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Thank you for listening to this Podcast
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1 production now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast 1, Spotify and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, hope you're doing great. I am off the grid this weekend, enjoying the beautiful country in the summer. And so we are giving you a rewind of our greatest episodes because we have grown probably tenfold since the last time some of these episodes dropped. My conversation with Jordan Peterson at a Turnpoint usa eventually you guys are not going to want to miss it. My conversation with the great, the amazing Jordan Peterson who has really impacted my life tremendously. Please consider becoming a contributor@charliekirk.com support charliekirk.com support Become a Supporter of the program helps us be self sufficient, away from leftist boycotts that want to destroy this program. CharlieKirk.com support email me your questions freedomarliekirk.com get involved with TurningPoint usatpusa.com type in Charlie Kirk show hit. Subscribe, give us a 5 star review and if you do so, we'll send you a signed copy of the MAGA Doctrine. All right, buckle up, Jordan Peterson. Charlie Kirk. You're gonna enjoy it. Here we go.
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C
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy, his spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point usa.
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A
We will not embrace the ideas that
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C
have destroyed countries, destroyed lives.
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A
And we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here. Doctor, thank you so much for taking time to be here with this unbelievable
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audience crowd of angry young white men.
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A
Yeah, exactly. I was reading one of the articles on you earlier. I think it was from the New Yorker. It said Dr. Peterson's doctrine of masculinity. I kind of look around at a Young Women's Leadership Summit getting a standing ovation. It's a little bit different than the narrative they've been trying to paint about you recently.
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C
Well, the more identity politics leaning media types that have been covering what I'm doing have a very difficult time with it because they can only see the world through their ideological lens. And the lens that they use basically assumes that the world is populated by groups above all and that every individual within that group is nothing but a mouthpiece for the group. And it's, and it's, let's say, claims for power. I'm trying to help people put themselves together as individuals. But that isn't part of that narrative because within that narrative framework, which I've characterized, and other people as well as sort of postmodern slash neo Marxist, even those, those two things don't fit together very, very logically in that narrative. There aren't any individuals, there are just groups and power. And so when they talk about me, they have to put me in a group oriented category of one form or another. And it's often radical right, or it's male or, or it's whatever, white, it's racist, racial. That's the other one. But that's not what it's about as far as I'm concerned. So.
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A
Right. And your book, which is fantastic, by the way.
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C
Thank you.
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A
Is it still number one? It was number one for.
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C
It bounces up and down. It's been number one in about eight countries now, I think. Something like that.
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A
Fantastic. It talks about the individual, what an individual can do to improve their life as an antidote to chaos. And what I love about your teaching is that you're brutally honest. Life is suffering.
- [03:47]
C
Yeah, well, you know, it's a. So I've been doing. I've been on this tour of one form or another since January, and we've gone to about 40 cities, something like that. There's probably about another 40 or so on the roster in the US and Canada and the UK and Europe and Australia. And, you know, part of what I'm doing in that tour is laying out a conceptual landscape. And part of that, part of the basis of that is the blunt truth, I suppose, that life has a tragic element, you know, because we're vulnerable, all of us, and we know it, which is the particularly human curse, let's say. We're aware of our vulnerability. And it's not just vulnerability in the tragic sense. It's also the human proclivity for evil that makes the tragedy of life even worse than it would otherwise have to be. And you could say that that's a basic truth. You could even say that that's a basic truth with regards to the meaning of life. You know, it's a pessimistic way of looking at it in some sense, but it leads to an optimistic conclusion. All of us have to face our limitations and malevolence in the world and the possibility that we'll beat, be betrayed or betray other people and act improperly. And that's a heavy burden. But the truth of the matter is, as far as I'm concerned, that Each of us has enough potential, character, power of character, let's say, if it's properly manifested, to contend with that in a noble way and to rise above it and to transcend and to deal with it in large part because we can make the world a much better place than it is for each of us individually and for our families and for our community. And we can constrain the malevolence, at least in our own hearts, and. And perhaps have a positive effect on those around us as a consequence. And that actually does make things better. And we actually can do that. And that's where the meaning in life is to be found. And that meaning, you know, that goes along with the adoption of that kind of responsibility is actually the antidote to the suffering. You know that perfectly well. Because all of you need a reason to get out of bed in the morning, especially on a rough morning, you know, when things aren't going so well in your life. And there will be plenty of times when things aren't going so well in your life and you still need a reason to get up and get moving and get out there. And if you have adopted the responsibility at an individual level to make things better, given how bad they are, if you adopted the responsibility to make things better, then you. You have a reason to get up. And so one of the things that I've been stressing to people is that there's very little difference between the meaning in life that gives you fulfillment and that engages you in existence and the willingness to shoulder as much individual responsibility as you can possibly handle. Those are the same things. And that's a really useful thing to know. And you kind of know this, right? Everybody knows this because first of all, if you're not living up to your responsibilities even to take care of yourself, the probability that you're going to be ashamed of that at some level is extraordinary, extraordinarily high. And so your own soul tells you that you're in error, so to speak. But also, if you look at who you spontaneously admire, which is a good indication of where your value system really sits, you'll see that the people you admire are always people who take responsibility for themselves and responsibility for their family and responsibility for their community. You know, cynically, it's often considered that we admire, let's say, the rich and successful because of their status and their. And their wealth and their power. But. But that's a very shallow. And it's very trivial. And I also don't really believe that it's true. I think that the people we admire are people who conduct themselves admirably in life and that and you get a spontaneous admiration as a consequence of that. And that's a call from, from the deepest reaches of your being to imitate and to follow in that pathway. And you can do that and so well. And so that's not a narrative that fits very well with the whole identity politics, collectivist notions of how humankind is constituted.
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A
Well, let's talk about that. And so for those in the room that are not totally familiar with this idea of postmodernism and identity politics, where did this come from and what is your analysis of where it stands today and what is the true agenda of those people that are pushing postmodernism, identity politics, so on and so forth?
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C
Well, I would say that the ground, the intellectual groundwork for postmodernism was probably laid in France in the late 60s and early 70s, and it was mostly laid by people who were at one point Marxist types. They were radical leftists. And I mean, that was very common, especially in France at that time, because there was an immense student revolutionary movement in France, probably bigger there than anywhere else in the world, except perhaps the United States. And the problem was is that the leftist narrative ran into some major problems in the late 60s and early 70s. And the basic leftist narrative is the radical leftist narrative. I should say, just as a point of clarity, that there is utility for political belief across the spectrum from the left to the right. Right, because what the right tends to do is to make a case for the utility of hierarchies. And what the left tends to do is say, well, look, one of the things you have to understand about hierarchies is that they tend to dispossess people so that they stack up at the bottom. And so you need people to speak for the dispossessed. And you need people to speak on behalf of hierarchies. And so that's the political spectrum. And there should be a dialogue between those two groups constantly, because you want to keep your hierarchies functional and intact and healthy, but you want to make sure that they don't alienate people who aren't succeeding in the hierarchies, because then they stack up at the bottom and that's hell for them, and it's not good for the stability of society in general. So you need that dialogue. But clearly people can go too far on the right and they can go too far on the left. They go too far on the right, I think when they start talking about ethnic and racial superiority, and we've kind of boxed that in, we kind of know when that's gone too far. When they go too far on the left is a much more difficult thing to determine conceptually. I think the left wingers go too far when they start talking about, for example, equality of outcome, which is an absolutely catastrophic doctrine anyways. What had happened at the end of the 60s was that the evidence that the extreme leftist experiments had failed catastrophically became so overwhelming that even the radicals couldn't in all good conscience support an affiliation with those systems anymore. I think the real death blow to the idea of communism as an acceptable moral solution came with the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago in the early 70s. And I would highly recommend, and I'm dead serious about this, I would highly recommend that you read that book. It's one of the seminal books of the 20th century, certainly one of the most important 10 books that were written in the. In the 20th century. And the reason that it's so important to read it is not only because it documented the absolute catastrophe of the Soviet system and by implication the Maoist system and the system that obtained in Cambodia and in Venezuela more recently and in North Korea. These catastrophically murderous systems. It documented their excesses. But that isn't the particular contribution of the. The book. The particular contribution of the book is that it showed that the catastrophe of the system wasn't an aberration in relationship to radical leftist thought, but the logical conclusion of it. And, you know, there was an idea it was pushed hard because people had been documenting what was happening horrifically in the Soviet Union really from the 1920s onwards. And of course, the revolution only happened in 1918. So the catastrophe starts, started to pile up right away. As soon as the revolution occurred, people attempted to finesse that by saying that it was, well, it was a cult of personality and that the catastrophe could be laid at the feet of Stalin and that that wasn't real communism, despite the same thing, that that wasn't real communist.
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Every time it's tried.
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C
Yes, well, that's the thing. And so. But by the 1970s, the early 1970s, it was clear that that narrative wasn't going to fly anymore, because the evidence that it was an utter catastrophe of unparalleled proportions became so clear that even French intellectuals had to admit that something was wrong. And what arose instead was this postmodern view. And it's complicated. The postmodernists basically stumbled onto a problem that's actually bedeviled a lot of different disciplines. And the problem is, is that the world is unbelievably complex and it's very difficult to perceive it. This is why it's been difficult to build artificial intelligence systems that can perceive the world, because it turns out that just looking at the world is incalculably difficult, because there are so many ways of looking at the world. There are an immense number of ways that you can look at anything. So even, even small sets of objects are complicated in ways you can't possibly imagine. And so the postmodernists figured this out in literary theory. Essentially, they thought, well, we have these books, we regard them as canonical. How is it that we should interpret them? And the answer was, well, there's an indefinite number of interpretations which there. Which is actually true. There isn't like trying to interpret something like the corpus of books that make up the Bible, for example. It's like there's no end to the number of interpretive frameworks that you can use. And so that was mystery number one. Mystery number two was, well, if there's an indefinite number of ways of interpreting something, how do you know which ways are to take precedence? Well, that was a big problem because, you know, if you're teaching, for example, a course in literary theory and you have an interpretation of a book, you. You want to make the assumption that there's something particularly valuable about your interpretation or why bother teaching it? But if there's an indefinite number of interpretations and you can't rank order them, then how can you justify your particular approach? No one knew. Well, in some sense, the jig was up. And that's what happened with postmodern theory. It was, well, we can't figure out why what we're teaching is the proper thing to teach. We can't justify it intellectually. The consequence of that was a questioning of the idea of a canonical interpretation at all. And so there's a real ethical and moral relativism that comes in there. But that was the, that was the underlying intellectual rationale for that. Well, what happened, and this is where things get strange, is that the problem with a viewpoint like that is that it doesn't leave you with any way to orient yourself in the world. Right? Because if no interpretation is better than any other interpretation, then why do anything? Why do one thing instead of another? Which of course you have to make decisions to do one thing instead of another. You'll never do anything, and you have to do things. And so there's a real nihilistic element to postmodernism that's built into it. And the way that that was resolved, as far as I can tell, was really blindly in some sense, by an alliance between the neo Marxist types that were still around and looking for a new doctrine and the postmodern types. It was like, even though the postmodernists criticized the idea of overarching narratives, and Marxism is certainly an overarching narrative, that didn't stop them from allying with this leftover Marxism and reconfiguring it in some sense. So instead of the old Marxist narrative about the bourgeoisie, the upper class, the ownership class, say, and the proletariat who were being oppressed by them, we got identity politics out of it. And what we got is the same old victimizer, victim narrative in new form. And instead of being fundamentally economic, it became racial or ethnic or gender based or something sex based, or you name it, age based or attractiveness based, it didn't really matter. And so they could, the Marxist types could keep on playing the same old game in new clothing, let's say. And that movement became extraordinarily popular, first at Yale. So it was actually Yale's fault, just so you all know, and then across the universities over approximately a 30 year period. Now, I'll close with this. You see, I think the postmodernists are seriously wrong. And I actually think we know why they're wrong. Because although there is a very large number of ways of looking at the world, or perhaps a near infinite number of ways of looking at the world, there isn't a near infinite number of ways of acting in the world in a manner that actually is successful successful. So there are constraints on how you can, how you can interact with the world in a successful manner. Let's assume that you don't want undue pain and anxiety. We could just start with that, and I think that's a reasonable proposition. You could tolerate some pain and anxiety if it's in the service of something greater, obviously, but I just mean pointless pain and anxiety. We don't want any more of that than is necessary. And that means that you have to take care of yourself to some degree, but the manner in which you take care of yourself is severely constrained. This is partly what, why you have to be intelligent and careful and plot your way through life properly. You have to take care of yourself today, but you have to take care of yourself in it today in a way that doesn't interfere with you taking care of yourself tomorrow and next week and next month and next year and five years from now now and ten years from now. So you can't do just what you want to in the next hour. Because if it's impulsive pleasure seeking, let's say something like that, excess alcohol use or excess drug use or careless sexual behavior or betrayal of people to. To gain you some, gain you something in the moment, you're going to pay for that. You're going to pay for it tomorrow. You're going to pay for it next week and next month, the next year. So because you're going to exist in the future, and because you have to live with yourself, there's only a certain number of ways that you can act that are going to work. But it's more than that. It's not just that you're responsible to your future self or the set of all your future selves, is that you also have to act in a way that works for your family, because otherwise your family is going to disintegrate and break down and cause you and them all sorts of misery and grief. And. And not just your family now, but also your family into the future, and then not just your family either, but also your community. And so you have to set your aspirations so that they serve you in the broadest sense over a long period of time. And they also serve your family, and they also serve your community. And that's a very tight set of constraints. And I think that the best solution to that set of constraints, from a philosophical perspective, or maybe even a theological perspective, is to view the world as a place not of groups, but of individuals, of sovereign individuals who are responsible for their destinies, responsible for their families and for their communities. And that's essentially the ethos of the modern West. Because the thing that's so remarkable about the West, I would say, is that we did a remarkable. We did a wonderful job of articulating out the idea of individual sovereignty, and we made that the cornerstone of our political and economic systems. And the thing about that is it works. And the evidence that it works is. Well, it's right here in this room. Everything in this room is working right. And around the world, increasingly, people are becoming economically better off at a rate that's absolutely staggering. And a huge portion of that is because we've articulated out the ethos of the responsible sovereign individual. That's not the same as the individual with rights. It's like. It's not like rights are irrelevant, but rights are really there to facilitate your adoption of individual responsibility. One of the things I would like to say to all of you, and it's one of the things I really wanted to talk about coming here today when I was thinking about it, is that you don't want to play identity politics. And that can happen because it can be played on the right and the left. Right? And that's a collectivist idea. You don't want to do that. What you could bring to the table that hasn't been brought to the table for years is an emphasis on individual responsibility. And the right way to do that, as far as I'm concerned, is to start with yourselves, develop a vision for your life. You start to think about if you could be, who you could be, what would that look like? That's the beginning of a mature philosophy of being. If you could be the person that you would admire, who would that person be? How would you configure yourself? How would you configure your career, your education, your family, your use of time outside of work? If you wanted to be the noblest person that you could be, who was adopting the maximal amount of responsibility, how would that look then? You need a strategy to put that into place, and that's the way you change things properly and also the way you do the least amount of harm while you're changing them. And so it should be an individual. An individual focused set of ideas. And that way you can sidestep the identity politics traps, and that would be a very good thing. And I think a modern conservatism, which isn't really all that distinguishable from a classical liberalism, as it turns out, is to put tremendous stress on the responsibility of the individual. And one of the things that's wonderful about that, as far as I'm concerned, and I made reference to this a few minutes ago, is that you need a meaning to offset the tragedy of life. Otherwise you just suffer stupidly and you tend to make people around you suffer the same way.
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A
It's what the modern left does.
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C
Yes, well, and the way that you find that meaning is by adopting as much responsibility as you can. And what's also so fascinating about that is, you know, you're characterized by an indefinite potential. And it isn't easy to understand exactly what that is, that potential. But you know, it's what people call you on when they say, you know, you're not living up to your potential, whatever that is. That potential will be called forth from you as a consequence of adoption of responsibility because it won't manifest itself unless you take on a load. You're not going to develop in all the ways you could develop unless you set yourself a serious challenge, because it takes the challenge to pull that out of you and also to motivate you to rid yourself of all the weaknesses and personality flaws that you've accumulated across the years and to let those disappear and burn off you. You need to load yourself up before the demands of life will be such that you will discipline yourself properly. And a noble goal is a very good way of beginning that.
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A
What do you think is this is a debate that you see a lot. What is the motivation then of the postmodernists? Are some of the individuals afraid or hesitant to take responsibility, their very own life, and they want to play the victim? They find admiration in that victimhood or they find meaning in the victimhood?
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C
Well, I think a lot of them. I think this is particularly true for a lot of the young people in universities. I think the universities are in some sense, especially the radical end of the humanities and the social sciences. And so I'd really put my finger on disciplines like women's studies and ethnic studies, all the cultural studies programs, anthropology, sociology, social work education is an absolute bloody catastrophe. Law is probably the worst. Well, there was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education just three weeks ago saying exactly that, you know, law is degenerating at a very rapid rate. But these, these radical disciplines. See, what I see them doing is the same thing that cults do. And what cults do is prey on people who are dispossessed in various ways. And I think that if you have had bad relationships, perhaps particularly with men in your life, you've never had a stable relationship with someone who is masculine, and you're confused about exactly how the world works in relationship to how men and women should behave, that you're a great target for exploitation by radical professors. But a lot of the people who are in that position are people who've been badly hurt in one way or another. And, you know, and they're trying to contend with the fact of their hurt. And they are often doing that by identifying the perpetrators, you know, but the problem is, is that they've often had something terrible perpetrated upon them. But that doesn't mean the fact that you've suffered at the hands of a man, let's say, or a woman, for that matter, doesn't mean that all men are somehow suspect as a consequence. And that's. Or that the proper way of dealing with that is to transform the sociological structure of the world. But many, many young people are taught exactly that by, by their idiot professors. And so. So that. That's part of it. That's part of the motivation. I mean, there's also, there's also. See there. There's this weird amalgam of compassion for the dispossessed and hatred for the successful as well. That. That's a constant characteristic of the left.
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A
It's like the Orwellian. It's what George Orwell observed when he was a former socialist, he said socialism has become much more about hating the rich than helping the poor.
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C
Yeah, well, the problem is, and this is something I just. I actually, I've been working on the preface to the 50th anniversary version of the Gulag Archipelago, the abridged version. And so that'll come out in about a year. And so that's been a good, great thing to work on. And I was trying to distill Solzhenitsyn's observations about why the Russian Revolution went so catastrophically wrong. Because, as I already said, there's reasons to be concerned about the dispossessed. Right? And that's the proper. That's the proper area of concern of the. Of the. Let's call them the moderate left. It's something perhaps the Democratic Party has been reasonably good at over the decades, serving as a political forum for the working class. And they need a political voice. Obviously, the problem is, and this started to happen very early on after the Soviet Revolution, with its demands for equality of outcome, is that, first of all, who's an oppressor and who's oppressed is not a very easy thing to figure out. And the problem really is, is that each of us is an amalgam of oppressor and oppressed. Because you think about it this way, is all of you have, I hate to use this terminology, but I'll use it for. For the purposes of illustration, all of you have unearned privilege. What's the privilege? It's like, well, you didn't build this infrastructure. You didn't build the highway system, you didn't build this amazing technological society that you live in that granted you a certain unparalleled standard of living. You know, you're undeserving, let's say, beneficiaries of what your ancestors bestowed upon you. And so. And you could call that privilege if you wanted to. Now, the problem with that is that you can divide people up in a very large number of ways. And so what do you have for privilege? Well, maybe you have gender privilege, and maybe you have attractiveness privilege, and maybe you have intelligence privilege privilege. And maybe you have being born in the United States privilege. And you have being. Yeah. And so if you buy the idea that all that is being purchased at someone else's expense, then that makes you an oppressor. Now, this is what happened in the Soviet Union. It's really what happened is the initial doctrine was, let's raise up the dispossessed. But the problem is, is that you can categorize people so many different ways in groups that you can always find a reason why someone's not a victim, why they're a victimizer. And you just can't believe, and this is why you need to read the Gulag Archipelago. You just cannot believe how many groups of people were obliterated in the nature of, in the service of, in the name of equality. You know, the communists wiped out all the socialists, so that's very interesting. They wiped out all the religious believers, they wiped out all the students, they wiped out anybody who had a middle class background. And that didn't just mean middle class people, it meant their families, including their children and their extended relatives. It's like if you were even peripherally associated with someone who could be regarded as privileged by any measure whatsoever, then the probability that you were going to get rounded up and killed or imprisoned or brutalized in some manner was, well, it was almost 100%. And so the problem is that it's not very easy to distinguish those who have compassion for the dispossessed from those who are using compassion for the dispossessed as an excuse to take revenge against anybody they think has any more than them. And because unless you're a saint, and you're probably not, the proclivity for hatred can be a more powerful motivator than the proclivity for love. Given that you're not very developed, then it was the proclivity for hatred that seemed to rise to the top very rapidly in these revolutionary societies. And the consequence of that was absolutely to call it dreadful is barely to scrape the surface. And so hypothetically, there's motivation with regards to compassion for the dispossessed. But in, in real life, even if, even if these movements are often started to give the devil is due by people who are genuinely compassionate. That doesn't mean they won't be taken over by people who have hatred as their fundamental motivation very, very rapidly. And that certainly happened in, I can't think of a circumstance where there was a radical leftist revolution in the last hundred years where that didn't invariably happen. That's what happened. And so it's not good that that happens. We don't want that to happen. And the proper response to that, as far as I'm concerned, is to develop a view of the world that's focused on the individual conceptually, to think of the individual as the fundamental category and then to act that out pragmatically. And what that essentially means is get your act together. You've got things to do in the world. The absence of your full being in the world leaves a hole that. That is filled by terrible things, at minimum. So at minimum, you have an ethical responsibility to ensure that the world doesn't devolve into something approximating hell. And at maximum, you have the responsibility, again, the ethical. And it's a heavy ethical responsibility to do everything that's in your power to make things as good as you can possibly make them in this sophisticated manner that takes you and your family and your community into account, and it's on you, right? And that's meaning, you know, people say, well, I'd like to have a meaningful life. It's like, well, fair enough. But the price that you pay for the meaning that transcends tragedy is the adoption of responsibility for the catastrophe of existence. But that ennobles you, right? It makes you into someone strong and someone competent and someone who. Who's worthwhile and who lives in a manner that justifies their own suffering. And that's what. There's nothing better than you could possibly do than that. And this is a. This is a movement that could.
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A
So I guess among the professors you've dealt with, would you say that they're coming from a position of virtue and goodness or from the triad of evil that you talk about?
- [33:31]
C
Well, kind of destruction, envy? I don't really think about it that way necessarily. You know, it's like. I do think about it more in the manner that I just laid out. It's like, I think that the collectivist viewpoint is very dangerous. And I just described why. I don't. I think you do not subsume the individual to the group. The other thing that should. That is happening on the left, that shouldn't happen, and it does happen on the right too, by the way, is that individuals are accused of the crimes of their group, which is sort of the essence of bigotry, I would say. You know, and again, this is something that happened in these. In these totalitarian, radical left societies where if you were the member of a group and the group was accused of some sort of crime, whatever the. The crime happened to be, the fact that you were a member of that group meant you were also guilty of that crime. I think that's an absolutely terrible way of looking at things. I would say it's better to stay disentangled from the collectivist narrative entirely. And just because one of the things that I've come to realize here is that if you want things to work out properly, the best way to make them work out is to tell a Better story. It's not necessary to find against the people that you think don't hold your viewpoint because the fighting actually produces negative consequences. And I'm not saying you should be a pushover because you bloody well shouldn't be a pushover. That's. That's pathetic. You should be able to stand up for yourself. But I mean, part of the reason that all of you are here is because you're looking for something, you know, and hopefully you're not looking for an enemy, although an enemy can make your life like. It can give a facade of meaning to your life.
- [35:06]
A
Life.
- [35:07]
C
Hopefully. The reason that you're here is because you've decided that you're going to take your proper place in the world and that you're going to move forward with. With dignity and with strength and with responsibility and all of that. And so that's a great motivation. And I would say you can in some sense forget about the collectivist narrative if that's what you're going to do, because the act of putting yourself together will be so powerful, both for you personally and for the people around you, but also by example, that you'll just blow the other narrative completely out of the water. And it's. It's to tell the better. The person who tells the best story wins. It's as simple as that. And the. The idea of the transcendent individual, that is the best story. There's nothing that can compare to that. And everyone wants that because you. I mean, even if you're cynical and bitter, you know, and maybe. And maybe embittered towards the world, you know, there's still a part of you that would like things to work out well. And you can call to that part and play and say, look, no matter how much you're suffering and no matter how bad things have been for you, things can improve and you can become the sort of person that you admire, and that's the best thing you can do. And everyone is desperate to hear that. And best of all, it's true.
- [36:17]
A
Well, I've seen this happen firsthand on campus. I've seen these ideas collide. So we were at UCLA and we had one of our many campus events. We did a speaking tour at UC Berkeley, Stanford and UCLA and lived to tell about it. And we need, of course, armed guards at every campus. And so Candace Owens and I were at ucla and there was this Black Lives Matter protestor that came up and started to try to shout down our speech. And Candace essentially said, I believe in you. I believe that you can be Better tomorrow than you were today. I believe in self empowerment, so on and so forth. And the protesters just screaming and sitting, stop it. That's racist. That's bigoted, homophobic. And we both said, we believe in you. We believe this. And she was really upset, and we
- [36:59]
B
said, fine, we don't believe in you.
- [37:00]
A
She said, thank you.
- [37:01]
B
I was like, what?
- [37:02]
A
You know, it's like almost. It's almost as if as soon as they. They're rejecting responsibility, in some ways, they're
- [37:09]
C
going, well, look, man, everybody's got the reasons to reject responsibility. It's tough because, well, that's it, you know, I mean, so it's not easy. If you're looking for a host of reasons why people might view the world from a collectivist perspective and attribute blame elsewhere is because, well, that is a dispersal of responsibility, you know. And we should also point out quite clearly that the idea that even the societies in the world that are thriving, and I would say those are fundamentally Western societies, although that's spreading very rapidly all around the world, right? Because things are getting better on the economic front at a rate that's absolutely beyond, beyond comprehension. You know, I don't know if you know this or not, but this is worth knowing. It's also worth. It's also worth thinking about. If you don't know it, that's also worth thinking about because it's so important that you should know it. And if you don't, there's a reason for it. You know that the rate of absolute poverty in the world fell by half from the year 2000 to the year 2012, right? So the rate of absolute poverty was defined as living on approximately something approximating a dollar a day in today's money. Now, the first thing you want to understand is that that was the situation for the average person in the western world in 1895. Okay? So it's only been 130 years or so that we've seen this unbelievable acceleration in living standards. And of course, in the west, we got rich first and before everyone else. But it's not been that long. You know, it wasn't even a hundred years ago that there were chronic famines in places like Sweden and Italy. You think, well, how can that be? It's like, well, that's the way of the world. That's how it was. But, but, but the economic miracle has been spreading everywhere, right? There's no one starving in China, there's no one starving in India, and Southeast Asia is increasingly rich and the fastest growing economies in the world right now. Are in sub Saharan Africa and child mortality rates are placing, plummeting, and people are getting access to fresh water at an unparalleled rate. And we're spreading cell phones all around the world, and about 300,000 people a week are being hooked to the power grid. And like, things are happening that are good so fast, you cannot believe it. And if you don't know that, one of the things you should ask is, well, why don't you know that? Because that's the biggest news that there is. And I think there's this chronic pessimism that's invaded our society. Maybe it's a consequence of 50 years of the Cold War or something like that. And we just can't believe that maybe we're not going to light everything on fire and die in an apocalypse, but, you know, improve the conditions of living all around the world. So. Well, and so the way that you do that is by. Okay, sorry, Charlie, I lost my track there. You'd asked me a specific question.
- [39:49]
A
Responsibility is tough is what we talked about.
- [39:51]
C
Oh, yes, yes, yes. Well, I got you. Okay. Oh, thank you, thank you. Well, so all of these good things are happening with. The issue with regards to responsibility is that it is difficult. And everyone has the same issue. We all have our reasons not to bear responsibility. And it's very useful and easy to find other people to blame. And it's not your problem. And do you really want it to be your problem? You have to take stock of all your weaknesses that way. And so, you know, you say, well, people on the left are unwilling to take responsibility. It's like, no, no, no. People are unwilling to take responsibility. And maybe you see exaggerations of that in the, in the pathological collective narrative that's generated on the left. But again, it's better to direct that towards yourself. It's like it's more, it's, it's. You're likely to do less harm that way. You can sit down and think about all the ways that you're unwilling to take responsibility and why. And why would you be? Well, it's hard. It's easier just. It's easier to roll downhill than it is to walk uphill, obviously. And so it's hard to take responsibility. And, you know, if you also, if you've also had hurtful relationships with people in your life, you know, it's not necessarily that easy to distinguish competence from power and tyranny. And one of the things that's also happening, and I would say this is very characteristic of the hurt radical left is that people who've been hurt are afraid of any display of competence because they can't distinguish from power and tyranny. And so they're also unwilling in some sense to manifest that individual competence in their own life because they think of that as a manifestation of the tyranny that they're accusing the entire system as being characterized by. You know, the idea that. I hate this idea. It's a terrible idea. The idea that the west is a patriarchal tyranny, which. Well, it's absurd. It's absolutely absurd. It's like, well, a tyranny.
- [41:46]
A
How many of you are taught that in schools, by the way, that there's a patriarchy and it's all rigged against the patriarchy?
- [41:51]
C
Yeah, yeah, well, but I mean, let's look at this clearly. I mean, every society tilts towards tyranny and corruption, right? I mean, because all hierarchies degenerate. And the way they degenerate is by having people, by becoming twisted so that power becomes the. An appropriate way of climbing up the hierarchy. It's like the definition of a tyranny. And hierarchies tilt towards tyranny, but one of the things that you're responsible for as a sovereign individual is to make sure that your hierarchies don't tilt towards tyranny. And so the leftist complaint that hierarchies tilt towards tyranny is actually accurate. But the leftist, the radical leftist compl. That our hierarchies are tyrannies and that all action that fosters those hierarchies is power and tyranny is just preposterous. You know, it's part of the problem of undifferentiated thinking. You can see this in discussions of the gender pay gap, for example. I mean, women are paid slightly less than men on average, but there's very many reasons for that. The biggest reason likely is that women take an economic hit when they become mothers. So it's actually not a gender pay gap, it's a mother pay gap. And that's a good way of starting to, like, formalize the issue and make it more precise. But there's all sorts of other reasons as well. Men work longer hours. Men are more likely to work outside. Men take more dangerous jobs if you work 14% more hours. This is a good hint, by the way, if you actually want to make some money in your life. If you work 14% longer hours, you make 40% more money. It's a nonlinear return. And men are more likely to work longer hours than women. Now, the Question is why. But. Well, there's all sorts of reasons. Now, part of the reason that there's a gender pay gap and perhaps part of the reason that there's a mother pay gap is because of arbitrary prejudice, because the system isn't perfect. But the question is what proportion of the pay gap is due to arbitrary prejudice? And the answer to that is a far smaller proportion than the total pay gap. And then to attribute all of that to, you know, the tyranny and prejudice of the patriarchy is the sign of the fuzziest possible thinking. And it's, it's the thing about that sort of. Well, the thing about that sort of thinking is that it's not even helpful to the people that you're hypothetically trying to help because you don't solve a problem by conceptualizing it stupidly. And so if, if you can't do it, if your diagnosis isn't correct, like it could easily be, and this is something for all of you to sort out, because this is going to be a problem for all of you, is that it isn't obvious what we should do about the fact that motherhood produces a vicious economic hit for women. You could say, well, that's a problem. Now maybe we don't know how to solve it. Maybe the only way to solve it is the way we have been solving it, which is to make it a problem that that's essentially solved by the family. Maybe that's the best solution there is. But that doesn't mean it isn't a problem. But we're certainly not going to solve it at all unless we specify the damn problem. And to conflate the problem of the economic hit that women take for becoming mothers with the gender pay gap is just going to get us nowhere. We'll just get tangled up in stupid arguments about the patriarchy.
- [45:06]
A
And I have to say I was made aware of you probably eight or nine months ago. But where I really leaned in is when you just obliterated. Is that her name? Kathy Newman from the uk. Oh my goodness. And what was so amazing about it is it seemed like you were being so kind and you were giving her as much opportunity as possible. And you said essentially what you said, there's a multivariate analysis based on the gender wage page gap. And she said, well, that must make you anti women. It was astonishing that she couldn't reconcile what you were saying, that you were actually trying to find some commonality upon that this might be a problem. There might be some ways to potentially have a discussion around it. She was immediately trying to marginalize your viewpoint of there's no way that we could possibly have any sort of agreement. Why can't you admit this? So on and so forth.
- [45:57]
C
So I thought, well, she was skeptical of me as a person.
- [46:01]
B
That was evident.
- [46:02]
A
She was like, this is a bad person with bad intentions. I have to do everything I possibly can to try to expose that.
- [46:09]
C
Yeah, well, and I would also say. I wouldn't say that I obliterated her.
- [46:13]
A
I would say I would.
- [46:14]
C
That she. No, no, it's not true. Because what. What. See, because obliteration requires force. And what I. Well, it does. It does well. And I'm making a very, very careful point here, and it's one you want to attend to very, very carefully because you're all interested in whatever you're interested in as a consequence of being here. Political. Political action to some degree, I would presume, but perhaps also psychological development, like what I did in that interview and what I've been able to do a number of times with a certain amount of success is apply the doctrine of the minimal necessary force. And I'll tell you, this is a very important thing to master and it's very sophisticated. So there's a New Testament idea that you should turn the other cheek. And that's a very tough one to contend with because it's not easy to separate out that from. From the appearance of weakness, let's say, because you want to be able to stand up and defend yourself. Obviously, there's no credibility unless you're capable of doing that. You have no credibility unless you're capable of doing that. In the, in the, in the interview that you're referring to, I attempted to use minimal necessary force, and all I was doing was deflecting accusations that as far as I was concerned, had nothing to do with me. And the reason that that was successful was exactly because I. Because there was no obliteration. That was just stepping back, say, well, that's not accurate the way that you're formulating that. And what happened was that that she had to show her hand, and it was her showing her hand that produced the consequences that were associated with that video, which I think has been viewed the video itself about 11 million times in the various clips and cuts is probably 50 million by now. But she. Because I didn't use force or any more than was necessary, then she had to keep stepping forward with her accusations and, and her ideology. And she just laid it out completely so that everyone could see it. And so it's another thing you really want to think about, like, you don't want to be thinking about this as a polarized political battle because you're, then you're in the damn polarized political battle. And it's actually the polarized political battle that's the problem. Now, it's not like, as I said already, it's not like you want to be a pushover, but you step away from that and you, while you work on yourself so that you're increasingly powerful person, but one of the, and one of the ways that you do that is that you learn to use minimal necessary force. It's like you don't defend yourself any more than you have to. Like, be careful, don't push any harder than you need to, because all you do is you generate a counter force by, by pushing harder than you need to. And then, and then you're in conflict and you think, well, I like a little conflict. It's like, look, fair enough, a little conflict, man, no problem. It keeps your life kind of interesting and maybe that's on the problem solving edge. But a little conflict can become a lot of conflict very, very rapidly. And if you have any sense at all, that's not what you want, you know, especially if you have other things that are better to do and you should have other things that are better to do. And so you know, to deal with these sorts of things, even when you're provoked with a light hand, there is no more effective strategy than that. And it's a real mark of sophistication and your ability to keep your temper in check. It's really something to aim at. And that's, that's true. Even when you're dealing with yourself, you know, you don't punish yourself any more than necessary. When you're negotiating with someone that you love, a partner, for example, or a husband or a wife, at least in principle, you defend yourself with minimum necessary force. And so it's not, you know, there's been a lot of videos that have been cut out of my talks at Jordan Peter Peterson obliterates X journalist or Y journalist. And I'm not putting those clips up and they're clickbait to a large degree. But when I've been successful in responding to attacks, it's only because I've responded to them minimally. So, for example, there's been a number of times when I've gone to universities and had pretty nasty demonstrations. There was one at McMaster University that got called quite out of hand, and a worse one at Queen's University where people were pounding on the windows while we were all sitting in the hall. But it was the same thing there. It's like control of temper, detachment, understanding that the full event has yet to play itself out. The ability to step back and the requirement to use minimal necessary force. And when I've been able to manage that, then it's worked. If I get, if my temper gets riled up and I have a temper, and if it gets riled up and I start to lash out more than necessary, then that, that goes badly right away. And I can see that in the comments and I can see that the memes that are made of me turn a little bit more mean instead of funny. And so, so this is really an important thing to know. It's like, keep your temper under control. Don't burst out into self righteous anger, in particular against those that you might regard as your political enemies. It is not going to help you, it's not going to help the cause, it's not going to help anything.
- [51:23]
A
And so, yeah, that's, that's terrific wisdom.
- [51:28]
C
See, you can, you can, you can accomplish what you want to accomplish if you're, if you're being wise about it by being eminently reasonable. That's the thing is you can have reason on your side. And I mean reason in the best possible sense sense. It's like you don't have to be temperamental and impulsive in this sort of situation. You can try to put yourself together, which I would highly recommend, and then you can, you can, you can, you can lay yourself open to the attacks. Now that means you should be able to defend yourself. You should have the articulated structures at hand. You should orient yourself properly, politically and philosophically, even physically for that matter, so that you're forced to go contend with. But once you have that down, then you, you play it with the lightest possible hand. And that way also you have the highest probability of, of, let's say, of changing the minds of people who are possessed by an ideology so that they can rejoin the productive political dialogue. And that's what you want, you don't want to defeat them. First of all, good luck with that. It's like, well, you got to live with them. You can't defeat people that you live with because there they are the next day. And if you defeat them, well then they're defeated. Maybe that's not for the best. And second, it's not like they're happy about the fact that they're defeated. It's not like they're not going to be waiting around to find out when they can defeat you next. It's like if you're married to someone, think, well, I won that argument. It's like, no, you didn't. No, you didn't. Because there that person is waking up next to you the next day, day. And so if you won, you know, and they've. They're defeated and humiliated because of it, then the probability that they're going to react properly to you, if they have any sense at all, is very low. And so, so what you want is you want to. You want to negotiate your way to a sustainable peace. And that's what you want to do in the political realm too, because, well, in this country, you know, there's a certain amount of polarization. I don't think it's anywhere near as bad as the media is making it out to be as they go through their death spirals and generate clickbait like mad. Because, you know, in the US you guys have been voting 50% Republican and 50% Democrat for what, about 20 years, right down the middle, it hasn't changed that much. But these people, these people who are on the opposite side of the political spectrum from you, they're the people who live across the street, they're the people who live down the street, their family members, for that matter. And you're gonna have to live with them. It's like you don't want to defeat them. You want to bring them back into the reasonable political dialogue. And you do that by having a certain amount, first of all, by getting your act together so that you're a credible and admirable person, but then by having some forbearance and negotiating towards peace. Think about what you want as a victory. You want a victory that. Where you're surrounded by the corpses of your defeated enemies, or do you want a victory that constitutes peace? Well, that's what you want. And in this country, I mean, you've been able to maintain that for a very long period of time, excluding the Civil War, let's say. And there's been other periods of polarization, like in the early 1970s. You don't want this to be a victory. You want this not. Not in that sense. You want to decrease the polarization, to bring everyone back under the umbrella of intelligent conversation. And you want to also know that just as you perhaps are temperamentally predisposed being more conservative to standing for patriotism and standing for the. What would you say? The. Well, let's say patriotism. We'll leave it at that. And for the utility of hierarchies that there are people who need to speak for the dispossessed. And you have to engage in a dialogue with them for your own good as well as theirs. Because healthy hierarchies do take care of the people who are dispossessed by the hierarchies. And that's one of the things that makes them stable. It's not an easy thing to figure out how to do. Right? I mean, you don't do it self evidently by things like redistribution of income, but it's still a universal. The problem of the dispossessed is a universal problem and it has to be addressed. And that's why you need the political dialogue. So no victory. Peace is the goal, not victory.
- [55:39]
A
That's great.
- [55:45]
B
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- [56:40]
A
I want to remind everyone we're gonna be. We're taking questions in a couple minutes, so tweet your questions with our hashtag ywls2018. I have a be looking at some of the tweets. It's been fun. The feedback's been great so far.
- [56:54]
C
There's another thing I wanted to say because. Because this is particularly a meeting of women because I think this is one thing that you could all do. One of the things I've noticed, and I think this is true right from the beginning of, let's say women became particularly emancipated as a consequence of the development of the birth control pill, which was much more a technological revolution than a political revolution. Okay. Because now you have control of your reproductive function at least in at least in large part. And so, and there's other technological advances that have also made that possible. So now the question is, well, with that additional freedom of choice, let's say, what is it that you want? And see, this is something that a women's movement like this could figure out because I don't think we really know. I know, it's my observation, like I've worked with women my whole life part because I've always worked in female dominated industries. So, you know, I'm young enough, let's say, so that women were fully integrated into the workforce in every domain I was in right from the time I started working. And so I've watched women in academia, for example, but in all sorts of other professions as well, negotiate their careers over their entire lifespan. And this is what I've observed, and I'm not saying it's right, this is what I've observed is that it looks to me like in our society, young women are taught to overvalue career. And what I mean by that is that they're not taught when they're 18 or 19 or 16 to 20, something like that, that what's actually going to play a crucial role in their lives. And so we have this idea that, well, you're going to have a meaningful career. It's like, well, first of all, most people don't have careers, they have jobs. And that's not the same. That isn't, I'm not saying that a job isn't necessary and useful, but it's not a career. It's not necessarily intrinsically meaningful. Right. It's something you do because it needs to be done and, and it's difficult and that's why you get paid for doing it. And so that's a job, not a career. And even if you have a career, careers are strange things because they're not as intrinsically meaningful as the purveyors of careers, like to tell you. And like I worked with a lot of women in law firms, for example, and these were like impressive, these were impressive people, man. They aced their high school, they nailed their university. They, they, they were, you know, top fifth percentile on their LSATs. They, they nailed law school, they went into articleing, they got their, their internship. That's not what it's called in law, but the word escapes me from articleing. And then they became partners by the time they were 30. This, they were on this rocket like trajectory. Almost all of them quit in their night in their 30s. And it happens in law school, in law Firms all the time. And you might say, well, that's a consequence of the oppressive patriarchy. It's like, no, it's not, that's not true. What it's a consequence of is the women hit their late 20s and early 30s, they make partner, which is sort of the pinnacle. They're hyper conscientious women, so they're aiming for the top. They hit it, they think, now I'm surrounded by all these people, many of them men. All those guys do is work like 80 hours a week. They just work non stop. They make a lot of money. But you know, money loses its incremental utility after you have enough money really to keep the bill collectors at bay. The psychological literature on that is quite clear. The women wake up when they're in their late 20s and they think, it isn't obvious to me why anyone would work 80 hours a week when they have other things to do, like have a relationship, like have a family. And let's be perfectly clear about this, most men are like that too, right? Because people work on average about 35 to 40 hours a week. They're concerned about having a family and having a relationship and having a life outside of work. If you're going to have a high end career, that's your life. Make no mistake about it. It's like you don't get to the top one percentile of your occupation unless all you do is work. And I don't mean work a little bit, I mean work 16 hours a day flat out. Like some of my clients got new microwaves because it took a few seconds shorter to heat their coffee in the morning. And so, and I'm dead serious about that, man. They were timed to the second, those people. And you think, well, do you want to live like that? It's like, well, maybe the answer is yes, but certainly the answer could be no because, well, why would you do that? What's the purpose of doing that when you could also have an intimate relationship that you spent some time on in a family? And so one of the things that you people should figure out, could figure out is, well, if you could have what you wanted as emancipated women capable of taking whatever place you want in society, what do you want? And how do you find out? Like, how do you find out what women want? I would say that you could consider partnering with some reasonable social scientists and start doing some surveys and survey women of all different ages, from 19 up to, up to, well, up to 70, and find out what women want. You know, I think you'd see it radically shift from 19 to 35, by the way. And I'd like to see that documented, because my experience has been that as Women mature from 19 to 30, the. The value that they lay on permanent relationship and family increases and the value that they lay on career decreases. Now, maybe that's wrong because it hasn't been documented particularly well, but I don't think it's wrong. It would be worth finding out, because then you could also find out, if you can find out what women actually want, and I don't think we've done a good job of figuring that out at all, then you could also figure out how to facilitate. And that would be a wonderful thing, because we actually need to know that. And I think the. To some degree, the academic disciplines in the universities are so corrupted by identity politics that they can't answer these or ask or answer these questions without falling into an ideological trap. But it'd just be good to find out, like, we know, for example, that men and women do differ temperamentally, and they do differ in their interests. You know, so women are more likely to be interested in people and men are more likely to be interested in things, broadly speaking. And there's exceptions, and that does modulate career choice. So we know, for example, as well that as societies become more egalitarian, this is an important point to know. As societies become more egalitarian, the proportion of women who choose STEM disciplines, science, technology, engineering, mathematics, decreases. It doesn't increase, it decreases. Now, you know, I don't know what to make of that, and I don't know whether that's a bad thing or a good thing. But I do know that men and women do differ in their proclivities and their interests, on average. And it would be interesting to see if we took that fully into account, which would seem to be something you do with a true feminism is like, well, we are going to deal with women as they are and perhaps as they could be, but at least we could start with as they are. So what do they want? How can we facilitate their ability to acquire that? How can we set up our society so that they benefit and everyone else benefits because of it? And I think. I really think there's a hole there that needs to be filled. And that would be a. It'd be nice to see a political organization that grounded itself carefully in actual gathering of data. And you could do that. It's like, what do women want? How is that going to work out properly for society? And is there any way that that could Be properly facilitated. Be a lovely thing for everyone to find out and for it to be depoliticized to the degree that that was possible.
- [64:33]
A
So one of the questions we're getting a lot of on Twitter, it's interesting, is this war on men and the idea of masculinity. Of all questions at a women's summit. So I'll read it as, conservative women, how can we help end society's negative stereotype of masculinity?
- [64:54]
C
I think you do that. I really think the fundamental way you do that is by constraining it in your own relationship. You know? Now, one of the things you'll find. Now, I'm going to tread on thin ice here, but that's okay. One of the things you'll find is that that attitude towards, let's say, toxic masculinity is likely to manifest itself in your own relationship. You know, in your distrust of your partner. Say, and I'm not saying that you should naively trust your partner. I don't think you should naively trust anyone, right? And sometimes people confuse naivety with trust. Say, well, when I was a kid, I trusted everyone. It's like, well, that wasn't wisdom, right? You just didn't know any better because you were a kid. And you say, well, then I got hurt and now I don't trust anyone. It's like, well, you're wiser now that you've been hurt because you know that that can happen and you know that that's within the realm of human possibility. And you say, well, yeah, but it's damaged my ability to trust. It's like, no, it hasn't. You never had any ability to trust. You just had naive faith in other people. And that's not the same thing. Once you've been hurt, trust becomes an act of courage, not an act of naivety. You say, well, I know that, like me, you're full of snakes, and God only knows when one's gonna pop out and bite me. And the same goes for you in relationship to me. It's like, so why should I trust you? And the answer is, because you're courageous. Because if you put forward your hand and trust someone to do the right thing, you radically increase the probability that they will. Now, you don't increase it to 100% and you lay yourself open for betrayal, right? But if you know that, if you're awake to that, you say, look, I'm willing to take the risk to be hurt in order to extend my hand in trust. Well, that's how you combat toxic Masculinity, right then and there. You do it in your own heart, you know, and you will call forth the best from the person that you're with by doing that, you know, and that's partly the willingness to be vulnerable. But. And I don't mean naively, right, because you're, you're not. You're not. There's no courage in vulnerability unless. Unless you know the price that you might pay. And so you have to trust and you have to be honest. That's the other thing, you know, and that's part of trusting. You need to let your partner know who you are and what you want. And that also means you have to let yourself know. And that's not such an easy thing, too. You have to have a dialogue with yourself and figure out what you want, and you have to be willing to share that with your partner. Think the way that you glue the relationships between men and women back together is by doing that locally. First of all, right, you deal with your. Your boyfriend, you deal with your husband, you deal with your brothers. You glue things back together with your father. If you can do that, you establish positive relationship with your son. And then, having learned how to do that well, you're going to spread your influence out properly into the broader community. Community. And I'm a very big admirer of local action. It's like, because local action isn't local, it spreads out so quickly you can't believe it. And if you do things right in the little domains that you have right in front of you, first of all, that's not easy. Like, it's hard to have a good relationship that maintains itself properly across time. That will take everything you've got. And if you're capable of developing the character that will allow you to do that move, moving that out into the broader social world will be a simple thing in comparison. So you start by manifesting courageous faith in your partner and the men that are close to you in your life. And you watch and you let them know when that trust is being violated. Obviously, because you're not a pushover. You say what you have to say, and that way you heal those relationships and that'll do the trick. That's all you need to do. All you need to do. It's like, good luck with that. It's very, very hard, but you can do it and it won't cause any harm. That's also a very good thing.
- [68:55]
A
So. The universities have become so radical when you say things such as, men are better at some things than women and women are better at some things than men. Those are considered horribly radical statements because of some of the insanity that has infiltrated higher education. I think some of the miscategorization upon your work and your teaching is just rooted in how they've moved the goalposts.
- [69:26]
C
Well, it's a funny. It's such a comical thing is, you know, the, the data that I've put forward with regards to the differences between men and women isn't controversial. So, you know, you say, well, so this is pseudoscience. That's one accusation. Well, here, let me tell you about it, okay? So just so you know, okay, so you got to try to figure out when. When scientific data is credible, okay? So here's one. Because you might say, well, it also gets contaminated with politics, and that does happen. Now, science has mechanisms to stop that from happening across time. But one thing you can be reasonably sure of is that if scientists publish data that violates their own political leanings, that's one bit of evidence that it might be reliable because they're not going to rush out and be thrilled about publishing science, something that shows that their fundamental political presuppositions are in error. Okay, so let's look at the personality literature, just because this is where you see the differences between men and women. Okay? So the first thing is that the best way those have been measured is by using a scale called the Big 5 Personality Inventory. There's a variety of different variants of it, but they all measure five fundamental traits. Extraversion, positive emotion dimension, neuroticism and negative emotion dimension, Agreeableness, which is compassion and politeness, conscientiousness and openness, which is a creativity dimension. Okay? Now the first question is, how did those dimensions come to be identified? Because you might say, well, is there political bias there? And the answer seems to be no, and here's why. So the way no one predicted these dimensions, they emerged as a consequence of brute force statistical analysis. So imagine that you ask a great number of people an immense number of questions, okay? And every sort of question you can imagine. And I mean that, because you get teams of people sitting down and writing down as many questions as they can think up. And so you give those questions to as many people as possible, and then you use a process called factor analysis, which is a statistical process that tells you how the questions clump. So, for example, questions like, I'm in a good mood in the morning and I'm often happy, people who answer seven on a scale of one to seven for the first question and seven on a scale of one to 7 for the second question that's going to happen and the statistics can pull out those patterns. And there's five patterns, those are the traits. So that doesn't seem to be politicized. And it was atheoretical to the degree that that was possible. Okay, so now you have the traits and they were started to be established in the 1960s and we got pretty good at measuring them. I would say by the 1990s that started to become a pretty stable model. Well then the next question is, are there differences between men and women? That's pretty easy. You just look and they don't even
- [72:27]
A
believe in men and women though. They think men and women are, it's a social construct.
- [72:32]
C
Yeah, well you know, we can get to that. And so the answer is yes, the biggest differences are women are higher in negative emotion and they're higher in agreeableness. And the difference isn't massive at the average level. So here's the difference. If you took a random woman and a random man out of the population and you had to lay a bet on who was more agreeable, so that's more compassionate and polite and you bet on the woman, you'd be right 60% of the time. So it's not 50, 50. There's a tilt towards women being more agreeable and you see this manifested in the culture. So the best personality predictor of being incarcerated is low agreeableness. And you have a 10 to 1 incarceration rate, men to women, that's in keeping with that. So and then women are higher in negative emotion, that seems to kick in at puberty because you don't see that with boys and girls, you see it at puberty. And that's also in keeping with the psychiatric literature that is indicates that worldwide women have two to three times the rate of depression and anxiety, which goes along with that. Okay, so there are differences. Then you might ask, well are those socio cultural? Now the proclivity of the social scientists would be to say yes, because they're leftist. All the social scientists are on the left, all of them. So they're going to be biased towards the social socio cultural interpretation. So here's how you do it. You say, okay, well let's look across countries at differences between men and women. And so if the socio cultural explanation is correct, as societies become more egalitarian in their social policies, the differences between men and women should disappear. Very straightforward prediction. And so those studies have been done and it's not some obscure damn study that's of kind collecting dust under some tree in the middle of a field. These are studies that have been cited thousands of times. And by scientific standards, that's overwhelmingly successful. If your paper is cited a hundred times, it's a major deal. If it's cited like 3,000 times, you've hit it out of the park. Like that happens to you once in your career or probably never. So these are major pieces of scientific inquiry and with tens of thousands of subjects. So, and what they found was, so you stack up countries by the egalitarian nature of their social policies, and then you look at differences between men and women and what do you find? You find that the more egalitarian the society, the bigger the differences between men and women. Well, people publish that. This is why the paper got cited like 3,000 times. It's like, whoa, we didn't expect that. And the reason is, it seems to be, is that imagine that there are two reasons why men and women might differ, socio cultural and biological. You remove the socio cultural influences, the biological differences maximize. Now, it isn't what anyone expected and it isn't what the researchers wanted to find, but that's the case. Okay, so what do we do about that? Well, you could say we increase the pressure on men and women to equalize them regardless of the biological differences. But the problem with that is, well, first of all, are you sure you want to do that? Like, maybe you are. Maybe you're going to say, hey man, equality of outcome, no matter what the cost. And so we'll socialize little girls more like little boys, and we'll socialize little boys more like little girls. That's a possibility. But the problem with that is that the differences are large enough and pronounced enough. So you're going to have to produce a pretty tyrannical bureaucracy to impose that degree of equalization on the outcome. And I would say you want to be very careful before you do social engineering on that scale. Alternatively, you could say, okay, well look, there are the differences. How are we to understand them and what are we going to do about them? Because one of the things that happens because of these differences, it appears, is that men and women sort them out into different occupations if you let them. And you see that most particularly again in the Scandinavian countries where there's a massive preponderance of male engineers. And remember, being an engineer is a very niche category. Right. Most people aren't of the engineering type. Most of them aren't. But the preponderance of those who are appear to be male. Okay. And we're not exactly sure why that is seems to have something to do with interest in things rather than people. And the preponderance of people who go into health care, nursing in particular, are women. Is that okay? Well, this is the sort of thing that your generation is going to have to figure out. Do we want to. Like my proclivity, and this is a personal proclivity, would be to let people sort themselves out as they see fit. That's kind of a free market solution. And it seems to me that that's a saleable message to young women. It's like, well, you're not exactly the same as men. Now, the parameters of difference aren't, aren't fully defined and the causes for that aren't fully understood, but there seems to be a fair bit of variability. It's like manifest the variability in a free market. That seems to be, to me, that's the, the least injurious solution. And I think that's a saleable message to young women. It's make your choices based on your proclivity, all right? Assuming that you're also taking care of yourself and your families and your community. And I think that that's a perfectly reasonable way of going about it because the alternative is to engage in really large scale and intense social engineering in an attempt to eradicate the differences. And the other thing too is we don't know how useful those differences are. So I've been, this is my opinion, just so you know it. I've been trying to puzzle out why women are more prone to negative emotion than men and why that kicks in at puberty. So, because it's not so fun to be more prone to negative emotion, right? You pay a big price for that. Produces increased emotional pain and anxiety. So it's a big price. So why in the. I thought, why in the world would women be characterized by, by higher levels of negative emotion, given that it produces an excessive depression and anxiety and it's associated with a fair bit of suffering. And I thought, well, here's a bunch of reasons. You can tell me what you think about them, okay? Women become sexually vulnerable at puberty and sex is more dangerous for women than it is for men for obvious reasons. Right? Because men don't get pregnant, right? So the cost of casual sexual encounter or forced sexual encounters count is very, very high for women. And so maybe there's, there's reason there to be more apprehensive. In general, women are smaller than men and they're not as strong in the upper body. So there's a physical issue here. As well. So that's rule, that's reason number two. But I think reason number three might be paramount. Look, we don't know how susceptible you need to be to distress to be a good mother, right? And it looks to me like you have to be quite susceptible to distress because what should happen when your infant is upset is that that should make you upset. That's an empathy response. Right. And so it could easily be that you have to be more sensitive to threat than might be good for you. Because there isn't you, there's you and the infant. That's the canonical female configuration, let's say, from a, from an evolutionary perspective. And so you're not afraid for you, you're afraid for you and the infant. And that puts you at a certain disadvantage in dealing, say, with adult men in the general world because you're a little bit more sensitive to negative emotion. That might be optimal, but that's the price that you pay for being particularly sensitive to incredibly dependent offspring, which of course is characteristic of people. Now, I don't know that that's true, but, but those are hypotheses I have about why the negative emotion differences exist. And if they do exist, like maybe it is the case that you're. That your infant is, has a slightly higher possibility of surviving if you're a little more sensitive to threat. It stands to reason. And obviously that can get out of hand. But those are differences that we might not want to mess with either because we don't understand their utility. And so it isn't obvious that you want to be trained out of that because maybe that would make you harsh and maybe that would make you too harsh to be really good at taking care of really small infants. Now, I don't know. Right. Because we've only really sorted out the fact that there are temperamental differences between men and women that are reliable. We've only really figured that out, I would say in the last maximum 30 years, but really more like 15. It's like that's not much time to adapt to a piece of information like that. And we've only figured out that it's not fundamentally socio cultural in its causation. It's been less time than that.
- [81:29]
A
But what's troubling is that from even your home country, there's a movement where parents say, I'm gonna let my kid decide if they're a boy or girl. There's this third option on the birth certificate.
- [81:43]
C
Yeah, good luck with that. But you know, so I've got a, I've got A funny story for you about that. So I had a family member who adopted kids and they were, they were kind of early adopters of the gender neutral idea, but in a low level way, you know, they were just not going to use stereotypical approaches to their children. And the outcome of that was absolutely comical as far as I was concerned. Their girl, she was like the most feminine girl I've ever seen. Her bedroom was like pink and it was full of flowers and it was just everything you'd expect from a stereotypical feminine person. And their son liked to hunt and fish, even though his father did neither of those and grew up to work on the oil rigs and was a real rough guy. Didn't make any difference at all. I suspect that these intrinsic gender differences, the sex differences, are robust enough so that some minor league social engineering first of all, is unlikely to change them, but might even exaggerate them. Because, you know, if you try to suppress something that doesn't make it go away, what that tends to do is to make it angry and get bigger. And so, I mean, I think that the, I think that the, the call for gender fluidity and the idea that there's a gender spectrum is likely to be very confusing for children and adolescents at a time in their life where the last thing they need is extra confusion about who they are under the guise of choice. So I think that it's a foolish bit of social engineering. I think the underlying theory on which it's predicated, which is now law in Canada, appallingly enough, the social constructionist version of gender, I think it's the reason it's been transformed into law, is because the activists lost completely in the scientific domain. They had to, you know, circumvent the whole proof issue and just introduce it by fiat. I think it's a sign of the degeneration of the education system in general. So I'm appalled by it. But I also think that getting rid of gender differences, so to speak, is going to be a lot harder than any social engineers can possibly imagine, and that the probability that it will kick back hard is really high. Because I think that what most people will do is defensively revert to a more rigid identity as an attempt to defend themselves against the confusion. That's the most likely outcome. I see. So we'll see, right? And hopefully most of this nonsense will disappear as people come back to their senses, which I hope they are.
- [84:41]
A
I sure hope you're right. But in the humanities, I think you first exposed this. 80% of all papers are written without peer review or citation.
- [84:50]
C
Oh, no, I didn't expose that. I mean, that you helped shut down.
- [84:53]
A
Oh, yes, that's what I mean. Through your platform.
- [84:55]
C
Oh, yes, yes. I was an avid tweeter of that particular statistic, you know, and I should hedge my bets to some degree. Like, look, the first thing you have to understand is that most enterprises produce a tremendous amount of useless noise. Right? Right. And whether that's academia or government or private enterprise, like, I mean, the first thing you want to think about is this, is that you take a typical corporation, and so maybe it runs on a 5% profit margin. That means it spends 95% of its effort just lumbering forward. And if you know anything about big corporations, you know perfectly well that they're capable of. Well, they do way more stupid things than they do intelligent things. Right. And the bigger the corporation, the more likely that is to be the case, which is why they tend to precipitously fail. Like, I think the typical Fortune 500 company lasts 30 years. Right. Which is partly. It's also partly why capital doesn't accumulate in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of the same people, even though there is that 1% distribution that's characteristic of pretty much all economies. So almost all large scale human enterprises produce a tremendous amount of stupidity. And that's also true of academia. And so the fact that 80% of humanities papers receive zero citations is mostly a consequence of the fact that most papers are hardly ever cited. Right. So it follows a Pareto distribution. So what you basically do is you take the number of papers that are published and assume that the square root of that number receives half the citations. So if there's 10,000 papers published in a discipline, then a hundred of them will receive half the citations. And that's the same law that applies to the distribution of money. It's the same law that applies to number of basketball hoops successfully completed by pro athletes or goals scored by hockey players, or size of trees in the Amazon, or size of cities or massive stars or like, it's a universal principle. It's Price's law, essentially. However, the fact that 80% of the papers receive zero citations isn't. Is a metric for something approximating catastrophic failure. Right? Now, one of the things that's happened in the universities that's facilitating this, the reason I put that preamble in, is because I don't want you to think that the universities are more spectacularly unsuccessful than most things, because they're not. But that doesn't mean the lack of success isn't worth assessing. So one of the things that's happened is a lot of these systems for evaluation have been gerrymandered. So zero citations means really no one, not even your friends or yourself, has cited your paper. So that's not so good. What happens with a lot of these journals is that a very small number of people publish in them. It's the same people, they request that the library subscribe to them. And the libraries pay radically inflated prices to subscribe to these journals, which is why the publishers publish them. And the price of the subscription is subsidized by tax money or by insane tuition fees. Either way, it's equally reprehensible. So there's a market for useless information that's generated by the subsidization of publishing journals at inflated prices. And so you get this generation of excess material that's completely useless and expensive. And that's part of what's driving this sort of thing. It's not good. I mean it's one of about seven fatal errors that the universities are making because I think they're making approximately seven fatal errors. So too much administrative overhead, like way too much administrative overhead that's been getting out of hand over the last few decades when the size of the faculty has remained essentially constant and the number of faculty that have full time positions has been plummeting. That's error number two. The faculty are being replaced with part timers who have no job security, who get paid nothing. And I really, I don't mean literally nothing, but it's so close to nothing that it might as well be nothing. And who have no, who have no power over the destiny of the universities whatsoever. So that's part time adjunct staff that are up to 40% of professors in many institutions now and higher in some. So administrative overhead, the decimation of the professoriate, insane acceleration of tuition fees far above the cost of inflation. Right way outstripping the value of the degrees. Gerrymandering the, what would you call it, the standards necessary to graduate. The proliferation of the activist disciplines, the use of these ethics committees that have taken, taken scientific research, especially on human beings and animals down at the knees. They've made it so cumbersome and slow that anyone with any sense is appalled by it. The fact that in the United States if you take out student loans which are easy to access, that you can't declare bankruptcy, which is just absolutely mind boggling to me because it's a form of indentured servitude. It's a way that the university Administrators have figured out how to pick the pockets of the future earnings of their current students. So that's. I think that's seven. There's more. But failure to teach people how to read, failure to teach people how to write, failure to teach people how to speak, failure to teach them the proper classics, especially in the humanities, because they're actually worth learning. It's just an unbridled bloody catastrophe, and the universities are going to pay for it.
- [90:37]
A
Beyond that, I had a campus lecture a month ago where a student came up and they said, you know, in our literature class, we are no longer, this is Stanford. We don't learn Shakespeare because he was a white male. And so I'm going to push back with one thing. You said, I don't know if it's going to get better anytime soon. It has gotten.
- [91:03]
C
Oh, I think the universities are going to lose their purchase on higher education. That's what's going to happen. Well, look, look at it this way. I mean, why read Shakespeare? Well, the answer is either there's intrinsic value in Shakespeare or there isn't. If there isn't any intrinsic value, then it doesn't matter if there is intrinsic value. So let's say the intrinsic value of the liberal. What's the intrinsic value of the liberal arts? It's not an obvious. The answer to that question is not obvious. But here's, here's my answer to that. Okay, so the liberal arts present to you the great works of literature and philosophy of the past. Okay, so why is that useful? Well, the reason it's useful is because it's useful is that these are examples, coded in stories and often in explicit philosophy, that tell you how to live properly with a minimum of excess suffering, with a minimum of unnecessary damage to others. They contain wisdom. And wisdom is valuable because wisdom is what you need in order to know how to live properly. And it's valuable. Okay, and then the liberal arts also hypothetically taught you to speak clearly, to write intelligibly, to think properly, and to familiarize yourself with those great works. What's the utility in that? We'll be blunt about it economically. Well, that's simple. If you can communicate in those means, speaking, writing, and if you can think you are so powerful that nothing can stop you. You think about it. Well, what do you mean? Well, I don't care who you are. I don't care if you're a plumber or waitress. Not that there's anything wrong with being a plumber or a waitress, because there isn't. It's like you're going to negotiate for a raise, you're going to negotiate for a promotion. You're going to negotiate how your customers treat you. You're going to negotiate how you, how you advertise yourself, for example, with regards to picking up customers. That's all articulated linguistic ability, the ability to express yourself. If you're good at that, you win. Period. And so, right, look, there's a reason, like, the children of rich people took liberal arts degrees. Why? Because the rich knew that that was the best possible training for leadership positions. And it wasn't because it was a romp through the park for four years and then daddy's inheritance. It was because if you learned how to communicate, you were unstoppable. Now, if the university stopped teaching people valuable things, they abandon the classic literature, for example, and they abandon their sacred duty to teach people how to communicate properly. All that means is that they'll devalue their brand and they'll disappear, because that's their brand. And then if they leave all that valuable material just lying around, then you can be sure that someone else will come and pick it up and make something useful out of it. And so I think that'll happen way faster than people think. It's already starting to happen online. I mean, I mean, the lectures that I put online, they're university lectures and they're devoted to what I just described, to helping people put their lives together and learning to communicate. I mean, there's millions of people have watched them. It's like, and that technology is just sitting there. And so the probability that we can generate systems quite rapidly that will educate and accredit thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people at very, very low cost. You watch, that's going to happen so fast, it'll make your head spin and the universities will collapse.
- [94:40]
A
I always say you can learn much more from watching Dr. Jordan Peterson and Prager University for a month than going to spend four years trying to pursue some liberal arts degree for $200,000 in debt. More wisdom, more instruction for life. So in the short time we have remaining, what advice do you have for this room, this particular audience? And what would you like to say that you haven't already had a chance to say to this historic gathering of young women?
- [95:10]
C
Don't underestimate yourselves. Don't, don't underestimate. Let me rephrase that. Let me rephrase that. Don't overestimate yourself, but don't underestimate who you could be. That's a much better way of thinking about it. You know psychologists of the, of the careless sort, I would say have been pushing the idea of self esteem for a very long time, probably since the early 60s in its more careless forms. You should be content with yourself the way you are. It's like, no, you shouldn't. You especially not, how old are you people? You're like 18. You can be content with yourself the way you are. What are you going to do with the next 60 years then? You know, seriously, like, you're nowhere near what you could be. You're not even close, right? And so that's a, that's a way more optimistic message. Like it's, you ain't seen nothing yet. That's the right message. And so I would say don't overestimate yourself now, but don't underestimate your future self. And you know, you're so, you have so much influence as an individual if you get your act together that you can't believe it. There isn't anything that has more influence than that. You have all the power that there is right where you are to put things right around you. And if you start now, you're also young. You start now, you develop a noble vision, right of who you could be. You start to put that into practice, develop some discipline, familiarize yourself with the great works of the past. Learn to read, learn to write, learn to speak, learn to think. Man, you'll be deadly.
- [96:48]
A
Doctor Jordan Peterson, just so everyone knows, he took two flights to get here. He had to come here. And he's going back to tonight, I think either to Kentucky or Indianapolis.
- [96:56]
C
Indianapolis tonight.
- [96:57]
A
You're on tour. So the fact you made time for this means the world to all of us. You are, In my opinion, you have been the most important thinker in my life and the creation and advancement of Turning Point USA and my world philosophy. And I believe you are the most instrumental thinker that will continue to allow us to help save Western civilization. And you are my hero and I want to thank you again for making the time. Thank you.
- [97:34]
B
What a great conversation that was. Please email me your questions. Freedom charliekirk.com freedomarliekirk.com if you guys want a signed copy of the MAGA doctrine, type in Charlie Kirk show hit. Subscribe, give us a five star review. Screenshot it. Email us freedomarliekirk.com freedom charliekirk.com First 20 to do so will get a signed copy of the MAGA Doctrine. And also thank you for supporting the Charlie Kirk show by going to charliekirk.comsupport please consider becoming a monthly donor in just a couple days. We have a private zoom call coming up for you. Thanks so much, everybody. God bless.