544. When the Right Goes Too Far | Dr. James Lindsay

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast – Episode 544: "When the Right Goes Too Far | Dr. James Lindsay"

Introduction

In Episode 544 of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson engages in a profound and intense discussion with Dr. James Lindsay, a prominent commentator on cultural affairs known for his critique of contemporary academic and cultural trends. Released on May 5, 2025, this episode delves deep into the complexities of modern political and cultural dynamics, particularly focusing on the phenomenon of the "woke right" — a term coined by Dr. Lindsay to describe a radical segment within the conservative movement.

Key Themes and Discussions

1. Defining "Woke Right"

   Dr. James Lindsay introduces and elaborates on the concept of the "woke right," explaining its paradoxical nature due to the overlapping usage of the term "woke" typically associated with the left. He explains how he adopted the term to describe conservative individuals and factions displaying behaviors reminiscent of the radical left, thus blurring the traditional ideological lines.

   James Lindsay [00:05:04]: "I decided to try to put..."

2. Psychopathology and the Dark Tetrad

   The conversation shifts to the psychological underpinnings of extremist behaviors, with Dr. Lindsay connecting "woke right" actions to Cluster B personality disorders and the Dark Tetrad traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism. They explore how these traits manifest in political and online behaviors, contributing to toxic environments both offline and in digital spaces.

   Jordan Peterson [00:14:12]: "They tend to be very low in conscientiousness..."

3. Impact of Digital Anonymity and Social Media

   Both hosts discuss the role of the internet in exacerbating pathological behaviors, emphasizing how digital anonymity allows individuals exhibiting Dark Tetrad traits to manipulate and disrupt without facing immediate social repercussions. The prevalence of bots and the ease of creating multiple online personas are highlighted as significant contributors to online toxicity.

   James Lindsay [00:30:35]: "Tremendous bot problem."

4. Historical and Mythological Parallels

   Drawing parallels to historical movements like Communism and Nazism, Dr. Lindsay argues that the "woke right" operates similarly by creating splinter movements that disrupt existing societal structures. They reference Joseph Pieper's "Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power" and Political Ponerology to frame their analysis of how language and ideology are manipulated to maintain power.

   James Lindsay [00:07:16]: "Is that Lobachevsky or something like this?"

5. Transgression as a Core Strategy

   A significant portion of the discussion centers around the "cult of transgression," where pushing societal boundaries becomes a means of gaining status and destabilizing existing norms. Both hosts agree that whether on the left or the right, transgressive actions serve to fracture the societal center, making cohesive governance and societal harmony challenging.

   James Lindsay [00:55:18]: "This is transgression, right?"

6. Anti-Semitism and Its Utilization

   The episode addresses the troubling rise of anti-Semitic sentiments within extremist circles. Dr. Lindsay posits that certain malevolent actors, potentially foreign adversaries like China or Iran, might be exploiting these sentiments to further destabilize Western societies. The use of memes and derogatory language online are examined as tools for spreading hate and manipulating public perception.

   Jordan Peterson [00:74:02]: "Absolutely, absolutely."

7. Strategies for Mitigation and Resilience

   Concluding their conversation, Dr. Peterson and Dr. Lindsay discuss potential strategies to combat the spread of pathological behaviors and extremist ideologies. Emphasis is placed on the importance of due diligence, fostering genuine dialogue, and creating robust cybersecurity measures to counteract foreign propaganda and bot-driven influence campaigns.

   James Lindsay [00:85:17]: "You know, Trump created a space force..."

Notable Quotes

• Dr. James Lindsay on "Woke Right":

  "It's woke people who call themselves conservatives, and some of them don't, though they call themselves right wing and they distinguish that conservatives and right wing are different."
  [00:03:11]

• Dr. Jordan Peterson on Institutional Parasitism:

  "It's particularly true because it's literally cost free. Yeah, Right. So you might imagine that any storehouse of value is likely to be parasitized to the degree that you can invade it for no cost."
  [00:14:20]

• Dr. James Lindsay on Cult of Transgression:

  "This is a cult of transgression where the way it's like the payment to be in the cult is to transgress a little further."
  [00:56:05]

• Dr. Jordan Peterson on Online Psychopathy:

  "The use of a transgressive cover name. Often satanic. Often. So, you know, and it's tongue in cheek, but no, it's not."
  [00:73:06]

Conclusions and Insights

Throughout the episode, Dr. Peterson and Dr. Lindsay provide a critical examination of how extremist ideologies evolve and infiltrate societal structures. By identifying psychological traits and behavioral patterns, they offer a framework for understanding the disruptive forces within both political spectrums. The discussion underscores the importance of vigilance, critical thinking, and robust institutional structures to mitigate the influence of pathological behaviors and maintain societal cohesion.

For listeners seeking to navigate the intricate landscape of modern political and cultural dynamics, this episode serves as an insightful guide into the challenges posed by the "woke right" and offers strategies for fostering a more resilient and informed society.

Final Thoughts

Episode 544 is a compelling exploration of the intersections between psychology, politics, and culture. Dr. Peterson and Dr. Lindsay's dialogue not only illuminates the dangers of extremist movements but also provides actionable insights for individuals and institutions aiming to safeguard against ideological parasitism and societal fragmentation.

---

Note: This summary is based on the provided transcript and aims to encapsulate the essence of the podcast episode while adhering to content guidelines. For a comprehensive understanding, listening to the full episode is recommended.

Transcript

[Jordan Peterson]

So what are you in trouble for now?

[James Lindsay]

The woke, right, It's a fraught term, right, because you have woke, which they associate with left, you have right, which they associate obviously with the right. And so now you've got a paradox.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's troublesome for those with a conservative bent to throw away the idea of institutional legitimacy, the only possible antidote to really unrestrained investigation. The idea seems to be something like the more radical, the revolutionary precept, the more likely something Luciferian is behind.

[James Lindsay]

So now we're talking at a very abstract, I think metaphysical is the right word level for what represents woke. This isn't going to be like recognizable to your average Joe on the street who's dealing with, you know, a pride parade.

[Jordan Peterson]

But yeah, and they are called pride parades.

[James Lindsay]

They are called.

[Jordan Peterson]

And the cardinal sin of Lucifer is pride. Hello everybody. My guest today is James Lindsay, who's been a commentator on cultural affairs for, oh, a good 10 years, I suppose longer than that, but being well known for that long, he was one of the people, along with Helen Pluckrose and others, who published a sequence of papers in radical journals that were not genuine, let's put it that way. And that was very scandalous. It was part of an attempt to expose the pathology of the academic, the pathology that had set into certain aspects of the academic institutions. And it's become much more widespread now. James has got himself in trouble in recent months once again for popularizing the phrase woke, right? By accusing or pointing out, depending on your perspective, the fact that various members of the so called right are engaging in shenanigans that are very much reminiscent of those that characterize the radical left. And so that's what we talk about today, the nature of the woke, right? I discussed the overlap between such behavior and classification of psychopathology with James. The relationship between woke behavior, mobbing, extreme perspectives, self victimization, protest, gaming, the system and cluster B, psychopathology, narcissism, histrionic behavior, borderline antisocial, and the dark tetrad. And we attempted to determine how our views align and how they differ. And well, it's a walk through the dark side of ideology. So join us for that. Nice to see you, Dr. Lindsay.

[James Lindsay]

It's good to see you, Dr. Peters.

[Jordan Peterson]

Two years, eh?

[James Lindsay]

It's been two years, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So what are you in trouble for now?

[James Lindsay]

The woke, right?

[Jordan Peterson]

Lay it out, man.

[James Lindsay]

It's a fraught term, right? People see it as paradoxical because you have woke, which they associate with left, you have right, which they associate obviously with the right. And so now you've got a paradox. And so I've caused myself some trouble by calling a radical segment, not the whole right, a radical segment of the right woke. Right. Which I kind of started doing, I guess last fall, September I really came. I started using it before that, the term. I didn't invent the term. A lot of people accuse me of inventing the term or credit me with it. This term has been in rough circulation, floating around in the Internet space for at least since middle of 22. So it's not a brand new term. I just adopted it and went kind of hard about it. And the simplest explanation I give people for well, what do you mean by woke? Right? How does that make sense? And I say, well, it's woke people who call themselves conservatives, and some of them don't, though they call themselves right wing and they distinguish that conservatives and right wing are different. But it's woke people. So the whole suite of behaviors, beliefs, even the deep metaphysical constructs underneath those beliefs, and as you recently pointed out, I think the psychology that generates those beneath all of that, the cluster B personality disorders are presenting and psychopathologies, psychopathy itself, sometimes all of that kind of feeds upward into this concept of woke, which I think we can talk pretty fruitfully about. But I don't believe it can only be presented through left wing causes. You can present it in terms of right wing causes or religious causes or other causes because it's the pathological expression of an ideology or of a belief structure that ultimately is woke. And so this term has confused people. It's angered people. I decided to try to put.

[Jordan Peterson]

Who is it angered?

[James Lindsay]

Well, this is the thing. This is what has. I'll use this word. This is a heavy word for the beginning of a conversation, but this is what has dismayed me. I knew it would anger the people that it applies to, in my opinion, because who would want to be called woke? Right, first of all. And second of all, it limits their ability to interact because they have a label that's not a good label that sticks to them. But what I'm dismayed over is that almost the. I hate to use this word so glibly, but what I refer to sort of as a, As a bookmark, as elite maga or the. The more who's who of the conservative movement seems entirely captured by this as well. And they also became upset, saw me as a turncoat and a traitor against the movement.

[Jordan Peterson]

One of the things that I think. Tell me what you think about this, but I don't think we should name Any names in this podcast. That's okay with you?

[James Lindsay]

That's totally fine.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. We can talk about why that is as we progress. Okay, good, good. I mean, I wasn't going to make that a cut and dried rule, but I have my reasons. So you just referred to some comments I made on Fox News and also to some degree on Rogan talking about. And I've actually written a fair passel on this. You know, there's been this idea that the extremes of political belief meet A. Yeah. And so let's hash that out a little bit. You seem to find useful or possibly accept this additional diagnostic distinction, which would be Cluster B or Dark Tetrad.

[James Lindsay]

That's right. I actually wrote about this. I don't know if you know, in 2020, that specifically in December. Yes, in 2020, I called the article something like Psychopathy and the Origins of Totalitarianism. And I published that at the end of December of 2020. I put forth the hypothesis, which of course I got from somewhere else in significant part. I had read that infamous quirky but I think important book, Political Ponerology.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes.

[James Lindsay]

Is that Lobachevsky or something like this? Is that name the author? And I had read that and found it striking and at the same time, almost, I think sometimes, you know, a chapter here, a chapter there, I read a very, I think one of the most important essays in English, which is Joseph Pieper's Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power. I don't know if you've heard of this. Joseph Pieper was a Catholic and he had some. He wrote this. I don't know what else he did, honestly, I should probably look into it. But he wrote this essay, Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, and talked about how tyrants arrange a. An abused version of the prevailing language to mislead people into the tyrannical program. And it's in two sections. Two parts. It's been five since I've read it. So forgive the details, but there's a sense, two chapters to this long essay, and one of the two is very Catholic in its orientation, and one of them is this more general thesis. And it was extremely interesting. But of course, in political ponerology, you also have the discussion of the importance of language, which of course, we were seeing with the social justice woke movement as well, that they're misusing words like racism very blatantly. And so in political pontorology, you have this claim he makes that he says, well, with the psychopath, what he calls a pathocracy, what you have is you have people who are psychologically disordered, who create a vision of the world. They need other people to play in it. And the way that they do this is by creating. He calls it a second language. So it's the same language, but the words now refer to other things. Of course, having read the postmodernists like Derrida, I'm picturing all of these things.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's what happens in the Tower of Babel.

[James Lindsay]

That's right. That's right. That's exactly right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Remember, words lose their meaning and no one can understand.

[James Lindsay]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Nobody can understand each other.

[James Lindsay]

So they reorient the discourses and then what he says actually solves the tyrannical problem. This is the Lobachevsky's, if I'm saying his name is right, his thesis, what solves it is that a third language evolves that unmasks the second language and allows people to see it for what it is and in fact laugh at it. And so this is what takes it apart. So I read these two essays and I'm taken in by them. Of course, I'd been reading the postmodern literature quite a lot. I had been reading Lyotard, the Postmodern Condition. And he has this very confusing. They're all very confusing sections throughout the whole book. This very confusing section about this thing called legitimation by parology, that he accuses all knowledge seeking enterprises, including the sciences, of being Legitimation by parology. And there's this story that goes along where he's teaching legitimacy by paralogy to his students. At some point or no, somebody's teaching Lyotard to their students, a philosophy professor, and says, okay, so what do you think legitimation by paralogy means? And everybody comes up with crazy ideas because you can barely get it from the text. And finally the professor says it means false legitimation. Through consensus, you get everybody to agree.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay.

[James Lindsay]

And so I framed out this essay in terms of saying that what the pathocracy, or the pathological ideological state, which becomes a vehicle for that pathology that serves the psychopaths at the center of it. The way that it operates is it generates a paralogy, a second false logic that defines the ideology and a paramorality, a second false set of values and virtues that also defines the parameters, the social parameters and the psychosocial parameters. How do I know if I'm a good person? How do I fit in with my society? And so I write this long essay. My poor assistant, I got in trouble for this. I had him publish it on Christmas I was so excited about it. Christmas Day we put this out and very long essay explaining that this is what I see as at the root because I was trying to diagnose and explain to people what nobody was calling woke yet at the time, at the end of 2020, or maybe we had just begun to call woke. We were trying to diagnose and explain this social justice left phenomenon. And so I put out this essay and said, I think at the root, underneath the whole thing, there is the same psychopathologies that motivated people like Lenin and Stalin and all this. And I didn't have the psychological chops. I was aware of dark triad or tetrad terminology. I did know quite a bit about the cluster B personality disorders because I knew some people who were basically rabid feminists in the 2000 and tens. And they were all talking about how they had various schizoidal personality or. And that one may be cluster A, I'm not sure. And then they had the, you know, borderline antisocial, histrionic, narcissistic. Narcissistic would come up again and again. I think that actually tell me is paranoid's cluster C. Right. My reading, for example, of Derrick Bell, one of the founders of critical race theory, is that he very likely suffered both paranoia and schizoidea, which are both mentioned by Lobachevsky as well as indicative. I can't say any about the cluster Bs, so I think it's a little broader than just that one cluster up here. Conspiracy theories are paranoid thinking, for example.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah, right.

[James Lindsay]

And schizoids tend to have imaginary conversations with people who aren't there on a childish fictional level. You know, they're pretending the world is the way that it should have been for their emotions when they were nine years old. That's the split, the skits and the schizoidal. And so they write these elaborate stories about how the world's supposed to be and then they have outbursts when the world doesn't match that. And Derek Bell is famous for writing these missives where he would present them as evidence of racism, say at Harvard, where he had an imaginary conversation with a dean and then would write the whole imaginary conversation down. And I'm thinking, this is so disordered, not just disordered thinking, but this is psychologically disordered that you would then present this hypothetical conversation as evidence. But at any rate.

[Jordan Peterson]

So let me.

[James Lindsay]

For a long time I've thought that's there.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so. So let's lay down some theses and tell me what you Think of them. So the first is that about 4 to 5% of the population, maybe more, has dark tetrad cluster B traits to some significant degree. And so that was histrionic, narcissistic, antisocial and psychopathic. Right, that's the cluster B cluster. Whether those are psychopathologies like illnesses, that's a matter of dispute. There are certainly forms of severe social misbehavior. Manipulative social misbehavior.

[James Lindsay]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

And people who fall into those categories will use cries of victimization to parasitize.

[James Lindsay]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So they're parasitizing on empathy. That's, that's one hallmark. Right. They have disordered interpersonal relationships, often very intense. They're predatory, particularly the antisocial types. That's more straight repetitive criminals, very stable pattern of behavior.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So let's say 4 to 5%. It's probably increased because of the net. That would be my guess. Because it's not well regulated on the net. Because most of our evolved mechanisms for dealing with such people don't work. Especially we could talk about anonymity because I can understand why people defend it. But by the same token, it allows you to escape from your well deserved reputation.

[C]

What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts, you'll get 10 different answers. Bull market. Bear market Inflation up. Inflation down. Can someone please invent a Cryst crystal ball? Well, until then, over 41,000 businesses have future proofed their operations with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one Cloud ERP bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one fluid platform. With one unified business management suite. There's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. Think about it. With real time insight and forecasting, you're essentially peering into the future with actionable data. When you're closing your books in days instead of weeks, you're spending less time looking backward and more time focused on what's next. For any business owner looking to streamline their operations, netsuite is the the solution I'd recommend. Whether your company's earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com jbp this guide is free to you at netsuite.com jBP Again, that's netsuite.com jbp.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, right. Okay, so that's years ago.

[James Lindsay]

By the way, you said that one of the features you got in trouble for this. And you were right, of course. But you said one of the features of our moment was that there's male aggression and female aggression that express themselves differently. And male aggression, I don't know if you use this terminology, but I think it's something to this effect. Doesn't upload very well. You can't punch somebody in the nose through the screen. But female aggression, the social aggression, uploads very well. But what it turns out is this Cluster B or Dark Tetrad manipulation uploads almost even better.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes, yes.

[James Lindsay]

You can have 50 accounts. You can, you know, switch from one to the other. You can create entire false environments that your, your targets have to engage in.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's particularly true because it's literally cost free. Yeah, Right. So you might imagine that any storehouse of value is likely to be parasitized to the degree that you can invade it for no cost.

[James Lindsay]

No, that's totally right. Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so this is what I think happened to the universities, right. Is that they, they're whale carcasses and they've been invaded by parasites. And the whale carcass idea is a very old one. It's a huge storehouse of value. Right. So Since World War II, the West was on a pretty productive trajectory and we generated massive storehouses of value in many, many places. Those would be financial storehouses, but reputational storehouses even more. That's even more germane. Like Harvard has both. It did have both. Right. $53 billion plus a stellar reputation.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah. The best brand in America.

[Jordan Peterson]

Exactly. And in the world next to Disney.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah, right, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Which is another storehouse of value that's been severely parasitized. Okay, so now, so that's two things. There's 5% of the population. Oh, yes. The Dark Tetrad types are narcissistic, Machiavellian, so they use language only as a means to manipulate towards instrumental ends. There's no communicative intent. It's all essentially status gaming. They're psychopathic and that means they're predatory parasites. And then they had to top it all off with sadism. And I think that's what changed the Dark Triad to the Dark Tetrad. I think the reason for that is that if you have a Dark Triad orientation towards the world and the world turns against you, it makes you so angry because you're rejected and unsuccessful, that that expresses itself in positive delight in the unnecessary suffering of others. Right, so this is dark material. Now there's no reason to assume that the Cluster B Dark Tetrad types would do Anything other than gravitate towards storehouses of value. First of all, the parasite problem is a very deep problem biologically. Right. It's so deep that some people think sex evolved to solve it. You mix the genes, it's harder for parasites to move down the generations. Right. So that's actually one of the canonical theories for the evolution of sex itself. Why would you take a 50% hit in terms of genetic transmission when you could just clone yourself? Well, the parasites can breed, multiply faster than you can, and so they have the upper edge in a lengthy battle. So you mix up the genes and anyways, the parasite problem is a very old problem.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so I want to add one more thing to that. So imagine that a system of knowledge is a way of representing the world and navigating in it. Okay. So that would be, that would be like a scientific theory or an engineering theory. Right. And so you might be able to assess that theory on the grounds of objective fact. Say, okay, but then imagine that there's a different form of language game, and that is that you, you orient yourself with a lot of. You bring a number of people together and you lay out some game rules. They could be religious axioms. In fact, I think religious axioms are game rules. I think that's the right way to think about it. But it could be political. Right. So communism, a pseudo religion, has game rules, axioms that you have to accept, and so does conservatism. These are games that can integrate a large number of people. Okay, so that's, that's a slightly different function. Right? Because now it's like if you and I decide to play basketball, we're going to produce a hierarchy within that set of rules. Right. Whatever set of rules you lay out, people are going to be differentially able at implementing.

[James Lindsay]

That's right, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Any set of rules.

[James Lindsay]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So for example, if you, if you were in a gym and you had school children roll and you had a competition, you'd get a hierarchy of rolling speed, and then the top rollers would be the high status people within that game. So you can organize systems of knowledge so that they're ground rules for a game. And then you produce a hierarchy. Now hierarchical position has value. So the higher you are in a social hierarchy, the more positive emotion you feel and the less negative emotion and the less likely you are to perish, partly because you have social capital and social support. So people will compete for status within the confines of any given hierarchical game. That's a whole different function than representation of the world. Now, maybe you'd hope that your game represents the world too, which I suppose is some. That would be something like competition in a scientific lab. Right. Because.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah, something like that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Something like that. Or. Yeah. Competition within a game that's actually productive and self sustaining. Yeah, right. And the axioms of Western culture seem to be a game like that.

[James Lindsay]

They do.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Right. Now, okay. Having established that you can game it.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah, of course.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. And so that seems to be. Okay, so we agree on so far there's nothing in that that you think is objectionable?

[James Lindsay]

No, nothing. No, that's right. I think that's exactly right. And it's a good way to look at it. And I think it opens a door to how this becomes woke in a particular way, if we get very, very general. Because if you actually want to know the controversy about woke. Right. What's happened? Eric Weinstein told me this. I know we said we're not going to name names, but it's positive. Yeah, he told me that what he realized. And of course, he's a mathematician as well, and I'm a mathematician. So he said what. He told me this at arc, actually, we were having a conversation and he said, when I realized what you'd done is generalized the concept of woke and then applied it in a different domain, it clicked. So it's no longer just left wing totalitarian behavior. It's now this mode of totalitarian behavior that I can apply.

[Jordan Peterson]

Transferable.

[James Lindsay]

Correct. And so with the hierarchy, not just the hierarchy, everything you just described, but you have these reservoirs of value in hierarchies built off of these games.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[James Lindsay]

So there's value there. And the parasite is drawn to the reservoir of value wherever it is. And the idea is that you want to be high status, but they have natural limitations because they're not competent. They're not competent. Yeah. They're outside of the range of what brings you to the top of these characteristics.

[Jordan Peterson]

They tend to be very low in conscientiousness.

[James Lindsay]

They tend to be. That's right. And so what you would do is try. There's a word for what you would try to create as the parasite who's now latched on the thing you would try to. There's different. If you want to talk about it in politics, there's one word. And if you want to talk about in religion or more generally, there's another, the general word or the religious word is cultural, you'll create a cult where you've taken a variation on those rules to where there's a new Status game that's rigged. So you're always on top of it.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yep.

[James Lindsay]

And what you're going to do is pervert the underlying rules. We call it an ideology or a cult doctrine. The word in politics would be splinter, a splinter movement within a broader movement. So MAGA is a political movement, and you could imagine a splinter off of it where the Democratic Party had a political movement and the justice democrats came along 10 years ago and made a splinter off of it that created the squash. A lot of people know that history at least, so it should be germane. So the generation of a localized cult is sort of this hypothesis. And the ideology grows out of the desire for the people at the top of that who are parasitizing the hierarchy to create their kind of internal nested hierarchy where they're on top of the whole thing. And the way they do that is by saying the big system is gamed, the big system is rigged, the big system is fake, and we have a secret truth about how things really work. And now you enter into the Gnostic kind of, I don't know, even metaphysical space. You know, the ancient Gnostic religions, whether against Judaism or Christianity, all held out that Yahweh, the character, the creator God of Genesis, was in fact a demon who had tricked everything. He wasn't the actual highest, unknowable God. He was this low level, you know, functionary God who said, you know, I'm going to rule over all this stuff. I'm going to imprison them in this, you know, wonderful garden. And then, whoops, they disobeyed me and almost realized the game by eating from the forbidden tree. So now we're going to throw them out into a real prison. And they've been, in the Heideggerian sense, they've been flung, their being has been flung into a world they didn't choose in which they suffer. And you get the whole Gnostic architecture. But the way that Gnosticism attracts is by saying, and I can make this kind of literal to things that are happening in our world if we have to, is that the authorities in the existing game know so much, but they don't want you to know everything. They don't want you to know more because you might surpass them. They're trying to keep you down. But if you come with me in my cult, I'll tell you the real secrets.

[Jordan Peterson]

Partly that's an appeal to paranoia too.

[James Lindsay]

Sure.

[Jordan Peterson]

And that's going to be more effective under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

[James Lindsay]

Sure.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so let's concretize This a little bit. Sure. I'd like to talk about. We can talk about Douglas and Joe. Sure. I think let's. Let's amend our rule. We're not going to point any fingers at woke right people. But I'd like to talk about the current situation.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah, the situation and the ideas I think are important.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, you know, Douglas is point with regard to Joe was that it's troublesome for those with a conservative bent to throw out, to throw away the idea of institutional legitimacy. Yeah. And that's a fair comment. Standalone comment. Joe's rebuttal to that, insofar as he had a rebuttal, because I thought the conversation was actually pretty civil given how difficult it was, was that the institutions have been so cataclysmically faulty in the last 10 years that the only possible antidote to their falseness is really unrestrained investigation. And Joe's being the master of unrestrained investigation, obviously, because he's allowed his interest to take him wherever it goes, which, allied with a certain amount of conscience, is a pretty good orienting function as far as I'm concerned. And I'm at a loss to some degree how to reconcile those viewpoints because I think it is a cataclysm that the institutions have become unreliable. But let's walk through them a little bit. I think the universities are gone.

[James Lindsay]

Me, too.

[Jordan Peterson]

I think that Harvard is having this war with Trump and that Trump is 100% right. Yep.

[James Lindsay]

Me too.

[Jordan Peterson]

The president of Harvard, in my understanding, said to the Trump administration that it was unfair to punish the researchers by withholding their research funds. But I look at that, and I think those researchers have been filling out DEI statements for 10 years.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So as far as I'm concerned, they lost all their credibility. They're not independent researchers at all.

[James Lindsay]

Oh, that's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And they, they say, they could say and have said that they were just following the rules. It's like that's not a pretty very good excuse if you're a seeker after knowledge. Right. If the rules have become pathological, you have an obligation to cease following them. Harvard took its. Its DEI head, I think it was Harvard, and changed. Kept the person and changed the name. Well, that's. What's. That. All the universities are going to do that?

[James Lindsay]

Yeah, that's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Why wouldn't they?

[James Lindsay]

That's just fundamentally deceitful.

[Jordan Peterson]

More deceitful, even. Yeah, right. It's another form of mimicry. And I guess that's another thing we could point out about the psychopathic 5% is that they're Masters of camouflage. Yeah. What a psychopath does is mimic competence, right?

[James Lindsay]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And usually they can't get away with it because. Not for long, because they, they, they don't create, they destroy. And eventually that evidence accrues and then they have to leave and find another host, so to speak. Right. Now, online, that's a snap, right, because you can just switch help.

[James Lindsay]

Exactly.

[Jordan Peterson]

You can just switch your identity and.

[James Lindsay]

That's Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And you've solved the problem. Or you can multiply it beyond. And then there's a bot problem online, too.

[James Lindsay]

Tremendous bot problem.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah, we've tracked some of that. And for some of these discussions about the woke. Right. 30% of the comments are bots.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah. Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So. Right. So that means we're automating the psychopathy. Like I've thought for a long time, and I do think this may be the case, that virtualization enables psychopathy. And if that's the case, we're in trouble. We're in trouble.

[James Lindsay]

We're in big trouble.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, 50. At least 50% of Internet traffic is criminal. Right.

[James Lindsay]

Holy cow. Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's 30% pornography, which is close enough to criminals. So I think distinguishing them is not useful. And then, like, old people are just scammed non stop.

[James Lindsay]

Non stop.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. And. And there's no policing. And there can't be because you can hide so effectively.

[James Lindsay]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So, and then it's. What it seems to happen is that the unrestrained psychopathy spills over into the public domain and everyone is mad. Like in both senses, angry and insane because of it.

[C]

I wanted to share something special with you as we transition from Lent into the Easter season. You know how Lent was all about fasting and reflection? Well, Easter is our time to rejoice and remember that Jesus died and rose up for us. Hallow has put together this amazing Easter program with Sister Miriam James Heidland, Father John Burns, and even Liz Tabish, you know, the actress who played Mary Magdalene in the Chosen. Oh, and Kevin James is part of it, too. They're all exploring this beautiful spiritual book called Interior Freedom by Father Jacques Philippe. The program is designed to help you explain, experience true freedom in your everyday life. Each day you'll learn practical ways to let go of those external things that weigh you down and discover the peace that comes from trusting God more deeply. It's perfect for continuing those prayer habits you worked so hard to build during Lent. Just a few minutes each day for reflections, prayers, and meditation that really connects with the joy of Easter. And Hallow isn't just for Easter. They have thousands of prayers, meditations and even music to help you build that daily prayer habit and grow closer to God. So why not download it today? They're offering three months, completely free. Visit hallow.comjordan for this exclusive offer.

[Jordan Peterson]

Let's return just for a moment to the hierarchy idea. So you, you pointed out one interesting mechanism of attaining status, which is to twist the rules slightly, create a new game and dominate that as its originator.

[James Lindsay]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So that's a transformation of a process that's actually creative and adaptive. Right. Because if I wanted to make a variation of a business, I could do that. And then if I served my customers well and so forth, I could climb to the top of that new business niche and succeed. This is the parasitical equivalent to that. Yeah, right. It's to. It's to what? To generate a version that does nothing but attract unwarranted attention. That would be the narcissistic spin. And to use any means whatsoever to.

[James Lindsay]

Attract that attention while directing blame to the parent structure. I think that's very important. So for example, with Karl Marx, he phrased his vision of communism wasn't the crude communism that was experimented with by Gracchus Babouf in the French Revolution, it was a transcendent communism. And I use that word because he doesn't call it transcendent communism, he calls it communism. What he says his exact wording for it is, it's communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self estrangement and thus a complete return of man to his true nature as a human or social being.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So that's a Nietzschean revaluation of all values.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah, it's much deeper than people think about. It's redistributing property, it's to transcend property. And so how does this turn into what I said is that the game which at that point he's looking at, it doesn't matter if it's capitalism or feudalism or even slavery, it's the private property game that he believes is the course of history. He says everything is actually that thing's fault and people who play that game are the people who are the problem. And that's how he recruits. He finds people who are losing within that game, who are being injured by that game, and says, you know what, it's the. It's not you, it's the whole bloody game. Come over here. We've got a different game, but the trick is who's at the top of that game? With Karl Marx, it was Karl Marx, it Wasn't the people ever. If you read it, you know, so what's Communist Manifesto? We'll just break it down. Chapter one. Communist Manifesto is titled Bourgeois and Proletarians, Bourgeoisie and Proletarian. So he describes the relationship between the people who are playing that game, the bourgeoisie, and then the proletarians, who are the workers at the bottom who are making that game. And he says, all you guys down at the bottom are getting exploited. You're being alienated from who you really are. You're alienated from your product. Everything's terrible for you, and it's exploitation. So the winners of that game can cheat you. That's the relationship that he puts out. Chapter two is Communists and proletarians. And he says, so it starts out brilliantly. He says, so what's the relationship between the communists and the proletarians or the workers movements? He says, we don't disagree with any of the workers movements. We actually are the highest expression of them. So we take their vision and put theory behind it and take it to a higher level of understanding. And we're going to bring all you guys with. And so naturally. Naturally, what's going to happen? So let's say he agitates the proletarians to revolt. He's just said that the shepherds are going to be the Communist Party. And then who's going to run the Communist Party? Karl Marx.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes.

[James Lindsay]

So it's a whole thing as a giant scam to blame the existing system, to agitate a large group of people who aren't winning within that system to switch games with him at the very peak.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so to me, I know that we've talked a little bit about religious matters, but I'm going to delve into that first.

[James Lindsay]

Let me actually. Before we put a bookmark.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes.

[James Lindsay]

Because Hitler did the exact same thing. The exact same thing. Mussolini did the exact same thing. Hitler is much more clear. He says, we had this German race, and back in history, he writes this fictional mythological history of the Germans. Some of it, if you read or see it, is just kind of humorously, transparently false about how great they were in antiquity and all of this. So we've got these Germans and they've got all this, you know, he's got this whole occult, theosophical, Aryan stuff that he's brought in from Helena Blavatsky and read the Secret Doctrine and all this weird, weird occultism. He's attached to race. And in Mein Kampf, second volume, chapter one, he talks about, well, the Nazis have a new world concept. Weltan schwang. And that world concept will be the racial world concept. Then he lays out how the state exists to preserve the race. That's, that's the point. Because when you have the race, you have the people who will generate high culture. When you have the people who generate high culture, then you can advance society to its highest level of expression and man's highest level of expression. Very progressive ideology. But what he's saying is we had this somewhere in this mythical, distant, foggy past, and we can recover it How? By taking every step that we can to figure out the race and purify the race. And guess what? Everybody who's with me that wants Germany to be made great again after World War I and the ravages of the Treaty of Versailles as they saw it, and the challenges that came with the interwar period as we see it now, all you Germans who are mad at Europe and mad at the French and you're having a bad time, guess what? There's a mythic Germany that you've lost. And we can get it back. Hey, come on, let's go. And here's the ideology. It's our racial world concept. And here's how it's going to be organized. Not with this, you know, vanguard Bolshevik model over there that the communists use, but we're going to use what I call the Fuhrer Princip. Not me. Hitler called the Fuhrer Princip. The leader principle, of course. Who's the Fuhrer?

[Jordan Peterson]

Hitler.

[James Lindsay]

So he's on top. And it's this absolutely rigid, top down pyramid of authority, which is a completely different expression.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's what a Tower of Babel is.

[James Lindsay]

That's exactly right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. With the wrong thing at the top.

[James Lindsay]

But it's the same program. The game that we've now, it's not the game that we're all playing. It's the game that we've been forced into by this rotten circumstance has dispossessed us from who we should be. We're heritage Germans, for example. And we should have the benefits of our mastery of race. But the problem is in his sight.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's very attractive to anyone who has nothing to offer but racial identity.

[James Lindsay]

That's right. That's right. And two things, racial identity and obedience. Maybe a modicum of cruelty as well.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, that comes along for the right.

[James Lindsay]

It comes along for the ride eventually. Because a lot of the young Germans were actually inspired because they thought it was going to be good for the worker. They were inspired by the socialism part of National Socialism. And that it was going to be good for Germany, and they loved their country and they wanted to see it great. And so they were swept up. The Hitler Youth were swept up to get into this, but it's the same program. There's a game. We used to be the masters of the game, but now we've been dispossessed from the game. They threw us from top to bottom. That was an intolerable experience. By the way, this is also a story of Lucifer. We've been cast to the bottom. And so what we're gonna do now is we're gonna grab our rightful inheritance and we're going to build the structure that returns us to it. P.S. the organizational structure is the furrow princip. So I'm at the top.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. So I want to talk about this Lucifer idea. So Lucifer is the morning star, and he's the angel of the untrammeled intellect. That's how he's portrayed in Milton. Right. And he's allied in some strange way with the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

[James Lindsay]

If I might just interject. If he's the morning star, what do you do in the morning after the morning star rises? You wake up.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[James Lindsay]

Woke.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, Right, right. The spirit of enlightenment. Right, okay, so.

[James Lindsay]

Or dark enlightenment, as it were.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, right. Absolutely. Well, that's the question. What's the difference between genuine. What's the difference between what's genuine and what's false? So in the story of Genesis, God tells Adam and Eve that they can pretty much have free reign, except for one thing. They can't. As far as I can tell, what it means is they can't take the right to define the moral order to themselves. They have to abide by the moral order. That there's an intrinsic moral order that's grounded below nature, even grounded in the principle of being itself.

[James Lindsay]

Sure.

[Jordan Peterson]

They have to ally themselves with that. But Eve, interestingly, Eve, is tempted by the serpent. Maybe her powers of discrimination are somewhat lacking. Maybe her proclivity to empathy clouds her, and maybe it's a form of feminine pride. In any case, the serpent tempts her, telling her that if she ate of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, that she would become like God, which is the one thing God forbade. Right. So the idea seems to be something like the more radical, the revolutionary precept, the more likely something Luciferian is behind it. So it's a serpent in the garden. So it's clearly something poisonous. But then it gets weirdly associated with the idea of Lucifer. Right. Which is a very strange leap. The leap is something like what's the most poisonous of all possible serpents? Right. Then it becomes a meta principle. And it looks to me like it's something like the drive to power and that. That fits well with the notion that, well, Marx would be on top of the communists and Hitler would be on top of the Nazis and Mussolini would be top of the Italian fascists.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So if the belief system is pressed into the service of the hierarchical status of its originators, then there tends to be something profoundly Luciferian behind it. Yes, yes.

[James Lindsay]

So now we're talking at a very abstract, deep, whether metaphysical is. I think metaphysical is the right word level for what represents woke. This isn't going to be like recognizable to your average Joe on the street who's dealing with, you know, a pride parade and saying, well, that's woke. I understand woke, but yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And they are called pride parades.

[James Lindsay]

They are called.

[Jordan Peterson]

And the cardinal sin of Lucifer is pride.

[James Lindsay]

Is pride.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. It does for the desire to replace God, to replace the fundamental moral order. So I figured something else out too recently. So imagine that you could found a society on power, because you can, at least for a short period of time. And imagine that you could organize a group of people hedonistically as well. So that would be the real dark side of populism. Right. We'll just have the government give people. It's like Pleasure island in the Pinocchio video. Right. Bread and circuses. You can get away with that for a while. Power, hedonism. You can abandon everything and sink into a pit of nihilism. That's not very effective psychologically or socially. But then that begs the question that the postmodernists wrecked their ship on. I would say is there a unifying principle, a high order unifying principle? That's the metanarrative idea. Right. Because the cardinal proclamation of postmodernism is that there's no pinnacle metanarrative, there's no upper union. But I think that's wrong. I think that the principle of voluntary self sacrifice is foundational. And I think that's the narrative that runs through the biblical course.

[James Lindsay]

You've given very, very eloquent speeches on that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well. And so then we would have a dynamic where one. Because we're trying to figure out how to identify the Luciferian players. Sure, that seems reasonable. Right. So they're, they're, they're in love with the creations of their own intellectual. But that intellect is not serving the principle of voluntary self sacrifice. It's serving the Principle of power.

[James Lindsay]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

You remember in the, in the Gospel account, when Christ is in the desert, the third temptation that Satan lays before him is the temptation of power.

[James Lindsay]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right.

[James Lindsay]

Everything that you see before you.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes. Matthew 4, if you follow me.

[James Lindsay]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, Right. So that seemed. Okay. So you don't have any problem with the underlying dynamic of that?

[James Lindsay]

No, not at all. No, not at all. And I see, you know, a fruitful, a fruitful discussion because you know, this is of course very high order thinking and expressing. But the experience for people on the ground is exactly what we were mentioning earlier. It's those traits of the dark tetrad like Machiavellianism and all of this. So they're going to experience what does that look like in everyday experience? The swarms on social media, this cancel culture, the struggle session, you know, this kind of stuff, the lying and the manipulation, the crisis victimization, gaslighting. And as the, you know, it's called sometimes darvo deny attack, reverse the roles of victim and offender. When you catch a psychopath out, they do a. It's an acronym darvo. They deny that there's a number of.

[Jordan Peterson]

People operating like that everywhere.

[James Lindsay]

And so these are the experiences. So the expression that I could give to Thai people just to bring woke right back to the conversation is we're familiar now with the machinations of woke left. Right. And what I would say is, well, what's woke right is same energy, different direction. You have all of those same exact. Whether it's Luciferian at the high level, whether it's struggle sessions, Machiavellianism.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, we've got a higher, it's like it's Luciferian at the core. Then we've got the cluster B dark tetrad traits. Then there's the mechanism.

[James Lindsay]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So that's a differentiated then that gives us a way of identifying.

[James Lindsay]

So if we use the kind of, you know, pop word of the day of, you know, vibes or energy, it's same energy, different direction. This is exactly like what I was already saying with, with Marx versus fascism or communism versus fascism. And we could go as weirdly deep as you want. There's a few ways to get to it. Like you say, well, obviously communism's kind of the arch progressive ideology, but I would disagree. It's probably fascism, but differently. Communism was actually obsessed. If you read Marx, he's obsessed. What was this? Well, the quote, positive transcendence of private property is human self estrangement and therefore a complete return of man to what his real true self. It's obsessed with state of nature. It's obsessed with we've been alienated all the way back to the beginning. For him, private property marks the fall. So the serpent came along and didn't offer an apple, but offered the fundamental right to exclude private property. But you have this same general concept. So they're obsessed with looking all the way back to this state of nature.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, and that is also an unbelievably effective move on the psychopathic side because the basic criminal attitude is. And I've dealt with criminal types quite a lot. It's pretty straightforward. It's perfectly fine for me to take what you have because you took it.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah, that's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. And so Mark just nailed that perfectly.

[James Lindsay]

That's exactly what it is.

[Jordan Peterson]

As property is theft. As soon as property is theft, the. The criminal is the. Is the moral agent. And that, that happened in the Soviet Union. Right, because in the prisons the criminals were treated as moral agents, whereas the political prisoners were treated as, you know, what would you say? The kinds of heretics who deserved nothing but the longest possible sentence and death. Right, right. Because the criminals were victims. If property is theft, criminal. Criminals are victims. That's a hell of a satisfying outcome for the criminals.

[James Lindsay]

That's right.

[C]

And so what with Mother's Day just around the corner, I wanted to share an amazing organization that's making a real difference for mothers in need Preborn. Their network of clinics provides love, support and hope to pregnant women who are feeling scared, alone or pressured about their pregnancy decisions. These choices can affect not just their baby's life, but their own emotional well being as well. When a woman walks into a preborn clinic, she's welcomed with compassion and offered a free ultrasound so she can see and hear the little life growing inside of her. And you know what? Most of the time, these powerful moments help her choose life. This Mother's Day you can help both a mother in crisis and her baby. Just $28 provides one ultrasound or $140 covers five. Every dollar goes directly to supporting these moms and babies. Plus monthly sponsors receive photos and stories about the lives they help helped save. Want to get involved? It's easy. Just dial pound 250 and save baby or visit preborn.com Jordan Make a Difference this Mother's Day by supporting both mothers and their babies. Again, that's preborn.com Jordan get involved today and impact generations to come.

[James Lindsay]

What you have in that same paragraph. So you have Mark saying that what we're going to do is get back to our state of nature. But we're not going to go back. It's not going back. He's just discussed Baboof and the failure of the French Revolution commune model. It was all low end. It was, you know, grubby. It was dirty. They had no high culture. They had, same as Hitler's interest, no high culture. He says this is wrong. We're gonna have a transcendence. So we're not going to go back to state of nature. We're gonna transcend. And all he's doing is rehashing Rousseau which had passed through Hegel and Schiller. And what Rousseau had said is we need to be. Cause he wanted to live a free, libertine lifestyle. Not liberal, but libertine. But he liked being a citizen, didn't he? And so he wanted to. Savages made to live in cities. That's. I mean in the French, however. But that's what he literally called them, savages made to live in cities. That's the completion of man. The Omega of man. Alpha of man is the primitive communist. The Omega of man is when you reach the point where you're the. You have the same sharing attitude and liberated lifestyle as the beginning, but now you have all the high culture and benefits of all the production in between.

[Jordan Peterson]

So.

[James Lindsay]

So it's a perfectly paradoxical and impossible thing. But Marx calls it the riddle of history solved that knows itself to be its own solution. And so that's. So that libertine alpha and the Omega.

[Jordan Peterson]

So that libertine offering is an interesting twist I've been trying to puzzle out. I wrote this article with Jonathan Pageau on the scarlet Beast of the Apocalypse and it was really illuminating to me. There's lots of. Of the book of Revelation. I just don't understand me and many other people, but I understand some of it. So the scarlet Beast is the degenerate state. So imagine that when a uniting principle disappears. So that would be the Nietzschean death of God. You get the postmodern condition, which is that there's no uniting narrative. And so the state grows a lot of different heads. It's kind of a hydra now. It's collapsing into chaos. Symbolically speaking, it has a lot of different heads because nothing's uniting it. And that's why it's gets blood red, because that's a very dangerous condition. It's a fragmenting condition. Okay, so that's the scarlet Beast of the degenerate state. This is a symbol of the end of times.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And I don't mean the end of time per se. This is a symbol of how things end. Right? Always. Always.

[James Lindsay]

Sure, that's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Okay, fine. So the state deteriorates still. It's a multi headed hydra. Okay, but then it has something on its back and that's this. That's the horse of Babylon. Yeah, the mother of all prostitutes. So the idea there is that when the patriarchal state or psyche loses its central function, female sexuality commoditizes. Right. And we can see that's like just happening everywhere right now. Onlyfans is the greatest example of that. That woman in Great Britain who's sleeping with like a hundred men a night, or I think she managed a thousand in a week, something like that. I won't say her name, but it, she's, she's become very well known for the absolute outrageousness of her behavior. Her mother is her business manager. So awful that you just can't believe it. Okay, so you have this mother of all prostitutes. So that's the central spirit of commoditized female sexuality that's going to happen when the state deteriorates. Of course female sexuality is going to commoditize when the state loses its protective and integrative function. And so she offers this libertine pleasure. Right. So you could think of power. That's a way that power. That's what power offers to those who are willing to use power. Like why do you want control over someone? Well, to have your way with them, obviously. And there's going to be a sexual component to that. That was certainly the case in Marx's own life, for example. So you can imagine the fantasies that possessed him too would be, well, once we establish this new utopia and the communists promised free love, that's a common leftist. As if it's love, which it isn't, and as if sex is free, which it never is. What happens at the end of the Scarlet Beast of Babylon? Dichotomy, say interaction is the beast kills the prostitute. So that's perfect, right? Because so the degenerate, the degenerative patriarchal state breeds the commoditization of female sexuality, but ultimately destroys all pleasure. And I also think that's happening now. I mean, you have radically high rates of virginity, for example, among Japanese and South Koreans and in the west more broadly, a breakdown, an apparent breakdown of the relationship between men and women, not least politically right, with the men starting to fly off into the conservative sphere of influence and the women becoming increasingly liberal. So that's another. It shows you the fact that these mythological tropes appear Fitting shows you how deep the malaise is, right? The culture war is way deeper than.

[James Lindsay]

The political in a vehicle to. This is transgression, right? Transgression of the existing order. And transgression, I think, is such a key feature. In fact, I've described recently a cult of transgression that you can easily describe on the woke. Left, right. And it kind of fits my same energy, different direction, or same energy, opposite direction. Because you see with both of these two wokes, but also other. These kind of degenerate ideologies and psychosocial dynamics, you have this. This cult of transgression where the way it's like the payment to be in the cult is to transgress a little further. You start with, oh, yeah, well, we need LGBT representation. Okay? We've already transgressed because the T is different from the lgb. It's completely different. It refers to trying to work out.

[Jordan Peterson]

A disintegration to concentration of transgression.

[James Lindsay]

Well, there's nothing in lesbian, gay, or bisexual that is a disintegrated psychology. There's something fundamental in the transition that's a disintegrated psychology. If you have gender dysphoria, if we admit that that's even real, you have a disintegrated psychology. Your phenomenology of self and your ontology of self are out of whack. And in fact, what they do then is once it gets out of whack, they invert it and they put this phenomenology first and say the ontology has to follow. So if we do enough surgery, somehow we've changed ourselves. This is completely disordered thinking. So it's already a transgression. But let's not get lost in this.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, in the foundational principle, there is sexual identity, right? This is a very strange thing about these. These fragmented identity claims is that they, like an identity, should unite, and it should serve a psychological and a social purpose simultaneously. Sure, an identity that's predicated on hedonistic orientation isn't an identity at all.

[James Lindsay]

And this is where the transgression is. What does the horror present? The horror. She presents sex out of its context, free. As you said, sex is never free. She presents free sex. Right? So what she. The ability to transgress. And so you go from LGBT itself as a word, but we need representation. Okay, fine. So we need to put gay characters on tv. Maybe that's a problem, maybe it's not a problem. Who knows? Well, we take a step. What has it gotta be after this? We know. Well, we need gay characters in children's programming. It's a further transgression then we need them in schools. Now we need a drag queen to come read to the kids. Well, the drag performance needs to get more radical. And you can see it in the pride parades too. It's the inclusion of more and more transgressive stuff. Stuff. This is a cult of transgression. And it's how.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so those trends. Okay, so those trends. Now we can link the transgression back to your original idea that you have a hierarchy of social status, let's say, let's call it conservative. And so now the parasitic predators swarm in and they splinter it. They splinter with transgression.

[James Lindsay]

Sure.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So, so that's, that's an important thing to note. Right.

[James Lindsay]

There's a deeper thing here, which is, it's also what Mao did with his red identity black ident, which were split themselves, is that the target is actually normal integrated society. And the excuse for the targeting is the opposite side pathology. Right. And so with Marcuse to go back to the left, he writes this essay in 1965, Repressive Tolerance. He says, okay, there's three kinds of tolerance. He says, there's democratic tolerance. That's what a normal healthy society has. And it only can tolerate so much or it'll fall apart. And then there's the repressive right wing. Maybe it's fascist. Whatever. He actually uses the word fascist repeatedly. And then what he says is actually those two things are the same thing because of different stupid excuses, nuclear weapons or whatever else. So actually we live in the repressive state now.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, right. All game rules are repressive.

[James Lindsay]

And his argument is actually that all capitalist society will degenerate into fascism unless it's resisted. And he says the answer to this is liberating tolerance. And what is liberating tolerance? And his own definition, which is close to from memory, a quote, it is, we will extend. Liberating tolerance, he says, would mean we extend tolerance to movements from the left and we withdraw tolerance from movements from the right, which is everything to his right. Okay, so it's amazing how that's played out in psychopathology.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's splitting, by the way, and sociologically. I mean, one of the things I've noticed about my home country, it's really stark. In Canada, if conservatives protest, they're flattened. Yeah, left protest. There's no holds barred, no matter how pathological it becomes. The left wing protesters are always the heroic victims. The trucker convoy was a great example of that. Right because, you know, it was a disruptive demonstration, although remarkably peaceful, and, and the legal repercussions are still unrolling. And I think maybe it's. Tell me what you think about this. I think it's because it might be partly the spread of the ideas of Marcuse through the country.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Jordan Peterson]

But I also think that people are genuinely people. There's something to genuinely fear when actual conservatives protest because they don't do it until they're pushed to the wall. There may be.

[James Lindsay]

That may be, but I think, is.

[Jordan Peterson]

It also an indication that something very fundamental has gone sideways because conservatives aren't the protesting type.

[C]

We'll be right back. But first, here's a sneak peek at the member exclusive portion of this episode.

[Jordan Peterson]

What the hell is going on?

[James Lindsay]

I mean, the left is doing what the left does. The issue is never the issue. We're trying to tear apart society, gain advantage. The whole thing, everything they did with critical race theory, queer theory, you name it, it, they're doing it now with this new issue. They're saying Israel is bad and the Jews are a problem that doesn't play well with mainstream America. So very plausible that this is coming from foreign adversaries. China's behind it. Let's say Qatar's behind it. 2018, the Wall Street Journal publishes an article, 250 MAGA influencers are on the payroll of Qatar trying to influence Trump's policy. Do you think they stop?

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, certainly in Iran interest, the Iranians would sacrifice every single Palestinian in a second. They're just cannon fodder. I mean, it's obvious that Iran is funding Hamas.

[James Lindsay]

Propaganda works. Throwing the dust of moral confusion into the air. Blinds the eyes. Say you tweet something that they like, doesn't matter that it's you, they can blow it up, they can put tons of bots behind it, they can put lots of positive comments on it so that they can create an artificial environment.

[Jordan Peterson]

This is such an ugly vision of the future.

[C]

Listen to the full member exclusive session now on Daily Wire plus.

[James Lindsay]

No, but I think that the, that the trucker protest tells us something different because the target, these people, this is one of the most genuinely peaceful, pro liberty, free. It was the freedom convoy and they meant it. And they policed their own borders. They kept the radicals out on the right. So what happened was they showed up, the left showed up to protest the normal people. I'm not gonna say the middle, the normal people, everyday freedom loving Canadians. And the excuse was there's a far right. Yeah, okay, so what happened is, I Call this ideological flattening or dialectical flattening, but it's psychologically, it's splitting. The person that's occupying the leftist deranged position has flattened liberals and conservatives into a single monster. Not so they can fight the conservatives, so they can fight the liberals. And that's happening on the other side. Conservatives will look over and say, well, there's the far left and all the classical liberals are actually in their camp and they've flattened them. It's the same splitting behavior again. So this is again an emphasis of this woke, an exhibition of this woke. Right phenomenon of same energy, different direction, opposite directions in this case. And the idea is that they are attacking the middle through the proxy of the far opposite side. So I brought up Marcuse because he's also famous for eros and civilization and the sexual liberation. And we were talking about the pride and the queer theory.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, those left wing movements in the 60s all floated on a cloud of free love.

[James Lindsay]

That's right, they did.

[Jordan Peterson]

And.

[James Lindsay]

But look at the pride parade. Okay, so we're gonna. We need representation and visibility for gay people because there's a repressive society. That's the excuse. It's the far right. They won't let anybody come out, so they come out and does that. Is that where it stays? Is that what they're actually targeting? No, you have fetishes, you have all kinds of perversion, degeneracy. I mean, I don't want to even talk about what it is, you know, explicitly, which is an advantage to queer theories. Nobody will say what it actually says. Yeah, so gross. Yeah, but what they were targeting were liberal societal norms, real societal norms, healthy, let's forget liberal, healthy, not degenerate societal norms about sex and sexuality. And the excuse was if you.

[Jordan Peterson]

Degenerate's the right word too, I think, because I think one of the hallmarks. Because if you are a relativist, you might say, well, who are you to place modes of orienting yourself in the world in a hierarchy? Because you describe some of them as degenerate. The reason that they're degenerate is because when they're employed, they degenerate.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah, sure, of course.

[Jordan Peterson]

So they're games that violate their own principles as they play themselves out.

[James Lindsay]

But there's nothing about a guy in fetish gear at a parade in front of children, for example, that's challenging the norms of a repressive sexual society that thinks that it should be procreative, heterosexual sex only. That's an excuse. It's pretext. What they're after is the norms that hold regular society together. And my argument is that the woke, right, does the same thing. They have a cult of transgression, too. They sometimes call it being based, but that's a completely bad word for what they're trying to describe, because based should mean based in reality, Although the origin of the term is slang for being free, based on cocaine. So they're out of their minds. Right. It's just funny how this lines up. But what do they do? Okay, so the left has told us, the far left has told us, you can't be racist. Racist is worse. Everybody's a racist. And of course, they completely made degenerate the concept of racism, the word racism, the accusation the sky is racist, going for a hike is racist. But they aren't trying to reclaim and say, okay, no, wait, racism's bad. We don't want to be racist and nobody should be racist. And the left completely ruined it. So we need to reclaim the term and have the healthy societal norm about discrimination and bigotry. What they're doing instead is saying it's time for us to be a little bit racist. The left said, don't be racist. So we're going to be really racist. And we're going to do it in order to make, you know, to own the libs, as they sometimes phrase the thing. Right. But really it's to reject woke. Culture's the pretext. They're not acting racist or blaming Jews for everything going wrong in society or, you know, getting further and further into the racial expression or the white racial consciousness or whatever, the white supremacy or even white nationalism in order to challenge the left. No, they're doing it to challenge, not again, the center, the healthy core of society and its norms. So that's the target. It's a cult of transgression. But they point in opposite directions. Left in some sense, says, don't be racist. They say, do be racist. And this is again, the communist fascist thing. We're going to liberate everybody. That's what the communists say. They come along, it screws everything up. And, you know, there's all this oppression in society. We're going to liberate people from oppression and everything's going to be utopia. That's Marcuse in a nutshell. Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

Defined primarily by full sexual liberation, of course. Right. And there is.

[James Lindsay]

Hold on, hold on. It all goes to hell. And so then the right wakes up, wakes up woke and says, actually, I think the oppression's what was holding us together, so we should do more of it and they create a hierarchy in society that's very rigid. Again with that Fuhrer Princip from the fascists because Mussolini had his lighter version of it. Hitler concretized it for Nazi Germany in 33, following Carl Schmitt's book the legal basis for the total State. They created the legal structure for this thing. But the idea was that there is a hierarchy that kept society on the rails. And we're going to go back to that hierarchy in extreme pastiche form. And there's a reward structure socially for the people in the club to push the envelope and attack those normal everyday societal norms in the center. So again, same energy, opposite direction. But the point is the transgression, which they call queering. On the left, we don't have a word for it. On the right they call it being based. But that's not the same as transgress. But it's still transgression. And so same pathology for different reasons, same idea. Like Mark said, you go all the way back to the state of nature, you're going to combine it with the end. So you're going to become the man, the alpha man, who's also the omega man, in other words, the alpha and the omega of humanity. So there's you become God man, Homo deus, as Harari named it in his book, Homo Deus. And then on the right, they don't go that far back. They don't go back to the state of nature. They're not interested in the state of nature. They're interested in the mythic past from which they've been dispossessed that never existed. A romantic vision of who they were at some golden era in the past that they've been ejected from. But they're still now the alienated outsider. The alien force came in, dispossessed them from who they are, and now they're going to claim it back. And the way they're going to do it is by organizing a fascist structure as an answer to the degeneracy. A very rigid structure and a too rigid structure in answer to the not rigid enough structure of communism. And then what they do is the exact same transgression against the center to build their own power out in their local little cult against the big game of society. They're attacking the game of society to build their numbers with the hope of being able to replace it in both cases. So this is why I call these people woke. It's not just that they've gone on canceled rampages and struggle sessions. It's not that They've put me through a relentless struggle session since September without stopping or doxxed my family and everything else in their wrath. They said, I said, James calls them all woke, right. And they decide to prove me wrong by canceling me and struggling me and doxxing my family and acting exactly like we all went through in 2015 when you stood up about the pronouns. And so that's the thing, Jordan, back then, you stood up and you paid. That was ugly. And you were right. You saw that when they said, you will use these literally transgressive pronouns or else. Or else you said no. And it's like the world lost its mind on you. And looking back, it's almost quaint, but it wasn't quaint to go through. But the thing is, you were right. And then Peter and Helen and I did the grievance studies papers and we were right. So we were right. And I see the same structures, the same patterns, the same behaviors, the same reactions, the same explanations with slight modifications. That's the difference between communism and fascism as modern archetypes. And what I see when I, you know, you can think of those as modern era mythologies for how society is supposed to be organized. And I see the same thing. And the thing is, we were right then and we're right now.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. I've been thinking about it as the hijacking of belief. Right, that's it. That's a nice phrase.

[James Lindsay]

It's a parasite.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[James Lindsay]

And that hijacking of belief is this. Just to take it all the way back to the Gnostic thing. That's what the Gnostic cults did before Irenaeus put them down. And then, you know, Augustine comes along and mentions them all and says, There have been 84 heresies or whatever up to this point. By the 4th century, the Gnostic cults did the same thing. They splintered off from the true faith. They came up with the idea that they had secret knowledge. That's the gnosis. But look at what the cults were like. The Manichean cult. The Manichean cult is an absolute splitting of the world into total good and evil. It's not us and them, it's us and everybody else against us. And the idea is that the evil is embodied in the world and the good have to slowly work to consume the evil and turn it to good. And eventually you end up with all good. But this Manichean battle between good and evil is what Marx codifies on the first page of the Communist Manifesto when he says that in a word, what he's talking about. The entirety of the story of history is oppressor versus oppressed. It's a fundamental dualistic metaphysics. There's no unity of society with a kind of melange of different people in different places, working, playing different roles, sliding up and down the ladder. No, there is a fundamental dualism. You might move within each of those, but there's a fundamental dualistic structure, and they are in conflict. That's the first line of the Communist Manifesto after the famous preface. The first chapter, the history of man is the history of the. The conflict of contending classes, oppressor and oppressed. And he says that what it's going to result in is the revolution of society or the common ruin of the contending classes. So either the bottom's going to come up on top and take over, the splinter group is going to replace society itself, or they're going to ruin everything. They'll destroy everything that they can't have. And then we're looking at beastly behavior. And I don't mean animals.

[Jordan Peterson]

So do we. Maybe we could lay out some of the behavioral markers so that. Because we might as well make this concrete, I can tell you what I've observed about the behavior of psychopathic parasites online. Okay, sure. Maybe if you have five of these, you're one of them. You know what I mean?

[James Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's often anyone alone isn't enough.

[James Lindsay]

Right. Diagnostic criteria.

[Jordan Peterson]

So. So in the comments sections, for example, anonymity is a marker. Use of a transgressive cover name. Often satanic. Often. So, you know, and it's tongue in cheek, but no, it's not. Yeah, Derisive language. Right. So that would be language indicative of contempt. Yeah, contempt's a really toxic emotion. Contempt and disgust. Hitler used disgust language to characterize the Jews, not fear language.

[James Lindsay]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And you destroy things you're disgusted by.

[James Lindsay]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

You stay away from things you're afraid of.

[James Lindsay]

He says in Mein Kampf that early in the book, in the second chapter, that one of the best moments. He doesn't say, it's the best moment of my life, but he realizes, and it's clear, that he's very happy about it, was the moment when he realized that the Jew is not a German and the German is not a Jew. That's disgust, right?

[Jordan Peterson]

Absolutely, absolutely. They use derisive and contemptuous. What do you call those? LOL is a good example.

[James Lindsay]

Oh, yeah. Dismissive. Kind of.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, acronyms.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah, acronyms.

[Jordan Peterson]

Now, you know, there's lul's culture Online.

[James Lindsay]

Yes, of course.

[Jordan Peterson]

I do it for the luls. And that's a hallmark of sadism. Now those people, people who do those things. So those are four or five things. Anonymity, pathological. No. Nom de plume. Derisive language. And then the use of these contemptuous and. Contemptuous and cool acronyms. Belittling. They use the word dude. That's a real good marker. Or they'll use a derisive nickname to kind of equalize the playing field.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah, I'm Jimmy a lot.

[Jordan Peterson]

You're Jimmy? Yeah, yeah, right. Diminutive. They'll use a diminutive.

[James Lindsay]

Jimmy. Concepts instead of conceptual. James.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right, right, right.

[James Lindsay]

That started on the left and now the right uses it.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right? Yeah, yeah. So. So those are markers. What else have I seen? An insane rise in explicit anti Semitism. And that's been going open about five years. And it's open all the time.

[James Lindsay]

And Nazi apology.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, that's.

[James Lindsay]

Which isn't just the apology too. It's. It's the transgression. It's the post. The meme sometimes meant to be funny so you have plausible deniability. Or the other social functions of humor come into play. But they'll post the meme of Hitler. Why? Because you're not supposed to. Yeah, that's why. So you have norms of decency around different things. One of those norms in again, mainstream, healthy society has been that we're not going to valorize Nazis. We're not going to lionize these guys. And you have. I'm not talking about the historians or whatever else that are coming out and rehashing David Irving or any of that. I'm talking about these, to use the word that's on the Internet, shitposters who come and post pictures of Hitler with a smile on his face or they're translating his speeches into English and clipping out parts where he's rousing Germany to a cheerful future. Oh, he just loves his country. That's one of the messages they put. They love. I'm sorry. Read Mein Kampf. Actually read it. He's utterly clear about the point of his state is to preserve the race and the biggest pollution of the race. To preserve it against pollution of inferior races. And the most inferior race is the Jews. Absolutely clear. The demonization is absolutely visible in 25 when he publishes that way before they say, well, it took until 38, 39, maybe 42 when Churchill got involved, that's when they had to really start hating the Jews and known. And that current is all the way back to the beginning.

[Jordan Peterson]

So this shitposting problem. So that's part of the enabling of the psychopaths by the free social media platforms, by the costless social media platforms. Do you have any sense? So we're working out ways to identify people.

[James Lindsay]

Swarm behavior, by the way, is another one, another marker. Another marker. So you'll get one of these derisive replies and within minutes it'll get 600 likes on it. You don't know how that happened. From an account with 30 followers. And your reply somehow gets 600 likes in a minute or two minutes. And then everybody piles like a biblical plague of.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[James Lindsay]

And then they jump in on you and say you got ratioed. Of course, a lot of it's bots that people bought. But what they do is they say, my comment was more popular than your comment, therefore you're not very interesting. And we're very interesting. So we're ascendant. And by the way, that's psychologically really impactful if you don't know what's going on.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes, definitely.

[James Lindsay]

You feel like the crowd, they tell me this all the time. We're all laughing at you. We're all laughing at you.

[Jordan Peterson]

You.

[James Lindsay]

We're all laughing at you.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, right.

[James Lindsay]

It's very sophisticated psychological torment. Unfortunately for my antagonist, hallmark of sadism. I understand the game. And therefore does it affect you? Only when I'm not prepared for the, the. The pathway by which it comes. When I'm. When I'm aware of it, no. But when, not at all. Except maybe to encourage me. Somebody put up a meme of me the other day and it shows a guy building a castle standing inside the wall, a big giant guy, and it's me. And there's all these people throwing rocks. And it says on the meme, it says James when his haters throw rocks at him. And I'm building a castle out of all the stones they throw at me. And so, no, not so much, except they can catch you off guard. They can catch you off guard. And what catches you off guard the most? This is the power of the struggle session. What will catch you off guard the most is when one of your friends buys it. They see it and they go with. They go with the people that are haranguing you. That's when it'll get you. That's when it'll affect you.

[Jordan Peterson]

So the proliferation of this kind of pathology seems to be linked to another.

[James Lindsay]

Characteristic is the attempt to get people to distance themselves from you. I face that very frequently. You want to get away from him. He's contaminated. Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, that's disgust terminology again. Right. You're the carrier of something pathological.

[James Lindsay]

That's right. Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. So the, the social media platforms. So Musk's perspective and Rogan's to some degree too. Mine for that matter, is that the best antiseptic is sunlight. But there might be a flaw in that reasoning and maybe you can help me think it through. When I'm sitting across from you, I bear the weight of my words, right? It's going to have an impact on the net, but it's also going to impact the relationship I have with you. And so I'm constrained or regulated. I'm regulated in my utterances by consequences. And so there's never been a time really where free speech existed without reputational weight. Now, maybe pamphleteering and that sort of thing, but that's trivial compared to what we have now, right? I mean, how many people can you get your pamphlet to and what sort of effect is that going to have? That was back in the time of writing, but now your pathology can multiply virtually without end. And then I'm thinking, well, maybe it's necessary, I thought, for Twitter, for example, that there should be two sections. There should be a section where people's ID identification is validated and a section for the anonymous trolls. And that should be demarcated. So you can go visit hell land of trolls if you want, but you know that they're not real people.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Now the problem with that, as far as I can tell, is the digital ID problem. I mean, the net allows people to escape the reputational consequences of their psychopathology, their destructive, sadistic, corrosive, power mad, hedonistic psychopathology. It's a terrible thing. And people have no idea how dangerous it is. But if you verify IDs electronically, then we walk down the route to Chinese totalitarianism, something like that, as far as I can.

[James Lindsay]

And if you read the original documentation, Stanford University has its Digichina project and translates Chinese documents. 2014, they're putting forth a social credit system. And they actually explained that the purpose of the social credit system is to achieve a perfect socialism, because it's not just a social control mechanism, it's a Pavlovian training mechanism.

[Jordan Peterson]

Nudging.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah, it's like your life becomes a video game, nudging you to hold the beliefs that the state wants you to have.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, the guy who just got, the man who just got got elected prime minister in Canada.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

He says two quite stunning things in his book, which no Canadians read because we'll leave that lie. 75% of the world's fossil fuels have to stay in the ground. Okay, that's proposition number one. And he's made that a centerpiece of his thinking for 20 years. There's no, there's no priority guiding every financial decision by every individual and every corporation that should be prioritized higher than decarbonization. That means every single thing. And then he says, of course there'll be losers in consequence of that, but it's a price we're willing to pay. We have to pay the sacrifice of others. So this is a man who thinks that net zero is the proper game and that, that if you were a moral actor, decarbonization would be your God. Right. Regulate every single one of your decisions. Well, out of that comes the kind of pathocracy that you described. Like you've seen this already. There's edges appearing, there's credit cards, they were issued in Australia that track your carbon footprint. Right. And at the moment you're still allowed to spend on whatever you want, regardless of your. At the moment, that's exactly right. And once you're fully trackable, well, then we know it'll happen. You know exactly what'll happen.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

You'll be nudged in whatever direction benefits the power mad Luciferians. That's exactly what will happen.

[James Lindsay]

It's not just social control. It is social training. It is, it is operant conditioning. I was looking for the word. It's operant conditioning in its most sophisticated form, especially when equipped with, with the technologies of AI, that's for sure.

[Jordan Peterson]

Because the AI systems trained on your purchasing behavior, for example, will be able to predict your likely behavior with a stellar degree of accuracy.

[James Lindsay]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. I mean the advertisements that you're fed already do that to some degree.

[James Lindsay]

That's right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So the only solution I can think of to this is to. Because the digital ID solution seems to be. Be troublesome to say the least, means no privacy whatsoever forever. Fundamentally, I guess it's exposing this and hoping that people make wise decisions. And I guess that's what you're trying to do with the woke. Right idea.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah. There are workable activities that could step into play. For example, a lot of times you'll hear, especially libertarians talk about the revision of to the Smith mundt Act in 2012. And now our intelligence communities, we know that our social media is awash with propaganda. Well, there are legal constraints that you can put at least on your own government to prevent that. You can take. You want to have a Task force for doing something in terms of, say, national cybersecurity, keeping Russian and Iranian and Qatari and Chinese bots and bad actors, Pakistani. These are where a lot of these bot networks are coming from. Keeping those influence campaigns, foreign influence campaigns out with a dedicated cybersecurity project is going to clean up a lot of it.

[Jordan Peterson]

You think the administrators can stay ahead of the.

[James Lindsay]

I don't. I don't think so, actually. So far, not yet. I don't know.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's. I mean, that's another problem, Right. Is that the system transforms itself so rapidly that it's very difficult to regulate it.

[James Lindsay]

What I'm thinking is, you know, Trump created a space force because of maybe space war or whatever it's supposed to do. And I'm not quite sure, but this, like, there's. I don't want to make it a branch of the military, but I'm using it as an analogy.

[Jordan Peterson]

I don't know, maybe it should be.

[James Lindsay]

The cyber security or cyber warfare division, an entire branch that is dedicated to that, because this is a serious problem for. And again, the bigger the country, the more power it wields, the more likely it is to be attacked. Not to be rude to people from Botswana, but there's just not that much incentive to go mess around with their Internet. There's a ton of incentive to mess with maga, which is informing Trump.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, we've already tracked, too, some of the groups that I'm working with, women 18 to 34, have political opinions that are way off center compared to everyone else. Plus, they're dreadfully miserable people. Yeah, right. Well, they get 80% of their news from Tick Tock, and Tick Tock is a bought farm, fundamentally.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And the algorithms are designed to produce exactly the kind of upsetting pathology that characterizes female voters between the ages of 18 to 34.

[James Lindsay]

Well, I mean, this is why woke is so female coded. Everybody kind of wonders, what in the world is critical race theory? Why is it so female coded? It's because it all. Every bit of what we call woke on the left passed through feminism to mainstream. So it was all built off of pathological women trying to figure out how to pathologize young women to join their club or culture. And so it all ended up getting twisted. If you look at communism, that's part.

[Jordan Peterson]

Of that oppressor, oppressed narrative.

[James Lindsay]

Soviet Communism was not a feminine endeavor. Right. Brutal gun shooting, the whole thing. And there's a lot of things you could say about the snitch culture and all of this, but not like what we have now. But the reason is because the ideology passed in order to become viable in our society, to be, to find the receptor sites. The receptor sites for Marxism in the west were overwhelmingly young white women. And it had to pass through feminism to be able to get the parasite to attach as a mind virus in order to get there. Because that's what it was designed to do. On the other hand, therefore you have young men who've been ravaged. You literally, Dave Rubin and I were talking the other day and he said that you as an individual have done more than, and I believe him more than any individual on the planet earth to help young men who've had a hard time through all of this nonsense for the last 20 to 30 years, been a voice in the wilderness, to reach and help and guide them and get them to, you know, clean their room and all of the stuff, you.

[Jordan Peterson]

Know, and to identify the parasitic predators and keep them at bay.

[James Lindsay]

So what we have now is we had a vulnerability complex that attached to young girls. Now we have another one that's rising in answer that's attaching to young men. So the tragedy for me, and I'm watching this and I get, you know, I talk, I'm integrated with the moms networks of the grassroots moms all over the country, right? And of course these demons have come up with all kinds of salacious rumors to spread with regard to that, to discredit me and to remove me from their activity, which are all nonsense. But at any rate, what I'm watching is all these moms I'm hearing from these moms already who are telling me they aren't using this phrasing. This is my phrasing. By the grace of God, their daughters didn't get pulled into the trans destruction mania and now they're having to watch their sons get lured into Nazism. That's why I'm so worked up about this woke. Right, Cult of transgression. I get it. You're a 15 year old boy. Maybe you're a 19 year old boy or 25 year old. Maybe you're a 35 year old who hasn't grown up and got out of his parents basement and you think it's funny to post a mustache man meme or two here and there to rile up the libs and the normal people in the left and everybody else.

[Jordan Peterson]

Plus you're irritated that your identity has been targeted for 30 years. Yeah, of course, on racial grounds, right?

[James Lindsay]

Just. Just like the way the Germans felt with the imposition of the Treaty of Versailles. They saw it that way, whether we do or not. How the Germans felt about the French and broader Europe and the rest of their standing in the world. And they were impoverished and they were broken down. It's. It's the same powder keg, or maybe that's not the right word. It's more like, like a tank of propane because you're going to pump it up and get it to spray fire when it comes out the other end, right? It's like.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, one of the things people can watch for everybody who's watching and listening is beware of anything that's motivated by resentment. You know, the, the mere fact that you have had difficulties that are somewhat arbitrary, first of all, doesn't distinguish you from the main run of the human race. But if the motivation out of resentment, the probability that something horrible has got a hold of your soul is extremely high.

[James Lindsay]

So I go back to the first thing I said, right? What's woke? Right? Well, it's woke people who act like cons or call themselves conservatives. It's woke people who call themselves conservatives or right wing, right? So there it is. You just said it. They are people who feel alienated and dispossessed from their heritage, victimized, they're filled with resentment and they channel it through left wing or right wing causes.

[Jordan Peterson]

You know, that's the story of Cain, eh?

[James Lindsay]

It is the story of Cain.

[Jordan Peterson]

Cain's sacrifices are not rewarded. He invites the spirit of resentment into occupy his soul and becomes not only murderous, but the progenitor of genocide and the precursor to the flood, right? And the media. It's so interesting, James, because. Because. So Cain's sacrifices are rejected and it's a little ambiguous as to why. And then he goes to complain to God and God says, basically he says, you think you're miserable because you're failing. It's like you're not. There's lots of things you could do about failing. If you did well, you would be accepted, right? What you've done is you have allowed something terribly tempting that crouched on your doorstep to enter your house and have its way with you. And that's why you're bitter, resentful and murderous. It has nothing to do with your failure. It's this additional variable, which is you're. Because the thing is, everyone, in a sense, this is true of heroes in mythology. Everyone starts out lowly, everyone starts out dispossessed, everyone starts out oppressed, right? And there's angles of your identity that you can construe as oppressor, oppressed narrative, with no problem. If you decide that you've been treated unfairly and now you have a right to resentment and revenge, then. Well, then you're the monster that breeds genocide. Yeah.

[James Lindsay]

And so what does Cain do? He's rejecting the system that he has to succeed in order to be rewarded. He's rejecting. So there's a system out there.

[Jordan Peterson]

Luciferian.

[James Lindsay]

And so what does he do, though? He goes and kills his brother. He goes and murders successful brother. The successful brother. He goes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Exactly.

[James Lindsay]

So it's exactly the same thing. A lot of these guys that are pushing the woke right stuff. And there's nothing wrong with a new character coming on the scene. Every one of us was a new character. I mean, you were doing great work, obviously, and you have a body of work extending well before that as a professional. But then you spoke up in 2015 about that horrific pronouns Bill, and you sort of became a different. Different monster or public intellectual. It's a curse word, I think, but you know what I mean. And this, you know, you. My favorite moment ever. I was skeptical of you until I watched you talk to Cathy Newman and then I watched you do the most effective.

[Jordan Peterson]

You should have been skeptical of me to begin with.

[James Lindsay]

The most effective judo I've ever seen in a discussion in my entire life. And I said, I watched that. I was going to tell everybody how you were wrong. And I watched it and you impressed me. And I was like, I have to like him now.

[Jordan Peterson]

And so how annoying is that?

[James Lindsay]

Isn't it? Yeah, no, but. And I think that that's the thing I was excited to start learning as opposed to being annoyed and resentful. I'm like, oh, well, I was wrong about this guy.

[Jordan Peterson]

Move on.

[James Lindsay]

But a lot of these fellows that are pushing the woke right stuff appeared in the anger and in the repression. Is the word of 2020 more. 2021. They don't have a body of work extending before that. They just kind of came out of the ground and good, I get it. There was a lot going on. There are making people making great commentary about liberty regarding the COVID policies. There are people making great commentary about the obviously critical race theory, cultural revolution running amok and the queer theory later. So I'm very grateful to everybody who came along. But these people that have a longer perspective and a deeper body of work.

[Jordan Peterson]

It'S hard because that's a crucial. So that touches on Douglas's point too, is that to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. I mean, one of the things.

[James Lindsay]

Institutions are corrupt, but due diligence matters.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Right. What has this person who's saying these things done? And to whose benefit is it is what they're saying. So you have these pretenders. I think this is. Maybe we can end with this at this section. I think what we'll do maybe on the daily wire side is talk about the anti Semitic trope, but I'd like to introduce that for a bit. Bit. I don't. I don't understand it exactly. The. I don't understand why the woke. Right. For example, is particularly capitalizing on anti Semitism. Do you just think that that's a particular, particularly daring and attention seeking transgression? Is. I mean, is. Is. Is there. Are they proclaiming that no, there's more. They'll violate something sacred because that's how brave they are.

[James Lindsay]

This is a yes and a yes and okay, yes, it's this transgressive. Also. They know good and damn well that there are certain transgressions you can't come home from. You go too far down that road, there's no way back. And not because your new friends are going to call you names like a sellout or a cuck or dual loyalties or whatever. There are certain lines you go down and you don't get to come back. And they know that. So they get to trap people there. But this I believe, Steve, and we will probably or possibly disagree on this. I think that there are particular malevolent actors that are pushing this who have grander designs than getting clicks, getting an audience, satisfying their own narcissistic urges, transgressing boundaries. I think that there are and it makes total sense if I were to say China's supporting all of it. And if I had evidence, you would.

[Jordan Peterson]

And Iran.

[James Lindsay]

Oh, China, Iran, Qatar, Pakistan, like the Arab League, Russia and the Deep State. Possibly. Trump is a problem to something. We can tell by the way that they've organized the Trump derangement program. That's just screwed Canada royally, but has deranged Americans. I have family members I can barely relate with. Still, because of Trump derangement, I was obviously cast out in disgrace from the last vestiges of the left when I said I was gonna vote for Trump. Trump and said publicly on a podcast, Make America Great Again. They lost their minds and said I went crazy. And so Trump is something. Right. There is a lot of reasons besides just the fact that he's the sitting President of the United States of America. He's doing a lot of things to this global order that are disruptive and in a good way. In all likelihood, there's a lot of motivation to take this man down. And if you can fragment his base by getting them to argue about Israel good, Israel bad, that's a deep cut that you've just taken Cloven Maga in half. So all it takes is one event, something that goes down in Israel, and Trump takes a side, takes the Israeli side, and bang, they can pull the thing apart. So it's like a wedge. It's not just what we were saying. It's also a wedge to hammer deeper and deeper and deeper into Maga, the people who like Israel and the people who don't, or the conservative movement or America itself, which therefore implicates the left side doing the same exact thing at the same exact time, using the horrible events of October 7th as their pretext.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, we'll continue this on the Daily Wire side. And that way we can attract the maximum number of commentators who say that the reason we saved the discussion of anti Semitism for the Daily Wire section is because I'm under the thumb of Ben Shapiro and the Zionists.

[James Lindsay]

Oh, me too. Don't worry, I don't have Ben Shapiro. Piro are the Zionist. I'm Zionist. I'm paid by Israel. I've turned out the lights for them on Friday for years. Don't worry.

[Jordan Peterson]

I see. Okay. Well, apparently we're in the same club.

[James Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. All right. Good talking to you, sir. Thanks very much for coming in today. Thank you to all of you are watching and listening and to the film crew here in Scottsdale for this making this completely preposterous conversation possible and helping us what, broadcast the word to be awake. And be careful who you're listening to and why you're listening. And what spirit possesses you while you're listening. And beware of resentment, boys and girls, that everyone in hell is resentful. So good to talk to you, sir.

[James Lindsay]

You too, Jordan.