Читать книгу Dr. Jordan Peterson - Man of Meaning. Complete Edition (Volumes 1-5) - Hermos Avaca - Страница 7

I want to go as deeply underneath the problem as I can possibly manage tonight. So I'm going to marry some of my ideas about, what you might describe as the grammatical structure of belief with some more overtly political analysis, concentrating on what actually constitutes ideology. Because one of the things that I've been trying to figure out... and, I guess, this is part of my attempt to wrestle with some of the actual problems that the postmodernists pose. I don't mean as people or as thinkers, I mean conceptually. Because you always have to give the devil his due, so to speak.

There are elements of postmodern thought, like the idea that there's an infinite number of interpretations for any finite set of facts that actually happen to be true, and they're quite problematic. And it's for good reasons - as well as bad reasons - that postmodernism has become such a dominant strain of thought. It's necessary to take it seriously, and I've been trying to...

One of the things I've been trying to figure out is: Is there a reasonable way of distinguishing a philosophy from an ideology? And the postmodernist answer to that is basically "No"! It's ideology all the way down, like the turtle is all the way down. You never escape from the grip of your viewpoint, in some sense. And there's some truth in that. But there's not enough truth, that's the thing. One of the hallmarks, I would say, of both postmodern- and ideological thinking is the proclivity to reduce very complex phenomena to single causes. We're going to go underneath things as far as we possibly can.

The first thing that I'd like to point out - or would like to discuss - is the actual problem that we're all trying to solve. Including the ideologues, who claim to have the, let's say, interests of either the working class or the oppressed uppermost in their imagination, in their heart or in their intellectual concerns.

There's absolutely no doubt that there is oppression and that there's no shortage of suffering in the world. And I do think that that's the fundamental reality of the world. This is an existential theme and it was developed, at least to some degree, by Martin Heidegger. Heidegger had a concept that he called "Thrownness", which is an interesting idea. Thrownness is a brief description of the arbitrary nature of human being, or even of being itself.

The word he used for that (which is a German word) can be translated in other ways. It can be translated as abandon or dereliction or dejection, which obviously are much harsher words than mere Thrownness. Thrown-ness, this is more of a detached term. But what it means is that it's a characteristic of human conscious experience to be underpinned by arbitrary realities, that have nothing to do, in some sense, with your choice as a being. And so some of the elements of being thrown are: That you're born at a certain time, rather than in a different time.

That seems like it's an irrational fact. That's how Jung would describe it, Carl Jung. It's an irrational fact because there's no real way of accounting for it from a causal perspective, not subjectively speaking.

You're born a certain race and you're born with a certain level of intelligence, let's say, although that can certainly be impaired with enough effort... and you're born in a certain culture, with a certain language, in a certain socio-economic class and with a certain degree of attractiveness.

Those are things that are all handed to you, in some sense. They make up the axiomatic structure of your being. Some of them are advantageous and others are disadvantageous... and you're stuck with them. That really is a problem. Partly, because life in and of itself is a problem, a problem of suffering. But also because it seems quite evident that... well... or at least you could make a strong case that the talents and catastrophes of life are by no means equally distributed.

And so, in some sense, there seems to be an intrinsic... we might regard it from the perspective of the standards of human justice - and, perhaps, human mercy as well - as something intrinsically unfair, unjust, about the structure of existence itself.

Now, I like the existentialist take on that because what the existentialists do is: They attribute that inequality, injustice and unfairness to the structure of being itself and pose that as the central problem of life! And I find that very realistic.

I like this painting by Van Gogh, I think it does a very good job of expressing that. You know, he's an old man and he's obviously sorrowful. He's not rich as you can tell by his shoes and, like... it's rough! And he's a nexus of oppression and, perhaps... a nexus of oppression, in that he may have served as an oppressor. But also someone who's suffering and oppressed as a consequence of the conditions of his life.

And so then the question might be "Why is life like that? And what might be done about it?" That's where the differences really start to arise. So we can start from the perspective of the fact that life presents a universal problem to those of us who are alive and conscious.

Now, there are various meta-theories that account for the existence of this suffering. My interpretation bases on the story of Genesis, essentially. Which, in some sense, describes the introduction of suffering into the world.

What seems to happen in the story of Genesis is that human beings originally emerge as a mythological representation. It's a deep fictional representation, that's one way of thinking about it. Keeping in mind that fiction can be more true than truth, which is, partly, why we're so attracted to it. Because fiction distills truth and presents it in a much more concentrated form than a mere description of everyday reality.

In the Genesis story, there seems to be an association between the development of vision and self-consciousness - and the awareness of death and the awareness of good and evil. Those things happen pretty much at exactly the same time.

The consequence of that self-consciousness is a dawning awareness of vulnerability. You remember, in the story of Genesis, when Adam and Eve open their eyes (or have their eyes opened) as a consequence of falling prey to temptation: "The scales fall from their eyes. And they realize that they're naked." And then they immediately cover themselves up. Of course, the question is: "What does it mean to realize that you're naked?" And there's a variety of complex answers to that.

One is that: Well, if you're naked... a common nightmare is to be naked in front of a crowd. The reason that that's a nightmare is that people don't like to have their full vulnerability exposed to the judgmental eye of the crowd. And for good reason!

Everybody has, what would you say, maybe an inbuilt sense of shame about their fundamental inadequacy in relationship to the difficulties of life. So the story of Genesis, which is, I think, a foundational story... well, I don't think it's a foundational story, it obviously is a foundational story. The foundational story of Western culture! It suggests that it's mankind's knowledge of its own nature that leads to... not only to suffering, but to work!

Because once you realize that you're vulnerable and that that vulnerability never really goes away, you always have to prepare for the future. Because even if you solve the problems that are right in front of you this moment, that doesn't mean that you've solved the plethora of problems that are likely to pop up for you tomorrow, next week, next month and next year... and that, in some sense, are beyond your ability to finally solve.

But I think there's a different viewpoint that comes of the Marxist perspective. I'm going to talk to you about Marxism and postmodernism, both of which I regard as variant strands of the same ideology. And as I said, I'll define why I think they're ideological.

The thing that strikes me so clearly about the Marxist perspective is that the finger is always pointed at inadequate social order as the root cause of suffering. And that just seems to me to be... I don't know, it's so naive that it's difficult to understand why people can possibly fall for it.

Maybe because there's some hope embedded in it, right? There's an idea that our suffering might be transcended if we could just organize our societies properly. But it seems to me:

1) That that's highly unlikely, and

2) As Dostoevsky pointed out: Even if we did organize our societies so that no one had anything to worry about from a material perspective - everyone had enough bread and shelter - that we are the kind of insane creatures that would blow that apart, fragment that sort of static utopian perfection, just so something strange and interesting might happen.

And I think that that's a really devastating critique! Dostoevsky formulated that back in the late 1800s. He had thought through the consequences of communist utopia before it even manifested itself as a political force. And I think he put his finger exactly on at least one of its primary weaknesses. You know... if we were delivered from suffering, it's not necessarily clear that we would be happy about that. Because one of the things that does characterize human beings is this intense desire for experience that transcends the normative.

People will go out and look for difficult things to do, just for the sake of doing difficult things. They climb mountains, they engage in extreme sports and they put their lifes in danger... there's no technical reason for that and it doesn't seem like a very intelligent thing to do - from the pure perspective of self-preservation - but we're certainly capable of it.

The Marxists seem to lay the reason for suffering at the foot of inadequate social structure. But they go farther than that, they also describe the social structure as it exists. And this is where the idea of the patriarchy is derived, as far as I'm concerned: As something that is necessarily an upper-/oppressive class against the oppressed class.

The people who fit in those different categories can vary. With classic Marxism, it was the rich against the poor, or the poor against the rich, right? The burgeousie against the proletariat.

That's been transformed by the postmodernists, using a fairly self-evident sleight of hand into identity politics, where the oppressed-oppressor narrative just takes different forms. According to the identity that happens to be plugged into the same aetiational structure. What seems to happen as a consequence of that...

I mean, there's pretty good data about this with regards to the genesis of intense intergroup conflict. One of the things that predicts intense intergroup conflict (like the conflict in Rwanda and certainly also in Nazi Germany) is, that genocidal activities are often marketed as "pre-emptive strikes" against an oppressor class. Right? That would have been the Jews in Germany and in Rwanda the same narrative emerged.

It's very common to dichotomize the society as oppressor and oppressed, and then for the oppressed to rise up and take out the so-called oppressors. Even before anything of any particular violence occurs, because of this enhanced sense of victimization and the moral highground that it seems to provide. The logic being something like "If we're being oppressed, we have every right to to defend ourselves", so to speak. Even against threats that are only, in some way, imaginary.

Now, I don't want to get to cut-and-dried about that because it certainly is the case that there isn't a political or economic system in the entire world that lacks corruption. So, the idea that the social structure is corrupt enough, so that everyone who is embodied in that social structure doesn't necessarily have an equal chance to manifest their "gifts", say, and rise to the top, is certainly true.

Because human beings are completely incapable of producing perfect social structures, for a variety of reasons:

 Our own blindness.

 The fact that we inherit structures that we don't really understand, that are all demented and bent in one way or another.

And so there's always an element of truth to critical claims that if we just got our act together better - from a social perspective - that everything would be more fair and just. But to say that is not to simultaneously justify the claim, that all the reasons that human beings are suffering (and that life is unfair and unjust) is because the social structure is corrupt and oppressive. Right? You got to think in multivariate terms if you have any degree of intelligence at all! And for any complex phenomena, there's generally a multitude of causes and they are not easy to differentiate.

I mean, that's partly what social scientists do: To take a look at a complex outcome - suffering certainly being one of those - and to look at the potential contributors of a multitude of factors. Now, it's very difficult because those factors are not easy to categorize and they overlap, so on and so forth.

But you have to be pretty... motivated and stupid, I would say (both at the same time), to use a univariate hypothesis to account for such a complex phenomenon. I don't care what the phenomenon is! That's another hallmark of ideological thinking: The causal story collapses into a single dimension.

You see that often in psychopathology, too. People who get obsessive about something can't shake a particular idea that possesses them. Paranoid people are like that and people who have eating disorders, especially anorexia, are like that. Their entire value structure collapses into the dimension of thin equals beautiful and good. And it's very rigid, very black and white and it does them absolutely no good.

Some of the problems with the Marxist perspective seems to be that victimhood, the sense of enhanced victimhood, tends to produce an intense sense of resentment. And that's a very bad idea because resentment is a very toxic and violent emotion. It's also very ungrateful, which is one of the things I would really say some things about... especially the radical-left student types, especially at Ivy League universities.

I mean, it's really quite a spectacle to see people at places like Yale come out and agitate as a consequence of the realization of their own oppression - when, by any reasonable standard (current or historical) they're probably in the top 1/100th of 1 percent, perhaps better than that, of all the people who have ever lived anywhere. Ever!

It's really quite staggering to me that the top 0.001 percent can express their resentment about the top 0.0001 percent in such strident terms. Without noticing that exactly the same claims of privilege apply to them! All you have to do is transform the bin in which you're doing the privilege comparisons, then that becomes immediately self-evident. And, you know, the fact that as Americans (or as North Americans, since I'm a Canadian), that we're staggeringly privileged, compared to the rest of the world, is certainly a consequence of the arbitrariness of our political borders.

But to forget that, when you're claiming a particular brand of oppression for yourself, seems to me to be very ungrateful, at the least. And certainly politically motivated. Because, I think, it justifies your expression of hatred for those... that tiny fraction of people who are still better off than you. And also a degree of historical ignorance that's absolutely staggering in its magnitude - and a complete indictment of our education system which should be indicted in every possible way.

Now, the Marxists claim to their benefit this worldview of class struggle as being the primary driver of human history and the Well-off, socioeconomically - because that's pretty much the only way they define well-off. Which is also something I take great objection to, because: There's lots of hierarchies in the world, there are many important hierarchies and not all of them can be reduced to socioeconomic status, by any stretch of the imagination.

Imagine if you were 80 years old and you had 20 million dollars, you know, you might be perfectly happy to get rid of all that money if you could be 18 again! You know, one of the best predictors of wealth in North America is actually age! Because young people haven't actually had much time to make money, whereas old people have had quite a bit of time. But the problem with being old and rich is that you're still old!

That actually turns out to be quite a serious problem, because: No matter how rich you are, you eventually die. And so, the money has a very delimited effect with regards to addressing the fundamental problems of the suffering of life.

We know perfectly well, from the empirical perspective: Once you have enough money so that the bill collectors aren't chasing you around, essentially (something like the beginnings of a middle-class existence, maybe the upper end of the working-class), then additional money has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on your psychological well-being! And that's actually an indication of the limitations of material comfort, let's say, as a medication for the suffering that's attendant on life.

Another thing that's very weak about the Marxists and very interestingly contradictory, is: They're very anti-capital in their structure - but they're so damn materialistic that it's absolutely mind-boggling! Because the Marxists are actually more convinced that money is useful than most capitalists are, as far as I can tell.

They believe that money is in fact the solution to all life's problems. The problem is that just the right people don't have the money. I think that's a staggeringly naive perspective because there's many problems in life that money just cannot solve - and there's a fair number of them that it actually makes worse!

I used to work for a socialist party in Canada when I was a kid, about the time I was 14 'till the time I was 17. Before I figured out what was wrong, not so much with socialism per se, but with ideology per se. I actually admired the socialist leaders that I had the fortune to be introduced to, because at that point they were very much a voice for the working class, a lot of union leaders and people like that, you know. So they were classic democratic socialists on the labor end of the distribution.

It's absolutely necessary for labor and the working class to have a political voice, something the Democrats might keep in mind! Maybe they wouldn't lose their elections quite so frequently. I really think it's appalling, you know. Because it's necessary for the working class to have a political voice - and to have that transformed into identity politics is a real catastrophe.

Anyways. I think that the people that I met, many of them were genuinely concerned with the problems of the working-class and, you know, more power to them. So I think there are people on the left who genuinely are trying to make a difference for people who could use a fair shot at opportunity in life. But at the same time, I noticed that a tremendous number of the people (especially at the lower end party worker protestor types) were more peevish and resentful than good-hearted and kind.

It was about that time that I came across George Orwell's famous critique of left-wing thinking in the UK, in a book called Road To Wigan Pier. Where Orwell basically made the claim that the Socialists that he knew, especially the middle-class ones, didn't give a damn about the poor. They just hated the rich!

And that's.. I mean, that is something worth thinking about for a very long period of time. Because hatred actually turns out to be a very powerful motivation, you know. If you think about the sorts of things that happened in the Soviet Union and all these places, that were supposed to be workers paradises... if you look at the outcome and you had to infer whether it was goodness of heart and kindheartedness and care for the working man that produced the genocides - or outright bitter resentment and hatred:

It's a lot easier to draw a causal path from the negative emotion to the outcome than from the positive kind-hearted benevolence. You don't get gulags out of benevolence, that's just not how it works!

So I think the bloody historical evidence is clear. Although I have read the most convoluted, pathological, pathetic, twisted rationalizations of what happened, say, in stalinist Russia, that you could possibly manufacture. It's as if a stack of corpses that would reach halfway to the moon isn't enough evidence for the pathology of a certain form of belief. Well, some people can't be convinced by anyone's death but their own, I suppose.

Now I want to talk about postmodernism a little bit. That's Michelle Foucault:

And you could hardly ever discover a more reprehensible individual or even dream up one, no matter how twisted your imagination. Foucault and Derrida (I would say there's more) but I would say they're the two architects of the postmodernist movement. In the late 60s and early 70s, they were avowed Marxists - way, way after anyone with any shred of ethical decency had stopped being a Marxist!

By that time, even Jean-Paul Sartre had woken up enough to figure out that the Soviets hadn't ushered in the "kingdom of heaven", you know. He had evidence stretching back 45 years that he could have attended to if he would have been willing to open his eyes. Talk about Bad Faith, which was his ethical critique, essentially. Quite staggering.

The postmodernists knew that they were pretty much done with regards to pushing their classic Marxism by the late 60s and early 70s, because the evidence that stalinist Russia... not only Stalin, certainly Lenin was no saint by any stretch of the imagination. The killing certainly got under way while he was still alive and continued after Stalin was dead, as well. Although, perhaps, not with the same degree of brutality and efficiency.

And then there is of course Maoist China, where the estimates... you know, nobody knows how many people died under Mao, but the estimates run as high as a 100 million people - which actually turns out to be quite a few people! The fact that we can't keep count accurately without an error margin of something in the tens of millions just tells you exactly how horrible the situation was.

These guys transformed the Marxist dialogue of rich vs. poor, into oppressed vs. oppressor. Foucault in particular, who never fit in anywhere. He was an outcast in many ways, a bitter one and a suicidal one his entire life. Did everything he possibly could (with his staggering IQ) to figure out every treacherous way possible to undermine the structure that wouldn't accept him in all his peculiarities.

And it's no wonder, because there would be no way of making a structure that could possibly function, if it was composed of people who were as peculiar, bitter and resentful as Michele Foucault. You couldn't imagine a functioning society that would be composed of individuals with his particular makeup

In any case, he did put his brain to work. Trying to figure out

1 how to resurrect Marxism under a new guise, let's say, and

2 how to justify the fact that it wasn't his problem that he was an outsider - it was actually everyone else's problem.

And he did a pretty damn good job of that and laid the groundwork for the... what would you call it? The rise of the marginalized against the center.

Derrida's thinking is very much the same, you know. Even though Foucault and Derrida hated each other and regarded each other as intellectual charlatans - which was about the only thing either of them was ever really correct about!

Derrida is even a more treacherous thinker in some ways.

He makes the claim that, like a political system has a center around which the majority congregate, let's say, (quite similar to Faucoult's analysis) and there are people who are outside the category system. Which is obviously true because no matter how you categorize people, there are certain people inside the category and certain people outside.

That's actually why you categorize things, right? Because if every category holds every entity, then every cognitive operation is infinitely complex. You can't manage the world that way! To categorize, you have to include and exclude, it's in the very nature of categorization.

And you can't just scrap categorization because without simplification and categorization, you actually can't function in the world. You just die! Right? You die of excess stress! Something like that happens to schizophrenic people because their category systems break down, they're completely incapable of functioning in the world as a consequence of that. Anyways.

Derrida (and Foucault as well) went a step further... and this is one of the incredibly crooked elements of their thinking, another sleight of hand, which was: "Well, category systems exclude, political systems exclude, economic systems exclude, any hierarchy of value excludes" - obviously! Because if there was a hierarchy of value, some things are more valuable than others. And the less valuable things are excluded because otherwise it wouldn't be a hierarchy of value.

But the the next claim they essentially make is, that the reason that those hierarchies of value are constructed is not to produce whatever it is that's of value - but to exclude and to maintain the structure of power that's intrinsic to the hierarchy of value. And that's an unbelievably crooked claim! Because there are multiple reasons why a hierarchy of value might be put into place: There are hierarchies of beauty, there are hierarchies of competence, hierarchies of intelligence and attractiveness, athletic ability and musical talent...

There's multiple hierarchies and in order for those things to exist at a high order, in order for us to laud musical genius, we have to exclude all the people who can only squawk their clarinet from the hierarchy! Because otherwise you don't have any music and there's no up and there's no direction.

So to claim that the purpose of the hierarchy is to exclude is unbelievably crooked. And it's a central claim for both Foucault and Derrida. It's one of those sleights of hand that people don't quite notice, but that have absolutely catastrophic effects.

Now, for Foucault and Derrida... here's how you could imagine their world, essentially: You know, for the philosopher Hobbes life was "nasty, brutish and short" and people were at each other's throat in the state of nature.

But Hobbes really thought about that as the chaos of individuals. He believed that a central authority had to exert force in order to organize that intrinsic chaos so that some degree of peace could reign.

It's kind of the opposite of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theory, which was that human beings were intrinsically good and the state, the government, was intrinsically bad - and that all of what made people evil derived from the state.

I would say if you put Hobbes and Rousseau together, you actually get the truth. Even though they do seem to be coming at it from opposite perspectives, because people are actually good and evil. And social structures are also good and evil. You know, it's paradoxical and we don't like paradoxical categories, but that's still how it is.

What Foucault and Derrida and the postmodernists did, was that they kind of added a collective element to that. So their Hobbesian world isn't a world of individuals struggling against one another, in the initial state of warlike nature. It's groups of individuals, bound by whatever their identity happens to be - struggling against each other for power! Because in the postmodern Neomarxist universe there's nothing but power!

There's a variety of reasons for that. Partly, it's because the postmodernists don't admit that there are any standards outside of arbitrary opinion, essentially. They don't really believe in the real world - which is why they can generate critiques of science, for example, which is increasingly characterized as nothing but part of the "eurocentric patriarchy's", what would you call it... "desire to impose their power structure on the rest of the world." Despite the fact that it also makes planes fly and computers operate.

It's a rare bloody social justice warrior that doesn't have an iPhone or an Android that wouldn't work if quantum mechanics wasn't actually correct. Because, the fact that quantum mechanics is correct is one of the reasons why these unbelievably highly developed pieces of technology actually function. They bitch and whine about the patriarchal underpinnings of eurocentric science and use the gadgets all the time to aggregate, to complain about it. So it's really pretty appalling.

Anyways, the worldview of the of the postmodern Neomarxists is that everybody is basically not an individual (because that's really a fiction and it's a eurocentric patriarchal fiction at that), but a member of whatever their identity group happens to be. And there's no real possibility of communication between identity groups, hence phenomena like cultural appropriation.

So it's a war of all groups against all groups - and it's nothing but a struggle for power. And there's no higher order ethic to be referred to, because: For the postmodernists, there is no such thing as a higher order ethic. There's no such thing as a uniting narrative. That's a hallmark of their thinking.

Now, of course that doesn't work out in practice because without an ethic or a higher order value, there isn't anything you can do with your life! Because you keep undermining yourself, if everything is just a whim and subjective and there's no hierarchy of values... then, what the hell do you do when you get up in the morning? If one thing isn't better than the other, you might as well just lay there and smother yourself with a pillow. That would be a lot easier than opening your eyes and struggling in the world!

So it's a completely self-defeating philosophy. I think that's part of the reason why it's more or less self-evident that it's a mask for the continuation of Marxism. Because at least Marxism has, as one of its advantages, a direction. It's an ethic, right? You have something to struggle against, even though what you're struggling against is certainly

1 of the things that you actually rely on, and

2 something that you have to oversimplify in a very ungrateful and resentful way to justify fighting against it to begin with.

And that's especially true in Western cultures: As pathological as they certainly are (which is approximately as pathological as all of you are), they are a lot less pathological than almost everything that's ever happened - and pretty much everything that's currently happening elsewhere in the world. And you can kind of tell that by the fact that people tend to emigrate to the West rather than the reverse.

Now, the postmodern Neomarxists would have an answer to that, which would be "The only reason the West functions is because it's raped the rest of humanity and the planet!" But, you know, the less said about that, the better.

Marx was wrong about this, too: "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains!" That actually wasn't true. They lost their food, they lost...

You might see that happening again in Venezuela where the middle-class are having a hard time getting toilet paper. Which is a lot less funny than it sounds.

They lost their families, that's good. They lost their land, they lost their freedom, they lost their right to exist without pain. They lost the right to honestly suffer and talk about it, which is a terrible thing to lose. And then they lost their lives. So that was wrong and he can smile all he wants about it, but it wasn't very cute!

This is nice, I saw this on Twitter today:

That's world GDP per person in 1990 international dollars.

You can see that there's an unbelievable spike that happened at about 1895, which was... let's put it this way: It was precisely and exactly the opposite of what the Marxists predicted. But, you know, when your predictions fail and you're an ideologue, you just gerrymander the axioms of your theory - because otherwise you'd have to drop the damn thing and then you're plunged into a state of existential chaos (which is no joke) and you have to reformulate yourself. You don't want to underestimate the difficulty of doing that.

But it's still relatively amusing. Especially when you consider that that unbelievable increase in gross domestic product per person actually happened despite the best efforts of the Marxists to prevent it from happening. And so god only knows where we would be if 120 million people weren't sacrificed painfully and pointlessly in the 20th century to this idiot god of socialist utopia... that turned out to be murderous beyond comprehension.

"Postmodernism: An attitude of skepticism." Skepticism towards everything, but postmodernism, I might add. "Irony toward rejection of grand narratives," that's a lot bigger a problem than you think. Because, actually, the things that unite people are grand narratives, you know. A narrative is a cognitive structure that orients you towards an ideal. That's what a narrative is.

If you go see a movie (which is a narrative), the hero is up to something. First of all there is a hero - because why the hell go to the movie otherwise? You don't want to watch a bunch of people bumble around randomly, you're not interested in that at all! You want to see someone who has a problem to solve and who who's applying an ethic to the solution of that problem. It could be a bad ethic, that would be an antihero, right? Could be a pathological ethic... that's a good object lesson, anyways. But it's certainly an ethic.

It's grand narratives that unite people. And when the postmodernists become skeptical about the grand narratives, what that essentially means is that they're demolishing the hypertruths, the fictions, the true fictions that unite us as people and stop us from being at each other's throats. That enable us to compete and to cooperate in a peaceful and productive manner, at least some of the time - which is a miracle in and of itself and should be regarded as such!

We're so blind in the West to the miraculous nature of our culture, that it's... well, it's a consequence of being privileged, let's say, although I hate that word. We could call it fortunate. When Ayaan Hirsi Ali came to Holland, one of the things that's really struck me when I read her book Infidel...

She was very taken aback by the fact that you could stop by a bus stop and there'd be a little digital display there that said when the bus was coming. And when the digital display said the bus was coming, then the bus would show up. She just couldn't accustom herself to that, it was like... that produced existential terror - and it's no wonder! Because, you just think about how bloody impossible that is. That's impossible! I mean, the Dutch could manage it because they manage a dozen impossible things before breakfast. They live under water, for god's sake!

She was also absolutely amazed that you could go ask policeman for help and they wouldn't just hurt you and take all your money. That is also another form of miracle, the kind of thing that we just take for granted.

"Skepticism towards ideologies and universalism," well, we can scrap the ideology part. "Including objective notions of reason, human nature, social progress, absolute truth and objective reality." It's an unbelievably corrosive system of thought. Because, first of all, it defines hierarchy as power - and that's actually technically wrong.

Even Frans de Waal (who's been studying chimpanzee hierarchies) has established quite clearly that the most brutal and powerful alpha chimp is not the one who establishes the most stable dominance hierarchies, let's call them social hierarchies. Because the brutal tyrant chimp gets torn apart by two subordinate chimps, three quarters as strong as him as soon, as he turns a blind eye!

The more stable hierarchies, even among chimps, are ones that are governed by someone... you know, a chimp that's got some physical power and some capacity for intimidation, but who's perfectly capable of establishing reciprocal relationships with other male and female chimps. He's got friends and allies around him, that stabilizes his rule, so to speak. So the idea that hierarchies in functioning societies are primarily a consequence of power is cynical beyond belief, apart from being wrong.

And it also destroys the idea of a hierarchy of competence. Which I really think is one of the reasons for the theory to begin with, because: We know from the empirical data that in Western societies, the best two predictors of long term life success are intelligence and conscientiousness. They do a pretty good job of predicting long term life success, accounting for about 25 to 30 percent of the variance - which is a lot by social science standards.

It's kind of a testament to the integrity of our societies that complex jobs tend to be filled by intelligent, hard-working people. And thank god for that! Because who the hell do you want running them? You don't want to be doing that randomly, most of those things are incredibly complex and difficult. So you better have disciplined people who are willing to work 60 hours a week and who are super smart governing those things - or the lights go off! And they should be off right now because it's impossible to keep a power grid functioning.

It's not like entropy isn't trying to tear it to bits at every second, right? There are thousands of people out there, working madly to stop this thing from doing what it should be doing, which is: To fail. And so competence is everywhere. I mean, you think about how many competent people have to be working behind the scenes so that you can all come here in your leisure, fundamentally, and sit for two hours peacefully in a lecture. It's absolutely beyond belief!

I think that the postmodernists are after the destruction of the idea of competence itself and we're walking down that road very, very rapidly. As well as trying to destroy the idea of the world. And that's part of the... what would you call it... the attempt to insist that there's no such thing outside the text. Which was one of Derrida's great statements: "There's no such thing outside the text."

What he meant by that, in some sense, was: Everything his interpretation. And there is a manner in which that's true, but it's not the kind of final truth that the postmodernists like to think it is. They're a little too tangled up in language and that's not a good thing

So here is where we're at with regards to the spread of postmodern-neomarxist ideas, these are... see, I've been trying how to...

You can identify the right wingers you don't want to hang around with, because they talk about white supremacy and maybe they have a swastika. It's like that's a little sign, say. If you're conservative, move away from those people! And most conservatives do that, you know. In the aftermath of Charlottesville, for example, Ben Shapiro immediately distanced himself from the radical right.

William Buckley did the same thing in the 1960s, 1970s, when he divorced himself from the John Birch Society. Conservatives are pretty good at putting borders around things. In fact, that's a good definition of a conservative. I'm serious! Conservatives like to have borders around things, whereas liberals think "Well, if you have too many borders, information can't flow!" That's true.

The conservatives say: "No borders is chaos!" And the Liberals say: "Too many borders is stagnation" - and those are both right! So you have to argue about how thick the border should be. But anyways.

Liberals have a hell of a time drawing borders and that means they can't separate themselves from the radical leftists - who have absolutely no interest, whatsoever, in sustaining the genuine liberals: They just use them as "useful idiots," to take a phrase from the Soviet Union. And here are the hallmarks, I think, of the pathological left:

I think that if someone is pushing this quaternity on you, then you should be very suspicious of them in every possible way, and you should resist it as much as you possibly can.

"Diversity. Inclusivity." Well, you know, those are the minor demons of the radical left, let's say. "Equity?" It's like: No. We're not going there. That's equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. And equality of outcome (I'll tell you why in a bit) is an absolutely pathological idea. There's nothing about it that's good, it's impossible to implement, it's fundamentally motivated by resentment - and it's a lie! So I like the fact that those three make the acronym DIE, though, because that seems to be approximately appropriate.

And then the worst of the bunch is "White Privilege." Because, as far as I'm concerned, there's absolutely no difference between that statement and an outright racist slur. They're the same thing. It's quite straightforward why. It's doesn't take a bloody genius to figure this out. I mean, what constitutes racism? It's the ascription of the hypothetical qualities of a group to all the individuals who compose that group.

So white privilege, it's like... Even the people who are interested in intersectionality, you'd think, would have some problem with that? It's like: What about all the poor white people? "Well, they are more privileged than the poor people who aren't white", I suppose. But, you know, that's a pretty bloody weak argument in my estimation. And to call it privilege is also something... and to associate it with race per se is also something extraordinarily interesting. We'll get into that a little bit later.

So, let't talk about "Diversity". Well, first of all we have do define it. You know, Jonathan Haudt has been trying to define it as diversity of opinion. I think it might be useful to define it as diversity of personality, because there is actually more variability in personality within groups of people (regardless of the groups) than there is between groups of people.

That should be said again: There is more variability within groups of people than between groups of people. And to state otherwise is to state something that is, in fact, categorically racist!

Because if I said that there is more variance between groups of people than within groups, then I am saying that each racial group is an entity onto itself - which could be true, but happens to actually not be!

So the diversity definition is really quite interesting. Right now, that's being defined by

 Race

 Sex or gender

 Sexual orientation and

 Disability

Although there's a very large number of other potential dimensions of difference that could be included in the list of oppressed versus oppressor. That's actually why intersectionality has emerged, you know. Because people figured out "Well, you're having a harder time if you're black - and you're having a harder time if you're a woman," depending on how you define harder time, "but you're even having a harder time if you're a black woman." There's an intersection there. Okay, fine. Well, where are we going to stop with the intersections?

I figured out the other day: If each of those categories could be differentiated into 100 subunits... (who knows how many there are. With gender and sex, there's an infinite number of them, apparently) ...then you need 6 dimensions before you're down to one in a billion. So 6 dimensions of intersectionality brings you down to the level of the individual. Which is the flaw in identity politics theory, manifesting itself as an internal contradiction.

So I think that's very funny. If you push intersectionality to its final frontier, you break down everyone to the level of the individual. Which is actually what Western culture figured out about 4000 years ago: That the ultimate minority is the individual! And the fairest society is one where individuals are allowed to rise to the level of their ability. Because, what are you going to do otherwise? You're going to co-vary out all their differences? That is impossible, it's technically impossible! There's a....

Given postmodern logic itself, there's an infinite number of ways to categorize a finite number of facts. So how are you going to determine which dimensions of difference are the ones that should be adjusted, for the individual? Since there's an unlimited number of dimensions of variability? Intelligence, height, attractiveness, age, personality (there's five dimensions of personality), socioeconomic class, right? Degree of historical oppression...

That can be multiplied endlessly. Seriously. So what are you gonna do? Control for all those? It's like, good luck, that's never going to happen.

And then: Diversity in the service of what, exactly? The idea that a group of people that's racially diverse is better at problem solving than a group of people who is not - there isn't a shred of evidence to support that idea! It's a presupposition, a supposition.

It also brings you back to something like racial essentialism, right? So in every possible way, logically and practically, it's a non-starter. I think the diversity issue is irrelevant, anyways. Because I think the fundamental reason that the postmodern Neomarxists push diversity is, because it's another way that they can attack the power structure that they regard as patriarchal and oppressive.

They say "Well, it's in the service of the working class and the oppressed." It's like, we already covered that a little bit with regards to the Marxist claims: "To be working on the side of the working class." When, in fact, what really happened was that many of them (perhaps most) were killed and the ones that weren't killed were certainly, at least, made extraordinarily miserable - which is maybe even better than killing them, if you're particularly malevolent.

One of the things that's happening, that's quite pathological and very interesting is, that the postmodernists... this is, I think, a direct consequence of training activists in universities...

The universities have more to be ashamed of than you could list in a two-hour lecture! I think someone estimated that about 4000 colleges and universities will go bankrupt in the US in the next 10 years. And, as far as I'm concerned, the faster the better!

So the Toronto District School Board announced recently that it will now give priority to the hiring of diverse staff, especially in racialized backgrounds. Why in? I don't know. I suspect, it's because the people who wrote the damn policy are functionally illiterate.

You'd certainly think that if you looked at the intelligence of their policies. And so, what is that, the "priority to the hiring of diverse staff, especially in racialized backgrounds"? What the hell did does that mean?

I tweeted "If you aren't going to hire straight, white, cis...," is it -cis? I guess cisgendered is the same thing, but we use it because it's such a hateful phrase... "If you're not going to hire straight, cis-gendered men as teachers, why the hell do you let them into the faculties of education to begin with? You might as well just exclude them before they waste four years!" On your... what would you call them... ideologically rigid pseudo-educational nonsense.

"Equity". This is something I really like. There's the little happy thing: Equality of opportunity on the left, versus equity on the right.

You see: The little kid gets to lift up and eat the apple, isn't that lovely? But what really happens in equity is that everyone gets to have exactly the same depth of grave. And they're perfectly equal when they are 6 feet under! If you don't believe that, then you can look at what happened in the Ukraine in the 1930s, during the Holodomor, when the Soviets decided that it was perfectly reasonable to ascribe class guilt to the successful farmers, wiped them out and then starved 6 million Ukrainians to death - thus establishing a certain equality.

This woman, she's... This is a Shakespeare quote, I think it's from Richard III., but I'm not exactly sure: "One can smile and smile and smile and still be a villain."

And, you know, she's a lovely looking, old grandmotherly type of creature - but that doesn't mean that everything that she did wasn't pathological beyond leaf. It was her second-rate pseudo-intellectual opinionated meanderings that produced the concept of white privilege.

What she did was: She made a list of all the ways that she felt that she was particularly privileged in society. That was her bloody methodology. And that's the sort of methodology that these pseudodisciplines that have invaded the universities get away with - because the rest of the faculty are too damn timid to stand up and say "Uhm, the emperor has no clothes!"

You better stand up and say something about it pretty soon! Because you can bloody well be sure that they're coming for the physicians and the evolutionary biologists and psychologists next. And they're not weak, they're well organized... so, it's a very terrible thing. Anyways.

These papers rely on "personal examples", because we know how methodically vigorous that is, "of unearned advantage as McIntosh says..." But that whole methodology thing, that vigorous methodology, that's just another manifestation of the eurocentric patriarchy. So you don't have to be concerned about your damn methodology when you have your personal experience to rely on.

Here's the privileges:

 I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time

 If I should need to move I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live

 I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me...

...unless they know that I'm the author of the fundamental paper on white privilege!

 I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed

Well, the first thing is: A lot of those, so-called privileges, are just the consequence of living in a reasonably civilized society and apply to pretty much every one.

The second thing is: There's no reason to associate this with race! That's another one of these absolutely pathological sleights of hand. How about we call it majority privilege? You think that's not the case for the majority members of every society that has ever been actually functional? Obviously there's a majority advantage! If there wasn't a bloody majority advantage, people wouldn't make societies.

The whole point of making a society is that the people within the society have the advantages! Now, you might say "Well, when people are being integrated into the society, they should be given those advantages," when they join the club, so to speak, "as rapidly as possible!" - and obviously that's the case. But to attribute this level of civility and safety to some hypothetical construct, like white privilege, is... well, it's exactly what you'd expect from people whose response to the idea of methodology is that "that's just a social construct." Like everything else is.

There's the class enemies from the Ukraine, the Kulaks. They were the farmers who were productive in the 1920s and before, who had recently emerged from the peasant class.

They were all rounded up and shot, raped, robbed and then sent to Siberia to freeze to death or to die of some infectious disease. Because guilt was attributed to them as a consequence of their membership of a class.

I can tell you: If there are people around you that are attributing guilt to you because of your membership in a class, they are not your friends. In fact, they're the friends of no one! And they're contributing to this intense state of political polarization and racial disharmony, that seems to be me to be expanding at an exponential rate. It's not good.

I really like this juxtaposition of pictures:

So when the Soviets collectivized the farms in the Ukraine, they took all the grain that the Ukrainians had produced - which wasn't very much, because they had collectivized the farms - and they shipped it all to the cities. Then the rule was: If you were a starving Ukrainian woman who had children and you went out in the field and you picked up individual half rotten bits of grain to feed your kids, that was an offense punishable by death!

You were supposed to turn that in to the local authority so they could ship that to the city, too. So on the one hand you have a nice picture of the bags of grain that were heroically going into the cities - and on the other hand, you have a picture of the bodies that were the cost of doing precisely that.

Let's look at the failures of this system. Well, you could list them forever:

 The death of the Kulaks

That was right off the bat, which is why I use it. It was very, very early in in the collectivization process. Then

 The Ukrainian famine

Which, I mean... I don't know how often that's taught in high schools in the United States and Canada. But I would suspect never is the answer to that.

 The rise of the Gulag State

Because it turned out that the bloody Soviet Union couldn't function, unless they enslaved everybody and made them work.

 The death of tens of millions (It's uncountable)

 The '56 crackdown on Hungary

 The '68 invasion of Czechoslovakia

Not to mention the whole cold war that put the whole goddamn world at risk, from 1962 to 1989. And that still is rearing its ugly head with our current dispute with North Korea. Which is the last remaining, let's call it, gulag-like Soviet state.

So there's the death counts. Perhaps.

That's a relatively conservative estimate: 8 to 61 million in the Soviet Union. Huh, it's quite a margin of error, wouldn't you say? That's

 The Red Terror

 The Great Purge

 The national operations of the NKVD (later the KGB)

 The Great purge in Mongolia

 Soviet killings during World War II

 The People's Republic of China, land reform...

Land reform - that's what you call it when you take land that grows food and turn it into land that's just full of corpses. That's land reform.

 The suppression of counter revolutionaries

 The Great Leap Forward (that was a good one!)

 The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

 Cambodia and the Killing Fields... and then a list of other countries.

Every single place where these pathological ideas were put into practice became... what you might describe as the literal equivalent of hell on earth so rapidly, that it was a kind of miracle in and of itself. And yet we still...

You know, what is it? 1 out of 5 social scientists in American universities regard themselves as Marxists. It's like: What the hell? Really? Really? What is going on with that? I don't understand that in the least, you know!

I don't understand why that pathological ideology that's so murderous, so intensely murderous and so closely tied to the genocides (from a causal perspective) can not have accreted to it the same unutterable, unhonourable state that Nazism has accrued to itself. What's going on? Why don't we see it that way? I don't understand that.

I mean, maybe it's because of the hypothetical universal utopia that the damn Soviets were aiming at. Maybe you could get away with that in 1895, you know. Maybe after World War I, when things were brutal and the monarchies of Europe were collapsing and everything was chaotic.

You didn't know then, that your utopian ideas were going to result in an absolute catastrophe. But it's a 100 years after that now, almost to the day. And the evidence is clearly in. "I'm a Marxist!" It's like... No! You're just jealous because you don't make as much as a bloody investment banker. That's why you're a bloody Marxist! If you were paid 4 times as much, you'd be a capitalist so fast it would make your head spin.