Dr. Jordan B Peterson on Freedom of Speech & Political Correctness (Full Transcript)

Faith Goldy – The Rebel Media

He’s been a dishwasher, a gas jockey, a bartender, a short-order cook, a beekeeper, a plywood mill laborer, and a railway line worker.

But today, Professor Jordan B. Peterson is best known for his work in the academic world. He has published more than 100 scientific papers, transforming the modern understanding of personality and revolutionizing the psychology of religion with his now classic book, “Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief”.

As a Harvard professor, he was nominated for the prestigious Levinson Teaching Prize. Now, at the University of Toronto, he is regarded by students as one of their truly life-changing teachers.

And I think that I speak for a great deal of people in this room, and frankly across the country, when I say you needn’t be one of Professor Peterson’s students to have been enlightened and inspired by that eight-pound universe between his ears, as well as his bravery.

Most recently, Dr. Peterson became the center of an ongoing national controversy for refusing to abide by the University of Toronto’s attempt to put very specific words into his mouth when they ordered professors comply with the genders pronouns policy.

Dr. Peterson’s vivid dissent over language politics and the political agenda behind it has seen him threatened and shouted down by snowflake students and the academic hierarchy alike. As a result of his public views on how “political correctness” violates freedom of speech and academic freedom in the west, Professor Peterson has become a cultural icon for liberty lovers, and a long-awaited obstruction to the wayfarers on the long march of the institutions.

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.

JORDAN B. PETERSON – Canadian clinical psychologist

So about 3 months ago, I sat in my office at night — I wasn’t really sleeping very well, because my mind was running, and it was running because I’d just read some policy documents on the Ontario Human Rights Commission website in relationship to Bill C16, and at the same time I had heard that the University of Toronto, HR & Equity vice president had decided to make “anti-unconscious bias training” mandatory mandatory for her staff.

Which I find appalling and still find appalling and I would recommend if any of you are asked or required to have your unconscious biases adjusted that you might note to yourself that by agreeing to do so you have agreed that you’re guilty. And I wouldn’t recommend that.

Anyways, I was mostly trying to straighten out my thoughts on these issues, and that’s usually what I do when I speak, because, and I have a good reputation as a speaker and I think there’s two reasons for that, and one is I don’t ever speak to a group I always speak to individuals. I’m not speaking to the group, I’m speaking to individual people.

And I’m not telling you what’s right, because I don’t know what’s right. What I’m trying to do is to formulate my thoughts more clearly. And it’s helpful to do that in speech, even in front of an audience because it’s a dialogue with an audience, if you watch the individuals then you can tell if they are following you, or whether mostly whether they’re following you, if they can understand the line of the argumentation.

And some of them will be shaking their heads and some of them will be nodding. And some of them will be looking puzzled, in which case you kind of have to reformulate and so, that’s how I… that’s how to think. And when you’re speaking to people it’s okay to tell them what you know, but better to show them how you think.

And that means you’re going to stumble around like an idiot some of the time because you’re trying to grapple with things and what I try to do for my students is to model the process of grappling with things. Because that’s what you do. When you think — and well Norman pointed out that you can be right, or you can try to get smarter and to be right, then you convince people that you’re right but to try to get smarter you find out why you’re wrong.

And so I decided a long time ago, that one of the ways to deal with my ‘authoritarian tendencies’ let’s say, was to make friends with what I don’t know instead of what I do know. And that’s a whole different way of looking at the world, and it’s got its pain because you’re always trying to figure out why you’re a biased moron and that’s a very long list — you have a very long list of reasons for that.

And then you have to find out why you’re wrong and as a short term mechanism for attaining psychological stability I wouldn’t recommend it. But as a long term process where you’re trying to make things work better in the medium to long term, then it’s the only way.

But it’s easy to sacrifice the future for the present, although it’s kind of the reverse of the way you should do things. So anyways I made these videos –pretty amateur videos and the lighting wasn’t very good and there was a bunch of things wrong with them.

But one of the things I’ve been wondering about for the last three months is just what happened? What’s going on here? This is crazy. I’ve been accused of a lot of things, some of which are no doubt true. But I’ve been accused of being a racist and being a transphobe and— what else — profiteering, and I guess the other one was scaremongering! Yeah that’s the other one. Scaremongering.

And so course I’ve been wondering if those things are true because it’s not like my heart is as pure as the driven snow, hardly. And everyone has biases and all of that.

And I also — while this unfolded had a group of friends who were definitely critics who were watching everything I was doing and letting me know pretty forthrightly when I was being arrogant or when I was — looked kind of disheveled and when my arguments weren’t as clear as they could be and so these were smart people and their comments were very incisive and then of course I had all the blowback.

And I was paying attention to it because, well, you should pay attention to such things. And I do pay attention to things! That’s the thing; I actually pay attention to things.

And if I’m embroiled in a controversy even if it’s a problem in my home, I try to get to the damn bottom of it. And the bottom of things is not a pretty place to look. When you’re arguing with someone at home, even someone you love, you notice that your argument can get out of hand pretty quick.

So if you’re arguing with your wife or your husband — and it depends on how volatile you are of course — but you start arguing about some little thing and then you come to understand pretty quick that it’s not actually about that little thing at all — that little thing is associated with a bigger thing underneath that, and maybe that’s associated with even a bigger thing under that.

And soon you’re taking each other apart — and assuming you’ve been married for twenty years — for all the stupid things you’ve done to each other over the last twenty years, and it doesn’t have to end there. And that’s not pleasant. It’s really hard to bind a conversation so it doesn’t go everywhere, so one thing you can do if you’re talking with someone about something you disagree with — someone you love you can tell them a bunch of good things about what they’ve been doing which you actually believe and then just say “Well but there’s this little problem here, and I’d just like it adjusted in a minor way. And maybe that’ll sort things out a bit between us.” And maybe you won’t fall into that stupid pit, which is easy to fall into which certainly can lead to divorce, among other things.