The Downfall of the Ivy League: Victor Davis Hanson (Transcript)

And what that meant was for the first time, there was an embryonic sense of meritocracy. And you can really see it today.

I’ve traveled almost, I think, to every Middle East country except Iran. I’m always curious when I was in Libya or Egypt or Tunisia why they don’t work, even given some countries have enormous natural resources. And I always would hear a refrain, well, you know, we hire our first cousin or we hire our second cousin, that there is still a tribal loyalty.

And what’s tragic about the United States is that meritocracy and that multiracial, what became a multiracial, multireligious body politic was united by a primary allegiance to the idea of America where people, you know, where they enriched America with their food or their fashion or their art or their music. And that made America culturally rich, but they didn’t import Mexican ideas of constitutional government such as they were, or they didn’t bring in Russian ideas of individual liberty. They didn’t touch the core, and that core united us.

And now we can see that that’s no longer true, that people are re-tribalizing, and they’re starting to identify with either their kin group or their ethnic group or their religious group. And what’s scary now in the United States is that we’ve seen when you have a geographical force multiplier, and we’re starting to see that with red-blue migration, it’s sort of analogous to what happened in the 1850s where there was a Mason-Dixon line, so to speak, of a very different culture that bifurcated from the North.

And if this continues, I think we’re going to see a sort of a traditionalist America that claims that it follows the founding principles in red states of limited government, less regulation, small taxation, and the idea of a citizen giving up their primary allegiance to the state versus the blue state model of California, Illinois, and New York. In which a number of identity politics groups or special interest groups all lobby for influence. And you can see what happens in the LA City Council hot mic scene where all of these Latino council people got caught on a hot mic where they were explicitly defining the new idea of a citizen.

And that was that — their primary identity group was at war with people from Oaxaca, it was at war with blacks, it was at war with gays, and they were angry because of their representation was not demographically proportional to their numbers in the population. So they said, and I think that was a future for the country, and it’s what’s going on in California in the present.

JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah, so you worry about what you might describe as a reversion to this more implicit tribalism that’s predicated on, well, it’d be predicated on religious identity or skin color or linguistic identity or perhaps shared philosophical identity, although that would be rarer. And that that’s the counterposition to this more abstracted notion of citizenship.

So let’s delve into that for a minute because I think we could lay forth the proposition that unless there’s a higher order principle that unites people either psychologically or socially, then they’re disunited. And if they’re disunited, they’re anxious and confused and aimless and conflict-laden. Like the natural state of human beings in the absence of a unifying principle isn’t peace, it’s war.

And so then we might ask, is there a unifying transcendent principle that’s valid that isn’t just another narrative, you know, because the postmodern critique is that all unifying narratives are, what would you call it, expressions of arbitrary power and domination. And I don’t really think that’s true. I don’t think that’s true of Western societies. And the reason I think that’s technically untrue is because there’s an idea in Western society that I think is fundamentally, well, it’s Logos-based, it’s partly Greek, and it’s partly Judeo-Christian, that the individual is the proper level of analysis in some real sense and that the individual has intrinsic worth and dignity.

But there’s more to it than that, is that it’s necessary for that intrinsic dignity and worth of the individual to be recognized and set apart by law in some sense, honored by law, because the individual has something to offer to the group. And that’s the uniqueness of their being, let’s say, and that if you allow people to be free or encourage their freedom, then they can trade that uniqueness with everyone else freely. And in that trade is to be found both peace and, let’s say, abundance. And I think that principle isn’t merely another narrative. I think that is the predicate both of peace and of economic well-being.

Okay, okay. I’ll let you comment on all that.

ARISTOTLE: DEMOCRACY LEADS TO RADICAL EQUALITY

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Another way of putting it is the United States was based on an idea of equality of opportunity, that because we’re not born equal or we have different life experiences or we inherit or don’t inherit or we’re healthy or we’re long-lived or not, we don’t try to even that out in terms of economic recompense. We just let people follow their own trajectories.

And then we have other methods to appeal to their magnanimity, so the philanthropic, the religious, the humanism. We have all these ways that if people do better than other people, we allow them to be creative and to try to bring back – give back to the society or at least use their talents. Even if it’s profit-minded to build a better bridge or a dam rather than the alternate, which is a strain in Western civilization. It starts actually – the socialist impulse starts with the Greeks. There is a strain of that with the Pythagoreans. And the other idea — And that’s what we’re, I think, fighting now is the woke equality of result, that we’re going to appoint some platonic guardians and give them untold power.

And in their infinite wisdom, they’re going to do two things. They’re going to force people to be equal, what they call equity. And they’re never going to be subject to the consequences of their own ideology because they need special exemptions given their enormous responsibilities and their talent.

And so what we see now is this bi-coastal elite in the United States is starting to mandate behaviors and principles and issues and policies that they themselves would never follow and would have no intention of following. And it’s based on that every single person has an innate right to be the same as another person. Or as Aristotle said, once a man in democracy – and he feared this – feels that he’s equal in voting with another man, then he feels by extension he should be equal in all other aspects of his life. And that was the philosophical worry about democracy, that it was – so it always evolved to a more radical form of equality.

I think we’re now at the end stage where almost everybody feels they have a grievance against the state and therefore they’re entitled to compensatory or repertory money or land. Here in California when we were discussing reparations, suddenly people were bidding in the Oakland City Council and suggesting that they were owed $800,000. And they had a grievance apparently even though they were six generations away from slavery and maybe four from – they were in the fourth generation of the civil rights movement. And they had grievances against people who had never had slaves and California, for example, had never been a slave state.

But it was that mentality and a lot of people warned us about this. Tocqueville said the problem that we would face in the United States is that most people innately would rather be poor and equal than all better off but some more better off than others. And he felt that if that – that would be a very dangerous development. I think we’re pretty much there now.

WESTERN CULTURE’S EMPHASIS ON THE INDIVIDUAL

JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah, well, that’s I suppose to some degree why there’s an injunction against covetousness in the Ten Commandments that you’re not supposed to covet or envy your neighbor’s donkey or his wife or his house. I mean, part of the reason for that is that if no one can have anything more than anyone else, then no one can have anything at all. And that’s generally been the state of humanity for the longest reaches of human history.

It looks very much like if we’re going to allow a rising tide to raise all boats, we have to allow some people to rise faster than others in multiple dimensions. And I don’t see any way out of that and certainly not the case that these hypothetically egalitarian systems of governance like communism ever produced anything that had less of a Pareto distribution or an unequal distribution than capitalist societies. I mean, everyone was much poorer, but the rich were still much richer than everyone else.

And there’s also something in there, you talked about identity, and I’ve watched this happen on the, what would you call it, inevitable consequences of pathological thought front. So the leftists who were pushing for equality of outcome insisted that if there were differences in socioeconomic outcome that you could identify by group, then that was a prior evidence of systemic oppression, let’s say. But they fell astray of a certain peculiarity with regards to group identity, which is that group identity is actually infinitely fragmentable.

And so out of the initial identity political theorists, you’ve got the intersectionalists who made the case that while you were oppressed, let’s say if you were Latino and you were oppressed if you were female, but the joint interaction between Latino and female made you even more especially oppressed and then you could add gay to that or whatever other.

And what you see happening on multiple fronts in consequence is that the litany of potential ethnic groups increases, the number of them. And then the number of interactions increases and that increases exponentially as you add more identity categories. And what that essentially means is that the problem of computing equity starts to become technically impossible because every single person’s identity is so complex on the intersectional front that there isn’t even a hypothetical way of deciding whether any given socioeconomic outcome is equitable.

And so when I walked through that, I thought, well, Western culture had actually solved that problem several thousand years ago by pointing out that the appropriate level of analysis is the individual. Because the individual has a unique identity that is in some sense a consequence of all their multiplicitous group identities, but singularly, what would you say, singularly representative of each individual. And so then you let individuals compete and cooperate in a fair market. And that’s the best possible way of moving towards the right balance between equity and wealth. That’s what it looks like.

RECALIBRATION OF THE TERM “DIVERSITY”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I think that’s right. And you can see that where this leads to, it’s logical that you would end up with a Ward Churchill or Elizabeth Warren that by needs would fabricate a victimized identity. She was the first Native American professor of law at Harvard on that basis alone. And then on the other realm, when you start to replace class interest or economic status with race, then the left really hit on something. I think it was it was really Barack Obama in between 2009 and 2016. He took a rather ossified word diversity and he recalibrated to mean we’re not going to look for victims on the basis of their income anymore because that’s mutable. In fact, Marxism never worked in the United States because this free market capitalism and a lot of free land in the 19th century was always a movement of upward mobility. And therefore you would never have a continually oppressed class.

In fact, today people go up and down out of and in of the middle and the upper middle classes. So what I think Obama did was he redefined race in America is not a binary between 88 percent white and 12 percent black. But he came up with this word diversity that replaced class differentiation or class oppressions or class grievances. And he said, it’s 30 percent of the population is we’re going to call them nonwhite and therefore they’re diverse. And where we ended up with this ridiculous situation where to take a caricature, you have Meghan Markle, the duchess who is half black, lamenting to Oprah Winfrey, who is a multibillionaire, about their shared grievances as being nonwhites or LeBron James complaining.

And so that was a very brilliant thing the left did, because once they made race the arbiter of oppression and being the oppressed and the victimized, then class didn’t matter anymore. And now we have this elite who says that they’re not white in a particular percentage. And all of a sudden we don’t really care about the circumstances of their home, their car, their wealth, their income. It doesn’t matter anymore. They’re going to be perpetual victims on the basis that they are diverse. And the left really massaged that in such a way that I don’t think anybody quite knew what was going on until they sprung it on us.

MERIT LEFT BEHIND, SAT’S

JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, there’s a real attraction to a kind of deep narcissism there. And I think I first encountered that probably at Ivy League schools in the U.S. So I’m a Canadian and not that familiar with the more differentiated class structure in the U.S. And so when I went down to teach at Harvard, it was an anthropological adventure for me as well as a, let’s call it a research oriented adventure and an intellectual adventure.

And I didn’t understand as much as I do now how, what dynamic the Ivy League schools played in the U.S. in terms of ensuring upward mobility. And I knew at Harvard, I believe it was when I was there in the 90s, the estimate was that 40 percent of Harvard undergraduates would be billionaires by the age of 40. And that was, you know, that was 30 years ago. And so that was quite a substantial amount of money then.

And the whole point is, is that if you got into an Ivy League school, as soon as you got in, you were basically a member of the 1 percent. Now, you might have been a junior member, but you were definitely a member. And I thought that was perfectly fine because in some sense, because the Ivy League did a damn fine job of merit based selection. Now, it wasn’t perfect. There were legacy students, for example, and, you know, there was a bit of play in the system there.

But fundamentally, Harvard and the other Ivy Leagues had transformed themselves into from old boys clubs in the 1960s into highly elite intellectual institutions by the 1990s. But then what I saw, too, and this was so interesting, was that being junior members of the 1 percent with, you know, almost certain hallmark of long term success as a consequence of Ivy League admission wasn’t enough for many students and their idiot professors. They had to have the label of oppressed working for them, too.

So you had these strange spectacle, as far as I was concerned, of these unbelievably fortunate Ivy League students who were offered an opportunity that, well, is really unparalleled in human history, not only benefiting as a consequence of being the beneficiaries of this amazing system, but simultaneously claiming the status of the poor and oppressed and claiming at the same time to be avatars and representatives of that oppressed group. And I thought, Jesus, you guys, like being rich and powerful in junior form isn’t enough for you. You have to have all the virtues of the rich and all the privileges and opportunities. And you have to have all the virtues of the poor and oppressed at the same time. It’s like that just seems to me to be a bit much.

And you see that reflected in the people that you’re describing who have these this unbelievable wealth and opportunity and who yet put themselves forward as, you know, canonical victims of an oppressive system.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I think we’re going to see in our lifetime, though, the end of the Ivy League Stanford Berkeley cattle brand as a mark of entree into the 1 percent. And by that, we’re no longer in the — when we have proportional representation at admissions and hiring, that was sort of the modus operandi until George Floyd. So 12 percent of the student bodies were African-American, even if they had on an average 200 points less than Asian students on the SAT. Or we had about 65 percent. Why? Asians were, of course, treated like Jews in the 1930s. They were discriminated against. So their numbers would only be about 20 percent or otherwise they would have been 40. And Latinos are about 12.

But after George Floyd, we went into a radical compensatory or repertory admissions. So Stanford, where I work, just announced their new class profile. It’s 23 percent white. And out of that, 55 or 54 percent are women. So and you have about 12 percent white males. And the SAT to accommodate that became optional rather than mandatory.

But here is what was interesting about some of the statistics. They would not allow anybody to have information about how many students that were admitted this year actually took the optional SAT. They wouldn’t release that. But they did, for some reason, release the fact. I think they were proud of it, that of those very rare students. I think it’s zero point one or something who get a perfect score, which is almost impossible to do on the SAT in math and in the analysis. And of course, in English and composition, they rejected 70 percent of them, 70 percent.

CAMPUS DEMOGRAPHICS, COMPETITION

So what we’re what we’re seeing, you can see it in freefall because what’s happening when you bring a lot of students that were not competitive through K through 12 and almost instantly and arbitrarily, you declare that they are Ivy League students. Then they go into these classes and then the professors are in this dilemma because they either have to do one of two things, one of three things. They either have to change radically the curriculum to facilitate people that were not properly prepared. And they’re doing that some or they’re going to have to radically change the grading system so that a person who gets would have gotten a D or C gets a B or A. And they’re doing that in some cases, or a few feel that they are going to die on the altar of standards and they’re starting to grade according to what people actually earn.

But when we have 15,000 administrators or administrative staff and 16,000 students, you can see that we’ve got kind of a commas or system. And many of these are these new diversity, equity, inclusion czars. And so then if a faculty member does cling to standards, cling, I guess, is a good word. Then he has a systemic racist pedigree because he’s deliberately giving grades lower in this narrative to people of color.

And the result, how it all works out, I think, in the end is that Silicon Valley and all these people privately when you talk to them, they’re either preferring, say, a coder from Georgia Tech than from Stanford or themselves. They’re actually giving tests to people stealthily. So if you want to go to work at Google or you want to go at a startup and you come with a Stanford bachelor’s degree, that no longer is entree anymore because they know that the degree is not competitive with Cal State San Luis Obispo or much less Hillsdale College.

And so what they’re doing is they’re offering tests themselves or I should say requiring it. And so I think in a very brief, Yale let in 50 percent of its student body was white. I think it was 55 percent female. So about 25 percent was white male of that campus. And so they’ve deliberately taken a whole demographic. And when you I think you wisely pointed out legacies and athletes.

So out of that small, reduced demographic are many or if not the majority of legacies. So what we’ve done now in the space of three years is pretty much disenfranchised the white working class male who had a chance to go to these blue chip universities on the basis of meritocratic SAT scores or GPAs. And they’re no longer on campus anymore. They’ve disappeared in the space of — there’s no room for them given the demands on this identity profile.

CRITERIA FOR ADMISSION: WHY IT MATTERS

JORDAN B PETERSON: So let’s talk technically for a minute so that everybody can understand what the selection criteria actually means. So you could define a meritocratic selection process technically say imagine you have an outcome. So you need an outcome first which might be job performance or net lifetime productivity something like that. And you can very much argue about what the outcome variable should be. But it’s generally associated with something like economic productivity.

And having made that measure that might be income, might be number of people you employ in your lifetime, might be number of businesses that you generate, might be number of creative enterprises that you engage in. There’s a variety of different measures of a lifetime productive and creative output. And then you could say that you use a meritocratic selection process if you use a statistical procedure that has been linked to that outcome measure.

And so you might say, for example, are there things we can measure that predict lifetime creative or productive capacity? And the answer is, well, yes, we actually know what they are. So one of them is general cognitive ability, which is often assessed with IQ tests or SATs or MCATs or GREs standardized tests.

And the other is personality with a secondary, what would you say, contributor of interest. And so people who are productive have high general cognitive ability, which can be assessed quite rapidly. They tend to be conscientious, which is a personality trait, and that makes them good managers and administrators. Or they tend to be high in openness, and that makes them creative entrepreneurs. And it also helps to some degree to be somewhat free of negative emotion. And those are basically the category of predictors.

On the interest front, you have interest in people versus interest in things. And the interest in things types tend to be more frequently male, and they tend to pursue the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics streams.

And so we actually know how to select people on the basis of merit. We do general cognitive ability testing and personality and interest, and you can provide a very economically valuable service to each individual and to the state at large by selecting according to those criteria, because you then select people who can benefit most radically from being put with their peers and from education. And the data on this are crystal clear.

Now, the alternative, I’ve talked to people like Adrian Wooldridge about this, and you touch on it as well in your book on citizenship. You might say, well, what’s the alternative to meritocracy? And Wooldridge’s hypothesis was that in the absence of a technical meritocracy, you reverted to dynasty, so it’s aristocratic transmission of status, or nepotism, which you talked about already in relationship to kinship.

And so as soon as you abandon the merit principle, you open up the grounds in all likelihood to all sorts of corrupted mission processes, and so the universities are going to be wrestling with that. They already are, because one of the ways they discriminate against Asians, which is everyone’s loss, right, to not maximize our exploitation of the productive and confident Asians, let’s say, the way they discriminate against them is by deeming certain stereotypical Asian personality traits as not appropriate on the personality front.

And so they do that to gerrymander the admission criteria on the basis of race.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: And I think they’ve even in the last two years evolved beyond that. The old complaint against them was in this triad of the admissions profile, standardized test scores, GPA, and what they call community service or personality, whatever you want to talk about. It was amorphous. So they would go after Asian students with that, and they’d say, well, they’re robotic or they’re one-dimensional.

Okay, but now they’ve gotten rid of all standardized tests, and they don’t need to do that anymore. So basically they have the Asian admissions between 20 and 25 on the principle that they’re about 12% of the population. They won’t sue if they’re 20 to 25, and they can exclude them any way they want now because there is no SAT.

And what the next horizon is, as you saw, I think in Cornell right now, there’s a big movement to abolish grades. And at the new school in New York, everybody wants to have an A, an automatic A at the new school. And we’re going to see that because what’s happening on these Ivy Leagues very rapidly, it’s almost amazing at kind of the speed of light, that graduation and admission are now synonymous. In other words, once you’re admitted, and that was true to some extent in the past, we’re kind of reverting back to this, what you mentioned, the old boy gentlemen see Ivy League of the 40s or 19th century.

And now we’re saying, if you get into Harvard or Yale or Stanford, and you can’t do the work, you have a right to graduate. It doesn’t matter, and we will make the necessary adjustments.

JORDAN B PETERSON: You have to get something for your $300,000 in tuition. And so why not? So you can think about it. Think about it this way. You can think about it biologically. Like I tend to think that it’s a funny metaphor, but I tend to think of whale carcass. And here’s why. So it takes a whale a long time to build up a whole whale body. And then if it washes up on the beach, there’s plenty for everyone to eat for a while.

And so you see this happening in all sorts of big organizations, is that they build a brand, and the Ivy Leagues definitely built a brand in the US. And that brand has tremendous value. For a long time, because the Ivy League admission standards were so high, you could be virtually certain that if you hired a graduate, they were going to be statistically likely to be top performers. And that was all a consequence of the stringency of admissions policy. Very little a consequence of the quality of education, by the way.

And all the business schools know this, too. They know perfectly well that a huge proportion of the value they offer prospective employers is a 99th percentile score on the MCAT at admission for their MBA students. They well know that. I’ve talked to dozens of them. And so for a long time, because the Ivies were so meritocratic, they could justify what they were charging, and they could justify their stringent selection, because there was an immense demand for their graduates. Especially on the financial industries front, right? Most of the kids that I taught at Harvard, strangely enough, went off to pursue careers in finance. Which I thought was kind of a shame, you know, because Harvard wasn’t producing many scientists, for example.

But whatever, their cognitive capacity and their work ethic were highly valued by potential employers. Well, so now you have a pool there that’s basically a brand, right? And it’s value for the taking. And so because the Ivies have generated this reputation of high quality, that can be exploited. And what’s happening right now is a huge invasion of parasitical exploiters. And a huge portion of those are the administrators.

You said, what, there’s 15,000 administrators at Stanford for 16,000 students?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yes.

JORDAN B PETERSON: That’s hilarious. That’s hilarious. There’s no way that can last, man.

THE COMMISSAR SYSTEM

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: No, I mean, it’s very similar to the Russian army in its disastrous year in 1940, latter part of ‘41, when they had so many commissars that were overseeing military operations. That had no intrinsic worth other than to impede and supposedly make sure that everybody was a proper Marxist-Leninist, that the German army almost got to Moscow. And then, of course, Stalin stopped it.

In Extremis, he said, you know what, we’re going to start getting people like Konev and Zhukov and go back to a merit system. And what’s sad about the university, they’re adopting almost something like the commissar system, where we have these intrinsic — and here in California, almost every university has a diversity oath, where a faculty member has to state explicitly what they have done and what they will do to encourage diversity, equity, inclusion. And every candidate has to make a statement about what they have done in the past and to show their commitment, kind of like the loyalty oaths, as you remember, in the United States in the ‘50s.

And it’s very — this destruction of meritocracy is taking on all of the aspects in the past that were failed. So we have a commissar system that failed. We had the loyalty oath that was, you know, it was a war, it was an antithetical to meritocracy. And then by getting into these, on the basis of race, and then not having to be subject to meritocratic performance standards, it’s kind of like the British army in the 19th century, or late, especially the late 18th century, where you could buy a captaincy. In fact, to be an officer, you had to put up money.

And the irony was one of the reasons of the startling success of the Napoleonic system was that after the revolution, they did have a meritocratic standard for officer corps. And the marshals of France were not all aristocratic. They were merit-based. And the French army ran wild for 15 years on that basis until it was exhausted.

But the point I’m getting at is if you thought you couldn’t come up with a better system if you planned for years how to destroy this Ivy League brand than destroying standardized tests, admitting people that could not take the test and perform at a level that would be, I guess you would say, admissible at almost anywhere else. I taught at Cal State Fresno, and Cal State Fresno for 20 years I taught there. Those standards at that time that I was there were the admission standards are more rigorous than the Ivy League now. Everybody had to take the SAT. You don’t have to do that anymore.

And we never had people — it was politically correct, but we never had people looking over our shoulder. We never had students that would report us for untoward language or unwoke language, or we never had a dean call us up and said, you’re late on your diversity statement. And so it’s inviting a level of corruption. The corruption of this system is just… because we have these people who are writing these statements, and I’ve seen them. It’s tragic, if not pathetic, what they’re saying.

And when I was eight years old, I sat on a bus with people who weren’t white or on the other hand, when I was 15 years old, somebody called me a name. And ever since, I’ve been cognizant of the racist nature of America. And none of this has anything to do with being able to teach a classical language or build a bridge or design a coding system. And it’s going to have consequences. If it hasn’t already, I think it already has.

ADMISSION REJECTION BASED ON DEI

JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, I know that in the UCAL system that 75% of applicants for junior faculty positions have their applications rejected on the basis of inadequate DEI statements before their research dossiers are evaluated. And so it’s, well, here I guess is the optimistic side. So tell me what you think about this.

So I’m involved in two new university enterprises. One’s at Ralston College in Savannah. We’re trying to build a humanities research or humanities institute there. And we had our first class this year and that went extremely well. Very, very carefully selected students. We had an applicant pool of 1,000 so that we could choose 25 students. And we screened them in every possible manner and had a bang up class. And so that’s sort of a bricks and mortar institution. And we’ll see how that goes because that’s complicated.

But I’m going to start an academy. My daughter’s working on this. In November we’ve got about 30 professors on board now called the Peterson Academy. And we hope to drive down the cost of a bachelor’s degree. We’ll start with the humanities and the social sciences to $4,000 in total. Now, it’s hard to replicate the social element of university. And that’s a huge part of university is the new peer group and the people you meet and all of that. And the apprenticeship element. It’s hard to virtualize that.

But when I hear the sorts of things that you’re talking about, then what leaps to my mind in some part is market opportunity. Because the fact that students are now paying an insane amount of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to an Ivy League institute that is simultaneously failing to educate them, siphoning their future earnings into the pockets of greedy administrators and ever more of them, and sabotaging their own brand simultaneously, it just looks to me like that is not a sustainable model. And you said that you believe that the larger companies, for example, Google and other companies that are actually concerned with performance still, are going to stop regarding an Ivy League degree as a brand of capability.

And so that means over a 10-year period or 15-year period, they’re going to scuttle their own economic model. Maybe there’s all sorts of opportunities for new education.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I think there is. I agree with you entirely. There are 650,000 fewer students in America than last year. And about 2 million fewer than 10 years ago. And, I mean, they say it’s demographic, but it’s not demographic because the country increases by about 2 million people per year. And what’s happening is, especially I think with the Zoom phenomenon during the COVID lockdowns, we’re getting people like what you and I are doing or what your podcast or the Prager University that offers an alternative for autodidacts and people who want continuing education.

And then we’re getting a much greater emphasis on vocational education. When the lockdown happened, we weren’t saved by sociology majors that take six units over eight years with $60,000 in student loans. We needed skilled carpenters and plumbers and electricians and roofers. And real dollars, they’re making more than ever. So we’re getting a larger group of people who say, I don’t want to be encumbered by these student loans, and I’m going to have a vocational.

And then, as you say, the third alternative are these schools. A college like Hillsdale traditionally had about 1,000 students. I think it’s up to 1,600. And their dilemma right now, as I understand it, and I teach there a couple of weeks every year for the last 20 years, is they are being flooded by applicants that have not gotten into Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Stanford, and they require SAT. They had already sort of been in terms of academic rigor or admissions rigor comparable to Oberlin or Williams or Amherst. But now they’ve got a real dilemma because they have this traditionalist, I think quite deservedly so, this idea that they teach the whole person.

So if you go to Hillsdale College, you learn how to shoot and study the Second Amendment.

JORDAN B PETERSON: And lift weights.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: You lift weights, absolutely. It’s 100%, 360-degree, 24/7 citizenship idea. But when you bring all of these people in that are now looking at a Hillsdale, because it is meritocratic and because it has high standards, but many of them are not in any way conservative. And so what do you do if you’re Hillsdale? I think they are interviewing them, and you mentioned it. That’s what I thought was fascinating, that you’re interviewing their applicants. They’re interviewing 95% of the people that are applying, and they have to now.

JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, they have a code of honor that they enforce quite rigorously at Hillsdale. And we’re also in discussion with Hillsdale with regard to potential accreditation for these online courses, because I really like the Hillsdale model.

And here’s something to think about, too, on the technology front. So I spent a lot of time analyzing the relationship between psychological testing and productivity and creativity across the lifespan. And so I know a fair bit about that, I suppose. And one of the things I did learn was that part of the reason the universities have their degrees are valuable is because they were very careful in terms of meritocratic admission, and they also have a hammer lock on accreditation.

And so once you have an MBA, obviously, you’re accredited as an MBA graduate from a given school, and that means you had a certain peer network and a certain level of intellectual proficiency even to get into the program, certain degree of conscientiousness to rigorously pursue the program and pass it. So the value in the universities in large part is nested inside the accreditation.

Now, you could imagine, and I don’t think this is technically impossible, you could imagine a system of blockchain accrediting tests that would be freely available to people. I would do this on a for-profit basis, but so that if you wanted to claim Bachelor of Arts equivalents with regards to your knowledge of the humanities, that you could take a set of objective tests that couldn’t be mucked about with by administrators and gain your proxy by that manner.

So imagine this. It’s an enterprise that I’ve envisioned and we’re pursuing at the moment. Imagine I could gain, produce a data set of 10,000 multiple choice questions, say, in American history. And I could do that by buying multiple choice tests from high school and university professors all across the country.

Okay, now we’d have to administer them to several thousand people and then we could analyze each question with regards to its accuracy as a predictor of general knowledge domain. You can do that. You can rank order them. Then imagine you have a program that can randomly pick equivalent level of difficulty questions from that whole set of 10,000. You could set up a system that could produce random tests so they couldn’t exactly be faked or cheated easily.

And you could rank order people in terms of their knowledge domains with regards to those tests and you could blockchain it so it would be completely impenetrable to administrative interference. And you could steal the accreditation away from the universities. And I think that’s, I can’t see any reason at all that that’s not technically possible.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: But that’s been raised before in the United States and that’s the third rail as far as universities are concerned because I think they suspect that given the state of education today, higher education, that a person’s entering SAT score may be static or actually go down after four years. And that the idea that everybody would take an SAT as an exit exam. And it’s quite logical because remember what they said about the SAT in the 50s and 60s. This was a meritocratic device so that people of different backgrounds economically deprived or racially, and they didn’t go to competitive schools, they wouldn’t be punished.

So even though they got A’s, Harvard would say, well you got A’s from Fresno, but it’s not the same as St. Paul’s. And then they answered back and said, but we took the SAT test. And this student did as well. But when you get rid of all of that and you say, okay, you introduced the SAT because you said that there were different levels of prior education at high schools. We want to reintroduce it on the back end because we feel that there’s different levels of instruction quality at universities. So just as you suspect that high schools were of uneven quality, we now suspect that colleges, i.e., Stanford, Harvard, Yale are of uneven quality and the B.A. would mean nothing, just like you said the GPA would mean nothing unless it was coupled with a SAT score. So to get a B.A., everybody has to take the test that you outlined, whether you went to school or not.

And another thing, you talked about accreditation. If we could just give every student graduating in the United States the choice, you can go through the School of Education. And that’s really the catalyst for wokeness because it trains all of our K through 12 public. Or you have the alternative of going and get a master’s degree for one year in an academic subject, chemistry, biology, English. I think the vast majority of B.A.s would prefer to go get a master’s degree in an academic subject. And I think that was really…

ACADEMIA IS BROKEN

JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, let’s talk about that for a minute. And I’ve talked to Larry Arnn about this, who’s the president of Hillsdale. So from what I understand at the moment, about 50% of American state budgets are dedicated to education, broadly speaking. So that’s an awful lot of money.

Now, interestingly enough, and let’s say pathologically enough, the faculties of education have a hammerlock on teacher accreditation. And that strikes me as absolutely preposterous. It’s a form of monopoly, and there’s no excuse whatsoever for it. Now, I’ve watched faculties of education for 60 years, and they are not a credible… The faculties of education are not credible academic institutions, by and large. They have been responsible for some of the worst frauds ever perpetrated on the buying public. So whole word reading is a good example of that. The whole self-esteem movement, which was a complete catastrophe. The idea of different learning styles, the idea of multiple intelligences, etc. We can lay it out all at the foot of the faculties of education.

And generally, they attract pretty damn bad students. And there’s no evidence whatsoever that their so-called education training produces better teachers. They’ve been 100%, not only derelict in their duties for like 60 years, but they’ve actually been… What they’ve done has been antithetical to the general research tradition. Very, very low-quality research, most of it irreproducible, most of it based on idiot ideology, and definitely not in the public interest.

So here’s an idea. How about every governor in the United States just scraps the requirement to have a teaching certificate to be able to teach? You wouldn’t even need a master’s degree. You could say, we will open up the teaching profession to anybody who graduated in the top 20% of their class. And then, poof, you don’t have faculties of education anymore, and you don’t have these institutions. Like, if you think about the idea of the long march through the institutions, the place where that’s being focused most intently and with most efficiency with regards to the propagation of woke ideology is definitely through the faculties of education.

And the only reason they have a single cent of dollar value is because they have a monopolistic hammer lock on teacher certification. And that should be scrapped. There’s a teacher shortage in the U.S. anyways. And there’s no evidence at all that the faculties of education have produced teachers who know how to teach.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: We have this Orwellian system in the United States in which you can be 18 years old in May in a high school graduating, and your teacher has to have a credential. And then over the summer, you will enroll for the fall in a community college, supposedly at a higher level of instruction, and the community college teacher does not need a credential. They need a master. In some cases, they can get exemptions.

So there’s no logic to it other than the self-interest of the teachers union. But I guess what I’m getting at is that whether it was the COVID lockdown or the George Floyd ignition or the acceleration of the woke movement, we’re in really revolutionary times as far as higher education. And the economy, I don’t think, is given the smaller pool of applicants and people not choosing to go to college. There’s no economic rationale to support these universities in their present course, and I think there’s going to be a radical change.

I used to talk to people in Silicon Valley, and they would say, Victor, we know that Stanford doesn’t teach very well, but they do one priceless bit of research for us. When we hire a Stanford graduate, we know that they had to be very, very bright on test scores and GPA. And now if you take that away, they have no reason to tap their graduates since they’re not going to learn very much, and their admissions are no longer meritocratic. And so I don’t know.

And then the other thing that they sold was they sold one – they said to the employer, we will train people, and you will like them. But even if we don’t, we were so stringent and careful in our admissions, you’re going to get somebody that’s naturally talented. But then they also, with a wink and a nod, said this to the parent, and we’re going to get the seons and the children of the elite, and we’re going to have them all here. And so you mentioned the social interaction of a campus experience, but they can’t even offer that anymore because if you are making your criteria based on gender and race and sexual orientation and not merit for whatever reason, then the chances are that people are not going to, at Harvard or Yale or Princeton, have a roommate whose father had a corporation that he wanted to work in or a coder, all of those ties that they, with a wink and a nod, sell the parent because they’re not even a clearinghouse for the elite anymore where they make these relationships that last throughout their entire life to their own benefit and advantage. They can’t even sell that.

So in a very disinterested fashion, I don’t see what they have to offer anymore to anybody. I don’t really agree what they –

POINTS OF FAILURE, ADJUNCTS

JORDAN B PETERSON: Let’s pursue that a little bit farther because there’s other points of failure on the university front that we could concentrate on too. So as I progressed through the ranks at Harvard and then at the University of Toronto, I also watched the multiplication of adjunct faculty. And so just so everyone who’s listening knows, most departments abetted by their administrators but also pursuing a very narrow and foolish self-interest have farmed out a lot of their teaching to so-called adjuncts. And so at some places, that’s 50% of the teaching population.

So now, if you’re a full professor at a heavy-duty research institution, you have to conduct research, so you need a lab, you have to have graduate students who are pursuing original research, and you have to teach, and you have to do a certain amount of administrative work. And you’re evaluated on the basis of your research, your teaching, and your administrative work, basically in that order.

Now, if you are a full professor, you’re in the tenure stream and you’ll be guaranteed a certain degree of job security after putting in your apprenticeship. But if you’re an adjunct professor, so that’s a part-time professor, and that’s 50% of the professors now, you don’t have a research enterprise, you don’t have any graduate students, you don’t have a permanent office, you don’t get paid anything, you get just paid an absolute pittance, nowhere near enough to live on, and you do 50% of the teaching at the universities.

Now, this is very convenient for the administrators because the adjunct faculty have zero political power, like zero, or less than zero even, and they can be fired or dealt with in any manner whatsoever at a moment’s notice with no problem. And as there are more and more adjuncts, there are fewer and fewer full-time faculty. And so not only are the universities failing to assess the students properly and then group them together in peer groups that would be of some economic utility across time, and elevating the tuition fees completely beyond comprehension at the same time, they’re also radically decreasing the quality and the influence of the professoriate at precisely the same time, as well as not hiring enough of them because administrators have multiplied like rabbits and faculty numbers have remained relatively constant.

So they’re whittling away the quality of the students on the one hand as fast as they possibly can, but they’re doing exactly the same thing to the faculty on at least two fronts, the DEI front plus the adjunct faculty front. And I complained about this at the University of Toronto for years. I used to tell my colleagues like, why don’t we require that the administration set a cap to adjuncts, like 20% of the faculty, force them to hire more full-time faculty equivalents because that’s who should be hired to serve the students properly.

And the response from my colleagues was always something like, well, it’s pretty convenient for us to have these adjuncts pick up the excess teaching load. We don’t want to put too much pressure on the administration. I thought, that’s fine, guys. That’s a hell of a good long-term strategies. Like good luck with that over 20 years.

And so here we are now, the universities are making, I would say 10 fatal errors on the business front, not just one. There’s so many errors that it’s almost, it’s a miracle of incompetence. And I do think it’s going to produce a precipitous collapse.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I do too. And I think just in conclusion that this is all done by egalitarian. These are people who are very critical of Walmart and the gradations in pay. But in fact, there’s far greater degrees of inequality and exploitation in the university by so-called liberal people than there are in the American workplace. That’s what’s so ironic about it. I’m speaking as a person who was farming and then was an adjunct faculty for two years. And suddenly they made me a tenure track professor. And I just noticed I was teaching the same teaching load, but I made three times, four times the amount of money and I had benefits.

And all of a sudden I was allowed to use the Xerox machine, which I hadn’t been allowed to before. And all of a sudden I hadn’t changed in anything, but for the rest of my teaching career, I was very sympathetic to these people who lived in their cars and they went from one community college to state college and they were exploited. And this was all done by very, very left-wing, enlightened people, so to speak. And that’s another story, but there’s so many things wrong.

JORDAN B PETERSON: You said something very interesting there. And I just want to call this out. So you just said that after you were promoted from peasant adjunct professor living in your car, so to speak, to reasonable tenure stream faculty member, you got to use the photocopying machine. So this is the level of petty tyranny that these people, what would you say encounter in the university system?

You’re an adjunct faculty, you’re so far down the bloody social totem pole that it’s almost incomprehensible. And for someone to implement a rule, like just imagine the mindset that it requires to implement a rule, which is, well, our adjunct faculty are of so little use that it’s perfectly reasonable for the administrators to forbid them from using the photocopier. Because you know how often people just do that for fun. They wouldn’t be photocopying like handouts for their students or anything like that. They’d just be sitting in there, I don’t know what, playing with the photocopy machine, which is exactly what adjuncts do if you don’t supervise them 100% of the time. And that’s a good snapshot of exactly how universities treat their adjunct faculty, man. It is beyond pathetic.

And the fact that it is these hypothetical egalitarians doing it indicates to me that what we’re seeing is much more a war on the idea of competence and quality itself than it is any push forward for some hypothetical egalitarian utopia. It’s like, we’ll destroy the universities in the name of egalitarianism. And the universities are participating en masse in their own destruction. It’s hard not to sit outside and think, you people, so to speak, you’re going to get exactly what you’re aiming at. And isn’t that going to be something?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yeah, I think, not that they were, I mean, I was a big, at a point in my life, I started a classical languages program at a state college for mostly minority students. And I felt that it was, it gave an enormous advantage to people who had been disadvantaged, to master languages, archeology, history, literature. But I don’t, that was a different era. And I don’t, I can’t see that the university is a positive force in society anymore. It’s pathological. Almost every bad idea that is reified, the United States has its origins in the university, whether it’s critical legal theory or critical race theory or critical penal theory or you name it, it came from university.

I was watching a clip of a break, a smash and grab in San Francisco was on YouTube. And I remember a conversation I had with a professor 20 years ago when he was trying to explain critical legal theory. And he said, you know what? We’re going to change the legal system because the only reason it’s against the law to take a candy bar out of a store is because rich white male heterosexual Christians don’t need to steal candy bars. So they made a law.

And I said, no, no, no, no. Theft is innate to the human species. That’s pathological. You can’t have a civilization without, of any sort. But that idea that was common has filtered down to the street level. And that’s why the universities are, they’re a drag on the economy. They’re a drag on the culture. They’re a drag on the collective morality. And they either have to be radically changed or destroyed.

CHILD PSYCHOLOGY, PREDATORS

JORDAN B PETERSON: Those ideas are so pathological that only a half-bred intellectual could possibly believe them. So I studied the development of antisocial behavior in children, criminal behavior, for a long time. And so one of the things we found, so antisocial behavior is extremely stable. And once it’s manifest, say, it’s very, very difficult to do anything about it, to ameliorate it. There’s virtually no evidence on the psychological front of any successful programs in relationship to the amelioration of antisocial personality.

And so my research team, I didn’t run it, but it was a research team I was associated with at McGill and at the University of Montreal, kept pushing back into childhood development to find the origins of antisocial behavior. Because you see childhood conduct disorder in children as a precursor to adult criminality. And we could push it back, we being the broader research community, to two years of age.

So at two years of age, there’s a subset of children, they’re almost all male, about 5% of males, who are temperamentally quite predatory in their aggression. And so they kick, hit, bite, and steal. And if you group kids together in age-matched groups, the most violent offenders are two years old. And the violent two-year- olds are a subset of the two-year-olds.

And so you see that kind of in adult life because about 1% of the criminals are responsible for 65% of the crimes, typical Pareto distribution. But you do have a subset of kids who will use predatory aggression as their primary mode of adaptation. Now it turns out that the vast majority of those two-year-olds are socialized by the age of four. But some of them aren’t. And the ones that aren’t get rejected by their peers. Because who the hell wants to play with someone who kicks, hits, bites, and steals, and then maybe also has tantrums if they don’t get their way. It doesn’t make you popular. It doesn’t give you friends.

And so what happens to those kids is that they fall farther and farther behind in their social development because they don’t get into the peer networks. And they retain their primordial predatory aggression as their central means of adaptation. And so the idea that theft and criminality are a secondary consequence of a pathological social system seems to be, well, I imagine there are cases where that’s true. But fundamentally it seems to be flawed. There is a proclivity to predatory aggression that’s part and parcel of the panoply of human possibility. And most people are socialized out of that.

So the reverse is a kind of bizarre Rousseauianism that proclaims that every single human being is innately good and it’s only the corrupt social system that introduces any pathology into reality at all. And only an idiot French intellectual could believe that. And all the American acolytes.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I think what’s worrisome about all of what we’re talking about is that it’s not abstract. It has real consequences that filter down. And by that I mean it’s so ubiquitous. The U.S. military now has lowered physical standards in combat and special forces units to accommodate women that have innately, on average, not in every case, but less physical rigor and strength. And they feel there will be no downside. They have spent about 5 million hours going through the ranks collectively to search out what Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin in their congressional testimonies characterized as white rage and white supremacy and white privilege.

And the funny thing about it is they have not met their recruitment standards suddenly. None of the three branches. The academies have not met their enrollment targets this year. And the reason probably, and there’s no scientific data, but I think most people agree, is that for one reason or another, the military, almost like the British, relied on the Gurkhas, or the Indian Army relied on Sikhs. You could argue that the U.S. Army relied on rural Americans, mostly white males and south of the Mason-Dixon line.

In fact, if you look at the fatality records in Iraq and Afghanistan, they died at about 75% of all combat deaths were white males. And yet they only made up 35% of the population. So here were Milley and Austin suggesting that they were going to be proportional on every aspect of the military, or repertory, in fact, except they never mentioned the data on the combat dead. And so what they essentially have done in the space of just about a year and a half, they’ve told all of these families, even though you went to Vietnam, and even though your son went to the first Gulf War, and even though it’s a family tradition that your grandson fought in Afghanistan, now your great-grandson is going to turn 18, we still suspect that you’ve suffered from white rage.

And even though you died at double the numbers of your rubric, we’re not going to count that. And so they’ve just said, we’re done. We’re not going to join. Go get somebody else. And that’s happening everywhere in this country right now. And it’s not just the military. You can see it with the airlines pilot training. You can see it with medical school admissions. We used to make a joke in the United States, well, they’re never going to do this where nuclear plant operators are pilots. They are going to.

And so I think we’re getting to a, we’re going to get, we’re seeing a, civilizations, I mean, it’s like that line in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises when he asked about bankruptcy. He said, ‘How did you become bankrupt, Mike?’ And he said, ‘Gradually and then suddenly.’ And I think that’s what’s happening with the United States. We’ve gone with this woke diversity stuff. And now it’s, it was gradual. And now it’s just accelerated to the point of suddenly. And we’re not seeing basic competency in our grid, in our transportation system, in our education.

And so I think, and the data support that. And, you know, when people measure the United States quality of freedom or business environment vis-a-vis other countries, we’ve really fallen down.

THE ARMED FORCES, SEEKING CHALLENGE

JORDAN B PETERSON: And let’s look at the military issue for a minute. So the American military is a very interesting institution because it was staggeringly meritocratically based. And that started more or less in World War I when the U.S. military started to use tests of general cognitive ability to select for officer training. And the American military were pioneers in meritocratic assessment for decades. They did a lot of the basic research on general cognitive ability. And they were strictly meritocratic.

And there’s some really cool things about that because one of the things it meant, so black Americans are disproportionately likely to serve in the armed forces as well, which is quite interesting. And so the U.S. has set up its military system, not only to be available in wartime, but also to be a means of social progress in peacetime. And that’s been part of explicit policy.

And so the military was very good at finding kids who had some ability, especially on the officer front, and who had some competence and some diligence, and then subjecting them to a meritocratic evaluation and training process and moving them up the socioeconomic hierarchy. And so it’s quite remarkable to see that.

And I know a lot of military people, and especially at the higher ends of the performance spectrum, they’re a very singular type of person. I mean, one guy I know, for example, a Texas Ranger, I talked to him about when he decided he wanted to be a Texas Ranger. And he said he was like five years old when he knew he wanted to do something that was military and specialized. And he was one of these people who, he was only interested in training if it was almost impossible, insanely rigorous, and strictly meritocratic. It’s actually what he was looking for.

And so one of the problems with producing, let’s say a military apparatus where you dispense with meritocracy is you cease to attract the very people who you absolutely want to attract, who are unbelievably ambitious with regards to stringent attainment. That’s especially true for the special forces. And so you can imagine that you just decimate the military by excluding the very people who would be likely to thrive temperamentally and practically. It’s a real catastrophe.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: And you’ve lost, the Reagan Foundation just did a poll last year, and traditionally 75% of Americans had polled. They had great confidence in the military. Now it’s 45%. And the same is true when we see this weaponization, and I don’t need to get into that big topic of the FBI, the CIA. We’re starting to see that these institutions that we all revered, especially on the conservative side, they completely lost all of their conservative traditional support. And they become almost Stasi-like in their, they’ve been weaponized.

And I feel like, so we’re starting to see in the private and the public sector, everything that worked and made the United States singular and exceptional, suddenly, I mean we can chart the genesis of it, and it goes way back decades, but suddenly it’s accelerated to such a point. And whether we’re talking about district attorneys in Chicago or Baltimore or San Francisco or Los Angeles laying criminals out the day that they commit a violent offense, we’re starting to see society unwind. And what we don’t realize is this happens a lot in Rome.

There was no reason why the Western Empire had to fall in the late 5th century that the Byzantine Eastern half survived for a thousand years. But once you lose confidence in these institutions and once they’re no longer meritocratic and once people’s primary allegiance is not any longer to the state, everything we’ve talked about this morning, then the end result is an implosion, very quickly.

And I think we haven’t…

THE DILEMMA FOR CONSERVATIVES, TRUMP

JORDAN B PETERSON: This is a real conundrum for conservatives. Maybe we can start to talk about Mr. Trump here a little bit because of this. So here’s the dilemma that I see with regards to conservatives, especially on the populist front.

And so Trump was very good at speaking to disaffected working class Americans. And certainly the Democrats abandoned them completely in the Clinton campaign. And they’d been preparing to do that for years like the idiot champagne socialists have at the universities. But in any case, Trump was pretty good at talking to working class Americans.

But here’s the danger as far as I’m concerned on the classically conservative front. And I don’t really know what to do about this. It’s like the radical leftists have this fundamental proposition, which is all institutions are corrupt and predicated on dominance and power. And so that’s kind of their elite motif. But now you have people like Trump who come in as outsiders and say, on the populist front, hey, everyone on the right, on the conservative side, working class side, let’s say now, all your institutions are corrupt and basically predicated on dominance and power. And I think, well, this is a big problem because the conservatives are objecting to the corruption of the institutions in the manner that you just described. They’re captured by the woke ideology.

But the underlying message to people is kind of the same, which is our fundamental institutions can no longer be trusted. And the problem with beating that drum on the conservative side, as far as I can tell, is that you add fuel to the fire on the left side. And so then you’re in a position, and we can talk about the role of the humanities and education there. You’re in the position of asking yourself, well, if you are conservative and you’re traditionally based, but you believe that the institutions have been corrupt, how the hell can you plot a pathway forward without falling prey to exaggeration of exactly the concerns that the radical leftists are putting forward? Because they say the same thing. The institutions can’t be trusted. It’s like the spirit of the institutions can be trusted.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I would maybe differ just in two regards. One is I think they used to say the institutions can’t be trusted, but it was the left that egged on the Russian collusion hoax, the laptop hoax, the ping and the alpha bank hoax. And it was the left who said that James Clapper, who lied under oath once, and John Brennan, who lied under oath twice, and James Comey, who famed amnesia 245 times under oath, and Andrew McCabe, who lied four times under oath, and Anthony Fauci, whose latest interrogatory was just a mishmash. If I can’t remember, I don’t recall.

And they are all iconic in the left. So the left has basically said these institutions got so unwieldy and two million people working for the federal government, and the regulators who were not elected alone had the expertise of this huge Byzantine complex because elected officials come and go, but the EPA guy is always there, and he knows every judge, jury, executioner, legislative, judicial, executive power, all-in-one-person mode of operating, that the conservatives said, we’ve got to break this up. We’ve got to take the FBI office and put it in Kansas City. We’ve got to cut 10% of the workforce. We’ve got to make sure that HHS, it shouldn’t even be in Washington. We’ve got to get rid of the Department of Energy. I remember Mr. Perry, the Texas governor, he said, I’m going to get rid of three agencies. Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember which ones they were on the debate stage.

But that’s what conservatives were doing. But the left is saying, well, you know, just as you have lost confidence because they’re over-regulatory and they’re intrusive and they are anti-constitutional and they go after the individual, we find them now for the first time quite attractive because in our Davos agenda or our Great Reset agenda, whether it’s mandating green energy or mandating equity or mandating vaccinations, we find these institutions suddenly for the first time in our lives, very, very attractive.

And so they’ve inherited them and adopted them now. And it’s uncanny to watch.

AGENDA = FINANCIAL SUPPORT

JORDAN B PETERSON: All right. So it is uncanny to watch. I mean, one of the most miraculous things I’ve seen in my lifetime is the insistence by people on the left side of the spectrum that pharmaceutical companies can be trusted. So that’s just like, you know, everything is absolutely upside down when that happens.

Okay. But now you’re pulling out something that’s very paradoxical, because on the one hand, we’ve already established the case that this fundamental critique that’s emerged from the universities is a critique of institutional reliability. And the basic doctrine is one of power, is that all institutions are predicated on the expression of arbitrary power, and they can’t be trusted, especially if you’re not in the power elite.

But then you say there’s a paradoxical side of that, which is that at the same time, the same people, at least with regards to their political and philosophical orientation, are increasingly willing to utilize large-scale social institutions to put forward a given agenda. I suppose maybe the difference there is that the left is perfectly willing to trust large-scale institutions if the institutions operate under the rubric of their ideological theory.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Absolutely.

JORDAN B PETERSON: Right. So you could make that case, or you could make…

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: They get rid of all this… Yeah, absolutely. They get rid of all the sturm und drang of discussion in the Congress. When they take the military over, they worship the chain of command, because whether it’s transgendered subsidized surgeries or women in combat units, they can affect social change in an authoritarian chain of command fiat. So everything that makes these institutions skeptical or suspicious to the traditional supporters, that they become… They’ve taken away the power of the individual. They are commissary-like. They’re ideologically weaponized by the left.

All of those things make it attractive to the left. So one of the strangest things, I think, in the history of the country, how the right has backed away from all of these investigatory agencies, military. They don’t trust them anymore, because they’ve been… I guess their DNA, like a virus, has been recalibrated against the individual in traditional America. And the left comes in and says, we like what they’re doing. We like their overreach of civil liberties, because that’s the only way that we can affect these changes that 51% of the people don’t want, because they’re stupid.

But when you control Silicon Valley and K-12 and Hollywood, now the military and the FBI and the CIA and the DOJ, now we can finally enact change without public support. And so I don’t know where it’s all going to end, but the conservatives are backed off, and in that vacuum, the left has moved in.

THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, ETHOS

JORDAN B PETERSON: So, you know, one of the things I really appreciated about reading Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was his insistence that what happened in the Soviet Union was not an aberration in relationship to the set of ideas that made up the communist utopian vision, but a fulfillment of the, what would you call it, of the core content that was implicit in the original doctrines. Right?

Because the apologists on the left constantly and still do to this day say, well, real communism has never been tried, which I think is one of the world’s most appalling excuses, by the way. But independent of that, the real notion was, well, a system of ideas had been produced that had a certain degree of internal coherence, and then if you launched that system into the world, it would run algorithmically and produce certain outcomes. And it did that in country after country.

And the problem, in some sense, with the discussion we’re having now is that we’re not making a distinction between the they that are putting forward these ideas and the algorithmic, what would you say, impetus of the system of ideas itself, right? Because it’s not exactly a shadowy cabal of conspiracists operating behind the scenes to bring this about. What it is is a set of ideas, most of which emerged in France and Germany and then were adopted in the United States, that have a certain ethos built into them. And the ethos is partly group identity predicated, right?

The fundamental predicate is that the most important distinction between people is some element of their group identity. And then there are ideas associated with that, like all outcomes should be equal or that’s evidence of the dominance of something like arbitrary power. And another ethos would be the fundamental motivating principle of the human race is power and domination.

And so those ideas have an ethos that makes itself known across time. And it elaborates, and then it becomes a system of ideas that possesses individuals. And then they act in concert with the ideas, but you don’t need a formal conspiracy.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: No, I think I agree in a similar way. I think what we’re witnessing now is the end stage of what was Wilsonian progressivism, elements of the New Deal, the Great Society program, all of which could be justified by the left. To address the needs of the day and maybe to rectify some of the rigidity of the American system, but ultimately it was built into them that eventually it would appear in this latest manifestation because always on the horizon, there was the idea that we’re marching toward radical egalitarianism by fiat. And that requires a level of coercion that’s antithetical to a democratic society.

In Plato’s Gorgias, I think Socrates at one point says, ‘Well, in Athens, they will not be happy until the dogs and the donkeys can vote.’ And what he’s trying to say is that each element of expanding the franchise, justified as it was, ultimately is going to end in the absurd because there’s always going to be somebody who says that he doesn’t have the same franchise as someone else. And I think it’s very similar.

JORDAN B PETERSON: Well, that’s always the case.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I think it’s built into this mindset or ideology. Once you threw out the Bourbons, that was justified. Then you had the Constitutional Republic. Yes. And you can see that that was. And then you had Danton. But ultimately, whether you knew it or not, you had a rendezvous with the Jacobins, just like you had a rendezvous with the Maoists, just like Kerensky and the Mensheviks had a rendezvous with Bolshevik. It was headed that way until if somebody didn’t derail it. And I think that’s where we are today.

LITERACY AND EMPOWERMENT

JORDAN B PETERSON: Okay. So this allows us to return to a theme we didn’t develop enough, which is part of the purpose of a true humanities education is to transmit the difficult-to-acquire knowledge that actually allows people to become wise enough to forestall that inevitable deterioration towards an idiot and vengeful egalitarianism. It takes a lot of training.

Now, you know, you said you had taught ancient languages, for example, to minority students. And people listening might think, well, what the hell good is that? And let me make a case for what good that is very briefly, because it’s a case for the humanities. And you can comment on that.

Well, first of all, there isn’t anything you can do to empower people, which is a word I hate, more effectively than to teach them how to be deeply literate and historically knowledgeable. If you’re looking to facilitate people’s ability to make positive changes in their own life, there is nothing you can do that’s more helpful to that than to make them literate. And if you want to help them understand who they are in the deepest sense, over and above the superficial attractions of tribalism, let’s say, you have to educate them deeply in this historical realm that requires the acquisition of explicit knowledge about the central nature of the human being. And that would be the distinguished citizen, let’s say, someone capable of upholding the responsibilities of a citizen and someone worthy of the rights that are part and parcel of that. And without a deep humanities education, all of that disappears because it has to be transmitted explicitly. And so that was the proper role of the universities for years.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: It was. As I envision it, our role was twofold, that we were going to teach a method, the inductive method, as opposed to the deductive method, so that people, when they looked at the human experience via art or literature or history, they would look at exempla and then they would come to a general overriding conclusion that took the evidence, rather than say, I have an idea and I’m going to cherry pick the evidence. That was one thing that we taught, the Socratic inductive method.

The other was we had to give them some kind of arsenal or realm of knowledge or referent point. So I know I used to Xerox maybe 500 terms, ionic order, or Non compos mentis test, anything I could give as an architecture. And then everybody made fun of multiplication. We had mostly essay tests, but I always thought there was a value in a multi-choice test. And key dates, generals, I would always say to the student, when you leave here, I want you to know how far Sparta is from Athens. I want you to give me three reasons quickly why the Mycenaean Empire collapsed.

And it was funny because some of our students would sit in on interviews from Ivy League professors and they would ask these questions. And these professors, I should say ABDs, didn’t have any answers for them. They had no practical knowledge. And then one student said to me, well, why are we doing this? And I said, well, it’s so that you don’t have to repeat every life experience that you have. You’re going to learn what is wise and stupid by experience. And often that experience is going to be deleterious to your character or your fortune. But you don’t have to do that all the time.

If you think that sometimes people who are right are punished or the more moral a person is, the more that he’s hated, it’s not you alone that experiences that. You can find comfort in antigony. Or if you can say the race goes not to the swift. And one of the students came in and he said, you know what, I’m the best tackle on the team, but I never get a chance to play because I don’t kiss up. And I said, then you’re old Ajax and what are you going to do about that? That’s the dilemma of Ajax and the Sophoclean play.

So that was some of the things in a more pragmatic sense the humanities were able to do. They were able to give a person a whole reference of knowledge so that they didn’t have to live out and learn something by rote or by, they had an example. And the other thing is it gave them a sense of beauty and style.

JORDAN B PETERSON: That’s not optional. That’s not optional for human beings. I mean, we are linguistic creatures and we require an awful lot of cultural programming.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I think we do.

JORDAN B PETERSON: And every culture knows that. And so you definitely — we’re definitely in this situation where if we don’t inculcate the wisdom of the past into our young people, then they are forced to regenerate that wisdom through painful and often fatal experience. Those are the options. And to study history and the humanities is to arm yourself against the sea of troubles and to become literate. And that is the core of the universities. And the universities have definitely abandoned that in the favor of this idiot narrative.

Here’s something you might find interesting. So I did a research study with one of my students just before I was basically, you know, kicked out of the university for being persona non gratis. And we investigated two mysteries. The first was, was there a coherent set of beliefs that you could describe as politically correct? And the way we investigated that was to produce a very large body of political statements and then to find out the degree to which people agreed with them and then to analyze them statistically to see if there were patterns of belief.

And we found two patterns of belief that were obviously commensurate with the notion of a politically correct set of beliefs. And one of them was like a politically correct liberalism and the other was politically correct authoritarianism. And there’s been quite a bit of research on the psychological front with regards to politically correct authoritarianism in recent years.

So first of all, there is such a thing as politically correct beliefs and there’s an authoritarian version. But then you might also ask yourself, what predicts whether or not people will believe these theories? You know what the biggest predictor was? This is so horrible. It was low verbal intelligence. It was more, it was a bigger predictor than verbal intelligence is a predictor of grades or socioeconomic outcome. It was 0.45, a correlation whose magnitude you never get in the social science study, a walloping effect.

And then the subsidiary predictors were being female was one of them, being agreeable in temperament, which is a feminine personality temperament. And then having taken any courses that were essentially propagandistic in nature. And so part of the reason that people fall for these, this simplistic set of ideas is because, well, they are simple and they are very attractive to people who want or require a unidimensional view of the world. In light of both of its simplicity, let’s say, but also its underlying proclivity also to identify a convenient enemy.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I think that’s true. I had a student, I mentioned it in The Dying Citizen, but I had a student who once said to me, well, you know, this country is very unfair because Wyoming has one senator. I think at the time it was for 200,000, 400,000 residents and California at that time we were 30 million, now it’s 41. But we have to have 15 million people and we only get one senator.

And I said, now why would that be? And he said, because the founders were not democratic. I said, yes, but why weren’t they fully democratic? And do you have — the house was going to be elected every, the whole house flips every two years. It represents 750,000 people. So it is democratic, but it’s balanced by the Senate that flips every three years. I mean, one third only flips every two years. You have to be older. It represents states. It’s America as defined by the individual 50 states, not the people. That’s the house. And this then is balanced by the executive.

And the person was so arrogant because he was so ignorant, but he had got this catchphrase in his mind that America is a democracy and therefore the Senate is not democratic. And then, so I was very interested in this. And so I went in, when I was doing the, I didn’t realize there was a whole body of scholarly literature attacking the Senate from law schools and from political science departments. The Senate is sort of the last target of the left. They’re trying to change it. There’s a whole body of research showing just how toxic and conservative and anti-liberal it is because it doesn’t represent people. It represents states and that the representatives in some states, senators in some states, have larger constituencies in Senate and the other. And the Supreme Court has already ruled one man, one vote as it pertains to house districts. And therefore, it must rule that the Senate, each senator must be proportionally equal.

JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah. Well, you know, it’s not that, look, you can see that the idea of a distributed democracy has an instantaneous intuitive appeal. It takes a lot of sophisticated thinking before you can understand that there have to be intermediary institutions, right? And part of the purpose of a humanities education was to give people that wisdom.

Look, the problem with radical democracy is that it can degenerate into rule by the mob, like impulsive rule by the mob. And that’s the danger of populism, for example, of an untrammeled populism. And so you need intermediary institutions.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: You can kill Socrates in one day and… Vote to kill Socrates by a majority vote in the court. Or you can vote to kill all the Middlinians on Monday and then decide the next day you don’t want to do it and send a ship after the first trireme because the entire assembly has flipped in 24 hours from being murderous to semi-murderous. And that was what our founders knew that it was very dangerous. But that knowledge is completely absent in this younger generation because the sources of that transmission in history departments or political science departments or government departments is not there anymore.

And it’s not there at K through 12. There is no civic education anymore. There’s no body of music and art and tradition and literature and poetry that each do their part to make a citizen aware of how unique the system was. And so that’s what I find really frightening is this collective amnesia in this generation. This generation especially. It took a long time but this generation is the first that I’ve been aware of that is completely amnesiac about the past. It hates the past. It feels that history is melodrama.

JORDAN B PETERSON: Yeah. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. And so that was the role of the university. So look, we’ve used up our 90 minutes of time here on YouTube. We didn’t get to talk about Donald Trump too much but maybe we’ll have an opportunity to do that again in the future. We did cover a fair bit of territory in relationship to the idea of citizenship and the role of the universities. And so I think that was useful and apt.

And I do believe that there are stellar opportunities on the educational front at the moment as the responsibility for proper education is abdicated by the universities. There’s an economic opportunity and a conceptual opportunity. And you know, the U.S. is a pretty damn dynamic place on the entrepreneurial front. And it certainly might be the case that new institutions will arise to fill the void that’s left by the universities as they collapse. And it might be that places like Hillsdale are on the forefront of that. We’ll see if that happens.

Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. And to all of you who are watching and listening on YouTube and associated podcasts, I’m going to talk to Dr. Hanson for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform. I like to delve into people’s biographies to see how their career got its start and how it developed across time. And so we’ll delve into that. And it’s a pleasure meeting you, sir. And thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me and to everyone else today. And Happy New Year to you. And we’ll flip over to the Daily Wire Plus side. Goodbye, everybody who’s watching and listening.

For Further Reading:

Jordan Peterson: Life, Death, Power, Fame, and Meaning (Transcript)

Sam Altman: GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the Future of AI (Transcript)

The Epidemic That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Stephen J Shaw (Transcript)

The Historical Evidence for Jesus’ Resurrection That Even Skeptics Believe: Gary Habermas (Transcript)

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