Fireside Chat with Dr. Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson 00:00:00

[inaudible] Saskatchewan, I think there are strange things moving at the bottom because they're not good. And I say this with some embarrassment or trepidation because I think that the universities are in large part responsible for this, and that's not something that I'm least proud of, but it's a disaster to tell the truth. So I'm gonna talk to you today about the ideological war that's currently razing the very substructure of our culture. Under normal circumstances, we don't have to pay attention to such things, but I'm afraid the times are not precisely normal at the moment.

Jordan Peterson 00:01:14

The humanities in the universities, so disciplines that deal with art, literature, and really with the sustaining of Western culture, let's say, have been overrun, I think is the proper word, by a coterie of ideologues who are driven by two ideologies: one, known as postmodernism, and the other, known as neo-Marxism. This is the brand of Marxism — this comes from a variety of sources. I'm not going to go into that today because it can take too long. But it's not a warning about the fact that this is going to happen to the universities of the future. It's a straightforward — well, you could describe it as a straightforward — calling out to all of you that this has already happened. That it's happening very rapidly in the education systems that your children are attending as well, which is something that you absolutely need to be aware of, because the values that your children are going to be taught in the public education in the next 10 years are going to have very little to do with the values that the vast majority of you undoubtedly hold.

Jordan Peterson 00:02:15

Now here's the basic story. The radical leftist, neo-Marxist postmodernists — I know that's a terrible mouthful — have a particular view of the world, the West in particular. Their view of the world is that human beings are defined by their group identity fundamentally. And so you're not an individual, you're a race or an ethnicity or a gender, some group category — it doesn't matter which. The important thing is that you're a member of the group category, and the world itself is a landscape of warring groups. There are no individuals in that landscape, and there's no other possibility of interaction between people other than outright raw power. And so that's the worldview. You can imagine sort of a field of pyramids full of people, each busily pursuing their own group-fostered identity, each fundamentally at war with the other. That's the postmodern neo-Marxist viewpoint.

Jordan Peterson 00:03:15

And the worst of all those groups is the West. And the West is fundamentally a patriarchal tyranny. And it's rich, to the degree that it is rich, only because it's exploited all those people who are less fortunate than perhaps all of us — that's the fundamental claim. Now, within that landscape of power dynamics and group identities, there are people, and people in that landscape fall into one of two categories: they're either victims or perpetrators. And so if you're not a victim, then you're a perpetrator. And it's easy to identify the perpetrators, because the perpetrators are anybody who has had any accomplishment or success, which is increasingly now marked out as undeserved privilege. And I can tell you what you do with the belongings of the people who have belongings because of undeserved privilege — the answer to that is you take them away. And so if you're successful within this tyrannical patriarchy, that means that you've accumulated whatever success that you have accumulated only at the cost of others.

Jordan Peterson 00:04:28

So it's a variation of the old Marxist doctrine. It's not only a Marxist doctrine, it's an anarchist doctrine as well — that property is fundamentally theft. Now, we'll get back to that. So what's the answer, as far as the radicals are concerned? That's easy, and you can actually find out the answer to this if you take a little time on your own and go to websites — university websites, often — that advertise the agenda of disciplines like women's studies, which claim outright precisely what I have been claiming. And furthermore, also note that their purpose as educational establishments is to generate activists who will demolish that structure. And so, as I said before, I'll say it again: that ethos already characterizes the humanities at large in the universities, with very few exceptions.

Jordan Peterson 00:05:27

And the humanities are at the heart of the university. Now, you may think, well, why is that relevant to you? This is just an ivory tower affair. Do not make that mistake. The world runs on ideas, and the ideas that are in the universities are the ideas that are going to be in the general public in five to ten years. And there's no shielding yourself from 'em. So what's there is coming, and I can see it coming. It's becoming a quite substantial force in Canada. We had the worst scandal at a university in Canadian history in the last two months, as a consequence of some new legislation that was passed in Canada, which I won't get into — suffice it to say it was an ugly situation. What's the solution to the fact that the West is a corrupt, heteronormative, tyrannical patriarchy?

Jordan Peterson 00:06:12

Well, the answer to that is to tear it down from the bottom up. And that's exactly what students are being taught at the more radical ends of the universities, and that's coming to your schools very, very rapidly. And that's partly because of all the disciplines that have become corrupt at the universities — the faculties of education are probably first and foremost. Although it's a tight race, because there are other disciplines that are arguably equally corrupt — women's studies should certainly be one of them. So that's the current situation. Now, how is this retooling to be conducted? Well, first, in the form of a conceptual assault, and you'll see flurries of this appearing in the popular press, indicative of the fight that's going on at a much lower level. There's an assault on the idea that the nuclear family is the appropriate — what would you call it — container within which human beings should organize their lives and raise children.

Jordan Peterson 00:07:05

That's an idea that's under deep assault. There's also a deep assault on the idea of man and woman itself, and that's played out well in all of the controversy around transgender identity — most of which, by the way, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any care about the rights of transgender individuals. I know that quite well, because many transgender people have reached out to me in Canada, about 40 so far, complaining about the fact that the transgender activists, number one, don't want to speak for them, and number two, are basically offering them up as the newest sacrificial victims on the radical left's political agenda. So there's an assault on the idea of man and woman, and that's coming into your schools unbelievably quickly. Look up the gender unicorn if you're interested in that — remember, the gender unicorn. I know — God, we know what sort of world we live in, where such a thing exists.

Jordan Peterson 00:08:00

But it's definitely something that will open your eyes. And there's an assault as well on the categories of logic, reason, competence, and excellence — logic, because it's seen as only an extension of the patriarchal West; reason, because reason is the strategy that the patriarchal West uses to justify its own existence; competence, because competence is the mask that successful people wear to pretend that they didn't steal their success as a consequence of power; and excellence, because excellence is a term that signifies success by which the theme justifies their success. And that's the basic philosophy. Now, here's a simple way of telling if you're being exposed to this sort of thing unknowingly, let's say, or — more importantly, perhaps, for you — that your children are being exposed to it. And that's that you'll hear discussions of these five topics, especially in an educational setting where they're building increasingly into their curricula: diversity, which is predicated on the idea that the health and moral appropriateness of a culture should be judged by —

Jordan Peterson 00:09:07

— its careful attention to the details of group representation, which is an appalling idea — inclusivity, which I haven't even been able to define properly, so I'm not going to discuss it — and equity, which is unbelievably a toxic word. I mean, equity sounds nice — everybody should have what they need, let's say that's equity — but that's not equity. Equity is equality of outcome. And we've played equality-of-outcome games many times in the last 150 years, and I would suggest that it hasn't gone very well. And so when you listen to people talk about equity, you're listening to people who are avowed enemies of Western civilization, make no mistake about it. And you can say the same thing about gender. And so one of the things that you might think about doing is waking up to this sort of thing, so that when your children are exposed to this — which they most certainly will be, if not in public school, and it will happen there without a doubt — without a doubt, in university, especially if they're not in disciplines that are tightly associated with the sciences, which are, by the way, also under assault.

Jordan Peterson 00:10:10

So what's the alternative to this worldview? Well, one is the rise of the far right, and we're definitely seeing signs of that, especially in places like Europe. And the reason for that is that the people on the far right, who are playing identity politics just like the people on the far left, are basically saying something like this: alright, if we're gonna play the game of each of us is defined by our race or ethnicity, we're going to play the same game, but we're bloody well going to win. And I would suggest that that's also a pathway that we don't want to walk down, since we did that already about 60 years ago, and it turned out to be a very bad idea. So what I've been doing over the last 18 months or so is talking to students, mostly young people, young men often, because they seem to be the ones that are most attracted to what I'm saying about an alternative route — which is a return to the fundamental — what would you say — the fundamental bedrock of Western society, which is the idea that the individual is the canonical category, and that the responsible individual is the proper aim.

Jordan Peterson 00:11:19

And so the idea that I've been trying to put forward is that, to the ills that our society still obviously suffers from — given that no society's perfect, although we do pretty well in comparison to the thuggish tyrannies elsewhere in the world — the proper response of the typical individual, all of you included, is that people should adopt a sense of responsibility rather than continually clamoring about rights, which is something that we've talked about for about four decades too long, as far as I can tell. And so I've produced a very large series of videos online outlining the idea of personal responsibility, the idea that each of us has a manifest destiny, let's say, to confront the chaos and the tyranny of the world as individuals, and to work wholeheartedly at making the world a stronger and better place, because the alternative is the absolute insanity of the radical left, which is murderous right to the core, and the equally crazy counter-response of the radical right.

Jordan Peterson 00:12:24

And so I was invited here today to tell you what I think is happening and what I think is coming. And I know that it's a very harsh message, but I do believe that it also happens to be one that's true, and it would be good if you woke up and watched what was happening and took appropriate action sooner rather than later, because taking action sooner is going to be a lot of trouble, but it is not going to be anywhere near as much trouble as it is going to be taking action later. I made a video about two weeks ago — a week ago, actually — suggesting to junior high and high school students and their parents that if they are being taught by teachers who use this terminology — diversity, inclusivity, equity, white privilege, and gender — that they leave their classes, because they left the realm of education and entered the realm of indoctrination, and there's no excuse whatsoever for that. So I guess I'm putting those ideas out before you — I'm going to talk to Vance about them. And that's my — what would you call it — my description of the state of the universities and of the ideological warfare that's occurring at a very high level, right at the basis of our society. So thank you very much.

Jordan Peterson 00:14:11

Well, I suppose one of the things you could look at is something that recently happened in Canada. I mentioned that there was a scandal at a university called Wilfrid Laurier University. And what happened was that a teaching assistant there named Lindsay Shepherd showed a clip of a debate between myself and another professor at the University of Toronto about some legislation in Canada known as Bill C-16, which purported to add gender identity and gender expression to the protections of the Canadian Human Rights Code, but which was in reality an attempt to write in a particular view of human identity — what the radical left calls acceptable — to Canadian law, and to compel certain kinds of speech, which I objected to quite vociferously, and which caused a major scandal in Canada as a consequence.

Jordan Peterson 00:15:38

She was hauled before an inquisition — there's no other way of describing it — consisting of two faculty members and an administrator, who accused her, merely as a consequence of showing a five-minute clip of this video (which had been shown on Canadian public television by essentially a state broadcaster, and a very middle-of-the-road broadcaster at that), of breaking provincial and federal law, of being a far-right agitator, a bigot and a bigot. And at the same time, I was compared to Hitler and Milo Yiannopoulos — I don't know if you know who Milo is — pretty ridiculous to be compared to Hitler and Milo, as far as I'm concerned. Anyways, that caused — she taped it because she was afraid of the hearing, and she released the tape, and that caused an international scandal. And you can go listen to the tape.

Jordan Peterson 00:16:26

I would highly recommend it — millions of people have listened to it, and they had every reason to. And the radical leftists said, well, they said that the professor misconstrued the law, which she did not. And they said she overstepped her boundaries, which she may have, but she was following university policy — there was a university administrator at the hearing. And all of this occurred merely as a consequence of the unfolding of these sorts of ideas. So that's probably the best piece of proof that's emerged so far. I warned a year and a half ago, about September 2017, that the law was written in such a way to make the sort of thing that happened at Wilfrid Laurier not only possible, but inevitable, because laws have consequences. Ideas have consequences — they unfold in the world in a deterministic manner, because when you write things down on paper and put "if the law, then things happen" —

Jordan Peterson 00:17:19

— that's how it works. And that's what happened at Wilfrid Laurier. So the president of the university apologized to her and said that she had done nothing wrong, and said that the university would revisit its stance on free speech. But I have very little optimism about that, because the humanities departments from which these professors emerged, for example, and the administrative structure from which the punitive administrator emerged, are built so deeply into the structure of the university that I don't think they can reverse it. These people are all tenured — they're gonna be there for the next 25 years, and most of them are young. So what the hell is the university gonna do about that? Nothing, as far as I can tell. I think the universities have become deeply corrupt, and I would say dangerously so. And the worst of that is that they're educating the people that are educating their children —

Jordan Peterson 00:18:07

— they're miseducating the people who will now be miseducating their children.

Jordan Peterson 00:18:07

Well, I mean, there are disciplines that are essentially untouched — more or less the disciplines that you're describing. The ones that are grounded in the sciences are still robust, I would say, and still performing their jobs. But they're in much more danger than they think.

Jordan Peterson 00:19:02

So the thing about scientists — and people generally who are working hard — is that they focus on a narrow specialty and they devote their life to it, and that's a great thing, right? Because that's how you make new discoveries. But that only works if the surrounding structure is actually supportive, and not leaking and listing and threatening to sink. The sciences are still in decent shape, and if you're gonna send your kids to university, I would say make sure that they take courses that are grounded in the sciences, because there's some safety there. But make no mistake about it — the sciences themselves are in danger of the same process that swamped the humanities, it looks to be. So, do I get any pleasure out of it?

Jordan Peterson 00:19:53

Quite the contrary. And I'm not saying this because I'm an alarmist, because I'm not an alarmist — I'm fundamentally an optimistic person, believe it or not [laughter]. Yeah, I know it's pretty amusing, eh — but I could see the writing on the wall. And so I thought, as an educator, it's my duty, when I see the writing on the wall, to say what I see and think. And I don't believe that anything that I've said in public in the last 18 months has been proved incorrect, and believe me, there's been plenty of people trying to prove it incorrect.

Jordan Peterson 00:20:42

There's no evidence whatsoever that diversifying your workplace, as a consequence of increasing the number of groups that are included, constitutes a diversity of thought. That's an absolute fallacy — there's no evidence for it at all. And that's not to say that attempts shouldn't be undertaken to remove structural barriers for everyone who needs a job. Obviously, if you're a greedy capitalist, one of the things you want to do is open yourself up to exploiting the largest number of people possible, to say it most cynically. And so you're only working at cross purposes to yourself if you have foolish policies in place that discriminate against qualified people — that's certainly not the issue. There should be no discrimination whatsoever against qualified people; it does no one any good whatsoever. But to claim that you improve diversity of thought by improving diversity of group membership is to fall firmly into the postmodern trap that claims that the fundamental marker of human identity is the group.

Jordan Peterson 00:21:37

And that's simply incorrect — it's incorrect factually as well as morally. And companies need to take this into account very, very carefully, because they're manifesting their tolerance by playing this game. I'm telling you very straightforwardly that this is not a game that companies want to play, 'cause the people who are playing this game seriously are not the friends of companies. Put it that way — put it mildly. And these all sound like — what would you call them — the badges of honor of the tolerant and compassionate. I can buy that for a second. They're the verbal weapons that are being used by a fifth column. And corporate America is foolish enough to allow 'em into their boardrooms — it's a very bad idea, and they're going to pay for it.

Jordan Peterson 00:22:25

Well, I would say that the intellectual diet in the West for the last 60 years has been a nonstop feast of rights.

Jordan Peterson 00:23:20

There's a big problem with that. First of all, there's no difference between rights and responsibilities — your rights are my responsibilities and vice versa. That's how rights exist, right? We each allow each other a space, and we undertake the responsibilities necessary to make that space possible. So you just can't have an endless conversation about rights without creating a conceptual vacuum. The other problem is that it isn't rights that lend meaning and dignity to life. You all know that. What lends meaning and dignity to life — it's not impulsive pleasure, it's not living for the moment, it's not your damn rights. It's your willingness to take up responsibility, to take concerted action to make your life better at the same time that you make other people's lives better. You all know that as farmers — that's what you're doing. That's what makes the world work.

Jordan Peterson 00:24:09

To tend your garden properly, and to make it, say, nourish the world properly — we need to have a discussion about responsibility. And I see this as particularly germane, for reasons I don't exactly understand, to young men. And I think it's because no one has talked to them properly, at least at a profound philosophical or psychological level, about the fact that nobility in life is to be found by bearing up under the greatest responsibility that you can imagine, that you can manifest. That's what gives you dignity and worth — not happiness, not rights. All that shallow idiocy that they're being spoon-fed is appalling to me. And so I think people know this deep in their hearts — that this is a shell game, and that it's a dangerous game, and that there's nothing revolutionary about this in any sense — it's a return. Unless — it's radically — it's revolutionarily conservative, something like that.

Jordan Peterson 00:25:11

How can you have any respect for yourself without taking on some of the burdens of the world? Now, you need respect for yourself, because life is very difficult, life is tragic and full of suffering, and you need to have a means to justify your miserable existence. And you do that by bearing up nobly under the burden of life. And that's a much better alternative than turning to the blandishments of the far right and discovering your white identity and joining the bloody neo-Nazis, or drifting off to the left, where everything's about resentment and victimization and privilege and tearing down the damn system. It's sickening, as far as I'm concerned. And it's time that it comes to a stop.

Jordan Peterson 00:26:00

Well, don't shelter them. Don't encourage them to view themselves as victims. Obviously, life is difficult — everyone's life is tragic, everyone dies at the end. There's no doubt that life is difficult. But to decide, as a consequence of that, that the right stance to take in relationship to being and the world is to be a victim, is not only pathetic and weak but destructive and terrible — it leads to nothing but resentment at first —

Jordan Peterson 00:26:59

— and then a kind of — well, resentment is only the beginning — a kind of murderous hatred that resentment breeds. It's a terrible thing. What you do with your children is you expose them incrementally to the things that they're afraid of, and challenge them, and make them strong, so that they can deal with the inevitable snakes in the garden, right? You don't shelter them and make them weak and tell them they're victims and confuse them about their identity and describe their entire culture as corrupt and turn them into hopeless nihilists by the time they're 18. That's not a good idea, and I know you all know that's not a good idea. There are things to be done in the world that are worth doing, and that's what you tell your children: get the hell out there, right? Get the hell out there, plow some ground, plant some trees, feed some people.

Jordan Peterson 00:27:47

Use your damn head and quit whining about the substructure of existence. It's unfair, obviously. It's tragic, clearly. What are you gonna do — you're gonna whine about that and hide in your basement, talk about how the world is oppressing you? Jesus, that's so pathetic — there's hardly words for it. So you encourage your children. Human beings are very, very tough and resilient creatures, and despite the fact that we live under the ever-present shadow of death, we're capable [inaudible], and that's what we need to do. Our whole culture is predicated on that principle, and that's actually why it's not corrupt, right? Our whole culture is predicated on the hero — that's the West, the culture of the heroic individual who confronts chaos and transforms it into habitable order. The oldest story of mankind. We live in — un — [inaudible]. And that's how you raise your children — not to be safe.

Jordan Peterson 00:28:46

There's no safety in life. What are you, a fool? There's no safety in life. How many of you could be mangled by heavy machinery? There's no safety in life. You train your children to be courageous and competent, not to be safe. And that's something that we need to remember, because that's how you make people safe — you make them competent, so that they can function in the world, so that people can't tyrannize them, not without a fight, so that when the inevitable slings and arrows of fortune make themselves manifest, they're ready for 'em, and ready to take arms against their sea of trouble, right? Strength and virtue, honesty, responsibility — all those are associated with a deep meaning in life. And it is that deep meaning that stops people from becoming cynical, nihilistic, and destructive. We all know this. We need to remember it. We need to take not so much pride in it, but we should take humble gratitude for the fact that we already know this.

Jordan Peterson 00:29:49

Well, there are times in your life where you have a choice to engage in the conflict now, or to wait and engage in it later when it's worse. Those are your options. There's no clear path to quiet and safety here. And maybe I'm wrong, maybe things aren't moving down this road, but I don't think so.

Jordan Peterson 00:30:49

I think they are, and it is certainly the case that this is already the situation in universities. So we might as well solve this problem while it's still solvable — that's my estimation. There are lots of times where you don't get to not engage in the conflict. It's perfectly reasonable when people confront you with the conundrum to say, look, I'd rather not have the trouble that goes along with that. That's exactly what you should say most of the time, because to walk away from a fight is usually the wisest thing to do. But if you know full well that walking away from one opponent means that three are going to show up at your doorstep the next day, then it's not very wise to walk away. And I would say — I see this happening constantly, especially in the corporate world now — the radical leftists go after the corporations for their hypothetical corruption.

Jordan Peterson 00:31:37

And I'm certainly not saying that corporations are without corruption, because they're also made out of people. But they bend backwards immediately and take two steps backwards, and the radicals take two steps forward, so that the situation is even worse in the next quarter. And so that's just gonna continue to happen. It's not like you have "do nothing and be safe" on this hand and "engage in the conflict foolishly" on that hand — that's not the choice. It's like: straighten this out now, or wait — and if you wait, you're gonna get gored. So that's how it looks to me, and I might not be correct. I've been talking about this sort of thing in Canada now, to a scandalous degree, let's say, for really about 18 months, and I've been called every name in the book. I think "Hitler" is pretty much as bad as it can get.

Jordan Peterson 00:32:26

So that's kind of talked out there — luckily the source wasn't very credible, to say the least. I've got about 300 hours of videos online, something like that, that outline why I think this way. And as you pointed out, people seem to find it quite compelling. And it's because, as far as I can tell, I don't really have a stake in this, in some sense, except that I can see that things are going in a direction that I don't think is good, and I'm saying that as straightforwardly and as deeply as I possibly can. I spent my entire academic career studying the atrocities of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, trying to understand how those things came about, to understand how cultures could become that warped and demented, and how the people within them — normal individuals — could commit the absolute atrocities that they all committed.

Jordan Peterson 00:33:18

And I think I understand that very well — unfortunately, well, you might say — and that research constitutes the bedrock, I would say, of the knowledge that's enabled me to see the writing on the wall. You can watch my videos if you're interested, or not, and decide for yourself if I know what the hell I'm talking about. And, like I said, perhaps I don't, but I'm afraid I do. So that's how it is [laughter].

Jordan Peterson 00:34:18

I don't think — I don't think I'm strong. I just think I'm afraid of the right things. That's not the same thing, right? No — turning away from one monster to face a smaller one doesn't really constitute bravery, it just constitutes wisdom. And because what I see coming isn't good, then confronting what I see now doesn't seem brave, it just seems prudent. So there's that. Then with regards to listening to your enemy, I've done plenty of that. I mean, seriously — and this is the literal truth — I would say there hasn't been a single day in the last 15 months where I haven't been embroiled in something deeply controversial.

Jordan Peterson 00:35:19

I mean, seriously controversial —

Jordan Peterson 00:35:19

Oh yes [laughter]. And I'm constantly being assaulted, let's say, by accusations of all sorts, and I'm taking them very seriously. I talk with my family, who are very smart and wise and supportive, and I talk with my friends, and we go over what I'm saying with a fine-tooth comb, and I'm thinking and writing constantly to see if I'm on the right track, and listening to the criticism, because I want to get this right. And, you know, if someone throws 50 things at you, and 49 of them are unwarranted, one of them might be true — it's worth figuring out which one of those is true, because maybe you can bloody well fix it. You don't have to walk blind — you can do a bit. That's the advantage of listening to your critics.

Jordan Peterson 00:36:03

But I think I've done that — certainly not perfectly, but as well as I can do it. And I'm also very critical of my own thinking — I'm always trying to pry it up with a crowbar, one way or another, to see if I've left something fundamental unaddressed. Like I said, you can look online and find that out for yourself and see what you think. And I guess there's some other evidence for my credibility, if that evidence needs to be put forward. I did this series of biblical lectures last year — it was quite surreal, I would say. I rented the theater in Toronto, and I did 13 lectures on Genesis, the book. It really — it's a staggering book — speaking from a psychological perspective, which is what I was doing in the videos, because I'm not a theologian. But the theater was packed every time.

Jordan Peterson 00:36:58

It was all young men, and millions of people have watched the lectures online. It's like, well, what the hell's up with that? How do you get an audience full of young men to attend psychological lectures on Genesis? You try presenting that as a business plan — good luck with that. So there's something that I'm saying, and I don't think it's because I'm saying it — it's because I've studied mythology and religious thinking and belief systems for a very long time, and tried to get to the bottom of it as much as I possibly can. And I've been explaining what I've learned, and it's not the fact that I'm explaining it — it's the power of these underlying stories that's carrying it today. Now, our culture is Judeo-Christian in its fundamental origin. And of course, the ideas of Judeo-Christianity have been under radical assault for about 400 years, partly for good reason, partly because of the rise of science —

Jordan Peterson 00:38:00

— [inaudible] — then you better look the hell out, there's definitely danger in doing that in the West. So I'd be lecturing about what I think these old stories mean. And what they mean, I would say, is profoundly — the consciousness of the human being at the center of the cosmos, as a part of the divine mechanism, whereby the potential of the world is transformed into reality. That's all we all do. And we have an ultimate moral obligation to confront possibility and turn it into something as closely resembling heaven as we can, rather than doing everything we can to turn it into — and we did that, we did that in the 20th century. We turned everything into hell, and I don't think we should do it again. I think that we're in great danger of walking down the same pathway, and I don't think we should do it. That's what I think — that everybody should man up and bear their suffering properly, and fix what they can fix around them, and straighten out their lives and work for themselves and for others. Put the damn ship straight, here, to sail on it properly into the future.

Jordan Peterson 00:39:47

Yes. I should thank my publisher — it's called 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. I wrote some rules a while back for a website called Quora. I wrote about 40 of them — some kid wrote in and asked what some good guidelines for living were, and so I wrote down these 40 rules, and they were very popular on this website — tens of thousands of people read them and commented on them. So I turned 12 of them into a book.

Jordan Peterson 00:40:45

The book is a meditation on the sorts of things that I talked with you about today, and it's an attempt to lay out — you could think about it as a self-help book, in some sense, that's one way of thinking about it, but I would say it's deeper than most self-help books. It's more of a warning about the difficulty of life, I would say. But I'm trying to lay out, for example, what it means for people to be made in the image of God, because part of what that means is that — at the beginning of time, God used the word to conjure order out of potential, conjure order out of chaos. That's the story of Genesis, the origin story, and human beings are made in that image. And what that means is that we have that spark of the divine.

Jordan Peterson 00:41:33

It enables us to conjure up order out of chaos. And if we do that properly, honestly — that is, primarily, if we do that honestly with responsibility — then the order that we conjure out of the possibility is good. That's what God says when he creates the world at the beginning of time — he uses truth to speak forth order and describes it as good. Well, the order that we can pull out of the chaos that surrounds us with the use of truth is good, and that's what we should aim for. I'm trying, in this book, at least in part, to explain what those ideas mean, so that people can get a grip on them and really understand what they mean, so that they can be fortified in their necessary confrontation with the tyranny of the state and the chaos of nature. So you can take a look at that book if you're interested in it — take some risk, because it's a difficult book, but I'm hoping that it will be as worthwhile to read as it was to write.

Jordan Peterson 00:42:36

Thank you.