538. South Africa: What the West Needs to Learn | Dr. Ernst Roets

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Episode 538. Dr. Ernst Roots

Title: Understanding South Africa's Complex History and Current Crisis

Host: Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Guest: Dr. Ernst Roots
Release Date: April 14, 2025
Duration: [Summary based on provided transcript]

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Introduction

In Episode 538 of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, host Dr. Jordan B. Peterson engages in a profound discussion with Dr. Ernst Roots, a historian and filmmaker specializing in South African history. The conversation delves into the intricate settlement patterns of South Africa, the legacy of apartheid, and the nation's current socio-political turmoil. This episode provides listeners with an in-depth understanding of how historical dynamics continue to shape modern South Africa.

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1. Historical Settlement Patterns in South Africa

Key Discussion Points:

• Early Inhabitants: The original inhabitants of South Africa were the Khoi and San peoples, commonly referred to as the Bushmen, who have lived in the region for tens of thousands of years. They are genetically and culturally distinct from both European settlers and Bantu-speaking groups ([00:00]-[07:50]).

• European Settlement: The Dutch East India Company established a refreshment station in Cape Town in 1652, attracting Dutch, German, and French settlers who became the proto-Afrikaners. Over approximately 400 years, they developed a unique language and culture distinct from their European origins ([07:07]-[13:34]).

• Bantu Migration: Concurrently, Bantu-speaking groups migrated south from central Africa, pushing out the Bushmen and establishing dominant communities like the Zulu Kingdom. This migration was driven by inter-tribal conflicts and the search for fertile land ([07:07]-[14:39]).

Notable Quote:

• Dr. Ernst Roots emphasizes the complexity of South Africa's ethnic landscape:
  “The situation with regards to ethnicity and race in South Africa is a lot more complicated than it appears on the surface.” ([07:50])

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2. The Great Trek and Afrikaner Identity

Key Discussion Points:

• The Great Trek (1830s): Approximately 2,000 Afrikaners embarked on the Great Trek to escape British rule, seeking autonomy and fertile land in the interior. This migration led to significant conflicts, notably the Battle of Blood River in 1838, where a small Afrikaner force defeated a much larger Zulu army.

• Formation of Identity: The Great Trek is considered the origin story of Afrikaner identity, marked by vows of resilience and religious commitment. This historical event underpins the Afrikaners' conservative and land-centric culture today ([17:26]-[30:36]).

Notable Quote:

• Dr. Ernst Roots recounts the vow made before the Battle of Blood River:
  “We make a vow to God that if he protects us in the battle that lies ahead... we will commemorate this day as a Sabbath.” ([28:45])

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3. Demographics and Population Growth

Key Discussion Points:

• Population Dynamics: South Africa's population has grown to approximately 60 million, with white South Africans constituting less than 5 million, including about 2.7 million Afrikaners. The majority of the population is black African, with significant "colored" communities and smaller groups of Indian and Asian descent ([31:13]-[33:27]).

• Apartheid and Its Aftermath: The apartheid system, which enforced racial segregation and economic disparity, is often misconstrued as a genocide. However, Dr. Roots clarifies that while apartheid was oppressive, the black population actually doubled during its implementation, emphasizing a complex demographic evolution rather than outright extermination ([32:18]-[33:27]).

Notable Quote:

• Dr. Roots challenges the characterization of apartheid as genocide:
  “Genocide is not the right term because the black population in South Africa doubled...” ([31:29])

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4. Modern Political Climate and Challenges

Key Discussion Points:

• State of Infrastructure: South Africa faces severe infrastructural decay, exemplified by frequent power outages, water shortages due to poor maintenance, and deteriorating transportation systems. These issues disproportionately affect impoverished black communities in townships ([71:00]-[75:53]).

• Rise of Radical Politics: The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), led by Julius Malema, advocate for radical land reforms and have incited violence against white farmers through chants like "Kill the Boer." This rhetoric fuels ethnic tensions and threatens societal stability ([78:57]-[84:22]).

Notable Quotes:

• Jordan Peterson on the impact of infrastructural collapse:
  “Once your infrastructure starts to deteriorate, the poor people... die from the bottom up.” ([73:50])

• Dr. Ernst Roots on radical political rhetoric:
  “We are not calling for the slaughter of white people, at least for now...” ([84:18])

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5. Prospects for the Future and Potential Solutions

Key Discussion Points:

• Economic Policies: The African National Congress (ANC) has struggled to address the triangle of unemployment, poverty, and inequality, often resorting to socialist policies that have exacerbated economic disparities without fostering production or reducing unemployment effectively ([65:01]-[66:31]).

• Call for Decentralization: Dr. Roots advocates for decentralizing political power to allow for cultural autonomy and mutual respect among diverse communities. He suggests that solutions lie in recognizing and respecting different frames of reference rather than enforcing a monolithic Western perspective ([93:44]-[97:53]).

• International Support: There is a discussion about seeking refugee status for Afrikaner farmers in the West, highlighting fears that loss of this community could lead to further societal collapse in South Africa ([90:35]-[91:42]).

Notable Quote:

• Dr. Roots on the necessity of decentralization:
  “We need to find a way where there's mutual recognition and respect between different perspectives.” ([94:09])

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Conclusion

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Dr. Ernst Roots provide a comprehensive exploration of South Africa's historical complexities and current crises. The dialogue underscores the importance of understanding nuanced historical contexts to address modern challenges effectively. The episode serves as a critical reminder of how deeply ingrained historical conflicts and policies continue to impact contemporary societal structures and highlights the urgent need for thoughtful, decentralized solutions to foster stability and prosperity in South Africa.

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Disclaimer: This summary is based on a provided transcript and aims to encapsulate the key discussions and insights from Episode 538 of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. For a complete understanding, listening to the full episode is recommended.

Transcript

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

I mentioned this story about the vow that was made in 1838. And he went to negotiate with the Zulu king, King Dingaan. They signed a treaty. The king said, we need to celebrate this, but leave your weapons outside. And so during the celebration, the Zulu king chanted, kill the wizards. And they slaughtered him. We need to retaliate. We need to attack back. And so they had a commander of about three to 400 people. They were completely surrounded by about 12,000, a man named Sahl Salih. He was the religious leader. And he said, we need to make a vow to God. Some people say that's the origin story of our people.

[Jordan Peterson]

Let's flip to the modern time. What was the relationship between the apartheid state per se and this notion of separate homelands?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

The argument was that South Africa should be thought of as Europe. The single biggest problem in South Africa, it's a triangle of unemployment, poverty, and inequality. Ironically, they've gotten to a point where they can only think about inequality.

[Jordan Peterson]

It looks to me like the cost of innovation is inequality. Okay, now your book is entitled Kill the Boar. There's a reason for that. Hello, everybody. I've watched, over a very long period of time, the political and economic situation in South Africa both heat up and destabilize. And that's taken somewhat of an accelerating turn in the last few years. And because of that, I've become increasingly interested in delving more deeply into the history of South Africa to understand the context and then also the political situation on the ground in that country now. And I came across the work of Dr. Ernst Roots, who wrote this book called Kill the Boar, this book which was published in 2018. Now, he's also a filmmaker. He made a film called Tainted Heroes, which is about the apartheid era in 2016, and another one called Disrupted Land. And I hoped to talk to Dr. Roots about South Africa about its history and about. Well, about its current situation and about hopes and concerns for the future. And that's exactly what we did. And so the first thing I wanted to do was to delve a little bit into the history of the origin of South Africa, because there's a narrative in the west that the evil white Europeans came to a land dominated by black Africans and colonized it in their brutal and murderous fashion. And, well, any territorial dispute has its bloody edge, let's say. But the truth of the matter is that the settlement of South Africa is a hell of a lot more complex than that, and that the two primary racial groups that exist there today weren't the original inhabitants of the land. Whether they're black or white. And so just knowing that is useful. And we spent the first half, really, of the podcast talking about the history of the settlement of South Africa. The original people there were Bushmen who aren't particularly related genetically to the Bantu, the black people who live there now, and obviously not to the Europeans. So the. The situation with regards to ethnicity and race in South Africa is a lot more complicated than it appears on the surface. And so, well, that's what we're trying to puzzle out in this podcast. So join me and my guest, Dr. Ernst Roots, for that discussion. So this is likely to be an unsettling conversation, so we might as well dive right in. The first thing I think that people who are watching and listening should know is more a somewhat more detailed history of the settlement patterns in South Africa, because the presumption, first of all, what most people in the west know about South Africa, you could put in a very small thimble with enough room left over for another thimble, and that includes me. And so it's not like I studied that in high school, for example. And so people know nothing about South Africa, like really nothing. And they certainly don't know anything about its settlement patterns. And so I suppose people use the analog of the European settlement of the Americas, which, which is also a very complex story. I mean, by the time the pilgrims got to the eastern coast of the United States, there are estimates that 95% of the native Americans had already died from measles, smallpox, mumps, et cetera. And so the settlement story is extremely complex, but it's even more complex in South Africa, and they're not the same. So. So could you enlighten everyone who's watching and listening about the settlement patterns, the relationship between the land and the Europeans and the black Africans, and let's just lay that out so we know where we stand first.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Well, let me firstly say thank you very much for speaking with me. And I can say with great self assurance that a lot of people in South Africa would be very happy to hear that you are interested in what's happening in South Africa.

[Jordan Peterson]

Interested in and terrified by.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Well, hopefully we can flesh out a lot of that. So you're absolutely right to say that the history of, or the patterns of land ownership and the history leading to this is complex. And we can do an entire interview just about that. Because there were so many events that happened in South Africa, broadly speaking, the people who live in South Africa, who are of European descent, such as myself, arrived in 1652. That was the settlement when the Dutch East India Company arrived in Cape Town, or what is today Cape Town, to start a refreshment station for ships traveling around Africa to trade with the East. It was initially the Dutch, and they were then joined by Germans and French especially, but some other Europeans as well. And we sometimes call them the proto Afrikaners because the Afrikaner people became a people. Obviously it's not just one singular event and then you are a people. But it happened over time when we developed our own language and culture in Africa. So that was about 400 years ago. But what also happened in South Africa, in terms of the different black groups, if you could use that term, who live in South Africa, is we had the. And still have the. What is called the Khoi and the San. A lot of people know it as the Bushmen. That's how they're also known. A lot of them prefer to be called the Bushmen. People know them from the movie the Gods Must be Crazy and so forth. And they are the true indigenous people. If you want to say who are the indigenous people of South Africa, it's the Koi in the Sand. They lived pretty much all over South Africa. They've been there for tens of thousands of years.

[Jordan Peterson]

And they're a very ethnic and genetically separate group. Right. There's a lot of genetic and ethnic diversity in Africa, more than in the rest of the world, by a lot. And the Bushmen, those people are very distinct. In fact, I've read that genetically they're more akin to Asians than they are to black Africans.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

I've heard that too.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah, so. So I'm just laying that out, not to make any genetic claim of any sort, just so everybody's clear about that. But just to know that these things are extremely complicated and all so called black people aren't the same by any stretch of the imagination, any more than they're probably less similar from a cultural and genetic perspective than Europeans are to one another.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

I think you're right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, I think you can make that case pretty bluntly. So there's a lot of diversity in.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Africa and I'm very happy that you recognize this because a lot of people don't, because all those black people are the same. Yeah, yeah. But there are also groups like the South African government who would like people to believe that all black people are the same because that's their way of organizing as a collective on the basis of race.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah. Well, that way you can make the racial story, the racial oppression story, for example, a lot Simpler than it actually is, yes. Okay, so is there any estimates for the number of people, of Bushmen people that were there, say, in the 1600s? What, like, how densely populated was South Africa and what part of Africa exactly are we talking about? Like, Africa's a wallopingly big continent, despite the Mercator projection. And so. And the, The. The people who Americans think of as black, they occupy. Mostly they occupy Africa south of the Sahara Desert, but north of. Fundamentally north of where South Africa is. Like, how far down, how far up were the Bushmen? How far to the north were the Bushmen, the predominant human population in the 1600s?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Well, that's a very important point. So they occupied. There were several thousands. I don't know if they were 100,000. I'm not sure we can check those numbers. But they lived pretty much all over South Africa, and they lived more to the eastern part, which is important because the eastern part is much more fertile land. It's much more humid, and that's where the most productive farming land is and so forth. The western part is arid. It's more deserts and dry and so forth.

[Jordan Peterson]

So they live mostly in the east.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes, but they don't anymore. And that's important because. So if you go to the eastern parts, like the Drakensberg, you would find the cave paintings of the koi and the. But they don't live there anymore because they were pushed out by groups coming in from the north who. It has become a controversial term, although I don't know what the appropriate term then would be, by the Bantu people. So the word Bantu is a word that means people. It just means people.

[Jordan Peterson]

Like, that's typical. Anthropologically, most tribes refer to themselves as the humans as opposed to everyone else who aren't the humans.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Exactly. So they've been known as the Bantu speaking groups. But today it's controversial to use that term.

[Jordan Peterson]

Why is that?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Because it's a term that refers to black people. And I think some people have used the term in the context of making derogatory remarks or something to that effect.

[Jordan Peterson]

I see, I see.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

But that's how they were known historically, and that's the Zulus and the. And the different groups that we know in South Africa today.

[Jordan Peterson]

And they came down from the north.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

And they pushed out the Bushmen.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Now, also the Bushmen, from what I understand. Like, I don't know lots about the Bushmen either, although what I do know about them is that they were basically hunters and gatherers and trackers and that they were very sophisticated.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

That they were nomadic.

[Jordan Peterson]

They had those little lightweight bows and arrows and the poison darts, and they're very good at running down prey. Right. And they can live where no one else can live. But also, they weren't agriculturalists, from my understanding. And there were no places where the Bushmen produced, like, cities or dense population centers.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Correct. And. And they are. They are fairly small also, which is one of the reasons when. When the bigger tribes came in from the north and there was conflict between these groups, they were pushed out. They were not able to. To take a stance against the Zulu people, who are typically a strong nation.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. And very. Yes, yes. Well armed, comparatively very militaristic. Yes, right, right. The. The Bushmen have those little bows and arrows with their poison darts, but those don't make very effective weapons of war. Partly because the poison is long acting.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes, exactly.

[Jordan Peterson]

For all those people who think, by the way, that the Bushmen were like peaceful agrarian communists and that there was no conflict amongst them, let's say, prior to the Bantu or the Europeans. The most common, if I remember correctly, the most common pathway to death for a Bushman man is through murder. So you can use those darts on other people quite effectively if there's a feud. I also know that the Bushmen, because they lived in small tribal groups, they didn't evolve a real judicial system, and often their disputes would turn murderous. And so in some of these areas where the Bantus, for example, came down, the Bushmen would use the Bantu judicial system, which was more advanced, as a means of mediating their own disputes. So I just want to bring that up to put to rest any suspicions that the Bushmen, for example, were Rousseau, new noble, noble savages, and that everything was peaceful before civilization came along. It's like, that's not how the world works even a little bit. Okay, so in the 1650s, the Europeans came to the very southern tip of Africa, and that was primarily a consequence of the trading routes, because people had to sail around the Horn. Yes, right. And they set up this settlement as a refreshment station, you said, for. For the sailors, and that would be the European sailors who were starting to trade in the. Well, in India and so forth.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Exactly. Yes. And in Asia, and also to service the ships, building ships, repairing ships and so forth. Yes. So that they started then, 1652. Eventually they had what. What we call the Freibergers or the free burgers, which was that some of the. They were employees of the Dutch East India Company. Some of them were then released from their contracts. So that they could become farmers so that they could start developing an economy. And so there were some clashes with, for example, the Bushmen already there in the Cape between the Europeans and the Bushmen. But there was also examples of trading and cooperation and so forth.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So that's similar to what happened in North America. Yeah, like there were lots of it. There was a lot of allied, there were lots of peaceful and productive interactions between the natives and the Europeans. And it also depended on which Europeans. So the Cree in Canada were much more likely to ally with the English, for example, than with the French. And so these things were very common.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

We had the same dynamics in South Africa with the Afrikaner people and the English as well. Yes. And so, but just to get to that point, it's unfortunate that thinking about history, history tends to overestimate or overemphasize the conflict and downplay the cooperation. Cause conflict is more newsworthy, you could say. So when we think about history, we think about war and conflict, but we forget the cooperation part. That's very important.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

And so that was about the time when the Zulu people were settling in what is today KwaZulu Natal. And that calls our people in what is the Eastern Cape closer to where the Afrikaners or the proto Afrikaners were.

[Jordan Peterson]

When did the Bantu start moving south and why hadn't they done that before?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

I'm not sure why they haven't done that before. But from what I know, there was conflict up north in Africa and there was nomadic tribes and some groups of people.

[Jordan Peterson]

So they were pushed down as a consequence of inter tribal warfare in their own lands.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's still surprising, isn't it, that so much of Africa was essentially unsettled. I mean, I know the, the Bushmen were there, but there weren't very many of them. And, and it's also a lifestyle that can't support that huge a population. Pre agricultural lifestyle.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So I mean there weren't very many human beings 100,000 years ago.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. And so all right, so the Europeans start settling in the southern, in the southern most part of Africa. It's the Dutch East India Company. It's primarily for trade. The employees of that company get acclimated to Africa. They realize that there's immense productive farmland there. Like I, I read, for example, I know Uganda's farther north, but Uganda has enough arable land to feed all of Africa with no problem and a water table that's 200ft below the surface of the country. That's virtually everywhere in the country. Right. So Africa's God only knows how many people Africa could support if it was well managed.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes, which is why we have some of the best farmers in South Africa today. So in terms of the history then, one major event was with the Napoleonic wars. We sometimes joke as the Afrikaner people, we say we skip the Enlightenment because we have this joke. We say in Europe they were reading Jean Jacques Rousseau while we were hunting elephants.

[Jordan Peterson]

That was probably a better use of time than reading Jean Jacques Rousseau anyways.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah, but that's important because I think think it in a way shaped our culture in a particular way, which is why the Afrikaner people at least are much more conservative, much more religious than many of our friends in Europe.

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[Jordan Peterson]

Should outline a little bit probably too the conflict between the Dutch, the Boers and the English.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes, I want to get to that now.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so, so we've got, we've got the setup now. So really what happened in South Africa was that there was a relatively small population of pre agricultural tribesmen, the Bushmen, who are very ethnically distinct from this, let's call them Central Africans for the time being. And that in around 1600, 1650, let's say to 1750 there was an influx of Bantu speaking people who were larger from the north and there was an influx of Europeans before, I think they.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Came in before the Europeans came, but they were coming in from the north and okay, in the same century, you could say.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, in the same century. Anyways, and so the, the Bushmen were starting to feel pressure from an invasion, so to speak, from the north and also an influx from the south.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so that's a more accurate. And, and none of this was agricultural to begin with.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes, Right, so.

[Jordan Peterson]

So the. Now were the Bantu also interested in agricultural settlement?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes, they were more, less nomadic than the Bushmen. The Bushmen were more nomadic, they moved around much more. And the Bantu groups were also in a sense nomadic, but they settled in like the Zulus built the Zulu Kingdom in KwaZulu Natal in the eastern part of the country. And they had more degrees of settlement. Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

So we're also seeing an anthropological struggle in the broader sense between the archaic mode of human existence, which was nomadic hunter gatherer, and the developing agricultural and settled communities. Some of them were black in Africa and some of them were white. And so now we've got at least a three way conflict going on, not counting the conflicts, but between inside the groups.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. Okay. And so by mid-1700s, what's the status of the white settlements in, in South Africa?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So the, it developed, it grew and the borders shifted out toward the, especially toward the east. Then the reason why I mentioned the the Enlightenment is after the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars took place, specified the time frame. 1810.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yep.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

And that's when the British came to colonize the Cape, partly as a result of the wars in Europe. And so we had some battles with the British, the Battle of Blouberg, the Battle of Maizenburgen. And eventually the Cape was colonized.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So that's while the Brits are really expanding their empire. And so now they come into what's now a European settlement in South Africa. And the battle for dominion is between Europeans. Now you see the same kind of thing in a sense play out in North America. Right. Because, well, it was New Amsterdam before it was New York. And of course much of the United States was settled by Germany and a huge chunk. Well that was eventually the Louisiana Purchase was French and of course Quebec remained French. And so who the colonizers were, they were, it's not like they were a monolithic group and there was plenty of fighting between them. So what motivated the English to show up in South Africa per se in the 1800s? You said it was in the aftermath of Napoleonic wars, but it was part of the colonial expansion. No doubt. It's a trade issue as well, I presume.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

I think it's all of that. It was part of the British expanding the British Empire. The strategic importance of the southern point of the African continent, especially trade. That was before the.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, the richness of the land was gold discovered by.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Not yet.

[Jordan Peterson]

Not yet. Okay.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah. And so they settled, which led to the great event in our history that many people say is the event that. During which we became a people, which was the great trek. So some of the Afrikaner people or the Dutch speaking peoples in the Cape at the time felt that they cannot be governed by another nation. They were very, very aggrieved by the idea that someone came in from another continent and took over. Yeah, yeah. And they wanted to be free. And so they eventually opted to move into the interior of South Africa, which was a very dangerous thing to do because people didn't know what they would find in the interior. They sent in some. What they call the commission track. They sent in some scouts. And actually the scouts came back and said that they found some people in certain areas, but largely speaking, there were vast open tracks of land. Because what's also important, and this is again, why the history of land ownership is so complex, that was shortly after the Mifikane genocide, which was a genocide. Some figures estimate that about a million people were killed as a result of Zulu expansionism and a conflict between the Zulu king and Mufekane or Msilikati. Who was the. I think he was a soldier in the Zulu Kingdom. And he eventually had the Matabeles or the Ndebele people. And it was expansionist wars, and it spread out throughout the southern part of Africa and there was mass extermination campaigns. So the scouts came back and they said in some places they found peoples living. In some places there was just no one. And in some places they just found bones, skeletons.

[Jordan Peterson]

So there was evidence that there was good reason and possibility to get the hell away from the English and move the British and to move farther north and into the central parts of South Africa.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

What sort of size geographical area are we talking about?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

South Africa is about twice the size of Texas. So it's a pretty big country compared to the U.S. it's small. You could say it's the size of Western Europe if you take away Spain. So it's a pretty big country.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, Right.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

So there was plenty of northward geographical area to move towards.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

And how many Boers, what year was the trek?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

The 1830s.

[Jordan Peterson]

1830S. And how many Boers participated in the trek?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

I think about 2000, if I recall.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, okay.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So it's a fairly small group initially.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Right. And now. And they used wagons and moved wagons.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes, ox wagons.

[Jordan Peterson]

So it's kind of like the settlement of the American west in that way.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Very, very similar. The Africana story is remarkably similar to the American story. It's, it's also. We had our wars with the British. We had. It's remarkably similar our interactions with local communities, The. The track towards the interior. It's.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

It's a fascinating story just how comparable it is also, culturally speaking.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So there was plenty of vacant land in the Western U.S. when the pioneers went westward. There was occupied land as well. There's still plenty of vacant land in the Western U.S. like, plenty. Although a lot of it's desert. And so I suspect that, although I don't know this for sure, but I expect that there was more habitation in North America than there was in South Africa at that time. I guess I really don't know because I don't know how extensive the Bantu settlements might have been. But you said that was also complicated by the fact that there was a genocide and that many, many people were wiped out. Of course, the situation in North America was complicated by the fact of the mass deaths that were a consequence of the illnesses that spread across North America. Like a plague, actually, like three plagues. And so, well, all that to just say how complicated these things are. Okay, so these 2,000 people spread north, and then what was the consequence of that?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So they. Again, going back to the issue of conflict versus cooperation, there were many examples of cooperation and treaties, dozens of treaties that were signed with local tribes cooperating. But there was also conflict. And one of the most significant or the most well known battle was the Battle of Blood river, which was when the Voortrackers, as they were known, which essentially means pioneer. Also another similarity, it means those who go out ahead, they were known as the f. Trackers. And so they had conflict with the Ndebele people of Mi. This soldier from the Zulu, who was part of this, you know, so he.

[Jordan Peterson]

Was a rebel in the Bantu.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah, yeah. He had conflict with the Zulu king. And then they also had conflict with the Zulus. And one of. One of the battles, I should just mention this in, in passing, was the battle of Fakop, where the. The fur trackers were attacked by the Ndebele of Msilikatsi. But it was an ambush. They didn't expect it. And so it was men and women and children who had to defend themselves. And it's an important part of our story because the women were there in the field next to the men with their, as they called it, these front loading rifles, the very sort of primitive guns that they had at the time. And they had to defend themselves as they were attacked.

[Jordan Peterson]

And from what I understand too, the victory of the Europeans over the Zulus, the Bantus, let's say, was by no means foregone conclusion that they were very formidable fighters. And there was a difference in weaponry, as you just pointed out, but it wasn't like the Boers had machine guns.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah, it took quite some time to reload the gun. It took quite some time. So sometimes you had to get people to help you to reload the gun. And also they had. They were. They had sheer numbers against him.

[Jordan Peterson]

So.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So I mentioned this story, but if. Maybe I should tell this to you as well, the story about the. The. The vow that was made in 1838. I mentioned this when I spoke with Tucker Carlson as well. So. So the Voortrackers, they had a democratic election internally, and they elected this leader, Peter Tief was his name. He became sort of the leader of this track, and he went to negotiate with the Zulu king, King Dingaan, who was the younger brother of Shaka King Shaka. He actually killed his brother, and then he became the king. And they negotiated for a piece of land, and the treaty was, broadly speaking, that they would get a piece of land between the Tugela and the Umzambubu rivers, and for which they had to get cattle back that was stolen from the Zulus by another tribe. And so they brought the cattle back. This Retief was warned against this. Some of the people said to him, listen, this is very dangerous and be careful. And he said, no, we have to do this. We need to get land and we need to buy land. So they went to the Zulu king, they gave the cattle back. They signed a treaty. The king made a cross on a piece of paper on the contract. And he then said. The king said, we need to celebrate this. And so he said, come to my camp tonight and we'll have a celebration, but leave your weapons outside. And so during the celebration, the Zuluking at one moment chanted, bulalani abatakati, which means kill the wizards. And so they took the entire group to a nearby hill and they slaughtered them. And this Retief, who was the leader, they had him stand and watch how his men were slaughtered, including his son who was with him, and they killed him last. So then they went out to attack the Laagers, the camps where the Voortrakkers were, especially women and children. I Believe the number is 185 women and children who were killed during these attacks, surprise attacks at night. The Voortrakker people then said, or the Afrikaners said, we need to retaliate. We need to attack back. And so they had a commander of about three to 400 people to go and attack the Zulus. At one moment, they found that they were completely surrounded by about 12,000 Zulus. Some people, some estimates say 20,000, but I think 12,000 is the number that's most commonly used. Like all around them on the hills.

[Jordan Peterson]

How many of them?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

They were about 300 against 12,000, surrounded by 12,000. And so they thought, well, we're gonna die. This is it.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's kind of what you think.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

All right. And then a man, I'm very proud to descend from him, a man named Sarul Salih. He was the religious leader, and he said, we need to make a vow to God. And so they got together and they wrote a vow. And the vow said that they. They make a vow to God that if he protects them in the battle that lies ahead, that they would commemorate this day as a Sabbath, even after, regardless of what day of the week it is, that we would tell our children to commemorate this day as well, and that we will build a church where he wants us to build a church, and that the honour of the victory will go to him and not to us. And so that battle took place on the 16th of December, 1838. And the consequence of the battle was that not one of the voortrackers were killed. 3,000 Zulus were killed in the battle. So it was a spectacular event. And some people say that's the origin story of our people. That's when we became a people. And that's partly. This is so important to us, firstly because we still celebrate 16th of December. We commemorate that as a Sabbath. We go to Church on 16 December. We have cultural festivals and so forth, not because of the battle against the Zulus, but because we were protected by God. But it says a lot about why we are so conservative, why we love the land so much and the country and why we are so religious still. So after that, they went further north and they settled and they established Pretoria, which is the capital of South Africa today. And many of the northern towns and cities eventually became developed.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, now, since then, let's skip ahead a little bit. Since then, the Bantu people have multiplied and the Europeans have multiplied. I. I don't know to what. I don't know the population ratios or the Absolute numbers. So maybe you could fill me in on that. And I'm curious about where the bulk of the population growth has come from. Like how much more European influx from Europe directly has there been to South Africa? How much of it is multiplication of the Afrikaner stock? And I'm curious about the same thing with regards to the central Africans who came down and also invaded the Bushmen territory.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Well, it's certainly both. So the population in South Africa grew quite rapidly in the centuries that followed among the white communities and also the black communities up to the point where now There are about 60 million people in South Africa.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, and what's the racial mix?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

It's about the white section, which are the, what you could say the white Anglos, the English speaking and also the Afrikaner people are just below 5 million. The Afrikaners are about 2.7 million. And the African or the black African population has grown rapidly. Interestingly enough, this is worth mentioning. It's often said that the apartheid system was a genocide. There's a lot to criticize and we should talk about that, about just how bad it was and what went wrong. But genocide is not the right term because the black population in South Africa doubled in, I think it was in the first two decades of the apartheid system, and then it doubled again after that. So there was a massive population growth among black South Africans, especially in the last century.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. And so now you said 60 million people in South Africa as a whole, and 5 million are of European descent and 2.7 million of them are Afrikaner and the rest. And what about like Indians and Asians and so on?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So they would be slightly less. We can look up the exact numbers. They are slightly fewer. There's also what we call a colored community. I think in some countries they say mixed race. Quite significant, Quite big as well, bigger than the Afrikaner community. They generally speak Afrikaans, the same language as us, but they have their own culture that they've developed over time. They also live mostly more in the southern parts of South Africa. So just from a racial perspective, South Africa is very diverse. But as you mentioned initially, races are not homogenous. So if you consider the fact that within the different racial groups there are different cultures and communities, the diversity, the complexity of South African society is really something that people should take note of. And it's easy to simplify that by simply saying, oh, there are white people and black people and the whites and blacks are in conflict. It's easy. That's. That's so oversimplified. That it's a false narrative.

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[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Right. Well, in a false narrative that can be usefully repurposed. Okay, so now my suspicions are, and we'll get back to this as we proceed in our discussion, that the history that you briefly outlined, which puts things in context quite nicely, would be criticized by leftist and radical historians. Okay, so what would be the counter story for. Because like I, the way that like, I didn't. I don't know a lot about South Africa, but what I do know is in accordance with what you just described, I knew that the land was basically sparsely occupied before the Europeans came and that most of the people who lived there now, who aren't European, came from Central Africa and weren't there originally. And so it's a, it's actually a story of, well, sparsely inhabited hunter gatherer society with. That was mobile.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yep.

[Jordan Peterson]

Being pressured from the south and from the north by two competing, you could say two competing diverse racial groups. And, and that produced a population explosion over the last 300 years. The transformation of a hunter gatherer society into an agricultural industrial society that looks. And that's roughly the story that you told now. But that isn't the story that the typical Westerner who isn't South African, if you guys are Westerners, which I guess.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes, you know, whatever that.

[Jordan Peterson]

What? Yes. And so that's not the story that is on everyone's like at the tip of everyone's tongue and everyone being people who are absolutely 100% ignorant about South African history like they are about their own history. And so, but if. If we were giving the devil his due, what's the strongest European colonial narrative? I mean, I guess that would probably more involve even the English or the British.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So, unfortunately, that narrative is so oversimplified that it's almost farcical. So the one claim would be that Europe is the continent for white people and Africa is the continent for black people. So it doesn't matter that the groups who live in South Africa came from the north of Africa. They still came from Africa.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's kind of hard on the North Africans.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes. And so my answer to that is that implies that if you apply that same argument to Europe, then you should say black people in Europe are not welcome. They should go back to Africa. Because the narrative in South Africa is whites must go back to Europe because this is black people's continent.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, it also begs the question of which black people. Like, is it the San, the Bushmen, or the Bantu, let's say. And it's not like that's the only kind of black people that are in Africa.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

And so the political slogan is that when the Dutch came, they didn't bring any land on their ships. So that's sort of the joke that, oh, you came and you colonized. And the narrative is that they wouldn't say that South Africa was densely populated because they know it wasn't, but they would say that all of it belonged to the black groups who were living in South Africa. And so the arrival of the Europeans was essentially.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's a particularly tricky argument when you're talking about people like the Bushmen, because my suspicions are, from what I understand about them anthropologically, first of all, they conceptualize themselves as belonging to the land rather than the reverse, which is a much more typical attitude of hunter gatherers, because they're nomadic, they don't own land. There's no ownership notion. And so not. I mean, what. What. What did the Bushmen owned there? They definitely owned their bows and arrows and the things they could carry with them, which were very lightweight. And. And I don't believe they had domesticated animals. I don't believe.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Not originally. Later, they had.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah. But that was the same in. In the Americas, like the Indians. The Indians. I'm going to use that phrase because it's not politically correct. Let's say they didn't have horses till the Spaniards showed up.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jordan Peterson]

So there were. Now, there were some domesticated animals in South America. Llamas, for example. And it's not that easy to domesticate animals, as it turns out. So I don't know what the Bushmen would have owned. Like, I'm not even sure. Especially ownership of land. I think that's a conception that you develop once you become you like you have herds and you have agriculture before that and a permanent settlement. Like how do you own land when you don't have a permanent settlement? That's not your relationship to the land. Yeah.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So the argument is if something like if you have walked over a mountain once, then that mountain belongs to your tribe. Something along those lines which is playing.

[Jordan Peterson]

Out in Australia for example, right now in a major way.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, and in Canada for that matter.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

But this is a classic example of what Huntington would call the clash of civilizations. It's just different perspectives on, for example, the issue of property rights, the notion of what does ownership mean. Different cultures, different communities, but also different civilizations have different perspectives on that. And now we're sort of in this place now where the Western perspective has become the dominant perspective.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. And so it looks self evident.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes, yes, exactly. But yeah, that was the fact of the matter is there were lots large tracts of land that that wasn't inhabited.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, and there's, there's also a really complicated question here too, which is the. There was a very small population in South Africa in consequence of the Bushmen's lifestyle.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

So then you ask yourself, well, is there any net good. Absolutely. Speaking in generating a technological revolution that radically increases the carrying power of the land. Right. Because that's the question about agriculture, that's the question about domesticated animals, is certainly the question about industrial civilization. Right.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

And I guess the answer would be something like you'd hope that if there were hunter gatherers and then agricultural people came along or industrial people came along, that in optimal circumstances there would be a series of treaties and the treaties would hold and everybody could have their cake and eat it too. There's going to be conflict because there's always conflict between, well, herders. There's certainly conflict between hunter gatherers, agriculturalists, herders and industrialists. Right. So those conflicts are going to emerge. You could imagine a series of treaties that would mediate that. I mean, complicated to establish and to maintain, especially given the unbelievably vast cultural differences. But I guess that's what you'd hope for, for a non warlike solution. And some of that did happen in North America and in Africa.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

But, but I want to add, still happening. I'd like to add one thing is, is weapons technology or warfare technology? So, so Neil Ferguson talks about the killer Application. That's. That's one thing that has a massive consequence. So many of these, like stirrups. Yeah, well, like the tribes that came in from the north had spears, and the Bushmen weren't able to defend themselves against spears. Then the Zulu people, King Shaka, developed or had a different approach to using a spear as a weapon. He made the stick or the staff end much shorter so that you don't throw away your spear. Because he became concerned that you go to war and you throw away your weapon, and then what do you do? And so he said, we shouldn't throw away our weapons. We should have big shields so that when they throw spears at us, we should be able to defend ourselves. And then our spear is something that we can use to stab, and then we still have it. And just that one thing had a massive consequence in terms of Zulu dominance in South Africa.

[Jordan Peterson]

Just that one thing like the stirrups that allowed mounted, armored Europeans to become knights. Right.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

And then to go to.

[Jordan Peterson]

And to go to South America and wreak absolute havoc because they were basically the equivalent of tanks.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes. Right. Isn't it the Space Odyssey story with, I think there's reference to the ancient primates and the one. One group is able to pick up a stick, a bone, and the fact that one group is able to do that and the other isn't just means.

[Jordan Peterson]

That was a big deal.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

The other group gets obliterated throwing. Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So these things, from our perspective as industrialized people, these look like trivial technological transformations. But, you know, what's trivial is not obvious.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So, you know, I read, for example, that when the Europeans went especially into the Pacific, especially the Pacific islands, but this happened to many, certainly Stone Age people, that they came across that they were prone to distribute steel axes like they were nothing. Well, these are people who, if you were the big man in the kingdom, you had a really nice stone ax, and those bloody Europeans came along and were giving away steel axes like they were nothing. Was a little on the demoralizing side.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

You might say it's the equivalent of the atomic bomb. It's a game changer.

[Jordan Peterson]

Exactly.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. So, okay.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Absolutely.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, okay. So you said that the. The antithetical history would be, well, the black people owned the land. And so blacks are generally homogeneous, the same people. And they had a concept of ownership. And ownership applied, despite the fact that these were widely dispersed nomadic tribesmen. Ownership applied to all the land. Like over what district? I mean, that's something that's sort of ambivalent. You Said when the scouts went north, they found huge tracts of land that were unoccupied. I mean, even in European, say British, English, British common law. Now if you leave a tract of land uninhabited, if there is a tract of land that's uninhabited and someone comes along and improves it and builds a domicile, at some point they obtain rights over it. Because there's a deep principle that if you're not using the land, it doesn't belong to you.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Certainly not intrinsically. And even under a contract like, because you can end up with and you know, squatters, rights can obviously be taken too far. But we should note that there is a principle that if you're not using it, you don't own it. Right.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

It's the Dutch legal principle of res nullius is a piece of land or property that doesn't belong to anyone because there's no one there.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

And so if so that's something, if you. If so, a res nullius is something that you can occupy. But that's not the narrative. That's not, that's not the mainstream narrative. I think there are very few historians who actually push this mainstream narrative. I think most historians who are worth their salt know that the history of land ownership in South Africa is much more complex.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well then that begs a question. And now we can. Let's turn from the historical to the more political and then we'll start talking about the current day in South Africa, because I think we laid the groundwork quite nicely. So the typical observer of South Africa pretty much buys the. The land was inhabited by the black people and then the white people came and stole it. They buy that narrative. Right? So given the complexities of the situation and the fact that as you just pointed out, most historians, worst their salt, tell a story that's somewhat approximately akin to the story you just described. Why is it that that isn't the story that's widespread in the west as such? Why do you think that is?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

That is a very good question and I think it deserves a long answer. And I might not have the full answer.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, fair enough.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Because I think it ties in with a lot of the problems that the west has in terms of this deep rooted sense of guilt that Westerners have about their own history, about their own past and this oikophobic. I think that's Roger Scruton's term of sort of hating your own and having a deep sense of remorse for your own history and feeling sorry for that. I think it's rooted in that. It's this down with us mentality that we are the bad guys and we need to feel sorry.

[Jordan Peterson]

Do you see any of that in South Africa among the Bantu?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

No, no.

[Jordan Peterson]

Like literally none. Is there any streams of black thought, let's say, in South Africa where there's guilt being manifested for what happened to the Bushmen?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

To be honest, I haven't seen that. What I can say is Prince Mangosouthelesi, who was a very well known Zulu politician, anti apartheid activist, he once apologized to the Afrikaner people for the massacre of Peter Tiff that I mentioned earlier.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so that's one example of. Yeah, of remorse for, for expansionist overreach, let's say.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes, that's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Because I'm curious about why this would be a particularly a European malaise. Right, because it seems to be particularly a European malaise. I mean, maybe that. Does that have something to do with the intrinsic peacefulness of Christianity? Maybe. I mean, we don't have to wander down that rabbit hole. But it is an interesting thing to speculate about. Like why has this become this self hating, become a Western obsession?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

I think it's oversimplified, but I think Enlightenment philosophy has played some role.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, is that part of the reason that you noted earlier that the Enlightenment skipped.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, develop that a little bit then.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So why I say Enlightenment philosophy played a role, I mean, there are many examples. We mentioned Jean Jacques, so Voltaire, for example, if you read his works, he places a lot of emphasis on, as many modern philosophers do, sort of detachment from the community. We have to cultivate your garden, which is a good thing. But the Voltairean view of cultivating your garden is, you know, don't look at what's happening in the world out there, just focus on your garden at your home. Something like that. But Voltaire also writes a lot about how other, you could say, civilizations are actually better in the West. He writes a lot about the east, about.

[Jordan Peterson]

So, okay, so that's interesting. You know, that could be actually an indication of something that I think was part of the reason for the destruction of Rome. You know, and Nietzsche wrote about this a fair bit. So. Well, so imagine you have a relatively homogenous local community, let's call it Christendom. Okay. Well, there's a lot of fractionation inside Christendom and a lot of factions fighting. But roughly speaking, there's an overarching ethos which is Christian in its essence and even the warring parties agree on many things. Okay. But now you expand and you expand and you encounter. Well, the Chinese. Let's say, and you encounter the Indians, the actual India Indians, these sophisticated alternative societies, the Buddhists, the Muslims, who have cultural traditions as sophisticated and rich as your own. Well, so Nietzsche's take on that was twofold. He said, well, first of all, you think you're right to begin with, but part of the reason you think you're right is because you don't know any other ideas. It's like 14th century Christians didn't believe Christian things. They weren't like Enlightenment rationalists who adopted Christian superstition. I mean, they looked at the universe through a Christian lens. There wasn't another viewpoint apart from a couple of secular people and some heretics. It was like the world was Christian.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

That's your frame of reference.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's everything about it. That's that, you know, you're you. You see. Yeah, there's no contrary philosophy. Okay, now you expand. Well, and you're also doing this with regards to the Enlightenment discoveries in scientific. And now there's like eight competing viewpoints, each of which has the same depth. Let's.

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[Jordan Peterson]

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[Jordan Peterson]

And so at some point, you have a terrible case of indigestion. And then. And then Nietzsche says something even more subtle than that. He Says, well, you know, first of all, there's a monolithic worldview. And so you're pretty secure about that because that's just the way things are. Then you encounter these competing belief systems, and they're pretty compelling and competing ethical systems as well. And then it starts to become a question when it never was, who's right? Well, good luck sorting that out. That's what wars are for. Right. It's really hard to sort that out. But then Nietzsche says something even more interesting. He said, well, you have belief system one, then you encounter belief system two, and you see there's a conflict and it isn't obvious who's right. Then you add belief system three in there and you think, oh, oh. It's not just that there's a conflict in belief systems, it's that the idea that there's an absolute truth itself, or even truth itself, now becomes questionable. That's when moral relativism makes its ugly appearance in nihilism. And so not only do you lose faith in your initial unquestioned presuppositions, but you lose faith in the idea of certainty itself, and then you have no strength. I mean, I think part of the reason the Romans couldn't withstand the. The barbarians, let's say, is because they died of indigestion. Like there was no unity of purpose anymore because they had bitten off more than they can chew. And you could certainly. I think part of the reason the UK is in the dreadful situation that it's in now is exactly because of that. It's like when you go to India and you're a little island and there's hardly any of you, and you go invade India, it's a real toss up who's invaded who. Like, you might have the upper hand for 50 years, but when you're outnumbered by a factor of, what is it, 100 at least, who's going to win that? Contact is by no means obvious.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes. So maybe a different way of putting this, as opposed to reference, talking about Enlightenment philosophy, is to say the west has had to make this. The west went through some form of a recognition that the Western frame of reference is not the frame of reference, but a frame of reference. And I think a lot of people in the west, we're not quite sure how to deal with that.

[Jordan Peterson]

We still aren't.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah. Which leads to a lot of conflict. And one way of dealing with doubt. Yeah. And one way of dealing with that is to say that our way is right and everyone else's way is wrong and we need to enforce our view on the rest of the world, then.

[Jordan Peterson]

You get a kind of ethno fascism that can develop out of that.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes. And that doesn't work.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, that's got its problems, let's say.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

And another way of dealing it that is equally bad is to say, well, we need to dissolve. We have an identity crisis as a result of this. And so maybe those guys are better than we are. And I think the appropriate solution lies in the middle. The golden mean is to say that we have a particular frame of reference, and we see that in South Africa all the time. But there's a Western frame of reference. But people who aren't Westerners don't have that frame of reference. And one practical example in South Africa is property rights. So we believe in individual ownership of.

[Jordan Peterson]

Property because we also believe in individuals.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

But the Zulu culture is much more one that emphasizes monarchy and communal ownership of land. So the king owns the land. And I don't think the correct way to deal with that is for me to go to the Zulu people and say, you guys are wrong. You need to change your culture. You need to adopt our way of thinking. And it's not that. It's not that easy to navigate. And I think that's why South Africa is such an important case study for the world, because we have these communities living on this piece of land. And how do we deal with that? Because people think about things like history, as we mentioned, differently. They think about things like property rights differently. They think about ownership and so forth in different ways. And the appropriate way to deal with that is not to try to enforce your way of thinking onto the other, but to try to find a way where there's mutual recognition and respect between different perspectives.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, but even that presumes that there's something like boundaries. Right. Like, so that you can each have your space, so to speak. And so there's a metaphysic under that even, which is. Well, there can be treaties. And the treaties are made between sovereign. What individuals, or at least sovereign peoples like. And even that can be as. As pointed out, say, in the massacre, there was a treaty there. Well, you know.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah. Which to us was very important. But in their culture, it's not that. Not that big.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

And signed document is almost.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, the fact that there's eternal war between different tribes is an indication of the complexities of negotiating such things.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. But it is the case as well that there's two streams in human history. And one stream is kill the foreigner, and the other stream is. No, we've got our differences, but they have something to offer and we have something to offer. And if we can get the trade arrangements right, we could both be better off. Right. And, you know, well, that's the battle. It's like, can you get the trade arrangements right? That's really hard. And if you don't, well, then it's capitulation or mayhem. Right. So we're trying to figure out how to get the trade arrangements right. And you guys are right on the cutting edge of that.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, now this book of yours, Kill the Boar. Let's flip to the modern times. Now, you know, I can remember in the 1980s going to McGill, and at that time, apartheid was a major issue. And we should let everybody listening and watching know what the apartheid state was. Exactly. So we get that clear. But there is immense pressure, especially from the more radical end of the political belief spectrum, to divest any investment in South Africa to put pressure on the government to dispense with apartheid. And I watched that and I thought, well, apartheid's pretty brutal regime and it has its marked catastrophic disadvantages. But you bloody radicals, you're messing with things you don't understand and you're virtue signaling like mad, and you're not going to have to bear the consequences of your idiot interference. Because I figured, and I still do, that the most likely outcome for South Africa is that because of the vast disparities in population size and distribution of wealth, is that the white South Africans are going to find themselves in serious trouble. Now, that already happened in Zimbabwe.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

That already happened in Rhodesia. And we haven't talked about the relationship between those states and South Africa at all yet, but we might. But, like, the most likely pathway forward is the one that requires the least intelligence and effort, right? Because there's way more ways for things to deteriorate than for them to improve. Like, there's like, one way for them to improve at a million ways for them to go wrong. And the wealth disparity in South Africa is a major, major problem, like a massive problem. And that has to do with land ownership as well. And so. And so it seems to me that there's great danger, at least in that as an outcome. And now I've watched, especially in the last few years, because let's say for the 35 years since the 1980s, I don't remember exactly when the apartheid state disintegrated. When was that?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

1990 was when it ended.

[Jordan Peterson]

94 was basically 35 years away from that. And so things maintained a somewhat stable equilibrium until Five years ago. Is that about right?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Let me just say something about the dismantling of the apartheid system by the end of the system. Initially, it started out as an attempt to deal with these complex dynamics that we've been discussing. And the broad idea was, let's give everyone homelands. We have a strong central government to keep everyone in check, and then the different nations have their own homelands. And, you know, that sounds great, but in practice, it's not that it's not quite that applicable, especially when you still have a strong central government that sort of manages everything. But by. By the 80s, the Afrikaner people knew this. This is not working. You know, we. We need to change. We need. And. And what's.

[Jordan Peterson]

What was the relationship between the apartheid state per se and this notion of separate homelands? Exactly. So there were nations or states set up like a federation, essentially, and they were racially or ethnically or both. Like, how are the states configured culturally?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So the argument was that South Africa should be thought of as Europe, which I don't think is a bad argument, because the point is it's a big piece of land that's very diverse. And how do we deal with that? And the solution to Europe is not have one big European government.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, we've seen where that goes.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Exactly. So the solution must be some form of decentralization. But the way to do that, they thought, was to have one big centralized government that sort of manages the decentralization. And then, of course, there were all these laws that were implemented. And it was also during the time of the Cold War. So they had the Suppression of Communism act, which said that if you promote communism, it's a crime and you're going to be prosecuted.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Well, this whole suppressing communism thing is a very complex rabbit hole as well.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Exactly.

[Jordan Peterson]

The communists turn out to be quite a lot of trouble, especially in places where there's a lot of wealth disparity.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah. The concerns about the threat of communism wasn't exaggerated. That's certainly.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's hard to exaggerate the threat of communism.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. Especially in parallel with wealth disparity. Because it's a revolutionary ethos. Exactly. And one that results in nothing but bloody, brutal, murder and mayhem, starvation. Like, as a solution to the problem of disparity of wealth. It's not a good one.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah. So the point I want to make is, by the end of the apartheid era, the metaphor that was used was like riding on the back of a tiger and having to get off, you know, you have to get off this tiger. But the question is, how do you get off without getting eaten? That was the question that at least the Afrikaner people were grappling with. How do we end this in a way that is peaceful and in a way that would not.

[Jordan Peterson]

And sustainable?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes, yes. And it was. The transition, I would say, was at least peaceful fairly, I think.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, not bad.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

The violence in townships I think is underestimated, but especially black on black violence in South Africa.

[Jordan Peterson]

Tell people who at the townships were and are.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So, so that's the, the. It's urbanized areas that are very poor in South Africa where the majority of black people live. And at the time, there was some very, very vicious rival warfare, you could say, between competing political groups who were competing for support of black people, as if that's one whole. And the ANC who's currently governing was. Was not the biggest initially, but they became the biggest because they were supported by the Soviet Union and the Chinese and they got weapons and so forth.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, in terms of getting off a tiger, things went not too bad like it could have been. It could. As apartheid fell apart, it could have been like the fall of the Soviet Union. It could have been a lot worse. It's quite the miracle that it wasn't just absolute bloody mayhem immediately. And you know, there were a lot of remarkable people who took leadership at that point to make sure that it did go well.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Nelson Mandela, miraculously. Well, all things considered, Nelson Mandela probably being the prime example of someone who continually called for peaceful solutions. And he was criticized by that within his own part for that, within his own party. But, but I think to use you mentioned, safe but also sustainable. So the solution we got was a safe one, but not sustainable.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, well, walk through that. Tell, tell, tell everybody what, what has unfolded and what the current situation is.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Well, there's so much that has unfolded, but one way to think of it is that in terms of the way I put it is we have two problems. The one is the ship is headed in the wrong direction. And what I mean by that is those in power openly say they want to implement socialist solutions, they want to take property rights. They think the way to help to uplift the poor is to attack the rich, because that has happened there many times.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, well, and we should. Let's rephrase that a bit. There's different between. There's a difference between rich and productive. Right?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Productive people have something for themselves, but they produce a lot for other people. And from what I understand about. Well, I think this Is true. In Zimbabwe, Rhodesia and South Africa. It's like, well, the South African farmers, they feed the country.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So if you do what was done in Zimbabwe and you confiscate the land because the rich people own it, the oppressors, you confiscate the land. Well, then what happens? Well, everyone starves to death. That doesn't. Then everyone's equal because they're all six feet underground.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Exactly.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. So. So like the, the problem, part of the problem we have in the west is that language has been capped, captured so completely by the left that it's almost impossible to have a discussion like this without using their terms. Like most pro free market people in the west talk about capitalism. Yeah, that's a really bad idea. It's like, it's not capitalism. It's free market.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

It's not capitalism ideology.

[Jordan Peterson]

The poor. Exactly. In South Africa, as if the rich only have what they have because they took it from the poor. It's like, no, the South African farmers, most of whom are white, actually know how to farm.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

They're some of the best farmers in the world. So one way they did this, which.

[Jordan Peterson]

Is they were Dutch, a lot of them. And look at what the Dutch do in Europe.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

I think the Dutch are probably the best. I think productively the best farmers.

[Jordan Peterson]

They are. That's. That, that's their status in. That's their status in, in the European West. Right. So go Dutch farmers.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes. So what?

[Jordan Peterson]

Rich because they make stuff.

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[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So one thing they did which is very smart and very strategic is the anc. When they took power, they said the single biggest problem in South Africa is a triangle. It's a triangle of unemployment, poverty and inequality. And so they lump those three things together. And so the solution is to find, or the quest is to find a solution for these three things, which is essentially the same thing. But unfortunately, they don't seem to know how to encourage production. They don't know how to fix the unemployment problem because they think the solution is socialism. And so the way, ironically, they've gotten to a point where they can only think about inequality. And so they get. Margaret Thatcher had that famous line saying you would rather have the poor be poorer provided that the rich is less rich.

[Jordan Peterson]

And it's that there's actually an anthropological theory about human beings that's relevant to that. So, you know, we evolved in our genetically modern form 350,000 years ago. Okay, so one question is, well, what the hell were we doing for the 330,000 years, like before the Ice age, say? And the answer is, well, we were engaging in non stop inter tribal warfare. And then within our own tribes, every time anybody got something that everyone else didn't have, immediately we just killed them.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah, right. We had to figure out how to.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, we had to figure out how to let some people have more than other people some of the time. Because the alternative solution is like, imagine a new product comes along like a flat screen TV. Well, the first people to get the flat screen TV are the billionaires. But if you wait five years, then everybody gets a flat screen TV or an iPhone. You have to wait. And so if the socialist idea is something like, well, if a new innovation comes along that makes people wealthy, it can't be implemented until every single person can have exactly the same amount all at once. Well, so it looks to me like the cost of innovation is inequality because things have to start somewhere. Now, you know in the west that if you're rich, what does it mean if you're really rich compared to just like middle class? It means your, your house has exactly the same amenities but three times the square footage. It's like. Or your car is more luxurious while you're stuck in the same traffic. Right. The incremental difference is truly, it's trivial between middle class and ultra wealthy, you know, and I mean people might say, well, you know, that's easy for you to say because you're rich. It's like if you're middle class, you're rich. And if you're too stupid to realize that you know nothing about the world. And so in, in South Africa, but you, we know one of the things that promotes violence like this is absolutely crystal clear from the anthropological, sociological and psychological literature. Extreme inequality breeds male violence like mad because low status poor men have nothing to lose by engaging in mayhem. Right? You see this in gang warfare. You see it. You know, so for example, if you look in the, in North America, this is true across the world. Places where everyone's poor, there isn't much violence and places where everyone's rich, there isn't much violence. But places where some people are poor and some people are rich, look the hell out. And South Africa's got that in spades. And so the easiest solution for a politician, especially unscrupulous one, is to say, well, you see those people over there in that house? They took it from you.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yep, exactly.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's what the bloody Bolsheviks said to the peasants. And that worked very effectively. It's like soon there were no people who were rich, Right? None. And then everyone was dead.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So, okay, so you guys have this problem in spades. And the, the communist influence, it's stronger now than it was 40 years ago.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

It. Yes, but also not. So that's, that's the irony. So that goes to the point about the ship I mentioned. The ship's headed in the wrong direction, but even though the ship is heading in the wrong direction, the ship is sinking. And what I mean by that is.

[Jordan Peterson]

That'S a bad combination.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes. So the fact that the ship is sinking has become a bigger problem than the fact that it's headed in the wrong direction. And when I say the ship is sinking, I mean that we just have massive state failure in South Africa. So they want to implement all these very radical policy ideas, and they have become more radical because they talk about a two phase revolution. Phase one is getting control of the levers of power through democracy. And phase two is once you have power, you need to use the levers of power to implement your socialist ideas, which is where they are now. So we have this plethora of new, very radical leftist policy ideas in South Africa. But on the one hand, they're not really able to implement this because firstly of large scale corruption, but just sheer incompetence within the South African government. So every sphere, everything that the government is supposed to be doing in South Africa, with the exception of tax collection, is, is, is collapsing.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, tell, tell us what that looks like. Like, can we start with the stability of the power grid? Like what, what do you, what's the difference between South Africa now as a modern industrialized state? In South Africa, say 10 years ago.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

What are you seeing? Fraying? What does it look like in the streets?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

And so, so we can literally take any example, but let's take power as an example. We started having rolling blackouts maybe a decade ago. And it was first you would have an hour without electricity because they're not able to provide electricity for everyone because they didn't build power stations.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, providing electricity for everyone turns out to be very difficult. Yes, you better stay on top of it.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So you have to build stations, but you also have to Maintain them.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Right.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

And neither of these two are happening. So we're about at. I think the last time I saw about at half of the capacity, we would have been if the power stations were maintained with a massive population increase. Yes, exactly. And so. Yeah, so that's one part of the problem. But then. So where we are now, initially, it's the metaphor. Let me say this because I think this is relevant. So Cyril Ramaphosa, who's the president of South Africa now, was the chief negotiator for the ancient. During the negotiations for the African National Congress. That's it. Yes, the ruling party. And so one member of parliament, who was an opposition member of parliament, wrote in his memoirs that he was part of the negotiations. And he asked, during this negotiations, he asked Ramaphosa, who's, as I said, the president at the moment, what's your plan for dealing with the whites? To which he said, well, that's easy. You deal with them like boiling a frog alive. You know that metaphor, putting the frog in the water and just lifting.

[Jordan Peterson]

Hear that metaphor a lot nowadays? In many places, yes.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Just lifting the temperature gradually, and then the frog doesn't jump out. And so the problem with that is we really see that how we. Something gets worse. We hear that we have, for example, one hour of rolling blackouts and everyone complains, and that's fine for a week or a month, and then it's two hours, and then it becomes three hours.

[Jordan Peterson]

People can adapt, like, unbelievably well, and the new normal becomes normal so fast. It's just beyond, like. I just remember during COVID it's like six months in, it was like, oh, this is how life is. And you just forget about what it was like before. Part of that's a testament to human adaptability, but it's also an indication of the fragility of our. Even our fundamental expectations. Okay, so there's a level of collapse that is slow enough so people won't rise up and. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So now we have times where there are up to 12 hours a day without electricity.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's everywhere. And what people take diesel generators? How do you deal with that?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah, yeah. We put up solar powers so people adapt to that. Those who can afford it, you. You have. Right, Solar power.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So the richer people still have power.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Exactly. Ironically, making the gap.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes, of course. Well, look, as soon as your infrastructure starts to deteriorate, the poor people, like, people die from the bottom up. Right.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Literally.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, yeah.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Water is an example. So we lose about 40, almost 50% of our water as a result of leakages, pipes not being maintained. And the funniest story was in one town, the town didn't have water. And then the municipal manager said, but remember these pipes were built by the apartheid government, so we should blame the pipes. So they're not maintaining the pipes, but the fact that they were built by the previous government means that the pipes are the problem, but not maintaining them.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's right. Well that's like failure as indication of our moral virtue. That's what the degrowth people have been doing in the west too. It's like we're not economic failures, we're aiming at degrowth and man, we're hitting the target. Yeah.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

And so we have. That's a good example where again, people who are more wealthy can make a plan, they dig holes or something.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, it's the definition of wealth.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

You're protected from entropy.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

And the people who suffer the most are poor black South Africans who live in townships who die from drinking water that is contaminated.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, yeah. When the water would be even a more crucial issue than power. Exactly right. They're integral. What else do you see?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Well, we have the transport system, for example, our railways have collapsed. The port in Durban, in the eastern port part of the country, last I read was it was number. Was it 405 rated number. 405 on a list of 405 ports. So the worst one in the world, which is a big deal because you need a well functioning port for the economy to function.

[Jordan Peterson]

So that's an example for people not to die.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Again, once again, the transport. I mentioned that the roads, the fact that the roads aren't maintained. And then we have these practical things like, like, well, policing is more than just practical, so. And once again, an example of the more wealthy people who are able to adapt to that.

[Jordan Peterson]

So we hire private security.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Exactly. So private security in South Africa is currently double the size of the police and the army combined.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh yeah. Oh, oh yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Because. Because the police are. I mean I was in an army.

[Jordan Peterson]

So that's really a reversion to something like it's quite quasi feudal society at that point.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes. And then what happens again in poorer communities is they resort to some form of mob justice because the police aren't there. There's a guy who rapes people in your community. Everyone knows who he is and the police doesn't do anything. So the people deal with him themselves. So you get vigilante justice in South Africa so that we can go down the list. The education system. One poll found that 80% or survey 80% of the schools in South Africa are dysfunctional. I believe the top, I think the number is the top 200 schools in South Africa, which are predominantly the more wealthy schools, have more distinctions for children who finish high school than the next 6,000 schools combined. So the education system and so again, everything. One economist, who's a very renowned economist in South Africa, he sort of makes a joke, but it's not just a joke. He says people ask him, where should you invest? What should you do to make money? And he says, it's easy. You should look at what is the government supposed to be doing and invest in something that is in the private sphere, that is doing that thing, whether it's electricity generation, whether it's water, whether it's private security, whether it's private education. Those are the areas that are.

[Jordan Peterson]

So. Okay, so your metaphor was not only is the ship going in the wrong direction, so that's in we're going to do more stupid things faster. But the additional complication is that all the evidence is that the whole thing is fraying at the seams and sinking Right. And that that's the most. Well, of course, the most likely trajectory always is the disintegration of a complex and sophisticated industrial society, because those bloody things are impossible to produce and very difficult to make maintain. And so now that one of the terrifying things that, you know, you brought up earlier is that, you know, wither goes South Africa, there goes the West. It's just, like, delayed. And, you know, that's. That's partly why I'm interested in South Africa. It's like, okay, let's not be thinking that couldn't happen here, because that is here for all intents and purposes, it's just on the cutting edge of here. Okay, now your book is entitled Kill the Boar. There's a reason for that. So why don't we delve into that? We've got about 20 minutes left. Something like that. On this side of the podcast, let's switch to the, like, cutting edge, let's say, of the revolutionary inclination in South Africa. Because I've really noticed, especially in the last two years, like, things have been heating up. Like, Matt, you know, I watch X a lot and I follow a lot of South Africans. And I'm starting to see, well, I'm starting to see some evidence of the worst of possible outcomes increasingly becoming likely. And so you're obviously concerned about something approximating that. So let's delve into this particular phrase and illustrate for people where that came from and what it means.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah, well, I'd love to talk about that and I would also love to hear your views on that because this is. I know you have a particular interest.

[Jordan Peterson]

In people do what they say they'll do. That's my view. You want to know what Hitler was going to do? Read Mein Kampf. You know, and you think people hide their motives. It's like, no, most people aren't sophisticated enough to have two personalities. The well developed lie and the actual plan. People more or less do what they say they're going to do. And so when they're chanting kill the boar or singing about it, that's. Even if, even if none of the individuals in that chanting mob would take the next step. The spirit that infuses the mob, the climate, it's already there. Yeah, so.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So the counter argument would be that it's just a metaphor.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, right.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

And they should respond.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, really? No, seriously, that's not the answer. Yeah, well, come on, there's metaphors. And kill the X. That's not a metaphor. Yeah, that's not, that's not a cover for some benign, for some benign revolutionary idea. No, it's like, it's, it's the, it's the call to blood of the psychopaths wielding the sort. And maybe there's some good thinkers around the edge. You think, oh, they don't really mean it, it's just a metaphor. It's like, make no mistake about it, the worst of them mean it. And it doesn't take very many people to mean things. 3% of the population, that's.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

It doesn't need to be. The majority of Wasn't.

[Jordan Peterson]

The majority of Russians weren't Bolsheviks. Yeah, tiny percentage. 3 to 5% maybe.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So, you know, don't you think you don't need that many organized psychopaths to wreak bloody blue murder, that's for sure.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So there was a cartoon about this in South Africa. It was two farm attackers. They have just murdered a farmer and they were running out of the house. And then the radio had a news report which says kill the Boer is just a metaphor. And then the one attacker turns to the other and asks, what's a metaphor? So the kill the Boer is a chant. And what happens? And again, considering that people say it's just a metaphor, you have these politicians, many of which are more to the left of the ruling party, who are already quite to the left. So they have these political rallies.

[Jordan Peterson]

The fringe of the fringe.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes. And then they make these speeches.

[Jordan Peterson]

Let's name a politician. Who's the guy who's been pushing this much?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Julius Malema is in particular. Is the guy the leader of the Economic freedom fighters?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So they fight for economic freedom.

[Jordan Peterson]

Seems like he's lots of fun. And so now, has he been pushing the metaphor camouflage?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

He would say he's celebrating the struggle against apartheid, and that's why he chants this. But then he would also conclude that. He would also say that the struggle isn't over.

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[Jordan Peterson]

The struggle is never over. Not for the Communists.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, it's over when they all die.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So he would make a speech, and the speech would be along the lines of, we need to slit the throat of whiteness. He would say things like that. He would say, that's all conceptual, you know. Yeah. And then he would make a. This is an exact quote. He would say all white people are criminals and they should be treated as such. He would say that during a speech, and then he would get an applause.

[Jordan Peterson]

Standard Bolshevik nonsense.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

And he says if you. And then they do the dehumanization thing, they call them cockroaches and all of that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. That's. That's the utilization of disgust as a. So disgust is a very, very dangerous emotion. Like, people have this misapprehension that the German Nazis were afraid of the Jews. It's not fear, it's disgust. Yep. The thing about fear, fear freezes you. And fear, if you're afraid of something, you also respect it. If it's disgust, you want to eradicate it, you burn it, you eliminate it. Right. It's a disease, like mold. There's no quarter given. So any appeal to disgust, or.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

They would say it's false. They would say white folk.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So it's the disgust.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Blood purity, all those metaphors, they're all disgust, not fear.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yep.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. And so anybody who's making an appeal to disgust, boy, you better be thinking there's murder on their mind.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yep. So they would do that. They would talk about economic inequality and the road. They would suggest that the road to your wealth is to go and attack those people over there. And then they would say things like, again, this is a direct quote. If you see a beautiful piece of land, go and take it. It's yours.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So they would make these claims, only.

[Jordan Peterson]

The thieves own it now.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes. Yeah, exactly. The people who own it are criminals.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. It's exactly what the bloody Bolsheviks did with the kulaks in the Ukraine before they starved 6 million people to death. Exactly the same place.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Well.

[Jordan Peterson]

And you can see why it's effective. You know, you talk to people and you say, well, look at how miserable your life is. It's like, yeah, it's pretty damn miserable. Look at those people over there. They have everything. Why do they have everything and you don't have anything? Well, it's because they're evil people and they took it from you. Well, it kind of looks like that.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

It's going to take a dog.

[Jordan Peterson]

Know any better? Yeah. The moral thing to do is to kill the cockroaches. Right. Well, then you think, well, where does our food come from? It's like, well, you know, we'll deal with that.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Exactly.

[Jordan Peterson]

We'll deal with that later. When the. When the. When the Edenic landscape that we're promising makes itself manifest, which, of course, never happens. Right. But you can see why it's so effective.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

And so this same guy, he would again, during a speech, and he was asked about this in court.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah. Because it became a free speech case, didn't it?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So he said, we are not calling for the slaughter of white people, at least for now. That's the line he used.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. And so in court, then, everyone's relieved by that. Yeah.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

At least for now. Happy.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So there was a court case against this song, this chant, and he was asked to explain this, and he said, I can't guarantee the future. So the lawyer asked him, if you say, I'm not calling for the slaughter of white people, at least for now, do you foresee a future where you might call for the slaughter of white people? And he said, yes, I do. I foresee that. But that would be their fault. It would be the fault of white people for not getting to the program.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, definitely.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

And so they would make these speeches, and then once the speech is finished.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, the Jews in Nazi Germany, you know, they brought it on themselves.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah, it's.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, no, that's the standard claim. Of course it is. Of course that's the claim. You know, that's the claim that. That's analogous to the climb is while they're conspiring against us, we better act before they do. You know, that's a. That's a genuine precursor to genocide. Like when that kind of rhetoric starts that that's what happened in Rwanda. It's like those people, they're preparing to attack you. You better get ready. Then you add the disgust and you add the economic inequality, and you heighten that with some ethnic tension. And, you know, and then. And you give people the excuse to go. Plus, they're they're so angry. And you can see why people who are like young and absolutely poverty stricken with no hope, they're so angry. And if they have the opportunity to turn that anger into vengeance, even for a day, especially the worst of them, it's like, oh my God.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, mayhem breaks loose and then there's nothing for anyone. Well, oh, well, that's tomorrow, you know. Yeah, yeah. Brutal, brutal.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So they would then burst into this chant and it's not even a song, it's just a chant. Kill the Boer, kill the farmer. And there are different variations there.

[Jordan Peterson]

Often they would kill the farmer there, that's a, that's a slogan aimed at death. Yeah, Kill the farmer. Okay, well, what are we going to eat?

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

That doesn't matter.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, that's what happened in Ukraine because they descended into cannibalism.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Venezuela as well.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, right, yeah, right. You know, at 1, I think this may be still true, but at one point, the not too deep distant past. So I mean, in the last decade it was illegal for doctors to list starvation as the cause of death. That's how the communists dealt with hunger. It's illegal to die of starvation. Oh, problem solved.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Problem solved.

[Jordan Peterson]

Problem solved.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's, yeah, it's bizarre. But, but you know what's really, really shameful is so I and many others have been campaigning against this for quite some time and I can honestly say I'm not aware of a single cause in South Africa for which you get more viciously attacked by people in the media, the government and so forth.

[Jordan Peterson]

In South Africa. In South Africa and in the rest.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

And largely in the rest of the. No, I mean, I'm talking about a South African cause for which you get attacked more than campaigning for the farm killings to stop and for the hate speech to stop.

[Jordan Peterson]

So explain that.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

You would be accused of fear mongering. And so we had this term Roy Gefar. The red danger was the fear about the communists. And now the accusation is swarthfar. So you are depicting black people as dangerous. When it's a minority, it is a minority who's doing these things. But you get viciously attacked.

[Jordan Peterson]

Resentful communists as dangerous like they are. Right, right.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So it's, I think there's a reason why. I think there's because some form of a hierarchy of recognition in terms of who should be recognized for the, the hardships that they face. And when it comes to recognizing hardships in South Africa.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oppression Olympics.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and, and this is an, sort of an inconvenient reality when you talk, when you go to the area of oppression. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So people don't want that part of the conversation.

[Jordan Peterson]

Jews, you know, that's a rough one because they're the, the radicals who play the Oppression Olympics game. Won't let the Jews play because they're successful. Right. So you don't get to play. You don't get to be in the Oppression Olympics, even if you have reason to be terrified out of your skulls.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Say, because it's inconvenient to us.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a counter. It. It goes against the narrative in a terrible way. The victimization narrative.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Exactly.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right. So, yes, that's definitely playing out in South Africa. There's no doubt about that. Yeah, yeah. Because the rule is, the fundamental rule of that narrative is if you're poor and dispossessed, you're moral and oppressed. And, you know, some people who are poor and dispossessed are moral and oppressed and some aren't.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yep.

[Jordan Peterson]

And look out for the ones that aren't because some of them are vicious, psychopathic, murderous criminals, and you don't need that many of them. And they're generally about 3 to 4% of the population, so heaven help you when they organize. And people are so naive about that. You see that especially on the left. It's. Well, you saw this again in the Soviet Union because the rule was, well, if you're a criminal, then you're part of the victim class, which is why the bloody Russians let the criminals run the gulag camps. You're a socially friendly element. Well, why are you a criminal? Well, it's because you were oppressed by the landowner. It's like, no, I'm a murderous thug. No such thing, just victim.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So the criminal is a victim.

[Jordan Peterson]

The criminal. And the worse the criminal, the more the evidence for the victimization. And it's partly because, like, to give the devil is due a lot of the radical progressive leftists, especially the sheltered middle class type, they're very agreeable by temperament. They're empathic, they're maternal. They have no idea. There's no space in their worldview for the sort of person you don't want to have hiding under your bed at three in the morning when you come home from a party. It's like those people don't exist, they're just victims. It's like you wait till you run across one, you'll change your tune. But if you're protected enough, you never have to Deal with that reality, you know, because you're Jean Jacques Rousseau and everybody's a noble savage. It's like, well, most people. Most people are peaceful, even if provoked. Some people aren't. Right. And you better be able to draw the distinction between those kinds of people, because otherwise you're at the mercy of the worst of them. Right. And this is a lesson that's very hard for people to learn while you guys are going to be facing this in no time flat, while you are all are already.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Can I say something about that, about sort of the road ahead? Because that's probably the most important part. So President Trump has started speaking out about what's happening in South Africa, for which we are very grateful, which has led to quite a backlash from the South African government. And their response is, it's not happening. That's the official. It doesn't exist. There are no farm murders. Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Fear mongering.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I do think one of the issues that's on the table now is refugee status for the Afrikaner, especially the farmers, to flee to the US or to get some form of protection from the US And I know some people are interested in that. But what I should also say, and that's why I'm so grateful that we spoke about the history part at first, is our concern is that if we just leave the country, our culture dissolves and our. Our. Our communal identity dissolves and we become Americans or whatever. And so.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, plus, the entire country descends into, like, lawlessness, chaos, and everyone dies.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yep.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Because if all the white South African farmers leave, that's 100% what will happen. Right.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Well, and you can look at the rest of Africa as an example, Zimbabwe and so forth. So we need to find some form of a, what I would call dispensational solution. The solution is not simply to say we need a different president or we need a different party to take over parliament because there's fundamental structural problems with the political system. It's like trying to repaint the skirtings when there's a problem with the foundation of the House. And the reason why I say that is because the country's very big. It's very diverse. It has a very strong central government. And also the country is quite poor. And poor countries tend to have more socialistic governments that are not necessarily.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's because they want to be poorer still.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah. And they're not necessarily interested in economic investments. It's just about blame shifting and scapegoating.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, definitely.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So. So, and, and I think and this is our message also to people in America is it's great if there are people who want to flee or get out to help them, that they should get help. But we must also look towards some form of a solution for the problem.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, we've got five minutes left on this side. One of the things I would. So for everybody watching and listening, most of you know that we do another half an hour behind the daily wire paywall and I think I'm going to call concentrate mostly on what South Africa, what the boars, let's say the Boers, who were concerned about this, what they would want to see from the west politically and sociologically. So I'd like to do that on this side. We're only going to be able to do about five minutes here, but you can come and join us on the daily wire side for an additional half an hour. If this is a topic of particular interest, that's what we'll talk about there. Okay, so let's, let's at least lay out the outlines of that. Like, what do you see? What can the west, the rest of the west offer under these circumstances to everyone in South Africa? Because it's a catastrophe. This is an impending catastrophe for everyone. Like it might be the white farmers that are first on the chopping block, and that's highly likely. But as soon as they're gone, everyone else dies first.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

They came for the Jews.

[Jordan Peterson]

Not good.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there could be many different solutions. And but I think what we are quite certain about is the direction that we need to head in and that could lead to different outcomes. But the direction, the way I see it is it's some form of a combination between decentralization of political power so that those in power have much less power.

[Jordan Peterson]

So that turns South Africa into something more like Europe, let's say, where there are a multitude of nations.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah. It could be a federation, it could, it could be some form of cultural autonomy, it could be territorial autonomy, it could take different forms. It could be Balkanization.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

So decentralization and the other aspect is sort of the bottom up approach is self governance because people, and that's not just for the Afrikaners or the white Anglos or it's South Africa is a people call it a community of communities. There are so many different nations and tribes and so forth and they don't get to make decisions about their own affairs because the central government decides and the central governments, the central government regards things like cultural identity and so forth as backwards tribal thinking.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, you See the same thing playing out with the European Union at the moment.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

It's very similar. It's very similar to the European dynamics with the European Union.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. The problem is that as the size of government mounts, the proclivity for society to become tyrant and slaves magnifies. Right. You need those intermediary structures which are something like, well, families, towns, cities, states, you know, maybe separate countries in some sort of federation with, with serious limitations on the top down power. Right, right. That's a subsidiary structure, the classic alternative to tyranny and slavery.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

And, and the, and there's a big problem in South Africa with traditional leaders, or let's say the king of the Zulus, for example, not being recognized by the government for his role that he's playing. And so the government, the way we talk about it is the difference between natural identity and artificial identity. They have this slogan that says, for the nation to prosper, the tribe must die. But the nation for us is something else in the way a lot of Westerners think about the nation. Because the nation in our context is an artificial thing. It's a construct. It's putting all these people together, lumping. It's like saying you are all just Europeans now. And so Europe is the nation and the nations or the countries.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Well, that Enlightenment emphasis on the atomized individual leaves no place for the town, the city, the family, the state. Right. We haven't sorted that out well in the west at all.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

The west has gone too far.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We missed the idea of subsidiarity. We don't know what to do with the complexities of structured social identity. Right. We figure the autonomous individual is the only unit of analysis. And that's true under very limited conditions. Right. One of the conditions might be something like first approximation to cultural homogeneity and a Judeo Christian metaphysic. Right. And so where that doesn't apply, you don't have atomized sovereign individuals. Yep, yep.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

And when it gets to the point where the community dissolves and the, the atomized individual finds himself against the Leviathan.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

There's nothing you can do. You can't do anything.

[Jordan Peterson]

You can pray.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

You can pray, that's. That's the only thing you can do. So, so the only solution is, is again what we call natural community or natural identity as opposed to these artificial communities we see today, is for communities to be well organized in the context of their communities, to have community institutions. That's very Tocquevillian. Alexis de Tocqueville, when he wrote democracy in America. He said, well, this is what is going to make America great in the 1830s.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, America's got that right. With its 51 state or 50 state experiments.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yes, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Because they're always. Americans are always doing something intelligent somewhere, no matter how many stupid, stupid things they're doing other places. Right. Well, they keep renewing because of that.

[Dr. Ernst Roots]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's a miracle to see. Okay, we should stop on this side. And so everyone join us on the Daily Wire side. We're going to talk more about solutions. We're going to talk about, well, what the Boers, for example, in South Africa need to see from the West. And while the pathway forward, while really what, what's. What are we trying to avoid in South Africa? Mass murder and starvation, which is by far the most likely outcome as far as I can see at the moment. So join us on the Daily Wire side to continue the discussion. And thank you to the film crew here in Scottsdale today for facilitating that and the Daily Wire for making this distribution of this podcast widely possible.