2017/06/28: Postmodern NeoMarxism: Diagnosis and Cure

Hi everyone, my name is Baro Ferrari, and I am the financial director at Students in Support of Free Speech at York University. I'll keep all the intros for tonight short because we really don't have any time.

If you're ever traveling downtown on a Tuesday night around 7 o'clock and you pass by the Isabel Theatre, the Elevator Theatre, you'll see hundreds of people, about 500 people lined up outside. You’ll ask yourself, "Why are there these older people, younger people? Why is everyone just outside waiting in line?" And it's confusing. You think maybe there's a celebrity there. You know, it turns out it's Professor Peterson discussing the psychological significance of the biblical stories.

Hundreds and hundreds of people, sold-out crowds every single week. I often ask myself, what is it about Professor Peterson that just attracts such a large audience? For me personally, it's how genuine he is when he speaks. Many times you'll see him get on stage and be emotional, and you don't only get that from many speakers. Also, the professor's command of the English language is so eloquent and yet so simple to understand, which is really unfound nowadays. It’s really amazing to have Professor Peterson here because he was the initial inspiration behind Students in Support of Free Speech. [Applause]

On that note, it is my pleasure to introduce Professor Jordan Peterson. [Applause]

So, I’m going to talk to you a bit briefly about why post-modernism is wrong, and I actually mean technically wrong, apart from ethically wrong, morally wrong, intellectually wrong, emotionally wrong, and practically wrong. But I'll give the devil its due to begin with because they’re actually wrestling with quite a difficult problem.

The founders of post-modernism were by no means unintelligent individuals, and they actually put their finger on quite an important problem. The important problem that they pointed out was the fact that any set of phenomena has a near-infinite number of potential interpretations, and that actually happens to be the case. That fact, let’s say, was discovered simultaneously in a number of different disciplines, one of them most surprisingly being artificial intelligence.

The artificial intelligence people ran into that conundrum when they learned that it was much more difficult to make a machine that could perceive the world than had originally been supposed. You know, we were supposed to have autonomous robots and functional artificial intelligence back by the late 60s, and of course, that didn’t happen. Part of the reason for that was that the artificial intelligence researchers, when they were starting to instantiate perception into their machines, learned that charting your course in the world might be a trivial problem in comparison to determining how to perceive the world. The reason for that is there’s a very large number of ways to perceive the world.

And the postmodernists actually caught on to this. One of the claims they made was that, well, there’s a near-infinite number of ways to interpret any given text, and that actually also happens to be the case. Then they said, well, since there’s a near-infinite number of ways to interpret any text, how do you know that any given interpretation should take precedence over any other interpretation? Which is also a perfectly reasonable issue.

They went off the rails very rapidly after putting forward that set of propositions, and that’s partly why they also kept their alliance with Marxism. Because the problem with post-modernism fundamentally is that if you agree to the proposition that all interpretations of all phenomena are of equal value or lack of value, then you can’t act in the world. The problem with that is that if you’re a human being, you have to act in the world, because otherwise, you suffer miserably and then you die.

That seems to be an unacceptable outcome for most people. So the issue with post-modernism isn’t so much the erroneous claim that there are a very large number of interpretations for any given phenomenon, including the meaning of a text. The error in post-modernism is the failure to recognize that there are a finite number of credible interpretations of phenomena and also a refusal to engage with the intellectual problem that determining what that finite set might actually consist of.

I’ll just give you a very brief overview of how it is that we happen to solve this problem as human beings. We do it partly biologically because we inhabit a biological framework that’s been developed over the course of about 3.5 million years that severely constrains the manner in which we interpret the world. It constrains it such that we tend to only manifest spontaneous interpretations of the world that don’t result in undue suffering and our demise.

There are plenty of ways to be stupid enough to perish and ways to suffer without meaning, but there aren’t very many ways to live properly and carefully for a long period of time in a manner that doesn’t also simultaneously do harm to other people. So that’s the second set of constraints—that you have biological constraints on your perception that are built in as a consequence of a Darwinian process.

The second part is that you’re forced to interact with yourself now, in this week, next week, the week after, in the month after, and the year after. You have to conduct yourself in a way that doesn’t interfere with your future life as you’re living now. Simultaneously, you have to conduct yourself in a way that makes all the other people around you want to cooperate with you, compete with you, and maintain the relationship with you today, next week, next month, next year, and so on into the future.

So although there are a very large number of interpretations of the world, there are unbelievably severe constraints on the number of functional interpretations there are in the world. One of the things that the humanities was supposed to be educating people about was understanding what the universe of those finite functional interpretations might be, and that’s being more or less abandoned by universities under the guise of post-modernism.

The fact that the post-modernists dare to be Marxist is something that I find, I would say, not so much intellectually reprehensible as morally repugnant. One of the things that the post-modernists and postmodern neo-Marxists continually claim is that they have nothing but compassion for the downtrodden, and I would say that anybody with more than a cursory knowledge of twentieth-century history who dares to claim simultaneously that they have compassion for the downtrodden and that they’re Marxists is revealing either their ignorance of history that’s so astounding that it’s actually a form of miracle or a kind of malevolence that’s so reprehensible that it’s almost unspeakable.

Because we already ran the equity experiment over the course of the 20th century, and we already know what the Marxist doctrines have done for oppressed people all around the world. The answer to that mostly was imprison them, enslave them, work them to death, or execute them. As far as I can tell, that’s not precisely commensurate with any message of compassion.

So I don’t think that the postmodern neo-Marxist have a leg to stand on ethically or intellectually or emotionally. I think that they should be going after as hard as possible from an intellectual perspective, an informed intellectual perspective. This is fundamentally a war of ideas, and that’s the level of analysis that it should be fought upon.

Not only is it a war of ideas, I think it’s one that can be won. Because I think that especially the French intellectual postmodernists are a pack of what would you call them? Well, we could start with charlatans—that's a good one. Pseudo-intellectual would be good, resentful would be another, and I would also consider them highly deceptive in their intellectual strategies.

Almost all of them were Marx's student intellectuals, and they knew by the time the Gulag Archipelago came out and even before that the nightmares of the Soviet Union and Mao's China were of such magnitude that they had completely invalidated any claim to ethical justification that the fundamental Marxist doctrines had ever managed to manifest. So it’s a no-go zone as far as I’m concerned intellectually. The game’s over.

We’ve already figured out that there are finite constraints on interpretation, and we also understand why those exist and how they evolved. From the perspective of political argumentation, there’s absolutely no excuse whatsoever in the 21st century to put forth Marxist doctrines as if they’re the bomb that’s needed—by the compassionate, to the downtrodden. Sorry, tried that, didn’t work.

We got a hundred million corpses to prove it, and that’s plenty for me. If it’s not enough for you, well then you should do some serious thinking either about your historical knowledge or about your moral character. So that’s the first thing. [Applause] [Music]

Okay, so the next thing is what to do about it. I thought about a lot of things about what might be done about it apart from just talking about it, which seems to be reasonably effective. But I thought for a while that it would be useful for the political systems—people are running the political systems to consider doing something like cutting the funding of universities by 25 percent and letting them fight over the remains.

Hopefully, what that would mean—that the pseudo disciplines, such as women's studies, which never had a methodology that was credible to begin with. I would put, in the same classification, all the ethnic and racial studies groups that are popping up on campuses like mad under the guise of true disciplines, which they’re not in any sense of the imagination. But also increasingly the social sciences and the general humanities that have been corrupted quite terribly by the postmodern doctrines.

I thought, well, maybe it would be good to see if the funding could be cut for them because there’s no reason that the public at large should be funding a fifth column whose aim is to disrupt the fundamental structures of Western civilization— with tax money that’s devoted to supporting people while they’re doing that. [Music]

You know, and I’d like to think about that. It’d be nice if that was a paranoid delusion. When I first started thinking and talking about this, the first thing that people thought—and quite rightly—was “Who the hell is this crazy professor, and how many things might there be wrong with him?”

Which is exactly what you should think when someone stands up and says, “Hey, you know, this system that you guys all think is going really well and that’s been going really wrong for decades, there’s something seriously wrong about it.” The first thing you should think of is, “Well, what makes you think you’re not insane?” Because that is the right answer under those circumstances.

But it turned out, at least as far as I can tell, that I’m not actually insane, and that the things that I was pointing out were actually factual. What happens in Canada, at least, and I would say to some degree around the world was that as journalists who actually happen to be concerned about free speech generally speaking—started to look into the claims that I was making about such things as the legislative policies surrounding Bill C-16, they realized that I was actually just reading what was written on the page and understanding it instead of trying to blow something out of proportion.

I had absolutely no motivation whatsoever to do that. But then, you know, I thought, “No, you can’t have political interference with the universities because what happens is that— you think what happens is that if you arm the politicians so that they can start telling the universities what they can and cannot teach, even with regards to funding, then that goes seriously sideways very rapidly, and you don’t end up with the result that you wanted. You end up with some other result.

Because you know how it is when you allow one organization to interfere with the autonomous function of another—the people that you want to do with the regulating are not the ones that end up doing the regulating, and the things that you want to stop are the things that you end up getting regulated. So that's not a good idea.

I think I have a better idea, and I think the better idea is that the postmodernists should be starved at their source. I don’t use that terminology lightly. I think that what needs to happen is that freshman and second-year university students and students coming into university from high school need to be educated about the postmodern cult, and they need to be encouraged to not take the courses—to just drop the courses—to just stay the hell away from them.

The humanities enrollments have been declining precipitously since the 1960s, and a big part of that is that, you know, why in the world would you go as a half-confused high school student into university and have whatever shreds of culture that you’re still clinging to to keep your head above water in a sea of chaos taken away by your professors? So you’re stripped bare of anything but some vague sense that maybe you’re a horrible racist unconsciously in some manner that you can’t detect, and then be left with nothing for your hundred-thousand-dollar investment in your bloody student loan?

People are smart enough, maybe not to continue to enroll in that sort of thing over time, and the humanities have been decimated since the 1960s as a consequence. But it’s time for that process to accelerate. So here’s something cool that happened this week. I decided a couple of weeks ago to make a postmodern lexicon, and I started analyzing word use in—I was gathering abstracts from this Twitter site called New Real Peer Review, which is something that the postmodernists really hate.

Because, of course, what New Real Peer Review does is take actual published abstracts from postmodern humanities journals, which, by the way, have a zero citation rate of 80%, and merely republish them. The abstracts are so reprehensible and so incoherent and so cult-like and ideologically addled that the people who wrote them get irritated when other people read them, which is good because the original—the Real Peer Review, which was the first one—was shut down by people who are irritated that the people who ran the Twitter site had the unmitigated gall to actually publicize writing that was written to be publicized.

It was like the only situation I’ve ever seen where authors were actually embarrassed that someone did what they could to publicize what they’d written.

Anyways, New Real Peer Review picked up where they stopped and has been publishing abstracts like mad from these crazy postmodern journals, which are journals only in name. So I started to pull out key keywords. Well, I’ll tell you a little bit about that game in a minute. I started to pull out keywords that were emblematic of, let’s call it the postmodern cult, and then I thought I generated a questionnaire that parents of university students and late-stage high school students and freshmen and university—maybe second-year students—could use as a guideline so they could look at the course descriptions and check off word frequency from the postmodern list and decide if the course was part of the postmodern cult.

They should maybe just not take it. But then I got a real interesting email from a guy—I will tell you his name yet—but who’s a computer programmer. He put together an AI system to parse apart the postmodern lexicon automatically, and he set up a website now where students can feed in course descriptions of any sort, and it will spit out whether or not they’re postmodern.

We’re developing, so the point is to get the program up to the point where it can automatically distinguish between postmodern and non-postmodern content. Students will be able to cut and paste a course description and paste it into the analysis box on this website along with the professor’s name and the course’s name and the discipline and the university. We should be able to produce a listing of every university and every course that people are willing to participate in analyzing across North America and set up a list of courses and professors and disciplines that should be avoided.

Maybe we can starve them out at their source, and that’s what should happen. It has to be bottom-up, as far as I can tell, for this to come to an end, and it should come to an end because the postmodern neo-Marxist doctrine is nothing but a cult. Except that it’s the sort of cult that doesn’t have enough economic sense to run itself out of profit.

So not only is it a cult, it’s a failed cult. If it was so, it’s a cult that has to be subsidized by the public purse in order to exist at all. That’s a pretty damn pathetic cult. Because normally, if you’re a decent cult leader, you can at least figure out a way to pick the pockets of your victims in a manner that enriches you. So I can’t even manage to get that right, which I think accounts for the pronounced anti-capitalist bias. They haven’t been able to transform their ideological doctrine into some way of making themselves spontaneously rich.

Although it certainly seems to have done a great job of labeling students with observed levels of student loans in the United States. It’s exactly the point in their life where they should be free to make entrepreneurial decisions and take some risks, which is also something that I regard as absolutely reprehensible.

So universities have figured out how to conspire, in some sense, to pick the future pockets of the students that they’re purporting to educate. They’re not educating them; they’re indoctrinating them. They’re not teaching them how to speak, they’re not teaching them how to debate, they’re not teaching them how to write, they’re not introducing them to the classical wisdom of the Western Judeo-Christian tradition.

That’s absolutely appalling because that’s what the bloody institution was there for to begin with, and that’s what it’s supposed to be doing. [Applause]

Yeah, so what else do I have to tell you about that? Oh yes, I just have one more thing. I guess one of the things that I was quite curious about was, I’ll tell you about two things. One of the things I was quite curious about is the postmodern, say, neo-Marxist insistence that the only true human motivation is power.

Now, I’ve been thinking about that in a couple of ways. I think that was actually Marxist sleight of hand at the end of the 1960s because the original Marxist revolutionary doctrine was that Western society—let’s say capitalist society, but you can think about it more broadly as society in general—is basically best conceptualized as a zero-sum game fought to the death between the oppressors and the oppressed, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, let’s say.

As we know, playing that game in places like the Soviet Union and Mao’s China didn’t work out so well for everyone, so there seemed to be a fundamental flaw in the conceptualization. Although people could always excuse that by saying, “Well, that’s not real communism,” which is the sort of statement that should immediately get you punched in the nose hard enough to knock you out, as far as I’m concerned.

Because a statement like that reveals only one thing. What it reveals is that if you had been fortunate enough to be in the position of Joseph Stalin, you wouldn’t have been quite the murderous monster that he was because your moral character is such that you wouldn’t be swayed by access to that kind of extreme power.

If you dare to make that claim, then there are some things about yourself and humanity that you should learn, and you should learn them rapidly before you pose more of a danger to yourself and others than you already pose. So, part of it is the postmodernists turned the Marxist emphasis on economics into an emphasis on power in the 1970s.

I think they did that as a form of sleight of hand because by the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was obvious even to people as intransigent as someone like Jean-Paul Sartre who refused to denounce the Communist Party until that late, that there was just no way that you could maintain your intellectual and moral credibility and remain a supporter of standard communist doctrine.

Also, it seemed to be the case that, strangely enough, contrary to Marx’s prediction, the working class in the West was getting richer and richer than people had ever got in history, rather than being increasingly downtrodden by the brute heel of the corporate and capitalist elite. So it was not a revolution that was particularly easy to sell.

Part of the sleight of hand was, “Oh, it’s not about economic power; it’s about oppression and oppressed and oppressors,” on a broader sense. That’s where we got the transformation into identity politics, which is just the Marxist oppressor-oppressed doctrine under a new guise.

I think it’s really tremendously reprehensible for people to be conducting themselves intellectually in a manner that insists that the most important element of any student or any person for that matter is whatever racial, gender, and sex identity happens to be flavor of the month. I think the problem with that fundamentally is, first of all, that those category systems are extraordinarily loose, and they’re indefinitely multipliable.

To take any given individual, there’s probably—well, it’s the postmodern problem—there we go, it’s the postmodern problem that there’s almost an infinite number of ways to categorize any given individual. So how the hell do you figure out which group they belong to? And that’s actually a major problem.

Like, if you’re 1/8 black, what does that make you exactly? Are you black? Are you white? Are you oppressed? Are you oppressor? Are you, let’s see, one half as oppressed as someone who’s a quarter black? Does it work out? Or is it “medically” that way? Okay, I’m dead serious about this, man. If we’re going to play this sort of game, that’s exactly the question that has to be asked, right?

And then how do you multiply up your oppressed identities? And then again, who decides? Who gets to decide exactly which identity you should manifest? And then how do we rank order those identities? And then how do we equate between them, and what measurement techniques do we use to determine who’s oppressed and who isn’t? And how do we assess equality, and on what dimensions are we going to assess equality, and who’s going to enforce it, and who’s going to make the decisions?

It’s like, oh, well, we’ll figure that out as we go along. It’s like, yeah, we certainly will, and the results won’t be pretty, I can tell you that. Because the problem is actually unsolvable. All it’ll mean is that those categories will be made at the whim of the people who are making the categories.

And since, as we know, the only thing they believe in is power, you can be absolutely sure that they will have absolutely no hesitancy whatsoever to use power in the seeking of their aims. I think the other reason that all of the postmodernist neo-Marxists ever do is talk about powers is because they want to justify their use of power to get exactly what they want when they want it.

There’s nothing but power. It’s like, “Alright, if there’s nothing but power, that means we’re at war over power.” If that’s the claim that you make, then you can justify the use of power because there isn’t anything else to turn to. There’s no logic, there’s no dialogue, there’s no consensus, there’s no discussion between well-meaning people. There’s nothing but divisions between power groups and identity groups— a Hobbesian state of war between all of us.

When I won’t look at people anything in that, then my proclivity as a psychoanalyst is to think that’s exactly what they want. To divide us up all by race and ethnicity and sexual identity and sexual preference and sexual expression and gender identity and all these multiplying forces of group identities seems to be nothing but an invitation to chaos, and that’s exactly what I see looming.

It needs to come to a stop, and it needs to come to a stop as fast as possible. One way of doing that is to stop the universities from continuing to indoctrinate young people who really, at least at the beginning, don’t know any better into playing these absolutely insane and I would say bordering on murderous intellectual games.

So then I’m going to set up this website, and maybe some other ones like it. I’m going to do a series of videos for young university students and for high school students, and I’m going to tell them that perhaps they don’t need to go to university to be indoctrinated. Perhaps they could go to university to learn.

If they want to know the difference between an educator and someone who’s merely interested in indoctrination, the production of the next generation of pathetic whining radicals, then they can use the website to distinguish between credible people and people who aren’t. Maybe we can drop the damn enrollment in those horrible courses by 75% over the next three years and just stop it in its tracks. [Applause]

So anyways, that’s part of the plan, and I think it’s something that’s actually implementable. These things can turn around fast, and one of the ways that they’ll turn around is if people just stop taking the courses. What people need to do in order to know that they should stop taking the courses is to know what the aims of those courses are.

That needs to be explained. Then they need to know what language the people who teach these courses are using in order to fulfill those aims. Then they need to know how to identify the courses, then they need to know that it’s in their best interest, both spiritually and economically, to avoid those courses and those disciplines like the plague.

Then maybe we can get the disciplines that have become entirely corrupt and the ones that started that way to put themselves back together before they run themselves out of existence completely. I might as well name a few of the disciplines that I think are particularly reprehensible to begin with. I’m obviously painting this with a very broad brush, and I’m not making the claim that every single person who engages in activity within all of these disciplines has been corrupted beyond comprehension by the postmodernist neo-Marxist, but it’s close enough for a first-pass approximation.

So, as I said already, Women’s Studies and all the ethnic studies and racial studies groups, man, those things have to go. The faster they go, the better. They should never have been part of the university to begin with, as far as I can tell. Sociology, that’s corrupt. Anthropology, that’s corrupt. English literature, that’s corrupt.

Maybe the worst offenders are the faculties of education. I read the recent policy documents of the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario, and I can tell you, you can go read it. It’s right on their website. Their plan—and they just say it, I’m not making this up. You don’t need any inferences. There’s nothing implicit about it—is to reorganize the curriculums from kindergarten to grade eight so that children are taught to be social justice warriors from the moment they step foot in the public education system.

That’s exactly what they’re doing. They’re making—that they’re making—that’s just look, I mean, we have social justice tribunals in Ontario, okay? That’s not subtle, in case you didn’t notice, to name them social justice tribunals.

You see the same sort of language in the ETF documents, that social justice is the right way to go. The appropriate thing to do is to train children to follow precisely that pathway, and the best way to do it is to get them as young as possible. And that’s the faculties of education for you, and they’re not producing people who are interested in educating children at all. They’re taking the easy route, and what they’re doing is training people who can memorize and then spew forth a one-dimensional view of humanity.

Then have the unmitigated goal to presume that what they should be doing with children is indoctrinating them into that particular line of thinking from as early an age as possible. And so faculties of education— they need to be fixed. They need to be fixed. [Music]

And then, this is where I’ll stop. One of the most shocking things I learned this year—I didn’t really know this, but I didn’t learn this until I went to Queen’s University. I was invited there by a group of law students. You know, I was their hope hypothetically to debate Bill C-16.

The students went to all the law professors and asked them if they would debate me, and none of them would. I thought, “Well, that figures,” first of all. That’s what I thought. But then I thought, “Jeez, that’s pretty absurd,” because I’m a psychology professor. One thing lawyers are pretty good at is arguing if they’re good lawyers.

I mean that in a complementary manner. That’s what you learn to do when you’re a lawyer. You learn to speak, you learn to formulate an argument, and you learn to formulate an argument on virtually any set of principles because, you know, you’re acting as defense or you’re acting as prosecution.

You need to be flexible on your feet and put forward the best possible argument given the facts at hand, and they couldn’t find anybody to debate me. So Bruce Party, who’s a professor there, had to act as devil’s advocate, which he did quite nicely. But I thought that was pretty appalling to say the least, that they were either so ideologically rigid that they wouldn’t confront me on their bloody territory.

It’s like if a law professor from Queen’s wanted to come and debate me about psychology, hey, there’d be no problem with that. Because, after all, that’s my field of expertise. The fact that a law professor wouldn’t come forward and debate me on a legal matter, I thought was just—I didn’t even know what to think about that.

But one of the things I did learn—and I really learned this more— is that law has actually become corrupt as well as a discipline. It’s not so much— I know a lot of lawyers, and I’ve worked with a lot, but most of them have been more on the corporate business end of things. All the human rights law, all the law that doesn’t seem to be attached in some sense to business concerns, has also become corrupt and social justice-oriented beyond belief.

The students at Queen’s were complaining to me that they weren’t learning any law in their courses. All they were learning was social justice propaganda. So you’d bloody well better watch out for that, I can tell you, because the people who make your legislation are lawyers, and they’re making plenty of legislation that is not in your best interest.

Even worse than that, perhaps, it’s not even in the best interest of the people for whom the legislation purports to because the bloody legislation and the policies are so incoherent and so badly written. Like Bill C-16—here’s one of the things it did. No one knows this, and I can’t believe they haven’t noticed.

You know the strongest argument that gay people have had for the last 50 years for being included in broader society and let’s say tolerated, so to speak, or welcomed for that matter, is that it was a biological phenomenon. I’d say the evidence for that isn’t overwhelming, but it’s certainly suggestive.

It’s like Bill C-16 has eradicated that because it’s predicated on the presupposition that there’s no relationship between biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity. They blew out the structure that enabled them to make the argument for including them in pursuing the rights to begin with.

If I was a good, hateful right-wing radical and feeling rather anti-gay in my orientation, let’s say, I might say something like, “Oh, I see. It’s just something you learned, is it? Well, how about you unlearn it? And if it’s just your whim, well, then why should I put up with it at all?” That’s actually written into the damn legislation now.

So watch the lawyers, because they’re being trained as social justice warriors, and they’re producing incoherent bits of legislation that are going to produce a tremendous amount of problems as they roll through the legal system.

So anyways, in closing, it’s a war of ideas, and it’s an educational problem. What we’re going to try to do is to educate students well enough while they’re making their course decisions so that they can stop being indoctrinated by people who should have known better than to do that to begin with. So that’s the plan for the next couple of years, and hopefully it will be effective. Thank you very much! [Applause] [Music]