ウィスパリング同時通訳研究会コミュのJordan Peterson Full Address Q&A | Oxford Union

Dr. Jordan Peterson: Well, that’s one of the more positive welcomes I’ve had from a university.

Student Representative: Thank you for coming. If you’d like to give a few opening remarks, and then we’ll move on to some questions.

JP: Ok, so I have about half an hour for this, I guess.

SR: About 15 to 20 minutes for opening remarks.

JP: OK, that’s fine. No problem. I think I’m going to talk to you today a little bit about hierarchy. It’s a small talk that I’ve been developing as I’ve been doing my public lectures over the last couple of weeks. It’s an elaboration of some of the ideas I’ve put forth in some of my scientific writings and Maps of Meaning. But more particularly in 12 Rules for Life, in Rule 1, which is "stand up straight with your shoulders back." It’s in part a meditation on hierarchy. I want to talk about the political significance of that. But you know how I’ve been trying to sort that out in my own imagination. I think it sheds light on the nature of political debate itself, and maybe deeper light on why temperamental factors might contribute to political framing and perception. We know that people tend to vote by temperament, although there are other reasons that influence their political allegiance and voting behaviours.

Let’s start with a couple of simple observations. The first is that complex biological creatures—and even simple biological creatures, for that matter—have to move forward in the world. That’s the case for any creature that’s mobile, and that goes all the way down to one-celled organisms. The idea that approach and avoidance are the fundamental motivations is a very old biological idea, and it seems to apply across levels of analysis in the animal kingdom. And it’s true for us as well. We have to move forward towards things, because we have requirements. There are things that we require to keep us alive, and to keep us wanting to be alive as well, and those are different things. We move forwards towards things that we value.

So there’s two propositions there. The first is that we have to move forward, because there are things to move forward to, and because there are things we need and want. The second is that to move forward towards something is simultaneously to value it. One of the implications of that is that we always live in a framework of value. There’s no escaping that. I detailed this out quite substantially in my book Maps of Meaning, but we’re always at a place, and we’re always moving towards a place that in principle has an advantage over the place we’re at. Otherwise, why move towards it?

What that means is that there’s no life without value—at least there’s no human life without value. Not only out of necessity at the physiological level, but also out of necessity at the psychological level. Another thing you might point out is that not only do you have to move from point A to B in life, but point A is often a very difficult place to be, because we’re fragile and bounded and mortal and limited, and because we know that. One of the implications of that, as many great religious traditions are at pains to illustrate or demonstrate or proclaim, is that life is essentially suffering. I believe that to be a fundamental truth. But perhaps not the most fundamental truth, because I think the most fundamental truth is that, despite the fact that life is suffering, people can transcend that.

Partly the way they transcend that is by pursuing things of value, so that if there is no value proposition at hand, then you have no meaning to justify the difficult conditions of your life, and that’s brutally difficult for people. Nietzsche said, "he who has a why can bear any how." I’ve certainly seen this as a clinical practitioner, that people who have no purpose in their life are embittered by the difficulties of their life. They become first bitter, and then resentful, and then revengeful, and then cruel, and there’s plenty of places to go past cruel. That’s just where you start, if you’re really on a downhill path.

All right, so that’s the first proposition. The second proposition would be, "well, if you’re going to pursue something of value, because you’re a social creature, you’re going to pursue that thing of value in a social space. That means you’re going to compete and cooperate with people around you in pursuit of that value." What that inevitably means is that, given that the pursuit of anything valuable is going to be a collective enterprise, you’re going to produce a hierarchy—or maybe more than one hierarchy, but at least a hierarchy—of competence in relationship to that pursuit. So it doesn’t matter what you decide to pursue. You’re going to find that you and other people vary in your ability to manage that pursuit effectively and efficiently. And so there’s going to be a hierarchy of people from those who are very good at the pursuit. Maybe it’s pole vaulting; maybe it’s delivering massages; maybe it’s delivering groceries; maybe it’s setting up an enterprise. It doesn’t matter. But if it’s a valuable pursuit and you pursue it socially, you’re going to produce a hierarchy, and the hierarchy is going to be one of competence.

If you’re going to pursue value, that you’re going to construct a hierarchy. There’s an implication from that, which is that, if you construct a hierarchy, a minority of people are going to be fantastically successful at the pursuit, and a very large number are going to stack up at the bottom. That’s a manifestation of what’s known as Price's law. It’s mapped by the Pareto distribution. It’s an expression of what’s been known among economists as the Matthew principle, from the New Testament: "to those who have everything, more will be given. From those who have nothing, more will be taken away." It’s an iron law of the distribution of success and hierarchies. So if you’re going to have value and you’re going to have hierarchy, then you’re going to have inequality. That’s a problem.

Now you have a political divide. The conservative types say, "well, we need the hierarchies, and that’s self-evident as far as I’m concerned, given that set of propositions. If you’re going to pursue something of value, which you have to and need to, then you’re going to produce a hierarchy. So if you demolish the hierarchies, you demolish value itself, and that’s not a tenable move." The left wing, though, says—and to their credit—"yeah, but you have to be very careful with your hierarchies, because they tend towards inequality of distribution. That’s one problem. Once they’re established, they also tend to a form of tyranny, because once a hierarchy of competence has been established, it can be invaded by people who use power as the means to attain status in the hierarchy.

That can corrupt and destroy even the entire hierarchy. So you have to be on guard for that. Plus, if your hierarchy becomes too steep in its distribution"—so it’s too tiny a fraction of people at the top and too great an agglomeration of people at the bottom—"especially in conditions of genuine privation, it’s not only unjust and unfair and producing excess suffering, but the people at the bottom have nothing to lose and may as well just flip the hierarchy on its head, and that’s not a good way to produce a sustainable society. You don’t want to put people in a position where they have nothing to lose, especially if you have something to lose, but also just with regards to principles of fairness and justice, let’s say."

It seems to me that’s a decent way of conceptualizing the political landscape, and that gives you a conceptual framework, within which you can put people on the left and right in their proper position. The right, basically, is that portion of the population whose temperamental proclivity is to admire and support hierarchies and work effectively within them. That’s actually the personality traits that make up a conservative, because conservative by temperament are low in trait openness, which is a creative dimension, and it’s associated with lateral thinking. I would say it’s very environmental underdetermined. It's a biological predisposition, especially with regards to creativity. And they are high in conscientiousness. The conservative temperamental types make very good managers and administrators. That’s how they manifest themselves in the world.

Essentially, if you set up a hierarchy, and it runs algorithmically, then the conservatives will do very well in that structure, because they can implement an algorithm—and they’re very good at implementing algorithms—whereas the liberal types are very good at generating new hierarchies. That’s because they are high in trait openness, they’re less conscientious, so they’re not suited as well to within-hierarchy operation. But in a functioning economy—and in a functioning democracy, I would say—you need both types. You need the liberal types to establish new territory and put out new values, so that new hierarchies might be organized, so that effective movement towards those ends might be instantiated. And you need the conservatives to actually implement the processes.

So a society of only conservatives becomes static, and that's not good, because the environment transforms, and you have to keep up with it. A society that’s only composed of the left-leaning liberal types is very good at generating all sorts of new possibilities but very bad at generating all sorts of new actualities. And so we should be first of all cognizant of the fact that hierarchical organization is inescapable, if you're also going to pursue value. Second, that if you produce hierarchical structures, you’re going to produce inequality inevitably, and there are negative consequences as a function of that. Both sides of that equation, let’s say, need a voice, because both of those functions are valuable, necessary, but also at odds with one another—and at permanent odds, because it is the case that you need hierarchies, because otherwise you have nothing to do, and it's also the case that if you have hierarchies, then the poor will always be with you. That’s a chronic functional problem that has to be addressed. That's the proper place, I would say, of the left.

That’s only fifteen minutes, but I’m going to stop there. You can chew on those propositions and see what you think of those. I’m really interested, actually, in having a discussion with all of you. And I’d be happy to start the question period a little earlier than it might have otherwise been necessary.

SR: Thank you. Thank you very much.

JP: My pleasure.

SR: Now we’ll move on to some questions. I will ask two initial questions, and then open up to the audience in order to ensure that as many people as possible have a chance to ask some questions. My first question is, "political correctness is a rather vague term that refers to a wide range of issues, from preventing explicitly racist hate speech to calling out someone for wearing culturally insensitive clothes. Do you think that we should universally reject political correctness, or is there a line that can be drawn?"

JP: Well, that was the other thing that I was thinking of talking about tonight. I’m actually having a debate in Canada about that very proposition tomorrow. Here’s what I’ve been thinking about that—trying to formulate my thoughts for my six-minute initial opening remarks tomorrow. It’s a very tight time constraint. Think about it this way. Imagine that you need to describe the world in order to perceive the world and to act in it—both of those; not just to act in it, but also to perceive it—and that you need a description at different levels of resolution.

You can think about how you use your computer when you’re dealing with images. There are times when what you really need is a thumbnail, because it doesn’t require much processing power and it’s sufficiently representative of the reality. So you can do whatever you need to do with the image, with the thumbnail. You never replace the thumbnail with a high resolution image, if the thumbnail will do. I really like that. I don’t think it’s an analogy. I think it’s a description of a very large number of cognitive operations. Maybe there’s a rule of thumb, which is, "never use a high resolution theory when a low resolution theory will do." The converse is also true, by the way.

So then let’s say that in order to orient ourselves properly in society we need a general purpose, low resolution, existential theory. Something like that. It’s not precisely a description of the objective world. It’s more like an agreed-upon narrative about how the world is constructed in relationship to human experience, and how we should act in the world—how we should look at ourselves, look at history, look at our social being, so that we can coexist peacefully, so that we can move forward, so that our societies function. And then imagine that comes in broadly two forms, and I think it does. One is a collectivist form, and I would say that collectivist form is built very deeply into human nature. It’s essentially a tribal outlook.

It’s an outlook that you can trace back hundreds of thousands of years, and perhaps more deeply than that. We know, for example, that chimpanzees have a tribal outlook and will patrol the borders of their tribes, looking for chimpanzees who aren’t of the tribe. And when they find them, they will tear them into pieces. That was revealed by Jane Goodall in the 1970s. It was very shocking to everyone, when that was first discovered, because there was a very influential line of thinking—mostly derived from people who were influenced by Rousseau—that human beings were innately good, and only culture made them cruel and capable of atrocity. But the fact that the chimpanzees patrolled the borders and tore apart their enemies really did that theory in, in a very serious way, or at least made it more complicated.

So the collectivist view is essentially that the best way to conceptualize what a human being is, is to look at what tribe they belong to. The tribe might be—well, this is one of the problems with the collectivist view: which of your tribal allegiances is to be paramount. That’s actually a fatal problem, by the way, because there’s an infinite number of ways you can be categorized, and it isn’t obvious which of those tribal allegiances should be canonical, hence the rise of intersectionality, which is a dragon that will eat its own tail. But there’s a notion there.

Forget about that for a minute. We’ll say, "the most important thing about you is your group: your gender, your sex, your race, your ethnicity; all of the multiple categories that we’re supposed to be considering as fundamental realities now, and that the best way to construe reality is that it’s a battleground between those groups for dominance, power." That’s the postmodern ethos, and it’s a pretty decent thumbnail sketch of reality. You can sum it up quite quickly. You can use it as a guide for action in all sorts of domains. It has its consequences, however.

One of the consequences is that it’s tribal, and tribal identities tend towards mayhem. Now the alternative low resolution view is the view that I think has been articulated most effectively in the West, and perhaps of all the places where it’s been most effectively articulated in the West, the most effective articulation has come from the U.K. There’s something remarkable about what your country has done with regards to laying out the idea of individual sovereignty in a fully articulated manner, in a way that allows a political system to arise predicated on the assumption that the individual is of intrinsic value. If you need a thumbnail view of the world, the most effective thumbnail view of the world isn’t that you are the member of a tribe—even though in many ways you are, and a member of many tribes. The most effective thumbnail view is that you are going to be regarded as a sovereign individual, and you are to treat other people that way as well. Both with regards to their rights, but even more importantly and often forgotten, with regards to their responsibilities.

I think that polities that are based on the first set of presuppositions, the tribal, degenerate into precisely what you’d expect, which is tribal warfare. The second have the possibility of blooming into exactly what they have bloomed into, which are the most functional societies, the most peaceful societies, the most successful societies, the societies that are the best at generating wealth—along with inequality—that the world has ever seen. So I would say we sacrifice the latter to the former at our great peril. And I would also say that—and this is something I’m very ashamed of—the universities, broadly speaking, are doing absolutely everything they can, as fast as they possibly can, to ensure that we sacrifice the sovereign individual view for the collective tribal view. I think that is appalling beyond forgiveness. That’s what I think about political correctness.