Piers Morgan Uncensored - Piers Morgan Uncensored: Jordan Peterson on Israeli/Palestine Conflict

Episode Date: October 31, 2023

On Piers Morgan Uncensored, Piers is joined by once again by Jordan Peterson bu this time on his perspective on the Israel/Palestine War. Watch Piers Morgan Uncensored at 8 pm on TalkTV on Sky 522, Virgin Media 606, Freeview 237 and Freesat 217. Listen on DAB+ and the app.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Good evening. Welcome to Pierce Morgan Uncensored. I'm in Los Angeles this week. And tonight I sit down with one of the world's great thinkers, Dr. Jordan Peterson. Just a few weeks ago, we did an interview that proved very popular. But that was before the events of October the 7th. And on October the 7th, Hamas committed, of course, one of the world's worst modern terror attacks on the people of Israel. And that day, Jordan Peterson tweeted, give them hell, Netanyahu. Enough is enough. What did he mean by that? What is enough in terms of Israel's response? Does he regret tweeting that? Well, I asked him all these questions in a very wide-ranging new interview. And I explained to him that I've honestly had a lot of moral quandaries since this conflict began, since the war started. I don't know what a proportionate response is to what Hamas did that day. I don't know if there is such a thing as a proportionate response to the attention.

atrocities which unfold on the people of Israel. But I do know that the people of Gaza, the innocent Palestinians who live in Gaza, who've been under Bombabat mouth for many weeks and seen thousands of children get killed, I know that they believe they are living through hell. So tonight I sit down with Jordan Peterson to ask him some difficult questions about a very, very difficult issue. Well, I'm joined now by Dr. Jordan Peterson. Jordan, great to have you back on the program.

A lot has happened since you were last on just a few weeks ago. I want to start by saying that I'm wrestling with a lot of moral quandaries about this war. And I'm hoping that through our conversation today, we might get to at least have some clarity about the moral quandaries and see if we can work out what we should be thinking about this, because I think it's very complicated, and it's got to be nuanced this conversation. Do you feel any moral quandaries about it?

Well, I don't think you can have a war without moral quandary. I mean, a war is the consequence of an unsolvable moral quandary. And so it's not surprising that the conversation surrounding the war is full of moral quandaries, because if it was straightforward and simple, And if there was an easy path forward, then there wouldn't be a war. And so, I mean, I'm... I can tell you what I think is going on to the degree

that you can reduce it to something quickly explicable. You know, I think Iran is desperate because of the tenuous hold on power that the mullahs now have in Iran, given their own citizens' rebellion. I think they see the Abraham Accords, which were the most significant step forward towards peace in the Middle East for like 75 years. They see the Abraham Accords as an existential threat.

This is a last-ditch attempt by the Iranian mullahs to use the Islam against Jews story to prop up their own dismal rain. And so they rattled the chain of their Hamas puppets and said, provoke and they did and their hope is that the Israeli response will be so overwhelming that the Arab world turns against them and maybe even the people who

might be inclined to be swayed by a victim narrative in the West and that the Abraham Accords will fall apart and that'll be the end of that and that could happen and I'm hoping it won't because I think the Abraham Accords were you know and it's irritating to me

for whatever you know utility that is is that is that I think I know, insofar as you can know such things, that Saudi Arabia would have signed the Abraham Accords two years ago if Biden would have moved a little bit more forthrightly on it. And I think the reason that he didn't, and the Democrats didn't, was because they didn't want to give Trump any credit for anything that he had attained in his administration.

And I think all of that is appalling. And, you know, I see this story of Muslim against Jew being put forward in this propagandistic mess. And I think, well, the Muslim world has to make a choice too, because it doesn't look to me like their proper champions are, is the government in Iran, you know, and and it's not like the Saudis don't have their flaws and perhaps the rest of the Arab governmental structures, but the Islam world should move in the direction of the Abraham Accords. That would be great for everyone. We could have a real peace. We could have something approximating a, a, union of the Abrahamic people, and I think the accord was named extraordinarily well. Or we could have what we've had for the last 75 years with the Palestinians as perpetual cannon fodder, you know, at the be beck and call of those for whom having them be canon fodder is useful.

And so, yeah, well, there's just moral quandaries everywhere there. It's a minefield, but that's what I think is the fundamental reality of the current situation. It's a propaganda war, and there's a lot at stake. On October the 7th, Hamas obviously committed a terror attack of appalling magnitude. Where were you when you first heard about it, and what was your instant feeling about it? Well, my instant feeling was to be sickened by it. It hasn't been that long since I was in Jerusalem, and so it was a little closer to me than it might have otherwise been. I'm also more sensitive to any signs of anti-Semitic catastrophe

from studying the Holocaust for the length of time that I did. And I've always regarded Jews as the canary in the coal mine. And I think the reason that the Jews are the canary in the coal mine is because they're a successful minority. You know, and if a culture can tolerate a successful minority, it's pretty damn robust and it's not very resentful. And as soon as a culture starts to get resentful, the Jews make an easy target because they're a minority, and so that's an easy target to begin with, but then they're the minority that has the temerity to be successful. And that really brings the resentful out of the rat holes.

And I've seen a rise in anti-Semitism online over the last three years. It's just stunning to behold, on the right and on the left, but jointly. And then, well, so I was sickened by it, but then I was also immediately suspicious of Iran's rule. role. And I mean, that doesn't require any particular perspicacity on my part. I think it's quite obvious. But that also opens up the rat's nest of the maneuvering, the political maneuvering around the Abraham Accords. Because, you know, I was very ill when the Abraham Accords were signed, and I couldn't or hadn't paid much attention. And when I sort of recovered my ability to see again, I saw that this remarkable peace process had taken place. And I could not understand for the

life of me why it wasn't trumpeted on the front page of every newspaper across the world. And I also think that Trump's team should have got a Nobel Peace Prize for it. I cannot see how you can possibly make a counter-argument to that. For all of Trump's flaws and for his administration's flaws, this was a major accomplishment. And yet, and I know the Saudis were behind it. You know, they didn't sign it, but it wouldn't have gone forward without their nod and wink. And I know, I believe, that if Biden would have taken the opportunity and been a bit magnanimous in his response to Trump, which he could have been, instead of thinking of him as Satan himself,

that he could have enticed the Saudis into a peace accord. And we wouldn't be in this damn situation now. And now we're playing it out the hard way, you know, because the Iranians could win the propaganda war, and they've got, God only knows how many agents they have in the West, you know, promoting the kind of social upheaval that we've seen on the streets in the last few weeks. And so the narrative could go either way. But I'm rude and hard for the, for the Abraham Accords Sinez, and I hope they have the courage of their convictions, and I hope they can see that their way forward is the most appropriate way forward for the good of the Muslim world.

Or what, are we going to stay in some 14th century conflict between the fundamentalist Muslim world and the Jews? Jesus, that sounds, you know, we've had enough of that, haven't we? You'd think. I asked Ben Shapiro, what is the... proportionate response to what happened on October 7th. And he said there isn't one. There is no proportionate response and there shouldn't be. I mean, that in itself, you know, I asked Vivek Ramoswami when I interviewed him at the weekend the same question. And he was

basically inferring the same, but he also said that, you know, he would happily put the heads of 100 Hamas leaders on stakes along the border as a message to people not to. to commit this act. I thought that was a sort of medieval barbaric response to medieval barbarism. And that eye for an eye, tooth for tooth is not the solution. I also believe that Israel has a fundamental right, not just to defend itself after what happened,

but has a duty to protect its people. And it has to take that duty obviously very seriously. But if your mission statement, as they've made clear, is to eliminate Hamas completely, and Hamas live in the in Gaza surrounded by civilians, among civilians, you can only do that. You can only get rid of Hamas with massive civilian casualties. And that's where I have this moral quandary about how much is too much. Well, does Israel get a license to do whatever it wants to eliminate Hamas? Or should there be a limit? And if so, what is that limit? Well, I don't think Israel will have a license to do whatever it

wants because what will happen inevitably and I think if I was an Iranian propagandist I would be counting on this Let's imagine that Israel moves against Hamas with its usual effectiveness and they start winning You know in a serious way and the casualties mount well it's a lot easier to take a victim appreciation stance against a power that's clearly winning so Israel can't win without accruing losses along the way, because the more they manifest their military superiority, the easier it's going to be for those who cast the Palestinians as victims

to hold, to gain the moral upper hand. And so that doesn't mean I know what Israel should do because I wish I had that wisdom. But what I would like to see happen, in the best of all possible worlds, perhaps, would be for the signies of the Abraham Accords to say to Israel, privately first, we're not budging.

And then maybe to take a foray into the public and say that. It would be lovely to see Saudi Arabia and come out and say, you know, we're going to continue the Abraham Peace Accord process. And then Israel could say, well, if the Abraham Accord holds, and we have the probability of expansion, it, we can take the risk of not being so devastating in our response to Hamas and they could back off,

but because there'd be a counter-victory in it for them. And so as far, like, I can't see a better pathway forward than that. And I think that's a potentially realistic pathway, especially because that would also have the side benefit of not allowing Iran to prevail. So that's as, that's the best I can do on how this might proceed in the in the most optimistic possible way and I don't know if that's good enough or not on October the 7th you tweeted give them hell Netanyahu enough yeah is enough and you got some blowback for that as everybody yeah a lot says anything about this were you surprised by the scale of the blowback do you wish you'd phrase that tweet differently do you have any regrets about well

You know, Twitter is a very complicated social media platform, and it's been difficult for me to learn how to use it wisely. And I'm not alone in that, because it's difficult to be wise on Twitter. Now, what I'm trying to learn is when a tweet is appropriate and when a long-form commentary is appropriate. And the rule, I think, is something like the higher the stakes, the more likely that the long-form commentary is necessary. And really, it would have been better had I,

because I did release a YouTube video where I explained some of what we already talked about. I'm sorry, yeah, yeah. And that was, well, that was received much better, let's put it that way, but it also gave me a chance to elaborate my argument. And so what it highlighted for me, and I felt, you know, I was, look, I wasn't, I was very taken aback by what happened in, in Israel and I was also appalled because in my estimation it was unnecessary as I said the Abraham Accords could have been extended earlier and maybe this wouldn't have been necessary

And so I I I I allowed myself to express some sentiment at that point without providing context and That wasn't as good as providing the context and so and I'm re-thinking thinking Twitter overall at the moment about how to use it. You know, Elon has taken off the character limit, and he's also made it possible to distribute video, and so it no longer has to be a place where impulsive exchanges can occur rapidly, and I'm trying to reconfigure how I use it. I'm much happier with the video. Now, you know, I was upset because I had developed somewhat of a Muslim following on YouTube.

and I was very happy about that. A lot of people on the Islamic side of the world were watching my biblical lectures, for example. And, you know, and I've had extensive conversations with Muslims on my YouTube channel. And, you know, I burnt some of that up. And I'm not sure I did that. Well, I would say I'm certain.

I didn't do that in the most productive manner. And so do I regret it? It would have been better to do the long form, to have done the long form to begin with, you know? And Twitter invites and rewards a certain amount of impulsivity. And it wasn't, I don't know, Pierce, I don't know if it's ever time for impulsive action, especially when the stakes are serious, you know. There's no doubt, for example, that what happened October the 7th was a form of hell for the victims

and for their families. There's also no doubt that for many living in Gaza, for many innocent Palestinians, as we know of the two million or so residents and citizens there they I think it's more than half of child age and many are very young children and many children are getting killed and as a father I'm sure as like me as a father it is utterly heartbreaking to see so many thousands of children being killed who have nothing obviously to do with this again this this comes back to this moral quandary I have you know it's interesting when you said enough is enough in that tweet you know some people are already saying even if

they're very sympathetic to Israel's need to take out Hamas they're looking at these fairly apocalyptic scenes in Gaza and thinking enough is enough of that you know In other words, the revenge is already far greater in terms of death toll than the original appalling terror attacks. That, again, is where I have a moral quandary. Well, the question is, I suppose, and I don't have an answer to this, is the most effective way of combating Hamas military. And part of the answer to that is, is the military eradication of Hamas, even? possible because as I said, and we can see it unfolding in real time, as Israel's more successful militarily and the casualties mount, the resistance to what they're doing is going to grow.

And so even if they could take out Hamas militarily, which isn't obvious given its interpenetration with the civilian population, all of what's going to be played out is going to be played out on the military front. And we can see that in the rising tide. let's say of demonstrations around the Western world and I would say those demonstrations are likely to get larger and more effective in precise proportion to Israel's success on the military side and so then I would think well is there another way of restraining Hamas and well that's again that brings us back to the Abraham Accords because they were the most promising thing that's happened in seven decades you know and I think it's it's easy to underestimate what a miracle they were the people who formulate the Abraham Accords had to fight the State Department. They tried to introduce it under Obama to begin with, right? The notion was, well, maybe we could

We could start the peace process with Israel without putting the Palestinians first and that had been off the table Conceptually in the State Department as far as I've been informed forever and Then it was proposed during the Obama era and it was rejected and then it was proposed during the beginning of the Trump era and rejected but eventually they they carried the day. And then they did do an end run. And I think that actually put, I think that was actually good for the typical Palestinian, because it put a tremendous amount of pressure on the Palestinian authorities who are basically tyrants who are more than willing to use their own citizens as cannon fodder. It put a lot of pressure on them to actually do something moving, moving towards a genuine peace, which is why now Iran, that's why Iran is so desperate to scuttling a

Accords, I think. Of course. So I think the way through Hamas, all things considered in the medium to long run, is to desperately extend the Abraham Accords as rapidly as possible. That's not a military victory, but, you know, it's easy to do this from the armchair. When you look at the full history of this conflict, the seven decades of conflict between Israel and Palestinians, Johnnethon Friedland is a very good, respected Jewish journalist for the Guardian in the UK. He wrote a very interesting column the other day saying, you know, you could argue that both sides have a just cause here.

And he said that as a leading Jewish commentator. Historically, both sides have a just cause. And that it's important to remember that. And that's why passions run so high. It's why people care so much. and it's why racing to take sides is a mistake in this conflict. What do you think of that? Well, I think that, you know, if there wasn't a lot to be said on both sides,

then the conflict wouldn't drag on forever and be unresolvable. You know, I think at some point you do something like Cut the Gordian knot, which I do think to some degree the Abraham Accords had begun to do. You know, I think it's, I don't think Israel's going away, but I don't think the Palestine isn't going away either. And so those things have to be accepted. It looks to me like they have to be accepted as on the ground realities. Now, the problem I've seen continually, I don't know,

is that it's been convenient to use the Palestinians as an irritant to Israel in the West. And so the Palestinians have been held hostage. You know, the people who portray them as innocent victims presume that the Palestinians have been held hostage by the Jews, let's say, but I would say the Palestinians have been held hostage even more effectively by their own leadership and by those who are perfectly willing to use them as the front man,

the expendable front man to irritate Israel in the West. Well, you can't get peace under those circumstances, you know, and so Palestine is a reality that isn't going to go away, and Israel's a reality that isn't going to go away, and the Abraham Accords started to recognize that, and there was move in the right direction. And if that falls apart, we're going to be back to where we were 15 years ago, except worse.

The interesting moment for me came when Israel turned off the power and the water. They just were able to do that to 2 million people in Gaza. They could turn off the internet. And it struck me that that was a very vivid reminder that Israel effectively controls Gaza. It doesn't do so politically, but it does in reality. And that for many young people in Gaza, they know this. And they do feel that they've been living in a perpetual prison camp where their movement is controlled,

where their access to basic things like water and energy and so on is controlled. And that until they get the freedom that they crave, this can never get resolved. But I also understand on the other side that the Israelis feel how can we give freedom to a place that is run by a terror group who are literally committed to the eradication of not only Israel, but all Jewish people? Well, you laid out what are the two sets of valid counterclaims? I mean, there's another complicating factor too.

You know, you said that your moral back is up because of the continual toll in civilians in Palestine, especially among people who, let's say, weren't even born when they first came to power. And so it's very difficult to look at that and see it as anything but unjust. But then it begs a whole other set of questions too, doesn't it? It's like, well, if your government is a totalitarian band of armed criminal thugs, what responsibility do you bear for that as these subjected people. And, you know, it's not like I know the answer to that. But, you know, I see in my own country in Canada that things are slipping and sliding in all sorts of pathological directions,

and people are letting it happen. And if you let that happen long enough, well, things get very, very bad. And they have got very, very bad in Palestine. And the answer to whatever tyranny Israel might be exerting over the Palestinians isn't for the Palestinians to exert even more tyranny over themselves, especially not in concert with a third party like Iran, who's perfectly willing to sacrifice them at any point. And so now, and then that question emerges, well, what responsibility did the Palestinians bear? Well, then I think we start to touch on more metaphysical issues. It's like, well, the Palestinians, like all people, bear the responsibility to live in truth and to stand up to tyranny in their, in their deeds, their attention and their deeds and their actions.

Because if you don't, you pay for that, and so do your children, right? And then so to your grandchildren, so to your great-grandchildren. And, you know, there seems to be something unjust in that, in that why did the children suffer? And the biblical answer to that has always been, well, the children suffer for the sins of their forefathers. And you might think, well, it's pretty unfair that the world is set up that way. It's like, hey, it might be unfair, but it is set up that way,

and it does beg the question. what responsibility do the people who are living under the thumb of totalitarians have for the fact that they're living under the thumb of totalitarians and the answer isn't none so this is why I'm a psychologist not a politician I would say but I think

I think it's a really interesting question it's also an interesting question why why won't Arab states around Gaza take in Palestinian refugees I mean these are legitimate questions right well There's a lot of chain and saber rattling about how tyrannical Israel is, and of course they're held to a very higher moral standard.

But, you know, the prison that is Palestine has walls on sides that aren't Israeli. So, and that no one is certainly not the progressives, will never talk about that. And that's partly because, you know, all the oppressed people are equally morally virtuous. And so the fact that the Arabs won't take in the Palestinians, you can't even bring that up because, of course, the Arabs themselves are victims of Western colonialism, which is, you know, one of the most

absurd propositions ever set forth by anyone about anything, but, you know, here we are. And it is quite a miracle in some ways that that, the multidimensional fact of Palestinian enslavement isn't discussed in a much more forthright manner. There's many people are building the walls that make Palestine into whatever prison it is. And perhaps, the Israelis are playing their role, but they're by no means the only actors. Let's talk about the response of progressives, and in particular what's happening on student campuses, particularly in America. You know, I've been struck by two things. One, the horrifying immediate response, not just in America, but when you saw mobs in Sydney, Australia, chanting

gas the Jews, when you saw huge protests by the Israeli embassy in Kensington and West London, near where I live, all celebrating. This is all within hours of what happened on October the 7th. You saw similar scenes in America. So the gut reaction of many young people appeared to be to be celebrating what had happened. And we even had some, it was a Cornell professor who was heard in public saying how exhilarated he was by what happened and still hasn't been fired. And these are people who've driven this cancel culture for many years now, where if you use the wrong pronoun, they want you eradicated, fired, shamed, abuse and so on. But here, if you celebrate the actions of a terrorist organization and killing 1,500 people, you actually don't lose your job.

Students who've beamed pro-Hamas rhetoric onto the building at George Washington University. They haven't lost their places at that university. So even for the most heinous possible thing that you could do which might warrant cancellation, the people who've driven cancel culture spare themselves. Well, this shows you how shallow the oppressor oppression, oppressor narrative really is. Oppressed oppressor narrative really is. Now, George Orwell famously said that the typical middle class, socialist didn't love the poor, they just hated the rich. And I think the oppressor

oppressed narrative gives people moral license to identify the oppressor and to hate them resentfully with a good conscience. Plus it's also extremely simple-minded, you know, and this is one of the problems with what's being taught in universities and even much more broadly than that. Now, the notion is we can view all human social relations and the past itself through a meta-Marxist narrative that proclaims that there are only oppressors and victims and that all you have to do to be moral

is to be on the side of the victim. Now, the shadow side of that is that once you proclaim your moral superiority and you're on the side of the victim, well, number one, you don't have to think anymore. You just have to identify the two sets of players. And number two, you're moral without effort because all you have to do is feel sorry for the victims.

And then consequence number three is the oppressor being intrinsically evil can be the target of everything that's resentful and bitter and absolutely dreadful about you. Now, that's the standard narrative that's being taught on university campuses and the Palestinians play the role of victim. And so you can't argue against the Palestinian cause,

let's say, if you were inclined to, without simultaneously having to face the weight of every single person who's adopted the oppressor-oppressed narrative, upending that, and there's no way the university, not in the state they're in now, there's no way that's going to fly. And so we see exactly what happened. The narrative's already in place. All oppressed people are innocent and virtuous victims.

Well, so then when something like this happens, and you see the Palestinian victims rise up against the, their evil Jewish overlords, then it's time for celebration. And we forget entirely that the evil Jewish overlords story was the same story that the Germans used so successfully. And we also forget, and this is very interested in relationship to Iran, I was reading a book by Stavann Zweig yesterday about turn-of-the-century Vienna, just at the end of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, and the dawning of the movements that eventually morphed into Nazism in Germany

And one of the things Zvig pointed out was that, you know, if you're a corrupt, oppressing psychopath who's hell-bent on exploiting the population, and you want to deflect that, the Jews make a constant, positive, universal target, right? Because they tend to be disproportionately successful, and you can just say, well, you know, I'm not the oppressor here. It's those successful Jews, and that's being played out now. That's the guys, that's the disclosional. guys of left-wing anti-Semitism. I mean, it's a terrifying. We don't hate the Jews. We just love their enemies.

Right. I mean, the anti-Semitic response in the last three weeks has been actually quite terrifying to watch. I've got Jewish friends who are literally living in real fear now, some of whom were in Israel at the time and thought, well, the world will rally behind us and actually very quickly realized that in many cases, that wasn't the case. In fact, the complete opposite. And then he saw these scenes in Dagestan at the airport with a mob literally charging around trying to find any Jewish passengers they could find. And it was, I mean, horrendous, but also if you're Jewish, this is utterly terrifying and must take you right back to Nazi Germany, World War II, the Holocaust. This never again, it is beginning to happen again.

Well, I think we could be heartened in that regard by the counter position, though, too. I mean, I would say the reasonable majority in the Western world didn't take that stance still. And quite forthrightly, I mean, even my prime minister, Justin Trudeau, who virtually never says a true word in his life or makes a... his actions are concontinations of false gestures even. You know, he came out with a pretty forthright statement decrying what had happened on the Hamas side. And that has characterized the leadership of the West in general, and so I can certainly understand why

that the tiny minority of Jews that do exist in the world are terrified about what's happening. you know, there's no reason for catastrophic alarm. You know what I mean? It doesn't look to me like this is going to spiral out of control. And I'm not even so certain that in the medium to long run, it's going to be the worst possible thing. Because you know, too, the other thing that happened is that a lot of the false moral disguise

of the progressive types was exposed in a radical way in the last few weeks. I mean, Harvard, for example, just took it. a beating. You know, I mean, first of all, Harvard was ranked dead last by fire in terms of its support for free speech. And then it was 32 different Harvard groups came out essentially in support of Hamas. And then a whole variety of CEOs said they wouldn't accept a Harvard degree as a hiring criteria. And Larry Summers came out and said, you know, the previous president of Harvard that the institution had become so corrupt that it wasn't salvageable. Then, you know, the White House press secretary decried the actions of the...

squad who were supporting the Hamas protests, you know, so we're seeing cracks on the progressive side because of this that haven't been evident before, you know, and Biden himself came out and talked about how important it was to push forward with the Abraham Accords, which was something, you know, I wish he would have done two years ago, but better late than never. So I can understand why there's tremendous fear and uncertainty, but I certainly wouldn't say that all the news is bad. Talk about social media for a moment. There's no doubt that the kind of tribalism that we see in modern society, fueled by social media,

has probably never been worse than I've seen it in the last three weeks. A constant barrage of often completely fake imagery, videos, claims, counterclaims from both sides. But it's just a barrage. I've been really quite shocked by just the scale of it and how little of it appears to even. and have a semblance of truth about it. What do we do about this? Well, that highlights a very pronounced danger. So, you know, in the last 15 years,

we've erected virtual perceptual systems and virtual systems, virtual systems of representing reality. Now, if your system of representing reality is not in accord with reality, you're delusional. And, right, technically, that's. what a delusion is, and you're going to run into trouble when you try to act in your fantasy and run into the world. Well, these virtual worlds that we've erected on top of the real world don't run by the same principles as the real world, and that makes them delusional. And that

delusional element is affecting us very badly in a couple of ways. I just heard Jonathan Haidt this morning talk about some of the research he's reviewing in his new book. He shows very clearly that young liberal women, the probability the young liberal woman who saturates her life with social media has a mental illness is more than 50%. That's how bad it's got. Yeah, it's really bad. But that's not the only thing that's going on. You see, the other thing I've been watching, and this is really quite frightening to me, is that the problem with online, one of the problems with online communication is it disinhibits the narcissists and the psychopaths. And the reason for that is that they can circumvent the normal control systems that obtain in face-to-face interaction.

Yes. You know, and in face-to-face interaction, there's things you will not say or do because you will be held responsible and maybe immediately you can say whatever the hell you want online and you can get away with it too and maybe even be rewarded for it. And so we have, so you just think about the amount of criminality and quasi-criminality online. 35% of internet traffic is portographic. And it isn't nice guys that are running that. Let's put it that way.

There's an immense amount of online criminality. Like most people are targeted by online criminals at a pretty regular basis. And then we just have the run-of-the-mill narcissistic psychopaths who generate anonymous troll demon accounts, who are spreading misery and sadistic hate as fast as they possibly can. And there's no barriers whatsoever to them doing that. And so then when something does happen that's contentious, let's say, the sadistic psychopaths just make hay out of that, right? They're spreading their misery as rapidly as they possibly can for the lulls and the lulls's and to delight in other people's suffering. And the social media companies are naive enough not to regulate that.

Now, regulating it's difficult, but it's a conversation we have to have, Pierce, because I think, like, if we let the psychopaths, that's 4% of the population. Whenever they get the upper hand, and that happens from time to time, everything burns. I also think that young people in particular, they are exposed to such relentless dopamine imagery, both still pictures, videos, whatever. And in particular, the last three weeks, if you're a young person with an impressionable mind and you're getting bombarded with some of the worst imagery imaginable, you know, babies dead, dead, limbless, and so on. If you're getting that on your feed all day long,

which I'm seeing on mine, so they must be, it can only have an incredibly damaging effect to, I think, a young generation already ripped with anxiety, ripped with problems about how to deal with the real world. And I think a lot of it is they're just seeing so much bad stuff all the time on social media, which when I was young, you just couldn't see it. You would not be able to access

this kind of thing. You were protected in a way from the reality of things like warfare and protected from this kind of imagery. Yeah, well, again, it's a problem of technological revolution because this new sensory system that we've produced, this new system of perception, it's a fire hose, first of all, that's impossible to govern. You can never get on top of it. It's infinite in its scope. And then it allows the pathological and the terrible to spread as rapidly as the beneficial and the good. And so it is overwhelming. It's not just kids that have a hard time with that. I mean, it's just these technologies, well, what do we expect? They're insanely powerful and remarkable. But they carry with it the, well, they carry with it all of the implications of that insane power on the

pathological side. And we don't exactly know how to deal with it. We don't know how to We haven't evolved these social norms even that regulate online conduct. You know, I mean, when I block people on Twitter, let's say I have qualms about it, you know, well, I'm in favor of free speech. Do I block trolls online? And when exactly do I block them? You know, I've got more direct about that. I have a couple of rules.

You know, if you're anonymous, if you're anonymous and you're annoying, it's like you're done as far as I'm concerned. But that's just the beginnings of the evolution of anything approximating social norms. But aren't you just saying, I mean, I've wrestled with that because I've blocked, I think, 11,000 people or whatever it is. I can't remember what the latest tally is. I'll go on little block spurges sometimes. But to me, there's no contradiction between believing passionately in free speech, but also allowing yourself not to have to listen to it. You don't have to listen to what people are saying to you. You have the right in a free democratic society to say, look, you're entitled to say whatever you want,

but I don't actually have to listen to it. You're not preventing them from exercising their right to free speech. You're just saying, I don't want to hear it. Well, that's why we have walls. That's a good example of the difference between the virtual world and the real world. You have a house, and it has walls and a door. And the reason for that is you don't want a random stranger to come in and just yell things at you when. Right.

You know, and so what are the walls and the doors on social media? Well, we have no idea because we thought, well, we'll democratize the public square. Okay, so what does that mean? It means that any narcissistic psychopath anywhere can say whatever they want to you and everyone you know. Well, you know, that's just not going to work. It's not going to work. There's always been criminals and quasi-criminals and troublemakers and we have some mechanisms

of regulation in the actual world and virtually no mechanisms of regulation whatsoever in the virtual world. And so, yeah, it's a tremendous problem. And it is also making it more and more difficult for us to distinguish what's real from what's not real because you don't know when you're being played for a, what would you call, masochistic fool by a sadistic psychopath. And the answer to that is often, often, you know, frighteningly often. And so, My sense, like I've proposed this before, is like I don't, I think social media enterprises above a certain size should separate people with verified identities, verified by their site, not with some universal digital ID, separate them from the anonymous types.

Like if the anonymous types want to post, no problem, but they shouldn't get to post with the actual human beings. Because there's no responsibility, you know, and then, you say, well, you know, maybe I'm a whistleblower and I'm standing for truth and I don't want to bear an undue responsibility for telling truth to power. It's like my sense online is for every one whistleblower who's genuine, who's anonymous, there's 99 anonymous anonymous troll demons who are sadistic, right? Yeah. That's not a good ratio. You interviewed BB Net and Yahoo quite recently actually a few months ago. A lot of pressure on

internally, a lot of criticism. Hamas released a video on Monday of some of the hostages attacking Netanyahu's administration for not having a ceasefire and so on. That was clear propaganda. But it also reflects what a lot of people in Israel feel about Netanyahu and the catastrophic failure of security and defense on October the 7th. He's resolutely refused to accept any responsibility or to apologize. for that. Do you think you should? Well, I guess I wouldn't presume to know. I mean,

my observation about that was that people said, well, how could this happen? How could the Israeli defense systems be that porous? And I would say our defense systems are way more porous than anybody would ever want to think. You know, it's very, very difficult to

stop people who are willing to light themselves on fire to singe you. And any random person in a civil society can cause an unbelievable amount of mayhem and trouble. And in order to forestall that possibility completely, which would be impossible in any case, we'd have to move towards a surveillance state like China where we're being monitored 100% of the time, and then the bloody cure would be worse than the disease.

It doesn't surprise me that Israel's defense was that porous. I don't think it cannot be in a society that's still vaguely free. even if you lock people down, Jesus, you can still cause a lot of trouble if you're hell-bent on doing it. So should Netanyahu apologize for the failures of the Israeli defense system in relationship to the Hamas attack?

I don't know enough to say. It isn't obvious to me that it failed any worse than you should expect a system like that to fail when it's faced by psychopathic terrorists who are being funded by outside sources who want to do nothing else but cause misery and mayhem. So I interviewed Netanyahu partly because I wanted to talk to him,

because I was curious, and I was also an admirer of his economic reforms, the economic reforms that I think did raise Israel to this position of pronounced economic power and entrepreneurial capacity that they now possess, which also made them a more attractive partner during the Abraham Accords, because the Israelis had the possibility of offering to the Arabs the sharing of their technology and their entrepreneurial and managerial prowess. They had something to offer, along with their military strength. So I thought that was all to the good.

I don't know enough about Netanyahu and about the intricacies of Israel politics. God, it's hard enough to keep it track of my own country, you know, to dare to say anything more than that. I'm glad I'm not in his shoes. How about that? That's, you know, I can't imagine there's anything about that that's anything other than abysmally difficult non-stop. Dr. Jordan Peterson, what a fascinating hour. Thank you very much indeed for joining me.

Hey, thank you. It's always a pleasure to talk to you, Pierce.