Former Australian Deputy PM John Anderson and I speak again

Jordan, thank you so much for giving us some time again. I'm in Sydney. You're in Kentucky.

Yes, I am. I'm there as part of my 12 Rules for Life tour, which is, I think, expanding to hit about maybe 80 cities, something like that.

Goodness. Well, that was very keen to have a follow-up chat after the conversation that you and I had together when you were in Sydney. And in particular, to frame that for people who might be listening to this conversation: at that time, I had not seen you in front of a live audience. The evening of that conversation, after that conversation, I had that opportunity at Chatswood, one of the seven talks that you gave in Australia, put together by Sam McClelland from Melbourne. Every one of them was a sellout.

I have to say, I don't know whether the biggest issue for me is what I learned by watching that, or all the questions that arise out of it. But the first thing I'd say is I was concerned at the time that you and I had had a very long conversation, that it might be too long for people when we put it on the website. And you said, "No, John? It won't be. Young people especially are hungry for content. Put it all up there. They will listen to it."

You're absolutely right. Young people are looking for content. It's absolutely amazing.

Yes. Well, I mean, some of the big YouTube stars, like Joe Rogan, they're constantly putting out three-hour podcasts, and people listen to all of them. Long-haul truckers listen to them, and guys driving forklifts and young people, and couples, and like, there's a massive hunger for high-quality educational material. It shouldn't be underestimated.

And I mean, one of the things that seems to be the case with these people on YouTube that are making a splash, let's say, in this alternate media format is that they fully respect the intelligence of their audience, and they don't pull any punches in terms of content or length.

Yeah, well, that's where they come back to that. But, as I say, you know, it's just extraordinary. I pull up in a fuel station out in a country town near where I live, and somebody gets out of the car next to me, father of about 35, I suppose. He looks at me and he just says straight up, before he even says hello, he says, "I've just been listening to you and Jordan Peterson having a conversation." And everywhere I go now, that's what people say.

So thank you for the opportunity. You made the comment there, though, that for every YouTube visit, there'd be up to 11 podcasts. I think that's what you said.

Well, the podcast market is absolutely exploding, and you're actually seeing this start to affect book publishing because audiobooks have become extraordinarily popular. People are discovering that they can use their found time, when they're commuting or exercising or walking or doing dishes, whatever, to engage themselves in high-quality educational material, books, and podcasts. So that's a real revolution. It really is a revolution.

So these are the people—young people too, you know—instead of listening to music, which is really something because music has been a predominant cultural force for a very long time. So it's an amazing technological revolution, and I really appreciate it.

By the way, I think we had a great conversation. I enjoyed it immensely. And it seems to me that this is a sort of modern version, and I think this is terrific, if I'm understanding it correctly, or the old idea where people who have perhaps had another great formal education had access to good-quality literature and so forth, put together by whether it was Penguin or what was it? Everyman's book or Everyday Books, whatever they were called—even Reader's Digest—to make that education, that learning of the classics and so forth, available widely.

And now this is a modern version of it, perhaps, and I think what's happening with the mainstream media is that they underestimate the moral quality of their viewers. They underestimate their intelligence. They underestimate their persistence. They've also become quite manipulative in their use of editing and message massaging, spin really.

And the other thing that's really good about these sorts of conversations is that what you see is what you get; they're bare bones. They’re not high-tech—well they are, in their highest tech in some sense—but not on the production end or the editing end. So people can trust them, and they're genuine conversations. They're not designed to craft the message or anything like that; they're not manipulative, and that's a big deal. YouTube, particularly, doesn't respond well to manipulation, as far as I can tell.

Well, I enjoyed that conversation enormously. I've been stunned by the response. It's gone very, very widely, as you know, both on your site and on mine. But to come back to that day, later that day, you gave one of the talks of the set—one of the seven that you gave in Australia, Chatswood, and I was very kindly allowed to compare it for you. One thing that 19 years in public life taught me is to have a bit of a look at your audience and summarize them.

It was a pretty amazing experience. The first thing that happened was that you walked on. Before you said a word, you got a standing ovation. Now that’s something unheard of in this country, but they did. 90 minutes talk—they gave you another standing ovation. You left, came for a few minutes, came back on, took 30 minutes of questions, and again, they responded in the same way.

Let me just say a couple of things about that audience. I've got to say, pretty heavily impacted, as I looked out there and recognized that there was an enormous hunger to hear what you had to say. Even though your message was perhaps best described as tough love, you weren't ginning them up with a soft story; you were really pushing, you were really challenging them.

The second thing that struck me is that I've said many times since, I reckon 50% of the people in that room that night were young Australian men under the age of probably 35. The third thing that struck me was that that was a cross-section. I would say many of them were university students, but all were university graduates, but many, many were not.

And the fourth thing that just goes back to something you said a moment ago: they knew what you were saying. And you're a clinical psychologist and a highly educated person. To suggest that they didn't understand would be very patronizing; they got what you're on about.

Oh, definitely. There's no doubt about that. I mean, those lectures aren't interesting unless you understand them, and there's just no doubt that that's happening, you know? I think one of the most important things that psychologists have made, especially the more popular ones over the last three or four decades, is to try to convince people that they're okay the way they are. It's like the self-esteem movement, you know? You should love yourself the way you are. You should feel good about yourself the way you are. And that's actually not a very optimistic message for people because people are generally sensible enough to not be particularly satisfied with the way that they are. They want to be who they could be; they want to have something noble to aim at.

And so, I make that case very strongly that you should be more aligned and on board with who you can be than with who you are—and that who you can be isn't a person who has endless rights or is the member of a privileged or underprivileged group. It should be who you should be: an individual who's willing to take on full responsibility for the catastrophe of existence and for the malevolence that's part of it.

And see, I think people are responding to that, first of all, because everyone who has any sense knows that life is a tragic business and that everyone is susceptible to betrayal and malevolence on their own part and as a consequence of the actions of others—that's our existential predicament.

And I think people also know, in a very deep sense, that the antidote to that isn't security or safety, and it's not envy or bitterness. It's the willingness to try to work to make the world a better place, to start with yourself, to take responsibility for yourself, and then to take responsibility for your family, and then to take responsibility for your community.

And everyone knows that the people they admire are exactly the people that do that. And we also all know that that's what gets you out of bed on a rough morning. It's that you've got something important and vital to do. And it's not an easy thing. It isn't necessarily even something that makes you happy; it's something that's meaningful and necessary to fight back against the tragedy and the malevolence of the world. And people know that deeply; it's deeply rooted inside their souls, I would say, and a call to that is very meaningful for people, including me, you know? I include myself in my audience, like I'm lecturing to them precisely. I'm having a conversation with them about how we can set the world right.

And we are setting it right. Things are getting better very rapidly around the world, and we can really push that forward in the decades to come if we make a conscious effort. I think this is a very exciting message for people. One of the things that I'd say about Australians is they have the world's best bulldust detectors. They recognize authenticity very quickly, and if you're not authentic, they won't listen.

So I think, in part, they are responding, if I can pay you a compliment, by the fact that you weren't talking about you. You were talking about us. You were addressing where we are all together as human beings, and in a way, it was as though you were saying, "To get to the good news, you've actually got to go through what might be called the valley of death. You've got to face yourself; you've got to be realistic about yourself in the world that you live in."

And I saw those young people. It was almost as though they were saying, "We're sick to death of a therapy culture that offers us sort of—"

There’s a dictum that Carl Jung derived from the great alchemists in the circle: "In this infinite or," and it means, "What you most want will be found where you least want to look." What you most need will be found where you least want to look. And that people know that, you know? Everyone knows they are tired of naive optimism, let's say. And not optimism because optimism doesn't have to be naive, and they know perfectly well that the way to set themselves right is to take careful stock of themselves and to pay very careful attention to the errors that they know they're making and to grow up and to mature and to adopt the responsibilities of a forthright citizen.

And I think people are sick to death of too much discussion of rights and too much discussion of self-esteem and all that—that discussion that goes along with what everyone owes you. It's like, it’s just not helpful to people because it isn’t your rights that give you meaning in life. And you need a meaning to set against the tragedy, and everyone knows that the way that you find that meaning is by adopting responsibility—obviously, for yourself. You've got to take care of yourself, your family. I mean, you want to be a good person to your parents. You want to be a good person to your siblings and your children, clearly. And you have to bear some responsibility for your community.

And if you're really firing on all cylinders, you do all those things at the same time. You know? And I do believe, and I tell people, I do believe that the world is a tragic and malevolent place in many, many ways, but that the way forward through that is to do everything you can to put yourself on the side of what's good and to aim high, and that's where you get the dignity that enables you to bear life without becoming corrupt. And everyone knows this is true. Who's going to argue with that?

Having found yourself and having any of your like and being realistic about yourself and recognizing—we were talking about this last time—the dividing line between good and evil. It's not between black and white or whatever, captor and jailer, or man and woman. It's somewhere across every human heart. Having recognized that, you can then go on and help build a stronger, fairer, more just, more humane society, rather than what seems to be the way people approach it at the moment—that somehow rather your society can fix your problems.

Yes. Well, that's it. I mean, for young people in particular, it's kits are actually a very depressing message for young people to hear that it's time for them to get involved in political activism because any young person who has any sense knows perfectly well, especially if they're 18 or 19 years old, is they don't know a damn thing. You know? They haven't started a business. They haven't started a family. They don't have a permanent relationship. They're not educated. They don't have any experience, and for someone to come and say, "Well, you're in a position to change the world" is nothing but a way of disenchanting them with adult wisdom.

It's like you're not ready to change the world; you've got a lot to learn. But you can learn it, and in learning it, you'll become much more powerful and much more charismatic and much more articulate and much more wise and sensible, and that's the way forward to being much more than you are.

And young people, when you're 18, and you have 60 years of life ahead of you, what you want to hear above all else is that there’s way more of you yet to come. Because what else has anything with those 60 years? So, it's a message. It's a harsh message because it says, "Well, you're not everything you could be." But it's a deeply optimistic message because it's because the idea is that you could be way more than you are, incomparably more than you are, and I do believe that.

And what's so fun about this is that people keep telling me that. People keep telling me that it's true. You know, I have people—endless people. I got one kid come up to me the other day. It was so fun. He said, "A year and a half ago, I had just got out of jail, and I was homeless." And he said, "I started listening to your lectures, and I just—I got married this year. I have a child, and I just bought my apartment." It's like, "Wow, man. Good work!" You know? You did that in a year and a half.

And, you know, I was in LA about a month ago, and you know this. I was in a rough part of LA, downtown LA, near the Apollo Theater, and I'd given a talk there. My wife and I were walking down the street, and this car pulled up, and then this kid walked out. He was about 19 or so, a good-looking Hispanic kid, ran over and asked me if I was Dr. Peterson. I said yes, and he was all excited. He said he'd been watching my videos for about a year and a half, and they really helped him straighten out his life. He was just smiling away. He said, "Wait a minute, wait a minute," and he ran back to his car and he came back out with his dad. His dad was standing there, you know, and they had their arms around each other, and they were just grinning like mad.

And the kid said, "Look, I've really put my relationship together with my father, and we're really on board with this together." And they were just like so happy you couldn’t believe it, and that just happens over and over. Like, it happens, I would say, four or five times a day in restaurants or in airports or while you've been experiencing that to some degree in Australia, you said. And it’s so good.

And the mainstream media that's been covering what I've been doing, you know, they just missed this completely because it seems like everything that constitutes news in our society has to be political and group-oriented. This isn’t political, and it’s not group-oriented. What I'm trying to do, as a good clinical psychologist and perhaps a good educator—and I mean striving to be good in the moral sense—is to help people develop as individuals. And they are, and it's really working, and it's a thrill to be on this tour because that's all I hear and no one talks to me about the political issues or very, very rarely.

And it's all because I also think that the battle against collectivists and, let's say, the battle against identity politics isn't to be had in the political realm. Maybe that's a secondary issue. The way that you fight for the sovereignty of the individual is by getting your act together and right locally, right where you are, and starting to take advantage of everything that you have in front of you.

And then, you do, you know, harm our way. All you do is make yourself less bad. Who's the harm? That's a good thing. To some extent, I think the battle here is almost one of statism or collectivism versus individual liberty—who's going to shape who?

So you've got the whole push from the left—identity politics, victimhood policies, approaches, and what have you we owe these people, what have you? So the state has control and shapes individuals and helps them forward. On the other hand, you have the different view that says, "No, the state should be shaped by the people that make up the state." You know, Australia is a sum total of individuals who are Australian, and they ought to be shaping the public square, not having the public square or your local public sector shaping them.

The whole argument is about what's the primary unit of analysis. That's everything. What's the primary unit of analysis? And in the West, the primary unit of analysis has been the logos, and that's something like divine individual consciousness. And it's on that ground that we developed our idea of individual sovereignty and citizenship.

And, you know, we don’t talk about a citizen as someone who adopts the responsibilities of an ethical being. That’s a citizen. We don’t talk about that even in schools. Tell people that, look, the meaning in your life is going to be found, it’s going to be proportionate to the degree that you take responsibility for positively shaping your experience and the experience of the people around you.

And this isn't like “be good” in some weak, be inoffensive and harmless sense. It's not that at all. It's like get your spine straight, get your aggression integrated, pick a heavy goal like a heavy high goal—something you can barely tolerate lifting—and struggle along with it, and that's where you'll find self-respect. And people know that.

It’s fun to watch the working-class guys respond to this, too, you know, because they know this. Most of those guys work like mad, you know? And they know that there’s nobility in that—and there is. And so, it’s well. People also say, well, they’re happy to come to my lectures or even read the book because I’m helping them find words to express things that they already knew to be true, and those things that they know to be true are the bedrock axioms of our culture.

And one of the things we got right in the West was the idea of the sovereign, responsible individual—not the person with rights, and certainly not the person with rights granted to them by the state. That's not part of the English common law tradition. You're the locus of rights, but only in some sense because you're the locus of ultimate responsibility.

I guess part of what I've been trying to tell people is that there’s no difference between meaning and responsibility. They're the same thing.

Yeah. No, I understand what you're saying.

Now, as I looked at that audience, I thought to myself: We're doing a lot of talking about the First World War in this country. 60,000 Australians died out of a very small population in that horrendous event, and we celebrate their bravery, those young Anzacs. We call them who went off to Gallipoli and then to the Western Front and were involved in some of the critical battles of the First World War. Every year, Australians turn out in extraordinary numbers, and more and more young Australians turn out to, if you like, pay tribute to their courage.

And as I looked out across that audience, I thought there are a lot of people here that I’d willingly—or I would choose—to be with in the trenches. They are essentially people who want to be, to use the word you did just a moment ago, noble to the best of their ability. But they live in a culture somehow that says, "No, that's all nonsense. That's not where you ought to go," and it seemed to me that they're deeply resenting and deeply keen to reject that approach.

Look, here's what it is. So there’s this idea that’s pushed very hard in the universities by the postmodern neo-Marxist types. And before anybody objects, I know perfectly well that technically speaking post-modernism and neo-Marxism aren’t commensurate. But it doesn't stop people from joining them together ideologically. But in any case, the idea is that the West is fundamentally an oppressive patriarchy, which it isn’t; it’s hardly an oppressive society because every society is partly oppressive and flawed. But fundamentally, the West is not an oppressive patriarchy.

And if you buy that line, then the next thing that comes along is that anything you do that contributes to that patriarchy is also oppressive and tyrannical. And so that's extraordinarily demoralizing for people who are trying to make their way in the world because they're trying to hoist their responsibilities up on their shoulders and become competent, contributing adults, and they're criticized to death for being oppressive tyrants.

And so there's a conflation of competence with tyranny, and you can't do anything to anyone that’s more demoralizing than that. You know, Nietzsche said if you want to punish someone, punish them for their virtues. And so they're tired of that. It’s so demoralizing.

You know, like it appeals to the part of each man, let’s say, and each woman for that matter, who wants to avoid responsibility because you can rationalize it and say, "Well, I'm not going to take responsibility because that just makes me a tyrant and an agent of the patriarchy." But that sort of thing leads people down a tool path, and I’ve seen that—my friends and in my clinical practice.

So instead, we say, "Look, our culture has problems; every culture does, and it needs everyone. Everyone has to be awake so that we don’t slip at every level of our social being into some, like, blind authoritarianism." But the way that that happens is by waking up and taking responsibility once again for yourself and your family and your community. And that’s noble, which is a word you never hear.

It’s like a human being has to be a noble creature to withstand the tragedy of existence without becoming corrupt. And so that calls to the best in people.

And Jordan, just we should wrap up on that part of it that evening, though, but there was one other thing: when we came to question time, there were four mics in the room. They lined up 20 deeper deets. We got to seven. I think the seventh question was from a lady who asked a very intelligent question about what parents bring to their children, and in particular, were there things that mothers brought to their children that women do best and other things that fathers bring to their children that are best? You gave a very rousing answer, the issue of fathering.

And as I say, there are a lot of men there. I gather that your audiences—the demographics—have broadened out now, but that was a very young man-centric group, and you hammered the importance, as I heard it, all fathering.

Well, the empirical literature on this is absolutely clear. I mean, you know, we have this idea that’s being pushed forward that all families are equal. It’s like—there’s a grain of truth in that in that people who are struggling mightily to raise their children properly are worthy of respect, whether they’re single or in couples—but the empirical literature is absolutely clear that stable, intact families with fathers produce children who do way better on almost every possible measure.

And even more than that, in communities where fathers tend to be at home as part of the stable family, the communities themselves do better—even those kids that don’t have fathers at home. So the role of the father is unbelievably important, and the question is, what particular role does a father play? I just had a good conversation with Warren Farrell about that, and part of my research indicated that men are particularly useful in initiating rough-and-tumble play and play with their children in general.

Farrell extended that by noting that men could use the opportunity to play as a reward for delaying gratification among their children. That’s a really big deal because one of the things you have to do to help people mature is to teach them to delay gratification and to sustain attention, and it looks like the pleasure that children get in playing with their fathers, rough-and-tumble play, but other forms of play as well, is a primary reward that can be used to help children learn to make the proper sacrifices and regulate their impulses over the long term.

So, you know, of course mothers can do this too, but I think fathers are, because mothers are generally charged with the fundamental care of infants, there’s a tension between that and encouraging children to step forward out into the world as courageous beings. And you know mothers are very, very attached to their infants, and their infants are very fragile. It’s often hard for them to make the transition from primary security provider and caregiver to forthright encourager of adventure.

And that’s certainly something that fathers can do. It's better to construe life as an adventure rather than as an enterprise that’s there to make you feel secure or happy. It's a great adventure and a dangerous one at that because everyone's life is at stake in this adventure. You know, we're unbelievably tough creatures if we put ourselves out fully.

Okay, now you said something very interesting there and very important in my view. You talked about empirical evidence in relation to the importance of fathering—empirical evidence, reason, evidence-based decision-making, calm, thoughtful deliberation rather than emotion. In other words, the difference between thinking and feeling seems to me to be incredibly important. We should follow the facts to where they take us, but we’re confronted by, it seems to be, you mentioned, and you said they’re not related, but we tie them together. There, you know, sort of cultural Marxism and post-modernism. It seems to me the cultural Marxists will deliberately distort the truth because of their agendas or hide the truth because of their agendas.

The post-modernists have fallen into this trap of, if you like, moral relativity, so what’s good for you is true for you and what’s good for me is true for me, even if they’re really painting black as white and white as black. Isn't that a problem?

It's worse than that in some sense because it's not even what's true for you; it's true for you and what's true for me is true for me. It's what it's true for your group is only good for your group, and what's true for my group is only good for my group. And so that sets us off in group conflict in a tribal sort of way.

You know, the real radical types who are swallowed up by this ideology believe that science itself is nothing but a Eurocentric patriarchal construct. I mean, they dispense completely with the fact that scientific discovery has given us this incredible technological power that’s lifted the entire world out of abject poverty in a period of about a hundred and fifty years. For that—for some reason—that doesn't constitute evidence. And so, when you bring up evidence, there's hand waving because the people who dispute this sort of thing rarely know the details of the literature; they just write it off and say, "Well, that whole scientific enterprise—that's just part of the way that Eurocentric males dominate and destroy the planet.” It’s all power games for these people. There’s no reality at the bottom of it outside of the power game.

And so that, to me, that’s a viewpoint that leads inevitably to tribal conflict. That's all—that's what it does.

You might be able to help me. I think it was George Orwell who made a reference to an idea being so utterly stupid that only a member of the intelligentsia could believe it. No sensible person in the street would accept it for a moment. There was a bit of that night, I would have thought. You actually made a comment, quite a—I thought a very astute remark—that about something that sounded absolutely obvious, and then you finished it by saying you would have thought someone in a university somewhere might have noticed.

Now, if I’d been an academic at any university in Australia, I would have realized that I needed to wake up to myself because the audience lifted the roof—the place—with their applause. They are highly skeptical about what is happening now in our educational institutions. There is no other way to read that audience of a thousand decent Australians. They are very skeptical about the value for money we’re getting now out of our tertiary education sector.

Yeah, well, it’s the whole education sector too, I would say, increasingly, from kindergarten all the way through university. I think that I'm increasingly embarrassed to be a member of the Academy because of that. Like, I was reading this book today by a Norwegian called Progress. It’s a really good book. I would highly recommend it—very straightforward. All it is is a compendium of empirical facts about how much better the world has been getting for the last hundred and fifty years in just every possible way.

300,000 people a week are being hooked to the electrical power grid. Right? We’ve reduced—we’ve almost eliminated starvation throughout the world except for political reasons, and starvation was a big problem in places like Sweden and Italy less than a hundred years ago. People have access to fresh water, and the fastest-growing economies in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa. We’re just making progress—progress on every possible front. And everything that people learn in the education system seems to be associated with the idea that human beings are a cancerous growth on the planet, that we’re going to hell in a handbasket and that we’re gonna burn ourselves out in the next 50 years and die—and it’ll be our fault too. And you know, it’s just not the case. It’s simply not the case.

I mean we have problems in front of us, but there's a deep anti-human ethos that permeates that. And you know, maybe it's still a hangover from our pessimism from the Cold War, you know? Because everyone was truly terrified for about five decades that we were gonna put everything to the torch, you know, and maybe we still haven’t really recovered from that. And it’s not surprising because it was brutal.

But reading this book on progress just made me think again how badly we’re educated because people just don’t know how much things are getting better and why. Free markets are a huge part of it; private property is a huge part of it. And that’s all associated with the idea of the sovereign individual. And so this really works.

I mean, it’s true that Europe got rich first, but that’s only been in a hundred, at most, one hundred and fifty years. It's not even that long. It’s really since about 1895. And Europe first, but man, China—there's no one starving in China. There's no one starving in India. You know, Southeast Asia has enough food, and sub-Saharan Africa is growing like mad.

And then we have these—we have our education system that trumpets that you know we live in a corrupt patriarchy, that we should all identify with our tribal groups and that the right way of interviewing history is victimizer group against victim group. It’s like it’s no wonder people are skeptical about it. It’s a profoundly anti-Western ethos.

And the thing is about the West is we got the sovereign individual right. It’s right, and it’s the responsibility part that’s right. Not the rights part. I mean the rights traits are necessary, but only—the rights are there so that you couldn’t express your responsibility. That's what—that's the whole point.

Okay, well let’s come to this issue of our own almost loathing now of our own beliefs and values. Here in Australia, now we’re having an extraordinary debate going on—a very wealthy and likable philanthropist called Paul Ramsey, who was very active in the health sector, left a very large amount of money to be made available to set up an academy for the study of Western civilization. And he wanted it to be done in one of our major universities.

Now, one of our most acclaimed universities entered into deep negotiations with him, and then the education union got involved and said, "No, no, this is going to be terrible. It’ll be all about European ideas of European supremacy." So that same university has centers for Islamic studies, for Indigenous studies. They are not particularly autonomous in the sense that the university—or sorry, they’re not particularly controlled, it seems, by the university. They do pretty much their own thing.

But I know you can’t have a center for the study of Western civilization. It will fill us up with all sorts of racist ideas, supremacist ideas. This is really worrying. If we can’t understand our own past—in fact, as a very wise Asian said here the other day, "If you want to understand Asian cultures, understand your own first."

Well, it means to me, it’s just first of all, you know, in some sense, I’m less worried about what’s happening with the universities than I was because I think that they’re going to destroy themselves completely if they continue the way they are. And that all that’s going to happen is that people will take the genuine value in the wisdom of the past and present it in alternative forms. They’ll just steal it out from underneath the universities, I would say to the philanthropist.

If the universities don’t want the money, then they should set up an institute on their own. That might very well be a good course. You can go directly to the people now, you know? Like, for now, a social example for me: if I want to lecture now, I can lecture on anything I want whenever I want, with no bureaucratic restrictions. And I have an audience of people who are only listening because they want to listen.

There, that’s where the university is. The university is where there’s an audience of people who are only listening because they want to be educated. That is the university. The buildings are irrelevant.

Let’s build on that for a minute because watching this debate unfold in Australia, we’re listening to your academics saying, "Ah, no, no, we’ve got to preserve our academic integrity and we’re here to protect policies of diversity and inclusiveness and all those sorts of things."

Somebody tartly pointed out, "Actually, we thought they were there to teach our young people how to think for themselves primarily." That isn’t what they’re there for because that’s predicated on the idea that there are sovereign individuals and that they can actually think for themselves as individuals.

The whole idea here is that you’re not an individual; you’re the member of a group. That's it, and they’re serious about this. This isn’t a trivial objection; it’s a fundamental objection.

But I would also say, look, there’s a New Testament statement: "Don’t cast pearls before swine." And you know that usually has to do with words, right? Don’t waste words of wisdom on those who will not hear. But you could also just look at it literally: if you have pearls and you’re trying to give them to someone and they won’t take them, then go find someone else to give the pearls to.

If you’re trying to give money to a university to do something great and they won’t take it, it’s obvious that they don’t want to do anything great. So don’t give them the money; it’s the wrong people.

Okay, well, let’s taste this a little bit more wisdom: you’ve mentioned the difference between, if you like, knowledge and accumulated cleverness and what have you and wisdom. Surely there’s a difference. Because to go back again to Chatswood, I would say a good chunk of the people there were not university educated, but they were smart and I would say more—they were wise.

They were striving for wisdom, and that’s where wisdom is. Wisdom is in the striving for wisdom, and wisdom isn't a collection of facts; wisdom is knowledge of how to conduct yourself in the world. So it’s an action. It's an existential issue; it’s truth as revealed in action. That’s wisdom. Wisdom also understands consequences.

Well, it’s sophisticated in its understanding of consequences because you think, well, what are the consequences? And the answer is, well, there are the consequences for you now and for you next week and next month and five years from now.

So the consequences are you and future you. So that’s an iterated game, but the consequences are also for your family now and in the future, transferred to your community now and in the future. And wisdom is the ability to consider all of those consequences as part of your operations in the world, and that’s character.

And then, nobility of character is to take all of those things into account simultaneously. As I watch the debate, I thought to some extent one of the problems you’ve got here is, see, as Lewis might have pointed out, is pride—pride getting in the way of people having sufficient humility to recognize that the nonsense they’re peddling is simply unconvincing in terms of what you might call the pub test.

What would pass the pub test? Out there where people have common sense and can see when people are being real and when they’re not being real.

Well, it’s easy to dispense with that. You just develop sufficient contempt for the common person, and then you don’t have to worry about what they think, you know? And then—and that’s when you confuse being smart with being wise, and they’re not the same thing.

I don’t think there’s any relationship between them, in fact. I mean, intelligence is a great gift, but it can go terribly wrong, and it can certainly turn into a kind of intellectual arrogance, that’s for sure, that blinds you to your own ignorance. And humility is the antidote to that. And the humility—the element of humility there that’s necessary is to understand that what you don’t know is more important than what you know.

And so if you’re an ideologue, you dispense with all doubt because you already know everything. I was gonna say I was reminded of that friend in Chatswood. As you probably gathered, it had a big impact on me. It was a powerful reminder to me that, for me, it seems very important to recognize that there’s a sense in which the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know very much, and there’s a lot more to learn.

Yeah, well, you know, being with an audience can help with it out too because if you’re if you’re talking to an audience, you can check to see if your message is being received, you know? And you might say, "Well, these people just can’t understand what I have to say." It’s like, “Well, yeah, they probably can if you’ve formulated it carefully and you actually talk to them individual-to-individual,” which is what I try to do in my lectures.

Like, I’m not talking to the mob. I’m not talking to the group. I never talk to the group when I’m lecturing; I always pick people in the audience and speak right to them, and they reflect the audience—they reflect the entire group, but they only reflect it because the group is made up of individuals like them.

So let’s just go back to something you said earlier that asked of me is very interesting, and that is that young people don't want to be involved in political activism. They want to get themselves sorted out first. Many of those young people, though, I think, want to behave nobly and help build a better society, a stronger civic square, if I can put it that way. Good on them! That’s terrific. That’s important.

They're very disillusioned with politics, and yet we have to govern our country. We have to make certain the rules are set, if you like, and that we maximize everybody’s opportunities to live in freedom and security. When young people have, if you like, grounded themselves and feel ready to act nobly in the public square, what should they do? How can they make a difference? They want to make a difference. How do they go about it?

Oh, more power to them, I think. But I think, you know, they start by realizing they don’t know anything and by starting to learn. And then if they learn and work and discipline themselves, the opportunities to expand will come naturally because people will notice them.

Like, look, if you work with competent people, hyper-competent people, one of the things you learn is that hyper-competent people are always looking for young people to mentor. Yeah, there's starving and hoping that someone will come along who has a lot of potential, and then what they'll do is offer them an opportunity.

You know, I keep my eye out at the university and in my private work as well all the time for young people who've got something to contribute. “Oh, you look like you’re sharp; let’s find out. Here’s a task. Why don’t you go try this?" Then they come back and knock it out of the park, and you think, "Oh, that’s good because I’ve got 20 more things here that need doing and that I can’t do. I’ve got more opportunities than I know what to do with. Here’s another one."

And so the thing is that if you develop your competence and you discipline yourself and you start to make that manifest in any hierarchy that’s even vaguely competent, you’ll have more opportunities come your way than you’ll know what to do with. So it’ll happen organically, and it is the way of the world.

And well, if that isn’t happening in the organization that you’re working with and you’re working diligently and you have your act together, then it’s time to find a different organization. But generally speaking, most organizations aren’t that corrupt; some are.

Interesting. I’d say that Australia—we worship youth culture in a way, but one of the things I’ve noticed about youth is that overwhelmingly, if I have the opportunity to tap into the wisdom of an older person to be mentored, they go looking for it. They’re very keen for it.

Well, it's part of the human proclivity to admire and imitate, you know? I mean, one of the things that drives us forward: we don't only learn by facts. In fact, we hardly learn by facts at all. We learn by stories, and we learn by imitation, and we may imitate those we admire. And we admire those who are competent.

And so if you find someone who knows what you don’t and can operate effectively in the world in a manner that you would like to but can’t, then you’re going to admire them. And if you admire them, you’re going to open the door to have them mentor you. And I mean that’s fundamentally to human cognition and human psychological development; it’s the catalyst for human development because we’re deeply imitative.

It’s the thing that distinguishes us from other creatures, perhaps even more fundamentally than language use. If I watch, if you know how to do something and I watch you do it, I can learn to do it without having to go through all the pain that you had to go through to learn it.

It's such a gift. That's why history is so important—our personal history. Our, if you like, our family history. I was thinking the other day that my grandfather made a mistake with my father on the farm that I am determined, because I can learn from that, not to repeat with my own son on the farm.

And then there’s, of course, the broader cultural history, which is why I believe—and I think you and I share this view—we ought to learn from our history. We ought to learn from the horrors of collectivism in Soviet Russia. We ought to be honest about it. We should teach our young people that at the same time as we're honest about what's in our own cultural history, but we’re also honest about the nobility. For example, the mighty push to abolish slavery—surely the greatest human rights movement of all times. We ought to know about it. It's noble. It was led by noble people who struggled against extraordinary odds for a long time.

Yes, exactly. And slavery was a human universal. So it’s an amazing, miraculous attainment. It’s a miraculous attainment, absolutely. And you know, what we’re supposed to be doing in the universities is separating the wheat from the chaff, not dispensing with everything as if it’s chaff because we don’t want to put in the effort to discriminate.

And so it’s easier—well, it’s just all corrupt. It’s like, no, it’s not. People aren’t starving to death anymore, and societies are increasingly free and children aren’t dying in the massive numbers that they once died in, and people’s life expectancy has doubled.

Like, things are going pretty well! Don't muck it up! And we need to figure out why, and we need to take stock of the things that we did in the past that were wrong, obviously, but that doesn’t mean that everything everyone did in the past was wrong. That's not thinking—that’s just reflexive resentment masquerading as intellectual superiority. There’s nothing about it that’s good.

When you've been incredibly generous with your time, can we wrap up? Let’s just think through what would we say in terms of people looking for solutions in academia, in the media, in politics. How do we, if you like, start the movement to reclaim what you called evidence-based, empirical decision-making? In other words, learn to think again and stop being so emotional.

There’s a place for emotion, but there’s a place for thinking.

I think, well, I mean, if you're a university student, the first thing you want to note is that you're there to learn to think, to write, and to read, and to speak. That's what you're there to do. And the reason you're there to do that is because that makes you incredibly confident—because you’re going to have to communicate with people for the rest of your life.

And if your communication has depth and clarity, then you can see your way forward, and you can bring other people aboard, and you can do great things. And so it’s super useful to get a real liberal arts education because it can make you into a great communicator and thinker.

If you’re going to university, read the great books. And you can find professors who will teach you that, but that’s what you’re there to do: you’re there to spend four years immersing yourself in the imitation of the greatest people that our culture has produced. And if you think, "Well, there were no great people," well then you might as well not go to university because university is the storehouse of the thoughts of great people.

And if you dispense with a whole notion of great, then maybe you’re there to be a political activist, but that’s not university—that’s something else; that’s like an ideological cult, and maybe that’s what you want.

And I mean, you know, you'll pay the price for that one way or the other. But you even, as a university student, you have to take on the burden of educating yourself to a large degree. But you have to decide that that’s what you want and that’s what you need in terms of your own personal life.

I have a program that I developed with my colleagues called the Future Authoring Program. It’s selfauthoring.com, and it helps people develop a vision for their life along about six fundamental dimensions: family, education, mental and physical health, career, avoidance of temptation like drug and alcohol use. We tried to parse out our use of time—a productive and meaningful use of time outside of work. We tried to parameterize a decent life.

And then to guide people through the process of imagining what their life could be like if they put it together properly. And you need to develop a vision for your life and a sense of who you could be if you were the character that you could be. And thinking through that and articulating it should be part of a classic liberal arts education because the whole point of education, apart from the technical end (which is important), is to produce a noble citizen. That’s the point—not to produce a bloody political activist.

Well then, you just wish would keep in mind that because even in Chatswood, a lot of those people—most of them—are not at university. So they’re not excluded either, in any way, shape, or form, from broadening their horizons. It’s not like they’re not doing important things.

Like working men, for example. Working people in general—I don’t care what they’re doing. If they’re working at a diner as a waiter, they’re laying bricks, or what? Working a forklift, or they’re plumbers—these people are bloody important. They build the infrastructure, and there’s a huge difference between a craftsman who takes pride in caring what he’s doing and contributes to his family and the community in that nobility of work and someone who does it half-hazard.

There’s great nobility in genuine work. And so, I believe that you have just as much power, let's say, as much authority and clout as a forthright and honest working person as you do as an intellectual. And I mean, you can be very successful as a working person if you’re diligent and honest and committed and competent and aiming up because, look, I do believe that each person is the center of the world, and you have what you need right at that center.

And maybe you’re not intellectual, but you’re good with your hands and you’re practical and solid and people can rely on you—it’s like, man, that’s a big deal, because then when their roof blows off in the middle of a storm, they can call you up and you’re there in an hour, and you put the damn thing back together.

And hooray for you! It’s all of these things are important. And so there’s great nobility in working-class work, as far as I’m concerned.

Well, Jordan, that’s again a fascinating conversation from my perspective, and it’s tremendous to be able to interact with somebody who cares passionately because that’s what they’re picking up. I know it’s not about you; you’re actually trying to make a difference for people.

And you know, we’re seeing this. I’m really disturbed by the way in which some of these movements we’re seeing at the moment are trying to divide men from women, and a lot of people are getting the idea that somehow their masculinity is toxic.

Well, you know, we don’t say that when the brave young French policeman takes a bullet for a young woman and her daughter in a French supermarket; we celebrate that. And I actually think that not all—but the great majority of men want to be noble. They know their flaws, as you said. They’ve got to be honest about them—we all need to be honest—but they also have a big part of them, if you like, that divine spark, that aspires to be responsible and noble people.

Yes, and that's what women want for men too. So unless—and as they’ve been damaged in their relationships so that they don’t trust men at all and then are prepared to dispense with all of them, which isn’t helpful. But, you know, men and women need to call to the nobility in each other, and that is what they both want.

Because you want a stalwart companion by your side. If you’re a man, you want someone you can trust and you can rely on, who will help guide you and care for you and care for your children and all of that and to make a life with. And if you're a woman, you want a man that you can rely on and that’s going to help you deal with the children and with the excess fragility that you have because of your pronounced role in reproduction.

And that is what we want, and to denigrate and to split men and women apart is to damage humanity itself because it’s not like we’re all men or all women. I have sisters and a mother and a wife and a daughter; and women have husbands and sons and fathers—we’re not separate.

And to split us apart on the basis of sex is—it’s as pathological as a suicidal impulse, or a murderous impulse, or a genocidal impulse. None of that’s good; it’s not acceptable. But we're a hell of a lot better off than we were, and things are getting better, and we can do better yet. That’s a way better story.

We look forward very much to having you back on those shores.

Very nice speaking with you again, and thank you very much for the opportunity.

Thanks, Jordan!