Jordan Peterson: The fatal flaw in leftist American politics
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What is political extremism? Professor of psychology Jordan Peterson points out that America knows what rightwing radicalism looks like: white nationalism. "What's interesting is that on the conservative side of the spectrum, we've figured out how to boxin the radicals and say, 'No, you're outside the domain of acceptable opinion,'" says Peterson. But where's that line for the Left? There is no universal marker of what extreme liberalism looks like, which is devastating to the ideology itself but also to political discourse as a whole. Peterson is happy to suggest such a marker: "The doctrine of equality of outcome. It seems to me that that's where people who are thoughtful on the Left should draw the line, and say no. Equality of opportunity? [That's] not only fair enough, but laudable. But equality of outcome…? It's like: 'No, you've crossed the line. We're not going there with you.'"Peterson argues that it's the ethical responsibility of leftleaning people to identify liberal extremism and distinguish themselves from it the same way conservatives distance themselves from the doctrine of racial superiority. Failing to recognize such extremism may be liberalism's fatal flaw.

JORDAN PETERSON

Jordan B. Peterson, raised and toughened in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta, has flown a hammerhead roll in a carbonfiber stuntplane, explored an Arizona meteorite crater with astronauts, and built a Kwagu'l ceremonial bighouse on the upper floor of his Toronto home after being invited into and named by that Canadian First Nation. He's taught mythology to lawyers, doctors and business people, consulted for the UN Secretary General, helped his clinical clients manage depression, obsessivecompulsive disorder, anxiety, and schizophrenia, served as an adviser to senior partners of major Canadian law firms, and lectured extensively in North America and Europe. With his students and colleagues at Harvard and the University of Toronto, Dr. Peterson has published over a hundred scientific papers, transforming the modern understanding of personality, while his book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief revolutionized the psychology of religion. His latest book is 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

TRANSCRIPT:

JORDAN PETERSON: I would like to talk briefly about depolarization on the Left and the Right, because I think there's a technical problem that needs to be addressed. So here's what I've been thinking about.

It's been obvious to me for some time that, for some reason, the fundamental claim of postmodernism is something like an infinite number of interpretations and no canonical overarching narrative. Okay, but the problem with that is: okay, now what?

No narrative, no value structure that is canonically overarching, so what the hell are you going to do with yourself? How are you going to orient yourself in the world? Well, the postmodernists have no answer to that. So what happens is they default—without any real attempt to grapple with the cognitive dissonance—they default to this kind of loose, egalitarian Marxism. And if they were concerned with coherence that would be a problem, but since they're not concerned with coherence it doesn't seem to be a problem.

But the force that's driving the activism is mostly the Marxism rather than the postmodernism. It's more like an intellectual gloss to hide the fact that a discredited economic theory is being used to fuel an educational movement and to produce activists. But there's no coherence to it.

It's not like I'm making this up, you know. Derrida himself regarded—and Foucault as well—they were barely repentant Marxists. They were part of the student revolutions in France in the 1960s, and what happened to them, essentially—and what happened to JeanPaul Sartre for that matter—was that by the end of the 1960s you couldn't be conscious and thinking and proMarxist. There's so much evidence that had come pouring in from the former Soviet Union, from the Soviet Union at that point, and from Maoist China, of the absolutely devastating consequences of the doctrine that it was impossible to be apologetic for it by that point in time.

So the French intellectuals in particular just pulled off a sleight of hand and transformed Marxism into postmodern identity politics. And we've seen the consequence of that. It's not good. It's a devolution into a kind of tribalism ...

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