2017/05/13: Freedom of Speech: Not Just Another Value

Jordan Peterson, psychology professor at the State University of Western Ontario but no University of Toronto, been there some years fast got involved because we were sent the letters that Dr. Peterson's Dean and then vice provost him, and they worried us so tremendously as people concerned about academic freedom and the integrity of teaching. The letters warned Dr. Peterson to stop saying publicly that he would refuse requests to use non-gendered or additional pronouns. And this is for us, that was a very serious matter; very serious incursion on the freedom of teachers to teach as they will. Teaching has a lot to do with the rapport between the professor and the students, between classroom dynamics, and the honesty and sincerity that teaching requires. We thought were infringed by these orders, and especially orders coming from Deans and the department that the department had. And so we wrote two letters to the University of Toronto about this.

So we're very privileged to have Dr. Peterson with us today to talk to us about these things, maybe also some more theoretical and abstract things than his own particular case. He's going to talk to us about why freedom of speech is not just another value. Lex Peterson thanks.

[Applause]

So I thought I'd start. I'm going to approach this from three directions, but I went three sections. I thought I'd start by just letting you know why I was objecting specifically to Bill C-16. I made three videos in late September, and one of them criticized Bill C-16. One of them criticized the University of Toronto administration's, the Human Resources people's decision to make so-called anti-unconscious anti-bias training mandatory for their HR staff, which I thought was, and still think was reprehensible. And I don't even remember what the other one was about, but it doesn't really matter. Those were it; it was the first one, the one on Bill C-16, that caused most of the furor surprisingly enough.

And I said I wouldn't use the made-up, what I consider neologisms, that purport to describe the status of people whose sexual identity is ambiguous because that isn't how it looked to me. It looked to me like these words, like "ze" and "zir" and so forth, were the linguistic vanguard of an intellectual movement that I would say detest is probably the right description. That's this strange blend of post-modernism and Marxism that has emerged to occupy the bulk of the humanities and a good chunk of the social sciences. And so that was the first thing, is that I'm not using those words. That was the first thing that was personal, right, is that that's not a form of linguistic game that I'm willing to play, and I have my reasons for that.

The second was I regard any legislation that compels people to use a certain kind of language as a very dangerous, of all dangerous, piece of legislation directly, but also a very dangerous precedent. I mean, there are limits on free speech that are already reasonably well instantiated in the law. You can't incite a crime; you can't threaten someone bodily in a believable manner; you can't libel someone. We already have reasonable restrictions on what you can't say, but we've never had legislation that required you to use a certain language, except in certain commercial applications. For example, if you sell tobacco, you have to put a warning on it. But the United States Supreme Court decided, I believe it was in the 1940s, that similar attempts to compel speech on the part of individuals in non-commercial settings was unconstitutional.

And I know that that doesn't have any direct bearing on Canadian law, but certainly the principle does. And then, I was also very – see, one of the problems with a piece of legislation, and this is I suppose the problem with interpreting a text as the post-modernists would say, is that it's not easy to get the level of interpretation right, right? Because interpreting a text, you can look at this, look at the letters that happens with biblical interpretation very often. You can look at the individual words; you can look at the phrases; you can look at the sentences; you can look at the paragraphs; you could look at the work as a whole. And then you also have to look at the context within which the work is being interpreted in order to come up with an interpretation of anything that's complex.

And so when you see a piece of legislation, it isn't obvious what the legislation is actually intended to do despite what it's purported to do. And it isn't obvious what level of analysis to pick when you're going to criticize it. And in some ways, Bill C-16, you could regard it as innocuous, just as an extension of rights they've already been granted to certain, let's say, protected groups. Although I'm not so thrilled about the whole notion of ascribing rights to groups to begin with, we're already far down that path. But and, you know, I've been accused of making a mountain out of a molehill.

But happily enough, the University of Toronto, after I made the videos, immediately produced two letters that were informed by their legal departments, stating that what I had done with the video was perhaps in conflict with the university ethical guidelines. If you forget the ones that had to do with freedom of expression, that they might – that my actions and even in making the video might have violated the tenants of the Ontario Human Rights Act as it's are they, at least as it's interpreted by the Ontario Human Rights Commission. And so that helped put to rest any suggestion that I was actually scare-mongering because as soon as I made the videos, the legal department at the U of T immediately validated my fears, and so that was a perverse effect of the letters they sent to me.

So the other thing that I – there were other elements of the legislation that I object to and objected to and still do and if you read the policies within which the legislation will be interpreted, as the federal Justice website indicated that it would be interpreted in, within the policies that the Ontario Human Rights Commission has already established. Of course, there’s close crosstalk between Ontario and the federal government because the Liberals are empowering both, and the radical end of the liberal parties are in power in both situations. And now it turns out that it's illegal for, like, you're liable as an employer, for example, if any of your employees say anything that can be construed as harassment, say on the grounds of sexual or gender identity, even if what they say has unintended consequences and even if you don't know that they said it.

And so that kind of legislation I just think is absolutely reprehensible, and then because it's designed to cast the broadest possible net to catch the most fish. And it's clearly being implemented by people who are not precisely pro-employer, let's put it that way. And then there's another little ugly secret hidden underneath the policies, and that's manifest most clearly in the form of what's come to be known as the gender unicorn, which I would recommend that you look up, which is an animated character designed to indoctrinate small children into the social constructionist worldview, which claims that biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity vary independently, which they most certainly do not.

Now, and that's what I said in the video; that's partly why I've been accused of being transphobic. I also complained that the university was taking policy advice from the people who started Black Lives Matter, and I don't have anything against Black Lives Matter particularly, but the two people who started it are not the sorts of individuals, let’s say, that the university should be basing its policy decisions. They shouldn't be taking advice from those people with regards to their policy, and apparently that makes me a racist.

So the first part of the argument about what happened with my videos was actually whether or not I was racist, transphobic, and all of that. But the point that I was making, the technical specific technical point, was that they claimed that those four phenomena vary independently was just patently false. And it is by any reasonable definition of false. And I know that it's part of a much broader propaganda exercise, as evidenced by the gender unicorn, for example, which gets children to indicate on four sliders their sex assigned at birth, their gender identity, their gender expression, and their sexual proclivity. And you can look at the animation or at the cartoon and decide for yourself by its graphic style what age people it's aimed at.

So is this a bill to protect transsexual rights, or is it a bill to further a post-modern neo-Marxist agenda? Well, God only knows. But as far as I'm concerned, having analyzed the context within which this bill arose and within which it will be interpreted, I'm going to go for the furthering the post-modern neo-Marxist agenda until that's thoroughly disproved. I would also like to inform you that I've had plenty of letters from transgender people, at least thirty, and only one of them was critical of what I'm doing, because they claim, and as have many of the people I've talked to, that the idea that a group of activists self-nominate as the representatives of a given group and then speak for them as if they have a modulated voice is absolutely absurd.

And it is completely ridiculous, and most of the transsexual people that have been contacting me have said the same thing, which is these people don't speak for me. I wish they'd shut up because they're doing a lot more harm than good, and I don't buy what they're doing anyways. So you know, I think that the claim of the activist types to speak on behalf of the groups that they purport to represent is weak at best, and I don't know why we ever assumed that their representation is valid except that we're afraid to criticize that particular presupposition.

You know, I mean, there's nothing more ridiculous than assuming that someone is, because someone is black, that they speak for black people. I mean, I think I can't think of anything that's more particularly indicative of a fundamentally racist attitude than that. You know, well those people, they’re all the same. It's like, yeah, well sorry, it didn’t work out that way. So I wanted to clarify all that so that you know you have a little bit clearer idea about why I was doing what I was doing.

I mean people have asked, so to speak, why I chose to die on that particular hill, and the answer is every massive conflict of ideas, let's say, manifests itself in the minutiae, and that's why it's often difficult to gain any headway because no matter where you draw the line, it's arbitrary and subject to criticism. And you know the fact that this happens to be about gender-neutral pronouns regarding transgender people, to me, is just more or less an accident; it could have been about almost any number of other things.

But I would also like to suggest that what should have happened with what I did was nothing, right? I made some videos that were relatively obscure academic, and I made some videos in my private time that were, you know, pretty badly produced because they're just amateur, and I was trying to straighten out my thinking about a couple of issues: the anti-unconscious bias training, for example, and also this legislative mess. And obviously, it struck a major chord, and that to me is indication that my original supposition was correct and that there was far more going on under the surface than there was at the surface. I mean, you know, like I said, it's very difficult to pick the proper level of analysis, but one of the ways you justify your choices is by observing the impact of your choice of level of analysis and seeing if it's, if the consequences are commensurate with your original hypothesis.

And I thought, well, just because people say they're doing one thing with a piece of legislation doesn't mean that that's what they're doing. And of course, a lead piece of legislation is a Hydra in any case; it does all sorts of things that people don't intend it to do.

So that's a little background, and I'll leave the background at that. And then I'll talk to you now from a practical perspective why I believe that the idea of freedom of speech is not just another value among other values. And I would say that the simplest reason for that is that speech isn't precisely a mechanism; it's a process. It's a generative process. Free speech is the process by which all ideas are generated, and I want to make it clear why I believe that to be the case with speech specifically.

Because you might say, well, no, that's thought, but I don't think that's right because the thing is that thought is a far more collective enterprise than people generally understand. First of all, most of the thoughts you have aren't your thoughts. You know, I don't remember who it was that said that everyone is the unconscious exponent of a dead philosopher, but that's definitely the case. You know, the very linguistic mechanisms by which we formulate our grip on the world are collective constructs, and in some cases, almost entirely because creative thought is far more error than people generally presume.

And what that means is that when we're speaking and when we're thinking, we're usually using, if not clichés, which is very frequently the case, as you know perfectly well if you've ever graded a particularly bad undergraduate essay, but even among more sophisticated people, it's generally the case that they're acting as avatars of ideas that they did not produce. And so it doesn't mean they can't further the ideas, but the point is, is that, you know, we're born into a linguistically mediated culture, and it's mediated at all of the multiple levels of analysis that I already described, and we're shaped in the way that we view the world with regards to the input that we receive that's collective.

We learn language from other people; we use the words that other people use; we use the phrases that other people use. It's an intensely collective exercise. But even more specifically, so that's from a general perspective, let's say, but even more specifically, the problem with thinking is that you're a very narrow channel, right? I mean, there's a lot of world and here isn't very much of you, and that means that there's a lot more that you filter out than there is that you take in, and your filtering is very, very intensive. It's dependent, to some degree, on your embodiment; it's dependent, to some degree, far more than people generally realize on your motivations and your temperament, which is a topic we'll return to, and then it's further narrowed by your position in society and by the people that you have around you and by your particular domain of expertise or lack thereof.

And then there are sets of darker motivations as well that blind you to certain things that you should be able to see but either don’t or won’t. And so the problem with thinking is that you're an errant channel; and, see, you're not very good at it; and, C, you're incredibly biased. And there isn't much you can do about that except listen and talk to other people. Because they're, I mean, they're not the only source of correction, but they're a pretty intense source of correction. And, I mean, we're blasting corrective information at each other all the time, right?

I mean, even in a situation like this, which you could think of as a monologue, but isn't; it's a dialogue if, it's the reason I'm watching all of you is to see, you know, are you paying attention? And if not, I better adjust what I'm saying. Do your facial expressions indicate that you're understanding what I'm saying and following it? Maybe you're nodding; your eyes are open, you know, in some specific way; you're actually facing me; your eyes are on me. I can read your facial expressions, which is always why I'm looking at individuals in the audience. And I'm constantly calibrating what I'm saying if it’s a dynamic conversation to ensure that the information flow is maximized.

And the reason I look at your eyes is because I can tell where they're pointing. And the reason I look at your face is because you're broadcasting motivational and emotional information non-stop at me while I'm speaking. And so even in a situation like this, which, like I said, is more monologue than otherwise, there's a tremendous amount of corrective information continually flowing between speaker and listener. And if that stops, you know, if you hear a speaker who's detached from the audience, often someone who's reading, for example, it's much more difficult to listen to them as everyone knows.

And that's because there's a deadness about reading something in front of an audience, and I think the reason for that is that that living, let's call it, spirit, isn't manifesting itself in the same manner as it is when the speech is both spontaneous and self-correcting. And so the thing about free speech is that, like, I'm not a free speech advocate, let's say. I'm a true speech advocate, which is to say that I believe that people should say what they believe to be true. I think that's your obligation; it's also your right, but it comes with an obligation.

But I don't believe that true speech is possible without free speech because you're just not very good at thinking. And so you have to stumble around when you're first formulating ideas and wander into territory that's not necessarily productive and manifest your biases, and in short, you have to be a fool. And the only way that you improve upon that performance is by, first of all, stumbling through it to begin with, and then second, by observing carefully what sort of reactions you're getting and having a dialogue around it so that you can start to sharpen up your ideas, improve their focus, and find out where you've made a mistake and all of those things.

So a lot of what's necessary with regards to thinking is the freedom to make mistakes because what are you going to do, get it right the first time? I don’t think so. And you know that's why for Carl Jung, for example, the fool was a mythological precursor today to the hero, the trickster's mythological precursor to the hero, because unless you're willing to stumble around badly to begin with, you know, and to be a fool when you first start doing something, which is always the case when you're learning something new, then you're not going to make any progress.

And so, practically speaking, free speech has to be as untrammeled as possible so that people can be wrong and they can be biased and they can still express their opinions, including their darker ones, and then allow themselves to be subject partly to improvement by the world. Because if you say things that are too stupid and then act them out, the world smacks you a good one. But there's also the social intermediaries, the other people that you're communicating with, who will also do the same thing.

No one, we're always broadcasting information at each other, constantly trying to shape each other's behavior, and what we're trying to do is to bring forth from other people that which we would like to see them manifest. And so there's an implicit ideal as well that people are broadcasting at each other all the time, and there's tremendous social pressure, generally speaking, to manifest that implicit ideal as closely as possible, because otherwise people disapprove of your lack of interest in what you're saying or criticize you and so on. You have to be allowed to be exposed to that kind of corrective feedback because otherwise you drift, and you become subject to your own idiosyncratic insanity.

And I mean, I've seen that very many times in my clinical practice because, well, first of all, I have some isolated people that come to see me, and all they do is talk. I just listen, I mean, because they don’t have anyone else around, and they need someone to run their narrative by to keep their minds organized. They can't do it themselves; they can't do it without listening to themselves talk even because for most people, talking is how they think. And talking socially is even more how they think, and I mean that literally; I don’t mean that metaphorically. And I think that’s true for almost everyone, you know? I mean, there are people who are trained academically who can actually think, but to think, you have to divide yourself into sub-personalities, I suppose, each of which has a different opinion, a well-elucidated differing opinion, and then you have to let those different elements of your personality have an internal dialogue, and you have to draw conclusions from that.

It's very, very difficult for people to do that, and we radically overestimate the degree to which they do. Jung said at one point that people don't think so much as thoughts appear in their head, and they believe them, which I think is a much more accurate way of describing the general because true thought is not only that the thoughts arise in your mind; it's that you look at the thought and then you critique it. Right? You have to separate yourself from the thought and decide whether or not it's valuable. That's more like an editing function, and you know, it takes a long time to be a good editor—a tremendous amount of time. And it just doesn’t happen, generally speaking.

So well, I would say, without free speech, there’s no true thought. And then you might say, well, who the hell cares whether or not we think? And I think the answer to that is fairly straightforward. I mean, you might think it so obvious that it doesn’t need explanation, but there are very few things that are so obvious they don’t need explanation.

So the reason you think is so that the world doesn't smack you as hard as it might fundamentally, you know? And I really mean this technically because the way that people evolve the capacity for thought was that the prefrontal cortex, which mediates a lot of voluntary linguistic ability, actually emerged over the course of evolutionary history out of the motor cortex. And so, that's a very interesting thing to understand because it means that animals basically think by moving. And the problem with that is if you think by moving and you make the wrong move, then you're dead.

Whereas what human beings can do is they can generate fictional avatars of themselves in fictional worlds, and they can run the avatars as simulations, and the ones that get killed they don’t express in behavior. And I mean, you could do that with words too, although people, you know, originally would have done it mostly with images. They'd do the same thing with drama.

And so the reason that you think, and I think it was a guy named Alfred North Whitehead that said this, I think—I’m not absolutely sure—the reason you think is so that your thoughts can die instead of you, and that's a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant phrase and absolutely the case. So if you think properly, then you kill off the ideas that, if you acted out, would kill you or at least cause you suffering or perhaps cause suffering to the people around you.

And since it's more or less obvious a priori that suffering is worse than not suffering under most circumstances, it seems reasonable to act in a manner that will minimize it to the degree that that's possible, and so you need clarity of thought because that helps guide you through a world that's enshrouded in fog and full of sharp objects. And if you don't want to stumble into them and impale yourself, then you should have sharp vision and sharp capacity to communicate.

You know, that's one of the things I tell students when I'm trying to teach them to write because no one ever tells them why they should learn to write. It's like you learn to write so you can think, and you learn to think so that the world doesn't treat you any more harshly than it absolutely has to. And that's no joke, you know? And if you're a person who's been around a bit, you see very rapidly that people who sharpen their arguments properly and can articulate their position and defend it are always, always the people who are most successful and most compelling in that.

And that changes the way structures function, and that also helps things continue in the proper path when they're running down the proper path. It's no joke to be articulate and to be able to think. There isn't anything that's more powerful than that. And that's a good segue into the second or the third part of what I wanted to talk to you about.

See, since I made those videos, I've become, I guess the word is, popular on – yeah, well in many ways by about November, by the end of November last year, there were more than 200 newspaper articles about the consequences of the videos that I'd produced. And those were like in press printed articles; I'm not talking about anything that happened on YouTube, and YouTube is a very strange phenomena, let me tell you; it's far more powerful than you think.

So just as an aside, I was on a program last week, hosted by a guy named Joe Rogan. I don’t know how many of you know who Joe Rogan is. Joe Rogan gets 1.2 billion downloads of his podcasts a year. You think about that; like, that's absolutely unparalleled. And everybody under 30 is getting their news from either Facebook or from YouTube. The old conventional media sources, they’re dead; they are so dead you can hardly believe it.

So YouTube—and one of the reasons I'm bringing it up is because YouTube is the first platform that's produced for people the capacity to make the spoken word as far-reaching and permanent as the written word, right? That's a complete cultural revolution; it's the first time it's ever happened. I mean, it wouldn't have to be YouTube; it just turns out that that's the platform that got there first, but it's a big deal.

And anyways, the reason that my, that I became popular, I think, was partly because of the political philosophical videos that I made, but then when people came to my website to watch them, they stayed, generally speaking, to watch the lectures that I had been posting on there since 2013. And those were derived from work I did on a book called Maps of Meaning, which I published in 1999.

And see, what I was trying to do with that book was to sort something out that was very complex, and that was when I was growing up and the Cold War was raging, I couldn't understand precisely why we had divided into two armed camps around our respective ideological positions either, why those ideological positions were so important that people would risk the destruction of the world to protect them, let’s say, or why it was those two particular ideologies or whether or not this was just a difference of opinion, right?

Which would be that would be a more post-modern view, as there are multiple ways that you can organize societies. In the West, we haven't organized society one way, but that's one of a plethora of potential ways of organizing society. And let's say the Communists had decided to organize their society another way, and human beings are infinitely malleable. And so, you know, the social structures that we occupy are arbitrary in some sense and matter of opinion and a matter of collective opinion, but nonetheless still a matter of opinion, and I thought, well, is it the case that the values that we hold to be true in the West are merely based upon opinion?

And so I started to investigate that, and the conclusion that I came to as a consequence of hitting the question from multiple different perspectives was that that was not a reasonable way of formulating, of interpreting the evidence. And so I looked at neural evidence from neuropsychology and neuroscience, mostly based at least in part on the work of someone named Geoffrey Gray. He was a very good psychologist very interested in anxiety. I looked at general behavioral psychology, looked at literature, and I looked at mythology.

And I could see a pattern emerging across all of those, which I think is a nice way of determining whether or not something exists. Like, it's one thing to see a pattern in one set of data, but if you can see the same pattern in another set that's quite historically distinct from the first and then see the same pattern in another set and then another set, then the probability that that's a spurious pattern starts to decrease quite radically.

And so I don't think that the pattern was spurious, and so I'm going to tell you what I think I, what would you say, extracted. This is very complicated and makes a difficult transition in the talk, so I'm going to read something first.

This is from the Gospel of John. It's one of the most famous lines in the Bible: “In the beginning was the word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It's a very strange idea because, from a cosmological perspective, it posits that there's something conscious or cognitive about the origin. That there's a necessary cognitive element to the origin, and I think about that essentially as something associated with consciousness.

And of course, we don't really understand the relationship between consciousness and being. We don't understand consciousness at all, but it seems integrally associated at least with our individual beings because one of the things that we seem to not doubt is that we are, in fact, conscious. And that's—or other people—and if I treat someone as if they're not conscious, well, they tend not to be very happy about that.

So they'll certainly object to it. So despite what we might say we believe, we certainly act as if we regard all other human beings as conscious, and the consciousness is that prerequisite further for the existence of their experience. So anyway, so that there’s this emphasis in this book that is at the root of our culture, that there's something about verbal communication in particular that has to be regarded as foundational.

And I think that's actually, to some degree, in keeping with the post-modernist claims that everything is a language game, let's say; that everything is constructed by language. Now I don't believe that everything is constructed by language, but I'm just pointing that out because you can take this particular perspective and you can look at it from very, a variety of different intellectual sources and still derive an analog of the claim from it.

So, and then, so that was, so I want you to keep that in the back of your mind for a moment now. That idea that the word was there at the beginning of creation; that's a very, very old idea. It's older than the Judeo-Christian context from which I extracted it. So for example, in Egypt, there was a god named Patah—who's a major god—I may be pronouncing that wrong—but as far as the Egyptians were concerned, he was the original creator. And he created as a consequence of thinking, but more specifically, as a consequence of speaking.

So again, there was this idea that there was this primacy of speaking as a force that brings being into existence. And then you see the same thing in the Mesopotamian context too. Their creation myth was called the Enûma Eliš, and there's a God in that story. That story apparently is one of the places from which the creation story in the Bible was extracted. That God is named Marduk, and Marduk is a God that fights chaos and creates the world out of the consequences. And he has a variety of different attributes, one of which his head is ringed with eyes so he can see in all directions.

So there's very much emphasis among the Mesopotamians on the primacy of attention, let's say, but he can also speak magic words. And it's the fact that he's equipped with this massive capacity for tension and the ability to speak magic words that enables him to go and fight the dragon of chaos, roughly speaking, and to cut her into pieces and make up the world. One of Marduk's names, for example, is “He who makes ingenious things out of the combat with Tiamat.”

And Tiamat is this primordial goddess of chaos that represents the sort of the formless protoplasm of things from which consciousness extracts structure. No, that's one way of thinking about it. So, that idea is quite widespread, in fact, it’s an idea that informs mythological structures everywhere, as far as I can tell. There's this idea that there's a dynamic between what you know and what you don't know. You can think about those as different domains of reality: what you know and what you don't know, and the thing that mediates between what you know and what you don't know is this thing that has the attribute of spoken wisdom.

It's something like that. And here's a way, that's a very complicated idea; it's very difficult to understand, and it's extraordinarily difficult to understand, but the— I can give you some sense of it. It’s a phenomenological idea, I suppose. Imagine that you, that, I don't know, maybe you have it, yeah, maybe you’re a medical student, the medical pre-med student, right? You want to go to medical school, and so you’re busily beetling away on your, on your courses. You’re doing all right, you know. Then you go take the MCAT and you score, say, the twentieth percentile, which, of course, 20% of people do.

And that will, as quite a shock to you, no doubt, because you go in there in the world that you understand, and in that world you’re competent, let’s say, to become a medical doctor. And when you open the envelope and you look at the number, then, well then your world crumbles and collapses. And what it collapses into, I would say, is equivalent to this formless chaos that the ancients believed was the ground of being, and it’s this place where confusion reigns.

Right? In fact, the word for the chaos that God orders with the word at the beginning of Genesis is often translated as chaos or confusion. Now when you think, well you've formulated a world that you inhabit with a particular link with grass and a logical structure, it's predicated on certain axioms of belief, like that you're competent to be a medical doctor. And then you receive a piece of information that makes not only your present understanding of yourself no longer relevant or correct, but also your past understanding of yourself and also your future.

Gone, right? Long gone. Where? Gone into what? Well, gone into chaos, roughly speaking. And then you're in very rough shape as a consequence of that. And if you do manage to lever yourself out of that chaotic condition that you now find yourself in, you’re going to essentially do it with thought and dialogue, right? Because you’re going to talk to people: What did I do wrong? What’s wrong with the way I thought? How could I have been so misled by what I believed? What should I do now? Who actually am I? All of that is a way of reconstructing yourself from the ashes, so to speak, I would say, that—and you do that with speech, and you do that with true speech; and so true speech is what redeems you from the chaos of unstructured being.

And so, so then that’s, that’s another thing to think about for a moment. And then, I’m going to bring up this final piece and we can think about it too. So, I've been trying to figure out how these ideas came to be because they came to be over a very long period of time. So the god Marduk, for example, he was assembled, you could say, as the empires of the ancient Middle East, as the tribal people of the ancient Middle East came together, and they each had their own deities that represented their highest values. And when they came together, those deities had to be amalgamated.

And so tribe A has its highest value, and tribe B has its highest value, and they're embodied—that's the deity element—and they come together and then the deities in some sense have to have a war to figure out who's the top god. And so if you assemble a few hundred tribes, out of that comes a conceptualization of the top god that was Marduk, for example, in Mesopotamia. And he usually absorbs the names of all the previous gods and as he sort of emerged as the king of a hierarchy.

And so you think about this, if you think about the expression of the deity as the projection of the highest ideal of the tribe, and that's something that's being worked out over perhaps millennia, especially with people who have an oral tradition. And then you bring those different tribes together. What happens is the highest ideals in their embodied form have what you could think of metaphorically as a war.

And the war of gods in heaven, by the way, is a very ancient and widespread mythological motif. And out of that war arises what you might describe as a meta-value. And so the meta-value would be the highest value among a set of values. And the question would be, well, what would that value be? What would that highest value be? Is there something about it that's, it's recognizable and say somewhat constant? So that if you took a hundred tribes here and amalgamated their ideals, and you took a hundred tribes here to amalgamate their ideals, if the two sets of amalgamations would have a structural similarity to one another, and as far as I can tell, the answer to that is yes.

And it's a logical answer because you'd expect structural similarity if you extract out a common element from a very large number of constituents represented. So for example, if you take a large number of female faces and average them, so I'm not talking about the average face, I'm talking about the average face. It's not the same thing; the averaged female face is attractive, and so is the averaged male face. And so because it kind of constitutes the central human form, and if it takes 64 women and you extract out an average face and you take another 64, you get the same face. Well, then, maybe it takes more than 64, but you get the point.

And so, well, so I was thinking about how that process came to be. I decided to look at it even like to go back farther in time to try to understand how it is that we formulated our values per se and especially given that at some point we weren't linguistic creatures at all, right? We separated from the common ancestors between us and chimpanzees about six million years ago. Sometime during that six million year process, we started to be able to imitate ourselves first and then represent ourselves in image and action, and then only after that to start to articulate ourselves.

And so a lot of the knowledge that we have is grounded in our embodiment, but also in the shaping of that embodiment across extraordinarily long periods of time. So like there's an implicit way of being in your form—in your embodied form—but more importantly, there's an implicit way of being that's a consequence of the fact that we've existed within hierarchical social structures for far longer than we were even sharing a common ancestor, say, with great apes. So that's for maybe hundreds of millions of years with regards to being embedded in a hierarchy.

So then the question is something like, if we're embedded in a hierarchy and we have been forever—that's about 350 million years, by the way—is there a set of attributes that tends reliably to move you up the hierarchy? Because if there is, you see, being going up the hierarchy increases the probability of representing more important to determine, over the course of 350 million years in sign of hierarchy, then how it is that you ratchet yourself up the hierarchy reliably?

And you can think about that in some sense as the source of ideals. Here's a kind of a concrete way of thinking about that. You know, if you get a hundred men together, they're going to organize themselves into a hierarchical structure. They have to, or they’re going to stay chaotic and fight; that's the other alternative. But the way that the people who are going to rise to the top, they might rise to the top because of their sheer physical prowess and power, but they also might rise to the top because they're very competent at certain things.

And it's as if all the men are going to get together and vote. Maybe that would actually happen—to determine who best embodies the spirit of the group and who should be granted leadership. And in an evolutionary context, by the way, that would also help ensure that that person would propagate their genes into the next generation. It's not a trivial effect, especially among men; it's a big effect because roughly speaking, half of all men are not represented ly successful.

So there's a wicked, there's a wicked culling, let's say among men. Well, you can see this among chimpanzees as well. They have dominance hierarchies; some sort of chimps rise to the top. You might think, well, that's the caveman chimp who's best at pounding out all the rivals, but it turns out that that's not exactly the case. And Frans de Waal has done a very good job of detailing this with his work on chimpanzees in particular, and he's found that the power-hungry tyrant sort of chimp can rule for a while, but he tends to have a very unstable kingdom.

And the reason for that is, is he got very good at mutually grooming; he’s not that—it's socially connecting with other males, and he isn’t popular among the females and doesn’t attend to the young essentially. And so what happens is, even if he's like the meanest, toughest guy on the block, the subordinate chimps team up, they make friends, they groom each other, and they have each other's backs. And in one day, he's having an off day because he ate too many fermented bananas the night before, and they just tear him into pieces.

And chimps are unbelievably strong and unbelievably brutal. They seem to have absolutely no internal regulation whatsoever of their aggression; that all seems to be manifested outside in terms of dominance hierarchy control. And we know that because they go on raiding parties into other chimp territories, and when they find chimps that aren't part of their hierarchy, they just rip them into pieces. And so that's a scary thing if you think about our similarity with chimpanzees because we like to think we have internal controls over our aggression, but it's not so bloody obvious, I can tell you that.

Anyways, what de Waal found was that it's actually the chimps that are more, you might say humane, although I don't know what the equivalent is, let’s say humane, that managed to produce hierarchies that are more stable and actually managed to stay alive on top of them for much longer periods of time. And he thinks about that as the emergence of an implicit morality, right? So morality that's acted out.

So then you think, well, there are different ways of climbing up a hierarchy. There are worse and better ways. The better ways allow you to live longer in a more stable hierarchy, and the evolutionary payoff for that is that you leave more descendants. And so the hierarchy itself becomes a very powerful shaping mechanism that determines how it is that people are going to adapt because it's the primary method of selection.

So there's an ethic in there; there's an ethic that emerges from the social interactions, but that's rapidly transformed into a biological selection device. And so we're selected, and that's especially true among human beings because, with chimps, the females are indiscriminate maters, which is to say that a female chimp in heat will mate with any male chimp.

Now this—the dominant males chase the subordinate males away, so they're still more likely to leave offspring than the subordinates, but it's not because of the females. But human females are different; human females exert choice and quite brutal choice, you might put it that way. They're very choosy, and it's one of the things that seems to have distinguished us from chimpanzees.

And what roughly seems to happen is that the male dominance hierarchy elects men to the higher, say, rungs of the hierarchy and the females peel from the top. And so that means that what you can say is that human beings are the consequence of intense male dominance competition. It's not necessarily dominance, but it's competition for the upper rungs of the hierarchy by female selection.

And so that's produced, as far as I can tell, a powerful, a powerful pattern of behavior. Now the question is, what’s that pattern of behavior? I would say, well, it’s encapsulated in mythology in two forms. And the question is, well, who should lead, let's say? That’s the question: who should lead? That is the question. Who should be sovereign? Or maybe when it becomes abstracted, what should be sovereign?

The first question from an evolutionary perspective is who should be sovereign? But once you can abstract, then the principle of sovereignty can be detached from the leader and become a principle all on its own. And that might be first expressed in mythological or imagistic form, dramatic form, like the good guys versus the bad guys or good versus evil, we could say it like that. But obviously it's embodied and acted out far before it's extracted and turned into an abstracted representation.

Well, what seems to have happened is that one of the common themes for example in mythology is what's roughly being described as a hero myth. A hero myth involves someone who's part of a demolished community under threat. The threat is usually signified by something vaguely like a dragon. The dragon comes out, it's eternal, it comes out to attack the village. The hero comes out and confronts the dragon and then frees the virgin, for example, or gets the gold.

And to me, that's a very, very well—that is a very old story. It's in the Enûma Eliš, for example; it's the story at the basis of very many, what would you call it, widely dispersed myths around the world. The dragon, for example, is a very common symbol, and I think the reason for that is it's so complicated, but I think the reason for that is something like this: is that human beings learned to understand over time that the most reliable leader was the person who could step outside the structure when it was damaged to confront something that was chaotic and dangerous, in whatever form that might be, and then to bring something valuable back as a consequence.

And you see that principle being elevated continually in mythological stories, like the Enûma Eliš, for example, where the main hero Marduk is elevated among the other gods and is characterized by this intense capacity for vision, which the Egyptians also worshipped in the form of Horus, and this capacity to speak which has this ability to formulate and reshape the world. Well, that's the thing is that it's as if what we've discovered as a species in some sense is that the person that should lead, the thing that should be sovereign, is the thing that can step outside the structured order, incorporate something new and dangerous, and then produce something valuable out of it.

That's one phase. Another phase is another hero myth is the person who criticizes the power elite when it becomes corrupt and points out the corruption and then restructures the society. That happens in the prophetic books, for example, continually in the Old Testament, because you could think that the historical enemies of humanity are twofold in some sense. One is the chaos that comes from outside and that disrupts the standard order, and that needs to be dealt with; and the other is the chaos that comes from the inside when our institutions and hierarchies become corrupt.

And then the thing that transforms that is the thing that has enough courage either to stand up against the chaos or to say something about the corrupt institutions. And what's happened, as far as I can tell, is that over time, those principles have been extracted out from this much more embodied domain and raised to the principle of highest sovereignty. Now, one of the things that happened in Egypt was called the democratization of Osiris and Horus. What seems to happen—this is what happened in Egypt—is that the power to manifest that sovereignty, let's say, is first only regarded as an attribute of the sovereign.

The king is actually only king insofar as he can manifest that. So in Mesopotamia, you’re only emperor if you were a good Marduk. You’d go out on New Year's Day and reenact the entire cosmogony, and you had to be a good representative of Marduk, otherwise you didn’t deserve your sovereignty. And in Egypt, unless you were a good avatar, let’s say, of Horus and Osiris, the combination, then you didn’t get to be Pharaoh. So you were embodying this principle, this principle of sovereignty.

And what happened in Egypt was that first of all the principle of sovereignty, the images of sovereignty could only be used by the Pharaoh, and then it became the aristocracy. And then what seemed to happen after that, this was maybe a transmutation in part via the Greeks and in part via the Jews, is that the idea that that sovereignty that was inherent in the Pharaoh and then in the aristocracy was actually something that could be attributed to everyone that was human.

And that was, I think that that manifested itself most completely in some sense at the beginning of the Christian era because there was an emphasis then on the idea that every single individual carried within them a spark of the divine, let’s say, and that was the proper source of sovereignty. And so then the question is, well, what is that source of the divine?

And that's why I read you that section from John to begin with because the source of the divinity is the capacity to speak and transmute the world as a consequence of speaking. And that's the proper principle of sovereignty. And as far as I can tell, it's also the reason why in the West people have an inviolable right. The reason they have an inviolable right is because our society figured out—and based on these unbelievably deep and decent precedents—that every individual had the capacity to contribute something to the group without which the group would be less.

It's something like that. And so you're regarded at the base of our law as the avatar—that's exactly right—as the avatar of a divine principle, and that divine principle is the capacity to use your speech to give order to the chaos of the world and to criticize structures of order that have become corrupt and reformulate them. And so you have this territory that surrounds you that's inviolate.

It's something about you that transcends even the reach of the law, which is a very strange thing, you know, because in our society, even if you're a murderer, even if everyone knows it, you still have inviolable rights. But you think of all the things that are unlikely to have emerged as a concept, that's got to be like number one. It's been a very long, long struggle for human beings to understand that we embody this principle, let’s say, that continually generates the world out of chaos and revitalizes it when it becomes corrupt and dead.

And that's, as far as I can tell, that's what's expressed in John, is that there isn't any difference between that and the capacity to carefully articulate the nature of your experience to other people and then to respond to the corrective feedback. That's the way that human beings progress through the world, and that's the ultimate principle that should be at the top of what I think of as the set of all human dominance hierarchies, right? Something will move you up a hierarchy; something slightly different will move you up a different hierarchy.

You take a huge set of hierarchies and say, well, what's the principle that's going to work best across all those hierarchies? It's something like the capacity to speak the truth, and so that's how it looks to me. And that's why I think, apart from the practical reasons that I already described, I know that's a tremendous amount of information to process.

And my hope that made some sense; it's a very difficult thing to boil down in a short period of time. I mean, I've been trying to do that for like thirty years to get it coherent enough to represent it in a short period of time. But there's the practical issue, which is that's how we encounter what we don't understand and turn it into habitable space and how we communicate about it and reach consensus. But then there’s something much deeper underneath that, which is that we know that, and we know it really, really deeply. The whole human race has been aiming at that for God only knows how long, but it’s hundreds of thousands of years certainly, and it might be far longer than that.

And so it's not a principle that we can dispense with and assume that we’ll construct something okay in this absence because it's actually an expression of the fundamental nature of human beings, and we mess with that at our extreme peril. And as far as I can tell, that's exactly what we're doing now. So, so that's part of the reason why I objected to Bill C-16 because I don't think that it's reasonable for government authorities to put their goddamn words into their citizens' mouths.

And as simple as that, I think there isn’t—there's almost nothing you could embark on that would be more dangerous than that. And the fact that this had to do with purportedly had to do with the rights of a small minority of people, I think is a complete sideshow. I think it's almost irrelevant in relationship to the broader context, and I think that if that wasn't the case, then there wouldn't have been any furor whatsoever about what I said because who the hell cares what I have to say.

So anyways, that's my take on it; so that's all I've got to say.

[Applause]

So you mentioned the form of dialogue, so we're giving a lecture. You mentioned that you're not in fact engaging in a monologue because by looking and seeing our reactions, you're constantly modifying your speech. I was wondering if you could speak up because I'm probably the only millennial in this room—or no, one more, one more—but as someone who's kind of grown up in the internet and who in fact has social media, do you think sites like Facebook and not so much Twitter, but basically Facebook today stops this dialogue? Or how do you learn the ramifications of such things as people are communicating with each other without really being in the same room?

What, for you, is lost?

I think it's sort of analogous to the danger of derivatives in the financial market, you know? Because like a derivative is something that can amplify the degree to which the market moves, right? Because it's an abstraction from the underlying reality. So it's more powerful for good, and it's more powerful for evil. And I would say, so to speak, you know, if you're thinking about metaphorically, well, it's an amplifier, and that can be a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing.

And I think it does often amplify the proclivity of people to disappear into a self-reflective bubble, and that's aided by the algorithms that feed to you what you want to see. So—and we don't know exactly what that's going to do; it's not—it’s a very dangerous thing because we're building an unconscious into the internet, and no one's going to understand how it works because it gets more and more complex, especially when any AI kicks in in a big way because you can't understand how those systems work even though they work.

And the problem with that unconscious in the internet is it filters information, and you don't know what the filtering is. Maybe you don't know what your own filtering is, you know, because you're not conscious of your underlying processes. But this adds a whole new dimension to it, and the fact that it's self-fulfilling in some sense increases the probability of positive feedback loops that will go out of control, maybe in your life.

Because I’m not freaking on a frequent pushing the easter by Diana; hi! It has no people forcing of themselves; there is a relationship that indicates constant feedback. So it's kind of like them thinking of us absolutely. This is the dialer—narcissus. Narcissus looking at your own reflection in the mirror and—oh, yes!

Well, I think what happens is with you does allowing other—I think that is a danger. I also think though is that you also fall prone to the implicit narcissism of all the other Facebook users. And well, because people generally post glowing reviews of their own life, and you know, to some degree, that's understandable because who wants to be subject to a constant barrage of misery?

I mean there are reasons that people do it; they post themselves when they're having fun, when they're doing something spectacular. But that also means that you're being blasted all the time by these endless images of other people having a far better time of life than you are. And so I think that we do know that there is some evidence that more exposure to Facebook means more depression.

Now it's hard to pull out correlation and causality there, but then in the political sphere, you have the same problem because you’re not being fed an unbiased sample of information, and your own initial biases are multiplied by the algorithms that select for you what you're going to look at. And we don't know.

We have no idea what the consequence of that is.

So thank you very much. Incidentally, I have a question that concerns something similar, but I'm talking about the real face-to-face conversation. You said how important it is for you as a speaker to get the feedback of your audience. Now having grown up in East Germany, we have learned to look this no expression whatsoever.

It's the most outrageous stupid things because the consequences of like rolling your eyes when they were talking about us being well ahead economically of the West would be just very negative. So we didn't do that. And I see something very similar happening here, especially at certain political lectures.

So if somebody tells you that what you are doing is solvable and I'm in that audience, I wouldn't roll my eyes unless I know what's that. So the consequences are now, of course, in those are microaggressions. Yes, really! I'm not kidding you, you know, it's exactly what it is. Yes—rolling in particulars is it sign of contempt? Exactly!

So, but of course, if I never do that to you, you now get the impression that what you say is just wonderful. So you don't get the critical feedback that is, as you pointed out lightly, very important for you. Yes, sir. Klaus said, it goes both ways. It's actually one of the fundamental defenses of free speech is that you're deeply if you constrain it; you're depriving people of corrective feedback.

And that's a very bad thing because people cannot maintain sanity in isolation. You outsource your sanity to other people. If you're vaguely socially acceptable, what that means is people can tolerate having you around, and then they will provide you with corrective feedback. And as long as you react to that, you don’t have to worry about being sane because they’ll keep you that way.

And you might think, well, no, you can manage your sanity by yourself. But no, it's too complex; you can't; it's not possible. So the problem is not just and give it ultimately natural reaction absolutely while suddenness spontaneous reactions!

Right? Because a lot of those facial gestures, those aren't precisely conscious, and that's actually good because they're untrammeled expressions of your initial instincts, something like that. You know? It's like having dogs around you; you know, if you're agitated and upset, the dog will get all nervous. It's like, well, you can trust that the dog doesn't have an agenda, you know?

And people are like that in their initial responses too because that doesn’t mean they’re correct, but at least it means that it's not mediated by like an ideological bias.

Are not so straightforward just before we hear from Eva; I wanted to mention that we let our hypothesis die in our stead.

Yeah, Karl Popper—Harlan, my favorite philosopher! Yes! So just to talk a bit, first of all, I want to thank you for a most interesting presentation, and on a line which a lot of us here haven't heard before.

So I thank you for that, and I did two things that I wanted to ask you about. One, the concept that you’ve enunciated of the emergence of an extremely long period of time of the idea that we all have somewhat of the divine intervention, I suppose, also implies that we have somewhat of the opposite as well.

Yeah, it also, by that, leads directly to the idea of individual rights versus group rights, yes? And a lot of the troubles that all of us here faced is that we have become the target of these group demands for group types rather than individual rights at all attaining or not. That march towards the higher hierarchies of society is based on our own efforts and our own performances and so on.

So that's one, but that's also the other side of another thing that you raised, which one really hears in any of these kinds of meetings—the biological basis of our behavior. And I was really interested to hear you bring this into the discussion because it seems to me over the years—and I've been around this business since the 60s, I think, when all the struggles seem to have started—that a lot of the feminism nonsense is involved with the denial of differences between males and females.

A lot of the problems with the performance and affirmative action and so on is the denial that there may be a biological basis to some of the performance differences that we see in various fields of activity around the world. And also this idea that we can decide what gender we are tomorrow morning is, and I must have never heard of this, so what did you call this? The gender unicorn?

And I will say look it up. When I go, and the ice fairy instruction rolls and six-year-olds would be subjected to this, it's positively alarming. So I just have to comment!

Yeah, well, they call that biological essentialism, right? And so that's a curse word essentially, right? So, and again, that's partly why I objected to the legislation and surrounding policy, because it doesn't allow for a biological influence.

And so, which is preposterous in my estimation, and I mean the biology actually is much more useful than people even realize.

So, you know, one of the things we were talking about earlier today was, say, the distinction between conservatives and liberals. I can tell you one of the things that produces right-wing authoritarianism; it’s very interesting, and you wouldn’t guess this in a million years: prevalence of infectious disease!

So there was a great paper published three years ago; it was brilliant. Prevalence of infectious disease, so it was published in a journal called PLOS ONE. And these researchers were interested in this hypothesis called the behavioral immune system.

And so, you know, very frequently when heretofore isolated human groups come into contact, that either one group or the other dies, like maybe, maybe all of them or virtually all of them. That's essentially what happened to the Native Americans when the Spaniards hit Central America, right? Because they didn't have any built-in immunity to smallpox or chickenpox or mumps or measles, and like successive epidemics just wiped them out.

The estimates vary, but it could be as high as 95%. And so it appears as though the border idea—the idea of thick borders, let’s say—which is a fundamentally conservative idea. The liberals want open borders and a lot of information flow, and the conservatives want closed borders, and more restriction and protection at every level of the conceptual hierarchy.

It's not just political borders; it's borders around everything. But that seems to be tightly associated at least in part with the prevalence of infectious disease, both at the country level and at the local level within countries. And the correlation is like .7; it’s not trivial, and it's not with governmental authoritarian attitudes; it's with individual authoritarian attitudes at the locales where the infectious diseases are prevalent.

And it seems to be associated with the emotion of disgust. So Hitler wasn't afraid of the Jews; conservatives aren't afraid of others; that isn't how it works. They're disgusted. That's not the same thing; it's associated with a personality trait called orderliness.

And so, I read once this being sorted out by psychologists over about the last ten years, let's say, and when I was plowing through the literature and working on the relationship between disgust sensitivity and personality, I happened to reread Hitler's table talk, which was a collection of his spontaneous speeches collected at dinnertimes, lunchtime by secretaries from 1939 to 1940.

And once I knew this other information; just leapt out at me, you know? So Hitler was a mere admirer of willpower. That makes him a conscientious type of person, very obsessed with order, washed his hands continually, was hyper clean and disgust sensitive, and his primary metaphor for the German people was a body—Aryan body, pure body—under assault by Paris; pure disgust and contamination language.

And it's mediated by disgust sensitivity, and that's one of the things that predicts that kind of right-wing close-the-border attitude. And that's also heightened in places where infectious diseases are a real problem.

So if you want to eliminate right-wing authoritarianism, that actually looks like one of the things you could do is promote public health programs everywhere to rid the world of it to the degree that that's possible of infectious diseases. Well, you know you want to impede the flow between people if there's infectious diseases everywhere, obviously!

And that manifests itself in political attitudes. So, there's the biology that reaches way deeper than then people are willing to like to assume that some of the things that it tells us are unbelievably useful to know; being terrible to know in some sense but useful to know!

And so I’d like the wall's work on on the stability of primate hierarchies is incredibly important. I mean, he's been looking at the emergence of proto-morality among chimpanzees, and that seems to be driven in large part by the dominant hierarchy structure.

It’s not exactly a dominance hierarchy; that's probably not exactly the right way to think about it because, you know, dominance implies pure power, but lots of human hierarchies aren't dominance hierarchies, and all their competence hierarchies or something like that.

So it's very different. I'm a libertarian, so I'm in favor of freedom, but unlike a lot of libertarians, I don't think that there's kind of a natural affinity to freedom among human beings, that evolution has actually trained us to be conformists much more than freedom-loving individualists.

Absolutely! And as a result of that, I mean, because in our evolutionary history it was often much more important to roll all in the same direction, the clan, the roughly relatedly related clans that were roaming—that it was much more important to row in the same direction than to roll in the right direction.

As long as you didn't roll off the cliff or were going to run off the cliff, that would be as bad. But as long as you were muddling through, it was better for everyone to be in the same, and so therefore we evolved to be very much conformists.

And people like you, and to a lesser extent the rest of us in this room, are the disruptors. We're the ones who are non-conformists. We're the ones who say, "Hey, wait a minute! That doesn't sound right to me!"

And we’re the ones who want to lead society back to chaos, the state of chaos where everyone's got their own little view of how things should go instead of following the leader and just doing what everyone else does. And that’s why people like you attract to me, to my way of thinking.

That’s why people like you attract such a visceral, you know, angry reaction, is that you're leading us back into chaos.

And if we don’t all ignore you and shut you down, you know, we’re all going to be, you know, in the state where the clan is fighting amongst each other instead of rolling in the same direction.

I know you have any thoughts on that?

Well, I think certainly one of the things I've learned—see, I already knew before all this happened that people were primarily conforming. I actually don't have much of a problem with that because most of the time the tradition is correct, but sometimes it’s not correct at all; that’s the problem is that so you know one of the things I always tell my clients and my students for that matter is you should do what everyone else does unless you have a really good reason to vary.

And one of the things I learned from Jung, Carl Jung, was that if you do vary, you should try to only do it in a couple of directions because you probably can't handle doing it more than that. It’s just too much—too much psychologically.

But you know the problem is, is that sometimes the group is rolling off a cliff, and that’s then, you know, that’s partly why the individual in some sense is the eternal savior of the group. Because the group is, it has the aspect of sheep, let's say, and the sheep are doing fine. They've got the whole herd thing going for them.

It decreases the risk of individual predation; they've got all their nervous systems in tune, so there's real utility in the herd. But they’re also subject to all the problems that herds have—like herd panic. And so, that's not good enough.

That's what human beings figured out was that being part of the herd, although necessary, isn't good enough. There has to be a balance between the tradition— the old dead tradition—and the revivifying force of the living law, essentially; that's how the God split up in need, you see? Because Horus was roughly a representation of the living, and Osiris was roughly a representation of the dead, and it was the combined consequence of those two that made up the sovereign.

Very intelligently like dramatic political philosophy. So, but you know one of the things I have seen since September is—I mean I knew that people were conformist, but I really had—I really had no idea to what degree that was true, you know? Like I mean I've got very, very few letters of support from people who are academics, for example, and they—I get secret reports really, you know?

People come and say, well, we agree with what you’re doing, but we wish you could be a little nicer about it. Which, you know, it's a funny thing for people to say because it implies that if they did what I was doing, they would do a better job, you know? And which is fine; but you know, you can always try it out; see how it goes.

So when I hate talks to, on the climate, definitely one of the most common comments I would get after the thing is over, and people, I find really around and shaking Amanda, is I agree with everything you said, that I would never—

Yeah, yeah, it’s well, it’s no wonder; it’s not surprising, you know? I mean, there are real reasons not to stick out from the herd if you mark a zebra so that you can identify it against the herd, the Lions will kill it, right?

And that's worth knowing; it explains a lot that—oh, sorry, thanks very much for elaborating very, very compellingly the fundamental significance of thought and speech. Almost impossible to, at our point and development, to separate. And the trans issue, which is the particularity that isn’t very important.

Yeah, you know, I, you know, would agree with you. But I'm a sex researcher, so people are going to ask me the trans issue; I think is an appropriate lightning rod for social constructionism.

And you know, as a researcher in this field, I can tell you that John Money was wrong; kids are tabula rasa. And you know Mickey Diamond was right and et cetera.

And now you're in trouble!

Yeah, the presence of police officers here was actually a very interesting underscoring of the power of thought and speech and the millennial issue of the internet, and it reminds us that we don't choose our audience in the internet.

You're basically exposed to the world, and your tendency to self-center to avert being trolled is probably great. At any rate, that's just background. My colleagues are going to—my colleague Ken Zucker, one of your colleagues at the University of Toronto, was recently fired for his departure from common wisdom, and it wasn't much of a departure. And in fact, he represents common wisdom on the trans phenomenon.

Having said all that, my colleagues are going to ask you two questions—ask me two questions. If he met Joan, who was, you know, trans feminine, okay, you know, male-to-female transsexual, would you refer to her as Joan?

Yes. Okay.

And the other issue is amidst all the garbage and the hype and the—let's reassign a three-year-old and, you know, stuff that I think all of us would regard as nonsense. Many of us, some of us in this room, deal with trans individuals every day, you know, like some gay individuals—that's just a way they emerged in life. They're genuine; they're not particularly begging special privilege.

My colleagues going to say would you—you'd call her Joan, and would you accord her a facticity or reality, or where is she socially constructing herself? Where will she blend that with?

Well, the devil is always in the details, you know? I mean, one of the things that's emerging right now, although this is a fringe viewpoint, is like imagine that you’re dating. Well, you're prejudiced because people's prejudices shine forth most clearly in their choice of partners, right?

They choose people who are—sorry? Oh, people's prejudices shine forth most brightly in their choice of sexual partners, right? We prefer young people generally speaking; we prefer healthy people; we prefer people of our own race; we prefer people of our own religion; we prefer the highest performing individuals we can get our hands on, generally speaking.

And so though that’s deeply prejudicial and one of the things that’s emerging – I wouldn't say in the trans community because there isn’t such a thing as far as I can tell. But among certain individuals is their dubious, I think I’d call it, of your right to choose your sexual partner based on their genitalia, let’s say, because that’s a form of discrimination.

So yeah, well, you know, look, I could tell you in Huxley's Brave New World—and this is worth thinking about—you didn’t get to it.

Was it a social faux pas to turn down a sexual request? Because it’s discriminatory in Huxley's Brave New World. You're like, well, it is discriminatory, really?

I'm not kidding, man; that’s the deepest form of discrimination. You're basically saying, you're basically saying—yes, exactly; that's exactly it!

And that’s what you had to do in Huxley’s Brave New World. And you also weren't allowed to have a long-term monogamous relationship because the exclusionary element of that was regarded as prejudicial, which it is.

That's the thing! It’s the thing! And so the question is, well, I could say, well, I wouldn’t discriminate.

It's like, well, it depends on exactly what you mean by discriminate!

And then, of course, the argument is about exactly what right I have to discriminate, and increasingly the answer is none!

Like we’ve already sacrificed freedom of assembly. We’re pretty much on the way to sacrificing freedom of speech.

It’s a logical conclusion to all of this that another issue—they’re very much on the same page.

I'm going to be a psychology graduate. Yes, what is your view of the authenticity that is?

Some reason like I’ve always identified the opposite gender; now a little much matter that I’ve transitioned. Yes.

Well, that’s a part that I’m more skeptical about because the evidence isn’t all that clear that people do feel better when they transition.

So—but it’s look—it’s consumed. Yes, it is!

First of all, there’s the fact that there are categories, doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions; okay, there’s exceptions!

Now what those exceptions signify—well, that’s generally to be dealt with on an individual to individual basis, and that’s fine with me. You know, I’m a clinician. I’ve dealt with all sorts of people who don’t—and who fits in the categories? Nobody like to become socialized.

What you do is you mangle your square peg into a round hole, and I mean for some people that’s obviously far more of a sacrifice than for others. But you know social being demands, what would you call, restriction of your—at least of your individuality in all sorts of different aspects.

And for some people, that's much more of a sacrifice than others. The question is, what does the existence of the exception imply for the general case?

And I believe that if you're a postmodernist and a Marxist underneath that, it supplies the excuse to take down the category of gender.

And why would you do that? Well, it’s a category used by the oppressive patriarchy to continue—it’s to continue its pathological power-seeking distinction.

Leave me alone; I want to get on with my life, versus I'm going to dismiss the category so that there’s room for me. Yes, precisely!

Or I'm going to dismiss the category on behalf of someone else who I claim to speak for, which is even more commonly the case.

This is a general environment where oppression and identity are the currents status and advantage. Yes, right?

Right, well, I just don’t see that it's going to be all that useful. Kids are confused enough when they're growing up.

I think to add gender confusion to that, which we're doing very, very rapidly, is going to destroy 15 people for every one it saves.

It might be more than that because there are plenty of confused people out there. I would say, like what, two out of thirty? Something like that are just barely clinging on to the edges of reality, and they’re looking for acceptance and transmutation wherever they can find it.

And confusing them further isn’t going to help, and these people that were transitioning young is going to be one hell of a kick back from that.

I can tell you when they hit the—when they hit adulthood. Let me just follow up on Grant Brown's question: Jordan is among the top five or top ten professors in North America during the past year who’s been a lightning