Transcript for:
Discussion on Responsibility and Influence

how much responsibility do you feel you have particular guys the alt-right who has you say some of them have enjoyed your work and so i'm not one of i'm not one of you guys i'm not with you guys they haven't enjoyed my work i've definitely read bits on the internet read more you've sold 2 million copies of 12 rules for life you have 800 000 followers on twitter 1.4 million followers on youtube what is it that you're selling that so many people want to buy i don't think i'm selling anything well i went to a show where you were where you were selling tickets to your show so people are willing to pay a lot of money to see you speak you know what is it that you think that people are hungry for they want to hear from you they're hungry for a discussion of the relationship between responsibility and meaning and we haven't had that discussion in our culture for 50 years we've concentrated on rights and privileges of freedom and impulsive pleasure and those are all useful in their place but they're shallow and that's not good because if people are murdered shallowly then storms wreck them and storms come along so i'm talking to people about how they can build a foundation underneath them that works and and people need to know that because otherwise their lives are harder than they need to be what is it that you have that no one else has what are you offering that no one else is right now well i think i think that is what i'm offering that that's not part of the public discussion you know and it's grounded in my clinical knowledge so i've been a clinician for a very long time and i'm familiar with the works of most of the great 20th century clinicians and a reasonable amount of philosophy and a good swath of literature and i'm a credible scientist and so i can bring that all together and i've tried to bring it all together and to make a case for the significance of individual life and the psychological necessity of courage and nobility and responsibility these things that sound old-fashioned but are old-fashioned in the best sense they're old-fashioned because they've lasted forever and they're absolutely necessary and people need a call to responsibility because they need to mature they need to want to be adults you know and i don't think we do a very good job in our culture of making a case for why it's a good thing to be an adult and two things really made you famous which is first of all is the book 12 rules for life the second one i think was an interview that went viral with kathy newman of of channel 4 news which she talked about women right he's got a big big following but that was i think really fascinating that interview because it was specifically about men and women and you said at the time you know youtube sku's very male and your fan base is very male is that still the case are you still mostly primarily talking to men um i would say the talks are probably 60 40 65 35 male to female the book sales i don't know i doubt it because usually it's women who buy books although men do buy non-fiction if they buy books we don't know the demographics on the books but the book has definitely expanded my audience i would say um and that's a good thing as far as i'm concerned i mean i never set out specifically to talk to men my students for most years at university have been primarily female i think most of my graduate students have been female it might be about 50 50 but i think it would probably tilt more in the direction of female so it wasn't like it wasn't something i set out to do i think though that as i said earlier well i can't tell how much of it is merely a consequence of the fact that youtube skews so male it might also be something to do with the call to take on voluntary responsibility i'm not exactly sure why that would be more necessary for men right now i think it might be because our culture confuses men's desire for achievement and competence with the patriarchal desire for tyrannical power and that's a big mistake those aren't the same thing even a bit so and it's very inappropriate psychologically and sociologically to confuse them so well one of the things i want to come back to is this idea so that you say in the book you know there is masculine order and feminine chaos that's no actually i say that those are symbolic representations of the two things right okay so why why is order masculine um i think it's because our primary social hierarchy structures are fundamentally masculine and that's not the patriarchy well it's not the modern idea of the patriarchy that's for sure i mean so that's my idea of the patriarchy which is a system of male dominance of society yeah but that's not my sense of the patriarchy so what's yours well in what sense is our society male dominated uh the fact that the vast majority of wealth is owned by men the vast majority of capital and is owned by men women do more unpaid labor very tiny proportion of men and a huge proportion of people who are seriously disaffected are men most people in prison are men most people who are on the street or men most victims of violent crime are men most people who commit suicide are men most men most people who die in wars are men people who do worse in school are men it's like where's the dominance here precisely what you're doing is you're taking a tiny substrata of hyper successful men and using that to represent the entire structure of the of western society there's nothing about that that's vaguely appropriate but i could say equally what the most rape victims are women terrible things happen to people of both sexes and you could say that with with perfect utility but that doesn't provide any evidence for the existence of a male-dominated patriarchy well that just means the terrible things happen to both genders which they certainly do but there are almost no women who rape men for example so that is an asymmetry there in sexual violence well yes there's an ace there's an asymmetry in all sorts of places but that doesn't mean that western culture is a male-dominated patriarchy the fact that there are asymmetries has nothing to do with your basic argument no but you might say this is a trope that people just accept western society is a male-dominated patriarchy it's like no it's not that's not true and and even if it even if it has a patriarchal structure to some degree the uh the fundamental basis of that structure is not power it's competence that's why our society works it's only when as when a structure degenerates into tyranny that the fundamental relationships between people become dependent on power it's not power if you hire a plumber who's likely to be male it's not because there's roving bands of tyrannical plumbers forcing you to make that choice and it's the case with almost every interaction that you have at the face of our culture you're dealing with people who are offering a service of one form or another who are usually part of the broad middle class and who offer and what you're looking for is the person who can offer the best service and you can find it it's not a consequence of being dominated by anything that's tyrannical and and then again our culture or western culture which is by no means perfect and certainly has tyrannical elements like all cultures do is the least tyrannical society that's ever been produced and certainly the least tyrannical society that exists now so where's the patriarchy exactly and all of them well saying that it's the least tyrannical society's not the same as saying it's not a tyrannical society that's exactly why i said it was the least tyranny but that's what i mean so you haven't debunked the existence of patriarchy then you've said that actually now is better you don't have to debunk women to demonstrate its existence okay well let's go through it i'm writing a book about feminism in the moment uh until 1919 there were professions that women were barred from they simply were not allowed to do it until 1880 why would you blame men for that because who was in those professions who was guarding entry to those professions who was worried about losing their status if women became doctors that emancipated women in the 20th century just out of curiosity well a couple of different things i think it was technology i think it was the pill helped enormously because when was that development in the 60s right so that wasn't 1919. no but i also think it was a series of legal changes that started in britain with the married women's property act which said for the first time women are full legal beings under the law they can own property and that to me is a structure that has continued throughout from a time when women didn't have the same legal rights as men to now when they mostly do but culture still lags behind it i don't think you and i are necessarily talking at such cross purposes it's just that your conception of patriarchy i see it in the book is that quite a lot of men are quite nice and they do nice things for women no that's not my conception of patriarchy and i don't require men or advise them to be nice well you do talk about the guy who's the tampon king the sanitary towel king of india right i wouldn't call that nice okay brave okay did you read about his life when he was trying to develop that yeah god it was absolutely miserable and he did it anyways we freed all sorts of women as a consequence and i think that was nice that's courageous that's noble that's visionary it's not nice i think it is all so nice i think it is also something that is recent you know it is honoring your social obligations um i'm not so sure that that's a social obligation because many other people would have done it had it been a social obligation he said what he was concerned about he saw that his wife was suffering with her monthly period and had to choose between feeding her family and taking care of herself properly and chose to feed her family and thought he would do something about that that goes way past nice especially given what he had to suffer through to do all the experimentation that produced his his eventual technology so like i this whole patriarchy thing i think you have no idea how pernicious and dangerous it is well no i don't i really don't go throughout history have fundamentally cooperated to push back against the absolute catastrophe of existence a terrible death rate the probability of chronic starvation early death disease the difficulty of raising children with all the death that was associated with that and to look backwards in time and say well basically what happened was men took the upper hand and persecuted women in this tyrannical patriarchy it's absolutely dreadful misreading of history it's a terrible thing to teach young women and it's a horrible thing to inflict upon men i mean i absolutely disagree with you i think that's like saying slavery in the us was actually most people cooperate well no you didn't you had a system where one set of people owned another set of people and until women got full legal rights they could own property for themselves they could work essentially they were owned they were first owned by their fathers and then by the status to the domination by men and he said that you thought that what emancipated women primarily in the 20th century was technological revolution no not primarily but that's one of two i think that's two things primarily no i think the pill was a primary force in the emancipation of women i think of tampons let's say or the or the provision of proper sanitary uh facilities toilets and that sort of thing you're you're thinking instead it was the action of courageous feminists in the 1920s that produced a social revolution that overthrew the patriarchy that's your theory yeah that's a foolish theory well i'm very sorry to hear you say that but i think you in the kathy newman interview i think it's a multivariate right i think there are lots of different things that all contributed to well then let's be assuming that the western society was a tyrannical patriarchy that's one of them and then other things happened as well so you have the pill you have the dishwasher and white goods labor-saving devices in the home i think all of those were really important but you also have things like campaigns for the vote yes you also have things like that yes so how when in a system that existed in england until 1918 went home why would you even want to look at history like that like what what's your what's your goal because i think the people who don't look at history are condemned to repeat it and i think that we are going to what are we going to do repeat the the persecution of women do you think that's a realistic possibility yeah we're sitting here you see that we're sitting here in america right where we've just had a fifth judge appointed to the supreme court who is now anti-abortion is now conservative i think that abortion rights are actually fundamental to women being able to function as full humans in society and i think that is now under threat in america i think it is extremely smug and complacent to think civilization has peaked it's all upwards from here yeah well um good luck with that it's a living like you know i there are lots of people who agree with me there are lots of people clearly who agree with you um i want to know they're just a lot of people i would say who are coming to listen to what i say because they're sick and tired of having their desire to move forward in the world and to achieve something and to take their place as adult males let's say who are under the weight of accusations that their ambition and forthrightness is a manifestation of something that's fundamentally tyrannical they're not happy with that it's not doing anyone any good and it's also not true it's really a terrible thing to do to young men and it's happening all the time that's why they're bailing out of universities like mad there won't be a man left in the social sciences in 10 years in the universities and it's no bloody wonder it's an inhospitable place and it's unhospitable precisely because of this doctrine said that throughout history the fundamental relationship between men and women was one of power essentially slavery it's like fine believe it if you want it's not going to do your relationships any good i can tell you that so okay well we'll we'll see how that one goes i'm currently married but you know i'll i'll raise it with him um i think the university's example is a really fascinating one because you talk in the book about the fact that now women are a majority on two-thirds of college courses in the us uh and you know i've also seen you saying would you believe in a quality of opportunity but not a qualitative outcome maybe that i don't believe in equality of outcome i think it's an unbelievably pathological wish and doctrine right it's very dangerous history has demonstrated exactly how dangerous it is equality of opportunity is something that anyone with any sense would support but equality of outcome it's so what's your problem with their notifications beyond belief to to to support equality of outcomes okay so what's your problem with there not being enough men in the social sciences perhaps women are just clever perhaps that's why there are more women at university right under your doctrine i don't think that but that's what i think the logical extent of your doctor isn't the fact that there's an unequal distribution the problem i have with it is that the reason that men are bailing out is because of the prevalence of the doctrine that you're espousing that's the problem i have with it it doesn't matter that much they will bail out i don't see any way that the universities are going to redeem themselves in the next decade so and and maybe that will be fine but i doubt it let's see that seems extremely pessimistic when the majority the numbers of people going to university just generally are going up yeah well that's not going to last for very long why not because it's too expensive and the universities are doing all sorts of things that aren't um acceptable mostly racking up the price ratcheting up the price so and and decreasing the quality of what they're offering and playing into the hands of the people who are ideological acolytes of the identity politics routines and playing post-modern stunts and pushing neo-marxism and all these things that are characteristic of of the social sciences and the humanities primarily see this is where i find you you fascinating to me because you know you talk in these quite apocalyptic terms i think that you know someone will listen to that and think wow there's a really big problem but what we're really talking about is some irritatingly post-modern professors and some students with blue hair and funny ideas about gender in a handful of courses around america that's what we were talking about no one would have paid attention to me for more than about 15 minutes so you might see this as some surface manifestation that's irrelevant but that isn't how most people view it certainly the case too that this identity politics battle of ideas was a determining factor in the last american election if hillary wouldn't have played identity politics played cozy with the identity politics type she would have kept the working class and she would be president now so these aren't trivial issues by any stretch of the imagination it's not just some kids having a decent time while they're being creatively rebellious at university it's a much deeper problem than that the doctrine the doctrines that i'm opposed to are predicated on well one assumption they're predicated on it's probably the primary assumption is that the best way to view history is as the domination of a tyrannical male patriarchy and that's true also particularly of the west which is a doctrine i find absolutely unpalatable and historically absurd biologically ridiculous and ungrateful among other things who's ungrateful sorry in that who is being ungrateful look at what you have i live in the best society that's ever been created you know i was reading about some indians do you mean me as a woman or me as a 21st century person in in the world i mean us yeah i mean i'm incredibly grateful for what i have but to me the project is politics it's construction of a tyrannical patriarchy you're grateful for the productions of a tyrannical patriarchy how does that make sense because i think life is good i think it could be better that that's that's what's being progressing but i guess that isn't commensurate with your claim that you're the beneficiary of the tyrannical patriarchy why not how can it be good if it's the consequence of a tyrannical patriarchy tyranny isn't good is it i mean that's the definition of tyranny something that isn't good and yet it's produced all these things that you're grateful for like doesn't that contradict in contradiction bother you where did where did what was good come from where is well i think from i think i'm benefiting actually from a lot of things that i don't support that are unearned privileges in my life i think that's absolutely like your job like i have a very good job i had a loving family who i don't think that's going to do the world any good is it that's a hell of a fine rationalization for your privileged position oh well fair enough but like you know if you could trade it off with someone who's less privileged i could be a start i could i could do that and and but i don't i don't want to and i won't and i don't think i should be expected to why not is it okay for you to occupy a position of privilege in the patriarchal tyranny and if it is is it because you're female or is it just because it's convenient let me tell you my political philosophy i'm i guess i'm a social democrat so what i believe is that you should if you have a good life you should try and pass that on i believe in a progressive redistributive tax system for example it was once said by lord mandelson in british politics you know but new labor was okay with people being filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes now i'm kind of less okay with people being filthy rich well that i think i would leave that you're probably in the top one tenth of one percent of people who've ever lived on the planet that would constitute filthy rich by historical standards okay but i'm not sure where that is in the line exactly be able to help the neanderthals at this point really by giving up some money but this is my point is that what i believe is and i believe in a structure in which people who have had a good life and had lots of advantages should pay that back pay that forwards which i think is the message that you preach as well right you have responsibilities and if you've had like us a very lot of advantages civilization has a tyrannical patriarchy well it's not purely a tyrannical thing that's for sure it isn't it's purely not right and that's exactly the issue but why would you describe it as a tyrannical patriarchy then you make a case that it's purely that and that's exactly what's ungrateful it's not purely that at all why is saying that something has elements of this same as it is purely that isn't what's being said merely to define it as a patriarchy implies unit unit unit dimensionality and to insist that that's also tyrannical doesn't offer a balanced viewpoint at all well i think that's probably where yeah i think that's probably where your disagreement comes with this which is because i do not see it in that way i do not see that it is univariate at all i see it as one why call it a patriarchy because it describes an overarching structure does it and what if the patriarch is fundamentally composed of women is it still a patriarchy that would be a matriarchy would it so let's say we take a patriarchal structure like the medical profession and we fill it primarily with women is it then a matriarchal structure what makes it a patriarch to begin with is it the hierarchical structures that is it the fact that it's mostly men is it the sociological structure or is it the fact that it's mostly men well i think that's really interesting because male primary school teachers for example only 15 of them are men and i interviewed some of them for my book and you know what they report exactly the same things that women do in male-dominated offices right they say people have conversations that i feel excluded from i feel stigmatized like i shouldn't be here people look at me askance when i say i'm a primary school teacher and i'm a man you know they kind of reel back we all make those implicit associations so so if it is if it is a structure that's dominated by women then it's also a tyrannical patriarchy i think in that case then men have a way they should be able to complain about the fact that a very female dominated office leaves them feeling out too yeah i'm really feeling left out so how do we get something that isn't a tyrannical patriarchy if it's composed of women and it's a tyrannical patriarchy and if it's composed of men it's a tyrannical patriarchy we're kind of out of options right but well or you could have a blend an office in which a blend of people have both so if it's 50 50 then it's not a tyrannical picture no not 50 50. i'm saying that 40 60. i'm saying that there is clearly when there's only 15 of male parameters which is they do feel marginalized and excluded so so you think the defining hallmark of a tyrannical social structure is the predominance of one gender and if that was if that was relatively equalized then all of a sudden it would be a free and an open institution i don't think that the male primary teachers being tyrannized i do think they are being marginalized and i do think that they feel excluded and stressed well this is what i mean i think actually and i'm i'm surprised you don't agree with me on this that actually having more male primary school teachers would be a really good thing because boys need role models actually people particularly boys who don't have a father figure in their life that's really important to have a stable adult who shows them what it's like to be a man around the place could be but you shouldn't achieve it as a consequence of preferential hiring no i don't necessarily need to be preferential hiring i think it would nest it would probably be about making that job breaking down the stigma to entering that job i think teaching is a really interesting example it was seen at the time when i was 18 19 right there were no men in it and how did that make you feel i loved it yeah you know the kids i used to wrestle with the kids which of course can't do now because everybody knows that that would just be a catastrophe and i used to draw them pictures of monsters and they'd line up for that and i liked working with kids quite a lot and i didn't care whether it was female dominate i've been in female dominated my professions my whole life right i think it felt marginalized as a consequence well then you have been lucky and i i have talked to people who might be like the opposite right be careful conduct as well explain that more to me well why would you assume that it would be luck well if i say that you know there is a statistical analysis and i've talked to a broad range of people and you know you would always expect outliers at either end some people have had a really terrible time some people have had a really brilliant time everybody else the things that i strive to do is not to become resentful well okay that's very good i have to say that your twitter feed does not give me that impression you come across as somebody who takes criticism very much to heart is that true i don't think you have any grounds for that suggestion i mean you've seen my interviews online if i was someone who took criticism at heart i'd be in a lot more trouble than i am now in what way well i've been criticized endlessly for two years i've been in scandals i've probably been in i don't know how many scandals in the last two years and had unbelievably contentious interviews with journalists online on tv on radio in podcasts if i was someone who couldn't tolerate criticism the evidence for that would already be clear twitter's a strange social network i've kind of pulled myself away from it so it's not an easy place to conduct yourself with as much grace as you might and i think it's it sort of rewards impulsivity because it's maybe it's because of the constraint on on characters or something like that so i think that people tend to show their worst on twitter and and and some of that's a consequence of the of the structure of the technology i think i certainly agree with you i think that's something that we agree on there i think people are really at their best on twitter no and you know i pulled myself away from it quite a lot in the last month um mostly for to see why you know i kind of kept an eye on twitter all the social medias media networks for the last few years partly to see well i'm trying to monitor what's happening around me i suppose is probably the right way of thinking about and to see if i'm making mistakes and how they might be rectified but i don't think twitter's been good for me and i don't think it's i don't think the reply function on twitter is useful and i think the fact that so many people on twitter are anonymous is not a good thing at all do you think you'd be less angry if you weren't on twitter that's something i think quite a lot i mean just i would be coming to contact with less things that annoyed me on a daily basis oh i think there's no doubt about that yeah yeah i i think that's definitely the case and i've talked to other people who've pulled back from twitter and experienced the same thing i don't know what it is exactly but there's a there's something about twitter that seems to really heighten the desire of people to be provocative and maybe it's the case that only people who are feeling irritable respond you know we don't know you know like if you put up a post and a thousand people read it certainly a thousand people don't respond a few people respond well maybe maybe it's skews way over to those people who had a bad day like we have no idea right because it's a communication channel that no one understands we're not evolved to understand it we're not evolved to use it we don't we can't interpret it plus you're interacting with random strangers which is something you never ever do and it's never the same set of random strangers and you don't react to twitter like it's random strangers you rack to twitter like it's a person that you know and it isn't you write in 12 rules for life about having had violent impulses that you didn't act on and i think in maps of meaning you elaborate on that you say you've fantasized about stabbing a classmate in the neck and you say you're very clear about the fact that you you know you never ever thought you would take those seriously but it just does make me think whether or not are you somebody who thrives on anger who finds anger to be something that they need in their life that they find motivates them to do the things that they need to do those are two different questions okay you can answer them both one is whether i thrive on it and the answer to that is most certainly not so i actually don't like conflict then how have you ended up doing this as a job which is arguing with people right just because you no that's not my job it's not to argue with people okay so my job is to not do things that i don't think i should do right and my government made the mistake of assuming that compelled speech was acceptable as long as motivated by hypothetical compassion and that's not happened for me so i made that point it wasn't because i wanted to or because i enjoyed it i don't really like conflict i'm actually a rather agreeable person which is partly why i'm a clinician and so i find the the constant conflict exhausting but that's not the issue i'm you're not morally obligated you're morally obligated to do things other than that which you like so now i really do enjoy the lecture series that i'm doing and the reason for that is that it's not political in its essence i'm trying to do everything i can to bring people who are trying to develop a vision for their life together and to encourage them to act more responsibly but but not in a finger wagging sort of way but because i've come to understand that the meaning that sustains you in life is mostly to be found through responsibility and through the voluntary adoption of responsibility you're very likely to find your fundamental strength and i think that that's clinically unassailable observation and so and that's all very good and i'm very pleased to be doing it and it seems to be having a salutary effect as far as i can tell and but but it's not because i thrive on anger i mean you were at my show what to on thursday night yeah how much anger was there in that well i thought it was fascinating because it was in long island um i drove we drove to it and we went past a lamborghini dealership a porsche dealership this is not a poor area the audience was i would say very like as i was surprised how many women there was pretty mixed it was overwhelmingly white and i thought you talked uh you know you said at the end i was more incoherent than i normally am you ranged across quite a range of subjects from you know status in monkeys to perception but the things that the crowd clapped and they applauded when you went oh you can't say that that's a microaggression or multiculturalism is a you know it's a scourge that is sweeping canada and what i got was a strong sense that has swept canada okay well what i got was a very strong sense of people whose lives i never said that it was a scourge that swept canada either i wouldn't have said that okay well certainly i will go back and check your exact wording what you said but you definitely i'm not in favor of it as a fundamental doctrine right i don't think it's a scourge so i wonder if you and i mean the same thing when we talk about multiculturalism because you have a first nations room in your house right you have a lot of first nation stuff how is the co-existence of the honorary member of a first nations family as a matter which wonderful i have a uh a first nations artist and when i'm from when i went to canada last year but that to me is the essence of canadian multiculturalism living that culture being preserved and living alongside the anglophone culture that in some senses supplanted it how is that not multiculturalism well multiculturalism is the idea that the cultures can all be put together in a single place with no overarching structure or undergirding structures like that's not the case how can that possibly be the case that defines the situation in the world and the world is full of war so how does how can that possibly work if you're going to bring people together and they're going to be and they're going to exist together in harmony they have to be playing a game that everyone plays that everyone knows the rules for it can't be 10 different sets of rules for different people that isn't going to work so it's absolutely naive to believe how if that worked the world wouldn't be full of war well before we had you know multiculturalism we still did have war war in fact war isn't as stephen pinker i'm sure you've read your stephen finger says you know this is the least violent time in human history so something that's a consequence of working tyranny well if you think the patriarchy has been eroded over the last hundred years maybe that's what it's down to maybe you could give some credit to it for that i actually didn't say that the patriarchy had been eroded well you know because you don't believe it existed in the first place fair enough but i my definition of multiculturalism is citizenship based right so you can be both canadian and first nations you can be both quebecois and also canadian uh you know but that means that everybody in the multicultural milieu is one thing and another right they're all one thing and another yeah yeah well you know our prime minister said well there is no canadian identity it's like well okay what is it that unites us well nothing we all protect our cultures it's like well that leads to war okay that doesn't only lead to war obviously but unless you have people operating within a shared framework of perception and value they can't cooperate and compete peacefully there's i don't understand how that's even a disputable topic that's how you organize people okay i think if that's what he said that's what trudeau said that is a dumb thing for the prime minister of canada to say when you are prime minister of canada yeah you might you might say that i would agree much more with what barack obama said when he said you know i'm trying not to make her red states america or blue states america white america blackmail i'm trying to make a united states america and that to me the democrats are very good at that well they've tried identity politics for the last 20 years all they've done is inflamed tribal tribal tendencies as far as i can tell so he can say that but it isn't obvious that it's the case and it's not obvious to me at all that one of the consequences of barack obama's presidency was a reduction in racial tension in the united states no i wouldn't agree with that either i think a lot of people found having a black college-educated professor very alarming and threatening to their idea to stop them from voting for him twice no that is very true but again it's fundamentally true right it's really the crucial issue at hand here no but he built a big coalition of white well-educated liberals and people of color i mean that is that that is the democrat election how do you explain the rise of racial tension in the united states then well i think it's caused by a lot of things not at least in one of which is the republican party in flaming it you talk about the left playing identity politics i think the right play identity politics all the time the right doesn't dominate the universities no but it dominates but donald trump is president so realistically trump is hardly a typical republican no he i would say that he commented for most of his life if i remember correctly he was a democrat right i don't think he has anything to blame donald trump okay but i'm going to say the rest of the republican party are also quite happy to play i would say white identity politics they go they did not dump him as their candidate when he said mexicans they're not sending us their best people here they're rapists right the whole idea of the united states it said i think a beautiful thing all men are created equal but it meant men and it meant specifically white men women and black people could not vote the u.s was founded on identity politics this is not some new concept that has come along in the last 20 years the united states wasn't founded on identity yes it was that's absolutely absurd proposition the united states was founded on the same principles that what would you say that that played their powerful role through the development of of of english democracy and that was nested inside a judeo-christian view that fundamentally presumed that both men and women were made in the image of god and that all people had divine value and it took a long time for that set of ideas to fully manifest itself in the political realm but to consider that a manifestation of identity politics is i i can't imagine why you would possibly do that i don't consider that a manifestation of identity politics i consider having a constitution that says only some people are citizens to be a manifestation of identity politics well what do you think changed it across time and then look let's get our definition straight here you can't lump all occurrences of non-equal treatment into the category of identity politics identity politics is a very specific thing it's really only existed since the 1970s you can't go back into 1770 and say that the founders of the american constitution were playing identity politics politics that was based on identity that's my definition of identity that's not the definition of identity politics unless you play fast and loose with the definition identity politics is something that's in no one talked about identity politics 20 years ago or 30 years ago it's a new term you you can't say that people's proclivity to identify with their group is identity politics that's just tribalism and that's like who knows how old that is a million years old 500 000 years old and you're going to call tribalism identity politics well that's not helpful if you want to talk about tribalism we could talk about tribalism but identity politics is something that's nested inside a particular political view of the world it's got a marxist basis and it manifests itself in post-modernism and it emerged in the american in france first in the 1970s and then has swept through the american universities and increasingly the rest of the west since then that's identity politics if you want to talk about tribalism that's fine i'm not a fan of tribalism which is why i don't like the identity politics types and i don't care if they're on the right or the left i think the right wing use of identity as the primary marker for human categorization is as reprehensible and dangerous as it is on the left my problem with the left at the moment the fundamental problem with the radical left is that they're hyper dominant in academia and that's not good and that's not my opinion you can go look at jonathan heights data and see for yourself and he's as moderate person as you can hope to find and probably less prone to anger than me and and i agree with you i find a lot of students phenomenally irritating but i would question how much power they have in contrast to the things i find more worrying that happening in the world today right or even the professors right even 20 year olds don't have that much power but they're not 20 forever 10 years later they're 30. and 20 years later they're 40. right and whatever happens in the university happens everywhere five years later and very very sadly for people in my politics left-wing politics what happens to people as they get older is that they've traditionally got more conservative so i don't think you can make a case that the the current where people are where they're 20 today is actually going to be the ideology that takes them all the way through their life that's never been the case it'll be around long enough to do plenty of damage like it already is okay but even if we accept that students and their pomo professors are quite annoying which i think is probably i agree with something they're not just annoying like they're destroying the universities and that's not a good thing and they're particularly destroying the social sciences and the humanities the sciences are safe so far but not for long because the scientists in particular are terrible at politics and the left-wing activists are great at politics and so they'll win eventually the national science foundation is already introducing diversity requirements for hiring in mathematics and universities it's like good luck with that that's not going to work there are hardly any mathematical geniuses if you start putting all sorts of arbitrary restrictions on their hiring you're just going to not and you're going to end up not finding the ones that there are so besides i don't think that's true actually because if you say there are very few mathematical genes well i'm i want next year i'm going to be a fellow oxford university so i spend time talking to academics i've talked to a lot of academics from my book i do agree with you there is an illiberal strain that is sweeping through a lot of universities i don't think it's an existential threat and i certainly don't think it is to me the biggest issue in world politics today it's the one that i would choose personally what do you think is the biggest issue i think that the rise of strongmen authoritarians around the world is very worrying and that's one of the reasons i find the subtitle of your book fascinating because it's called an antidote to chaos why isn't it an antidote to order which you also say in its excessive manifestations is bad i've said that well you can't write a book about everything no no but you've specifically chosen antidote to chaos so why is chaos 300 lectures online and i talked plenty about the pathology of order in those lectures okay but i'm just a fan of authoritarian strong men that's for sure well that's good but i do think that the way that you talk about order in the book is something that people will take away from it be specific okay so let me think um the way that you talk about natural dominance hierarchies in lobsters let's get on to the lobsters because i think that the the thing that people take away from that is male lobsters compete for female lobsters and that says something about society now that's that men need to be dominant in in society because if lobsters do it then there is something that we can read about humans from there's nothing in that chapter at all that suggests that the way that men should succeed in human hierarchies is a consequence of the exercise of power there's not one line in that entire book that's that claims that because it's not what i believe most human hierarchies as i already pointed out are hierarchies of competence not power okay so that's why we don't live in a patriarchal tyranny and so if you want to be a successful man then you should be competent and that will move you up the hierarchy and that will make you attractive and for good reason unless you want an incompetent mate which is possible and and and happens but isn't something that i would recommend people will sometimes choose an incompetent mate because they're intimidated by competence and so they'll settle for someone who they don't respect because they feel that they can master them and they won't be intimidated but it's not a recipe for a happy life i can tell you that so there isn't a line in that chapter that talks about power as as as the proper means of conducting yourself in life there's not a line in the book and there's nothing in anything i've ever said that suggests that okay no i'm sorry but it's really important because people have read this chapter and they make exactly the argument that you make and it's a misapprehension so it's a misapprehension of the book okay but if so many people are getting the same misappropriation could it be there are so many people that are getting it there's two million people that have bought the book and there's a very small handful of people who have a particular ideological perspective who enjoy developing that perspective because it indicates just what sort of reprehensible individual i am but it has absolutely nothing to do with what i wrote or what i've said or what i believe i don't believe that our fundamental hierarchies are based on power i don't believe that the way that you move up our hierarchies is as a consequence of manifesting power it's competence okay my big problem with the lobsters is that it's scientifically bollocks right it's just you cannot read across from lobsters and what they do to what humans can that's why serotonin works on lobsters but it works in two different ways so if serotonin makes lobsters more aggressive it makes them less aggressive right no that's not right serotonin makes human beings more dominant but less aggressive and the only reason it makes them more dominant is because they're less irritable and they're less defensively aggressive so it's not bollocks i know my neurochemistry so if you're going to play neurochemistry let's go and do it okay we'll use the antidepressants work on lobsters yes they do we make a lobster that's been defeated in a fight more likely to fight again that's not the same mechanism that happens the same humans because don't get depressed as the way that humans are i think you're anthropomorphizing into a ridiculous degree these are creatures that urinate out of their faces i think that uh the fundamental issue among um knowledgeable uh animal behaviorists is that anthropomorphization with animals is generally the appropriate tactic unless you have reason to doubt it which is because there's continuity between us and animals rather than discontinuity and the idea that the anthropomorphization of animals is inappropriate is something derived from 1950s behaviorism the the highly trained affective neuroscientists and people who study motivation and emotion as well as neurochemistry know perfectly well that there is biological and behavioral continuity across the animal kingdom and way down into the kingdom as well which is exactly why i chose lobsters to indicate that there is so much continuity in the systems that allow us to estimate a status position that we share it with creatures that are a third of a billion years old and the reason that i made that argument was to put paid at least into part in part to the absurd marxist proposition that hierarchical structures are a secondary consequence of western civilization and free market economies which is as preposterous a perspective as you could possibly develop about anything hierarchies are a third of a billion years old you can't blame them on the west or men or capitalism and we're wired for hierarchical perception in ways that you can hardly possibly imagine even our ability to rank order a set of objects seems to be tightly linked to our ability to assess the relative status of people in our in our social uh milieus so and the biochemistry is very very similar and the reason we know that is because most of the drugs that are used on people are first tested on animals now it's not often animals as primitive as lobsters but it is plenty so a lot of what we know about neurological structure for example is a consequence of studying the flat room worm which is much more primitive organism than the lobster continuity is the is the rule okay so what can we learn from killer whales that live in matriarchal pods often led by a grandmother someone who's been through a menopause why isn't that an example that you've picked to talk about in the book it's because lobsters say the thing that ideologically you want to talk about which is your belief that there is a kind of marxist ideology you say that the point that i was making the point that i was making with lobsters i just said what it was that hierarchies have been for around forever who genuinely really today is arguing apart from maybe three mad marxist academics that there is no such thing as hierarchy hierarchies they're not they're not arguing that there's no such thing as hierarchy oh there should be no such thing as hierarchies oh there's plenty of them are arguing really because i see that almost never in the wild as an argument i see people think that hierarchy should be based on merit and they should be more what do you call the demand for equality of outcome is if it's not an attempt to flatten hierarchies or to to eliminate them what else could it possibly be and you don't think the neo-marxists and the post-modernists think that hierarchy is a social construction okay you're not talking about the same people that i know that's for sure everything is a social construction for the social constructionists including hierarchies but i just don't think that is a very widely held view in the world it might be liberalized 20 percent of social scientists identify as marxist and and where's that statistic from look it up and look it up in in heights work okay you know i know i mean i'm interested i don't know i've checked it out quite yeah yeah but i'm just i'm a perfectly valid statistic i don't have the reference at hand so it's one in five okay and there the the number of conservatives or even liberals for that matter in the social sciences and humanities is not only vanishingly small but getting smaller and you think the social constructionists believe that hierarchy is built into biology they're not very good social constructionists if that was if that's what they believe and the post-modernists and the neo-marxists are radical social constructionists because they wouldn't believe that human beings are infinitely malleable and and and that we can be recreated in in whatever image the ideologues might want to recreate us in if they didn't think that and it's much more prevalent than you're admitting i mean there these there isn't a competing position on campuses except among the evolutionary biologists and the evolutionary psychologists let's say and they're under complete attack they're certainly next on the chopping block as far as i can tell i've been warning them for the last two years social constructionists don't like evolutionary psychologists and they don't like biology and i i really don't understand why except that it interferes with this idea that human beings are infinitely malleable and stops them from being able to blame hierarchy on the west look if you're really concerned about the poor as a as a social democrat let's say the first thing you should do is abandon your presupposition that the dispossession produced by hierarchies is a consequence of the patriarchal structure of the west it's a way deeper problem than that so there have been we've been dispossessed forever way before capitalism okay i think i would agree with that so if if it is a way deeper problem than that how do you tackle it i don't know well that's a bit i mean that for someone who's intelligent you just throw their hands up and go maybe something there's lots of things i don't know how to tackle i don't know how to tackle the fact that people range range extremely widely in their cognitive ability either these are big problems right but we can start with a redistributive tax policy right where people who earn a lot pay more tax than people lower down the income scale to redistribute income that was a fairly obvious way that you could make poor people less poor it's something that you know the labor government did they almost i think they have child poverty it is possible to do things and we do have mechanisms well i wouldn't i wouldn't uh make the immediate uh presumption that it was the redistributive tax policy that have child poverty you know that absolute poverty in the world has halved between near 2000 and 2012 and you can't attribute that to redistributive policies no i can't i'm only talking about britain i'm talking about that particular government which had you know then there are fiscal analysis that have been done but i think um let's move on from from lobsters i mean you know that chapter is about people becoming responsible and competent not about them becoming like dominant and powerful okay not that at all but my problem is i think you got criticized by a lot of marine biologists right and by a lot of geneticists okay well i can name it pz myers is one who's criticized you um adam rutherford who's former editor of nature has criticized that chapter there are you know that is not but one i think biologists dispute the fact that most or organisms organize themselves into hierarchies and that the fundamental biological mechanism for the regulation of hierarchy is the serotonin system that's not disputable now you can find animal organizational structures that vary from that from that what would you call it fundamental pattern but the existence of variance isn't proof against the existence of a fundamental pattern like i don't i don't know how you can sit there and be skeptical about this if you know the literature on hierarchical structure you understand that across the entire animal kingdom animals tend to organize themselves into chemistry very hierarchies types of hierarchies right so there's a you have and that's why we know they're hierarchies yeah but that the path like you say the pattern as if that you know the the hierarchy is the pattern right okay and that's fine so chimps have one very obvious social structure and bonobos haven't it's not as different as people have made it out to be the bonobos are a lot more violent than the right and they're not hippie monkeys right observers of the barnabas have admitted okay but nonetheless you say that as if the deed those little details don't matter as if there can't be such a thing as a hierarchy that is much worse than another hierarchy that's my problem i'm not saying that at all there's clearly hierarchies that are worse than others right baboons have terrible hierarchies for example and i'm saying tyrannical hierarchies aren't my cup of tea that isn't the point i was making the point i was making was that hierarchies can't be blamed on capitalism or the west they're built into our biology that the neural the neurochemistry is so old that we share it with with uh crustaceans so that's a third of a billion years which is the proof that hierarchies aren't a recent construct if proof like that needs to be needed needs to be provided and that the best way for people to adopt a uh a strategy that will move them up the hierarchy which is a desirable thing in most regards is to face the suffering of the world forthrightly that's what that chapter is about and the people who've been criticizing it uh read it as if it's a defense of the western patriarch it's like there's there's no defense of the western patriarchy i don't think that's true i think the way that people criticize it is the and i think this happens a lot with evolutionary psychology is a uh which is not quite what the lobsters are but it's where other stuff in the book is other things you said for example like uh women wear rouge because it reminds men of ripe fruit right well first time why do you think women wear rouge i have absolutely no idea right that's really not a very good answer well yeah you said before there were a lot of things you don't know the answer to but i'll tell you one thing you're most criticizing your perspective on this you're criticizing mine so i'm presuming that's an alternative idea why women why do you think where women wear makeup i think they're an enormous nightmare let me let's go back to why women may reach because it reminds men of not right fruit okay first of all not all right fruit is red uh why would you not want color vision to detect ripe fruit do you you want to eat women no i think unless men are having sex that's not really what and where is the evidence that women who are redder in the cheeks are more have more offspring what do you think happens during the sexual flush but that's the key point isn't it is that you would expect actually if this is a sexual selection that women who are ready is the proclivity for it to flush red and yes youthful women have more children it's a primary sign of fertility i think you wait a second here what do you think women wear makeup for come on if you're going to go after me on this okay let's let's let's women people say well women wear makeup to feel better about themselves that's not a very deep analysis why makeup that's my facial makeup i'll tell you why i wear makeup which is to stop the comments that i would get if i didn't wear makeup and my gender i always say my gender is low maintenance right i don't feel particularly like a woman inside i don't really know what that would mean but what i try and do is try and look you know in the same way that you get black women who talk about the problem with natural hair is it's seen as unprofessional right and as a woman if you don't wear makeup that is seen as a political choice that is seen as something that you know you are so you wear makeup to protect yourself from from what from geological men no no but and tyrannical women as well i would say i think women very partially judge each other's appearance and there are very good reasons for that probably because they've learned that from oppressive men no i don't think so i don't why do you think it is then i think that women are encouraged to be seen as being in competition with each other encouraged you don't think that there's anything about that that's natural eh well i would be reluctant to get into that because i i think you could talk about sex intersexual competition that's a very big deal among the social sciences and evolutionary science it's not my particular competence but yeah i wouldn't my conception of the patriarchy is not that men are beastly to women it is that there is a structure in which women participate too that overall privileges and benefits men in order to control female reproduction and i think those are two very different things you write in 12 rules that you skipped a grade in school and you were small for your age do you think that shaped your personality and your experiences of life well i did to some degree made it difficult for me to participate in sports so i didn't really do anything that was fundamentally athletic till i was in graduate school so my parents are guilty about that because they felt that it wasn't good for me but i'm not unhappy about it i got through school faster i wasn't a fan of school and the faster i got through it the better i think it might have encouraged me to do two other things which was i probably hung around with rougher kids that i might have otherwise as partly as a compensation i suppose for being smart and academically able and also small so i probably exaggerated my roughness i suppose and it made me more verbally more capable of verbally defending myself but other than that i don't think it had much of an effect i think i pretty much left all of that behind that's very good also the other thing i was really interested in was that you married your teenage sweetheart mm-hmm yeah well i met her when i was eight so we've known each other for 50 years yeah so this is i think really fascinating so i i read that and i thought that was quite moving and then i was reading the bit about um you know the animal kingdom and bit free take away from the lobster section is that you know what happens if your top lobster is that you get to impregnate all the females as being evolutionary successful as a lobster right um your that's proclivity towards polygamy which is one of the things that pulls on human society right and you're now the pretty big lobster and yet you are monogamous you're faithful to your wife you don't you know you don't want to go around impregnating every woman that you see right no no one woman's enough trouble right so so i think that's right to me that was really interesting because that's a way in which we are very obviously very different from animal society and to me i mean there are plenty of societies where exactly that happens right you've been able to overcome that biological urge right and so in the sense that maybe there are other biological edges such as men's propensity towards violence that might also be overcome well it's not self-evident that you want it to be overcome i mean you don't know what goes along with it you know i mean obviously first of all defining violence isn't that straightforward how about use of force in self-defense does that constitute violence i think to me that's a separate category of violence i think but it's not that easy to distinguish them like if you're what what you want to do with a child who's aggressive is socialize them so that they become sophisticated in their manifestation of their aggression you don't want to inhibit it you certainly don't want to socialize little boys to be more like little girls that's first of all you don't know how to do it to begin with but second of all it's not very it's not an advisable strategy so well i found that really really interesting because in the book you say that actually if you feminize men that might give them more you know might have more of an allure towards you know these very fascists that's that's standard psychoanalytic that's like psychoanalysis 101. if you repress something it comes back with a vengeance okay so tell me what you mean by feminizing in that sense because to me if you don't mind me saying so you are a man who is quite feminine you're in touch with your feminine side you are very well dressed you talk a lot about your diet you've talked about your emotions yeah you're talking about my diet right but you you cry in public you um you enjoy spending time with your kids you know all of these things that are not no sad isn't it but they're not stereotypically male and i think that's very admirable pretty strange behavior for a patriarchal tyrant well that's why i think that you're probably in some ways you're not a patriarchal tyrant although actually all of our programming if you want to call it that in biology is is overcomeable because you are integratable right but you are a man who some people would say has a lot of feminine traits like that and i don't do you think that means that you are now being in the allure of authoritarian fascistic ideologies because you you know you're baking cakes oh i noticed the allure and then what do you do with that work to live such that there's no temptation in that which is also what i recommend to everyone else right if you see any temptation in that then you should straighten yourself up real quick so and that's what i've done for decades so of course you have to see the allure in that if you don't see the allure in it you're a fool just like if you don't see the allure in the radical leftist ideas i mean if they didn't have if if you didn't understand the allure you couldn't understand the ideas they're dangerously alluring you know it would be lovely if there was a strong man who could solve all our problems and those who deserved it got exactly what was coming to them it's not something that i would recommend as a wish so but that doesn't mean you you know you want to be blind to its attraction you want to see what the dark parts of you are attracted to it helps you keep an eye on where things can go if they go badly sideways so i don't think it has anything to do though with my with my what would you say more classically feminine interests um not as far as i can tell i mean i have all sorts of classically masculine interests too so right and seems to be reasonably well balanced right so you talk with them about social i shouldn't socialize little boys like little girls but actually you know i have lots of stereotypes i'm interested in politics which is overwhelmingly male dominated um you have lots of classically feminine interests why you know what is the problem here with people having personalities that are a mixture that there's no problem with that at all the problem is when it's dictated by fiat well i mean who's who's fant about the education system so in in schools you think you know that there is well i outlined i can't remember the psychologist's name at the moment but he was quite influential in the 1980s who recommended as a control for male violence that boys be socialized more like little girls and i don't think that that's a particularly unpopular viewpoint so on the the the emphasis on competition for example in in games the increase in in in the rise of competitive games where scores aren't kept that sort of thing is all a manifestation of that kind of theory as far as i'm concerned the idea that there's something intrinsically wrong with competition it's a very foolish idea especially if you want to motivate relatively aggressive boys because they're competitive well competition that's not good someone has to lose it's like well you're not going to get very far looking at the world that way i'm afraid you know maybe you want to generate a plethora of games so that everybody has a shot at winning that's a good idea but you certainly don't want to devalue the notion of winning if you're doing something necessary you should reward people who are particularly good at it it's part of the definition of it being necessary so and that the contr you don't want to control aggression any more than you want to control sex you want to integrate it and and if it's integrated that's the integration of the shadow from the union perspective and something i talk a lot about in my lectures it's like you need to have the capacity for danger you need to be dangerous but you need to learn how to not use it except when it's necessary and that is not the same as being harmless harmless that's a terrible virtue it's like a rabbit there's nothing virtuous about harmlessness it just means you're ineffectual yeah i think i would agree well i i think there are some people who through their harmlessness become iconic and they become symbols i think the gandhian the principle of nonviolence he's not harmless he just transcended his deep violence that is completely different thing okay without his without that capacity there would have been no way he would have had the strength of character that he had he was an integrated person not a harmless person okay that's a very very different thing did you have different ambitions for your daughter and for your son of them were different i i encouraged my daughter in her desire to be a mother which is not something i did with my son did you encourage him in his desire to be a father absolutely right so you encourage both of them to be a parent right but those are different yeah so i know and yeah i mean and in some sense i think it's it's harder for young women because of course the the problem of integrating family with career is a more complex problem for women to solve so and i spent a lot of time talking to her about how she might solve that i wouldn't say that we came up with anything that was spectacularly original or successful but i at least let her know that whatever pathway she chose was fine with me if she as long as she was being honest with herself about what it was that she wanted but also that you know i'm not a fan of the idea that the most fundamental orientation that a person is likely to have in their life is career i don't believe that's true for most people i certainly don't believe it's true for most women and i think the evidence supports that claim quite straightforwardly so um however it is the only thing that you get paid for under capitalism right man live but that's how can you say something like that it's so cliched but it's so painful to hear that maybe cliche but it nonetheless is true right women do more capitalism well for god's sake it is no it isn't you have to invest into a child for 18 years before they have any economic utility it's a consequence of delayed economic utility we don't know how to monetize it it's not a consequence of capitalism it's a consequence of the fact that human beings have an 18-year dependency how do you monetize that even in principle well we don't know we did used to send them up chimneys to be fair and at that point well true really interesting is at that point children were seen as being much more the property of the man i mean as they become economically useless all the legal studies show that that's when we start moving to a model of female custody right because it was about caring labor but this is the point i'm making a model look i'll tell you there are plenty of men who are not very happy about the model of female custody and that would yes and that would include the what is it 85 of men who are essentially denied 50 50 custody when they divorce and have young children so i wouldn't think that one of our major problems or at least a major unidimensional problem is the proclivity of men to foist off the custody of their children onto women there's certainly another side of that argument barry no there is and i do think that actually a lot of anger has been generated by the way we have an in britain anyway we have an in england and wales we have an adversarial fault-based divorce system that's something that's changing but what it does is encourage people to come in on day one and say if you want to get divorced you're going to have to make out a case that the other person has been a boss it doesn't matter because if you move to a non-fault-based divorce system then all that happens is the fault shifts to who should get custody so it doesn't remove the acrimony by any stretch of the imagination it just shifts it to custody of the children that's what's happened in canada right and in britain we actually talk about access rather than custody because the idea is not that you own the children it's that you actually want to be able to see the children and spend time with them and i think that's really important but fault-based divorce is is something that increases the chances of couples having a bad divorce right that's the problem is it it sets people against each other from the start they have to go into court and contest that the other person has done something wrong which is not a great base in which to start then an argument about you should be encouraged to divorce even if no one's done anything wrong no i think that having to prove that in a court of law is not something that is going to lead you to a better arbitration about settling money and settling you know access to children i think that's the point you have a ridiculous situation where couples who say well actually we've just grown apart nonetheless unless they want to wait five years or two years for separation they have to go in and plead unreasonable behavior to get a divorce and start splitting up their assets that's the joy of no fault divorce is that you don't have to make those contest cases you can simply say our marriage is no longer working and part ways without going into all of that acrimony that seems quite sensible to me it also seems quite naive to me i've seen very few non-acrimonious divorces they're very hard on kids so i think i don't think anything that makes them easier is a very good idea it might be good in the short term but it's not good in the long term unless unless you don't think that marriage is a useful institution and if you think that it's part of the patriarchal tyranny then you might think that as well so but it's a very useful institution mostly for kids so i agree that i'm married modern marriage has a lot to recommend it i do also think it is a patriarchal institution it is literally why you think that well because you think virtually everything that occurs in our society is a patriarchal institution it's easy to think that because then you only have to think one thing you could give a one thing answer for everything you could let me part of the patriarchal institution i don't think you're obeying the rule that says maybe treat people as if they have something worth hearing so i'm not making a case for the patriarchal tyranny i don't think you are either i think that you're making a case that that's like a a universally cliched case for the patriarchal tyranny i don't i don't see their too at all why do women change their names on marriage traditionally i don't know exactly why do you think they do because it was to symbolize the transfer of their ownership from one family to another family that's why in the handmaid's tale you have off warrants oh god margaret atwood well she was just about devoured by the feminists last year so that was something interesting to observe i think she made a very good but she wasn't divided by all feminists i'm a feminist i thought what she said about due process in cases like that is perfectly reasonable well many people didn't no but then you know guess what this is the on the internet you can find someone who disagrees with pretty much anything but so why do you think women change their names when they get married traditionally if it's not about transfer of property ownership traditionally i don't know if i have an opinion about that the the specific reasons for that i'd have to look into it for a fair amount of time before i decided it but i certainly wouldn't boil it down to a unidimensional argument about the ownership of women by men so okay i just you know the part of the problem too is with this sort of discussion is that it's and this is why i consider it a manifestation of ideological possession it's predictable well that's what you know knowing your stance on but having a coherent ideology does mean that it is predictable because you don't need an ideology it is one logical thing that flows from another and all those pieces tessellate together so what i find very interesting about your thinking i find it quite slightly baffling is that i don't really see how all the pieces fit together you know you say that you're not you know you believe in god but there's a lot of yeah emphasis about i actually say i act as if god exists right but which is actually my definition of belief okay so but that's it but that then doesn't to me tessellate very obviously with your insistence that we know actually it's just about pure science and there's not a you know that because what what insistence that it's just about pure science i wrote maps of meaning there's no insistence in that that it's just about pure science okay but you make a picture different you make appeals to science all the time you say well this is what the literature says and the trouble with god is ultimately you can't say this is what the literature says there is no literature which is why i don't don't say anything about the scientific status of god apart from what can be experienced maybe under certain conditions of what would you call chemical induced mysticism which seems to be something that you can say something scientifically about but i see that there's two different realms right there's a realm of values in the realm of facts and in the realm of facts science reigns supreme but it doesn't in the realm of values you have to look elsewhere that was what the humanities were for before they got what would you say hijacked by ideologues and you know the the idea that that that some that something should be consistent you were talking about the necessity for consistency and ideology it's like i'm not hearing what you think i'm hearing what how you're able to represent the ideology you were taught and it's not that interesting because i don't know anything about you i could replace you with someone else who thinks the same way and that means you're not here that's what it means it's not pleasant so you're not you're not you're not drawing you're not integrating the specifics of your personal experience with what you've been taught to synthesize something that's genuine and surprising and engaging in a narrative sense as a consequence and that's the pathology of ideological possession it's not good and it's not good that i i know where you stand on things once i know a few things it's like why have a conversation i already know where you stand on things i bet you don't know where i stand on all things i i would hope that that that was true okay uh let's talk about let's talk about transgender issues that's one what do you think i think about transgender issues i suspect that you think that gender expression gender identity are fundamentally social constructs but i could be wrong no i believe that there are definitely some biological differences between the sexes we've observed them i do believe that gender is a hugely powerful social structure that we've built on top of that that it is largely but not entirely socially constructed i think when you look back through the history you know biological differences have consistently shrunk and like we were talking in the age they haven't in scandinavia they've magnified okay but we were talking about that's actually an important exception because scandinavia has gone farther than any other area the scandinavian countries in establishing egalitarian social policy and the differences in interest and career choice and personality between men and women have grown as a consequence not shrunk which is exactly the opposite of what the social construction is predicting but also to suggest that they're malleable actually rather than fixed well of course they're malleable no one would ever suggest otherwise right so that's what i mean so i think they're not malleable in the direction that the social constructionist presumed as you flatten out the sociological landscape you maximize the biological differences no one saw that coming and you might think well it's a handful of right-wing scientists who are pushing that it's like no it's not it's mainstream psychology and there aren't any radical right-wingers in mainstream psychology and everyone who discovered that was absolutely shocked by it and these papers have been cited by thousands of people and they have tens of thousands of subjects and they've been done on virtually national level samples cross-culturally but i also think the behavior in scandinavia has changed for example a lot more men take paternity leave now that there is a portion that is reserved purely for men that doesn't seem to make them wildly unhappy so i think there are definitely behavioral things that are susceptible to nudges by society by government and by the state and that do change the way that people behave so we can possibly meet in the middle of now that people can be educated and that we can develop as a consequence of learning that's that's certainly not a disputable proposition and i also believe that there is no evidence for gender identity in the way that it is used and by uh you know as an idea of a soul i think that that's the way that it's often used to me by who by by transgender activists yes well i think about having a female soul and that to me is seems strange i don't see how you something like biological determinism right which is very it's one of the things that's so perversely amusing about these sorts of arguments is that well but i i attribute it to the lack of demand for logical consistency as a consequence of post-modern thinking you can believe one thing when it's convenient in one situation and another thing when it's convenient for another so we're in the perverse position where if you're a man born in a woman's body that's biologically determined but if you're a woman born in a woman's body that's socially constructed it's like okay good luck with that theory right i don't believe you can be a man born in a woman's body a woman born in a man's body what i believe is there are some people who feel alienation towards their bodies and they want to remove well everybody feels that right but they feel it to such an extent that the best clinically the best treatment for them is to transition and live as if they were the ones yeah well i don't think that there's any evidence that that's clinically the best treatment we certainly don't know enough to make that presupposition and i think we're playing with fire assuming that that's the case the the long-term outcome studies certainly don't don't uh demonstrate that so it's not so so i would make a very big distinction there between adults and between children i think that would be a good distinction to make right but i think we are very quick to diagnose and treat children in a way that i find and not waiting for the research and that i find concerning yeah so well the lawsuits will put it into that in about 15 years so there's there's there's one place that we've found from which that is something that gets me a lot of hate right i'm sure it does a turf and a bigot for that so right i don't think that's something that you would have been able to predict that i think because that is not now the orthodox feminist position i agree completely isn't that good congratulations we've all learned something um i just wanted to talk quickly about uh about me too movement uh tell me your reaction to what's unfolded over the last year i won't put words in your mouth you tell me well there's certainly no shortage of evidence for reprehensible sexual behavior on the part of people who can use power to get away with it so that's not so good the metoo movement i suspect it probably did some good things and some terrible things so i would say that there is a dangerous proclivity to abandon the concept of the presumption of innocence so in university campuses for example we're moving towards a preponderance of evidence model i'm not very happy with that model i think that's a very big mistake the presumption of innocence is nothing short of a miracle and we abandon it at our extreme peril so i'm not happy with that i think the believe the victim idea is something that only a fool could could could conjure up because it opens the door to to unbelievable opportunity for manipulation um i think i would disagree with you and slightly on that because i think what that means is what what people are arguing for is don't instantly dismiss or disbelieve the victim right which is right that's partly what they're very different there's plenty of people who are arguing for the fundamental attitude to be believe the victim so some people are are arguing to not automatically disbelieve the victim which is a perfectly reasonable thing to argue for but that isn't where it ends so okay climate change uh i saw you posting a link to a study suggesting that you know a lot of the the weather it's talked about has been over hyped what do you what are your what are your beliefs about well i spent a lot of time i don't really have beliefs about climate change i wouldn't say i mean i think the climate is probably warming but it's been warming since the last ice age so i don't think it's dramatically accelerated in the la even in the last yeah maybe possibly it's not so obvious i spent quite a bit of time going through the relevant literature i i read about 200 books on ecological what would you call it on ecology and economy when i worked for the un for about a two year period and it's not so obvious what's happening just like with any complex system the problem i have fundamentally isn't really the climate change issue it's that i find it very difficult to distinguish valid environmental claims from environmental claims that are made as a what would you call it secondary anti-capitalist front essentially so it's so politicized that it's very difficult to parse out the data from the politicization so i saw there was a line in 12 rules which says people stricken with poverty don't care about carbon dioxide yeah there's that's definitely the case and i think that's not an unreasonable point to make because you think about maslow's hierarchy of needs right people if you can't eat then actually you can't really worry about what's happening in 50 years to the planet however i don't think that's a reason not to tackle climate change because those same people people in the global science it's partly a reason is it though because people in the globalization generated plants stop people from starving so yes it's partly a reason and it's certainly the case that making energy more expensive obviously makes things more difficult for poor people so yes it's definitely an issue and i would say you know it's kind of a conundrum for those on the left it's like what's it going to be clean air or hungry people think well we don't have to choose it's like okay oh renewable energy or good luck with that or nuclear power i'd be fine with more nuclear power yeah well it doesn't look like we're moving in that direction very fast but that is that is that is a solution while it worked for the french i was fascinated david attenborough is something kind of close to a national religion in britain so there's a bit where you say population control advocates like him you confess eric harris one of the columbine killers why then is it virtuous to propose that the planet might be better off if there are fewer people on it and i found that completely boggling that you have elided their population control through people not being born and the mass slaughter of people who are already alive the motivation that i question right tell me more about that well what kind of statement is the planet would be better off with fewer people on it first of all there's an easy solution to that you could leave unfortunately much the best efforts of elon musk that is not yet an option permanently that's what i meant yes if you're very concerned about your carbon footprint there's a very fast solution to that so and i think it's disingenuous to what's the other people or maybe it's the people who haven't been born yet it's like i don't i'm there's a this is also the problem i have with much of the environmentalist movement is there's a powerful stream of anti-human sentiment that motivates it and masquerading under the guise of virtue on a planetary scale it's like could be i mean it's not like we're not fouling our own nest you know that's why that's why i'm i'm fascinated by where you come from is because the book you know is so much about things being in balance and harmony right and order and chaos outweigh each other well what overpopulation has done is got to the center it says we have overpopulation well i think that it's very difficult to see under the current model of fossil fuel based capitalism sorry to use that word i know it upsets you but that is what you until we've until we've run it when we run out of fossil fuels yeah that's not going to happen well it will happen yeah because there are people have been saying that's going to happen for 50 years and now that now the united states is a net exporter of fossil fuel right and so no one saw that coming did they but it happened and you're right that might be the case but at the moment i would say that you know china is putting up new coal power stations you know by the bucket load it is entirely possible that the stuff that the developed nations did that now developing nations did you know and now we're doing something sometimes they're concerned about clean air when they get richer that's what the data indicate once you get gdp up to about five thousand dollars per year people start to become concerned with environmental issues so if we make that might happen fast enough i don't think so it'll happen too late for some things it looks like we're going to top out at about 9 billion i think we can handle that i think probably people one of the problems that will be set us in 100 years assuming there are even creatures like us around in 100 years is that there'll be too few people not too many you know the projections top out at about 9 billion it's only 2 billion more than we have now there's every reason to assume that we can cope with that especially given the rapid decreases in poverty around the world at the moment there's a bit of a bottleneck there'll probably be some more extinction what we're doing to the oceans by overfishing doesn't seem very smart but we've only been aware of our role as planetary stewards since 1960 i would say and we're not doing too bad for people who just woke up to the fact that we actually have that we're actually a planetary force and i don't think that we're over populated i think all the arguments that all the all the people who made those arguments in the 1960s like paul ehrlich i think he wrote the population bomb predicted mass starvation by the year 2000 he was absolutely and completely wrong now we've been very lucky with things like golden rice for example genetic engineering of crops i think it's not luck well no it is it is i agree there you know human ingenuity is a huge part of that definitely right well in more people you know more ingenuity you know and bjorn lomberg who i really admire the skeptical environmentalist who's actually gone a very long ways to trying to figure out what we could do at a planetary level that would actually be useful and productive his research has indicated the best the best possible investment isn't carbon tax it isn't cessation of utilization of carbon-based fuel it's probably investment in early infant care around the world especially in developing countries seems right to me he's done the analysis very carefully one more area that you've talked about that's caused controversy is gay parenting you said the the devil is in the detail and you want to see more studies on that what do you think might be the adverse effects of having same-sex parents well i don't think we know um what modeling is optimal for children that's really the issue i mean i suspect that two parents are better than one suspect right i don't know one parent is definitely worse than two we know that um but we don't know what exposure to role models say is necessary for the continuity of maternal behavior or for the adoption of functional gender roles we don't know any of that and so that's the variable obviously you know no one knows what the consequence of being raised with two people of the same sexes maybe none right so there doesn't seem to be any evidence so far that's that's all the literature review suggests that absolutely there was a there were a couple that were that showed problems but they were in in couple coupledoms that had already broken down right so so there is no as no evidence maybe there will be some found but at the moment there is no evidence that there is any problem with having gay parents i never said there was i somebody asked me i believe it was a question like if there was a problem what would it be it's something like that no i mean you can make a very strong conservative case for gay marriage i think i mean not that i would necessarily be motivated to make a conservative argument david cameron our former prime minister said i'm support gay marriage because i'm a conservative yes right right so you know it's it's obviously homosexuality is it's been around forever also what's the appropriate social response to that well conceivably bringing as many people as possible into something approximating the same game i think you could make a reasonable case for that what's the consequence of that for children in those families i don't know i mean what i would say is while the obvious risk is that there's no one of the opposite sex around i mean it doesn't take up what would you it doesn't take the perception of genius to come up with the observation that that might be a problem no maybe it's not and my suspicions are there's probably far more relevant problems with regards to what happens to children that isn't good than that so so this is a way in which you know that is now a conservative position to hold i think it's uh 20 years ago that would have been anathema to mainstream control well people were concerned with the deterioration of marriage and believe that any additional transformations would further weaken it and i think that that's not an unreasonable position given how weak it's become and i don't think that that's been good for people overall okay let's talk about free speech to finish on you write in your book about nietzsche who became the nazi's favorite intellectual and you also talk about a professor only through his sister's mistranslations of his work right but you talk a little bit as well about another professor whose ideas you thought led in never to be to kind of maoism and you said i don't know how he can't be more worried about where his ideas lead do you worry about where you you know where your work might be taken and used by other people i saw you posing with them i worry about that all the time with a pepe flag i can't believe you brought that up right but i just think it's the e seriously i can't believe you brought that up you should go online yeah i do there's a believe me i do there's a video uh called i think it's called is jordan peterson a darling of the alt-right have you have you re have you watched the video of the person who put up that peppy flag with me he's online but i don't watch it i have seen you wouldn't i would say and why are you concerned about pepe anyways jesus he disappeared like three years ago it is and most of that was trolling by young guys who were trying to drag the media into idiot accusations like the idea that this was a white supremacist gesture which i was asked about on cbc it's like no it wasn't it was fortran trolls playing the media for fools which worked and much of the peppy thing was that as well okay but the problem with people ironically pretending to be nazis on the internet they weren't pretending to be nonsense but no this is a separate phenomenon and a 4chan definitely do ironically pretend to be all the worst things they can possibly be is that some people take that very seriously there was a case in america recently of a guy who stabbed his father because he had thought that his father was a democrat he'd got bet he was writing stuff for a conservative website he'd got very into the pizzagate conspiracy theory he's probably paranoid right so there are people who take this up very very seriously and they latch on to it what's your point i'm i'm saying that you know how much responsibility do you feel you have particularly guys the alt-right as you say some of them have enjoyed your work and so i'm not one of i'm not one of you guys i'm not with you guys they haven't enjoyed my work i've definitely read bits on the internet read more okay find some evidence i'm extraordinarily sick and tired of this particular accusation line of questioning i'm no fan of the identitarian right the ethno-nationalists the alt-right first of all what do you mean by alt-right exactly do you mean ethno-nationalists do you meet white supremacists no i mean people who are on the right but have got their power base outside the traditional media they see themselves as an alternative so i see them it's a pretty loose definition rush limbaugh kind of um talk radio right people who see themselves in opposition to rush limbo is not the alt-right he's been around for 30 years right so he's the progenitor of what i see now breitbart and things like that are the new media version of that very old media well let's define what constitutes alt-right first for me they're ethno-nationalists they tend to be white supremacists and generally when people tire me with an alt-right epithet the reason they're doing that is to associate me with those people they don't like me and the reason for that is that as me i've made it very clear not only in my videos but on twitter that i don't like them i don't like their anti-semitism i don't like their use of identity politics i don't agree with their aims i think that their notion is something like well if everybody's going to play identity politics we're going to play it too and we're going to win and i can certainly understand that motivation but i think it's a bad game all around and i think the only reason that i was ever associated in any sense whatsoever with anything to do with the alt-right was because it was extremely convenient of the radical leftists who i fundamentally detest to paint me as a representative of that viewpoint right other than that zero now okay but that's not what i did you say so i no point did i say you were well you brought up the whole picture but i did bring that but there was a reason i did that which is that nietzsche himself said i'm an anti-anti-semite right and yet his ideology and his philosophy ended up being used by the nazis so my question to you is how much responsibility do you feel about what i feel it's not how much responsibility i feel it's how much responsibility i take right right and i take as much responsibility as i possibly can right which is why i'm doing what i'm doing when i'm going around the world i'm talking in different cities i'm talking to people as much as i can i'm putting out content that i think is useful for people online and i'm clarifying what i think i have 300 videos on youtube virtually for all intents and purposes every single word i've said to students in a professional capacity since 1992 and despite the fact that i have innumerable highly motivated enemies they haven't been able to find one thing i've said in 30 years that uh what would you say justifies any of those accusations or any other accusations for that matter so it's uh it's it's quite the phenomena i mean i understand it to some degree you know sorry about the pepe flags you can you can help me explain why why did you pose with it what were your reasons for doing it did people just come up and bring it to you and and yeah i was like posing with i i probably been photographed with i don't know 5 000 people in the last two years and you know it's one after the other often in groups of 150 or 200 people and it just it's like 15 seconds right and they brought this flag one of them had spoken at the event they were doing it ironically um they unfurled the flag and we took a picture and that was that would you post ironically with a hammer and sickle flag i i don't know under the circumstances how what i would have done i have all sorts of soviet art in my house right because i think anybody could get caught out and social embarrassment is a huge factor and you don't want to kind of tell people you've been very nice to you that actually you don't want to do the thing i just wonder if that's something that you regret now that you wouldn't do again if you if you had the opportunity well i don't think it did me any good ah i don't think i'll betray my former self we'll just leave it where it is i made the decision that i made under the circumstances and took what was there into consideration i think that i think that the pepe formulators did a wonderful job of trolling the standard media i don't think that they were what everyone presumed them to be i think they did a wonderful job of trolling you as well in a sense right recruiting you and your image and your appeal to people to to their kind of cause which is ironic i don't really think so it is not actually you know underneath it all i don't find it very ironic actually what don't you find ironic that a lot of the kind of 4chan culture which is saying i'm just going to say the worst possible thing that i can say just to prove that i can say it because free speech is still alive i think that in itself is quite poisonous to the discourse i think i try and conduct myself online in a relatively civilized manner i do not always succeed but i do not think just going into a room and screaming epithets is something that i need to do on a daily basis to prove that free speech isn't dead right i think we could probably agree that that's a reasonable a reasonable a rare note of consensus i i but i have to come back to the free speech idea because i think that whole idea of the intellectual dark web and this came up a couple of times at your event on thursday it's predicated on the idea that you have been marginalized for your opinions or a press for your opinion predicated on my claim of that right it's predicated on well i don't know i'm not claiming i've been marginalized i would never use that word first of all that's for sure so but the idea of a dog i don't feel oppressed good i'm pleased to hear it but i do think that the way that you you got the cheers from that that crowd was very much about there was an idea of taboo breaking right that oh this is a microaggression but i'm going to say it anyway that you know hard work is the way to succeed and i thought that was fascinating because to me you don't look like somebody who has particularly suffered an outrageous amount for your opinions people have certainly disagreed they've been rude they've you know they've in some cases the only reason i haven't suffered an outrageous amount for my opinions is because i've handled the consequence of their utterance exceptionally well my job was at risk my career was at risk my family's stability was at risk so i wouldn't push that one too far in what way was your job at risk jesus last year 200 of my fellow faculty members signed a petition to get me fired that was only one of a dozen things that happened the university wrote me two letters two cease and desist letters from their hr departments with their legal staff three of those and you're done they just fired rick meda in canada at acadia university for talking about many of the same things that i've talked about so the fact that i've come through this relatively unscathed has very little to do with the vitriol of the attacks there is plenty of motivation to take me out it just didn't work right and i think the fact that it didn't work to me makes me ultimately optimistic about where we are because i've why because i've worked i went on i did a panel a while ago with zaghanara a burmese comedian who was imprisoned for making a joke right and we are not yet at that stage i think undoubtedly we're not we're damn close really um how about the guy with the pug in the uk count dankula that's the one right but he did actually i mean that was a joke i might not have liked it i didn't say it was a good joke i didn't say it was an appropriate joke i didn't say any of that i didn't say it was a well thought through joke but it was a joke yeah i don't i just fundamentally not don't believe that it was a joke i believe that it was camouflaged as a joke and that's what it kind of comes across right well that's exactly what you would believe if you were inclined to persecute comedians no i'm not inclined to pesky well you're inclined to persecute him i don't think he's a comedian and i don't think i i i i would have to look at the circumstances of that case but i i think he didn't like his girlfriend's pug and thought he would teach it to do something reprehensible as a joke right but i see you getting involved say tweeting douglas murray's article like tommy robinson and i think you see that as a free speech issue and that's not how i see tommy robinson's case at all i see that as contempt of court someone who endangered a grooming trial how do you see that case i see it as very fortunate that tommy robinson didn't die in prison i think i would say that about a lot of people in prison i think it's very hard to be in prison if you are a sex offender for example i think our british prisons are less inhumane than american prisons but they are still brutal places to be however i do think that was an appropriate punishment for somebody who tried to collapse a grooming trial well but are you and i guess are you sorry are you a prison abolitionist no oh right okay so you do believe that some people there are offenses for which people need to go to prison why would you ask me a question like that it looks like someone who isn't interested in meeting out appropriate punishment no but i just thought maybe i was made an assumption about you and i didn't want to make an assumption about you um i'm just going to end with a quick fire around so i know that uh this isn't well this is youtube so we have been able to talk for a really long time but i just want quick answers from you who is your favorite author dostoevsky who's your favorite female author margaret lawrence i think i don't know her she's a canadian author kind of an antidote to margaret atwood in my estimation okay when did you last cry oh god who knows last week probably who is your smartest opponent hmm sam harris is pretty smart because you've had debates about atheism with him and about rationality yeah i don't really regard him exactly as an opponent you know i mean we disagree on things i don't really tend to think of people as opponents generally i mean but harris is you know harris is smart he's good at making his case and so that's been that's been interesting what big question don't you know the answer to what big question don't i know the answer to well god that's a tough one there's so many of them well personally it's what i should do in two years when did you last change your mind about something important i'm changing my mind about things all the time every time i do a lecture i change my mind about something but something important something big oh well i i can tell you i mean um one thing i've learned in the last two years is that i think i overestimated there's an obesity epidemic in north america perhaps throughout the western world i think i overestimated the degree to which that was a consequence of a sedentary lifestyle and overestimated the degree to which a lack of discipline was contributing to it i think i think much more now that it's an illness those are two different things aren't they discipline is self-control and illness is something out of your country well let's say you're overweight you should exercise it's like well actually the evidence that exercise will thin you down isn't that great and maybe the reason that you're not exercising is because you're ill not that you're ill because you're not exercising so i've i have a lot more sympathy for the hypothesis that the obesity epidemic is actually a consequence of a of a of an illness of a broad scale illness isn't exactly right it's a dietary problem fundamentally and there are deep causes for that are you still eating your all beef diet unfortunately yes really just just beef not can you have like ketchup on it nothing right yes i wouldn't it isn't something i would lightly recommend it's a little hard on your social life it makes traveling quite difficult and it's dull as hell but but but what's it what has it done for you well i lost 50 pounds in seven months i stopped snoring i had some autoimmune conditions that seemed to have gone away i'm not taking antidepressants my mood isn't perfectly regulated but i'm under a fair bit of stress so that might have something to do with it i sleep much less um i can work more um imagine your arteries might not be i don't i don't shape i don't think there's any evidence that that i don't think we have any idea what causes arteriosclerosis i think all of the dietary knowledge we have is is rubbish and partly because it's unbelievably difficult to do proper dietary studies you can't do controlled studies say it's all correlational and there's so many variables i think the correlational studies are useless so um also the this all meat diet this all beef diet has apparently cured my daughter so who had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis well that was the original diagnosis then it was idiopathic which means we don't know what health is causing it yeah but she's completely symptom free so that sort of thing makes you sit up and take notice because it doesn't make any sense when was the last time you lied because the book says no lying do you still lie everybody lies as dr house himself told us what is most important i'm pretty damn careful about it what is most important to you in life not being stupid how would you like making foolish mistakes not being in cautious yeah that's tough on yourself life's tough man right how would your life have been different if you've been born female multiple orgasms it's not a bad one what's your biggest regret that i didn't take advantage of the opportunity to learn to play the organ when i was seven if that's your biggest regret this is going to be a great deathbed because that's yeah well you know i would have liked it would have been better for me if i would have been better musician and finally how would you like to be remembered as someone honest dr jordan peterson thank you very much