Here is the full transcript of The Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast episode titled “Potential Solutions To Fix Mass Indoctrination” with author and professor of politics Eric Kaufmann. This episode was recorded on May 27th, 2024.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: Hello, everybody. I have the opportunity today to talk to Dr. Eric Peter Kauffman. He’s a Canadian author and a professor from the University of Buckingham. He’s written a new book to come out in two different forms: “The Third Awokening,” or “Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution.” Eric is also the author of a number of other books, “Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth,” “The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America,” “The Orange Order,” etc. He’s a rare bird, you might say. He’s a relatively conservative social scientist, and there aren’t very many of those. In fact, I think the two of us talking are about the only two that there are. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not much.
We talk about a lot of things today. We talk about the sacred dimension of the victim-victimizer narrative. We talk about the state of modern universities and what’s being done to, what would you say, stem the tide of the radical leftists. We talk about Dr. Kauffman’s, well, his presumption that much of what’s happening on the culture war front isn’t precisely due to the invasion of Marxists that you often hear about, or even about post-modernism per se, but more about progressive literalism with its roots in the early 20th century, and so he makes that case. We talk about sex and the different political beliefs that are emerging, especially between men and young women.
Join us for the conversation. You’re concentrating on the culture war, which continues to rage madly, especially in, well, academia and everything it touches. Do you want to tell, I thought we’d start with two things. Do you want to tell people why you entitled your new book, “The Third Awokening,” and then maybe fill everybody in a little bit about your, the history you’ve had with council culture and academia and how that ties in with your broader, your broader body of work?
The Third Awokening
ERIC KAUFMANN: Yeah, Jordan, it’s great to be on the show, and yeah, I’ve got a new book, “The Third Awokening.” The title in Britain is called “Taboo,” and what this book really is about, what it really argues is that what we’re seeing, council culture, for example, attacks on the past, on history, this is actually a continuation and an acceleration of a pre-existing set of ideas. It is not a deviation from this, well, there are people who will say everything was fine in the 2000s, and suddenly we’ve had this post-2015 deviation. My argument is actually no, what we’re seeing is really a continuation of a set of ideas which arguably go back a century.
And so these are the ideas really of left liberalism, and we have to understand ourselves as living within an acceleration of left liberalism, a set of ideas that kind of come together in the first decade of the 20th century as liberal progressivism. People like John Dewey, Jane Addams in the United States, the origins of pluralism, the origins of the critique of ethnic majorities and national identity, and then this is sort of accelerated in every generation, but really from the late 1960s we get a sort of take-off, and then we’ve kind of had with social media another acceleration.
And so “The Third Awokening” simply means that we’re not in the first one, that we’ve had three of these emotional outbursts and ideological awakenings. Just like in Protestantism you have the first and second great awakenings in American Protestantism, these are sort of emotional upsurges. So the first one was in the late 60s, and people forget that you had Black Panthers occupying buildings armed to the teeth, you had students demanding 50 black professors be studied, every black student be admitted, black studies – this is how black studies got started, for example, is through demands by people who occupied the offices of administrators.
So the late 60s we have a number of these things. Then there’s another awokening, which is in the late 80s, early 90s, that’s sort of probably when you and I were coming of age, we had political correctness, Afrocentrism, speech codes, for example, “hey ho, Western Civ has got to go,” changing the curriculum, purging it of dead white males. Talk in the late 80s, early 90s. And then we have another wave which comes in post-2010.
Defining Woke Ideology
So these are, in my view, continuous. They really touch on the same set of ideas, which is really making sacred a couple of things, which is identities are made sacred. So I define, for example, woke. One sentence definition, people always ask, what is the definition of woke? Well, the definition of woke, as I mentioned in the book, is the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups. That’s it. That’s the one sentence definition.
And that is also what I would say, what I would describe as a kind of big bang of our moral order. And out of that emerges a kind of very fuzzy folk ideology, which says, so these are the sacred groups. Those groups cannot be offended. So anything you say that might be interpreted by the most sensitive member of such a group as offensive marks you out as a blasphemer. You’re profaning the sacred. You must be excommunicated, i.e. canceled.
The other part of this is absolute equality in terms of prestigious positions and resources between these groups. So for example, you can’t have a race gap or a gender gap in terms of the boardroom, in terms of admittance to elite universities, and so on.
But the point I make is this ideology is not some kind of system like Lockean liberalism or even Marxism. That is, it is more of a bottom-up empathizing rather than a top-down systematizing cognitive thing. It’s much more emotional. We’re attached concretely to the black civil rights movement, to the indigenous, to the LGBT movements. And it’s our romanticization and sympathy for these concrete groups that provides our meaning. And that’s primary in the system. It’s not a set of ideas like Marxism. It’s actually a set of emotional attachments. And so this is very much emotional, and it’s driven from the ground up.
The Role of Emotion and Gender in Woke Ideology
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: Okay. So let me ask you some questions about that. Okay. I guess you pulled out two strings there. You did associate the system of ideas with liberal progressivism, let’s say, starting in the early 20th century. But then you were also stressing the more emotional side of it. Let’s call it the compassionate side.
So I want to ask you, and you talked about it as bottom-up and emotion-driven. So it seems to me that there’s the analysis of the woke phenomena has revealed a number of potentially fundamental causal elements. You pointed to liberal progressivism and compassion and the role of emotion, let’s say. Other people have pointed to the role of like a kind of a meta-Marxism. The Marxists, of course, divided the world into victim and victimizer, essentially on economic grounds.
The difference now is that that same narrative seems to play out. There are victims and there are victimizers, but there is a number of dimensions along which that axis of inequality can reveal itself. And you talked about race, gender, and sexuality. There’s other axes as well, but those are likely the primary ones.
And then with regards to the emotional side, this is something I can’t help wondering about, and no one is talking about it. And I can understand why. We did a series of studies that were published in 2016, which was pretty much when I left the university, so it never got completed. But we identified a group of ideas that hung together statistically that we called politically correct authoritarianism, deviated to some degree from, say, the liberal-progressivist ethos in that the people who adopted the set of ideas were perfectly willing to use compulsion and force, that being perhaps the primary distinction.
The predictors that we found that determined whether or not people adopted those beliefs were first of all low verbal intelligence. That was a walloping predictor. And the second one was being female. And the third one was having a female temperament. And the fourth one was having ever taken even one politically correct course.
And so one of the things I’m very curious about, see, I’ve been thinking that one of the things that we’re seeing is the increased female domination of the university system, especially in the humanities and the social sciences. And I think there’s a fundamental feminine ethos that’s instinctive that can be made more sophisticated with genuine education, but that has a proclivity to divide the world up into predators and infants. And woe betide you if you happen to fall into the predator camp. It’s very tightly allied with the victim-victimizer narrative.
And you know, you do point out in your book that there is a predilection for women between the ages of 18 and 34, and this has been shown everywhere. They’re way out of lockstep without it with every other demographic group. They’re way more progressive, far more radically left, way more likely to identify, for example, to even claim that the Hamas terrorists are victims in some sense, which is just an absolute miracle of interpretation.
So we’ve identified a number of streams. There’s a Marxist influence. There’s a postmodern influence, which we haven’t talked about. There’s a liberal progressive influence. There’s an emotional influence. And then I don’t know if you have any specific thoughts about how the increasing female domination, especially of the humanities and the social sciences, plays into that, because that’s a major league cultural revolution, the fact that the universities are dominated, for example, administratively as well by females. And so I know that’s a hell of a thing to ask you to talk about right off the bat.
ERIC KAUFMANN: I think that’s actually really interesting, and I think it is a contributing factor, but I just want to sort of put in a couple of caveats. And the first is we only see this female effect amongst young people. So older women, we don’t find greater support for cancel culture. It very much seems to be among young women.
The second thing is if you were to go back to 1970, for example, women were, you know, there’s a survey done every year in the US, HERI, Higher Education Research Institute, 100,000 freshmen, 18-year-olds entering American universities. In 1970, women were somewhat more conservative than men, 18-year-old women, 18-year-old men. And it’s really not till 2004 we start to see those 18-year-old women starting to be more liberal than the men, and that’s now widened to about 15 points. And so some things happened to women in the recent period. That’s the first point to note.
And the other thing is that FIRE, which is Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, does an annual survey in the US, 55,000. So there’s a lot of survey data in the book. I try and ground this as much as possible in the data.
So they ask questions, for example, is it OK to shout down or block somebody from speaking? And on those questions, actually, especially using violence to prevent somebody from speaking, women are less likely than men to support that on blocking. They’re about as likely. Where women really stand out is, should a speaker come to campus who wants to say something that might be offensive to themselves? For example, that says BLM is a hate group, that says trans is a mental disorder, there you see a big gender gap. And you see it also amongst Republican women, by the way, versus Republican men.
So it seems like the attitude, there’s the authoritarian, I want to do violence, which is, I think, not gendered, or it may even be somewhat more male. But there’s this protective, oh, I don’t want anyone’s feelings to be hurt. And that, I think, is more female. So I think there are some nuances here.
What I would say, the way I think about it is, women will tend to back up whatever is the moral order. If the moral order is a woke moral order, they’ll back that up. If it’s a religious or patriotic moral order, they’ll be more likely to back that up, whereas men will be more likely to be the contrarians.
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: I think, because it’s, you know, people will talk about, well, women are more compassionate. But the point is, compassionate to who?
ERIC KAUFMANN: Well, that is the point. That’s for sure, that’s the point. So compassionate to the transition or the de-transitioner? Compassionate to the biological male wants to enter a woman’s shelter or a woman’s prison or the women in the prison? I mean, the ideology is what tells you who to be compassionate towards.
So if we go back to the liberal progressives, Jane Addams was relatively pro-lynching, or at least thought that wasn’t a bad idea, because she was very, very empathetic towards white women. And so she was willing to accept that there were these black male predators and buy into that framing. So what I’m just saying is, I think what’s happened is, an ideology has crept in and told women who to be compassionate towards and who not to care about.
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The Role of Ideology in Shaping Compassion
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: So, okay, so your point fundamentally is that, I believe, is that the ideology specifies the victim victimizer dimension and identifies the victim. Now do you think, do you think it’s, so when we did our study, it was agreeable, I said it was being female and having a female temperament. Those were both predictors.
We never saw that in any study we ever did, looking at what predicted beliefs, for example. If generally, if we controlled for temperament, sex had no effect, but that wasn’t the case in this specific situation, which, which I thought was extremely telling. And so, and it’s also very interesting, as you pointed out, that it’s young women in particular and I can’t help, as someone, you know, psychoanalytically influenced, I can’t help but think that a fair chunk of this is misplaced maternal instinct.
I believe that the young women who are, by and large, childless in the years when they shouldn’t be, are unbelievably sensitive. Well, let’s talk about what happened in 2004, you know, you said that’s when women started to shift their political priorities. Now, I know from people who’ve been investigating this, that TikTok is a particularly pernicious influence, especially with regards to the campus protests that are occurring right now. And the TikTok short videos that are fostering that the campus protests, at least among women, focus on compassion for the war victims to the ultimate degree. And they seem to be extraordinarily effective.
But there’s a real problem here that needs to be wrestled with. Because if it is the case that young women are differentially sensitive to a certain kind of propaganda, and they often, and they also increasingly occupy the majority positions in university institutions, for example, then we have a whole new kind of social problem on our hands. Because we’ve never had, it’s only been in the last 30 years that we’ve had the opportunity to see what female dominant large institutions would look like, right? That’s historically unprecedented. We have no idea what pathologies or advantages those systems might have.
So what do you think happened in 2004? Like why did the tide start to turn then?
The Shift Towards Liberalism in the Early 2000s
ERIC KAUFMANN: So my interpretation, there’s other data series that we can see changing. So political donations shifting towards the Democrats, for example, around roughly the same time. Now, political donations come from people who are highly educated, relatively well off, for example.
I think what happens in the US anyway, is you get George W. Bush, who’s more of a populist, not an elite style conservative, who’s just about tax and spend, for example. And I actually think you see, he’s also to some degree advancing the agenda of the religious right to some degree. I think this populist style cultural conservatism doesn’t work as well with the elite opinion formers. And so they start to drift away in terms of political donations.
The Influence of Elite Institutions on Cultural Ethos
ERIC KAUFMANN: And if you like the kind of background, the ambient noise, the mood music that is coming through the elite institutions, the schools, the culture, just starts to turn against Republicans and conservatism, for example. So I actually think women are a kind of, they kind of reflect what is the dominant ethos in a society, or at least the prestige ethos in a society. So if we actually swung the ethos against wokeism, I think women would be in the forefront of that. I don’t think there’s anything biological.
So I am more of a sociologist and a political scientist. So I tend to approach these things from a kind of sociology of emotions perspective, which says that ideas can tell you which emotions to turn off and which emotions to express. And now, of course, that’s refracted through things like gender. So in this case, I think women will just back up and reinforce the dominant values, dominant ideology of the elites in a society.
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: So I’m not as convinced. Why the elites? Why do you think it’s okay? Why would women specifically back up the dominant ideology of the elites? Do you think that’s a consequence of something like hypergamy? Or what’s your theory about that? Because it’s weird. If they’re also standing up for the underdogs, is it that they accept the elite differentiation of who’s an underdog and who’s a power monger? And then why is that associated with youth, let’s say, with women? I’m trying to disentangle all that.
The Critical Role of K-12 Education in Shaping Beliefs
ERIC KAUFMANN: Well, I think the schools are critical. So one of the things we’re finding, for example, is that students largely are formed by the time they come on campus. And a lot of the studies of universities show people’s views don’t actually change a great deal between when they come on, step onto campus and leave the university, however. So we really have to focus on the school.
So one of the things we found in the study that that Goldberg and I did was we looked at how much exposure to critical race and gender theory concepts students had had in high school. And, you know, we take take, for example, somebody who didn’t get any exposure to any of these critical race concepts like white privilege, systemic racism, unconscious bias or the gender concepts, many genders, patriarchy, for example, someone who got no exposure to that is sort of 50 to 100 percent less likely to express, for example, white guilt, think that, you know, whites are racist and mean to favor racial quotas and affirmative action. All of these things are 50 to 100 percent. Yes.
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: Wow. And mind boggling. That’s between somebody having no concepts and the maximum of six concepts.
ERIC KAUFMANN: Similarly, by the way, for partisanship, you know, someone with a Republican mother who is exposed to no concepts, this is essentially 60 percent of them identify as Republican exposed to six concepts. It drops to below 30 percent. So one of the points that I try to make in the book is that K-12 education, public education is absolutely massive and must become a top priority for certainly conservative politicians. If you want to have a hope in the future in terms of turning this around, we’ve got to get at K-12 education.
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: OK, so so let me ask you about that. I just saw a study the other day, just a graph of a study showing across a variety of different age groups when people believe that the culture, their culture peaked in terms of quality, music, entertainment, food, peace, etc. And the the general proclivity was for people to focus on the time between there about, say, 15 and 19. And you know, there’s a tremendous amount of neural reorganization that goes on at that point. So there’s a big die off of neurons between two and four.
Right. So you’re born with more neural connections than you ever have again in your life. And a lot of what happens when you learn is actually pruning. There’s a major pruning in late infancy, and then there’s a major pruning in teenage in the teenage years. You kind of die into your adult personality. That’s a reasonable way of thinking about it.
Now, people have known for a long time that if you want to get men into the military in the proper way, you have to do that when they’re young adults. The earlier, the better. By the time they’re 23 or so, like, forget it. You can’t tribalize them. Right. So that we and we don’t know exactly the critical period for the establishment of tribal identity. But you’re suggesting that your research is indicating that it’s actually prior to university. You know, I bet it’s the same time that people develop their musical preferences. Right. Right.
ERIC KAUFMANN: Right. Right. Well, yeah, that’s such a key point that you make about the neurons and brain development kind of ending in a certain way in the early 20s. That tends to manifest itself. I mean, a political scientist like myself would tend to look at these as cohort effects. So you kind of your beliefs crystallized to some extent in your early 20s and you carry those through life, because right now I think there’s a complacency amongst a lot of people who say, well, you know, young people are woke, but they’ll grow out of it. You know, they’ll come back. They’ll have kids. They’ll they’ll own a house and they’ll suddenly become conservative. And I think that’s quite naive in many ways. I think that I think that may be true in terms of self-interest, paying taxes. But in terms of these core values, I don’t think that’s likely.
You can see that, by the way, with religion. So secularism, non-religion started with young people and they those beliefs were sticky and they maintained non-religion through life. And now we’re seeing record levels of non-religiosity in the U.S. and Britain, for example.
The Potential for Generational Shifts in Attitudes
One of my contentions is, yes, there’s no question that we, you know, woke has kind of peaked. We’ve seen a rollback of DEI incorporations to some extent. We’ve seen to some extent, yes, we’ll see about that, right? They’re pretty slippery, man.
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: Just because they don’t have the same name doesn’t mean they’re not up to the same tricks.
ERIC KAUFMANN: Exactly. But but but be that it is may be that as it may in The New York Times and The Washington Post editorializing in favor of free speech and against, you know, mandatory diversity statements. What I say is that’s true. And I think those senior liberals have rode back. But I think we’ve got to look at this in terms of cohort change, generational turnover. When the median voter and the median employee in an organization is a millennial or a zoomer, they’re going to carry the beliefs they have with them into midlife. And that is going to change our culture.
So, for example, if if I say here’s a question that we asked, you got asked to hundreds of thousands of British respondents on his panels, do you favor political correctness because it protects people from discrimination or do you oppose political correctness because it stifles free speech? No. In the British public, it’s sort of forty seven to thirty seven against political correctness. Amongst academics, it’s maybe seventy five, twenty in favor amongst social science, humanities, academic. Young people take after that. They’re about two to one in favor of political correctness.
And what I would sort of predict is if we run the clock forward 20 years, the median in society is going to shift from essentially being opposed to political correctness to being supportive of political correctness. So something like speech codes, for example, in universities will have majority support. And so I think we really have to turn this ship around while we still have a sensible population because we can’t guarantee that that’s always going to be the case. And so that’s why I think the schools changing the culture in schools has to be so central.
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The Establishment of Sacred Identities
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, so okay, so you, I want to bring a couple of other issues here before perhaps we turn to your solutions. Now when we began our conversation, you said that part of this movement was the establishment of sacred identities. And I just brought that up because you brought up the religious issue as well. And I know you’ve done some writing about that additionally.
So there’s a variety, I like the idea of sacred, see I think what, I think religion, religious ideas are axiomatic starting points, like the Euclidean axioms for Euclidean geometry. There’s very many different forms of geometry, right? You just have to switch the axioms. The axioms of a cognitive system, I think the word sacred is exactly right, is that you have to accept a certain number of things on faith, and then you can build a logical edifice on top of that, maybe even a functionally logical edifice. But there’s going to be axioms at the base, and so I think that any assumption, for example on the part of people like Dawkins, that we can replace the religious enterprise with something that’s purely secular, is nonsense.
I think what we’ll get is a different set of sacred axioms. And you pointed to race, gender, and sexuality, and so why do you, first of all, I want to know what you think about that, and why you use the term sacred. But I’m also curious about your thoughts with regard to why it was that when we shed our previous set of sacred presumptions, let’s say, that it was race, gender, and sexuality that rushed in to fill the void. So why them? Why those axioms?
ERIC KAUFMANN: Right, well, I mean, there is a sort of earlier history, which I don’t go into as much in the book for reasons of space, so to some degree, you know, this was directed against – immigrant groups were sort of slightly protected by the liberal progressives, not as extreme as race post-1960s.
But I think to understand this, we have to go – and one of the reasons I make the argument that this is about left liberalism is that the civil rights movement, starting in the mid-50s, but really it’s in the mid-60s, this occurs with the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, which are things that I support. But as Shelby Steele in his book White Guilt, which I recommend to everybody, he’s an African-American, he grew up in the South, experiences what he called a dramatic shift, almost overnight, where the cultural power goes away from whites, where black people have to kind of genuflect to whites, to suddenly white people having to sort of virtue signal that they are one of the good whites to black people. So the cultural power flows to black people. That doesn’t mean economic power initially, but cultural power.
That’s what he said. And in fact, American institutions, in order to – they lost their moral legitimacy by admitting that they engaged in the sin of racial discrimination. So once you admit, he says, you give up cultural power, now you have to admit, because these were real things. But that loss of cultural power means that you now have to fight for your moral legitimacy.
Now how do you do that? Through virtue signaling. So you’re kind of virtue signaling that you’re one of the good whites, that your institution still has moral legitimacy, so you’re going to have an affirmative action program. For example, you’re going to have some kind of racial sensitivity training, which is the precursor to diversity training.
So a lot of these things really begin in the 60s and 70s, which is one of the reasons – and these are not Marxist things. This isn’t Herbert Marcuse saying we failed on class, we got to move to identity because they might do the radical revolution. Those people were there. Don’t get me wrong.
The Interplay Between Left Liberals and Radicals
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: You had, Rufo is correct, and Lindsay, that at least in terms of the ideas, those ideas were there. But really what drove this? President Johnson was an anti-communist. He was bombing Vietnam. This is not some kind of a neo-Marxist. What this was really about was kind of virtue signaling and saying, I’m not one of the bad people and we’re one of the good people. So white guilt, guilt, compassion for these groups, and a certain exaggerated catastrophizing fear of the right of conservatives. They’re going to drag us back to Jim Crow, back to 1933 Germany, that constant ginning up of that alarmism. These are the three elements of the left liberal stool that are developed. And so that’s kind of the emphasis.
So I put the civil rights movement as kind of the big bang of our moral order. And it is sort of the sort of center of our moral universe. Now once you’ve got the sacredness around race that you have to very tiptoe around black Americans because you’ve done wrong and you feel a bit guilty, then you sort of can take that sacredness. It’s a bit like kryptonite and you can wield it. And you can, if you’re a feminist movement, you can grab a bit of that power and use it. If you are an indigenous movement, you can use it.
And so, and then you can stretch it. So it’s now mispronouncing somebody’s name or the Moynihan Report 1965 about the black family. That becomes a bit offensive and you have to shelve it, right? So the stretching, it’s a bit like putty. You can then stretch it across to different groups, outwards to microaggressions. And this is where all the power comes from.
And I think, you know, there’s another, there’s, well, there’s another interesting dimension there too that’s worth thinking about that’s more psychological than sociological. So there’s a group of personality disorders that are extraordinarily resistant to treatment and should have probably never been medicalized, in my estimation, because they’re not illnesses.
So antisocial personality disorder is one of them. Criminality is not an illness, even though it’s diagnosable. The associated pathologies are borderline personality disorder, which is perhaps the female equivalent of antisocial personality disorder, although I would argue it’s even more toxic. Hysterionic personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, that kind of fleshes it out.
Now the, so those, the people in that cluster, let’s say, they, the personality traits they show are, they’re Machiavellian. So they use their language to manipulate. So if, if someone like that is talking to you, the only thing they’re using their words for is to obtain power over you for their immediate needs. That’s it. There’s, there’s no, there’s no dialogue. There’s pure manipulation.
They tend to be psychopathic, and so psychopaths are predators and parasites. They are hysterionic, so prone to high levels of emotional display, especially negative emotion. They’re narcissistic, which means they want unearned social status. And just to top it off, because that’s not bad enough, they have a proclivity to be sadistic, which means they take pleasure in the undeserving suffering of others.
Now the reason I’m bringing this up is because that group of people uses claims of victimization to harness guilt to obtain power. So there’s a, there’s an additional twist here that, that I think is stunningly dangerous. And you see, it’s tied in with your notion that the progressive liberals have enabled the radicals. See, because here’s the problem. If you’re empathic and progressive, you don’t believe that cluster B people exist, but, because everyone’s a victim. But the problem is, they do exist.
And it’s in times when that small minority of people, maybe that’s four percent, something like that, when they get the upper hand, and they do, they got the upper hand after the French Revolution, they got the upper hand after the Russian Revolution, it is no fun for anyone, because they’re chaos, they’re chaos worshipers, their best means of obtaining power and even reproductive opportunity is in the ashes.
And so I’ve spent, I spent five years working with Democrats in the US, and it got frustrating, and so I stopped doing it. But part of the reason it got frustrating is because I could never get any of the ones that I worked with, and that was a lot, to say to me, when does the left go too far? And I would point out the dangers of the cluster B psychopaths, and they just hand wave. It’s like, oh, no, they don’t really mean what they say. They don’t mean what they say when they’re talking about equality of outcome, for example. Kamala Harris, she doesn’t mean equality of outcome. She just means equality of opportunity.
And it is stunning the degree to which that’s an axiomatic belief of progressive liberals. That that radical left fringe doesn’t exist, or they don’t mean what they say. That’s universal. I’ve literally not talked to one of them who, including Robert Kennedy, by the way, who was willing to say, for example, what you said in your book, which is that we better wash out for the demand for equality of outcome, because I do think that’s where the pathology really manifests itself.
It’s like, really, you want equality of outcome, do you, along all dimensions? And you’re going to, how are you going to obtain that exactly, except by force? Well, maybe we want force. It’s like, yeah, yeah, maybe you do. Yeah.
So, so, well, so there’s this interplay between sociology and thought and psychopathology that that that people aren’t attending to. And it’s very dangerous because the other thing that’s terrible is that social media seems to enable the cluster B types because in normal conversation, they’re subject to the restrictions that face to face interaction carries with it. Like the possibility of getting hit, for example, but none of that is there on social media. And that enables, as far as I can tell, that enables this psychopathic manipulation to have essentially free sway.
ERIC KAUFMANN: Yeah, I mean, that’s really an interesting set of observations. I think you’re right. And I guess we’re agreeing, but from different ends of the telescope, because I think that what’s happening is this large group. So in a university, the median academic is liberal left, soft left, not far left, 50 to 60 percent of the university. And this is why, for example, by a two to one ratio, social science, academics and elite universities support mandatory diversity statements. And so this is not something they’re being forced to do by a few crazies.
But of course, as you say, there’s a symbiosis between the authoritarian left and this large group of liberal left. So my view is if we can work on at least convincing some of those liberal leftists to change course, then that will reduce. It’s like unplugging a guitar from the amplifier. The liberal left is the amplifier and the radical left is the guitar player.
The Unbounded Nature of Left Liberalism
So how do we. But you make another good point, which I’ve heard before, which is when does the left go too far? The unwillingness. And there’s really a couple of strands to this and we might call them equal outcomes. Diversity is another and inclusion is another. The EDI triumvirate.
And I would say that on all of those dimensions, left liberalism really has no boundaries. So left liberalism is it is, in my view, sane on the economy. It believes in a mixed capitalist economy. And so left liberalism really emerges as the victor through two world wars and the Cold War as the ideology of sort of the elite cultural ideology. It’s not communist, actually. I don’t think it is communist. I think it believes in a maybe a higher tax rate perhaps than the free market. Right. But I’m not really that concerned about the economy.
It’s on the cultural side. There are really no guardrails at all. It’s just there are we’re not diverse enough. We’re not inclusive enough. We’re not equal enough. There’s no bound to that. So whenever someone comes along and says we should be a more equal, it’s like, yes. So what we have is this ratcheting.
And that’s really where I mean, Hanania’s book on affirmative action in the United States moving to this idea of, well, starts out as, well, we want equal treatment. That’s what affirmative action meant. Pretty soon it was goals and timetables. Then there was disparate impact. Well, you know, if you have a test like the SAT and certain racial groups are not represented, then that’s a kind of indirect discrimination.
So what we can see is this kind of evolutionary ratcheting. Now, that’s quite different from a neo Marxist takeover of institutions, a kind of vanguard march through the institution’s argument, which I think is I’m not as persuaded. But I think there’s some of that happening. But I think it’s really this sort of evolving, ratcheting left liberalism because it has no boundaries.
As you say, when does when is there too much diversity? And we know from the studies, Robert Putnam, for example, or Easterly, that too much diversity actually has negative impacts on, for example, economic development, on various kinds of examples, trust in your neighbors.
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: And this is now this is a finding I would call it. Well, how can you have trust? How can you have trust without cohesiveness? Right. Right. How can you manage that?
ERIC KAUFMANN: Yeah, but there’s no limits and there’s no willingness to recognize we don’t want to maximize these things. We want to optimize them. That is not the way the liberal left thinks. They just think more equality, more diversity, more inclusivity. Now, of course, inclusivity means we got to have speech codes. We got to clamp down on speech, which might be offensive. So people don’t feel included, might damage their self-esteem. So this is getting at free speech to be to get inclusion. And that and I just don’t know.
The Flawed Concept of Self-Esteem
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, self-esteem, well. I’ve been watching these pathologies grow in psychology for 30 years and the social psychologists in particular, they just they’ve irritated the hell out of me for like three generations. And so self-esteem, people still use that word. So here’s what self-esteem is. Self-esteem is trait neuroticism minus extroversion. There’s no such thing as self-esteem. It’s a complete bloody lie. It has no construct validity whatsoever.
It’s an index of your temperamental proclivity to negative emotion. And women have lower levels of self-esteem because they have higher levels of neuroticism and that kicks in at puberty. And so this is a good example of how the educational psychologists and the social psychologists have actually perverted the whole culture, because we actually believe in things that don’t exist so deeply that people use them in their speech as if they’re actual facts, maximizing self-esteem. It’s like it’s trait neuroticism.
It’s extremely difficult. It’s very much set temperamentally, has a very powerful genetic. What would you say, foundation, neuroticism doesn’t differ between boys and girls, doesn’t kick until puberty, it’s different between men and women all around the world. And, you know, so we can’t lower people’s self-esteem. It means we’re aiming at a target that doesn’t even exist. And we’re using ideological means because we’ve got our measurements wrong. So.
Turning the Ship Around
All right. So so one of the things that was striking about your book, and I don’t know how to rectify this apparent paradox, you make the case that. We’re we’re we’ve raised a cohort of kids who’ve been thoroughly propagandized in. High school, let’s say, because that looks like about the place where it’s occurring, and your belief is that that’s pretty sticky, although there’ll be some movement in a conservative direction, people get more conscientious as they get older, they get more agreeable, they do tilt a bit more towards conservatism. But you believe that a lot of those ideas will be sticky.
And that means that that’s going to dominate, let’s say, in positions of power 10 years down the road. But by the same token, you also believe that there’s time to turn the ship around. So let’s talk about that. You have 12 ideas, and I’m really curious to see you go through them.
ERIC KAUFMANN: So while you lectured for us at Peterson Academy, right? That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, right, right.
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: But so that’s one of our answers to the problem. And that’s launching, by the way, at the end of the month.
ERIC KAUFMANN: Fantastic. Yeah, it was very enjoyable experience. I didn’t teach anything particularly controversial. But still, what I would say is there’s really two different approaches to dealing with the issue. One is what I might call libertarian, and that’s using market-based solutions. And the other is interventionists using government-led solutions.
Now, I actually lean more towards the second than the first, which may jar against some of the libertarians in the audience. So, for example, I think when it comes to the battle of ideas in the media there, I think it is the barriers to entry are quite low. You can set up a podcast, you can have the impact that you’re having that Joe Rogan is having. But when we’re talking about universities or tech firms, particularly search engines, there are natural monopolies and there are sort of market failures.
The Challenges of Reforming Educational Institutions
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: So there are first mover advantages to being Harvard. It’s going to be very hard for Harvard’s reputation. I know it’s dropped a little, but it’s going to be hard for that rank order to change a lot. And so and similarly with schools.
So the view that we should simply have school choice and that’s going to fix the problem. I think school choice is great, but I don’t think it’s going to make much difference. Surveys that I’ve looked at, for example, show the kids who go through the through to private school to parochial school who are even homeschooled actually don’t differ very much in their views. And in addition, the amount of critical race and gender theory that they are being exposed to is relatively similar.
If you think about universities in homeschools, very, very it’s a little bit lower. But in the data that I’ve seen, which is the at the FIRE Foundation, Individual Rights and Expression. And also we also asked the school questions on our 18 to 20 survey. Now, we didn’t get a ton of variation. Now, it could be that the homeschool kids, we got a selection of those homeschool kids which wasn’t representative. I don’t know. Maybe that’s the case. But why is it a curriculum? Is it a curriculum issue? Like, well, how do you account for that? Because on the face of it, that seems I believe it with the private schools, because my experience with private schools is that they tend to be as woke as the public schools. Maybe not quite as much, but pretty much the homeschool one that that’s more complex.
But it’s not that easy for parents, for example, to set up a curriculum. And the curricula are well dominated by the ideology, let’s say. But how do you make sense of that?
ERIC KAUFMANN: Right. Well, well, I think there are some differences. So on the gender ideology, there’s a bit less amongst the homeschool. Now, we don’t have a massive sample, but there looks to be some effect. But it’s not massive.
And my point is, you know, if you are a really switched on parent, you could send your kid to a classical school if you have that option nearby. That may make a difference for you. But the number of parents who are like that is quite small. Most of them will just say, what school is going to get my kid ahead into a top university, gets the best results, even if they have a choice. And so most kids are just going to be put through the sort of indoctrination machine.
And that’s my concern is not the freedom of a very, you know, switched on parent to actually avoid these things, which is important. But it’s most of these kids are being put through the same system. So we’ve got to, I think, get at the public school system. So, for example, I think something like what Ron DeSantis is doing, sort of essentially banning DEI, sort of getting indoctrination out of the schools, monitoring that.
The Risks of Top-Down Intervention in Education
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: OK, let me ask, let me ask you about that, you know, because I really have mixed feelings about this. And I’ll tell you why. I like Chris Rufo. I’ve enjoyed talking to him. I think him and DeSantis have done very interesting work in Florida. But I have a concern, and the concern is that once you establish the precedent that the universities can be directly. Can be directed from the top down by the politicians, particularly to set their curricula straight, you set a vicious precedent, and I believe that the work that Rufo is doing in Florida, setting up the new university, for example, and pushing back against DEI is laudable, partly because all the universities to speak of are woke, with the possible exception of like Hillsdale.
And and so even if there is a risk of overshooting on the conservative side, they’re at such a disadvantage that practically speaking at the moment that might be necessary. But like if the universities are incapable of governing themselves and that would go along with the faculties of education and we turn that we move that responsibility up the political hierarchy to the elected officials, we open the door for mass intervention in the education system for ideological reasons. And that’s like. So I just can’t see that as I see that as a solution with a lot of attendant danger.
Distinguishing Between K-12 and University Reform
ERIC KAUFMANN: So I’m wondering. Like I said, I’m I’m I’m I understand what Rufo is doing and why and DeSantis as well, and I think they’re both sensible people, but that doesn’t mean that it’ll always be sensible people doing such things. No.
So I would draw a very stark distinction between K-12 in the school system where you’ve got minors who are captive. They have to be there. They have to parrot back what the teacher says in order to get a good mark with the universities where academics have academic freedom, for example. So at university level, I would be opposed to critical race theory. I’ve taught critical race theory. I think you’ve got adults. They’re choosing which courses to take.
Now, I do think, however, that state governments or the government has the right to defund, not ban, but to defund, say, well, we’re not going to fund this kind of course. Now, that’s a political decision, but it’s not to say it’s banned. You can cross subsidize that from your more profitable faculties. And I think that will just it will allow it to be taught if people really want to take it.
But so I don’t think this is practical for universities. I think there’s a different set of solutions. But I think for the school system, it is perfectly legitimate to say we’re going to have a politically neutral space. More important than that, I just want to say one thing, which is you have to teach about the past and the war, slavery, genocide, conquest.
But I don’t think you should be allowed to teach about American slavery without teaching about, say, indigenous slavery or Ottoman slavery. You shouldn’t be able to teach about Roman slavery or Greek slavery or, yeah, or stolen land, you know, the Americans stealing land from the indigenous without talking about the Iroquois stealing land from the Huron and the Comanche committing atrocities against the Apache.
So what I mean is we need to have a fully conceptualized discussion that all land is stolen land in a way. And that because I think part of what the problem is, you know, 70 percent of, you know, 18 to 24 in the United States believe that, you know, the Native peoples, quote unquote, the Native Americans lived in peace and harmony prior to the arrival of the Europeans.
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: Right. So this is exactly the problems we have. They were all wise stewards of nature and everything was peaceful and harmonious. Yeah, right. Jean-Jacques Rousseau 101. It’s so pathetic.
ERIC KAUFMANN: Yeah. So I think that kind of really that sort of attempt to forge the curriculum. Now, if you look historically, Canada, the US, Australia, Britain, conservative parties have tried and failed. They’ve essentially been outdistanced by the education establishment time and time again on this stuff. That’s going to have to change. They’re going to have to get hold of the curriculum and insist on a balanced curriculum and political neutrality. Britain has a law on the books that schools cannot politically indoctrinate. But what they do is they say, well, critical race theory is not political. They get around that.
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, right.
The Challenges of Curriculum Reform
So then, OK, so that begs the next. Well, that begs the next question. It’s like once the institutions that we’re discussing, the faculties of education, let’s say once they’re universally corrupted, who the hell has the wisdom or the time in order to manage something like curricula analysis? You know, I went to the Republican Governors Association meeting, which was an interesting thing to do. I did that last year.
And one of the things that really struck me and kind of strikes me in general about the Republicans, it was a rather dull meeting. They were trying to appeal to their donors. So I expected a bit more spice, but it was dull in a kind of competent, administrative manner. So the governors would get up and they would talk about what were essentially local micro initiatives that were sensible and practical. But they weren’t the sort of cultural transformation vision that’s necessary for people to sit down and say, OK, well, the faculties of education are propagandizing.
What do we want our children to learn? Like who in the Rufo is an exception to this, maybe, but he’s a singular sort of person. I don’t see. Widely, you know, I spent a lot of time talking to political people all across North America, and it isn’t obvious to me that I see anywhere the kind of expertise or even the time that’s available to manage such a thing. So how do you how do you envision that happening?
ERIC KAUFMANN: Well, I think there are groups of the National Association of Scholars has model curriculum, civics curriculum that they’re developing. Some of the think tanks, Manhattan Institute as well. So there are now model curriculum. Britain History Reclaimed is working on this. So we actually have got model curricula that say conservative governments could adopt. They have to have the fight with the educational establishment, which, by the way, they have had and lost.
Now, you look at, for example, DeSantis, the African-American, the AP, for example, I don’t know if you recall where DeSantis rejected the the AP for African-American studies was filled with critical race theory, forced the critical race theory to come out of that. That’s an example of what I’m talking about, is you actually have to get into the weeds of this and you have to insist and you have to do inspection. You have to mainstream it into the inspection regime. All this very boring, technocratic, bureaucratic stuff. I just think so.
It’s a bit I use the analogy of Elon Musk taking over Twitter had so much more of an effect than Gab Parler. Those are those are important to have. These alternatives are important, but I just think we’re going to have to get our hands dirty, get into the weeds of the details of the curriculum and insist on a balanced curriculum and actually have that fight.
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The Challenges of Reforming Educational Bureaucracies
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: OK, OK, well, that’s fair enough. I’m going to point out a couple of problems again, it’s not because I don’t agree with you, it’s just like you said or implied, at least the devil’s in the details. I mean, the person who took over Twitter, that was Elon Musk, and he’s a complete bloody monster and he’s run many difficult corporations and done impossible things.
And so he’s like, there’s one guy like that. And he fired, what, 80 percent of the Twitter staff and nothing happened except the place got better. Now, the Pareto distribution for large corporations or large enterprises kicks in very viciously. And so the Pareto distribution, what would you say, mathematical equations indicate that the square root of the number of people in a given organization do half the work.
And so if there’s 10,000 educational bureaucrats, then 100 of them do half the work. And that basically means you could fire 80 percent of them. And if the whole place is corrupt, you probably have to. And like, I just can’t see how the hell the conservatives are going to manage that, because it could easily be that 80 percent of teachers need to go.
Now, I know there are places like the Acton Academy and so forth that are setting up educational institutions where teachers, for example, are much less necessary because the students take a lot of the work on their own. And there and I understand, as you pointed out, that there are places that are producing model curricula. But I just I’ve talked to Republican governors, for example, who’ve tried to take on the teachers unions in their own states and. You know, failed because the well, because they have 50 percent of the state budgets and they’re insanely powerful, they’re much more powerful, generally speaking, than the governors are so.
ERIC KAUFMANN: Right. Well, so you talk about Florida and Florida is a good model, but that’s one state, you know, and so so lay out some more of your ideas for how these things might change.
Implementing Educational Reform at the State Level
Well, I do think so. It’s already having an effect in Florida. I mean, the showing effect on the CRC, the CRT bans and those are being now I think there are many red states and I’ve lost track of the number. It might be approaching twenty five that are rolling this out. And actually there is compliance. It’s not perfect.
But I think if the Republican Party in these states is serious, it will invest political capital and it will demand accountability. It will ask people to sort of, you know, what are the inspections saying? You have to report to the legislature on progress. And I actually think that process first, because I also think most teachers are I think a lot of teachers are flexible and actually teachers are not quite as left wing, believe it or not, as academics.
So there is actually, I think, more receptivity. Now, you also need to open up new avenues into the profession so you don’t have to require an education degree. There’s all the things that you need to do. So there’s a whole set of things we can do as liberal democracies.
Likewise, with the government, getting CRT and DEI out of government is something I think we can do. I think you can. So through political appointments, you have to you’re probably going to have to fire some people. You might have to set up new agencies.
So on the UK, we have the Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act, where there is a new 10 person academic freedom directorate. That’s a new institution. Now, I actually think that’s a good thing. Now, it could be that labor comes in and defangs it.
Fine. I mean, perhaps to some degree, this becomes a matter of political contestation because really what all of this gets down to is the only institution that the sensible majority on the cultural side can control is the elected government. That is the only institution that we have. We don’t we we haven’t got the schools, the universities. We haven’t got the civil service, the quangos. What we actually need to do is to use elected government to reform all of these devolved bodies and also institutions relying on public money.
We’re not trying to indoctrinate them. Our goal is political neutrality and balance. That’s it. I think that has to be the goal. That’s maybe where I disagree a bit with Rufo and some others who want to put in a different ethos based on Christianity or Yoram Hazoni. I don’t believe it. I believe we can have political neutrality and actually you can chill activists within the academic sector.
The Postmodern Challenge to Political Neutrality
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: OK, so let me ask you about let me ask you about that, because the postmodern rejoinder to your claim is that while you claim that your anti-DEI stance, let’s say, is politically neutral or that there’s even such a thing as political neutrality, but really all you’re trying to do is what would you call it? Sneak in an alternative ethos of power to replace the one that is highlighting the victimized and the marginalized and, you know, pushing things back 50 years into the hands of like white Christian conservatives, you know, because for the postmodernists, there’s no neutrality. There’s only a battleground of power.
That’s it. And they believe that and they believe it technically. And certainly the radical leftists not only believe that, but revel in it because it allows them to use power with no guilt. And so why are on what grounds are you convinced that the claim that institutional neutrality, for example, could be instituted and that it actually constitutes neutrality? What’s your philosophical justification for that claim?
ERIC KAUFMANN: Well, philosophically, you know, what I approach the whole book with is this idea of human flourishing, a kind of utilitarian argument that says we want to have a certain amount of equality, a certain amount of diversity, a certain amount of inclusion, but only the amount that is optimal to maximize human flourishing in the system. I think we’ve overshot on those three and we have to sort of move it back, not back to where it was in 1950, but back a little bit further. And so the idea there is institutional neutrality is critical for people to have trust in the system.
Now, we already have, for example, the civil service in Britain is supposed to be neutral. We already have this aspiration. And I think a lot of people, even even left liberals, will actually be convinced by they’re not postmodern in being radically cynical the way that I mean, some of them are. But I think many people will be won over if you say, look, what we want is neutrality.
You know, you’ve talked about, you know, American slavery. We want to talk about Ottoman slavery. I think that making that argument can win over some people. And I think a neutrality argument is more winnable than to say we’re going to replace your ethos of woke with our ethos of public religion, to use Hazoni’s argument.
The Potential for a Centrist Consensus on Neutrality
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: Right. OK, so you still think that there’s enough of a centrist consensus around what neutrality constitutes for that to still be a compelling argument to people, even even the left, the more liberal progressive types?
ERIC KAUFMANN: Well, you’d think at least they’d be self-interested enough to understand that neutrality. Throughout sequential elections might be held a lot better than domination by the radical conservative right, which is certainly a possibility, and that’s certainly something that’s emerging in Europe and could easily well, who knows how things will play out, but it’s popping up its head in many, many places in Europe. Right. The last country to go was the Netherlands. So that’s what Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy, most of Eastern Europe like this is starting to happen very, very widely and could certainly continue. So neutrality, you’d think across sequential elections would be the best policy for everybody if we had enough of a consensus to define it.
Well, I’d also say, too, that right now the public, if you take a look and I’ve done surveys in the US, Britain and Canada, the public in all three societies leans about two to one against what I would call the woke position. And that could be teaching kids that Canada is a racist country or, you know, that there are many genders or whatever. So it’s roughly two to one against across 50 questions, let’s say. In a democracy, the democracy gets to set the curriculum.
I think the majority of the population would be on board the idea of political neutrality and balance as they see it. And I think we have the numbers to to institute that now. And one of my pleas in terms of a 12 point plan is that the conservative politicians really need to upgrade the focus on culture because you have a right to want to ensure a two to one majority. These are clear wedge issues. They divide the left and they unite the right.
A question like, you know, should Winston Churchill’s statue be removed from Parliament Square? You know, if you take conservative voters, they are overwhelmingly strongly opposed to that. If you take Labour and Green voters and Liberal Democrats, they’re kind of splintered. Some are strongly in favour, but many are not. So these are obvious issues to go after. Why haven’t conservatives gone after them? Because they’re scared of being accused of being a racist.
The Underutilization of Wedge Issues by Conservatives
I’ll give you another example, which is affirmative action. Red state, only four red states have got bans on affirmative action, 13 of bans on abortion. Now, abortion is a relatively unpop and bans on abortion are relatively unpopular. They may have a one third support across the US population. Bans on affirmative action might have a two third support. And yet there’s very little of it in red states. How do we explain that?
Well, we explain it, first of all, by the fact that this issue has not been important enough for conservative politicians. Henania does a good job of talking about that. And also that the abortion lobby, the gun lobby, they’re very organized. You know, they put pressure on Republican politicians between elections. The anti-affirmative action lobby is totally disorganized. It cannot hold conservative politicians feet to the fire if they do nothing about it.
That has to change that organization between elections. We have to be putting much more pressure on our politicians to raise the importance of this issue and to deliver on that issue. Now, that may be changing.
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: Well, I’ve seen I’ve seen in Canada. Well, I talk to a lot of conservative politicians in Canada and a fair number in the US, although I think the proclivity for this is much more market in Canada because it’s more left leaning. Ten years ago, the typical conservative was terrified in Canada of saying anything that smacked of social conservatism. And there was a very specific reason for that.
And the reason was if any one of them came out publicly and said anything socially conservative, then the woke psychopathic mob would take them out on social media like as an individual. Right. They’d be targeted and destroyed. And that was very effective.
And the conservatives, who are also very guilt prone, like that’s the other thing, too, is that the left has this radicals have this tremendous advantage because especially the really psychopathic ones, because conservatives feel guilt, but radical leftist psychopaths feel none and they can use guilt as a weapon. And conservatives are very sensitive to that. So you get that combination of clear threat because it is no fun to be mobbed. It’s really, really hard on people.
It drives them to not only to distraction, but often to suicide. You lose your job, you lose your friends, you lose your reputation. No one has enough courage to stand up beside you. The radicals had the conservatives cowed completely.
And so and affirmative action is a real touchstone for that, because to even question it, well, it’s changed to some degree now, not that much. But to even question it meant the probability that you could be accused of being a racist was like super high. It’s going to happen instantly. Right.
ERIC KAUFMANN: But I think this is where you have what political scientists would call an Upperton window of acceptable debate. Right. And if you’re outside that window, you can be canceled. But you can be attacked by the press.
But what we’ve actually seen in Europe and in the U.S. is you take an issue like immigration. That was a taboo in many European societies. It’s no longer a taboo.
So Sweden, for example, you could not be the sort of establishment conservative party tried to one of the ministers tried to raise levels of immigration as an issue in Sweden in 2014. He was attacked in the media as a racist. OK, he shut down. But then what that means is the next year, the Sweden Democrats swoop in on 12 and a half, and of course, they’ve reached 25 percent.
U.S. Trump was the only candidate of 17 primary candidates in 2015, 16 to make the border a signature issue. He was willing to go there. Now, once you break the taboo, all of a sudden, as in Sweden, now all the parties are talking about immigration and the taboo is it’s not gone entirely. But the Upperton window is open quite a bit.
And so in Canada, likewise, we’re going to need that. Now, we’ve seen it a bit of a gender issue. Premier Higgs in New Brunswick. We’ve seen Scott Moe in Saskatchewan. That’s the beginning of an opening up of a converse. You need a brave politician like Higgs to break the ice.
Breaking the Taboo on Canada’s “Mass Graves” Issue
The next thing that we need to see from a Canadian politician is to break the ice on this hoax of the mass graves that has somebody has to sort of say the emperor’s new clothes on this thing because there is no evidence of this. And it underpins an entire garment rending attack on national history, on the founders of Canada, et cetera. Now, who is going to take who’s going to throw the first stone in that? I don’t know, but it has to happen.
And I think I would argue that, in fact, the population will follow you, because, for example, in the surveys I’ve done by two to one, Canadians do not want Sir John A. Macdonald statues removed. They support the idea. Yes, he was a creature of his time. No, this idea that the residential schools are genocide, et cetera. I mean, I just think somebody needs to go after that.
Conservative Leadership in Canada
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: Have you had a chance to talk to Pierre Poliev, the new leader of the Conservative Party in Canada?
ERIC KAUFMANN: I haven’t. I’m a little concerned. I mean, I certainly think, obviously, that Trudeau was was a disaster for all the issues we’re talking about. So but I’m worried that Poliev has only largely talked about economics and only reluctantly about any cultural issues.
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: Now, I get it. He’s well ahead of the polls. Why endanger that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I already read some of that. Yeah.
My sense is, though, you know, my sense is in Canada that the Conservatives are a lot different lot than they were 15 years ago. Like Daniel Smith has a spine. Scott Moe has a spine. Higgs has a spine.
So does Poliev. Poliev isn’t pushing the cultural issues at the moment. And I think it’s partly because and I think this is actually wisdom to some degree. If your opponent is busy slaughtering himself, you might as well just stand and watch.
ERIC KAUFMANN: Well, seriously, there’s not you know, there’s no sense causing a tremendous amount of trouble while that’s occurring. But the Conservatives are much less intimidated in Canada than they were 15 years ago, like a lot. And they’ll certainly make an issue of the sorts of things that we’ve been discussing in a way that wouldn’t have been conceivable in, say, 2010.
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: I think that’s right. Yeah, I think that it’s also but I do think it’s important for the grassroots to to some degree hold Poliev to account when he’s in office. If, for example, he backtracks on defunding the CBC, if he doesn’t do anything or say anything on immigration, on culture wars, I think that, you know, and my worry, having seen it in Britain, where the Conservative government came in with the support of Brexit voters and essentially did not deliver, hoping that the voters wouldn’t notice. So that’s my worry. But I don’t know is the honest answer. I don’t know him or his cabinet.
Kaufmann’s Political Self-Characterization
So let me let me ask you a more personal question maybe, and then I’ll see if there’s some anything else you want to talk about on the YouTube side of this discussion. Does it like when you characterize yourself politically, where do you characterize yourself politically? First of all, that’s the
ERIC KAUFMANN: I mean, I think that I don’t think that I’m down. So I think economically, I’m sort of centrist. You know, I have many centrist views, I believe, in the welfare state. I actually think tackling climate change is actually a worthwhile thing to to a degree and using nuclear and using a whole bunch of other on. However, on the cultural side, I think I’m very much a conservative and I think we are in danger of losing free speech and truth. We’re in danger of losing national cohesion. And so in a whole series of issues, I’d say I’d probably lean conservative for that reason.
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: OK, is that a surprise to you? I mean, you’re a rare academic, right? I mean, it’s not like there’s no people like you and there are a lot more of them than there used to be. You know, I’m in touch regularly with a group that we communicate by email that’s got like 100 people on it. And there’s there’s more people who’ve been well, many of them kind of. Slipped surprisingly into the conservative camp over years, but it’s rare, it’s still comparatively rare and it’s particularly rare in your field, I would say, although that’s also the case in mine.
Kaufmann’s Political Views and Academic Experience
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: So why is that the case with you and how did you come to these conclusions? Well, how do you manage any degree of success while having them?
ERIC KAUFMANN: Yeah, it’s a tough one, as you probably know yourself. You know, I mean, we’re anyone right of center is five percent perhaps in the soft social sciences. And that’s what the surveys seem to show. Now, I haven’t changed my views, really, not really. I can’t think of any major change that I’ve had in my views since I was in my 20s. But yeah, you keep your head down. You write you sort of write things that are not controversial, that are in fields that are not political. And that’s what I did for many years until about 2018 or thereabouts.
I was a full professor. I was head of department. I felt that I kind of did what I wanted to do in terms of publishing. I published in the major university presses and journals. And so I just thought now’s the time to actually, you know, with the populist moment and the rise of Brexit and Trump, I sort of, you know, I was talking about why I think these things happened in a different way. And I was also more openly critical of the social justice movement.
And that is really what got me under attack from Twitter mobs, open letters, internal investigations, right, which are prompted by people inside the university and outside who simply have to bombard your Twitter feed and put in a complaint against you. And then you have to. Yeah.
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: OK, well, I think what we’ll do and I’ll let everybody watching and listening know this too. I want to talk to you for another half an hour on The Daily Wire side unless let’s not step into what happened to you personally. Let’s do that on The Daily Wire side. And I guess what I would like to do is there are there other issues that you’re working on now or that are germane to this new book that you would like to close with? Let’s say, are there some other things we haven’t talked about that you’d really like to bring to the attention of people on the YouTube side?
The Broader Implications of Woke Culture and Cancel Culture
ERIC KAUFMANN: Well, I just say a couple of things. I mean, first is that I think that woke and cancel culture are connected to many different issues that are very pressing to a lot of voters. And one of them is, you know, the populist right is going to do very well in Europe in the European elections coming up in a couple of weeks or thereabouts. This is really so.
So it’s not just about free speech and truth. When we talk about cancel culture, it has downstream effects. If you can’t talk about immigration, you’re not going to get control of your border. You’re not going to get to you’re not going to be able to deport people. And then you’re going to have populist rising up because the mainstream won’t touch it.
I use the example of the Soviet Department store. You can only sell black pants. Well, then you’re going to have somebody popping up and selling blue jeans. So if the mainstream parties are only selling one immigration policy, then the political entrepreneur, which is going to be UKIP or the Sweden Democrats or Donald Trump, is going to pop up.
So if you care about polarization and populism, you have to have free speech, which means we have to deal with woke. And I should just say one other thing, which is I’m trying to both with this book and which with a new course that I’ve run this year on, it’s an open online course on woke, trying to get people to understand what what’s led to this problem and why so many of the things that we we argue about and talk about crime, health care, education, they’re downstream of this. So we can’t.
One of the things that I fear is that the culture wars get siloed into this narrow campus bubble and people think it’s a minor thing and they forget that it has many, many effects on a lot of issues that a lot of voters care a lot about. So I just think it’s a much bigger thing in a way. It’s the future of our civilization. It’s not just a little culture war.
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: Yeah, right. Exactly. Well, that’s the thing is you’ve got to see what the source is. And it’s well, it certainly seems that the sources, the source of much of the trouble is, well, I think it’s the higher education system. And then it’s the more specifically the ideologies that have gripped the higher education system that people have allowed to grip it, I suppose, and also enabled. And so, yes, you’re absolutely right. It’s in my opinion that. It isn’t about economics with the culture war being a distraction. That’s it’s partly to, you know, one of the things I’ve come to deeply understand that. Wealth is a consequence of an ethos, it’s not a consequence of natural resources.
In fact, the natural resource curse is one of the economic facts that seems to disprove that entirely. Countries that are rich in natural resources are often, in fact, statistically more often not likely to be rich because they become corrupt. For example, you need an ethos and an ethos makes you wealthy. And that’s what happened in Japan, for example. And the default interaction between Japanese citizens is one of trust and honesty. And so Japan can be filthy rich in the absence of any natural resources at all.
And so there’s no culture war independent of economics. That’s foolish, is if we get the culture war wrong, we’re going to destroy the economic system. And that’s actually the stated goal of many of the real deep radicals. And so that actually should come as no surprise to anyone who’s listening.
And so this and I think you’re right in consequence about the libertarians. It’s like. You need a certain kind of cultural consensus so that less government is even an issue and it’s not going to be less government, it’s going to be better distributed responsibility. And that’s not the same thing at all. Like right. Because the libertarian ethos only works when you have a citizenry that’s capable of picking up governance on their own to take that responsibility. Then libertarianism is fine. But if the culture war has destroyed that responsible ethos, less government is not a solution. It just lets the ideologues win.
The Importance of Civic Trust and Institutional Neutrality
ERIC KAUFMANN: Well, exactly. I mean, this is sort of a point Tocqueville made as well, is that that sort of layer of civic trust is vital for the functioning of freedom. If we have more polarization, polarization means you can’t enact the right economic policies because each party is sort of wrapping that policy into its ideology. People can’t be rational and detached. Right.
And this is one of the things I think that the left loses sight of is that if you try and infiltrate institutions and politicize them, civil service, schools, corporations, you are actually going to cause half the citizenry to lose trust in those institutions. And therefore, without trust, I mean, as part of Putnam’s work, a lot of people have done work on the salutary effect of trust on entrepreneurship and innovation without that basis of trust.
If that’s being torn apart, as you say, by culture wars and polarization. And so I just I’m trying to appeal to the same left to say, look, you cannot just conduct your politics by infiltrating institutions. If you want to win that battle in the court of public opinion, that’s fine. But to try and do it surreptitiously by infiltration is actually eroding the trust in society.
And I and by the way, you can see it on the right to the right is kind of won over more positions on the Supreme Court. So what do we see? The left’s trust in the Supreme Court as an institution falls. And that’s what happens when you politicize. And so I just think we’ve got to solve. And when people say it’s just a little culture war, no, these are critical issues that we have got to come to a solution on if we want to overcome this polarization. Yeah. Yeah.
Wrap-up and Next Steps
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: All right, sir. For everyone watching and listening, I’m going to continue this conversation on The Daily Wire side. I’m going to talk to Eric more about what happened to him personally with regard to his experience with cancel culture, because, well, these things are made much more realistic when they’re nailed down to to actual experience. And so if you’d be willing to join us there, please feel welcome and invited to do so.
Thank you very much, sir. Be nice to talk to you again at some point. I’d like to delve into the the the the issue of fundamentals like your take is something like as far as I can tell that there’s still enough centrist consensus so that we can adopt this stance of neutrality and use that as a what would you say as a conceptual structure to push back against the wolf nonsense? And, you know, that seems plausible to me, possibly there might be enough trust left for that.
I’d like to have a conversation with you at some point about what the sacred fundamentals perhaps actually have to be. You know, what are the ones that are lurking underneath that residual consensus? Because I think you can be utilitarian when the implicit consensus still exists. But the question is, you know, are we so fractionated that that’s not the case anymore? Hopefully not.
ERIC KAUFMANN: Yeah, I think that we do have to sort of try and just as we fought the Cold War, it was economic utilitarianism and well-being against economic socialism. What we have now is we’ve got cultural socialism and we need that sort of cultural wealth perspective. It’s a bit like the economists always talk about the pie.
The more equally you cut it up, the more it shrinks or the less it grows. So you need an optimal balance between equality, redistribution and growth. I think like likewise with the culture, we have to have a conversation about the more we push equal outcomes by race and gender and other things, the more that cultural pie isn’t going to grow.
So you may and maybe a white man can’t write about a black woman in that impoverishes literature. You can’t borrow that’s cultural appropriate. I mean, so essentially we get a poorer culture, the more we push cultural socialism. And so, again, I think we need this sort of new vision, which is really about human flourishing and overcoming cultural socialism. We’ll have some concern with equality, as we did with economic equality, but it’s not going to dominate the whole thing. Right now, I feel we’ve got cultural socialism unbounded with no guardrails. And that’s something that we’re going to have to address.
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: All right, sir. Thank you, everybody, for watching and listening. As I mentioned a few minutes ago, I’m going to continue talking to Dr. Kaufman on the Daily Wire side. Please feel free to join us there. To the film crew here in northern Alberta, thank you very much for your help. Where are you, Eric, at the moment?
ERIC KAUFMANN: I’m in London, actually.
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: You’re in London.
ERIC KAUFMANN: Well, you’re in northern Alberta. Whereabouts in northern Alberta?
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: I’m in a town called Fairview, which is near near Grand Prairie. It’s about 400 miles north of Edmonton.
ERIC KAUFMANN: Right. I lived in Peace River for you. I think I mentioned that once, but you know…
DR. JORDAN PETERSON: You know exactly where it is. All right. All right, sir. Well, thank you very much. And yeah, and good luck with your book and with your continued efforts. And thank you to everyone watching and listening.
ERIC KAUFMANN: Thanks, Jordan.
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