Jordan Peterson on Universal Basic Income - Joe Rogan

Hello freak bitches. Intelligent conversation about that, right? Because the lefties say oh-oh, too much inequality and they need to be listened to because the evidence is quite clear if you let the inequality ramp up enough the whole system destabilizes because the people at the bottom think fuck it, we'll just we'll just flip the system upside down. No one wants that. Like right-wing conservatives don't want that. So because you could make a Republican argument and say don't let the inequality in your neighborhood get out of hand because the crime rate will skyrocket and the empirical evidence on that is overwhelmingly strong. Inequality drives crime. Now you can say you can argue about why but the fact that it does is that's not disputable. So we could have an intelligent discussion between the left and the right and the discussion would go something like this. You need innovation, you pay for innovation with inequality but you need to bind inequality because if it's too intense then things destabilize. It's like okay we could agree on that. We've got the parameters set. Now we have to start thinking very carefully through how to do the redistribution issue and we don't know how to do that. So you might say well we have a guaranteed annual income for people which I think is a horrible solution by the way but it addresses the right problem. The problem is that we're hyper productive but the spoils go to those at the top and some of those resources need to be funneled down to the people who have zero so that they have an opportunity to at least get to the point where they can innovate and so the whole bloody thing doesn't wobble and fall. And I would say in some sense that's what the political discussion is about but we've skittered off into these radical oversimplifications which is something like well if if you have more than another person you're an oppressor and you're evil and if you have less it's because you're virtuous and victimized and that's just a non-starter. So you think that there's a real problem with something like universal basic income? You think it's a horrible idea? Well I think the idea that the solution is a basic income is not a good idea because I think the problem is deeper than that. I don't think the fundamental problem is that people don't have enough money. I think the fundamental problem is that human beings in some sense are beasts of burden and if they're not given if they're not provided with a place where they can accept social responsibility social and individual responsibility in an honorable manner they degenerate and die. That's the opiate crisis in the west right now like men need men who are men don't need money they need function and we've got a problem. One of the problems is for example here's an ugly stat I think I told you this once before it's illegal to induct anyone into the armed forces if they have an IQ of less than 83 and the reason for that is the armed forces despite having every reason to draw the contradictory conclusion has decided that there isn't a single thing that you can be trained to do in the military if you have an IQ of less than 83 that isn't positively counterproductive that's 10 percent of the population and we're producing a culture that's very cognitively complex like what the hell are you going to do if you can't use a computer? Like if you can use a computer you're at least in the game if you can really use when you're hyper powerful if you're not literate enough to use a computer you're at zero 10 percent of the population the conservatives say well there's a job for everyone if they just worked hard enough it's like ah no and increasingly no and the liberals say well everyone's basically the same and you can train anyone to do anything it's like no you can't. I want to go back to the inequality point here because if you look at this biologically actually I think it reveals a lot why are we I mean we know from careful study that people are motivated by the degree of inequality more than they are the absolute level of well-being that they have and there's a very good it's tragic but a very good evolutionary reason for this which is if you are working on some piece of land and your neighbor has the adjacent piece of land and they're doing twice as well as you it's because they know something you don't right and so becoming focused on what they're doing that you're not doing is a rational thing to spend your time on so you can figure out what it is that they know that you don't in the modern environment this is a catastrophe because who are your neighbors? Well you've got some box sitting on the wall of your living room that has a totally artificial portrait of other people who may be much wealthier than you and it's broadcasting in as if you're looking in their window right in the adjacent house and so you think you're being triggered to think that you're doing something wrong that you might fix when in fact the solution may not be first of all the person on the other side of that screen may not be for real but even if they are they're not living in the same environment as you the technology is interfacing with our brains badly but so we have the perception of massive inequality economically we do have massive inequality you're arguing that the solution to this involves some sort of massive redistribution. As a solution. I would argue. But nonetheless redistribution is wildly unpopular for various reasons and so what we've got now is a situation this is speculative but what's really happening is that austerity is being used as a threat to keep people who would otherwise rebel against the inequality in line and my fear about this is that this is exactly the conditions that are going to trigger that tribal population against population mayhem that we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation that when people have the sense that the burst of growth that they were experiencing is now over the natural response is to turn on those who are not as powerful and take their stuff that this is a totally indefensible but nonetheless biological pattern of history and that if we want to avoid that we have to stop sending the signals that trigger us to imagine that we've just run to the limit of the opportunity that we had discovered and it is now time to look and see who can't defend their position. How are we sending these signals? Well by basically failing to provide enough well-being that people's perception of the inequality is reduced to a tolerable level. That's the argument for universal basic income right? Certainly a strong one and I you know it's also a good argument for equality of opportunity right? Because people are people are actually not as resentful about the success of others as you might expect they're resentful about it if they feel that the game is fixed but they're also willing to consider the game long-term so lots of people will say look like I'm stuck at not zero I'm stuck at one but my kids might make it to four and that's good enough and that's been the American dream right? And that's a really high power antidote to inequality it's like well yeah there's some inequality we need it to keep the generative mechanism going but the game is fair and you can play it too and there's some reasonable probability that either you or someone you love will be successful so that so it has to be a straight game and that's why ethics is so important to keep this landscape stable people can't play crooked games and the rich shouldn't be fixing the game if they want to hold on to their money and the problem is is that some of them although not all some of them are fixing the game and no one's happy about that and no wonder you know and I guess that was evidence to some degree by the 2008 collapse because it seemed and I'm just as uninformed as the next person so I'm capable of commenting on this it seems from the outside that the rich disproportionately benefited from the restabilization of the economic system and people are not happy about that and they shouldn't be happy about that because it indicates that there's something fundamentally rotten about the game so you could say well maybe people can tolerate necessary inequality if the game isn't rigged and so that's why everybody has to act in a manner that indicates that the game isn't rigged and that means they can't rig it that's really what it means so and so we're also being driven into this inequality corner by I would say by the postmodernists and the neo-marxists because they say this is the pernicious thing they say well the reason that some people have more than others is because every hierarchy is based on arbitrary power and they're all oppressors and the reason they have the money is because they stole it from you and there's some truth in that because there are some criminals but when you get to the point where you fail to distinguish the productive people from the criminals which is exactly what happened in the nineteen twenties in the soviet union you better bloody well watch out because when you radically make things egalitarian you're gonna wipe out all your productive people and then you're gonna starve and so that's that's one of the doom and scenarios that awaits us if this idiot process of polarization continues and what I find reprehensible about the universities and you're tangled up right up to your neck in this is that the universities are actively agitating to produce people who believe that all inequality is due to oppression and power and that's just well first of all it's technically wrong but why is that though you guys both operate in that system so what here's the problem no as far as I know nobody has properly studied the question of what fraction of the economy is actually crooked rent-seeking right not productive and I fear that the answer to that question is that it's an awful large fraction of the economy not because of some uh... conspiracy but because opportunity is finite con games aren't and so anybody who can find a mechanism for transferring wealth from somebody else for doing nothing finds that mechanism and that thing is is ever present whereas discovering the next big thing that's actually productive is you know something that goes along and fits and starts and so if we were I mean really you've you've described it very well we've got a battle between two caricatures of what's true either the market is wonderful and it's producing great stuff with very little corruption or everything that makes people unequal is the result of corruption both of these things are wrong markets are marvelous engines for figuring out how to do something really well they're brilliant this right and so people who see that fall in love with it understandably because they're so good at it but what they're terrible at is telling you what you should want or what you should do if people tell markets here's what we would like to accomplish and then the markets tell us well how do we accomplish that best that would be a very viable system that would not result in massive rent-seeking resulting in everybody feeling that all of their misfortunes are the result of a rigged game which is so massively rigged that when they check they see yes that is actually large large to a large extent what we're suffering from but they want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and so they want to throw out markets entirely which you know it would be a terrible mistake