The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Modern Times - Camille Paglia

Episode Date: October 19, 2017

Dr. Camille Paglia is a well-known American intellectual and social critic. She has been a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (where this discussion took place) since 1984. She is the author of seven books focusing on literature, visual art, music, and film history, among other topics. The most well-known of these is Sexual Personae (http://amzn.to/2xVGEEV), an expansion of her highly original doctoral thesis at Yale.

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at selfauthoring.com. I've really been trying to understand the underlying psychology of postmodernism and its relationship with Neomarxism, and then the spread of that into the universities and the effect on the culture and what I would like to start with is a description of your understanding of that because like I've presented to the people who are listening to me my understanding of it.

I interviewed Stephen Hicks recently and he wrote an interesting book called Explaining Postmodernism which I liked quite a bit. It's been criticized for being too right-wing although I don't think he's right-wing at all. I think maybe you could characterize him as middle of the road conservative, but I would say he's more like a classic liberal. But I'm really curious about your views about, well, what postmodernism is, first of all, I know you've identified it with the general tricksters, Derrida and LaCa and Foucault and Foucault and Predictor you've talked about, but I'd like to know what you think about postmodernism and also why you think it's been so attractive to people.

Well, my explanation is that there is no authentic 1960s point of view in any of the elite universities. Rather, the most liberated minds of my generation, 1960s, did not go on to graduate school. I witnessed this with my own eyes. I saw genuine Marxists at my college, which was the State University of New York at Binghamton, upstate New York, Harper College, which had a huge cohort of very radical downstate New York Jews,

who in fact, the Harper used to be called Berkeley East. So I saw genuine passionate Marxists with my own eyes. They were not word choppers. They were not snide postmodernists. They were in your face aggressive. They used the language of the people. They had a populist energy. They dressed working class.

They were non-materialistic. These are people who lived by their own convictions. They were against the graduate school. When I went on to graduate school and they became known that I was going to go to Yale, I was confronted by a leader of the radicals on campus, in broad daylight in front of everyone, who denounced me for, he said,

the grad school is not where it's happening, you don't do that. If you have to go to graduate school, you should go to Buffalo. Now, I had applied to SUNY Buffalo because the great leftist critic, Leslie Feedler, was there about a huge impact on me. He created identity politics, but without its present distortions.

And Norman Holland, the second one, little critic was there. I would be very happy to have gone on to Buffalo, but I needed the library, yeah, also I continued on to yeah. There were no radicals in the graduate schools. From 1968 to 1972, when I was there, only one radical, Todd Gittlin, went on to have a career success.

The actual radicals of the 1960s, either when dropped out of college and went off to create communes, or they were taking acid and destroyed their brains. Now, I have also written about that, the destruction of the minds, of the most talented members of my generation, through LSD.

It was going on all around me. What's happened is the actual legacy of the 60s got truncated. The idea that these poststructuous and postmodernists are heirs of the 1960s revolution is an absolute crock. What they represent as Foucault said, that the biggest influence on his thinking was Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot,

which was a post-World War II play written in Paris that was about the disillusionment and nihilism experienced after Hitler went through occupied France and all of Europe was in ruins. It had nothing to do. What's in Winnievergadot has nothing to do with the authentic legacy of the 1960s, which was about genuine multiculturalism,

a movement toward India, toward Hinduism, a transformation of consciousness through psychedelics, which I did not take, but which I identified with totally through the music, et cetera, right? It identified with totally through the music, etc. It was a turn toward the body, it was a turn toward sensory experience, not this word-chopping thing, and this cynical removal from actual experience. That French import came in to the graduate schools, it did not affect any genuine 1960s person. The real 1960s revolution was about young.

It was about a way of seeing the cosmos in mythological terms. And the Jungian contribution went on into the new age movements of the 1970s aside from the universities. So who took over the universities were these careerists. I saw them with my own eyes. I saw what happened.

I was at Yale when Derri-Dai was being shipped over to address the students, the grad students, and the faculty. And I said to a fellow student, after hearing one of these guys speak, it was in Derri-Dai. It was another one of the theorists. I said, they are like high priests murmuring to each other. This was an elitist form from the start.

It was not progressive, it was not revolutionary, it was reactionary, it was a desperate attempt to hold on to what had happened before the 1960s sensory revolution. But this postmodernist thing, this trashing of the text, this encouragement of a superior destructive attitude toward the work of art. We're going through it, primally, with red pen and hand, finding all the evidence of sexism, check, racism,

check, homophobia, check, that is not the empathic, emotional, sensory based, a revolution of the 1960s. I am sick and tired of these people claiming any kind of mantle from the 1960s. They're frauds. These people are what happened in the 1970s was a collapse of the job market in Akadim. All of a sudden, the jobs were scarce. And this thing was there, the new and improved and shiny

thing to be a theorist. People seized on it. It was institutionalized. And it's an enormous betrayal of the 1960s. So you touched on this idea of the destruction of the work of art. And one of the things I really liked about reading Nietzsche was his discussion of Rasantemall, of resentment.

And it seems to me that a tremendous amount of the mode of power that drives the postmodernist, let's call it, it's not a revolution, transformation. It seems to me to be driven by resentment about virtually anything that has any, well, what would you say, any merit of competence or aesthetic quality? And I don't know if that's, it seems to me that that's partly rooted in the academics disdain for the business world, which I think is driven by their relative economic inequality, because most people who are as intelligent

as academics are from a pure IQ point of view, make more money in the private sphere. And so I think that drives some of it. But there also seems to be this, there's a destruction, an aim for destruction of the aesthetic quality of the literary or artistic work. It's reduction to nothing but some kind of power game. And then surrounding that, the reduction of everything to something that approximates a power

game, which I can't help but identify with jealousy and resentment as a fundamental motivator, does that seem reasonable to you? These professors who allege that art is nothing, but an ideological movement by one elite against another group. These people are Philistines. They're Philistines. They're middle brow, hopelessly middle brow. They have no sense of beauty.

They have no sense of the aesthetic. Now Marxism does indeed assert this. Marxism tries to reconfigure the universe in terms of materialism. It does not recognize any kind of spiritual dimension. Now, I'm an atheist, but I see the great world religions as enormous works of art as the best way to understand the universe and man's place in it. I find them enormously moving, they're enormous poems.

And what I have called called for the true revolution, would have been to make the core curriculum of the world education, the world, the great religions of the world. I feel that is the only way to achieve understanding. And it's also a way to present the aesthetic. I feel that the real 60s vision was about exaltation, elevation, cosmic consciousness,

right? All of these things, we're rejected by these midgets, intellectual midgets who seized onto Lecaw, Derri Datt and Foucault. And my career has been in the art school, so my entire career, beginning at Bennington College. So I represent a challenge to this from the perspective of art. It is an absolute nonsense as poststructural some maintains that reality is mediated by language, by words, everything that we can know,

including gender. It's absolutely madness because I'm teaching students whose majors are ceramics or dance or jazz musicians who understand reality in terms of the body of sensory activation. Now see what happened was something was going on in the art world as well. I identified with Andy Warhol and pop art. That was what was going on during my years in college. Everything about Andy Warhol was like, wow, admiration, wow, what happened immediately after that in the arts, 1970s, was as collapse into a snide sort of postmodernism. Also, this happened in the art world.

And it was an utter misunderstanding of culture. It seems to me by that movement in the art world. That is, oppositional art, in my view, is dead. What posmodernism is, isn't it a pathetic attempt to continue the old heroism of the avant-garde. The avant-garde was genuinely heroic from the early 19th century, where we're talking about, you know, whether Courbet, the Realists, you know, we're talking about Monet and the impressions. People who genuinely suffered for the radical ideas of their innovations and so on.

Right? Going right down to Picasso and down to Jackson Pollock, who truly suffered, okay, for his art. It was only after his death, okay. That suddenly, the market was created for abstract art. Pop art killed the avant-garde. The idea that the avant-garde continues is an absolute delusion of the contemporary art world, which feels that it must attack, attack, attack, challenge, the simplistic beliefs of the Hoi Pili,

somehow the art, excuse me, from the moment Andy Warhol went through and embraced the popular media, instead of having the opposition to it, the serious arts that had. That was the end of oppositional art. So we have been going on now for 50 years, the postmodernism and academe, hand in hand, with the stupidity and infantilism that masquerades as important art, at galleries. There's incredible, incredible, you know, it's mechanism of contemporary art, pushing things that are so hopelessly derivative.

That are, with this idea that once again, that the art world sometimes has a superior view of reality. The authentic leftism is populist, okay? It is based in working class style, working class language, working class direct emotion, and an openness and br brussiness of speech, not this fancy, contorted jargon of the pseudo-leftus of academia who are frauds, these people,

these people who manage to rise to the top and at Berkeley, at Harvard, at Princeton, okay. The idea of these people are radical, they are career people, they're corporate types, okay. Like who succeeded in, and they love the institutional context, they are career people, they're corporate types, okay, who succeed in, and they love the institutional context, they know how to manipulate the bureaucracy, which is totally invaded and usurped, okay, they are, they are, and academia everywhere, okay. These people are company players, they could have done well in any field, okay, they love

the city and the committees, they love bureaucratic regulation and so on. There's not one leftist, okay, an American academic, raised his or her voice against obscene growth of tuition costs, which have bankrupted a whole generation of young people. Not one voice, okay, to challenge that invasion by the bureaucrats, okay? Absolute fascist bureaucrats, okay? If they're like a cancerist, okay? There's so many of them, okay? If they're like a cancerous, they're so many of them, the faculty have completely lost any power in American academia, it's a scandal what has happened and they deserve the presence of servitude that they're in right now because they never

protested. When I first job at Bennington College, in 1976 I was there when there was an uprising by the faculty against encroachment by the Board of Trustees and the President. And it was a huge thing. It was reported on the New York Times and so on. And we pushed that President out. And there's not been a single uprising of that kind against encroachment by the trustees

and by the administrations. And all these decades, passive, slaves, slaves, they deserve their slavery. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I've thought the same thing about university professors for a long time is that they get exactly what they deserve because they never stand up and say no. And the fact that in the United States,

it's not quite as bad in Canada, I wouldn't say, but the fact that the students have been essentially handed a bill of indentured servitude here for the student loans is absolutely beyond comprehension. You know, it seems to me that the bureaucracy has basically conspired to determine how to pick the pockets of the students' future earnings, right? And they do that by offering them an extended adolescence with no quality control, something like that. So it's a real bargain with the devil. And I told a abandonment of any kind of education actually in history and culture. It's gone along with it.

That is the transformation into a cafeteria kind of a menu. We can pick this course or that course or this course without any kind of guidance from the university about a central core curriculum that teaches you history and chronology and introduces you to the basics. Because, oh, we have our professors, our such pre-Madamas, they can only teach in their little areas. So we have this total fragmentation.

The great art history survey courses are being abandoned, steadily, because why? Because graduate students are not trained to see the great narratives, because we are taught now that narratives are false. Okay, so that's another issue that I'd like to bring up, because one of the things I cannot figure out is the alliance between the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists. I can't understand the causal relationship there, because tell me if you disagree with this, okay, because I'm a psychologist, not a sociologist, and so I'm dabbling in things that are outside of my field of expertise, and there is some danger in that.

But the central postmodernist claim seems to me that because there's a near infinite number of ways to interpret a complex set of phenomena, which actually happens to be the case, that you can't make a case that any of those modes of interpretation are canonical. And so if they're not canonical, if that canonical element isn't based in some kind of reality, then it serves some other master.

And so the master that it hypothetically serves for the postmodernists is nothing but power, because that seems to be everything that they believe in. They don't believe in competence, they don't believe in authority, they don't seem to believe in an objective world because everything is language mediated. So it's an extraordinarily cynical perspective that because there's an infinite number of interpretations, none of the mercononical, you can attribute it everything to power and dominance. Okay, so that seemed like a reasonable summary

of the most important. Yeah, exactly. A radical relativism. Okay, it's a radical relativism now, but the strange thing is despite, OK, and so what goes along with that is the demolition of grand narratives. And so that would be associated, for example,

with the rejection of thinkers like Jung and Eric Neumann, because of course, they're foundational thinkers in relationship to the idea that they're embodied grand narratives. That's never touched. But then, despite the fact that the grand narrative is rejected, there's a neo-Marxism that's tightly, tightly allied with postmodernism that also seems to shade

into this strange identity politics. And I don't, two things. I don't understand the causal relationship there. Like the skeptical part of me thinks that postmodernism was an intellectual camouflage for the continuation of the kind of pathological Marxism that produced the Soviet Union, and that has no independent existence as an intellectual field whatsoever. But I still can't understand how the postmodernists can make the no-grand narrative claim, but then immerse themselves in this grand narrative without anyone pointing

out the evident contradictions. I don't understand that. So what do you think about that? Well, I can only speak about literary professors, really. And they seem to me, almost universally in the US, to be very naive. They seem to know nothing about actual history, political science, or economics. It's simply an attitude. They have an attitude.

Marxism becomes simply a badge by which they telegraph their solidarity with a working class that they have nothing to do with. Generally nothing but contempt. Yes, and the thing is that the campus leftists are almost notorious for their rather snobbish treatment of staff. They don't have any rapport with the actual working class members of the infrastructure, the janitors, and even the secretaries. There's a kind of high and mighty aristocracy.

These are people who have wandered into the English department, where products of a time during the new criticism, when history and psychology had been excluded. My ambition was, I love the new criticism as a style of textual analysis. And the new criticism had multiple interpretations that were possible, and that were encouraged. In fact, one of the great projects was made in Max series, 20th century views.

You had at least books I adore them in college. It was about Jane Austen or about Emily Bronte or about Wordsworth. And they were collections of alternate views of the same thing. The idea that there were no alternate views and there was no relativistic, situational kind of an interpretive approach is nonsense, okay, about. But the point was, we needed to restore history

to literary study, okay, and we needed to add psychology to it because there was great animus against Freud. And when I arrived in graduate school, in fact, I actually went into the director of graduate studies and protested the way Freud and Freudian were used as negative terms in a sneering way by the very was professors. So we needed to have, and actually,

it seemed like we were moving there. In the early 1970s was a great period of psychobiography, about political figures. So I thought it's happening. This here, in all of a sudden it all got short circuited by this arrival, you know, of post-structuralism and post-modernism in the 1970s. Right, so I feel I'm an old historicist.

Okay, not a new historicist, so I think new historicism. It's an absolute scam, right, and it's like, it's just a way, it's like tweezers. You like just, you pick, you put a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of that. You make a little tiny salad, and I'm some of this atomized thing, okay, it's supposed to mean something.

It's all to me, very superficial, very cynical, very distant. I like, I am the product, okay, of old historicism, German philology, I just's my first choice of a profession when I was a child, was Egyptology, archaeology. Everything I ever think about or say is related to an enormous time scheme from antiquity and indeed from the Stone Age.

And that is the problem with these people. They're maleducated, the postmodernists and academic Marxists are maleducated, embarrassingly so. They know nothing before the present. Foucault is absolutely a joke before the enlightenment. Perhaps he might be useful to people to talk about what happened after neoclassicism, which by the way, he failed to notice.

A lot of what he was talking about, turns out to simply be the hangover of neoclassicism. This is how ignorant that man was. I mean, he was not talented as a researcher. He knew absolutely nothing. He knew nothing about antiquity. How can you make any kind of large, a structure, large mechanism to analyze Western culture

without knowing about classical antiquity. He did not see anything. This was a person who had no business making large theoretical statements about anything. Well, maybe part of it is that if you generate an intelligible doctrine of radical relativism, then there is no reason to assume that there are distinctions between categories of knowledge or between different levels of quality of knowledge. So I've seen the same thing in the psychology departments, although we have the, what would you call it, the luxury of being bounded at least to some degree

by the empirical method and by biology. It's one of the things that keeps most of the branches of psychology relatively sane, because the real world is actually built into it to some degree. But if you accept the postmodernist claim of radical relativism, then you completely demolish the idea that there are quality levels that are associated with education because everything becomes the same. And that seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable justification for maintaining ignorance. You know, like Foucault, I actually found him the most readable of the Lecah Derrada Foucault triad.

You can read Foucault, I read Madness and Civilization in a couple of other books, and I thought they were painfully obvious. The idea that mental disorder is in part a social construct is self-evident to anybody who has even a smattering of psychiatric training. I mean, the real narrow medical types tend to think of a mental disorder, let's say,

as something that might be purely biological. They have a pure disease model, but nobody's who's a sophisticated thinker ever thinks that. It's partly because medicine is a brand of engineering, not a brand of science, because it's associated with health. And the diagnostic categories are hybrids between physiological observation and sociocultural condition. Everyone knows that, and so when I read Madness and Civilization, I thought, well, that's not radical, that's just bloody self-evident.

But... Well, for Coz admirers, actually think that he began the entire turn toward a sociological grounding of modern psychology. he began the entire turn toward a sociological grounding of modern psychology. The social psychology was well launched in the 1920s for example. The levels of ignorance, these people who think Foucault's so original have not read Durkheim.

They've not read Max Weber. They've not read Irving Goffman. In other words, to me, everything in Foucault seemed obvious to me because I had read the sources from which he was borrowing without attribution. So I mean, again, I know these people, I mean, in some cases, you know, knew the McGradrill school, people who went on to become these admirers of Foucault

like on Darynda. And I know what their training was. Their training was purely within the English department. That's all they ever knew. They never made any research outside of that, right? And so the idea, so the Foucault is simply this ease of mechanism, it's like a little tiny kit by which they can approach everything in culture, and then the contortions of language,

the deliberate, labyrinthian, elitist language, at the same time as pretending to be a lafcus, this is one of the biggest frauds ever practiced. So I got a story to tell you that you might like like because I've thought a lot about that use of language, you know, because language can be used as camouflage. And so here's the story. I think I got this from Robert Sapolsky. So he was talking about zebras. And zebras, of course, have stripes and hypothetically that's associated with camouflage, but it's not a straightforward association because zebra's are black and white and they're on the vell along with the lions. The lions are camouflage because they're grass-colored, but the bloody zebra's are black and white. You can see them like 15 miles away. So

okay, so biologists go out to study zebra's and they're like making notes on zebra and they watch it and then they look down at their notes and then they look up and they think, oh oh, I don't know which zebra I was looking at. So the camouflage is actually against the herd because of the zebra's a herd animal, not an individual. And so the black and white stripes break up the animal against the herd so you can't identify it. So this was a quandary for the biologist so they did one of two things. One was drive a Jeep up to the zebra herd and use a dab of red paint and dab the haunch of the zebra

or tag it with an ear tag like you use for cattle. The lions would kill it. So as soon as it became identifiable, the predator, yes. The predators could organize their hunt around that identifiable animal. That's why there's the old idea that lions and predators take down the weak animals, but they don't.

They take down the identifiable animals. So that's the thing. Is if you stick your damn head up, you get picked off by the predators. And so one of the things that academics seem to do is congregate together in herd-like entities, and then they share a language, right? And the language unites them and also keeps them,

as long as they share the same set of linguistic tools among themselves, they know that there isn't anybody in the codery that's going to attack them or destabilize the entire herd. And that seems to me to account for that impenetrable use of language. It's group protection strategy and it has absolutely nothing to do with the search

for security within a system and not the desire to expand the system. Not such a thing, but it's to me this blatantly careers because it was about advancement and it was also about the claim that somehow they have like special expertise. This is a special technical language, no one else can understand it only only weekend. But what's absurd about it, absolutely ludicrous, is that these people, these American academics, are imitating the contorted language of French translations from the French.

When Lacan is translated into English, there's a contortion there. What he was trying to do in French was to break up, the neoclassical formulations that descended from Rossine. There was something that was going on. There was a sabotage of the French language going on that was necessary in France, not necessary in English.

We have this long tradition of poetry going back to Shakespeare and Chaucer. We have our own language, far more vital than the French. Yeah, the French can strain their language all the time. By the absurdity, in the amateurism of American academics, trying to imitate a translation of La Conde, when La Conde is doing something in France, that is absolutely not necessary, and indeed wrong to be doing in English. So the other cynical abandonment of the great tradition of the English departments, I felt that the tru radicalism was not about adding on other departments.

So we have African-American studies and women studying and so on. The tru radicalism would have been to shatter the departmental structure. That's what I wanted. I feel that was the authentic revolutionary in 1960s and to do, to blend all the literature studies together, to make it easier, to make an interdisciplinary

kind of organization closer to the British model, where a person can pursue related subjects, overlapping subjects. These departmental models were to me totalitarian to begin with, separating language into fiefdoms. And what this did to create, the English, the women's studies department, absolutely out of the air, to snap your fingers and create women's studies. The English department had taken a century to develop. It was a huge argument within it.

And all of a sudden, to create a department with a politicized agenda from the start by people without any training, whatever, in that field. What should be the parameters of the field? What should be the requirements of that field? How about biology? If you're going to be discussing gender, that should have been a number one requirement

as part of any women's studies department or programs. But no, it was all hands off. It was just the administrators wanted to solve a public relations problem. They had a situation with very few women faculty, nationwide. At a time when the women's movement had just started up, the spotlight of attention was on them.

They needed women's faculty fast. They needed the women's subject on the agenda fast. So they just let there be women's faculty fast, they needed the women's subject on the agenda fast. So they just like, poof, let there be women's studies. And now we'll just hire some women, usually from English departments, you know, here and there, and we'll just throw them together. You invent it. You say what it is. So that's why women's studies got frozen at a certain point of ideology,

of the early 1970s. I was already in revolt from it. I was a precursor in terms of my endorsement of feminism before even now was created, but I couldn't even have a conversation with any of these women. They were hysterical about the subject of biology. They knew nothing about hormones. I probably got a disfights over this. People were so convinced that biology had nothing whatever to do with gender differences. See, that also seems to me to be related to the postmodern emphasis on power.

Because there's something terrible underground going on there. And that is, and I think this is the sort of thing that was reflected in the Soviet Union, too, and especially in the 20s, when there was this radical idea that you could remake human beings entirely, right, because they had no essential nature. And so if your fundamental hypothesis is that nothing exists except power, and you believe that,

then that also gives you the right, in some sense, to exercise your power at the creation of the kind of humanity that your utopian vision envisions. And then that also seems to me to justify the postmodern insistence that everything is only a linguistic construct. It again goes down to the notion of power, which Derrida and Foucault and La Cahre so bloody obsessed with.

And so it seems to me what they're trying to do is to take all the potential power for the creation of human beings to themselves without any bounding conditions whatsoever, right? There's no history, there's no biology, and everything is a fluid culture that can be manipulated at will. And so, I mean, in Canada, there are terrible arguments

right now about biological essentialism, let's say. And one of the things that happened, which was something I objected to precisely a year ago, is that the social, constructionist view of human identity has been built now into Canadian law. So there's an insistence that biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity

vary independently with no causal relationship between any of the levels. And so that's in the law, and not only is it in the law, it's being taught everywhere. It's being taught in the armed forces. It's being taught in the law, it's being taught everywhere. It's being taught in the armed forces. It's being taught in the police. It's being taught to the elementary school kids and the junior high school kids.

And underneath it all, I see this terrible striving for arbitrary power that's associated with this crazy utopianism. And I still don't exactly understand it. I don't understand what seems to be the hatred that motivates it, that you see bubbling up, for example, in identity politics. And in the desire to do nothing, but let's say demolish the patriarchy, it kind of reminds me, and this is something else I

wanted to talk to you about, you know, in your, you're an admirer of Eric Neumann and Elf-O-Roy-Yoh. Yeah. And that's the Neumann connection is really interesting, because I think he's a bloody genius. I really like the Great mother is a great book and I'm really a great warning in that book and also the origins and history of consciousness is what I was most influential books. Yeah, that's so interesting. I read an essay that you wrote. I don't remember when it was. I'm not sure I gave a Neumann at NYU, yes.

Yes, it's always been staggering to me that that book hasn't had the impact that it should have had. I mean, Jung himself in the preface to that book wrote that that was the book that he wished that he would have written. It's very much associated with Jung's symbols of transformation. And it was a major influence on my book, Maps of Meaning, which was an attempt to outline the universal archetypes that are portrayed in the kind of religious structures

that you put forward. But the thing that I really see happening, and you can tell me what you think about this, in Neumann's book, Consciousness, which is symbolically masculine for a variety of reasons, is viewed as rising up against the countervailing force of tragedy from an underlying feminine, symbolically feminine unconsciousness.

And it's something that can always be pulled back into that unconsciousness. And it's something that can always be pulled back into that unconsciousness. That would be the microcosm of that would be the Freudian etepalm other familial dynamic where the mother is so overprotective and all encompassing that she interferes with the development of the confidence, not only of her sons, but also of her daughters,

of her children in general. And it seems to me that that's the dynamic that's being played out in our society right now, is that there's this, and it's related in some way that I don't understand to this insistence that all forms of masculine authority are nothing but tyrannical power. So the symbolic representation is tyrannical father with no appreciation for the benevolent father

and benevolent mother with no appreciation whatsoever for the tyrannical mother Right, and that's that and because I thought of ideologies as fragmentary mythologies That's where they get their archetypal and psychological power, right? And so in an balanced representation you have the terrible mother and the great mother as As Neumann laid out so nicely and you have the terrible father and the great mother, as Neumann laid out so nicely, and you have the terrible father and the great father, so that's the fact that culture mangles you have to death. Well, it's also promoting you and developing you. You have to see that as balanced, and then you have the heroic and adversarial individual.

But in the postmodern world, and this seems to be something that's increasingly seeping out into the culture at large, you have nothing but the tyrannical father, nothing but the destructive force of masculine consciousness, and nothing but the benevolent great mother. And it's an appalling ideology, and it seems to me that it's sucking the vitality, which is exactly what you'd expect symbolically. It's sucking the vitality of our culture. You see that with the increasing demolition of young men

and not only young men in terms of their academic performance, which they're falling way behind an elementary school, way behind in junior high and bailing out of the universities like Mad. And so, and I, Well, the public school education has become completely permeated by this kind of anti-male propaganda. I mean, to me, public schools are just a form of imprisonment,

you know, right now. They're particularly destructive to young men who have a lot of physical energy, right? Now, you know, I identify as transgender, okay, myself, but I do not require the entire world to alter itself, okay, to fit my particular self-image. I do believe in the power of hormones. I believe that men exist and women exist,

and they are biologically different. I think there is no cure for the culture's ills right now, except if men start standing up and demanding that they be respected as men again. OK, so I got a question about that. So one of the things, we did a research project a year ago, trying to figure out if there was such a thing as political correctness from a psychometric perspective,

to find out if the loose aggregation of beliefs actually clumped together statistically, and we actually found two factors which I won't go into, but then we looked at things that predicted adherence to that politically correct creed, and there were a couple that were surprising, one was being female was a predictor. The personality attributes associated with femininity, so that would be agreeableness and higher levels of negative emotion were also both independent predictors, but so were

symptoms of personality disorder, which I thought was really important, because part of what I see happening is that like I think that women whose relationship with men has been seriously pathologized cannot distinguish between male authority and competence and male tyrannical power. Like they fail to differentiate, because all they see is the oppressive male, and they may have had experiences that there are experiences with men might have been rough enough so that that differentiation never occurred because it has to occur. And you have to have a lot of experience with men and good men too before that will occur.

But it seems to me that we're also increasingly dominated by a view of masculinity that's mostly characteristic of women who have terrible personality disorders and who are unable to have healthy relationships with men. Now, but here's the problem. This is something my wife has pointed out too. She said, well, men are going to have to stand up for themselves, but here's the problem. I know how to stand up to a man who's unfairly trespassing against me. And the reason I know that is because the parameters for my resistance are quite well-defined,

which is we talk, we argue, we push, and then it becomes physical. Like if we move beyond the boundaries of civil discourse, we know what the next step is. Okay, that's forbidden in discourse with women. And so I don't think that men can control crazy women. I really don't believe it. I think that they have to throw their hands up in what, in, in, it's not even disbelief.

It's that the cultural, there's no step forward that you can take under those circumstances. Because if the man is offensive enough and crazy enough, the, the reaction becomes physical right away or at least the threat is there. And when men are talking to each other in any serious manner, that underlying threat of physicality is always there, especially if it's a real conversation, and keeps the thing civilized to some degree. If you're talking to a man who wouldn't fight with you

under any circumstances whatsoever, then you're talking to someone to whom you have absolutely no respect. But I can't see any way. For example, there's a woman in Toronto who's been organizing this movement, let's say, against me and some other people who are going to do a free speech event, and she managed to organize quite effectively. And she's quite offensive, you might say.

She compared us to Nazis, for example, which publicly, using the swastika, which wasn't really something I was all that fond of. But I'm defenseless against that kind of female insanity because the techniques that I would use against a man who was employing those tactics are forbidden to me. So I don't know, it seems to me that it isn't man that have to stand up and say enough

of this, even though that is what they should do, it seems to me that it's same women who have to stand up against their crazy sisters and say, look, enough of that, enough man hating, enough pathology, enough bringing disgrace on us as a gender. But the problem there, and then I'll stop my little tirade, is that most of the women I know who are sane are busy doing sane things, right? They're off. They have their career. They have their family. They're quite occupied. And they don't seem to have the time or maybe even the interest to go after their crazy, heartbeat sisters. And so I don't... Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.

You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at selfauthoring.com. I've really been trying to understand the underlying psychology of postmodernism and its relationship with neomarchism, and then the spread of that into the universities and the effect on the culture and what I would like to start with is a description of your understanding of that because I've presented to the people who are listening to me my understanding of it. I interviewed Stephen Hicks recently and he wrote an interesting book called Explaining

Postmodernism which I liked quite a bit. It's been criticized for being too right-wing although I don't think he's right-wing at all. I think maybe you could characterize him as middle of the road conservative, but I would say he's more like a classic liberal. But I'm really curious about your views about, well, what postmodernism is, first of all, I know you've identified it with the general tricksters,

Derrida and Lecah and Foucault, and Foucault and Predictor know you've identified it with the general tricksters, Derrida and Foucault and Pertikta, but I'd like to know what you think about postmodernism and also why you think it's been so attractive to people. Well, my explanation is that there is no authentic 1960s point of view in any of the elite universities, rather the most liberated minds of my generation when 1960 did not go on to graduate school. I witnessed this with my own eyes. I saw genuine Marxists at my college, which was the State University of New York at Binghamton,

upstate New York, Harper College, which had a huge cohort of very radical downstate New York Jews, who in fact, the Harper used to be called Berkeley East. So I saw genuine passionate Marxists with my own eyes. They were not word choppers. They were not snide postmodernists. They were in your face aggressive.

They used the language of the people. They had a populist energy. They dressed working class. They were non-materialistic. These are people who lived by their own convictions. They were against the graduate school. So when I went on to graduate school and became known that I was going to go to Yale,

I was confronted by a leader of the radicals on campus, in broad daylight in front of everyone, who denounced me for, he said, the grad school is not where it's happening, you don't do that. If you have to go to graduate school, you should go to Buffalo. Now, I had applied to SUNY Buffalo

because the great leftist critic, Leslie Feedler, was there about a huge impact on me. He created identity politics, but without its present distortions. And Norman Holland, the second one, little critic was there. I would have been very happy to have gone on to Buffalo, but I needed the library, yeah, also I continue on to yeah. There were no radicals in the graduate schools.

From 1968 to 1972, when I was there, only one radical Todd Gittlin went on to have a career success. The actual radicals of the 1960s, either when dropped out of college and went off to create communes, or they were taking acid and destroyed their brains. Now I have also written about that, the destruction of the minds, of the most talented members of my generation through LSD. It was going on all around me. Now, what's happened is the actual legacy of the 60s got truncated.

The idea that these poststructuous and postmodernists are heirs of the 1960s revolution is an absolute crock, what they represent as Foucault said, that the biggest influence on his thinking was Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which was a post-World War II play written in Paris that was about the disillusionment and nihilism experience after Hitler went through occupied France. And all of Europe was in ruins.

It had nothing to do. The what's in Winifreddo has nothing to do with the authentic legacy of the 1960s, which was about genuine multiculturalism, a movement toward India, toward Hinduism, a transformation of consciousness through psychedelics, which I did not take, but which I identified with totally through the music,

et cetera, right? It was a turn toward the body. It was a turn toward sensory experience, not this word-chopping thing, and it's like cynical removal from an actual experience. That French import came in to the graduate schools. It did not affect any genuine 1960s person. The real 1960s revolution, was about Jung. It was about a way of seeing the cosmos in mythological terms.

And the Jungian contribution went on into the New Age movements of the 1970s, aside from the universities. So who took over the universities were these careerists. I saw them with my own eyes. I saw what happened. I was at Yale when Derrida was being shipped over to address the students, the grad students, and the faculty.

And I said to a fellow student, after hearing one of these guys speak, it was in Derrida. It was another one of the theorists. I said, they are like high priests murmuring to each other. This was an elitist form from the start. It was not progressive, it was not revolutionary, it was reactionary, it was a desperate attempt to hold on to what had happened before the 1960s

sensory revolution. But this postmodernist thing, this trashing of the text, this encouragement of a superior destructive attitude toward the work of art, we're going through it, primally with red pen in hand, finding all the evidence of sexism, check, racism, check, homophobia, check, that is not the empathic, emotional, sensory based, a revolution of the 1960s.

I am sick and tired of these people claiming any kind of mantle from the 1960s. They're frauds. These people are, what happened in the 1970s was a collapse of the job market in Akadim. All of a sudden jobs were scarce. And this thing was there, the new and improved and shiny thing to be a theorist. People seized on it, it was institutionalized, and it's an enormous betrayal of the 1960s. So you touched on this idea of the destruction of the work of art. And one of the things I really liked about reading Nietzsche was his discussion of Rasantemall, of art. And one of the things I really liked about reading Nietzsche

was his discussion of Rasantemal, of resentment. And it seems to me that a tremendous amount of the mode of power that drives the postmodernist, let's call it, it's not a revolution, transformation. It seems to me to be driven by resentment about virtually anything that has any, well, what would you say, any merit of competence or aesthetic quality? And I don't know if that's, it seems to me that that's partly rooted in the academics disdain for the business world, which I think

is driven by their relative economic inequality, because most people who are as intelligent as academics are from a pure IQ point of view, make more money in the private sphere. And so I think that drives some of it. But there also seems to be this, there's a destruction, an aim for destruction of the aesthetic quality of the literary or artistic work. It's reduction to nothing but some kind of power game. And then surrounding that, the reduction of everything

to something that approximates a power game, which I can't help but identify with jealousy and resentment as a fundamental motivator. Does that seem reasonable to you? These professors who allege that art is nothing, but an ideological movement by one elite against another group. These people are Philistines. They're Philistines. They're middle brow, hopelessly middle brow. They have no sense of beauty.

They have no sense of the aesthetic. Now Marxism does indeed assert this. Marxism tries to reconfigure the universe in terms of materialism. It does not recognize any kind of spiritual dimension. Now, I'm an atheist, but I see the great world religions as enormous works of art, as the best way to understand the universe and man's place in it. I find them enormously moving.

They're enormous poems. What I have called for, the true revolution, would have been to make the core curriculum of world education, the world, the great religions of the world. I feel that is the only way to achieve understanding. And it's also a way to present the aesthetic. I feel that the real 60s vision was about

exceltation, elevation, cosmic consciousness, all of these things where we're rejected by these midgets, intellectual midgets who seized onto Lecaw, Derri Dyn Foucault. My career has been in the art school, so my entire career, beginning at Bennington College. So I represent a challenge to this from the perspective of art. It is an absolute nonsense as post-structuralist maintains that reality is mediated by language, by words, everything that we can know including gender. It's absolutely madness because I'm teaching students whose majors are ceramics, dance, jazz musicians, understand reality in

terms of the body's sensory activation. Now, see, something was going on in the art world as well. I identified with Andy Warhol and Pop Art. That was what was going on during my years in college. Everything about Andy Warhol was like, wow, admiration, wow, what happened immediately after that in the arts, 1970s, was as collapse into a snide sort of postmodernism. Also, this happened in the art world.

And it was an utter misunderstanding of culture. It seems to me by that movement in the art world. That is, oppositional art, in my view, is dead. What posmodernism is, isn't it a pathetic attempt to continue the old heroism of the avant-garde. The avant-garde was genuinely heroic from the early 19th century, where we're talking about, you know, where the Courbet, the Realists, we're talking about Monet and the Impressionists, people who who genuinely suffered for the radical ideas of their innovations and so on. Going right down to Picasso and down to Jackson Pollock, who truly suffered for his art.

It was only after his death. That suddenly the market was created for abstract art. Pop art killed the avant-garde. The idea that the avant-garde continues is an absolute delusion of the contemporary art world, which feels that it must attack, attack, attack, challenge, the simplistic beliefs of the Hoi Pilo, somehow the art, excuse me, from the moment Andy Warhol went through and embraced the popular media, instead of having the opposition to it, the serious arts of hand.

That was the end of oppositional art. So we have been going on now for 50 years, the postmodernism and academes, hand in hand with the stupidity and infantilism that masquerades as important art and galleries everywhere. There's incredible, incredible, you know, it's mechanism of contemporary art, to pushing things that are so hopelessly derivative, that are pretty, with this idea that once again, that the art world sometimes has a superior view of reality. The authentic leftism is populist, okay?

It is based in working class style, working class language, working class direct emotion, and an openness and brussing some speech, not this fancy contorted jargon of the pseudo-leftus of academia who are frauds, these people, these people who manage to rise to the top and at Berkeley, at Harvard, at Princeton, okay, kind of these people are radical, they are career people, they're corporate types, okay, who succeeded in, and they love the institutional context, they know how to manipulate the bureaucracy, which is

totally invaded and usurped, okay, they are, they are an academia everywhere, okay. These people are company players, they could have done well in any field, okay. They love the city and the committees, they love bureaucratic regulation and so on. There's now one leftist, an American academic, raised his or her voice against obscene growth of tuition costs, which have bankrupted a whole generation of young people. Now one voice to challenge that invasion by the bureaucrats, absolutely fascist bureaucrats, they're like a cancerous, okay, there's so many of them, they've, the faculty have completely lost any power in American academia, okay, it's a scandal

what has happened, okay, and they deserve the presence servitude that they're in right now, okay, because they never protested. I mean, when I, my first job at Bennington College, in 1976 I was there when there was an uprising by the faculty against encroachment by the Board of Trustees and the President, okay, and it was a huge thing, I was there, when there was an uprising by the faculty against encroachment by the Board of Trustees and the President. And it was a huge thing.

It was reported on the New York Times and so on. And we pushed that President out. And there's not been a single uprising of that kind against encroachment by the trustees and by the administrations. And all these decades, passive, slaves, they deserve their slavery. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I've thought the same thing about university professors for a long time is that they get exactly what they deserve because they never stand up and say no. And the fact that in the United States it's not

quite as bad in Canada I wouldn't say, but the fact that the students have been essentially handed a bill of indentured servitude here for the student loans is absolutely beyond comprehension. You know, it seems to me that the bureaucracy has basically conspired to determine how to pick the pockets of the student's future earnings, right? And they do that by offering them an extended adolescence with no quality control, something like that. So it's a real bargain with the devil.

And I told a abandonment of any kind of education, actually, in history and culture. All right, that's what's going along with it. That is the transformation into a cafeteria kind of a menu. We can pick this course or that course or this course, without any kind of guidance from the university about a central core curriculum that teaches you history and chronology and introduces you to the basics.

Because our professors are such pre-Madamas, they can only teach in their little areas. So we have this total fragmentation. The great art history survey courses are being abandoned, steadily, because why? Because graduate students are not trained to see the great narratives. Because we are taught now that narratives are false. Okay, so that's another issue that I'd like to bring up, because one of the things I cannot figure out is the alliance between the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists. I can't understand the causal relationship there, because tell me if you disagree with

this, okay, because I'm a psychologist, not a sociologist, and so I'm dabbling in things that are outside of my field of expertise, and there is some danger in that. But the central postmodernist claim seems to me that because there's a near-infinite number of ways to interpret a complex set of phenomena, which actually happens to be the case, that you can't make a case that any of those modes of interpretation are canonical.

And so if they're not canonical, if that canonical element isn't based in some kind of reality, then it serves some other master. And so the master that it hypothetically serves for the postmodernists is nothing but power, because that seems to be everything that they believe in. They don't believe in competence, they don't believe in authority, they don't seem to believe in an object of world, because everything is language-mediated. So it's an extraordinarily cynical perspective that because there's an infinite number of interpretations, none of the mercononical you can attribute it to everything to power and dominance. Okay, so that seems like a reasonable summary of the post-mortemism.

Yeah, exactly. Because it's a radical relative. Okay, it's a radical relativeism now. But the strange thing is despite OK, and so what goes along with that is the demolition of grand narratives. And so that would be associated, for example, with the rejection of thinkers like Young and Eric Neumann, because of course, they're foundational thinkers

in relationship to the idea that they're are embodied grand narratives. That's never touched. But then, despite the fact that the grand narrative is rejected, there's a neo-Marxism that's tightly, tightly allied with postmodernism that also seems to shade into this strange identity politics. I don't, two things, I don't understand

the causal relationship there. Like the skeptical part of me thinks that postmodernism was an intellectual camouflage for the continuation of the kind of pathological Marxism that produced the Soviet Union, and that has no independent existence as an intellectual field whatsoever. But I still can't understand how the postmodernists can make the no-grand narrative claim, but then immerse themselves in this grand narrative without anyone pointing out the evident contradictions.

I don't understand that. So what do you think about that? Well, I can only speak about literary professors, really. And they seem to me, almost universally in the US, to be very naive. They seem to know nothing about actual history, political science, or economics. It's simply an attitude. They have an attitude. Marxism becomes simply a badge by which they telegraph their solidarity with a working

class that they have nothing to do with. Generally, nothing but contempt. Yes, and the thing is that the campus left us are almost notorious. Therefore, there's their snobbish treatment of staff. They don't have any rapport with the actual working class members of the infrastructure, the geniters, and even the secretaries. There's a kind of high and mighty aristocracy.

These are people who have wandered into the English department, and were products of a time during the new criticism. When history and psychology had been excluded, my ambition was, I love the new criticism as a style of textual analysis. And the new criticism had multiple interpretations, okay, that were possible, okay, and that were encouraged. In fact, one of the great projects was made in Max series, 20th century views. With you had at least books I adored them in college. It was about Jane Austin or about Emily Bronte or about Wordsworth, and they were collections of alternate views

of the same thing. The idea that there were no alternate views, and there was no relativistic, situational kind of an interpreter approach, is nonsense. But the point was, we needed to restore history to literary study. And we needed to add psychology to it because there was great animus against Freud. When I arrived in graduate school, in fact, I actually went into the director of graduate studies and protested the way Freud and Freudian were used as negative terms in a sneering way by the very was professors.

So we needed to have, actually, it seemed like we were moving there in the early 1970s was a great period of psychobiography about political figures. So I thought, it's happening. All of a sudden it all got short circuited by this arrival of post-structuralism and post-modernism in the 1970s. So I feel I'm an old historicist.

Not a new historicist, so I think new historicism. I'm an absolute scam. It's just a way, it's like tweezers. You pick a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of that. You make a little tiny salad. And I'm some of this atomized thing. It's supposed to mean something.

It's all to me very superficial, very cynical, very distanced. I like, I am the product of old historicism, the German philology. It's my first choice of a profession when I was a child, was Egyptology, archaeology. And I thought, everything I ever think about or say is related to an enormous time scheme

from antiquity and indeed from the Stone Age. And that is the problem with these people. They're maleducated, the postmodernists and academic Marxists are maleducated educated embarrassingly so. They know nothing before the present. Foucault is absolutely a joke before the Enlightenment. Perhaps he might be useful to people to talk about what happened after neoclassicism, which by the way he failed to notice.

A lot of what he was talking about, turns out to simply be the hangover of neoclassicism. This is how ignorant that man was. He was not talented as a researcher. He knew absolutely nothing. He knew nothing about antiquity. How can you make any kind of large mechanism to analyze Western culture without knowing about classical antiquity? He did not see anything.

This was a person who had no business making large theoretical statements about anything. Well, maybe part of it is that if you generate an intelligible doctrine of radical relativism, then there is no reason to assume that there are distinctions between categories of knowledge or between different levels of quality of knowledge. So I've seen the same thing in the psychology departments, although we have the, what would you call it, the luxury of being bounded at least to some degree by the empirical method and by biology.

It's one of the things that keeps most of the branches of psychology relatively sane, because the real world is actually built into it to some degree. But if you accept the postmodernist claim of radical relativism, then you completely demolish the idea that there are quality levels that are associated with education, because everything becomes the same. And that seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable justification for maintaining ignorance. You know, like Foucault, I actually found him the most readable of the Lecah Derrada Foucault triad.

You can read Foucault. I read Madness and Civilization in a couple of other books, and I thought they were painfully obvious. You know, the idea that mental disorder is in part a social construct, is self-evident to anybody who has even a smattering of psychiatric training. I mean, the real narrow medical types tend to think of a mental disorder, let's say, as something that might be purely biological.

They have a pure disease model, but nobody's who's a sophisticated thinker ever thinks that. It's partly because medicine is a brand of engineering, not a brand of science, because it's associated with health. And the diagnostic categories are hybrids between physiological observation and sociocultural condition. Everyone knows that. And so when I read Madness and Civilization,

I thought, well, that's not radical. That's just bloody self-evident. But. Well, for Coz admirers, actually think that he began the entire turn toward a sociological grounding of modern psychology. The social psychology was well-launched in the 1920s for example.

The levels of ignorance, these people who think Foucault's so original have not read Durkheim. They've not read Max Weber. They've not read Irving Goffman. In other words, to me, everything in Foucault seemed obvious to me, because I had read the sources from which he was borrowing without attribution. So I mean, again, I know these people,

I mean, in some cases, you know, knew the McGradrill School, people who went on to become these admirers of Foucault, Lecca, and Daryndan. And I know what their training was, their training was purely within the English department. That's all they ever knew. They never made any research outside of that, right?

And so the idea, so the Foucault is simply this ease of mechanism, it's like a little tiny kit by which they can approach everything in culture, and then the contortions of language, the deliberate, labyrinthic, elitist language, at the same time as pretending to be a lafcus, this is one of the biggest frauds ever practiced. So I got a story to tell you that you might like, because I've thought a lot about that use of language, you know, because language can be used as camouflage. And so here's the story. I think I got this from Robert Sapolsky. So he was talking about zebras. And zebras, of course, have stripes and hypothetically, that's associated with camouflage.

But it's not a straightforward association, because ze are black and white and they're on the vell along with the lions. The lions are camouflage because they are grass-colored, but the bloody zebra's are black and white. You can see them like 15 miles away. So okay, so biologists go out to study zebra's and they're like making notes on a zebra and they watch it and then they look down at their notes and then they look up and they think, oh, oh, I don't know which zebra I was looking at. So the camouflage is actually against the herd because of the zebra's a herd animal, not an individual. And so the black and white stripes break up the animal against the herd, so you can't identify it. So this was a quandary for the biologist, so they did one of two things. One was

so they did one of two things. One was drive a Jeep up to the zebra herd and use a dab of red paint and dab the haunch of the zebra or tag it with an ear tag like used for cattle. The lions would kill it. So as soon as it became identifiable, the predator, yes. The predators could organize their hunt around that identifiable animal. That's why there's the old idea that lions and predators take down the weak animals, but they don't, they take down the identifiable animals.

So that's the thing is if you stick your damn head up, you get picked off by the predators. And so one of the things that academics seem to do is congregate together in herd-like entities, and then they share a language, right? And the language unites them and also keeps them, as long as they share the same set of linguistic tools among themselves, they know that there isn't anybody in the coterie that's going to attack them or destabilize the entire herd. And that seems to me to account for that impenetrable use of language. It's group protection strategy,

and it has absolutely nothing to do with the search for, it's the search for security within a system and not the desire to expand the system. So, it's to me, this blatantly careers, because it was about advancement and it was also about the claim that somehow they have like special expertise. This is a special technical language

no one else can understand it only only weekend. But what's absurd about it, absolutely ludicrous, that these people, these American academics, are imitating the contorted language of French translations from the French. When Lacan is translated into English, there's a contortion there. What he was trying to do in French was to break up,

the neoclassical formulations that descended from Rossine. There was something that was going on. There was a sabotage of the French language going on that was necessary in France, not necessary in English. We have this long tradition of poetry going back to the Shakespearean Chaucer. We have our own language, far more vital than the French. Yeah, the French constrained their language all the time.

By the absurdity, in the amateurism of American academics, trying to imitate a translation of La Conde, when La Conde is doing something in France, that is absolutely not necessary, and indeed wrong to be doing in English. So the other cynical abandonment of the great tradition of the English department. And I felt that the tru radicalism was not about adding on

other departments. So we have African American studies and women's studies and so on. The tru radicalism would have been to shatter the departmental structure. That's what I wanted. I feel that was the authentic revolutionary 1960s to do, to blend all the literature studies together, to make it easier, to make an interdisciplinary kind of organization closer to the British model where a person can pursue related subjects, overlapping subjects.

These departmental models were to me totalitarian to begin with separating language into fiefdoms and what this did to create a women's studies department? Absolutely out of the air. Just snap your fingers and create women's studies. The English department had taken a century to develop. It was a huge argument within it. All of a sudden to create a department with a politicized agenda from the start by people without any training, whatever in that field, what should be the parameters of the field, what should be the requirements of that field, how about biology? If you're going to be discussing gender, that should have been

a number one requirement as part of any women's studies department or program. But no, it was all hands off. It was just the administrators wanted to solve a public relations problem. They had a situation with very few women faculty, nationwide, at the time when the women's movement had just started up, the spotlight of attention was on them. They needed women's faculty fast. They needed the women's subject on the agenda fast.

So they just let there be women's faculty fast, they needed the women's subject on the agenda fast. So they just like, poof, let there be women's studies. And now we'll just hire some women, usually from English departments, here and there, and we'll just throw them together. You invent it. You say what it is. So that's why women's studies got frozen at a certain point of ideology, of the early 1970s. I was already in revolt from it. I was a precursor in terms of my endorsement of feminism

before even now was created. But I couldn't even have a conversation with any of these women. They were hysterical about the subject of biology. They knew nothing about hormones. I probably got a fist fight over this. People were so convinced that biology had nothing whatever to do with gender differences.

See, that also seems to me to be related to the postmodern emphasis on power. Yes. Because there's something terrible underground going on there. And that is, and I think this is the sort of thing that was reflected in the Soviet Union, too. And especially in the 20s, when there was this idea, radical idea that you could remake human beings entirely, right,

because they had no essential nature. And so if your fundamental hypothesis is that nothing exists except power, and you believe that, then that also gives you the right, in some sense, to exercise your power at the creation of the kind of humanity that your utopian vision envisions. And then that also seems to me to justify the postmodern insistence that everything is only

a linguistic construct. It again goes down to the notion of power, which Derrida and Foucault and La Cahre so bloody obsessed with. And so it seems to me what they're trying to do is to take all the potential power for the creation of human beings to themselves without any bounding conditions, whatsoever, right?

There's no history, there's no biology, there's, and everything is a fluid culture that can be manipulated at will. And so, I mean, in Canada, there are terrible arguments right now about biological essentialism, let's say, and one of the things that happened, which was something I objected to precisely a year ago, is that the social, constructionalist view

of human identity has been built now into Canadian law. So there's an insistence that biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity vary independently with no causal relationship between any of the levels. And so that's in the law, and not only is it in the law, it's being taught everywhere. It's being taught in the armed forces, it's being taught in the police, it's being taught everywhere. It's being taught in the armed forces. It's being taught in the police. It's being taught to the elementary school kids and the junior high school kids.

And underneath it all, I see this terrible striving for arbitrary power that's associated with this crazy utopianism. And but I still don't exactly understand it. I don't understand that. That what seems to be the hatred that motivates it, that you see bubbling up, for example, in identity politics, and in the desire to do nothing, but let's say demolish the patriarchy, it kind of reminds me, and this is something else I wanted to talk to you

about, you know, in your, you're an admirer of Eric Neumann and of who are you. Yeah, and that's the Neumann connection is really interesting, because I think he's a bloody genius. I really like the Great Mother's a great book, and I really, a great warning in that book, and also the origins and history of consciousness. What about the most influential books? Yeah, that's so interesting. I read an essay that you wrote. I don't remember when it was.

That's true. I gave a Neumann at NYU, yes. Yes, it's always been staggering to me that that book hasn't had the impact that it should have had. I mean, Jung himself, in the preface to that book, wrote that that was hasn't had the impact that it should have had. I mean, Jung himself in the preface to that book wrote that that was the book that he wished that he would have written. It's very much associated with Jung symbols of transformation, and it was a major influence on my book, Maps of Meaning, which was an attempt to outline the universal archetypes

that are portrayed in the kind of religious structures that you put forward. But the thing that I really see happening, and you can tell me what you think about this, and Neumann's book, Consciousness, which is symbolically masculine for a variety of reasons, is viewed as rising up against the countervailing force of tragedy from an underlying feminine, symbolically feminine unconsciousness.

And it's something that can always be pulled back into that unconsciousness. That would be the microcosm of that would be the Freudian, Edible, Mother, familial, dynamic, where the mother is so overprotective and all-encompassing that she interferes with the development of the confidence, not only of her sons, but also of her daughters, of her children in general.

And it seems to me that that's the dynamic that's being played out in our society right now is that there's this, and it's related in some way that I don't understand to this insistence that all forms of masculine authority are nothing but tyrannical power. So the symbolic representation is tyrannical father with no appreciation for the benevolent father

and benevolent mother with no appreciation whatsoever for theent father, and benevolent mother, with no appreciation whatsoever for the tyrannical mother, right? And that's that, and because I thought of ideologies as fragmentary mythologies, that's where they get their archetypal and psychological power, right? And so in a balanced representation, you have the terrible mother and the great mother, as Neumann laid out so nicely,

and you have the terrible father and the great father. So that's the fact that culture mangles you have to death. Well, it's also promoting you and developing you. You have to see that as balanced. And then you have the heroic and adversarial individual. But in the postmodern world, and this seems to be something that's increasingly seeping out into the culture at large,

you have nothing but the tyrannical father, nothing but the destructive force of masculine consciousness, and nothing but the benevolent great mother. And it's an appalling ideology, and it seems to me that it's sucking the vitality, which is exactly what you'd expect symbolically. It's sucking the vitality of our culture. You see that with the increasing demolition of young men,

and not only young men, in terms of their academic performance, which they're falling way behind in elementary school, way behind in junior high, and bailing out of the universities like Mad. And so, and I, Well, the public school education has become completely permeated by this kind of anti-male propaganda. I mean, to me, public schools are just a form of imprisonment,

you know, right now. They are particularly destructive to young men who have a lot of physical energy, right? Now, you know, I identify as transgender, okay, myself, but I do not require the entire world to alter itself, okay, to fit my particular self-image. I do believe in the power of hormones. I believe that men exist and women exist

and they're biologically different. I think that there is no cure for the culture's ills right now, except if men start standing up and demanding that they be respected as men again. OK, so I got a question about that. So one of the things, we did a research project a year ago, trying to figure out if there was such a thing as political correctness from a psychometric perspective,

to find out if the loose aggregation of beliefs actually clumped together statistically, and we actually found two factors which I won't go into, but then we looked at things that predicted adherence to that politically correct creed, and there were a couple that were surprising. that predicted adherence to that politically correct creed. And there were a couple that were surprising. One was being female was a predictor.

The personality attributes associated with femininity, so that would be agreeableness and higher levels of negative emotion. We're also both independent predictors, but so were symptoms of personality disorder, which I thought was really important, because part of what I see happening is that like I think that women whose relationship with men has been seriously pathologized cannot distinguish between male authority and competence and male tyrannical power. Like they fail to differentiate because all they see is the oppressive male and they may have had experiences that there are experiences with men might have been rough enough so that

that differentiation never occurred because it has to occur and you have to have a lot of experience with men and good men too before that will occur. But it seems to me that we're also increasingly dominated by a view of masculinity that's mostly characteristic of women who have terrible personality disorders and who are unable to have healthy relationships with men. Now, but here's the problem. You know, this is something my wife has pointed out too. She said, well, men are gonna have to stand up for themselves,

but here's the problem. I know how to stand up to a man who's unfairly trespassing against me. And the reason I know that is because the parameters for my resistance are quite well defined, which is we talk, we argue, we push, and then it becomes physical. Like if we move beyond the boundaries of civil discourse, we know what the next step is. Okay, that's forbidden in discourse with women.

And so I don't think that men can control crazy women. I really don't believe it. I think that they have to throw their hands up in what? It's not even disbelief. It's that the cultural, there's no step forward that you can take under those circumstances because if the man is offensive enough and crazy enough, the reaction becomes physical right away or at least the threat is there. And when men are talking to each other in any serious manner, that underlying threat of physicality is always there,

especially if it's a real conversation, and keeps the thing civilized to some degree. If you're talking to a man who wouldn't fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you're talking to someone to whom you have absolutely no respect. But I can't see any way. For example, there's a woman in Toronto who's been organizing this movement, let's say, against me and some other people who are going to do a free speech event, and she managed

to organize quite effectively. And she's quite offensive, you might say. She compared us to Nazis, for example, which publicly, using the swastika, which wasn't really something I was all that fond of. But I'm defenseless against that kind of female insanity because the techniques that I would use against a man who was employing those tactics are forbidden to me. So I don't know, it seems to me that it isn't man

that have to stand up and say enough of this, even though that is what they should do. It seems to me that it's same women who have to stand up against their crazy sisters and say, look, enough of that, enough man hating, enough pathology, enough bringing disgrace on us as a gender. But the problem there, and then I'll stop my little tirade, is that most of the women I know who are sane are busy doing sane things, right? They're off, they have their career, they have their family, they're quite occupied, and they don't seem to be invading the culture and undermining the masculine power of the culture in a way that's, I think, fatal. I really do believe that.

I do believe that these are, there's a symptomatic of the decline of Western culture, and it will just go down flat. I don't think people realize that, you know, the masculinity still exists, okay, in the world as a code among jihadists, okay. And when you have passionate masculinity, okay, circling the borders like the Huns and the Vandals during the Roman Empire, that's what I see. I see this culture rotting from within, okay, and disemboweling itself literally. Now my highlight overview of why we're having these problems, okay, and it comes from the fact that I'm the product of an immigrant family, all four of my grandparents and my mother were born in Italy.

So I remember from my earliest years in this factory town in Upstate New York, where my relatives came to work in the shoe factory, I can remember still the life of the agrarian era, which was for most of human history, the agrarian era, which was for most of human history, the agrarian era, where there was the world of men and the world of women, and the sexes had very little to do with each other, each had power and status in its own realm. And they laughed at each other in essence. The women had enormous power.

In fact, the old women ruled, not the young, beautiful woman like today. But the older you were, the more you had control over everyone, including the mating and marriage. There were no doctors. So you had the old women were like midwives and knew all the ins and outs of the same inherited knowledge about pregnancy and all these other things. I can remember this and the joy that women had with each other all day long,

cooking with each other, companions to each other, talking, conversing, my mother remembered as a small child in Italy when it was time to do the laundry, they would take the laundry up the mountain, up the hill to the fountain, Il Sorgho, and do it by hand, They would sing, they would pick Nick and so on. And we get a glimpse of that in the Odyssey. Win Odysseus is thrown up naked on the shores of Eusha. And he hears the sound of young women laughing and singing. And it's Nozikia, the princess, bringing the women

to the laundry. He's exactly the same thing. So there was, each gender had its own hierarchy, its own values, its own way of talking, and the sexes rarely intersected. Like I can remember in my childhood on a holiday, typical, it could be a Christmas, it could be a Thanksgiving, whatever. All the women would be cooking all day long, everyone would sit down to eat. And then after that, the women would retire on mass to the kitchen kitchen and the men would go, I would look at the window and see all the men, the men would be all outside, usually gather

on the car, and the time when cars didn't work as well as they do today, with the hood up. And the men would be standing with their hands on their hips like that, everyone staring at the engine. And I went, that's how I learned. Men were refreshing themselves by studying something technical and mechanical after being with the women during the dinner. So all of these problems of today are the direct consequence of women's emancipation and freedom from housework thanks to capitalism which made it possible for women to have jobs aside at home for the very first time in the 19th century. No longer to be dependent on husband or father or brother.

And so this great thing that's happened to us, that allowing us to be totally self-supporting independent agents has produced all this animosity about baby women and men and women because the women feel unhappy. Women today, wherever I go, whether it's Italy or Brazil or England or America or Toronto Okay, the upper-biddle class professional women are unhappy miserable They want and they don't know what why they're unhappy. They want to blame it on men, okay?

Men must change men must become more like women. No, that is the wrong way to go. It's when men are men, okay? And understand themselves as men, are secure as men. Then you're going to be happier. Well, there's nothing more dangerous than a weak man. Yeah, absolutely, okay. Especially all these quizzlings, okay?

Spouting feminist women, right here, that. Yeah, I'm not kidding. Okay, it makes me sick. But here's the point. Men and women have never worked side by side ever. Maybe on the farms, when you were maybe one person's in the potato field, the other ones over here in the tomato or whatever.

You had families working side by side, exhausted with each other, no time to have any clash of this. It was a collaborative effort on farms and so on. Never in all of human history, have men and women been working side by side. And women are now the pressure about Silicon Valley. They're also sexist. Oh, they don't allow women in and so on.

The men are being men in Silicon Valley. Especially the engineers. And the women are demanding that, oh, this is terrible. You're being said, maybe the sexists have their own particular form of rhetoric, their own particular form of identity. Maybe we need to re-examine this business about, maybe we have to perhaps accept some degree of tension and conflict between the sexes in a work environment.

I don't mean harassment. I'm talking about women feeling disrespected, Somehow their opinions when they express them are not taking seriously or even Hillary Clinton is complaining. When the woman writes something online, she's attacked immediately. Everyone's attacked online. What are you talking about? The world is tough. The world is competitive. Identity is honed by conflict. The idea that there's no conflict, that we have to be in this bath, okay, of approbation.

Yes. And, you know, we're just, well that's the devouring type of. That's right, it's absolutely infantile. And I mean, okay, so a couple of things there. Well, the first thing is, is that the agreeableness trait that divides men and women most, there's three things

that divide women and men most particularly, from the psychometric perspective. One is that women are more agreeable than men. And so that seems to be the primary maternal There's three things that divide women and men most particularly from the psychometric perspective. One is that women are more agreeable than men. And so that seems to be the primary maternal dimension as far as I can tell. It's associated with a desire to avoid conflict, but it's associated with interpersonal closeness, compassion, politeness. Women are reliably higher than men, especially in the Scandinavian countries and in the

countries where egalitarianism has progressed the farthest. So that's where the difference is maximized, which is one of the things James DeMour pointed out quite correctly in his infamous Google memo. Women are higher in negative emotions, so that's anxiety and emotional pain, that difference is approximately the same size. And again, that maximizes any egalitarian societies which is extremely interesting and then the biggest difference is the difference in interest between people and things and

so women are more interested in people and men are more interested in things which goes along quite nicely with your car anecdote but the thing about men interacting with men again is that it isn't that they respect each other's viewpoints that's not exactly right what happens with a man and I know a lot of men

that I would regard as remarkably tough people for one reason or another, and everything you do with them is a form of combat. Like if you want your viewpoint taken seriously, often you have to yell them down, and like they're not gonna stop talking unless you start talking over them. And it's not like men are automatically giving respect to other men because that just doesn't

happen. It's that the combat is there and it's expected. And one of the problems, and so this is part of the reason why I think men are bathing out of so much of academia and maybe the academic world in general. And maybe the world in general is that men actually don't have any idea how to compete with women, because the problem is, is that if you unleash yourself completely then you're an absolute bully, and there's no doubt about that, because if men unleash themselves on other men, that can be pretty goddamn brutal, especially for the men that

are really tough, and this so that just doesn't happen with women. But, so you can't unleash yourself completely. If you win, you're a bully. If you lose, well, you're just bloody pathetic. So how the hell are you supposed to play a game like that? You know, so in I've worked with lots of women in law firms in in Canada, for example, and high achieving women, like really remarkable people, I would say. And they're often non-plussed, I would say, by the attitude of the man in the law firm, because they would like to see everyone pulling together,

because they're all part of the same team. Whereas the man are, like, at each other's throats, in a cooperative way, because they want the law firm to succeed, but they want to be the person who's at the top of the success hierarchy, right? So, and that, that doesn't jive well with the more competitive or cooperative ethos that's part and parcel of agreeableness. And so, we don't really have any idea how to integrate male and female dominance hierarchies.

Exactly. That's exactly right. This is why I love this show, Real Housewives, which is with the Gora-Sanim Scorns. And just last night, I was watching an episode where the women were at each other at a party and recounting, but I said this to you, but you said this to me and the men got together there and said, well, this is the way they communicate with each other. And the men, we men, just will have a fist fight. And in 10 minutes later, we're gonna have a beer at the bar next to each other. And so I have observed that my father, my daughter,

my daughter used to be really irritated about that because she, like most people, was the target of feminine conspiratorial bullying at one. She's no pushover, my daughter. So this, it wasn't like this was a continual thing or that she didn't know what to do about it. But she'd observe these girls conspiring against her and then blackening her name on Facebook,

which is part of the parcel of the typical female bullying routine, which is often reputation demolition, right? That there's a good literature on that. And then she'd watch what would happen if my brother or my son would have a dispute with his friends, you know, and maybe they were drinking and there was a dispute. They'd have a fight and then the next day they were friends again. And that's another thing that's strange is that, like, men have a way of bringing a conflict to a head and resolving

it, right? And that, it isn't obvious to me that women have that same, perhaps you might call it luxury. But it's also the case that men don't know what to do when they get into a conflict with a woman, because what the hell are you supposed to do? Mostly what you're supposed to do is avoid it. Well, I've seen, I don't know whether the crosses into other countries, but that there's a certain kind of taunting and teasing that men and boys do with each other that toughens them, where they don't take things seriously. But, a growth feeling has become extremely hurt if she hears something that is very tough,

you know, sarcastic against her. So, I mean, I do feel that there are profound differences between the sexes in terms of the emotions, in terms of communication patterns. You know, my father used to say that he could never follow women's conversations. He said, he said, women don't even finish sentences. The women understand immediately what the other woman is saying. And the way women tend to be more interested or have been traditionally more interested in soap operas, it's not just that the women were home without jobs.

I believe that soap opera does reflect, does mirror the way women talk to each other. There's these communication patterns that have been built up through women, the world of women, which was, it made sense there was a division of labor, it wasn't sexism against women that there was a division of labor. The men went off to hunt and did the dangerous things. The women stayed around the hearth because you had pregnant women, nursing women, older women, they were cooking and so on.

So I feel that these communication patterns that we're talking about have been built up over the centuries, men had to toughen each other to go out. The hunting parties are Native Americans, they could be gone for two weeks, and when the temperature was below zero, many of them died.

The idea that somehow, oh, any kind of separation of the sexes or different spheres of the sexes is inherently sexist. And inherently driven by power dynamics. The answer to all of this, everything that we're talking about, is education into early history. Until people understand the stone age, the nomadic period, the agrarian era, and how culture, how civilization don't up.

In Mesopotamia, the great irrigation projects, or in Egypt, where you had for the first centralized government authority, became necessary to master these, you had a situation where environmentally, difficult situation like the deserts of Mesopotamia or the peculiar character of Egyptian geography where you can only have a little tiny fertile line along the edges of the Nile, otherwise desert landscape.

So civilization and authority, as not necessarily about power grabbing, but about organization to achieve something for the good of the people as a whole. Yes, you want to see that as well. That's exactly the symbolism of the great. By reducing all hierarchy to power and selfish power, it is utterly naive. It's ignorant. So I say education has to be totally reconstituted, including public education, to begin in the most distant past.

So our young people today who know nothing about how the world was created that they inhabit can understand. What marvelous, you know, technical logic, paradise they live in, and it's the product of capitalism, the product of individual innovation. Most of it is the product of a Western tradition that everyone wants to trash now. If you begin the past and show, it also talk about war. Because the war is the one thing that wakes people up,

as we see. War is a reality. And we may see. Yes, wars, the reality prints. My father and all, and five of my uncles, went to World War II, and my father was part of the force that landed in Japan, okay, he was a paratrooper, you know, at the time of the Japanese surrender, okay.

And my couple uncles got shot up and so on. When you have the reality of war, when people see the reality of the horrors of war, Berlin burned, you know, to a crisp and so on, you know, starvation,vation, then you understand, this marvelous mechanism that brings water to the kitchen and you flip on a light, the electricity comes out. I know, for me, and I suppose it's

because I have somewhat of a depressive temperament. I mean, one thing that staggers me on a consistent basis is the fact that anything ever works. I mean, because it's so unlikely, to be in a situation where our electronic communications work, where our electric grid works, and it works all the time, right? It works 100% of the time,

and the reason for that is that there are mostly men out there who are breaking themselves into pieces, repairing this thing, which just falls apart all the time. Absolutely. I said this in the month debate in Toronto several years ago. I said, the invisible all these, you know, these elitist professors, sneering at men, it's men who are maintaining everything around us. This invisible army, which you, which your feminists don't notice, right? Nothing would work. Or regarded as oppressive, which is, like a professor is someone who's standing on a hill

surrounded by a wall, which is surrounded by another wall, which is surrounded by another wall. Like it's walls all the way down, who stands up there and says, I'm brave and independent. It's like you've got this protected area that's so unlikely. It's so absolutely unlikely. And the fact that people aren't on their knees in so absolutely unlikely. And the fact that people aren't on their knees in gratitude all the time for the fact that we have central

heating and air conditioning and pure water and reliable food, it's just, it's so, it is. It's absolutely unbelievable. I mean, people used to die for the water supply, okay, with contaminated with cholera for having sex, right? People can understand, okay, they have clean water, fresh milk, fresh orange juice, all of these things. These are more of the time. And all of the time. All of the time.

Western culture is heading because we are so dependent on this invisible infrastructure. We're heading for an absolute catastrophe when Gihot is figure out how to paralyze the power grid. The entire culture will be chaotic. You'll have mobs in the street, okay? Within three days, okay? Suddenly the food supply is interrupted and there's no way to communicate. That is the way Western culture is going to collapse, okay? It won't take much. Single points of failure. Because we are so interconnected, and now we are so dependent on communications and

computers. I used to predict for years there would be an asteroid hitting there. Do you know how the solar flares work? So this happens about once every century, so back about 1880, and I don't remember the exact year, there was a significant enough solar flare, so that produces a electromagnetic pulse like a hydrogen bomb because the sun is a hydrogen bomb and electromagnetic pulse will emerge from the sun and wave across the earth and it produces huge spikes in electrical current along anything that's electronic and it'll burn them out. It lit telegraph operators on fire in the 1800s. And one of those things took out the Quebec Power Grid in 1985

and knocked out the whole Northeast corridor. And so they figured those things are about one in a century event. But my brother-in-law, who's a very smart guy, he designed the chip and the iPhone. We were talking about political issues the last time I went in saw him in San Francisco. And his notion was that all that the government

should be doing right now is stress testing our infrastructure the same way they stress test the banks. Because we're so full of these single points of failure that, and I think you're absolutely right, luckily, we've been, what would you call, invaded by stupid terrorists instead of smart terrorists. Because a smart terrorist could do an unbelievable amount of damage in a very short period of time.

So and it's just God's good graces that that hasn't happened yet. And so- And then what will happen is that it's the men, okay? The men will reconstruct civilization while the women cower in the houses and have the men go out and do all the dirty work. That's what's going to happen again. Only men will bring civilization back again. So what, okay, so now a couple of things. So the universities, I mean, I've proposed

although it's something that's probably beyond my power that what should happen is that the universities, the real content of the universities should be stolen back from the universities because they're not making use of their intellectual property and that something should be started online that would constitute a genuine university. The problem is the accreditation issue, but I don't think that's an unsolvable problem. But do you see, like all these people who have these post-modern neo-Marxist agendas are completely embedded

inside the university? Oh, absolutely. And the point is, over the last 25 years, I have received constant mail from people dropping out of the graduate schools or giving up altogether on any idea of being a college professor. So what's happened is that the most talented and independent thinking people have avoided in the school. So we are now, who we have are the compliant, the servile, the people who are currently

in the university and hiring their successors, okay, are maladricated themselves, okay. I mean, I, when the first letters I received in the early 90s, I'll never forget it. So, I'm a woman who was now painting houses in Missouri and said she had been part of the comparative literature graduate program at Berkeley and that she finally had a drop out

because she said every time she would express enthusiasm for what they were reading, the people looked at her as if she had somehow created an offense. And in other words, enthusiasm for art, the very things you need as a teacher in the classroom, were being trained out. Yeah, well, the thing is, if you respect art and literature,

that means that you implicitly accept a hierarchy of quality. And that, of course, contradicts the fundamental tenets of the postmodern doctrine, which is that there are no hierarchies of quality. And you talked a little bit earlier about the idea that you refer to again to the idea that everything is associated with power. And that's the thing that I can't, that's the thing that I can't help but associate

with a kind of personality pathology. You know, from a psychometric perspective, the best predictors of long-term success in our society are intelligence, IQ, which you can measure very accurately, and trade conscientiousness, which actually is a real testament to the culture, right? Because what you hope is that the smart people who work hard are the people who advance. It isn't like they deserve it exactly, that isn't what I mean. It's that if the culture is harnessing the productive power of individuals properly, then it should differentially reward people who are smart and conscientious, because they're

going to do a bunch of really interesting work for the rest of us. And that's very well established finding. It's as good as any finding in the social sciences. But despite that, and despite the fact that everything works, which is a goddamn miracle of sorts, there is this consistent story that we live in a patriarchy, that it's only oppressive, that it's done nothing but oppress women since the beginning of time, which is also something that just boggles my mind.

You know, like I know that- I mean, men have sacrificed for women and children, including their lives, for thousands of years. You know, yes, there's been brutality, but the brutality is the minority, okay? Yes, this sick, I'd portray a trail of human history as nothing but male oppression and female victim age, okay? This is a way to permanently ensure the infantilization of women.

Yes. Yes. Well, you know, you can even make the case from a purely logical perspective. So here's an interesting fact. So most of the people who abused their children were abused as children. But most of the people who were abused as children

don't abuse their children. Right, so if you look at the population of abusers, they were all abused, so you can say abuse causes abuse. But that's not a good idea because you have a specific sample there, right? It's not a random sample. What happens is that abuse dampens out of over the centuries. It doesn't propagate itself.

And that's obvious because if the hypothesis of essential male tyranny was true, it would spread exponentially through the population in like three generations, and there wouldn't be an exception at all. And so what happens is even when there is a tilt towards tyranny, let's say in the family, or even in the society, that regresses back

to something that's far more benign, very, very rapidly. And you see this. So, to me, one of the biggest unexamined issues is the transition from the great extended family of old, into the nuclear family. And I do feel that Freud is the best analyst of the particular kind of claustrophobic cell of the modern nuclear family. It could be that human beings were never intended, to be trapped in a house just with their parents.

They extended families, you had your aunts and grandparents and cousins, all of whom helped form your identity. So one's identity is a member of a community, rather than in this like hot house environment. So I think that a lot of current issues, including the sudden spate of transgender claims and so on, a lot of these things are coming from this unstable,

in cell, it's a prison cell. I mean, of the nuclear family, two parents perhaps cannot give all the knowledge of life, okay, to the young. And so I think there are all kinds of sexual issues that are generated by it. But with the psychology today is now simply a practical matter.

People come in, the psychologist in the United States deals with your present problem. Let's not go into the distant past, okay? Let's just deal with our present problem, which are obviously we have forms of communication, we need to like fix this and then you'll be fine. Okay? As a consequence, there's a complete absence of any kind of analysis of your experiences as a child with your parents, you know, with your siblings and so on.

How that might relate to your current sexual identity issues, whether it's transgender or homosexuality. You cannot possibly ask about any genesis of homosexuality today, because that is automatically defined as homophobic. Well, excuse me, as an openly gay person myself, every gay person I know, there is There's some story there, okay? It seems to be in childhood. Not only that, there's a strange similarity of the storylines, of all of my friends who are gay, okay? There's a same pattern that had to do with blurred

borderlines between a son and his mother and so on. I'm not blaming the mother, okay? I'm not blaming the mother at all, okay? What I see as a dynamic going on in the bourgeois house in the nuclear family where you had sometimes a distant father, a father who was present, but not really engaged. And a mother who made the son her companion in some way. Often the mother has great imagination and flair and they had a shared thing. And I mean, the idea that homosexuality has nothing whatever to do with your family life is nonsense.

Well, it's also completely, well, that's another thing. And I got a lot of trouble in Canada for my opposition to Bill C-16, which was a bill that had to do with transgender rights. And I didn't really give a damn about the transgender right issue. That had nothing to do with it. What bothered me was that there was an issue of compelled speech because you were required by the Ontario Human Rights Commission to use the pronouns of the person's choice, right? Otherwise...

And that is absolutely or well-in. That's right. That is absolutely intolerable. You know, I have said, I said years ago, okay, that my book, Sexual Persony, which was like a 700 page book, I said that is the biggest sex change in history because I, okay, with my transgender issues,

look to the magnificent construction of English, it was the English language that I seized on to gain my identity and my power as a person. And therefore, any intrusion into English, someone trying to tell me how to use English as great gift to me, this is an absolutely obscene and evil. For any government who tried to predictate to us how we're going to use this magnificent instrument of English. Yes, absolutely. And that was for me the breaking point because I believed, well, and I think that that's associated with the idea of the logos in the West,

you know, because that's a deep mythological idea that the logos is the thing that brings order out of chaos through communicative speech and that that's tightly aligned with your soul. And I don't care if you're an atheist or a believer, it doesn't matter, it's still the right language and that no one has any right whatsoever under any circumstances to trespass against that. And so, but that's okay, because that's law in Canada now. But okay, so now back to your, let's see, you were making a point about... I know we would agree on that. Oh yes, okay, because it's interesting to look at these things from obviously from multiple

perspectives, which is another thing that ideologues don't do, right? Because for them everything is one cause. That's how you can tell when you're dealing with someone who's ideologically possessed, is they make everything attributable to a single cause like power. So one of the things that's happened with the nuclear family that's quite interesting too

is that parents are older and they have fewer children. So you could imagine that that hot house environment in some sense has been exaggerated for a bunch of reasons. One is, well, your child is a lot more valuable to you if you're older and you only have one or two, right? Because you're not going to get another chance, that first of all, you might have had some trouble having the child to begin with, and you're not going to get another chance. So you've got all your eggs are in one basket, so to speak.

And then of course, children don't have the number of siblings they used to have. And one of the things that's really useful about having siblings is that they keep you in your place, right? They're primary socialization agents. And I mean, that can be brutal. And that's reflected, say, in the story of Cain and Abel,

that internal household dynamic with siblings can really become murderous. And that has to be kept under control. But I think the hot house flower person who's incapable of tolerating any jibs or any testing, any dominant hierarchy testing of the sort that you said that men do, part of that's the consequence of being raised by older parents who have excess resources,

who have no siblings, because the child is then, of course, special. And that's specialness. Well, there seems to be an inverse relationship between that specialness that's protected, and the person's robustness and resilience. And then that's caught into, or not caught into, that's pandered to by the universities, which insists upon setting up a situation where no one is ever offended by anything any of the time. And that's something I also can't understand at all because- Let me just say that's a huge point you just made, because it's the upper middle class

of the professional class, who postpones having the children. Because they go to law school, they go to medical school, and they have the children after they're settled in a job. So they're the ones who have injected this hypersensitive bourgeois idea code into the universities. Now, my parents were 20 when they married, and 21 when they had me. My father went to college on the GI Bill getting out of World War II. So, when I was born, my father was still in college and was sweeping floors and so on.

I am the product of young parents. And nature wants actually, young parents, because pregnancy is quicker, it's safer, and so on. And my parents had the energy to, you know, this useful energy that we can do spirit that came out of World War II and so on. I'm a product of that. Then, not only other sibling, it was born 14 years later. My father, at this point, was a college professor. So she had completely different parents than I did. So she has very excellent manners and so on. She had completely different parents than I did. So she has very

excellent manners and so on. She's completely different. And I have all this like the energy of me. My parents were just a lot of their teens. So now today we have this situation. No, it's considered heresy to raise this issue. That you have young women are told. There's one future for you. You are a future leader. You must move forward, four years of college, and perhaps it was a professional class. So maybe the young women's bodies are signaling that they want to be others.

Maybe there are signals coming from the body of maybe now wanting this system of education that was devised for men, this being funneled along channel long, this mechanism, all right. So young women, you know, feel unhappy, they don't know why, they have the sense of identity. If they want to marry and drop out of college

and have a baby, they will be treated as traitors to their class. What, you are a future leader, what have a baby only working class women would do that. When I find working class women in general, far more rounded as personalities, they express themselves forcefully, they have body language that takes up space, a man says something to them on the street, they are right back in their face, and so on. It is the bourgeois girls who are taught to their special,

who have to postpone actual life for all these years. These are the girls who miss judge the fraternity parties setting. These are the girls who run for parental protection and hand holding on the committee, investigating what we're running on their date and so on and so forth. So yes, I think that you have located, that's very interesting. The idea that these young girls who are so sensitive,

and college so unable to handle their sex life, are the product of older parents because they went through the professional career track. Yes, and they have not had the experience of the competitiveness and teasing of other siblings. Well, also, the thing about young parents is they don't care as much as older parents, and not actually turns out to be better, because what you really want for your children is minimum necessary intervention, right? And the developmental literature is actually quite clear on this, so if you're at home with

your child, what the best role that you can play is to be there. But not to be interacting with the child all the time. The child should be off doing whatever it is the children do, which generally is playing with other children, without it being mediated also by screens and technology, because that's how they formulate their identity. And that's how they learn to play joint games with other people.

And the parent is supposed to be there as a recourse for the child when they go out a little bit farther than they can tolerate. And they have to come back and get some security. And so that's especially not what happens to single children because they're basically raised as miniature adults. So when I wonder too, how much of the antipathy towards, these are dark musings. And I would say how much of the antipathy towards, these are dark musings, and I would say,

how much of the antipathy towards men that's being generated by, say, college age women is deep repugnance for the role that they've been designed and at disappointment with the men, who, you know, like you think of those, is it Carpathian, or, I can't remember the culture. The basic marital routine was to ride into the village I can't remember the culture. The basic marital routine was to ride into the village and grab the bride and run away with her on a horse.

It's like the motorcycle gang member who rips the two naive woman out of girl out of the bosom of her family. Because they've been women, so I can say ancient myths. There used to be bride stealing. It was quite widespread. I wonder if part of the reason that modern university age women aren't so angry is because that fundamental feminine role is actually being denied to them and they're

objecting to that at a really fundamental level, like a level of primitive outrage at... Well, because what happened is the chaos that my generation of 1960s bequeathed through the sexual revolution. I went, when I arrived in college in 1964, okay, the colleges were still acting in local parental in place of the parent. So my dormitory, all women's dormitory, we women had to sign in at 11 o'clock at night. The men could run

free the entire night. So it's my generation of women that rose up and said, give us the same freedom as men have. The colleges replied, no, in the world is dangerous, you could be raped. We have to protect you against rape. And what we said was, give us the freedom to risk rape. So that what that today's women don't understand, it's a freedom that you want. It's the same freedom that gay men have. When they go and they pick up a stranger someplace, they know it's dangerous, they know

they could end up beating up or killed, but they find it hot. If you want freedom, if you want equality, then you have to start behaving like a man. No, so what we did is we gave freedom to these young women for several generations, but my generation had been raised in a far more resilient and robust culture. We had the strength to know what we wanted and to fight for what we wanted.

These young women have been raised in this protected, terribly protected ways. So I think in some strange fashion, that all these demands for intrusion from these Stalinist committees, sexual, investigating dates and so on, it's a way to re-institute the rules that my generations throughout the window.

So I think these young women are desperate. Not only that, but I have spoken out very strongly in a piece I wrote for Time Magazine, as in my most recent book, that the raising the drinking age in this country, okay, from 18 to 21, okay, and it's had a direct result, okay, in these disasters of binge drinking fraternity parties. Because to let cow'd students the way we could go out as freshmen, have a beer, sit in a protected adult environment, learn how to discourse with the opposite sex,

in a safe environment, and so on. And now today, because of the stupid rule that young people can't even buy a drink in a bar until the 21, we have these fraternity parties that are like a caveman era. Well, of course, in this modern age, this is Vengeance's men, okay. Men want to hook up, men want to have sex,

women don't understand what men want, so women are like put out because they're hoping that maybe the man will continue to be interested in them, okay, the man just wants experience, okay. They have the hormones drive toward me. I theorize, okay, that the sex-driving man is intertwined with hunting pursuits. Yes, yes.

So I feel absolutely this is what women don't understand. And if women understood what I understand from my transgender perspective, these women on the streets, I'm obviously Madonna, admirer, and I support pornography and prostitution. So I don't want what I'm about to say to seem conservative. It isn't. What I'm saying is, the women on the street young women who are about who are jogging with no bra on, short shorts, and have ear buds in their ears, just jogging along like

it. I said, these women do not understand the nature of the human mind. They do not understand the nature of psychosis. And this intro 20, I'm talking about, of the hunt and pursuit thing. They're triggering a hunt thing, just what you have talked about in terms of the zebra herd. They are triggering the hunt impulse in psychotic men.

There goes a very appetizing and totally oblivious animal bouncing along here. We're in a period now where psychosis is not understood at all. And yet, young women have had no exposure to movies like Psycho, the kind of rapist serial murderer thing and so on. The kind of strange dynamic that has to do with the assault on the mother and mother, you know, in the mind of the psychotic. But I think that is an incredible now-even, these young women are emerging and going to college in this incredible, dionetian environment of a sex orgeastic sexual experience in fraternity houses, they're completely unprepared for it.

And so you're getting all this outrage. So feminist rhetoric has gotten more and more extreme in this portrayal of men, but in fact, what we have is a chaos. It's a chaos in the sexual realm. The girls have not been told anything real, again, in terms of biological substratum, just sexual. No, and there's full of lies about what constitutes consent, too. Exactly.

And it's become something that's essentially portrayed linguistically as a sequence of progressive contracts, which, you know, is, it's, well, I think, you know, I've thought for a while that we're living in the delusional fantasy of a naive 13-year-old girl. That's basically sums up our culture. And I look at all these sexual rules that permeate the academia. And I think two things. The first thing I think is, well, I know because I was an alcohol researcher for a long time and you know that 50% of violent crimes are directly attributable to alcohol.

So if you're murdered, there's about a 50% chance that you're drunk and about a 50% chance that the person who kills you is drunk. And alcohol is the only drug that we know that actually amplifies aggression. It does that in laboratory situations. Plus, it's a great disinhibitor, right? So what alcohol does is it doesn't make you oblivious to the future consequences of your action. Because if you ask someone who's drunk about the consequences

of something stupid, they can tell you what the consequences are. But it makes you not care. And it does that because it's technically an anxiolytic, like barbituates or like benzodiazepines. And it also has an activating property for many people who drink. So it's a stimulant and an anxiolytic at the same time, and it's very potent for both of them. And we put young people together and douse them in alcohol at the binge drinking level,

and then which also interferes with memory consolidation, which of course makes things much more complex. And then we're surprised when there are sexual misadventures. And then it's also attributed almost purely to the predatory element that's part and parcel of masculinity, but a tremendous amount of that is also naivety and stupidity. Because we expect like 18-year-old guys, especially the ones that haven't been successful with girls,

which is like 85% of them, because the successful men are a very small percentage of men. The 85% who haven't been successful with men, or with women, they don't know what the hell they're doing at all. Right, and part of the reason they're getting drunk is to garner up enough courage to actually make in advance. You know, because I think another thing that women don't understand, especially with regards to young men, is just exactly how petrifying attractive woman who's of, say, somewhat higher status

actually is to a young guy. And there's lots of guys that write me constantly and people that I've worked with that are so terrified of women they can't even talk to them. It's very, very common. Well, I take a very firm position, which is that I want college administrations to stay totally out of the social lives of the students. If a crime is committed, it should be reported to the police. I've been writing that for 25 years now.

But it's not the business of any college administration to take any notice of what the students say to each other, say to each other, as well as do with each other. I want it to totally stop is fascism of the worst kind. I agree. I think it's fascism of the worst kind because it's a new kind of fascism. It's partly generated by legislation. So the title nine memo that was written in 2011, I recently got a copy of that god damn thing that was one polluting bit of

legislation that was that memo basically told universities that unless they set up a parallel court system they were going to be denied federal funding it is absolutely unbelievable and in the leftists are supporting this I know I know it's and this is this shows there is no authentic campus leftism. I'm sorry, it's a fraud. Okay. I mean, the faculty should be fighting the administrations on this, fighting federal regulation

of how we're supposed to behave on campus. Well, how can you be so naive and foolish to think that taking on organization like the university, which already has plenty to do, and forcing it to become a pseudo legal system that parallels the legal system could possibly be anything but utterly catastrophic. It would mean you would have to know absolutely nothing

about the legal system and about the tremendous period of evolution that produced what's actually a stellar system and about the tremendous period of evolution that produced what's actually a stellar system and an adversarial system that protects the rights of the accused and of the victim and to replace that with an ad hoc bureaucracy that has pretty much essentially the same degree of power as the court system with absolutely none of the training and none of the guarantees. I think you wrote cards. I think you wrote cards. There are 10. There are 10. That piece that I wrote about date rape,

it was in January 1991, News Day. But the most controversial thing I ever wrote in my entire career, I attacked the entire thing and demanded the college to stand back and get out of the social wise of the students. And people, the reaction, people tried to call the president of my university, try to get me fired. You can't believe the hysteria, OK? I can believe it. try to get me fired, you can't believe the hysteria, okay?

I can believe it. Yes, you can believe it. I can believe it. I can believe it. I can believe it. I can believe it. Anything that says to women, that they should be responsible for their own choices, is regarded as reactionary?

Are they kidding me? This is such a betrayal of authentic feminism in my view. Well, it's the ultimate betrayal of authentic feminism because it's it's an invitation of all the things that you might be paranoid about with regards to the patriarchy back into your life, right? It's an insistence that the most intrusive part of the tyrannical king come and take control over the most intimate details of your life. Incredible. And the assumption is that that's going to make your life better rather than worse, right? In that dimension, this idea of the stages of verbal consent, as if your impulses based in the body have anything to do with words, and so on. I mean, that's the whole point,

you know, about sex, okay, it's to abandon, okay, that,'s to abandon that part of the brain that's so entrammeled with words. Do you see these? It's actually a marker of lack of social ability to have to do that, because if you're sophisticated, it's not like if you're dancing with someone, it's not like you call out the moves. If you have to do that, well, you're more worse than a nail fight, right? You're an awkward nail fight and anybody with any sense should get the hell away from you. And so if you're reduced to the point where you have to verbally negotiate every element of intimate interaction, then what a

downer. Oh my god. Yes, but what a unbelievably, what would you call it? Naive and pathological view of the manner in which human beings interact. There's no sophistication in that. Well, what I'm worried about also in this age of social media, I've noticed as a teacher in the classroom, that the young people are so used to communicating now by cell phone, by iPhone, that they're losing body language and facial expressions, which I think is going to compound the problem with these dating encounters, because the ability to read the human face

into read little tiny inflections of emotion, well I think my generation got that from looking at great foreign films with their long takes, because you'd have John Moro and Kevin D'Anoz in potential romantic encounters. And you could see the tiniest little inflections, that signal communication or sexual readiness or irony or skepticism or distance or whatever. So the inability to read other people's intentions, I think this is going to be a disaster.

I just noticed that how year by year the students are becoming much more flat affect. They themselves complain that they'll sit in the same room with someone and be texting to each other. Yeah, well there's a piece of evidence too that supports that to some degree. So women with brothers are less likely to get raped. And the reason for that is that they've learned that nonverbal language deeply, right? And they can spot the... Not only that, but I have noticed, in my career, that women who have many brothers are very

good as administrators and as business people because they don't take men seriously. They regard, they saw their brothers, they think their brothers are jokes, but they know how to control men while they still like men, they admire men. So this is something I have seen repeatedly. Yeah, well so that would be also reflective of the problem of fewer and fewer siblings. Yes, that's right. I've noticed this in publishing. The women who have the job of publicist rise to the top as manager of publicity.

Their ability to take charge of men and their humorate men. And they have great humorate men. And they have great relationships with men, because they don't have the sense of resentment and worry and anxiety. And so they don't see men as aggressors. And I think that's another thing too, is that as feminism moved into its system of ideology, it has tended to a denigrate motherhood

as a lesser order of human experience. And to enshrine, of course, abortion. Now, I am 100% abortion rights. I've longed to plan parenthood for years until I finally rejected it as a branch of the Democratic Party, my own party, and so on. But as motherhood became excluded, as feminism became obsessed with the professional woman,

I feel that the lessons that mothers learn have been lost to feminism, which is, if the mothers who bear boy children understand the fragility of men, the fragility of boys, they understand it, they don't see the boys and men as a menist, they understand the greater strength of women. So there's this tenderness and connectedness between the mother and the boy child, when motherhood is part of the experience, of women who are discussing gender. So what we have today is that this gendered theology is risen up on campuses where none of the girls,

none of the students have married, none of them have had children. And you have women, some of whom have had children, but a lot of their lesbians are like professional women and so on. So the whole tenderness and forgiveness and encouragement that women do to boys. They don't understand this hypersensitivity of boys. They're not understood. Instead, boys are seen as somehow more privileged and somehow their energy level is interpreted as aggression, potential violence and so on.

So I think that what we would do the better, if we would have, I have proposed, that colleges should allow, the moment a woman is entered, she has interest in that college for life. And that she should be free to leave, to have babies, when her body wants that baby, when it's healthy to have them. And then return, have the occasional course to build up credits and fathers,

I mean, you might be able to do it as well. And so on, to get married women, women with children into the classroom, the moment that happens, it's happened after World War II. Okay, we've had a lot of married guys in the classroom, okay, and so on, not yet that many women. The experience of a married person with a family, okay, talking about gender, but most of the gender stuff would be left out of the room, okay, if you had a real mother in there who would experience a child

birth and had raised, it was raising voice and so on. So I think that's also something that has led to this incredible artificiality and hysteria of feminist rhetoric. There's another strange element to that, which is that on the one hand, the radical feminist types, the neo-Marxist postmodernists, are very much opposed to the patriarchy, let's say. And that's that unidimensional ideological representation of our culture.

I mean, perhaps the word could be applied to Republican Rome, and that's it. Well, maybe it could be applied usefully to certain kinds of tyranny, but not to a society that's actually functional. Victorian England wouldn't argue, okay, but other than that, to use the word patriarchy in a slough dash way, so amateurish,

absolutely, it just shows people know nothing about history, whatever, have done no reading. So what confuses me about that is that despite the fact that the patriarchy is viewed as this essentially evil entity, and that's associated with the masculine energy that built this oppressive structure.

The antithesis of that, which would actually be femininity, as far as I can tell, which is tightly associated with care and with child wearing, is also denigrated. So it's like the only proper role for women to adopt is a patriarchal role, despite the fact that the patriarch is something that's entirely corrupt. So the hypothesis seems to be is a patriarchal rule, despite the fact that the patriarch is something that's entirely corrupt. So the hypothesis seems to be that the patriarchy would be just fine if women ran it.

So no changes, it would just be a transformation of leadership, and somehow that would rectify the fundamental problem, even though it's hypothetically supposed to be structural. OK, so I'm going to close with something. So there are elements in my character that are optimistic. You know, I've looked for example,

I work for a UN committee and on the relationship between economic development and sustainability and I found out a variety of things that were very optimistic like the fact that, you know, the UN set out to have poverty between 2000 and 2015 worldwide and actually hit that by about 2010, right? So we're in the period of the fastest transformation of the bottom strata of the world's population into something

approximating middle class that's ever occurred. And there's all these great technological innovations on the horizon and it looks to me like things could go extraordinarily well if we were careful, but I'm not optimistic and maybe that's me. I'm pessimistic because I also see that there's five or six things happening, all of which appear at the level of catastrophe that are all happening at the same time. And so one of the things that I'd like to ask you is like, what do you see happening in the next 10 years in the universities or in culture at large?

And I mean, you just put forward a proposal for the universities for the treatment of women, which I think is a very interesting one, because women do have a different time frame than men. But like, what the hell is the proper way forward? I've been encouraging young men to tell the truth and to take responsibility, and there's a huge market for that message, but I'm not convinced by any stretch of the imagination that it's enough. What, like, when you look forward and you try to be optimistic, what the hell do you see? Well, in the largest scale, I'm concerned about the future of Western culture because as a student of history, it looks too much to me like ancient Rome,

which became overexpandent, which became, it was at the mercy of bureaucratic creep. Okay. And- I can imagine one of this. Yes, and in the Roman identity eventually got blurred, okay, in its incorporation of so many different cultures, which at first seemed like a healthy kind of multiculturalism, but eventually overexpand

and simply collapse of its own way. So I am concerned about whether Western culture is in rapid decline, I think it would be very easy because we are so interconnected and so over complex, very easy to bring it to ruin. It would only take one major natural disaster to do that. But the university themselves, I think people are all of a sudden in the United States, much more attentive to issues of political correctness because of the riots at Berkeley, which

was the capital of free speech. I mean, the free speech movement happened in the spring before I entered college in 1964. It's one of the great principles and inspirational stories of my entire life, Mario Savios, a assertion of the supremacy of free thought and free speech. So I think that perhaps, you know, we might just have turned a corner,

but it's going to take a very, very long time for the University to be reform. I feel that the cafeteria menu of the University curriculum has to be abandoned, that we must return to historical courses that begin in the earliest period, the Stone Age in antiquity, in order to give perspective to our present analysis of our present culture.

I want 50 to 75% of college administrators fired, and the money be transferred over to faculty, into libraries, into instruction. I think that obviously the way things are being trained right now, including at the public school level, is I think the public school level has gone to hell. When my mother came to the NIST age of six, the old public school system was very strict. And therefore, if she had excellent education, and got all A's in her, even though she started out in not speaking English, spoke without an accent, et cetera.

So today, this kind of feel good public school education, which is a form of ideology and indoctrination right now. So it's all about no bullying. And not even seriously about no bullying. Yes, yeah. So I mean, I can tell in my own students, I mean, I've even seriously about no bullying. Yes, I mean, I can tell in my own students, I've been teaching for 46 years. So I can tell this slow degradation of public school education to the point now that the students have absolutely no sense of world geography, of world history.

They don't know anything about wars, and the reality, the barbaric reality of most of human history. And what of a fantastic culture we live in. And so, now, identity politics itself has just got to stop. I mean, it was important once. I was a rebel against the wasp hegemony, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant hegemony in American culture-Saxon products in the Germany, in American culture. It was suffocating. I was raised in the 1950s when wasp's control

corporations and education and politics and so on. So the identity politics was necessary once. We asserted gay rights. With Stonewell, we're building a 1969. We asserted women's, okay, with it, we still know we're building a 1966, we asserted okay, the women's rights with the rebirth of second-wave feminism in the late 1960s, okay, but there's endless, okay, preoccupation with a fragmented identity. We must return to the authentic 1966 vision, which is about identity coming from consciousness,

which transcends gender, which transcends all these divisions of race, and ethnicity, consciousness itself. There's no sense of that any longer. That's what the 1960s saw. Well, I see that as a complete abandonment of personal responsibility, because that consciousness, I think, symbolically, and I got a lot of this from young and also from Eric Neumann.

I mean, that's the great logos of the West, right? That's the transcendent principle, which is respect for the primacy of individual consciousness. And what goes along with that primarily isn't individual rights, although that's built into it. I mean, that's the reason we have individual rights is for respect for that. But the responsibility that comes along

with being an individual instead of the member of some group, especially a victimized group, which is like the, I wrote an article with one of my students who had toured the mass grave sites in the former Yugoslavia, you know, and had been exposed to that sort of thing. And one of the things that our research indicated was that the best predictor of genocide

is victimization on the part of the group that produces the genocide, right? A sense of an accelerated sense of victimization, and then it's well, we get them before they get us. So, and everyone's being taught now that they're a victim, and then no one seems to have any sense that, you know, that's part of the essential tragedy of being that life is suffering and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that, and that the world rests on a foundation of suffering. It's nothing to take personally and something to take responsibility for instead of blaming and resentment and all of the things that have polluted our universities and our culture. Well, and there also was the abandonment of the canon. People asserted that the canon was the product of bias and again of a provincial elitism and so on, but in point of fact

as a student of the mystery of the arts, I can assure people that the canon, overwhelmingly so, is the result of what artists have determined. We say a work is important, it's canonical, because artists following it, okay? We're influenced by it. We have this like a beautiful cascading tradition

of influence, all right? So that's another part of the Philistinism, okay? Of current education, to believe that there are these external reasons, okay? For why a work last, why a work, you know, 500 years ago or a thousand years ago, has global relevance. As if it's some sort of political conspiracy that's based on power. As if anybody could even manage that no matter how nefarious they were.

Right. But also, you know, we in the 60s, you know, had the idea, the idea that there was a human sensibility, that transcendent individual nations and so on, and that it was this like rubric cosmic consciousness. This sense of the universe as a whole, to see the human being in relationship to great eternal principles of life, to death, mortality and so on, whereas Marxism is blind. Marxism is very narrow. All it sees is society. It sees nothing beyond society.

It doesn't see nature. I mean, it's absolutely man. How you can have a system being taught in universities, which thinks that this tiny thing of society, compared to the enormity and beauty of nature, it should take all of our, you know, absorb all of our energy and attention. So, I mean, I just think that there's like a parochialism,

a provincialism, you know, now, a kind of, you know, systematized elitism in our current education, it's got to be rooted out. I want to return to basics, great simpliities. All these faculty members teaching their little tiny courses that have to do with their own specialty. That's got to stop. People can pursue whatever they want in their private research as scholars.

Certainly, that's necessary. But they must teach in the core curriculum. And people must decide what is crucial for an educated person to know. I do want a multicultural, I do want a global curriculum. I want all the cultures taught, okay? Right, this is not the answer.

Marxism, this neo-Marxism in the universities, okay? It's simply, it's lazy, It's a lazy way to assert multiculturalism without actually doing the research and the study of other cultures. Okay, all right. That's a good one to close on. We agree on everything I knew this. I knew it. All right, great. To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, the link to which can be found in the description of this episode. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs can be found at self-authoring.com. Thank you.