The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 250. The Adventures of Pinocchio and Free Speech Part 3/4

Episode Date: May 6, 2022

In part 3 of this 4-part series on the relationship between the freedom of speech and the ability to speak itself. We go deep into the belly of the whale in this episode, and it ends up with us briefly touching on the subject of the next and final episode. The redemptive power of true speech. Time Codes: [00:00:00] Nietzsche and returning to nothing - 2015 Personality Lecture 06: Depth Psychology: Carl Jung (Part 01)[0:02:52] The difficulty of change in the university and being silent - James Orr & Arif Ahmed on JBP Podcast S4 E75[21:43] Resurrecting your dead father from the bottom of the ocean - 2015 Personality Lecture 06: Depth Psychology: Carl Jung (Part 01)[22:28] The importance of free speech - Andrew Doyle on JBP Podcast S4 E32[33:16] The signs of degeneration in society - Dr. Julie Ponesse on JBP Podcast[38:50] Jiminy Cricket the Conscience - 2015 Personality Lecture 06: Depth Psychology: Carl Jung (Part 01)[39:36] What Dr. Azar sensed and caused her incident - Dr. Rima on JBP S4 E28[43:10] Going to the Monster - 2015 Personality Lecture 06: Depth Psychology: Carl Jung (Part 01)[44:10] Red Skull and the attack on the essence of free speech - Andrew Doyle on JBP Podcast S4 E32[51:45] Pinocchio freeing his father from the monster (whale) - 2015 Personality Lecture 06: Depth Psychology: Carl Jung (Part 01)[57:16] Paul coauthoring an essay with Bari Weiss - Paul Rossi on JBP Podcast S4 E17[03:13:46] Pinnochio as the Hero - 2015 Personality Lecture 06: Depth Psychology: Carl Jung (Part 01)

Welcome to episode 250 of the JBP podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson. This is part three of our series on free speech, a deep dive into the impact of restricting freedom of speech. We'll be looking at what great thinkers like Nietzsche, Carl Jung, and Jimny Cricket have had to say on the topic. Then towards the end of the episode, we take a closer look at a concept that'll be the focus of the next and final episode in this compilation series, what Dad calls the redemptive power of free speech. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Okay, so what's happened there? Well, many, many things at multiple levels of reality simultaneously, and that's the characteristic of an archetypal story.

So on one level, Pinocchio's too old to go home. He can't go home to his father because in some sense he's already transcended his father. So there are things for example that your father can't help you with and the reason for that is that he doesn't know any more about the situation than you do and he can't. And so that's where his knowledge limits out. So that would be sort of on the personal level and then on the trans-personal level, which would be the deeper archetypal level, what's happening to Pinocchio is exactly what Nietzsche described at the end of the 19th

century. Remember that Jepetto is his creator and now he's dead, he's gone. And so Pinocchio is bereft of placement, so to speak. His soul has been corrupted and he doesn't know what to do about it. And when he returns to his family home or when he returns to his tradition, what he finds is nothing. Okay, so then what happens? Well, this is another thing that you'll swallow with just no problem whatsoever.

Well, this dove comes along that's sort of golden and glowing and drops a note right in front of them. Now, you may remember, and perhaps you don't, but the star from which the dove comes is a representation of the Blue Fairy. And the Blue Fairy is the positive element of the unknown in Pinocchio movie. And so what it basically is saying that when you're despairing because your father has died and your tradition has nothing to offer, that the paused development of the unknown may provide you with a message about where to go if you pay enough attention, that would be an intuition. Or it would be the automatic attraction of your interest to a new thing by forces that you do not understand. So one of the real ways of coming to grips with the idea of the act of unconscious is to understand that

you cannot control what you're interested in. And so then you might ask, well, if it's not you, what is it? And if you think about that problem long enough, you'll start to understand what Jung was talking about, because that is the way that you can understand in your own life, that the things that direct you as a being are not things that you consciously choose. In fact, they're not even things that you can consciously choose. They're directed by other forces. So anyways, the dove drops a message in front of Pinocchio and the cricket.

Now it's the cricket that reads it, so it's the same idea as what bugs you, so to speak. The cricket is an interpreter. She said, and I thought this is very telegenic, just to describe the state of the academy. She said, when I came to Cambridge, I was expected. She said, the motto of the Royal Society is, don't take anyone's word for it. And she said, that's what she was expecting when I come to Cambridge. I was expecting to engage in rigorous discussion where all of my cherished beliefs would be challenged, you know, and I'd come away shaken and uncomfortable and I would think for myself and I would be forced to rethink everything with the most important things in my life. I think she was actually studying psychology.

And then she said, when I got here, it wasn't like that. When I got here, I felt that I was being coddled and there was certain things that you couldn't question, certain things that you would just make a feeling outside of, it was a brilliant article and really telling because it was her own experience of what it's like for a student now compared to what it was like when I was an undergraduate, you know, many years ago. So that's an illustration of how things can go wrong in the sorts of things we were seeing around us

in the sort of summer and then the autumn of 2020. J.E.L., did you want to say anything more about that point or we can talk more about that. No, I mean, I think it was then, wasn't it, June, July, 2020? I remember you came round for lunch, round here, and we started talking about who might be willing to sign in public a support which was required by the mechanisms of the all the kind of procedural mechanisms.

I think we needed 25 names, wasn't it? And I think we could come up between us, we managed to come up with 7 or 8. And then it took us another 8 to 10 weeks to get past the 25. I think it was September that we were starting to look promising. And in fact, I think in the end, we got quite a few more than 25 for the three amendments that Arif was proposing to introduce to kind of, to take out the respect plan, which and replace it with.

Okay, so you needed tolerance. You needed those 25 to put the amendments forward. That's right, yeah. Okay, so that would indicate that some people were concerned that that requirement for 25 rather than just one person. But it was hard to get 25. Yeah, it was telling. It's telling that actually, I mean, there might have been two reasons why. One reason why it might have been because it was a trivial issue and nobody cared about it, who cares quibbling about a few words. Another reason, which I suspect was,

you know, we've turned up, was with a more likely explanation, was that actually a lot of people were afraid to sign something in public. So why do you think it's not trivial, and why do you think that argument's invalid? The reason I thought the argument was invalid because the additional evidence that I got after the vote, because the vote actually had a very high, a lot of people bothered to vote on this, and they bothered to vote for that change. If it had been a trivial thing nobody would have cared to vote. So that was one bit of evidence. The other bit of evidence was the testimony of people who wrote to me who I called up at the time and James may have got this as well. You know, people who are saying, look, we support this, we can see what you're doing and we can see why it's

concerned, but I just don't want to get involved in this kind of fight right now. Getting involved in this is going to be too difficult for me right now. I'm up for promotion right now. Yeah. I don't want to face all of these things. So, yeah, well, you're practice what you become, we'd be sorry, you become what you practice. And, you know, that's, well, and this is something I learned as a psychologist. And I think maybe it was part of my temperament to begin with is like, if you put off fights, they don't get better, not usually. They usually get worse. And maybe you think, well, I'll be in better position later. And you might be, but probably you won't. And so that notion that it's not a good

time, fair enough, you know, I hate conflict. I really hate it. I'm not built for it temperamentally. But I've learned through painful experience, I would say, and not least as a clinician that when you see the elephant's trunk under the rug, you can infer the rest of the elephant, and it's going to get bigger as you feed it with your stupidity and your withdrawal, and you let whatever it's feeding on continue. And it's extremely dangerous. You see this reflected in ancient mythology, actually quite nicely in many situations. You see that in the Mesopotamian creation myth where a dragon grows in the background

essentially that threatens to swamp everything. And that's eventually defeated by a great, you know, a, Marda Kazat turns out, this is a very old idea that little things left grow in the dark and get big. And so it's not really a very good reason. And especially if your conscience is bugging you because it's something that looks into the future and says, well, this is kind of small at the moment, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, moment, but yeah, but yeah, that's right. Actually, go on James. Well, I'll just say yeah, I remember reading that, that there's a kind of Babylonian creation myth, I think, isn't it? But that sense of things just growing with a kind of gathering momentum of their own is something that we've experienced a lot over. I think it's there's been

some work on this in sociology. I think they call it the spiral of silence. It's, I can't remember, Elizabeth Neumann or Noelle Neumann. The basic idea is that fear of isolation, social isolation, autism is a huge motivating factor in a person's behavior. Yeah, well, there's two great fears, right? That's one is being isolated and thrown out of the group because then you die. And the other is biological catastrophe. Those are the two big classes of fears that you see as a clinician. Right.

So that's the animating idea. And then the spiral starts, you know, the monster starts to grow when some people notice that their opinions are spreading fast. And that gives them a kind of confidence to double down and express themselves more confidently. And then on the other hand, people who disagree with those opinions see that their views gaining less traction

and they stay silent because of the fear of social isolation. And then they get weaker. They get weaker. And a lot of these people, they are gorgeous. Well, I was just going to say, social media and that those sorts of things, that obviously all the network effects from that accelerates that. And so what happens is that people just get very bad at judging what the real spread of opinion is in a social environment. And then it's a kind of a dynamic process.

It's a spiral. And so you get a spiral to the point where what is a confident minority position becomes this completely unassailable orthodoxy. And I think that's one reason why in the case of what was started to happen in Cambridge in the summer of 2020 and leading up to the vote in December is that what we saw was that although there was deep reluctance among colleagues who struggled to get more than 25 votes to sign in public that are of amendments. When it came to the vote, which crucially operated by a secret ballot, so you were allowed to measure opinion by people voting from within the closet,

as it were. And as soon as that mechanism was allowed to operate, you suddenly, the spiral of silence just as it were, the monster explodes. Right. So that's really interesting procedurally as well, because these sorts of positive feedback loop phenomenon, you see those in clinical therapy too. So for example, when people start to get depressed, then they withdraw and they stop socializing, say, and they stop engaging in their, in the activities that bring the meaning and joy. And so that makes their depression worse, and then they're more likely to withdraw again.

And, you know, it's probably an example of something like the Pareto principle operating again, right? That things can spiral up very, very rapidly and dominate, and they can spiral down very, it's non-linear on both ends and and there's some truth to that that kind of process that underlies all sorts of phenomena. So that secret ballot issue that's really relevant for bringing something like this to a halt. Yeah, I mean, I think yeah. Go go go ahead, I know it's good to say one, I mean one part of the isolation process also, I think, is certain kinds of social interactions or professional interactions.

What I mean is the experience of being in meetings, for instance, departmental meetings or college meetings, where probably a lot of people, there will be some mad or insane proposal, I've known to say, we're going to remove all pronouns from our policy or we're going to have this change to the syllabus or whatever. And everybody, or maybe most people in the room, were thinking this is nonsense, but I'm not going to say it's nonsense. And they left a meeting thinking they were the only person who thought it was nonsense. Because nobody spoke out and the thing was not decided by a secret ballot. If it had been decided by a secret ballot, as was the case, as James says in December, suddenly you had thousands of people realizing that

they weren't alone. They thought, oh, It's also possible that the objections, so imagine those objections manifest themselves in people's imagination, but they're not hooked so tightly to a whole ideological network as the proposal is. And so in some sense, people don't have the right words at hand immediately. You know, the pronoun thing is a good indication because, well, justify your use of he and she. It's like, well, I don't know how to do that exactly. That's what everyone does. We've done that forever, and that's my justification.

It's like, well, it's pretty weak compared to that whole ideology that's coming at you. Those people who are so committed, they're often pretty verbal. They're pretty well able to articulate that ideology and quite forcefully, and they're emotionally committed to it. And so that's also a structural problem. And they have devices. So for instance, if you think about the way I found the way these people use terms like not only welfare, but also harm, you know, the idea that words do harm to people, which has a lot of currency now in Britain and is chilling, is based on an absurdly inflated conception of harm.

But when you were in the middle of a discussion, you know, you know, it's also related to another cognitive problem, which is one of the things I often did as a therapist when someone told me they were afraid of something, doing something is, I said, well, that's because you're not afraid enough of not doing it. Because the doing produces this harm, let's say. And you can be afraid of that. But the not doing is sort of invisible. And that has something to do with decision making in uncertainty, by the way.

And so I used to get people to flesh out what would happen if they didn't do the thing they were afraid of. And then they thought, oh, I see, there's real risk, both ways. And now I get to pick my risk. And this harm issue is the same thing, because you could say, well, sometimes words do do harm. There's no doubt about that. And maybe that's, it's unfair to conflate that

with something like physical violence, although you could have a discussion about that. But the question that isn't being asked then is, well, what harm does your attempt to shut down what words you regard as harmful? What's that likely to produce for harm? Well, none. It's like, oh, really? So you haven't thought that part of it through at all, and you're going to be the arbiter of what's harmful and what's not. And there's no danger in that either. Is there? So that's a good way to deal with that sort of thing.

I agree. And of course, another thing that a lot of the time people feel don't see is they think, you know, we can impose on people's speech, we didn't tell them how to, how to behave various ways, but they don't think that that's an instrument that can be abused in all sorts of ways. So, if you mandate speech on one thing, one day, it's going to be mandate on other things the next day. And in general, I think with any form of coercive, coercive principle, you need to think what's going to happen in the hands of somebody wicked and tyrannical. That's how we should think about these things. Not only in university, but in politics more generally. Typical right wing clap trap. Well, that's kind of an interesting thing, right? Because one thing that conservative thinking does always

is say, yeah, but it's like, while you're putting this forward for the good, and fair enough, you know, and it's based on compassion, and that's actually a virtue, although it is by no means the only virtue, and sometimes it's a vice, but why are you so sure that this will only do the thing

you think it will do and nothing else, and that you're wise enough to make that change, right, in something that's sort of working already. So, hmm, hmm, you part of the problem might be that it I think it's a sort of a glitch within liberalism when you think back to mills I did, the famous No Harm Principle, which for many, many years operated is a very, very good basic rule for governing social interaction. But you can understand the temptation of trying to fold under the notion of harm or violence. I think it's the Australian psychologist Nick Haslam

who calls this concept creep. You can see that you see the sort of the power that comes from leveraging these concepts, particularly when an institution is caught in the headlines of a Twitter model or whatever it might be, that there's threats of harm or violence to the person which are. In the end, I think I take your point, Jordan, there may well be certain situations in which views of speech can be thought of as as in in in in in in in in in in in in in in in in in the legislature in that society needs to deliberate upon and and decide and and you

know we all accept that freedom of speech is not is not not qualified right and and indeed academic freedom has has proper parameters imposed as well. So we can also be growing up and say that it's dangerous, but necessary. It's dangerous, but necessary. I think the danger comes in when what counts as harm is being subjectively determined. And so this notion that started to gather steam at the last few years, this idea of a microaggression, which in effect is an aggression or a claim

that harm has been infected on a person that is subjectively determined. That is to say, it's in principle not an offense that could be explored in any kind of forensic context by jury or a judge. That is to say, the only evidence that count of the harm that could possibly count is the subject saying, you've hurt me. And so the danger of the language that that Arif was protesting against, the identityarian respect language, is that it effectively conferred a veto on the most psychologically fragile person in the university and who could simply say, and we would be no way of establishing whether or not they were sincere with that, they'd

have to be just simply taking a face value. But this person, the invitation to this speaker troubles me, upsets me, does me harm. Yeah, well, that's interesting too. Imagine you take that hypothetical sensitive person. It might not be in their best interests to actually grant them not sort of veto power because one of the things you do with someone who's really depressed or anxious is actually, especially if you're working as a cognitive behaviorist, let's say, is

you get them to look at the thoughts that are upsetting them and maybe modify the ones that are making them sensitive beyond what is good for them. And that's also to some degree judged subjectively by them. And so it isn't necessarily the case that protecting people in that manner and giving them that sort of power is actually in their best interest. So it reminds me of that insight of Jonathan Hyde and Greg Lukianoff in there. I think it's there 2017 Atlantic article that became the coddling of the American mind, where one of the three principles I think Jonathan isolates is a sort of inversion of the niche and idea where one of the three principles, I think Jonathan isolates is a sort of inversion of the niche and idea that, you know, what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. That is to say, and a thing that, you know, the sort of harm or violence that

sort of any kind of threat is, it doesn't have, it's not something that can toughen you up, it's not an opportunity to try and strengthen your character or to develop resilience. I know that I think this is something you've talked about. That's also a huge part of what universities are doing for their students if you think about it psychologically. So we could talk about people who are hypersensitive to anxiety and depression, let's say they're higher in neuroticism. Well, one of the things you want to do when you get educated is arm yourself with defenses. And I mean, practical defenses, both ideational, so the way you think and the way you act against

that kind of onslaught. And education can really do that, right, because you're quicker on your feet and you know more. And also, if you're trying to reduce someone's anxiety and depression and they're temperamentally tilted that way, what you actually do is gradually expose them to the things that they're afraid of. You don't protect them more and more and more because that actually makes that positive spiral dissent into depression and anxiety worse. So the fact, the idea that you should remove

everything that might threaten someone's identity, and you should make that a university-wide policy, is actually exactly the opposite of what you should do, speaking clinically if you're trying to help people become more resilient. This is a serious issue. And, well, obviously, this is all serious. But the fact is, universities in the UK are, to some extent, going in the opposite direction. So they do have, as James point said, this category of what's called microaggressions, these are things which can even be a matter of a discipline reaction if you're referring to it. Where you say something. At NYU, there's posters all over the place, in the bathrooms, for example, encouraging people to report such things to the appropriate, you know, well-paid

bureaucratic authorities. Okay, so we tried to introduce a system where you could report, you could report these things anonymously. So not confidentially anonymously. Nobody knows who made the report. So it's like he's Germany. The report comes in and then somebody could, in principle, be disciplined for it. No one would ever use that. You know, you could imagine that. So as you say, you know, if making fun of someone's religion, for instance, is something I can't do, you know, that's a kind of challenge, which might upset them. And as you say, part of the point of words is to some extent, and they do some harm. They're meant to be upsetting. They're meant to shake your views about things. You know, if the conversations you have at

university, you know, never upset you, never make you feel a little bit less confident, never make you, make you, perhaps even make you cry sometimes, university isn't doing its job. Okay, so now what have we found out? Well, we found out that God, the father and God, the father, the creator, are not in fact dead, which is what Nietzsche pronounced, but alive in some weird way in this horrible creature at the bottom of the ocean. And so what does Pinocchio decide to do? It decides to go find him.

That's actually what you're doing at university, by the way. For all the chaos that you experience when you come to university and all the uncertainty and all the doubt What you're trying to do is to resurrect your dead father from the bottom of the ocean And if you do that you won't be a Marianette and if you don't you will be a degraded View of humanity. I feel where we are effectively like Marianettes humanity, I feel, where we are effectively like Marianettes, and that we're just being played, and that we don't have any agency anymore. And therefore, we can't be responsible for our own words, not just our actions. We can't be responsible for our own words and their

ramifications. So we have to be controlled, and we have to be stifled by the state. And it's very, it makes me very nervous. So I've been thinking through the importance of free speech, I suppose, from a psychological perspective. And it seems to me that, well, we can walk through some axioms and you can tell me what you think about them if you would. So, I mean, the first thing we might posit is that it's useful to think. It's better to think than not to think. And that might seem self-evident, but

but thought can be troublesome and stir up trouble. And your thoughts can be inaccurate. So it's perhaps not that unreasonable to start the questioning there. But unreasonable to start the questioning there, but I think it was Alfred North Whitehead who said that thinking allows our thoughts to die instead of us. And so he was thinking about the evolution of thought in some sense from a biological perspective, so imagine a creature that's incapable of thought has to act something out, a representation of the world or an intent. It has to be embodied. And then if that fails, well, it fails in action. And so the consequence of that might be death. It might be very severe. Whereas, once you can think, you can represent the world abstractly,

you can divorce the abstraction from the world, and then you can produce avatars of yourself, sometimes in image like in dreams, let's say, or in literature, in fiction, in movies, and so on, produce avatars of ourselves that are fictional, and then run them as simulations in the abstract world and observe the consequences. And we do that in our stories.

We do that when we dream. We do that when we imagine in images and depict a dramatic scenario playing itself out. But then we also do that in words because we encode those images. It's one more level of abstraction. We encode those images into words and those words become partial dramatic avatars. And then the words can battle with one another.

So, the thought seems to work, let's say verbal thought. You ask yourself a question. You receive an answer in some mysterious manner. There's an internal revelation of sorts. That's the spontaneous thought. You know, when you sit down to write a book, thoughts come to you, perhaps because you pose yourself a question. And no one knows how that works, but we experience it that thoughts manifest themselves in the

theater of our imagination. So that's the revelatory aspect. And then there's the critical aspect, which is, well, now you've thought this, and perhaps you've written it down, can you generate counter positions? Are there universes that you can imagine where this doesn't apply? Are there situations where it doesn't apply? Are there better ways of formulating that thought? But I would say, with regard to critical thought, and to some degree with regard to productive thought,

an indeterminate proportion of that is dependent on speech. I don't think it's unreasonable to point out that thought is internalized speech. And the dialectical process that constitutes critical thinking is internalized speech. So you and I are engaging in a dialectic enterprise. You'll pause it something and all respond to it and you'll respond to that. And we're in a kind of combat.

There's some cooperation about it as well. And we're attempting to formulate a truth more clearly, at least in principle, if we're being honest. We do, if we're being honest, we do that when we're speaking. So our thought, the quality of our thought is actually dependent on our ability to speak our minds. Absolutely. And then, short, go ahead.

Well, I couldn't agree more because I think speech is the way in which we collaborate on our thoughts. That's how it works. You refine those thought processes that you've described. I mean, I'm no psychologist, but I understand this basic premise that, that it we have these various thoughts that are continually in conflict within ourselves, unless we're able to articulate them and to engage in others through that process, through that transactional process of speech, then those thoughts are never refined and they remain

in this kind of infancy. And this is why there is refined as we can make them as individuals. But that's also assuming that you even have the words which you also learned in a dialectical process. Right. Exactly. It's not as though the truth is ever fully graspable, but we can we can get nearer to it through that collaborative process of speaking and articulating the thoughts. And in fact, even in the act of like you say writing or articulating yourself with your self-authoring program, for instance, the act of writing things out is what clarifies the points of view for you.

I've actually found that the way that I think about these issues now is largely a product of the fact that I've written so much about it and changed my mind through the act of learning how to express myself on these points. And the consequence of not having that opportunity, I think is something I would barely want to contemplate. And I think to give an example of the moment, which is that because any kind of attempt, do you have a discussion or debate about the perceived conflict between trans rights and gender critical feminism? Because to even attempt that discussion at the Because any kind of attempt, do have a discussion or debate about the perceived conflict between

trans rights and gender critical feminism. Because to even attempt that discussion at the moment, we'll have such grave social consequences. And certainly in terms of career prospects, major consequences, people will not have that discussion. I have people I know in politics in the media and they say to me, quite honestly, I will not talk about this, I have concerns, I have qualms, I want answers to questions, but I absolutely will not open my mouth about this.

And if you don't do that, this is why no one understands the issue. This is why no one has reached any kind of consensus on this issue. All we have is a sense in which to have the quote-unquote wrong opinion makes you a pariah. And therefore, I I better not have that opinion. Well then that's not a sincerely held conviction. That's just that's just that if the definition of wrong is continually transforming and in an unpredictable manner, then it's best just to sidestep the issue entirely and then that leaves it murky and ill-defined and and assuming that

you believe that thought has any utility. And so when you're sitting down to write, when I'm sitting down to write, and I produce a sentence, it might have come from some theoretical perspective. Maybe I'm approaching something from a Freudian perspective or a Marxist perspective or an Enlightenment perspective, etc. I mean, it's a psychological trope, I suppose, that we all think the thoughts of dead philosophers, right? We think we have our own opinions, but that's really very, very, very rarely the case. It's not that easy to come up with something truly original and generally make incremental progress at best. And so your ability to abstractly represent the world and then to generate avatars that can be

defeated without you dying is dependent on your incorporation of a multitude of opinions. And that in itself is a consequence of, I mean, that works to the degree that communication is actually free and that you can get access to as much thought as you can possibly manage. So I can't see how you can deny the centrality of free speech as a fundamental right or a fundamental right, perhaps, unless you simultaneously deny the utility of thought. But maybe if you are also inclined to remove the individual from the central position of the political discourse, then maybe you can also make the case at least implicitly that individual thought doesn't matter and that mostly it's just causing trouble. But I think individual thought is key and actually even in the outline you've described there, there is an individual agency in reaching a conclusion that

has been articulated before, insofar as if you are engaged with a multitude of writers and philosophers and artists and ideas, and you've come out with a perspective. Well, that perspective may not be original to you, but the process that you've gone through to reach that viewpoint is individual to you. There is a power in that. There's something important about that. You know, I very much- Not there's something crucial. If you're a practicing psychotherapist, one of the things you have to learn

is to not provide people with your words too much. What you want is for them to formulate the conclusion. And you can guide them through the process of investigation. You talked about the self-authoring process, and which is online at self-authoring.com, that it steps people, say, through the process of writing an autobiography of analyzing their current virtues and faults and of making a future plan.

The utility of all of that is dependent on the person who's undertaking the exercise, generating their own verbal representations. Right. And that seems to cement it somehow as yours if you've come up with the words. And so it's the upper most expression of personhood, the ability to have the words that you should speak, reveal themselves to you and to have the right to express them as you see fit. Yes, in which case, if you are merely repeating an accepted script,

then to what extent can you say to it, can you even say to be an individual at all? This to me is... Well, I think that's part of the philosophical conundrum is that if you believe that all people do is pre-digested scripts, especially if your view is that the fundamental human motivation is power and the entire social landscape is nothing but a competition between equally,

what would you say, selfish and single-minded power strivers, then there is no individual. There's no individual in that conceptual world. And it seems to me that that's the world that we're being pushed to inhabit and are criticized on moral grounds for criticizing. You seem to have an ability to see slippery slopes we might call them better than most. How do you think you know when you're at the top of one of these precipices pointed downward, about to degenerate we might say into some pretty worse things?

And what are the signs of that? Well, I think one of the, for me, one of the signs was violation of fundamental principles. These principles, like the principle of freedom of speech, which is not just one freedom among many. The conservatives make a huge mistake on this front all the time, because they talk about, how about viewpoint diversity?

Without noticing that now they've made diversity, the superordinate moral imperative and have subordinated freedom of speech to that, which means they've lost, they instantly lose when they do that. Freedom of speech isn't one freedom among many and it's not a right, not any, not in the truest sense. It's a necessity and it's a moral responsibility. Your faith is all the

others possible. That's right. That's right. It's the precondition for all other freedoms and it's, you have the right to speak freely so that the truth can be investigated. And the truth needs to be investigated because the truth is very complicated. And it's dynamic in some sense because the future is different from the past. And so there's a cutting edge we have to stay on to stay adapted because the

future is literally not predictable from the past. And the truth is not partisan, right? Everyone should be invested in discovering the truth. Everyone should, it should matter equally to everyone. It does, it does matter. I mean, the truth is not partisan in that different partisan stakeholders will have a different, a prior presumptions about which pathway

for it is correct, but that's all based on previous experience. And previous experience is a partial but not total died. And so the proper way forward literally emerges as a consequence of the free discourse between diverse agents. And so as soon as that's interfered with, the process of thought itself is interfered with and thought is the process that isn't it? I mean, what's thought for? Is it not the process that adapts us to the horizon of change?

I mean, that's what thought does. And there's no distinction between free speech and thought. In fact, most of our, even our internal thought is mostly conducted as a variant of an argument. Or as opposed to thinking that truth has to be, instrumental in order to achieve some goal. We might think even more fundamentally truth just is an expression of our essences of being humans.

And if we're not doing it, or thought if we're not doing it, right, we're not human anymore. Well if we're not doing it, right? We're not human anymore. Well, the instrumentality issue is dead relevant. I mean, one of the reason when I did this interview, for example, and all the discussions I have with my podcast, they're not instrumental. Like, I didn't come on this podcast because I thought, well, I'm going to talk to several thousand truckers, let's say. And here's what I want them to think. And so I better make sure that I talk in this manner. And I have to make sure I hit these talking points. And there's none of that zero. And because I want to find out what happens in the moment, right, we're just going to have

a discussion just this week. this was so comical. So CNN people came after Jill Rogan. And- Yes, did they? I didn't hear. Yeah. And one of them said, essentially, man, what's going on here? We thought this whole bureau is devoted to fact checking

in the truth and all these experts hired and and why the hell aren't people listening to us when they listen to Joe Rogan and he's just winging it. And I thought just winging it, eh? You try just winging it in front of 11 million people for five years and see if you're still standing buddy. You think just winging it is so easy. Well, first of all, why aren't you doing it? If it's so damn easy. And second, isn't it something that with all your resources, you can only garner like one

tenth of the audience of one man who has like zero production expertise in his studio. He just puts it all out online. And all he does is have honest conversations. I mean, in so far as he's capable of that, you know, Joe stumbles and he knows that and admits it. And sometimes it gets too, you know, buttoned down on a given point. But fundamentally, he's just trying to do

what we're doing here. We just have a- No, you don't have to say leave him alone whoever wants to listen to Joe. Go listen to Joe for goodness' sake. Yeah, part of me, part of me now thinks, hey, keep at it guys. Every time you attack him, a million more subscribers for Joe, they kick him off Spotify. He would have a new platform like in two days with twice as many listeners. And so Joe's got to the point where,

as long as he's continues to be careful, and he is being, I don't think he can be canceled. In fact, I think all the attempts to cancel him only were down to his credit and increased the rapidity with which he's destroying the entire legacy media. Now, this is very interesting because the conscience here plays a very dichotomous role. So on the one hand, Pinocchio is often ahead of his conscience, so to speak, so he's taking the leading

role and the dialogue is kind of choppy and neither of them know exactly what they're doing. But in this situation, it's very paradoxical because you can see Pinocchio has been half turned into brain jackass at this point. Something you might well consider when you remember your adolescence. So at this point, the cricket, his conscience, does two things. It warns him how horrible this is going to be and how utterly dangerous it is. And then at the same time, it helps him prepare and goes along with him. And so it's quite comical. So watch what happens here. And what were you, okay, so tell me about your thoughts about people's inability to speak.

What have you been thinking or experiencing prior to this explosion of interest in your particular case? What had you been sensing? And was that the culture at large? Was that at Mount Allison? What had you been experiencing and was was that the culture at large? Was that at Mount Allison? What had you been experiencing that was worrisome to you? That is at large. You know, when we hear stories about people being, being silence in one way or another or when we see that people are being, I don't know if that's the term in English, but this is reputable, I mean,

and being made into doubleizing them, you know, saying words, you know, this or that, traces or that, just because I'm asking. Right, you're having the reputation attacked. Yes, exactly, and so that, and that is actually, it's ironically a contradiction with where I come from where we know we have a powerful group or more powerful than other groups but we have not had issues but people still express their opinions there despite stories, you know extreme stories of you know kidding here and there you know but I mean they can teach freely, they can criticize freely. And I do criticize things there. And I have never imagined in my whole life that my problems would be from Canada.

And not like coming from when I come from which is what I mean. So what did you write about that got that caused trouble? And for how long did tell us all about that? It's very hard to know precisely, but I, but, um, you know, some of the things it's public information and not saying anything that was that went in, and, emails or in social media from the university. So I, or, or went in the media actually if you read the stories of being accused of being racist, of being, you know, all these terms like encouraging

sexual violence. So those were the accusations against you. They were accusations of racism. They were accusations that you were promoting sexual violence? Yes. What else were you accused of? It seems odd to be promoting sexual violence, but I can explain why perhaps people, maybe younger people think in black and white and don't see the nuances, and I can understand that when we are young, sometimes it's like that. But I try, I think I try to bring some perspective

by comparing places worse than Canada. Canada has issues of course, like all the countries, but Canada is not as bad as we think. Had it been that bad, I would have not immigrated here. My family would have not immigrated here. My family would have not, I would have not chosen to stay. So, so maybe I may have said in wars, war times or under certain radical groups, you may have rape, or culturally. And by no means I meant to be saying, minimizing the experience of people going through, through horror, both things like

rape and then that sexual act. So that's absolutely not the case. But I think it's all about the blog, in all honesty, all what we hear in the media is not the main thing is the blog, is it's disturbing. Okay, so I've cut this a little bit, but what happens in the movie is that he goes to the bottom of the ocean and he starts to ask about monstro. And as soon as he asks any of the fish down there, the denizens of the sub-oceanic world, where monstro is, they just run away.

And so monstro is he who cannot be named, right? And I'm sure you've encountered that in your reading before, right? And I'm sure you've encountered that in your reading before, right? That's the hallmark of, in the Harry Potter series. Right? See now, you've done it. Yeah.

So this represents something so terrible that it can't even be talked about. OK, so what happens is Pinocchio ends up not only at the bottom of the ocean, but he has to go to the deepest part of the bottom of the ocean, where the most terrible thing rests. And so we're cutting to the point where he does that. You had it yourself recently with that ludicrous Marvel

comics thing where you became the Red Skull. And that, to me, was a perfect example of the banality of an artistic endeavor that becomes an exercise in political pedagogy, because that was quite clearly. I mean, you couldn't even say it was satirical, because it cannot be satirically effective if the thing that they are comparing you to is the precise opposite of the thing you believe. I mean, of all the sort of public figures I can think of, you have the most clear track record of opposing tyranny in all its forms, which anyone who knows anything about your work will know, you've

spent years lecturing about the evils of authoritarianism, including Nazism. So the idea that you would then become this super magic Nazi is propagandistic. It's totally banal artistically. First, it's not theoretically right, but also it's just, you know what it reminds me of actually, I don't know if you remember after the Fat War against Salmon Rushdie, there was a film made in Pakistan called International Gorillas, where they turned Salman Rushdie into this evil villain playboy who was colluding with the Israeli military services. And at the end of the film, these flying copies of the Quran float down and shoot laser beams into his head and kill him off. And that is such a ridiculous laughable film. You know,

you put your enemy as the main villain and you just misrepresent him in that way. Well, that's just what they did to you. It's as banal as that. And that's, I think people are sick of that. Well, the response, thankfully, seems to indicate that, you know, it didn't, that people, it didn't do me any harm as far as I can tell. I mean, it was very shocking to me that it happened. It took me about 12 hours to sort of regain my

composure because I actually couldn't believe it to begin with. I was sure that it was a fabrication, especially, but then it was even more shocking when I found out who authored it. You know, it wasn't with someone who had an intellectual reputation. But he, but he's an activist, isn't he? He's an intersectional activist. He definitely, his opinions definitely place him on the side of the radical left. So it's very difficult to, so there's an attack on the essence of free speech.

I mean, I remember reading Derrida, Derrida criticized our culture, Western culture as fell logo centric. And it's really actually quite a precise word. So the phallic part of it is masculine, obviously related to the phallus, to the, and logos is, well, that's the central concept of Greek rationalism, but it's also the central concept of Christianity. And the logos is something like the magical power of genuine and true speech.

It's something like that. And there are representations of the magical power of speech that predate Greece and Christianity. You see it in Mesopotamia, the equivalent to the Savior and ancient Mesopotamian religious thinking was Marduk and he could speak magic words. He had eyes all the way around his head, which meant that he paid attention to everything, but he could speak magic words. And so that idea of the centrality of speech to the, and its association with the very fabric of reality, that's been an idea that has strived to make itself manifest for thousands and thousands of years.

I mean, in Judeo-Christian tradition, in the biblical tradition, the word is given cosmological status as the thing that brings habitable order out of chaos, and it's identified with divinity itself. And so the assault on free speech is an assault on a principle that's fundamental beyond say its centrality, its central importance to the Enlightenment. And it's an assault on the idea of the logos itself. I agree. This is why I always mistrusted the post-structuralist. When I was studying for English, it was the Deridan

Foucault and Liatar and these were taken as a given and this idea that there is no truth beyond language, you know, language is all language the way in which we construct our perception of reality and our perception of truth and actually there is no truth at the heart of it. I just found it so depressing, depressingly pessimistic because it also means that you can construct any kind of reality you like. And it also... Well, and maybe that's part of the motivation for it is... Yeah.

The hypothetical lack of constraint by anything that that seems to imply, right? I mean, if there's no canonical reality, well, there's no responsibility, that's for sure. You could argue that there's no meaning and that's for sure. You could argue that there's no meaning and it's deeply pessimistic, but maybe the payoff for that is no responsibility, but there's also no constraint of any sort. There's certainly no ethical constraint. And I mean, I keep trying to dig to see what's at the bottom of this this anti-Logo sentiment, and it's a very it's a very difficult thing to make to make it bright to maybe it's not even as deliberate

as the way that it sounds. Maybe it is just the fact that these theories for whatever reason became fashionable in universities about 20 years ago and now for whatever reason they have escaped into the mainstream and you know I mean most of the people that push this stuff don't read for co. And they don't know about the people whose ideas they've imbibed and actually very much misunderstood. The whole point of the postmodernist was to trash the notion of grand narratives. And what we have now in the social justice movement is an incredible grand narrative. We are on the right side of history, we are the righteous ones, and everyone else needs to be decimated. It seems to me that this stuff, I don't think it's conspiratorial as that. I think it's just sort of circumstances of history, one thing after another,

and this is where we're at now. But the end result that we have to deal with, which I think you've alluded to, is this idea that if there is no such thing as reality beyond language, then you are at liberty to just to construct whatever of a pseudo reality that you desire or it is easiest for you. And we see elements of this reverberating, I think in a lot of the discourse at the moment of things like lived experience, you know, you can present as much data as you want, but it will be disregarded if it doesn't tally with what lived experience really means, which is what I want to be true. Well, there's also this insistence that seems part of it that, I mean, I objected to some legislation that was passed in Canada and that's sort of what propelled me into public visibility, let's say.

to public visibility, let's say. And to begin with, I was mostly concentrating on the violation of the principle of free speech that the legislation seemed to me to represent because it compelled certain utterances. And I was never a fan of hate speech laws to begin with. And this was something beyond hate speech laws because hate speech laws stop you from saying things, whereas compelled speech laws force you to say something which is much worse,

even though the first one is also in advised, ill advised as far as I'm concerned. So now you might ask, how did Japan get in the whale? And the answer to that is it's never really made that clear in the movie. But I can tell you some things about that, is that if you conceptualize your historical tradition as a personality, like a body of laws and customs, say, it's not alive, it's dead, right? Because it's composed of the past. And because it's dead,

it can't come up with anything new. So if it encounters something new, it's stopped. And that's what's happened to Jopetto. He's engulfed by this entity that represents the absolute unknown. And he cannot figure out how to get out. And the reason for that is none of the things he knows, so none of the things that history has produced as a body of knowledge, are sufficient to deal with the fundamental problem. That doesn't mean they're useless. It just means that just like the puppet is lost without the father, the father is also lost without the puppet.

And that's the relationship between you and history, your history, is lost without the father, the father is also lost without the puppet. And that's the relationship between you and history, your history. When you study history, you think, well, you're studying a record of events in the past, and that's not right. What you're studying is the circumstances that gave rise to you as a being.

And unless you understand your history in every way you possibly can, then you're an incomplete creature. You don't know enough to move forward. In the same way, your culture, being composed of dead fathers, so to speak, can't progress without you, because you're its eyes. And there's an Egyptian story that features the God Horus, who I've talked to you about before, who actually resurrects his father from the dead

by giving him an eye. So a Jepetto can't figure out how to get out of this whale without help. All right, now something very sophisticated happens here. And I have to explain it to you at multiple levels at the same time. So now, Jepego is hungry. And when the whale opens its mouth, a lot of fish come in.

Now, one of the things I want you to think about, you can just put this in the back of your mind, is that one of the oldest symbolic representations of Christ is a fish. And all of his followers were fishermen. And so there's this weird relationship between the messianic figure who's at the base of at least at the base of Christian culture and the idea of things that are pulled up from the depths. Now, here's what happens in this part of the movie.

It's so amazing. So, Jepetto is looking for fish. And the reason for that is he doesn't think he can get out of the movie. It's so amazing. So, Jepetto is looking for fish. And the reason for that is he doesn't think he can get out of the whale. And so he might as well have some fish while he's in there. And so he's given up on getting out. Now, what happens is that the whale swallows Pinocchio as if he's a fish.

So, Pinocchio is put into the same category as fish. And it happens to Jepetto a couple of times. He mistakes Pinocchio for a fish. You'll see. So what that means in some sense is that jupetto can't distinguish between the fish that will feed you for the day and whatever it is that Pinocchio represents. And so you can think about Pinocchio as a fisherman instead of as a fish. And so you can think about it this way and here's an old saying, if you give a manifest, you feed him for one day, but if you teach him to fish, you feed him forever.

And so the idea is it's better to develop the skill to acquire something than it is to have the thing. Now, what Pinocchio represents is he's like a meta fish. I know this is a strange way of thinking about it. Japan's problem isn't that he's hungry. His problem is that he can't get out of the whale. And so what he's fishing for isn't something to eat. It's something that will help him get out of the whale. But he can't recognize the difference

between the proximate solution, which is so that he'll just no longer be hungry. So he's got a very short-term outlook and a solution to the much broader problem. So what happens is the whale swallows a bunch of fish and pinocchio is in there and Jepetto is fishing away and he catches pinocchio. And pinocchio announces himself and Jepetto says tells him to be quiet because he's interfering with them fishing and then when he turns to hug pinocchio because he wakes up, he actually hugs a fish and then he discards the fish.

So then he figures out that Pinocchio, because he wakes up, he actually hugs a fish, and then he discards the fish. So then he figures out that Pinocchio is there. Then, Jepetto decides that, well, they're going to have to live inside the whale. And it's another idea of his blindness at this point, because he's composed of the dead past, so to speak. So what Pinocchio does is start to destroy the ship itself, which is what they're floating in in the whale, to start a fire. And the fire makes the whale mad enough to spit them out,

and the whale then transforms itself into a dragon and tries to kill them, because it's a fire breathing entity at that point. And so part of the understory is it's better to figure out how to fish than to fish or that more profoundly, it's better to figure out how to do something than to merely

benefit from the thing itself. Penocchio represents that which can do new things. So he's a hero and he's willing to destroy part of the current order. That's the ship. In order to produce a new strategy that will actually free them from the whale. Now he wants to get his father out of there too. So that's what happens in the next five minutes, I would say. So all of this was happening around me,

but I felt like a kind of stoic in difference to it because I felt a sort of awakening in me that made all of the hubbub sort of irrelevant. Now it sounds like you had decided to do this. Yeah, I think I had been sort of unconsciously waiting for an opportunity and when it happened, when I blurred things out and it happened, then I embraced it and I realized that I was not ashamed and I was not contrived and I was proud. I was not ashamed and I was not contrai and I was proud. I was actually proud.

And when did you write the essay that was very wise? I don't want to rush you if there's more. To hear it. I realize I don't want to tax you as either. But I had, I knew I wanted to write about the whole thing. So I, I had taken a lot of notes over the years. And so my first draft was about 5,000 words. And it contained a lot of information, centered around the actual Zoom meeting, and then, you know, the effects on the students and, you know, what had happened to me.

And then I realized like, what the reason why I did, well, I said the thing in the meeting in the first place was because I was trying to model for the students and that was what was animating me. And so I, you know, I handed it off to a friend who edited and really hacked it way down. Cut out a lot of this stuff, and then I did another draft

where I was really trying to get to the main ideas and boil them down as crispy as I could, and then Barry took a look at it, and how did she make it? Conjages, Barry. Through the fair, through fair, because I had been volunteering with them for a couple of months now. And fair just so everyone knows is a foundation against intolerance and racism.

And you know, we, you know, I was in the process of, I still am, you know, helping to build the organization and select chapter leadership in various states so that we can really, we're in this sort of networking phase because I'm calling people, given us their names and I'm calling people and and what I'm finding is that everyone has a story. So I can't just be on the phone with them for, you know, 15 minutes and all the volunteers are finding this that there's a tremendous outpouring. It's very emotional. They'll talk about what's happening with their kids. They'll talk about the data. They didn't suspect that anything was wrong in the culture until maybe a year ago.

And now it's clear to them and they want to do something. And so you really have to listen before you can, you know, just operationally try to plug people in. And, you know, a lot of times it's it's it really feels like I'm not a therapist but it feels like at the peak I was making like five calls a day and each of those were about an hour and you you wind up really having Having an engagement with another human being so this is starting to inform you writing Yeah, definitely thinking about what's going on at the school. Yeah, and so I'm sorry, I'm sorry to feel like

I have a lot of people that are, that this is something that's becoming kind of a duty, like almost a moral duty. So yeah, so that's kind of the background to that. And then the article came out. And I waited. And there's just a tremendous, I've had an email at the bottom of the article. And I was expecting like 50% positive, 50% negative.

I would be happy if it was 50% positive. Now I realized later it's on Barry Weiss's sub-stack and mostly her fans, but I put the email on some other places. that maybe 500 emails in the first two days and long emails, like e-people writing, some of them are just a word or a subject line, but people had a lot to say, a lot of stories. And I've spent a couple hours each day since then going through them and responding to everyone because it's really important to do that. I

think that, you know, I feel like it's just, I can't just, you know, ignore them or just give like a one sentence thing because some of these, some of these, I try to, you know, I try to respond and please one or two sentences in a way that addresses their particular situation and then I try to respond in least one or two sentences in a way that addresses their particular situation, and then I try to direct them to fairs as an organization that can help. And all people of all different backgrounds, people wrote in from other countries. And what are they telling you in the main? They are just a lot of what I'm getting. I'm just getting a lot of pads in the back just like yes, you know, good for you. Bravo. Like, you know, this is amazing.

Keep doing it. Keep doing what you're doing. I support you. You know, 100% this is a huge problem, you know, and you're standing up for it and what you're doing is right and you know and and uh okay so you publish this and Barry Waises sub-stack and the school reacts. Mm-hmm. What happens? Well they make the claim that the claim that some of what I've written is a mischaracterization. And they're not trying to, I think it's a little blurry to me now actually, because so much has happened since so I kind of have to reconstruct what happened. But in this time, so the article came out on the, I believe on the 13th. And, you know, I had a contract assigned for the following year. And part of that contract, my contract is up, this current contract is up at the end of August,

but the deadline for me to sign next year's contract was April 15th. And as one of the stipulations of my contract was that I had to attend restorative justice practices designed by the school to address the harm that I had caused students of color and other students. I see. So you were obliged to be guilty enough to go to be retrained. Right. And, you know, the details of the of this process would be revealed to me after I signed.

So I was signing something that I didn't, you know, I wouldn't know what I was signing. So I waited for an admission of culpability and guilt. Right, right. Now I've unspecified nature. Right, and now participation, I thought about, I was like, well, participation doesn't mean that I have to, you know, say, may a culp I can participate in it.

Maybe it's an opportunity for me to engage, you know, and I thought about it, but then I said, well, that would mean that I was signing on to it mean that I was legitimizing it By signing it and so I decided not to sign it Because if I put my word on it, then it would mean that I was Saying that that was an appropriate request to make of someone So I did the world did you manage to make that decision? So I did. Did you manage to make that decision?

Well, I just really just delayed it and thought about it. And then I talked to friends about it. And then I realized it, no, I'm just going to let it lapse. Because, you know, I'm reinvented myself before. I've had several careers. I have math skills, coding skills. I figured, you know, if I didn't work for grace, I could find, I could land on my feet somehow. I didn't, I don't have kids. So there were, I felt like I had options. You know, I felt like no matter what happened, I had faith that I would be okay. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ you