Academics From Canada

"Here's how you can tell someone is your friend: A) You can tell them bad news, and they'll listen. B) You can tell them good news, and they'll help you celebrate."

"To know that the biblical stories have a phenomenological truth is really worth knowing, because the poor fundamentalists are trying to cling to their moral structure and I understand why, because it does organize their societies and it organizes their psyches so they've got something to cling to. But they don't have a very sophisticated idea of the complexity of the idea of what constitutes truth, and they try to gerrymander the biblical stories into the domain of scientific theory, promoting Creationism, for example, as an alternative scientific theory. That just isn't going to go anywhere, because the people who wrote these damn stories weren't scientists to begin with. There weren't any scientists back then. There's hardly any scientists now! Really, it's hard to think scientifically. Even scientists don't think scientifically outside the lab, and hardly even when they're in the lab. You've got to get peer-reviewed and criticized. It's hard to think scientifically. So, however, the people who wrote these stories thought more like dramatists think, like Shakespeare thought. But that doesn't mean that there isn't truth in it; it just means you have to be a little more sophisticated about your ideas about truth. And that's okay. There are truths to live by. Okay, fine—then we need to figure out what those are, because we need to live and maybe not to suffer so much. And so if you know that the Bible stories in general are trying to represent the lived experience of conscious individuals, then that opens up the possibility of a whole different realm of understanding and eliminates the contradiction that's been painful for people between the objective world and the claims of religious stories."

"There's no difference between the conquering of the unknown and the creation of habitable order."

"Do you want to be what you are or do you want to be what continually changes what you are?"

"You can't have the conversation about rights without the conversation about responsibility, because your rights are my responsibility. That's what they are, technically, so you just can't have only half of that discussion. And we're only having half of that discussion. Then the question is, "Well, what are you leaving out if you're only having that half of the discussion?" And the answer is, "Well, you're leaving out responsibility." And then the question is, "Well, what are you leaving out if you're leaving out responsibility?" And the answer might be: "Well, maybe you're leaving out the meaning of life." Here you are, suffering away. What makes it worthwhile? Rights? It's almost impossible to describe how bad an idea that is. Responsibility: that's what gives life meaning. Lift a load. Then you can tolerate yourself. Look at yourself: you're useless, easily hurt, easily killed. Why should you have any self-respect? Pick something up and carry it. Make it heavy enough so that you can think, yah, well, useless as I am, at least I can move that from there to there. For men, there's nothing but responsibility. Women have their sets of responsibilities: they're not the same. Women have to take primary responsibility for having infants, at least, and also for caring for them. They're structured differently than men for biological necessity. Women know what they have to do; men have to figure out what they have to do. And if they have nothing worth living for, then they stay Peter Pan—and why the hell not? The alternative to valued responsibility is impulsive, low-class pleasure. Why lift a load if there's nothing in it for you? And that's what we're doing to men and boys that's a very bad idea. "You're pathological and oppressive." "Fine, then! Why the hell am I going to play? If I get no credit for bearing responsibility, then you can be sure I won't bear any." But then your life is useless and meaningless, and you're full of self-contempt and nihilism, and that's not good. And so that's what I think is going on at a deeper level with regard to men needing this direction. A man has to decide that he's going to do something: he has to decide that."

"It's so interesting to watch the young men when you talk to them about responsibility. They're so goddamned thrilled about it. It just blows me away. It's like, "Really?!" That's the counterculture: Grow the hell up and do something useful! "Really? I can do that? Oh, I'm so excited by that idea! No one ever mentioned that before!" It's like, "Rights, rights, rights, rights…" Jesus! It's appalling. People have had enough of that. And they better have, because it's a non-productive mode of being. Responsibility, man: that's where the meaning in life is."

"Most of the adventure genre is about how there is some enemy that's lurking, and someone rises up to confront it and maintain order. There's no getting away from that story."

"Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion—and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings."

": Jordan: I could be either of them. But I don't have to tell you."

"Every explorer is therefore, by necessity, a revolutionary, and every successful revolutionary is a peacemaker."

"Peterson tosses 2,000 years of Christian biblical theology and redefines what it means to be a Christian as mere truth-seeking — no repentance, no regeneration, no profession of faith, and it seems not even a conscious decision to become a follower of Jesus Christ. This Christ-less Christianity is so cut-rate as to make what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” look downright expensive. …There is more of the postmodern about Peterson’s philosophy than one might imagine."

"For all the bizarre but now-familiar attempts to smear him as ‘far-right,’ Jordan Peterson is just a centrist liberal, with all the uninterestingness that that entails. But he’s a centrist liberal who has been demoralized by the officialization of polite falsehood enough to loudly speak what should be insipid truths. Platitudes like ‘Enlightenment values are worth preserving’ and ‘science is true even if when produces discomforting results’ now qualify as bomb-throwing."

"The startling success of his elevated arguments for the importance of order has made [Jordan Peterson] the most significant conservative thinker to appear in the English-speaking world in a generation."

"The more you hear Peterson babble about anything that isn’t himself, the more it becomes apparent that he’s simply not very intelligent or very well-read."

"Peterson is, in many ways, countercultural. He doesn't offer get-rich-quick schemes, or pick-up techniques. He is not libertine or libertarian. He promises that life is a struggle, but that it is ultimately worthwhile."

": Jordan: No, you were invited... to..."

": Danny: You don't have to tell me. I was under the impression- I was invited to talk to a Christian. Am I not talking to a Christian?"

": Danny: I think everyone should look at the title of the YouTube channel. You're probably in the wrong YouTube video."

"I've tried to maintain a relatively balanced view of the excesses on both sides of the political spectrum, but one thing I have clearly experienced repeatedly is that the Left will shun and exclude to a degree that's almost unknown on the Right. I've never had anyone on the Right, that I've talked to, refuse to talk to a hypothetical guest, for example. And I've had people on the Left, they just do that all the time. And I don't get that exactly. I think maybe it has to do with the association in personality between agreeableness and Leftist's proclivity. So the socialist types, the Lefties, are technically more agreeable. And I think maybe among agreeable people, if you don't go along with the agreeable game you are much more likely to be categorized as a predator."

"Part of the reason that politicians have come to believe that the public is stupid and has no attention span is that television had a 30-second attention span. So you had to assume your audience remembered nothing, knew nothing, and could flip out to a different channel at any moment. Plus the bandwidth was insanely expensive. Now all that is gone. I think that will be a revolution in political discourse."

"You can kill people with compassion. That's the Freudian Oedipal situation. Think about working in a nursing home. There's a rule of thumb that we can use as a guide when interacting with people in general. It is this: Do not do anything for anyone that they can do themselves. You just steal it from them. Imagine that you're working with elderly people. It might be easier to do something for them than to let them struggle through it. But you just speed their demise by taking away their last vestiges of independence. People do the same thing with kids. The answer is: struggle through it."

"The kids are starting to burn this place and to trash it. They're dragging a grand piano down the stairs. It's the destruction of high culture, about which they're nothing but cynical, because they don't believe that hard work and sacrifice can produce something of any value. They want to bring it down and destroy it. You can see it in the story of Cain and Abel. Abel is hard working and everyone likes him, and he makes the proper sacrifices, so his life goes really well. And that's part of the reason that Cain hates him. He's jealous and resentful, but worse than that—if you're not doing very well and you're around someone who is doing very well it's painful, because the mere fact of their Being judges you. And so it's very easy to want to destroy that ideal so that you don't have to live with the terrible consequences of seeing it embodied in front of you. And so part of the reason that people want to tear things down is so that they don't have anything to contrast themselves against and to feel bad. And that's exactly what's happening here. Kids are destroying all of this culture, because the fact that it exists judges them."

"The thing that's so interesting about being alive is that you're all in. No matter what you do you're all in; this is gonna kill you. So I think you might as well play the most magnificent game you can while you're waiting—because, do you have anything better to do, really?"

"If you are not capable of cruelty, then you are absolutely a victim of anyone who is. For those who are exceedingly agreeable, there is a part of them crying out for the incorporation of the monster within them, which is what gives them strength of character and self-respect, because it is impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth. And if you grow teeth, you realize that you're somewhat dangerous, or seriously dangerous. Then you might be more willing to demand that you treat yourself with respect and that other people do the same thing. That doesn't mean that being cruel is better than not being cruel. What it means is that being able to be cruel, and then not being cruel, is better than not being able to be cruel, because in the first case you're nothing but weak and naïve, and in the second case you're dangerous but you have it under control. If you're competent at fighting, it actually decreases the probability that you're going to have to fight, because when someone pushes you you'll be able to respond with confidence, and with any luck a reasonable show of confidence, which is a show of dominance, will be enough to make the bully back off."

"People camouflage against the herd. People aren't after happiness, they're after not hurting."

"Life is suffering. Love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering ameliorated. Truth is the handmaiden of love. Dialogue is the pathway to truth. Humility is recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn. To learn is to die voluntarily and be born again, in great ways and small. So speech must be untrammeled, so that dialogue can take place, so that we can all humbly learn, so that truth can serve love, so that suffering can be ameliorated, so that we can all stumble forward to the Kingdom of God ."

"I know that the evidence for genuine religious experience is incontrovertible, but it's not explicable. So I don't want to explain it away. I want to pull back from that and leave it as a fact and a mystery, and then we're going to look at this from a rational perspective, and say that the initial formulation of the idea of God was an attempt to abstract out the ideal and to consider it as an abstraction outside its instantiation. And that's good enough. It's an amazing thing if it's true. But I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater."

"The way that we behave contains way more information than we know. And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge has been extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave, and telling stories about it over thousands and thousands and thousands of years, extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity, and trying to represent them party through imitations but also through drama, mythology, literature, and art, and all of that, to represent what we're like so we can understand what we're like. That process of understanding is what we see unfolding, at least in part, in the Biblical stories. It's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that, which is one of the things that makes it so complex, but I see in it the struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears and to become conscious of what it means to be human, and that's a very difficult thing."

"A good work of fiction is more real than the stories from which it was derived. Otherwise it has no staying power. It's distilled reality. And some would say "it never happened," but it depends on what you mean by "happened." If it's a pattern that repeats in many, many places, with variation, you can abstract out the central pattern. So the pattern never purely existed in any specific form, but the fact that you pulled a pattern out from all those exemplars means that you've extracted something real. I think the reason that the story of Adam and Eve has been immune to being forgotten is because it says things about the nature of the human condition that are always true."

"You plunge into that underworld space, and that's also where you begin to nurse feelings of resentment and aggrievement and murder and homicide—and even worse. If people are betrayed enough, they become obsessed with the futility of Being itself, and they go to places where perhaps no one would ever want to go if they were in their right mind. And they begin to nurse fantasies of the ultimate revenge, and that's a horrible place to be. That's hell. That's why hell has always been a suburb of the underworld, because if you get plunged into a situation that you don't understand, and things are not good for you anymore, it's only one step from being completely confused, to being completely outraged and resentful, and then it's only one step from there to really looking for revenge. And that can take you places—well, that merely to imagine properly can be traumatic. And I've seen that with people many times. And I think that anybody who uses their imagination on themselves can see how that happens, because I can't imagine that there is a single person in the room who hasn't nursed fairly intense fantasies of revenge, at least at one point in their life—and usually for what appear to be good reasons. It can shake your faith in Being to be betrayed, but if it shakes it so badly that you turn against Being itself, that's certainly no solution. All it does is make everything that's bad even worse."

"Something that's everything lacks limitation. There are advantages to not being able to do things. If you had everything you wanted at every moment at your fingertips, then there's nothing. There's no story. It's like Superman being able to bounces hydrogen bombs off of him. The whole series died because he didn't have any flaws. There's no story without limitation."

"The proper path of life is to take the tradition and spirit that is associated with consciousness as such, and to act it out in your own personal life in a way that is analogous with the way Christ acted it out in his life. What that means, in part, is the acceptance of the tragic preconditions of existence. That's partly betrayal by friends and by family and by the state, it's partly punishment for sins that you did not commit (the arbitrary nature of justice), and the fact of finitude. Your duty, and the way to set things right in the cosmos, is to accept all those details as necessary preconditions for being and to act virtuously despite all that. That's a very, very powerful idea."

"It's an open question, the degree to which the cosmos would order itself around you properly if you got yourself together as much as you could get yourself together. We know that things can go very badly wrong if you do things very badly wrong—there's no doubt about that. But the converse is also true. If you start to sort yourself out properly, and if you have beneficial effect on your family, first of all that's going to echo down the generations, but it also spreads out into the community. And we are networked together; we're not associated linearly; we all effect each other. So it's an open question, the degree to which acting out the notion that Being is good, and the notion that you can accept its limitations and that you should still strive for virtue. I don't think we know the limits of virtue. I don't think we know what true virtue could bring about, if we aimed at it carefully and practically. So the notion that there is something divine about the individual who accepts the conditions of existence and still strives for the good—I think that's an idea that's very much worth paying attention to. And I think the fact that people considered that idea seriously for at least 2000 years indicates that there's at least something to be thought about there."

"If religion was "the opium of the masses," then communism was the methamphetamine of the masses."

"The dragon is the imagistic representation of the functional category of predator. It's like this: If you're a monkey, then a bird will pick you off, like an eagle. That's the wings. If it wasn't an eagle, then it was a cat (dragon claws), because they climb trees and give you a good chomping. And if it wasn't a cat, then you go down to the ground and a snake would get you, or maybe the snake would climb up the tree. So a dragon is a cat-snake-bird. And that's the thing that you really want to avoid. And the other thing is that it breathes fire, which is interesting because fire was both greatest friend and greatest enemy of humanity."

"St. George is the hero who goes out to confront the dragon, and he frees the virgin from its grasp. I would say that's a pretty straightforward story about the sexual attractiveness of the masculine spirit that's willing to forthrightly encounter the unknown. It is a straight biological representation to me, and it's a really, really old story. It's the oldest written story we have, and it's basically the ancient Mesopotamian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, which basically plays out that story. You've seen this story played out a hundred different ways, and you never get tired of it, because it's the central story of mankind."

"And then Snow White has to wait for the Prince to come rescue her, and you think: "How sexist can you get, that story?" Well, seriously, because that's the way that that would be read in the modern world, like, "She doesn't need a prince to come rescue her." That's why Disney made Frozen, that absolutely appalling piece of rubbish."

"The Bible is a collective attempt by humanity to solve the deepest problems that we have. The deepest of all problems that we have is the problem of self-consciousness. The unique predicament of human beings is that we are self-conscious. Not only is it true that we are mortal and that we die, but most crucial is the reality that we know we will die."

"Jung said that science is nested in a dream. The dream is that if we investigated the structures of material reality with sufficient attention and truth, we could then learn enough about material reality to then alleviate suffering—to produce the philosopher's stone, to make everybody wealthy, to make everybody healthy, to make everyone live as long as they wanted to live or perhaps forever. That's the goal—to alleviate the catastrophe of existence. The idea that the solutions to the mysteries of life enable us to develop such a substance, or multitude of substances, provided the motive force for the development of science. Jung traced that development of the motive force to over the period of 1,000 years. Jung went back into alchemical texts and interpreted them as if they were the dream upon which science was founded. Newton was an alchemist, by the way. Science did emerge out of alchemy. The question is, What were the alchemists up to? They were trying to produce the philosopher's stone, which was the universal medicament for mankind's pathology."

"The lion lying down with the lamb is the idea that is either projected back in time, saying that there was a time, or maybe that there will be a time, when the horrors of life are no longer necessary for life itself to exist. And the horrors of life are, of course, that everything eats everything else, and that everything dies, and that everything is born, and that the whole place is a charnel house. It's a catastrophe from beginning to end. This is the vision of it being other than that. There's a strong idea that human beings can interact with reality in such a way that the tragic and evil elements of it can be mitigated, so that we can move closer to a state of being where we have the benefits of existence without the catastrophe that seems to go along with it."

"A thing isn't quite real until you name it."

"Without that forward-going, courageous consciousness, a woman herself will drift into unconsciousness and terror. It's the sleep of the naïve and damned. She needs to wake herself up and bring her own masculine consciousness into the forefront so she can survive in the world. Unless woman is taken out of man, then she isn't a human being—she's just a creature."

"Women are attracted to men's ability to generate, to be productive, and to share. These qualities transcend wealth, which can disappear."

"What do people do that animals don't? Work. What does work mean? It means you sacrifice the present for the future. Why do you do that? Because you know that you're vulnerable, and because you're awake. From here on in, from this point forward, there's no return to unconscious paradise. I don't care how many problems you've solved so that today's okay. You have a lot of problems coming up. No matter how much you work, you're never going to work enough to solve all the problems. All you're going to do from here on in is to be terrified of the future. That's the price of waking up. It's the end of paradise, and that's the beginning of history."

"The intellect is the most incredible human capacity. It is the highest of all human capacities, actually. However, it is also the thing that can go most terribly wrong, because the intellect can become arrogant about its own existence and its accomplishments, and it can fall in love with its own products. That's what happens with ideologies. You become obsessed with a human-constructed dogma of which you believe is 100% right, and it eradicates the necessity of anything transcendent."

"The Bible presents a cataclysm at the beginning of time, which is the emergence of self-consciousness in human beings, which puts a rift in the structure of Being. That's the right way to think about it. That's given cosmic significance. You can dispense with that and say that nothing that happens to human beings is of cosmic significance, that we're these short lived, mold-like entities that are like cancers on this tiny little planet, rotating out in the middle of nowhere on the edge of some unknown galaxy in the middle of infinite space, and nothing that happens to us matters. This is not a road that you can walk down and live well. For all intents and purposes, it's untrue. If fact, if you really walk down that road, and you take it really seriously, you end up not living at all. The kind of conclusions suicidal people draw about the utility of life, prior to wishing for its cessation, are very much like the conclusions that you draw if you walk down that particular line of reasoning long enough."

": Jordan: You're really quite something, you are."

"We require routine and tradition. That’s order. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown—and that is also not good. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path."

"If you can bite, you generally don't have to."

"When you try to analyze the operation of the set of ideas, you ought to find out first who the current proponents are in the conversation that's going on now. But then you need to trace it back to deeper ideas and the philosophers, and sometimes the theologians even (depending on how deep you go), from whom those ideas flow. And in order to understand the entire structure of the system of ideas and its interrelationships, so that you can understand its motivation and its nature, you have to delve deeper into the underlying history of the ideas."