Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, my name is David Theroux, and I'm the president of the independent Institute We're especially delighted to welcome you to this Evening our special program is entitled the meaning and reality of individual sovereignty with a renowned scholar and best-selling author Jordan B. Peterson For those of you who may be new to the independent Institute, you'll find information on us in the printed program that hopefully you received The independent Institute is a nonprofit nonpartisan public policy research organization that sponsors in-depth studies of major social and economic issues The purpose is to bowl the advance peaceful prosperous and free societies grounded in a commitment to human dignity In the process we seek robust dialogue of key issues and we stand against efforts to shut down the free exchange of ideas The results of our work are published as books and form the basis for numerous conference and media programs Neither seeking nor accepting government funding. We hope that you will join our lighthouse society Within just a couple years Jordan Peterson has taken the world by storm Indeed he's become a profound and powerful phenomenon in the midst of the cultural confusion of our age a A courageous articulate and sparkling champion of free speech individual liberty personal responsibility Free markets civic virtue the rule of law and the judeo-christian values that underpin Western civilization Dr. Peterson has burst onto the public scene with his incisive critiques of political correctness identity politics moral relativism post-modernism and collectivism and statism on the left and right Here's just a sampling of the many memorable quotes by him quote Don't compare yourself with other people compare yourself with who you were yesterday unquote or Free speech is not just another value is the foundation of Western civilization Don't lie about ANYTHING, EVER. lying leads to hell We have to rediscover the eternal values that... and then live them out No one gets away with anything ever So take responsibility for your own life Now what is remarkable is that such common sense and enduring wisdom Has been so sadly lacking in the public square But what is also so astounding and encouraging is the enormous interest Dr. Peterson is generating globally in restoring first principles Author the number 1 international bestseller 12 rules for life an antidote to chaos Jordan Peterson is professor of psychology at the University of Toronto He is also author of the book maps of meaning the architecture of belief Plus over 100 scientific papers and he has almost 2 million subscribers to his YouTube channel His work explores the modern world by combining the hard-won truths of ancient tradition With the stunning revelations of cutting-edge science now you can read further details about his background on the program that hopefully you got But I will just add one additional note He's a native of North Western Canada (in) 2016 he was inducted as an honorary member of the quack-e-to-tell tribe in the Pacific Northwest and given the name alestalagie meaning great seeker Please join me in welcoming Jordan B Peterson Well, thank you all for coming. it's good to see you here The meaning and reality of individual sovereignty That's a fundamental question as far as I'm concerned Because it's by no means self-evident Why? the idea of individual sovereignty should be granted the primacy of place that it Has been granted or you could say it another way the The reasons that that proposition have been deemed self-evident are not obvious so When I was just backstage, I was looking at the Declaration of Independence, which I do quite regularly make sure that I've got that especially the introductory Statements formulated properly and the introductory statements. I won't quote them precisely but They lay out a series of propositions And the first is that we hold these truths to be self-evident and that people are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights that they're equal and that Government is to govern bike by the consent of individuals and Those are axiomatic statements, right? There are this sort of statements that you build a system from you have to accept the statements first before you can build the system And it's analogous in some sense to Euclidean geometry, right? There's a Set of axioms and you accept them and then you can build a system, but you have to accept the axioms But you don't have to accept the axioms. That's the thing and one of the things that's very much worth understanding is that the current culture war that we're Embroiled in which really has been going on for in some ways For thousands of years, but in other ways for More specifically political ways. I suppose since the rise of Marxism about a hundred and fifty years ago It depends on how you analyze it whether you think about it as political or psychological because as a psychological phenomena, it's much older The the proposition that Those truths that are laid out in the Declaration of Independence are self-evident is No longer accepted by a large number of people Let's say in the intellectual academy and I would say that's particularly true of the post modernists. It's also true of the Marxists and the post modernists and the Marxists have United in a very strange manner because their Philosophies are not really commensurate with one another the post modernists profess Skepticism about meta-narratives large-scale stories that perhaps might Might serve as uniting structures for people's own cognitive Contents but also that unite groups of people across large swaths of territory they profess skepticism about the validity of those narratives and yet well, the problem with that is it leaves you nowhere because if you don't have a Uniting narrative a uniting story of uniting ethos. You don't have an explanation for Your existence in the world and you don't have a direction And that's not helpful Because you can't live without an explanation for your existence in the world and a direction or if you do live under those conditions You're bound to be miserable. And the reason you're bound to be miserable is because And I would say that this is technically true That almost all the positive emotion that you're going to experience in your life is a consequence of pursuing valuable goals It's not a consequence of attaining them It's a consequence of positing them aiming at them and then observing yourself moving towards them and that... the sense that accompanies that and we know the neurobiology of this sense actually quite well. the sense of that is one of Forward movement and engagement and meaning and accomplishment. It's something like that Hope that's another way of thinking about it. And it's the antidote in some sense to the flip side of life which is the fact that it's nasty brutish and short as Thomas Hobbes put it And that's inalienable as well there's no escape from the limitations and suffering of life And so in order for that not to become overwhelming and then that can easily become overwhelming and often does in people's lives Then you need a countervailing Set of propositions that you can act out and embody to endow that- Limitation with worth and that's a not a trivial Problem. I was just debating... Not really Slavoj Žižek about a week ago and two weeks ago maybe and I was debating him because he had been advertised to me and many others as sort of the world's foremost Marxist scholar and it turned out that He really was not much of a Marxist at all. And so I ended up criticizing the communist manifesto which Deserves criticism and and then I expected him to defend it but he didn't and so that was Sort of Interesting but non blessing um But he said something very interesting during that debate and it came all of a sudden it came out of the blue, you know And I think it was the most striking part of the entire discussion And then this is just a strange segue, but I'm trying I want to I need to Discuss this because it struck me so hard because I think it's such an important point I'd never thought about it before so he told me something I'd never thought about before at all He was talking about the Christian passion and he said that his Sense was that the most important part of it was The scene let's say where Christ is crucified and cries out to God that he's been Forsaken And he said look you gotta think about what that means. I'm paraphrasing him. He said that the suffering that characterizes individual human life is so intense that even if God Himself Dane's to undergo it it will test his faith to the point where he will not believe in his own existence That's really something and I thought wow, that's such a brilliant. That's such a brilliant observation. Is that Because it's definitely the case, you know, if you if you if you interact with people in any manner, that's the least bit Below the surface you find out that most people are carrying A relatively heavy existential burden of one form or another, you know, I mean most people many people have a physical illness that they're dealing with or a mental illness that they're dealing with and if You're in a fortunate position where you're not dealing with either of those you probably have a family member that does and if you don't have either of those you will that's for sure and And you know, that's just one of many terrible catastrophes that are certain to visit you and That terrible catastrophe is A challenge to us in many ways. It's a challenge to us because it forces us to look deeply for a countervailing meaning that can make sense out of that and then maybe more than makes sense out of it and And so I've been curious about whether or not that countervailing meaning exists, you know the post modernists The first thing about them especially the identity politics types I never know really what to call this group of people because if I call them postmodern Neo-marxists then I'm accused of being alt right conspiracy theorists and if if I if I call them Collectivists well that's accurate in some sense But not not precisely and I could call them identity politics players and that happens on the right and the left but that's the basic