This is the only thing I can find. The jerks asking the questions are supposedly on the conservative side but are clearly open-ended critics of Trump. Peterson was much more careful and if he was critical, it was only about Trump’s timing in what he said and not what he said. The bozos interviewing cannot see the point. This is Peterson in my own rough but reasonably accurate transcription (from around 2:00 in):
“Truth is a tricky thing because you have to take the temporal context into account. There are white lies and black truths. Black truth is when you use the truth in a way that isn’t truthful. . . just like a white lie is a lie that isn’t harmful…
“What Trump did wrong … was he failed to specify the time and the space of the utterance. Because what he should have come out and done is said that I unequivocally denounce the white supremacist racism that emerged in Charlottesville, and then he should have shut up. And then two weeks later he could have said, well when we look at the political landscape as a whole that it’s pretty obvious there are reprehensible individuals acting out on both ends of the extreme. The Charlottesville week was not the week to make that point.”
And this is Peterson’s views on Trump’s intelligence.
He gets it, even if he is cautious about saying it.
A brief exchange in which Peterson comprehensively rebuts everything she premises her questions on. He worries about when he finally makes a mistake after which his credibility will fall apart. We out here will forgive him, but the question will be whether he then forgives himself.
But his style as much as his content is what is so formidable. He never backs down! He never accepts the premise of the person asking the question, since in dealing with the media, the person on the other side will almost always be an enemy who is trying to do him in. And really, who is going to be able to rebut Karl Jung who is the basis for much of what he says? You would have to be as much a genius as Jung was himself to know in which way Peterson was wrong or even misguided. Won’t find anyone like that on the media, or anywhere else either. As he says about what has drawn others to listen closely to what he says:
“I tell archetypal stories. I think that’s it.”
And as for the most important lesson he provides to young men causing them to pay attention to what he says:
“Rights are not as useful in regard to establishing what’s meaningful in your life as responsibility.”
This is the blurb that comes with the vid:
Jordan Peterson sits down with the CBC’s Wendy Mesley to talk about political polarization, Pepe the Frog and his support from the far right. He has a new book called 12 Rules for Life: an Antidote to Chaos. Peterson sparked controversy in 2016, when he spoke against a federal bill on gender expression and the University of Toronto’s policy requirement to address students by their gender pronoun of choice.
But not every interview is hostile: Jordan Peterson – What if Cathy Newman had been a Male Interviewer?
Always makes sense and speaks directly to the point.
Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro join Dave Rubin for a live discussion about postmodernism, Trump, conservatism, free speech, and rules for life.
Well, they say it’s a live discussion but it is actually recorded, although I am sure that at the time it took place, it was really them talking to each other.
My two favourite writers at one and the same time – both, as it happens Canadian, I think only by coincidence but perhaps not – in which one, David Solway, discusses the other, Jordan Peterson, with the title, The Jordan Peterson Phenomenon. My only observation is that David Solway is less astonished at the emergence of Jordan Peterson because they have been friends for a long time and therefore he is used to hearing Peterson, and no doubt others of a similar cast of mind, such as his wife, the equally brave and articulate Janice Fiamengo. He may therefore be less aware than someone such as myself, who has no such close associates, how absolutely rare a Jordan Peterson is. I have only once or twice personally met up with someone anywhere near holding the kinds of views Peterson has expressed so accurately, who is reaching a vast audience that has been hungering for this kind of sustained and intelligent articulation of our values that today can be found virtually nowhere else. Partly this is because few understand these issues even half so well, and partly because very few are willing to stand up in public and make the case to others. Career death is a common phenomenon for those who do.
But Peterson has done something else as well. What he did was transcend discussion of the politics of the day, which is what most of us do. Most of us anchor our observations on some piece of current events that we use as a basis for saying whatever it is we say. He has, instead, stepped out of time and place, into the rarefied atmosphere of the ancient and historical traditions of our own cultural past, placing them within an evolutionary progression as they have developed literally since the Stone Age. It is in part because he is a psychologist, and therefore used to ideas which are philosophically grounded, but also because he has been able to draw down on a vast array of our own literary and religious traditions to explain, at a very deep level, the basis for the ideas each of us has, which allow those of us who come across his work to see past and through the post-modernist, cultural-Marxist conceptions that are doing so much to ruin Western civilisation at the present time, and indeed, almost all of the ancient civilisations of the world. He has explained in unusually accessible terms what the West has stood for, and why preserving this tradition is so crucial. Let me take you to this passage from David Solway to help explain what I mean:
Peterson’s message is not new to anyone who has read and pondered his sources; yet it is new in the sense that he has performed an act of synthesis for a largely illiterate, politically indoctrinated and under-educated generation. As John Dale Dunn writes in American Thinker, Peterson’s “great accomplishment is teaching, counseling, and coaching people to urge them to live the good life, the virtuous life … The only way he might be ambushed is [by being targeted] by the destroyers of the left with their name calling and politics of personal destruction,” deploying tactics straight out of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.
I may well be part of that “largely illiterate, politically indoctrinated and under-educated generation” but in that case we all are. Many of us have fought over this same terrain but have made no breakthroughs on the Western Civilisation Front in the ongoing Culture Wars. Jordan Peterson has, and he may have established a new salient that we need to do everything we can to reinforce, defend and expand.
The above is Jordan Peterson refuting utilitarian philosophy whose core principle is that happiness is life’s aim. As much as I am an admirer of John Stuart Mill, this part of his philosophy has always left me cold. Peterson explains why in just two minutes. And below is an interview by Dennis Prager, no mean philosopher himself.
And then this about finding the right woman rather than roaming the field, assuming you can roam the field.
The videos are both of Jordan Peterson discussing his extraordinary book, 12 Rules for Life. This is the statement that comes with the first:
The clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson sets out twelve profound and practical principles for living a meaningful life. His 12 Rules for Life will offer an antidote to the chaos in our lives: with eternal truths applied to our modern problems.
As for the book, I just finished it today, and my advice to you is to buy it and read it yourself. It is like nothing you have ever come across before.
Waking up at 35, desperate to have a child, is not a good realisation, as Peterson says. That reasonable point prompted the young man hosting the video to chip in with a charmless insight — that the anxieties of mid-30s women keen to be mothers are known as “baby rabies’’ among “plenty of communities of young men … in the dating scene’’. There is no lack of work for psychologists. But young women are not the ones who most need help.
And now from the comments, working from the first of the Top Comments and then down.
This article is akin to Cathy Newman’s interview of Peterson. It’s taking what Peterson says out of context or is straight-out inaccurate. One of the refreshing things about Peterson is that he’s telling home truths, and bases many or most of his observations on decades of being a treating psychologist of both men and women. What an irony that a female journalist chooses to block the concerns and experience of many women in this rant against him.
Young women entering law, he claims, will find it “very, very demanding, very, very difficult, very, very stressful and very, very competitive. And you’re not going to find the fulfilment of your desire for intimate, close interpersonal relationships’’. How patronising. Isn’t he just telling it like it is and asking of women in particular “is this what you want”?
“In exaggerating the problems that women can expect to face in demanding careers, Peterson casts doubt on their capabilities” He’s neither exaggerating nor casting doubts on capabilities, he is again asking “is this what you want”.
Jordan Petersen has kept his own practice as a clinical psychologist outside his University work and the points he makes are from experience with many women who have come to him in that private practice with problems created by the real-life trials and tribulations he now seeks to point out to those who will listen.
It’s disappointing, but not unexpected, for the article to refer, in a pejorative fashion that the advice of Dr Peterson appeals to “some conservatives” suggesting extreme right-wingers and thus to be ignored. He claims no political position and an interest only in the truth.
@Neil I agree with Peterson – I’m a doctor working 60 hours a week – it is hard, very demanding and very stressful. Having close interpersonal relationships is extremely difficult – luckily my husband is happy to work as a team to raise children and understood the impact my career would have on family life before he married me.
“By the time you’re 40, if you don’t have a family and children you are one lost soul.’’
That’s true, as a generalisation. Obviously some women do not ever want to have kids and live happily without them, but the vast majority eventually realise children are what they want most of all. It’s usually around 35 that it dawns on them they’ve wasted their best years sleeping around with worthless men and obsessing over meaningless work.
This doesn’t affect men as much because there is usually no shortage of younger women willing to date older men, and men remain fertile their whole life. Women, on the other hand, struggle to find a decent partner once they hit 35 and inevitably have to significantly lower their standards. The result is more miserable women, more broken families, more neglected children and more socialism to pay for it all.. Feminism is self-defeating and unfortunately it’s women who usually end up worse off.
You might say Peterson is patronising; I say he is realistic.
He seems to get a lot of support from women in their 50s and over so you cant speak for them as a group. This is the type of emotive shallow analysis that drives people to Peterson. The contrast between Newman and Peterson was embarrassing and your contribution is almost as insipid as Newman’s was.
One has always to be careful of an article like this…cherry picking without context is dangerous. I have seen a lot of Petersons work and I have rarely heard him say anything that would upset a well grounded woman. That is why his interview with Cathy Newman was such a car crash (for her) She tried on the feminist rant only to be met with sensible well researched answers that she could not deal with.
I don’t find Jordan Peterson patronising. He is realistic and respectful – realistic about the differing natures of men and women and able to recognise, as most feminists do not, that difference does not mean unequal in value.
Sorry Tessa, but I can’t fault a single word that JP says in this video.
I know from personal experience that pursuing a career is hard work, often unsatisfying, always competitive…and it doesn’t come without many sacrifices.
Young women are fed a whole lot of aspirational and unrealistic claptrap, which is all well and good for some, but for others, it simply leads to regret and disappointment.
JP’s video dispels some of the myths that are fed to young women about what’s important in life.
I think the writer must have watched a different video to the one I saw? Either that or she has a problem listening and actually responding to what was said rather than responding to what she wanted him to say!
His single most important piece of advice: “Stop saying things that make you weak.”
Dealing with critics: “They are not just trying to shut you down but to discredit you. If you are very careful in what you say AND YOU DON’T BACK DOWN ultimately things turn around for you.”
On the question, are you dangerous: “Yeah!” . . . “You should be able to be a monster and then not be one.”
On one form of censorship now very common: “If you are a conservative it is highly probable that your youtube content will be de-monitised. . . . It will not be associated with advertising content” and therefore not be promoted and viewed.
Peterson begins the interview by explaining why he tells young men to grow up and take responsibility for getting their lives together and becoming good partners. He notes he isn’t talking exclusively to men, and that he has lots of female fans.
“What’s in it for the women, though?” Newman asks.
“Well, what sort of partner do you want?” Peterson says. “Do you want an overgrown child? Or do you want someone to contend with who is going to help you?”
“So you’re saying,” Newman retorts, “that women have some sort of duty to help fix the crisis of masculinity.” But that’s not what he said. He posited a vested interest, not a duty.
“Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful,” Peterson goes on to assert. “And I don’t mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. That’s not power. That’s just corruption. Power is competence. And why in the world would you not want a competent partner? Well, I know why, actually, you can’t dominate a competent partner. So if you want domination—”
The interviewer interrupts, “So you’re saying women want to dominate, is that what you’re saying?”
And then there is the discussion on the pay gap between men and women, which of course refers to the difference in the averages. An old old story among economists for which the answers are all well known except to those who prefer not to know. But Peterson is a psychologist so takes a very different tack.
The next section of the interview concerns the pay gap between men and women, and whether it is rooted in gender itself or other nondiscriminatory factors:
Newman: … that 9 percent pay gap, that’s a gap between median hourly earnings between men and women. That exists.
Peterson: Yes. But there’s multiple reasons for that. One of them is gender, but that’s not the only reason. If you’re a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis. You say women in aggregate are paid less than men. Okay. Well then we break its down by age; we break it down by occupation; we break it down by interest; we break it down by personality.
Newman: But you’re saying, basically, it doesn’t matter if women aren’t getting to the top, because that’s what is skewing that gender pay gap, isn’t it? You’re saying that’s just a fact of life, women aren’t necessarily going to get to the top.
Peterson: No, I’m not saying it doesn’t matter, either. I’m saying there are multiple reasons for it.
Newman: Yeah, but why should women put up with those reasons?
Peterson: I’m not saying that they should put up with it! I’m saying that the claim that the wage gap between men and women is only due to sex is wrong. And it is wrong. There’s no doubt about that. The multivariate analysis have been done. So let me give you an example––
The interviewer seemed eager to impute to Peterson a belief that a large, extant wage gap between men and women is a “fact of life” that women should just “put up with,” though all those assertions are contrary to his real positions on the matter.
Throughout this next section, the interviewer repeatedly tries to oversimplify Peterson’s view, as if he believes one factor he discusses is all-important, and then she seems to assume that because Peterson believes that given factor helps to explain a pay gap between men and women, he doesn’t support any actions that would bring about a more equal outcome.
Her surprised question near the end suggests earnest confusion:
Peterson: There’s a personality trait known as agreeableness. Agreeable people are compassionate and polite. And agreeable people get paid less than disagreeable people for the same job. Women are more agreeable than men.
Newman: Again, a vast generalization. Some women are not more agreeable than men.
Peterson: That’s true. And some women get paid more than men.
Newman: So you’re saying by and large women are too agreeable to get the pay raises that they deserve.
Peterson: No, I’m saying that is one component of a multivariate equation that predicts salary. It accounts for maybe 5 percent of the variance. So you need another 18 factors, one of which is gender. And there is prejudice. There’s no doubt about that. But it accounts for a much smaller portion of the variance in the pay gap than the radical feminists claim.
Newman: Okay, so rather than denying that the pay gap exists, which is what you did at the beginning of this conversation, shouldn’t you say to women, rather than being agreeable and not asking for a pay raise, go ask for a pay raise. Make yourself disagreeable with your boss.
Peterson: But I didn’t deny it existed, I denied that it existed because of gender. See, because I’m very, very, very careful with my words.
Newman: So the pay gap exists. You accept that. I mean the pay gap between men and women exists—but you’re saying it’s not because of gender, it’s because women are too agreeable to ask for pay raises.
Peterson: That’s one of the reasons.
Newman: Okay, so why not get them to ask for a pay raise? Wouldn’t that be fairer?
Peterson: I’ve done that many, many, many times in my career. So one of the things you do as a clinical psychologist is assertiveness training. So you might say––often you treat people for anxiety, you treat them for depression, and maybe the next most common category after that would be assertiveness training. So I’ve had many, many women, extraordinarily competent women, in my clinical and consulting practice, and we’ve put together strategies for their career development that involved continual pushing, competing, for higher wages. And often tripled their wages within a five-year period.
Karen Straughan’s Take on Jordan Peterson’s Channel 4 Interview. It lasts 38 minutes but never wavered for a moment. So much to get and she gets it very well. Interesting first comment by Karen Straughan in the youtube comments:
Within ten minutes of this video going up, Channel 4 had hit me with a copyright takedown. I filed a dispute based on fair use and it’s now viewable again, but have lost my monetization privileges on this video for up to 30 days, the fuckers.
The beeb didn’t want to see their shame spread any farther, but too late for that. Good to know that the BBC is embarrassed by the interview, and so they should be.
FACEBOOK RESPONSE: A mate of mine put this post up on Facebook and this is the note I just received from him:
Facebook just marked as spam my post of your post
I’m not on Facebook so I don’t know how any of it works, but the response time had to have been less than an hour. These people are evil, genuinely evil.
These are reactions to the Cathy Newman interview of Jordan Peterson. His own reaction, as discussed in the final video below, is that the interview is an example of “the instability of the times we are in.” It is a forewarning of the dark times ahead for us all.
These are a series of quotes from the last interview with Peterson not necessarily perfectly transcribed [and now for some reason no longer available]:
“She laid out two sets of ideological presuppositions, two sets actually, her set and my set. The set of ideological position she laid out from my side bore very little relation to what I think or say.”
“She would ask me a question that wasn’t really a question but a barb with bait on the end of it. She would say what I said which had nothing to do with what I had said. She was fabricating on the sly the person – the villain – that she hoped I would be and insisting that was me and denying that it was a lie. That is what the interview was.”
“I was watching her after the first minute like a clinician and watching what she was doing. And I truly don’t believe that anything she said in that entire interview was true on its own.”
The form of conversation was not one designed to further our knowledge of the truth which is the highest form of conversation. Indeed, there is quite a fascinating discussion of the nature of her approach to the discussion. “Playing the devil’s advocate and asking difficult questions are not the same thing.”
“Her claims became so preposterous and self-contradictory that it was difficult to remain completely detached. And this was the crux of the interview . . . she had asked me in her self-righteous manner just what gave me the right to offend someone and hurt their feelings, and I thought about six things at the same time, but the first thing I thought was, you’re a journalist, that’s the last question in the world you should ever ask someone, if you have any genuine integrity as a journalist because that’s all you have as a journalist. You have the right to offend people and hurt their feelings. So I called her out on that.”
“There was a three-fold ideological battle going on. There was a battle between her position which was radically neo-Marxist post-modernist. She was arguing against who she thought I was. And then there was the position I was trying to put forward which had virtually nothing to do with what she was discussing.”
“I was able to keep reasonably detatched during the interview because whoever she thought she was talking to bore very little resemblance to me.”
“But she couldn’t make her reputation and her living that way using those tactics – those were not tactics of seeking the truth but they were almost tactics of domination.”
But the outcome should not be seen as a win since “virtually everyone watching it online . . . are not happy with the way the interview went. . . . That should be crushing for her. . . . If we are forestalling a correction and we keep putting it off, then when it comes it will be much worse.”
Newman was driven by “ideologically motivated lies”.
In regard to his life’s work: “My conscious goal was the hope it would make people immune to ideological possession” an ambition which he himself notes he has not been successful at.
Anyway, don’t ignore the last of the videos the first half hour of which are Peterson’s own reflections. That is the most disturbing part of this entire episode and is worth your close attention. You should also listen to the last hour and a quarter as well but the analysis of the conversation is quite profound and something you will rarely encounter. He is a very dark prophet of our time. These are his own words about the kinds of outcome Cathy Newman, and indeed the entire post-modernist world of the neo-Marxist left, are leading us towards.
“We are playing with fire. Polarisation can only go on for so long before we start acting it out.”
I don’t think when we start acting these things out that the outcomes will be in any way positive at all. Meanwhile, here are the various videos but don’t forget the one that comes last.
And if you haven’t seen it yet, this is the original interview. And what makes this so remarkable is that the BBC was so certain of the outcome that they scheduled a half hour interview that went very very wrong, for them.
And the following provides some commentary about Cathy Newman and the entire outcome by Peterson. The first 33 minutes and then the rest is his discussing his philosophy and work.
Law of Markets 