Transcript Prepared by @Litanscombe, who we warmly thank for allowing us to make this content available on our website. Editor’s Introduction: I am releasing this transcript free of charge to best facilitate free use discussion of the debate and the two authors. However, in place of charging a fee and in recognition of the work I put in, I would strongly ask anybody who found extensive use of it to give a small donation of $5 or more to the Red Panda Society (https://www.redpandanetwork.org/give/) or a similar conservation organization. I have included my method and aims in a Note at the end of the transcript.
[Applause as lights go down]
Unseen Announcer: Good evening and welcome to the Sony Center for Performing Arts. Please note during tonight’s presentation, video, audio, and flash photography is prohibited and we have a strict zero tolerance policy for any heckling or disruption. [Applause] And now, please welcome your host and moderator, president of Ralston College, Doctor Stephen Blackwood. [Applause]
Stephen Blackwood: Thank you. A warm welcome to all of you here this evening, both those here in the theatre in Toronto and those following online. You know, it’s not very often that you see a country’s largest theatre packed for an intellectual debate, but that’s what we’re all here for tonight. Please join me [Applause] please join me in welcoming to the stage Doctor Slavoj Žižek and Doctor Jordan Peterson. [Long Applause as they enter]
[o0:37]
Stephen Blackwood: Just a few words of introduction. There can be few things—I think—now more urgent and necessary in an age of reactionary partisan allegiance and degraded civil discourse than real thinking about hard questions. The very premise of tonight’s event is that we all participate in the life of thought. Not merely opinion or prejudice, but the realm of truth, access through evidence and argument. But these two towering figures of different disciplines and domains share more than a commitment to thinking itself. They are both highly attuned to ideology and the mechanisms of power, and yet they are not principally political thinkers. They are both concerned with more fundamental matters: meaning, truth, freedom. So it seems to me likely we will see tonight not only deep differences, but also surprising agreement on deep questions. Doctor Slavoj Žižek is as philosopher. He has not one but two doctoral degrees [sudden cheer, Žižek shrugs off audience reaction]—one in philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and a second in psychoanalysis from University [sudden cheer, Žižek holds his hand to his head]—let’s hear it for psychoanalysis! —from the University of Paris VIII. He is now a Professor at the Institute of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, and the Director of the Birbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. He has published more than three dozen books, many on the most seminal philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries. He is a dazzling theorist with extraordinary range. A global figure for decades, he turns again and again with dialectical power to radical questions of emancipation, subjectivity, and art. [Applause to which Žižek holds his head, widespread audience laugh and a second round of applause as Žižek joins in the applause briefly]
[o3:58]
Stephen Blackwood: Dr. Jordan Peterson is an academic and clinical [applause, cheers, Blackwood pauses] an academic and clinical psychologist. His doctorate was awarded by McGill University and he was subsequently [scattered applause and cheers, Peterson shrugs at Blackwood to audience laughs] we got some McGill go—graduates out here. He was subsequently Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and then the University of Toronto where he is today. [Applause] The author of two books and well over a hundred academic articles, Dr. Peterson’s intellectual roots likewise lie in the 19th and early 20th centuries where his reading of Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and above all, Carl Jung inform his interpretation of ancient myths, of 20th century totalitarianism, and especially his endeavor to counter contemporary nihilism. His 12 Rules For Life is a global bestseller and his lectures and podcasts are followed by millions around the world. [Scattered Audience applause and cheers] Both Doctor Žižek and Peterson transcend their titles, their disciplines, and the academy, just as this debate—we hope—will transcend purely economic questions by situating those in the frame of happiness, of human flourishing itself. We’re in for quite a night. A quick word about format: each of our debaters will have 30 minutes to make a substantial opening statement, to lay out an argument. Dr. Peterson first, followed by Dr. Žižek. Each will then have, in the same order, ten minutes to reply. I will then moderate 45 minutes or so of questions many of which will come from you, the audience. Both here in Toronto and online. With that, let’s get underway. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Jordan Peterson for the first opening statement. [Applause as Peterson walks to the lectern, stretches and opens his laptop]
[o6:29]
Jordan Peterson: Well thank you for that insanely enthusiastic welcome for the entire event and also for being here. I have to tell you first, that this event, and I suppose my life in some sense hit a new milestone that I ju—was just made aware of by a stagehand today backstage who informed me that last week the tickets for this event were being scalped online at a higher price than the tickets for the Leafs playoff games. [Audience Applause] So I—I don’t know what to make of that. Alright, so.
[o7:23]
Jordan Peterson: How did I prepare for this? Um, I went—I familiarized myself to the degree that it was possible with Slavoj Žižek’s work and that wasn’t that possible because he has a lot of work and he’s a very original thinker and this debate was put together in relatively short order. And what I did instead was returned to what I regarded as the original cause of all the trouble, let’s say, which was the Communist Manifesto and [light audience laughter] what I attempted to do—because that’s Marx and we’re here to talk about Marxism, let’s say. And um what I tried to do was read it. And to read something you don’t just—follow of the words and follow the meaning but you take apart the sentences and you ask yourself at this level of phrase, and at the level of sentence, and that the level of paragraph, is this true? Are there counter-arguments that can be put forward that are credible? Is this solid thinking? And I have to tell you—and I’m not trying to be flippant here—that I have rarely read a tract—and I read it when I was 18, it was a long time ago right that’s 40 years ago—but I’ve rarely read a tract that made as many errors per sentence—conceptual errors per sentence—as the Communist Manifesto. It was quite a miraculous reread. It—and it—it was interesting to think about it psychologically as well, because I’ve read student papers that were of the same ilk in some sense—although I’m not suggesting that they were of the same level of glittering literary brilliance and polemic quality and I also understand that the Communist Manifesto was a call for revolution and not a standard logical argument.
[o9:10]
Jordan Peterson: But that notwithstanding I have some things to say about the authors psychologically. The first thing is that it doesn’t seem to me that either Marx or Engels grappled with one fundamental—with this particular fundamental truth which is that almost all ideas are wrong. And so, if you—and it doesn’t matter if they’re your ideas or someone else’s ideas—they’re probably wrong and even if they strike you with the force of brilliance your job is to assume first of all that they’re probably wrong and then to assault them with everything you have in your arsenal and see if they can survive. And what—what struck me about the Communist Manifesto was it was akin to something Jung said about typical thinking—and this was the thinking of people who weren’t trained to think. He said that the typical thinker has a thought—it appears to them like an object might appear in a room—the thought appears and then they just—they just accept it as true. They don’t go the second step which is to think about the thinking. And that’s the real essence of critical thinking and so that’s what you try to teach people in University is to read a text and to think about it critically, not to destroy the utility of the text, but to separate the wheat from the chaff. And so what I tried to do when I was reading the Communist Manifesto was to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I’m afraid I found some wheat, yes, but mostly chaff. And I’m going to explain why, hopefully in relatively short order.
[o10:43]
Jordan Peterson: So I’m going to outline ten of the fundamental axioms of the Communist Manifesto. And so these are truths that are basically sel—held as self-evident by the authors and they’re truths that are presented in some sense as unquestioned and I’m going to question them and tell you why I think they’re um…unreliable. Now we should remember that this tract was actually written 170 years ago. That’s a long time ago. And we have learned a fair bit from—since then about human nature, about society, about politics, about economics. There’s lots of mysteries left to be unsolved but—left to be solved—but we are slightly wiser, I presume then we were at one point. And so you can forgive the authors to some degree for what they didn’t know. But that doesn’t matter given that the essence of this doctrine is still held as sancrosact by a large proportion of academics…probably are among the most what would you call….guilty of that particular sin.
[o11:51]
Jordan Peterson: So, here’s proposition number one: history is to be viewed primarily as an economic class struggle. Alright so—so let’s think about that for a minute. First of all is there—the proposition there is that history is primarily to be viewed through an economic lens, and I think that’s a debatable proposition because there are many other motivations that drive human beings than economics and those have to be taken into account. Especially that drive people—other than economic competition, like economic cooperation, for example. And so that’s a problem. The other problem is that it’s actually not a…nearly a pessimistic enough description of the actual problem because history—history—this is to give the devil his due. The idea that one of the driving forces between history is hierarchical struggle is absolutely true but the idea that that’s actually history is not true because it—it’s deeper than history, it’s biology itself, because organisms of all sorts organize themselves into hierarchies and one of the problems with hierarchies is that they tend to arrange themselves into a winner-take-all situation. And so…and that is implicit in some sense in Marx—Marx’s thinking because of course Marx believed that in a Capitalist society, capital would accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people and that actually is in keeping with the nature of hierarchical organizations. Now, the problem with that is that—so much the fact of the—so there’s the—there’s accuracy in the accusation that that is a eternal form of motivation for struggle, but it’s an underestimation of the seriousness of the problem because it attributes it to the structure of human societies rather than the deeper reality of the existence of hierarchical structures per se, which as they also characterize the animal kingdom, to a large degree, are clearly not only human constructions. And the idea that there’s hierarchical competition among human beings—there’s evidence for the: at that goes back—at least to the [Paleolithic] times.
[o14:06]
Jordan Peterson: And so that’s the next problem is that well, the—this ancient problem of hierarchical structure is clearly not attributable to capitalism because it existed long in human history before capitalism existed and then it predated human history itself. So the question then arises, why would you necessarily, at least, implicitly link the class struggle with capitalism given that it’s a far deeper problem? And now—it’s also—you’ve got to understand, that this is a deeper problem for people on the Left not just for people on the Right. It is the case that hierarchical structures dispossessed those people who are at the bottom. Those creatures who are at the bottom—speaking, say, of animals—but those people who are at the bottom and that that is a fundamental existential problem. But the other thing that Marx didn’t seem to take into account is that there—there—there are a—far more reasons that human beings struggle then their economic class struggle, even if you build the hierarchical idea into that which is a more su—sup—comprehensive way of thinking about it. Human beings struggle with themselves, with the malevolence that’s inside themselves, with the evil that they’re capable of doing, with the spiritual and psychological warfare that goes on within them. And we’re also, actually, always at odds with nature and this never seems to show up in Marx and it doesn’t show up in Marx’s Marxism in general. It’s as if nature doesn’t exist. The primary conflict as far as I’m concerned—or a primary conflict that human beings engage in—is this struggle for life in a cruel and harsh natural world and it’s as if—[slight scattered applause]it’s as if that doesn’t exist in the Marxist domain.
[o15:47]
Jordan Peterson: If human beings have a problem it’s because there’s a class struggle that’s essentially economic. It’s like ‘no.’ Human beings have problems because we come into the life starving and lonesome and we have to solve that problem continually and we make our social arrangements at least in part to ameliorate that as well as to—as to—well upon occasion exacerbated. And so there’s also very little understanding in the Communist Manifesto that any of the cl—like, say, hierarchical organizations that human beings have put together might have a positive element, and that’s an absolute catastrophe because hierarchical structures are actually necessary to solve complicated social problems. We have to organize ourselves in some manner and you have to give the devil his due. And so it is the case that hierarchies dispossessed people and that’s a big problem. That’s the fundamental problem of inequality. But it’s also the case that hierarchies happen to be a very efficient way of distributing resources and it’s finally the case that human hierarchies are not fundamentally predicated on power, and I would say that biological-anthropological data on that are crystal clear. You don’t rise to a position of authority that’s reliable in human society primarily by exploiting other people. It’s a very unstable means of obtaining power. [light distant audible laughter] So—so that’s a problem. Well the people that laugh might do it that way. [Slight laughter, turning to applause]
[o17:13]
Jordan Peterson: Okay, now the other—another problem that comes up right away is that Marx also assumes that you can think about history as a binary class struggle with clear divisions between say the proletarl—proletariat and the bourgeois. And that’s actually a problem because it’s not so easy to make a firm division between who’s exploiter and who’s exploitee, let’s say. Because it’s not obvious like, in the case of small shareholders, let’s say, whether or not they happen to be part of the oppressed or part of the oppressor. This actually turned out to be a big problem in the Russian Revolution and my big problem I mean tremendously big problem because it turned out that you could fragment people into multiple identities and that—that’s a fairly easy thing to do—and you could usually find some axis along which they were part of the oppressor class. It might have been a consequence of their education or it might been a consequence of their—of their—of their—of the wealth that they strived to accumulate during their life, or it might have been a consequence of the fact that they had parents or grandparents who were educated [or] rich or that they were a member of the priesthood or that they were socialists or—anyways that the listing of how it was possible for you to be bourgeois instead of proletariat grew immensely and that was one of the reasons that the Red Terror claimed all the victims that it claimed. And so that was a huge problem. It was probably most exemplified by the demolition of the kulaks who were basically peasants—peasant farmers although effective ones in the Soviet Union who had managed to raise themself out of serfdom over a period of about 40 years and to gather some—some degree of material security about them and about 1.8 million of them were exiled. About 400,000 were killed and the net consequence of that…removal of their private property because of their bourgeois status was arguably the death of 6 million Ukrainians in the famines of the 1930s. And so the binary class struggle idea, that was a bad idea. That was a very, very bad idea.
[o19:30]
Jordan Peterson: It’s also bad in this way and that—this is a real sleight of hand that Marx pulls off is you have a binary class division: proletariat and bourgeoisie—and you have an implicit idea that all of the good is on the side of the proletariat, and all of the evil is on the side of the Bourgeoisie and that’s classic group identity thinking. You know, it’s one of the reasons I don’t like identity politics is because once you divide people into groups and pit them against one another, it’s very easy to assume that all the evil in the world can be attributed to one group—the hypothetical oppressors—and all the good to the other and that[applause and some cheers]—well then that’s—that’s—that’s naïve—that’s naïve beyond comprehension because it’s absolutely foolish to make the presumption that you can identify someone’s moral worth with their economic standing. So—and that actually turned out to be a real problem as well because…[Peterson pauses, holding his hand to his chin] Marx also came up with this idea, which is a crazy idea as far as I can tell of the—that’s a technical term, crazy idea [slight laughter]—of the dictatorship of the proletariat. And that’s the next idea that I really stumbled across. It was like, okay so what’s the problem? Well the problem is the capitalists own everything. They own all the means of production and they’re oppressing everyone—that would be all the workers—and there’s gonna be a race to the bottom of wages for the workers as the capitalists strive to extract more and more…value from the labor of the proletariat by competing with other capitalists—should drive wages downward—which by the way, didn’t happen. Partly because wages wage earners can become scarce and that actually drives the market value upward—but the fact that—that you assume a priori that all the evil can be attributed to the capitalists, and all the good that the bourgeoisie—and all the good could be attributed to the proletariat meant that you could hypothesize that a dictatorship of the proletariat could come about. And that was the—the—the first stage in the Communist revolution. And remember this is a call for revolution and not just revolution but bloody violent revolution and the overthrow of all—the overthrowing of all existent social structures [some cheering, applause from the audience. Peterson slowly nods disbelieving at the audience, to some laughter. Žižek and Blackwood gesture at the audience to each other.].
[o22:05]
Jordan Peterson: Anyways the—the—the problem with that—you see—is that because all the evil isn’t divided so easily up into oppressor and oppressed that when you do establish a dictator of the proletariat to the degree that you can do that—which you actually can’t because it’s technically impossible and an absurd thing to consider to begin with, not least because of the problem of centralization and you have to hypothesize that you can take away all the property of the capitalists, you can replace the capitalist class with a minority of proletariats, how they’re going to be chosen isn’t exactly clear in the Communist Manifesto—that none of the people who are from the proletariat class are going to be corrupted by that sudden access to power because they’re well, by definition good, so—so then you have the good people who are running the world, and you also have them centralized so that they can make decision—decisions that are insanely complicated to make—in—in fact impossibly complicated to make and so that’s a failure conceptually on both dimensions because first of all, all the proletariat aren’t going to be good and when you give—put people in the same position as the evil capitalists, especially if you believe that social pressure is one of the determining factors of human character which the Marxist certainly believed, then why wouldn’t you assume that the proletariat would immediately become as or more corrupt than the capitalist? Which is of course, I would say, exactly what happened every time this experiment was run. And then.[Some Applause]
[o23:32]
Jordan Peterson: The—the next problem is well, what makes you think that you can take some system as complicated as—like—capitalist free-market society and centralize that and put decision-making power in the hands of a few people—the mechanisms by…without specifying the mechanisms by which you’re going to choose them? Like—what makes you think they’re gonna have the wisdom or the ability to do what the capitalists were doing, unless you assume—as Marx did—that all of the evil was with the capitalists and all the good was with the proletariats and that nothing that capitalists did constituted valid labor? Which is another thing that Marx assumed, which is palpably absurd. Because people who are—like, maybe if you’re a dissolute ir—aristocrat from 1830 and—or earlier—and you run a Feudal Estate and all you do is spend your time gambling and—and—and chasing prostitutes, well then—the—your labor value is zero, but if you’re—if you’re running a business and—and it’s a successful business, first of all you’re a bloody fool to exl—exploit your workers because even if you’re greedy as sin because you’re not going to extract the maximum amount of labour out of them by doing that, and the notion that you’re adding no productive value as a manager rather than a capitalist is—it’s absolutely absurd. All it does is indicate that you either know nothing whatsoever about how an actual business works or you refuse to know anything about how an actual business works. So that’s [some applause]—that’s also—that’s also a big problem.
[o25:14]
Jordan Peterson: So then the next problem is the criticism of profit. It’s like—well—wh—what’s wrong with profit exactly? What—what’s the problem with profit? Well the idea from the Marxist perspective was that profit was theft. [No?] But profit, well, can be theft because crooked people can run companies and so sometimes profit is theft, but that certainly doesn’t mean that it’s always thre—theft. What it means, in part at least, if the capitalist is adding value to the corporation then there’s some utility and some fairness in him or her extracting the value of their abstract labour—their thought, their abstract abilities, their ability to manage the company, then to engage in proper competition and product development, and efficiency, and the proper treatment of the workers and all of that—and then if they can create a profit well then they have a little bit of security for times that aren’t so good and that seems absolutely bloody necessary as far as I’m concerned. And then the next thing is well. how can you grow if you don’t have a profit? And if you have an enterprise that’s valuable and worthwhile—and some enterprises are valuable and worthwhile—then it seems to me that a little bit of profit to help you grow seems to be the right approach. And so.
[o26:33]
Jordan Peterson: And then the other issue with profit and—you know this if you’ve ever run a business—is it—it’s really useful constraint. You know, like it’s not enough to have a good idea. It’s not a good enough to have a good idea and the sales and marketing [plant?] and then to implement that. And all of that—that’s bloody difficult. Like, it’s not even g—easy to have a good idea. And it’s not easy to come up with a good sales and marketing plan. And it’s not easy to find customers and satisfy them. And so, if you allow profit to—to constitute a limitation on what it is that you might reasonably attempt, it provides a good constraint on—on wasted labour. And so most of the things that I’ve done in my life even psychologically that were designed to help people’s psychological health, I tried to run on a for-profit basis and the reason for what that was—apart from the fact that I’ve not averse to making a profit—partly so my enterprises can grow—it was also so that there were forms of stupidity that I couldn’t engage in because I would be punished by the market enough to eradicate the enterprise. And so. [light applause]
[o27:41]
Jordan Peterson: Okay and then—so the next—the next issue—this is a weird one. So Marx and Engels also assume that this dictatorship of the proletariat which involves absurd centralization—the overwhelming probability of corruption and impossible computation as the proletariat, now, try to rationally compute the manner in which an entire market economy could run—which cannot be done because it’s far too complicated for anybody to think through—the next theory is that somehow the proletariat dictatorship would become magically hyper-productive. And there’s actually no theory at all about how that’s going to happen. And so I had to infer the theory and the theory seems to be that once you eradicate the bourgeoisie, because they’re evil, and you get rid of their private property and you—you—you—you eradicate the profit motive then all of a sudden magically the small percentage of the proletariat who now run the society determine how they can make their productive enterprises productive enough so they become hyperproductive. Now and they need to become hyperproductive for the last error to be logically coherent in relationship to the Marxist theory, which is that at some point the proletariat—the dictatorship of the proletariat will become so hyperproductive that there’ll be enough material goods for everyone across all dimensions. And when that happens, then what people will do is spontaneously engage in meaningful creative labor—which is what they had been alienated from in the capitalist horror show—and the utopia will be magically ushered in. But there’s no indication about how that hyperproductivity is going to come about and there’s no also—there’s also no understanding that—well that isn’t the utopia that is going to suit everyone because there are great differences between people.
[o29:47]
Jordan Peterson: When some people are going to find what they want in love, and some are going to find it in social being, and some are going to find it in conflict and competition, and some are going to find it in creativity as Marx pointed out, but the notion that—that—that will necessarily be the end goal for the utopian state is preposterous. And then there’s the Dostoyevskian observation too which is one not to be taken lightly which is what sort of shallow conception of people do you have that makes you think that if you gave people enough bread and cake—and the Dostoyevskian terms—and nothing to do with busy thems—to bus—accept busy themselves with the continu—to—continuity of the species that they would also all of a sudden become peaceful and heavenly. Dostoyevsky’s idea was that, you know, we were built for trouble. And if we were ever handed everything we were—we needed on a silver platter, the first thing we would do is engage in some form of creative destruction just so something unexpected could happen, just so we could have the adventure of our lives. And I think there’s something—well there’s something to be said for that. [some applause]
[o30:53]
Jordan Peterson: So and then—the last error, let’s say. Although by no means the last—was this—and this is one of the strangest parts of the Communist Manifesto was Marx—it—agree—admits and Engels admit repeatedly in the Communist Manifesto that there has never been a system of production in the history of the world that was as effective at producing material commodities in excess than capitalism. Like that’s—that’s extensively documented in the Communist Manifesto. And so if your proposition is “Look we got to get as much material…security for everyone as we….as—as possible as fast as we can, and capitalism already seems to be doing that at a rate that’s unparalleled in human history.” Wouldn’t the logical thing be just to let the damn system play itself out? I mean unless you’re assuming that the evil capitalists are just gonna take all of the flat-screen televisions and put them in one big room and not let anyone else have one,[light laughter] the—the logical assumption is that while you’re already on a road that’s supposed to produce the proper material productivity.
[o32:01]
Jordan Peterson: And so—well that’s ten reasons as far as I can tell that—and so what I saw in that—that—that the Communist Manifesto is, is like, seriously flawed in—in virtually every way it could possibly be flawed and also all in—and in—and—evidence that Marx was the kind of narcissistic thinker who could think he was—he was very intelligent person and so was Engels. But what he thought—what he thought when he thought was that what he thought was correct. And he never went the second stage which is—wait a second, how could all of this go terribly wrong? And if you’re a thinker, especially a sociological thinker especially a thinker on the broad scale, a—a social scientist, for example, one of your moral obligations is to think “You know, you might be wrong about one of your fundamental axioms or two or three or ten,” and as a consequence you have the moral obligation to walk through the damn system and think: “Well what if I’m completely wrong here and things invert and go exactly the wrong way?” Like I can’t—I just can’t understand how anybody could come up with an idea like the dictatorship of the proletariat especially after advocating its implementation for—with violent means—which is a direct part of the Communist Manifesto—and actually think, if they were thinking, if they knew anything about human beings and the proclivity for malevolence that’s part and parcel of the individual human being that that could do anything but lead to a special form of Hell. Which is precisely what did happen.
[o33:40]
Jordan Peterson: And so I’m going to close—’cause I have three minutes—with—with—the a bit of evidence as well that… Marx also thought that what would happen inevitably as a consequence of Capitalism is that rich would get richer and the poor would get poorer. So there would be inequality. The first thing I’d like to say: is we do not know how to set up a human system of economics without inequality. No one has ever managed it, including the Communists. And the form of in—inequality changed and it’s not obvious by any stretch of imagination that the free market economies of the West have more inequality than the less free economies in the rest of the world. And the one thing you can say about capitalism, is that—although it produces inequality, which it absolutely does—it also produces wealth and all the other systems don’t. They just produce inequality. [applause]
[o34:39]
Jordan Peterson: So here’s—here’s a few stats—here’s a few free-market stats, okay? From 1800 to 2017 income growth adjusted for inflation grew by 40 times—but for production workers and 16 times for unskilled labor. Well GDP fact—GDP rose by a factor of about 0.5 from 1 AD to 1800. So from 1 AD to 1880 it was like nothing, flat. And then all of a sudden in the last two hundred and—and seventeen years there’s been this unbelievably upward movement of wealth and it doesn’t only characterize the tiny percentage of people at the top who, admittedly, do have most of the wealth. The question is—not only though—what’s the inequality? The question is, well what’s happening to the absolutely poor at the bottom? And the answer to that is they’re getting richer faster now than they ever have in the history of the world. And we’re eradicating poverty [light applause] in countries that have adopted moderate free-market policies at a rate that’s unparalleled. So here’s an example: the UN Millenni—one of the UN Millennium Goals to—was to reduce the rate of absolute poverty in the world by 50 percent between 2000 and 2015. And they define that as a dollar-90 a day. Pretty low, you know? But you have to start somewhere. We beat—we—we hit that at 2012. Three years ahead of schedule. And you might be cynical about that and say “well, it’s kind of an arbitrary number.” But the curves are exactly the same at three dollars and eighty—three dollars and 80 cents a day and seven dollars and sixty cents a day. Not as many people have hit that, but the rate of increase towards that is the same. The bloody UN thinks that we’ll be out of poverty defined by a dollar ninety a day by the year 2030. It’s unparalleled [slight applause] and so—so the—so the rich may be getting richer, but the poor are getting richer too. And that’s—that’s not the—look, I’ll leave it at that. [slight laughter] Because I’m out of time. But one of the—I—I’ll leave it with this. [slight laughter] The poor are not getting poorer under capitalism. The poor are getting richer under capitalism by a large margin. [slight laughter] And I’ll leave you with one statistic which is that now, in—in Africa the child mortality rate in Africa now is the same as the child mortality rate was in Europe in 1952. And so that’s happened within the span of one lifetime. And so if you’re for the poor—if you’re for the poor—if you’re actually concerned that the poorest people in the world rise above their starvation levels then—the all the evidence suggests that the best way to do that is to implement something approximating a free-market economy. And so, thank you very much.[wide applause, Peterson returns to his seat.]
Slavoj Žižek: [Žižek looks to his left and sees a chair behind a podium, then speaks to Blackwood just audibly] I have a chair, I can sit that?
Stephen Blackwood: Yes
Slavoj Žižek: It help me a lot. Okay.
Stephen Blackwood: Thank you Dr. Peterson. Dr. Žižek.
Slavoj Žižek: Thank you. [Žižek mounts a chair at his podium and prepares to read from his papers. Widespread long applause.] Okay. First, a brief [some shouts] introductory remark. I cannot but notice the irony of how Peterson and I, the participants in this [dismissively waving his left hand] “duel of the century,” are both marginalised by the official academic community. [some audience shouts] I am supposed to defend here the left, liberal line against neo-conservatives. Really? Most of the attacks on me are now precisely from left liberals. [some cheers, applause] Just remember the outcry against my critique of LGBT+ ideology. And I’m sure that if the leading figures in this field were to be asked if I [am] fit to stand for them, they would turn in their graves even if they are still alive. [laughs, applause and cheers]
[o38:44]
Slavoj Žižek: So let me begin by bringing together the three notions from the title: Happiness, Communism, Capitalism. In one exemplary case: China today. China in the last decades is arguably the greatest economic success story in human history. Hundreds of millions raised from poverty into middle class existence. How…did China achieve it? The twentieth century Left was defined by its opposition to the two fundamental tendencies of modernity: the reign of capital, with its aggressive market competition, the authoritarian bureaucratic state power. Today’s China combines these two features in its extreme form: strong, authoritarian state, state-wide capitalist dynamics. And it’s important to note: they do it on behalf of happiness of the majority of people. They don’t mention communism to legitimise their rule, they prefer the old Confucian notion of a harmonious society. But…are the Chinese any happier for all that? Although even the Dali Llama justifies Tibetan Buddhism in Western terms of the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain, happiness as a goal of our life is a very problematic notion.
[o40:12]
Slavoj Žižek: If we’ve learned anything from psychoanalysis, [some cheers, applause] it is that we humans are very creative in sabotaging our pursuit of happiness. Happiness is a confused notion. Basically it relies on the subject’s inability or unreadiness to fully confront the consequences of his/her/their desire. In our daily lives, we pretend to desire things which we do not really desire, so that ultimately the worst thing that can happen is for us to get what we officially desire. So I agree that human life of freedom and dignity does not consist just in searching for happiness. No matter how much we spiritualize it, or in the [dismissively waving his left hand] effort to actualise our inner potentials. We have to find some meaningful cause beyond the mere struggle for pleasurable survival. However, I would like to add here a couple of….qualifications.
[o41:21]
Slavoj Žižek: First, since we live in a modern era, we cannot simply refer to an unquestionable authority to confer a mission or task on us. Modernity means that yes, we should carry the burden, but the main burden is freedom itself. We are responsible for our burdens. Not only are we not allowed cheap excuses for not doing our duty, duty itself should not serve as an excuse. We are never just instruments of some higher cause. Once traditional authority loses its substantial power, it is not possible to return to it. All such returns are today a postmodern fake. Does Donald Trump stand for traditional values? No, his conservatism is a postmodern performance, a gigantic ego trip. In this sense of playing with traditional values of mixing references to them with open obscenities, Trump is the ultimate postmodern president. In–if we compare with Trump with Bernie Sanders, Trump is a postmodern politician at its purest while Sanders is rather an old fashion moralist.
[o42:41]
Slavoj Žižek: Conservative thinkers claim that the origin of our crisis is the loss of our reliance on some transcendent divinity or [dismissively waving his left hand] higher value. If we are left to ourselves, if everything is historically conditioned and relative, then there is nothing preventing us to indulge in our lowest tendencies. But is this really the lesson to be learned from mob killing, looting and burning on behalf of religion? It is often claimed that true or not, religion makes some otherwise bad people do good things. From today’s experience, I think we should rather speak to Steven Weinberg’s claim that while without religion good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things, only something like religion can make good people do bad things. More than a century ago, in his Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky warned against the dangers of godless—godless moral nihilism. If God doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted. The French philosopher André Glucksmann applied Dostoyevsky’s critique of godless nihilism to September 11 and the title of his book, Dostoyevsky in Manhattan suggests—as this title suggests. He couldn’t have been more wrong. The lesson of today’s terrorism is that if there is a God, then everything—even blowing up hundreds of innocent bystanders—is permitted to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God. The same goes also for godless, Stalinist Communists. They are the ultimate proof of it. Everything was permitted to them since they perceived themselves as direct instrument of their divinity: of the historical necessity of progress towards communism. That’s the big problem of ideologies: how to make good, decent people do horrible things. [very light applause]
[o44:53]
Slavoj Žižek: Second: yes, we should carry our burden: accept the suffering that goes with it. But a danger lurks here: that of a subtly reversal. Don’t fall in love—that’s my position—with your suffering. Never presume that your suffering is in itself a proof of your authenticity. [Some cheers, applause] Renunciation of pleasure can easily turn into pleasure of renunciation itself. For example, an example not from neo-conservatives. White, left liberals love to denigrate their own culture and blame eurocentrism for our evils. But it is instantly clear how this self-denigration brings a profit of its own. Through this renouncing of their particular roots, multi-cultural liberals reserve for themselves the universal position: graciously soliciting others to assert their particular identity. White, multiculturalist liberals embody the lie of identity politics.
[o46:02]
Slavoj Žižek: Next point: Jacques Lacan wrote something paradoxical but deeply true. That even if what a jealous husband claims about his—about his…wife—that she sleeps with other men—is all true, his jealousy is nonetheless pathological. The palod—pathological element is the husband’s need for jealousy as the only way for him to sustain his identity. Along the same lines, one could say that even if most of the Nazi claims about Jews—they exploit Germans, the seduce German girls and so on—were true—which they were not, of course—their anti-Semitism would still be a pathological phenomenon, because it ignored the true reason why the Nazis needed anti-Semitism. In the Nazi vision, their society is an organic whole of harmonious collaboration, so an external intruder is needed to account for divisions and antagonisms.
[o47:13]
Slavoj Žižek: The same holds for how today—in Europe at least—the anti-immigrant populists deal with the refugees. The cause of problems which are, I claim, imminent to today’s global capitalism, is projected onto an external intruder. [light sustained applause] Again, even if the reported incidents with the refugees—there are great problems, I admit it—even all these reports are true, the populist story about them is a lie. With anti-Semitism, we are approaching the topic of telling stories. Hitler was one of the greatest storytellers of the 20th century. In the 1920s many Germans experienced their situation as a confused mess. They didn’t understand what is happening to them with military defeat, economic crisis, what they perceived as moral decay, and so on. Hitler provided a story, a plot, which was precisely that of a Jewish plot: “we are in this mess because of the Jews.”
[o48:20]
Slavoj Žižek: That’s what I would like to insist on. We are telling ourselves stories about ourselves in order to acquire a meaningful experience of our lives. However, this is not enough. One of the most stupid wisdoms—and they’re mostly stupid—is “An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard.” Really? There is—is—are you also ready to affirm that Hitler was our enemy because his story was not heard? The experience that we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, in order to account for what we are doing is—and this is what I call ideology—fundamentally a lie. The truth lies outside in what we do. In a similar way, the alt-right obsession with cultural Marxism expresses the rejection to confront the fact that the phenomena they criticize as the effect of the cultural Marxist plot—moral degradation, sexual promiscuity, consumerist hedonism, and so on—are the outcome of the imminent dynamic of capitalist societies.
[o49:42]
Slavoj Žižek: I would like to refer to a classic. Daniel Bell, Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism written back in 1976, where the author argues that the unbounded drive of modern capitalism undermines the moral foundations of the original protestant ethics. And in the new afterword, Bell offers a bracing perspective on contemporary Western societies, revealing the crucial cultural fault lines we face…as the 21st century is here. The turn towards culture as a key component of capitalist reproduction and concomitant to I,t the commodification of cultural life itself are, I think, crucial moments of capitalism expanded reproduction. So, the term Cultural Marxism, I think, plays the same role as that of the Jewish plot in anti-Semitism. [cheers, some applause] It projects, or transposes, some immanent antagonism, however you call it, ambiguity, tension of our socio-economic lives onto an external cause, in exactly the same way. Now, let me tell you a different—give you a different more problematic example. In exactly the same way, liberal critics of Trump and alt-right never seriously ask how our liberal society could give birth to Trump. [cheers, applause] In this sense, the image of Donald Trump is also a fetish, the last thing a liberal sees before confronting actual social tensions. Hegel’s motto: ”Evil resides in the gaze which sees evil everywhere” fully applies here. The very liberal gaze which demonizes Trump is also…evil because it ignores how its own failures opened up the space for Trump’s type of patriotic populism. [applause]
[o51:50]
Slavoj Žižek: Next point: one should stop blaming hedonist egotism for our woes. The true opposite of egotist self-love is not altruism—a concern for the common good—but envy, resentment, which makes me act against my own interests. This is why as many perspicuous philosophers clearly saw, evil is profoundly spiritual, in some sense more spiritual than goodness. This is why egalitarianism itself should never be accepted at its face value. It can well secretly invert the standard renunciation accomplished to benefit others. Egalitarianism often de facto means “I am ready to renounce something so that others will also not have it”. This is I think—now comes the problematic part for some of you, maybe—the problem with political correctness. What appears as its excesses, its regulatory zeal, is I think an impotent reaction to that masks the reality of a defeat. My hero is here a black lady, Tarana Burke, who created the MeToo campaign more than a decade ago. She observed in a recent critical note that in the years since the movement began it deployed an unwavering obsession with the perpetrators. MeToo is all too often a genuine protest filtered through resentment.
[o53:28]
Slavoj Žižek: Should we then drop egalitarianism? No. Equality can also mean—and that’s the equality I advocate—creating the space for as many as possible individuals to develop their different potentials. It is—that’s my paradoxical claim. [some applause, cheers] It is today’s capitalism that equalizes us too much and causes the loss of many talents. So what about the balance between equality and hierarchy? Did we really move too much in the direction of equality? Is there, in today’s United States, really too much equality? I think a simple overview of the situation points in the opposite direction. Far from pushing us too far, the Left is gradually losing its ground already for decades. Its trademarks: universal health care, free education, and so on, are continuously diminished. Look at Bernie Sanders’—and I don’t idealize him—program. It is just a version of what half a century ago in Europe was simply the predominant social democracy, and it’s today as decried as a threat to our freedoms, to the American way of life, and so on and so on. I can see no threat in—to free creativity in this program. On the contrary, I see healthcare and education and so on as enabling me to focus my life on more important creative issues. I see equality—this basic equality of [trenches?]—as a space for creating differences and, yes, why not, even different more appropriate hierarchies. Furthermore, I find it very hard to ground today’s inequalities—as they are documented for example by Piketty in his book—on—to ground today’s inequalities in different competencies. Competencies for what? In totalitarian states, competencies are determined politically. But market success is also not innocent and neutral as a regulator of the social recognition of competencies.
[o55:50]
Slavoj Žižek: Let me now briefly deal[waving his hand, as grasping for a word] —with—a—in a friendly way—I claim, with what became known—sorry for the irony—as the lobster topic. [some amused applause, cheers] I’m far from a simple social constructionism here: I deeply appreciate evolutionary talk. Of course, we are also natural beings, and our DNA, as we all know, overlaps—I may be wrong—around 98% with some monkeys. This means something. But nature, I think—we should never forget this—is not a stable hierarchical system but full of improvisations. It develops like French cuisine. A French guy gave me this idea, that French—the origin of many famous French dishes or drinks is that when they wanted to produce a standard piece of food or drink, something went wrong, but then they realised that this failure can be resold as success. [light laughter, applause] They were making cheese in the usual way, but the cheese got rotten and infected, smelling bad, and they said, “Oh my God, look, we have our own original French cheese.” [audience laughter] Or, they were making wine in the usual way, then something went wrong with fermentations and so they began to produce champagne and so on and so on. I’m not making just a joke here because I think that it is exactly like this that—that’s the lesson of psychoanalysis, that our sexuality works.
[o57:29]
Slavoj Žižek: Sexual instincts are, of course, biologically determined. But look what we humans made out of them. They are not limited to the mating season. They can develop in a—permanent obs—into a permanent obsession sustained by obstacles that demand to be overcome in short, into a properly metaphysical passion that [perturbs] the biologically rhythm. With twists like endlessly prolonging satisfaction in courtly love, engaging in different perversions and so on and so on. So it’s still, yes, biologically conditioned sexuality, but it is if I may use this term, transfunctionalised. It becomes a moment of a different cultural—however you call it—logic. And I claim the same goes for tradition. T. S. Eliot, the great conservative, wrote, quote “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the work of art which preceded it. The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.’” End of quote. What does this mean?
[58:44]
Slavoj Žižek: Let me mention the change enacted by Christianity. It’s not just that in spite of all our natural and cultural differences the same divine sparks dwells in everyone. But this divine spark enables us to create what Christians call Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit. A community which hierarchic family values are at some level—at least—abolished. Remember Paul’s words from Galatians: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer male and female in Christ.” A democracy extends this logic to the political space in spite of all differences in competence, the ultimate decision should stay with all of us. The wager of democracy is that we should not give all power to competent experts. It was precisely Communists in power who, legitimized their rule, by posing as fake experts. And, incidentally I’m far from believing in ordinary people’s wisdom. We often need a master figure to push us out of an inertia and, I’m not afraid to say, that forces us to be free. Freedom and responsibility hurt: they require an effort, and the highest function of an authentic master is to literally to awake us to our freedom. We are spontaneously really free.
[o1:00:17]
Slavoj Žižek: Furthermore, think to—I think that social power and authority cannot be directly grounded in competence. In our human universe, power, in the sense of exerting authority, is something much more mysterious, even irrational. Kierkegaard, my and everybody’s favourite theologist, [some applause] wrote “If a child says he will obey his father because his father is a comp—competent and good guy, this is an affront to father’s authority”. And he applied the same logic to Christ himself. Christ was justified by the fact of being God’s son, not by his competencies or capacities. As Kierkegaard put it: “Every good student of theology can put things better than Christ.” If there is no such authority in nature, lobsters may have hierarchy, undoubtedly, but the main guy among them—I don’t think he has authority in this sense. Again, the wager of democracy is that—and that’s the subtle thing—not against competence and so on, but that political power and competence or expertise should be kept apart. In Stalinism, precisely they were not kept apart, while already in ancient Greece they knew that they have to be kept apart, which is why their popular weight was even combined with lottery often.
[o1:01:52]
Slavoj Žižek: So where does Communism, just to conclude, where does Communism enter here? Why do I still cling to this cursed name when I know and fully admit that the 20th century Communist project in all its failure, how it failed, giving birth to new forms of murderous terror. Capitalism won, but today—and that’s my claim, we can debate about it—the question is, does today’s global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms which prevent its indefinite reproduction? I think there are such antagonisms. The threat of ecological catastrophe, the consequence of new techno-scientific developments—especially in biogenetics—and new forms of apar—apartheid. All these antagonisms concern what Marx called commons: the shared substance of our social being. First of course, the commons of external nature, threatened by pollution, global warming and so on. Now, let me be precise here. I’m well aware how uncertain analysis and projections are in this domain. It will be certain only when will be too late. And I am well aware of the temptation to engage in precipitous extrapolations. When I was younger—to give you a critical example—there was in Germany an obsession with “Weltsterben” the dying of forests with predictions that in a couple of decades Europe will be without forests. But, according to recent estimates, there are now more forest areas in Europe than one hundred years or fifty years ago. But there is nonetheless—I claim—the prospect of a catastrophe here. Scientific data seems—to me at least—abundant enough. And we should act in a large scale, collective way. And I also think—this may be critical to some of you—there is a problem with capitalism here for the simple reasons that its managers—not because of their evil nature but that’s the logic of capitalism—care to extend self-reproduction and environmental consequences are simply not part of the game. This is again, not a moral reproach. [some applause]
[o1:04:21]
Slavoj Žižek: And incidentally—so that you will not think that I don’t know what I’m talking about—in Communist countries, those in power were obsessed with expanded reproduction, and were not under public control, so the situation was even worse. So, how to act? First by admitting we are in a deep mess. There is no simple democratic solution here. The idea that people themselves should decide what to do about ecology sounds deep, but it begs an important question, even with their comprehension is not distorted by corporate interests. What [coughs] qualifies them to pass a judgement in such a delicate matter? Plus, the radical measures advocated by some ecologists can themselves trigger new catastrophes. Let me mention just the idea which is floating around of solar radiation management. The continuous massive dispersal of aerosols into our atmosphere, to reflect and absorb sunlight, and thus cool the planet. Can we even imagine how the fragile balance of our earth functions and in what unpredictable ways geo-engineering can disturb it? In such times of urgency, when we know we have to act but don’t know how to act, thinking is needed. Maybe we should turn around a little bit, Marx’s famous thesis eleven in that—in our new century we should say that maybe in the last century we tried all too fast to change the world. The time has come to step back and interpret it.
[o1:06:07]
Slavoj Žižek: The second threat, the commons of internal nature. With new biogenetic technologies, the creation of a new man, in the literal sense of changing human nature, becomes a realist prospect. I mean primarily so-called popularly, neural-link, the direct link between our brain and digital machines, and then brains among themselves. This, I think, is the true game changer. The digitalisation of our brain opens up unheard-of new possibilities of control. Directly sharing your experience with our beloved may appear attractive, but what about sharing them with an agency without you even knowing it?
[o1:06:51]
Slavoj Žižek: Finally, the common space of humanity itself. We live in one and the same world which is more and more interconnected. But, nonetheless, deeply divided. So, how to react to this? The first and sadly predominate reaction is the one of protected self-enclosure. “The world out there is in a mess, let’s protect ourselves by all kinds of walls.” It seems that our countries are run relatively well, but is the mess the so-called rogues countries find themselves in not connected to how…we interact with them? Take what is perhaps the ultimate rogue state, Congo. Warlords who rule provinces there are always dealing with Western companies, selling them minerals. Where would our computers be without coltan from Congo? And what about foreign interventions in Iraq and Syria? Or by our proxies like Saudi Arabia in Yemen? Here refugees are created. A New World Order is emerging, a world of—[Žižek pauses and squints at something in front of him, gestures to his paper looking to his left, likely to Blackwood] Can I just finish the page? [He nods and slightly waves a hand, seeming to have received affirmation, slight audience laughing] Two minutes, literally.
[o1:08:05]
Slavoj Žižek: A world of peaceful co-existence of civilisations, but in what way does it function? Forced marriages and homophobic—homophobia are ok, just that they’re r—limited—limited to another country which is otherwise fully included into the world market. This is how refugees, again, are created. The second reaction is global capitalism with a human face. Think about socially responsible corporate figures like Bill Gates and George Soros. They passionately support LGBT, they advocate charities and so on. But even it its extreme form, opening up our borders to the refugees, treating them like one of us, they only provide what is medicine—what in medicine is called a symptomatic treatment. The solution is not for the rich Western countries to receive all immigrants, but somehow to try to change the situation which creates massive waves of immigration, [mounting audience applause] and we are complicit in this.
[o1:09:17]
Slavoj Žižek: Is such a change a utopia? No. The true utopia is that we can survive without such a change. So, here I think, I know it’s provocative to call this a plea for communism, I do it a little bit to provoke things. But what is needed is nonetheless in all these fears I claim, ecology, digital control, [rotating his hand, as if indicating more items] unity of the world. Capitalist market—which does great things, I admit it—has to be somehow limited, regulated and so on. Before you say, “it’s a utopia,” I will tell you “but just think about in what way global market already functions today. I always thought that neoliberalism is a fake term. If you look closely, you will see that state plays today more important role than ever precisely in the richest capitalist economics. So, you know, the market is already limited but not in the right way, to put it naïvely.
[o1:10:28]
Slavoj Žižek: So, a pessimist conclusion: what will happen? In spite of protests here and there, we will probably continue to slides towards some kind of apocalypse, [wide laughter, some applause] awaiting large catastrophes to awaken us. So, I don’t accept any cheap optimism. When somebody tries to convince me that in spite of all these problems, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, my instant reply is, “yes, and it’s another train coming towards us.” [laughter, growing into applause and cheers] Thank you very much.
[continued wide applause and cheers as Žižek sits, begins writing on a paper]
Slavoj Žižek: [Žižek shakes his head, raises his hands to admonish the audience] Please, don’t do this because I really think that that’s why I—I—I hope you Jordan agree with it that why we are here engaged in this debate. Don’t take it as a cheap competition. It may be that, [audience laughter] but we are as you said in your introduction, desperately trying to confront serious problems. [wide applause] For example when I mentioned China—China I didn’t mean to celebrate it. That worries me terribly my God, is this our future?
[o1:11:58]
Stephen Blackwood: Now—now—now—
Slavoj Žižek: Sorry, sorry, for this, sorry. [Peterson waves his hands as though dismissing it as a problem]Please d—discount—take away this from my ten minutes.
Jordan Peterson: No—[growing audience laughter]no problem, no problem, no problem.
Stephen Blackwood: [Dr.] Peterson, ten minutes to you to reply. [Peterson takes his laptop and goes to the podium]
[o1:12:18]
Jordan Peterson: So, I like to speak extemporaneously but Dr. Žižek’s…discussion was so complex that there’s no way that I can juggle my responses spontaneously, so okay.
Slavoj Žižek:[audible, but with his mic off] That’s—that’s why I want—that’s what I wanted to achieve.
Jordan Peterson: [laughing] Okay—ha—yeah. Well and—and—and…ha. Achievement managed, I would say. So—so I heard much of—I heard—much of what I heard I agreed with. But we can get to that, I’m gonna respond.
Slavoj Žižek:[audible, but with his mic off] Keep that. Pull out the knife.
Jordan Peterson: All right, [audience laughter] alri—well? I—I—I…
[o1:12:53]
Jordan Peterson: I heard a criticism of capitalism, but no real support of Marxism. And—and that’s an interesting thing because for me the—the terms of the argument were—well, there were three, terms of the argument, let’s say—there was capitalism, there was Marxism and there was happiness and I would say Dr. Žižek focused probably more on the problems of capitalism and the problems of happiness than on the utility of Marxism. And that actually comes as a surprise to me because I presumed that much of what I would hear would be a support of something approximating traditional or even atraditional Marxism which is why I organized the first part of my talk [some audience laughter] as an attack against Marxism per se.
[o1:13:33]
Jordan Peterson: Okay, so, now, Žižek points out that there are problems of capitalism and I would like to say that I’m perfectly aware that there are problems with capitalism. I wasn’t defending capitalism, actually, in some sense, I was defending it in comparison to communism, which is not the same thing. Because as Winston Churchill said about democracy, you know, it’s the worst form of government there is, except for all the other forms. And so…you might say the same thing about capitalism is that it’s the worst form of economic arrangement you could possibly manage except for every other one that we’ve ever tried. And the—and that—and I’m dead serious about that. I’m not trying to be flippant. I mean that it isn’t obvious to me, and…when—when Dr. Žižek is speaking in more apocalyptic terms—it isn’t obvious to me that we can solve the problems that confront us. You know? And it—it’s not—also not a message that I have been purveying that unbridled capitalism per se as an isolated—what would you say?—social economic structure, actually constitutes the proper answer to the problems that confront us. So I haven’t made that case in any of the lectures that I’ve—anything I’ve written or any of the lectures that I’ve done because I don’t believe it to be true.
[o1:14:45]
Jordan Peterson: He—he said well what’s the problems with capitalism? Well, the commodification of cultural life. All life. Fair enough. There—there’s something that isn’t exactly right about reducing everything to economic competition and capitalism certainly pushes in that direction. Advertising culture pushes in that direction. Sales and marketing culture pushes in that direction. And there’s reasons for that, and I have a certain amount of admiration for the necessity of advertisers and salesmen and marketers. But that doesn’t mean that the transformation of all elements of life into element—into commodities in a capitalist sense is the best way forward. I—I don’t think it is the best way forward. I—I think the evidence for that’s actually quite clear. There is—by the way—a relationship—this is something I didn’t point out before—there is a relationship between wealth and happiness. It’s quite well defined in the psychological literature. Now it’s not exactly obvious whether the happiness measures are measures of happiness or whether they’re measures of the absence of misery. And my sense is as a psychometrician who’s looked at these scales that people are more concerned with not being miserable than they are with being happy. And those are all actually separate emotional states mediated by different psychobiological systems. It’s a technical point but it’s an important one.
[o1:16:05]
Jordan Peterson: The—There is a relationship between absolute level of income and self-reported lack of misery or happiness. And it’s pretty linear until you hit…I would say something approximating decent working-class income. And so what seems to happen is that wealth makes you happy as long as it keeps the bill collectors at bay. Like once you’ve got to the point where the misery is staved off as much as it can be by the fact that you’re not absolutely in—you’re not in absolutely economically dire straits, then adding more money to your life has no relationship whatsoever to your well-being. And so it’s clear that past a certain minimal point, additional material provision is not sufficient to—let’s say—redeem us individually or socially.
[o1:16:56]
Jordan Peterson: And it’s certainly the case that the radical wealth production that characterizes capitalism might produce a fatal threat to the structure of our social systems and our broader ecosystems. Who knows? I’m not absolutely convinced of that for a variety of reasons. I mean, Žižek pointed out, for example, that there are more forests in Europe in—now than there were a hundred years ago. There’s actually more forests in the entire Northern hemisphere and there were a hundred years ago and the news on the ecological front is not as dismal as the people who put out the most dismal news would have you think. And there is some possibility. [light applause] That doesn’t mean that there aren’t elements of it that are dismal, you know? Other tha—what we’ve done to the oceans is definitely something catastrophic and we—we definitely have our problems. But it is possible that human ingenuity might solve that.
[o1:17:49]
Jordan Peterson: What else? There are inequalities generated by capitalism: a proclivity towards a shallow materialism, the probability of corruption. The thing about that for me is those are catastrophes that are part of the struggle for human existence itself and not something to be laid at the feet of any given socio-political system especially one that seems to be producing a fair modicum of wealth for the poorest section of the population and raising people up to the point where—you know—they—their lives aren’t unending—an unending day-to-day struggle for mere survival. There’s some evidence, for example, that if you can get GDP up to about $5,000 per person per year—oh that’s GDP—that people start to become concerned about environmental degradation and start to take actions to prevent it. And so there is some possibility that if we’re lucky we can get the bottom billion or two billion people in the world—or three billion as the population grows—up to the point where they’re wealthy enough so they actually start to care enough about the environment so that we could act collectively to solve environmental problems. Now you might say “well by that time we’ll be out of Earth.” You know? We’ll have—we’ll have exhausted the resources that are in front of us so desperately that there’s no hope of that but I would like to remind you of a famous bet between Julian Simon and the biologist at—at Stanford who wrote—Paul Ehrlich who wrote The Population Bomb. They bet—Ehrlich who—who thought we’re gonna be overpopulated by the year 2000—bet Simon that by the year 2000 commodity prices would have increased dramatically as a consequence of evidence that we were running out of material resources and made a famous bet over a 25 year period and Ehrlich paid off Simon in the year 2000 because commodity prices went down and not up. And so there is no solid evidence that the fact that our population is growing and will peak out—by the way at about 9 billion—there’s no solid indication that the consequence of that is that we are in fact running out of necessary material resources. And so it’s a danger but it—there—it’s not a danger that’s proven and there is some utility and considering that the addition of several billion more brains to the planet—especially if they were well nourished brains as they increasing are might help us generate enough problem-solvers so that we can stay ahead of…the looming ecological catastrophe as our population balloons outwards. Now we’re going to peak at 9 billion it’s not much higher than we are now and it looks like we might be able to manage it.
[o1:20:17]
Jordan Peterson: The—the other thing is that I didn’t hear an alternative, really, from Dr. Žižek. Now he—he admitted that the rise to success of the Chinese was in part a consequence of al—of the allowance of market forces and decried the authoritarian tendencies and—fair enough that’s exactly it. It also seemed to me that the social justice group identity processes that Dr. D—Žižek was decrying are to me a logical derivation from the oppression narrative that’s a fundamental presupposition of Marxism. So there I never heard a defense of Marxism in that part of his argument as well. And so for me again it’s to ask what’s the alternative?
[o1:20:54]
Jordan Peterson: I also heard an argument for egalitarianism and—but I heard it defined as equality of opportunity, not as equality of outcome which I see as a clearly defined Marxist aim. I heard an argument for a modified social distribution of wealth, but that’s already part and parcel of most modern free-market states with a wide variation and an appropriate variation of government intervention all of which constitute their own experiment. We don’t know how much social intervention is necessary to flatten the tendency of hierarchies to become tilted so terribly that only the people at the top have everything and all of the people at the bottom have nothing. It’s a very difficult battle to fight against that profound tendency much deeper than the tendency of capitalism itself and we don’t exactly know what to do about it. So we run experiments and that seems to be working perfectly reasonably as far as I can tell.
[o1:21:48]
Jordan Peterson: Let’s see [pause] well also—I’ll—I’ll close with this. Capitalism and the free market. Well that’s the worst form of social organization possible, as I said, except for all the others. There is a positive relationship between economics measured by income and happiness or psychological well-being which might be the absence of misery. I certainly do not believe—and the evidence does not suggest that material security is sufficient. I do believe however, that insofar as there is a relationship between happiness and material security that the free market system has demonstrated itself as the most efficient manner to achieve that. And that was actually the terms of the argument. So that’s—if it’s capitalism versus Marxism with regards to human happiness, it’s still the case that the free market constitutes the clear winner. And maybe capitalism will not solve our problems. I actually don’t believe that it will.
[o1:22:40]
Jordan Peterson: I’ve in fact argued that the proper pathway forward is one of individual moral responsibility aimed at the highest good. It’s something for me that’s rooted in our underlying Judeo-Christian tradition that insists that each person is—a—a what is—is sovereign in their own right and a locus of—of—of—of—of—of ultimate value which is something that you can accept regardless of your religious presuppositions and something that you do accept if you participate in a society such as ours. Even the fact that you vote—that you’re charged with that responsibility is an indication that our society has structured such that we presume that each person is a locus of responsibility and decision-making…of such import that the very stability the state depends upon the integrity of their…psych—the-inte—the integrity of their character. And so what I’ve been suggesting to people is that they adopt as much responsibility as they possibly can in keeping with that—in keeping with their aim at the highest possible good which to me is something approximating a balance between what’s good for you as an individual and what’s good for your family in keeping with what’s good for you as an individual and then what’s good for society in the larger frame such that it’s also good for you and your family. And that’s a form of an—well an elaborated iterated game. A form of elaborated cooperation. It’s a sophisticated way of looking at the ways society could possibly be organized and I happen to believe that that has to happen at the individual level first and that’s the pathway forward that I see. And so that’s my [sustained applause and cheers] ten-minute commentary.
[o1:24:20]
Žižek: Ah yeah I think—I go up again?
Stephen Blackwood: Yeah. As you wish. Thank You Dr. Peterson, Dr. Žižek.
Slavoj Žižek: [Since] already—spent a little bit of my time I will try to be as short as possible so a couple of remarks and then my final point why I think this self limitation of capitalism is needed. First about happiness, just a couple of remarks. Jordan, I want to ask you but isn’t it—am I dreaming I think I’m not. I remember a couple of years ago it was reported all around the world some kind of….investigation percentage of people interviewed in different countries: Do they feel happy with their life? And the shock was that some Scandinavian countries which we—which we considered [dismissively gesturing] social democratic paradise were very low, while Bangladesh, I think was close to the top. Now I know this logic has a limit, I don’t buy the bullshit of “poor people are happy in their world” there and so on. But you know, my argument here is not against you, my argument here is problematizing…happiness even more. Look, this may interest you.
[o1:25:42]
Slavoj Žižek: I was years ago in—in I think Lithuania and we debated a report on this in one of my books when were people in some perverted sense—and this is the critique of the category of happiness for me—happy. And we came to the crazy result. After the Soviet intervention, Czechoslovakia in 1970s and 80s. Why? For happiness first you don’t have–you should not have too much democracy, because this brings the burden of responsibility. Happiness means there is another guy out there you can put all the blame on him. And as the joke went in Czechoslovakia, if there is bad weather, a storm, “oh, these communist screwed it up again.” That’s one condition of happiness. The other condition—much more subtle ones is—and this was done in Czechoslovakia—those dark times after [so.] The—the life was relatively moderately good, but not perfect. Like there was meat all the time, maybe once a month there was not meat in the stores. It was very good to remind you how happy you are—the other times.
[o1:26:57]
Slavoj Žižek: Another thing: they had a paradise which should be at the proper distance, West Germany uplands. It was not too far, but not directly accessible. You know? So I—I—it was—so…maybe in your critique of communist regimes—I agree with you—you should more focus on something that I experienced of—you know, don’t look only at the terror, ultimately totalitarian regime. There was a kind of a—a silent perverted pact between—at least in this late—a little bit more tolerant but I still oppose them—communist regimes between power and population. The message was, leave us the power don’t [mess it] worse and we guarantee you a relatively safe life, employment, private pleasures, private niche and so on and so on. So I am not surprised. But again this is not for me the argument for the communism but against happiness that….You know, people said when commu—when the wall fell down “what a wonder in Poland.” My god, in—in…in like Solidarność which was prohibited a year ago, now triumph at the elections, who could imagine this? Yes but the true miracle in a bad sense for me was four years later democratically ex-communists came back to power.
[o1:28:20]
Slavoj Žižek: So you know, [don’t]—again, this for me not the argument for them but simply for the…let’s call it corruptive nature of happiness. So my formula—maybe you’d agree with it—is: my basic dogma is: Happiness should be treated as a necessary by-product. If you focus on it, you are lost. It comes as a by—byproduct of you [audience applause, the camera pans to Peterson nodding] working for a cause and so on. That’s the basic thing for me.
[o1:28:50]
Slavoj Žižek: Second point. Maybe we disagree here. China. Of course the miracle—economic miracle was due to unleashing…market ref[orm] and so on. But—and here comes my pessimism—some of my liberal friends are telling me “just imagine what would they have achieved with also political democratization.” I’m a pressimist here, no. They found a perfect formula of how—and that’s the paradox of China today. The Communist Party is the best manager of capitalism and protector against workers. The truly dangerous thing in China today is not to flirt with Western ideas, is to organize trade unions to[day]—you know? Like this is what worries me. This perfect combination between unleashing capitalism and…still the authoritarian rule or to put it in another way, my worry is that today all around the world this eternal marriage between capitalism and democracy is…slowly disappearing. Till now, I admit it. Capitalism needed from time to time some 10, 20 years of dictatorship. When things started to improve, democracy returned. Chile, South Korea and so on. I wonder if we are still at that.
[o1:30:16]
Slavoj Žižek: Now it’s just a—very quickly, your basic point in the introduction—in your introduction. You know, I almost am tempted to say the way you presented Communist Manifesto, the simplified image and so on so on, it’s crazy to say, but on many points right I agree with you and it’s a very complex argument. Marx didn’t have, for example, a good theory of how social power exists. His idea was simply with disappearance of class structure it secretly—although he wouldn’t have accepted it—a technocratic dream. Like by experts, social life will be run as a—a perfect machine. Although he was at least aware of the problem which is why he was so enthusiastic—Marx—about Paris Commune, you know, which was precisely not centralized power. So I’m not just defending Marx I’m saying it was not clear to him. And…so let’s drop that maybe? [light audience laughter] I have more interesting things—to say.
[o1:31:26]
Slavoj Žižek: Ah! Another point. Nonetheless, where—where…at one point I’m ready to [say?] Where did you find this—this goes maybe for today’s politically correct jerks and so on that this….egalitarianism. There is one passage in his late Critique of Gotha Program where Marx directly accesses the problem of equality and he dismisses it as a strict bourgeois category Explicitly, explicitly. [audience cheers, applause] For him communism is not a egalitarianism. It’s yes, hierarchies, but not based on capitalism, okay. I’m not defen—totally defending here Marx. I’m just saying….don’t [inaudible] to Marx okay, but to conclude because yes I want to keep my promise to be a little bit shorter.
[o1:32:23]
Slavoj Žižek: You know I agree with you on many points but you know what my problem with—my problem that I was aiming at with all the openings—I know we don’t know really what is happening with ecology and so on—who—and this is—okay let’s take oceans, you mentioned them. But isn’t it for me—correct me if I’m wrong, and I don’t mean this rhetorically maybe I’m really wrong but—the problem of oceans can…the only way for me is some kind of cooperated international action and so on. You cannot simply leave it to the market. [scattered audience applause] That’s what I’m saying. This is the [fateful] limit that I see. Wh–about this diminishing poverty and so on I’m aware of it, I tend to agree with. I also—but at the same time so many explosive tensions. For example, do you know about South Africa? It’s a terrifying situation on the edge of the civil war. To be very brutal, the only thing that—I’m simplifying it—that really happened with end of apartheid is that the old ruling class is simplified in grotesque Marxist term was joined by a new black ruling class which is not doing a good job so they are trying to play the race card. [scattered audience applause] It’s still the consequence of…white colonialism and so on and so on. But—but tensions are terrifying and here I was pleading for not abolishing borders and so on but this type of—I [don’t] know how to put it—global change, cooperation…Like again the example of Congo that I and…mentioned or like the—the forget killing of that guy, Khashoggi. It’s horrible but the true nightmare is Yemen today. What—I mean—you said somewhere that we should well think without engaging in large-scale reform what the consequences will be. If you[Žižek points in front of him, appearing to see the clock. The audience laughs]—okay—very briefly.
[o1:34:27]
Slavoj Žižek: I agree with you that the gap of standard Marxismwas that the proletarian revolution will be a place where you do something and you know exactly what you do. If there is a lesson of the 20th century is that this tragic logic—you want something, maybe good, the result is catastrophic—holds absolutely also for revolutions and so on and so on. But…it’s—but like—in spite of all this—and I don’t know what form will it have, I’m not pleading for a new Leninist party or whatever—I’m just pleading for new [forms] of international cooperation and so on. I agree with you when you said the majority of us is not even really aware of the seriousness of especially the poor of ecological problems and so on. And I think, would you agree that the situation is here much more subtle and obscene? We—it’s that logic that in psychoanalysis is called disavowal—Verleugnung—in French je sais bien, mais quand-même. we know ecological problems but we don’t really take them seriously. And here I see problems and I don’t see an easy way out. I—I am a pessimist, if you ask me. When people say “no but they—they’re growing, protests are growing and so on and so on.” Yes I’m listening to this story from when I was young, you know. They are growing and then look what happened.
[o1:36:06]
Slavoj Žižek: The mega tragedy is for me, for example, what happened to Syriza. They were elected for change, whatever, and they become—and I’m not blaming them—they become the perfect executors of—of austerity program. So I just see problems. I’m a pessimist and I’m not a radical pessimist, but you have to—maybe here we are different. I noticed with your final speech that final moments of your [introduction] that it’s very strange because usually Marxists have this stupid optimist anthropology. [audience laughter and applause] Just get rid of capitalist terror and we will all be happy. My God, I’m much more a pessimist. I don’t believe in human goodness. I’ve been—never underestimate…evil never underestimate Envy. I mean it’s part of my nature. In Slovenia we have a wonderful story. A godlike figure comes to a farmer and—I will stop immediately[widespread audience laughter] —and asks—and asks him “I will do to you—to you whatever you want. Just I warn you, I will do twice the same to your neighbor.” You know what Slovene farmer answers? “Fine take one of my eyes.” You know. [widespread audience laughter] We are in this. Don’t underestimate this. I don’t see any simple clear way out. Thank you. [widespread audience laughter and applause as Žižek returns to his seat.]
[o1:37:29]
Stephen Blackwood: Thank you both very much. It’s pretty clear, I think, to all of us that you both have quite a bit to say to each other and so—
Slavoj Žižek: —and to ourselves. [One of us.] Yes.
Stephen Blackwood: and [laughing]—and I—so I think before we—we jump to some audience questions I thought it would be nice to give each of you a chance to ask a—a response or ask a question or two from each other. So starting with you, Dr. Peterson.
Slavoj Žižek: Maybe you want simply to counter-attack. It wasn’t fair…to….
Jordan Peterson: Well I’ve only—
Slavoj Žižek: —to do your reply.
Jordan Peterson: —I had…three questions…
Slavoj Žižek: Okay!
Jordan Peterson: …and two of them are now completely irrelevant. And so. [audience laughter] I have one left, I guess. And I’m—I’m not sure that it’s a fair question, but maybe it’s—it seems to me to be a fair question. You’re a—you’re a strange Marxist to have a discussion with. [widespread audience laughter] and well, but here’s why, this is not an insult by any stretch of the imagination.
Slavoj Žižek: No, no!
[o1:38:39]
Jordan Peterson: I mean, one of the things that struck me when I was looking at your work was that…you’re well…first of all you’re a character, you know? And that’s—that’s an—that’s an interesting thing, like you’re—
Slavoj Žižek: Is this an insult or not?
Jordan Peterson: It’s not an insult. [Žižek warmly laughs] It’s a sign of—it’s a sign of originality. And—and it—and it’s a sign of a certain amount of moral courage. And—and—and it’s a sign of a certain temperament and it makes you humorous and charismatic and attractive and—and—and—and I think you appeal to young people the way that outside intellectual rebels appeal to young people. And so those are all positive things that can be used positively or negatively. And my question is…like it seems to me that your—your—your reputation unless—I’m very misinformed about this—is as a strong supporter of Marxist doctrines on the left or was that? And so then my question is, given the originality of your thought, why’d—why is it that you came to presume, at some point in your life, perhaps not now, [Žižek gives an affirming sound] and perhaps still, that the promotion of Marxism rather…say rather than Žižekism was appropriate? Because it seems to me that there’s enough originality in your body of thought and lateral thinking in the manner in which you approach intellectual ideas that there’s just no reason for you to be allied with a doctrine that’s a hundred and seventy years old and that is…if capitalism is rife with problems is twice as rife as prob—with problems as that? And so you’re kind of a mystery to me in that way and so that’s my question.
[o1:40:31]
Slavoj Žižek: [wide audience applause] Okay. [inaudible as he nods]. Very briefly. I—I developed systematically in my books critical insights into many traditional Marxist theses, so no doubt here. You know what I still admire nonetheless in Marx? Not those simplicities of Communist Manifesto but I still think that his so-called critique of political economy, Kapital, and so on, is tremendous achievement as a description of the dynamics of capitalist society and if you read it closely Marx is much more ambiguous and open there. For example, he mentions, for example, [a propos?] what you refer to. He mentions that Law of Diminishing Return like—like—why crisis will arrive necessarily, poor are getting poorer, but he is honest enough to enumerate seven or eight counter tendencies. And if you read him closely you will see that—that precisely those tendencies prevailed later. Or…forget Communist Manifesto, go to read his political analysis of—it’s unsurpassable—18 Brumaire and so on of the 1848 revolution which are incredibly complex—no traces of—traces of that class binary there—there. Marx deals with middle classes with crucial lumpenproletariat with the ambiguous role of intellectuals and so on and so on.
[o1:42:13]
Slavoj Žižek: But basically what I was pleading for—and I like to put it in paradoxical term—was for a return of from Marx back to Hegel. I define myself more as a Hegelian. Why? [small but loud audience cheers] Hegel is consider….Hegel is considered a madman, you know? The guy, absolute knowing and so on and so on. No, Hegel much more modest and open. The danger in Marxism is for me this teleological structure. We are at the zero point unique chance of a reversal into a new emancipated society and so on and the danger here is that of self instrumentalization. Proletarian communist party is a—an agent of history which knows the laws of history—to put it—follows them and so on—that’s catastrophe. In Hegel such a position is strictly prohibited. In Hegel, whenever you act you err. So you know—you have to—there is no position of this pure acting where you know what you are doing and the result will be—will be. So I—this—this would be—this would be my main point so yes, my—my—my formula is kind of…ironically I know Hegel is the greatest idealist—materialist reversal of Marx by turning back to Hegel. For Hegel—Hegel says in a part that people don’t read, Introduction to—Foreword, sorry to Philosophy of Right he says explicitly that the owl of Minerva takes off in the evening when there is dusk, so philosophy can just grasp a social order when it’s already in its decay. Philosophy cannot see into the future, it’s radical openness. We need this openness today. The tragedy today—maybe agree here—is that we really don’t have a basic—how should I call it? a—cognitive mapping. I don’t think we have here a clear insight into where we stand, where we are moving and so on and so on.
Stephen Blackwood: Thank you.
Slavoj Žižek: So I’m much more again, sincerely of a pessimist. [wide sustained audience applause]
[o1:44:38]
Jordan Peterson: inaudibly [So I’ll read the case]
Stephen Blackwood: Yeah, reply.
Slavoj Žižek: Can I ask you now a questions?
Jordan Peterson: Let me, I’ll well let me—
Slavoj Žižek: Let me reply, yes, yes yes….
Jordan Peterson: —respond and then I’ll—and then you can ask me questions.
Slavoj Žižek: Of course. Sorry.
Jordan Peterson: So—well—I don’t have any thing to quibble about with what you just said—
Slavoj Žižek: But—[what’s you] but?
[o1:44:54]
Jordan Peterson: Well, no, there’s not even a but, really. It’s that the…even if the—if what you said about Marx’ more sophisticated thought is true, I think the unfortunate reality is that any support for Marxism—especially directed towards those are—who—who are young—is likely to be read as support for the most radical and revolutionary proclivities and I would say that as they’re outlined in the…in the document that I described—in The Communist Manifesto—that they’re of extraordinary danger and so it seems to me that…by attempting to—you know—rescue the sheep you’ve in—you’ve sort of invited the dragon into the house and that seems to me to be….dangerous and unfortunate.
[o1:45:55]
Slavoj Žižek: Here I can answer you by asking you mine question. Because you know—very naively—you mention [Marx]….first do you really—where did you find the data that I simply don’t see it—okay let me begin by this. You designate your—under quotation marks, I’m not characterizing here—“enemy” or what you are fighting against as sometimes you call it “postmodern Neo-Marxism.” I know what you mean—all this from political correctness…
Jordan Peterson: Yes…
Slavoj Žižek: …to this excesses of whatever…spirit of envy and so on and so on. Do you think they are really—where did you find this data? I don’t know them. I would ask you here give me some names or whatever. Where are the Marxists here? [mounting widespread audience applause and cheers] Sh—show me any big names of political correctness….
Jordan Peterson: Well…well…
Slavoj Žižek: ….I think they—they fear like a good vampire fears garlic any—this is why they are already the one who is not a Marxist but at least approaches economic topic. Bernie Sanders he is already under attack as white male and all that stuff and so on. I simply—I simply….my problem would be with this one: What you described as “postmodern neo-Marxism.” Where is really the Marxist element in it? They for equality, sorry, where? They are for equality at this cultural stru—struggles, proper names, how do we call each other? Do you see in them—in political correctness and so on—any genuine will of…to change society? I don’t see it. [audience applause and cheers] I think it’s a hyper moralization—hyper moralization which is a silent admission of a defeat. That’s my problem. Why do you call—give me—no—I—again it’s not a rhetorical question…
Jordan Peterson: Yes, I understand….
Slavoj Žižek: …or politely saying you are an idiot, you don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s simply—I would like to know—because you and I like this often: when you attack somebody, you said aggressively and what should read more. Tell me whom. So I’m asking you now—not read more [some audience laughter] I don’t advise you—but who are—give me some names and so on and—who are these post-modern egalitarian neo-Marxist and where do you see any kind even, of a Marxism? [mounting widespread audience applause and cheers] I see in it mostly and—an impotent—an utterly impotent moralization. Please, I’m so sorry that I was cut—
Jordan Peterson: No, no, that’s—that’s no problem…
Slavoj Žižek: Go on, please.
[o1:48:52]
Jordan Peterson: Well, I mean…organization like Jonathan Haidt’s—what’s it called….
Stephen Blackwood: [barely audible] Heterodox Academy
Jordan Peterson: Heterodox Academy and other organizations like that have documented an absolute dearth of conservative voices in the social sciences and the humanities and about 25% according to the—what I think are reliable surveys—approximately 25% of social scientists in the US identified themselves as Marxists and so there’s that…
Slavoj Žižek: [inaudibly Could be?] but where are these [Marxists]?
Jordan Peterson: Well okay. But but….let…well…let’s go to the….
Slavoj Žižek: Can you name me one…the… I know a couple of Marxists. For example, who does very solid economic work….
Jordan Peterson: Yeah….
Slavoj Žižek: ….that I don’t totally—David Harvey, one. But he writes very serious books of economic analysis and so on and so on. Then there is the old guy who is far from simplification, Fredric Jameson and so on. But they are totally marginalized today. In this [politically] correct mainstream, you know? I don’t see….
[o1:49:42]
Jordan Peterson: Well, yeah, your question seemed to me to focus more on the pair—the peculiar relationship that I’ve noticed and that people have disputed between post-modernism and—and neo-Marxism. And I see the connection between the postmodernist types and the Marxists as a sleight of hand that replaced the notion of the oppression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie as the oppression by one identity group by another. And…
Slavoj Žižek: Totally agree with you.
Jordan Peterson: Okay, so but that—but—so…now look, we can—we could have a—we could—
Slavoj Žižek: But that’s precisely a—a non—a non Marxist gesture part [par excellence?]
Jordan Peterson: Well, that—that’s the—see—th—the—I guess that’s where we might have a dispute because I think what happened—especially in France in the 1960s is as the—as the radical marxist postmodern types like Derrida and Foucault realized that they were losing the moral battle—especially after the information came out of the Soviet Union in the manner that it came out—that—that—the whole—
Slavoj Žižek: Solzhenitsyn and so on….
Jordan Peterson: Yeah! That the whole bloody Stalinist….
Slavoj Žižek: Yeah.
[o1:50:50]
Jordan Peterson: ….the whole Stalinist catastrophe, along with the entire Maoist catastrophe, they didn’t really have a leg to stand on and instead of revising their notion that human history—and this is a Marxist notion—should be regarded as the eternal class struggle between the economically deprived and the oppressors, they just recast it. And said “Well it—it’s not based on economics, it’s based on identity.” But it’s still fundamentally oppressor against oppressed and to me that meant that they smuggled the—the—the fundamental narrative of Marxism and many of its schools back into the argument without ever admitting that they did so. Now I’ve been criticized, you know, for this supposition. Because….people who are postmodernists say “Look, one of the hallmarks of postmodernism is skepticism of meta-narratives.” It’s like, I know that perfectly well. And I also know that [Marxism] is a meta-narrative and so you shouldn’t be able to be a postmodernist and a Marxist but I still see the union of those two things in the insistence that the best—the appropriate way to look at the view—world is to view it as the battleground between groups defined by a particular group identity—between individuals defined by a particular group identity so that the group identity becomes paramount and then the proper reading is always oppressor versus oppressed. With the secondary insistence that—it’s very similar to Marx’s insistence upon the moral superiority of the proletariat—that the oppressors are by definition because they’re oppressed morally superior. And—and there’s the call for….perhaps not revolutionary change—although that comes up [above?]—but change in the structure so that that oppression disappears so that a certain form of equality comes about. Now, you argue that Marx wasn’t a believer in equality of outcome and I’m not so sure about that because his notion of the eventual utopia that would constitute genuine communism was a place where all class divisions were eradicated. And so there’s at least—
Slavoj Žižek: But [those are] anarchists…
[o1:53:01]
Jordan Peterson: Well—well there’s at least an implication….
Slavoj Žižek: I…okay….
Jordan Peterson: …at the most important of the hierarchies had disappeared. And so maybe he had enough sophistication to talk about other forms of hierarchies but if—if that’s the case then I can’t imagine why he thought that the Utopia that would emerge as a consequence of the elimination of economic hierarchies would be a Utopia. Because if there are other forms of hierarchies that still existed people would be just as contentious about them as they are now. Like we have hierarchies of attractiveness for example that have nothing to do with economics are very little to do with economics and there’s no shortage of contention around that or any other form of ability. And so that’s why I associate the Social Justice types who are basically postmodernist with Marx. Postmo—their postmodernist with Marxism. It’s the insistence that you view the world through the narrative of oppressed versus oppressor and I think it’s a catastrophe. I think it’s a catastrophe and you appear to think—
Slavoj Žižek: No….sorry….[light audience applause and cheers]
Jordan Peterson: …it’s a catastrophe as well
Slavoj Žižek: Just one sentence and then he—you can reply. It’s so strange that you mentioned, for example, somebody like Foucault who….for me….his…are you are that his main target was Marxism? Okay for him, represented [some audience cheers] in—in he—and his—his game was never a radical change but—and this is what I don’t like in this, what you call postmodern, let’s not call Marxist but revolutionaries—it—it’s enjoying your own self marginalization. The good thing is to be on the margin, you know? Like not in the center and so on and so on. It almost made me nostalgic for old communists who at least had the honesty to say “no, we don’t enjoy our marginal position, we want to do something central power.” I find so disgusting this—
Jordan Peterson: It’s no—it’s no wonder you don’t get invited to lots of places.
[o1:55:03]
Slavoj Žižek: Yeah, [all three laugh] no—you know—you know…Foucault for me embodies this logic of revolution and by revolution, he meant any social change serious—bad, small resistances and so on, small marginal places of resistance and so on and so on. So okay but, let’s maybe drop it here if you want but since you are replying my question you should have…the last word here.
Jordan Peterson: No that—I’ll stop with that. Let’s move to the next—we’ll get back to these topics no doubt as we move forward with the questions so I’m happy to let that—that particular issue stall—stop there.
Slavoj Žižek: [pointing to Stephen Blackwood] Did you already do your Stalinist manipulation and censor the questions [as you go?]. [Stephen Blackwood laughs nervously] Because this program that he described to us through some screens questions and so on, I think it puts him to the one who decides which questions are, as Stalinists would have put [it], are real voice of the people [some of that?]
Jordan Peterson: Yes yes, well hopefully we can trust him.
Stephen Blackwood: Let’s move on from that. [widespread audience laughter] At heart, this evening…we’re talking about happiness, at least that’s the frame of the debate that we have tonight and you’ve both been in your work and also tonight very critical of happiness as mere hedonism, pleasure-seeking or even simply as a feeling. What does true or deeper human happiness consist of and how is it attained?
[o1:56:35]
Slavoj Žižek: You? [pointing to Peterson, Peterson shrugs] [What] I don’t care, sorry.
Jordan Peterson: Well I don’t—I don’t—first of all there’s, something you said five minutes ago or so. I think you were still at the podium that I agree with profoundly which is that happiness is a side effect. It’s–it’s not—it’s not a thing in itself. It’s something that comes upon you. It–it’s like an act of grace in some sense and my sense is—
Slavoj Žižek: I accept even the—theological undertone of what you said.
Jordan Peterson: Okay, okay…
Slavoj Žižek: No, no, the category of grace can be used in a perfect atheist sense, it’s one of the deepest categories, I’m sorry. [motions for Peterson to continue]
[o1:56:35]
Jordan Peterson: Yeah well—okay good—well I—I would think—I would think that we could find agreement about that because partly because of your psychoanalytic background. You know perfectly well that we’re subject to forces within us that aren’t of our voluntary control and certainly happiness is one of those because you cannot will yourself to be happy. You might be able to will yourself to be unhappy, but you can’t will yourself to be happy. There are certain preconditions that have to be met that are quite mysterious in order for you to be happy, and then it happens and then maybe if you’re wise you—you regard [this] as a—like an inc—a minor incomprehensible miracle that somehow you happen to be in the right place at the right time. Now I’ve made the case that the most effective means of pursuing the good life—which is not the same as pursuing happiness—is to adopt something like a stance of maximal responsibility towards the suffering and malevolence in the world. And I think that that should be pursued primarily as an individual responsibility. It’s not like I don’t think that political and familial—larger organizations are necessary—but in the final analysis we each suffer alone in some fundamental sense and we have our own malevolence to contend with in some fundamental sense and the proper beginning of moral behavior—which is the proper beginning of the right way to act in the world—is to take responsibility for that. I think you do what you can to conceptualize the highest good that you can conceptualize. That’s the first thing, to develop a vision of what might be. And it has to be a personalised vision as well as a universalized vision. And then you work diligently to ensure that your actions are in keeping with that and you allow yourself on that pursuit to be informed by the knowledge of your ignorance and the necessity for acting and speaking in truth. And a fair bit of that—I believe—is derived—I think it’s fair to say that that’s derived from an underlying judeo-christian ethic—and I make no bones about the fact that I think of those stories metaphysically or philo—philosophically or psychologically as fundamental to the proper functioning of our society in so far as it can function properly.
[o1:59:35]
Jordan Peterson: And so it’s not happiness, it’s meaning and meaning is to be found in the adoption of responsibility and then—I—I’ll close with this—the responsibility is not only to do what you believe to be right—that’s not—cause that’s duty that—that’s not enough—that’s sort of what the Conservatives put forward as the ultimate virtue which is duty—it’s not that. It’s—it’s that you’re—you’re acting in a manner that is in accordance with what you believe to be right but you’re doing it in a manner that simultaneously expands your ability to do it. Which means that you cannot stay safely ensconced within the confines of your current ethical beliefs. You have to stand on the edge of what you know and encounter continually the consequences of your ignorance to expand your domain of knowledge and ability so that you’re not only acting in an efficient manner but you’re increasing the efficiency and productivity and meaningfulness of what it is that you’re engaged in. And I think that—and I believe that the psychological evidence supports this—even the neuropsychological evidence is that—that’s when true happiness descends upon you because it’s an indication from the deepest recesses of your psyche—biologically instantiated—that you’re in the right place at the right time. You’re doing what you should be doing but you’re doing it in a manner that expands your capacity to do even better things in the future. And—and that’s—I think that’s the deepest human instinct there is. It’s not rational, it’s far deeper than that. And it’s something that—it’s something that’s genuine and that exists within us and that constitutes a proper guide if you don’t pervert it with this dis—self-deception and deceit. So that’s my perspective. [widespread audience applause]
[o2:01:16]
Stephen Blackwood: Slavoj….
Slavoj Žižek: Okay I’ll try if you are stupid enough to believe me to be brief. You know [laughing] First I like very much what you began with: this—grace or whatever we call it—moment of happiness. And I would like to—would you agree that the same goes for love? I think.
Jordan Peterson: Beauty too—
Slavoj Žižek: We have in English and they have it in French, I don’t know if in other language they have it. They use the verb to fall in love which means it’s—in this sense, in some sense—a fall you are surprised you are shocked. Authentic love, I think, is something very traumatic even in this sense. I always like to use this example: let’s say you live stupidly happy life. Maybe one night stand here and there you drink with friends then you fall in love passionately. This is in some sense, a catastrophe for your life. [light audience laughter] All the balance is lost and so on….
Jordan Peterson: Yes! Yes! Yes!
Slavoj Žižek: So….
Jordan Peterson: That’s why cupid has arrows.
Slavoj Žižek: Sorry? Yeah. Yeah.
Jordan Peterson: Right.
Slavoj Žižek: Yeah, yeah. So—about—
[o2:02:34]
Slavoj Žižek: But—where I first—second, surprisingly maybe for you I agree with your point about judeo-christian legacy for which I am very much attacked: “Oh you’re a centrist and so on and so on.” You know, I wonder if you’d agree with it, I will try to condense it very much. You know what’s for me the deepest—I simplify to the utmost—something unheard of—and I as an atheist accept the spiritual value of it—happens in Christianity. In other religions you have got up there, we fall from God and then we try to climb back through spiritual discipline whatever…training good deeds and so on and so on. The formula of Christianity is a totally different one. As we philosophers would have put it, you don’t climb to God. God—you are free in a Christian sense when you discover that the distance that separates you from God is inscribed into God himself. That’s why I agree with those intelligent theologies like my favorite Gilbert Keith Chesterton who said that this—the cross, the crucifixion is something absolutely unique because in that moment of Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani God, father why have you abandoned me? For a brief moment symbolically God Himself becomes an atheist in the sense of, you know, you get a gap there. And that is something so…absolutely unique it means that you are not simply separated from God, your separation from God is part of divinity itself. And we can then put it also in other terms, maybe closer to you like that. Like that—that’s why for me happiness is not some blissful unity with highest value. It’s the very struggle, the fall and so on and that’s why I hope we both worry about what will this possibility of so-called—I’m horrified with it…
Jordan Peterson: Well there’s….
[o2:04:47]
Slavoj Žižek: What Ray Kurzweil calls singularity and this blissful state I prefer it not to know. But the final point, very brief. What I only don’t quite get why do you put so much access to this: we have to begin with a person with personal change—I mean this is also the second or which one, I don’t remember, forgive me of your slogans in your book. You know, first set your house in order then. But extremely common sense naive question here: but what if in trying to set your house in order you discover that your housing is in this order precisely because the way the society is messed up which doesn’t mean, [light audience applause] “Okay let’s forget about my house.” But you can do both at the same time and I would even say….I will give you now the ultimate example, yourself. Isn’t it that you are so socially active because you realize that it’s not enough to tell to your—to your—to your patients, “Set your house in order.” Much of the reason of why they are in disorder, their house is that there is some crisis in our society and so on and so on. So my reproach to you—benevolent—would have been another joke: “Tea or coffee” “Yes, please.” like individual or social “yes please.”
[o2:06:23]
Slavoj Žižek: Because this is obvious in extreme situation like, I hope we agree to say to somebody in—in North Korea, “set your house in order.” No? [light audience laughter] Ha ha [I mean]. But I think in some deeper sense it goes also for our societies and that’s repeating what you are telling, you see some kind of a social crisis, and I don’t see clearly why insist so much on this choice. Because—I—let’s say [just to finish]—I will give you an example that I think perfectly does it. How do we usually deal with ecology? By this false personalization, you know? They tell you—”Ah! What did you do? Did you put all the Coke cans on the side? Did you recycle old paper and so.” Yes we should do this, but you know like—I—in a way this is also a very easy way to [discard] yourself of—like—you say “Okay I do the recycling [gives a middle finger in the audience’s direction] show up, you know? I did my duty, let’s go on. So I would just say, why the choice there?
[o2:07:34]
Jordan Peterson: Okay, so—well—so first of all, I have to point out that it’s…you have unfairly tasked me with three very difficult questions and so I’m—I’m hoping that I can re—
Slavoj Žižek: That’s life, that’s life!
Jordan Peterson: That I—[breaks to laugh]
Slavoj Žižek: As you said, life is a challenge and so on.
Jordan Peterson: Yes—so—so I’m going to—I’m hoping that I have the mental wherewithal to keep them in track and answer them in order but you can help me if I stray. I was very interested in your comments about the—about Christ’s atheism on—on the cross, that final moment of atheism. That—that—that’s something I—I never thought about it that way.
Slavoj Žižek: [Chesterton]—Chesterton Orthodoxy. A short book, excellent.
Jordan Peterson: No, no, it’s a very—it’s a very interesting thought because what it—what it—it’s a really—it’s an unbelievably merciful idea in some sense…
Slavoj Žižek: Yeah.
Jordan Peterson: That the burden of life is so unbearable. You–and you see in the Christian passion of course: torture, unfair judgment by society, betrayal by friends and then—and then a—a—a low death. And so that’s—that’s kind of—that’s about as bad as it gets, right?
Slavoj Žižek: [Yup.]
[o2:08:48]
Jordan Peterson: Which is why it’s an archetypal story, right? It’s—it’s about as about as bad as it gets. And the story that you described points out that it’s so bad that even God himself might despair about the essential quality of Being.
Slavoj Žižek: [Yes.]
Jordan Peterson: Right, right so…and so that is merciful in some sense because it does say that there is something that’s built into the fabric of existence that tests us so severely in our faith about being itself that even God himself falls prey to the temptation to doubt. And so that’s…okay now. [loud sigh] This is where things get very complicated because I—I wanna use that in part to answer the other questions that you answered. Look, there’s—there’s a very large clinical literature that suggests that if you want to develop optimal resilience what you do is you lay out a pathway towards somewhere better, someone comes in, they have a problem, you try to figure out what the problem is and then you try to figure out what might constitute a solution. And so you have something approximating a map, right? And it’s a—it’s a tentative map of how to get from where things aren’t so good to where they’re better. And then you—you have the person go out in the world and confront those things that they’re avoiding that are stopping them from moving towards that higher place, and there’s an archetypal reality to that. It’s—you’re in a fallen state you’re attempting to redeem yourself, and there’s a process by which that has to occur, and that process involves voluntary confrontation with what you’re afraid of, disgusted by and inclined to avoid. And that works. Every psychological school agrees upon that, is that exposure therapy—the psychoanalysts expose you to the tragedies of your past, you know? and—and redeem you in that manner and the behaviorists expose you to the terrors of the present and redeem you in that manner—but there’s a grea—broad agreement across psychological schools that that’s—that works. And my sense is that we’re called upon as individuals precisely to do that in our life.
[o2:11:02]
Jordan Peterson: Is that we are faced by this unbearable reality that you made reference to when you talked about the situation on the cross, is that life itself is fundamentally—and this is a pessimism that we might share—is fundamentally suffering and malevolence. But—and this is I think where we differ—I believe that the evidence suggests that the—the—the light that you discover in your life is proportionate to am—the amount of the darkness that you’re willing to forthrightly confront and that there’s no necessary upper limit to that. So I think that the good that people are capable of is actually—it’s a higher good than the evil that people are capable of and believe me I do not say that lightly given what I know about the evil that people are capable of. And I—and I think that—I believe that the central psychological message of the biblical corpus fundamentally is that. That’s why it culminates in some sense with the idea that it’s necessary to adopt it’s—it—it’s necessary to confront the devil and to accept your—what would you say?—your—the unjustness of your tortured mortality. If you can do that, and that—and that’s it’s a challenge as you just pointed out, that—that’s sufficient to challenge even God himself, that you have the—you have the best chance of transcending it and living the kind of life that will set your house in order and everyone’s house in order at the same time.
[o2:12:30]
Jordan Peterson: And so I think that’s even true in states like North Korea. And like I’m not asking people to foolishly immolate themselves for pointless reasons, you know? If I’m a—when I’m working with people who are clini—clinically and they have a terrible oppressor who’s their boss at work, I don’t suggest that they march in and tell them exactly what they think of them and end up on the street.
Slavoj Žižek: Mmmm.
Jordan Peterson: It’s not helpful, you know? And—so the pathway towards adopting individual responsibility happens to be a very individual one. But I do believe that the best bet for most people is to solve the problems that beset them in their own lives—the ethical problems that beset them that they know are problems. And that they can set themselves together well enough so that they can then become capable of addressing larger scale problems without falling prey to some of the errors that characterize—let’s say—over optimistic and intellectually arrogant ideologues. And the— [light audience applause] I’ll—I’ll close with—
[o2:13:28]
Stephen Blackwood: [almost inaudible] [You’re good for time]
Slavoj Žižek: Yeah but very briefly.
Jordan Peterson: Let me close with one thing. One of my favorite quotes from Carl Jung—it’s actually a quote that I used at the beginning of my first book which was called Maps of Meaning—was that if you take a personal problem seriously enough you will simultaneously solve a social problem. And then—and this bears on—on your point because it’s not like you’re a small family even the relationship between you and your wife is immune in some sense to the broader social problems around you. And so let’s say right now, there’s tremendous tension between men and women in the West and—and that’s certainly the case given the divorce rate—let’s say—that would be some evidence and the later and later stag—ages that people are waiting to become in—to—to—to—you know—enter into permanent relationships. There’s a—there’s a real tension there. And then if you do establish a relationship with a woman, or—or a partner—but we’ll say a woman in this particular case—you are instantly faced with all of the sociological problems in a microcosm in that relationship and then if you work those damn problems out, if you can work them out within your relationship and you can get some insight—it’s not complete insight—but you can get some partial insight into what the problem actually is and get the diagnosis right and you’ve moved some small measure forward in addressing what might constitute the broader social concern.
[o2:14:55]
Jordan Peterson: And what’s even better. You’re punished for your own goddamn mistakes. And that’s another thing I like about the idea of—of working locally is that, you know, if I do broad scale social experiments and they fail it’s like, well, tough luck for the people for whom they failed. But if I’m experimenting on myself within the confines of my own relationship and I make a mistake, I’m going to feel the pain. And then I—and that’s good, that’s just, but it also gives me the possibility of learning. And so I believe that you do solve what you can about yourself first, before you can set your family straight and before you should dare to try to set the world straight. Otherwise you degenerate into this kind of—you already talked about it—this shallow moralizing. The—this—well I’ve divided my goddamn Coke cans up, and now I can spend more money on new packaging—
Slavoj Žižek: Yeah [laughs]
Jordan Peterson: —at the supermarket which is exactly what the psychological research indicates that people do if they perform a casual moral….action. They immediately justify committing a less moral action because they’ve put themselves in a higher moral place. And you might—if you were real pessimist—you’d say “well, that’s why they performed the action to begin with”: I think that’s often true. [That’s] associated with that shallow moralizing. [audience applause and cheers]
[o2:16:20]
Stephen Blackwood: Slavoj
Slavoj Žižek: Are we—are we too much in this direction or—or a—again I will put in my Stalinist terms, would you go as far as to say who needs the people, we talk for the people and [laughs] we know better than the people. No, because I don’t want—don’t want to take too much of the time for the public but you know what interests me? Would you then agree—because this is how Hegel reads the story of the Fall: that fall really is Felix culpa in the sense that for Hegel, before the fall we are simply animals. It’s through the fall that you perceive goodness as what will drag you out of the fall. So in this sense, Fall is constitutive of the very—you know, it’s not you fall from goodness. You fall and that’s the dialectical paradox. Your fall retroactively creates what you fell from, as it were. And that’s the tough lesson for cheap moralist to—to—to accept. But you know where I see—very briefly maybe a counter question—what fascinates me, we didn’t cover this, I didn’t cover this—but speaking about ideology: would you agree, what fascinates me more and more is not big ideology in the sense of projects and so on in our cynical era people claim “Oh, we no longer take them seriously” and so on. But and here for me social dimensions enter—enters even our intimate space: implicit beliefs, ideological presuppositions—why not?—which we embody in our most common daily practices. For example, probably some of you already know it, I will nonetheless repeat a very shortened version. I was occupied at some point by the structure of toilets in Western Europe. I noticed this—
[o2:18:26]
Jordan Peterson: I know about that.
Slavoj Žižek: —yeah yeah—specificity of German toilets where, you know, the shit doesn’t—the shit doesn’t disappear in water it is their exposed that you smell it and control it for whatever and I immediately associated it with German spirit of poetry and reflection and so on. It’s a bad joke but what I’m saying is that in a sense and I’ve spoken with some specialists, I was so intrigued by of how do you construct toilets and they admitted it, there is no direct—direct utilitarian reason. It is as if even in something as vulgar as going to the toilet, ideology in this deeper sense is there. Another thing that at the same level—I repeat one of my old jokes—that fascinates me intensely is how it’s not just as superficial psychoanalysts claim: we pretend to be moral to believe but deeply we are cynical egotist. Quite often in today’s times we think that we are free, permissive and so on, but secretly we are dominated by an entire pathological—or not even often pathological structure of prohibitions and so on—so we may and this is what interests me so much precisely in today’s time where—and this is how would you agree, we would explain this simple facts which may appear weird at how apparently they so they tell us, we live in permissive times, “take your pleasure make—enjoy it.” But at the same time there is probably, so some clinicians are telling me, more frigidity and impotence than ever. That’s the lesson of psychoanalysis, I hope we agree is not this vulgar one. You are—cannot perform sexual, you go to a psychology—psychiatrist he teaches you how to get rid of authority and so on. It’s a much more complex situation. It’s—and this is what interests me immensely. All this set of implicit beliefs how you don’t even know but you—you know—I will repeat the story that half of you know and you, my favourite, that Niels Bohr anecdote. You know he had the house outside Copenhagen—the Quantum Physics guy—and he had a horseshoe—
Jordan Peterson: Mmm. Yes.
Slavoj Žižek: —a superstitious—above his door and then a friend asked him “what—do you believe in it? Why do you have it there?” And he said “Of course not, I’m a scientist.” “Why then do you have it there?” “Because I was told it works, the idea is it prevents evil spirits to enter the house. It works even if you don’t believe in it. “
Jordan Peterson: Yeah. [laughing] Yeah.
Slavoj Žižek: That’s ideology today. [audience laughs] That’s ideology today, fundamentally.
[o2:21:18]
Jordan Peterson: Okay so—so—so—[growing audience laughter, applause]
Slavoj Žižek: I want to solicit from you to tell a joke, don’t you see this? [audience laughter]
Jordan Peterson: I think—I think that people. [laughs] I think I think that people are—are possessed by ideas that aren’t theirs. They’re—
Slavoj Žižek: Yeah.
Jordan Peterson: —and their personalities that aren’t theirs. And that’s the great psychoanalytic insight, it’s not ideas it’s personalities. It’s way worse than—than ideas. And some of those personalities might be the ones that are assocti—associated with the idea that freedom is found in maximizing hedonistic moment-to-moment pleasure or something like that.
Slavoj Žižek: [Yeah,] nice metaphor, yes.
[o2:22:01]
Jordan Peterson: Which sounds like freedom. Like for me, I—one of the things that I suggest to people is that they watch themselves as if they do not understand who they are or what they’re ruled by and then notice those times when they’re—they’re—they’re where they should be. That—and that’s back to our discussion about meaning rather than happiness, it’s like, you’ll see there are times that in your life where you’re somewhere or you’ve done something and all of a sudden, you’re—you’re together, you’re where you should be, your conscience is not disturbing you’re—you’re—you’re not proud of what you did, because pride is the wrong term but you understand deeply that you’ve done something that you should have done. You might not understand why, you might not even understand what it is. But the study of that can help elucidate the difference between what actually constitutes you—is a very difficult thing to discover—and what constitutes the accretion that characterizes you because of the—well let’s say your intense—your intense proclivity for socialized mimicry. And so, you know, you’re—I don’t mean you personally, but people are amalgams of everything they’ve seen and everything they’ve—
Slavoj Žižek: This is me.
Jordan Peterson: —every person they’ve ever watched—
Slavoj Žižek: This is me. [laughing]
[o2:23:21]
Jordan Peterson: Yes, and everything they’ve read. Anda—and to integrate that, and to find the—the—the—the—the—the truth that constitutes that integration is an incredibly difficult endeavor and one of the reasons why in 12 Rules for Life, for example, I suggested that [well] try to tell the truth or at least don’t lie is because one of the ways apart from pursuing what you—what appears to you to be meaningful. One of the ways of escaping from that possession by the kind of ideology that you’re describing which is like an—it’s like a—it’s like an unconscious of unidentified axioms, it’s something like that, even though they take personified form they’re like personalities—is to stop saying things you know not to be true. It’s a nice pathway forward. And it’s the original rule was “tell the truth” and I thought no, that’s not any good because you’re so biased and limited and ignorant and possessed that you don’t know what the truth is and so you can’t be asked to tell it. But everyone does have the experience of being about to say or do something that they know by their own….they know as deeply as they can know anything about themselves, that that utterance or action is wrong, and they still do it.
[o2:24:42]
Jordan Peterson: Now my suggestion is try to stop doing that. [isolated audience laughter] And one of the consequences—well [turning to the audience] you can try in small ways, like you might not be able to manage it in big ways. But now and then, you know, you’re tempted to do something that you know to be wrong and you could not do it. And if you practice that, you get better and better at not doing it and that means you lie less and you—and you take the easy route less and you pursue hedonic pleasures that cost you in the future less. You start to straighten yourself out, you take the beam out of your eye, that’s essentially what you’re doing. And over time, you have some modicum of hope that your vision will clear up and you’ll be able to see the proper pathway forward. And that’s part of the process of redemption and it seems to me to be in your grasp, you’re capable of doing that, you have a conscience it does inform you from time to time correctly about the difference between good and evil. The—the consequence—the knowledge—the consequence of the Fall that you described, which I think you described it very eloquent terms and that you can slowly make your way back to the straight and narrow path that’s characterized by maximal meaning but also…see that this instinct of meaning is a sophisticated one.
[o2:26:07]
Jordan Peterson: It’s not that I’m making a case for the individual like Ayn Rand makes a case for the individual. That’s not it. I’m making a case for individual responsibility, that’s not the same thing. It’s like there is something that’s good for you, but it has to also be good for your family. If it’s just good for you, that’s not good enough and if it’s good for you and your family and it’s not good for society, then that’s not good enough either. And so the responsibility is to find a pathway that balances these things in a harmonious manner. It’s like a—I got a lot of this thinking from Jean Piaget and his idea of equilibrated states, right? Is you’re—you’re attempting to find something like a game that everyone is willing to play that can be played in an iterative manner and not degenerate. Well, hopefully actually ascend if that’s possible, hopefully become a better and better game across time. And I do believe that—I do believe that you can do that. I do believe that you can do that if you’re guided by truth and I do believe that the pathway to that is the phenomenology of meaning and then the secondary consequence of that is if you do that, now and then you might be happy. And then you should be profoundly grateful because happiness, as we already agreed upon is something like a grace.
[o2:27:24]
Slavoj Žižek: Basically—sorry. [light audience applause, which Žižek joins] Again my pessimism comes here. I agree with you but the danger here—here ideology can massively enter. You describe a nice situation, you are tempted or ordered or whatever to do something that you know it’s wrong. But…so-called totalitarian ideologies step in at this point and try to present to you that the true greatness is to do what you individually think it’s wrong for the higher course. You know who says this wonderfully? Horrible guy….Heinrich Himmler of SS. [audience laughter] No, no, no, sorry seriously.
Jordan Peterson: No, that’s no joke.
Slavoj Žižek: He—he—he knew the problem.
Jordan Peterson: Yes.
Slavoj Žižek: German officers must do horrible things.
Jordan Peterson: Yes.
[o2:28:21]
Slavoj Žižek: Kill Jews and…his solution was double. First, to let them know—as he put it somewhere—every idiot—idiot, okay ordinary men—can do something great, maybe. Not all. Sacrifice himself for his country. But his reply was—his point was—but it takes a truly great men to be ready to lose his soul and to do horrible things for his country.
Jordan Peterson: Yeah.
Slavoj Žižek: And I read some good memoirs of relatively honest communists who broke down when they were sent to the countryside from in—in early thirties. And this is what—this is what they were told by apparatchik: “you will see horrible things: children starving and so on. Remember there is a higher course and your highest ethical duty is to—is to overcome this small bourgeois sentimentality and so here I see the danger of—again my pessimism—false meaning which can massively cover this, false narrative. Second thing—also the solution by—I wonder if you share this pessimism of mine—another one by Himmler. You know what was his sacred book, I read? He all the time had a special leather-bound copy in his pocket: Bhagavad Gita. He massively—he said his problem was this one, he puts it perfectly. Nazi officers have to do—SS—horrible things. How to enable them to do it without themselves becoming horrible beings? His solution was oriental wisdom: to learn to act from distance “I’m not really there” and this is—was the shock of my life. Based on this do know the book—I found a book the [guy] wrote many books, Brian Victoria: Zen at War. It’s a shocking book, especially horrible from many so-called anti-eurocentrists who [claim] “Our monotheism is guilty of everything, we need oriental” yeah but that book is about the—apart from a couple of exceptions—the behavior of Zen Buddhist community in Japan in the thirties, early forties. Not only they totally supported Japanese expansion into—into China they even provided properly Zen Buddhist justification for it. For example, the one—you know who did this? No you are not as old as me, I remember him—DT Suzuki the Great Prea—[appears to be responding to someone off-camera] Yeah, but. Okay, he was doing this in the sixties but as a younger guy, he was fully supporting Japanese militarism and one of his justifications was this one: the advice to—of Japanese military, to them, to support Zen Buddhist training. Because he says—it’s one of the most horrifying thing that I’ve ever read—he said….sorry don’t take it personally.
Jordan Peterson: No, no.
[o2:31:27]
Slavoj Žižek: —but let’s say an officer orders me—if I were to tell this to you [gesturing to Blackwood] it would be too obvious so I pick you [gesturing back to Peterson]—I have to kill you stab you with my kni[fe]. And he says if “I remain in this illusionary self then I feel responsible. I kill you” but he says if you are enlightened by Zen Buddhism, then you know there is no substantial reality. You become a neutral observer of your life just a flow of phenomena and you tell yourself—”it’s not that I am killing you, but in the cosmic dance of phenomena, my knife is floating and [light audience laughter] somehow your knife falls.” You know what I’m saying this? I’m not disputing some spiritual greatness of Zen Buddhism. I’m saying how even the most enlightened—this—spiritual experience can serve a terrible cost.
[o2:32:22]
Stephen Blackwood: Now because we’re running very quickly out of time and it’s clear that this conversation could go for a very long time, I’m going to ask one representative question here and give you each one minute each. [Žižek throws up his hands in jest] And that is—and that is simply this: coming from online, what is one thing you hope people will leave this debate with and why. Jordan. [scattered audience laughter as Peterson hesitates]
Jordan Peterson: I—I hope they leave this debate with a belief in the power of communication between people with different views. You know? That’s….[widespread audience applause] I mean there—there—there is this—there is a growing idea on college campuses—tell me if I go over my minute that there really is no such thing as free speech because people are only the avatars of their group identity and they have nothing unique to say. And besides that there’s no communication across boundaries of identity or belief. And—and I think that that’s an unbelievably dangerous and—and pernicious…doctrine. And I think that people of good will—despite their differences—can communicate and they can both come out of that communication…improved even though there might be some dissent and some—some dissent and some dissent on the way. And so that’s what I would hope people would come out—
Stephen Blackwood: Slavoj
Jordan Peterson: —about this. [audience applause]
Slavoj Žižek: I will be more…concrete even politically. There is today—so it appears—this big conflict between all that—post modern stuff that you oppose, and this alt-right and so on. I hope sincerely that we made at least some people to think and to reject this simple opposition. There are quite reasonable [wo— coughs]—the only alternative to alt right is not political correctness and so on. And I—now I’m speaking not for you but for me—please, if you are a leftist, don’t feel obliged to be politically correct. [wide audience applause and cheers]Think—think don’t be afraid—don’t be afraid to think. And…especially would you agree? One great version of not thinking is how immediately if they don’t agree with you, you are labeled a fascist. But that’s the laziness people find something they don’t agree with instead, of thinking, they think about something we all agree was a bad thing up, “you are a fascist” and so on. You know? It’s not a simple aspect. Even Trump of whom I’m deeply critical—no, I’m sorry to tell you, yes, he’s a catastrophe in the long term and so on, but he is not a fascist. You make it all too easy to play these games. I just want not—a positive result but to [shatter] you a little bit. To—to make you think.
Stephen Blackwood: I have always felt that the greatest conversations are unfinished ones. Please join me in thanking Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson for a great unfinished conversation!
[o2:35:54]
[wide audience applause and cheers as Peterson stands to greet Žižek]
Slavoj Žižek: Ah—ah—
Jordan Peterson: Hi.
Slavoj Žižek: It’s nice that we survived this [inaudible] you know?
Stephen Blackwood: Thank you, Slavoj
Slavoj Žižek: [telling a joke] I forgot that I am still wired and I said to my friends, what a total [boob] is that guy [gesturing to audience].
Stephen Blackwood: Shall we wave to everyone? Alright.
Slavoj Žižek: Okay. We go out there.
Stephen Blackwood: You can go out this way. Good night everyone!
[Continued applause as all three leave stage]
Note on transcription method: I have attempted to transcribe the entire video without correcting any material, so as with any ordinary speech, many grammatical errors should naturally exist within the transcript. Likewise, all punctuation, paragraph separation and time stamps are entirely editorial. My aim was fidelity to the source and I attempted to transcribe every word possible including repetitions, mispronunciations with the only omissions being obvious hesitation markers. I have used quotation marks when the two participants are either paraphrasing, quoting or ventriloquizing the words of others.
I am opened for constructive criticism or correction by DM at my Twitter handle (@Litanscombe).s
