 It's almost like we're living in a world that is the worst elements of Jordan Peterson's nightmare predictions. The most extreme examples of where he warned we would end up if we didn't change, if we didn't make some shifts. So you have this toxic malignant naivety mixed with utopianism, mixed with really hardline identity politics creating an explosion of narcissistic rage induced by multiple narcissistic or perceived narcissistic injuries over time from people who are extremely fragile, extremely thin skinned and very intolerant of other people's point of view. We have it seems now abandoned reason and the capacity to meet each other in the middle avoids the multiple pitfalls of identity politics and just engage in reasoned debate based on mutual respect for common outcomes. The human being is a force, a logos force that can stand up against chaos and catastrophe and tragedy and evil and prevail. I never did think that that meant that if you did stand up and tell the truth that you would necessarily prevail, right? It's not a magic trick. It's your best bet. That's the thing. You don't have a better option. When I first came across Professor Jordan Peterson, I was irritated. I found his following, I thought they were zealots. I thought I was like listening to basically college graduates, mostly lads, they liked a father figure and they wanted somebody to wag their finger at them and daddy to spank their bottoms and I thought it was a bit, I thought it was a bit much. It was too mystical for me, too much Jungian stuff, too many archetypes, too much rambling about the Bible and I got very annoyed by the confusion between postmodernism, Marxism and sort of SJW woke culture and I just, I couldn't see past it. But over time and with people kept on recommending, I went back again and again and I found that thematically there was a flavour that I personally needed and I think that was part of my irritation was I needed to hear what the man was saying as somebody who had lost track himself in my own life, who lost a sense of purpose, who lost a sense of the necessity to carry my own burdens, to make sacrifices, to responsibly face up to where I needed to grow as a man. I annoyingly found him to be correct and that I also was a young man who needed the finger wagged at him by stern Canadian daddy so that I could make my bloody bed and I started to open up from that point of view. I got past the pettiness of the definitions and everything. I was like, OK, thematically what is this man saying? He's encouraging us to move from chaos into order and he's encouraging people to be responsible. Once he, once I listened to him long enough and he cracked the identity politics thing on those issues, I agreed with him 100%. I mean, in terms of freedom of speech, in terms of falling into these pitfalls where we think we're being kind and we think we're being generous and compassionate and actually what we're doing is accidentally creating nightmare consequences. One of the big things that that he talks about so frequently and I really think it's a problem, it's social liberalism could be sort of characterised as a heavy leaning on the idea of equality of outcome, whereas he defines himself as a classic liberal, which would be characterised as equality of opportunity. They both have the word liberal in them, so they seem to sit side by side, but they create dramatically different consequences in the real world. If you trust people, that's an act of courage. If you're not naive, right? If you're naive, it's an act of stupidity because you might get bit and you probably will and if you're naive and you get bit, you will suffer for it. It'll traumatise you. But if you're not naive and you know you can get bit, then you might ask, well, what should you do with people? And the answer is you should trust them and not because you're naive and not because they couldn't betray you and not because you don't know that they could betray you. But because if you hold out your hand in trust, then you're inviting the best part of that person to step forward and that won't happen unless you take that initial step and that's courage, not naivety. And so to trust someone once your eyes are open, that's an act of courage. And that opens up the world. You know, and you might say, OK. George and Peterson very accurately prophesied the time that we're going through. If you go back to one of his talks in the biblical series, the Abraham talk, he opens by, and this is from three years ago now, talking about how YouTube shut his channel down. And he said he's very concerned about it because he thinks in the future, these big tech companies are going to start removing people from their platforms just because of ideological and political differences. That's three years ago. So if that's not a prophecy that came true, I don't know what is. But broader than that, I think the the the dissolution of our narrative and our capacity to meet in the middle being directly correlated by people doubling down on identity politics, which is extremely dangerous. And some of the worst elements, I wouldn't call it postmodernism or Marxism, I would say it's it's much more low resolution to use his phrase than that. It's like woke ism. So woke ism as a cheap version, a cheap replica of Marxism as a cheap replica or just misuse of postmodernism to say, well, because some institutions are bad, tear everything down, which is it's a real really lazy, sloppy, low impulse control understanding or misunderstanding of some valid points like institutions, you know, can do evil when we say, this is the way it must be, tyranny can follow in the footsteps of that. But the conclusion then isn't destroy all institutions, destroy all hierarchies. That's not going to lead anywhere good either. So but that's what we're seeing. We're seeing and it's very much an anti hierarchical, anti institutional phase of humanity that we're living through. Because we've seen the damage that can be done, we're saying level it all, smash it all down. If that isn't exactly what he prophesied, I don't know what is. And so Nietzsche had this really interesting idea about freedom. And he believed that slavery was an intermediary between the undeveloped individual and the free individual that you had to you had to submit yourself to some intense disciplinary process for some period of time in your life before you could develop any true freedom. So one of the things that he comes back to again and again, and he cites Nietzsche frequently on this subject is the concept of discipline of the concept of living within within a structure within a sort of ordered manifestation of an intent and how that brings us back to ourselves. So we're focused on ourselves and our own responsibility. I think because he's been working in universities his whole life and he's seen this this cultural shift towards looking outside where everybody is just blaming, they're blaming the outside world, they're blaming this institution, this person. And ultimately, if you go too far in that direction, of course, everything dissolves into witch hunts and cancel culture. Because if all the problems of the world are out there, then we must, the logical conclusion would be go out there and get them go out there and eradicate them and stop them. And of course, it's not true. So from Nietzsche to Jung, the Jungian point that he references a lot of times is that some of these problems dwell in the shadow, they dwell in the unconscious. They're really not out there. Sometimes they're in here and drawing that distinction is hard and it takes time and it takes work and it takes humility and we have to be willing to do that. We have to be willing to go there to, as Jordan Peterson says, face the monster because as he says, you're not so bloody brilliant either. So you've got a bunch of people thinking they're angels and that they're on the side of good because they're pursuing evil, which is a pure isle, a childish way of organizing your life. In fact, it's not a way of organizing your life at all. It's a way of avoiding life. It's a way of avoiding responsibility and adulthood because you can just live your life as a perpetual witch hunter. It's role play. It's lapping basically. It's live action role play. It's pitiful and it serves a function, which is it stops the person who's engaging in that behavior from having to face up to their responsibilities, from having to look to themselves and say, where's the darkness in me? Where's the evil in me? Where am I going wrong? Where is this thing that I've been told is out there and that I am telling other people is out there is actually in me and it's hard to do that much, much harder to do that. And this is why I think he draws so extensively from archetypal stories from the Bible and so on because he's trying to draw together these themes in a way that is comprehensible to people so they can understand it as being a human problem. He's not he's not playing the same game. He's not saying it's new university students that are the problem. He's not saying it's all the fault of these SJWs or these postmodernists. He's saying it's a human problem. We've always wrestled with this. Sometimes we win. Sometimes we lose. Right now we seem to be losing in our fight with this problem. It opens your eyes to the domain of the transcendent. That's the right way of thinking about a real piece of art is a window into the transcendent. That's what it is and you need that in your life because you're finite and limited and bounded right by your ignorance and your lack of knowing. And unless you can make a connection to the transcendent then you don't have the strength to prevail. I think Professor Peterson has effectively and succinctly made the point multiple times now that because we've lost connection with the transcendent we're stuck with the material and it makes us petty. It makes our focus petty and our self-image grandiose and narcissistic. If you're connected to the transcendent your focus becomes broader and that grandiosity goes outward so you can see things in a much much grander scope. That is what being connected to the transcendent is. You're connected to the grandest thing imaginable, the grandest thing that we could possibly conceptualize and it reduces that internal narcissism, that internal grandiosity because you can only sit in humility in front of that. So the hammering of the point that we must reconnect to the transcendent is in effect becomes a solution to this whole problem individually. So it can only be done at an individual level. It's for the individual to say, OK, I'm going to face my responsibility. I'm going to connect to the transcendent. I'm going to give myself a mission and a purpose in life. When I'm connected to the transcendent, I am not so important. I am not a little, you know, narcissist sat on his throne. I can live in a way that is much more humble, that is much more sane and that is truly compassionate, not this fake virtue signalling version of compassion. That is just basically a masturbatory, narcissistic performance of practice that we're seeing in action now. But to be truly connected to the transcendent means that we can take action and be compassionate in ways that are authentic and meaningful. I don't agree with everything that Jordan Peterson says. And I love that it's enjoyable for me to listen to him and I can sort of argue with some of the concepts in my head. And I love that I think that we should protect people who offer us the ability to disagree, that offers the ability to think and really he isn't giving us solutions. He's providing us a means for thinking about problems and formulating our own solutions. And I highly value that. I don't care where on the political spectrum you're coming from. If you're offering me that, I value you. So I'm really glad to see he's back and I hope he continues to recover past his health issues and to produce more material because we really need men like him. My name is Richard Granin. If you enjoyed this video and you'd like to see more content like this, please like and subscribe. Thank you.