Name: Jordan Peterson on Unearned Moral Superiority (from Joe Rogan Experience #877)
Uploaded: 2016-11-30T19:44:51.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jordan Peterson on Unearned Moral Superiority (from Joe Rogan Experience #877)' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-11-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jordan Peterson on Unearned Moral Superiority (from Joe Rogan Experience #877)' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-11-30. Transcript available.

hello freak bitches why do these patterns repeat themselves what is it about
human beings well we
like things simple we like things simple so and then you often like a simple
explanation is a
good explanation unless it's too simple but distinguishing between simple and
too simple
is no easy matter we like we like to know who's our friend and who's our enemy
and we like the
feeling of unearned moral superiority and learned moral superiority that's that's
the why earn it man
especially when there's no such thing as earning anyways so and then i mean
there's deeper and
darker things that are underneath that it's like the human proclivity to pull
down those who have
more than you it's like these kids on the campuses who are claiming identity
with the oppressed you
know somewhere like yale it's like how in the world you can speak of oppression
if you happen to be at
yale is beyond me i mean first of all you're north american which puts you in
the top one percent
and then of north americans you're in the top one percent so you're in the top
one percent of one
percent but yet you you want that you want to have all the power that goes
along with that
and you want to have the moral superiority that comes from being a uh
representative of the oppressed
so that's exactly what you want you want all the power and you want all the
victimization at the same
time well yeah yale is a great example because yale was one of what happened
with the halloween costume
debacle at yale was one of the first videos that was released that made people
horrified where they
couldn't believe how students were communicating with professors yeah well the
student who who screamed
up a storm about about that uh the male professor who was the husband of the
woman who wrote the pro
halloween costume letter it turned out she was on the bloody hiring committee
that hired him one of the
things she screamed was who hired you it was like well it turned out it was you
because you were on the
committee just a few years before i know and they took like yeah that was
explain that to people that
don't know what the hell we're talking about well explain this debacle because
it really was about
questionable halloween costumes well it was about questioning halloween
costumes halloween costumes
are part of the whole point of halloween is to have questionable costumes right
you play with death for
example and decay and and horror and and it's it's a time when the norms with
regards to the expression
of things that are outside of our normal behavior are suspended so that
everybody can can have a
little celebration as it turns out well you know campuses have got all upset
about things like
cultural appropriation at queen's university in in canada just the other week
they were going after
students who were dressing up as vietcong for example or mexicans it's like i
just don't see what the
hell's racist about dressing up like a mexican mexicans have a traditional
traditional clothing
there's nothing wrong with mexicans so why is it wrong to dress up like them
and if you want to be
puncho via for halloween what's wrong with that well you can you can regard
that as an homage just as
much as a denigration it's like why is that such a problem right but anyways it
doesn't matter because
nothing's too trivial to be a problem to a social justice warrior and because
they don't like to deal with
real problems and yale went after halloween costumes so this woman wrote a
letter saying maybe we should
just relax about this stuff and you know not don't put restrictions on what
people wear for halloween
but let people decide what is and isn't offensive yes and well and many halloween
costumes are offensive
that's the point but her letter wasn't really reasonable yeah it was perfectly
reasonable it
was like an it was like an adult wrote it yes yeah and and you know all hell
broke loose all help and
she ended up she ended up quitting and i think he did did no i don't think i
don't think he left i don't
think he left but she did seeing him bow down to this woman screaming at him
swearing in his face was so
disturbing it was so humiliating i felt so humiliated for him because she was
screaming this is our home
what the fuck are you doing you're not making it's not a bloody home the
university is not a home right
it's not a safe space it's not a secure space none of that and and if if that
when a university isn't a
home that's not what it is it's a place to be confronted by i would say often
horrible ideas
you want to learn about history you think that's going to be safe do you know
what human history
is like it's an endless bloodbath with you know with with a certain amount of
hopeful progress
underlying it it's it's a it's a it's a horror show and great literature is
like that and and and
biology is terrifying and physics is terrifying and you want to be safe it's
stay home stay home with your
mom stay home with your dad don't come to university if you want to be safe
because i don't even go
outside no one of you if you if you're going if the university is going to make
you safe then it
ceased to be a university so one of the things i try to do in my class i have
this class called maps of
meaning which concentrates on atrocity basically on soviet atrocity and and nazi
atrocity mostly and what
i try to do in the class is to teach my students that had they been in nazi
germany in the 1930s
they would have been nazis and had they been offered the opportunity to be in
oschwitz
oschwitz camp guard then maybe they would have leapt at it and maybe they would
have been in the sadistic
in the more sadistic proportion of the oschwitz camp guard population you think
that makes you feel safe
it doesn't make you feel safe to know that nazis were humans and you happen to
be one of them
so i think that educators that tell students that they're offering them a safe
space are doing them a
profound disservice and you don't i'm a clinical psychologist and here's one of
the things you do
to make people less afraid you don't make the world safer what you do is you
people tell you what
they're afraid of and then you break it into little bits so that they can go
confront them you know
so maybe they're afraid of going to a party and you break that down you say
well do you know how
to introduce yourself and they say well i know i don't really even know how to
shake someone's hand
and so then you practice having them shake their hand and introduce themselves
because maybe they
weren't taught by that by their half-witted parents when they were when they
were young because they
were ignored and so then you say well maybe you can go to a party for half an
hour and all you have to
do is introduce yourself to two people and we'll call that success and you
build up their confidence and
their confidence one step at a time and what happens the the clinical
literature indicates
quite clearly is you don't make people less anxious by doing that you make them
braver
it's not the same thing you don't make the world and its horrors smaller you
make the person and their
their their capacity to deal with horror larger you encourage them you
strengthen them that's what
you do at a university you arm people with arguments you you hone their
intellect you you help them learn
to write so they can marshal their arguments you you help them learn how to
engage in intellectual combat
because that's better than engaging in real combat you make them you make them
hard and strong you
don't mollycoddle them and make them safe unless you're their enemy unless you're
trying to devour their spirit
and that's what we have in the universities we have we have the reign of the oedipal
mother who's
who's answer to everything is oh just come a little closer dear and i'll
protect you from the world
it's just like hansel and gretel's the you know the the witch in the hansel gretel
story well my house
is made of gingerbread just come in here and everything will be fine well she
feeds you candy to
fatten you up so she can eat you that's the archetype of a modern university