Transcript: The Psychology of Human Aggression – J. D. Haltigan on The Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

So those would be some of the people that I would associate or would think that some people might recognize as developmental psychologists.

Freud’s Contributions and the Oedipal Complex

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. So Freud, I mean, Freud at least attempted taxonomy and a classification of developmental stages. I think he actually made some pretty good contributions to our understanding of parental relationships insofar as they impact psychopathology.

My sense, especially in modern times—I’d like your take on this—is that Freud’s specification of the Oedipal complex was a major step forward in identification of much of the pathology that characterizes the modern world. It’s a variant of really what Freud was pointing to in a rather oblique way, because he tended to sexualize everything.

Freud was very convinced that the fundamental motivating factor in human beings could be construed in a relatively unitary manner. Sex occupied that place, although he also was concerned with the impulse towards death. But Freud certainly pointed out that the instinct that mothers have to love and care for their infants was also something that, if it went wrong, could pose a remarkably pervasive danger to those same infants.

The psychoanalysts, for example, posited that the good mother necessarily fails. That stemmed from the Freudian tradition, the idea that the mother was in this uncomfortable position of having to make a transition from the indefinite amount of care that has to be poured into a newborn who’s completely helpless to the facilitation of the relative autonomy that a toddler requires. Obviously, older children and adolescents as well.

Freud pointed out, highlighted, let’s say, the fact that a mother who extended her concern for the infant past its due date could then pose a major threat to the developing psyche. I think he got that right. Then, of course, Jung and his followers followed that up, especially Erich Neumann, with their descriptions of the symbolism and mythology associated with the Devouring Mother.

The Devouring Mother and Modern Culture

I can’t help but see in the pathologization of the current administrative environment, let’s say, particularly in universities and also in the K-12 system, all the hallmarks of a maternal instinct gone absolutely stark raving mad, so that everything becomes an infant. If it isn’t an infant, then it’s likely a predator. That’s a bad situation to be in if you’re either the infant or the predator and you actually happen to be neither.

Any comments about that? Part of the reason I wanted to talk to you, I think, is because I’ve been following you on Twitter for a long time, and you’re one of the very few psychologists—they can probably be listed on one hand—who’s willing to make a case for the developmental psychopathology that’s associated with the current culture war. I’m kind of wondering how you construe that. Then we’ll get back to some of these more fundamental developmental theorists.

J. D. HALTIGAN: Yeah, I’m glad you brought up Freud and some of his contributions, because I see Freud’s work as mostly a cultural psychologist. I think Freud, like you said, he sexualized everything. People have dismissed him out of hand because of that, and kind of, in some ways, rightfully so, if you’re a psychological scientist. But from a cultural perspective, when you’re looking at what’s happening now in our culture, he was really indeed onto something.

You mentioned the good enough mother. That’s kind of where I departed and where attachment theory departs a little bit from Freud. The object relation school, like Winnicott, Donald Woods Winnicott, who was the famous British psychoanalyst, and then Bowlby following from him, they kind of broke away from Freud.

In fact, Bowlby was excluded from the British psychoanalytic society because he focused on the environment, what was actually happening in the world and to the infant rather than in some fantasy world. Really, Winnicott’s notion of the good enough mother was that she would fail or the good enough caregiver would fail. In other words, they wouldn’t suffocate the infant or try to be too perfect.

That’s a critical concept that is really happening as I see it in the world today, the sort of overprotectiveness or suffocation of children’s ability. Because children have to grow up and develop and master, cognitively master the environment. If you constantly shield them from any challenges or impingements, as Winnicott might say, on the environment, you’re necessarily going to restrict their ability to adapt to that.

The Importance of Developmental Failure

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, we should point out too what that failure of adaptation means. A child who’s intimidated by a novel situation will turn, a young child will turn to their caregiver, their mother or father, or substitute to regulate their anxiety when a challenge confronts them that their emotions indicate might be too large to master.

What the good enough parent does is replace that need for dependency on an external source with competence and skill on behalf of the child. Now, the problem with that, and I think Freud, and certainly the Jungians as well, got this right, is that for a mother whose status and sense of moral superiority depends on that relationship with her child, maybe her emotional dependency is there too, the fact of that child’s dawning competence actually poses a threat to her psychological integrity.

That I think becomes particularly relevant when we’re discussing, let’s say, cluster B mothers with cluster B psychopathology who are very immature and narcissistic themselves, like toddlers, let’s say, and who are unable in consequence to attend to the child without putting their own emotional, personal, emotional needs first and foremost. Need for status, need for love, need for security, need for belonging, all those sorts of things that shouldn’t be there, twisting and dementing the child’s pathway forward.

That also gives us a route into discussing developmental psychopathology in the relationship. I’ve read, for example, that up to 50% of mothers whose children progress with trans surgery have some variant of the cluster B personality disorders.

Cluster B Disorders and Attachment Preoccupation

J. D. HALTIGAN: Yes, and I think cluster B personality disorders in the attachment literature would track what we call preoccupation with the attachment relationship. In other words, there’s some inability in this case, typically the mother, to extract herself from whatever she was dealing with in her own early childhood or around those sorts of relationships with her own parental figures.

This preoccupation is a constant focus or hyper focus, a hyper affective focus on aspects of the relationship. What happens is the parent regulates their own sense of satisfaction or affirmation through their child. The child is basically placed in the position, a reverse position of providing the sort of emotional satisfaction for the parent that the parent would otherwise seek to establish in the child a sense of competence, a sense of direction in the world.

It’s kind of an inverted, what we call role reverse relationship. That’s very toxic for a child who has to adapt to the environment, develop his own sense of mastery, competence. But when it’s inverted like that, the caregiver, in most cases the mother, will place that burden on the child.

That’s where you see that inversion. Of course, that leads to all sorts of psychopathology in the child. It certainly influences it in terms of a weak identity structure, inability to regulate their own emotions, and the child’s constant focus on pleasing the caregiver or the mother at the risk of if they don’t, they’re going to lose that source of caregiving that protects them and is their source of parental love and authority.

The Challenge of Cluster B Parenting

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Well, they face the additional problem, those children that the parent, let’s say most often in this case the mother. Cluster B fathers tend to be absent. So cluster B mothers tend to be present. And so we should outline for our viewers and listeners what cluster B consists of.

So that’s a grouping of statistically and symptomatically related pathologies of personality that include histrionic. And so that’s kind of the modern variant of the Freudian hysteric who’s very dramatic and over emotional. Narcissistic, and so people with narcissistic personality disorder are always attempting to garner unearned social status and attention. Psychopathic, which is callous and unfeeling, very, very self-centered, very present focused and antisocial. And that’s more associated with criminality per se.

That particular variant is more common among men, especially in its more violent forms. As I said, those sorts of fathers tend to be absent. So now part of the problem if you’re a child and you have a mother with cluster B psychopathology is that not only are you called upon to attend to her unmet emotional needs constantly, but there is actually no way of meeting those needs.

I mean, treating cluster B people is notoriously difficult and stressful for even a very practiced therapist who’s only around some of the time. For a child, it’s filling a pit that is so deep that a lifetime of work would not be sufficient to fill it to the brim. So let’s, why don’t you tell us a little bit about how, let’s tie that into attachment theory and how that develops. We can focus a bit on the multigenerational transmission of familial emotional pathology.

Multigenerational Transmission of Emotional Dysregulation

J. D. HALTIGAN: Well, yeah, I think it’s important to consider that multigenerational transmission from both the sort of biological and the social perspectives, and that means that there will be some inherent dispositions on the part of caregivers to be. You know, we all have our own baseline levels of emotional regulation, but the actual social relationship of early childhood is critical to sort of fine tune or to calibrate the ability to emotionally regulate.

So we have, we all have a baseline of the ability to regulate our emotions and so forth. But it’s really that early caregiving relationship that kind of fine tunes or calibrates it. And if that fails, what you end up having is a complete failure and inability to regulate emotions. And that’s kind of what we see in some of the cluster B histrionic preoccupied discourse or personality disorders.

And so when that continues generationally, it basically perpetuates itself and propagates itself from parent to child and child to the next generation. So I think it’s important for listeners to understand that if there’s a failure to regulate or to sort of scaffold the infant and child and developing their own regulations, that’s going to persist until there is some corrective course or it won’t. There won’t be any corrective course. And I think that’s kind of what we’re seeing now is that a lot of these failures have sort of aggregated in the culture and you’re seeing that play out at sort of a more of a macro social level.

The Developmental Arc from Infancy to Social Play

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So let’s, I’m going to walk you through a very brief description of a what let’s call it a summary of proper infant development. And then I’d like you to comment on that and flesh it out or offer criticisms if you will.

So you could imagine this neurologically and practically. So an infant comes into the world with a few primary emotions which develop across time, a few primary motivations and a few wired up motor skills, skills for action and perception. So a child, very early, very young child, an infant can focus his eyes or her eyes on the face of the mother at about the distance from breast to mother’s face.

The sucking reflex, it’s not precisely reflex because it’s more sophisticated than that. The child’s mouth and tongue are quite developed when the child’s born. So you can imagine an animal like a deer or a moose, something like that, very soon after they’re born. They can stand up and walk or even run. Human infants can’t. But we do come equipped into the world with some hard wiring and our lips and our tongues work pretty well and so we can latch onto a nipple, say. And it’s partly also why very young children put things in their mouth. Because the motor and sensory apparatus of the tongue and lips are there. The child sort of develops from that outward. It develops from the center outward.

The basic motivation emotional structure is positive and negative emotion. But it works on a very, very short term basis. And it’s very focused on the immediate needs of the child. And those emotions are very intense and all consuming. And they can, the negative emotions can include pain, it’s there at the beginning, anger, that’s there very early. Fear that develops about when the child starts to become to be able to move.

And on the positive emotional side, well, interest, excitement, enthusiasm, certainly the capacity for love, those are all there. What the parent and the social environment is trying to do with that panoply of motivations and emotions is to further the skill development, but also help the child learn to integrate its emotions in a playful manner with the family and then a broader social community.

And to facilitate that movement from egocentricity to thoroughly engaged social play. And rough and tumble play helps with that. And so does the more subtle forms of play that a mother might engage in. And hopefully that gets to the point where by the age of about three, a child that would otherwise be egocentric and hyper emotional is now able to take the stance of another person and start to develop the ability to play and to engage in turn taking reciprocal friendships.

And then those friendships scaffold further development from the age of four onward. And the best evidence that I had come across, and I haven’t reviewed this literature for a long time, was that there was something like a critical stage of development for play between the ages of two and four. Such that if a more aggressive and emotional child wasn’t socialized into proper play behavior by the age of four, it was very difficult for them to establish friendships. And they tended to fall further and further behind and to be isolated and alienated and sometimes criminal for the rest of their lives.

So anyways, that’s my memory of the developmental literature in a nutshell. And so elaborate on that, criticize that. Tell me what you think about that as a model.

The Still Face Paradigm

J. D. HALTIGAN: I think as a model, that’s kind of a broad, generalized overview that’s pretty on point. I would say our sort of understanding of critical points of time is still fluid. We’re still looking at that in the literature. But I’m glad you brought up sort of the basic instincts and drives, because I was just discussing this the other day on another show that the best sort of analogy or best sort of understanding to give your listeners would be, there’s a paradigm in infant research called the face to face still face paradigm.

And basically what that is, is it illustrates everything you just said with remarkable clarity. Basically, the paradigm is this. It’s a well known paradigm in developmental tradition. Usually an infant and a mother is brought into the lab, or in some cases his father too. I don’t want to emphasize the mother, but in most cases that is true. And you place the infant in a car seat in front of the mother or the caregiver, and you have them looking at each other, they’re separated by maybe a little bit of space.

And the paradigm is this. You have three minutes of free play where the mother usually engages facially and communicatively with the infant. Then you have a two minute period where the mother sits back kind of like I’m doing now, and maintains a completely still face. And then you have a follow up three minute period where they resume interaction.

And one of the best replicated effects in all of infant literature is during that still face, when the parent cuts off that social communication, those facial gestures, the infant’s negative affect just rockets up. And I’ve seen this in the lab myself, crying, squirming in the car seat and so forth. And then typically we call that the still face effect.

And then the reunion. Once there’s a rapprochement and the mother engages typically, or the caregiver engages back with this emotional communication, gestures, like you said, sort of social play, the infant is still highly negative in affect, but there’s sort of a deadening of that sort of towards a more positive affective tone. Typically by the end of that three minutes there’s some sort of reintegration.

And that little encapsulated eight minute sequence right there illustrates in sort of a tight way what’s happening all across infancy and childhood. And so what we can see from that procedure is that if there’s inability of sort of the reunion effect, if there’s still consistent negativity, you kind of get a window into how that socialization process is maybe going. And so during the reunion, what we typically see is that the caregiver—

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Will work to re—

J. D. HALTIGAN: Engage, you know, to lessen the negative affect in the infant. And so that’s kind of the basic sort of analogy to use even in later development is the, what the idea is the parent is scaffolding in many ways that regulation of emotion. And as the child ages, that includes things like letting the child explore the environment. What if the child is out and playing on the street, has a fall, they’re injured, how does that process of seeking comfort work out? And how does the parent regulate sort of the need for autonomy from a need for closeness and some sort of protection as the child grows?

The Role of Temperament in Parent-Child Dynamics

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Well, and we should point out too that this is a very tricky business in the real world for parents to negotiate, not least because children vary widely in their intrinsic levels of negative emotion. And so there are children who are by temperament, they’re much more likely to become upset, but also once upset, are much more difficult to soothe.

And so how in the lab do you separate out or can you at all the competence of the parent in reestablishing that relationship and the intrinsic sensitivity or trait neuroticism of the child who’s involved?

J. D. HALTIGAN: Well, that’s kind of what gets down to the heart of the methodology about some of this work that’s been so degraded with the current insanity that we’re living through in the academy is that we have these gold standard measures that measure infant temperament, which is essentially personality in infant. And we have measures that we have, you know, coded observational protocols to look at how sensitive, for example, a parent is being towards the child in a free play setting, or the still face, how much do they look, how much do they engage?

And you can code all of that, and then you can look at that in a multivariable analytic framework. So that’s one way to do that. But what you point out with sort of the basic instinctual drives as well as the sort of social influence is crucial because now there’s sort of a hyper focus on the only reason that, for example, an infant or a child could become screwed up in a way or maladjusted is from social influences.

There’s never a proper accounting of the role that temperament does play. Some children are much more difficult to soothe. And that’s why Winnicott and others beyond him emphasize that the parent’s role is not to be perfect. They got to do the best they can to manage those different levels of baseline negative affectivity and other sort of intrinsic characteristics of their child.

But there’s become a constant hyper focus in today’s culture about this idea of perfection and the perfect child or the perfect environment. And I think that has led to a lot of the sort of the notion of the suffocation and the devouring mother that is actually enigma to healthy development.

The Role of Parents in Child Development and Socialization

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You might say as a rule of thumb that the combined influence of the mother and father should be about as positive and about as negative as the typical potentially social interaction that a child’s likely to have in the world. Right? So you can think of parents as caregivers, but as the child matures, the parents should also become proxies for the actual social world that the child’s most likely to encounter.

So one of the reasons that disciplinary strategies are necessary with regards to the fostering of infant and toddler development is that parents obviously have to prepare their children to behave in the real world. And that means that the child has to learn to integrate their emotions into a framework of behavior and attention that other people find attractive and inviting.

When I worked in the developmental field, which was back in the mostly in the 90s, mid-90s to say, mid-2000s or the first decade of the 2000s, I was struck and hurt in some ways by the fact that the destiny of children who aren’t well socialized between that age of 2 and 4 is pretty dismal. And it really struck home for me the necessity of parents to do everything they could to encourage another instinct in their children, which is that instinct towards mastery and integration.

You know, we talked about the instinctual basis of negative emotion and positive emotion, but there’s also an instinct towards integration which is probably associated with the transfer of behavioral control from the more primordial and immediate emotional systems to the more distal and social systems that are mediated by the cortex, which takes a lot more socialization, so to speak, to program.

And so the reason that parents need to regulate the emotions of their children is first of all, so their children won’t be suffering as a consequence of the domination of their negative emotion, but also so that other people can appreciate or even stand having their children around so they’ll play with them and educate them.

And so if you’re at the beck and call of your infant constantly, and you’re doing that in part because you can’t tolerate any distress on the part of the infant, or you’re covertly rewarding the infant’s infantile behavior so that he or she won’t leave, then you’re absolutely devastating there. You’re destroying the possibility that they’re going to be able to have friends and thrive in the world. And so why do you think, do you think there’s any evidence that that developmental process has been interfered with at a societal level now?

The Impact of Helicopter Parenting on Emotional Regulation

J. D. HALTIGAN: Well, that’s right. What you said is right, completely a fair description of this process of impulse control development. And I think there’s a lot of work that has been done regarding broad based trends and helicopter parenting or parental over involvement. And I think that’s exactly what’s happening, at least at some generalized level in the larger culture.

If there’s an inability for the child to engage the environment because they’re constantly dependent on the parent for whatever reason, either to fulfill the parent’s needs of their own emotional satisfaction, or to fulfill the child’s need, who’s never told, you know, you need to explore the environment, what you see is an inability to regulate the impulses, and that ends up down the road in a complete failure.

And that’s kind of what you see in the phenotype of some of this cluster B stuff we’re seeing play out on the tent cities and these campus protests, for example. Even in 2020, with a lot of the rioting, it’s just this completely emotionally dysregulated behavior. And that’s downstream from the millennial generation being raised in this different way than was 30, 40 years ago, where the child went out. They explored a lot.

Sort of commentators have noted, you went and played on the street till it got dark and you came home. That isn’t happening anymore. And so what is the effect or can we quantify in some way what that’s doing? I think there’s definitely evidence for this playing out. There’s definitely evidence for an influence of some of this overprotection.

But in terms of, and this is one of the things that the ideologues in the academy will do is they want you to mechanistically fine grain measure this and make the case for it in a mechanistic way. And that’s the challenge that someone like me is faced with. We can see with our own eyes these trends playing out, but then how do we frame it in an academic, methodological way to make the case? And I think we are at that point.

But there has to be room in the academy to investigate these questions. They can’t be censored, they can’t be allowed to be not asked. And so grant money needs to be funded for those types of things. But I definitely think there’s evidence for these types of large trends that we’re seeing. I mean, we see them with our own eyes and it’s undeniable in the sense that you can look at something that’s happening earlier and you can see something that’s happening now and you can make the link. But the challenge is really formalizing that in some sort of methodology, right?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Well, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have been struggling with that.

J. D. HALTIGAN: Abigail Shrier is another one.

Sociological Factors Contributing to Developmental Changes

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Abigail Shrier. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So let me offer some sociological explanations for this dysregulation, because I’m always inclined to, well, you have to give the devil his due. And as you said, if you’re going to consider multiple variables, you consider sociological and economic variables along with psychological variables.

So tell me what you think about these contributors. So now we have older parents, often old enough so that under normal human conditions they would have been grandparents. And so older parents are more conservative, and they also tend to be richer and they have far fewer children. So they have all their eggs in one basket, so to speak. Plus they’re more conservative. And they can also provide for their children in a way that makes say no to their wants dependent on the decision of the parent rather than the restrictions of their economic circumstances.

So those are three big changes, right? So now let’s say the typical mother is 30. Let’s say the, and because she’s 30, likely to be in more positive economic circumstances and therefore able to respond to the child’s demands with the provision of material wealth.

Then we also have the fact that there’s far fewer children in each family. And so that means each child doesn’t have to contend in what’s likely a beneficial way, at least under some circumstances, with a multiplicity of siblings with whom they have to share the attention and resources and learn how to get along with, right, in that intense cooperative and competitive environment that characterizes a sibling relationship.

And then we also have the additional problem of single parents or parents with multiple relationships who’ve had disrupted familial relationships themselves. Then we have the problem as well that there just aren’t as many children out on the street. There aren’t mothers watching them all the time like there were when there were neighborhoods full of children.

And so that’s in some sense independent of the psychological variables that we’ve been describing. And so what does the current literature in relationship to developmental psychopathology have to say about those longer term sociological transformations?

Gaps in Developmental Psychology Research

J. D. HALTIGAN: Well, I think that’s an excellent question that isn’t really being asked in the developmental psychology literature, at least to the extent that I’ve seen it recently. The developmental psychology literature tends to be heavily focused on a mechanistic investigation of things in infancy or childhood with less of a focus on those broad based trends that you just mentioned. And I think that’s one area that needs to be improved in literature.

Obviously single parenting has been studied, but the role of what you’re noting, these more broad based secular trends, for example, of older parenting, fewer children, to my knowledge at least, at least in terms of the literature scope that I have looked at recently, those types of questions aren’t being asked because in part I think the answers is not what the ideologues in the academy want to hear, that there is evidence for some of the things that they don’t want said.

So the role of younger parents and single parenting and older parents has to be all looked at with an equal poise that is not really happening right now in developmental psych. And that’s one of the limitations of developmental psych is it’s so fine grained and focused on some of these more fine tuned interactions like I mentioned to you, with the face to face still face and they miss the forest by focusing exclusively on the trees.

And so I think we need to get back to some of these bigger questions that are asking, why do we see a generation growing up in the way they are with an undeniable, I guess, less of an ability to regulate their emotions than previous generations? How much of that is due to actual three things really? How much of it is due to their inborn temperament? How much of it is due to being differences in how they were reared, but also how much of it is due to differences in the larger cultural milieu and how that’s influencing their decisions perhaps consciously to regulate or not regulate their emotions.

The Impact of Screens and Social Media on Child Development

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so we could add some additional variables there that need to be considered. So height, Jonathan Haidt has been making a strong case for the danger of social media. Well yeah, but we could expand that a bit because there’s, I’ve talked to some of the leaders, let’s say of the social media networks about Haidt’s concerns and you know, they made some very interesting points.

It’s social media to some degree and the intense competitiveness, abstraction and backbiting that characterize those realms. But the thing is it isn’t obvious at all that children and adolescents are spending the bulk of their time on social media per se. Depends on how you define it. So they’re also texting instead of interacting face to face, for example. And then they’re also exposing themselves to other content online, like pornography.

But then there’s something more fundamental, I think, that’s often missed, which is that, see, when we had little kids back in the 90s, my wife and I were the youngest parents we knew with the oldest kids. Even though we weren’t that young, we didn’t start having kids till we were in our late 20s. Now, one of the things that would happen was that we would take our kids over to other houses that had children, and when we got there, the parents would put on a television show for the kids to watch, which I was never happy with, because what should have happened was the kids were thrown into the basement, so to speak, and they, with nothing to do so that they had to play.

And so they could watch TV. And of course, they were quiet if they were doing that. But they weren’t inventing their own dramas. They weren’t interacting face to face in a manner that made them come up with the creative conceptualizations that characterize dramatic play, like playing house, for example, that lay the bloody groundwork for future adult relationships.

Now, and that was TV that had nothing on screens because everyone was concerned about the detrimental effect of TV back then. But, my God, now, you know, screens are absolutely everywhere. So the screens have content, but they also interfere with child’s play. And so I’d like your opinion about that.

Delayed Dramatic Play and Identity Formation

And also one other thing that I’ve been thinking about. Let me tell me what you think about this. You know, I watch all these strange identity issues that are emerging in adolescence and even on university campuses in early adulthood, this preoccupation with sexual identity, with gender identity, and they, and also the variant forms of even more imaginative play that are associated with that, like the furry culture, for example, and the anime culture.

And what I see there is delayed dramatic play. Right. So I’m wondering if what’s happening to some of these kids is that they get away from this oppressive family environment where they’re never allowed any freedom. They burst out at, say, the age of 17 or 18, and then they have to frenetically engage in a dramatic search for identity because they didn’t do it when they were three, which is when it really needs to happen.

We radically underestimate the significance of dramatic play. Then we have dramatic play on the part of rebellious adolescents constantly, you know, as they protest in the streets.

J. D. HALTIGAN: That’s right, 100%. You know, I’ve spoken with Jonathan Haidt and others. And I’ve really been kind of engaged in the discourse about the role of social media, you know, and how that plays into the development of emotional regulation. You’re right. How do we define that?

But I think your point about, you know, it’s basically more broadly than just whether they’re on TikTok or whether they’re on Facebook or whether they’re on Snapchat, it’s looking at a screen rather than at another face. And you see that wherever you go. I mean, even when I do work on a supermarket deli now on a part time basis, customers will come in, they’ll be looking at their phone or I’ll be trying to look at my phone.

And it’s a completely different world and landscape that we’re now in that has sort of taken away the normal face to face, communicative, rough and tumble play where you’re actually physically looking at somebody rather than at a screen or your attention is not constantly looking at a screen. So it’s much more broader.

And I think the other point too, you said, well, it’s not just social media, you’re right, it’s social media combined with an increasing secularism that has basically, we’ve lost all sense of moral constraint. So when there’s no sort of, when there’s sort of a weakening of all, you know, traditional classical religions and there’s no orienting structure, you get thrown into the social media world where you can basically create anything that gives rise to what we see as this complete inability to form, you know, an identity in early childhood.

Now they’re on the screens where there’s just basically a consumer market for identities. Whether that’s identities as furries, whether it’s an identity as, you know, gender identity or even as you say, I mean, it’s a complete role playing world now that’s happening on social media.

And one of the individuals who’s done a lot of great work on this is Catherine D. Who’s default friend on Twitter. She’s looked at some of this and I think we’re missing to a certain extent and all the discourse around the role of social media on mental health and the ability to establish a strong identity is the fact that we’re now moving into a different era where we’re actually living online rather than in the world.

And that’s why I’ve been constantly stressing the need for athletics based programs or environmental programs where children are in nature to get away from this sort of movement to a world that’s completely imaginary online because that leads to all sorts of limitless ability to establish identities that, identities that while they may exist in this creative realm, when you get back into the real world, they’re useless. They’re dysfunctional, really. And that’s sort of what we see.

The Dark Tetrad and Online Behavior

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, they’re also not subject, as far as I can tell, they’re also not subject to the constraints that are characteristic of the real world. One of the things I’ve been very concerned about, I’d like your thoughts on this is I think it was, what’s the boxer’s name, Mike Tyson, who so famously said, the problem with the virtual world is that it’s made all of you all too comfortable with never getting punched when you deserve it.

Now, that’s a bad paraphrase, but he did actually say that. And I think there’s something about that that’s actually very interesting and very correct. You know, one of the, I don’t know how many comments I’ve looked at online, but it’s tens of thousands, you know, and I’ve started to develop something like a troll taxonomy.

And, you know, there is a culture online they call Lulz culture. And that’s laugh out loud or I did it for the lulz. And it’s basically a culture of sadists and psychopaths. And this is actually quite well documented in the relevant research literature because there has been ongoing research into the personality structure of provocative trolls and their dark tetrad types.

So they fit into the cluster B psychopathology. They are narcissistic, so they want unearned attention. They’re Machiavellian, so they use their language as a tool to manipulate rather than to communicate. They’re psychopathic, which means they’re predatory parasites. And that wasn’t good enough, as it turned out, because that was the dark triad. They had to add sadistic to that.

And that’s where the lulz element really comes into play, because the sadist takes positive delight in the suffering of others. And that’s really the nature of lulz culture. And it can thrive online because, well, people say things online all the time that would get them an immediate slap in the real world, like a morally required immediate slap. And so they say things that, now this, the reason that concerns me.

See, my sense is that we know that the base rate of psychopathy across cultures is about 4%, which isn’t that high. But we also know that there were historical epochs in which the cluster B personality types probably got the upper hand. And I would suspect that happened in the French Revolution. I think it probably happened in the Russian revolution, probably happened during the rise of the Nazis in National Socialist Germany.

You don’t need that many people to be disinhibited in their psychopathology before your culture might be in grave danger. And that’s particularly true if they can organize, which they can really do online. And so I’m very concerned that the incentive structure online facilitates dark tetrad behavior.

Now there’s more evidence too, right? Because here’s another problem. 25% or thereabouts of online content is pornographic. So basically criminal, right? It’s basically prostitution facilitated by electronic pimps. So that’s not good. And then a tremendous amount of online activity is outright criminal. Right? I mean older people are just being scammed on an unbelievably constant basis.

And so it might be that 50% of online activity is in the psychopathic, antisocial and cluster B realm. It’s very, very difficult to regulate. And my suspicions are, is that spilling over in really a really counterproductive manner into the actual flesh and blood world?

And so, you know, I’m curious about your thoughts about that because one of the things that’s odd about you on Twitter in a good way, is that you are constantly drawing people’s attention to the relationship between cluster B psychopathology and online and political behavior. And so what do you think about that as a hypothesis with regard to the pathological incentive structure of the virtual world? Right. Maybe it’s a non playable degenerating game.

Social Media as an Incubator for Cluster B Pathology

J. D. HALTIGAN: Well, I think in a lot of ways that’s exactly why, I know you’re familiar with the paper that I wrote on this, is social media is an incubator of all this cluster B type of stuff. Because on social media you have this indirect communicative, language based amplification of all these traits.

Whereas male aggression in the real world, it doesn’t scale. You have an encounter, there’s something said, somebody gets punched in the face and that’s it. What you have is on social media, indirect aggression. And you have all these traits and antagonism and histrionic behavior that just basically gets amplified and emotionally resonates and resonates and resonates and balloons out and it builds and builds and builds.

And one of the best examples of that is what we saw with Hamas. I mean they filmed all their atrocities as they were going into Israel. And that was one of the most interesting, in a morbid way kind of aspects of that incursion was it was just filmed. They were basically, in fact, doing it for the lulz.

Regardless of whether you think on how much atrocities or what was the exact specific atrocities that were committed, they were filming them on GoPro for exactly that reason and to amplify that. And so, you know, that is one way for a perfect example of how this is all spiraled out of control.

And I will say for myself, you know, others have written about the cluster B stuff in terms of political ideology and how that’s played out before. You know, the famous Lobaczewski is one of them and others. So, but I just see it so clearly because when you look at the traits and you look at what’s happening online and it’s a perfect incubator for all these just to continue to amplify and amplify and amplify without any mechanism that limits it, and it just spills out.

And then what happens is you have an event like October 7th, or you have an event like what you’re seeing on these campus tent cities, all of that’s mediated and amplified online. And then it gets played out with all this petulance and romper room behavior on campuses.

The Psychology of Aggression and Social Media

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, okay, so let’s dig into that two ways. So the first thing I’d like to point out, and you can comment on this, if you would, is that, you know, you mentioned that male aggression doesn’t scale well and it doesn’t work that well in the real world. And that’s definitely the case.

I mean, one of the things that my daughter was often perplexed about when she was growing up in her household with her brother is the difference in response pattern to aggression between boys and between girls. So my son and his teenage friends would not that infrequently have an altercation. You know, sometimes it might even come to brief blows. And that would end it, and that would often not only not stop a friendship, but strengthen it, partly because they knew where they stood with each other.

Now, this didn’t happen that often, but the threat of it happening was always there. Now with the girls, by contrast, they could backbite and gossip and screech and moan and bitch and kill each other virtually online. And there was no limit to it. And there was very difficult to limit at all.

It’s definitely the case that female style antisocial behavior is unbelievably difficult to regulate. Now, having said that, I’m not blaming the females for online pathological behavior, although there’s certainly the female equivalent of that in places like TikTok.

But what I do see happening is that the histrionic, narcissistic and borderline, the men who have those traits can get away with that kind of female type antisocial behavior online, that gossiping and backbiting and reputation savaging and outright Machiavellian deception with absolutely no consequences or even worse, with a certain level of perverse reward because attention is brought to it and maybe even amplified by the social media companies. So that’s not good to say the least.

Cluster B Pathology and Religious Fundamentalism

Now let’s add one more thing to that that people need to understand. So, you know, the conflict between Hamas, let’s say, and the people of Israel and the rest of the bloody world for that matter, can be construed as a political or as a religious or economic battle. But you put your finger on something that’s absolutely vital.

So the cluster B types, the psychopaths and the narcissists and the Machiavellians, they’re unbelievably good at using proclamations of victimization to justify their aggression and also to camouflage what they’re doing with a moral story.

And so when I think of violent religious fundamentalists, I don’t actually generally think of the religion itself as a motivation, even though it can be. I think of the psychopathic, power striving, narcissistic, Machiavellian adopting the cloak of the religious. That’s what the Pharisees do in the Gospels, by the way. And they’re Christ’s biggest enemy.

They adopt the camouflage of moral virtue, religious, economic or social, and then they pretend to be the good guys. Well, in fact, they’re ravening. What did Christ call them? Ravening graves that would devour even the ancestors that they claimed to worship.

And so I think that as a culture, we’re radically underestimating the perverse consequences of the intermingling of the cluster B psychopathologies with the hypothetically religious, political and economic. We’re making them primary when in fact the pathology, the cluster B pathology, is probably the primary problem.

So maybe when you see people involved in sectarian violence, the first thing you should ask yourself is, well, is that sectarian violence or is that just an excuse for the Cain-like narcissists to get the upper hand? So what do you think about that?

Moralizing Lies and Social Contagion

J. D. HALTIGAN: I think that’s exactly right. I see the world from that lens of looking at psychopathology as opposed to the background religion itself. Clearly there’s definitely historical religious conflicts that motivate some of this. But I see it much more from the perspective of how does this culture give rise to these macro social, what I consider contagions of these cluster B traits.

And you mentioned lying and moral virtue. And I think one of the things, and I just made this point a couple of days ago with regards to what’s happening here in the States and sort of the lies that the mainstream media have told about Joe Biden is that there’s lying that most corrupt politicians will do. Many people lie. There’s white lies and so forth, and then there’s lying.

But moralizing that lie and moralizing that lie, in my view, is much more worse and psychopathic than just some lie that you beat some kid on the street the other day and it never happened. And you see, that’s the strategy that they use. They lie, but they moralize it. They’re the oppressed, they’re the victims. So that gives them the currency to then create and engage in all sorts of atrocities or behaviors that somehow are socially acceptable.

And, you know, you mentioned too, the sort of male instantiation of these cluster B traits. And that’s something that I saw during COVID online, too. A lot of the female scholars that I was collaborating with at one point or that kind of grew to know, who were doing COVID work or pushing for the elimination of mask mandates or saying that lockdowns were harmful, they were getting attacked by these male narcissistic, what I would consider trolls on Twitter who had credential degrees, but they were constantly bullying these female nurses, doctors, and so forth in the most trollish way.

And so that sort of manifestation was something that was very glaring, that would have never played out in the real world. It was only made possible by the sort of milieu of the social environment of the Internet and social media. And it was something that really bothered me.

And so there’s this idea that you moralize that, you know, a few people might be harmed by lockdowns, but the majority of the population won’t be. And it’s the majority of the population that were, in fact harmed.

The Dissociation of Atrocity from Guilt

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, so, hey, so when you watched the Hamas atrocities and you said that what you saw first and foremost was the pathology. Okay, so I want to delve into that a little bit because one of the things that’s really struck me about the peculiar times that we’re in is the dissociation of atrocity from guilt.

So one of the things that you had to give the Nazis credit for, so to speak, is that they were guilty about their crimes and they tried to hide them. And one of the things that I see at the moment that’s so unbelievably pathological that I can hardly get my head around it, is that the butchery on the trans side, for example, is trumpeted as a moral virtue.

There’s no attempt to hide what’s going on. In fact, it’s brought forward as something that’s positive. Now, that’s associated in a way with what you saw with regard to the Hamas massacres, is that this is actually being reveled in.

Again, we’re going to talk about this independent of the hypothetical reasons for the cause. I mean, people, you just think about it. The sadist, the sadistic types want to claim victimization because they’re also predatory parasites. And if you’re a victim, then other people have to kowtow to you and take care of you.

And we know that half of criminal lifestyle is parasitical lifestyle. There’s the rule breaking and the actual crime, but the other part, that’s the predation. But the other part of it is living off the work of other people in an insanely unconscientious manner and coming up with a story to justify it.

You know, that the successful are just thieves themselves, for example, or that nobody really works to get what they deserve. There’s no really such thing as merit. There’s only power. And so since everyone’s a thief, there’s no reason not to get in there and get some of your own.

And so you watched the tapes and with the eye of a psychopathologist, and so what do you think you saw?

Valorization of Sadistic Behavior

J. D. HALTIGAN: Well, what I saw was the valorization of sadistic behavior, not just sexually sadistic behavior, but the killing and mass slaughter of people. It was sort of meant to be propagated on the screen for that exact reason, to be seen as something to be. And I think in part, they sort of wanted to valorize it as somehow, in a way, it was allowable for some sort of oppression that they had experienced at the hands of Israeli occupation or the situation in Gaza.

But you can also see that in the trans movement online, Reddit, TikTok, there’s a glamorization about this stuff that is so widely discrepant from what is actually happening in the actual perpetration of, in the case of the trans stuff, the mangling and the confusion of children and other negative effects that this leads to.

That it’s almost something that they’re trying to create an environment where it’s seen as heroic to engage in these behaviors, when in fact it’s just the opposite. And that’s made possible by the social media landscape where you can click like and you can get all the retweets and shares or create these echo chambers, but it’s a parasitic lifestyle, which is exactly what Hervey Cleckley, who really was sort of behind the original construct of psychopathy, that’s exactly what he identified, this parasitic lifestyle.

And they moralized that type of behavior as virtuous. It’s like virtuous victimhood, and it’s very toxic.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Virtuous victimhood, valorizing sadism.

The Moralization of Lies

J. D. HALTIGAN: You mentioned lying. There’s lying and then there’s lying. That is, there’s moralization of the lie. And I see the latter moralization of the lie is much, much worse.

And we see that just recently, I’m sure you’re aware of, we had a debate here in the States, Biden and Trump. It’s obvious that Biden is cognitively really struggling. And we all knew this for many years, but the mainstream media constantly moralized this lie, that it was somehow unfair to criticize Biden for that or to acknowledge that.

That’s much worse, in my view, than Trump just shooting off some ridiculous remark that’s clearly a lie. But he’s not moralizing that lie. He’s not saying you’re a bad person because you basically observe with your own eyes what we’ve all known about Biden for four years.

And so I see the latter as much more psychopathic, parasitic and toxic to a culture than the former.

The Moral Instincts of Civilization and Primate Aggression

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So, okay, so I’m going to tell you a frightening story and you tell me what you think about it. This is, maybe this is too pessimistic, but I’m still working that out. To what degree do we have moral instincts, let’s say, that are in keeping with the self-sacrificing ethos of a complex civilization? How much of that is part and parcel of our inborn conscience? You know, Cleckley, of course, defined the psychopaths as someone without a conscience or with a very underdeveloped conscience.

So I read two books in quick succession. One of them was a book by the Dutch primatologist, who unfortunately is recently deceased, Franz de Waal. One of his books on chimpanzee behavior, I don’t remember which one because I read a number of his books, but he detailed out the phenomenon of chimpanzee war, essentially. And this was first discovered, I believe, by Jane Goodall, who was pretty flipped upside down by the revelation, as she should have been, because of course, the sociological types and the lefties and the cultural constructionists like to think that the human proclivity for warfare is a consequence of corrupt social structure.

A theory which is shot to hell by the fact that chimpanzees go to war, which indicates that it’s much more an inherent part of our primate nature than anyone wants to think. So what happens with the chimps is that the juveniles in particular will go on parties around the borders of their territory. Let’s say they have a fairly acute sense of territory. And if they come across chimpanzees from another troop and they outnumber them because they have a rudimentary sense of amount anyways, they can’t count, but they have a sense of amount. They’ll attack them sometimes with juvenile females accompanying them, and they tear them to shreds.

Right. So what seems to be the case is that in the absence of a social hierarchy, that limits aggression. So if a male gets too aggressive in a troop, the rest of the troop gets upset and generally the alpha male will step in to quell it or the rest of the troop will. So you can think about the troop’s level of negative emotion as an inhibitory function. Has an inhibitory function, it clamps down on male aggression which might otherwise have no limit.

Okay, so why would I say no limit? Well, because when you look at the chimpanzees go to war when they’re attacking a troop member that has no social standing, which would be a member of an other troop. There’s no limit to what they’ll do. Now, chimpanzees are capable of hunting. They hunt 40 pound colobus monkeys and they’ll eat them alive while they’re screaming. So it isn’t obvious that the distress of another primate has much inhibitory force.

And so they’ll use their jaws to castrate the other chimpanzees, for example, and literally tear their skin off. And they’re very, very powerful. They’re very, very strong, about six times as strong as the typical adult male. So look the hell out if you’re attacked by a chimpanzee, okay?

So the hypothesis there would be our closest primate relatives have no inhibition whatsoever on their capacity for aggression once they’re outside the confines of a well constituted social hierarchy. Okay?

The Rape of Nanking and Human Aggression

So soon after that, I read “The Rape of Nanking,” which is a book about as brutal as any book you might ever come across. And it details the magnitude of Japanese atrocity in the city of Nanking just prior to World War II. And there isn’t, you would have to be one pathological person indeed to imagine, even in the wildest extremes of your most vicious fantasies, anything worse than what happened in Nanking.

You could take the worst possible chimpanzee troop and equip them with a much more sadistic imagination and let send, then set them free to do anything they could possibly imagine. And that’s what happened in Nanking. And so then I started thinking, oh my God, does that actually mean that there’s no limit on human aggression outside of social hierarchy? Essentially, because, you know, there were a lot of normal Japanese soldiers that were involved in this. It was certainly contagious.

Now, undoubtedly it was led by the bloody psychopathic sadistic types. And it was certainly the case that the Japanese government had instilled in their troops a sense of ethnic superiority with regard to the Chinese and dehumanization of the Chinese. But that in itself isn’t enough to account for this stunning sadistic brutality. And so, you know, that would indicate that. Well, what does it indicate? It indicates that that psychopathic and sadistic tendency might be a lot more transmissible than we think, at minimum.

J. D. HALTIGAN: Yeah, I think the abolition of hierarchies has led to worse hierarchies in almost every situation and historical circumstance we can think of. Hierarchies are an ingrained part of human behavior. And when you try to replace them with some other utopian scheme where there is no hierarchy or dominance hierarchy, what you end up with is what you just described.

And I think that’s really what the tyranny of structurelessness is all about. When there is no hierarchy or guiding set of principles to create a hierarchy, you just have complete structurelessness. And to think about it, that’s what you see in all this cluster B behavior. It’s completely dysregulated. There’s no structure to any of their behavior.

And that’s really what’s at the heart of, I think, the cultural malaise that we’re living through is that all these ideologues want to abolish structure or categories, whether that’s categories in mental health, diagnostic classifications, law and society. And you see this with some of the LGBTQ+ world things. They want to abolish any type of constraint.

And as Rieff, one of the cultural commentators, Philip Rieff, who is no longer with us, once you have a culture in which man is allowed to express anything, you have a culture in crisis. You have no constraints on the ability of anybody to live any pathology they want or do anything they want. There’s nothing, no hierarchy, no containment at all to some of the underlying tyrannical behavior that can be given rise to when you have a lack of structure or containment.

So you have a culture in crisis right now because they’re trying to abolish all structure, all containment, all hierarchy. And that’s just a recipe for cultural disintegration.

Academic Merit and the Question of Employment

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: All right, so, okay, so on that note, let’s turn to the more particularly personal. So I sat on a lot of university hiring committees at Harvard and at the University of Toronto, and I’ve evaluated a lot of CVs, and your CV is good. It might be very good. You have an h-index of 34, which means that you have 34 papers with more than 34 citations. And so that’s at minimum respectable. And a citation count of about 5,000.

And for those of you listening, scientific productivity and merit is quantified not least by observing how many other scientists cite someone’s work, i.e. refer to it in their own writing, in their own research. Now, it’s not a perfect measure because you can be cited for being hyper popular in a sense, or you can be cited for publishing an erroneous paper that people are required to refer to. But by and large, citation count is actually a good predictor of future productivity. It’s about the best predictor we have, actually. That and pure number of papers. And so number of well cited papers is also a good indicator.

So by on purely objective grounds, you know, you’re a contender, let’s say, and you can obviously speak and you can obviously think, and you’re very interested in research. And so we might ask ourselves, why aren’t you employed in the academy? And so do you want to tell that story and you were at the University of Toronto in the psychiatry department. Tell everyone what happened and how things ended up for you and why, as far as you’re concerned?

J. D. HALTIGAN: I think there’s a number of different things that I’ve thought. Obviously, I have no specific answers to why I’m not in the academy. I have a number of different takes on why that may be, but a couple of different things. A lot of my early work was in attachment, and that’s a very nuanced field of research that is, you know, has its own people in the academy that do that kind of work and so forth and so on.

Another reason is that I’m very strident in what I believe and what I say and what I feel. And if you’re a white male and especially in psychology and you’re strident and you tend to be a little bit more outspoken, that’s seen as being too disagreeable. Once you get on faculty interviews, of which I’ve been on many, it becomes a personality contest. And I think, in retrospect, I’ve been told things like I don’t smile enough on faculty interviews or other outlandish things that have nothing to do with my merit.

I’m sure that there’s been faculty interviews or job market searches where I’ve given talks that haven’t been as great as other talks. So you never know the real reason why you don’t end up in the academy or you end up not staying in it.

As far as where I’m at now, when I was at the University of Toronto and working, you know, at the medical hospital that I was there, it was during that period of time where things were getting very woke, especially around the gender stuff. I was working with people who, you know, they claim to be scientists, who are rigorous, and you have “they/them” in their bios. And that to me was just outlandish. I mean, how can you be at a medical research hospital purporting an ideology that is totally disconnected from what we know about human sexual development?

So I spoke out about that. I spoke out about things like land acknowledgments and how they were just absolutely ridiculous and they were being forced on people. And I think that didn’t make things go well for me. I have to say, though, that others have been canceled way worse than I was. I don’t have a typical cancellation story.

The Invisible Cancellation

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You have an invisible cancellation story. And I actually think in some ways that’s worse. Look, one of the reasons I stopped working at the University of Toronto was because while graduate students were interested in working with me. But the whole point of having a graduate research student, fundamentally, if they’re really research oriented, is so that they can go off and have their own research lab and pursue an academic career.

And I knew with 100% certainty that any of the Caucasian males that worked with me, or perhaps any females for that matter, would be so tainted by their mere association with me that the probability that they would ever get an interview, even let alone a job, was essentially zero. And so how in the world can I offer a person a position, even if they’re interested in working with me on those grounds?

And I know perfectly well that a fair bit of that is racial. So if you’re Caucasian, you’re much less likely to get an interview at the same degree of merit. That’s 100% true. And it’s also true when it comes to gender. So you’re much less likely to get an interview if you’re male. And so I also didn’t want to partake in that anymore. It’s like, go to hell, you sons of bitches. If that’s what you want, you think I need you, you’ve got another thing coming.

And so I don’t know. You know, I read recently that 94% of the 300,000 jobs that were distributed in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death went to non-white, non-males. Right. If you were white and male, you didn’t get one of those jobs, put it that way. Right. And so that’s inexcusable in my way of looking at things, because I also know, because I’ve done extensive work in psychometrics, that we can assess merit, especially in the scientific realm, with a fair degree of accuracy.

And the best way to do that, as we already discussed, is by just looking at publication record back before the whole publication system had also become corrupt beyond comprehension. So, you know, you say you didn’t get canceled that hard, which means you escaped without overt reputational damage that was made public, but you don’t have a job. And so that doesn’t seem so minor to me, given that you have a stellar academic record that you’re obviously someone who’s genuinely interested in research and those people aren’t that common. And so where are you working now?

The Aftermath of Academic Cancellation

J. D. HALTIGAN: So I would see myself as having a soft cancellation. What I’ve done is I’ve come back, I’ve tried to build my social media platform and prior to me leaving Toronto, I had numerous students reach out to me that wanted research, mentorship and so forth. And those students came to me via the normal channels that you would when you’re a professor at an institution.

And I got so many emails, I didn’t know what to do with them all. So I said, look, the more high merit ones that I saw I could see from their CVs. I said, if you’re interested in getting some experience and you want to do it on an involuntary basis and just kind of work with me offline and through some of the projects that I have ongoing, feel free to do so.

Many took me up on that offer. I had them write Substack pieces and tried to improve their writing skills in that way. And some still do kind of engage with me. We’re doing a meta-analysis that I had started. But as far as my current work, it’s kind of hard because you have to have some sort of income.

So I’ve kind of taken a part-time job at a deli, cut some meat. I see the working class culture, I’m sort of in there. But it’s very difficult in the sense that to go from the intellectual world to the blue collar world. It is a dramatic change and you can’t be as dialed into all the rapid pace intellectual stuff that’s going on now. And so that’s really what I’m finding challenging and difficult.

But it is my love of research that has kept me in this. My students have kept me in this. The ones that reach out to me via Twitter, via email, or who have just seen what I’ve said on Twitter and email me independently saying we thank you so much for speaking out. Because a lot of the younger students, whether they’re undergraduates or early graduate students, they don’t have any. Either they don’t have the temperament to speak out or they don’t feel that they can. And giving them a voice has been hugely influential for me.

And so I guess right now I’m in this transitional state where I am slated to do some online teaching in the fall at my alma mater at the University of Miami, teaching some stats there. And that’s, I feel very empowered to do that and continuing to work with my students. But otherwise, it’s just speaking out and trying to build your independent platform.

Legal Challenge Against DEI Statements

Another thing that I had happen is that through my Substack writing, a Pacific legal team picked up a case on my behalf. We sued the University of Santa Cruz for their DEI statement requirement, which all professors typically have to submit now as part of their job applications. And that’s still in the mix. It’s now with the judge. There was a motion to dismiss, but that case is one that we filed, saying that, look, DEI statements are a form of compelled speech, and you’re seeing now a lot of pushback on the DEI statements.

And so I’m hoping that my case, whether the case is dismissed or not, will continue to work against it. But that’s been hugely influential to me to see some of the legal stuff that goes on behind the scenes and how badly there is this reverse discrimination in DEI statements, which are nothing more than political litmus tests, and they filter out. If you’re not on board with social justice or equity or any of that stuff, forget it.

So for me, that was just pointless. Why apply when I have to submit stuff that I don’t believe in? And I’m not someone who, that would sit well with me. So I want to sleep well at night. And sleeping well at night means staying true to who you are and what you believe. And I’d rather do that and work at a deli than have a position where people around me are saying outlandish things or they’re walking the walk and they don’t believe any of the stuff that they’ve said socially.

The Death of Scientific Truth-Seeking

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, it’s death for scientists because, look, well, okay, two things. First of all, I’ve seen very little evidence in our discussion so far that you’re particularly strident. I’ve seen plenty of evidence that you’re trying to do your research and you’re trying to go where it takes you, and that you are doing that in a manner that’s more overtly conservative than the manner that might characterize the demented progressives and the outright bloody cowardly liars that aggregate in the psychology field at the moment. So there’s that. So strident. I don’t see any evidence of that at all in your comportment.

You know, I’ve interviewed lots of people, like 500 people for YouTube alone. And so, and I’ve sat on many juridical committees trying to evaluate potential candidates. And there isn’t a single bit of behavior that you manifested today that I would put in the strident camp. In fact, when you’re discussing not only your research preoccupations and your beliefs, but what’s happened in your own personal life, you’re remarkably reserved and careful in your choice of words. So that’s just rubbish.

It seems to me much more that you ran into the trouble that you ran into because you wouldn’t go along with the lies. And that’s one of the things we should point out to people who are watching and listening is that that’s the death of the scientific enterprise, right? Because the only thing that makes science true is the truth-seeking behavior on the part of scientists.

You can falsify your data at every level, in its recording, in its statistical analysis, in its presentation, at conferences, in its publication and papers, in your public discussions of it. You can lie non-stop at all of those levels. If you’re incompetent or all you’re doing is pushing your career forward because there’s no objective truth and you’re not oriented right to the bloody core of your soul for truth, you’re definitely not a scientist because it’s actually hard to be a scientist and it rubs against the grain.

You know, I mean, I had students who lost two years work because we wouldn’t publish a paper that they weren’t able to replicate. You know, there was a rule in my lab is you don’t get to publish your study, even if it works, unless you can replicate it. And so it would have been much easier on the students and certainly better for me in that narrow sense of career provision if I would have just let my students publish the first paper that they had positive results with.

But that’s not acceptable because it pollutes literature. And if you believe in truth, you don’t want to do that, if you don’t want to pursue a goddamn lie for the rest of your life too, because you’ve been such an idiot as a graduate student, you allowed yourself to get deluded into believing that you found something when you didn’t.

So I despair of the academy putting itself back together on the research side. I mean, again, that’s pretty damn pessimistic, but I don’t see an alternative to it at the moment. So it’s not surprising you’re on the outs.

The Degradation of Academic Rigor

J. D. HALTIGAN: I really have become much more pessimistic as well. And even some of the students that work with me now on an independent basis, I mean, I teach them a lot of skills that are relentless in terms of when you do a meta-analysis, you have to do a complete literature review that’s very detailed and systematic, and they’re learning those skills, but it’s a very aggressive and relentless pace and they’re learning how to do good research.

There’s no immediate payoff, but that’s really how the academy is being degraded now with a lot of what’s happening is there’s no attention to detail, there’s no scientific rigor, and it’s just anything goes. And even when there is scientific rigor in the sense of appropriate methodology, it’s being laundered around ideologies.

Where you might do a study. There’s a recent thread I did on Twitter where there’s a study on scales of identity dysfunction. And of course, what you find in these scales is that there is a structure of identity dysfunction. It’s associated with all this negative mental health stuff. But when it comes to gender identity, the authors in the discussion talk about how well we can’t evaluate these associations in the gender diverse population because they’re not cis-normative.

And so that’s a soft normalization of psychopathology, in my view. It’s not true scientific research. They see what they see in terms of the statistics and then they try to write it off by defining a population as somehow deserving of less scrutiny or different scrutiny. And that’s really, to me, even if you want to take that view, you have to demonstrate equal poise about what you’re doing. And they don’t do that.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I think that word “cis” is a curse. I hated that word when it first popped up. I knew exactly what those goddamn lefties were up to with, that progressive radicals were up to with the misuse of language. In that regard, I was just going to…

J. D. HALTIGAN: Say “cis” is basically the elimination of structure. It’s basically defining a normative and trying to eliminate any sort of hierarchy or any sort of structure to what we’ve understood in the natural world for a long time. And that gets back to what we were earlier talking about. It’s complete abolition of structure, the complete abolition of any definition of normativity. And when you do that at scale, you have a culture in crisis.

The Paradox of Bringing the Marginal to the Center

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So here I’ve got one final horrible hypothesis for you. So you tell me what you think about this. So you know that if you’re marginal, you’re likely to occupy a lower rung socioeconomically, and your existence, in some fundamental sense, is much more likely to be tenuous. So if you occupy a lower rung in a hierarchy, you’re more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, and you’re more likely to be unemployed, and you’re more likely to be mentally ill, and you’re more likely to have an alcohol and drug problem. Of course, there’s a bidirectional causal relationship.

So you can imagine a structure with something at the center, and then rungs, circles, concentric circles of marginalization radiating outward from that center. Okay, so now imagine this. You could think of the world as thesis and antithesis, right? There are things and there are opposites, but that’s not right. There are things and a plurality of opposites.

Now imagine you try to make the marginalized central, which is the big postmodern push. Let’s bring the margin to the center. Well, that’s fine, except the margin is a plurality. So now you’re hypothesizing that you can make a plurality, a unity, which you can’t. And that’s why the LGBTQ etc. mob continues to expand its nomenclature, because there’s no limit to the plurality. There’s literally no limit to the plurality.

Okay, so what does that imply? Well, let’s say you bring the marginal to the center, but now that doesn’t center all the marginal, because the marginal is an infinite plurality. And so what that means is that when you bring the marginal to the center, you just get a new margin, but that new margin is even more marginal. So let’s say that’s the addition of T to LGBT.

Okay, now the question is, when you bring the even more marginal to the center, who do you destroy? Do you destroy the center, or do you destroy the previously marginal? And the answer to that, seems to me, given the vulnerability of the marginal, is that when you bring the fringe of the fringe in, you destroy the fringe, not the center.

So, and I don’t see a way out of that, because if the fringe are already compromised because of the multiple forms of stress, and the even more fringe come in, at some point, as you go out into the fringe, you’re past the fringe. You’re into the bloody monstrous.

This is what happened to the Scottish Prime Minister when she decided that all men who said they were women were women, and so then made political moves to allow psychopathic rapists to claim that they were women and to go into women’s prisons. The naivety of these people or their malevolence is really without bounds. It’s like you have no idea what you’re encouraging.

And this is one of the advantages or disadvantages of being a psychopathologist. I’ve seen and studied some of the worst forms of human behavior and I have some real sense of just exactly what will happen if you destroy all hierarchical structure. You know, and you saw this after the Russian Revolution and the French Revolution, all the useful idiots lose their heads first.

So there’s a warning to those who want to extend the Alphabet brigade beyond any reasonable limit. It’s like, wait till you get to the real monsters, boys and girls. And you’re damn close now. They’ll come out under their rocks and you wish you’d never been born.

The Dangers of Unmitigated Pluralism

J. D. HALTIGAN: That’s exactly right. And I’ve spoken out about pluralism on X as well. You’re seeing that pluralism language in developmental psychopathology is somehow lauded. Pluralism is being described as the new wave of, you know, you have pluralism in methodology, but you have pluralism in integrating lived experience into our understanding of mental illness.

And what ends up happening, and I’ve said this in these exact words, is unmitigated pluralism is ideographic insanity. It’s just you have a thousand “my truths,” and there’s no truth. It just spirals completely out of control. And that’s exactly the language that is being used in developmental psychopathology right now. Pluralism that’s lauded, but that’s going to lead to completely, you know, at the end of the day, that’s going to lead to no psychopathology at all.

Everybody’s going to be living their own psychopathology or their own idiosyncrasy, and you won’t be allowed to categorize them as somehow disordered or somehow non-normative. And so Christopher Lasch, one of our great cultural commentators of all time, he basically pointed this out. It’s a pluralist utopia and it never works. And so you reach a threshold where you have so many plurals and it’s just insanity.

I mean, we see this now even on social media. The plurals movement is this sort of the idea that you have all these plurals that assume multiple identities online and it’s just complete nonsense. But it’s being given a patina of credibility by this lunacy in the academy, where I don’t know if they’re doing it intentionally. And some pluralism might be good. If you’re like a methodologist and you want to have different methodologies to sort of test something out, but that’s not what they mean. It’s much more of an ideological political project.

The Silence of Psychologists

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: All right, sir, look, I think we should probably close with that, so I’d like to keep in touch. I’m obviously following you assiduously on Twitter because, as I said, you’re one of the few voices in the psychological community that’s willing to, Jesus, to point out the obvious.

I’m so appalled by my colleagues. I’m so ashamed, especially of the psychopathologists, because they should know better. And the developmental psychologists, too. They know perfectly well that what’s being foisted on us in terms of gender affirming care and the rewriting of the rules around the classification of psychopathology, they know perfectly well.

And the whole notion that we should do anything other than wait in the case of kids with gender dysphoria who are primarily depressed and anxious and victims of their pathological parenting, we all know that. All psychologists with their salt know that. Bloody bunch of silent cowards.

And so, you know, so you’re working at a deli. At least you’ve got your tongue, and that’s the thing that’s attached directly to your soul. So, you know, good on you as far as I’m concerned. And I hope that you keep scrapping away. My suspicions are that things will turn around for you quite dramatically when they do turn around, and at least in 20 years, you’re not going to have to be sitting there thinking, geez, you remember when all those young girls were getting their breasts cut off and I was fully for it or too damn cowardly to say anything about it.

It’s like, at least you had enough of a spine and a spirit to put your money where your mouth is. And so, you know, that’s very rare in today’s world. And so I salute you for it. Seriously, good work.

The Imperative to Speak Out

J. D. HALTIGAN: Certainly you’re one of the ones that has really compelled everybody to speak out more. And I certainly have been influenced by a lot of your speaking out. But, yeah, I mean, that’s what allows me to sleep at night. I’m not going to sit back and watch this unfold and not be able to speak out about it.

And you know, I’ll have to deal with whatever challenges. And I don’t mean to imply that I have, you know, extensive challenges. Certainly there’s people that have many more, but it is hard not to be part of the research, not to be part of the milieu. But I don’t see any other way. I don’t see any other way except to continue to speak out and build your platform and hope for things to turn around.

The Return of Amateur Scientists

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: All right, sir, so for everybody watching and listening, I’m going to continue my conversation with Dr. Haltigan on the Daily Wire side of things. I’m not exactly sure what we’ll delve into there. Probably I’d like to find out a little bit more about the students that he still has and how he’s managing to continue developing his social media network and what he thinks about the return of amateur scientists.

You know, when the scientific endeavor emerged, mostly, or much of it in Great Britain, a lot of the founders of the disciplines we have now were amateur scientists who actually did scientific work on their own. And, you know, for a while, the universities were capable of protecting the eccentrics who had that kind of drive for knowledge, and that was their damn job. That was the job of the secretaries and the administrators instead of foisting their idiot opinions on the faculty members who were trying to pursue truth.

And so maybe we’ll see a return to something like that. You know what independent science that means we’ll have to do something about the way science is published, but that doesn’t seem like an insurmountable obstacle to me. So, anyways, we’ll talk about that more on the Daily Wire side of things.

Thank you very much, Dr. Haltigan. And to everybody watching, listening, the film crew here in up in the wilds of Ontario, appreciate your work today, too. Thank you, sir.

J. D. HALTIGAN: Thank you.

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