Name: Jordan Peterson Explains "Class Based Guilt"
Uploaded: 2016-12-16T19:29:06.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jordan Peterson Explains "Class Based Guilt"' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-12-16. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jordan Peterson Explains "Class Based Guilt"' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-12-16. Transcript available.

Hello, freak bitches.
You should step back. And this is a narrative that gets repeated over and over
again in the social justice warrior culture.
This idea that you should just step back and let these others talk because they
understand more.
Yeah, and the others are always other group members, right?
And somehow their discourse is to be privileged in reverse because, hypothetically,
they're a member of an oppressed class.
Of course, and you can multiply the numbers of oppressed classes ad nauseam,
which is another part of the problem.
Yeah, like the idea is that in giving them privilege because they have been
marginalized, you will balance things out.
You will somehow or another reverse the scale.
Yeah, and that's another example of the class-based guilt idea.
It doesn't seem to me self-evident that I'm to blame for slavery, for example.
I mean, being a Canadian, it's a slightly different situation, I suppose.
I mean, the idea that as a member of a culture that you're somehow responsible
for the past sins of that culture, let's say, it's a very, very anti-Western
ethos.
It goes along with this idea of class guilt because your group membership is
the most important thing.
If your group at some point in the past did something reprehensible, which, of
course, every group has done, that's for sure, then you are de facto
responsible in the present for that.
How do you think we got to this point where people are repeating these patterns
that were ultimately incredibly unsuccessful and dangerous and deadly in the
past, like Marxism, for example?
Like, people proudly proclaim themselves as having Marxist ideology.
One in five social scientists claims to be a Marxist.
How do they not understand the history?
Why don't you fill people in on how that went bad?
Well, the estimates vary, but in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959,
somewhere between 30 and 50 million people were killed in internal oppression
alone.
So that's pretty bad.
And then in China, which was operating under exactly the same principles, might
have been up to 100 million killed during Mao's time.
And of course, Mao was still revered in China, appallingly enough.
And Vietnam and Cambodia and wherever these ideas were implemented, Cuba,
wherever these ideas were implemented, the result was absolute mayhem, absolute
mayhem.
And I think what happened is that the Marxist ideas are actually quite
attractive if you're an intellectual and if you're, I would say, if you're
tilted towards compassion from a personality perspective, because they're based
on doctrines like from each according to his ability to each according to his
need.
And the idea that you should fulfill people's needs or that society should
fulfill people's needs is on the surface of it an attractive idea.
Of course, the problem is who gets to define the needs and who gets to define
the abilities.
And that really is a big problem.
And well, and then those ideas were put into practice first in the Soviet Union
and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote the Gulag Archipelago, did a very lovely
job of detailing in horrifying detail how those initial doctrines were
transformed into legislation and then how those legislation was transformed
into endless genocide, essentially, and almost destroyed the world.
And let's not forget that, partly with the help of Castro, who just died, the
doctrines when put into actual practice were murderous instantaneously.
Now, what happened, there were always apologists for the left in the West,
especially in France, especially among the French intellectuals, especially in
the late 1960s.
And then when all of the information about what was happening in the Soviet
Union came flooding forward, and that culminated, say, in about 1973 when Solzhenitsyn's
book was published, the French intellectuals changed their tune.
Instead of agitating on the part of the working class, which allied them with
murderous Marxists, they switched and started to talk about power and to talk
about group identity.
It was like a sleight of hand. The underlying pathological philosophy remained
exactly the same, but the surface nomenclature changed, and that became very
attractive.
And at the same time, the Soviet Union dissolved. And so one of the problems I
think we have now, a perverse problem, is that these Marxist ideas are very
attractive to compassionate intellectuals.
And we don't have good, bad examples like the Soviet Union around that
everybody can point to and go, yeah, yeah, well, that sounds good, but, you
know, what about the murderous death camps and the millions of people who are
suffering?
We still have North Korea, but, you know, people treat North Korea like it's a
joke instead of like it's an exemplar of a pathological system.
And people have no historical memory, like my students, and that's partly
because they're taught so badly in schools, is they have no idea what happened
in the Soviet Union.
They have absolutely no idea. They know a little bit about the Second World War,
maybe.
And, of course, people generally know about the Holocaust, but they have no
idea what happened in the Soviet Union, so they have no idea where these ideas
could lead.
And the universities and the high schools are so full of people who are
radically left-leaning that they're never taught any, that students are never
taught any proper history.
You know, they're taught about the evils of capitalism and, you know, I mean,
it's not like, it's not like any system is perfect, but there's difference
between imperfect and, and consciously murderous.
I think one of the things that you just said that's very important is that it's
attractive to compassionate intellectuals, people that without really looking
at what the potential for these, these laws and regulations,
what the negative potential for them is, the underlying inclination to lean
towards that is that you care about people and that you want people to be okay.
Yeah, well, you're kind of treating them like they're your children.
Yes.
And I don't mean that in an entirely sarcastic manner.
It's reasonable in some sense to treat other people like people that you love,
although it's not reasonable in very many other ways,
which is why you don't invite every stranger on the street to come and live
with you in your house.
I mean, everybody puts up boundaries and you have to do that.
But, and, and people tend more than, than we ever expected.
And I've done a lot of research in this in my lab that people do tend to vote
and think their temperament a lot more than, than anyone really realizes.
And, and if you're kind and that's your highest virtue, then you tend to treat
people like their kin, because that's what kind means, right?
It's, it's an extension of the word kin.
But that doesn't work well in larger groups.
You need other principles.
And so you, you look at something like the idea of, of equity, which is
equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity.
On the surface of it, it seems perfectly reasonable to say, well, if every
resource isn't distributed absolutely equally to every group, then the system
is unfair.
And on the face of it, that's a reasonable proposition, but it falls apart
under minimal examination.
So here's something to think about for, for all, for everyone who thinks that
equality of an outcome is a good idea.
It's like, why the hell are you striving for anything then?
Because the reason anyone strives to better themselves or to develop a skill or,
or to move forward in life at all is to produce inequality.
You, you're trying to rise above the, the mediocre masses every time you make
an effort at anything.
And so everything that we associate positive movement forward to or positive
motivation is actually an attempt to render the world more unequal.
Now you're rendering it unequal in a just way, right?
Because we might say, well, if you work really hard, you deserve an unequal
outcome.
Well, yeah, unless you want people to stop working hard.
And that was the old joke in the Soviet Union, you know, they pretend to pay us.
We pretend to work.
So it's, it's so, it's, it's, it's so thoughtless that that's, that's the
problem.
Well, and it's also extremely annoying for people who've worked really hard and
who've made the requisite sacrifices to become successful along some dimension
to have that immediately attributed to their oppression.
Yes.
And it's not, it's not obvious that that's something we want to do.
It's like, for the social justice warrior types out there who, who might be
listening.
It's like, do you, are you really willing to say that every single person who's
accomplished something has done that as a consequence of oppression?
That, that's again what the Soviets claimed with regards to the, to the
successful peasants in the 19, in the, just before the 1920s.
It's like, well, the peasants weren't emancipated.
They were serfs until about 30 years before that.
They were serfs.
They were basically slaves.
And some of them had clambered up to the point where maybe they could own their
hut and a cow and could, you know, employ someone.
Well, the Soviet claim was, well, that's all theft.
You got that all because you're an oppressor.
And so then the Soviet intellectuals went into the villages and just imagine
how this happened.
So imagine a village, a small town where everyone knows everybody, and there's
maybe 10, 20 people there who are moderately successful.
Okay.
And so you can imagine that those 20 people have like a hundred enemies at the
bottom of the socioeconomic distribution, useless, horrible people who are
jealous and resentful about the fact that these people have been successful.
Okay.
So now the intellectuals come in and say property is theft.
Success is oppression.
And then they look for the people in the village who are willing to move
against those 20 successful people.
Well, those guys at the bottom, those hundred resentful, jealous, murderous
people at the bottom, they're just waiting for an opportunity to go kick down
some doors.
And that's exactly what they did in the 1920s.
And as I said, they wiped out all their productive peasants.
And then six million Ukrainians starved to death.
They had posters.
The Soviets produced posters in the 1930s that said, essentially, don't forget,
it's wrong to eat your children.
So.
Whoa.
Whoa.
Yeah.
Whoa.
There's nothing about the Soviet, there's nothing that you can imagine that's
horrible enough so that it matched the reality of what happened in the Soviet
Union between 1919 and 1959.
And, you know, the West knew about this, too.
Early, Malcolm Muggeridge in the 30s was documenting for England, for English
newspapers, exactly what was going on in the Soviet Union.
Bloody intellectuals didn't admit it until the mid-70s, you know, with the
exception of people like George Orwell.
Never will.
.