening on the left that's horrifying is murky. It might even be multi-dimensional; maybe there isn't a single radical leftist idea that's murderous like the racial superiority doctrine; maybe it's a combination of three or maybe a set of four—who knows.

Because of that, it doesn’t seem as repugnant. And there was also a universalizing tendency among the communists that seemed to be less morally reprehensible than the ethno-nationalism of the Nazis. So, you think, to go back to 1914, it’s complicated. But if you go back to, say, 1918, at the time of the Russian Revolution, it's not like the communists knew that their attempts to bring about the socialist utopia would be doomed to absolute murderous catastrophe, right?

They were working in ignorance. Now it’s not that simple because by that time, Dostoevsky had already written The Possessed and he outlined very clearly what he thought would happen if people like that got the reins of power, and Nietzsche had done the same thing in his writing.

So people knew that there was something toxic, let’s say and deadly about the doctrine, but it hadn't been played out on the world stage. But now it's like, well, this is why I said what I said at the beginning, fine you know, if I don't know exactly how to make the moral distinction, but it's a distinction that has to be made.

I think that people who apologize, who say something like, "I think that it’s virtually—" I don’t know if it’s as reprehensible to say that a given ethnic group should be consigned to the fire and to say that, "that wasn’t real communism," but they’re damn close!

When I hear someone say "that wasn’t real communism," I know what they mean! What they mean was if I was the dictator in Stalin's shoes, I personally would have brought in the utopia—that's what that statement means! Or it means an ignorance of history that's so utterly appalling that any political statement made on behalf of that person whatsoever should immediately be followed by a paroxysm of extreme embarrassment.

I just want to be clear that these students were conceding that they don't agree that they share your critique. They don't share it enough. Okay, fair enough. I just want—so they would more or less agree with what you just said, I think about it's not okay to say those regimes weren't proper communism and that the proper communism should be tried. They still dispute, though, that socialism as an ideology is on par with Nazism, so I just wanted to make—you know, we could say communism, let's say we could say radical leftist ideology.

As I said already, there are reasons for the left and the right wing, right? The right wing stands for hierarchy, and the left wing stands for those who are displaced by hierarchy, right? An endless problem. But that doesn’t mean that—it still leaves it in the camp of the people speaking on behalf of egalitarianism to figure out just what the hell went wrong and to take some responsibility for it. You know, it’s no joke.

We see these things play out continually still, look at what happened to Venezuela. Here’s a fun story. Do you know that it is now illegal for physicians to list starvation as the cause of death for a Venezuelan child in a hospital? That’s how they’re dealing with the fact of starvation. Right? You just make it illegal to have that diagnosed as your cause of death. That’ll solve the problem.

It’s like, you know, we have a group of well-meaning socialists in Canada who just produced something called the Leap Manifesto a couple of years ago. It’s a pretty radical document. They’re trying to move our Socialist Party, the NDP, New Democratic Party, towards acceptance of this Leap Manifesto, which doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. But they were all radical promoters of the Venezuelan government before everything went badly sideways.

You know, I think the average Venezuelan now has lost 17 pounds. That’s not because they were put on a voluntary dieting program, right? It’s not good. And so if you’re tilting towards the left and you’re temperamentally inclined that way and half the population is, then you have an ethical problem on your hands, which is how do you segregate yourself from the radical policies that produce the catastrophes of the 20th century? And you can't just say, well that's not my problem. It's like, well okay, if it’s not your problem now, it certainly might become your problem in the future.

And I would say it’s actually everybody’s problem in the aftermath of the 20th century—it’s everybody’s problem. So, it’s complicated, like there is a genuine desire—like I worked for a socialist party for quite a while when I was a kid; you know, when I saw both sides of it, I saw some very, very admirable people. I was privy for a variety of chance reasons to the leadership of the Socialist Party in Canada at the provincial and the national. I met the people who ran the provinces and who ran the party, and a lot of them were really admirable people.

Like they'd spent their whole life, I would say, working on behalf of the working class, you know? So they were genuine labor leaders, and there was also a lot done in Canada on the left that looks like it was actually pretty good. Standard work week, the income, you know—establishment of pensions, the introduction of our health care system, which I would say probably overall works better than the American system, although not at the upper end—and they were working hard on behalf of people who had working-class lives.

But then I also encountered the sort of low-level activist types, and I didn’t have any respect for them at all. I just thought they were pea dish, and resentful, and irritable, and that those two things exist in a very uneasy coalition on the West. There’s care for the poor and hatred for the successful, and those two things aren’t the same at all.

And it looks to me like one of the things that really happened when the communist doctrines were brought into play—and it also, by the way, we did the multinational experiment, right? It doesn't matter where you put these policies into play; the same bloody outcome occurred. It didn’t matter whether it was Russia or China or Cambodia or Vietnam, or to pick a random African country or Cuba or Venezuela for that matter; it was an unmitigated catastrophe.

And so to me, that’s experiment plus replication. Enough! Enough! Well, that has to be dealt with, and it's not a delay that intellectual left in the way has been absolutely appalling in their silence on the communist catastrophe. Like for my students, a lot of my students really haven't heard about anything that happened in the Soviet Union in any detail until they take my personality class in the second year of university. It’s like, well, what the hell? Why are they learning about that in a personality class in the second year of university?

That's not—that should be first and foremost in their historical knowledge, what happened in the 20th century. I mean, it was almost fatal what happened, and we still haven’t completely recovered from it, right? I think, isn’t your president Donald Trump going to talk to like insane totalitarian number one sometime here in the near future? But that’s still a Soviet-era state; those people are armed to the teeth, and they have weaponry that could easily take you out.

So we're not I don't know if you know—do you know what happens if you blast a single hydrogen bomb 100 miles above the United States? Just one? You lose all your electronics, right? They're all done—tractors, cars, trains, subways, computers, phones—all of them burn out, and that's it. So we're not done with this yet.

And the Korean state, North Korea, as an emblematic representative of the communist catastrophe—you know, everyone there starves; there’s millions of people died 20 years ago. It’s had not gotten any better, so it’s not like we solved this problem. And there’s a deafening silence on the intellectual side of the spectrum with regards to what happened on the egalitarian left, and there’s no excuse for it!

So somewhat relatedly, I think it’s fair to say that even though you have criticized segments of both the left, social justice warriors, and the right, the alt-right, your critical commentary over the last year and a half has focused significantly more on the left than on the right. A lot of people I've talked to here at Lafayette take issue with that. They say that we're so far from a Marxist takeover of our culture and political institutions, but to suggest otherwise is to engage in a classic kind of right-wing exaggeration and hysteria that we've seen before in Western countries in the early to mid-20th century.

They also say—and this is important to them—that the nationalist authoritarian right poses more of a threat to freedom of the individual than the left does today, as it has in the West since the early 20th century. They argue that the left may have sway in the Academy and large segments of the media, but nationalist right parties, figures, and movements with authoritarian tendencies have risen, become potent, and often been victorious in recent years. They point to Trump, Brexit, the National Front...

Pointing to Trump is rather pointless. I mean, I don't know what Trump is, but to think of him as a figure of the radical right is a little on the absurd side. So, I mean, we are polarizing and so who knows where the ultimate danger will come from? If it’s the ethno-nationalists on the right or if it's the radical leftists on the left? Who knows, right?

I suspect to some degree that’s a matter of happenstance. I mean, that’s what you’d expect if you looked at 20th-century history, but I emerged out of the Academy, and in the Academy, like, there aren’t right-wing people in the Academy not to speak of—that’s completely—that’s thoroughly documented.

And it’s certainly not the case in a country like Canada; there’s no threat whatsoever in Canada from the radical right. It’s like, I don’t know if you rounded up everybody who was in the radical right in Canada, you might be able to scrape up like what, three or four thousand people if you’re really, like, if you really worked at it, you know? So I just don't see that, at least in my own country—that's just a non-issue; it's a non-starter.

I mean, the last time there was any kind of radical right-wingers in Canada was probably in Quebec in the 1950s and maybe from the 1930s to the 1950s, but it’s never been a political issue. What about the AFD or the Italian—I can’t remember the name of the Italian party, the National Front in France. Where would you put—would you?

Oh, well, I mean, you're in Europe; it’s more—there’s more polarization, I would say. But the Europeans also have problems that we don’t have. You know, they’ve been struggling with the consequences of non-ending violence in the Middle East and the wave of refugees that have emerged as a consequence of that.

So the situation in Europe is different, and I would say there is more movement and activity on the right. So, but you know, I’m not an admirer of identity politics, well, and that's for the reasons I brought up to begin with. I think that you have to decide conceptually, psychologically, familiarly, and socially what your vision of a human being is.

If your vision of a human being is essentially tribal, so that you're defined by your collective identity in some manner, then you're going to play identity politics on the left. You're gonna play identity politics on the right. It's like, well, I think the identity politics types on the left pose a bigger threat in my country. It’s not so obvious in your country, because you guys—your political landscape is more balanced, I would say than ours.

If the radical right posed a threat to the Academy, which they most decidedly do not, then I would be just as upset about that. And so I think again, it’s part and parcel of the radical left’s failure to take—or the left’s in general failure to take responsibility for the radicals. It’s like, oh well, why aren’t you criticizing equally on both sides?

Well, the threat doesn’t exist equally on both sides—not in my country! So I think identity politics is a murderous game no matter who plays it, you know. And on the left, it’s, well we’ve already talked about that. So what’s wrong on the right? Well, you stand up and wave your flag and talk about your ethnic identity or your racial identity, and you take pride in that—it’s like, what the hell did that have to do with you?

Yeah, goddamn loser, you know? It’s like you’re one of the great heroes of the past, are you? That’s why you’re standing up and waving your flag? It’s no, you're not. You identify with your group because you don’t have anything of your own to offer, and so it’s pathetic and I’ve said that many times and in my lectures too, and people know this if they’ve actually watched my University lectures. I spend a tremendous amount of time, and have for 30 years, convincing my students that if they had been in Nazi Germany, there was a very high probability that rather than being Oskar Schindler and rescuing the Jews, they would have been a Nazi persecutor.

Because there’s like five Oskar Schindler's and like many million Nazis, so you can do the math for yourself. And if you don’t think that if you think that you would have been one of the few heroes, then you’re either someone truly remarkable or you’re unbelievably deluded. And so I would suspect that you’re in the unbelievably deluded camp, because truly remarkable people are rare.

And I’ve really seen this in the last year or two because one of the things I have noted, like I knew that people were timid, you know, and I knew why it’s dangerous to stick your head up above the rest. I mean it’s predator avoidance strategy to keep your head down. I mean that technically; it truly is. To blend in with the crowd is a predatory avoidance strategy. That’s what fish do in schools of fish; like it's very low-level behavior.

And if you stick your head up, there's some real danger, and the advantage to that is that people are pretty civilized and they go along with the group. That’s a good thing, because, you know, we should be civilized and go along with the group. But it’s a really bad thing when the group goes sideways.

And I’ve had many people, colleagues and but many other people too, say, wow really we agree with what you’re doing but we can’t really take the risk of standing up and saying so. It’s like well now, and then so most people fall into that camp. When I went to Queen’s University a month ago and was subject to that chilling demonstration, I would say, where the radicals climbed up into the stained-glass window wells and pounded, you know, unendingly for ninety minutes, while we were all inside. I had a professor write me the day before and say, look my wife and I work at the university, we really support what you're doing, but we can’t even risk coming to the talk because what if the students see and complain.

It’s like well yeah, there’s courage for you, man. There’s courage for you, you know. And so but that's par for the course, and it’s unsurprising to some degree. And but, anyways, on the right it’s like it’s an excuse by people on the left not to take the things that I'm saying seriously. That’s what it is. It’s like, well he's not attacking the right as much. It’s like, well they’re not after me; they’re not trying to close down my speech.

So I took that personally. Had it been right-wingers coming after me, well it would have been the same thing. So it’s a foolish objection.

I think for decades, ethnic groups have on average scored significantly differently on IQ tests according to psychology professor Richard Haier, whom you interviewed on your YouTube channel. There is no scientific consensus on the causes of these average differences in IQ test scores. Yet, according to Haier, psychologists do generally agree that general intelligence exists, that IQ measures it well, and in a non-culturally biased way, that IQ is highly predictive of success in educational and professional terms, and that for decades, ethnic groups have on average scored significantly differently.

So, assuming this is true, should we talk about it? Sam Harris raised this question in a podcast conversation with Charles Murray. Some argue that we should not talk about this as doing so could fuel the racial supremacist movements that you mentioned with potentially horrific consequences. Others, mainly on the intellectual dark web and to a very limited extent in academia, think we should talk about this topic because average differences in IQ scores have existed for decades. They may have played a role in generating the disparate educational and professional outcomes that we observe and care about, and thus that we cannot properly analyze these disparate outcomes unless we do talk about this subject.

Oh, geneticist David Reich recently argued in The New York Times that if scientists do not openly discuss the biological basis of race, pseudo-scientists could fill the vacuum with dangerous consequences. Furthermore, you, Professor Peterson, are highly critical of the oppression narrative that permeates segments of the Academy and activists left, and knowledge about average differences in IQ scores between ethnic groups, while tough to assimilate, could puncture this narrative.

So the question is, what is your view on all that I’ve just said?

Jesus, you guys already did take a long time to prepare these questions, didn’t you? Alright, so when I went to Harvard, I came from McGill, and I had spent a lot of time with my advisor there and a research team that he had trying to understand the genesis of antisocial behavior and among adolescents mostly.

So, well as kids as well, antisocial behavior is very persistent. So if you have a child whose conduct’s disordered at the age of four, the probability that they will be criminal at the age of fifteen or twenty is extremely high; it’s unbelievably stable. It’s a very dismal literature because you see these early-onset aggressive kids, and it’s persistent.

Then you look at the intervention literature, and you throw up your hands because no interventions work. Believe me, psychologists have tried everything you could possibly imagine and a bunch of things that you can't in order to ameliorate that. So we’re really interested in trying to understand, for example, if you’re antisocial by the age of four, then there isn’t an intervention that seems to be effective.

So, and the standard penological theory is really quite horrifying in this regard because what you see is that male aggression peaks around the age of 15 and then declines fairly precipitously and normalizes again by the age of 27 and standard phenomenological theory essentially is this cold-hearted; it’s like if you have a multiple offender, you just throw them in prison till they’re 27, and then they age out of it, and that’s all there is to it.

There's some downside to that because there’s a corollary literature that suggests that the worst thing that you can do with antisocial people is to group them together, which is what we do in prisons. So that’s a whole mess.

Anyways, one of the things we were doing was trying to see if there might be cognitive predictors of antisocial behavior, and so we used this battery of neuropsychological tests that was put together at the Montreal Neurological Institute. It took about 11 hours to administer and hypothetically assess prefrontal cortical function. We computerized out and reduced it to about 90 minutes and then assessed antisocial adolescents in Montreal and found out that they did show deficits in the problem-solving ability that we associated with prefrontal ability.

When I got to Harvard, I thought well that’s interesting; we could use the neuropsych battery to predict negative behavior; perhaps we could use it to predict positive behavior. So I thought well what if we turned the neuropsych battery—what if we turned it over and thought well can we predict grades for example?

Because, you know, that’s a decent thing to predict. So we ran a study that looked at Harvard kids, University of Toronto kids, line workers at a Milwaukee factory, and managers and executives at the same factory.

What we found was that the average score across these neuropsychological tests—they were kind of like games, they were game-like. So in one, in one test you had, there were five lights in the middle of the screen, and a box was associated with each light; and you had to learn by trial and error which box was associated with which light—that was one of the tests.

So we took people’s average score across the tests because they seemed to clump together into a single structure. You can do—you can find that out statistically if you take a bunch of tests. You can find out how they clump together statistically by looking at their patterns of correlations, and you might get multiple clumps, which is what happens with personality research, where you get five, or you might get a single clump, which is what happens in cognitive research.

We got a single clump essentially, and then we were trying to figure out if—at the same time I was reading the literature on performance prediction, and there’s an extensive literature on performance prediction, a lot of it generated by the Armed Forces, by the way, indicating that IQ is a very good predictor of long-term life success.

Here’s the general rule: if your job is simple, which means you do the same thing every day, then IQ predicts how fast you’ll learn the job but not how well you’ll do it. But if your job is complex, which means that the demands change on an ongoing basis, then the best predictor of success is general cognitive ability.

And I learned that the general cognitive ability tests clumped together into a single factor; that’s fluid intelligence or IQ, and then we didn’t know if the factor that we had found was the same factor as IQ. And we still haven’t really figured out whether or not that was the case because it kind of depends on how you do the analysis.

But anyways, I got deeply into the performance prediction literature, and I found, oh well if you wanted to predict people’s performance in life, there's couple of things you need to know: you need to know their general cognitive ability if they’re going to do a complex job; you need to know their trait conscientiousness.

Some of you might have heard that rebranded as grit, in a very corrupt act, by the way, because it’s a good predictor of long-term life success. Freedom from negative emotion, low neuroticism is another predictor; but it’s sort of third on the hierarchy. And then openness to experience, which is a personality trait, is associated with expertise in creative domains.

The evidence that—now I should tell you, there’s such a complicated question. I should tell you how to make an IQ test. It’s actually really easy, and you need to know this to actually understand what IQ is. So, imagine that you generated a set of 10,000 questions, okay, about anything! It could be math problems, they could be general knowledge, they could be vocabulary, they could be multiple choice.

It really doesn’t matter what they’re about, as long as they require abstraction to solve. So they’d be formulated linguistically, but mathematically they would also apply. And then, you have those 10,000 questions. Now you take a random set of a hundred of those questions, and you give them to a thousand people, and all you do is sum up the answers, right?

Some people are going to get most of them right, and some of them are going to get most of them wrong. You just rank order the people in terms of their score, correct that for age, and you have IQ. That’s all there is to it!

And what you’ll find is that no matter which random set of a hundred questions you take, the people at the top of one random set will be at the top of all the others—with very, very, very high consistency.

So one thing you need to know is that if any social science claims whatsoever are correct, then the IQ claims are correct because the IQ claims are more psychometrically rigorous than any other phenomena that has been discovered by social scientists.

Now the IQ literature is a dismal literature; no one likes it. Here’s why, here’s an example. So here’s a little, here’s a fun little fact for you—for liberals and conservatives alike—because conservatives think there’s a job for everyone if people just get off their asses and get to work, and liberals think, well you can train anyone to do anything. It’s like no—there isn’t a job for everyone, and no, you can’t train everyone to do everything. That’s wrong.

And here’s one of the consequences of that: as I mentioned, the Armed Forces has done a lot of work on IQ, and they started back in 1919. And the reason they did that was because, well, for obvious reasons, say, let's say there’s a war, and you want to get qualified people into the officer positions as rapidly as possible or you’ll lose, so that’s a reason.

And now the Armed Forces has experimented with IQ tests since 1919. And in the last 20 years, a law was passed as a consequence of that analysis, which was that it was illegal to induct anyone into the Armed Forces who had an IQ of less than 83. Now the question is why?

And the answer was all that effort put in by the Armed Forces indicated that if you had an IQ of 83 or less, there wasn’t anything that you could be trained to do in the military that wasn’t positively counterproductive. Now you've got to think about that, because the military is chronically desperate for people, right? It’s not like they’re lining up to be inducted, right? They have to go out and recruit, and it’s not easy.

They're desperate to get their hands on everybody they can possibly manage, especially in wartime, but also in peacetime. But then there was another reason too, which was the Armed Forces was also set up from a policy perspective to take people in the underclass, let’s say, and train them and move them up at least into the working class or maybe the middle class.

So there’s a policy element to it too, and so even from that perspective, you could see that the military is desperate to bring people in, but well, with an IQ of 83 or less, it’s not happening!

Okay, so how many people have an IQ of 83 or less? Ten percent. Now, if that doesn’t hurt you to hear, then you didn’t hear it properly, because what it implies is that in a complex society like ours and one that’s becoming increasingly complex, there isn’t anything for 10 percent of the population to do.

Alright, well, what are we gonna do? We’re gonna ignore that? We’re gonna run away from that? And believe me, we have every reason to, or we’re gonna contend with the fact that we need to figure out how it is, how it might be possible to find a place for people on the lower end of the general cognitive distribution to take their productive and worthwhile place in society, and that isn’t just gonna be a matter of dumping money down the hierarchy, because giving people who have nothing to do money isn’t helpful; it doesn’t work.

It’s not that simple. Well, so that’s kind of an answer to the question of whether or not we should deal with IQ forthrightly. It’s like if you can find a flaw in that logic, like just go right ahead. It’s not like I was thrilled to death to discover all of this! By no stretch of the imagination was that the case.

So what? So IQ is reliable and valid; that’s the first thing. It’s more reliable and valid than any other psychometric test ever designed by social scientists, by a factor of about three. That’s fact number one. Fact number two is it predicts long-term life outcome at about 0.3 to 0.4, which leaves about 85 percent, 70 to 85 percent of the story unexplained. But it’s still the best thing that we have!

Well, it’s also the case that in places like Great Britain, when IQ tests were first introduced, they were actually used by the socialists, and they were used to identify poor people who had potential cognitive potential and to move them into higher—into institutes of higher education. So there’s an upside, you know, a social upside as well.

Ethnic differences? This is something you can’t say anything about without immediately being killed, so I’m hesitant to broach the topic. But I'll tell you one thing that I did in the last week that’s relevant to this.

So, and this just shows you how complex the problem is. First of all, we should point out that race is a very difficult thing to define because racial boundaries aren't tight, right? So when you talk about racial differences in IQ, you’re faced with the thorny problem of defining race, and that's a big problem from a scientific perspective, but we'll leave that aside.

In result, I wrote an article this week. Somebody stood up at one point, one of my talks, and vice, bless their hearts, took this particular question and used it as an indication of the quality of the people who are my so-called followers. And by the way, the quality of my so-called followers is pretty damn high, and you can find that out quite rapidly just by looking at the YouTube comments, which are head and shoulders above what the standard set of YouTube comments.

I can tell you that. So someone asked me about the Jewish question, right? And the implication was that Jews are over-represented in positions of authority and power, and I was, I had just spoken for like an hour and a half, and you know, this guy had an ax to grind, and I thought there’s no goddamn way I’m getting into this at the moment.

And so I said, I said I can't answer that question, but that's not a very good answer. So I wrote a blog post this week, and I said look, here’s the situation: all right, Jews are over-represented in positions of power and authority, but then let's open our eyes a little bit and think for like two or three seconds. Think, hey, guess what? They’re also over-represented in positions of competence, and it’s not like we have more geniuses than we know what to do with, and if the Jews happen to be producing more of them—which they are, by the way—then that’s a pretty good thing for the rest of us.

So let's not confuse competence with power and authority, even though that's a favorite trick of the radical leftists, who always fail to make that distinction.

Well, why does this over-representation occur? Because it does—it’s also there’s also over-representation in political movements, including radical political movements. Okay, why? Well, answer: one Jewish conspiracy. Okay, that's not a very good answer; we’ve had—we’ve used that answer before.

Alright, but, but do we have an alternative? Well, here’s an alternative: the average Ashkenazi IQ is somewhere between 110 and 150, which is about one standard deviation above the population average. And so what that means is that the average Ashkenazi-European Jew has an IQ that's higher than 85% of the population—that's a lot higher.

Now, that doesn’t make that much difference in the middle of the distribution, okay? But geniuses don’t exist at the middle of the distribution, they exist at the tails of the distribution. And you don’t need much of a move at the mean to produce walloping differences at the tails, and the tails are important because a lot of where we draw, we draw exceptional people from are the exceptions, right?

So here’s an example of the same thing: most engineers are male. Why? Because men are more interested in things, and women are more interested in people. And you might say, well that’s sociocultural. It’s like no, it’s not!

And we know that because if you stack up countries by their egalitarian social policies, which you can do quite effectively, and then you look at the over-representation of men in STEM fields, the over-representation increases as the countries become more egalitarian.

So it’s not sociocultural; okay? Now men aren’t that much more interested in things than women; it’s one standard deviation, which is about the same difference, by the way, between the population norm and the Ashkenazi Jews. But if you’re looking at the person—the one person in 20 or the one person in 50 who’s most hyper-interested in things, and that’s likely to become an engineer, then most of them are men.

Here’s another example of the same thing: men are more aggressive than women. Now you might ask how much, and the answer is best place to look at that is in Sweden, where the egalitarian policies have been laid out for a long period of time, and you can get a more direct inference about biology.

If you took a random man and a random woman out of the population and you had to bet on who was more aggressive, and you bet on the man, you’d be right 60 percent of the time. So that’s not that much, right? It deviates from 50/50, but it’s not like 90/10; it’s 60/40.

Okay, so what does that mean? Well, we got a tail problem here again. Let’s say you decide to go out on to the extremes of aggression and you identify the most aggressive one in a hundred persons; they’re all men. Guess who’s in prison? Those people—that’s why most of the people in prison are men.

So this is an elementary part of the problem in our society is that we don’t understand statistics; we don’t understand that you can have relatively small differences at the population level that produce walloping consequences at the tails of the distribution.

Okay, so back to IQ, one final thing to say about IQ: the ethnic differences are difficult to dispense with; it’s not easy to make them go away. You can say, well the tests aren’t culture-fair. Well here’s a test of that: so imagine you tested Group A with an IQ test and you tested Group B with an IQ test, and then you looked at their actual performance in whatever you’re predicting.

If the test was biased against ethnic group A, then it would under-predict their performance, and that doesn’t happen. Now you could say, well there’s systemic bias in the performance measures and the potential measures, and that’s a possibility, alright? Now one other thing about that: there’s a real danger in the ethnicity-IQ debate and the danger is that we confuse intelligence with value, or that we include—we confuse intelligence with, yet, with human value. That’s a better way of thinking about it.

One of the things that we’re going to have to understand here is that that’s a mistake, is that being more intelligent doesn’t make you a better person—that’s not the case. It makes you more useful for complex cognitive operations, but you can be a pretty damn horrific as a genius son of a b****, right? It’s morally neutral. And we also know that from the psychometric data, by the way. There doesn’t seem to be any relationship whatsoever between intelligence and virtue.

So if it does turn out that nature and the fates do not align with our egalitarian presuppositions—which is highly probable—we shouldn’t therefore make the mistake of assuming that if group A or person A is lower on one of these attributes than group B or person B, that that is somehow reflective of their intrinsic value as human beings; that’s a big mistake. Now that’s, I don’t have anything else to say about that.

Okay, so I had three more questions, and so maybe slightly shorter answers to these three. Like maybe around—hopefully there’s simpler questions; Avra, on average five minutes? Okay, and then we will open it up.

So another taboo is to celebrate European culture. Multiculturalists get pretty unhappy when Europeans start expressing their culture or heritage. Many, especially on the left, do not draw much of a distinction, at least in practice, between European pride and white supremacy. You care about freedom of the individual, the individual's freedom to think, to speak, to associate—in short, to act as he sees fit without external compulsion, as long as he doesn't infringe on the similar liberties of others. Professor Ricardo Duchesne, a historical sociologist and professor at the University of New Brunswick argues that “individualism is a unique attribute of European peoples.”

It has been exported to some degree to other nations, but in my view, it is not something that comes to them naturally. So he continues: “You can’t play the game of we’re all individuals; we have to affirm and be proud of our ethnic identity and heritage to preserve the West's curious individualism.” If Europeans become minorities in the West, he argues, the founding idea of the West—that no entity, not an individual, not a community, not the state, can justly deprive an individual of life, liberty, or property by force, no matter what the individual’s race, class, or religion. I wouldn't be surprised if Duchesne, when he made this statement, had you in mind.

Look, the medieval Europeans identified seven deadly sins for a reason— and one of them was pride. It’s like let’s make the presumption: I do believe that for reasons that aren’t obvious, that the West has got some things right. We’ve got the sovereignty of the individual right; that’s the most fundamental thing we’ve got right.

We’ve articulated that, I think, in a remarkable way—not only theologically, but philosophically, in our body of laws, in our societies. And one of the consequences of that is it had its effect on the rest of the world is that everyone is getting richer quite fast, and that’s a really good thing.

Okay, having said that, it’s like am I proud of that? It’s like I didn’t do that; what the hell? Pride? What’s that? That’s not the right response! How about responsibility for that? How about that? It’s like you’re part of this great and unlikely set of propositions, this strange set of propositions that says that in some ineffable manner, the poorest person is as valuable as the king.

It’s like how the hell did we ever figure that out? That’s an impossible thing to think! And yet that’s the bedrock of our legal system. That’s nothing to be proud of; that’s something to tremble before, to take on as an ethical burden and not to wave a flag for how wonderful you are that you happen to have the same skin color as some of the people who thought that up.

It’s not the right response. It’s like it’s to open your eyes and recognize that as a miracle and a relatively new miracle on the world stage, and to participate in the process of upholding that in your personal and your public life. That’s not pride in European tradition!

Like when I go to Europe—and I love going to Europe, and the European cities are unbelievable masterpieces, which is why they’re completely flooded by pilgrims, right? Tourists—pilgrims—who go there to look at the beauty. So I don't feel pride about that; I feel like I have something to live up to. That’s not the same thing, man!

And so these right-wingers and they say, look what we’ve done! It’s like, no, it’s not you that did that! That’s something, man! You’ve got to have your act together before you would dare to say, well, that was me!

It’s like, yeah, sure, sure it was you. Yeah, right. No, it’s hard to stand up and take your place in that kind of historical process, that unlikely, miraculous historical process—not to just feel ashamed at the way that you’re presently constituted in the face of that means that you're deluded!

You’re using your great fortune at being a beneficiary of that system. Look at what we’ve got here, this great peace that we’re inhabiting right now. You’re using your unearned gift that’s been granted to you as a source of personal pride in your accomplishments due to your skin. It’s like, no, not a good argument.

So—and that doesn’t mean that, well, there’s nothing valuable about European culture. There’s plenty! There’s plenty about it that’s valuable. It’s not even so clear to what degree it’s European; I mean it came out of the Middle East, you know?

I mean, who—it’s so muddle-headed that you hardly know where to start!

So hopefully that was less than five minutes. There we go, dispensed with the radical right-wingers in four minutes!

I've heard a number of interesting things about Islam from you, and one of your intellectual soul mates, Camille Paglia, says that men and women benefit in many ways from living in largely separate worlds, as they did in traditional European societies and obviously as they do in much of the Muslim world today.

Relatedly, Paglia considers passionate masculinity a critical force for defending, sustaining, and advancing civilization, and she argues that passionate masculinity, while virtually moribund in the Western middle and upper classes, is alive and well in the Muslim world.

You have expressed some sympathy for the Muslim critique of the West, its godlessness, its spiritual void, its materialism, its technology-induced removal from life's elemental realities. You've said it is extraordinarily naive to believe that the differences between European culture and Islamic culture are not about anything fundamental.

You've expressed concern that Islam is a totalizing system. In a quote that stood out to me, you said in a Patreon chat on YouTube that in your view, "the only countries in the world that are essentially worth living in, in any real sense, are the ones that are predicated on the Judeo-Christian tradition and manifested in the Western body of laws."

So, an open-ended question: how would you synthesize your perspective on Islam and the fact that the Muslim populations of Europe and Canada—a product of recent immigration—are growing and reproducing much faster than the European-descended populations in these countries?

Yeah, and you guys already did spend a lot of time coming up with troublesome questions, didn’t you? We can see the problem is the problem. One of the problems is that I’m an ignorant man, and there's lots of things that I don’t know.

I don't know, I don’t understand Islam. I don’t know enough about it to be an intelligent commentary on it. I've done my best to peck away at the edges, but you know, it would require multiple years of study to understand the similarities and differences between the two viewpoints.

It looks to me like what Islam did was take a group of radically disparate tribes and unite them under a single ethos. Of course, the Muslim civilization expanded more rapidly than any other civilization ever had and occupied a very large part of the world, which, of course, it still does. Perhaps there’s something to be said for that unifying tendency.

There’s a problem, and maybe this is at the core of the problem: there’s no distinction between church and state in Islam and there is a distinction between church and state in the West. It isn’t obvious to me if it’s the case that our culture is grounded in an underlying, let’s call it literary metaphysics, something like that. A religious metaphysic—the part of the bedrock of our culture is the idea of separation between church and state.

As far as I can tell, that idea doesn’t exist in the Muslim world, and so I cannot understand how that faith is commensurate with the institutions of the West. It doesn’t seem to me that there’s any evidence that it’s commensurate because the number of Islamic democracies is, let’s call it finite. The best example is probably Turkey, and Turkey, as far as I can tell, isn’t doing that well at the moment on the democratic front, and it looked like the great shining hope and a lot of that was a consequence of secularization.

I’ve spent a lot of time, when I was reading Maps of Meaning for example, looking for commonalities among religious viewpoints, and I was able to find deep commonalities I thought between Buddhism and Christianity and Taoism and Christianity and Hinduism and Christianity for that matter, but it was a lot harder when it came to Islam.

It’s not a faith that’s opened itself up to me. I don’t understand it well. But I hope that people of goodwill can build a bridge between the two cultures because the alternative is too gloomy to contemplate.

Finally, you’ve stated: "Women are more agreeable by nature than men, and agreeable people are compassionate toward those they see as suffering. And that seems to include any minority, especially when you combine that with a kind of neo-Marxist doctrine that claims that anyone who has an advantage swiped it."

You’ve also said that women have been voting for a century now, and this, you suggested in a Patreon chat, may help to