Read the full transcript of Dr Jordan B. Peterson’s speech titled “Why Is Hedonism Wrong?” at ARC Conference 2025. (Feb 17, 2025)
Dr Peterson is a clinical psychologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. He authored the global bestsellers Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life and 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. His new book, We Who Wrestle With God, was published late last year.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Thank you. Thank you everyone. It’s quite the miracle to see you all here.
The Defining Characteristic of Our Civilizational Moment
So what is the defining characteristic of this civilizational moment? I would say that what lies in front of us, perhaps for the first time, is the opportunity to make the foundational principles of our civilization conscious, explicit and propositional, and in so doing, to pave the way for a genuine and mutually appreciative union of traditional conservatism and classic liberalism. To undertake such a venture, the first question that we must address is the nature of motivation for life, for being and becoming.
And I think we’ve proceeded far enough in our philosophical, theological and psychological, biological investigations to provide an answer to that. The default drives that motivate us or personalities that possess us might be regarded as those that foster a narrow and self-absorbed hedonism.
The Default State of Human Immaturity
And I would say that that’s the default state that characterizes human immaturity. That possession by implicit fragmented whim must be transcended by a more sophisticated uniting principle in order for the psyche to be integrated and to be sustainable across time in an iterated manner and for community itself to exist. Hedonistic pleasure-seeking, the gratification of immediate desire, the simple avoidance of pain or displeasure, is not a principle that can improve when it’s implemented or unite people in productive cooperation and competition so that a society can be established.
The dominance of the personality by local, narrow and self-serving whim is not a playable or noble game and it allies itself necessarily with the force that cynics, like the post-modernists, like the neo-Marxists, believe is the only viable uniting force, that of power.
If you’re motivated by nothing but the pursuit of your own subjective desire in the moment or your desire to avoid the necessary pain that mature conduct involves, you have to turn to power to impose your narrow will on others because if you’re dominated by the immature longing for your immediate self-gratification, then it’s all about you in the narrowest sense and the only option you have in terms of your relationship with others is to turn to the force and compulsion that make them involuntary servants of your will.
We’ve seen forever the dynamic between immature hedonism that fragments and that degenerates as it’s played out and the demand for the power that subjugates others to the will of the moment. Why is hedonism fragile? Wrong? Why is power wrong technically? I think it’s because both of those motivating forces or sets of motivating forces degenerate when they’re iterated.
You can’t go through life like an immature two-year-old because you can’t sustain your own existence while pursuing immediate gratification in the present. And you can’t sustain a society in a productive and abundant manner over the medium to long run if you use power to subordinate the will of others involuntarily to your desires. The reason that the hedonistic proclivity, the fractionated hedonistic proclivity, and the drive to power are immoral is because they degenerate when they’re implemented and iterated.
The Uniting Metanarrative
The skeptics, it’s particularly true of the postmodernists, this is the definition of postmodernism. Literally, the skeptics proclaim that there’s no uniting metanarrative other than that of power. And that’s wrong. There is a uniting metanarrative.
And as I intimated at the beginning of this discussion, I believe we’re now in a position where we can explicitly understand it. And that explicit understanding, in principle, could allow us to regain the necessary faith in the so-called self-evident axioms in which our liberal democracies are nested. The biblical library that lays out the narrative principles upon which free Western societies are founded is an elaborated exploration of the theme of sacrifice.
The Theme of Sacrifice
Taken at face value, the dramas of sacrifice that are portrayed in our foundational texts have an impenetrable and opaque quality.
What does it mean to offer something of value to the divine? It’s a drama that’s predicated on the realization that sacrifice is by necessity the foundation of civilization. Civilization is social and future-oriented.
And that means, since it’s social, that the individuals who come together to constitute society have to sacrifice their narrow, pleasure-seeking individuality, demanding gratification in the moment, for the sake of their mutual, reciprocal relationships with others, locally first, in marriage, in family, in town, in city, expanding to province and state and country, nested all under the auspices, let’s say, of the divine.
That’s a sacrificial process. It means foregoing the narrowly-immediate for the sake of the community. It means equally a sacrificial process in relationship to time. The distinguishing characteristic of maturity, as opposed to immaturity, and wisdom, as opposed to folly, is the ability to sacrifice the immediate demands of the present for the future.
To think before you act, to act with caution so you don’t have to repent at leisure. It’s a sacrificial process. When a child learns to make a friend, he learns necessarily the principle of sacrificial reciprocity. I have a turn, then you have a turn. I have a turn, then you have a turn. The sacrifice there is that it’s not always my turn and that sacrificial reciprocity is the foundational principle of the reciprocity upon which even the most primordial forms of society, friendship in childhood let’s say, are predicated.
The Foundation of Western Civilization
The foundational texts of Western civilization, the biblical texts in particular, are an extended study in the intricacies of sacrifice predicated on the emergent discovery or realization that the sacrifice most pleasing to God that sets the world right that creates the order that is good or very good is the sacrifice that tends towards the ultimate and the Christian drama portrays the sacrificial process in its arguably ultimate form.
And it’s no chance occurrence that the sacrificial altar is at the center of the church and the church is at the center of the town and the town is at the center of the state and the state organized under the divine principle of sacrifice that constitutes our proper association with the divine spirit that establishes the state that leads the desert to bloom and the land to abundance. And it’s not just sacrifice it’s voluntary self-sacrifice towards the highest possible end that’s the foundation of civilization the postmodernists be damned which is virtually a certainty by the way.
The Union of Traditional Western Conservative and Classic Liberal
Now understanding this I think in a more explicit sense to see that what we’ve been wrestling with for millennia is the movement towards the explicit formulation of the principle of voluntary upward self-sacrifice is the foundation of the community as the foundation of abundance itself as the precondition for the trust and reciprocity that enables us to compete and to cooperate so that we can produce societies that are endlessly productive the explicit understanding of the centrality of that principle in my estimation allows for the intelligent union of the traditional Western conservative with the traditional Western classic liberal.
The hypothesis being that the stage is set for the emergence of a liberal of the liberal individualism that we associate with the free Western world, the stage is set for the emergence of that ethos when the bedrock of reciprocal voluntary self-sacrifice is established and firm and the conservatives stand for the self-evident foundation of Western civilization and the classic liberals stand for its manifestation at the level of the individual, a manifestation which only maintains its validity when the underlying presumption of voluntary self-sacrifice is serves as the proper foundation.
The Opportunity of Our Civilizational Moment
So what’s this civilizational moment? This civilizational moment is the opportunity that we have in front of us to wake up and to realize consciously and explicitly the nature of the dream that has enveloped us for the thousands of years of Judeo-Christian civilization that dream is the celebration, the worship the given the deification of the principle of reciprocal voluntary self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of self to the future, the sacrifice of self to the community, as the necessary, inevitable, and revolutionary foundation of the civilization that makes us free and abundant.
And so it’s a core part of our mission to get our story straight, and in the free west, the destination of the oppressed across the world, we’ve acted out the appropriate story and benefited in consequence. And now we have the opportunity to understand that story explicitly, and to unite our understanding with our mythos, with our drama, and to fortify ourselves with the union of our cynical and skeptical mind and the bedrock foundation stone, the cornerstone rejected by the builder, that constitutes the true basis for civilization.
Conclusion
And so, that’s what we’re doing. And so with that, we’ll turn to some music. We’re going to hear a piece called “Irony” by a band, by the band Dirt Poor Robins, and we’ll welcome them on stage.
