Jordan Peterson on the Problem with Postmodernists - The Joe Rogan Experience

Hello freak bitches. The thing about the postmodernists, and I'm going to speak mostly about Jacques Derrida because I'll consider him the central villain. Now he actually, he may, they make a point. Explain who he is please. Well he's a French philosopher, a French intellectual who became quite popular in the late 1970s and then was introduced to North America through the Yale Department of English and of course English literature is one of the disciplines that has become entirely corrupt. And so Derrida was a Marxist to begin with, but that fell out of favour because it turned out that Marxist political doctrine kept producing evil empires and even radical left French intellectuals were forced to admit that by the mid 1970s. You know they'd put their head in the sand for 20 years, 50 years really, thoroughly in the sand and made sure their ears were full too. But by the mid 1970s the evidence that that was the case was so overwhelming that even a French intellectual couldn't deny it anymore and so they started to play sleight of hand with the Marxist ideas. So instead of trying to promote the revolution of the working class against the capitalist class let's say, they started to play identity politics and said well we can just separate everybody into oppressed versus oppressor but we don't have to do it on economic grounds and so we can call it power instead of economics. So that was part of it and then the other thing, but the fundamental critique that Derrida focused on, this is really worth laying out because the problem that he discovered, the postmodernist discovered, was discovered by a variety of other people at the same time in other disciplines. So for example among the people who were studying artificial intelligence since the early 1960s it was always supposed that we'd be able to make machines that could move around in a natural environment without too much problem. And the reason we could do that was because the world in some sense was just made out of simple objects, there they are and all you have to do is look at them and you see them and that's vision and then the complex problem is not how to see or what to see but how to act in reference to what you see. But it turned out that the AI people ran into this problem essentially sometimes known as the frame problem and the frame problem is that there's almost an infinite number of ways to look at a finite set of objects. So the fact that vision for example turns out to be way, way, way more complicated than anybody ever estimated. In fact you can't actually solve the vision problem until you solve the embodiment problem so an artificial intelligence that doesn't have a body can't really see because seeing is actually the mapping of the world onto action and so that was figured out more or less by a robotics engineer called Rodney Brooks. But what's at the bottom of this is the idea that any set of phenomena can be seen a very large number of ways so like there's a bunch of pens in front of me here. You know when I look at them my brain basically notes that they're a gripable object with which I can write so I see the function like if you look at a bean bag you see a chair not because it's got four legs and a seat and a back but because you can sit on it and most of what we see in the world we actually see functionally rather than see as an object and then interpret the object and then figure out what to do. So the function of the object constrains our interpretation but there's an endless number of interpretations so for example if I was going to paint that you know paint on canvas this set of pens and try to do it in a photorealistic way I would be looking at tiny details of these objects that the multiple shades of red that are there and the multiple shades of white and black and you know I would decompose it in many ways. And so the AI guys ran into this problem which was that looking at the world turned out to be exceptionally complex and that's still being solved now. Okay in literature the same thing happened what the postmodernists realized was that if you took a complex book let's say the Bible for example or a Shakespeare play there's an endless number of potential interpretations that you can derive from it because it's so complex and so sophisticated so imagine that well you can interpret the word you can interpret the phrase you can interpret the sentence you can interpret the paragraph you can interpret the chapter let's say you have to interpret that within the confines of the entire work then of the entire tradition and then within the context of discussion that you're currently having and all of those things affect how you're going to interpret the play. So their conclusion was well there's an infinite number of ways to interpret a text and then their conclusion was well there's an infinite number of ways to interpret the world and there's a way in which that's correct and so the next conclusion was there's no right way to do it so you could do it any old way and then their next conclusion was oh and this is where the Marxism creeped up again oh people interpret the world in a way that facilitates their acquisition of power now that's where the bloody theory starts to get corrupt because yes a bit but also no right because and this is why they're wrong this is why they're wrong you see the world is complicated beyond our ability to comprehend so there is a very large number of ways you can interpret it but but you have to extract out from the world a way a game from your interpretation that you can actually play so if the lesson that you extract from Hamlet is you should kill your family and yourself then we might say that that's not a very functional interpretation right because first of all people are going to object to that right it ends your life it ends many people's lives people are going to object to it and it isn't a game that you can play over and over again in the world so when we're when we're interacting with the world you see what we're trying to do is to extract out a set of tools that we can use to function in the world because we're constrained by the world so that we don't suffer too much and so that the things that we need in order to continue can be provided and we need to extract those out in a way that other people will so that other people will cooperate and compete with us in a peaceful and maintainable way so then you think well we have to extract out an interpretation that allows us to live and thrive over multiple periods of time in multiple environments while we're doing the same thing with other individuals who are motivated the same way so there's a tremendous number of constraints on our interpretations and the postmodernists don't care about that at all all they do is say well no no you can interpret the way the world the world any way you want all people are ever doing is playing power games based on their identity and there's going to be no cross talk between the power hierarchies it's not even allowed that's why they don't engage in dialogue see just to talk to like let's say if you're a if you're a postmodernist just to have a discussion with someone like you you know a heterosexual what do they call a cisgendered male of power you know and white to boot it's like that's that's an evil act in and of itself because all you're doing by engaging in dialogue with that person is validating their their power game that's all you see and this isn't this isn't this is no aberration that these people don't engage in dialogue that it's no aberration it's built right into the philosophical system they regard the idea of the idea that if you're in one power group and I'm in another the idea that we can step out of that group engage in a dialogue have our worlds meet and produce some sort of understanding of yeah yeah some sort of negotiated understanding no that's part of your your oppressive patriarchal game that idea that whole idea is part of your game so if I even engage in the dialogue I'm playing your game you win it's a complete it's complete you people don't understand that postmodernism is a complete assault on two things one it's it's an assault on the metaphysical substrate of our culture and I would say that the metaphysical substrate looks something like a religious substrate so it's a direct assault on that and the second thing it's an assault on is everything that's been established since the Enlightenment rationality empiricism science everything clarity of mind dialogue the idea of the individual all of that is is not only you see it's not only that it's up for grabs that's not the thing it's to be destroyed that's the goal to be destroyed just like the communists wanted you know wanted the revolution to destroy the capitalist system it's the same thing these people now you might say well does every social justice warrior activist know this it's like well no of course not it's not not any more than any every Muslim knows the entire Muslim doctrine or Islamic doctrine or every Christian knows the entire Christian doctrine you know it's fragmented among people but then when you bring them together the fragments unite and the entire philosophy acts itself out so you don't think that this is a nefarious plot by a few well planned out individuals that have some sort of an agenda that they're going to promote this ideology because they and they understand what they're doing you you feel like it's what you're saying that there's a bunch of different factions a bunch a bunch of different parts to this and it could be a lot of it is that people feel disenfranchised socially they are empowered by their positions in universities and by these insulated environments and groups they're intoxicated by the power that they have over young people and shaping their minds and and and imposing their ideologies they receive feedback from these kids it builds up everything strengthens they shore up the walls around them and they push this forward and then when they have something like this speech that you gave at McMaster's and they get to actually act it unites them it unites them and this is what you're getting from this glazed eye you know cod love yeah yeah well it's as if it's like Richard Dawkins idea of meme you know if you imagine that in your in your neural neural structure whatever ideas that you're manifesting are represented neuron by neuron let's say it's a web of neurons not any one neuron has the entire idea set this is obviously an oversimplification but you get the point there's a network from which the idea emerges well the meme idea is is that an idea can rest upon multiple individuals as if each individual is a neuron and so I mean there are people who are more or less fully informed as to the nature of postmodern doctrine and they're pushing it forward consciously and unconsciously they're they're consciously pushing it forward and acting it out and so there are individuals who are more representative of the entire set of ideas and individuals who are less representative but if you get them together in a group the thing that animates them and unites them is the common set of ideas and those ideas were produced by the postmodern French intellectuals in the mid 70s roughly speaking Jacques Derrida Michel Foucault Foucault was the person who famously pronounced that psychiatric diagnostic categories were primarily social in origin rather than biological and you know I read Foucault's work I think it was madness and civilization where he advanced that particular doctrine you can actually read Foucault unlike Derrida and Lacan but I just found what he was writing obvious it's I knew from my clinical training that psychiatric categories have a heavy sociological construction partly because psychiatry isn't a science medicine isn't a science it's an applied science those aren't the same thing at all and you know a pure science is is a pure science it deals with scientific categories like Adams but an applied science well it's a compromise between all sorts of different things and mental illnesses themselves are shaped by the social environment even though often they have a biological route the way they manifest themselves is clearly shaped by society and language I didn't find his work the least bit surprising I thought well really I mean everyone who's a sophisticated medical professional psychiatrist psychologist everyone knows that it's like I mean there's a book called discovery of the unconscious by a guy named Henri Alimberge that was written in the believe in the 60s great book on history of psychoanalysis and like he covers the shift in diagnostic categories across time it's self-evident so anyways there's all these French postmodernists they were all Marxist the most of them were student revolutionaries in France in the late 1960s before that all fell apart and they did two things they they pulled out this frame problem issue the issue of multiple interpretations and said well there's nothing that's canonical there's no overarching narrative there's no real interpretation and I already said why that's wrong and then the other thing they said was they did this slight of hand so instead of the working class against the bourgeoisie it was it was race against race or gender against gender unbelievably divisive it's all they believe in is identity there's no individual man that's gone with postmodernism this isn't an accident all of this stuff it's not random it's driven by these ideas like ideas are always at war always and we're in a war between these ideas I mean Marxism we already know was tremendously powerful doctrine and this is its newest manifestation what is the motivation behind the individuals that are at the heart of this movement well I would say that the motivations are as complex as as human motivations are in general but they seem to have solidified into a movement right well I think the dangerous part of it is that the it's it's a kind of it's almost like a scapegoat mentality it's it's almost like psychoanalytic projection that's another way of thinking about it's like one of the things that I've come to learn and one of the things I talk about a lot is that the the battle between good and evil so to speak isn't between states and it's not between individuals precisely although it manifests itself at those levels it's an internal battle a moral battle that happens inside people and so people have a broad capacity for malevolence and for and for benevolence and that's a terrible war for people and it's a terrible thing to understand and realize in fact often when people realize their capacity for malevolence if they're not prepared for it they develop post-traumatic stress disorder so that happens to soldiers in battlefields so they go out they're innocent guys you know naive guys young guys and they go out onto a battlefield and they get put in a really stressful situation and you know they they step outside themselves and they do something unbelievably vicious and brutal and then they're broken they can't take that manifestation of themselves and put it with like Iowa corn-fed you know nice guy and no wonder because one is like a flesh eating chimp chimp pansy on a war rampage and the other is you know a relatively well brought up and polite farm boy from the middle of the United States it's like how in the world you're gonna put those two things together well you can't that's post-traumatic stress disorder and to treat that my experience with post-traumatic stress disorder is that you have to teach people a philosophy of evil of good and evil because otherwise they can't recover and I've had I've had by the way in the last four months I've had two letters from people from soldiers with PTSD and I met two personally who said that watching my lectures had had brought them back it together because they couldn't understand what they had become before looking looking deeply at at at their malevolence now so I would say with regards to this movement this post-modern movement the malevolent aspect of it there's there's a couple of them one it's completely unbelievably authoritarian I got a letter today from a university student in Italy I don't know what university but she'd been having kind of a flame war on Facebook with with the social justice warrior and at the end she recommended that this particular social justice warrior seek out a local mental health counseling unit and put a link to it in the in the exchange and then she got a letter from the university I guess the other person that the SJW type turned her in but she got a letter from the university saying that that violated university policy and constituted harassment and that she should seriously consider retracting it and that you know future employees employers might be looking at what she posted and it was inappropriate to put that on a public site and it's like I thought wow if you how could you be so clueless as a as a administrator say to think that your monitoring of your students private utterances you're monitoring it at an institutional level and your intervention and threat at an institutional level is less dangerous than letting two students you know troll each other on on a on a public social forum it's just I just I don't know what to think about it it's just unbelievable it happened and it's happening all over the place this sort of thing and so there's the authoritarian element to it which is a hatred of I think it's a hatred of competence because competence produces hierarchies that aren't based on power I think it's a hatred of clear intellect I hatred of clear intellect how so what do you mean when you say clear intellect well you have a clear intellect as far as I'm concerned I think that's why you're so popular is because you pay attention and say what you see and you're not too concerned about doing anything other than that I mean of course you have an agenda because everyone has an agenda you can't help but have an agenda if you're alive but you can tempt or the agenda like you can be clued in enough to try to listen and learn and watch and and pay attention to what your own senses are telling you and try to articulate that and that that's what the logos is technically speaking and the reason I'm bringing this up is because Jacques Derrida described Western culture in a famous phrase he described it as fallow fallow go centric P H A L logo L O G O centric fallow go centric and it needs to be brought down well the fallus part that's male the logo part that's logos now that's partly logic because the word logic comes from the word logos but logos is a deep mate much much older concept than logic like logos is it's essentially it's a theological concept and that's where things get complicated but you could describe it as as the manifestation of truth in speech and the postmodernist they don't like any of that so foul logo centric hello because it would be the ultimate mansplaining yes exactly yes like any man who expresses or tries to correct a woman in any way becomes a man's or maybe to correct anything in any way right particularly with what you wear the Ted Cruz Sally Yates testimony that's been going on in America I'm pretty fascinating no no I'm not aware of that I saw an example of that in an Australian congressional debate where a guy was accused of mansplaining by one of his colleagues and really like Torres strip off her quite nicely yeah so what's happening in the States well Yates has just been pretty brilliant she was fired by the Trump administration because she rejected this idea of what was the very specific thing was about restricting immigration about shutting down different people that are trying to come into the United States and she had this debate with Ted Cruz where she you know just brilliantly shut him down with you know her knowledge of the Constitution and knowledge of what is and what is not legal or should or should not be allowed to happen and she was fired for it and he was grilling her and his you know he's a very smart guy Ted Cruz although I don't agree with him and I agree more with her the way it was going down this debate was described as mansplaining because it was a man talking to a woman it's just a recent yeah well I also read about something like that with regards to the Supreme Court yeah because somebody did an analysis showing that the female Supreme Court justices spoke less than the male Supreme Court justices immediately attributed that to sexism because you know how oppressed female Supreme Court justices are so the I still want to get back to this that the hatred or the dislike of clear thinking yeah do you think that this comes from people that I'm not even sure I completely wrap my head around this but do you think this is from someone with they understand that their logic is muddy they understand that they're imposing of this muddy logic is illogical in some sort of a way they feel it they feel it they feel it rather than think it I mean that's the other thing is that there isn't a lot of clear thinking on the side of the social justice types because a lot of what they're doing is is really emotional level yeah yeah well they're the best personality predictor