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  • Jordan Peterson, psychology professor at so since the University West material.

  • But no University of Toronto.

  • Um, been there some years staffs got involved because way were sent the letters that Dr Peterson's dean and then Vice Provo, I believe, had sent him.

  • And they worried us tremendously assed people, concerned about academic freedom and the integrity of teaching the letters warned Dr Peterson to stop saying publicly that he would refuse requests to use non gender door or additional pronouns.

  • Andi, this is, uh, uh, uh for us.

  • That was that was a very serious matter, very seriously in incursion on the freedom of teachers to teach as they will.

  • Teaching has a lot to do with the report between the professor and the students to classroom dynamics and the honesty and sincerity that teaching requires we thought were infringed by by these orders, especially orders coming from from Dean's and department Department heads.

  • Um and so we wrote letters to University of Toronto about this.

  • So we're very privileged to have Dr Peterson with us today to talk to us about these things.

  • Maybe also some or theoretical and abstract things than his own particular days.

  • He's going to talk to us about why Freedom of speech is not just another value, Peters.

  • Thanks.

  • So I thought I'd start.

  • I'm gonna approach this from three directions.

  • But I or in three sections, I thought I'd start by just letting you know why.

  • I was objecting specifically to build C 16.

  • I made three videos and late September and, uh, one of them criticized Bill See 16.

  • One of them criticized the University of Toronto administrations.

  • The hot human resources peoples decision to make so called anti unconscious anti bias training mandatory for their HR staff, which I thought was and still think was reprehensible.

  • And, uh, I don't even remember what the other one was about.

  • But it doesn't really matter those that was the 1st 1 the one of Bill See 16 that caused most of the fewer, surprisingly enough, And I said I wouldn't use the made up what I consider neologisms that purport to describe the status, the status of people whose sexual identity is ambiguous because that isn't how it looked to me.

  • It looked to me like these words like Z and Tzar and so forth were the linguistic vanguard of intellectual movement.

  • that I would say detest is probably the right description, and that's this strange blend of postmodernism and Marxism that has emerged to occupy the bulk of the humanities and a good chunk of the social sciences.

  • So that was the first thing is that I'm not using those words.

  • That was the first thing that was personal, right?

  • Is that that's not a form of linguistic game that I'm willing to play, and I have my reasons for that.

  • The second was I regard the lead any legislation that compels people to use a certain kind of language as a very dangerous first of all dangerous piece of legislation directly, but also a very dangerous president.

  • I mean, there are limits on free speech that are already reasonably well in Stan.

  • She aided in the law.

  • You can't incite a crime.

  • You can't threaten someone bodily in a believable manner.

  • You can't libel someone.

  • We already have reasonable restrictions on on what you can't say.

  • But we've never had legislation that required you to use a certain language except in certain commercial applications.

  • So, for example, if you sell tobacco, you have to put a warning on it.

  • But the United States Supreme Court decided.

  • I believe it was in the 19 forties that similar attempts to compel speech on the part of individuals in non commercial settings was unconstitutional, and and I know that that doesn't have any direct bearing on Canadian law.

  • But certainly the principal does.

  • And then I was also very see one of the problems with a piece of legislation.

  • And this is, I suppose, the problem with interpreting a text, as the postmodernists would say, is that it's not easy to get the level of interpretation, right, right for interpreting a text, you can look at the you could look at the letters that happens with biblical interpretation.

  • Very often you could look at the individual words you could look at.

  • The phrase is gonna get the sentences.

  • You can look at paragraphs.

  • You could look at the work as a whole, and then you also have to look at the context within which the work is being interpreted in order to come up with on interpretation of anything that's complex.

  • And so when you see a piece of legislation, it isn't obvious what the legislation is actually intended to do.

  • Despite what its purported to do.

  • And it isn't obvious what level of analysis to pick when you're going to criticize it.

  • In some ways, Bill See, 16 you could regard it as innocuous, just as an extension of rights that have already been granted to certain, Let's say, protected groups, although I'm not so thrilled about the whole notion of describing rights to groups to begin with, were already far down that path.

  • But and you know what?

  • I'm being accused of making a mountain out of a mole hill.

  • But happily enough, the University of Toronto, after I made the videos, immediately produced two letters that were informed by their legal departments.

  • Wisdom, um, stating that what I had done with the video was perhaps in conflict with the university ethical guidelines, if you forget the ones that had to do with freedom of expression and that they might, that my actions and even in making the video might have violated that the tenants of the Ontario Human Rights Act as that's or the at least as it's interpreted by the on terror Human Rights commission.

  • And so that helped put to rest any suggestion that I was actually scaremongering because as soon as I as soon as I made the videos, the legal department at the UT immediately validated my fears.

  • And so that was a perverse was a perverse effect of their of the letters they sent to me.

  • So, um, the other thing, that there is other elements of the legislation that I object to and objected to and still do and if you read the policies within which the legislation will be interpreted as the federal justice website indicated that it would be interpreted in within the policies that the on terror Human Rights Commission has already established.

  • First, there's close cross talk between Ontario and the federal government because the liberals Aaron power in both and the radical end of the Liberal Party's in power in both situations.

  • And no, it turns out that it's illegal for like you're liable as an employer.

  • For example, if any of your employees say anything that could be construed as harassment, say, on the grounds of sexual, uh uh, or gender identity, even if what they say has unintended consequences.

  • And even if you don't know that they said it, and so that kind of legislation, I just think it's just absolutely reprehensible.

  • And then because it's designed to cast the broadest possible net to catch the most fish.

  • And it's clearly being implemented by people who are not precisely pro employer.

  • Let's put it that way.

  • And then there's another a little ugly secret hidden underneath the policies.

  • And that's manifest most clearly in the form of what's come to be known as the Gender Unicorn, which I would recommend that you look up, which is an animated character designed to indoctrinate small Children into the social constructionists worldview, which claims that biological sex, gender identity, gender expression and sexual proclivity very independently, which they most certainly do not now that's what I said in the video.

  • That's partly why I have been accused of, say, being a transphobic.

  • I also complained that the university was taking policy advice from the people who started black lives matter, and I don't have anything against black lives matter particularly.

  • But the two people who started it, r r nata the sorts of individuals.

  • Let's say that the university should be basing its policy decisions.

  • The advice they shouldn't be taking advice from those people with regards to their policy and apparently that makes me a racist.

  • So the first part of the argument about what happened with my videos was actually whether or not I was racist, transphobic and all of that.

  • But the point that I was making the technical specific technical point was that the claim that those four phenomena very independently was just patently false.

  • And it iss by any reasonable definition of false, and I know that it's part of, Ah, much broader propaganda exercise, as evidenced by the Gender Unicorn, for example, which gets Children to indicate on four sliders.

  • They're sex assigned at birth, their gender identity, their gender expression and their sexual proclivity.

  • And you can look at the animation or at the at the cartoon and decide for yourself by its graphic style.

  • What age people it's aimed at.

  • So, um, is this a bill to protect transsexual rights?

  • Or is it a bill to further ah, postmodern neo Marxist agenda?

  • Well, God only knows, But as far as I'm concerned, having analyzed the context within which this bill arose and within which it will be interpreted, I'm going to go for the furthering the postmodern neo Marxist agenda until I'm until that's thoroughly disproved.

  • I would also like to inform you that I've had plenty of letters from transgender people.

  • At least 30 and only one of them was critical of what I'm doing because they claim and as as have many of the people I've talked to, that the idea that a group of activists self can self nominate as the representatives of a given group and then speak for them as if they have a homogeneous voice is absolutely absurd.

  • And it is.

  • It is completely ridiculous.

  • And most of the transsexual people that have bean contacting me have said the same thing, which is these people don't speak for me.

  • I wish they'd shut up because they're doing a lot more harm than good.

  • And I don't buy what they're doing anyways.

  • So, you know, I think that the claim of the activist types to speak on behalf of the groups that they purport to represent is weak at best, and I don't know why we ever assume that it that their representation is valid except that we're afraid to criticize that particular presupposition, you know, I mean, there's nothing more ridiculous than assuming that someone is because someone is black, that they speak for black people.

  • I mean, I think I can't think of anything that's more particularly indicative of a fundamentally racist attitude than that.

  • You know?

  • Well, those people, they're all the same.

  • It's like, Yeah, well, sorry it didn't work out that way, So I wanted to clarify all that so that, you know, you have a little bit clear idea about why I was doing what I was doing in.

  • People have asked, so to speak, Why I chose to die on that particular hill and answer is every every massive conflict of ideas, let's say, manifests itself in the minute.

  • And that's why it's often difficult to gain any headway.

  • Because no matter where you draw the line, it's arbitrary and and subject to criticism.

  • And, you know, the fact that this happens to be about gender neutral pronouns regarding transgender people to me is just more or less an accident.

  • It could have been about almost any number of other things, but I would also like to suggest that what should have happened with what I did was nothing right.

  • I made some videos that was relatively obscure academic and I made some videos in my private time that we're, you know, pretty badly produced because they're just amateur.

  • I was trying to straighten out my thinking about a couple of issues the anti unconscious bias training, for example, and also this legislative mess.

  • And obviously it struck a major chord.

  • And that, to me, is indication that my original supposition was correct and that there was far more going on under the surface than there was at the surface.

  • I mean, you know, like I said, it's very difficult to pick the proper level of analysis, but one of the ways you justify your choices by observing the impact of your choice of level of analysis and seeing if it's if the consequences air commensurate with your original hypothesis.

  • And I thought, Well, just because people say they're doing one thing with a piece of legislation doesn't mean that that's what they're doing.

  • And course lead piece of legislation is a hydra.

  • In any case, it does all sorts of things that people don't intend it to do.

  • So that's a little background, and I'll leave the background at that and then I'll talk to you now from a practical perspective.

  • Why?

  • I believe that the idea of freedom of speech is not just another value among other values.

  • And I would say that the simplest reason for that is that speech isn't precisely a mechanism.

  • It's ah, it's a process.

  • It's a it's a it's a it's a It's a generative process Speech free speech is the process by which all ideas air generated and and I want it make it clear why I believe that to be the case with speech specifically because you might say, Well, no, that's thought but But I don't think that's right, because thing is, the thought is a far more collective enterprise than people generally understand.

  • First of all, most of the thoughts you have aren't your thoughts.

  • You know, I don't remember who it was that said that everyone is the unconscious exponents of a dead philosopher.

  • But that's definitely the case, you know, are the very linguistic mechanisms by which we formulate our our grip on the world, our collective constructs and in some cases, almost entirely because creative thought iss far rarer than people generally presume.

  • And what that means is that when we're speaking and when we're thinking we're usually using, if not cliches, which is very frequently the case, as you know perfectly well if you've ever graded a particularly bad undergraduate essay.

  • But even among more sophisticated people, it's generally the case that they're acting as avatars of ideas that they did not produce.

  • And so that doesn't mean they can't further the ideas.

  • But the point is, is that you know, we're born into a linguistically mediated culture, and it's it's mediated at all of the multiple levels of analysis that I already described and were shaped in the way that we view the world with regards to the input that that that we receive.

  • That's collective.

  • We learn language from other people.

  • We use the words that other people use we use the phrase is that other people use.

  • It's an intensely collective exercise, but even more specifically so.

  • That's from a general perspective, Let's say, but even more specifically, the problem with thinking is that you're a very narrow channel, right?

  • I mean, there's a lot of world, and there isn't very much of you, and that means that there's a lot more than you filter out.

  • Then there is that you take it and you're filtering is very, very intensive.

  • It's dependent to some degree on your embodiment.

  • It's dependent to some degree far more than people generally realize on your motivations and you're and your temperament, which is a topic will return to.

  • And then it's further narrowed by your position in society and by the people that you have around you and by your particular domain of expertise or lack thereof.

  • And and then there are sets of darker motivations as well, that blind you to certain things that you should be able to see but either don't or won't.

  • And so the problem with thinking is that a You're a narrow channel B.

  • You're not very good at it and see your incredibly biased.

  • And there isn't much you can do about that except listen and talk to other people because they're I mean, they're not the only source of correction, but they're a pretty intense source of correction.

  • I mean, we'r blasting corrective information at each other all the time, right?

  • I mean, even in a situation like this, which you could think of as a monologue but isn't it's a dialogue that the reason I'm watching all of you is to see, you know, are you paying attention?

  • And if not, I better adjust what I'm saying.

  • Do your facial expressions indicate that your understanding what I'm saying and following it?

  • Maybe you're not in Your eyes are open, you know, in some specific way.

  • You're you're actually facing me.

  • Your eyes are on me.

  • I can read your facial expressions, which is always what I'm looking at individuals in the audience, and I'm constantly calibrating what I'm saying if it's a dynamic conversation to ensure that the information flow is maximized and the reason I look at your eyes is because I can tell where they're pointing and the reason I look at your faces because you're broadcasting motivation and emotional information non stop at me.

  • Well, I'm speaking.

  • And so even in a situation like this, which, like a set, is more monologue than that.

  • Otherwise there's a tremendous amount of corrective information continually flowing between speaker and listener.

  • And if that stops, you know what?

  • If you hear a speaker whose detached from the audience often someone who's reading, for example, it's much more difficult to listen to them as everyone knows and That's because there's a deadness about reading something in front of an audience.

  • And I think the reason for that is that that living, let's call it spirit isn't manifesting itself in the same manner as it is when, when the speeches both spontaneous and self corrected.

  • And so the thing about free speech is that, like I'm not a free speech advocates, let's say I'm a true speech advocate, which is to say that I believe that people should say what they believe to be true.

  • I think that's that's your obligation.

  • It's also you're right, but it comes with an obligation.

  • But I don't believe that true speeches possible without free speech, because you're just not very good at thinking.

  • And so you have to stumble around when your first formulating ideas and wander into territory that's not necessarily productive and manifest your biases.

  • And in short, you have to be a fool.

  • And the only way that you you improve upon that performances by well, first of all, stumbling through it to begin with and then second by observing carefully what sort of reactions you're getting in having a dialogue around it so that you can start to sharpen up your ideas and improve their focus and find out where you've made a mistake and all of those things.

  • So a lot of what's necessary with regards to thinking is the freedom to make mistakes.

  • Because what are you gonna do it right the first time?

  • I don't think so.

  • And you know, that's why, for Carl Young, for example, the fool was a mythological precursor.

  • Today to the hero, the trickster is a mythological precursor to the hero.

  • Because unless you're willing to stumble around badly to begin with, you know want to be a fool.

  • When you first start doing something which is always the case, when you're learning something new, then you're not gonna make any progress.

  • And so, practically speaking, free speech has to be as untrammeled as possible so that people can be wrong and they could be biased.

  • And they can still express their opinions, including their darker ones, and then allow themselves to be subject partly to improvement by the world.

  • Because if you say things that are too stupid and then act them out, the world smacks you a good one.

  • But there's also the social intermediaries, the other people that you're communicating with who will also do the same thing.

  • You know, when we're always broadcasting information at each other, constantly trying to shape each other's behavior.

  • And what we're trying to do is to bring forth from other people that which we would like to see them manifest.

  • And so there's an implicit ideal is well that people are broadcasting at each other all the time.

  • And there's tremendous social pressure, generally speaking, to manifest that implicit ideal as closely as possible because otherwise people disapprove of viewer, lack interest in what you're saying or criticize You were and so on, and you have to be allowed to be exposed to that kind of corrective feedback because otherwise you drift and and you've become subject to your own idiosyncratic insanity.

  • And I mean, I've seen that very many times in my clinical practice because well, first of all, I have some isolated people that come to see me, and all they do is talk.

  • I just listen I mean, because they don't have anyone else around, and they need someone to run their narrative by to keep their minds organized.

  • They can't do it themselves, and they can't do it without listening to themselves talk, even because for most people talking is how they think on dhe.

  • Talking socially is even more how they think.

  • And I don't mean that literally.

  • I don't mean that metaphorically is that.

  • And I think that's true for almost everyone, you know.

  • I mean, there are people who are trained academically who can actually think.

  • But to think you have to divide yourself into some personalities, I suppose, each of which has a differing opinion, a well elucidated, differing opinion.

  • And then you have to let those different elements of your personality have an internal dialogue, and you have to draw conclusions from that.

  • It's very, very difficult for people to do that, and we radically over estimate the degree to which they do.

  • Young said at one point.

  • That people don't think so much is as thoughts appear in their head and they believe them, which I think is a much more accurate way of describing the general.

  • Because true thought is not only that the thoughts arise in your mind.

  • It's that you look at the thought and then you critique it right.

  • You have to separate yourself from the thought and decide whether or not it's it's it's valuable.

  • That's more like an editing function.

  • And, you know, it takes a long time to be a good editor, a tremendous amount of time, and it just doesn't happen.

  • Generally speaking so well.

  • So I would say, Well, without free speech, there's no true thought and then you might say, Well, who the hell cares whether or not we think?

  • And I think the answer to that is fairly straightforward mean?

  • You might think it's so obvious that it doesn't need explanation, but they're very few things that are so obvious they don't need explanation.

  • So the reason you think it's so that the world doesn't smack you as hard as it might fundamentally, you know.

  • And I really mean this technically, because the way that people evolved the capacity to thought for thought was that the prefrontal cortex, which mediates a lot of voluntary linguistic ability, actually emerged over the course of evolutionary history out of the motor cortex.

  • And so that's a very interesting thing to understand because it means that you know, animals basically think by moving, and the problem with that is if you think by moving and you make the wrong move, then you're dead.

  • Where is what human beings can do is they can generate fictional avatars of themselves in fictional worlds, and they can run the avatars as simulations and the ones that get killed.

  • They don't express in behavior.

  • And I mean, you could do that with words, too.

  • Although people know originally would have done it mostly with images, they do the same thing with drama.

  • And so the reason that you think and I think it was George was Alfred North Whitehead that said this, I think.

  • But I'm not absolutely sure the reason you think it's so that your thoughts congee I instead of you.

  • And that's a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant phrase.

  • Onda Absolutely the case.

  • So if you think properly, then you kill off the ideas that, if you acted out, would kill you or at least cause you suffering or perhaps cause suffering to the people around you.

  • And since it's more or less obvious a priority, that suffering is worse than not suffering under most circumstances, it seems reasonable to act in a manner that will minimize it to the degree that that's possible and So you need clarity of thought, because that helps guide you through a world that's in shrouded in fog and full of sharp objects.

  • And if you don't want to stumble into them and impaled yourself, then you should have sharp vision and sharp capacity to communicate.

  • You know, that's one of the things I tell students when I'm trying to teach them to write, because they no one ever tells them why they should learn to write.

  • It's like you learn to write so you can think and you learn to think so that the world doesn't treat you any more harshly than it absolutely has to.

  • And that's no joke, you know.

  • And if you if you're a person who's being around a bit, you see very rapidly that people who sharpen their arguments properly and can articulate their position and defend it are always, always the people who are most successful and most compelling in that.

  • And that changed the way structures function.

  • And that also helped things continue in the proper path when they're running down the proper path.

  • It's no joke to be articulate and to be able to think there isn't anything that's more powerful than that.

  • And that's a good segue way into the second or the third part of what I wanted to talk to you about.

  • See, since I made those videos I've become, I guess the word is popular on Yeah, well, in many ways, by about November.

  • By the end of November last year, there were more than 200 newspaper articles about the consequences of the videos that I had produced, and those were like impress printed articles.

  • I'm not talking about anything that happened on YouTube, and YouTube is a very strange phenomena.

  • Let me tell you, it's a far more powerful than you think.

  • So, just as an aside, I was on our program last week, hosted by a guy named Joe Rogan.

  • I don't how many of you know who Joe Rogan is?

  • Joe Rogan gets 1.2 billion downloads of his podcasts a year.

  • Just think about that.

  • That's absolutely unparalleled.

  • And everybody under 30 is getting their news from my, their Facebook or from YouTube.

  • The old conventional media sources they're dead is they're so dead you could hardly believe it.

  • So YouTube and one of the reasons I'm bringing it up is because YouTube is the first platform that's produced for people, the capacity to make the spoken word as far reaching and permanent as the written word right?

  • That's a complete cultural revolution.

  • It's the first time it's ever happened.

  • I mean, it wouldn't have to be YouTube.

  • It just turns out that that's the platform that got there first.

  • But it's a big deal.

  • And anyways, um, the reason that that my that I became popular, I think was partly because of of the political philosophical videos that I made.

  • But then when people came to my website to watch them, they stayed generally speaking, to watch the lectures that I had been posting on there since 2000 and 13 and, uh, those were derived from work I did on a book called Maps of Meaning, which I published in 1999.

  • See, what I was trying to do with that book was to sort something out that was very complex, and that was when I was growing up and the Cold War was raging.

  • I couldn't understand precisely why we have divided into two armed camps around our respective ideological positions, either.

  • Why those ideological positions were so important that people would risk the destruction of the world to protect them, Let's say or why it was those two particular ideologies or whether or not this was just a difference of opinion, right?

  • Which would be that would be a more post modern view is there's multiple ways that you can organize societies in the West.

  • We happen to organize our society one way.

  • But that's one of a plethora of potential ways of organizing society.

  • And let's say the Communists had decided to organize their society another way, and human beings are infinitely malleable.

  • And so, you know, the social structures that we occupy are arbitrary in some sense, matter of opinion and maybe collective opinion, but nonetheless still a matter of opinion.

  • And I thought, Well, is it the case that the values that we hold to be true in the West are merely based upon opinion?

  • And so I started to investigate that, and and the conclusion that I came to as a consequence of hitting the question from multiple different perspectives was that that was not a reasonable way of formulating, of, of interpreting the evidence.

  • And so I looked at euros evidence from neuro psychology and neuroscience mostly mostly, um, based, at least in part on the work of someone named Jeffrey Gray.

  • It was a very good psychologist, very interested in anxiety.

  • I looked at general behavioral psychology, looked at literature, and I looked at mythology, and I could see a pattern emerging across all of those which I think is a nice way of determining whether or not something exists.

  • Like it's one thing to see a pattern in one set of data.

  • But if you can see the same pattern and another set that's quite historically distinct from the first and then see the same pattern in another set and then another set, then the probability that that's a spurious pattern starts to decrease quite radically.

  • And so I don't think the pattern was spurious.

  • And so I'm going to tell you what I think I What would you say extracted.

  • This is very complicated and makes a difficult transition in the talk, So I'm gonna read something first.

  • Yeah, this is from the from the Gospel of John.

  • It's one of the most famous lines in the Bible.

  • In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.

  • It's very strange idea because from a cosmological perspective, because it posits that there's something conscious or cognitive about the origin that there's.

  • There's a necessary cognitive element to the origin I think about that essentially, is something associated with consciousness.

  • And of course we don't really understand the relationship between consciousness and being.

  • We don't understand consciousness at all, but it seems integrally associate ID, at least with our individual beings, because one of the things that we seem to not doubt is that we are in fact conscious and that's or other people.

  • And if I treat someone as if they're not conscious, while they tend not to be very happy about that, so they'll certainly object to it.

  • So despite what we might say, we believe we certainly act as if we regard all other human beings as conscious and and the consciousness is a pre pre requisite for there for the existence of their experience.

  • So anyway, so that there's this emphasis in this book that is at the root of our culture, that there's something about verbal communication in particular that has to be regarded as foundational and I think that's actually to some degree in keeping with the postmodernist claims that everything is a language game.

  • Let's say that everything is constructed by language.

  • Now.

  • I don't believe that everything is constructed by language, But I'm just pointing that out because you can take this particular perspective and you could look at it for very a variety of different intellectual sources and still derive on analog of the of the claim from it.

  • So and then s Oh, that that was so.

  • So I want you to keep that in the back of your mind for a moment now.

  • That idea that that the word was there at the beginning of creation.

  • That's a very, very old idea.

  • It's it's older than the Judeo Christian context from which I extracted it.

  • So, for example, in Egypt, there was a god named Petya who is a major god.

  • I maybe pronouncing that wrong.

  • But as far as the Egyptians were concerned, he was the original creator, and he created as a consequence of thinking but more specifically as a consequence of speaking so again, there was this idea that there was this primacy of speaking as a as a force that brings being into existence.

  • And then you see the same thing in the mess.

  • Obtain me in context.

  • Their creation myth was called the Enuma Elish in There's a God in that story and that story.

  • Apparently it's one of the places from which the creation story in the in the Bible was extracted, that God is named Marduk and Martic is God that fights chaos and creates the world out of the consequences.

  • And he he has a variety of different attributes, one of which, his head is ringed with eyes so he can see in all directions.

  • So there's very much emphasis among the Mesopotamians on the primacy of attention, Let's say, but he can also speak magic words.

  • And it's the fact that he's equipped with this massive capacity for attention and the ability to speak magic words that enables him to go and fight the dragon of Chaos, roughly speaking, into cutter into pieces and make up the world.

  • One of Martick's names, for example, is he who makes ingenious things out of the combat with time at and time at is this primordial goddess of chaos that represents the sort of the formless proto matter of phase from which consciousness extracts structure.

  • Oh, that's one way of thinking about it.

  • So that idea is quite widespread.

  • It's a very in fact.

  • It's an idea that informs mythological structures everywhere.

  • As far as I can tell, there's this idea that there's a dynamic between what you know and what you don't know you can think about.

  • Those is different domains of reality, what you know and what you don't know.

  • And the thing that mediates between what you know and what you don't know is this thing that has the attributes of of spoken wisdom.

  • It's something like that.

  • And here's here's the way.

  • That's a very complicated idea.

  • It's very difficult to understand.

  • It's extraordinarily difficult to understand, but the I could give you some sense of it.

  • It's It's a phenomenal, logical idea, I suppose.

  • Imagine that you were that I don't know.

  • Maybe you have it.

  • Yeah, maybe you're a medical student.

  • Medicals, premed student, right?

  • You want to go to medical school, And so you're Isley Beadling away on your on your courses.

  • You're doing all right, you know?

  • Then you go take the M cat and you score it to, say, 20th percentile, which, of course, 20% of people do.

  • And that will come as quite a shock to you, no doubt, because you go in there in the world that you understand.

  • And in that world you're competent.

  • Let's say to become a medical doctor, and when you open the envelope and you look at the number, then well, then your world crumbles and collapses.

  • And what it collapses into, I would say, is equivalent to this formless chaos that the ancients believed was the ground of being.

  • And it's this place where confusion reigns, right?

  • Fact.

  • The word for the chaos that God orders with the word at the beginning of Genesis is often translated as chaos or confusion.

  • When you think well, you formulated a world that you inhabit with a particular linguistic, rational, logical structure.

  • It's predicated on certain axioms of belief like that you're competent to be a medical doctor, and then you receive a piece of information that makes not only your present understanding of yourself no longer relevant or correct, but also your past understanding of yourself and also your future Poof gone right, well gone, where gone into what Well gone into chaos, roughly speaking.

  • And then you're in very rough shape as a consequence of that.

  • And if you do manage to lever yourself out of that chaotic condition that you now find yourself in, you're going to essentially do it with thought and dialogue, right?

  • Because you're gonna talk to people.

  • What did I do wrong?

  • What's wrong with the way I thought, How could I have been so misled by what I believe?

  • What should I do now?

  • Who actually am I?

  • All of that is a way of reconstructing yourself from the ashes, so to speak.

  • I would say that and you do that with with With with speech.

  • And you do that with true speech and so true speeches.

  • What?

  • What redeems you from the chaos of unstructured being?

  • And so so then that that's another thing to think about for a moment.

  • And then I'm gonna bring up this final piece, and we can think about it too.

  • So I've been trying to figure out how these ideas came to be because they came to be over a very long period of time.

  • So the God Marduk, for example, he was assembled you could say as the empires of the ancient Middle East, as the tribal people of the ancient Middle East came together and they each had their own deities that represented their highest values.

  • And when they came together, those deities had to be amalgamated.

  • And so Tribe A has its highest value and try Bee has its highest value, and they're embodied.

  • That's the day of the element, and they come together.

  • And then the deities and some sense have to have a war to figure out who's the top god.

  • And so if you assemble a few 100 drives out of that, comes a conceptualization of the top God.

  • That was Martic, for example, in Mesopotamia, and he usually absorbs the names of all the previous gods and as he sort of emerged as the king of the hierarchy.

  • And so So you think about this.

  • If you think about the expression of the deity as the projection of the highest ideal of the tribe, and that's something that's being worked out over perhaps millennia, especially with people who have an oral tradition, and then you bring those different tribes together.

  • What happens is the highest ideals in their embodied form have what you could think of metaphorically as a war.

  • And the war of Gods in heaven, by the way, is a very ancient and widespread mythological motif, and out of that war arises.

  • What you might describe as I met have value.

  • And so the meta value would be the highest value among a set of values.

  • And the question would be, what would that value be?

  • What would that highest value be?

  • Is there something about it that's that's recognizable and say somewhat constant so that if you took 100 tribes here and amalgamated their ideals and you took 100 tribes here, it amalgamated their ideals.

  • If the two sets of amalgamation sze would have a structural similarity to one another, and as far as I can tell the answer to that is yes.

  • And it's a logical answer because you'd expect structural similarity if you extract out a common common element from a very large number of constituent represented.

  • So, for example, if you take ah ah, large number of female faces and average them so I'm not talking about the average face, I'm talking about the averaged face.

  • It's not the same thing.

  • The averaged female faces attractive and so is the average male face.

  • And so because it kind of constitutes the central human form.

  • And if it takes 64 women and you extract out an average face and you take another 64 you get the same face.

  • Well, maybe it takes more than 64 but you get the point.

  • And so well, So I was I was thinking about how that that process came to be.

  • I decided to look at it, even like to go back farther in time to try to understand how it is that we formulated our values per se and especially given that at some point we weren't linguistic creatures at all.

  • Right.

  • We separated from the common ancestors between us and chimpanzees about six million years ago.

  • Sometime during that six million year process, we started to be able to imitate ourselves first and then represent ourselves in image and action and then only after that, to start to articulate ourselves.

  • So a lot of the knowledge that we have is grounded in our embodiment, but also in the shaping of that embodiment across extraordinary long periods of time.

  • So like there's an implicit way of being in your form in your embodied form.

  • But more importantly, there's an implicit way of being.

  • That's a consequence of the fact that we've existed within hierarchical social structures for far longer than we were even sharing a common ancestor, say with great apes.

  • So that's for maybe hundreds of millions of years with regards to being embedded in hierarchy.

  • So then the question is something like, Well, for embedded in the hierarchy, and we have bean forever.

  • That's about 350 million years.

  • By the way, is there a set of attributes that tends reliably to move you up the hierarchy?

  • Because if there is, you see being going up the hierarchy increases the probability of reproductive success.

  • So there's actually nothing more important to determine over the course of 350 million years inside a hierarchy than how it is that you ratchet yourself up the hierarchy reliably.

  • And you could think about that in some sense, as the source of ideals.

  • Here's a kind of a concrete way of thinking about that, you know, if you get 100 men together, they're going to they're gonna organize themselves into, ah, hierarchical structure.

  • They have to where they're gonna stay chaotic and fight that That's the other alternative.

  • And so, but the way that that that the people who are going to rise to the top, they might rise to the top because of their sheer physical prowess and power.

  • But they also might rise to the top because they're very competent at certain things.

  • And it says, if all the men are going to get together and vote and maybe that would actually happen to determine who best embodies the spirit of the group and who should be granted leadership and in evolutionary context.

  • By the way, that would also help ensure that that person would propagate their genes into the next generation.

  • It's not a trivial effect, especially among men.

  • It's a big effect because, roughly speaking, half, half of all manner are not reproductively successful.

  • So there's a wicked.

  • There's a wicked culling, Let's say, among men Well, you can see this among chimpanzees as well.

  • They have dominance hierarchies, some sort of chimps rise to the top and you might think, Well, that's the like Cave man chimp who's best pounding out all the all the rivals.

  • But it turns out that that's not exactly the case.

  • And Friends to Wall has done a very good job of detail ing this with his work on chimpanzees in particular, and he's found that the power hungry tyrant sort of chimp can rule for a while.

  • But he tends to have a very unstable kingdom, and the reason for that is, is he's not very good at mutually.

  • Grooming is not good.

  • It's socially connecting with other males, and it isn't popular among the females and doesn't attend to the to the young essentially.

  • And so what happens is even if he's like the meanest, toughest guy on the block to subordinate.

  • Chimps team up.

  • They make friends, they groom each other and they have each other's backs.

  • And in one day he's having an off day because he ate too many fermented bananas the night before.

  • Like they just tear him into pieces.

  • And chimps are unbelievably strong and unbelievably brutal.

  • They seem to have absolutely no internal regulation whatsoever of their aggression.

  • It all seems to be manifested outside in terms of dominance, Harkin control, and we know that because they go on raiding parties into other chimp territories.

  • And when they find chimps that aren't part of their hierarchy, they just ripped them into pieces.

  • And so that's a scary thing if you think about our similarity with chimpanzees because we like to think we have internal controls over our aggression, but it's not so bloody obvious, I can tell you that.

  • Anyways, what the wall found was that it's actually chimps that arm or, um, you might say humane.

  • Although Champaign I don't know what the equivalent is, let's say humane, that managed to produce hierarchies that are more stable and actually managed to stay alive on top of them for much longer periods of time.

  • And he thinks about that is the emergence of an implicit morality rights of morality that's acted out.

  • So then you think, well, there there are different ways of climbing up a hierarchy.

  • There are worse and better ways.

  • The better ways allow you to live longer in a more stable hierarchy, and the evolutionary payoff for that is that you leave more more descendants, and so the hierarchy itself becomes a very powerful shaping mechanism that determines how it is that people are going to adapt because it's the primary method of selection.

  • So there's an ethic in there.

  • There's an ethic that emerges from the social interactions, but that's rapidly transformed into a biological selection device, and so were selected.

  • And that's especially true among human beings because with chimps, the females are indiscriminate maters.

  • Which is to say that a female chimp and heat will mate with any male chimp.

  • Now, this dominant males chase the subordinate males away, so there's still more likely to leave offspring than the subordinates.

  • But it's not because of the females, but human females are different.

  • Human females exert choice and quite brutal choice.

  • You might put it that way there, very choosy.

  • And it's one of the things that seems to have distinguished us from chimpanzees.

  • And what roughly seems to happen is that the male dominance hierarchy elects men to the higher say rungs of the hierarchy.

  • And then the females peel from the top.

  • And so that means that what you can say is that human beings are the consequence of intense male dominance competition.

  • It's not necessarily dominance, but it's competition for the upper rungs of the hierarchy, mediated by female selection and so that's produced a SW, far as I can tell, a powerful a powerful pattern of behavior.

  • Now the question is, what's that pattern of behavior?

  • I would say Well, it's encapsulated in mythology and two forms, and the question is, well, who should lead?

  • Let's say that's the question.

  • Who should lead?

  • That is the question.

  • Who should be sovereign?

  • Or maybe when it becomes abstracted, what should be sovereign?

  • The first question from an evolutionary perspective is who should be sovereign.

  • But once you can abstract, then the principle of sovereignty couldn't be detached from the leader and become a principle all on its own.

  • And that might be first expressed in mythological or imagistic form.

  • Dramatic form like the The Good Guys versus the bad Guys are good versus evil.

  • We could say it like that, but obviously it's embodied and acted out far before it's extracted and turned into an abstracted representation.

  • Well, what seems to have happened is so one of the common themes, for example, in mythology, is what's roughly being described as a hero myth and a hero myth involves someone who's part of ah demolished community community under threat.

  • The threats usually signified by something vaguely like a dragon, and the dragon comes out.

  • It's eternal.

  • It comes out to attack the village.

  • The hero comes out and confronts the dragon and then freeze the virgin, for example, or gets the gold.

  • And to me, that's a very, very well.

  • That is a very old story.

  • It's in the Newman English, for example.

  • It's It's this story at the basis of very many What would you call it, widely dispersed myths around the world.

  • The dragon, for example, is a very common symbol.

  • I think the reason for that is it's so complicated.

  • But I think the reason for that is something like this is that human beings learned to understand over time that the most reliable leader was the person who could step outside the structure when it was damaged, to confront something that was chaotic and dangerous in whatever form that might be, and then to bring something valuable back as a consequence.

  • And you see that principle being elevated continually in mythological stories like thehe New Mellish, for example, where the main hero, Marduk, is elevated among the other gods and is characterized by this intense capacity for vision, which the Greek, which the Egyptians also worshipped in the form of Horace and this capacity to speak, which has this ability to to formulate and reshape the world Well, that's the thing is that it's a ziff.

  • What we've discovered as a species in some senses that there's that the person that should lead the thing that should be sovereign is the thing that can step outside the structured order, incorporate something new and dangerous and then produce something valuable out of it.

  • That's one phase.

  • Another phase is another hero.

  • Myth is the person who hoo hoo criticizes the power elite when it becomes corrupt and points out the corruption and then restructures the society.

  • That happens in the prophetic books, for example, continually in the Old Testament.

  • Because you could think that the historical enemies of humanity are twofold.

  • In some sense, one is the chaos that comes from outside and that disrupts the standard order, and that needs to be dealt with.

  • And the other is the chaos that comes in the inside when when our institutions and hierarchies become corrupt and then the thing that transforms that is the thing that has enough courage either to stand up against the chaos or to say something about the corrupt institutions.

  • And what's happened, as far as I can tell, is that over time those principles have been extracted out from this much more embodied domain and raised to the principle of highest sovereignty.

  • Now one of the things that happened in Egypt with called the Dimock Democratization of Serious and Horace what seems to happen this is this is what happened in Egypt.

  • Is that the power to manifest that sovereignty?

  • Let's say it's first only regarded as an attribute of the sovereign king, and the King is actually only king in so far as he could manifest that.

  • So in Mesopotamia you're only emperor.

  • If you were a good Marduk, you'd go out on New Year's Day and reenact the entire Cosme Arditti, and you had to be a good representative of Marduk.

  • Otherwise you didn't deserve your sovereignty.

  • And in Egypt, unless you were good Avatar, let's say of Horace.

  • No serious.

  • The combination.

  • Then you didn't get to be Pharaoh.

  • So you were embodying this principle.

  • This principle of sovereignty and what happened in Egypt was that first of all, the principle of sovereignty.

  • The images of sovereignty could only be used by the pharaoh, and then it became the aristocracy.

  • And then what seemed to happen after that they were using the symbols.

  • What seemed to happen after that this was maybe a transmutation and part via the Greeks and in part via the Jews, is that the idea that that sovereignty that was inherent in the Pharaoh and then in the aristocracy was actually something that could be attributed to everyone that was human.

  • And that was, I think, that that manifested itself most completely in some sense at the beginning of the Christian era, because there was an emphasis then on the idea that every single individual carried within them a spark of the divine, let's say, and that was the proper source of sovereignty.

  • And so then the question is, What?

  • What is that source of the divine?

  • And that's why I read you that section from John to begin with, because the source of the divinity is the capacity to speak

Jordan Peterson, psychology professor at so since the University West material.

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