Campus Indoctrination: The Parasitization of Myth
Hello, hello! Can I have everybody's attention, please? We're gonna be starting soon. All right, so first of all, thank you for coming. I really appreciate seeing all of your faces here—makes me happy, and it's kind of a sign that we're in the process of reclaiming sanity on our campus that you guys all showed up to this. So thank you! Thank you!
I'm just gonna lay some quick ground rules for the event. So first of all, I want to thank the Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy, the Leadership Institute, and the Undergraduate Political Theory Association for all their support. After this, I'm going to give the mic over to Professor Overmenko, and he's gonna announce Dr. Peterson.
Photography is allowed, but no flash photography please. No signs are allowed besides a regular sheet of paper. Peterson is going to speak until 8 p.m., after which we will have a short Q&A until 8:30, and everybody's going to line up on this side. I will be holding the microphone. Actually, we might not be able to use microphones since we only have one. Okay, we should have a microphone for questions starting at 8:00.
I'll have you all line up down here, and we will be over at about 8:30. After the Q&A event, you guys are all free to leave. So thank you very much! Here's Professor Albert Overmenko.
[Music] [Applause]
Well, good evening, and welcome to our talk today, which is called "Political Indoctrination on Campus." I am Richard Avram Iancu, associate professor of political science and co-director with John Sharples, the English professor right here from the history department. We are the co-directors of the Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy. The center, along with the Young Americans for Liberty and the Undergraduate Political Theory Association, organized this lecture today.
If you'd like to be in the loop regarding other events, you can look us up on the intertubes. As I said, our talk today is called "Political Indoctrination on Campus," and I'm grateful to welcome John A. Dr. Jordan Peterson as our speaker this evening. Dr. Peterson is a professor of psychology and clinical psychologist from Toronto, Canada. He cut his teeth as a professor of psychology at Harvard University and now is a professor at the University of Toronto, where hopefully he enjoys the full protection of a robust tenure policy.
He's the author of two books: "Maps of Meaning," which is on my nightstand right now, and "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos." Dr. Peterson is also the author or co-author of over a hundred scientific articles on issues such as alcoholism, aggression, and the neurology of political consciousness, as I understand the titles, because I didn't read 100 articles.
In 2013, Dr. Peterson began recording his lectures on personality and its transformations, "Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief," and uploading them to YouTube, which have been very popular. I will admit publicly that I listened to many of his podcasts this past summer while on long training runs. They don't do much for pace, but they keep you going for a long time.
Dr. Peterson made something of a public splash in 2016 when he made a couple of YouTube videos criticizing Canada's Bill C-16, which adds gender expression and identity as a protected class under the Canadian Human Rights Act. Dr. Peterson argued that a person could be prosecuted for refusing to use preferred pronouns. A similar law has recently been passed in California, which, of course, raises the issue of forced speech and the First Amendment.
After these videos, Dr. Peterson acquired some notoriety. His YouTube channel has gathered more than four hundred and fifty thousand subscribers, and his videos have received more than twenty-five million views as of October 2017. His classroom lectures on mythology were turned into a wildly popular thirteen-part TV series on TV Ontario. Dr. Peterson also has a biblical lecture series on Tuesday evenings, which are almost always sold out. If any reason to move back to Toronto for me, that would be one of them! Finally, I learned that, like me, Dr. Peterson hails from Alberta. I assume he's a right-thinking man and a dusting Edmonton Oilers fan.
Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Peterson!
[Applause]
Thank you very much for inviting me. Can you hear me at the back? Yeah, it's good. All right, well, we might as well get right into this.
So I want to go as deeply underneath the problem as I can possibly manage tonight. I'm going to marry some of my ideas about what you might describe as the grammatical structure of belief with some more overtly political analysis, concentrating on what constitutes ideology, because one of the things that I've been trying to figure out—and I guess this is part of my attempt to wrestle with some of the actual problems that the postmodernists oppose—I don't mean as people or as thinkers; I mean conceptually. Because you always have to give the devil his due, so to speak.
There are elements of postmodern thought, like the idea that there's an infinite number of interpretations for any finite set of facts that actually happen to be true, and there aren't. They're quite problematic, and it's for good reasons as well as bad reasons that postmodernism has become such a dominant strain of thought, and so it's necessary to take it seriously.
And one of the things I've been trying to figure out is: Is there a reasonable way of distinguishing philosophy from ideology? The postmodernist answer to that is basically no—with ideology all the way down, like the turtles all the way down—you never escape from the grip of your viewpoint in some sense. And there's some truth in that, but there's not enough truth. That's the thing.
One of the hallmarks, I would say, of both post-postmodern and ideological thinking is the proclivity to reduce very complex phenomena to single causes. But anyways, so we're going to go underneath things as far as we possibly can.
So the first thing that I'd like to point out is, or like to discuss, is the actual problem that we're all trying to solve, in some sense, including the ideologues who claim to have, let's say, the interests of either the working class or the oppressed uppermost in their imagination, in their heart, or in their intellectual concerns. There is absolutely no doubt that there is oppression, and that there's no shortage of suffering in the world.
I do think that's not only the fundamental reality of the world, and this is an existential theme, and it was developed, at least to some degree, by Martin Heidegger. Heidegger had a concept that he called "thrownness," which is an interesting idea. Thrownness is a brief description of the arbitrary nature of human being or even of being itself. The arbitrary nature can be—his word he used for that, which is a German word—can be translated in other ways. It can be translated as abandon, or dereliction, or dejection, which, obviously, are much harsher words than mere thrownness.
Thrownness is a more detached term, but what it means is that it's a characteristic of human conscious experience to be underpinned by arbitrary realities that have nothing to do, in some sense, with your choice as a being. Some of the elements of being thrown are that you're born at a certain time rather than a different time. That seems like it's an irrational fact, that's how Jung would describe it. Carl Jung, as it's an irrational fact, because there's no real way of accounting for it from a causal perspective—not subjectively speaking.
And you're born a certain race, and you're born with a certain level of intelligence, let's say, although that can be impaired certainly with enough effort. You're born in a certain culture with a certain language and at a certain socio-economic class and with a certain degree of attractiveness.
Those are things that are all handed to you in some sense. They make up, in some sense, they make up the axiomatic structure of your being, and some are more advantageous and others are disadvantageous, and you're stuck with them. And that really is a problem, partly because life in and of itself is a problem, and a problem of suffering.
But also because it seems quite evident that, well, or at least, that you could make a strong case that the talents and catastrophes of life are by no means equally distributed. In some sense, there seems to be an intrinsic—we might regard it from the perspective of the standards of human justice and perhaps human mercy as well—something intrinsically unfair, unjust about the structure of existence itself.
Now, I like the exact existentialist take on that, because what the existentialists do is attribute that inequality and injustice and say unfairness to the structure of being itself and pose that as the central problem of life. I find that very realistic.
I like this painting by Van Gogh. I think it does a very good job of expressing that. You know, he's an old man, and he's obviously sorrowful, and, you know, he's not rich, as you can tell by his shoes. And like, it's rough, and he's a nexus of oppression. Perhaps, oh, a nexus of oppression in that he may have served as an oppressor, but also someone who's suffering and oppressed as a consequence of the conditions of his life.
And so then the question might be: Well, why is life like that? And what might be done about it? And that's where the differences really start to arise.
So we can start from the perspective of the fact that life presents a universal problem to those of us who are alive and conscious. Now, there are various, what would you call, meta-theories that account for the existence of this suffering. My interpretation of the story of Genesis, essentially, which in some sense describes the introduction of suffering into the world, is that what seems to happen in the story of Genesis is that human beings originally emerge as a mythological representation—it's a deep fictional representation—that's one way of thinking about it.
Keeping in mind, as you might, that fiction can be more true than truth, which is partly why we're so attracted to it, because fiction distills truth and presents it in a much more concentrated form than mere description of everyday reality. In the Genesis story, there seems to be an association between the development of vision and self-consciousness and the awareness of death and the awareness of good and evil. Those things happen pretty much at exactly the same time.
The consequence of that awareness, or that self-consciousness, is a dawning awareness of vulnerability. You remember in the story of Genesis when Adam and Eve opened their eyes or had their eyes opened as a consequence of falling prey to temptation? The scales fall from their eyes and they realize that they're naked, and then they immediately cover themselves up.
Of course, the question is: What does it mean to realize that you're naked? There are a variety of complex answers to that. One is that, well, if you're naked, a common nightmare is to be naked in front of a crowd. And the reason that that's a nightmare is because, well, people don't like to have their full vulnerability exposed to the judgmental eye of the crowd. And for good reason.
Like, everybody has what would you say? It may be an inbuilt sense of shame about their fundamental inadequacy in relationship to the difficulties of life. The story of Genesis, which I think is a foundational story—well, I don't think it's a foundational story. It's obviously a foundational story, a foundational story of Western culture—suggests that it's mankind's knowledge of its own nature that leads to not only suffering but to work.
You know, because once you realize that you're vulnerable and that that vulnerability never really goes away, you always have to prepare for the future. Because even if you solve the problems that are right in front of you this moment, that doesn't mean that you've solved the plethora of problems that are likely to pop up for you tomorrow and next week and next month and next year, and that, in some sense, are beyond your ability to finally solve.
However, there’s a different viewpoint, I think, that comes from the Marxist perspective, and I'm going to talk to you about Marxism and postmodernism, both of which I regard as variant strands of the same ideology. As I said, I'll define why I think they’re ideological.
The thing that strikes me so clearly about the Marxist perspective is that the finger is always pointed at inadequate social order as the root cause of suffering. That just seems to me to be—I don't know—it's so naive that it's difficult to understand why people can possibly fall for it. Maybe it's partly because there's some hope embedded in it, right? There's an idea that, well, suffering might be transcended if we could just organize our societies properly.
But it seems to be, number one, that that's highly unlikely. And number two, as Dostoevsky pointed out, even if we did organize our societies so that no one had anything to worry about from a material perspective—so everyone, let’s say, had enough bread and shelter—that we’re the kind of insane creatures that would blow that apart and fragment that sort of static utopian perfection just so something strange and interesting might happen.
I think that's a really devastating critique. Dostoevsky formulated that back in the late 1800s. He had thought through the consequences of communist utopia before it even manifested itself as a political force, and I think he put his finger on at least one of its primary weaknesses.
So, you know, if we were delivered from suffering, it's not necessarily clear that we would be happy about that. Because one of the things that does characterize human beings is this intense desire for experience that transcends the normative. You know, people will go out and look for difficult things to do just for the sake of doing difficult things. They climb mountains, and they engage in extreme sports, and they put their lives in danger.
There's no technical reason for that, and it doesn't seem like a very intelligent thing to do from the pure perspective of self-preservation. But we're certainly capable of it.
The problem the Marxists seem to lay for the reason for suffering at the foot of inadequate social structure—and they go farther than that. They also describe the social structure as it exists—and this is where the idea of patriarchy is derived, as far as I'm concerned—as something that is necessarily an upper class or an oppressive class against the oppressed class.
And what the people who fit in those different categories can vary. With classic Marxism, it was the rich against the poor or the poor against the rich, right? The bourgeoisie against the proletariat. That's been transformed, I would say, by the postmodernists using a fairly self-evident sleight of hand into identity politics, where the oppressed-oppressor narrative just takes different forms according to the identity that happens to be plugged into the same mediational structure.
What seems to happen, as a consequence of that—and I mean, there's pretty good data about this with regards to the genesis of intense intergroup conflict—one of the things that predicts intense intergroup conflict, like the conflict in Rwanda and certainly that also happened in Nazi Germany, is that genocidal activities are often marketed as preemptive strikes against an oppressor class, right?
And so that would have been the Jews in Germany, and in Rwanda, the same narrative emerged. It's very common to dichotomize our society as oppressor and oppressed, and then for the oppressed to rise up and take out the so-called oppressors even before anything particularly violent occurs because of this enhanced sense of victimization and the moral high ground that it seems to provide. The logic being something like, if we’re being oppressed, we have every right to defend ourselves, so to speak, even against threats that are only in some way imaginary.
Now, I don't want to get too cut-and-dried about that. Because, you know, it’s certainly the case that there isn't a political or economic system in the entire world that lacks corruption. Thus, the idea that the social structure is in part corrupt enough so that everyone who is embodied in that social structure doesn't necessarily have an equal chance to manifest their gifts, say, and rise to the top is certainly true.
Because human beings are completely incapable of producing perfect social structures for a variety of reasons. Our own blindness, the fact that we inherit structures that we don't really understand that are all demented and bent in one way or another. And so there's always an element of truth to critical claims that if we just got our act together better from a social perspective, everything would be fairer and just.
But to say that is not to simultaneously justify the claim that all the reasons that human beings are suffering and that life is unfair and unjust because the social structure is corrupt and oppressive, right? You gotta think in multivariate terms if you have any degree of intelligence at all. For any complex phenomena, there's generally a multitude of causes, and they are not easy to differentiate.
I mean, that's partly what social scientists do: take a look at a complex outcome, suffering certainly being one of those, and to look at the potential contributors of multitude of factors.
Now it's very difficult because those factors are not easy to categorize, and they overlap, and so on and so forth. But you have to be pretty, what would you say, motivated and stupid, I would say both at the same time, to use a univariate hypothesis to talk about a complex phenomena. I don't care what the phenomena is. So that's another hallmark of ideological thinking is that the causal story collapses into a single dimension.
You see that often in psychopathology too, where, you know, people who get obsessive about something can't shake like a particular idea that possesses them. Paranoid people are like that, and people who have eating disorders, especially anorexia, are like that, as their entire value structure collapses into the dimension of thin equals beautiful and good, and it’s very rigid and black and white and it does them absolutely no good.
So now, some of the problems with the Marxist perspective seem to be that victimhood, the sense of enhanced victimhood, tends to produce an intense sense of resentment, and that's a very bad idea because resentment is a very toxic and violent emotion. It's also very grateful, which is one of the things I would really say about especially the radical left student types, especially at Ivy League universities. I mean, it's really quite a spectacle to see people at places like Yale come out and agitate as a consequence of the realization of their own oppression when, by any reasonable standard, current or historical, they're probably in the top 1/100 of a percent—perhaps better than that—of all the people who have ever lived anywhere, ever.
It’s really quite staggering to me that the top point zero zero one percent can express their resentment about the top point zero zero zero one percent in such strident terms without noticing that exactly the same claims of privilege apply to them; as long as all you have to do is transform the bin in which you're doing the privilege comparisons, and that becomes immediately self-evident.
And you know the fact that, as Americans, let's say, us North Americans since I'm a Canadian, that we're staggeringly privileged compared to the rest of the world is certainly a consequence of what you might describe as the arbitrariness of our political borders.
So, but to forget that when you're claiming a particular brand of oppression for yourself seems to me to be very ungrateful, at the least, and certainly motivated, let's say, politically because I think it justifies your expression of hatred for those that tiny fraction of people who are still better off than you, and also a degree of historical ignorance that's absolutely staggering in its magnitude and a complete indictment of our education system, which should be indicted in every possible way.
Now the Marxists might claim to their benefit, let’s say, with this worldview of class struggle as being the primary driver of human history, and the well-off socioeconomically, because that's pretty much the only way they defined well-off, which is also something I take great objection to because there's lots of hierarchies in the world, and there are many important hierarchies, and not all of can be reduced to socioeconomic status by any stretch of the imagination.
Imagine if you were 80 years old and you had 20 million dollars. You know, you might be perfectly happy to get rid of all that money if you could be 18 again. So it's—and, you know, one of the best predictors of wealth in North America is actually age because, you know, young people haven't actually had much time to make money, whereas old people have had quite a bit of time.
But the problem with being old and rich is that you're still old, and that actually turns out to be quite a serious problem because no matter how rich you are, you eventually die. And so the money has very delimited effect with regards to addressing the fundamental problems of the suffering of life.
We know perfectly well from the empirical perspective that once you have enough money so that the bill collectors aren't chasing you around—essentially something like the beginnings of a middle-class existence or maybe the upper end of the working class—then additional money has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on your psychological well-being.
That's actually an indication of the limitations of material comfort, let's say, as a medication for the suffering that's attendant on life. It's another thing that's very weak about the Marxists and I think very interestingly contradictory because they're very anti-capital in their structure but they're so damn materialistic that it's absolutely mind-boggling because the Marxists are actually more convinced that money is useful than most capitalists, as far as I can tell, because they believe that money is, in fact, the solution to all life's problems.
The problem is that just the right people don't have the money, and I think that's a staggeringly naive perspective because there are many problems in life that money just cannot solve, and there’s a fair number of them in that it actually makes worse.
So anyways, having said all that, you could also still make the case—I used to work for a socialist party in Canada when I was a kid, about six, from the time I was 14 till the time I was about 17, before I figured out what was wrong, not so much with socialism per se, but with ideology per se.
I actually admired the socialist leaders that I had the fortune to be introduced to because at that point they were very much voices for the working class—a lot of union leaders and people like that, you know, so they're classic democratic socialists—on the labor end of the distribution, it's absolutely necessary for labor and the working class to have a political voice, something the Democrats might keep in mind, so maybe they wouldn't lose their elections quite so frequently.
No, I really think it's appalling, you know, because it's necessary for the working class to have a political voice. And to have that transformed into identity politics is a real catastrophe.
Anyways, I think that the people that I met, many of them were genuinely concerned with the problems of the working class, and you know, more power to them. And so I think there are people on the left who genuinely are trying to make a difference for people who could use a fair shot at opportunity in life.
But at the same time, I noticed that a tremendous number of people, especially the lower-end worker party worker protestor types, were more peevish and resentful than good-hearted and kind. It was about that time that I came across George Orwell's famous critique of left-wing thinking in the UK when—in a book called "Road to Wigan Pier"—where he basically made the claim that the Socialists that he knew, especially the middle-class ones, didn't give a damn about the poor; they just hated the rich.
That's something worth thinking about for a very long period of time because hatred actually turns out to be a very powerful motivation, you know. And if you think about the sorts of things that happened in the Soviet Union and in all these places that were supposed to be workers' paradises, if you look at the outcome, and you had to infer whether it was goodness of heart and kind-heartedness and care for the working man that produced the genocides or outright bitter, resentful hatred, it's a lot easier to draw a causal path from the negative emotion to the outcome than from the positive kind-hearted benevolence to the outcome.
You just don't get gulags out of benevolence. That's just not how it works. So I think the bloody historical evidence is clear, although I have read the most convoluted, pathological, pathetic, twisted rationalizations of what happened in Stalinist Russia that you could possibly manufacture.
It's as if a stack of corpses that would reach halfway to the moon isn’t enough evidence for the pathology of a certain form of belief. Some people can't be convinced by anyone's death but their own, I suppose.
So, you know, now I want to talk about postmodernism a little bit. What seems to me—that's much Michelle Foucault in the middle, and a more reprehensible individual you could hardly ever discover or even dream up, no matter how twisted your imagination. Foucault and Derrida, I would say, are more—but I would say they're the two architects of the postmodernist movement.
In brief, I think what they did was—in the late 60s and early 70s—they were avowed Marxists some way, way after anyone with any shred of ethical decency had stopped being a Marxist by that time. Even Jean-Paul Sartre had woken up enough to figure out that the Soviets hadn't assured in the Kingdom of Heaven, you know.
He had evidence stretching back 45 years that he could have attended to if he would have been willing to open his eyes. Talk about bad faith, which was his critical critique. Essentially it’s something quite staggering. The postmodernists knew that they were pretty much done with regards to pushing their classic Marxism by the late 60s and early 70s because the evidence that Stalin—certainly Lenin was no saint by any stretch of the imagination—had the killing certainly got underway while he was still alive and continued after Stalin was dead as well, although perhaps with not the same degree of brutality and efficiency.
Then there is of course Maoist China where the estimates, you know, nobody knows how many people died under Mao, but the estimates run as high as a hundred million people, which actually turns out to be quite a few people.
The fact that we can't keep count accurately, you know, without an error margin of something in the tens of millions just tells you exactly how horrible the situation was. They transformed the Marxist dialogue of rich versus poor into oppressed versus oppressor.
Foucault, in particular, who never fit in anywhere and who was an outcast in many ways, and a bitter one, and a suicidal one his entire life, did everything he possibly could with his staggering IQ to figure out every treacherous way possible to undermine the structure that wouldn't accept him and all his peculiarities.
It's no wonder because there would be no way of making a structure that could possibly function if it was composed of people who were as peculiar, bitter, and resentful as Michel Foucault. So you couldn't imagine this functioning society that would be composed of individuals with his particular makeup.
In any case, he did put his brain to work trying to figure out, A, how to resurrect Marxism under a new guise, let’s say, and B, how to justify the fact that it wasn't his problem that he was an outsider; it was actually everyone else's problem. He did a pretty damn good job of that and laid the groundwork for this, for what would you call it, the rise of the marginalized against the center.
Derrida’s thinking is very much the same. You know, Derrida, even though Foucault and Derrida hated each other and regarded each other as intellectual charlatans, which was about the only thing either of them was ever really correct about. So Derrida was also—and Derrida, in some ways, is even a more treacherous thinker because he makes the claim, in some sense, that like a political system has a center around which the majority congregate.
Let's say it's quite similar to Foucault's analysis in that there are people who are outside the category system. Which is obviously true because no matter how you categorize people, there are certain people inside the category and certain people outside. That’s actually why you categorize things, right? Because if every category holds every entity, then every cognitive operation is infinitely complex; you can't manage that way to categorize.
You have to include and exclude in the very nature of categorization. You can't just scrap categorization because without simplification and categorization, you actually can't function in the world; you just die, right? You die of excess stress.
It's something like what happens to schizophrenic people, because their category systems break down. They're completely incapable of functioning in the world as a consequence of that.
Anyways, then Foucault, you know, Derrida as well—they went a step farther, and this is one of the incredibly crooked elements of their thinking; I think another sleight of hand, which was, well, category systems exclude. Political systems exclude; economic systems exclude; any hierarchy of value excludes. Obviously, because if there was a hierarchy of value, some things are more valuable than others, and the less valuable things are excluded because otherwise it wouldn't be a hierarchy of value.
But the next claim they essentially make is that the reason that those hierarchies of value are constructed isn't to produce whatever it is that's of value but to exclude and to maintain the structure of power that's intrinsic to the hierarchy of value.
That's an unbelievably crooked claim because there are multiple reasons why a hierarchy of value might be put into place. There are hierarchies of beauty, and there are hierarchies of competence, hierarchies of intelligence, and attractiveness and athletic ability and musical talent. There are multiple hierarchies, and in order for those things to exist at a high order—in order for us to laud, what would you say, musical genius, we have to exclude all the people who can only squawk their clarinet from the hierarchy because otherwise you don't have any music, and there's no up, and there's no direction.
So to claim that the purpose of the hierarchy is to exclude is unbelievably crooked, and it’s a central claim for both Foucault and Derrida. It’s one of those sleights of hand that people don't quite notice but that have absolutely catastrophic effects.
Now for Foucault and Derrida, you could imagine their world essentially, you know—for the philosopher Hobbes, life was nasty, brutish, and short, and people were at each other's throats in the state of nature, right?
But Hobbes really thought about that as the chaos of individuals, and he believed that a central authority had to exert force in order to organize that intrinsic chaos so that some degree of peace could reign. It’s kind of the opposite of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theory, which was that human beings were intrinsically good and the state was intrinsically bad and that all of what made people evil derived from the state.
I would say if you put Hobbes and Rousseau together, you actually get the truth, even though they do seem to be coming at it from opposite perspectives because people are actually good and evil, and social structures are also good and evil.
It's paradoxical, and we don't like paradoxical categories, but that's still how it is. What Foucault and Derrida and the postmodernists did was they kind of added a collective element to that.
So their Hobbesian world isn't a world of individuals struggling against one another in the initial state of warlike nature. It’s groups of individuals bound by whatever their identity happens to be, struggling against each other for power because, in the postmodern neo-Marxist universe, there’s nothing but power.
There are a variety of reasons for that; partly it's because the postmodernists don't admit that there are any standards outside of arbitrary opinion, essentially they don't really believe in the real world, which is why they can generate critiques of science, for example, which is increasingly characterized as nothing but part of the Eurocentric patriarchy's—what would you call—desire to impose their power structure on the rest of the world, despite the fact that it also makes planes fly and computers operate and, well, you know—
Yeah, exactly! So, and it’s a rare bloody social justice warrior that doesn't have an iPhone or an Android that wouldn’t work if quantum mechanics wasn't actually correct because the fact that quantum mechanics is correct is one of the reasons why these unbelievably highly developed pieces of technology actually function.
So they whine about the patriarchal underpinnings of Eurocentric science and use the gadgets all the time to aggrandize, to complain about it, so it’s really pretty appalling.
Anyways, the worldview of the postmodern neo-Marxists is that everybody is basically not an individual because that’s really a fiction, and it’s a Eurocentric patriarchal fiction at that, but a member of whatever their identity group happens to be, and there’s no real possibility of communication between identity groups, hence phenomena like cultural appropriation.
So it’s a war of all groups against all groups, and it’s nothing but a struggle for power, and there’s no higher order ethic to be referred to because, for the postmodernists, there is no such thing as a higher order ethic.
There’s no such thing as a uniting narrative—that’s a hallmark of their thinking. Now, of course, that doesn’t work out in practice because without an ethic or a higher order value there isn’t anything you can do with your life.
Because you keep undermining yourself if everything is just a whim and subjective, there’s no hierarchy of values, then what the hell do you do when you get up in the morning?
If one thing isn’t better than the other, you might as well just lay there and smother yourself with a pillow. It would be a lot easier than opening your eyes and struggling in the world.
So, it’s completely—it's a self-defeating philosophy, and I think that’s part of the reason why it’s more or less self-evident that it’s a mask for the continuation of Marxism.
Because at least Marxism has, as one of its advantages, a direction; it’s an ethic, right? You have something to struggle against, even though what you’re struggling against is certainly one of the things that you actually rely on.
Second, something that you have to oversimplify in a very ungrateful and resentful way to justify fighting against it to begin with. That’s especially true in Western cultures because, as pathological as they certainly are—which is approximately as pathological as all of you are—there are a lot less pathological than almost everything that's ever happened and pretty much everything that's currently happening elsewhere in the world.
You can kind of tell that by the fact that people tend to emigrate to the West rather than the reverse. Now, you know, the postmodern neo-Marxists would have an answer to that, which would be the only reason the West functions is because it's raped the rest of humanity and the planet, but, you know, the less said about that, the better.
Marx was wrong about this too: the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains—that actually wasn't true. They lost their food, yeah?
You might see that happening again in Venezuela where they where they're having a hard time getting toilet paper, which is a lot less funny than it sounds. They lost their families. That's good. They lost their land. They lost their freedom. They lost the right to exist without pain.
They lost the right to honestly suffer and talk about it, which is a terrible thing to lose. Then they lost their lives. So that was wrong, and you can smile all you want about it, but it wasn't very cute.
This is nice. I saw this on Twitter today: when Karl Marx died in 1883, the average Englishman was three times richer than he was when Marx was born in 1818. That’s world GDP per person in 1919, 90 international dollars.
You see that there’s an unbelievable spike that happened at about 1895, which was, let’s put it this way—it was precisely and exactly the opposite of what the Marxists predicted.
But, you know, when your predictions fail and you’re an ideologue, you just gerrymander the axioms of your theory, because otherwise you’d have to drop the damn thing, and then you’re plunged into a state of existential chaos, which is no joke, and you have to reformulate yourself.
So, you know, you don’t want to underestimate the difficulty of doing that. But it’s still relatively amusing, especially when you consider that that unbelievable increase in gross domestic product per person actually happened despite the best efforts of the Marxists to prevent it from happening.
So, God only knows where we would be if 120 million people weren't sacrificed painfully and pointlessly in the 20th century to this idiot god of socialist utopia, which turned out to be murderous beyond comprehension.
Postmodernism is an attitude of skepticism and irony towards everything but postmodernism, I might add—irony toward the rejection of grand narratives—that's a lot bigger a problem than you think because actually the things that unite people are grand narratives.
You know, a narrative is a cognitive structure that orients you towards an ideal; that's what a narrative is. You know, if you go see a movie, which is a narrative, the hero is up to something.
First of all, there’s a hero, because why the hell go to the movie otherwise? You don’t want to watch a bunch of people bumble around randomly. There’s no—you’re not interested in that at all. You want to see someone who has a problem to solve and who’s applying an ethic to the solution of that problem.
It can be a bad ethic; that would be an antihero, right? It could be a pathological ethic, but that’s a good object lesson.
Anyways, but it’s certainly an ethic. And so it’s grand narratives that unite people, and when the postmodernists become skeptical about grand narratives, what that essentially means is that they’re demolishing the hyper-truths, I would say—the fictions, the true fictions that unite us as people and stop us from being at each other’s throats; enable us to compete and to cooperate in a peaceful and productive manner, at least some of the time, which is a miracle in and of itself and should be regarded as such.
I mean, we’re so blind in the West to the miraculous nature of our culture that it’s—well, it’s a consequence of being privileged, let’s say, although I hate that word. We could call it fortunate.
When I and Hirsi Ali came to Holland, one of the things that really struck me when I read her book "Infidel" was she was very taken aback by the fact that you could stop by a bus stop, and there'd be a little digital display there that said when the bus was coming.
And when the digital display said the bus was coming, then the bus would show up. And she just couldn't accustom herself to that.
It was like an existential—produced existential terror, and it’s no wonder as you just think about how bloody impossible that is! That’s impossible!
I mean, the Dutch could manage it because they managed, you know, a dozen impossible things before breakfast. They live underwater, for God’s sake!
But, you know, she was also absolutely amazed that you could go ask a policeman for help and they wouldn’t just hurt you and take all your money.
That is also another form of miracle—the kind of thing that we just take for granted. Skepticism towards ideologies and universalism, well, we can scrap the ideology part, including objective notions of reason, human nature, social progress, absolute truth, and objective reality.
It’s an unbelievably corrosive system of thought because, first of all, it defines hierarchy as power, and that's actually technically wrong. Even Frans de Waal, who’s been studying chimpanzee hierarchies, has established quite clearly that the most brutal and powerful alpha chimp is not the one who establishes the most stable dominance hierarchies—let’s call them social hierarchies—because the brutal tyrant chimp gets torn apart by subordinate chimps, three-quarters as strong as him, as soon as he turns a blind eye.
The more stable hierarchies, even among chimps, are ones that are governed by someone, you know, a chimp that’s got some physical power and some capacity for intimidation, but who’s perfectly capable of establishing reciprocal relationships with other male and female chimps so that he's got friends and allies around him.
It stabilizes, as a rule, so to speak. So the idea that hierarchies in functioning societies are primarily a consequence of power is cynical beyond belief, apart from being wrong.
It also destroys the idea of a hierarchy of competence, which I really think is one of the reasons for the theory to begin with because we know even from the empirical data that in Western societies, the best two predictors of long-term life success are intelligence and conscientiousness, and they do a pretty good job of predicting long-term life success, accounting for about 25 to 30 percent of the variance, which is a lot by social science standards.
It's kind of a testament to the integrity of our societies that complex jobs tend to be filled by intelligent, hard-working people. Thank God for that because who the hell do you want running them? You don’t want to be doing that randomly.
Most of those things are incredibly complex and difficult, and so you better have disciplined people who are willing to work 60 hours a week and who were super smart governing those things or the lights go off.
And they should be off right now because it's impossible to keep a power grid functioning. It's not like entropy isn't trying to tear it to bits at every second. There are thousands of people out there working madly to stop this thing from doing what it should be doing, which is to fail.
And so competence is everywhere, and it's absolute. You think about how many competent people have to be working behind the scenes so that you can all come here, you know, in your leisure fundamentally and sit for two hours peacefully in a lecture.
It’s absolutely beyond belief. So I think that they were after the destruction of the idea of competence itself, and we’re getting—we're walking down that road very rapidly as well as trying to destroy the idea of the world.
And that’s part of the what would you call it the attempt to insist that there’s no such thing outside the text, which was one of Derrida’s great statements: There’s no such thing outside the text.
What he meant by that, in some sense, was everything is interpretation, and there is a manner in which that’s true, but it’s not the kind of final truth that the postmodernists like to think it is. They’re a little too tangled up in language.
So here’s where we’re at with regards to the spread of postmodern neo-Marxist ideas, and these are— CI being true. You know how you can identify the right-wingers you don’t want to hang around with because they talk about white supremacy and they might have a swastika?
It’s like, “That’s a little science,” and if you’re conservative, move away from those people. Most conservatives do that. You know, in the aftermath of Charlottesville, for example, Ben Shapiro immediately distanced himself from the radical right, and William Buckley did the same thing in the 1960s and 1970s when he divorced himself from the John Birch Society.
Conservatives are pretty good at putting borders around things. In fact, that’s a good definition of a conservative, I’m serious! I’m serious! Like, conservatives like to have borders around things, whereas liberals think, “Well, if you have too many borders, information can’t flow,” and that’s true.
And the conservatives say, “No, borders equal chaos,” and the liberals say, “Too many borders equal stagnation,” and those are both right.
So you have to argue about how thick the border should be. But anyways, liberals have a hell of a time drawing borders. And that means they can’t separate themselves from the radical leftists who have absolutely no interest whatsoever in sustaining the genuine liberals.
They just use them as useful idiots, to take a phrase from the Soviet Union. Here are the hallmarks, I think, of the pathological left.
I think that if someone is pushing this “corner nity” on you, then you should be very suspicious of them in every possible way, and you should resist it as much as you possibly can.
Diversity, inclusivity—well, you don’t—those are the minor demons of the radical left, let’s say. Equity—it's like, “No, we’re not going there.” That’s equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity, and equality of outcome I’ll tell you why in a bit is an absolutely pathological idea. There’s nothing about it that’s good.
It’s impossible to implement; it's fundamentally motivated by resentment, and it’s a lie. So I like the fact that those three make the acronym DIE, though, because that seems to be approximately appropriate.
So, and then the worst of the bunch is white privilege because, as far as I’m concerned, there’s absolutely no difference between that statement and an outright racist slur. They’re the same thing!
It’s quite straightforward why. It doesn’t take a bloody genius to figure this out. I mean what constitutes racism is the ascription of the hypothetical qualities of a group to all the individuals who compose that group.
So white privilege, it’s like, even the interest—people who are interested in intersectionality, you’d think would have some problem with that! It’s like, “What about all the poor white people?”
Well, they're more privileged than the poor people who aren't white, I suppose, but, you know, that’s a pretty bloody weak argument in my estimation.
And to call it privilege and to associate it with race per se is also something extraordinarily interesting for us to get into that a little bit.
So let's talk about diversity, okay? Well, first of all, we have to define it. You know, when Jonathan Haidt has been trying to define it as diversity of opinion, I think it might be useful to define it as diversity of personality.
Because there’s actually more variability in personality within groups of people regardless of the groups than there is between groups of people.
So that should be said again: there’s more variability within groups of people than between groups of people. To state otherwise is to state something that is, in fact, categorically racist because if I said, “Well, there’s more difference between groups of people than within groups,” then I’m saying that each racial group is an entity unto itself, which could be true but happens to actually not to be so.
The diversity definition is really quite interesting, and right now that’s being defined by race, sex or gender, sexual orientation, and disability, although there’s a very large number of other potential dimensions of difference that could be included in the list of oppressed versus oppressor.
That’s actually why intersectionality has emerged, you know, because people figured out, “Well, you know,” you’re having a harder time if you’re black, let’s say, and you’re having a harder time if you’re a woman, depending on how you define harder time, but you’re even having a harder time if you’re a black woman.
There’s an intersection there. It’s like, “Okay, fine. Well, where are we gonna stop with the intersections?” I figured out the other day, if each of those categories could be differentiated into a hundred subunits—you know, who knows how many there are with gender and sex? There’s an infinite number of them, apparently.
Then you need six dimensions before you’re down to one in a billion. So six dimensions of intersectionality bring you down to the level of the individual, which is the flaw in what would you call it, identity politics theory manifesting itself as an internal contradiction.
So I think that’s very funny. If you push intersectionality to its final frontier, you break down everyone to the level of the individual, which is actually what I think Western culture figured out about 4,000 years ago is that the ultimate minority is the individual.
And the only—and the fairest society is one where individuals are allowed to rise to the level of their ability because how are you gonna do? You’re gonna covary out all their differences? It’s impossible!
It’s technically impossible! There’s, given postmodern logic itself, there’s an infinite number of ways to categorize a finite number of facts. So how are you going to determine which dimensions of difference are the ones that should be adjusted for the individual since there’s an unlimited number of dimensions of variability?
Intelligence, height, attractiveness, age, personality, there’s five dimensions of personality, socioeconomic class, right? Degree of historical oppression? You know, that can be seriously multiplied endlessly.
So what are you gonna do? Control for all those? It’s like, “Good luck! That’s never going to happen.”
And then diversity in the service of what exactly? You know, the idea that a group of people that’s racially diverse is better at problem solving than a group of people who isn’t, there isn’t a shred of evidence to support that idea. It’s a presupposition.
It also brings you back to something like racial essentialism, right? I mean, so in every possible way, logically and practically, it’s a non-starter.
I think the diversity issue is irrelevant anyways because I think the fundamental reason that the postmodern neo-Marxists push diversity is because it’s another way that they can attack the power structure that they regard as patriarchal and oppressive, say, “Well, it’s in the service of the working class and the oppressed.”
It’s like, we already covered that a little bit with regards to the Marxist claims to be working on the side of the working class when, in fact, what really happened was that many of them, perhaps most, were killed.
And the ones that weren’t killed were certainly at least made extraordinarily miserable, which maybe is even better than killing them if you’re particularly malevolent today.
And see, one of the things that’s happening that’s quite pathological and very interesting is that—mhm—the postmodernists—and this is, I think, a direct consequence of the training of activists in universities—and the universities have more to be ashamed of than you could list in a two-hour lecture.
I think someone estimated today that about 4,000 colleges and universities will go bankrupt in the U.S. in the next ten years, and as far as I'm concerned, the faster the better.
So the Toronto District School Board announced recently that it will now give priority to the hiring of diverse staff, especially in racialized backgrounds. Why? I don’t know.
I suspect it's because the people who wrote the damn policy are functionally illiterate, but you’d certainly think that if you looked at the intelligence of their policies.
And so what’s that priority to the hiring of diverse staff, especially in racialized backgrounds? What the hell does that mean?
I tweeted that if you weren't gonna hire straight white cis men—it’s—I guess this gender does the same thing, but we use it just because it’s such a hateful phrase. If you’re not going to hire straight cisgendered men as teachers, why the hell do you let them into the faculties of education to begin with?
You might as well just exclude them before they waste four years on your, what would you call them? Ideologically rigid, pseudo-education nonsense.
Equity. This is something I really like. There’s the little happy thing: equality of opportunity on the left versus equity on the right. You see the little kid gets to lift up and eat the apple. Isn’t that lovely?
But what happens really in equity is that everyone gets to have exactly the same depth of grave, and they’re perfectly equal when they’re six feet under.
And if you don't believe that, then you can look at what happened in the Ukraine in the 1930s during the Holodomor when the Soviets decided that it was perfectly reasonable to ascribe class guilt to the successful farmers and wiped them out and then starved six million Ukrainians to death, thus establishing a certain equality.
This woman—she’s—I remind this is the Shakespeare quote; one I think it's from Richard the Third, but I'm not exactly sure—one can smile and smile and smile and still be a villain.
And you know, she’s a lovely looking old grandmotherly type of creature, but that doesn’t mean that everything that she did wasn’t pathological beyond belief.
Her, what would you call them, second-rate, pseudo-intellectual opinionated meanderings produced the concept of white privilege, and what she did was make a list of all the ways that she felt she was particularly privileged in society.
That was her bloody methodology! And that's the sort of methodology that these pseudo-disciplines that have invaded the universities get away with because the rest of the faculty are too damn timid to stand up and say, “The emperor has no clothes.”
You better stand up and say something about it pretty soon because you can bloody well be sure that they're coming for the physicians and the evolutionary biologists and psychologists next, and they're not weak, and they're well organized.
And so it’s a very terrible thing. So anyways, these papers rely on personal examples because we know how methodical and rigorous that is of unearned advantage as a make-up.
But that whole methodology—thing, that rigorous methodology—that's just another manifestation of the Eurocentric patriarchy, so you don’t have to be concerned about your damn methodology when you have your personal experience to rely on.
And so here’s the privileges I can, if I wish to arrange, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford, in which I would want to live.
I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me unless they know that I’m the author of the fundamental paper on white privilege.
I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
It’s like, well, the first thing is, a lot of those so-called privileges are just the consequence of living in a reasonably civilized society and apply to pretty much everyone.
And the second thing is, there’s no reason to associate this with race. That’s another one of these absolutely pathological sleights of hand.
How about we call it majority privilege? You think that’s not the case for the majority members of every society that’s ever functioned? That’s actually being functional, obviously there’s a majority advantage.
If there wasn’t a bloody majority advantage, people wouldn’t make societies. The whole point of making a society is so that the people within this society have the advantage. So now you might say, “Well, when people are being integrated into this society, they should be given those advantages, or provided with those advantages when they join the club," so to speak, as rapidly as possible.
And obviously, that’s the case. But to attribute this level of civility and safety to some hypothetical construct like white privilege—it’s well—it’s exactly what you’d expect from people whose response to the idea of methodology is, “Well that’s just a social construct like everything else is.”
The class enemies from the Ukraine—the kulaks, right? They were the farmers who were productive in the 1920s and before, having recently emerged from the peasant class. They were all rounded up and shot, raped, and robbed and then sent to Siberia to freeze to death or to die of some infectious disease, because to them guilt was attributed as a consequence of their membership in a class.
I can tell you if there are people around you that are attributing guilt to you because of your membership in a class, they are not your friends. In fact, they’re the friends of no one, and they’re contributing to this intense state of political polarization and racial disharmony that seems to be expanding at an exponential rate.
It's not good. I really like this juxtaposition of pictures. So, when the Soviets collectivized the farms in Ukraine, they took all the grain that the Ukrainians had produced (which wasn’t very much because they had collectivized the farms), and they shipped it all to the cities.
The rule was that if you were a starving Ukrainian woman who had children and you went out in the field and you picked up individual half-rotten bits of grain to feed your kids, that was an offense punishable by death. You were supposed to turn that into the local authority so they could ship that to the city too.
So on one hand, you have a nice picture here of the bags of grain that were heroically going into the cities, and on the other hand you have a picture of the bodies that were the cost of doing precisely that.
So let’s look at the failures of this system. Well, you could list them forever. The death of the kulaks—that was right off the bat, which is why I use it. It was very, very early in the collectivization process.
Then the Ukrainian famine—which I mean, I don’t know how often that’s taught in high schools in the United States and Canada, but I would suspect never is the answer to that. The rise of the gulag state because it turned out that the bloody Soviet Union couldn’t function unless they enslaved everybody and made them work.
The death of tens of millions—it’s uncountable. The 56 crackdown on Hungary, the 68 invasion of Czechoslovakia—not to mention the whole Cold War that put the whole goddamn world at risk from 1962 to 1989—and that still rears its ugly head with our current dispute with North Korea, which is the last remaining, let’s call it, gulag-like Soviet state.
Here’s the death counts: perhaps that’s a relatively conservative estimate 8 to 61 million in the Soviet Union. It’s quite a margin of error, wouldn’t you say?
That’s the Red Terror, the Great Purge, the national operations of the NKVD, later the KGB, the great purge in Mongolia, Soviet killings during World War II, the People’s Republic of China land reform. Land reform—that’s how you—that’s what you call it when you take land that grows food and turn it into land that’s just full of corpses. That’s land reform.
And the suppression of counter-revolutionaries, the Great Leap Forward—that was a good one—the great proletarian cultural revolution, Cambodia, and the killing fields, and then a list of other countries. Every single place where these pathological ideas were put into practice became what you might describe as the literal equivalent of Hell on earth so rapidly that it was a kind of miracle in and of itself.
And yet we still—you know, what is it? One out of five social scientists in American universities regard themselves as Marxists? It’s like, what the hell? Really? Really? What is going on with that?
I don't understand that in the least. You know, I don't understand why that pathological ideology that’s so murderous, so intensely murders and so closely tied to the genocides from a causal perspective cannot have accreted to it the same, what would you call, unalterable and honorable state that Nazism has accrued to itself?
What’s going on? Why don’t we see it that way? I don’t understand that. I mean, maybe it’s because of the hypothetical universal utopia that the damn Soviets were aiming at.
Maybe you could get away with that in 1895, you know, or maybe after World War One when things were brutal, and the monarchies of Europe were collapsing and everything was chaotic. You didn’t know that your utopian ideas were gonna result in an absolute catastrophe.
But it’s a hundred years after that now, almost to the day, and when the evidence is clearly in—I’m a Marxist? It’s no. You’re just jealous because you don’t make as much as a bloody investment banker, so that’s why you’re a bloody Marxist if you are paid four times as much. You’d be a capitalist so fast, it would make your head spin.
I’m going to talk for 15 more minutes because we started a little late, and I do want to get through this. So, what’s the problem? Well, we already discussed it, and I want to show you a different way of conceptualizing it.
This is based on some of the work that I've done on archetypes. I think of archetypes as imagistic representations of the axioms of thought—that's a reasonable way of—or maybe of the axioms of being itself. There are categories of being: pain is a category of being, for example; suffering, limitation, finitude—those are all categories of being, and they’re very realistic.
They’re the fundamental elements of existence. Essentially, it’s a different—in some sense—than a materialist viewpoint, you know, because the materialists make the claim, and perfectly reasonable, in some sense, that the fundamental realities are material.
But they're only the fundamental realities in some sense if you define them that way. Not that that isn’t useful, and not that you can’t derive objective truth that’s pragmatically useful from that. But the fundamental realities of life have a lot more to do with motivation and emotion, especially with regards to suffering.
And so that is the unsolved problem of human existence. And we talked about the different ways of conceptualizing that, and I want to walk you quickly through some of my thinking about the true roots of suffering and human vulnerability.
I think of this as an antidote to ideological possession. I think that this is the fundamental map of religious belief, and I’ll walk you through it very quickly.
What happens in the case of the ideology is that the ideology takes a fragment of a religious belief system and expands it up into a totality, and has its mode of power because it draws on these underlying religious/archetypal narratives for its power.
So for example, you know, that the idea of the future socialist utopia is very, very similar to the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. It was always—you know, that’s a cardinal element of many of the three Western major religions.
So here’s a way of conceptualizing existence, and each of these levels of conceptualization have their own symbolic representations, and you can see these portrayed consistently throughout the narratives that we use to guide our existence, even the ones that we don’t understand explicitly.
They come up in movies, and in books, and in myths, and in stories we tell each other, in our dreams and in our imagination, constantly. So they’re really the categories of imagination.
And so the first category, and the one that’s most difficult to understand, I called the “dragon of chaos.” It’s sort of the outermost circle—that's a good illustration of it.
The dragon is a very large, very common symbol worldwide, and an anthropologist/biologist who I recently read called it a “snake-cat-bird,” which I really liked, and he thought about it as an amalgam of the idea of predator, you know, because our tree-dwelling ancestors and after that were basically preyed on by birds of prey, by predatory cats, and by snakes.
And so, well, and God only knows how much fire did them in as well. So a fire-breathing tree-cat-snake-bird is a very good representation of the category of everything that’s out there in the unknown that can do you in.
That becomes elaborated over the course of time into the idea of the dragon that hoards gold or the virgins for that matter. The idea being that human beings are half prey and half predator.
And so, we have to make a representation of that which exists beyond our comprehension that can do us in. That’s the dragon of chaos, let’s say.
But also come to understand that confronting that voluntarily is the appropriate way to gather new information and to survive. And that’s really the fundamental human story. The fundamental human story is to go boldly where no one has gone before.
And what you encounter are the terrible dragons that exist beyond your field of comprehension, and if you can manage that forthrightly, then you gather the kind of information and riches that enables you to develop yourself characterologically and to benefit your community.
That’s the fundamental story of mankind—the fundamental positive story—and that’s the underpinning of the hero mythology. So, which is a lovely antidote to ideological presupposition.
So that’s the outermost—the other outermost reality, you would say. That’s the unknown unknowns that Donald Rumsfeld referred to, and nested inside that are the terrible things about life that you actually encounter that you—they're not the hypothetical things that might get you, they’re the actual things that you encounter that you don't know, and some of those are positive and some of those are negative, and that can even flip.
Because sometimes your life is turned upside down by, let’s say, by a rejection from someone you love should be a good example of the terrible mother.
That’s the great mother on the outer ring, but that can mature you and make you wake up as well.
And so the encounter with the things that transcend your, what would you call it, your competence are also things that can make you grow and mature.
So you could think of the great mother as nature and the great father as culture, and the individual as the person who is enveloped by culture and by nature.
When you move to the fringes of your culture, you encounter nature itself, and that’s the case, let’s say, geographically, but it’s also the case conceptually, right?
Because if you’re the master of a field of endeavor—which is a geographical metaphor—you move towards the fringes so that you can stand on the unknown, encounter something that’s new, transform what’s new into inhabitable territory, and extend the dimension of human capacity.
So it works on a practical geographical level of representation, but also on an abstract level.
And you can also think about it as a person on an island in an ocean; that’s a good way of thinking about the human condition, except the person has two elements, and the island has two elements, and so does the ocean.
The person’s two elements are, classically speaking, the good and evil that wars in their heart, because it isn’t so self-evident exactly where your enemy is.
And it might be the class structure that’s so pressing you, but it might be the snake in your own heart, and it’s certainly the case that if you read people like Viktor Frankl and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, just to take a start, who were very perspicacious interpreters of the catastrophes of Nazism and the Soviet Union, both of their conclusions were that the fundamental problem with both those systems is that the individuals within the systems allowed themselves to be corrupted by what was in their own hearts.
And so one of the things that’s absolutely horrible, I think about the Marxist and postmodernist viewpoint is that it doesn’t attribute any of the pathology that’s all projected onto the social world to the individual him or herself.
And you might say, well, that’s where the fundamental battle takes place.
I would also say that the idea that existence is a battle between good and evil and it’s the battle of the soul is a consequence of the symbolic realization of Western civilization that the evil that has to be confronted most forthrightly is actually the individual.
The evil that obtains to the individual and that it’s primarily an ethical issue at the individual level, and that’s what you take responsibility for, if you forget that, you project it onto other people, you take no responsibility for it, and you end up thinking that you’re the good guy, and you probably shouldn’t think that because if you thought for about 15 minutes about all the stupid things that you’ve done in your life, you could—and malevolent things as well—you could figure out for yourself quite quickly that the probability that you’re the saint and that everyone else is the villain is only an indication of precisely how villainous you are.
So, and then with regards to the social structure, well, obviously, it’s pathological and tyrannical and corrupt and deceitful.
You know, it’s partly a structure of the dead, and people are corrupt to some degree and willfully blind. And so that’s an archetypal truth. That’s part of the thoroughness that we discussed earlier: you have this infrastructure that surrounds you, both physical and conceptual, and you’re its beneficiary and its victim.
It’s partly pathological and corrupt—it’s always been that way—and you’re damn lucky that it isn’t just purely corrupt because that’s frequently the case.
What your job is—not to whine about the fact that it’s corrupt—that’s self-evident. Your job is to straighten yourself up enough so that you can straighten up the culture, and that’s the old motif of rescuing your father from the belly of the whale, let’s say, which is part of the necessary process by which people become fully developed individuals.
What you’re supposed to be doing in university and the humanities is you don’t just study the great ideas of Western culture; you study the pathology of history and know that it’s about you, and then maybe you try to culture yourself and discipline yourself to the point where you have enough of an internal ethic so that when you take your place in the patriarchy, for lack of a better word, you’re going to be a force for good rather than a force for evil.
Then maybe the damn thing tilts a bit towards the good instead of the catastrophe, and then maybe you’ve done something that’s worthwhile.
Then nature—well, you know, it’s very easy to romanticize nature, especially if you’re a city dweller who’s never had to wander out in the northern woods in the middle of the summer and get eaten by black flies and mosquitoes and starving to death while trying to track down an animal.
It’s very easy to romanticize nature of course. Cancer and other diseases tend to disabuse you of the pure beauty of nature, and nature is a very, very destructive force.
It’s against us all the time as well as for us, and another thing that’s really not well-balanced in our society is the anti-humanism that’s become part and parcel of radical discussions everywhere.
Human beings are regarded as a cancer on the planet, to quote the—what was that? The Club of Rome worrying about the population explosion.
And we’re all guilty because we’re destroying things as fast as we can possibly manage. It’s like, “Jesus! Everything around us is always trying to kill us!” Most of the time, we’re just trying to stay alive.
I mean, we’re not perfect; we’re corrupt and so on, and our social structures and people get greedy and careless, but it’s not like nature’s all shining, wonderful young lady waiting in the wilderness to embrace us positively.
It’s the old hag that’s going to kill you every possible way, and you need to defend yourself against that.
And you know human beings have only been in a position since 1960—since we ever had any conceptualization of our potential to change the planet on a planetary scale—it’s been like four generations.
You know, back in the 1890s, Thomas Huxley was commissioned by the English Parliament to investigate the carrying capacity of the oceans, and his—he was a great biologist—his report was that there are so damn many fish in the ocean that every human being could fish every day for the rest of his life and catch everything he possibly could and we wouldn’t put a dent in it.
And that’s how—You know, that’s only 120 years ago! We only woke up to the fact that we became a planetary force in 1960.
It’s like, what the hell do you expect from people? You know? We’re trying to get our ourselves together as fast as we can and might be decent of us to stop with the anti-human rhetoric which is only going to lead to a bad end.
You know, if human beings are nothing but a cancer on the planet, then it’s the bloody hero who obliterates them, isn’t it? Because it’s the hero who gets rid of cancer.
And then people watch the school shooters and the mass shooters, and they think, “Well, what is it that motivates people like that?” So they could figure it out in about half an hour if they did the proper reading, just read what they wrote!
Human beings are a cancer on the planet; being is evil intrinsically!
I’m going to take out everything I can to show my displeasure with the structure of reality, and then I’m going to shoot myself just to show you how little I care.
And if you can’t understand that, then you haven’t looked very deeply into your own heart because there could be a time in your life, believe me, where something terrible enough happens to you that you’ll be able to understand that perfectly.
There’s a Christian representation of the same thing, right? The great mother is on the outside; that’s nature, and then the father is in the middle.
In that representation which I really like—this is from the 13th century—you see God the Father, who’s a representation of culture holding the suffering individual who simultaneously transcends his suffering.
That’s the goal: to be the suffering individual who simultaneously transcends his suffering. That’s why all those people on the inside of the open version—which is what that sculpture is called—are gazing at that image because they’re trying to figure out what the hell it means.
Well, people have been gazing at it for 2,000 years trying to figure out what it means. One of the things that you can be sure of is that that story and what that image represents is absolutely central to the integrity of Western civilization.
Five more minutes. This is an image of—I would call it—the patriarchy, and it’s a lovely image. It’s God the Father, and he’s assimilated to the sun because, well, because consciousness, which is associated with light, is the builder of culture, and he rules over the walled city.
And he’s the centering idea, you might say, that unites a culture. That’s another way of looking at it.
And he’s got two hands. I described them as security and tyranny all together—order and, you know, if you’re in a university—the U of T students complain about this all the time.
There are 60,000 U of T students, right? They feel like numbers; they feel ignored, and no wonder because they’re numbers, and they are ignored!
It’s no wonder they didn’t feel that way. You know, and there are huge classes of 1,200 people, and they get lost, and they think, “God, that’s a pretty evil structure,” and uncaring.
It’s like, “Yeah, that’s exactly right.” But by the same token, you know, you get to purchase four years of intellectual freedom, and you have all these people who could, at least in principle, teach you something.
And you get an identity out of the deal, and if you have half a bit of sense, you’re in the library trying to read great things, and maybe you’re not quite as dopey and useless when you come out as you were when you went in.
And so it takes with one hand and gives with the other, and you got to understand that about your position in relationship to society.
It crushes you and molds you at the same time. It limits you and furthers your compute capability at the same time. It’s up to you to determine how to establish a harmonious and productive relationship with that because that’s one of the fundamental demands of life.
That sort of splits into these two things, but that’s the king who devours his son. I love that picture, and that’s a society that’s become tyrannical, right?
And the son of the king is the thing that regenerates the king. The king’s old, and he’s blind, and he’s stupid, and he’s corrupt, and he has a son, and the son is lively and awake and alert and can see.
If the father’s not pathological, then he tries to make the son strong so that the son can grow up and revitalize the culture. If he’s a tyrant, well then, he devours him, and then he gets old and corrupt, and everything goes into chaos.
And then there’s the benevolent king who’s got that properly balanced, and you see in this picture he’s got a globe in his hand with the cross on top of it, and that means the same thing that that other symbolic image did, which is that the proper society supports the suffering individual in his or her attempts to transcend their suffering and attain a proper ethical perspective.
And then