Jordan Peterson Dissects the Ideological Nexus of Post-Modernism and Marxism at UBC Free Speech Club

hello everybody my name is Angelo and I am your emcee for the evening and on behalf of the UBC free speech club we would like to welcome you and thank you for attending our third dr. Jordan B Peterson event now I know you're all very excited to hear the man so I'm gonna keep these opening remarks very short the UBC free speech Club is devoted to the sanctity of Liberty in our society and the necessity to keep Liberty safe from those who want to destroy it within just the year our club has grown to over a thousand members and is now in the process of incorporation so that we may continue to bring speakers and host events such as this one none of that would be possible without dr. Peterson who has inspired countless students all over North America to start speaking up on their campus and in fact this club sprung up around the same time when dr. Peterson publicly came out against the bill c16 that was just over a year ago and since then his philosophy of cleaning your room and sorting yourself out has bettered and influenced the lives of countless people he's an accomplished psychologist professor and author his book maps of meaning is an analytical window into the myths and cultures of humankind and now he has written a new book it's called twelve rules for life and antidote to chaos and is available for pre-order on Amazon with the release date of January 23 2018 and on that note on behalf of the UBC free speech club we would like to introduce you all to dr. Jordan B Peterson [Applause] well thank you very much for that that's that's quite something all right there's a house Mike great I don't need this one okay well then let's just move it out of the way great so I'm gonna talk to you tonight about the ideological nexus of post-modernism and Marxism and I want to get into it fairly deeply so you can have a thoughtful thoughtful talk and then discussion afterwards so it's a confusing topic because it's not obvious by any stretch of the imagination why post-modernism and and Neel Marxism or Marxism proper would be aligned because post-modernism is an anti grand narrative philosophical movement and Marxism is a grand narrative and so the fact that those two things seem to coexist in the same space needs definitely need some explanation and it's a very tricky thing to get to the bottom of so we won't get to the bottom of it but we'll get farther to the bottom of it then I've got before and hopefully farther than many of you have got before so let's see what we can figure out here so I'm gonna start with some some definitions hmm I'll return to them as we continue you know with philosophical movements then they're often not named by the major thinkers in the movement they're sort of named afterwards the name covers a very large range of ideas and actions and perceptions like it's not that easy people talk about existentialism for example it's not that easy to come up with a one paragraph summary of what constitutes existentialism my sense for the existentialist is that it's a it's it's fundamentally a movement that's predicated on the idea at least in in this psychological sense that you know Freud tended to attribute human suffering and mental disorder to hood trauma it's more complex than that but that'll do for a for a quick overview but the existentialists thought that there was enough suffering intrinsic in life so that it wasn't insanity that was the question it was sanity it was how was possible for people to be sane and and and and let's say normal for lack of a better word given that there was brutality and malevolence intrinsic in life and the fact that you had to rise up as an individual and and stand in relation to that relationship to that is part and parcel of what constitutes existentialism there's all sorts of different people who were thinkers who were existentialist some of them atheistic some of them deeply religious like Dostoyevsky but so it's not I'm using that as an example to show you how difficult it is to bring a set of thinkers under one umbrella you're bound to oversimplify but we'll go ahead and oversimplify post-modernism you can think about it as an attitude of skepticism irony towards and rejection of grand narratives ideologies and universalism including the idea of the objective notions of reason that's a big one human nature that's a big one social progress absolute truth and object of reality all those things being questioned I kind of think of the head Joker at the top of the postmodern hierarchy as Derrida Foucault is often mentioned as are a number of other people here's some other attributes of postmodern thinking there's a recognition of the existence of hierarchy that's for sure and there's an echo of that idea the recognition of hierarchy and the term patriarchy because of course patriarchy is a recognition of hierarchy now it's a very particular kind of recognition but the post modernists also tend to define hierarchy as a consequence of power differential and so the world they envision as far as I can tell is something like a it's a sociological II Hobbesian nightmare so hobbes thought of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes thought of the natural state of human beings as every individual in some sense at the throat of every other individual so that the basic state of man mankind unlike the Rousseau lien state of say virgin innocence and and and the primitive garden of paradise was an all-out war of everyone against everyone else and that that required the imposition of the social order to keep peace essentially so it's a it's a fairly dark view of of humankind Rousseau on the other hand would think of people as intrinsically good and the social order as intrinsically tyrannical you can actually think about Hobbes and Rousseau in some sense of as as as opposites that need to be paired together in order to get a relatively comprehensive view of human nature well the postmodern view is like the Hobbesian view in some sense except you want to replace the individual with with with pyramids of of social organization so hierarchies of social organization that are based on group identity and that the landscape in which those pyramids exist is one of unbroken enmity and inability to communicate so it's a very dark view as far as I'm concerned and I think it's fundamentally wrong and in many ways I mean it's right in that there are groups of people and there is some difficulty in communication between them and that power is in the element in the formation of hierarchies but you can't reduce hierarchy or group relationship to those premises it's too simplified because people also cooperate we're also not groups many many of us belong to many groups so it's to the actual situation is far too complex to reduce it to that degree to reduce it to that degree even though you can come up with a good explanatory story if you do so it doesn't capture the nuances and they're not just nuances it doesn't capture the essence now the thing is is that when you make the presupposition that the reason that hierarchies exist is because of power then essentially what you do is turn every hierarchy into a tyranny and so if you if there is hierarchy then you assume it's a tyranny well that's really the patriarchy the patriarchy is hierarchy assumed as tyranny and that's also just not true except in pathological hierarchies so for example we know from the psychological literature that the best predictors of long-term life success our intelligence and conscientiousness in in Western countries at least well that's what you'd hope for right more or less if you want it even to set up a society even if you weren't particularly smart or hard-working you might want to set up a society where intelligence and hard work we're good predictors of success because then the people who were smart and hardworking would produce a bunch of things that you could have if you could trade for them and of course that is actually the situation that most of us are in so and of course the other thing about people who believe that hierarchies in the West are only composed of of power and tyranny is that their own actions belie that because whenever they make a decision to interact with that hierarchy they attempt or to make a purchase or to make a trade let's say or to obtain a server a service of any importance let's say a medical service they are going to definitely act as if there are less and more competent people within that hierarchy and seek out the ones that are more competent obviously which you don't do if if the hierarchy is only composed of tyranny and power there's no point looking for competence but anyways in the West and in functioning societies the hierarchies are basically predicated on competence and not power and and you might say well that's pretty naive it's like no actually it's not very naive I'm not saying at all that inappropriate power plays don't play a role in corrupting hierarchies of competence that happens but generally what happens is if the hierarchies of competence get corrupted enough by power then they crumble because they can no longer function so and though you know the evidence that our hierarchies of competence work is everywhere because everything around us works all the time ayaan Hirsi Ali tells that to to interesting stories in her book infidel which is a great book by the way she came from Africa and and from a country that wasn't very functional and when she came to Holland said there were two things that really amazed her and this really struck me because you know now and then you get lucky and you can see the the world you live in from an outsider's perspective right you get to see through someone else's eyes she said the first thing that knocked her off her feet was waiting for a bus in in Amsterdam and on the you know she's standing at the bus stop and there's a pole there and there's digital sign on the pole and the digital sign says when the next bus is going to come and counts down and then when it hits zero the bus appears and she just she just she absolutely could not believe that that would happen that there could be a sign that told you when the bus would come and that it would change and the bus would actually appear and you think well yeah no that's a miracle man that's an absolute miracle it is it is you've got to think that through you know the amount of timing and organization and and and reliability mechanical reliability and sociological or social organization and dedication on the part of the bus drivers in the entire company and the organization of the whole city in the state to make that possible is absolutely beyond belief especially when it's time to well perhaps not the second but to ten seconds or something like that that is absolutely beyond belief and her inability to comprehend that was the correct response and then the other thing she was amazed by was that you could go talk to policemen and they would help you that was just that was just a no-go for her because for her ik her experience was policemen were there to shake you down and and hurt you and so you think well you know well I won't I won't dwell on that point any longer the point is is that it's absolutely ridiculous blind to make the assumption that the hierarchies in functioning Western democracies are fundamentally predicated on power and tyranny and then you know I can use a biological example to which would place me outside of the postmodern realm of argument because the post modernists don't believe in biology but but they act like they do because they all die so so this primatologist named well I'll tell you two stories okay cuz these are these are really useful so the ones about rats and I got this story from yok panksepp who was a great neuroscientist he wrote a book called effective neuroscience which by the way is on my reading list that's on my website it's a really good book affective neuroscience he's a great scientist he was one of the people who he learned that he learned that rats laugh they laugh out ultrasonic li-like bats so if you're gonna you tickle them with a pencil eraser they laugh but you have to record it and then slow it down and then you can hear them and you might think well rats laugh like what would be a big grant for that what kind of idiocy is that it's like no no no just don't don't don't get ahead of yourself here you know he was showing that that that capacity for social interaction for social interaction that was mediated by physiological touch mmm-hmm activated the same excuse me activated the same circuits in rats that a dozen people and that those are actual biological circuits and that we share them even with rats now rats are quite similar to human beings as it turns out I could say especially post modernists but I won't and and and so the fact that that you know that little rats giggle when you tickle them is is actually extraordinarily important he also identified surprising I've been talking too much lately he also identified the primary play circuit in mammals and that's a big deal too from a scientific perspective that's like discovering a new continent like discovering a whole brain system that people really didn't know existed that's a big deal so here's a little story about rats so young rats like to engage in rough-and-tumble play especially juvenile males it's also the case for puppies if you've ever had a puppy dogs are like that they like to wrestle and it's one of the things that male human beings tend to do with their offspring and it's a really really good thing like rough-and-tumble play with children really help socialize them because helps them figure out the difference between touch and even rough touch and pain you know cuz one of the things you're doing when you're rough and tumble playing with the little kid is you know you throw them up in the air and you wrestle it around I built my I had two couches when my kids were little that were sort of face to face so we built this little wrestling ring and I used to go in there and pound them half to death every night you know so they loved that I mean they get so excited about that they love that so much it's just crazy but the reason for that is like you're stretching out their bodies and you're showing them that they can't put their thumb and your eye and you're teaching them to be graceful and and and you're teaching them the difference between something new that's happening to the body and something painful you're really teaching them to dance and it's this really complicated physiological dance that that is indicative of a socialized being and that's partly why women like men who can dance by the way because it seemed shows that you can pay attention to someone else first of all that you're coordinated but even more importantly that you can take the fact of your coordination and coordinate that with someone else's coordination so and that's very primal and physiological it's built right into your body and rough and tumble play helps without a lot anyways rats also like to rough and tumble play for much the same reasons and sort of sort of pretty much all social mammals so you can tell that rats like it see how do you know if a rat like something well he'll work for it and one of the ways you can figure out if a rat wants to work for something is that no you get him in a state where maybe he's desperate for whatever he's working for and you can put a little spring on him and figure out how hard he pulls to go somewhere he knows where he's going to get that and then you can measure the force that he's willing to apply and that gives you a rough estimate of his motivation or maybe asked a bar press like a you know like a coke cocaine addicted rat to to receive the reward and you can count rate of bar pressing and you can get an estimate of how excited the rat is to go do whatever it is the rats going to do and so panksepp used to put rats he'd pair them one rat against the other in kind of a play arena not a very big thing and and these were juvenile males and they would work to do that okay so they liked it and and maybe one rat was 10% bigger than the other and then when you paired them the big rat would beat the little rat because 10% weight advantage was enough to make the bigger dominant okay so then they established basically dominance and Submission you might think about that as a power relationship and to some degree it is but it's more complicated than that and this is very important so so the rats play together once and the big rat pins the little rat really very much like wrestling those rats wrestle just like people wrestle and if you pair them together then the big rat can pin the little rat okay so now you got dominant rats subordinate rat roughly speaking and but then you see if you stop the experiment there you'd think while the rats play to establish dominance and Submission but the thing is is that rats don't just play once they play many many many times and that's also the case with human beings is that you don't just play once you play many many times and there is a difference between the rules of a game and the rules of a set of games and that's so unbelievably important so you keep that mind because we'll return to that so anyways the next time the two rats get together the little rat has to ask the big rat to play because the rule basically is subordinate entity asks dominant entity to play and so the little rat does what mammals do to play you know they kind of put their paws down and put the rear end up bit up in the air you see dogs do that and unless you're completely clueless you know that that doesn't mean he's going for your throat means he wants you to whack him on the side of the head so he can sort of pretend to bite you you know it's it's pretty obvious if you've played with dogs and children so and I make that comparison because dogs and children understand each other right they're pack animals they follow the same basic rules they know how to play they can become friends otherwise you wouldn't have them as pets I mean the dogs not the children so anyways the little rat asks the big rot to play and the big rat things yeah yeah okay they will play they wrestle and you pair them multiple times well if you pair them multiple times what you find is that less the big rat lets the little rat win thirty percent of the time the little rat won't ask the big rat to play anymore and that do you think well who cares what like why is that important it's like it's really important that's a really important discovery because it shows you that that even rats have a set set a sense of fair play that emerges across iterated games it's it's it's an ever it's evidence for the biological instantiation of a social morality it's a big deal man that's a big discovery and and it shows you that even at the level of rats they're very social animals by the way the interactions between rats are are mediated by something like a sense of fairness or justice and so that's extremely cool because you know we tend to think of animals as having dominance hierarchies and that's predicated on power and that idea even though the bloody postmodern is still believed in biology they extend that analogy up to human beings it's just not true ok well the same turns out to be true of chimpanzees so friends de Waal who's a Dutch primatologist a very smart one too he's been interested in the biological basis of morality as well and he's written a lot of good books on primate behavior chimps in particular chimps are brutal creatures man-like they go to war eh and so in if you have a chimp territory out in the jungle then the juveniles will the males in particular they'll band together in groups of four or five is often but not always a female or two with them and if they come across chimps from another troop that aren't within their hierarchy let's say they will if they're if they outnumber them because they can't really count but they can estimate magnitude visually it's not the same as counting but if they outnumber them they will tear them to pieces and chimps are at least twice as strong as a really well developed human male and so they can tear you up pretty good and chimps are perfectly capable they hunt there they're carnivorous like human beings and they hunt they hunt colobus monkeys often they weigh about 40 pounds and they'll basically eat them alive but the monkeys screaming away like mad because you know it's in pain because it's being eaten and that doesn't slow the chimps down a bit there's no cross species empathy stopping them from having their knack and so chimps are very brutal creatures and it isn't obvious they have a lot of internal inhibition of their aggression at all most of the inhibition is Sociological it's out in the hierarchy and so the reason chimps aren't always aggressive with one another is because they know who can pound them and and who will gang up on them and who won't they establish their hierarchy anyways you know you think about a chimp hierarchy and you're talking about a fairly strong and aggressive creature you might think its biggest ugliest meanest most vicious irritable unpleasant chimp that rises to the top well that's kind of the postmodernist view of human society but that's not the case it happens sometimes but what happens and DeWall has documented this quite nicely is that tyrant chimps lead unstable regimes now you know you that might sound familiar because the same thing of course is true of human beings and why is that well it's because you know people don't like tyrants chimps don't like them that much either and chimps are actually quite reciprocal in their social interactions so they don't just dominate each other they groom each other they have friendships they can track social relationships over very long periods of time no and and they do that and so they engage in in reciprocal interactions let's say pro-social in reciprocal interactions and you might think well what's the what's the weak point of the biggest ugliest toughest chimp in the troop and that is he doesn't have any friends and so you know maybe he has a bad day he's a little hungover whatever from eating fermented bananas or whatever he is partying with and two of the slightly less uglies less slightly less mean chimps decide well this is a good time to take them out and they tear them to pieces and so one of the things do all is pointed out quite nicely is that if you want to have a stable chimp dominance hierarchy let's call it a regime the stable ones aren't ruled by the tyrants because the tyrants get taken out by by paired up friendship dyad something like that so that's really worth thinking about too you know because because it indicates that even in creatures that have less complex sociological orders and they do because one of the things that predicts how complex your social order is is how big your brain is compared to your body it's a encephalization essentially and the more encephalitis the creature the larger the social groups it can track and of course human beings are very highly in cephalo so we have quite complicated group we have quite complicated group organizations but even in simpler group organizations like the chimps it isn't the tyrant who rules stabili and that turns out to be also incredibly important okay so mmm-hmm so you know so much for the idea that power is the only game in town then you got to ask the question is well this is actually a postmodern question so you know get one of the things Derrida said the main postmodern Joker is that by categorizing you you you privilege one concept and you prep you for saw the concepts out to the margins and so he believed that when you constructed a hierarchy of power that the hierarchy of power privileged certain people and marginalized others and you know that's really not that brilliant at observation as far as I'm concerned it's rather commonplace all it means is that when you categorize something that there are things that are in the category and a bunch of things that aren't and so you actually can't categorize anything which meant means you can't perceive anything which means you can't think or live without making some things in the middle and everything else on the outside it's it's part of categorization itself and so maybe the post modernists would go far enough to question the utility of categorization itself and I think to some degree they do they do that but um the point here is is that if you you asked why it is that you would if you were a postmodernist yourself why it is that you would privilege the idea of power above all else it's exactly what is it that you're pushing to the margin and so that's something that we're going to talk about now here's one thing you might push to the margin let's say that you believe that hierarchies are a consequence of power well then you push competence to the margin and then applying the post moderate mark modernist logic you might say well the reason your privileges so that you could produce so that you could push competence to the margin and so you want to keep that in mind too because that's going to become important as we discuss the relationship between post-modernism and Marxism maybe you're after the destruction of the idea of competence itself all right so pro game postmoderns and we talked about it a little bit we'll return to it now we're going to talk a little bit about Marxism I've got a quote here from Marx the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains well that was pretty good for like 1880 or 1890 or whenever it was he wrote it somewhere around that period of time turned out the proletarians had a lot more to lose than their chains they had their lives and their families to lose and that was demonstrated amply as a consequence of the what would you call it the sociological movements that were put into place when the marxist presuppositions began to govern societies like the soviet union so all right so let's take the same post modernist approach so here's some basic tenets of Marxism its burgeois Xia against proletariat the version was the year the capitalist the property owners those sorts of people the proletariat working-class for all intents and purposes the basic idea is that history itself is nothing but the what would you call it the documentation of the struggle of one class against the other okay no like that's wrong but it's okay because it's too simple obviously it's obviously too simple there's all sorts of motivations that people have some of them are economic some of them are associated with power but that's okay we'll leave that let's give the devil his due and say well yeah fair enough there's still a fair bit of tension between the haves and the have-nots have-nots and maybe that was even more intense in previous societies than it is now and it's no there's no doubt that economics plays a role in in virtually everything that human beings do in a fairly significant role so let's let's accept that as a potential theory it's it's simple but maybe it's practically useful and then there's kind of an offshoot of that theory which is that well if you're a Marxist that means you have sympathy for the working class right because that's what you're saying all the time it's like well the poor working class they're all oppressed the poor poor proletariat you know and and then you're also saying well we're the good guys because we're standing on the side of the oppressed and so then you might also ask what your marginalizing when you claim that you're the good guys because one of the things that you would be marginalizing is all of the ways in which you're not the good guys but we can leave that aside for a moment too so but there's the claims is that you know there's the working class against the ruling class another claim is the ruling class is the ruling class because they exploit the working class basically stealing their excess labor from them another very very what surface lis attractive claim that lacks any reasonable justification you know because it's predicated on the idea of the world as a zero-sum game and clearly the world is not a zero-sum game so when someone creates wealth when someone is wealthy it can be at least at times because they created it not because they swiped it from someone else I think you know you can think of someone like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs is a good example of that you know they're there what they produced had a value that far exceeded what they garnered as a consequence of their production even though what they garnered was very substantial so anyways but we'll get like I said we're gonna give the devil his due okay it's the Burj huazi against the proletariat we'll accept that it's class warfare is the primary historical mover no problem now but here's one I'm not willing to give away so easily ah we have sympathy for the working class primarily and we're good because of that no I'm not going to just like give that away so simply so let's investigate that a little bit let's see if we can actually figure out if that's true we'll say use a pragmatic approach because I'm a pragmatist in that William James sense or maybe you could think about it even more deeply and anciently there's a statement in the New Testament I think it's by their fruits you shall know them fine so we're gonna go walk down that road before we do that so now that's another thing you have to keep in mind before we do that I want to make one more detour okay so I like making detours and then tangling them all back together so I want to give you a bit of a history of theories of suffering and I'm going to compare the Marxist theory of suffering to the judeo-christian theory of suffering and the judeo-christian would be and the reason I'm doing that is because I think the judeo-christian theory of suffering is actually one of the foundation stones of our entire culture and so it actually matters why you think they're suffering and so the story that describes the entry of suffering into the world the mythological story is the story in Genesis the story of Adam and Eve and basically what happens in the story of Adam and Eve is Adam and Eve are unconscious to begin with and they're sort of in this paradisal state there's no death or at least there's no knowledge of death there's also no knowledge of self and then Eve eats the Apple that the serpent gives her and the scales fall from her eyes and she gives the Apple to Adam and heats it as well so she makes him self conscious they both wake up the first thing that happens is they realize that they're naked and they cover themselves up and the second thing that happens as a consequence of that realization is that they come to know the difference between good and evil and I mean that's a insanely complicated story that's dealing with a absolutely incomprehensible number of complex phenomena simultaneously but it basically goes something like this is that to be aware that you're naked is to be aware of your agility and your mortality when when you have a nightmare about being naked in front of a crowd it means that you're exposed to the crowd all your flaws all your mortal vulnerability is exposed to the crowd for for them to see for you to be ashamed of for them to judge that's partly why we're all clothed that's partly why human being how human why clothing is a human universal there's many human universals by the way clothing is one of them although it's used for many different purposes so Adam and Eve cover themselves up and so it's because they've realized that they're that they're vulnerable they're naked and vulnerable that's self-consciousness human beings are self conscious animals we're really the only self conscious animals other animals have the glimmerings of self-consciousness some of them can identify themselves in a mirror for example but we have whole theories of ourselves we have whole articulated verbal and philosophical theories of what a human being is and what we each are as individuals so really those aren't in the same conceptual universe it's a whole different it's a qualitatively different issue in the case of human beings we're self conscious self consciousness loads on trait neuroticism technically speaking which means that self-consciousness is primarily something that manifests itself in the form of negative emotion and we all know that you're on stage you get self-conscious is that a good thing no you can get so self-conscious that you're tongue-tied right it's not good you don't want to be self-conscious on stage or maybe ever you get self-conscious in the in the face of someone you're trying to impress you turn all red you stammer it's like self-consciousness is a rough business it's no wonder because you know yourself for the for the fragile fool that you are it's even worse than that because see it took me a long time to figure out why it was that when Adam and Eve woke up they also developed the knowledge of good and evil I just couldn't figure that out because didn't make sense to me well how self consciousness knowledge of vulnerability and the knowledge of good and evil were tangled together or even really what the knowledge of good and evil meant but I figured it out eventually I thought oh get it I get it it was like a real revelation to me as soon as you know you're vulnerable you know the difference between good and evil because as soon as you know you're vulnerable then you know everyone else is in a suit you know that everyone else is vulnerable you know how to hurt them and so that means you can consciously know how to bring suffering into being and that's the knowledge of good and evil and you know that because let's say that you're really good at torturing people and there's no doubt the number of people in the audience who are actually quite good at that and maybe you all have a bit of an affinity for it if you're married I'm sure your partner would testify to that so if you're going to hurt someone what you think essentially is okay what would really hurt me and then you think well I'll just do that to them it's like that's that's that's a that's a good theory it's very sophisticated so anyways so okay so what happens Adam and Eve wake up they weren't supposed to do this God told them that they are gonna be sorry if they did that but they did it anyways cuz that's what people are like and because we always learn things that that knock us out of our present paradises right we're curious and we won't leave things alone and maybe things are not so bad and then you you know ask some questions that maybe you're not so happy about asking once you find the answer and you fall out of your little paradise into history and you got to work to set things right again and anyways God gets wind of this and and he chases Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden but he says some interesting things when he chases them out he says all right now you know what's the consequence of that and he says to Adam you're gonna have to work now that's cool that's really cool well he is God after all you know also he he knows what he's talking about he says you're gonna have to work so why would you have to work now that you knew you were vulnerable well the answer that is well if you know you're vulnerable that stretches out into the future you know you're going to die you know that you're fragile it's like maybe all your problems are solved right now you're all sitting here you're safe you're not hungry you don't want anything to drink etc but what about tomorrow what about next week or next month or ten years from now it's like just because you got all your problems solved for this second doesn't mean you've got them solved for the rest of your iterate through time so you got to work and the work is the sacrifice of the present for the future and so that's exactly right you have to work now you think see what's interesting about that this is the theory that I was going in it of course God tells that Eve well you've really you know screwed things up too you're gonna have these big brain babies and and that's a big problem you're gonna suffer in childbirth and then they're gonna be dependent on you forever and because of that you're gonna be dependent on this man that you just woke up and that's not gonna be very pleasant for either of you but tough luck and so that's it that's the curse in some sense and it's exactly right but the thing is there's a theory in there there's an interesting theory of suffering that's implicit in that story and the theory of suffering is that suffering is built into this structure of self-conscious being it's built right into the structure so if you're a self conscious being that's your lot it isn't someone else's fault it isn't a consequence of sociological oppression it isn't it a consequence of the fact that our society isn't organized properly it's just part of being alright so that's a big deal because that's a that's an important theory because one of the questions is well well you know why is there suffering what are you gonna do about it and it's a big it's a lot different if it's just the way it is for you and if it's actually your fault that he's suffering those are or maybe it's the group's fault that you're suffering those are major those theories are really really different than in the second story and Cain and Abel Cain makes sacrifices to try to get it in good with God and Abel make sacrifices and the sacrifices are kind of archaic from our perspective they're burnt offerings so the smoke goes up where God can detect it because he's up there somewhere up there where the stars are and God rejects Cain sacrifices and we don't really know why but it kind of looks like Cain is a second grader and then God Cain goes and complains to God and says like what kind of stupid universe did you make here I'm breaking myself in half trying to get things together making the proper sacrifices and nothing's gone well for me and Abel well you know he's everything he touches turns to gold everyone loves him he's even a really good guy it's like so annoying what's up with this place you built and God tells Cain don't be coming and telling me that the entire fabric of reality is wrong because it isn't working out for you says sin crouches at your door like a like a sexually aroused predatory cat that's basically the metaphor that that God uses and he says and you let it in and had it and let it have its way with you and that's really an interesting way of putting it because what God says to Cain is that you know you're all bitter and resentful and really it's no wonder because you know things aren't going well for you and then you've got Abel who's over shining you in every way and but yeah it's your fault this terrible thing waited at the door and you let it in and then you entered into a creative union with it and you produced something as a consequence and that's this tormented spirit that you have now and it's polluting your relationship with reality and that's why things aren't working so out very well for you so go put yourself together before you come and tell me just exactly what's wrong with the structure of reality and Cain isn't very happy about that because really is that really what you want to hear that's right like you have more misery than is necessary because you really didn't put your act together and you know it and you've done it creatively and so Cain goes and kills Abel that's the story of how resentment enters the world and it's the first story in the judeo-christian canon let's say about actual human beings because Adam and Eve were made by God so they don't really count Cain and Abel were born so that's something so that's a reaction to suffering right the necessity of sacrifice and the consequence of the necessity of sacrifice is that some sacrifices work and others don't and then if your sacrifices aren't met with the with the good will of God let's say well then that makes you angry well of course it does you can got out of the story if you want if you're not happy with that kind of mythological or narrative statement but it doesn't really matter because the whole point is is that if you make sacrifices especially if there's second-rate things aren't gonna go very well for you and you're gonna get bitter and resentful and murderous and maybe genocide 'el and it's really interesting you know because Cain has descendants and if you bug if you transgress against them they don't just kill you they kill seven of you and then his later descendants kill 49 of you there's this exponential growth of murderous nasai consequence of Cain's primary primal fratricide and then the next story is the flood and that's not an accident there's nothing in those stories is an accident okay so now you've got two different theories about the nature of suffering you've got the one I just laid out it's called the foundational story of suffering and malevolence and you have the Marxist story which is well there's oppressed people and the reason they're oppressed and suffering is because the oppressors are oppressing them those are not the same theories right and there's a utopianism that's implicit in Marxism which is if you could just get the damn oppressors to stop oppressing the oppressed then the utopia would arrive and so not only are the oppressors responsible for the suffering of the poor they're also responsible for the fact that the utopia isn't here for everyone and so how reprehensible can you get well then that certainly justifies that degree of malevolence justifies pretty much anything you'd like to do to them so anyway so let's take this apart in a little more detail don't do the Marxists have sympathy for the working-class George Orwell was interested in this question and so he wrote this book called Wiggin Road the Whig and peer which I would highly recommend it so on a reading list I made it's on my website you can check that out those are books that have been particularly influential to me and so Orwell was a socialist he wrote the book for left book club which published a kind of a socialist book once a month or well by the time he wrote this book he's already awake you know by in the 1920s after the Russian Revolution no one really knew what to make of what was happening in what would become the Soviet Union right I mean it was after World War one planet was in ashes Pro intents and purposes the old aristocratic order was crumbling it was a horror show and these revolutionaries came out with these new ideas and tried to give the in principle give the working class a break and everybody watched to see what would happen and the honest people and the intellectuals watched and I separate them for a reason but by nineteen twenty twenty-one twenty-two something like that it was obvious already that something was rotten in the state of Denmark Malcolm Muggeridge went over to the Soviet Union to check out how the collectivization of the farms was going and he found out it was actually pretty murderous right because what this what the communists did was round up all the successful farmers and raped them and kill them and steal everything they had and send them off to Siberia which turned out actually to be a pretty bad idea now you think you think about it those people were or serfs not very long before a couple of generations at most they were so not much more than slaves and some of them had risen up to the point where the me had a nice brick house and a couple of cows and maybe a person working for them or two and there was a small proportion of the agriculturalists in the soviet union that we're producing most of the food and that's just how it goes because that's a preeto distribution issue in any field where there's human productivity a small proportion of the people produce almost all of the output it's actually the square root of the number of people in the field produce half the output so if you have a hundred farmers ten of them produce half the food but if you have ten thousand a hundred of them produce half the food okay so what happens when you kill all the good farmers you starve six million Ukrainians to death in the 1930s and you know that's not something that's all that widely known but if you want to provide some additional fodder for your nightmares you could go online and read about what happened to the Ukrainians in the 1930s so without underneath the under the collectivization principles so let's say you're a mother and you were starving to death and so are your children and you know the Communists had come in and forcibly collectivized you and then they took all the grain that your collective farm had produced and they shipped it all to the city saying so that's all done and you think ok you know the city's gotta eat and so then you go out in the field to pick up the grains that the harvesters missed so that you can you know the ones that they've been lying there they're not so good there's not that many of them you go out and glean you pick up the seeds that weren't picked up so you can feed your kids so they don't die and so what's the punishment for that death because you were obliged under the collectivization orders to turn in any additional grains that you happen to pick off the ground to the authorities so that they could be well who knows but at least so you so they could be shipped to the cities I suppose which is of course absurd because of course that would never happen but it was mostly so that you could just actually die so ok anyways back to the road to Wigan pier now I'm gonna read you a little bit about about from the book so Orwell went out to this mining town in the northern UK and coal miners or will had sympathy for the working class he really worked on that his whole life because he was a middle class upper middle class snobby type Englishman and he knew it and he tried really hard to overcome that he he he served in the Spanish Civil War he wandered around as a he worked in in in low end restaurant he worked as a low-end worker in restaurants in Paris and and in London he has a very good book I think it's called down and out in Paris in London that describes that he was seriously committed dude and really a smart guy and so he's going up to these terrible towns in the northern UK where the coal miners worked and have their families and you know they had hard lives they had hard lives and that's just saying nothing you know that coal miners that he met they didn't have any teeth by the time they were thirty he said the women he talked you said teeth are just a misery it's better to get rid of them as soon as you can and and and they went and the man went and mine coal and that was rough you know they all have black lung by the time they were 40 and they were they were done fundamentally but here's a just a bit a bit of a story about how hard their lives were so they had to go in the mines during the day so they never saw the day so that's one thing they had to go to the mines and then they had their like not coal off the walls that's hard with hammers and picks and all of that and they had to move it but that was that was their job but there was the commute so here was the commute so imagine that the typical tunnel was about that high something like that and the typical coal miner was about that high that's a problem eh because you got to walk through those tunnels to get to work so you have to walk like this then the question might be well how far do you have to walk to work and the answer is three and a half miles and that's how far you have to walk back from work after you put your eight-hour shift in at the coal mine and they don't get paid for the commute and so huh or well said that was more or less like climbing a small mountain in the morning before you went to work and then climbing another one at night before you went home and so that was just I mean believe me I'm telling you very little about how tough their lives were but that gives you a little flavor like some one day like that for a modern person you're just your dad or you wish you were dead anyways and so Orwell talks about going up there to stay and terrible places he lived in while he was up there and the terrible food he ate and and the miserable wretched scenes that he saw and here's one of the miserable wretched scenes he's on a train through the neighborhoods he says the Train bore me away through the monstrous scenery of slag heaps chimneys piled scrap iron fouled canals paths of Sindri mud crisscross by the prints of clogs this was March but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of black and snow as we move slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little gray slum houses running at right angles to the embankment at the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones poking a stick up the lead and waste pipe which ran from the sink inside in which I suppose was blocked I had time to see everything about her her sac apron her clumsy clogs her arms reddened by the cold she looked up as the train passed and I was almost near enough to catch her eye she had a round pale face the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who's 25 and looks 40 thanks to miscarriages and drudgery and at war for the second in which I saw it the most desolate hopeless expression I've ever seen it struck me then that we meaning the middle class at that time our mistake and when we say that it isn't the same for them as it would be for us and the people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums for what I saw on her face was by no means the ignorant suffering of an animal she knew well enough what was happening to her understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold on the slimy stones of a slum backyard poking a stick up a followed drainpipe all right so Thor well rates the first part of the book and it details the lives of these people and then he makes an argument he says like how can you read about this how can you know about this without having some sympathy for redistribution schemes and social and socialist ideas and so he's actually asking himself this question it's not just a rhetorical question he's I mean he's a serious guy right he went he goes up there and he tells you a story that you have to have a heart of stone if you if you don't if you read that you don't think man something should be done about this it's really awful so he's set up this situation where your sympathies are completely with the people that he's describing but socialism wasn't all that popular in Britain at that time and and so and socialists weren't all that popular with Orwell didn't really like them that much he was trying to figure out why that was so this is what he wrote in the second part of the book now this got him in a lot of trouble they didn't want to publish his damn book after he wrote the second part but he fought with them and he got it published and it's a classic and and people still read it and you should read it because it's a great book and Orwell's a great writer and Orwell is another one of those people that intellectuals who woke up pretty early in all Orwell wrote Animal Farm in 1984 he wrote 1984 and 1948 wrote Animal Farm approximately around the same time he knew what was happening under Stalin and he wasn't afraid to say it but it was a message that in some sense fell on deaf ears especially among the intelligentsia and there was complicated reasons for that but but it wasn't like the facts weren't there for people to see them if they wanted to and has already said Muggeridge Malcolm Muggeridge had made it pretty clear in the 1920s and that was widely publicized by the way throughout the UK what was happening during decolonization the cool Acts being the farmers that I talked about earlier who who had committed the unspeakable sin of crawling out of their serfs status over a couple of generations to the point where they weren't mere property and half starved so this is what Orwell had to say about Socialists it might be said however that even if the theoretical oriented book trained socialist is not a working man himself at least he is actuated by a love of the working class he's endeavoring to shed his burgeois status and fight on the side of the proletariat obviously that must be his motive but is it sometimes I look at a socialist the intellectual tract writing type of socialist with his pull over his fuzzy hair and his Marxist quotation and wonder what the devil is motive it's really difficult to believe that it's a love of anybody especially of the working class from whom he is of all people the furthest removed the truth is that too many people calling them socialists revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves it means instead a set of reforms which we the clever ones are going to impose upon them the lower orders on the other hand it would be a mistake to regard the book train socialists as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited is perfectly capable of displaying hatred sort of queer theoretical in vacuo hatred against the exploiters hence the grand old socialist sport of denouncing the brew Swasey it is strange how easily almost any socialist writer can lash himself into frenzies of rage against the class to which by birth or by adoption he himself almost invariably belongs now I worked for the NDP when I was a kid and I had privileged access to the leadership for provincially and federally for reasons that I won't go into and I thought that many of them were honorable people who were really striving to give the working-class of voice and I believe that the working-class needs a voice a political voice for obvious reasons I think the Democrats in the United States have made an absolutely dreadful abysmal mistake replacing their working-class political ethos with identity politics we're going to talk about that and and I don't think the situation has changed that much I think one of the things that's happened in the United States is that world stability and peace in some ways has been purchased at the expense of North American working class well-being no because the Chinese have got rich compared to thirty years ago forty year go fifty years ago the in the Indians have got rich again same comparison basis there's more middle-class people in India now than there on the United States the trade arrangements that have been in North America allowed for the rise of middle classes globally at the same time they opened up the working class in North America to competition from those low-wage sources and maybe that's a good deal it's hard to say right because it's not such a bad thing that the Chinese aren't starving and it's not such a bad thing that the Indians aren't starving and that those societies are transforming themselves actually into communities that are quite wealthy it's like hooray for that it's an absolutely miraculous transformation it's the most rapid growth of human wealth in the history of humanity so we should be pretty happy about that but we should also remember at least to some degree who's paid the price for it and so as far as I'm concerned the working class needs a voice and it isn't obvious that they have one at the moment having said that however it isn't obvious to me at all that the people who purport to stand for the working class actually do so or that if they do so that the reason they do so is because they're all compassionate and sympathetic and loving and kind and saint-like I'm more convinced by Orwell's argument so back to the NDP the people I met at the leadership level a lot of them I had a fair bit of admiration for but as I worked with the party over about a five year period there is this contradiction that came kept emerging for me and that was that I didn't really like the low-level party functionary activist types like they just weren't personally appealing to me they seemed peevish and resentful and then at the same time I was going to college I was about 17 I got elected to the sit on the College Board of Governors and at that time Alberta was conservative politically right it still is of course but the it was part of the Progressive empire because they ruled Alberta forever and all the board of governor members were basically nominees right they were conservative nominees so these were conservative people and I was an MVP member and I thought when I'd worked for small businessman too who weren't NDP they were they were conservative he can never figure that out but I'll tell you about that in a minute but I had a bad case of cognitive dissonance because they actually turned out that I admired the people on the Board of Governors and they were mostly it was in Grand Prairie it's not a very big place and it's not very old and so if you were reasonably successful in Grand Prairie the probability that you would inherited your money from the Rs 2 crore aristocracy was like zero because there wasn't one write it the whole damn town was 50 years old so if you had any influencer or wealth you were a small businessmen small to middle sized businessman and you'd you knew what you were doing and I actually admired these people I thought well that's not very good I admire them and I don't share their political views and then there's these other people with whom I hypothetically sure political views and I don't admire them at all what's going on and then I read road to Whig and peer and I thought oh that's it they don't like the poor they just hate the rich it's not the same thing it's not the same set of motivations and so let's say that you're a post modernist and you privilege compassion for the oppressed think well what do you push to the margins well what are you doing with all your hatred and your resentment and your evil it's like you don't have any of that that's a bad theory that's a really bad theory okay so fine so you can say well yeah you can say that but I don't buy it I still think that the people who stand to speak for the oppressed or in fact motivated by empathy and sympathy their hearts are in the right place see I don't really buy that either because I don't really think generally speaking that it's a credible claim for someone to make that their heart is in the right place now you can ask that of yourself and if you think your heart is in the right place well more power to you you know I I I can't see the halo from here however and so given that you're just as malevolent as your neighbor or maybe even more so and that that's actually pretty malevolent given the intrinsic nature of human beings I can't help but wonder what you're doing with all those traits that you're not admitting to but you can you could even object well you know that's a pretty pessimistic view of humankind it's not by the way it's just not naive but anyways you could object that and you could say no actually the weight of moral authority is in fact on the left even the radical left with those who identify with the oppressed and who are working to better their conditions okay fair enough so then let's say well let's give those people some power and if they're actually motivated by compassion and empathy and desire for the working class if you give them power and you give their ideas power then as those ideas unfold in real time you're gonna find out like do things get better for the working class let's say or do they get worse because we could we could consider that like an experiment we could consider the outcome proof I I don't know what else you would do I don't know how else you would you would come to your decision because it's just theory till you see it happen now Nietzsche said back in the eighteen late 1800s that after he said that God was dead and I suppose that would also mean the theory that of suffering that I outlined at the beginning that is that the basis of judeo-christian civilization that God was dead and that people had killed him and that we'd never find enough water to wash away the blood it's a paraphrase but I've got the basic message right and he also said there'll be two consequences of that nihilism because there's transcendent meaning and a move to totalitarianism because people can't tolerate nihilism they said the most likely pathway to totalitarianism would be communism essentially he didn't quite use those words but he meant that he they words are close enough he said socialism but I'm going to use communism to distinguish in it distinguish it from democratic socialism and he said that probably tens of hundreds of millions of people would die in the 20th century as we played out that experiment and then he said but it might be worth it if we learn something from it rough man I mean and and unbelievable like I cannot figure out how in the world he knew that that was going to happen especially so far in advance but Dostoyevsky knew the same thing he wrote this book called the Devils or the possessed you could read that that's a great book it takes about a hundred and fifty pages to get going but once it like everything everything snaps together after that you know and then it moves and it's basically his prophecy about it's an examination of the kind of person who had arisen in the aftermath of the death of God in Russia who would lead the Communist revolution that's essentially it it's brilliant it's it's it's terrifying and it's a great intro to Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago which describes what did happen when those sort of people took over the revolution so let's look at what happened after the revolution and we might say well this how about we replicate the experiment a few times because you know how it is if you're running a scientific experiment you want to find out what something does if you allow it to behave you don't want to just run it once because well maybe there was something specific about those conditions that led to the outcome you want to generalize it across multiple circumstances so we might say well let's take this set of ideas and let's let's run it on a large scale over a very long period of time in a variety of exceptionally diverse cultures and languages so let's do that okay well we could first start with the with the Soviets people even now because it's like the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution or celebrating Lenin it's like that's not good that's like celebrating Hitler okay I'm dead serious about that it's not good and the fact that people can dare to think that that's okay means that there's something wrong with the way that we look at history Lenin was a monster and if you want to know about that you can read souls and instance writings about Lenin because they Communist apologists say well it wasn't Lenin Lenin was a good guy he was all motivated by love of the working class it's like well his henchman was Stalin and if your henchman is Stalin you're not a good guy and and Lenin was around during the early collectivization and if you read what he wrote you'll find out that he is perfectly willing to have any number of people die as long as his ideological system could be brought into being so there's no celebrating Lenin there's no work cool young Marxist hip revolutionaries and he's our Idol it's like there's none of that not if you know anything not if you're decent well there was death of the cool acts I told you about that there was Ukrainian famine that's 6 million gone there there was the rise of the gulag state because it turned out that Russia the Soviet Union couldn't run on the principles that it had that it had laid down as sacrosanct they just didn't work so you had to enslave everybody and run your economy as a slave state essentially and try not to kill the people in the gulags so fast that you can't suck some productive labor out of them was the death of tens of millions of people we don't even know the estimates range from 15 to 60 million and like we won't give to Picayune about the numbers because after the first 10 million you kind of made your point and the fact that we don't know between 15 and 60 is actually an indication of the horror of it because our count is off by tens of millions and that's only within the last century and then there was the 1956 crackdown on Hungary and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia then there was the whole like thermonuclear Holocaust thing that was going on at the same time in the fact that in 1962 and in 1984 we were seconds away from complete annihilation right during the Cuban Missile Crisis the keys were in the intercontinental ballistic missile release systems and Castro as he admitted to Jimmy Carter in case any of you are Castro fans which you shouldn't be that he was perfectly willing to have Cuba annihilate it if it would have meant the defeat of the United States and then in 1984 approximately I may have the date exactly wrong the Russians received an indication from their early warning systems that the Americans had launched five thermonuclear missiles and one Russian decided that it was a mistake and refused to launch the retaliation and he just died about two