Jordan Peterson - This isn't Progress, it's Tribalism

Hello so we should first decide what we're talking about We're not talking about my views of political correctness. Despite what you might have inferred from the last speakers comments This is how it looks to me we essentially need something approximating a low resolution grand narrative to unite us And we need a because otherwise we don't have peace What's playing out in the Universities and in broader society right now is a debate between two fundamental low resolution narratives. Neither of which can be completely accurate because they can't encompass all the details obviously Human beings have an individual element and a collective element a group element, let's say. The question is what story should be paramount and this is how it looks to me: In the West, we have reasonably functional, reasonably free remarkably productive stable hierarchies that are open to consideration of the dispossessed that hierarchies generally create Our societies are freer and functioning more effectively than any societies anywhere else in the world and than, and than any societies ever have. And as far as I'm concerned, and I think there's good reason to assume this. It's because the fundamental low resolution grand narrative that we've oriented ourselves around in the West is one of the sovereignty of the individual and it's predicated on the idea that all things considered the best way for me to interact with someone else is individual to individual and to react to that person as if they're both part of the process, because that's the right way of thinking about it. The psychological process by which things we don't understand can yet be explored and by things that aren't properly organized in our society can be yet set right. The reason we're valuable as individuals both with regards to our rights and responsibilities is because that's our essential purpose and that's our nobility and that's our function What's happening as far as I'm concerned in the universities in particular and spreading very rapidly into the broader world including the corporate world much too its... much to what should be its chagrin is a collectivist narrative and of course there's some Utility in a collectivist narrative because we're all part of groups in different ways But the collectivist narrative that I regard as politically correct is a pastiche of a strange Pastiche of post-modernism and neo Marxism and it's fundamental claim. Is that: No... you're not essentially an individual you're essentially a member of a group and that group might be your ethnicity and it might be your sex race and it might be any of the endless numbers of other potential groups that you belong to because you belong to many of them and that you should be ssentially categorized along with those who are like you on that dimension in that group. That's proposition number 1. Proposition number 2 is that the proper way to view the world is as a battleground between groups of different power. So you define the groups first and then you assume that you view the individual from the group context, you view the battle between groups from the group context and you view history itself as a consequence of nothing but the power maneuvers between different groups. That eliminates any consideration of the individual and at a very fundamental level and also any idea for example of free speech because if you're collectivist at heart in this manner There is no such thing as free speech. It isn't that it's debated by those on the radical left and let's say the rest of us so to speak. It's that in that formulation there's no such thing as free speech because for an individualist free speech is how you make sense of the world in reorganize society in a proper manner. But for the radical left type collectivist that's associated with this viewpoint of political correctness When you speak all you're doing is playing a power game on behalf of your group and there's nothing else that you can do because that's all there is. And not only is that all there is in terms of who you are as an individual now and how society should be viewed It's also the fundamental narrative of history For example, it's widely assumed in our universities now that the best way to conceptualize Western civilization is as an oppressive male-dominated patriarchy; and that the best way to construe relationships between men and women across the centuries is one of oppression of women by men. That's like well look: No hierarchy is without its tyranny. That's an axiomatic truth: people have recognized that literally for thousands of years; and hierarchies do tend towards tyranny and they tend towards the usurpation by people with power But that only happens when they become corrupt, we have mechanisms in our society to stop hierarchies from becoming intolerably corrupt and they actually work pretty well

And so I would also point this out, you know don't be thinking that this is a debate about whether empathy is useful or not or that the people on the con side of the argument are not empathetic I know perfectly well as I'm sure Mr. Frey does that hierarchies tend to produce situations where people stack up at the bottom; and that the dispossessed in hierarchies need a political voice which is the proper voice of the left by the way and the necessary voice of the left. But that is not the same as proclaiming that the right level of analysis for our grand unifying narrative is that all of us are fundamentally to be identified by the groups that we belong to and to construe the entire world as the battleground between different forms of tyranny in consequence of that group affiliation; and to the degree that we play out that narrative, that won't be progress, believe me. And we certainly haven't seen that "progress" in the Universities We've seen situations like what happened in Wilfred Laurier University instead. We won't see progress What we'll return to is exactly the same kind of tribalism to characterize the left