Name: Jordan Peterson on "The Truth"
Uploaded: 2016-12-16T19:27:56.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jordan Peterson on "The Truth"' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-12-16. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jordan Peterson on "The Truth"' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-12-16. Transcript available.

hello freak bitches well why would i put my job on the line to have an opinion
about compelled
pronouns i know why because the ability to speak your truth is the bulwark
against hell
and losing your job that's nothing that's nothing compared to where things can
go when they go
badly for me it was just preventative it's like this isn't going in a good
direction well should
you take a risk it's like you don't have that choice you're silent that's a
risk now most people
don't understand the risks of silence i happen to understand the risks of
silence because i've been
studying them for 40 years is it frustrating for you to get so little support
for these actions
and for for your your protests well i i wouldn't say that that's what happened
and i don't mean so
little support because you get a lot of support outside of the outside of the
university it's okay
it doesn't matter where the support comes from like i mean it's it's
disappointing in the same way that
it's disappointing for me to say i think the universities now do more harm than
good that's
disappointing but but it it doesn't it's not surprising to me like it isn't as
if intellectuals
are characterized by an intrinsic moral superiority oh they're smart so they'll
leap to the defense of
what's right it's like no there's no evidence for that intelligence and and
moral wisdom aren't
the same thing like and if you're corrupt and smart all that makes you is way
more treacherous it doesn't
make you less likely to be corrupt it just makes you much more you're 50 snakes
instead of two
or you're 56 headed snakes instead of two like i've had clients who were who
had very serious
personality disorders who are very intelligent it's like that's not necessarily
a good thing for them
they're just better at arguing for their pathology to themselves that is a real
problem where people
automatically assume that intelligent people are going to be healthy yeah well
they're healthy in
that often psychologically better in the world you know because because their
skills yes their skills
are more marketable and so on but there's no evidence that there's any
relationship between
intelligence and morality i mean god let me tell you a story man one time i had
this client
this woman was just ruined she looked like a street person you know and she had
very dirty clothes and
she was so shy that she couldn't even approach you she had to shield her eyes
from you as if you were
emitting light and she did that to everyone on the street like she was bent
over and and and and humble
like a like a chinese peasant brought before the emperor you know and uh one of
the things i was doing
with her in behavior therapy was trying to just get her to present herself in a
more normal manner so that
people wouldn't shy away from her and you know be instantly prejudiced towards
her and and she'd come
to the behavior therapy clinic and she wasn't bright this woman i think she had
only had like a seventh
grade education she was quite intellectually impaired and she lived with her
her sick aunt who was who was
schizophrenic and who had a like a a satanically possessed alcoholic boyfriend
that was always tormenting my
client she lived in absolute hell but she had this dog and she used to take it
out and walk the dog
all the time and then she she'd actually come to the behavior therapy clinic
partly because of her own
problem but but she'd come to this place called the douglas hospital and she'd
been an inpatient in the
douglas hospital and in the in the douglas hospital there were these long-term
psychiatric clients and they
looked like something out of a hieronymus bosch painting or dante's inferno i
mean these people were
this is way worse than one flew over the cuckoo's nest these people were
seriously destroyed
and they couldn't be let back out in the streets during deinstitutionalization
like they were lifers
and she had decided that part of the reason she wanted to come to the hospital
was because she had
been institutionalized there and she thought that maybe when she took her dog
out for a walk
she could go and get one of those damn inmates and take them out for a walk too
now that was a person who was immoral
dumb as a post just screwed in 50 different directions nothing going for her
and she had the
bloody moral capacity to decide that there was someone worse off than her and
believe me that
wasn't easy to find and that maybe she could do them some good if if the
hospital would let her
which they didn't by the way yeah well that's the story of the soul that's not
the intellect that's
for sure so so i didn't expect any support from my from my colleagues and and
it isn't that i don't
care if i got it but it's it's in some sense it's irrelevant it's irrelevant to
me because my goal was
i'm not saying those goddamn pronouns and the reason i'm not saying them is
because they're made up by
left-wing ideologues and i don't like left-wing ideology i don't like ideology
period and i know where
corruption of speech leads and i'm not going there and you know one of the
things i tried to learn
when i was taking apart what happened in auschwitz and trying to put myself in
the position of an
auschwitz camp guard which by the way you can do if you use your imagination a
bit i wouldn't
call it exactly the world's most pleasant meditative experience but you can
call up parts of yourself
that would be capable of taking someone who just got off a transport train and
having them carry a
hundred pound sack of wet salt from one side of the camp compound to the other
and back you can
conjure that part of yourself up if you want and that'll teach you something
about what you're like
people don't do it because it's too frightening but i know perfectly well that
i could do that sort of
thing and so once i learned that i could do that sort of thing and maybe that i
could even enjoy it i
thought okay fine i get it i'm going to see if i can figure out how to live so
that if that opportunity
was presented to me i wouldn't take it and i think that's the lesson that
people need to learn from the
20th century it's like that's what human beings did okay well we're all human
okay so how is it that we
should live so that we don't do that again well part of that is to try to say
the truth
no matter what because the alternative is worse and it is worse the truth no
matter what and that is
the real problem that you see with being forced into using these made-up
pronouns yeah absolutely it's
my language i'll take responsibility for what i say i am not saying your words
and being compelled to
say your words by law well that's that that that makes it that that takes it
past the point of
absurdity to the point of tyranny in in my estimation and i've seen some
criticisms where people are saying
you know he's talking about this but really he's grandstanding because no one's
doing anything legally
but the potential exists oh that's such rubbish but that is one of the
arguments yes they wouldn't
have changed the damn criminal they put it in the hate speech category and
altered the criminal code
it's as simple as that and then you could say well no we didn't really mean it
it's like oh yeah you
did you really meant it two of the social justice warriors that have debated me
in the last two months
accused me directly of hate speech all i had to do was poke them a tiny bit and
they came right out with it
and then the university's legal team reviewed everything i said carefully
believe me and they
decided that oh it was not only illegal to not use these compelled pronouns it
was probably illegal to
make a video saying that i wouldn't use them because otherwise why would they
write me a warning letter
and tell me that i violated university policy on the ontario human rights act i
think they did that lightly
have they acted on this at all is there well they won't no well they've acted
in that they sent me
two warning letters and told me to stop talking and you don't the idea that um
i was going to be
teaching in january again because i teach all my undergraduate courses from january
to may
that was on the table and i think the only reason that it hasn't happened one
of the reasons it hasn't
happened and i'm not attributing nothing but malevolence to the university
administration because
obviously it's very complicated and they did agree to host the debate for
example but the idea that i
wouldn't be teaching in january and and still might not be isn't is by no means
that was a perfectly plausible outcome and had this not caused a firestorm much
of which has emerged in
support of me then i would say there was a 50 50 chance that i would have had
my teaching privileges revoked
it's happened to other professors so the idea that i'm making it like that this
is a tempest in a
teapot it's like yeah okay fine why'd you change the criminal code then and why'd
you put it under
the hate speech laws exactly so no doesn't wash and i and the fundamental proof
of that is the university's
response because for sure their legal team crafted those letters you know it
was like recalcitrant employee
you're responsible for them okay what do you do with the recalcitrant employee
you write them a
letter telling them what they're doing wrong and asking them to stop then if
they don't stop you
write them a second letter that's more strongly worded then if they don't stop
you write them a third
letter even more strongly worded then you take disciplinary action that's like
hr 101 that's how you do it
so so here we said at the end of november uh closing on december you're
literally a bit more than a month
away and you don't know whether or not you're teaching your courses in january
it seems highly probable that i'll be teaching them i wouldn't say it's certain
but if i'm teaching
them it's because the cost of having me not teach them would now be too high it's
not because the
university believes that what i'm doing is either necessary or acceptable if
someone who's listening
to this or watching this feels compelled to act out in your support how can
they do that
i think they could do the future authoring exercise
and that that would be the best way to act out yes and i'm dead serious about
this it's like
sort yourself out sort yourself out before you try to figure out the world and
yes
that's the primary objective that's your that's your most important thing that
you can do sort
yourself out sort yourself out and and marshal your arguments and put yourself
in order so that
when someone pushes you a little farther than you should go you can say no and
you know what's going on now
so