1 00:00:00,540 --> 00:00:03,956 Hello my name is Peter Joseph and the following is an analysis and critique 2 00:00:04,061 --> 00:00:07,240 of Jordan Peterson's opening arguments during the Slavo Žižek debate 3 00:00:07,370 --> 00:00:09,520 from April 19th, 2019. 4 00:00:10,209 --> 00:00:12,892 I was planning on doing a full analysis of the entire debate 5 00:00:13,046 --> 00:00:15,310 but once I began dissecting Peterson's statements 6 00:00:15,544 --> 00:00:18,178 I realized there was no way I would have time to do the full event. 7 00:00:18,806 --> 00:00:22,307 The title of this debate is 'Happiness: Capitalism versus Marxism,' 8 00:00:23,040 --> 00:00:24,246 an unfortunate decision 9 00:00:24,350 --> 00:00:28,332 because it sets up a binary position between assumed ideologies 10 00:00:28,523 --> 00:00:30,190 while throwing in the word "happiness," 11 00:00:30,307 --> 00:00:34,713 muddying the issue even more since what defines happiness is sociologically vague 12 00:00:34,843 --> 00:00:36,252 when it comes to causality. 13 00:00:36,935 --> 00:00:39,076 I point this out because it's time for seriousness. 14 00:00:39,187 --> 00:00:42,000 Human society is faced with a lot of complicated challenges. 15 00:00:42,258 --> 00:00:45,858 Between rising social destabilization due to socioeconomic inequality 16 00:00:46,018 --> 00:00:47,809 coupled with vast ecological decline, 17 00:00:48,010 --> 00:00:50,473 it's really critical high level debate occurs regarding 18 00:00:50,584 --> 00:00:53,113 how human society can solve its problems 19 00:00:53,323 --> 00:00:56,510 ensuring sustainability both environmentally and socially. 20 00:00:56,904 --> 00:00:58,904 Sadly this debate accomplished none of that, 21 00:00:59,130 --> 00:01:02,726 instead trapping the conversation inside of this old duality of 22 00:01:02,830 --> 00:01:05,335 capitalism versus Marxism or socialism. 23 00:01:05,870 --> 00:01:09,360 Anyone seriously involved in considering environmental social science, 24 00:01:09,470 --> 00:01:12,129 public health science, and what kind of social system 25 00:01:12,233 --> 00:01:15,630 can create the best Public Health and sustainable practices, 26 00:01:15,950 --> 00:01:18,720 would gawk at this kind of duality proposed. 27 00:01:19,120 --> 00:01:22,172 It's not a serious framing and again it's very disappointing. 28 00:01:22,449 --> 00:01:25,206 And yet people are gonna watch this, especially young people, 29 00:01:25,452 --> 00:01:28,320 and this is gonna be their limit of debate, this is gonna be how they're gonna 30 00:01:28,443 --> 00:01:32,480 frame their sense of possibility in terms of future social organization. 31 00:01:32,855 --> 00:01:35,827 That said, again my focus here will be Jordan Peterson's comments 32 00:01:35,932 --> 00:01:39,089 which are conservative and on the side of capitalism if you will. 33 00:01:39,378 --> 00:01:42,615 And the first thing I think I should point out is that he's given great advantage here 34 00:01:42,984 --> 00:01:45,753 because what he does is create a massive straw man, 35 00:01:46,129 --> 00:01:51,052 addressing and criticizing the Communist Manifesto written almost 200 years ago 36 00:01:51,360 --> 00:01:53,150 by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. 37 00:01:53,932 --> 00:01:56,923 His attacks on this book, which as I will explain are 38 00:01:57,083 --> 00:01:59,643 extremely poorly thought out and just wrong, 39 00:01:59,883 --> 00:02:03,446 become a proxy for attacks on contemporary activists and thinkers 40 00:02:03,593 --> 00:02:06,326 looking to alter the capitalist structure or remove it. 41 00:02:06,830 --> 00:02:10,412 His perspective is consistently libertarian in the modern sense of the word 42 00:02:10,627 --> 00:02:14,720 and his pathological fetish with taking a psychological position 43 00:02:14,861 --> 00:02:18,960 rather than any kind of synergetic sociological relationship 44 00:02:19,193 --> 00:02:21,821 in terms of causality or social structure 45 00:02:22,024 --> 00:02:25,747 is to me what makes him one of the most regressive intellectuals out there today, 46 00:02:25,987 --> 00:02:28,393 especially considering how popular he's become. 47 00:02:29,000 --> 00:02:31,920 And since I'm about to be thrown into defending Marx 48 00:02:32,049 --> 00:02:33,920 and progressive thoughts in general, 49 00:02:34,030 --> 00:02:35,800 let me make one thing extremely clear. 50 00:02:36,135 --> 00:02:39,501 I am not a Marxist or a communist or a socialist or whatever. 51 00:02:39,889 --> 00:02:41,476 I don't identify with any of that. 52 00:02:41,830 --> 00:02:44,769 And I see Marx's writings as equivalent to other philosophers 53 00:02:44,880 --> 00:02:46,449 from Thomas Hobbes to Hegel, 54 00:02:46,652 --> 00:02:49,593 to Thorstein Veblen, and many others: it's all information - 55 00:02:49,833 --> 00:02:52,369 and some of it's good, some of it's bad and you weigh it all out. 56 00:02:52,769 --> 00:02:56,449 And the faster all of you people see all of this is as information 57 00:02:56,689 --> 00:03:00,313 rather than ideological dualities or symbols of something, 58 00:03:00,480 --> 00:03:02,910 the faster we can progress the conversation. 59 00:03:04,116 --> 00:03:07,236 Likewise let me clarify one other very important thing. 60 00:03:07,569 --> 00:03:11,421 Those that invoke disapproval of historical communism, and rightly so, 61 00:03:11,716 --> 00:03:15,852 almost universally say it was a consequence of the writings of Karl Marx. 62 00:03:16,461 --> 00:03:19,495 And I would argue that it's a consequence of the writings of Karl Marx 63 00:03:19,630 --> 00:03:21,932 in the same way the Columbine massacre 64 00:03:22,070 --> 00:03:24,590 was a consequence of the music of Marilyn Manson. 65 00:03:25,569 --> 00:03:27,950 Any respected historian and theorist 66 00:03:28,330 --> 00:03:33,809 recognizes that the Soviet Union was actually state capitalism in the extreme. 67 00:03:34,086 --> 00:03:39,280 It never achieved any level of theoretical socialism, and certainly not communism. 68 00:03:39,700 --> 00:03:43,058 And if you look at the writings of Vladimir Lenin, he admits to this fact! 69 00:03:43,716 --> 00:03:47,070 And again that's not defending anything; I'm being intellectually accurate. 70 00:03:47,403 --> 00:03:49,175 All that said, let's begin. 71 00:03:49,938 --> 00:03:54,572 [Peterson] So I'm going to outline ten of the fundamental axioms 72 00:03:54,818 --> 00:03:56,443 of the Communist Manifesto. 73 00:03:56,633 --> 00:04:01,760 And so these are truths that are basically held as self-evident by the authors. 74 00:04:02,430 --> 00:04:05,440 They're truths that are presented in some sense as unquestioned 75 00:04:05,636 --> 00:04:07,772 and I'm going to question them. 76 00:04:08,996 --> 00:04:13,390 "History is to be viewed primarily as an economic class struggle." 77 00:04:14,424 --> 00:04:16,910 Alright, so let's think about that for a minute. 78 00:04:18,530 --> 00:04:21,126 First of all, the proposition there 79 00:04:21,230 --> 00:04:24,590 is that history is primarily to be viewed through an economic lens. 80 00:04:24,820 --> 00:04:27,840 And I think that's a debatable proposition because 81 00:04:28,123 --> 00:04:32,150 there are many other motivations that drive human beings than economics. 82 00:04:32,320 --> 00:04:34,541 [PJ] He goes on a brief explanation here about how there are 83 00:04:34,652 --> 00:04:38,160 other important observable things occurring in history that relate to human society 84 00:04:38,276 --> 00:04:40,824 as if that's a revelation, as if that's a rebuttal. 85 00:04:41,030 --> 00:04:43,520 The text he's talking about is explicitly organized 86 00:04:43,630 --> 00:04:46,073 around the observation of economic stratification 87 00:04:46,196 --> 00:04:49,526 and the problems therein, as a result of that organization. 88 00:04:49,993 --> 00:04:54,215 But rather than simply acquiesce to the simple thesis of the book itself 89 00:04:54,547 --> 00:04:58,215 he goes off on this quick non sequitur that just muddies the waters, 90 00:04:58,363 --> 00:05:02,061 implying that the thesis itself overstates its relevance. 91 00:05:02,381 --> 00:05:03,618 It is true that-... 92 00:05:03,760 --> 00:05:08,375 [JP] ...there are many other motivations that drive human beings than economics but- 93 00:05:08,547 --> 00:05:11,372 [PJ] Economics is literally the foundation of survival! 94 00:05:11,821 --> 00:05:15,089 Without viable economic integrity, you die. 95 00:05:15,550 --> 00:05:17,735 It is the starting point of human well-being. 96 00:05:18,061 --> 00:05:21,876 And to quickly muddy it up with this subjective nuance garbage is just silly. 97 00:05:22,200 --> 00:05:25,704 [JP] The idea that one of the driving forces between history is 98 00:05:25,969 --> 00:05:29,480 hierarchical struggle, is absolutely true. 99 00:05:30,455 --> 00:05:34,203 But the idea that that's actually history is not true 100 00:05:34,313 --> 00:05:37,618 because it's deeper than history; it's biology itself because 101 00:05:37,993 --> 00:05:41,144 organisms of all sorts organize themselves into hierarchies. 102 00:05:41,440 --> 00:05:44,240 And one of the problems with hierarchies is that they tend to 103 00:05:44,356 --> 00:05:47,840 arrange themselves into a winner-take-all situation. 104 00:05:48,092 --> 00:05:51,704 [PJ] And here we have the cliché biological determinism of hierarchy, 105 00:05:51,815 --> 00:05:55,618 something that has been long criticized by behavioral biologists and anthropologists 106 00:05:55,895 --> 00:05:57,630 as an over-generalization. 107 00:05:57,901 --> 00:05:59,027 But before I address this, 108 00:05:59,200 --> 00:06:01,575 Peterson then goes on to say that the problem is hence 109 00:06:01,809 --> 00:06:04,135 "deeper" than social organization 110 00:06:04,295 --> 00:06:07,624 because hierarchy is inevitable and will prevail regardless. 111 00:06:07,770 --> 00:06:11,046 And the truly startling thing about this is that he's completely ignoring 112 00:06:11,150 --> 00:06:14,529 everything structural put forward by Marx and others. 113 00:06:15,270 --> 00:06:17,446 The criticism of hierarchy is not 114 00:06:17,550 --> 00:06:22,130 the criticism of hierarchy in and of itself, in whatever form it may take. 115 00:06:22,307 --> 00:06:26,203 It is the criticism of hierarchy that is mechanistically output 116 00:06:26,553 --> 00:06:28,935 by the very structure of market capitalism. 117 00:06:29,181 --> 00:06:33,753 It's about the dynamics that occur between those with capital and those without, 118 00:06:34,061 --> 00:06:35,243 labor and owners, 119 00:06:35,440 --> 00:06:39,076 and hence the class relationships and economic quality of life relationships 120 00:06:39,187 --> 00:06:42,470 that result consequentially, because of the structure. 121 00:06:43,100 --> 00:06:46,756 As far as biologically determined hierarchy in human society 122 00:06:46,860 --> 00:06:49,224 it's an extremely broad idea 123 00:06:49,507 --> 00:06:52,110 which could be talked about later if need be, 124 00:06:52,307 --> 00:06:54,640 but that's not what Marx was talking about. 125 00:06:55,089 --> 00:06:57,095 Not to mention there's no vagueness here. 126 00:06:57,267 --> 00:06:59,944 Just look around you at what people are complaining about today. 127 00:07:00,227 --> 00:07:05,101 Massive inequality between people with immense amounts of growing capital 128 00:07:05,335 --> 00:07:07,673 and then a working class with stagnating wages 129 00:07:07,809 --> 00:07:11,981 and all the general cost efficiency oppressive forces that are inherent 130 00:07:12,221 --> 00:07:13,593 to the logic of the system. 131 00:07:14,812 --> 00:07:19,144 [JP] So there's accuracy in the accusation that that is a 132 00:07:19,353 --> 00:07:22,498 eternal form of motivation for struggle. 133 00:07:22,676 --> 00:07:25,532 But it's an underestimation of the seriousness of the problem 134 00:07:25,690 --> 00:07:29,981 because it attributes it to the structure of human societies rather than the 135 00:07:30,116 --> 00:07:33,840 deeper reality of the existence of hierarchical structures per se, 136 00:07:34,020 --> 00:07:37,932 which as they also characterize the animal kingdom to a large degree, 137 00:07:38,049 --> 00:07:40,440 are clearly not only human construction. 138 00:07:40,578 --> 00:07:44,123 [PJ] Just to reiterate, Marxist perspective has to do with the structure of the system 139 00:07:44,295 --> 00:07:47,200 and how it produces socioeconomic stratification 140 00:07:47,341 --> 00:07:49,883 as a consequential result of the mechanics of the system, 141 00:07:50,036 --> 00:07:53,040 not some type of vague biological drive. 142 00:07:53,410 --> 00:07:57,790 And to give an analogy of what he's actually saying because he's trivializing 143 00:07:57,901 --> 00:08:01,770 the degrees of hierarchy that can exist regardless of how caustic they are, 144 00:08:02,030 --> 00:08:04,172 is that you could say there's an equivalency between 145 00:08:04,280 --> 00:08:06,787 a person in a cubicle working that can go home at night 146 00:08:06,990 --> 00:08:09,913 to a shackled slave centuries ago 147 00:08:10,080 --> 00:08:13,532 just because humans have some type of hierarchical need to oppress 148 00:08:13,680 --> 00:08:15,464 and therefore it doesn't matter which happens. 149 00:08:16,180 --> 00:08:20,443 [JP] And the idea that there's hierarchical competition among human beings, 150 00:08:20,800 --> 00:08:24,473 there's evidence for that; it goes back at least to the Paleolithic times. 151 00:08:24,627 --> 00:08:26,430 [PJ] Woh woh woh, hold on there champ! 152 00:08:26,664 --> 00:08:30,067 This is the most categorically incorrect statement made thus far. 153 00:08:30,443 --> 00:08:34,430 Human hierarchy going back to the Paleolithic era 3 million years ago? 154 00:08:34,978 --> 00:08:37,206 Stunningly passive statement to conclude upon, 155 00:08:37,323 --> 00:08:40,793 since it's been firmly established, corroborated over and over again, 156 00:08:40,929 --> 00:08:43,784 that before the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago 157 00:08:43,969 --> 00:08:48,147 human society lived in hunter-gatherer lifestyles with no social hierarchy: 158 00:08:48,570 --> 00:08:50,326 primitive egalitarian groups. 159 00:08:50,707 --> 00:08:52,073 I'm not observing some 160 00:08:52,664 --> 00:08:56,166 sophistication of this early period, the pre-Neolithic culture. 161 00:08:56,375 --> 00:09:00,332 It is simply the recognition that they did NOT have socioeconomic stratification. 162 00:09:00,570 --> 00:09:04,252 No class hierarchy and this has been proven by the numerous hunter-gatherer societies 163 00:09:04,363 --> 00:09:07,140 that have remained over the past few centuries that have been interviewed. 164 00:09:07,396 --> 00:09:10,640 Many of them didn't have a concept of economic hierarchy. 165 00:09:10,830 --> 00:09:13,316 Why? Because their means of production didn't produce it. 166 00:09:13,660 --> 00:09:15,630 Now I'm not going to spend much time giving examples of this 167 00:09:15,740 --> 00:09:17,846 because it's so commonly accepted and I'm stunned 168 00:09:18,080 --> 00:09:21,130 Peterson actually goes out in public and says these things. 169 00:09:21,340 --> 00:09:25,187 But it wasn't until the introduction of surplus upon the discovery of Agriculture, 170 00:09:25,593 --> 00:09:29,249 that the tendency for social stratification began forming 171 00:09:29,415 --> 00:09:32,652 and increasingly so by the structures that were being created 172 00:09:32,760 --> 00:09:36,043 through labor specialization, surplus hoarding and so on. 173 00:09:36,410 --> 00:09:40,381 Likewise if he's gonna play this bland evolutionary analog game 174 00:09:40,490 --> 00:09:43,230 such he's done before with his silly lobster shit, 175 00:09:43,587 --> 00:09:48,049 the two closest primate species to the human being are chimpanzees and bonobos. 176 00:09:48,330 --> 00:09:51,710 Both of them have social hierarchy, however they're very different. 177 00:09:51,901 --> 00:09:55,920 Those organized hierarchies show very different types of character 178 00:09:56,061 --> 00:09:58,400 because of the environments the two live in. 179 00:09:58,664 --> 00:10:01,907 Chimpanzees have a very rigid male-driven hierarchy. 180 00:10:02,123 --> 00:10:07,581 Bonobos have a very loose low-conflict female driven hierarchy. 181 00:10:07,735 --> 00:10:11,329 Now I'm not arguing hierarchy doesn't exist, but it's very malleable. 182 00:10:11,580 --> 00:10:14,627 There's a great plasticity in the primate species. 183 00:10:15,464 --> 00:10:19,046 How hierarchies manifest ultimately is contingent upon the environment 184 00:10:19,193 --> 00:10:21,156 and how society organizes itself. 185 00:10:21,421 --> 00:10:24,892 And there is no evidence that humans have to persist 186 00:10:25,027 --> 00:10:28,061 with the deeply imbalanced capitalist-driven hierarchy 187 00:10:28,252 --> 00:10:29,723 as some law of nature 188 00:10:29,913 --> 00:10:32,123 since 90% of human history 189 00:10:32,246 --> 00:10:35,070 has recorded no money markets or hierarchy. 190 00:10:35,390 --> 00:10:40,393 It's not built-in to our genetics in some deeply immutable impulsive way 191 00:10:40,535 --> 00:10:43,673 where people just drive towards hierarchy and status 192 00:10:43,920 --> 00:10:46,104 regardless of the environment around them. 193 00:10:46,338 --> 00:10:48,529 [JP] And so that's the next problem is that 194 00:10:50,246 --> 00:10:53,606 this ancient problem of hierarchical structure 195 00:10:54,170 --> 00:10:58,080 is clearly not attributable to capitalism because 196 00:10:58,806 --> 00:11:03,218 it existed long in human history before capitalism existed 197 00:11:03,396 --> 00:11:05,661 and then it predated human history itself. 198 00:11:05,820 --> 00:11:07,600 [PJ] And people wonder why I'm baffled 199 00:11:07,716 --> 00:11:10,455 by how this guy has any audience or following whatsoever. 200 00:11:10,621 --> 00:11:12,972 [JP] So, the question then arises, 201 00:11:13,138 --> 00:11:16,363 why would you necessarily at least implicitly link 202 00:11:16,553 --> 00:11:20,480 the class struggle with capitalism given that it's a far deeper problem? 203 00:11:20,707 --> 00:11:22,960 [PJ] Because it's definitely not implicitly linked. 204 00:11:23,260 --> 00:11:27,156 The structure of the system of market economics produces mathematically 205 00:11:27,267 --> 00:11:30,800 the result of the class structure; it can be analyzed and formalized. 206 00:11:30,953 --> 00:11:34,880 Has zero to do with biological circumstances in the structure that exists. 207 00:11:37,292 --> 00:11:41,113 So there's also very little understanding in the Communist Manifesto 208 00:11:41,390 --> 00:11:42,812 that any of the 209 00:11:44,104 --> 00:11:47,058 hierarchical organizations that human beings have put together 210 00:11:47,187 --> 00:11:50,756 might have a positive element, and that's an absolute catastrophe because 211 00:11:50,970 --> 00:11:53,772 hierarchical structures are actually necessary to solve 212 00:11:53,901 --> 00:11:55,458 complicated social problems. 213 00:11:55,593 --> 00:11:58,529 [PJ] Firstly as Peterson himself will point out in a moment, 214 00:11:58,676 --> 00:12:03,335 Marx acknowledges that capitalism is extremely efficient in outputting goods 215 00:12:03,483 --> 00:12:07,169 so there's acknowledgment that the system works in its hierarchy on that level. 216 00:12:07,366 --> 00:12:09,593 The main problem of the hierarchy is the distribution. 217 00:12:10,036 --> 00:12:11,630 That's why inequality is such a problem, 218 00:12:11,772 --> 00:12:14,086 that's why global poverty has existed for so long. 219 00:12:14,510 --> 00:12:17,575 Distribution is the problem: the way money is allocated, 220 00:12:17,692 --> 00:12:20,760 the way profit is obtained, the imbalance of it all. 221 00:12:20,880 --> 00:12:23,907 No one's ever argued that the system of hierarchy within capitalism 222 00:12:24,024 --> 00:12:25,212 hasn't been beneficial. 223 00:12:25,483 --> 00:12:29,390 Now that aside, to say that hierarchy is the only form of 224 00:12:29,513 --> 00:12:32,240 collaborative infrastructure that can produce something 225 00:12:32,620 --> 00:12:34,018 is deeply short-sighted, 226 00:12:34,196 --> 00:12:37,532 and I would like to open that up to the entire open source community 227 00:12:37,655 --> 00:12:40,966 and all the people that work through parallel lateral systems out there, 228 00:12:41,076 --> 00:12:44,363 working to develop new models which actually ARE more efficient 229 00:12:44,510 --> 00:12:45,513 when they are implemented. 230 00:12:45,858 --> 00:12:48,135 But obviously they're not implemented that often 231 00:12:48,320 --> 00:12:50,307 because of the dominance of the system. 232 00:12:50,480 --> 00:12:53,532 And you can even look at the efficiency of collectives, 233 00:12:53,840 --> 00:12:57,544 corporate collectives where there is a so-called socialist 234 00:12:57,815 --> 00:13:01,113 Board of Directors and everyone shares the profits equally 235 00:13:01,280 --> 00:13:03,938 or almost equally throughout the entire company. 236 00:13:04,104 --> 00:13:07,600 And they are also deeply efficient without the same kind of hierarchy. 237 00:13:07,815 --> 00:13:11,563 And in the end no one's arguing that hierarchy itself is somehow just awful. 238 00:13:11,796 --> 00:13:15,181 There are different kinds of hierarchy with different kinds of outcomes. 239 00:13:15,400 --> 00:13:17,673 So Jordan's generalizations don't help anything, 240 00:13:17,778 --> 00:13:20,695 they just become establishment-preserving once again. 241 00:13:20,850 --> 00:13:24,510 [JP] It is the case that hierarchies dispossess people, and that's a big problem. 242 00:13:24,640 --> 00:13:27,932 That's the fundamental problem of inequality, but it's also the case that 243 00:13:28,147 --> 00:13:31,330 hierarchies happen to be a very efficient way of distributing resources. 244 00:13:31,501 --> 00:13:35,156 [PJ] Again, distributing resources amongst the business class and the wealthy, yes. 245 00:13:35,300 --> 00:13:37,113 Distributing resources to the people that are in need, 246 00:13:37,255 --> 00:13:39,593 but don't have the money to GET those resources, no. 247 00:13:39,852 --> 00:13:42,892 [JP] And it's finally the case that human hierarchies 248 00:13:43,027 --> 00:13:46,073 are not fundamentally predicated on power. 249 00:13:46,190 --> 00:13:48,129 [PJ] OK, everybody strap in! you ready for this? 250 00:13:48,440 --> 00:13:51,421 [JP] And I would say that biological anthropological 251 00:13:51,753 --> 00:13:53,335 data on that are crystal clear. 252 00:13:53,600 --> 00:13:58,855 You don't rise to a position of authority that's reliable in a human society 253 00:13:59,107 --> 00:14:00,850 primarily by exploiting other people. 254 00:14:00,978 --> 00:14:04,050 It's a very unstable means of obtaining power. 255 00:14:04,178 --> 00:14:07,760 [PJ] I had to listen to that statement quite a few times to really absorb 256 00:14:07,932 --> 00:14:11,963 the detachment one has to have from reality to actually state it. 257 00:14:12,578 --> 00:14:17,236 "You don't rise to a position of authority that's reliable in human society 258 00:14:17,353 --> 00:14:19,926 primarily by exploiting other people. 259 00:14:20,104 --> 00:14:23,784 It's a very unstable means of obtaining power." 260 00:14:24,270 --> 00:14:28,326 There are two kinds of positions of authority we recognize in society today 261 00:14:28,490 --> 00:14:30,873 which fits the context of this whole conversation. 262 00:14:30,990 --> 00:14:33,760 First of all the economic power, hence the head of a corporation, 263 00:14:33,990 --> 00:14:36,830 or by extension political power which generally involves economics 264 00:14:36,947 --> 00:14:38,609 as most recognized, as Marx did - 265 00:14:38,720 --> 00:14:40,890 presidents and congressmen and people like that. 266 00:14:41,083 --> 00:14:44,695 Well, if you know what exploitation means in a Marxist distinction, 267 00:14:45,003 --> 00:14:49,218 it's not a negative act against somebody; exploitation is a system function. 268 00:14:49,323 --> 00:14:51,058 It's related to surplus value 269 00:14:51,243 --> 00:14:54,024 which means that when an owner employs a laborer, 270 00:14:54,313 --> 00:14:57,723 the laborer produces something, works a number of hours, 271 00:14:57,830 --> 00:14:59,341 there's a value to those hours, 272 00:14:59,606 --> 00:15:01,883 and then the owner sells it at a larger profit, 273 00:15:02,073 --> 00:15:04,867 and he takes the difference, hence the term "profit." 274 00:15:05,100 --> 00:15:09,009 Profit is the manifest surplus value of the exploited laborer, 275 00:15:09,113 --> 00:15:13,544 meaning the laborer that isn't recorded in the wages of the person. 276 00:15:14,344 --> 00:15:17,501 So firstly I can only assume that he doesn't even understand what 277 00:15:17,686 --> 00:15:20,123 Marxist exploitation even is 278 00:15:20,504 --> 00:15:22,830 and he instead sees it as some type of 279 00:15:23,464 --> 00:15:25,618 greedy kind of behavior 280 00:15:25,747 --> 00:15:29,636 which he clearly doesn't see profit that way as he talks about later. 281 00:15:29,963 --> 00:15:33,489 So by very definition, CEOs and all of these people 282 00:15:33,636 --> 00:15:36,209 work up the ranks of their value. 283 00:15:36,420 --> 00:15:38,861 They get more and more money, they have more capital, 284 00:15:38,972 --> 00:15:41,020 they invest more and more, they buy more companies, 285 00:15:41,156 --> 00:15:42,966 and they do that invariably 286 00:15:43,076 --> 00:15:45,430 by exploiting labor to some degree or another. 287 00:15:46,030 --> 00:15:48,843 And just for fun we'll extend this to the political context, 288 00:15:48,978 --> 00:15:50,960 I'll restate his proposition: 289 00:15:51,160 --> 00:15:54,627 "You don't rise to a position of authority that's reliable in human society 290 00:15:54,740 --> 00:15:56,560 primarily by exploiting other people. 291 00:15:56,763 --> 00:15:58,910 It's a very unstable means of obtaining power." 292 00:15:59,193 --> 00:16:02,535 Well I'm just gonna show the picture of this individual for a couple of seconds. 293 00:16:03,249 --> 00:16:06,781 Not only is he a poster child of the capitalist class 294 00:16:07,015 --> 00:16:11,796 with outrageous degrees of criminal corruption through literal exploitation 295 00:16:11,963 --> 00:16:13,723 to advance his bottom line, 296 00:16:14,018 --> 00:16:17,600 his political process to get elected was fantastically 297 00:16:17,809 --> 00:16:21,150 exploitative on so many cultural levels I don't even know what to say. 298 00:16:21,410 --> 00:16:23,987 Unfortunately the complete stupidity of this statement 299 00:16:24,092 --> 00:16:26,356 did not go unrecognized by the audience. 300 00:16:26,470 --> 00:16:28,978 [JP] ... society, primarily by exploiting other people. 301 00:16:29,083 --> 00:16:32,200 It's a very unstable means of obtaining power. 302 00:16:33,390 --> 00:16:35,267 [Audience laughter] So that's a problem. 303 00:16:36,215 --> 00:16:40,603 Marx also assumes that you can think about history as a binary class struggle 304 00:16:40,760 --> 00:16:45,581 with clear divisions between say the proletariat, and the bourgeoisie. 305 00:16:45,815 --> 00:16:49,003 [PJ] And then he proceeds to set up effectively a straw man saying that 306 00:16:49,130 --> 00:16:52,227 the Communist Manifesto doesn't differentiate clear enough 307 00:16:52,363 --> 00:16:54,707 between the proletariat or the bourgeoisie 308 00:16:54,836 --> 00:16:58,166 and they are somehow defined as categorical groups 309 00:16:58,320 --> 00:17:01,021 and that's that, almost like they're different races. 310 00:17:01,169 --> 00:17:03,624 That might sound really extreme but if you listen to what he says 311 00:17:03,735 --> 00:17:06,264 this is how he pitches it. He even goes on later to say that 312 00:17:06,375 --> 00:17:09,138 one group is considered evil and the other is considered good. 313 00:17:09,403 --> 00:17:11,864 Once again he's avoiding the structural relationship 314 00:17:12,080 --> 00:17:14,941 and he's reducing it all down to a psychological relationship 315 00:17:15,058 --> 00:17:17,396 or the assumption of such, as if 316 00:17:17,833 --> 00:17:21,550 you are a psychological being as the bourgeoisie 317 00:17:21,660 --> 00:17:24,141 and a psychological being as the proletariat 318 00:17:24,344 --> 00:17:25,440 but that's not how this works. 319 00:17:25,550 --> 00:17:28,135 The psychology is determined from the system, 320 00:17:28,258 --> 00:17:29,858 from the structure that people inhabit. 321 00:17:30,006 --> 00:17:32,313 If you're a capitalist you have a certain incentive structure 322 00:17:32,540 --> 00:17:34,861 and you are going to gravitate towards certain behaviors 323 00:17:34,978 --> 00:17:36,904 because of that incentive and power. 324 00:17:37,180 --> 00:17:39,821 Same goes for the laborers or the proletariat. 325 00:17:40,153 --> 00:17:43,070 They experience their oppression, they have a general outrage, 326 00:17:43,370 --> 00:17:45,655 they have certain patterns of incentives 327 00:17:45,920 --> 00:17:48,732 that create a different kind of psychological atmosphere. 328 00:17:49,180 --> 00:17:52,504 [JP] And that's actually a problem because it's not so easy to make a 329 00:17:52,880 --> 00:17:58,010 firm division between who's exploiter and who's exploitee let's say. 330 00:17:58,160 --> 00:18:01,790 [PJ] Again he must not understand what exploitation means in the Marxist context. 331 00:18:02,116 --> 00:18:05,046 Yes, you absolutely can understand who's exploiting and who isn't, 332 00:18:05,249 --> 00:18:07,304 who's the owner, who's the laborer, 333 00:18:07,600 --> 00:18:10,486 who's the submissive force, and who's the dominant force. 334 00:18:11,224 --> 00:18:13,310 [JP] Because it's not obvious 335 00:18:13,618 --> 00:18:16,615 like in the case of small shareholders let's say, 336 00:18:16,824 --> 00:18:20,652 whether or not they happen to be part of the oppressed or part of the oppressor. 337 00:18:20,910 --> 00:18:22,553 [PJ] Very bizarre hair splitting here 338 00:18:22,664 --> 00:18:25,206 and the reason he's doing it is so we can set up a story about 339 00:18:25,323 --> 00:18:28,640 the violence of the system or claim the violence of the system, 340 00:18:29,083 --> 00:18:32,320 based on the idea that there's no way to differentiate between 341 00:18:32,449 --> 00:18:36,301 who the "exploiters" and who the "exploitees" are, 342 00:18:36,473 --> 00:18:40,350 who the working class is effectively isn't who the ownership class is, 343 00:18:40,535 --> 00:18:42,209 and he goes on to tell this story. 344 00:18:42,393 --> 00:18:46,246 [JP] This actually turned out to be a big problem, in the Russian Revolution 345 00:18:46,418 --> 00:18:50,043 and by big problem I mean tremendously big problem. 346 00:18:50,276 --> 00:18:54,984 Because it turned out that you could fragment people into multiple identities 347 00:18:55,095 --> 00:18:56,732 and that's a fairly easy thing to do. 348 00:18:56,966 --> 00:18:59,956 And you could usually find some axis along which 349 00:19:00,123 --> 00:19:02,375 they were part of the oppressor class. 350 00:19:03,080 --> 00:19:05,544 Anyways the listing of how it was 351 00:19:05,753 --> 00:19:08,990 possible for you to be bourgeois instead of proletariat 352 00:19:09,212 --> 00:19:12,775 grew immensely, and that was one of the reasons that the Red Terror 353 00:19:12,953 --> 00:19:14,770 claimed all the victims that it claimed. 354 00:19:14,996 --> 00:19:17,803 [PJ] He then goes to describe the circumstance with the Kulacks which were 355 00:19:17,975 --> 00:19:20,713 peasant farmers that owned their own land, in Russia, 356 00:19:20,970 --> 00:19:23,267 and eventually the state came in and 357 00:19:23,378 --> 00:19:26,510 made them distribute it in a socialist way amongst other people 358 00:19:26,880 --> 00:19:31,076 and it resulted in their exile, which had chain reactions which were negative. 359 00:19:32,104 --> 00:19:34,781 [JP] And about 1.8 million of them were exiled. 360 00:19:35,347 --> 00:19:39,020 About 400,000 were killed, and the net consequence of that, 361 00:19:40,209 --> 00:19:44,658 removal of their private property because of their bourgeois status, was 362 00:19:44,953 --> 00:19:49,089 arguably the death of 6 million Ukrainians in the famines of the 1930s. 363 00:19:49,316 --> 00:19:53,230 And so the binary class struggle idea- that was a bad idea. 364 00:19:53,420 --> 00:19:56,030 [PJ] Okay so you have a group of private owners 365 00:19:56,172 --> 00:19:58,320 that have their private property taken. 366 00:19:58,787 --> 00:20:01,532 Obviously we don't agree with that today but that's completely beside the point, 367 00:20:01,649 --> 00:20:04,830 that's unfortunately what they did in the government at that time. 368 00:20:05,530 --> 00:20:10,652 How does that relate to this binary exploiter-exploitee thing? 369 00:20:11,230 --> 00:20:15,080 They were private property owners, and that was the issue. 370 00:20:15,476 --> 00:20:17,772 So the means of production was taken from them, 371 00:20:18,012 --> 00:20:22,338 sadly that's what happened, but there's no gray area in that as if 372 00:20:22,584 --> 00:20:26,652 the vagueness between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie 373 00:20:27,015 --> 00:20:29,144 somehow created and manifested this? 374 00:20:29,323 --> 00:20:31,015 It makes no sense at all what he's arguing; 375 00:20:31,140 --> 00:20:32,756 I don't understand how he came up with that. 376 00:20:33,440 --> 00:20:35,483 And in regard to his climax point 377 00:20:35,587 --> 00:20:38,824 with the death of millions of Ukrainians as a result of all this, 378 00:20:39,187 --> 00:20:42,320 assuming that it's systemically true - I'm not even sure - 379 00:20:42,633 --> 00:20:46,036 what we're really talking about is state authoritarian power 380 00:20:46,196 --> 00:20:48,012 abusing its power and killing people. 381 00:20:48,381 --> 00:20:52,756 That doesn't necessarily imply Marxism, socialism or communism. 382 00:20:52,960 --> 00:20:55,963 And it's really unfortunate to hear this constant nonsense that comes out. 383 00:20:56,120 --> 00:20:58,209 There's a book that was written called 'The Black Book of Communism,' 384 00:20:58,310 --> 00:21:00,929 it claims 100 million people were killed by communism in a century, 385 00:21:01,212 --> 00:21:02,492 a very dubious number. 386 00:21:02,603 --> 00:21:05,852 It also ignores so many other atrocities and genocides that happened 387 00:21:06,012 --> 00:21:07,556 because of power in general. 388 00:21:07,830 --> 00:21:11,600 And it's just a kind of manipulative strategy 389 00:21:11,716 --> 00:21:14,166 to get people to hate anything other than capitalism 390 00:21:14,380 --> 00:21:17,169 by saying "well, if you do anything other than capitalism 391 00:21:17,280 --> 00:21:18,523 you're gonna be killed by Authority." 392 00:21:18,790 --> 00:21:20,886 [JP] It's also bad in this way 393 00:21:21,255 --> 00:21:23,704 and this is a real sleight of hand that Marx pulls off is: 394 00:21:23,907 --> 00:21:28,012 You have a binary class division, proletariat and bourgeoisie, 395 00:21:28,190 --> 00:21:29,692 and you have an implicit idea 396 00:21:29,920 --> 00:21:32,744 that all of the good is on the side of the proletariat 397 00:21:32,947 --> 00:21:35,846 and all of the evil is on the side of the bourgeoisie. 398 00:21:36,010 --> 00:21:38,012 [PJ] Again, nowhere in the writings of historical 399 00:21:38,129 --> 00:21:40,529 or contemporary socialism as it were, 400 00:21:40,867 --> 00:21:43,101 is their explicit value judgments made 401 00:21:43,286 --> 00:21:46,400 where it's predetermined that bad people make it to 402 00:21:46,553 --> 00:21:49,710 the top of the hierarchy or the top of a corporation and so on, 403 00:21:49,913 --> 00:21:53,341 and good people are always gonna be the underdogs. 404 00:21:53,640 --> 00:21:56,418 There are transfers of psychology that do happen 405 00:21:56,523 --> 00:21:59,230 and that's been done through various university studies 406 00:21:59,470 --> 00:22:00,935 as people get more wealth and power 407 00:22:01,046 --> 00:22:03,378 they do become a little bit more corrupt, that's true, 408 00:22:03,870 --> 00:22:05,667 but it's a structural relationship. 409 00:22:05,876 --> 00:22:08,904 So the fact that he sets this up too is just deeply frustrating 410 00:22:09,021 --> 00:22:11,058 and he goes on and on about this crap as well. 411 00:22:11,169 --> 00:22:13,150 [JP] And that's classic group identity thinking. 412 00:22:13,680 --> 00:22:16,350 One of the reasons I don't like politics is because 413 00:22:16,621 --> 00:22:19,729 once you divide people into groups and pit them against one another 414 00:22:19,901 --> 00:22:21,347 it's very easy to assume that 415 00:22:21,520 --> 00:22:24,184 all the evil in the world can be attributed to one group, 416 00:22:24,344 --> 00:22:25,729 the hypothetical oppressors, 417 00:22:25,840 --> 00:22:27,181 and all the good to the other. 418 00:22:27,890 --> 00:22:30,049 It's absolutely foolish to make the presumption 419 00:22:30,160 --> 00:22:32,090 that you can identify someone's moral worth 420 00:22:32,215 --> 00:22:33,926 with their economic standing. 421 00:22:34,130 --> 00:22:36,307 [PJ] Again Marx never argued anything like that. 422 00:22:37,870 --> 00:22:39,772 [JP] Marx also came up with this idea, 423 00:22:39,907 --> 00:22:41,981 which is a crazy idea as far as I can tell, 424 00:22:42,843 --> 00:22:45,020 (that's a technical term, crazy idea) 425 00:22:45,686 --> 00:22:47,800 of the dictatorship of the proletariat! 426 00:22:48,012 --> 00:22:51,046 [PJ] And then he goes off on the "dictatorship of the proletariat" 427 00:22:51,163 --> 00:22:53,987 loving that play on words, which is exactly what it is. 428 00:22:54,264 --> 00:22:56,393 When Marx heard this phrase he employed it 429 00:22:56,541 --> 00:23:00,880 as an antithetical position to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, 430 00:23:01,175 --> 00:23:04,356 which was considered a kind of transition stage in the evolution 431 00:23:04,480 --> 00:23:05,870 of the socialist goal, 432 00:23:06,135 --> 00:23:09,083 where basically the state apparatus still needed to be utilized, 433 00:23:09,310 --> 00:23:11,249 as they tried to work away from it. 434 00:23:11,590 --> 00:23:14,344 Again you can argue the efficacy of any of these approaches 435 00:23:14,460 --> 00:23:16,178 but that's completely beside the point because 436 00:23:16,289 --> 00:23:18,596 Peterson is making it seem like it's a parallel 437 00:23:19,010 --> 00:23:21,396 exactly to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie 438 00:23:21,501 --> 00:23:23,286 when the dictatorship of the proletariat 439 00:23:23,538 --> 00:23:25,310 was more of a play on words once again 440 00:23:25,556 --> 00:23:28,264 that basically said we're going to create a "Council," 441 00:23:28,381 --> 00:23:31,698 a Democratic Council of the people in large form, 442 00:23:31,969 --> 00:23:34,473 and have a democratic process rather than 443 00:23:34,683 --> 00:23:38,646 a singular dictatorship of individual people or just a few people. 444 00:23:38,890 --> 00:23:39,950 That was the idea, 445 00:23:40,196 --> 00:23:42,769 and you won't see that explained by Peterson whatsoever. 446 00:23:43,132 --> 00:23:46,375 [JP] And that's the next idea that I really stumbled across- 447 00:23:46,492 --> 00:23:48,283 it was like okay, so what's the problem? 448 00:23:48,412 --> 00:23:50,947 The problem is the capitalists own everything. 449 00:23:51,083 --> 00:23:52,523 They own all the means of production 450 00:23:52,744 --> 00:23:56,221 and they're oppressing everyone, and that would be all the workers. 451 00:23:57,970 --> 00:24:02,184 The fact that, that you assumed a priori 452 00:24:02,320 --> 00:24:07,569 that all the evil can be attributed to the capitalists (the bourgeoisie), 453 00:24:07,747 --> 00:24:11,260 and all the good could be attributed to the proletariat meant that 454 00:24:11,636 --> 00:24:15,156 you could hypothesize that a dictatorship of the proletariat 455 00:24:15,267 --> 00:24:18,640 could come about and ... the problem with that you see is that... 456 00:24:19,193 --> 00:24:23,766 because all the evil isn't divided so easily up into oppressor and oppressed that 457 00:24:26,430 --> 00:24:28,369 all the proletariat aren't going to be good 458 00:24:28,547 --> 00:24:32,756 and when you put people in the same position as the evil capitalists, 459 00:24:32,910 --> 00:24:35,544 especially if you believe that social pressure is 460 00:24:35,650 --> 00:24:37,790 one of the determining factors of human character 461 00:24:37,901 --> 00:24:39,366 which the Marxists certainly believed, 462 00:24:39,643 --> 00:24:42,646 then why wouldn't you assume that the proletariat would immediately become 463 00:24:42,800 --> 00:24:45,556 as or more corrupt than the capitalist? 464 00:24:45,710 --> 00:24:47,809 [PJ] Okay, first he's continuing this contrived 465 00:24:47,913 --> 00:24:50,264 good-versus-evil framing as if it has relevance. 466 00:24:50,787 --> 00:24:53,593 Obviously, structures determine incentives and behavior. 467 00:24:53,981 --> 00:24:57,396 It's nothing new or profound, it's a basic sociological observation. 468 00:24:57,624 --> 00:25:01,249 Owners have different incentives than workers, in fact they are at odds; 469 00:25:01,378 --> 00:25:02,984 that's why unions exist. 470 00:25:03,230 --> 00:25:07,501 Even though they might seek gain of course, to maximize their gain, 471 00:25:07,800 --> 00:25:11,360 that's shared, but they come from completely different positions. 472 00:25:11,698 --> 00:25:14,461 Second, he makes a completely vague assumption about 473 00:25:14,584 --> 00:25:17,526 the proletariat being put in the position of the bourgeoisie 474 00:25:17,723 --> 00:25:22,006 and they must become corrupted if they make it to the top of that hierarchy 475 00:25:22,301 --> 00:25:23,876 as if everything is equal. 476 00:25:24,412 --> 00:25:27,870 Once again this completely avoids the structural change 477 00:25:28,012 --> 00:25:30,793 that underscores the entire socialist idea. 478 00:25:30,990 --> 00:25:35,704 It would be different if the proletariat simply wiped out the bourgeoisie 479 00:25:35,870 --> 00:25:37,286 and took their position, yeah - 480 00:25:37,390 --> 00:25:40,215 they would be absolutely corrupted in exactly the same way 481 00:25:40,326 --> 00:25:42,086 because they exist in the same structure. 482 00:25:42,689 --> 00:25:44,215 But that's not what the pitch is. 483 00:25:44,375 --> 00:25:47,932 That's not what the entire point of all of this energy that was spent 484 00:25:48,227 --> 00:25:50,553 in the socialist development was about. 485 00:25:50,664 --> 00:25:52,550 It's about changing the structure. 486 00:25:52,824 --> 00:25:56,467 And again he seems to be misinterpreting the full definition of the quote 487 00:25:56,590 --> 00:26:00,670 "dictatorship of the proletariat" which was a transition team if you will, 488 00:26:00,867 --> 00:26:03,446 a large group of people that were supposed to be 489 00:26:03,618 --> 00:26:07,710 generated that made democratic decisions about how to organize things, 490 00:26:07,850 --> 00:26:09,833 using the state institution 491 00:26:10,061 --> 00:26:13,421 as they worked to transition to more efficient socialist means. 492 00:26:13,950 --> 00:26:16,590 Now again I'm not sitting here supporting these theories, 493 00:26:16,700 --> 00:26:20,350 I'm simply telling you what the Communist Manifesto and Marx actually meant. 494 00:26:21,181 --> 00:26:24,966 Overall he seems to imply that hierarchy and power 495 00:26:25,310 --> 00:26:29,741 somehow will create a kind of corruption regardless, due to biology. 496 00:26:30,000 --> 00:26:31,526 That's what I draw from this. 497 00:26:31,766 --> 00:26:35,858 So the proletariat makes it to a position of power replacing the bourgeoisie, 498 00:26:36,061 --> 00:26:38,578 they are going to corrupt regardless. This seems to be 499 00:26:38,750 --> 00:26:41,224 what he's saying; I could be wrong but 500 00:26:41,489 --> 00:26:44,836 that's the only real logical conclusion based on his argument. 501 00:26:45,286 --> 00:26:46,658 [JP] The next problem is - 502 00:26:47,033 --> 00:26:51,341 well, what makes you think that you can take some system as complicated as 503 00:26:51,720 --> 00:26:56,701 like capitalist free-market society, and centralize that, 504 00:26:56,849 --> 00:26:59,770 and put decision-making power in the hands of a few people, 505 00:27:03,452 --> 00:27:07,218 without specifying the mechanisms by which you're going to choose them like, 506 00:27:07,446 --> 00:27:10,172 what makes you think they're gonna have the wisdom or the ability 507 00:27:10,412 --> 00:27:12,516 to do what the capitalists were doing 508 00:27:13,212 --> 00:27:15,446 unless you assume as Marx did that 509 00:27:15,643 --> 00:27:19,150 all of the evil was with the capitalists and all the good was with the proletariats 510 00:27:19,267 --> 00:27:23,329 and that nothing that capitalists did constituted valid labor? 511 00:27:23,587 --> 00:27:27,175 [PJ] So he appears to be alluding here to the complexity of an economy 512 00:27:27,480 --> 00:27:30,461 and how it's very very difficult for people to sit in a boardroom 513 00:27:30,572 --> 00:27:32,301 and decide how to distribute things 514 00:27:32,775 --> 00:27:37,550 while markets of course are extremely dynamic with the price mechanism and so on, 515 00:27:37,710 --> 00:27:41,286 something Ludwig von Mises and economists put out years ago 516 00:27:41,470 --> 00:27:43,150 in criticism of socialism: 517 00:27:43,378 --> 00:27:45,950 that it was impossible for man to sit back 518 00:27:46,233 --> 00:27:48,332 and regulate this manually, 519 00:27:48,516 --> 00:27:49,950 which was a fair criticism, 520 00:27:50,356 --> 00:27:54,140 something that isn't applicable today with technology and networking. 521 00:27:54,990 --> 00:27:58,898 He merges this brief notion with the idea that 522 00:27:59,040 --> 00:28:04,830 capitalists being deemed worthless in terms of labor is unfounded, 523 00:28:05,064 --> 00:28:09,132 and of course that's obviously true in terms of vision or innovation. 524 00:28:09,341 --> 00:28:13,193 The ownership class - the ownership individuals - do start things 525 00:28:13,304 --> 00:28:15,384 and there's value to that at abstraction. 526 00:28:15,864 --> 00:28:17,778 But he takes it too far once again. 527 00:28:18,024 --> 00:28:19,901 [JP] ...Which is another thing that Marx assumed: 528 00:28:20,030 --> 00:28:23,261 which is palpably absurd, because people who are- 529 00:28:24,061 --> 00:28:29,686 like maybe if you're a dissolute aristocrat from 1830, or earlier, 530 00:28:30,200 --> 00:28:33,316 and you run a feudal estate and all you do is spend your time gambling 531 00:28:34,270 --> 00:28:38,793 and chasing prostitutes, well then your labor value is zero but 532 00:28:39,581 --> 00:28:42,375 if you're running a business, and it's a successful business, 533 00:28:42,480 --> 00:28:45,840 first of all you're a bloody fool to exploit your workers because 534 00:28:46,170 --> 00:28:47,975 - even if you're greedy as sin - 535 00:28:48,200 --> 00:28:49,612 because you're not going to extract 536 00:28:49,723 --> 00:28:52,283 the maximum amount of labor out of them by doing that. 537 00:28:52,547 --> 00:28:56,030 [PJ] Again he clearly has no idea what Marxist exploitation even is. 538 00:28:56,350 --> 00:28:58,843 And the argument against the ownership class, 539 00:28:59,040 --> 00:29:02,240 the leisure class as Thorstein Veblen would call it, 540 00:29:02,461 --> 00:29:05,790 is that yes: when the machine is finally set in motion, 541 00:29:06,160 --> 00:29:09,821 the capitalist individual, the founder, he or she did work initially, 542 00:29:10,110 --> 00:29:13,409 but they don't do really anything after it's set in motion. 543 00:29:13,698 --> 00:29:15,692 Look at Jeff Bezos. 544 00:29:15,901 --> 00:29:17,187 Yeah sure, he's a visionary. 545 00:29:17,458 --> 00:29:21,612 But the machine he's created, he doesn't ever have to do anything ever again. 546 00:29:21,796 --> 00:29:25,286 But yet he will make stupid amounts of money every second 547 00:29:25,520 --> 00:29:27,280 because of what he set in motion. 548 00:29:27,600 --> 00:29:30,160 [JP] And the notion that you're adding no productive value 549 00:29:30,270 --> 00:29:32,473 as a manager rather than a capitalist, 550 00:29:33,110 --> 00:29:36,596 it's absolutely absurd; all it does is indicate that 551 00:29:36,824 --> 00:29:40,689 you either know nothing whatsoever about how an actu al business works 552 00:29:40,830 --> 00:29:44,769 or you refuse to know anything about how an actual business works. 553 00:29:44,892 --> 00:29:46,830 [PJ] I hate to be the broken record here but once again 554 00:29:46,947 --> 00:29:50,750 he is completely ignoring the structural relationships as observed by Marxism 555 00:29:51,070 --> 00:29:54,769 and as are fundamentally obvious sociologically 556 00:29:55,126 --> 00:29:56,923 because of the structure of business. 557 00:29:57,126 --> 00:30:00,098 Now if you want to talk about the quaintness of a small mom-and-pop shop 558 00:30:00,203 --> 00:30:03,606 and the fact that there is an owner, and they do their best to manage things 559 00:30:03,716 --> 00:30:06,276 and they want to improve things and take care of their employees, that's fine. 560 00:30:06,504 --> 00:30:09,716 That is not what happens when it comes to massive institutions 561 00:30:10,030 --> 00:30:12,024 and huge industries that have 562 00:30:12,135 --> 00:30:15,070 boards of directors that make stupid amounts of money. 563 00:30:16,024 --> 00:30:20,486 They have been lucky to be a part of the development of an institution. 564 00:30:20,680 --> 00:30:23,249 If the institution becomes popular and it works, 565 00:30:23,489 --> 00:30:26,615 they benefit gravely disproportionately. 566 00:30:26,978 --> 00:30:29,729 And that does have a moral ramification 567 00:30:29,926 --> 00:30:32,670 that was correctly observed by Marxist philosophy. 568 00:30:33,003 --> 00:30:35,218 And the fact that Peterson can't see any of that, 569 00:30:35,538 --> 00:30:39,581 doing this hyper-reductionism down to this idea 570 00:30:39,840 --> 00:30:41,593 of the capitalist manager 571 00:30:41,930 --> 00:30:45,144 again shows how utterly detached from reality he really is. 572 00:30:45,544 --> 00:30:48,572 [JP] Then the next problem is the criticism of profit. 573 00:30:48,904 --> 00:30:53,107 It's like, well- what's wrong with profit exactly? 574 00:30:53,212 --> 00:30:54,726 What's the problem with profit? 575 00:30:54,843 --> 00:30:59,009 Well, the idea from the Marxist perspective was that profit was theft. 576 00:30:59,280 --> 00:31:01,193 [PJ] So did Peterson get the Cliff Notes version 577 00:31:01,304 --> 00:31:03,126 of the Communist Manifesto or something? 578 00:31:03,240 --> 00:31:04,547 Because it's really bizarre 579 00:31:04,775 --> 00:31:08,609 how he jumps to this sort of moral argument about profit 580 00:31:08,860 --> 00:31:11,120 and how, as he continues, 581 00:31:11,409 --> 00:31:15,778 how obviously there's a contribution of the capitalist or the innovator 582 00:31:15,987 --> 00:31:19,292 and they deserve something. He goes on to say that they 583 00:31:19,476 --> 00:31:23,052 need more money to invest in other things eventually, 584 00:31:23,330 --> 00:31:27,003 equivocating effectively profit with income in general as if they're different, 585 00:31:27,120 --> 00:31:29,550 which in fact they are not in the way he describes it, 586 00:31:30,098 --> 00:31:35,490 because he's ignoring the fact that profit is derived from surplus value of labor. 587 00:31:35,803 --> 00:31:39,206 The Marxist concept of profit is related to surplus value, 588 00:31:39,575 --> 00:31:41,298 which I've already explained before. 589 00:31:41,710 --> 00:31:43,809 Now it's absolutely fair to argue that 590 00:31:43,913 --> 00:31:46,824 even though labor and resources cost a certain amount 591 00:31:47,140 --> 00:31:49,790 and the owner is going to sell it at a higher amount 592 00:31:49,901 --> 00:31:51,981 generating a margin of profit, 593 00:31:52,270 --> 00:31:56,892 there is still a lingering sense of contribution by the capitalist 594 00:31:57,000 --> 00:31:59,360 through innovation or organization 595 00:31:59,470 --> 00:32:02,209 or the purchase of capital machinery and so on, 596 00:32:02,375 --> 00:32:03,686 to make things happen. 597 00:32:03,956 --> 00:32:06,049 And that is a completely valid argument. 598 00:32:06,178 --> 00:32:08,215 However, that's not what he's doing. 599 00:32:08,418 --> 00:32:11,655 He's detaching the reality from the Marxist perspective and just 600 00:32:11,766 --> 00:32:14,732 pontificating about the role of profit in general, 601 00:32:14,984 --> 00:32:17,600 which really doesn't achieve any particular end. 602 00:32:18,067 --> 00:32:22,240 [JP] If the capitalist is adding value to the corporation 603 00:32:22,412 --> 00:32:26,960 then there's some utility and some fairness in him or her 604 00:32:27,107 --> 00:32:30,713 extracting the value of their abstract labor, 605 00:32:30,880 --> 00:32:35,218 their thought, their abstract abilities, their ability to manage the company... 606 00:32:37,360 --> 00:32:39,058 And then the other issue with profit 607 00:32:39,160 --> 00:32:41,095 and you know this if you've ever run a business, 608 00:32:41,220 --> 00:32:42,633 it's really useful constraint. 609 00:32:43,323 --> 00:32:45,544 Like, it's not enough to have a good idea. 610 00:32:45,926 --> 00:32:49,661 It's not a good enough to have a good idea and a sales and marketing plan, 611 00:32:49,864 --> 00:32:50,898 and then to implement it. 612 00:32:51,470 --> 00:32:56,787 It provides a good constraint on wasted labor. 613 00:32:57,735 --> 00:33:01,187 And so most of the things that I've done in my life, even psychologically, 614 00:33:01,316 --> 00:33:03,360 that were designed to help people's psychological health, 615 00:33:03,587 --> 00:33:05,501 I tried to run on a for-profit basis. 616 00:33:05,655 --> 00:33:07,649 And the reason for what that was, 617 00:33:07,809 --> 00:33:10,264 apart from the fact that I'm not adverse to making a profit 618 00:33:10,498 --> 00:33:12,260 partly so my enterprises can grow, 619 00:33:12,400 --> 00:33:16,560 it was also so that the reforms of stupidity that I couldn't engage in 620 00:33:16,676 --> 00:33:20,295 because I would be punished by the market enough to eradicate the enterprise. 621 00:33:20,461 --> 00:33:22,153 [PJ] What a bizarre man! 622 00:33:23,329 --> 00:33:27,643 Okay. He's saying that profit, if you don't make it, 623 00:33:27,944 --> 00:33:29,476 if it's not profitable 624 00:33:29,907 --> 00:33:32,726 and there isn't someone willing to pay you a profit, 625 00:33:33,046 --> 00:33:34,344 then it's not worth doing. 626 00:33:34,541 --> 00:33:38,812 And that might be true on his therapeutic business level. 627 00:33:39,378 --> 00:33:42,510 But let's think about all the things that don't generate a profit. 628 00:33:42,713 --> 00:33:45,550 Such as, oh I don't know- solving homelessness, 629 00:33:45,821 --> 00:33:48,646 or all of the things that don't have a return 630 00:33:48,880 --> 00:33:50,467 because either the people don't have money 631 00:33:50,650 --> 00:33:52,160 or what needs to be solved 632 00:33:52,363 --> 00:33:55,126 doesn't generate revenue by the process of solving it. 633 00:33:55,840 --> 00:33:59,076 This is an aside to the Marxist revelation of the 634 00:33:59,329 --> 00:34:02,541 exploitation of profit which is a perfectly viable concept. 635 00:34:03,384 --> 00:34:06,541 But Peterson is off in his own weird fantasyland 636 00:34:06,690 --> 00:34:08,221 as usual with all of this stuff. 637 00:34:08,676 --> 00:34:12,301 [JP] So, Marx and Engels also assume that this 638 00:34:13,058 --> 00:34:17,464 dictatorship of the proletariat which involves absurd centralization, 639 00:34:17,770 --> 00:34:22,935 the overwhelming probability of corruption and impossible computation 640 00:34:23,050 --> 00:34:24,978 as the proletariat now try to 641 00:34:25,433 --> 00:34:29,907 rationally compute the manner in which an entire market economy could run, 642 00:34:30,050 --> 00:34:31,378 which cannot be done 643 00:34:31,495 --> 00:34:34,160 because it's far too complicated for anybody to think through... 644 00:34:34,510 --> 00:34:36,744 [PJ] And the ultimate summation argument 645 00:34:36,855 --> 00:34:39,058 where you pretend that everything you've talked about 646 00:34:39,420 --> 00:34:41,790 has already been proven so you can summarize it all 647 00:34:41,907 --> 00:34:44,492 as if it's all official and declaratory. 648 00:34:44,700 --> 00:34:47,458 So you have the "dictatorship of the proletariat," 649 00:34:47,560 --> 00:34:49,846 a concept he clearly doesn't even understand, 650 00:34:50,116 --> 00:34:53,409 which will lead to "absurd centralization," 651 00:34:53,532 --> 00:34:55,655 will inevitably lead to corruption, 652 00:34:56,140 --> 00:34:59,310 and he clearly doesn't recognize once again the structural differences 653 00:34:59,420 --> 00:35:01,507 in what's being proposed, in theory, 654 00:35:01,636 --> 00:35:04,935 to change the structure; he sees a one-to-one equivocation, 655 00:35:05,070 --> 00:35:08,326 where the proletariat are just going to take the role of the bourgeoisie 656 00:35:08,596 --> 00:35:12,467 and hence perform the same "evils" as they always would. 657 00:35:12,861 --> 00:35:15,667 And then he goes on to talk about the economic calculation problem. 658 00:35:16,006 --> 00:35:19,360 Now no one can possibly comprehend the complexity of market dynamics 659 00:35:19,612 --> 00:35:21,236 in a roundtable group. 660 00:35:21,501 --> 00:35:24,843 Now that's probably true, but if you listen carefully to his disposition 661 00:35:25,175 --> 00:35:26,941 he would argue even today 662 00:35:27,181 --> 00:35:31,230 that nobody would be able to create economic calculation like the market 663 00:35:31,403 --> 00:35:34,030 because it's impossible, which is completely preposterous. 664 00:35:34,215 --> 00:35:37,772 With modern technology sensor systems, and AI, 665 00:35:37,920 --> 00:35:40,141 and all the networking capacities we have today, 666 00:35:40,280 --> 00:35:45,138 we could actually create a new market if you will without any money whatsoever 667 00:35:45,280 --> 00:35:46,941 and it would be 10 times more efficient. 668 00:35:47,052 --> 00:35:48,424 [JP] The next theory is that 669 00:35:48,990 --> 00:35:51,778 somehow the proletariat dictatorship 670 00:35:52,061 --> 00:35:54,233 would become magically hyperproductive. 671 00:35:54,652 --> 00:35:59,427 And there's actually no theory at all about how that's going to happen. 672 00:35:59,680 --> 00:36:02,867 And so I had to infer the theory and the theory seems to be that 673 00:36:03,218 --> 00:36:06,996 once you eradicate the bourgeoisie, because they're evil, 674 00:36:07,200 --> 00:36:10,049 and you get rid of their private property and 675 00:36:11,544 --> 00:36:13,766 you eradicate the profit motive, 676 00:36:13,920 --> 00:36:15,624 then all of a sudden magically 677 00:36:15,858 --> 00:36:19,944 the small percentage of the proletariat who now run the society 678 00:36:20,700 --> 00:36:23,396 determine how they can make their 679 00:36:25,163 --> 00:36:29,181 productive enterprises productive enough so they become hyperproductive. 680 00:36:29,569 --> 00:36:31,290 And they need to become hyperproductive 681 00:36:32,129 --> 00:36:36,067 for the last error to be logically coherent 682 00:36:36,590 --> 00:36:38,775 in relationship to the Marxist theory which is that 683 00:36:38,960 --> 00:36:42,436 at some point the proletariat, the dictatorship of the proletariat, 684 00:36:42,541 --> 00:36:46,713 will become so hyperproductive that there'll be enough material goods 685 00:36:46,910 --> 00:36:49,329 for everyone across all dimensions. 686 00:36:49,723 --> 00:36:52,609 [PJ] And this brings me back to my commentary at the very beginning. 687 00:36:52,873 --> 00:36:57,796 The vagueness of the Communist Manifesto lends itself for appropriate criticism 688 00:36:58,141 --> 00:37:01,150 and inappropriate criticism in the sense 689 00:37:01,360 --> 00:37:06,184 of drawing conclusions that seem to overshadow its basic principled theories, 690 00:37:06,473 --> 00:37:08,449 its observations and so on. 691 00:37:09,280 --> 00:37:12,326 It's not explained how any of this is supposed to occur. 692 00:37:12,584 --> 00:37:15,803 And rather than acknowledge the fact that it's not explained 693 00:37:15,926 --> 00:37:18,203 and that the text is fundamentally vague, 694 00:37:18,510 --> 00:37:21,335 Peterson takes it upon himself to jump on it 695 00:37:21,526 --> 00:37:25,243 as if it's indicative of some kind of larger ambiguity, 696 00:37:25,464 --> 00:37:28,055 a larger ambiguity that represents 697 00:37:28,246 --> 00:37:31,513 a general confusion of anyone today 698 00:37:31,698 --> 00:37:34,406 that attempts to criticize market capitalism. 699 00:37:34,707 --> 00:37:37,520 That's the implication; it might not be explicit 700 00:37:37,920 --> 00:37:43,126 but if you understand his work and his establishment-preserving tendencies, 701 00:37:43,427 --> 00:37:46,196 that is precisely what he is going for. 702 00:37:46,676 --> 00:37:51,433 And the fact that the Communist Manifesto is necessarily vague 703 00:37:51,593 --> 00:37:53,889 and was speculative in many ways 704 00:37:54,178 --> 00:37:55,883 gives him a jumping-off point 705 00:37:56,110 --> 00:37:58,953 to falsely validate his conclusions. 706 00:38:00,000 --> 00:38:02,701 [JP] The utopia that is going to suit everyone, 707 00:38:02,892 --> 00:38:05,747 because there are great differences between people. 708 00:38:06,380 --> 00:38:10,129 When some people are going to find what they want in love 709 00:38:10,240 --> 00:38:12,516 and some are going to find it in social being 710 00:38:12,627 --> 00:38:16,080 and some are going to find it in conflict and competition, 711 00:38:16,220 --> 00:38:19,304 and some are going to find it in creativity as Marx pointed out. 712 00:38:19,575 --> 00:38:25,458 But the notion that that will necessarily be the end goal for the utopian state 713 00:38:25,560 --> 00:38:27,040 is preposterous! 714 00:38:27,403 --> 00:38:32,061 [PJ] Okay. The fundamental premise of giving support to human beings 715 00:38:32,233 --> 00:38:35,169 is extremely rational in the same way 716 00:38:35,310 --> 00:38:38,393 that you create an infrastructure in society for people to travel around, 717 00:38:39,193 --> 00:38:41,803 for people to not go too far to purchase food, 718 00:38:42,381 --> 00:38:45,347 for people to have piping water into their homes, 719 00:38:45,938 --> 00:38:48,996 for people to have energy connected, heat, and so on. 720 00:38:49,181 --> 00:38:54,221 It might be romantic to walk a mile living in Africa just to get clean water 721 00:38:54,393 --> 00:38:56,252 and spend half your day doing that, 722 00:38:56,424 --> 00:38:59,181 [but] we prefer to have an infrastructure that supports us. 723 00:38:59,698 --> 00:39:03,126 The entire basic simple idea 724 00:39:03,427 --> 00:39:08,978 of socialism or frankly just any kind of design-oriented public health approach 725 00:39:09,366 --> 00:39:13,901 is that you allow people to have support on many levels 726 00:39:14,061 --> 00:39:17,427 so they don't have to worry about their most fundamental needs, 727 00:39:17,670 --> 00:39:20,609 allowing them to pursue other things. 728 00:39:21,113 --> 00:39:24,221 That's all the Bernie Sanders things wants to do, 729 00:39:24,449 --> 00:39:27,833 that's all historical Europe has ever done 730 00:39:28,086 --> 00:39:31,224 in the attempt to create universal health care and so on. 731 00:39:31,581 --> 00:39:36,830 It's about giving an actual safety net to people to make them feel secure 732 00:39:37,156 --> 00:39:39,864 and allow them to actually be free 733 00:39:40,104 --> 00:39:42,947 in stark contrast to the propaganda 734 00:39:43,206 --> 00:39:45,846 that any kind of socialist organization or any kind of 735 00:39:46,080 --> 00:39:50,073 design organization, any kind of planning - ooh! imagine that - 736 00:39:50,400 --> 00:39:53,913 will somehow result in totalitarianism or inefficiency. 737 00:39:54,227 --> 00:39:57,803 This is mythology, and this is where Peterson shines, 738 00:39:57,944 --> 00:40:01,212 because he has bought the line of privatization 739 00:40:01,390 --> 00:40:04,830 and this neurotic individualism hook line and sinker, 740 00:40:05,003 --> 00:40:09,741 and he goes out as an evangelist to promote the same bullshit libertarian stuff 741 00:40:09,920 --> 00:40:13,181 that so many others have done, and the pathetic thing is 742 00:40:13,304 --> 00:40:17,803 people continue to buy it at their own demise. 743 00:40:18,012 --> 00:40:21,513 The same people that support Peterson are the same people that look up to Trump, 744 00:40:21,624 --> 00:40:25,040 the same people that look down at any kind of organization of society 745 00:40:25,316 --> 00:40:29,556 as some kind of failure or some kind of denial of individualism and so on. 746 00:40:29,690 --> 00:40:32,258 [JP] Then there's the Dostoevskyan observation too which is 747 00:40:32,406 --> 00:40:34,178 one not to be taken lightly which is: 748 00:40:34,332 --> 00:40:37,107 What sort of shallow conception of people do you have 749 00:40:37,458 --> 00:40:38,646 that makes you think that 750 00:40:38,843 --> 00:40:43,409 if you gave people enough bread and cake in the Dostoevskyan terms and 751 00:40:43,587 --> 00:40:46,830 nothing to do except to busy themselves with 752 00:40:47,910 --> 00:40:51,415 continuity of the species, that they would also all of a sudden become 753 00:40:51,710 --> 00:40:52,984 peaceful and heavenly? 754 00:40:53,255 --> 00:40:56,400 Dostoevsky's idea was that, we were built for trouble! 755 00:40:56,676 --> 00:41:01,033 [PJ] I would have to counter that the more shallow conception of humanity 756 00:41:01,538 --> 00:41:06,578 is that they would need to be pressured and coerced by the system they live in 757 00:41:06,843 --> 00:41:10,043 to be forced into different labor roles to do things. 758 00:41:10,320 --> 00:41:13,513 Because if they don't have a foundational basis of their existence, 759 00:41:13,830 --> 00:41:18,449 they're just gonna be some kind of meandering blob sloth?! 760 00:41:19,384 --> 00:41:21,569 That is effectively what he's saying here 761 00:41:21,680 --> 00:41:24,978 and I have no idea if Dostoevsky ever said that. 762 00:41:25,218 --> 00:41:28,443 But it's completely preposterous to think that people don't have 763 00:41:28,603 --> 00:41:30,867 a sense of personal navigation and interest, 764 00:41:31,064 --> 00:41:34,615 and that they have to be constantly pressured by some external force 765 00:41:34,720 --> 00:41:37,692 to do anything which is effectively what he's implying. 766 00:41:37,956 --> 00:41:41,544 Along with apparently the idea that if people were given the necessities of life 767 00:41:41,890 --> 00:41:44,929 they would disturb it somehow? they'd fuck it up somehow? 768 00:41:45,593 --> 00:41:49,507 [JP] And if we were ever handed everything we needed on a silver platter, 769 00:41:49,661 --> 00:41:53,243 the first thing we would do is engage in some form of creative destruction 770 00:41:53,396 --> 00:41:55,636 just so something unexpected could happen 771 00:41:55,760 --> 00:41:57,975 just so we could have the adventure of our lives! 772 00:41:58,283 --> 00:42:02,160 [JP] I could assure everybody listening that giving people the necessities of life 773 00:42:02,295 --> 00:42:05,427 as a layer of support does not disqualify 774 00:42:05,593 --> 00:42:08,104 total chaos, pain, suffering, 775 00:42:08,307 --> 00:42:10,418 all the trauma and 776 00:42:10,836 --> 00:42:14,830 excitement and journey and adventure that people can experience in life. 777 00:42:15,273 --> 00:42:17,329 What a miserable human perspective. 778 00:42:17,747 --> 00:42:21,883 [JP] And then the last error let's say, although by no means the last, 779 00:42:22,676 --> 00:42:26,067 and this is one of the strangest parts of the Communist Manifesto, is 780 00:42:26,320 --> 00:42:31,981 Marx admits, and Engel admits repeatedly in the Communist Manifesto 781 00:42:32,190 --> 00:42:35,889 that there has never been a system of production in the history of the world 782 00:42:36,036 --> 00:42:41,292 that was as effective at producing material commodities in excess than capitalism. 783 00:42:42,246 --> 00:42:45,760 The logical thing needs just to let the damn system play itself out? 784 00:42:46,283 --> 00:42:49,470 Unless you're assuming that the evil capitalists are just going to take 785 00:42:49,827 --> 00:42:54,092 all of the flat-screen televisions, and put them in one big room, 786 00:42:54,240 --> 00:42:56,283 and not let anyone else have one. 787 00:42:56,470 --> 00:42:58,196 [PJ] That's kind of funny he uses that analogy 788 00:42:58,307 --> 00:43:00,627 since that's exactly what's happened in the world! 789 00:43:01,089 --> 00:43:05,483 You have stupid amounts of inequality, vast inequity, 790 00:43:05,680 --> 00:43:10,830 property hoarded by a very small number of people in the form of dollars 791 00:43:11,310 --> 00:43:15,913 that by system function, restrict other people from having that money, 792 00:43:16,172 --> 00:43:17,889 billions of people in poverty. 793 00:43:18,310 --> 00:43:20,129 I don't even know what the statistic is anymore, 794 00:43:20,436 --> 00:43:24,818 1% of the world owning half of the wealth, it's probably even more than that. 795 00:43:24,996 --> 00:43:28,763 I refuse to even look anymore because it gets worse every single year. 796 00:43:29,267 --> 00:43:30,270 But beyond that, 797 00:43:30,529 --> 00:43:34,375 he jumps on this thing that I mentioned before about productivity and capitalism 798 00:43:34,584 --> 00:43:38,055 and he just simply assumes that, "Well if we're producing a lot of stuff, 799 00:43:38,160 --> 00:43:39,630 forget the ecological crisis, 800 00:43:39,772 --> 00:43:42,276 forget the cultural consumer vanity crisis, 801 00:43:42,590 --> 00:43:45,476 but let's just keep producing lots of stuff regardless 802 00:43:45,600 --> 00:43:47,292 because we have the machinery to do it 803 00:43:47,483 --> 00:43:49,643 and the capitalist incentive of profit to do it, 804 00:43:49,889 --> 00:43:53,753 and that is going to somehow alleviate the problems of the world, 805 00:43:53,920 --> 00:43:57,852 and let's just keep doing that because that seems to be the trajectory." 806 00:43:58,129 --> 00:43:59,360 [JP] The first thing I'd like to say is 807 00:43:59,550 --> 00:44:03,766 we do not know how to set up a human system of economics without inequality. 808 00:44:03,950 --> 00:44:05,298 No one has ever managed it. 809 00:44:05,686 --> 00:44:07,716 [PJ] Definitively untrue; human cultures spent 810 00:44:07,827 --> 00:44:11,021 enormous swaths of time in egalitarian organizations. 811 00:44:11,458 --> 00:44:14,984 The correct question is: how do we set up an egalitarian system 812 00:44:15,120 --> 00:44:20,036 within a surplus-producing society, post Neolithic Revolution? 813 00:44:20,520 --> 00:44:22,984 Something that I've been talking about for a long time, 814 00:44:23,132 --> 00:44:25,483 and have written about, and it can be done. 815 00:44:26,203 --> 00:44:29,384 Not to mention there are still small pockets of civilization, 816 00:44:29,593 --> 00:44:33,427 that still live in egalitarian ways even though they're entrenched 817 00:44:33,600 --> 00:44:35,606 in the capitalist social order. 818 00:44:35,716 --> 00:44:38,280 And finally if you wish to take a scientific perspective 819 00:44:38,393 --> 00:44:40,135 of inequality and its attributes, 820 00:44:40,240 --> 00:44:42,966 rather than just imply that all inequality is equal 821 00:44:43,076 --> 00:44:44,990 and it doesn't matter the degree of extremes, 822 00:44:45,107 --> 00:44:47,544 take a look at the Gini coefficients across nations 823 00:44:47,803 --> 00:44:49,864 and then consider the economic practices 824 00:44:50,040 --> 00:44:51,938 of those nations with the lowest number. 825 00:44:52,430 --> 00:44:54,258 It's very clear that those nations, 826 00:44:54,541 --> 00:44:57,040 first world nations of course, the developed nations, 827 00:44:57,230 --> 00:45:01,390 that have well established social support programs that are less privatized, 828 00:45:01,563 --> 00:45:03,310 naturally lead to less inequality 829 00:45:03,500 --> 00:45:06,252 and of course they are also the happiest nations 830 00:45:06,363 --> 00:45:08,250 when it comes to the Happiness Index. 831 00:45:09,003 --> 00:45:11,027 All of this is to say that at a minimum 832 00:45:11,329 --> 00:45:13,667 the happiest, most equal nations 833 00:45:13,852 --> 00:45:17,661 are not poster childs for neoliberal free-market economics. 834 00:45:17,880 --> 00:45:21,538 They might still be market economies but they move to the other end of the spectrum. 835 00:45:22,220 --> 00:45:25,926 And my point here in rebuttal to Peterson's generalization 836 00:45:26,135 --> 00:45:29,464 is that it should be the interest of every nation for the sake of its public health, 837 00:45:29,686 --> 00:45:34,406 given how caustic socioeconomic inequality is across the board - 838 00:45:34,689 --> 00:45:38,067 from drug use to violence and so on, 839 00:45:38,172 --> 00:45:40,141 things I've talked about at great length before. 840 00:45:40,320 --> 00:45:41,778 And hence it's axiomatic to say 841 00:45:41,890 --> 00:45:46,153 "Well if these are the structural reforms that are increasing equality 842 00:45:46,400 --> 00:45:48,818 and effectively increasing public health and happiness, 843 00:45:49,040 --> 00:45:52,886 then why don't we continue moving in that direction because it makes the most sense?" 844 00:45:53,080 --> 00:45:56,030 [JP] And it's not obvious by any stretch of imagination 845 00:45:56,264 --> 00:45:58,412 that the free market economies of the West 846 00:45:58,547 --> 00:46:02,935 have more inequality than the less free economies in the rest of the world. 847 00:46:03,341 --> 00:46:05,575 And the one thing you can say about capitalism is that, 848 00:46:05,698 --> 00:46:08,504 although it produces inequality which it absolutely does, 849 00:46:08,640 --> 00:46:12,196 it also produces wealth, and all the other systems don't! 850 00:46:12,350 --> 00:46:14,184 They just produce inequality! 851 00:46:14,307 --> 00:46:16,504 [PJ] Let's listen to that exuberant stupid shit again. 852 00:46:16,670 --> 00:46:18,880 [JP] And the one thing you can say about capitalism is that, 853 00:46:19,052 --> 00:46:21,840 although it reduces inequality which it absolutely does, 854 00:46:21,963 --> 00:46:25,476 it also produces wealth, and all the other systems don't! 855 00:46:25,741 --> 00:46:27,489 They just produce inequality! 856 00:46:27,610 --> 00:46:31,378 [PJ] First of all, all countries on the planet are capitalist to one degree or another 857 00:46:31,692 --> 00:46:33,267 because they use money and markets, 858 00:46:33,575 --> 00:46:37,784 with extreme deviation in countries like North Korea 859 00:46:38,036 --> 00:46:40,196 and then a little less for places like Cuba, 860 00:46:40,455 --> 00:46:44,203 and then a little less for places like Venezuela and then China and so on. 861 00:46:44,775 --> 00:46:48,326 And as I've just talked about with the Scandinavian countries such as Denmark, 862 00:46:48,590 --> 00:46:51,710 which employ very strict controls of the market economy 863 00:46:51,840 --> 00:46:54,400 in terms of regulation and unions I should say, 864 00:46:54,646 --> 00:46:56,221 they're very free in many ways, 865 00:46:56,330 --> 00:46:59,089 but they're still very strict and they have massive social safety nets 866 00:46:59,193 --> 00:47:01,900 and avoid extensive neoliberal privatization, 867 00:47:02,061 --> 00:47:06,430 the real argument here is "what is the most successful of this spectrum?" 868 00:47:06,769 --> 00:47:10,590 And it's clear that Peterson doesn't even know what the word "wealth" even means. 869 00:47:10,935 --> 00:47:14,049 Are Denmark, Sweden and Norway and so on lacking wealth? 870 00:47:14,150 --> 00:47:17,156 even though they are some of the happiest countries on the planet, 871 00:47:17,260 --> 00:47:19,963 and they do not have the excess production of goods 872 00:47:20,073 --> 00:47:22,120 in the same way the United States does which by the way 873 00:47:22,233 --> 00:47:25,260 is one of the most miserable industrialized nations on the planet? 874 00:47:25,440 --> 00:47:26,990 Wealth is an abstraction; it's a 875 00:47:27,181 --> 00:47:30,676 perspective of affluency that's socially relative. 876 00:47:31,255 --> 00:47:34,412 So this whole quick little emotional diatribe by Peterson 877 00:47:34,523 --> 00:47:37,833 as some kind of punctuation mark on his arguments in general 878 00:47:38,283 --> 00:47:42,947 has zero value because he's arguing a complete invention that he's made up 879 00:47:43,150 --> 00:47:45,243 with respect to the way he sees the world 880 00:47:45,378 --> 00:47:48,676 under the assumption that free market capitalism in its highest extreme 881 00:47:48,970 --> 00:47:50,929 is going to be the highest production of wealth and hence 882 00:47:51,030 --> 00:47:52,627 the highest production of happiness and so on. 883 00:47:53,618 --> 00:47:57,353 [JP] Here's a few stats, here's a few free market stats, OK? 884 00:47:58,406 --> 00:48:02,640 From 1800 to 2017, income growth adjusted for inflation 885 00:48:02,861 --> 00:48:08,264 grew by 40 times for production workers and 16 times for unskilled labor. 886 00:48:09,169 --> 00:48:13,483 So from 1AD in 1800AD it was like nothing, flat. 887 00:48:13,784 --> 00:48:17,729 And then all of a sudden in the last 217 years 888 00:48:17,890 --> 00:48:20,486 there's been this unbelievably upward movement of wealth. 889 00:48:20,664 --> 00:48:24,486 And it doesn't only characterize the tiny percentage of people at the top 890 00:48:24,707 --> 00:48:27,600 who, admittedly, do have most of the wealth. 891 00:48:27,770 --> 00:48:31,335 The question is, not only though, "what's the inequality?" the question is 892 00:48:31,460 --> 00:48:34,153 "well what's happening to the absolutely poor at the bottom?" 893 00:48:34,313 --> 00:48:35,323 And the answer to that is 894 00:48:35,480 --> 00:48:37,144 "they're getting richer faster now 895 00:48:37,316 --> 00:48:39,076 than they ever have in the history of the world." 896 00:48:39,240 --> 00:48:41,938 [PJ] Earlier in this program Mr. Peterson said this: 897 00:48:42,180 --> 00:48:44,061 [JP] Almost all ideas are wrong. 898 00:48:45,273 --> 00:48:48,184 And it doesn't matter if they're your ideas or someone else's ideas, 899 00:48:48,473 --> 00:48:51,618 your job is to assume first of all that they're probably wrong 900 00:48:51,778 --> 00:48:56,080 and then to assault them with everything you have and see if they can survive. 901 00:48:56,440 --> 00:48:59,870 It was akin to something Jung said about "typical thinking" 902 00:48:59,987 --> 00:49:02,680 and this was the thinking of people who weren't trained to think. 903 00:49:03,218 --> 00:49:06,810 If a thought appears, they just accept it as true. 904 00:49:07,070 --> 00:49:08,978 They don't go the second step, 905 00:49:09,160 --> 00:49:11,409 which is to think about the thinking. 906 00:49:11,895 --> 00:49:14,381 [PJ] Very sage advice! very sage advice. 907 00:49:14,500 --> 00:49:16,381 Too bad Jordan doesn't employ it because 908 00:49:16,498 --> 00:49:19,403 what he does in this final conclusion, which I'm not going to play, 909 00:49:19,570 --> 00:49:23,052 is attribute the decrease of extreme poverty to free-market capitalism 910 00:49:23,335 --> 00:49:27,175 without any other level of investigation as to why this has occurred. 911 00:49:28,480 --> 00:49:32,320 This is a chart put forward by Gregory Clark called the Malthusian Trap. 912 00:49:32,744 --> 00:49:35,932 The Malthusian Trap points out that up until the 19th century 913 00:49:36,043 --> 00:49:37,507 incomes pretty much went nowhere. 914 00:49:37,830 --> 00:49:41,464 Generally miserable existence, kings, monarchs, regal authorities held great wealth 915 00:49:41,575 --> 00:49:42,920 while the peasants toiled away. 916 00:49:43,230 --> 00:49:45,286 And then you have this enormous divergence 917 00:49:45,390 --> 00:49:47,876 that happened upon the 19th century at the end of the chart, 918 00:49:48,012 --> 00:49:50,326 the great divergence as people have called it, 919 00:49:50,486 --> 00:49:53,033 which vastly increased incomes and hence wealth. 920 00:49:53,476 --> 00:49:57,107 And do you think this had to do with free market capitalism? 921 00:49:57,920 --> 00:50:01,630 Free market capitalism is an abstraction that we have coined in the modern era 922 00:50:01,809 --> 00:50:03,612 as per the theories of Adam Smith. 923 00:50:03,870 --> 00:50:07,963 But the framework of market economics goes back thousands of years. 924 00:50:08,295 --> 00:50:11,009 The concept of property and specialization of labor, 925 00:50:11,304 --> 00:50:15,021 ownership, means of production, and all of the fundamental attributes 926 00:50:15,126 --> 00:50:17,772 that are associated to capitalism as we know it today 927 00:50:18,049 --> 00:50:20,141 existed and molded and developed 928 00:50:20,363 --> 00:50:24,566 during the post Neolithic Revolution time, starting 12,000 years ago. 929 00:50:24,923 --> 00:50:26,633 And over the course of that time 930 00:50:26,867 --> 00:50:30,049 the characteristic of society was deeply unequal, 931 00:50:30,209 --> 00:50:32,190 miserable by today's standards. 932 00:50:32,370 --> 00:50:35,193 And yet market trade, ownership property, and all of that 933 00:50:35,304 --> 00:50:37,341 still existed to a general degree. 934 00:50:37,729 --> 00:50:40,220 That is what the Agricultural Revolution produced. 935 00:50:40,390 --> 00:50:43,692 You can argue the definition of this or that social system 936 00:50:43,800 --> 00:50:48,240 but there's a through line that starts from the Agricultural Revolution up until today 937 00:50:48,430 --> 00:50:50,449 and the general attributes have remained the same. 938 00:50:50,880 --> 00:50:53,901 And the massive move of increased wealth upon the 19th century, 939 00:50:54,012 --> 00:50:55,236 the Industrial Revolution, 940 00:50:55,353 --> 00:50:58,867 has nothing to do with market economics in and of itself 941 00:50:59,058 --> 00:51:02,603 and everything to do with the sudden discovery of advancement 942 00:51:02,750 --> 00:51:05,033 in efficiency-improving technology. 943 00:51:05,396 --> 00:51:08,984 The advancement of efficiency-improving technology which was sparked 944 00:51:09,230 --> 00:51:12,744 at that time in the 19th century: the Industrial Revolution. 945 00:51:13,421 --> 00:51:15,230 In other words the market got lucky. 946 00:51:15,489 --> 00:51:18,153 That rise of advanced technology was able to improve 947 00:51:18,320 --> 00:51:20,855 upon the networking elements of market economics, 948 00:51:21,064 --> 00:51:24,492 setting forward levels of efficiency and production that were once impossible, 949 00:51:24,780 --> 00:51:26,972 making effectively the market look good. 950 00:51:27,538 --> 00:51:29,864 And the fact that he doesn't recognize this 951 00:51:30,170 --> 00:51:33,507 as the driving force of what is in truth 952 00:51:33,610 --> 00:51:36,049 a very slow and arguably minor alleviation 953 00:51:36,166 --> 00:51:38,166 of poverty in the world, what he just talked about, 954 00:51:38,553 --> 00:51:42,689 goes to show that he is one confirmation-bias-seeking machine. 955 00:51:43,113 --> 00:51:45,846 He's not willing to take critical thought in anything, 956 00:51:45,963 --> 00:51:47,963 he's looking for things that will confirm 957 00:51:48,170 --> 00:51:49,587 what will sell his next book. 958 00:51:50,707 --> 00:51:54,541 And for all those out there that will continue to search for excuses to say 959 00:51:54,652 --> 00:51:56,713 "Well the markets are still the source of everything," 960 00:51:56,824 --> 00:51:59,341 "Oh, and markets had to get technology out there!" 961 00:51:59,655 --> 00:52:03,840 This singular fallacy causality is a tremendous blight. 962 00:52:04,603 --> 00:52:08,356 Human technological ingenuity and problem-solving is built into us. 963 00:52:08,843 --> 00:52:12,196 Long before the concept of trade and profit and competition, 964 00:52:12,418 --> 00:52:16,412 we invented lots of things from the wheel to mechanisms of hunting and so on. 965 00:52:16,683 --> 00:52:20,338 Necessity is the mother of invention, not the pursuit of fucking profit. 966 00:52:20,603 --> 00:52:22,996 And it's my hope people out there will take all of this to heart 967 00:52:23,113 --> 00:52:26,461 as what the true mechanisms of human networking and development really mean, 968 00:52:26,640 --> 00:52:29,692 what wealth really means, what innovation really means, 969 00:52:29,821 --> 00:52:31,698 what sustainability really means, 970 00:52:32,000 --> 00:52:34,646 and advance our currently arcane society to something 971 00:52:34,756 --> 00:52:37,070 that will actually work for future generations 972 00:52:37,230 --> 00:52:41,260 and not continue the trajectory that's going to lead towards complete destabilization. 973 00:52:42,135 --> 00:52:43,606 That's all for me, thank you very much.