The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - The Crisis of Masculinity

Episode Date: October 13, 2019

The Crisis of Masculinity is a lecture from Jordan's 12 Rules for Life Tour on Oct. 25, 2018 in Manchester. Thanks to our sponsors: Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/jordan Helix Sleep: https://helixsleep.com/jordan E Toro: https://www.etoro.com/peterson

Welcome to season 2, episode 30 of The Jordan B Peterson Podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's daughter, and collaborator. This is a podcast done in Manchester, recorded on October 25, 2018. If you haven't signed up for Think Spot, the social media platform Dad's involved with, please check it out at least. You go to ThinkSpot.com and enter the promo code LionDiet, one word, to be invited in sooner. It's still in the early stages and will be more formed in January, but it has great functionalities

built in. You can annotate podcasts, videos, basically have online book groups and interact with the content providers you want to interact with. I'm on there, hence LionDiet code, Dad is,ockewylink, Greg Hurwitz, and more. I've named this podcast The Crisis of Masculinity. The Crisis of Masculinity, a 12-year-old's-for-life lecture, done by Jordan B. Fisk. Thank you. That was very nice of you. So, I've had an interesting day in Manchester, not that that's surprising in any way. My wife and I, we had an interesting time getting here, too, because yesterday morning we were in Oslo,

and then we flew to Stockholm and did two newspaper interviews in a podcast, and then a TV talk show there, and then we made it to the airport to fly to London with like 20 minutes to spare. We're supposed to fly in this morning, but we thought that was risking it because my publicists at Penguin had cooperated with BBC to set up a radio interview this morning at 10, and we figured if we flew in, you know, if there was a flight delay, then that would be not good.

And so we flew to London last night, and we got in about midnight, and then we drove to Manchester, and that took about three hours. And so that was yesterday. And then this morning we got up, and we went to this BBC radio interview, which was very interesting.

And I thought I might talk to you about it a little bit. I'm going to talk to you tonight about three rules. I'm going to talk to you about rule 11, which is don't bother children when they're skateboarding, and rule 10, which is be precise in your speech, and rule 8, which is pursue what is meaningful, sorry, that's rule seven, pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient and I want to, I want to, what would you say, weave those together and also do that in a way that's relevant to what happened today because what happened today was quite cool. So, I went to this boxing club that's in Moss, yes, Moss side, Moss side, yes. And it was run by a gentleman named Nigel Travis.

And so, he's taken part of an own fire station there and turned it into a boxing club and so, and he did that to help primarily young men in the Moss side area, develop some discipline and to bring their aggression. I wouldn't say under control, but to learn how to use it in the most appropriate possible way. So, and then at the boxing club, there was nine people, nine people, other than me, there was the person who set up the interview, someone that I had talked to a year before, and then there were two young guys, 18-year-old guys who had learned to box and had ended up

doing very well at it. One of them is the current ABA national youth champion. Another one was a Somalian kid who has disciplined himself as a consequence of interacting with this group and is now mentoring young people. And there was a young guy from France and his name is Kevin Munga. He was an ex-gang member. And he turned his life around and finished his law degree. And he just wrote a book called Young Black Males Have Potential. Your color does not determine your future. So that was really interesting. And Guy named Rhodes, who studying for a PhD from Cypress,

who did military service and learned during his military service that he was not only capable of accepting a certain amount of discipline, but that he was capable of thriving in the chaos that was part and parcel of the military training. And so we had a really good conversation, there are some other people there as well. I won't mention them at the moment, but it was a really good conversation. You know, because, well, because it was a real conversation, that was the first thing. It was each of these guys had come from a background that was rough, and in its own way, one of them, I think his name was Nile, had developed type 1 diabetes when he was a kid,

and he talked about how he had learned to, I wouldn't say overcome that, because I don't really know if you overcome a very serious illness like that, but you can confront it and do everything you can to accept it without bitterness and to move forward despite the fact that you're impeded in some important way, an important, dangerous and frightening way. And so that was good. He started a business and that's thriving. And so he's pretty happy with that. And so we were talking about, we were talking about

all sorts of things. And so I wanted to sort of weave those together a little bit to think about what we were talking about. No, a couple of the guys that joined gangs when they were kids and adolescence. And you know, we're not very happy about young man joining gangs, but actually, it's, here's what's interesting. It's like, it's one thing to join a gang, and maybe that's not the best thing, but it's another thing not to be able to join a gang. You see, that's really a bad thing. It means

if you're 12 or 13 and you can't find a gang, that means that you haven't become socialized enough so that people will accept you. And so, joining a gang, being able to join a gang is actually a marker of a certain degree of maturation. And you need a gang if you're, you need a gang, if you're male, let's say. And maybe you need a gang if you're female too, although we don't seem to see roving gangs of females. So, well, right, I mean, that's not something that happens, right?

And I would say that's actually worthy of note. There's a reason for that. I think it might have something to do with the fact that because women mature sexually earlier than men, that girls, 13, 14, start going out with guys that are older than that, or maybe 14, 15, they start going out with older guys, and so they don't have that time where they aggregate together in, as I said, roving bands of teenage girls, whereas aggregate together in, as I said, roving bands of teenage girls, whereas younger guys, 14, 15, 16,

they're not necessarily that attractive as potential mates, and so they have to do something with their time, and maybe what they do is second best and hang around with other losers like them, whatever. I think there's more to it than that. I think that joining a gang is actually a stepping stone to full adult socialization, right? Because what you have to do is move away from your primary dependence on your parents and into a peer group, and then you have to learn how to interact with the peer group

in a manner that makes you a desirable part of that group and maybe a respectable part, and then you also have to be able to hold your own in that peer group, right? Because a male gang has a fair bit of contentiousness in it. There's a lot of poking and prodding that goes on often in humorous guys to see if you can, well, can you take a joke, you know? Can you take some hassle? Are you good for something? Are you at least, you know, or someone that could be relied on? Are you good for something? Are you at least, or are you someone that could be relied on?

Are you honest? Are you someone that could be talked to? Can you be relied on in a scrap if necessary? Can you take a blow in your life, or even an actual blow without falling apart as a consequence? All that testing goes on. That's all necessary. It's part of, see, because I think the way that human beings develop is that, first of all, their children

and their dependent, and they have their childhood friends and so forth, but fundamentally, they're within the confines of the familial group. And maybe that's even a matriarchal organization that initial familial group. Maybe it's not, but maybe it is. Anyways, you're certainly under the primary care of your mother and your father.

And if you have only a single parent and many of these young men did, that's often the mother. And so primarily you're under the care of your mother. And that's fine, except you just don't want that to be the case for your whole damn life, right? I mean, at some point, enough of that. And really, that

point's got to be somewhere around 12, 13, where, you know, you move out into the world despite the fact that you don't know what the hell you're doing, and you take your risks, and you take your blows, and you meet your mates, and you join a gang. And then, of course, the fundamental question is, well, what sort of gang is it going to be? That's really the fundamental question, not whether or not it's going to be a gang, is what sort of gang is it going to be? And the gentleman who started the boxing club in some sense has produced a gang and he tried to make one that was predicated on the ideals of discipline and respect, at least

in part. And that's not so much an antidote to the gang as it is a much better gang. And so what you hope is that, as you mature as a male, that the gang that you're part of gets more and more and more sophisticated and worthwhile, not that you don't have a gang. You know, like when I went to university, it was a relief to me to go to university, actually, because I was always interested in intellectual matters,

and when I went to university, so were the people at the university, although that seems to have changed substantially, since then, you know, and I found my gang, and it was twofold. It was other people who had a similar background to me. I come from a working class community and the friends that I made when I went to college were working class guys. A lot of them had worked on the oil rags and lead smelters. They were relatively

tough guys and they decided that. And they were smart, you know, although I wouldn't say necessarily classically intellectual, but they had decided that they were going to go to college or university and try to educate themselves, you know, because, well, because they had the capacity for it. And so that was part of my gang. But then the other part where the people, some professors I met who were really interested in teaching, I had some great professors, especially a small community college that I first attended, and they were great mentors, you know, they're actually interested in teaching and interested in opening up the remarkable gang of intellectuals whose work has spanned the last 2,000 years that we've collected

and aggregated and put together in university libraries so that people can join that club if they want to. And I really did want to. And so I spent a lot of time at university reading great books, which is what you should do if you go to university. And the reason you should do that is because great books aren't great because some bloody arbitrary patriarchy decided to elevate those writers above all else for reasons of power and tyranny, but because those books contain information that if you know, will save you an awful lot of misery and trouble.

And maybe everyone else as well, because they contain wisdom. And it's not necessarily the case that it's easy to extract the wisdom out. You have to contend and grapple with the books, right? You have to push yourself beyond your current intellectual ability and you have to discipline yourself so that you can do the reading and understand the concepts, but then that enables you to join this amazing gang that's the gang of those who have used books to conduct a conversation about what constitutes civilized reality across the last 5,000 years. And I tell you, man, that's a hell of a gang to join.

And so if you can do it, and that's what you're supposed to do if you go to university, especially if you go to university and take a humanities degree, because that was the whole bloody point. It's like, can you join the gang of those who engaged in this centuries-long, civilized discourse about the way the world should be structured? Okay, so we can talk about that. And these guys today, I know they were talking about what elevated them beyond the trouble that was part of their more unsophisticated gangs.

The problem with getting young guys together, they're 14 or 15, they all bunch together, is like, well, first of all, what the hell do they know? Not much, and what do they have at their disposal? Like, I'm not putting them down. It's just like, well, what do you know when you're 14 or 15? Your time horizon isn't very long. You haven't got a lot of experience with the world. The probability that you're going to orient yourself

in the optimal direction is very low, especially if that you're going to orient yourself in the optimal direction is very low, especially if you're only looking to each other for guidance, you know, and then maybe you're more swayed by the tougher guys, maybe the guys who are more like bullies, and maybe not too, but there is something to be said for being tough over, being weak. You know, even if it isn't manifested in its most sophisticated form, there's something to be said about people who can stand up for themselves. And that can obviously tilt into unfair domination

of others, and that's its more unsophisticated manifestation. But that doesn't mean that weakness is to be preferred. It's not to be preferred. And there's a reason for that, too. It's like, well, what's the problem with weakness? Well, here's the bloody problem with weakness, is that there's going to come hard times in your life. And not just your life, but the lives of your family, the people that you might be responsible

for. There's nasty things coming your way. And if you're strong, then maybe you can pull your family and yourself together when those terrible times come, and you can get through them with a minimum of absolute destruction. And that's good for you, and it's good for your family, and hopefully it's good for your community.

And that's the real core of strength. It's the ability to contend with adversity without it taking you down, or not only without it taking you down, but without it taking you down and making you better and resentful and cruel and troublesome. And so strength is the antidote to that. It's not the ability to dominate someone else, even though those things can be allied because well, because good things when they first develop aren't

as sophisticated and differentiated as they might be. And then we talked about the idea that maybe there's a crisis among young men and they need help. And I didn't really like that idea either of the crisis or of the help. And the reason I didn't like the crisis ideas is because it's like, well, what else is new? You know, like life's like bloody crisis. And so I was speaking with some reporters backstage just before I came out here and they

were asking me about the crisis among young men and a crisis of masculinity. I don't like the phrase. There's something about it that sort of puts me off. There's a victimy thing about it that I don't like the phrase. There's something about it that sort of puts me off. There's a victimy thing about it that I don't like. And I mean, look, young men, it's like, well, you didn't have to go to Europe and spend four bloody years in the trenches. You know, so that was a crisis, and then you didn't have to go fight the Nazis. Hey, that was a crisis and there was no war in Korea and there was no war in Vietnam and so we had, you know, a couple of decades of comparative peace and so by historical standards it's like, well really it's not that much of a crisis.

Like, oh, I got to play video games, you know. And I'm obviously making light of it, not because there isn't something serious going on because there is, but compared to how serious things can be, they can be so serious that it's just bottomless, you know. And so you kind of feel foolish about talking about the crisis of masculinity, you know, compared to, well, you know, I read George Orwell's book, Road to Wagon Pier, which I would highly recommend. It's on my, I have a list of recommended readings on my web page.

Some of you might be interested in that, or even know about it. But Road to Wagon Pier describes the lives of coal miners in the northern UK in the 1930s. And I mean, my God, it was just brutal, you know, Orwell, who was no, no, weakling. You know, or well, who was no weakling. You know, he'd spend a lot of time tramping around. He worked in rough restaurants in the UK in Paris. And like he did the working class thing,

even though he wasn't a member of the working class, he'd kind of put himself in that milieu. And he was a reasonably tough guy for an intellectual type. And, you know, he went into the coal mine one day just to see what these guys' lives were like. And they had to walk through a tunnel. I can't remember how long the tunnel was. It was like three miles. It was like some insane.

It took them like two hours to walk through the coal tunnel that was way underground just to get to work. And it was only like this high. So not only did they have to walk to get to the coal face to work, but they had to walk like this. And he said, well, he had gone like, you know, half a mile like that. And he was done. That was the end of him for the day. And that was just the morning, that was half the morning commute for the coal miners. And you know, and by the time they were 30, they were 35, they were pretty much done.

They had black lung, they didn't have any teeth, like they were just done. And of course they didn't get paid anything for it either. It was absolutely brutal work. And I mean, that was the characteristic of, well, not just men. You know, here's another thing that's worth thinking about, too. You know, and this touches on another issue. It just drives me, I don't know, it outranges me, I guess, in every deep sense. You know, and this also came up today when we were talking about the crisis of masculinity. You know, we have this idea that everyone is supposed to accept now.

Sometimes I talk to people and I object to this idea and they look at me like there's something wrong with me. It's like, because it's not an idea I accept. And the idea is that, well, what we live in, our culture, Western culture, which you, UK types are in large part responsible for creating, and as far as I'm concerned, thank you very much. I sincerely mean this, I think that English common law is God's gift to the world, it's such a remarkable creation, and so much of the idea of individual sovereignty and freedom

was established in great difficulty here and promoted all over the world. And it's an amazing achievement. And I see threats to an emerging in your land that just hurt my heart. I saw yesterday someone sent me pictures of posters in the Scotland subway asking citizens to turn each other in for hate crimes

and to see that emerging in the UK. It's just so appalling. It's so horrible to see that happening here in the closed-camera TV systems that are everywhere. I really hate to see that happening here because I think this is the center of the idea of individual sovereignty and democratic rights that it's the dead center of that throughout the world. And it's been an amazing achievement.

And I hate to see that threatened. In any case, we have this miss begotten notion generated by a tiny minority of resentful and extraordinarily well organized activists who have proclaimed very loudly and with plenty of help from government subsidy for the last five decades that the best way to characterize Western society is as a tyrannical patriarchy. And that is, it's so wrong.

You don't even know where to start. I mean, first of all, we could look at it psychologically. So we'll do that. We have a tendency to view our world, the world we experience in personified form. And it's a very powerful tendency. We tend to see things, human beings, we tend to see things as if they're animate.

Which is why, you know, when you read a book to a kid and it's Thomas the Tank Engine and Thomas has a big smile on, and the sun has a face, and everyone's perfectly happy about that. You read that to your kids, and you don't notice that it's rather absurd that Thomas is an animate character.

And part of the reason for that is because we're deeply social primates, deeply social animals, and our cognitive structures have evolved in a primary social, primarily social animals, and our cognitive structures have evolved in a primary social, primarily social environment, and we tend to see the world first and foremost as if it's characters in motion. And it's been with great difficulty that we can pull ourselves away from that viewpoint and produce something like an objective science where we're looking at the world as in some

sense as if it's dead material. Now, it's been very useful to do that, but it's not natural for us, which is why we didn't really manage it until like 500 years ago, right? It's a very new, I mean, maybe you can push it back to the Greeks, but they weren't really scientists, even though they laid some of the groundwork for what became science later on. Well, so it's easy to personify, to see culture personified and often as male. That's very typical symbolically. I laid that out a bit in 12 rules for life and also in maps of meaning, drawing primarily

from the work of the Jungian types like, well Carl Jung himself and Merchè Elliott and the great symbolic investigators of the 20th century, Joseph Campbell, among them, who laid out quite clearly the idea that what culture tends to be symbolized in mythology and literature and art for that matter as masculine. And there's two elements to the masculine in so far as it's representative of our cultural hierarchy. And one is the archetype of the wise king, and the other is the archetype of the tyrant. And every society is an amalgam of those two things. Every organization is an amalgam of those two things.

And we all know that because if you go to work in a small hierarchy, maybe you have a small business, there's some things about the business that are going very well, assuming that it's a thriving enterprise. And people are awake and working hard and interacting with one another, honestly. But then there's a tendency for that to go astray, for power to dominate the relationships in the hierarchy instead of confidence confidence or for a crookedness and

deceit to enter into it or for people to steal and become blind or willfully blind. And so we have this battle in every hierarchy between the wise king and the tyrant. And you see that expressed in popular tropes. So most of you have seen the lion king for example, which is a remarkable thing in and of itself that most of you have actually seen that King, for example, which is a remarkable thing in and of itself that most of you have actually seen that, and worth thinking about, given that it's an animated movie about like lions who can talk, and that's all fine with you. So, strangely enough, but you know, Mufasa, who's the wise king, and who's at the top of the hierarchy, perched

on top of Pride Rock, and master of everything he can survey, has an evil brother. That scar, scar has obviously been damaged by life, hence scar, and he's a little bit too intellectual for his own good, and not much of a physical specimen. And he's very, so he's a representative of the arrogance of the rational mind, fundamentally, and its opposition to wisdom,

and he's constantly conspiring to take down the king. And that's a very, very old story. It's an unbelievable, well, it's a story that was reflected in Egyptian mythology far before Christianity emerged. When the Egyptians figured out that every hierarchy that emerges as a consequence of natural human activity is threatened by its evil shadow. And that shadow is partly a consequence of the fact that if you make a business and it works, and then you don't change it at all for 20 years, then it dies, right? Because everything around it changes. So even if you produce something of great value,

if you're a heroic entrepreneurial type and you produce something of great value, and then you allow it to become static and stultified and unchanging, then it will deteriorate and die of its own accord, because the environment changes. And so things fall apart of their own accord, one of the great mythological messages. And that's sped along by the blindness of men.

That's the next great doctrine. And so that's the doctrine of the flood, for example. You know, the catastrophe is coming, the flood is on its way, always the case in life, but it's going to be a hell of a lot worse if you're blind and not ready. And so those are mythological truths. You have the wise king, always, always threatened by the evil brother and who's conspiring through deceit and willful blindness and sheer entropy to demolish the state. And so in Egypt, for example, there was a God associated

with each of those conceptualizations, the God Osiris, who was God of the state, a great hero in his youth, the founder of the Egyptian state, but old now and willfully blind, willfully blind, will not pay attention to what he should pay attention to, and archaic, like things that are old are archaic. And that's our culture, right? Our culture is the construction of the dead,

the past, the dead. And so it's blind, and it's out of date. And then it's threatened by a malevolent force, and the malevolent force is, well, malevolence itself, the willful blindness of people and the desire to do harm. And so it's reasonable to note that any hierarchical organization can be properly conceptualized in these two ways. There's a wise king element, and there's an evil tyrant element.

And then the question is, well, which has the upper hand? Now, what's happened with the radical types is they've just taken the wise King out of the equation altogether and said, well, what Western culture constitutes is nothing but the evil tyrant. It's like, well, okay, first of all, no wrong. It's wrong psychologically. It's like, well, you're missing a character there.

Where's the Wise King? Boy, so, well, there's no evidence for the wise king It's like yeah, actually there's plenty of evidence and so what's the evidence? Well here we are there's three thousand of us none of us know each other well some of you know each other a little bit But fundamentally you're among strangers. I mean they're within your own culture mostly But you're among strangers and look at you all. You're all peaceful. You're all sitting down the same way.

You're all eyes front the same way. You know what the rules are. You're participating in a complex political discussion that could be contentious with no hint whatsoever of violence. We're in this lovely theater. We don't think the roof will fall because the engineers who built it weren't corrupt and they actually used concrete

instead of sand, which is what they tended to use in the Soviet Union, right? If it wasn't radioactive sand, which it often was, because that's how you got rid of the radioactive waste, right? And so that's not happening. And probably the floor is going to maintain itself while you sit there and your chairs aren't going to collapse. And the lights aren't going to go off, and the the floor is going to maintain itself while you sit there, and your chairs aren't going to collapse, and the lights aren't going to go off,

and the PA system is going to work, and all of this, and it's warm, it's warm in here, and you notice the roof isn't leaking, and like, there's a lot of really good things happening in this room, and most of you, not too many of you don't look like you're starving, quite the contrary, and for... Well, you know there's more overweight people

in the world now than there are starving people. It's like, there is a reason for a party. We should be having like a two-week party every summer, all over the world, where the banners say, more fat people than starving people. Because it's such a massive accomplishment that one of our problems now is, oh my God, we have too many good things to eat.

And that's unparalleled in human history. That's for sure, man, that that's a problem. You know, in last month, apparently, we hit the point for the first time ever that there are now the majority of people in the world are working class. So it's like, well, that's a good thing. And you know, between the year 2000 and 2012, we have the level of absolute poverty across the world, fastest economic development in the history of the world.

You know, and you might say, well, we put the level of privation pretty low. It was the UN that did this. So, you know, now people are making more than a dollar a 90 a day by In today's money and you know that's not very much money and welfare enough You know it's not but it beats the hell out of starving and it's also the case that in 1895 even in places like the UK The average human being lived on less than a dollar a day in today's money. Right? Now it was only 130 years ago. And so, you know, we've moved away from that level

of privation with unbelievable speed. First in Europe and North America, let's say, first there, but it had to happen first somewhere because everyone wasn't going to get instantly rich all at once. That just can't happen. Some people have to have it happen first. And that's something to think about when you're jealous of rich people. It's like, well, someone has to buy the damn new things when they're hyper-expensive so that the price can be driven down so that everybody else can afford them. It's like, the good things have to come to some people first.

And if it's not you, and it is you, because by the way, you only need to make $32,000 a year now to be in the top 1% of income earners worldwide, so you're all in the top 1% or virtually all of you, so you should be guilty about that and what be ashamed of your privilege, regardless of what color you are, by the way. So, and so, none of this speaks to me of a patriarchal tyranny. It's not by any real world standards, it's like, okay, compared to what exactly, is this a patriarchal tyranny? We've already said that you got to watch the system,

because it tilts towards blindness and stupidity and corruption. But you've got mechanisms for dealing with that, right? Most large companies only last about 30 years. They turn over quite quickly. That's the typical lifespan of a Fortune 500 company. Most family fortunes only last three generations.

That's not a thousand years. It's really something approximating a single lifespan, a single total lifespan. And politically, well, you know, if your politicians sit in office too long, they tend to get corrupt, right, because their networks of power and influence grow too great and they start to be able to exercise control and power where they shouldn't. And so what do you do? Well, you kill them, ritually, every four years, right? But you don't actually kill them because you figured out how to do it ritually.

And you just defeat them at the polls and you say, well, you know, you guys have done, you've been, what would you say? You've been approximately as stupid on average as we would expect half decently competent Morons like us to manage, but you've had your kick at the cat and now it's time for another pack of And that's democracy, right? And I'm dead serious. I'm absolutely dead serious about this. It is not a utopian system. You know, and it's interesting to look at how the Americans managed this.

And as a Canadian, I regard Americans as Englishmen who more fully articulated what was already implicit in the English common law system. And so because basically the American revolutionaries were Englishmen who were demanding their rights as Englishmen. And so, and the Americans tend to look at it slightly different than that. But not so much.

They certainly know that their tradition emerged from the broader background tradition that I speak of. And the Americans were very wise and non-utopian in the way they set up their political system. They assumed that they didn't think, well, human beings are perfectable. And the perfectable issue is an interesting one. It's like, well, what do you mean, perfectable exactly? By whose standards? Well, the answer to that is

always, well, by my standards. I'd like to make people perfectable by my standards. I'd like them to be the way I think they should be. And then, if I'm politically minded, I can gerrymander the political structure so that we end up with a modern human being of the future. They certainly tried that places like Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union. I wouldn't say it went that well. And that's mostly because, well, you don't know what the perfect human being is, and neither does anyone else. And besides that, it changes with time.

Like, sometimes you need compassionate people at the helm, and sometimes you need dreadfully tough-minded people at the helm. Sometimes you need to listen to people who are worried and nervous, and sometimes you need to listen to people who are confident and secure, and you don't know when, because the tide changes and the earth shifts, and so what's right one day isn't necessarily right the next, which by the way does not mean that there's no such thing as right or wrong. That's not a sophisticated way of looking at it. And so what the Americans did in their attempt to regulate their society possible was make the following humble assumptions. Most people are flawed and error prone. And we're not really going to be able to do much about that.

And so what we want to do is produce a political system that idiots as foolish as us can't screw up too badly. And so that's what they did. That's why they put in the checks and balances. That's why we have cycling elections. That's even why there's an electoral college and you elect representatives instead of doubting indirect democracy, which is too dangerous, perhaps, with regards to unbridled rule of the mob. And so it's a very cautious system. And it's never been predicated on the idea

that we'll make society perfect in some final utopian sense, or that we'll bring about the new man. It's more, it's more like, well, we don't know what to do. We don't want to let anybody get too much of an upper hand. We want to balance the system out. And then we want to let all these peculiar creatures that we are go out there and have their kick at the can and more or less see what happens. And of course, that's not perfect and it can take a nose dive and it produces a fair

bit of inequality Like every other social system ever produced on the planet But it does allow people to strive genuinely forward to some degree and that makes it a miraculous system and one of the things that I actually I absolutely despise about the radical left identity politics collectivist types who generated up this tyrannical patriarchy narrative is that, well, number one, they have no sense of historical proportion whatsoever. I like to think that, to think that what we have

isn't better than anything else that's ever been produced, just means that you don't know anything at all about what history was like. It's like I read an article a while back. I don't remember who published it, and unfortunately, who was comparing the lot of Nelson Rockefeller in like 1915, 1916, to the typical modern middle class person, stating quite forthrightly that there's no way if you had any sense you would

change that position for that of a billionaire a hundred years ago. I believe one of Rockefeller's kids died of an infectious bacterial disease. It's like, well, you actually don't have to worry about that. Well, unless we keep abusing antibiotics, which were, you on doing. But right now, if you have a potentially fatal infectious disease, you can just go to the doctor and take pills for three days, and then you're not dead. And a billion dollars, a hundred years ago, wasn't going to buy that for you. And you have amazing technology at your grasp, and you have central heating, and you have plumbing, plumbing, plumbing, man.

Plumbing is a really good thing. And virtually everybody has it. Refrigeration. You should every morning, when you walk into your kitchen, you should bow before you're refrigerator. I'm serious, man, because that's a major deal. You can store food in a refrigerator. And then you actually have the food to store.

And you know, you don't notice that because, well, that's even more miraculous, is that that's so taken for granted that you don't even notice it. And so, there's no gratitude in that view of our culture. And it's not like, it's not flawed. I mean, human history is an absolute bloody nightmare. There's no doubt about it. There's no culture that you can whose history you can investigate without just shuddering at what it means to be a human being. It's so bloody brutal. But at least it seems to me that we've struggled forward to some degree modifying misery and suffering to some degree, and that

we're actually getting better and better at that. And so some gratitude for that is clearly an order, and the idea that fundamentally what we have is a tyrannical patriarchy is absolutely a boring message in my estimation. And then with regards to these young men, so back to the crisis of masculinity, I tried to put it into some historical context. So there is a crisis of sorts. I would say it's more of a psychological crisis than anything else.

That doesn't mean it's trivial. One of the guys I was talking to today, this was a good, he made a good comment. He remembered that when he was a kid, he was sitting down reading a picture book, looking at a picture book when he was very young. And his dad took the picture book out of his hand and cuffed him across the head with it and said,

like, what the hell do you think you're doing with that? You know, and you can imagine what would motivate that. Like maybe his father hadn't been educated very well, or maybe wasn't very prone to education, and maybe he had been harshly treated by teachers, and maybe he became very skeptical about any kind of intellectual endeavor, and was extraordinarily angry about that because of the opportunities that had been denied to him, and so he decided that he was going to hate that entire end of the enterprise, or maybe he was jealous of his son because he showed some signs that

that might be an aptitude, whatever, and that manifested itself in that little bit of cruel behavior, not so little, and something this gentleman still remembered 25 years later. It's like, well, I mentioned when that came up that the claim by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, that if you really want to punish someone, you really want to hurt them. You think, well, what, you want to hurt someone? How do you do it?

You don't wait for them to do something wrong and then punish them. That's actually kind of a relief, because if your conscience is reasonably well-constituted and you do something wrong and you don't get caught, then that actually kind of destabilizes your whole world, because you're kind of hoping the world is a just place, at least to some degree.

And if you can get away with murder, let's say, well, then where's the moral order, you know? And that's the great theme of Dostoevsky's crime and punishment. The British movie made about 20 years ago, dealt with the same theme called Shallow Grave, which was an absolutely terrific movie, which I would highly recommend, showing the negative consequence of doing something criminal and not getting caught for it.

Well, in any case, punishing someone for their crimes, it's like that's like an active mercy. You really want to hurt someone, you punish them for their virtues. You wait until they do something good, and then you nail them right then and there, and that's pain, that's for sure. And that's what I see as the crisis of masculinity. And it's not a crisis of masculinity because it hurts women just as much, because it turns out that women need men and men need women, and that's why there are men and women.

The whole human race is actually, well, God, it's, of course, you know, we're the same creatures. We've been cooperating together culturally and biologically for, well, ever since sex itself was invented, which is hundreds of millions of years ago, to think of us as separate in some sense in our interests, except in the most trivial way is a very shallow way of looking at the world. And so there can't be a crisis of masculinity without there being a corresponding crisis of femininity. Here's one way it's manifested.

The Pew Research Foundation has been tracking the desire of young women to enter into stable, long-term, monogamous relationships. That's that enforced monogamy thing that Dave Rubin was talking about. Marriage for lack of a better word. And the desire for marriage among young women has been going up precipitously over the last 25 years. At the same time that the desire for marriage has been going down precipitously among young men.

Well that's not what you call a recipe for peace, productivity and happiness. It's not good. And so there's no such thing as a crisis in masculinity. There might be a crisis in relationship between the genders and there is to some degree. And there's lots of reasons for that. The birth control pill probably being foremost among them. But in any case, the crisis seems to me to be, to the degree that it exists, to be fundamentally associated with this viewpoint that are already described. And that viewpoint is that fundamentally the West is a patriarchal tyranny. And so there are implications of that.

And that's like, that's the axiomatic view of the radical left as far as I can tell. And the feminist variant of that, but more particularly the radical left. And by the way, that's a view held by a very small minority of people. Much smaller than that was thought. There was an article last month and the Atlantic monthly, last week reviewing a new political science study looking at political polarization and viewpoints across the U.S. I suspect it's somewhat similar in Britain, it would be in Canada as well, showing that about 8% of people held radical

leftist viewpoints, and a smaller percentage held radical right wing viewpoints. So it's a small minority in both ends that are the radicals, and then they described everybody in the middle as the, what would you call it, confused and relatively silent majority sick to death of the polarization. And then they also asked the polling group what they thought about political correctness. And this was so cool, it's so comical, it's so deeply comical. First of all, on average, about 80% of Americans believed that political correctness had gone too far.

And so that's a lot, because 10% of the people didn't understand the question. So 80% is a lot, but they also broke it down by race and by age and by gender. And so here's what's really funny. The people who are most likely to think that political correctness has gone too far are those who have been termed so abysmally people of color. So it's the beneficiaries, hypothetical beneficiaries

of the politically correct identity politics culture who believe most strongly that it's gone too far. It rises to almost 90% among American Indians. So that's deeply comical, deeply comical. And what's even more comical is that the most racially homogenous political group in the entire spectrum is the politically correct. They're almost all white. And not only, not only are they almost all white, they're disproportionately likely to have a graduate degree and to make more than $100,000 a year.

And so, okay, and so this is what I think about that. So, a couple of things. The first thing is, here's what you want if you want to have your cake and eat it too, okay, because just having your cake isn't good enough for you and neither is eating it. You want both. And so what you want to do is you want to be part of the patriarchal elite, so let's define that. I hate to define it this way, but we're going to play the game. Well, you're white, you're rich, and you're highly educated. Okay, so that really makes you the exemplar of the tyrannical patriarchy. Now, maybe if you're highly educated. Okay, so that really makes you the exemplar of the tyrannical patriarchy. Now, maybe if you're female, it doesn't, but I can't tell, like if you're a successful female in the patriarchal tyranny, does that make you a patriarchal tyrant or not?

I don't know, I haven't been able to sort that out. So it seems to me that the answer is probably yes, if it's the hierarchical structure that's the problem, unless it's just the problem that it's man, but that doesn't make any sense, because if a man and a woman are acting the same way in the same structure, then it seems to be the structure, not the gender, but well, but logical consistency and coherence isn't actually part and parcel of the post-modern ethos. So, those sorts of questions never get asked, let alone get addressed. So, okay, so now you're rich and you're white and you're, let's say, educated beyond your intelligence,

because I think that's the right way of formulating it. And you've decided that that's not good enough for you. It isn't good enough for you that you actually occupy a position will say a power because there's no authority or competence in the identity politics way of looking in the world. It's just power. And so you've got that, but that's not good enough. It isn't, you're not satisfied with just being

a successful tyrant, although you think that would be enough for you, even if you were narcissistic. It's, oh no, you want another crown. You want a crown of the compassionate. So not only do you want to be on top of things, you want to be a leader of all the people who are at the bottom of things, because then you can have it both ways, right? You can have your cake, you can have your position of power, and all of that, and your position of privilege using your own damn terminology, And you can be hyper moral champion of the oppressed. It's like, no, sorry, you don't get it both ways. And it's one of the things that horrifies me about

watching Ivy League students complain about the 1%. It's like, I taught at Harvard for six years. Harvard was an interesting place. They treated their undergraduates so well, you can't believe it. And they had their reasons. And one of the reasons where they knew, and this was back in 1990, that 40% of their graduates would have a million dollars by the time they were 40. So they didn't have undergraduates.

They had baby millionaires. Right, and that's how they treated them. And the reason they treated them. And the reason they treated them that way, what was partly because I'm not going to be cynical about this is because they'd carefully selected these students, and most of them were truly outstanding people. Really, they were. And so, you know, to the degree that the university was wise, king, and not patriarchal,

tyrant, everyone was working hard trying to educate these people in the best possible manner. But there was something else which was, well, we're definitely going to make this a worthwhile experience for you because in 10 years we're going to come knocking and say, well, you know, got a spare 100,000 or so. And you're very likely to say, yes, which is why Harvard, I don't know what their endowment is now, but back when I was there, it was something like 50 billion dollars. And so that's very effective and very intelligent. But then you see these Ivy League students, so you go to an Ivy League school, any top tier university for that matter. I don't care which one it is. It's like, I don't care how old you are or what your political position is, you are now

part of the patriarchal tyranny. Now, you might not, you might be an unsuccessful part, but that doesn't redound to your credit, but you're certainly on the track forward to being that, and the fact that it's going to be delayed for 10 years means nothing. And so to also take to yourself the moral stance of advocate for the oppressed, who have you already dispossessed by the mere fact of your existence at that institution is a form of moral corruption that's really quite incomprehensible. And one, what would you say?

One, encouraged by any number of ideologically corrupt, resentful, and bitterly underpaid sociology professors, for example. I've often thought that if you wanted to eradicate political correctness among sociology professors, all you'd have to do is quadruple their pay. And it would probably be worth it because a tremendous amount of it, I've seen the antipathy that university professors has for business people, and vice versa, by the way, because I've worked in both domains.

And the university professors are often extremely annoyed, although they won't admit it, that with their level of intelligence, which admittedly is often very high, had they been working in the private world, they'd be making three for ten times as much money. And so their attitude to that is, well, there must be something corrupt about all those other people that are making that money, rather than, well, I made my choice, I have a very secure job, I have a tremendous amount of freedom, right, because as a university professor, you have a very optimal balance of security and freedom, it's quite unique a university professor, you have a very optimal balance of security

and freedom. It's quite unique. You're the most protected human being that's ever existed on the entire planet, you know, and you're supposed to work diligently. What would you say? In gratitude for that, and many do, but not all. And to be bitter about the fact that you know, that doesn't also accompany the almost unlimited capacity for material success that's characteristic of the business world strikes me as slightly ingenuous just to put it mildly. But to see these Ivy League students supported in their endeavor to play both games simultaneously is something that's just beyond comprehension to me. Okay, so back to the young man. And I said, well, you best punish people for the virtues. So let's walk this through.

Oh, yes, I wanted to finish with the demographics. That's right. So the Atlantic monthly article. So, it's 8% radical leftist few point identity politics types. 30% of those people think political correctness has gone too far. So that's down to 5% who don't. So that's like one in 20. And that's not very many people.

They obviously have a disproportionate impact. But here's what's so absolutely comical. It's so completely and utterly bizarre. And shows you what sort of upside down political world we live in. So here's the reality of the situation. The very people who decry the patriarchal structure, the tyrannical patriarchal structure, and its neocolonial attitudes, let's say, and it's, are those who are foisting a neocolonial doctrine of victimization on racial minorities

that do not match their demographic, despite the fact that those people do not want that to happen. Now, how can anything be more comical than that? It's, you couldn't make that up. It's like a deli painting or a Monty Python sketch from the life of Brian, you know, so So that was that was gratifying to see and very fun to read and entertaining to think through and all of that Okay, so back to the patriarchal tyranny narrative and the crisis of young men

All right, so well, what's the crisis? Well, this is what it is. And I talked to these young guys today about this. It's like, well, what do young men need? Well, they don't really need help. It's not the right way of thinking about it because help sounds like, look, let's say you work in a nursing home. Okay. And you need to work in nursing homes because they're necessary and people get old. And so then you say, well, are you offering them help? And you have to be precise about your words. That's rule 10, I said I would mention rule 10. You have to be precise about your words.

Well, isn't help you're offering an in nursing home? It's no, it's, you're offering what's necessary if you're offering an in nursing home. It's no, it's, it's, it's, you're offering what's necessary if you're sensible, you know, to forstall exceptional suffering and misery. And maybe you're doing that in part because, you know, you're gonna get old. And so it's definitely the case that the way you treat old people now is the way you're going to be treated.

So that chicken will definitely come home to roost. And so it's part of the intergenerational compact, let's say. But then again, there's a rule, if you're in a nursing home, it's the same rule that you should use when you're dealing with your own children. And that's partly, don't bother children when you're skateboarding. Don't do anything for the inhabitants of the old folks

home that they can do for themselves. Don't interfere with their autonomy. Leave them to practice what self-care they can practice. Let them maintain their ability and their dignity, and that's going to be one of the things you can do to aid them in their transition through old age. And that's not exactly help. It's judicious interaction. It's like, well, lend a hand when that's necessary, but I'll stand back and let you struggle forward

as an autonomous being to the degree that that's possible, just like I will if you're my child, because what you should do if you have a child, and you see them taking necessary risks is encourage them for that. It's like, kid man, the life's rough, get ready. And I'm not going to be able to protect you. I'll do my best when you're this tall. And I can kind of put a wall around you and hypothetically, you know, protect you. But soon with any luck, you're not even going to allow me to do that, right? You're going to be the 13-year-old gang member who says, hey, sorry, mom, I'm out of here.

I'm going to go join my idiot peers and enter the world, you know, and cause a certain amount of trouble. And as a mother, that's just going to be grief and not, but it's also a sign of success. The old psychoanalysts, they always said, the good mother fails. Right? If your 13-year-old is still in your basement,

that's just not success. Even if the alternative to that is that he's out causing a certain amount of trouble, well life is a certain amount of trouble. You know, when you have to experiment with a certain amount of trouble to find your way, well, so, okay, so back to the crisis of masculinity, yet again. Well, so we live in a patriarchal tyranny. Okay, well, who's responsible for that? Well, man, and how long have they been responsible for that? Well, forever. Now, of course, it's not true,

because the truth of the matter is, 120 years ago, everybody was bloody dirt poor and barely scrambling to stay alive, and men and women bonded together to the degree that they could under their intense privation to cooperate somewhat fraciously so that we didn't die, and that's the proper narrative of history, not a one-sided oppression, and also the insistence, the strange insistence what, okay, it's a patriarchal tyranny. Was that mean? Women had nothing to do with the construction of our culture?

It's like, all you women, you were just sitting around being oppressed for like 10,000 years. You didn't do anything useful at all, socially, until like 1960 when the germane grier appeared on the scene, and all of a sudden, you know, women entered the world. It's like it's such, it's such

absolute appalling rubbish and it wasn't germane, grear, and the damn feminist, anyways, it was the birth control pill. Period. Because that emancipated women enough so that they could participate much more, not period. There was other things. Well, it was the primary mover. Sanitation helped. Sanitary napkins helped. Tamparans helped. All of that, those base level technological innovations. Domestic equipment helped.

You know, it used to take a long time to wash clothes in the creek. You don't have to do that anymore. And so there's time freed up. And you have a certain amount of voluntary control over your reproductive function. These are biological revolutions. That's what's enabling women to move forward in the world and thank God for that. We need all the talented people we can possibly manage. But to think about the fact that that hadn't occurred 100 years ago as a consequence of oppression by man, it's like only in university could you learn something that foolish and that well articulated.

So okay, so now you've got manned and we know what men are like, they're patriarchal tyrants. So what are boys like? Well, that's obvious. They're baby patriarchal tyrants. So what are boys like? Well, that's obvious. They're baby patriarchal tyrants in training. And so then what do you see them doing? Well, you see them playing boisterously and you see them putting up their hand assertively and you see them talking out of turn and doing the assertive dominant masculine things that a certain proportion of young boys do. And you

don't think, oh, great, you know, there's a force that can be harnessed for good in the world if we can socialize it properly, which is precisely what you do, for example, if you take young men and you produce a boxing arena for them so that they can get the hell off the street and they can meet some older guys, and they can get a little discipline in their ability to express aggression. And then they can start to see a higher order good than what's offered to them by their gang, which is better than nothing, by the way, right, to show them a pathway for the future that's worth sacrificing for. That's what you do, that's education.

You don't say, oh well, all that manifestation of masculine energy is associated with nothing, but the power that our entire tyrannical patriarchal structure is based on, and then either dammit with faint praise, which is bad enough, or positively discourage it out of existence. It's like, what the hell good is that going to be? Exactly. What do we want? What do we want? Women, what do we want? A generation of useless men? Is that the idea? Well, maybe they'll be harmless like your neutered cat that little overweight that warms itself on your television set. You know, it's like, well, you know, he's not good for much, but if I feed him a bit, he doesn't do any damage. It's like, hey, there's a mate for you. It's like, and the women I know that are worth their salt,

they want someone to contend with. And this is quite clear, this is biology, and so forgive me for expressing some truths about biology. I know that that's damn near illegal now, and likely soon will be that women across the world, including in egalitarian societies, by the way, tend to mate across and up hierarchies. And so what they do is they look for men who occupy positions of authority and competence

that are above theirs. Well, why? Okay, let's think this through. It's not that complicated. Well, the first thing is, well, why not? Right? Why not? Look, look, let's say you're a woman.

And you have to figure out, I gotta find a man. It's like, oh my God, that's a horrible problem. It's like, and then look at all those men. How am I gonna sort through them? Why don't know? How about if I put them in groups and let them fight? And the ones that come on top will just call them the best men. Well, that's a good strategy.

It's like, well, it's the men who are making the hierarchies, at least in part, and some men rise to the top of them. And if the hierarchies were worthwhile, then those men are worthwhile, at least by the judgment of other men. And how else are you going to judge men except by the judgment of other men, and how else are you going to judge men, except by the judgment of other men? And so the women let the men sort themselves into hierarchies, and then they peel from the top down.

And that is exactly what they do. And you think, well, why is that? Well, how about because they're smart? How would that be? How about because that's a really good strategy? Now, there's a bit of a downside, because that might mean that there's a hierarchical imbalance in the relationship,

but here's the payoff for that. Well, why do you select a partner? Well, partly, partly, large part, if you want the whole race to survive is because, well, you want to have kids. And so what's going to happen when you have kids if you're a female? Well, a couple of things.

First of all, you're going to take an economic hit. So you know, the vaunted wage gap. It's not a gap between men and women. It's a gap between mothers and everyone else, fundamentally. And we should get that straight. And the reason there's a gap is because it's actually really expensive to have children. And we don't know what to do about that. It's like, first of all, well, they're expensive. You know, you have to buy things for them. You have to have room for them. You have to take care of them.

And then they take you out of your life, especially the first few years, especially the first year. It's like, man, that's a full-time job. A new baby, it's more than a full-time job. It's like 80 hours a week, the first year. And then, and even right up to the age of four or five when they enter school, it's a tremendous amount of effort to regulate the behavior of small children, especially if they have more than one of them. You might think, well, you could hire another woman

to do it, but that doesn't really solve the problem. It doesn't make the expense go away. So we don't know what to do with the fact that children are expensive. You could say, well, we could pay mothers to take care of them, but the problem with that is that the children aren't worth anything till 25 years later. Well, they're not economically. So we don't know, we don't have a mechanism for figuring out how to monetize an investment that has that much delay. If you're a blood-eventure capitalist, you know, you want a 10-to-1 return on your investment within five years.

It's like good luck with that, with a kid. You know, even if you sell the kid, that's not going to work. So, the other thing the women do is, well, they know they're going to take the primary hit, and there's a couple of reasons for that, and one is, well, they know they're going to take the primary hit. And there's a couple of reasons for that. And one is, well, women are actually better at taking care of infants. I mean, below the first year than men.

And it's also not, I seem not as terrifying to women. When my wife and I decided to have kids, I thought it through. We were quite young by modern standards. And I wasn't fully in what would you say placed in my career and I thought okay she wants to have a baby. It's like well what about that? I said what's Jesus I don't know what I'm going to do about that first year because I don't really know what to do with infants that. Well I mean I'd work in daycare and I really like

kids and I said okay look look no problem you can have a baby but look you got more or less take care of that baby the first year and got more or less take care of that baby the first year and I'll try to take care of you and we'll see how that goes. And it's not like I ignored the damn baby, but I didn't breastfeed it, you know, and I didn't want to. So, and I did helper, and I tried to see

when she was too tired and then I'd step in and all that. And, but I also facilitated, let's say, or at least didn't interfere with that tight bond that's produced between mother and infant. And one of the things we lie to young women about is because we tell them, oh, career is going to be everything for you. It's like, no, that's a lie. First of all, most people don't have careers.

They have jobs. And those aren't the same thing. And second, even most people who have careers find that when they have a family, especially when they have children, that they end up liking their children a hell of a lot more than they thought they would. I had one lawyer I used to work with,

female lawyer, tough cookie man, and unbelievably competent. And she said, well, you know, when I was going for partnership, I always thought the children were just sort of, they were just sort of decorative, you know, because she'd, let's say, suppressed her maternal attitude until it came out in full force at around 29, which is, you know, absolutely typical. And then she had a baby and it was like, it was just a shock to her. It was like, I really love this baby.

It's like, you know, because the thing about a baby that's so weird and I think this is especially true for mothers is, you know, you see a baby on the subway and you think, oh, there's a baby, and it's sort of like a generic baby. And like, because you just can't get too involved with every baby that comes along. First of all, people think you're peculiar, and that's not good. And second, well, you just can't take on that responsibility. So you don't really see the baby. You just see your kind of one-dimensional animated version

of the baby. And you glance and you walk away. But when you have a child, it's like, no, no, you get the whole creature right there. Like that's a real person right from the beginning. And it's your real person. And all of a sudden, it's someone that you're as close to or closer than anyone you've ever been close to

in your whole life. And if that doesn't change you, well then there's something wrong, something's gone wrong. And so then the priorities shift. And as they should shift, and that doesn't mean we know how to balance that with like long-term career. We don't, because it's complicated. But you know, women end up bearing the primary responsibility for extraordinarily dependent

infants. And so they tend to look for men who can provide the resources to balance that out to some degree. So they're looking at productivity and generosity, let's say as markers for a suitable mate. Now that's not the only thing. There's other elements that go into mate choice, but those are two very important things. Those are relevant and important. And so, well, what do you want to do? Well, you want to encourage young men to what? To grow the hell up, right, to take on responsibility. And so one of the things I talked to these young guys tonight, today about was what, where they'd found the meaning in their life.

And they all said, well, it was a consequence of taking on more responsibility. The two young boxers, they were only 18, you know, one of them really talked about the fact that he had disciplined himself and that he wanted to go to college, he ended up wanting to go to college, and it up wanting to go to college. It was a boxing college and there's like only four of them in the country. And he hadn't been doing so well academically, but he wanted to go to the damn boxing college because he had a talent and it was being encouraged by some older guys around him. You know, he was having some attention paid to him, so he buckled the hell down and did

the best he'd ever done academically and got into the college. It's like good work, man. Way to be. And then another kid, he said, well, he'd started boxing and that, he kind of toughened him up and made him more confident. And then he started teaching other young guys around him about how this worked. And that really helped him out. Because, you know, one of the ways that you can sort of determine if you're valuable

and you are, but the one the ways you determine that is to see that reflected back to you by other people. And if you lend out a hand, and people love doing this, this is another part about the rubbish about the patriarchy tyranny. I know lots of powerful men. You know, and most of them aren't powerful. They're bloody competent, and that makes them powerful. And one of the things they really like to do,

like one of the things that's intrinsically rewarding about occupying a position in hierarchy is that you get to look around and some young people come along and you see, wow, that person's got potential. That person's got potential. And that person's got potential. God, I can open up a door for this person and that'll help them develop.

And I can offer an opportunity. This person and that'll help them develop. And maybe offer an opportunity to this person and that will help them develop. And maybe you're lucky and you can do that with 12 people and you see these people grow and expand under your tutelage and you don't take too much credit for it. You think, wow, it's so intrinsically rewarding to do that. You think, well, that's not like two lines of coke on a naked supermodel on your god damn yacht. It's much more fundamental, it's much more profound, and it's much more realistic and lasting.

And it's a much more accurate reflection of the way things work, at least among reasonable people. And so what you do is you encourage, you encourage young boys. Literally, you don't help them them you don't make them safe You don't bother them when they're skateboarding you watch them take their risks and you stand back and you think Yeah, kid you're gonna bruise yourself man. You're gonna cut yourself You're maybe you're gonna break a damn arm, but hopefully only once and you'll smarten up a bit as a consequence of that But you know you're you're preparing yourself because there's tough things coming down the pipeline in your life and there's people

you're gonna bloody well depend on. You know, and you better be there for them. And you're gonna have to be tough, not safe, give up safe, what the hell, safe, life, 100% fatal. There's no safety. The best you can do is to confront that courageously and to pursue something that's deeply meaningful, right? That's no safety. The best you can do is to confront that courageously and to pursue something that's deeply meaningful, right?

That's rule seven. Do what is meaningful and not what is expedient. You look for meaning in your life. You find that through responsibility. You put that up against the tragedy and the malevolence of existence, right? You grow up responsible and respectable and awake and wise and you take your place in the world and you act as a cornerstone for your damn civilization and that's what you encourage and the lack of that That's the crisis of masculinity I'll be right back.

Thank you. These are some chairs. They are. They are. Some weird UK thing happening here. You were funny tonight. Well, thank you. You were the funny.

You mean purposefully funny? I don't know. That's the best kind. Yeah, I think you were purposefully funny tonight. Yeah, I hope so. Yeah. Yeah, feeling good, kind. Yeah, I think you were purposely funny tonight. Yeah, I hope so, yeah. Yeah, you're feeling good, huh? Yeah, not too bad. Must be this Manchester air.

All right, let's get to it. In 50 years, will students be referencing the Joe Rogan Experience Podcasts? As reliable sources. Well, they are reliable sources. I mean, one of the things that's great about the YouTube media explosion that you're part of is that they're not edited. And so they are reliable because you get to see exactly what's happening. And so that's a big plus. And you and I have both had this experience.

It's quite odd now for me, increasingly odd to do network television because I've done a lot of network television and I've done a lot of YouTube and podcast interviews and I'll tell you the to step into a television studio feels like stepping 30 years into the past. And the reason for that is that you just can't have a conversation with someone in a TV studio. It's very rare because everything's so tightly scripted and the person you're talking to isn't a person. They might as well be a simulacrum, right? Because they're not them.

They're the voice of the show. And so everything they do is scripted. And so you have this conversation. It is. It's like talking to a chatbot, and not necessarily a very sophisticated one, because you say something, and you expect that a person would carry that forward in a sort of melodic, playful way, and riff on it. And that isn't what happens.

As you say something, and you get a kind of, not exactly a blank stare, but an attractive mannequin look, that would be the right way of thinking about it, and then they ask whatever questions on the list. It's like, oh, I see, I guess none of what we just talked about had any content. And so, you know, be better just to provide pre-prepared answers to the pre-prepared questions. But the illusion is of a conversation. Whereas if you do a freeform interview like Rogan, it's like, you don't know what the hell's going to happen.

That's for sure. And there's some real potential for catastrophe there. But whatever it is that's happening is, catastrophe there, but whatever it is that's happening is it's honest in that everyone gets to see all of it. There's no a priori goal except let's try to have an interest in conversation. And so that is a reliable source. But God only knows what people will be referencing in 50 years. I mean, Jesus, I don't even know what will be like in 50 years.

I've been watching the Boston Dynamics robots. There's some new videos that have come out of you. You see everyone go look at the Boston Dynamics robots. Everyone, you got to see them. They have one now. God, it's unbelievable. It's this little thing about the size of a dog, weighs 35 pounds. It can run around for an hour and a half on batteries.

They had the damn thing dancing and twerking, which is... First time I've heard of say twerking. And even it has an arm that kind of looks like a head and it can open doors and pick up cans and so forth with it. But it's so sophisticated now that it can do, they call it chicken necking. And so if a chicken, this is true of all birds, if a chicken holds its head up and then it moves its body, its head stays in the same place. So it's sort of like this.

People kind of do the same thing, but we don't have such long neck, so it's not as obvious. This robot could do that. It could dance to music, like really frenetically, and hold its head in exactly the same position. Go through doors. They have one man-sized robot that can do back flips. You can push it over, and it can get back up. It's like these robots, they're coming fast, and we're making our technology so spectacularly intelligent. And

God only knows where we're going to be in 50 years. We better get ready because we're getting powerful, man. We better have our act together because it'll go seriously wrong if we don't. So I don't know what the hell people will be referencing in 50 years. As long as we're talking Rogan, next time I have you in studio, will you smoke a blunt with me? Only if you come to Canada. Is it legal in California? Oh, yeah, it's now completely legal in Canada, okay? So that's good. So now our completely inadequate prime minister can be stoned out of his door to all the time

Maybe that was the problem to begin with Maybe that was the problem to begin with. All right, let's go political here. Recently, a conservative MP was forced to apologize for saying in the EU that the Nazis were socialist. Were they socialist and should the MP have apologized? Well, they called themselves national socialists. It's complicated. I'd actually thought about a research project to sort, yeah, well look, it's complicated.

I'd actually thought about a research project to sort this out, because here's what you'd have to do to sort it out. Because it is complicated. Because there were the international socialists, those were the Russian communists, essentially. And there were the national socialists. And the national socialists were named in antithesis to the international socialists.

And part of the reason the Nazi movement emerged was as a response to the threat of communist takeover in Germany, and that was a real threat, because Germany was in rough shape after World War I. I mean, you think about it. First of all, there was all those brutalized men who'd spent all those years in trenches, and like, that's not good for your mental health.

And they were in a rough situation. And then the Treaty of Versailles knocked Germany down really hard and made the country labor under the necessity of reparations. And so then they hyperinflated the currency in the 1920s to blow out the debt. And what that meant was hyperinflation is really hard on good people right because You know the idea is well you should save some money You know that that's sensible for go gratification

and and save for the future and But then if hyperinflation comes along it wipes out your savings And so it wipes out the savings of the people who played the game most honestly. And it rewards everybody who spent every cent they had. So that was depressing. I mean, you just can't imagine how depressing it would be to see your hard-earned pension fund just completely evaporate. And they had hyperinflation of a magnitude that maybe it was seen in Zimbabwe.

I think Zimbabwe had it worse, but it was terrible. And so the national socialism emerged and there was a lot of the policies that were socialist, not only in look, but also in intent and in advertising. So there's a strong socialist bent. But what kind of makes it right wing, in some sense, is that it was also an ethno nationalist movement. And it seems to me that one of the things that characterizes pathology on the right is over enthusiastic identification with one restricted identity group, so it would be ethnic or racial. And that was definitely a strong part of the platform

of the national socialists that wasn't part of the hypothetical doctrine of universal brotherhood that was put forward by the international socialists. So it was an amalgam. Now I think the way to sort this out, and I would love to do this. I'd even do it at a university if it wasn't so difficult to do research at universities now. All you'd have to do is take all the, imagine you took a set, a random set of doctrines from the Soviet Union, you know, policies, and transformed them so that they were made up to date, but kept the meaning intact, and then do it with parallel with the Nazi doctrines, you know, you would eliminate the ones that would,

this would be a bit tricky, that would make it obvious that it was Nazis, and that would make it a bit tricky. And then what you do is make a questionnaire out of both, and then you'd administer the questionnaire to people who have identified political belief left or right, and you'd see who agreed most with what. And if it turned out that the right wingers were more likely to agree with the national socialist policies, then you could make a fairly strong claim that that was primarily right

wing. And if it was the lefties that agreed with, say, the international socialists and the national socialists, then you could say that it was primarily left. And I think that's it. I really think that's an experiment, like that's an experiment that a survey that could be done, that should be done. See, one of the things that happened after the Second World War was that there was an insistence among social scientists took me like four decades to figure this out because it's such a mess.

I had to do a tremendous amount of reading that insisted that there was only authoritarianism on the right. And that was the predominant view in the social sciences from 1947, 1948, right till probably 2005, 2006. My students started to put together an authoritarian leftist measurement instrument, but nothing like that had ever been created because there was an insistence,

especially by the, what the hell do you call them? It was Horkheimer and his group, and it's named after a city in Germany. Frankfort group, there was an insistence from them that authoritarianism was only a right wing phenomenon. And so then there was an insistence from them that authoritarianism was only a right-wing phenomena, and so then there was an attempt to paint what happened in Nazi Germany as purely a right-wing movement, and that was definitely part of the desire to absolve the left. And so there's a lot of intellectual crookedness about that, and it hasn't been sorted out

properly. And that was actually one of the things that I was trying to do with my students before I stopped working as a university professor. Like my student, Christine Brophy, who's working on a high school version of the Future Authoring Program, that was her next project,

was an authoritarian leftist measurement instrument. We've already made some good measurement instruments for assessing conservatism and looking at its underlying structure and so on. So the psychometrics haven't been done properly. So the answer is we actually don't know. And I think it's an amalgam. It might be an amalgam of the worst of the left and the worst of the right. But they define themselves as national socialists

and the idea that you can be pilloried for noting that that was a self-description and there were certainly socialist elements in their platform. I mean, the Nazis weren't libertarians by any stretch of the imagination. They wanted a very powerful centralized state, and so the degree, how that, that's certainly not with like North American conservatives want. They want a small state. And so it really is something that has to be sorted out. And it's something I'd like to do

if I ever get time to do it. So. Apparently you got a bunch of other things going on these days, huh? Oh, I like this one. I consider it a curse to be an intelligent and independent thinker. I feel my life would be happier if I were quote, stupid. Oh, yeah, that's the old habit.

Haberence is bliss. Oh, yeah, that's the old. Would you rather be, I think was this Spinoza? Might have been Spinoza. Might know how to be. Well, would you rather be a happy peger and unhappy philosopher? So that's basically the question.

And I'm trying to remember exactly, I got to remember this properly. I think it might have been incanded. I can't remember. I'll just have to paraphrase it. Dorothy Eski wrote about this too. It's like, well, what makes you think you'd give up your misery? You know, like people are self-conscious.

And that was presented in Genesis, the development of self-consciousness is presented as a cataclysm, right? And absolute cataclysm, an event that shattered the structure of reality when people became aware of their own nakedness and mortality, and the scales fell from their eyes of woke up and discovered death and suffering, you know, and its tainted life. And that's exactly the complaint here. It's like, the complaint is something like, I find my expanded consciousness unbearable. It's like, well, yeah, no kidding. Look at what you see around you. You see limitation and suffering. And maybe you see that even more intently.

Think, well, wouldn't it be better to just be as unconscious as an animal? Well, that ship sailed a long time ago. You know, and it's not like we don't regress. That's one of the things alcohol does. You know, alcohol is definitely a drug that invites the flight into unconsciousness, partly because it works as an anxiolytic. So, one of the problems with being self-conscious is that you're aware that stupid things you do will hurt you.

That's very annoying. It's one of the terrible things about being awake. It's like, oh God, that would be fun. Oh yes, but then I'd have to suffer for it. Oh no, that means I can't have fun. Better go get drunk. Then the fact that it might hurt me won't bother me, and I can have some fun. And that is exactly what alcohol does. And it's a negative transcendence, which is how I'll just Huxley described the alcohol. And it's very tempting.

And no bloody wonder. It's like people are rushing all the time to escape from the burden of their acute self-consciousness. Like, self-consciousness has a phenomenon loads on trait neuroticism. So because to say, well, I got self-consciousness as a phenomenon loads on trait neuroticism. So, you know, because to say, well, I got self-conscious when I talk, it's like, well, that's an elevated form of consciousness, but it's very painful because it makes you aware of your inadequacy. Okay, there's a great book about this, by the way. It's a very hard book, but it's a great book called The Origins in History of Consciousness by a man named Eric Neumann, was just talking to Camille Pallia yesterday.

She just wrote a new book. And she wrote an essay about 20 years ago suggesting that the best thinker for English, for literary critics, to have chosen, as an alternative to Derrida and Foucault, would have been Eric Neumann, who was a student of Jung's. And I agree with that, the was a student of Jung's.

And I agree with that. The origins and history of consciousness is a brilliant book. And one of the things he points out is that there's a struggle in human beings. Self-consciousness has to struggle upwards, and it's pulled downwards by the desire for unconsciousness. That's part of the etepol catastrophe of Freud. It's like, because an over-dependent mother can say, look, kiddo, going out in the world and challenging yourself and developing that self-consciousness is going to introduce

you to a world of pain and agony as you become more and more aware. It's like, I can pull you back and shelter you from all that. Now the problem is, is that there's a crippling that goes along with that. But it's in, see Jung characterized that eduple relationship as a conspiracy between mother and child. It's not something the mother imposes. It's like a pathological invitation. It's like, just stay with me and you'll never have to face the catastrophes of the world.

It's like, well, that's a potent invitation given the catastrophes of the world. You see this reflected as well. I wrote about this in 12 rules that famous statute by Michelangelo, the Pieda, right, where you see Mary holding the broken body of Christ in her arms. It's like that's the female crucifixion in some sense. It's like because what a woman has to do with her son

is offer him up to be broken by the world. And he has to take that responsibility onto himself. And so that's a dreadful thing. And so then the question is, what do you do about it? And see, this is part of what struck me so hard about Christianity as a philosophical system. And it's Judeo-Christianity, more broadly speaking, and maybe even the sum total of the searching

for human wisdom across all of the time that we've been self-consciouses. What's the antidote to self-consciousness? Well, one is a return to unconscious oblivion. And that's a suicidal desire. It might even be a genocidal desire. You know, it might underlie our desire to drive ourselves to the brink of nuclear destruction, saying that it would be better if being itself didn't exist because of its suffering. That's one way out. It'll obliterate everything because of its suffering.

The other way out is more consciousness, more attention, more of what's poisoning you, because that's the way out is to become more conscious. And the... So here I'll give you an example. This is one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen. There's this painting that was done in the Middle Ages. It's in my book, Maps of Meaning. And it's a tree.

And it's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And... And the tree has... on one half of it. It's okay. It's okay. It's all right. I'll just finish. I appreciate it, but it's okay. You were just going to show me the picture, I believe. But I'll just go on with it. So, all right. So on half of the tree, there's apples and the apples are skulls, okay? And so you see Eve picking the apple skulls and handing them to humanity. And so that's the discovery of death.

And that's a catastrophe, right? If that's the emergence into self-consciousness. And that is portrayed in our most fundamental narratives as a split in the structure of reality itself. And given the importance role that consciousness plays in reality, I think that that's a reasonable statement, something broke when we became self-conscious. We became aware of our own mortality. And that's when evil entered the world, because you can't be cruel until you understand your own vulnerability. You can't know how to hurt other people

until you know that you can be hurt. So when you discover your own limitations, the knowledge of good and evil enters the world. Okay, so there's the tree. And on one half of it are the apple skulls, and Eve is distributing them. And then on the other half, there's a skull at the top of the tree.

And on the other half, there's a crucifix with Christ in the tree. And then there's other apples, but they're the wheat and hosts that are part of the transformation mass, right? So that's the body and bread of Christ. And so the church, a female, it's the negative and positive female, the church is handing out these hosts to other human beings, to invite them to be cured of how the apple poisoned them. And so there's an idea there, and the idea is it's a very complicated idea.

That's why it's expressed in this painting. And we've been trying to figure out what this idea means for thousands and thousands of years. It's so complicated. It means that if you take on the burden of mortality and you face that completely. That will produce in you a series of transformations that are somewhat akin to deaths and resurrections and that will elevate your consciousness to the point where you can transcend the catastrophe of self-consciousness. And so that's the

meaning of the eating of the body and blood of Christ. That's the idea. It's an unbelievably profound idea that more consciousness is the cure for what half consciousness poisons you with. And that that requires this burning off of dead wood and constant re-transformation. Then you might say, well, is that only psychological? Because you could read it only symbolically. But you might say, well, you don't know, because if people turn around and accept the full catastrophic reality of their existence, and that's this terrible self-consciousness,

and decide that they're going to struggle forward admirably despite that, then they actually start to contend with it and fix it. And here's an open question. There's this idea of the genie and the genie is genius and the genie is infinite potential constrained in something very tiny. And that's us. We have this terrible constraint, but there's like an infinite potential within us. That's what makes us akin to deity in some sense and makes us made in the image

of God and is the foundation for our value, our intrinsic value before the law. We treat this very seriously. That potential lies within you. What would happen if you revealed it fully? Well, maybe we would not only dispense with our cowardice in the face of suffering, it's maybe we would overcome, and I don't even know what this means precisely. Maybe we would overcome suffering itself. Maybe we would overcome malevolence itself.

We don't know what we're capable of. And so that's the answer to that question. It's like, no, you don't shrink backwards. All that does is make things worse. It turns you into an animal, but that doesn't even work because it's too late for that. You can't shrink backwards. All that does is make things worse. It turns you into an animal, but that doesn't even work because it's too late for that. You can't go back. There's no going back.

There's only going forward. And going forward in the full sense means, it means full acceptance of the entire catastrophe of existence, and then forthright attempt to do everything you can to rectify it. So... I feel like we should roll at this. So what tools should people use to actually do that?

I mean, if you were in a clinical practice with somebody and they were coming to you with this, what would you tell them? Well, if you look at the Sermon on the Mount, for example, the Sermon on the Mount is a very interesting psychological document because it's a meditation on what constitutes that witches of central value.

And so it's part of, so what happens in the Old Testament in some sense is that human beings watch each other act. And then they conjure up a set of rules that approximately encapsulates civilized action. And so that would be the expanded decalogue, the law. And the law wasn't imposed from the top down. It emerged. It's like Moses, the mythological Moses, let's say observed the structure of morality

and then said, okay, well here's what it would look like if you made it into rules. You know, it's like a wolf pack watched what it did and said, oh, here's wolf pack rules. You know, and they're not rules to begin with, they're just patterns. Patterns become rules, and then you can follow the rules. But then you have the problem of the rules.

It's like, well, the rules conflict with one another. So like, what's the greatest rule? This is what happens in New Testament-a-Law, because Christ annoys everyone by pitting one rule against another. So he heals on the Sabbath. It's like, well, is that good or bad? Well, he's trying to point out that you have to produce a hierarchy of rules so that you can produce what constitutes the highest value. And the sermon on the mount, the idea is that it's something like this, it's a bit of an oversimplification,

but it will do, is that you want to orient yourself towards the highest good that you can possibly conceive of. And that gives your life purpose, real purpose. And that that orientation would be something like the constraint of suffering. And but not in just a merely compassionate manner because that doesn't solve the problem. It's a serious problem to address suffering. And the constraint of malevolence, that's partly why Christ meets the devil in the desert. You have to transcend evil and you have to you evil and you have to face suffering. Those are the part and parcel of developing

that ultimate vision. And that vision is something like, well, it's whatever is going to stand for you as the highest value. And that'd be the relationship with God, if you put it religiously. It's to live the best life you can possibly imagine. And that's going to change a bit as you get wiser, but that's what you're aiming at, right?

It's like I often tell people, you watch the movie Pinocchio, you know, and Jopetto wishes on a star, and that starts the transformation process of his creation, the wooden-headed puppet, who's nothing but a marionette, manipulated from behind the scenes. Jopetto raises his eyes above the horizon, looks to that which glitters in the darkness and makes a wish, it's a transformation wish, and that gets the ball rolling, and that's what you need in your own life. You have to decide that there isn't going to be anything that takes the place of you aiming at the highest possible good then you concentrate on the day.

And then you stumble forward that way. You know, rule four is compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today. It's like, okay, you're not everything you could be. You bloody well know it. And maybe you're too resentful and miserable and bitter and burdened by your self-consciousness to do anything about it. But that's not helpful. It's a road, it's the pathway to hell for all intents and purposes. You orient yourself and you stand up straight

and face things courageously and try to find the highest value because what do you have that's better to do than that? And then you move towards it and you focus on the day and you do everything you can during's better to do than that? And then you move towards it and you focus on the day and you do everything you can during the day to act responsibly and truthfully and to set things right. And that atones, that brings things together. And that in that manner you partake in the creation of the world, I would say,

in the creation of the world that's good. And that's your ethical responsibility. And in that, there might be sufficient meaning to justify the suffering of life. I think that that's accurate. It seems to me to be that that works. And I have people, they come and talk to me all the time. These guys that I talk to this morning, many of them.

They say, look, I was miserable in doing a bunch of bad things by their own definition. They decided they were going to take on some responsibility in Bera Harry, Heavy Birden, and try to make things better and to be more honest. They report, well, everything is way better. It's like, yes, well, then you ask yourself, how much better could we make things? I had this vision once of heaven. It was a very powerful vision.

And heaven was a place where everything was, it was like a place where you were eternally playing, like a child in a place that a father who loved you had prepared for you. There was that joy in it. But the joy was of a very particular sort because it was a joy that was aimed at producing the next level of joy. So it was like a heaven that would reveal another heaven

within it, and then that would reveal another heaven within that. And there was no limit to that. And maybe that's our destiny to do that. And maybe that's what we're struggling to do now. I mean, we're at a pretty low level heaven at the moment, but it could be much better. And I think that that's what music expresses to us. You know, when I listen to a box, say, a third, Brandenburg concerto, it, it, it, there's

a pattern that emerges. It's beautiful. It's like an architectural motif, like a flower that's opening up. And out of that comes another one, and it's even greater, and out of that comes another one. It's this continually unfolding of crystalline beauty. You see that in your great cathedrals.

There are expressions of that in stone and lattice, this beautiful tapestry of structure and light that's a representative of, well, it's a representative of the heavenly city. Essentially, it's a representative of what we could be striving to create. And so, and that's what you do with your terrible burden of self-consciousness. You know, and you do that in the day-to-day struggles that you have, and you start small and humbly because that's where you start. There's plenty to fix up around you, you know?

And there's no limit to that. And I really believe that. I don't have any idea. This is the problem with 50 years in the future. It's God only knows what we could create, and what we're destined to create. We're on the cusp of a new age. And if we aimed properly, maybe we could tilt everything

so that it would get better and better and better and better and better and better. You know what they say? To those who have more will be given. And from those who have nothing, everything will be taken. And so maybe we could decide that we would like to be those who have to whom more would be given.

And we start by giving to be those who have, to whom more would be given. And we start by giving to ourselves, you know, and participating in the process of creative production and the amelioration of suffering and the combat with malevolence within ourselves. And that's just, look, it's the central message of our culture to do that. What are we wrong about that? Look at what we've built because of it. It's no time to give up faith in that. It's time to redouble the faith.

As Nietzsche said, there's never been true Christians. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you end a show. So I am going to get out of the way and make some noise for Jordan Peterson, everybody. If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up dad's books, maps of meaning the architecture of belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 Rules for Life in antidote to chaos. Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B Peterson podcast.

See JordanBet Peterson dot com for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. I really hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please leave a rating at Apple Podcasts, a comment or a view, or share this episode with a friend. If you didn't, keep it to yourself or still at five stars. Thanks for tuning in and talk to you next week. Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson,

on Facebook, at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram, at Jordan.b. Peterson. Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommended books can be found on my website, JordanB Peterson.com. My online writing programs, designed to help people straighten out their past, understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future, can be found at selfauthoring.com. From the Westwood One Podcast Network.