Joe Rogan - Jordan Peterson: Why Identity Politics Lead to Totalitarian Oppression

And I was trying to figure out why the Russian Revolution went wrong so rapidly. Because it went wrong right from the beginning. And, uh, they, they, Solzhenitsyn quotes this guy named, I think his name was Walter Latzas, if I remember correctly. He got the Latzas part right anyways. And he said, when you're interrogating a member of the bourgeoisie, um, to decide whether they, you know, whether they constitute an enemy of the state, you don't give any credibility to such niceties as individual guilt or innocence. All you care about is their group and their background and their economic status. And if they're in the wrong group, the bourgeoisie, then that's it. That's the end of them. And Solzhenitsyn comments not just the end of them, but the end of their children and their grandchildren as well. And Latzas was eventually executed by Stalin. Somebody wrote me and just told me that after I wrote the forward. But one of the things I figured out was this, and this is really worth thinking about, man. So the intersectional claim is that, you know, each person has more than one group identity. So fundamentally, if you're going to calculate their victim status, then you have to calculate it across all the different groups that they might be victims in. And so, you know, maybe, uh, oh, who knows? A native American is one form of victim in this line of thinking, but a native American victim is, uh, female is, is like twice the victim or however you would calculate that mathematically. It's like, okay, and maybe you have, maybe you can be put into six different groups. We already talked about that a little bit, but here's the bloody rub. If I put you in six groups, in one of those groups, you're a victimizer. You can bloody well bet on it. And then here's the next rule. If you're a victimizer among any possible dimension of analysis, then it's the gulag for you. And so that's the fundamental danger of that group identity victimizer victim narrative, is that you fragment your identity in multiple dimensions. You'll find out that you're a victimizer and then everyone, then everyone's a criminal and then everyone's guilty. That's exactly what happened in Russia. And then you think, well, wait a minute, there are a bunch of people who are really compassionate about the poor. It's like, let's say, just for the sake of argument that at the beginning of the Russian revolution, that 20% of the communists were really concerned about the poor. Maybe we could say 50% just to be arbitrary about it. The other 50% were jealous and resentful about anyone who had anything more than they did. All right, now you put those two groups head to head in a battle for four years and see who's standing at the end. Even if you are one of those utopians who actually cares for the dispossessed, when the revolution comes, you can bloody well be sure that your head's going to be first on the chopping block. Because the people who are motivated by hate are going to be a lot more vicious in their attempts to eradicate than you're going to be, what would you call it, effective in your attempts to save. That whole game, that whole identity politics game, that is dangerous beyond belief. And it's predicated fundamentally on resentment and the desire to devolve people back into a tribal antagonism.