Jordan Peterson on postmodernism &c.
[From:
https://youtu.be/MPojltjv4M0]
"So the first thing that you might want to know about Postmodernism
is that it doesn't have a shred of gratitude -- and there's something
pathologically wrong with a person that doesn't have any gratitude,
especially when they live in what so far is the best of all possible
worlds. So if you're not grateful, you're driven by resentment,
and resentment is the worst emotion that you can possibly experience,
apart from arrogance. Arrogance, resentment, and deceit. There is
an evil triad for you.
And if you're bitter about everything that's happening around you,
despite the fact that you're bathed in wealth, than there is
something absolutely wrong with you.
The black community in the United States is the 18th wealthiest
community -- the 18th wealthiest nation on the planet.
That doesn't mean there is no such a thing as relative poverty,
which matters. It is an important political economic issue, and it
is very difficult to deal with. But absolute wealth matters too.
Western societies have been absolutely remarkable in their ability
to generate and distribute wealth. As you can tell by just looking
around, taking a brief bit of consideration for the absolute miracle
that even a building like this represents.
So you have to educate yourself about postmodernism.
So here's what the postmodernists believe: They don't believe in
the individual. That's the logos. Remember, Western culture is
Phallogocentric. Logo is logos. That's partly the Christian word,
but is also partly the root word of logic.
Okay, they don't believe in logic.
They believe that logic is part of the process by which the
patriarchal institutions of the West continue to dominate and to
justify their dominance. They don't believe in dialogue. The root
word of dialogue is logos -- again, they don't believe that people
of good will can come to consensus through the exchange of ideas.
They believe that that notion is part of the philosophical substructure
and practices of the dominant culture.
So the reason they don't let people who they don't agree with speak
on campus, is because they don't agree with letting people speak.
You see it's not part of the ethos.
Okay, so what else do they believe or not believe?
They believe that since you don't have an individual identity, your
fundamental identity is group fostered, and that means that you're
basically an exemplar of your race.
Hence, white privilege. Or you're an exemplar of your gender, or
your sex, or your ethnicity, or you're an exemplar of however you
can be classified so that you are placed in the position of a victim
against the oppressor. Because that's the game, and it's a post-Marxist
sleight-of-hand. Right? Before, the Marxist notion was that the
world was a battleground between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,
and that failed to have any philosophical or ethical standing, that
argument after the working class actually saw its standard of living
massively elevated as a consequence of Western corporate
democracy/Western free enterprise democracy, and also as a consequence
of the revelations of everything terrible that happened and every
bloody country that ever dared to make equity and the Marxist
Communist dogma part of their fundamental structure -- right,
nothing but murderousness and oppression, and so by the 1970s, it
was evident that that gig was up.
And so the postmodernist Marxists just basically pulled a
sleight-of-hand, and said, 'Okay if it's not the poor against the
rich than it's the oppressed against the oppressor.' We'll just
re-divide the sub-populations in ways that make our bloodied
philosophy continue in its movement forward, and that's where we
are now.
So for the postmodernists, the world is a Hobbesian battleground
of identity groups. They do not communicate with one another,
because they can't. All there is, is a struggle for power, and if
you're in the predator group, which means you're an oppressor, than
you better look out, because you're not exactly welcome. Not exactly
welcome, and neither are your ideas. So that's what you're up
against.
I would say it's time for conservatives to stop apologizing for
being conservatives.
You don't apologize to these people. It's a big mistake. They read
apology as an admission of guilt. You don't apologize, and you
don't back down.
You young people out there who are university students, you need
to take over the student unions, you need to take them back, because
they are absolute snake pits, and have been since the 1990s.
With regards to the universities, I thought at one point that the
best thing to do would be to cut their funding by 25% and let them
fight among themselves for the remnants, because it would force
universities to decide exactly what's important and what isn't.
So I would say the humanities, and much of the social sciences have
turned into a postmodernist neo-Marxist playground for radicals.
The scholarship is terrible.
************
80% of humanities papers are not cited once. Once!
************
And so what that means is that they write papers for each other,
and they sell them to libraries, and that's a how the publishers
are making money. No one reads them, but the publishers can print
them and the libraries have to buy them -- And they are buying them
with your tax money. And so all of you who are sitting here are
funding a postmodern radical neo-Marxist agenda that has its roots
in the university, and your tax money is going towards it.
And if you want proof of that. Just go online and look at the
websites, especially of disciplines like 'women's studies' which
is pathological right to the core. But it's not just women studies,
it is all the ethnic studies groups, it is anthropology, it is
sociology, social work, and most of all, it's education. And OISE,
for example, in Ontario is perhaps, apart from the Ontario human
rights commission, the most dangerous institution in Canada.
It should it should be defunded, it is as simple as that. They
don't do the research they purport to do. They're not interested
at all in education. They are interested in the indoctrination of
people as young as they can get their hands on, so to speak.
Our society needs to figure out how to stop shunting public tax
money to radical left-wing activists. If we were doing that for
the radical right-wing activists, there would be an absolute storm,
but it's happened incrementally since the 1960s and needs to stop.
So that's what conservatives and also liberals --true liberals in
the English sense-- are up against me. What's happened also as a
consequence of this postmodern neo-Marxist intellectual invasion,
is the center keeps moving way to the right now, so if you're a
classical liberal, you've become a conservative.
And so for all of you who are interested pursuing the conservative
agenda. There's a lot of classic liberals that you could be talking
to.
And then finally with regards to talking to young people. You
finally have something to sell to them. It is not easy to sell
conservatism to young people, because they want to change things.
That's not what conservatives want to do, they want to maintain
things. Well now you got something to sell -- you can sell them
freedom of speech, and you can sell them responsibility.
The left is selling them rights, you can sell them responsibility.
I can tell you, because I received many letters of this sort ...
young people are absolutely starving for someone to provide them
with a sense of responsibility, and say look here, here's something
worth living for, man.
You can find meaning in life with freedom, but freedom...freedom is
a chaotic sort of meaning, right, and freedom isn't sort of thing
makes people happy. It is the sort of thing people troublesome --
troubled. Because freedom expands your series of choices, and that
makes you nervous and uncertain... not to say that that's a bad
thing. It's a good thing but it requires that you shoulder the
responsibility of the freedom, but responsibility per se is what
gives your life meaning, genuine meaning in the face of suffering.
And young people are really there starving for that. I've been
teaching young people for 30 years, and mostly what I've been
teaching them about is responsibility.
Like, you're heirs to a great tradition. It's not perfect. Obviously.
But comparatively there's nothing else like it, that's ever been
produced, and it represents a tiny minority of the human polities,
most of which are are run by murderous antisocial psychopathic
thugs, and seriously, and so what kind of alternative is that?
We've got this beacon of freedom and wealth in the West, which
works, although it doesn't work perfectly. And one of one of the
responsibilities of young people is to find out what's at the core
of that, the great core of that. The paramount importance of the
individual, and the divinity of speech, man. That's something to
sell its what our whole culture is predicated on.
