At the end of October, London Magazine hosted a conservatively minded gathering called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). Inspired and started by world-renowned professor Jordan Peterson, this conference-styled event aimed at giving voice to those thinking about saving and strengthening Judeo-Christian civilization instead of letting it slide into a controlled decline amidst postcolonial guilt and moral relativism. About 1,500 people, mostly from Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries, were invited to share ideas and start building an international community. Legacy media nicknamed it AntiDavos and, maybe, rightly so. Time will tell if it can live up to that designation. Yet the challenges that created the dire need for such an alliance are here and ever-present. Vytautas Sinica from Lithuania sat down with Dr. Peterson to talk about the troubling effect of ideologies, cultural Marxism in particular, and the unique role that might be awaiting Eastern Central Europe in the culture war ahead.
Hello, professor, thank you for speaking with me. You came to Lithuania last month, and it was the first time you visited, if I am not mistaken.
Yes.
What brought you to this region? Any particular reason?
Well, personally, I’m interested in seeing as much of the world as I can. We had the opportunity to do a European tour, and I very much enjoyed touring through Eastern Europe all the times I’ve done it. And so, we haven’t been to Lithuania, and the opportunity opened up. That was the generality of the reason. When you plan a tour, there are a variety of considerations that go into it. The theater has to be available, it has to be of the right size, and then it has to be available when you’re near, so you can sequence it. So there are lots of considerations for which routes and which countries might be taken. And I indicated to my agents as well that I would like to spend more time in Eastern Europe.
The reason for that was that I suspect that Eastern Europe, and this would include the Baltic states, has a key role to play in the reversal of this trend towards moral Marxism and the culture wars that are presently raging. You guys had Marxism for seven decades and haven’t forgotten. Whereas we are too foolish in the West to have any idea of what that means. So those ideas that virtually destroyed you are still attractive to people here in the West. But they are not that attractive to people in Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, [and] not even to people on the Left. So, you know, I can see that Eastern Europe and the Baltic states have had some success in resisting the ideas that have made more impact in the West.
You were kind of the first person to introduce the term cultural Marxism to the mass media, or at least give it the biggest stage so far. But it is still not widely accepted. There are many people contesting the notion that there is such a thing as cultural Marxism. So, what is that?
Well, the Marxist view of the world, which is rooted in an older resentment, I would say, is that there are economic oppressors—that would be the capitalists—and the oppressed—that would be the proletariat, the working class—who the intellectuals hypothetically support (which they never do, by the way). So, there is a dichotomy built into Marxism, which is basically a variant of the oppressor versus the oppressed narrative. And what happened in the 1970s, when it became ethically inappropriate to be a Marxist, even in France, is that Marxism just mutated into a meta-Marxism, or cultural Marxism, where the oppressor versus the oppressed narrative was expanded to include all possible categories.
So, it expanded into the sexual domain; it expanded into the ethnic domain; it expanded into gender. And so, people are divided into their different potential classifications and then further subdivided into oppressor and the oppressed. And then morality becomes nothing but supporting the hypothetically oppressed against the hypothetical oppressor. Some of that was definitely influenced by Marxism, because most of the postmodernists, who were at the bottom of the emergence of these ideas, were Marxists, and they said they were Marxists. So, the idea that this isn’t real is like denying the obvious.
Foucault was a Marxist; Derrida was a Marxist; Sartre was a Marxist. I don’t think Sartre is directly to blame for postmodernism, but like most French intellectuals of his time, he was a Marxist. This is not a secret; all you need to do is read the writings of the people who are being worshiped now. Foucault in particular. I’m not inventing this. And it isn’t a term I invented; I mean, cultural Marxism was an idea that was kicking around for a long time. I don’t think it’s such a great term; really, I don’t know if we have a better one. You know, I’ve been criticized: “Oh, Peterson doesn’t understand the difference between postmodernism, which specifies the absence of all overarching meta narratives, and Marxism, because Marxism is a meta narrative.” It’s like, that might be true, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that the postmodernists, who said there was no meta-narrative, jumped into this camp anyway.
“There is no meta-narrative except that of power,” they claim. I don’t think that there is a more dangerous preposition than that. Because, first of all, look, we’re sitting here in this discussion, if it’s me against you, which is what it is, if it’s just power. If either you gain from this or I do, and it’s zero sum, we are always enemies. Maybe you’re my friend when our interests align, but as soon as they diverge, there is nothing but enmity. And I think the people who push that viewpoint—that’s what they want—they want to use power; they want a justification. One of the things they say is, “Well, everything is about power.” It’s like, no, wrong. Fundamentally wrong. Couldn’t be more wrong. It’s anti-truth.
Friendship isn’t about power, love isn’t about power. The love you have for your children isn’t about power unless you’re a tyrant. It is not a tenable preposition, to say the least; it is morally suspect, to say the least. And the idea that there is no such thing as cultural Marxism is … You can bend your words all you like, but the notion that power is at the root of everything and that you can be moral just by taking the side of the oppressed—that’s the universal anti-Western narrative, and it’s everywhere. It destroyed the universities. Well, but if people don’t want to believe all that, it is up to them.
Traditionally minded people used to think that the political problem was liberalism, but now we suddenly talk about Marxism, and that confuses them to some extent. So, how do we recognize Marxism in practice? Is it quotas? Is it the hate speech laws?
Marxism always divides people up into groups. As soon as you’re dealing with someone who proclaims that the core of identity is some group affiliation, [it] doesn’t matter what it is—ethnicity, gender, sex, race, socio-economic class—the ideas they possess have essentially been derived from Marxist presuppositions.
The classic liberals tend to concentrate more on the individual, the atomized and isolated individual. They tend to see the individual as constrained by the state, [and] by all social relationships. It’s the individual striving to be free to pursue their own rational self-interest, which is a stupid idea because our self-interest isn’t exactly rational. The liberals concentrate on the individual, and I prefer that to Marxism hands down, but the problem with the liberal viewpoint taken to the extreme is that you end up with this deracinated, atomized individuality as the core of identity, and it just doesn’t work because identity can’t be found within the individual. You exist in relationships. So, if you only stress the individual and strip away the relationships, you leave the individual virtually with nothing, maybe with their hedonism. And that is why there is an alliance between liberalism and hedonists. Because liberalism will collapse into hedonism and that’s just not helpful; it’s not sustainable; everyone knows that. You can’t just gratify your whims. And the classical liberals would say, “Well, you have your set of whims, and I have mine, and we can find a balance between them, and your right to your whims ends where my right begins.” And that’s pretty much their whole definition of the state.
But that is foolish because [the] state is a hierarchy of relationships; that’s a much more sophisticated conceptualization. You know, the state is marriage, family, local community, and then town, province, and then country, and then whatever contains that. And identity is all of those at once, operating in something like harmony. And if you are in a marriage, you are just as much a husband as you are an individual, and maybe even more so. And if you have children, you’re more father than you are an individual, or you should be, or your individuality (this is what Bishop Barron was pointing to in his ARC speech) finds its fore expression in the element of your being that’s making itself manifest as husband and father. That makes you more, not less; that’s not a restriction.
Part of the reason young people are so desperate to insist that they define their own identity is because everything else has been stripped away from them. Well, “the family is just a patriarchal institution; you shouldn’t have children, and business is nothing but the predations of capitalism.” And it’s just one thing after another; it’s demolishing; it leaves them with nothing.
It’s deconstruction.
Deconstruction, yeah. And the thing is that deconstruction doesn’t go all the way to the bottom because the deconstructionists themselves never deconstruct their own hedonistic whims. This is a thing that is so strange about an atomized individuality. It’s like, “Well, I get to do whatever I want.” Okay, what is the ‘I’ that you’re talking about? Is the ‘I’ now your wants? Your immediate wants? So that’s what you’re identifying with, and you think that’s you? Presume you’re in a rage, so now you’re nothing but your rage. Is that the theory here? Or maybe you’re nothing but your sexual desires, or you’re nothing but your fear. You’re not free. And why is that you? Why is that you, by definition? It’s complete insanity, and if you adopt the hypothesis that that is you, you will have the kind of insanity that makes you completely intolerable to yourself and absolutely unable to get along with anyone. You can’t get along with someone who says, “I get to do whatever I want, whenever I want.”
No one wants to be around someone like that. You want someone who, at least optimally, wants someone who treats you better than you treat yourself. That’d be a hell of a good thing to encounter. Optimally, that’s what you’d want. And you kind of strive towards that in a marriage, if you have any sense and you love your partner. And this is the same with the relationship you have with your children. It’s very often the case that parents will love their children more than they will love themselves. Maybe they shouldn’t be that way; maybe they should have more regard for themselves, but at least they find a higher order of being in the love that they have for children. One of the things I saw when I had little kids was that even the roughest guys on the street, broken people, strive to be better for kids. One day I walked into a bank, [and] there was this drunken guy, [a] street guy in the corner by the automatic teller. I brought in my son, and my son was a real nice kid, and he was only about three in that instant—you know, a happy kid. And the guy just crumbled and hid himself, he was so ashamed. Almost everyone is their better self around children. You have to be one bent puppy to not have your better part come out when you see kids. There are people like that, but thank God they’re not that common. We find our better self in the service to others.
We even know this technically: there is no difference between thinking about yourself and being miserable. Technically, if you do a statistical analysis and you look at the relationship between emotion and cognition, one of the best signifiers of misery is self-consciousness; they are the same thing. So as long as you are obsessed with what you want, you will be utterly miserable.
So, you know, kids are taught at school all the time now, like, “Who is the state? Is there any authority that should be allowed to regulate your sexual conduct? No, it’s just me.” Well, fine, if it’s just you, you’re doomed; you’re done. It’s not a good mode of being. And that is part of the manner in which liberalism is decadent, because it strips individuals of the community relationships. And you can’t do that; we’re so social that you can punish psychopaths by putting them in isolation. So, you take the worst people, the most anti-social people, the people who rely on power more than anyone else, and you want to punish them, you make them be alone. That’s how social people are. So, the idea that we’re autonomous individuals—there is nothing true about that.
We can imagine the state as extremely well set up, so that the traditional relationships are thriving, the family is intact, [and] the local communities are intact. You can be free, [and] you can be an autonomous individual within that, but that means all those other things are working. And we almost did that; you know, it’s even now; we got most of that. In a city like Amsterdam, [or] Montreal, you can walk around at three in the morning, you’re perfectly safe, you can pretty much do what you want, go where you want. You know, I lived in Montreal, and women can walk around at three in the morning in the roughest neighborhoods with no problem. But God, a lot of work went into that to happen. It’s very unlikely. It takes a lot of social organization to provide people [with] that much freedom. It is very unlikely, and the liberals took that for granted, or they said that all the social relations were nothing but restrictions. That’s what Rousseau would think: “No, man is innately good, and it’s only society that corrupts them.” Yeah…
Let’s move to another topic. You were the one who called pronoun laws ‘totalitarian’ and that was also quite a shock for many people. How can we call things, laws, and practices ‘totalitarian’ in democratic societies? What’s totalitarian about those pronoun laws?
Well, in a constitutional democracy, there are limits to what the majority can do. They can’t transgress against your intrinsic rights, and the most intrinsic of the intrinsic rights (I think it’s even above right to life) is the right to freedom of speech. Why? It’s not so you can just shoot off your mouth and say whatever you want to say. It’s because no one can think without free speech. There is no difference between freedom of speech and freedom of thought; they are the same thing. We’re thinking right now, you and I, having this conversation, and if I am not free to speak, I am not free to think. And if your citizens aren’t free to think, your society will die, because thought is the substitute for death. We think, so we don’t die.
So, as soon as the government steps on freedom of speech, they have overreached their boundaries. That’s a part of the idea that the government has to exist within a domain of intrinsic rights. It is not because the state grants you your rights; it’s because the state would not maintain itself if it is composed of citizens who are forbidden to think. It’ll just ossify and collapse. Just like you will if you stop thinking.
So, when my government said, “Here’s words you have to say,” I was like, “No, no, wrong,” I am way more afraid of the consequences of being unable to think freely than I am of whatever idiot[ic] punishment you half-witted dimwits can come up with. What are you going to threaten me with? Loss of my job? I don’t care; I’d lose my job in a second if it was either that or my tongue. I can get another job, [but] I can’t get another tongue. And I was right about that too; I told the Senate back in 2016 in Canada that their idiot[ic] legislation would produce a psychological epidemic. I told them straight out that it would affect the young women. I knew it because I knew the literature, and that’s exactly what’s happened. And I don’t regret that for a second. Oh, bloody Trudeau…
In some sense, that stance changed the world a little. We are here because of that, and many things started because of that.
Yeah, and everyone said to me, “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill, what do you have against trans people. I don’t care. My attitude towards trans people is something like, “Look, I’d rather you didn’t, but if you are an adult, you can go to hell in a handbasket in any way you choose. That is your issue. I think it is a dreadful error, and I can’t imagine how that is going to work out for you.” And I’d rather it didn’t happen, but… In that sense, I am a liberal.
You are. (smiles)
Well, in that sense. It’s like, you can’t tread on the domain of freedom. And that means people have to be free to make dreadful mistakes. And regarding the trans transformation, the probability that [it] is going to be a mistake is certain, as far as I am concerned. It’s not because I am prejudiced. I suspect that I’ve dealt with a broader range of people than 99.9% of people that you’ll ever meet. I’ve dealt with all sorts of people in my clinical practice. A very wide range of people. So, it is not prejudice; it’s sympathy. These trans kids would come up and say, “You’re interfering with us.” No, you have no idea what [the] things you’re doing are going to do to you. You have no idea. And I know what it’ll do to you. I am not your enemy because I oppose the way you are destroying yourself. That’s not an enemy. “You’re hurting my feelings,” they say. Well, you are destroying your body permanently; you are paying butchers to do it. The person who opposes that is your friend, even when you’re not being your friend. Brutal.
You mentioned that the post-Soviet countries in Central Europe have experience with Marxism in practice. And now, in the wake of Marxism again, that we talked about here, do you see the peoples and nations in this region as having some kind of mission, a duty to talk about it to the world?
Definitely, and I can see that when I travel through Eastern Europe. I’ve traveled through Eastern Europe pretty extensively. People there are perturbed about the susceptibility of the privileged, rich West to these foolish moralistic ideas. But you guys have the experience with this, and I think there is more resistance in Eastern Europe. That’s what I’ve observed. Hungary is a good case in point, so is Poland. And Hungary has been pilloried everywhere in the West. I mean, I’ve gotten in trouble simply because I’ve gone to Hungary and talked to officials there. “You’re talking to the fascists.” Well, they don’t look as much as fascists to me as you critics look like communists to me. And maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so.
I know that there’s still plenty of corruption in Eastern Europe, even by Western European standards. I’m sure that in Hungary, for example, there is no shortage of corruption, but that doesn’t mean that what the Hungarian government is doing is essentially fascist, and it certainly doesn’t mean that just because Hungarians aren’t fond of idiot[ic] western communists. And I really like the president of Hungary; I think she’s deadly. I really like her family policy, too. I think she’s got that exactly right, and it’s a major step forward. So, I think the Eastern European countries have a really important role to play because they could be the place where Western civilization makes its real stand. And I think that is happening to some degree. More power to them, as far as I’m concerned.
As we are here in ARC, can we say that ARC (the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) is meant to help Western civilization make its stand?
I would hope that ARC is here to help civilization make its stand. It’s funny when we talk about Western civilization. Let’s say the Western civilization we’re talking about is Judeo-Christian. Well, in what way is it Western? Certainly not European; it’s Middle Eastern, even African to some degree, North African. Is that Western civilization? I don’t think so. It’s civilization. And you might say, “What about the Hindus, the Confucianists?” Look, there is variance of civilization. Does the civilization that pertains to the West now, derive from the Judeo-Christian tradition and, because of that, have advantages that those other civilizations lack? Yes. I think they do. I mean, look at China; it’s quite the mess.
How submissive are the Chinese to social control?
Well, their societies aren’t based on the explicit preposition that each person is made in the image of God. And I think that’s true; I think that preposition is true; a person is made in the image of God. I think it’s true that if you accept that preposition and you act it out, there isn’t anything you can do that would set your life more in order than that. If you can act that out, everything will lay itself open. And you know that because if you’re married to someone and you treat them like a divine locus of consciousness, they’re going to like you; they’re going to be in love with you. You’re going to treat them maybe better than they treat themselves. If you treat everyone that you come into contact with with that realization in mind, everything will open up for you. And so, in that sense it’s self-evident.
If you do the reverse, which is something like the Marxist power game we discussed earlier, I’ll just reduce you to whatever I can get from you. Maybe I can fool you once; maybe I can steal what you have, but it’s not going to work if you are interacting with me twice or three times. And then I’ll turn you from a potential friend into an enemy. Collect a hundred enemies and see what your life is like. Or even one. You make an enemy at your peril, especially a real enemy. A real enemy will light themselves on fire to singe you. You don’t need many people like that around you before you’re in hell. And so, how do you get out of hell? Treat people like they are made in the image of God. There is no more practical advice than that.
