Transcripts / Jordan Peterson

Lady Foppington: My lords, ladies, and those that lieth betwixt. 'Tis evident nor sensation nor the passions possess dominion over the mind of man, which be ruled instead by reason, sovereign of all faculties. 👃

It must needs be remarked, that the power of the commonwealth deriveth not from the despotical acquisitions of conquerors, but from that covenant amongst men whereby they most resembleth the lobster.

Natalie: Ugh, Foppington are we doing this again?

Lady Foppington: Lady Foppington.

Natalie: I’m so happy to finally meet the real you.

Lady Foppington: Enchanté.

Natalie: I’m not gonna kiss your hand you freak, I’m more of a woman than you are.

Lady Foppington: That’s not what they were saying at the Parisian salon. Clock me Amadeus!

Natalie: Don’t break the fourth wall, I’m trying to make a video about postmodernism. Get out of my drawing room, you 18th century sexual deviant.

Lady Foppington: So much for the tolerant Jacobins. Hmm!

Natalie: Reason. Power. Truth. These are the kinds of topics that I simply don’t care about. Unfortunately we have to talk about them because of a guy named Jordan Peterson. So who’s Jordan Peterson?

Well, he’s a psychology professor at the University of Toronto who got famous for sounding the alarm about how protecting transgender people under Canadian human rights law shall surely lead to Stalinism. Since then he’s been touring North America as a celebrity lecturer. David Brooks called him the most influential public intellectual in the Western world, and his self-help book "12 Rules For Life" is a national and international bestseller. 

I’m starting to think we may need to take this guy seriously. He’s got a ton of fans on YouTube, and I hope you guys are here because I wanna talk. A lot of leftists who have responded to Peterson haven’t really engaged with his ideas very much, he’s often caricatured, avoided, or talked past, as in the infamous BBC interview where Cathy Newman keeps repeating back very uncharitable interpretations of everything he says:

Newman: "So you’re saying that by and large women are too agreeable to get the pay raises they deserve? 

Peterson: "No, I’m saying that’s one component"– 

Newman: "You’re saying that women aren’t intelligent enough to run these top companies?"

Peterson: "No"–

Newman: "You’re just saying these things though to provoke, aren’t you? I mean you are a provocateur. You’re like the Alt-Right that you hate to be compared to… You’re saying that we should organize our societies along the lines of the lobsters."

I think to people watching this it comes off as if leftists are like, afraid of his actual ideas. But I’m not afraid of his ideas. I’m not afraid of anything, I just smoked a bunch of fuckin PCP– 

👁👄👁 Daddy.

So I spent the last couple weeks listening to hours of Peterson’s lectures, and podcasts, and reading his books, and honestly I think I get why people like him. Clearly he has real talent as a public speaker and as a kind of life coach. His book "12 Rules For Life" echoes past bestsellers like Steven Covey’s "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People", or Rick Warren’s "The Purpose-Driven Life". The difference is that Peterson takes basic self-help insights like “take responsibility for yourself”, “don’t envy other people”, and he renews them with the intellectual trappings of psychology, philosophy, Jungian psychoanalysis, and Bible readings. 

He’s telling us a pretty classic story: life is suffering, happiness is not enough to sustain you through suffering, so you need a higher purpose in your life. But I knew that already, I learned it at the AA meetings I refuse to go to. These are like basic insights of world philosophy and religion. But they’re insights that today’s youths apparently haven’t heard before, I guess because not enough of them are alcoholics. Or at any rate they haven’t heard them in a vocabulary they connected with, so to a lot of people Peterson’s ideas seem new and urgent. And I don’t really object to any of the self-help stuff. Most of Peterson’s fans are young men, and I mean someone has to whip the neckbeards into shape. And if Peterson can do that, more power to him. I mean sometimes boys just need a daddy, and sometimes girls do too. 

But, there’s a big problem here. And the problem is that all this life coaching is basically just a Trojan horse for a reactionary political agenda. Peterson advocates an ethics of self-help not merely as a guide to private life, but as a replacement for progressive politics, which he characterizes as totalitarian and evil.

Newman: "There’s no comparison between Mao and a trans activist is there?

Peterson: "Why not? The philosophy that’s guiding their utterances is the same philosophy." 

Now Peterson doesn’t use the word "progressive" politics, because that doesn’t sound scary enough. His new, scarier word is "postmodern neo-Marxism". Now we have to be careful not to confuse postmodern neo-Marxism with Cultural Marxism, the Nazi conspiracy theory about Marxist intellectuals plotting to destroy the West. Surely this is not the same thing as that, right? Right?

So look, I genuinely do not think Jordan Peterson is a fascist. And you may quote me on that. But I’m wondering, if it’s not a fascist conspiracy theory about Marxist intellectuals plotting to destroy the West, then what is postmodern neo-Marxism? Well JP, that’s what I’d like to talk about. So Jordan– sorry, Dr. Peterson– Professor– Daddy– Let’s talk. And for once I’d like to actually treat this discussion with the seriousness and respect I think it deserves.

🎷🛁

Mm, that’s good, it’s a good temperature. Hand me the oil would you Daddy?

🤖

Thanks Daddy. It’s really an honor to bathe with a public intellectual of your… stature.

🤖

You know I never like to argue in the bath, so I want to start by telling you the things I like about you. The first thing is that I think some of your criticisms of the left, the stifling of even slightly different opinions, the gratuitous loathing of Western cultural monuments, the politics of resentment are– within a certain mediocre corner of academia– valid complaints. 

I even made a video about that a long time ago when I was a different person, oh god the dysphoria please don’t watch it. But my worry is that you’re leading an international political backlash against what is a very localized problem, and I worry that some of our society’s most vulnerable people could be hurt by that backlash. Like fine, you hate postmodern intellectuals and overly-sensitive student activists, but if your backlash also targets gender equality, LGBT acceptance, and civil rights, that would be bad right?

🤖

I also like that you tell people how to live their lives. I mean I personally hate taking orders outside of the bedroom but clearly the sheep need a shepherd, and you’ve really stepped up  with these twelve rules. You know on the left we don’t really tell people what to do, we tell them what not to do; don’t exploit the workers, do not do blackface. I guess we tell people what pronouns to use for trans people, but that’s a pretty small rule compared to some of your rules like how to raise your children or when it’s okay to criticize things.

🤖

The last thing I like is that you talk about deep shit. I was watching a video where you and a couple of zany goons were talking about Plato and Aristotle and the meaning of life, and I thought huh… On the left we don’t really talk about that kind of thing, all we talk about is how society oppresses people. And that might not be enough, because people need to have a positive purpose in life. I mean personally I don’t give a shit, I’m pretty happy to sit here watching the same three seasons of "Strangers With Candy" until I die.

But other people like Dostoyevsky, Camus, other white guys who talk about lobsters, they have this need to have purpose in the face of suffering, and like not just complain about patriarchy. I guess it’s easier not to complain about patriarchy when patriarchy isn’t the thing that’s making you suffer. But I do think an education that only teaches people about oppression is inadequate. We spend four years teaching undergraduates why capitalism is bad, and then we say "well you’re educated now, good luck getting a job under capitalism bye!" And that really kind of sucks. But you know, I think that’s a point that could probably be made without comparing transgender activism to Stalin.

🤖

I feel like this came across a little more sarcastic than I intended, see this is why you’ve got to use a firmer hand with me Peterson. If you don’t establish dominance, I’m just gonna mouth off. 

"They use all this compassion language, and I’m on the side of the oppressed, all of that posturing. It does nothing but mask the underlying drive to power. And I’ve just been starting to review their curriculum for children from kindergarten to grade eight. It’s pure social justice postmodernism. The people who hold this doctrine, this radical postmodern communitarian doctrine that makes racial identity, or sexual identity, or gender identity, or some kind of group identity paramount, they’ve got control of most low to mid-level bureaucratic structures, and many governments as well, but even in the United States where"– JP 

🎷🥛😳

So you gotta give it to JP, when he says “stand up straight with your shoulders back” he means it. So Jordan Peterson has succeeded largely by drawing in audiences with fairly popular opinions, political correctness often feels stifling, student activists are sometimes inarticulate and overreactive, angry transsexuals are telling me what words to use and I don’t like it. 

But once he draws you in with these inviting preludes, he leads you to a pretty weird place. His central political message is that leftist professors, student activists, campus diversity initiatives, and corporate HR departments are collectively following the philosophy of postmodern neo-Marxism to destroy Western civilization and sink us all into a totalitarian nightmare. Now there’s just no avoiding that this idea is actually pretty similar to the cultural Marxism or cultural Bolshevism theory. But I’m just going to ignore that because if I dwell on it I’ll sound like I’m saying Peterson is a fascist, and then everyone will think I’m crazy. Look I’m not afraid of psychologists… I don't– I have nothing to hide. 

So let’s just try not to think about that and instead just straightforwardly ask, is it true that postmodern neo-Marxism is out to destroy us all? Well, why don’t we analyze the concept of "postmodern neo-Marxism"? We all know what Marxism is, the idea that society should be understood as a class struggle between workers and capitalists, and that the workers will eventually revolt. Some college professors definitely do believe that, but 0% of corporate HR departments do so… that… okay… 

So what is postmodernism? Well, it’s the vaguest word in the English language. Some people try to explain it by listing all the things that are called "postmodern" and then trying to guess what they have in common. That’s basically what the YouTuber ArmouredSkeptic did in his video about it. So many daddies in this video. We should invite them all to a barbecue, complain about postmodernism, listen to some Zeppelin, I’ve had worse evenings.

I don’t think there really is a common thread linking all the things called postmodern. Basically postmodernism is everything that happened after 1945 that seemed new at the time. But when Jordan Peterson says postmodernism he’s not talking about Andy Warhol or Quentin Tarantino, he’s talking about postmodern philosophy. So what’s that? Well, basically it’s a kind of skepticism– not YouTube skepticism– but actual skepticism, you know like having doubts about whether humans can really know things about the world. Now skepticism is obviously not a new idea, that goes way back to ancient times. But more specifically, postmodernism is skepticism about modernism. So what’s modernism? What’s what? What are words? What’s anything?

I’m gonna divide modernism into two periods because I feel like it. First, there’s early modernism. Early modernism is the philosophy developed by a bunch of boring 18th century queens which says that we can form universal theories about the world through observation and reasoning AKA the scientific method. Now that turns out to work pretty well for whatever questions you have about plants, and crystals, and how to medically reconfigure human genitals but it has some limits, which was pointed out by David Hume, one of the least boring 18th century queens and one of the only philosophers I can actually put up with in small doses even though he was a fuckin racist and also Scottish. THIS IS A CALL OUT. Hume argued that from a strictly empirical perspective, you can’t really know much about important things like morality, causation, and the self, because those aren’t the kinds of things you can observe. 

Anyway then the late modernists came along and they said "fuck Hume, we’re gonna do science about those things anyway". So the late modernists were a bunch of boring 19th century neckbeards who one way or another tried to discover universal scientific truths about humans. So for example you have psychoanalysis, which said human nature can be understood in terms of unconscious drives– which is of course ridiculous, I’m conscious of all my drives– and you got Marxism with its analysis of bourgeoisie and proletariat, you got early sociology and anthropology which started out with racist social evolutionism, and progressed to a kind of we’re-all-the-same universalism. 

Jordan Peterson is right at home with the late modernists. His first book "Maps of Meaning" is an attempt to describe how humans make sense of the world and create order out of chaos through universal myths and archetypes, which he claims are a product of our species’ evolutionary past. Boy this is a lot of explaining. It’s so much explaining it’s triggering my gender dysphoria. I’d better put on some longer nails.

Abigail: Nails? Is that all womanhood means to you?

Natalie: ……mhmm!

Postmodernism is skepticism about modernism. So whereas modernists try to create eternal and universal theories about reality, history, and humanity, postmodernists say "actually no, that’s not possible". For example the French postmodernist Michel Foucault– Michel Foucault wrote intellectual histories of subjects like psychiatry, medicine, and criminal justice; in which he argued that we should not understand these histories as straightforward progressions toward liberty and scientific truth, but rather as mere shifts in the way that power orders our institutions and populations. 

The other postmodernist I’ve actually read a lot of is Richard Rorty– yeah fuck you Derrida, if you wanted me to read you, you should have been easier to read– Rorty advocates an attitude toward knowledge he calls “ironism”, irony being the skeptical caution with which we should regard our own beliefs in our awareness that our vocabulary for describing and understanding the world is not the final or best vocabulary. 

Alright, that’s enough explaining. And my nails are done, check it out! Do you enjoy having long glamorous nails, but do lesbians and queer girls keep glaring at them with barely concealed visceral rage? Well, I have a solution for you! The bisexual manicure! One hand for the V, one hand for the D. Both for degeneracy! It’s absolutely filthy! 

So we’ve got all the pieces on the table, now we just need to put the puzzle together. On the one hand we have Marxism, a fundamentally modernist worldview that theorizes the human condition in economic terms. On the other hand we have postmodernism, a skeptical worldview that denies our capacity to know any universal truths about anything. On the face of it, it would seem these two ideas are not compatible. And there is an extensive history of dispute between them, with for instance, the Marxist Sartre calling Foucault “the last barricade the bourgeoisie can erect against Marx”. And of course as we all know when Foucault died, capitalism did end forever. ☭

So where does Peterson get off talking about “postmodern neo-Marxism”? Well, it’s true that a lot of postmodernists were in some way influenced by Marxism, so the phrase could just refer to that continuity. But that’s not what Peterson means. It’s clear from the way he uses the term that the concept is even more jumbled and nonsensical than it initially appears. 

Peterson uses the term "postmodern neo-Marxism" to include not only postmodern intellectuals and Marxist intellectuals, but also liberal politicians, academic administrators and corporate HR departments that care about diversity, and so-called identity politics activists including feminists, LGBT, and civil rights activists. Basically it’s the entirety of the modern left. 

Now I’ve already mentioned how Marxism and postmodernism are fundamentally at odds, since Marxism is a big story about a struggle between two clear and distinct groups, and postmodernism is skepticism about big stories like this and about the stability of binaries like bourgeoisie and proletariat. But that’s not the only tension in Peterson’s clusterfuck idea of postmodern neo-Marxism. Anyone with any experience in leftist circles knows that Marxists and identity politics activists are constantly at each others’ throats, because the Marxists accuse the activists of being bourgeois dogs who want more female CEOs of color and more disabled transgender drone pilots, while the activists accuse the Marxists of being a boys club of brocialists no more woke on gender and race issues than the average Jordan Peterson fan. 

Most often these accusations are correct, because everyone is problematic and I disown them all. And then there’s also the conflict between the identity politics activists and the postmodernists. Why does everyone think that identity politics is postmodern? There’s nothing postmodern about it. Identity politics advocates for rights, equality, and justice for particular groups such as women, people of color, and gay and trans people. This kind of activism presupposes that these group categories exist and are a useful basis for political organizing. 

Postmodernists do kind of the opposite; they want to show that these categories– race, gender, sexual orientation– are contingent social constructs and are themselves potentially oppressive. This is why conventional feminist activists often hate postmodern feminism. Because the postmodern feminists want to show that the whole concept of womanhood, for instance, is contingent and potentially oppressive, and they think we should be working to destabilize and undermine it. And then the conventional feminist activists say "the fuck? We need the concept of womanhood to organize around women’s political interests. How are we supposed to do that if we destabilize and undermine the concept of womanhood?" And in turn, the postmodern feminists say well, here’s a quotation from Judith Butler, the most famous postmodern feminist ever:

“Is it not a sign of despair over public politics when identity becomes its own policy, bringing with it those who would ‘police’ it from various sides? And this is not a call to return to silence or invisibility, but, rather, to make use of a category that can be called into question, made to account for what it excludes.”

If you take the first part of that quote out of context, it almost sounds like something Jordan Peterson could have said. The difference is that JP actually does think we should return to silence and invisibility, or does he? It’s hard to tell what he thinks. More on that in a moment. I bring all of this up to show that one: the idea of postmodern neo-Marxist identity politics as a unifying concept of the left is nonsensical, and two: identity politics is not this dogma that must go unquestioned. 

There are sophisticated debates about this going on within leftist academia, but Jordan Peterson either doesn’t know that or doesn’t care. He uses the term postmodern neo-Marxism to characterize the left as a unified philosophical force bent on destroying Western civilization, when in fact it’s a bunch of bumbling buffoons who can’t stop squabbling with each over every goddamn little issue. 

The only reason I can think of that the left would appear to be a unified philosophical force, is if you’re so far to the right that literally everyone who supports the economic and social advancement of disadvantaged groups looks like one homogeneous enemy. But is that what Jordan Peterson is saying, that he opposes all social progress for women, racial and sexual minorities? Well it’s difficult to say, because while he spends much of his time comparing activists for these movements to 20th century mass murderers, he resists being pinned down to any more specific position. 

I was maybe too harsh on Cathy Newman earlier. She came out of that interview looking bad, but she had a tough job to do. Peterson’s rhetorical strategy involves saying something that’s more or less uncontroversially true, while at the same time implying something controversial. For instance, Jordan Peterson will make a claim like “there are biological differences between men and women”, which is obviously true. But he’ll say it in the context of a conversation about the underrepresentation of women in government, which implies… what exactly?

So how do you respond to this? Well, either you fall into the trap of arguing against the obviously true statement, or you have to guess at what he’s implying; in response to which he can accuse you of misrepresenting him, which is exactly what happened with the Cathy Newman interview. The most famous moment where Peterson does this is the notorious lobster argument. So he starts by saying:

"There’s this idea that hierarchical structures are a sociological construct of the Western patriarchy." 

And then he goes on to say that lobsters exist in hierarchies, and lobsters predate Western patriarchy by millions of years. So checkmate postmodern neo-Marxists.

Newman: "You’re saying that we should organize our societies along the lines of the lobsters." 

Peterson: "I’m saying that it’s inevitable that there will be continuity in the way that animals and human beings organize their structures."

The problem with that, is that no one has ever said that every hierarchy is the product of “Western patriarchy”. This is such a massive strawman that it overshadows any uncharitable interpretation of Peterson suggested by Cathy Newman in this interview. No one on the left denies that there are some natural hierarchies. Even the anarchists, whose whole thing is abolishing hierarchies, limit themselves to the abolition of unjust hierarchies. No one wants to abolish lobster hierarchies, the hierarchies we’re interested in are those of gender, race and economics within our own society, to which the lobster case is a complete non sequitur.

I mean you could use Peterson’s lobster argument in the same way he uses it to justify literally any hierarchy or authority, no matter how unjust. You could be an 18th century republican arguing against the monarchy, and the monarch could turn around and say “well hierarchies are inevitable. God save the lobster queen”. 

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Natalie: Oh dear god.

Lady Foppington: My lords, ladies, and those that lieth betwixt. The present rumor of republican rumblings amongst the rabble has compelled us to summon you together. Let us remind you that nature hath so made the lobster that some individuals be stronger than the others. Therefore let not the power of our crustacean sovereignty be anywise impugned. And as for parliamentarians, well, let them vote for cake.

Natalie: Very good, thank you. I need new roommates.

So I’ve argued that Peterson is invoking the incoherent concept of “postmodern neo-Marxism” as the supervillain in a childishly simple worldview he’s promoting where these evil leftists are out to destroy “the West”. Now it’s time to inspect the other side of this coin. What exactly is “the West”? 

Well there’s an academic usage of the term “the West” that describes the intellectual tradition that runs from ancient Athens to modern day Europe and its colonies. Now a true postmodernist would want to deconstruct the whole concept of “the West” and show how the very idea is racist, and exclusionary, and supremacist, and justifies imperialism, and all that kind of thing, but we don’t have time for that right now. So I’m just going to grant that the West is a thing, and look at how Jordan Peterson thinks about it.

For Peterson the West seems to be equivalent to capitalism, individualism, the idea that each human has a spark of divinity, and he therefore equates it with “Judeo-Christian values”, a term more popular with conservative pundits than intellectual historians. Peterson contrasts Judeo-Christian values with postmodern neo-Marxism, which he describes as anti-Western, collectivist, relativist and totalitarian. This framing of a conflict of ideas in terms of geographical chauvinism and external threat is inaccurate and scaremongering. Marxism is Western philosophy. Postmodernism is Western philosophy. If you’re really concerned about preserving the geographical boundaries of the intellectual tradition you should be ranting against the influence of Buddhism. 

Likewise, there is no feature of “SJW ideology” that is meaningfully non-Western. The very idea of people requesting different pronouns to suit their individual needs is exactly the kind of thing a person who values individual liberty over collective dogma should be on board with. You could even argue that Marxism is an extension of Enlightenment philosophy, with its concern for human progress, science, and liberty. 

I think a lot of people like listening to Jordan Peterson talk about the Western tradition, but they don’t seem to like reading any of it themselves. If you did read it you’d find a surprising diversity of thought, that doesn’t reduce to “Judeo-Christian” values. Much of Plato’s political dialogues are concerned with arguing against cultural relativism; suggesting that, far from being an invention of postmodernity, it was actually a pretty popular worldview among ancient Athenian pederasts. 

Our favorite Enlightenment philosopher David Hume famously said that: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions". Literally "feels over reals". And meanwhile his contemporary the Marquis de Sade was advocating the abolition of morality, filling the churches with scat porn, and ushering in a reign of untethered sexual perversion so decadent and depraved I’m not even allowed to talk about it on YouTube. 

This is the Enlightenment, not postmodernism. And it’s just as much a part of “the West” as Peterson’s soggy Bible-patting conservatism. But again, and I really can’t stress this enough, I don’t care either way. I make YouTube videos because I enjoy mood lighting and set design. So… what do you people want from me? The lobster queen is dead, long live the queen. 🦞👸