Peterson and Zizek Debate - transcribed by John Li -
johnmhli@berkeley.edu - 916 623 5512 -
https://chicago.academia.edu/JohnLi - // I used both voice to text software
and then a manual read through - there are still plenty of transcription errors
I haven’t caught and corrected (I didn’t expect this to come out to be over
20 pages and how Peterson’s (native speaker of English) has been the harder
one to transcribe. I will correct more when I get more time but I need to get
back to work. Please feel free to correct this document. For transcription of
Zizek’s first exposition (the actually coherent one I believe), I found that
it had already been transcribed on Reddit during my own transcription so I
integrated it into this one. Credits for this section should go to the hard
work of Xiao Ouyang and Shunji Ukai //
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EVENT BEGINS:
(Applause)
Venue Announcer: Good evening and welcome to the Sony Center for Performing
Arts. Please note for tonight's presentation, video, audio, and flash
photography is prohibited and we have a strict zero tolerance policy for any
heckling or disruption. (Applause) And now, please welcome your host and
moderator, president of Ralston College, Doctor Steven Blackwood.
(Applause)
Dr. Blackwood enters stage (Applause)
Dr. Blackwood (moderator): Thanks you. A warm welcome to all of you this
evening, both those in the theatre here in Toronto and those following online.
It is not every often that you see a country's largest theatre packed for an
intellectual debate, but that's what we're all here for tonight. Please join me
(Applause)... please join me in welcoming to the stage Dr. Slavoj Zizek and Dr.
Jordan Peterson. (Applause)
Zizek and Peterson enter stage (Applause)
Dr. Blackwood (moderator): Just a few words of introduction. There can be few
things I think now more urgent and necessary in an age of reactionary partisan
allegiance and degraded civil discourse than real thinking about hard
questions. The very premise of tonight's event is that we all participate in the
life of thought, not merely opinion or prejudice, but the realm of truth,
access through evidence, and argument. These two towering figures have
different disciplines and domains share more than a commitment to thinking
itself. They are both highly attuned to ideologies and the mechanism of power
and yet they are not principally political thinkers. They are both concerned
with more fundamental matters: meaning, truth, freedom; so it seems to me
likely we will see tonight not only deep differences but also surprising
agreement on deep questions. Dr. Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher. He has not one
but two doctoral degrees, one in philosophy from the University of Ljubljana
and a second in psychoanalysis from (applause) ...let’s hear it for
psychoanalysis... (applause) from the University of Paris VIII. He is now a
professor at the Institute of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of
Ljubljana and the Director of the Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute at the
University of London. He has published more than three dozen books, many on the
most seminal philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries. He is a dazzling
theorist with extraordinary range. A global figure for decades, he turns again
and again with dialectical power to radical questions of emancipation,
subjectivity, and art. (applause)
Dr. Jordan Peterson (applause) is an academic and clinical (applause) clinical
psychologist. His doctorate was awarded by McGill University and he was
subsequently (applause).. we got some McGill graduates out here… he was
subsequently professor of psychology at Harvard University and the the
University of Toronto where he is today. (applause) The author of two book sand
well over a hundred academic articles, Dr. Peterson’s intellectual roots
likewise lie in the 19th and early 20th centuries where his reading of
Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and above all Carl Jung inform his interpretation of
ancient myths, of 20th century totalitarianism, and especially his endeavor to
counter contemporary nihilism. His 12 Rules For Life is a global bestseller and
his lectures and podcasts are followed by millions around the world. Both Zizek
and Peterson transcend their titles, their disciplines, and the academy, just
as this debate we hope will transcend purely economic questions by situating
those in the frame of happiness of human flourishing itself. We're in for quite
a night a quick word about format. Each
of our debaters will have 30 minutes to make a substantial opening statement to
lay out an argument. Dr. Peterson first, followed by Dr. Zizek. Each will then
have in the same order, ten minutes to reply. I will then moderate 45 minutes
or so of questions many of which will come from you the audience both here in
Toronto and online. With that let's get underway. Please join me in welcoming
Dr. Jordan Peterson for the first opening statement.
(applause)
Jordan Peterson gets up to podium
Jordan Peterson: Well thank you for that insanely enthusiastic welcome for the
entire event and also for being here. I have to tell you first that this event
and I suppose my life in some sense hit a new milestone that I was just made
aware of by a stagehand today backstage who informed me that last week the
tickets for this event were being scalped online at a higher price than the
tickets for the Leafs playoff games (applause) so I don't know what to make of
that.
Alright, so how did I prepare for this? Um, I went, I familiarized myself to
the degree that it was possible with Slavoj Zizek’s work and that wasn't that
possible because he has a lot of work and he's a very original thinker and this
debate was put together in relatively short order and what I did instead was
returned to what I regarded as the original cause of all the trouble let's say
which was the Communist Manifesto and what I attempted to do (laughter) because
that's Marx and we're here to talk about Marxism let's say and what I tried to
do was read it and to read something you don't just all of the words and follow
the meaning but you  take apart the sentences and you ask yourself at this
level of phrase and at the level of sentence and that the level of paragraph is
this true are there counter arguments that can be put forward that are credible
is this solid thinking and I have to tell you and I'm not trying to be flippant
here that I have rarely read a tract and I read it when I was 18 it was a long
time ago right that's 40 years ago but I've rarely read a track that made as
many errors per sentence conceptual errors per sentence as the Communist
Manifesto it was quite a miraculous reread it and it was interesting to think
about it psychologically. well because I've read student papers that were of
the same ilk in some sense although I'm not suggesting that they  were of the
same level of glittering literary brilliance and polemic quality and I also
understand that the Communist Manifesto was a call for revolution and not a
standard logical argument but that notwithstanding I have some things to  say
about the author's psychologically
The first thing is that it doesn't seem to me that either Marx or Engels
grappled with one fundamental with this particular fundamental truth which is
that almost all ideas are wrong and so if you and it doesn't matter if they're
 your ideas or someone else's ideas they're probably wrong and even if they
strike you with the force of brilliance  your job is to assume first of all
that they're probably wrong and then to assault them with everything you have
in your arsenal and see if they can survive and what what struck me about the
communist manifesto was it was akin to  something Jung said about typical
thinking and this was the thinking of people who weren't trained to think he
said that the typical thinker has a thought it appears to them like an object
might appear in a room a thought appears and then they just they just accept it
as true they don't know the  second step which is to think about the thinking
and that's the real essence of critical thinking and so that's what you try to
teach people in university is to read a text and to think about it critically
not to destroy the utility of the text but to separate the wheat from the chaff
and so what I tried to do when  I was reading the communist manifesto was to
separate the wheat from the chaff and I'm afraid I found some wheat yes but mostly
chaff and I'm going to explain why hopefully in relatively short order…
So I'm going to outline ten of the fundamental axioms of the Communist
Manifesto and so these are truths that are basically held as self-evident by
the authors and they're truths that are presented in some sense as unquestioned
and I'm going to question them and tell you why I think they’re unreliable.
Now we should remember that this tract was actually written 170 years ago and
it's a long time ago when we have learned a fair bit from since then about
human nature, about society, about politics, about economics. There's lots of
mysteries left to be unsolved but left to be solved but we are slightly wiser I
presume then we were at one point and so you can forgive the authors to some
degree for what they didn't know. But that doesn't matter given that the
essence of this doctrine is still held as sacrosanct by a large proportion of
academics probably are among the most what would you call guilty of that
particular sin.
 
So here's proposition number one: history is to be viewed primarily as an
economic class struggle. Alright so so let's think about that for a minute.
First of all is there the proposition there is that history is primarily to be
viewed through an economic lens and I think that's a debatable proposition
because there are many other motivations that drive human beings than economics
and those have to be taken into account, especially the drive people other than
economic competition like economic cooperation for example. And so that's a
problem. The other problem is that it's actually not a nearly a pessimistic
enough description of the actual problem because history history--this is to
give the devil his due--the idea that one of the driving forces between history
is hierarchical struggle is absolutely true but the idea that that's actually
history is not true because it's deeper than history, it's biology itself
because organisms of all sorts organize themselves into hierarchies and one of
the problems with hierarchies is that they tend to arrange themselves into a
winner-take-all situation. And so now that is implicit in some sense in Marx.
Marx is thinking because of course Marx believed that in a capitalist society
would accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people and that actually is in
keeping with the nature of hierarchical organizations now the problem with that
is it so much the fact of so there's the there's accuracy in the accusation
that that is a eternal form of motivation for struggle but it's an underestimation
of the seriousness of the problem because it attributes' it to the structure of
human societies rather than the deeper reality of the existence of hierarchical
structures per se which as they also characterize the animal kingdom to a large
degree are clearly not only human constructions and the idea that there's
hierarchical competition among human beings there's evidence for that that goes
back at least to the Paleolithic times and so that's the next problem is that
well the ancient problem of hierarchical structure is clearly not attributable
to capitalism because it existed long in human history before capitalism
existed and then it predated human history itself so the question then arises
why would you necessarily at least implicitly link the class struggle with
capitalism given that it's a far deeper problem and now it's also you've got to
understand that this is a deeper problem for people on the Left not just for
people on the right it is the case that hierarchical structures dispossessed
those people who are at the bottom those creatures who are at the bottom
speaking say of animals but those people who are at the bottom and that that is
a fundamental existential problem but the other thing that Marx didn't seem to
take into account is that there there are far more reasons that human beings
struggle then their economic class struggle even if you build the hierarchical
idea into that which is a more comprehensive way of thinking about it human
beings struggle with themselves with the malevolence that's inside themselves
with the evil that they're capable of doing with the spiritual and
psychological warfare that goes on within them and we're also actually always
at odds with nature and this never seems to show up in Marx and it doesn't show
up in Marx's Marxism in general it's as if nature doesn't the primary conflict
as far as I'm concerned or a primary conflict that human beings engage in is
this struggle for life in a cruel and harsh natural world and it's as if it's
as if that doesn't exist at the Marxist domain if human beings have a problem
it's because there's a class struggle that's essentially economic it's like no
human beings have problems because we come into the life starving and lonesome
and we have to solve that problem continually and we make our social
arrangements at least in part to ameliorate that as well as to as to well upon
occasion exacerbated and so there's also very little understanding in the
Communist Manifesto that any of the likes a hierarchical organizations that
human beings have put together I might have a positive element and that's an
absolute catastrophe because hierarchical structures are actually necessary to
solve complicated social problems we have to organize ourselves in some manner
and you have to give the devil his due and so it is the case that hierarchies
dispossessed people and that's a big problem that's the fundamental problem of
inequality but it's also the case that hierarchies happen to be a very
efficient way of distributing resources and it's finally the case that human
hierarchies are not fundamentally predicated on power and I would say that
biological anthropological data on that or crystal clear you don't rise to a
position of authority that's reliable in human society primarily by exploiting
other people it's a very unstable means of obtaining power so so that's a
problem
(laughter)
Well the people that laugh might do it that way
(more laughter)
Okay now the other another problem that comes up right away is that Marx also
assumes that you can think about history as a binary class struggle with clear
divisions between say the proletariat proletariat and the bourgeois and that's
actually a problem because it's not so easy to make a firm division between
whose exploiter and who's exploiting let's say because it's not obvious like in
the case of small shareholders let's say whether or not they happen to be part
of the oppressed or part of the oppressor this actually turned out to be a big
problem in the Russian Revolution and my big problem I mean tremendously big
problem because it turned out that you could fragment people into multiple
identities and that's a fairly easy thing to do and you could usually find some
axis along which they were part of the oppressor class it might have been a
consequence of their education or it might be a consequence of their of their
of their of the wealth that they strived to accumulate during their life or it
might have been a consequence of the fact that they had parents or grandparents
who were educated to rich or that they remember of the priesthood or that they
were socialists or any ways that the listing of how it was possible for you to
be Bruce wah instead of proletariat grew immensely and that was one of the
reasons that the Red Terror claimed all the victims that had claimed and so
that was a huge problem it was probably most exemplified by the demolition of
the kulaks who were basically peasants asn't farmers although effective ones in
the soviet union who had managed to raise themselves out of serfdom over a
period of about 40 years and to gather some some degree of material security
about them and about 1.8 million of them were exiled about 400,000 were killed
and the net consequence of that removal of their private property because of
their bourgeois status was arguably the death of 6 million Ukrainians in the
famines of the 1930s and so the binary class struggle idea that was a bad idea
that was a very very bad idea it's also bad in this way and that this is
sleight of hand that Marx pulls office you have a binary class division
proletariat and bourgeoisie and you have an implicit idea that all of the good
is on the side of the proletariat and all of the evil is on the side of the
Bruce Bozzi and that's classic group identity thinking you know it's one of the
reasons I don't like identity politics is because once you divide people into
groups and hit them against one another it's very easy to assume that all the
evil in the world can be attributed to one group of hypothetical oppressors and
all the good to the other and that well that's that's that's naive that's not
even beyond comprehension because it's absolutely foolish to make the
presumption that you can identify someone's moral worth with their economic
standing so and that actually turned out to be a real problem as well because
Marx also came up with this idea which is a crazy idea as far as I can tell of
the that's a technical term crazy idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat
and that's the next idea that I really stumbled across it was like okay so
what's the problem well the problem is the capitalists own everything they own
all the means of production and they're oppressing everyone that would be all
the workers and there's going to be a race to the bottom of wages for the
workers as the capitalists strive to extract more and more value from the labor
of the proletariat by competing with other capitalists should drive wages down
word which by the way didn't happen partly because wages wage earners can
become scarce and that actually drives the market value upward but in fact that
that you assume a priori that all the evil can be attributed to the capitalists
and all the good and all the good could be attributed to the proletariat and
that you could hypothesize that a dictatorship of the proletariat could come
about and that was the the first stage in the Communist revolution and remember
this is a call for revolution and not just revolution but bloody violent
revolution and the overthrow of all over of all existent social structures anyways
the the the problem with that you see is that because all the evil isn't
divided so easily up into oppressor and oppressed that when you do establish a
dictator of the proletariat to the degree that you can do that which you
actually can't because it's technically impossible and an absurd thing to
consider to begin with not least because of the problem of centralization and
you have to hypothesize that you can take away all the property of the
capitalists you can replace the capitalist class with a minority of
proletariat's how they're going to be chosen isn't exactly clear in the
communist manifesto that none of the people who are from the proletariat class
are going to be corrupted by that sudden access to power because they're well
by definition good so so then you have the good people who are running the
world and you also have them centralized so that they can make decision
decisions that are insanely complicated to make in fact impossibly complicated
to make and so that's a failure conceptually on both dimensions because first
of all all the proletariat aren't going to be good and when you give put people
in the same position as the evil capitalists especially if you believe that
social pressure is one of the determining factors of human character which the
Marxist certainly believed then why wouldn't you assume that the proletariat
would immediately become as or more corrupt than the capitalist which is of
course I would say exactly what happened every time this experiment was run and
then the next problem is well what makes you think that you can take some
system as complicated as like capitalist free-market society and centralize
that and put decision-making power in the hands of a few people the mechanisms
by without specifying the mechanisms by which you're going to choose them like
what makes you think they're gonna have the wisdom or the ability to do what
the capitalists were doing unless you assume as Marx did that all of the evil
was with the capitalists and all the good  was with the proletariat and that
nothing that capitalists did constituted valid labor which is another thing
that Marx assumed which is palpably absurd because people who are like maybe if
you're a dissolute aristocrat from 1830 and or earlier then you run a futile
estate and all you do is spend your time gambling and and and chasing
prostitutes well then the your labor value is zero but if you're if you're
running a business and and it's a successful business first of all you're a
bloody fool to exploit your workers because even if you're greedy as sin
because you're not going to extract the maximum amount of labour out of them by
doing that and the notion that you're adding no productive value as a manager
rather than a capitalist is it's absolutely absurd all it does is indicate that
you either know nothing whatsoever about how an actual business works or you
refuse to know anything about how an actual business works so that's that's
also and that's also a big problem so then the next problem is the criticism of
profit it's like well what's wrong with profit exactly what's the problem with
profit well the idea from the Marxist perspective was that profit was theft no
but profit well it can be theft because crooked people can run companies and so
sometimes profit is theft but that certainly doesn't mean that it's always
threat theft what it means in part at least if the capitalist is adding value
to the corporation then there's some utility and some fairness in him or her
extracting the value of their abstract labor their thought their abstract
abilities their ability to manage the company than to engage in proper
competition and product development and efficiency and the proper treatment of
the workers and all of that and then if they can create a profit well then they
have a little bit of security for times that aren't so good and that seems
absolutely bloody necessary as far as I'm concerned and then the next thing is
well how can you grow if you don't have a profit and if you have an enterprise
that's valuable and worthwhile and some enterprises are valuable and worthwhile
then it seems to me that a little bit of profit to help you grow seems to be
the right approach and so and then the other issue with profit and you know
this if you've ever run a business is it it's really useful constraint you know
like it's not enough to have a good idea it's not a good enough to have a good
idea and the sales and marketing plant and then to implement that and all of
that that's bloody difficult like it's not even easy to have a good idea and
it's not easy to come up with a good sales and marketing plan and it's not easy
to find customers and satisfy them and so if you allow profit to to constitute
a limitation on what it is that you might reasonably attempt it provides a good
constraint on on wasted labour and so most of the things that I've done in my
life even psychologically that were designed to help people psychological
health I tried to run on a for-profit basis and the reason for what that was
apart from the fact that I've noted first making a profit partly so my
enterprises can grow it was also so that the reforms of stupidity that I
couldn't engage in because I would be punished by the market enough to
eradicate the enterprise and so ok and then so the next the next issue this is a
weird one so marx and engels also assume that this dictatorship of the
proletariat which involves absurd centralization the overwhelming probability
of corruption and impossible computation as the proletariat now try to
rationally compute the manner in which an entire market economy could run which
cannot be done because it's far too complicated for anybody to think through
the next theory is that somehow the proletariat dictatorship would become
magically hyper productive and there's actually no theory at all about how
that's going to happen and so I had to infer the theory and the theory seems to
be that once you eradicate the bourgeois because they're evil and you get rid
of their private property and you you you you eradicate the profit motive and
all of a sudden magically the small percentage of the proletariat who now run
the society determine how they can make their productive enterprises productive
enough so they become hyper productive now and they need to become hyper
productive for the last error to be logically coherent in relationship to the
Marxist theory which is that at some point the proletariat the dictatorship of
the proletariat will become so hyperproductive that there'll be enough material
goods for everyone across all dimensions and when that happens then what people
will do is spontaneously engage in meaningful creative labor which is what they
had been alienated from in the capitalist horrorshow and a utopia will be
magically assured in but there's no indication about how that hyper productivity
is going to come about and there's also no understanding that well that isn't
the Utopia that is going to suit everyone because there are great differences
between people when some people are going to find what they want in love and
some are going to find it in social being and some are going to find it in
conflict and competition and some are going to find it in creativity as Marx
pointed out but the notion that that that will necessarily be the end goal for
the utopian state is preposterous and then there's the dusty Espeon observation
too which is one not to be taken lightly which is what sort of shallow
conception of people do you have that makes you think that if you gave people
enough bread and cake and the Dostoyevsky in terms and nothing to do with busy
thumbs to accept a busy themselves with the continued continuity of the species
that they would also all of a sudden become peaceful and heavenly Dostoyevsky's
idea was that you know we were built for trouble and if we were ever handed
everything we were we needed on a silver platter the first thing we would do is
engage in some form of creative destruction just so something unexpected could
happen just so we could have the adventure of our lives and I think there's
something well there's something to be said for that so and then the last error
let's say although by no means the last was this and this is one of the
strangest parts of the Communist Manifesto was marks it agree admits and angles
admit repeatedly in the Communist Manifesto that there has never been a system
of production in the history of the world that was as effective at producing
material commodities in excess and capitalism like that's that's extensively
documented in the Communist Manifesto and so if your proposition is look we got
to get as much material security for everyone as we as possible as fast as we
can and capitalism already seems to be doing that at a rate that's unparalleled
in human history when the logical thing be just to let the damn system play
itself out I mean unless you're assuming that the evil capitalists are just
going to take all of the flat-screen televisions and put them in one big room
and not let anyone else have one the logical assumption is that while you're
already on a road that's supposed to produce the proper material productivity
and so well that's ten reasons as far as  I can tell that and so what I saw in
that the Communist Manifesto is is like seriously flawed in in virtually every
way it could possibly be flawed and also all in and in and evidence that Marx
was a kind of narcissistic thinker who could think he was he was very
intelligent person and so his angles but what he thought what he thought when
he thought was that what he thought was correct and he never went a second
stage which is wait a second how could all of this go terribly wrong and if
you're a thinker especially a sociological thinker especially a thinker on the
broad scale a social scientist for example one of your moral obligations is to
think you know you might be wrong about one of your fundamental axioms or two
or three or ten and as a consequence you have the moral obligation to walk
through the damn system and think well what if I'm completely wrong here and
things invert and go exactly the wrong way like I can I just can't understand
how anybody could come up with an idea like the dictatorship of the proletariat
especially after advocating its implementation for with violent means which is
a direct part of the Communist Manifesto and actually think if they were
thinking if they knew anything about human beings and the proclivity for
malevolence that's part and parcel of the individual human being that that
could do anything but lead to a special form of Hell which is precisely what
did happen and so I'm going to close because I have three minutes with with a
bit of evidence as well that Marx also thought that what would happen
inevitably as a consequence of capitalism is that rich would get richer and the
poor would get poorer so there would be inequality the first thing I'd like to
say is we do not know how to set up a human system of economics without
inequality no one has ever managed it including the Communists and the form of
inequality changed and it's not obvious by any stretch of imagination that the
free market economies of the West have more inequality than the less free
economies in the rest of the world and the one thing you can say about
capitalism is that although it produces inequality which it absolutely does it
also produces wealth and all the other systems don't they just produce
inequality
(Applause)
So here's here's a few stats here's a few free-market staffs okay from 1800 to
2017 income growth adjusted for inflation grew by 40 times but for production
workers in 16 times for unskilled labor well GDP fact GDP rose by a factor of
about 0.5 from 180 to 1800 so from 180 to 1880 it was like nothing flat and
then all of a sudden in the last two hundred and seventeen years there's been
this unbelievably upward movement of wealth and it doesn't only characterize
the tiny percentage of people at the top who admittedly do have most of the
wealth the question is not only though what's the inequality the question is
well what's happening to the absolutely poor at the bottom and answer that is
they're getting richer faster now than they ever have in the history of the
world and we're eradicating poverty in countries that have adopted moderates
free-market policies at a rate that's unparalleled so here's an example UN
millennia one of the UN Millennium Goals was to reduce the rate of absolute
poverty in the world by 50 percent between 2000 and 2015 and they define that
as a dollar 90 a day pretty low you know but you have to start somewhere um we
beat we hit that at 2012 three years ahead of schedule and you might be cynical
about that and say well it's kind of an arbitrary number but the curves are
exactly the same at three dollars and eighty three dollars and 80 cents a day
and seven dollars and sixty cents a day not as many people have hit that but
the rate of increase towards that is the same the bloody UN thinks that we'll
be out of poverty defined by a dollar ninety a day by the year 2030 it's
unparalleled and so so the sort of rich may be getting richer but the poor are
getting richer too and that's that's not deal look I'll leave it at that
because I'm out of time but one of the I'll leave it with this the poor are not
getting far under capitalism the poor are getting richer under capitalism by a
large margin and I'll leave you with one statistic which is that now in in
Africa the child mortality rate in Africa now is the same as the child
mortality rate was in Europe in 1952 and so that's happened within the span of
one lifetime and so if you're for the poor if you're for the poor if you're
actually concerned that the poorest people in the world rise above their
starvation levels and the all the evidence suggests that the best way to do
that is to implement something approximating a free-market economy and so thank
you very much
(Applause)
Peterson returns to his chair
Zizek gets up to his podium
(Applause)
Zizek: there is a chair there? I can sit there? It can help me a lot
Dr. Blackwood: Thank you Dr. Peterson….Dr. Zizek
(Applause)
Zizek (this portion [the real meat of the whole debate] I cleaned, cross referenced,
& corrected with transcription by Xiao Ouyang and Shunji Ukai as posted on
Reddit): First, a brief introductory remark. I cannot but notice the irony of
how Peterson and I, the participants in this duel of the century, are both
marginalised by the official academic community. I am supposed to defend here
the left, liberal line against neo-conservatives. Really? Most of the attacks
on me are now precisely from left liberals. Just remember the outcry against my
critique of LGBT+ ideology, and I’m sure that if the leading figures were to
be asked if I were fit to stand for them, they would turn in their graves even
if they are still alive.
(applause)
So let me begin by bringing together the three notions from the title:
Happiness, Communism, Capitalism in one exemplary case: China today. China in
the last decades is arguably the greatest economic success story in human
history. Hundreds of millions raised from poverty into middle class existence.
How did China achieve it? The 20th century left was defined by its opposition
to the truth fundamental tendencies of modernity: the reign of capital with its
aggressive market competition, the authoritarian bureaucratic state power.
Today’s China combines these two features in its extreme form: strong, totalitarian
state, state-wide capitalist dynamics. And it’s important to note they do it
on behalf of the majority of people. They don’t mention communism to
legitimise their rule, they prefer the old Confucian notion of a harmonious
society. But, are the Chinese any happier for all that? Although even the Dali
Llama justifies Tibetan Buddhism in Western terms in the full suite of
happiness and the avoidance of pain, happiness as a goal of our life is a very
problematic notion.
If we’ve learned anything from psychoanalysis, it’s that we humans are very
creative in sabotaging our pursuit of happiness. Happiness is a confused
notion, basically it relies on the subject’s inability or unreadiness to
fully confront the consequences of his/her/their desire. In our daily lives, we
pretend to desire things which we do not really desire, so that ultimately the
worst thing that can happen is to get what we officially desire. So, I agree
that human life of freedom and dignity does not consist just in searching for
happiness, no matter how much we spiritualise it, or in the effort to actualise
our inner potentials. We have to find some meaningful cause beyond the mere
struggle for pleasurable survival. However, I would like to add here a couple
of qualifications.
First, since we live in a modern era, we cannot simply refer to an
unquestionable authority to confer a mission or task on us. Modernity means
that yes, we should carry the burden, but the main burden is freedom itself. We
are responsible for our burdens. Not only are we not allowed cheap excuses for
not doing our duty, duty itself should not serve as an excuse. We are never
just instruments of some higher cause. Once traditional authority loses its
substantial power, it is not possible to return to it. All such returns are
today a post-modern fake. Does Donald Trump stand for traditional values? No,
his conservatism is a post-modern performance, a gigantic ego trip. In this
sense of playing with traditional values of mixing references to them with open
obscenities, Trump is the ultimate post-modern president. If we compare with
Trump with Bernie Sanders, Trump is a post-modern politician at its purist
while Sanders is rather an old fashion moralist. Conservative thinkers claim
that the origin of our crisis is the loss of our reliance on some transcendent
divinity. If we are left to ourselves, if everything is historically
conditioned and relative, then there is nothing preventing us from indulging in
our lowest tendencies. But is this really the lesson to be learned from mob
killing, looting and burning on behalf of religion? It is often claimed that
true or not that religion makes some otherwise bad people do good things. From
today’s experience, we should rather speak to Steven Weinberg’s claim that
while without religion good people would have been doing good things and bad
people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things. More than
a century ago in his Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky warned against the dangers
of godless moral nihilism... if god doesn’t exist, then everything is
permitted. The French philosophy André Glucksmann applied Dostoyevsky’s
critique of godless nihilism to September 11 and the title of his book,
‘Dostoyevsky in Manhattan’ suggests that he couldn’t have been more
wrong. The lesson of today’s terrorism is that if there is a god then
everything, even blowing up hundreds of innocent bystanders, is permitted to
those who claim to act directly on behalf of god. The same goes also from
godless, Stalinest Communists...they are the ultimate proof of it. Everything
was permitted to them as they perceived themselves as direct instrument of
their divinity... of historical necessity, as progress towards communism.
That’s the big problem of ideologies: how to make good, decent people do
horrible things.
Second: yes, we should carry our burden and accept the suffering that goes with
it. But, a danger lurks here, that of a subtly reversal: don’t fall in love,
that’s my position, with your suffering. Never presume that your suffering is
in itself proof of your authenticity. A renunciation of pleasure can easily
turn in pleasure of renunciation itself. For example, an example not from
neo-conservatives. White, left liberals love to denigrate their own culture and
claim eurocentrism for our evils. But, it is instantly clear how this
self-denigration brings a profit of its own. Through this renouncing of their
particular roots, multi-cultural liberals reserve for themselves the universal
position: gracefully soliciting others to assert their particular identity.
White, multiculturalism liberals embody the lie of identity politics.
Next point: Jacques Lacan wrote something paradoxical but deeply true, that
even if what a jealous husband claims his wife (that she sleeps with other men)
is all true, his jealousy is nonetheless pathological. The pathological element
is the husband’s need for jealousy as the only way for him to sustain his
identity. Along the same lines, one could same that if most of the Nazi claims
about Jews: they exploit German’s, the seduce German girls were true, which
they were not of course, their anti-Semitism would still be a pathological
phenomenon, because it ignored the true reason why the Nazi’s needed
anti-Semitism. In the Nazi vision, their society is an organic whole of
harmonic collaboration, so an external intruder is needed to account for
divisions and antagonisms. The same is true for how today in Europe the
anti-immigrant populists deal with the refugees. The cause of problems which
are, I claim, imminent to today’s global capitalism, is projected onto an
external intruder. Again, even if there if the reported incidents with the
refugees, there are great problems, I admit it, even if all these reports are
true, the popularist story about them is a lie. With anti-Semitism, we are
approaching the topic of telling stories. Hitler was one of the greatest
storytellers of the 20th century. In the 1920s many Germans experienced their
situation as a confused mess. They didn’t understand what is happening to
them with military defeat, economic crisis, what they perceived as moral decay,
and so on. Hitler provided a story, a plot, which was precisely that of a
Jewish plot: ‘we are in this mess because of the Jews’.
That’s what I would like to insist on. We are telling ourselves stories about
ourselves in order to acquire a meaningful experience of our lives. However,
this is not enough. One of the most stupid wisdoms and they’re mostly stupid
is ‘An enemy is just a story whose story you have not heard’. Really? Are
you also ready to affirm that Hitler was our enemy because his story was not
heard? The experience that we have of our lives from within, the story we tell
ourselves about ourselves, in order to account for what we are doing is and
this is what I call ideology fundamentally a lie. The truth lies outside in
what we do. In a similar way, the alt-Right obsession with cultural Marxism
expresses the rejection to confront that phenomenon they criticise as the
attack of the cultural Marxist plot moral degradation, sexual promiscuity,
consumerist hedonism, and so on are the outcomes of the imminent dynamic of
capitalist societies. I would like to refer to a classic Daniel Bell, Cultural
Contradictions of Capitalism written back in 1976, where the author argues that
the unbounded drive of modern capitalism undermines the moral foundations of
the original protestant ethics. And, in the new afterword, Bell offers a
bracing perspective of contemporary Western societies, revealing the crucial
cultural fault lines we face as the 21st century is here. The turn towards
culture as a key component of capitalist reproduction and concurrent to it the
commodification of cultural life itself are I think crucial moments of
capitalism expanded reproduction. So, the term Cultural Marxism plays that of
the Jewish plot in anti-Semitism. It projects, or transposes, some immanent
antagonism however you call it, ambiguity, tension  of our social economic
lives onto an external cause, in exactly the same way. Now, let me give you a
more problematic example in exactly the same way, liberal critics of Trump and
alt-right never seriously ask how our liberal society could give birth to
Trump. In this sense, the image of Donald Trump is also a fetish, the last
thing a liberal sees before confronting actual social tensions. Hegel’s
motto: ”Evil resides in the gaze which sees evil everywhere” fully applies
here. The very liberal gaze with demonizes Trump is also evil because it
ignores how its own failures opened up the space for Trump’s type of
patriotic populism.
Next point: one should stop blaming hedonist egotism for our woes. The true
opposite of egotist self-love is not altruism, a concern for the common
good,but envy, resentment, which makes me act against my own interests. This is
why as many perspicuous philosophers clearly saw, evil is profoundly spiritual,
in some sense more spiritual than goodness. This is why egalitarianism itself
should never be accepted at its face value. It can well secretly invert the
standard renunciation accomplished to benefit others. Egalitarianism often de
facto means “I am ready to renounce something so that others will also not
have it”. This is I think  now comes the problematic part for some of you maybe
the problem with political correctness. What appears as its excesses its
regulatory zeal is I think an impotent reaction that masks the reality of a
defeat. My hero is here a black lady, Tarana Burke, who created the MeToo
campaign more than a decade ago. She observed in a recent critical note that in
the years since the movement began it deployed an unwavering obsession with the
perpetrators. MeToo is all too often a genuine protest filtered through
resentment. Should we then drop egalitarianism? No. Equality can also mean, and
that’s the equality I advocate, creating the space for as many as possible
individuals to develop their different potentials. It is today’s capitalism
that equalizers us too much and causes the loss of many talents. So what about
the balance equality and hierarchy? Did we really move too much in the
direction of equality? Is there, in today’s United States, really too much
equality? I think a simple overview of the situation points in the opposite
direction. Far from pushing us too far, the Left is gradually losing its ground
already for decades. Its trademarks: universal health care, free education, and
so on, are continually diminished. Look at Bernie Sanders program. It is just a
version of what half a century ago in Europe was simply the predominant social
democracy, and its today as decried as a threat to our freedoms, to the
American way of life, and so on and so on. I can see no threat to free
creativity in this program; on the contrary, I saw healthcare and education and
so on as enabling me to focus my life on important creative issues. I see
equality as a space for creating differences and yes, why not, even different
more appropriate hierarchy.s Furthermore, I find it very hard to ground todays
inequalities as they are documented for example by Piketty in his book to
ground todays inequalities in different competencies. Competencies for what? In
totalitarian states, competencies are determined politically. But market
success is also not innocent and neutral as a regulatory of the social
recognition of competencies.
Let me now briefly deal with in a friendly way I claim with what became known,
sorry for the irony, as the lobster topic. I’m far from a simple social
constructionism here. I deeply appreciate evolutionary talk. Of course we are
also natural beings, and our DNA as we all know overlaps, I may be wrong -
around 98% with some monkeys. This means something, but nature I think, we
should never forget this, is not a stable hierarchical system but full of
improvisations. It develops like French cuisine. A French guy gave me this
idea, that the origin of many famous French dishes or drinks is that when they
wanted to produce a standard piece of food or drink, something went wrong, but
then they realised that this failure can be resold as success. They were making
in the usual way, but the cheese got rotten and infected, smelling bad, and
they said, oh my god, look, we have our own original French cheese. Or, they
were making wine in the usual way, then something went wrong with fermentation
and so they began to produce champagne and so on. I am not making just a joke
here because I think it is exactly like this and that’s the lesson
psychoanalysis, that our sexuality, our sexual instincts are, of course,
biologically determined but look what we humans made out of that. They are not
limited to the mating season. They can develop into a permanent obsession
sustained by obstacles that demand to be overcome in short, into a properly
metaphysical passion that preserves the biologically rhythm, like endlessly
prolonging satisfaction in courtly love, engaging in different perversions and
so on and so on. So it’s still ‘yes’, biologically conditioned sexuality,
but it is if I may use this term transfunctionalised, it becomes a moment of a
different cultural logic. And I claim the same goes for tradition. T. S. Eliot,
the great conservative, wrote, quote “what happens when a new work of art is
created is something that happens simultaneously to all the work of art which preceded
it. The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is
directed by the past’” end of quote. What does this mean? Let me mention
the change enacted by Christianity. It’s not just that in spite of all our
natural and cultural differences the same divine sparks dwells in everyone. But
this divine spark enables us to create what Christian’s call holy ghost or
holy spiritual community which hierarchic family values are at some level, at
least, abolished. Remember Paul’s words from Galatians: There is no longer
Jew or Greek, there is no longer male and female in Christ’. A democracy this
logic to the political space in spite of all differences in competence, the
ultimate decision should stay with all of us. The wager of democracy is that we
should not give all power to competent experts, because precisely Communists in
power who, legitimate this rule, by posing as fake experts. And, incidentally
I’m far from believing in ordinary people’s wisdom. We often need a master
figure to push us out an inertia and, I’m not afraid to say, that forces us
to be free. Freedom and responsibility hurt they require an effort, and the
highest function of an authentic master is to literally to awake in us to our
freedom. We are spontaneously really free. Furthermore, I think that social
power and authority cannot be directly grounded in competence. In our human
universe, power, in the sense of exerting authority, is something much more
mysterious, even irrational. Kierkegaard, mine and everybody’s favourite
theologist, wrote “If a child says he will obey his father because his father
is a competent and good guy, this is an affront to father’s authority’. And
here applies the same logic to Christ himself. Christ was justified by the fact
of being God’s son not by his competencies or capacities, as Kierkegaard put
it:‘Every good student of theology can put things better than christ’. If
there is no such authority in nature, lobster’s may have hierarchy,
undoubtedly, but the main guy among them does not have authority in this sense.
Again, the wager of democracy is that and that’s the subtle thing not against
competence and so on, but that political power and competence or expertise
should be kept apart. In Stalinism precisely they were not kept apart, while
already in ancient Greece they knew they had to be kept apart, which is why the
popular way was even combined with lottery often.
So where does Communism, just to conclude, where does Communism enter here? Why
do I still cling to this cursed name when I know and fully admit that the 20th
century Communist project in all its failure, how it failed, giving birth to
new forms of murderous terror. Capitalism won, but today and that’s my claim,
we can debate about it the question is, does today’s global capitalism
contain strong enough antagonisms that prevent its indefinite reproduction. I
think there are such antagonisms. The threat of ecological catastrophe, the
consequence of new techno-scientific developments, especially in biogenetics,
and new forms of apartheid. All these antagonisms concern what Marx called
commons the shared substance of our social being. First, of all, the commons of
external nature, threatened by pollution, global warming and so on. Now, let me
be precise here I’m well aware uncertain analysis and projections are in this
domain. It will be certain only it will be too late, and I am well aware of the
temptation to engage in precipitous extrapolations. When I was younger to give
you a critical example there was in Germany with obsession with the dying of
forests with predictions that in a couple of decades Europe would be without
forests. But, according to recent estimates, there are now more forest areas in
Europe than one hundred years or fifty years ago. But there is nonetheless the
prospect of a catastrophe here. Scientific data seems, to me at least, abundant
enough. And we should act in a large scale, collective way. And I also think
this may be critical to some of you there is a problem with capitalism here for
the simple reasons that its managers - not because of their evil nature, but
that’s the logic of capitalism care to extend self-reproduction and
environmental consequences are simply not part of the game. This is again not a
moral reproach. Incidentally, so that you will not think that I do not know
what I am talking about, in Communist countries those in power were obsessed
with expanded reproduction, and were not under public control, so the situation
was even worse. So, how to act? First by admitting we are in a deep mess. There
is no simple democratic solution here. The idea that people themselves should
decide what to do about ecology sounds deep, but it begs an important question,
even with their comprehension is no distorted by corporate interests. What
qualifies them to pass a judgement in such a delicate matter? Plus, the radical
measures advocated by some ecologists can themselves trigger new catastrophes.
Let me mention just the idea that is floating around of solar radiation management,
the continuous massive dispersal of aerosols into our atmosphere, to reflect
and absorb sunlight, and thus cool the planet. Can we even imagine how the
fragile balance of our earth functions and in what unpredictable ways
geo-engineering can disturb it? In such times of urgency, when we know we have
to act but don’t know how to act, thinking is needed. Maybe we should turn
around a little bit Marx’s famous thesis, in our new century we should say
that maybe in the last century we tried all too fast to change the world. The
time has come to step back and interpret it.
The second threat, the commons of internal nature. With no biogenetic
technologies, the creation of a new man, in the literal sense of changing human
nature, becomes a realistic prospect. I mean primarily so called popularly
neural-link, the direct link between our brain and digital machines, and then
brains among themselves. This I think is the true game changer. The
digitalisation of our brains opens up unheard of new possibilities of control.
Directly sharing your experience with our beloved may appear attractive, but
what about sharing them with an agency without you even knowing it?
Finally, the common space of humanity itself. We live in one and the same world
which is more and more interconnected. But, nonetheless, deeply divided. So,
how to react to this? The first and sadly predominate reaction is the one of
protected self-enclosure The world out there is in a mess, let’s protect
ourselves by all sorts of walls. It seems that our countries are run relatively
well, but is the mess the so-called rogue countries find themselves in not
connected to how we interact with them? Take what is perhaps the ultimate rogue
state Congo. Warlords who rule provinces there are always dealing with Western
companies, selling them minerals where would our computers be without coltan
from Congo? And what about foreign interventions in Iraq and Syria, or by our
proxies like Saudi Arabia in Yemen? Here refugees are created. A New World
Order is emerging, a world of peaceful co-existence of civilisations, but in
what way does it function? Forced marriages and homophobia is ok, just as long
as they are limited to another country which is otherwise fully included in the
world market. This is how refugees are created. The second reaction is global
capitalism with a human face think about socially responsible corporate figures
like Bill Gates and George Soros. They passionately support LGBT, they advocate
charities and so on. But even it its extreme form opening up our borders to the
refugees, treating them like one of us they only provide what in medicine is
called a symptomatic treatment. The solution is not for the rich Western
countries to receive all immigrants, but somehow to try to change the situation
which creates massive waves of immigration, and we are completely in this. Is
such a change a utopia? No. The true utopia is that we can survive without such
a change. So, here I think I know it’s provocative to call this a plea for
communism, I do it a little bit to provoke things but what is needed is
nonetheless in all these fears I claim ecology, digital control, unity of the
world a capitalist market which does great things, I admit it, has to be
somehow limited, regulated and so on. Before you say, ‘it’s a utopia’, I
will tell you just think about in what way the market already functions today.
I always thought that neoliberalism is a fake term. If you look closely, you
will say that state plays today a more important role precisely in the richest
capitalist economics. So, you know the market is already limited but not in the
right way, to put it naively.
So, a pessimist conclusion, what will happen? In spite of protests here and
there, we will probably continue to slide towards some kind of apocalypse,
awaiting large catastrophes to awaken us. So, I don’t accept any cheap
optimism. When somebody tries to convince me, ‘in spite of all these
problems, there is a light at the end of the tunnel’, my instant reply is,
‘Yes, and it’s another train coming towards us’.
Thank you very much.
Zizek returns to his chair
(Applause)
Zizek: Please don't do this because I really think that that's why I... I hope
you brought a limited that why we are here engaged in this debate don't take it
as a cheap competition it may be that but we are as you said in your
introduction desperately trying to confront serious problems for example when I
mentioned China China I didn't mean to celebrate it that worries me terribly my
god is this our future yeah
Dr. Backwood (moderator): Now, now, now...
Zizek: Sorry, sorry, for this, sorry... Please discount ten minutes take away
this from my ten minutes
Peterson: No problem, no problem...
Dr. Blackwood (moderator): Peterson 10 minutes to you to reply
Peterson: So I like to speak extemporaneously but Dr Zizek’s discussion was
so complex that there's no way that I can juggle my responses spontaneously so
okay…
Zizek: yeah that’s what I wanted to achieve (laughs)...
Peterson: (laughs) yeah achievement managed (laughs)...I would say... so so I
heard much of I heard much of what I heard I agreed with but we can get to that
I'm gonna respond
Zizek: you don’t need all that, pull out the knife (laughter)
Peterson: All right... well... I  heard a criticism of capitalism but no real
support of Marxism and and that's
an interesting thing because for me the terms of the argument were other three
terms of the argument let's say there was capitalism there was Marxism and
there was happiness and I would say Dr. Zizek focused probably more on the
problems of capitalism and the problems of happiness than on the utility of
Marxism and that actually comes as a surprise to me because I presumed that
much of what I would hear would be a support of something approximating
traditional or even a traditional Marxism which is why I organized the first
part of my talk as an attack against Marxism per se okay so now she checked
points out that there are problems of capitalism and I would like to say that
I'm perfectly aware that there are problems with capitalism I wasn't defending
capitalism actually in some sense I was defending it in comparison to communism
which is not the same thing because as Winston Churchill said about democracy
you know it's the worst form of government there is except for all the other
forms and so you might say the same thing about capitalism is that it's the
worst form of economic arrangement you could possibly manage except for every
other one that we've ever tried and and I'm dead serious about that I'm not
trying to be flippant I mean that it isn't obvious to me speaking in more
apocalyptic terms it isn't obvious to me that we can solve the problems that
confront us you know and it's not also not a message that I have been surveying
that unbridled capitalism per se as an isolated what would you say social
economic structure actually constitutes the proper answer to the problems that
confront us so I haven't made that case in any of the lectures that I've
anything I've written or any of the lectures that I've done because I don't
believe it to be true he said what's the problems with capitalism well the
commodification of cultural life all life fair enough there's something that
isn't exactly right about reducing everything to economic competition and capitalism
certainly pushes in that direction advertising culture pushes in that direction
sales and marketing culture pushes in that direction and there's reasons for
that and I have a certain amount of admiration for the necessity of advertisers
and salesmen and marketers but that doesn't mean that the transformation of all
elements of life into element into commodities in a capitalist sense is the
best way forward I don't think it is the best way forward I think the evidence
for that's actually quite clear there is by the way a relationship this is
something I didn't point out before there is a relationship between wealth and
happiness it's quite well defined in the psychological literature now it's not
exactly obvious whether the happiness measures are measures of happiness or
whether they're measures of the absence of misery and my sense is as a
psychometrician who's looked at these scales that people are more concerned
with not being miserable than they are within happy and those are all actually
separate emotional states mediated by different psycho biological systems it's
a technical point but it's an important one there is a relationship between
absolute level of income and self-reported lack of misery or happiness and it's
pretty linear until you hit I would say something approximating decent
working-class income and so what seems to happen is that wealth makes you happy
as long as it keeps the bill collectors at bay like once you've got to the
point where the misery is staved off as much as it can
be by the fact that you're not absolutely in you're not in absolutely
economically dire straits then adding more money to your life has no
relationship whatsoever to your well-being and so it's clear that past a
certain minimal point additional material provision is not sufficient to let's
say redeem us individually or socially and it's certainly the case that the
radical wealth production that characterizes capitalism might produce a fatal
threat to the structure of our social systems and our broader ecosystems who
knows I'm not absolutely convinced of that for a variety of reasons I mean
she's a quite a doubt for example that there are more forests in Europe and now
than there were a hundred years ago there's actually more forests in the entire
northern hemisphere and there were a hundred years ago and the news on the
ecological front is not as dismal as the people who put out the most dismal
news would have you think and there is some possibility that doesn't mean that
there aren't elements of it that are dismal you know what we've done to the
oceans is definitely something catastrophic and we definitely have our problems
but it is possible that human ingenuity might solve that what else there are
inequalities generated by capitalism a proclivity towards a shallow materialism
the probability of corruption the thing about that for me is those are
catastrophes that are part of the struggle for human existence itself and not
something to be laid at the feet of any given social political system
especially one that seems to be producing a fair Markum of wealth for the
poorest section of the population and raising people up to the point where you
know their lives aren't unending an
unending day-to-day struggle for mere survival there's some evidence for
example that if you can get GDP up to about $5,000 per person per year oh
that's GDP that people start to become concerned about environmental
degradation and start to take actions to prevent it and so there is some
possibility that if we're lucky we can get the bottom billion or two billion
people in the world or three billion as the population grows up to the point
where they're wealthy enough so they actually start to care enough about the
environment so that we could act collectively to solve environmental problems
now you might say oh by that time we'll be Oh of Earth you know we'll have
we'll have exhausted the resources that are in front of us so desperately that
there's no hope of that but I would like to remind you of a famous map between
Julian Simon and the biologist at at Stanford who Paul Ehrlich who willed the
Population Bomb they bet err like who thought we're gonna be overpopulated by
the year 2000 bet Simon that by the year 2000 commodity prices would have
increased dramatically as a consequence of evidence that we were running out of
material resources and made a famous bet over a 25 year period and err like
paid off Simon in the year 2000 because commodity prices went down and not up
and so there is no solid evidence that the fact that our population is growing
and will peak out by the way at about 9
billion there's no solid indication that the consequence of that is that we are
in fact running out of necessary material resources and so it's a danger but
it's it's not a danger that's proven and there is some utility and considering
that the addition of several billion more brains to the planet especially if
they were well nourished grains as the increasing they are might help us
generate enough problem-solvers so that we can stay ahead of the looming ecological
catastrophe as our population balloons outwards now we're going to peak at 9
billion it's not much higher than we are now and it looks like we might be able
to manage it yeah thing is that I didn't hear an alternative really from dr.
Jack you know he admitted that the rise to success of the Chinese was in part a
consequence of deal of the allowance of market forces and he cried the
authoritarian tendencies and fair enough that's exactly it it also seemed to me
that the social justice group identity processes that dr. Jack was decrying are
to me a logical derivation from the oppression narrative that's a fundamental
presupposition of Marxism so there I never heard a defense of Marxism in that
part of his argument as well and so for me again it's to ask what's the
alternative I also heard an argument for egalitarianism and but I heard
it
defined as equality of opportunity not as equality of outcome which I see as a
clearly defined Marxist aim I heard an argument for a modified social
distribution of wealth but that's already part and parcel of most modern
free-market states with a wide variation and an appropriate variation of
government intervention all of which constitute their own experiment we don't
know how much social intervention is necessary to flatten the tendency of
hierarchies to become tilted so terribly that only the people at the top have
everything and all of the people at the bottom have nothing it's a very
difficult battle to fight against that profound tendency much deeper than the
tendency of capitalism itself and we don't exactly know what to do about it so
we run experiments and that seems to be working perfectly reasonably as far as
I can tell that's see well I'll close with this capitalism in the free market
well that's the worst form of social organization possible as I said except for
all the others there is a positive relationship between economics
measured
by income and happiness or psychological well-being which might be the absence
of misery I certainly do not believe and the evidence does not suggest that
material security is sufficient I do believe however that insofar as there is a
relationship between
happiness and material security that the free market system has demonstrated
itself as the most efficient manner to achieve that and that was actually the
terms of the argument so that's if it's capitalism versus Marxism with regards
to human happiness it's still the case that the free market constitutes the
clear winner and maybe capitalism will not solve our problems I actually don't
believe that it will I've in fact argued that the proper pathway forward is one
of individual moral responsibility aimed
at the highest good and something for me that's rooted in our underlying
judeo-christian tradition that insists that each person is a what is is
sovereign in their own right and a locus of ultimate value which is something
that you can accept regardless of your religious presuppositions and something
that you do accept if you participate in a society such as ours even the fact
that you vote that you're charged without responsibility is an indication that
our society has structured such that we presume that each person is a locus of
responsibility and decision making of such import that the very stable the
state depends upon the integrity of their psyche the integrity of their
character and so what I've been suggesting to people is that they adopt as much
responsibility as they possibly
can in keeping with that in keeping with their aim at the highest possible good
which to me is something approximating a
balance between what's good for you as an individual and what's good for your
family in keeping with what's good for you as an individual and then what's
good for society in the larger frame such that it's also good for you and your
family and that's a form of an well an elaborated iterated game a form of
elaborated cooperation it's a sophisticated way of looking at the ways society
could possibly be organized and I happen to believe that that has to happen at
the individual level first and that's the pathway forward that I see and so
that's why
(Applause)
Zizek: I go up?
Dr. Blackwood (moderator):Thank You Dr. Peterson
Zizek: I spent a little bit of my time I will try to be as short as possible so
a couple of remarks and then my final point why I think this self limitation of
capitalism is needed first about happiness just a couple of remarks but am I
dreaming I think I'm not I remember a couple of years ago it was reported all
around the world some kind of investigation percentage of people interviewed in
different countries do they feel happy with their life and the shock was that
some Scandinavian countries which we which we considered social democratic
paradise were very low while Bangladesh I think was close to the to. Now I know
this logic has a limit I don't like the bullshit of people are happy in their
world there and so on but you know my argument here is not against you my
argument here is problematizing happiness even more look if I interest you I
was years ago in in I think Lithuania and we debated a report on this in one of
my books when were people in some perverted sense and this is the critique of
the category of happiness for me happy and we came to the crazy result after
the Soviet intervention Czechoslovakia in 1970s and 80s. Why? For happiness
first you don't have you should not have too much democracy because this brings
the burden of responsibility happiness means there is
another guy out there you can put all the blame on him and as the joke went in
Czechoslovakia if there is bad weather a
storm all these communist screwed it up again rest one condition of happiness
the other condition much more subtle ones is and this was done in
Czechoslovakia it broke dark times after life was relatively moderately good
but not perfect like there was meat all the time maybe once a month there was
not meat in the sauce it was very good to remind you how happy you are the
other time another thing they had a paradise which should be the proper
distance West Germany uplands it was not proof are not directly
accessible you know so I it was so maybe in your critique of communist regimes
I agree with you you should more focus on
something that I experienced of you know don't look only at the tear or
ultimately totalitarian regime there was a kind of a silent perverted pact
between at least in this late a little bit more tolerant but I still approach
them communist regimes between power and
population the messy trois leave us the power don't let it worse and we
guarantee you a relatively safe life employment private pleasures private niche
and so on and so on so I am not surprised but again this is not for me the
argument for the Congress but
against happiness let's you know people said when coming when the walls fell
down what a wonder in Poland my god in
in in like Salah darkness which was prohibited hiragana triumph at the
electrics who could imagine this yes but the true miracle in a bad sense for me
was four years later democratically ex-communists came back to power so you
know from this for me not the argument for them but simply for the let's call
it corrupted nature of happiness so my formula may buted riveted is my basic
Dogma is happiness should be treated as a necessary by-product if you focus on
it you are lost it comes as a byproduct of you working for a cause and so on
that's the vein the second point maybe we disagree here China of course the
miracle economic miracle was due to unleashing market reefer and so on but and
here comes my pessimism some of my liberal friends are telling me imagine what
would they have achieved with also political democratization I know we found a
perfect formula of how an extra paradox of China today the
Communist Party is the best manager of capitalism and protector against workers
the truly dangerous thing in China today is not to flirt with Western ideas is
to organize trade unions do you know like this is what worries me this perfect
combination between unleashing capitalism and still the authoritarian rule or
to put it in another way my worry is that today all around the world this
eternal marriage between capitalism and democracy is slowly disappearing ill
now I admit it capitalism needed from time to time from 1020 years of
dictatorship when in started to improve democracy returned Chile South Korea
and so on I wonder if we are still at debt now it's just very quickly your
basic point in the introduction in your introductions you know I almost am
tempted to say the way you present the communist manifesto the simplified image
and so on so on it's crazy to say but on many points right I agree with you and
it's a very complex argument Marx didn't have for example a good theory of how
social power against his idea was simply with disappearance of class structure
it secretly although he wouldn't have accepted a technocratic dream like my
experts social life will be run as a perfect machine although he at least aware
of the problem which is why he was so enthusiastic marks about Paris Commune
you know which was precisely not centralized power so I'm not just defending
marks I'm saying it was not clear to him and so let's drop that maybe I have
more interesting things to say ah another point nonetheless where at one point
I'm ready
to pay when did you find this this lost maybe for today's politically correct
drugs and so on that this egalitarianism
there is one asset in his late Critique of Goethe Program where Marx directly
accesses the problem of equality and he
dismisses it as a strict bourgeois category explicitly explicitly for him
communism is not a valid arianism it's yes he is but not based on capitalism ok
I'm not totally defending here Marx I'm just saying don't remark ok but to
conclude because yes I want to keep my
promise to be a little bit shorter you know I agree with you on any point but
you know what my problem with my problem that I was aiming at with all the
openings I know we don't know really what is happening with ecology and so on
okay let's take options you mentioned them but isn't it for me correct me if
I'm wrong and I don't mean this rhetorically I'm really wrong but the problem
of oceans can the only way for me is some kind of cooperated international
action and so on you cannot simply leave it to the market that's what I'm
saying this is tight we'll limit that I see about this diminishing poverty and
so on I'm aware of it I tend to agree with I also at the same time so many
explosive tangents for example do you know about South Africa it's a terrifying
situation on the edge of the civil war to be very brutal the only thing that unsimplified
that really happened with end of apartheid is that the old ruling class is
simplified in grotesque our system was drawn by a new black ruling class which
is not doing a good job so they are trying to play the race card it's still the
consequence of white colonialism and so on and so on but terrifying and here I
was pleading for not abolishing borders and so on but this type of global
change cooperation like again the example of Congo that I mentioned or forget
the killing of that guy khashoggi it's horrible but the true nightmare is Yemen
today what I mean you said somewhere that we should well think without engaging
in large-scale reform what the consequences will be if you very briefly I agree
with you that the gap of standard Marxism or that the proletarian revolution
will be a place where you do something and you know exactly what you do if
there is a lesson of the 20th century is that this tragic logic you want
something may be good the result is catastrophic holds absolutely also for
revolutions and so on and so on but in spite of all this and I don't know what
forum will it have I'm not pleading for a new land in this party or whatever
and pleading for new forums (forms?) of international cooperation and so on I
agree with you when you said the majority of us is not even really aware of the
seriousness of especially the poor of ecological problems and so on and I think
would you agree that the situation here much more subtle and obscene we is that
logic that in psycho analysis is called the survival furlough ignant in French
sister bian recipe M a comb hem we know ecological problems but we don't really
take them seriously and here I see problems and I don't see an easy way out i I
am a pessimist if you ask me when people say no but they're growing protests
are growing and so on and so on yes I'm listening to this story from when I was
young you know your ground and then look what happened the mega tragedy is for
me for example what happened to syriza they were elected for change whatever
and they become and I'm not blaming them they become the perfect executives of
of austerity program so I just see problems I'm a pessimist and I'm not a
radical pessimist but you have to maybe here we are different I noticed with
your final speech that final moments of your engagement that it's very strange
because usually Marxists have this stupid optimist and rapallo Glee just get
rid of capitalist terror and we will all be happy my god I'm much more
passionate I don't believe in human goodness I will never underestimate evil
never underestimate Envy I mean it's part of my nature in Slovenia we have a
wonderful story godlike figure comes to a farmer and I will stop immediately
and ask and ask him I will glue to you to you what everyone trusts I warn you I
will do price the same to your neighbor you know what live-in partner answers
fine take one of my eyes you know we are in this don't underestimate this I
don't see any simple clear way out thank you
(Applause)
Dr. Blackwood (moderator): Thank you both very much it's pretty clear I think
to all of us that you both have quite a bit to say to each other and so
Zizek: ...and to ourselves
Dr. Blackwood (moderator): ...and so I think before we we jump to some audience
questions I thought it would be nice to give each of you a chance to ask a
response or ask a question or two from each other so starting with you dr.
Peterson
Zizek: maybe you want simply to counter-attack it wasn't fair, maybe you should
do your reply
Peterson:  I had three questions and two are completely irrelevant and so I
have one Left I guess and I'm not sure that it's a fair question but maybe it's
it seems to me to be a fair question your your estranged Marxist to have a
discussion with and well but here's why this is not an insult I mean one of the
things that struck me when I was looking at your work was that your well first
of all you're a character you know and that's that's that's an interesting
thing like you're it's a sign of it's a sign of originality and it's a sign of
a certain amount of moral courage and and and it's a sign of a certain
temperament and it makes you humorous and charismatic and attractive and and
and and I think you appeal to young people the way that outside intellectual
rebels appeal to young people and so those are all positive things it can be
used positively or negatively and my question is like it seems to me that your
your your reputation unless I'm very Misinformed about this is as a strong
supporter of Marxist doctrines on the left or was that and so then my question
is given the originality of your thought why'd why is it that you came to
presume at some point in your life perhaps not now and perhaps still that the
promotion of Marxism rather say rather than Zizekism was appropriate because it
seems to me that there's enough originality in your body of thought and lateral
thinking in the manner in which you approach intellectual ideas that there's
just no reason for you to be allied with a doctrine that's a hundred and
seventy years old and that is if capitalism is rife with problems is twice as
ripe as with problems as that and so you're kind of a mystery to me in that way
and so that's my question
Zizek: okay very briefly I I developed systematically in my book critical
insights into many traditional Marxist resist so no doubt here you know what I
still admire nonetheless in Marx not those simplicities of Communist Manifesto
but I still think that his so-called critique of political economy, capital,
and so on is tremendous achievement as a description of the dynamics of
capitalist society and if you read it closely Marx is much more ambiguous and
opener for example he mentions for example a report what you refer to he
mentions that law of diminishing return like well why crisis will arrive
necessarily poor are getting poorer but in his honest enough to enumerate seven
or eight counter tendencies and if you read him closely you will see that
precisely those tendencies prevailed later or forget Communist Manifesto go to
read his political analysis of its unsurpassable 18 Brumaire and so on of the
1848 revolution which are incredibly complex no traces of traces of that class
binary day their March deals with middle classes with crucial loom
proletariat with the ambiguous role of intellectuals and so on and so on but
basically what I was pleading for and I like to put it in paradoxical turn was
for a return off from Marx back to Hegel I define myself more as a girl why
consider a madman you know the guy absolute knowing and so on and so on no
Kegley much more modest and open the danger in Marxism is for me this
teleological structure we are at the zero point unique chance of reversal into
a new emancipated society and so on and the danger here is that of self
instrumentalization proletarian communist party is a an agent of history which
knows the laws of history to put it follows them and so on the catastrophe in
Hegel such a position is strictly prohibited in cable whenever you act you err
so you know you have
to there is no position of this pure acting where you know what you are doing
and the result with it will be so I this this would be this would be my main
point so yes my my my formula is kind of ironically I know Hegel is the
greatest idealist materialist reversal of Marx by turning back to Hegel for
Hegel Hegel says in a part that people don't read introduction to Philosophy of
Right she says explicitly that the owner of Minerva takes off in the evening
when there is dusk so philosophy can just grasp a social order when it's
already in its decay philosophycannot see into the future it's radical openness
we need this openness today the tragedy today may be agree here is that we
really don't have a basic house they call it cognitive mapping I don't think we
have here a clear insight into where we stand where we are moving and so on and
so on so I'm much more again sincerely of a pessimist
(Applause)
Peterson: I don't have any thing to quibble about with what you just said
Zizek: But?
Peterson: well no there's not even a but really it's that the even if the if
what you said about Marx is more sophisticated thought is true I think the
unfortunate reality is that any support for Marxism especially directed towards
those are who are young is likely to be read as support for the most radical
and revolutionary proclivities and I would say that as they're outlined in in
the document that I described in the communist manifesto that they're of
extraordinary danger and so it seems to me that by attempting to you know
rescue the sheep yuvan you've sort of invited the dragon into the house and
that seems to me to be dangerous and unfortunate
Zizek: Here I can answer your answer by asking you mine question because you
know very naively you mention do you really where did you find the data that I
complete don't see it okay let me begin by this you designate you're under
quotation marks I'm not characterizing here enemy or what you are fighting
against as sometimes you call it postmodern neo Marxism I know what you mean
all this from political correctness this access of whatever spirit of envy and
so on and so on do you think they are really where
did you find this that I don't know them I would ask you here give me some
names or whatever one of the Marxist here
(Applause)
Zizek: I think they hear like a good vampire fear garlic and this is why they
are already the one who is not a market economic topic Bernie Sanders he is
already under attack as white male and all that stuff and so on I simply I
simply my problem would be this one what you described as postmodern neo Marxism
where is really the Marxist element in it therefore equality sorry where there
are for equality at this cultural struggles proper names how to be called each
other do you see in them in political correctness and so on any genuine wheel
of to change society I don't see I think it's a hyper moralization hyper
moralization which is a silent admission of a defeat that's my problem why do
you call give me, it’s not a rhetorical question or politely saying you are
an idiot you don't know what you're talking about
Peterson: no, I understand
Zizek: it's simply I would like to know because you and I like this often when
you attack somebody you said aggressively and what should read more tell me
whom so I'm asking you not read more I don't advise you but who are give me
some names and so on and who are these post-modern egalitarian neo-marxist and
where do you see any kind even of a Marxism I see in it mostly and impotent and
utterly impotent moralization
Peterson: well I mean there’s ganization like jonathon Heights what's it
called heterodox Academy and other organizations like that have documented an
absolute dearth of conservative voices in the social sciences and the
humanities and about 25% according to the what I think are reliable surveys
approximately 25% of social scientists in the u.s. identified themselves as
Marxists and so there's that very solid
Zizek: but where are these neo Marxists?
Peterson: okay, but....
Zizek: Can you name me one neo-Marxist?
Peterson: well, well...let’s go to....
Zizek: I know a couple of Marxists, for example, whp does very solid economic
work, David Harvey, one, but he writes very serious books, economic analysis
and so on and so on then there is the old guy who is far from simplification
Fredric Jameson and so
On but they are totally marginalized today it is politically correct mainstream
you know? I don’t see
Peterson: well yeah your question seemed to me to focus more on the pair a
peculiar relationship that I've noticed and that people have disputed between
post-modernism and and neo Marxism and I see the connection between the
postmodernist types and the Marxists as a sleight of hand that replaced the
notion of the oppression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie as the
oppression by one identity group by another
Zizek: totally agree with you
Peterson: okay so with that but so now look, we can
Zizek: but that’s precisely a non Marxist gesture
Peterson: well, that's it, see I guess that's where we might have a dispute
because I think what happened especially in France in the 1960s as the as the
radical marxist postmodern types like Derrida and Foucault realized that they
were losing the moral battle especially after the information came out of the
Soviet Union in the manner that it came out
Zizek: Solsynetisian and so on
Peterson: yeah that the whole blood is telling us yeah the whole Stellan this
catastrophe along with the entire Maoist catastrophe that they didn't really
have a leg to stand on and instead of revising their notion that human history
and this is a Marxist notion should be regarded as the eternal class struggle
between the economically deprived and the oppressors they just recast it and
said well it's not based on economics it's based on identity but it's still
fundamentally oppressor against oppressed and to me that meant that they
smuggled the the the fundamental narrative of Marxism and many of its schools
back into the argument without ever admitting that  they did so now I've been
criticized you know for this opposition because people who are post modernists
say look one of the hallmarks of post-modernism is skepticism of
meta-narratives it's like I know that perfectly well and I also know that
Marxism is a meta-narrative and so you shouldn't be able to be a post modernist
and a Marxist but I still see the union of those two things in the insistence
that the best the appropriate way to look at the view world is to view it as
the battleground between groups defined by a particular group identity nin
dividuals defined by a particular group identity so that the group identity
becomes paramount and then the proper reading is always oppressor versus
oppressed with the secondary insistence that it's very similar to Marx's
insistence upon the moral superiority of the proletariat that the oppressors
are by definition because they're oppressed morally superior and and there's
the call for perhaps not revolutionary change although that comes up above but
change in the structure so that that oppression disappears so that a certain
form of equality comes about now you argue that Marx wasn't a believer in
equality of outcome and I'm not so sure about that because his notion of the
eventual utopia that would constitute genuine communism was a place where all
class divisions were eradicated and so there's a
Zizek: but so are anrachists...
Peterson: well well there's at least an implication like the most important of
the hierarchies had disappeared and so maybe he had enough sophistication to
talk about other forms of hierarchies but if if that's the case then I can't
imagine why he thought that the Utopia that would emerge as a consequence of
the elimination of economic hierarchies would be a utopia because if there are
other forms of hierarchies that still existed people would be just as
contentious about them as they are now like we have hierarchies of
attractiveness for example that have nothing to do with economics are very
little to do with economics and there's no shortage of contention around that
or any other form of ability and so that's why I associate the social justice
types who are basically postmodernist with Marx Postma their postmodernist with
Marxism it's the insistence that you view the world through the narrative of
oppressed versus oppressor and I think it's a catastrophe I think it's a
catastrophe and you appear to think it’s a catastrophe as well
Zizek: No just one sentence and then he you can reply in so strange that you
mentioned for example somebody like Foucault who for me his main target was
Marxism okay for him represented in a radical change but in this is what I
don't like in this what you call postmodern let's not call the Marxist
revolutionaries enjoying your own self marginalization the good thing is to be
on the margin you know like not in the center and so on and so on it almost
made me nostalgic for old communists who at least had the honesty to say no we
don't enjoy our margin position we want to do something central power, you know
it’s so disgusting
Peterson: it’s not wonder you’re don’t get invited to lots of
places
(laughter)
Zizek: yeah, you know you know for me and bodies this logic of revolution
revolution he meant any social change serious bad small resistances and so on
small marginal places of resistance and so on and so on so okay but let's maybe
drop it here if you want but since you are replying to my question you should
have the last word here
Peterson: No, I'll stop with that. Let's move to the neck we'll get back to
these topics now as we move forward with the questions so I'm happy let that that
particular issue stop stop
Zizek: (to Dr. Blackwood moderator) did you already do your Stalinist
manipulation and censor the questions because this
program that he described to us through some screens questions and so on I
think it good scheme to the one who decides which questions, as Stalinists
would have put it, what they put in are real voice of the people
Peterson: yes yes, well hopefully we can trust it
Dr. Blackwood (moderator): let's move on from that, at  heart this evening
we're talking about happiness at least that's the frame of
the debate that we have tonight and you've both been in your work and also
tonight very critical of happiness as mere hedonism pleasure-seeking or even
simply as a feeling what does true or deeper human happiness consist of
and
how is it attained ?
Zizek: (points to Peterson: you want to start, I don’t care, sorry
Peterspn: well I don't I don't first of all there's something you said five
minutes ago or so I think you were still at the podium that I agree with
profoundly which is that happiness is a side effect it's not it's not a thing
in itself it's something that comes upon you it's like an act of grace in
some
sense
Zizek: I accept even your theological  undertone
Peterson: okay, okay
Zizek: the category of grace can be used in a perfect atheist sense, one of the
deepest categories, sorry
Peterson: yes I would think I would think that we could find agreement about
because partly because of your psychoanalytic background you know perfectly
well that were subject to forces within us the aren't of our voluntary control
and certainly happiness is one of those because you cannot will yourself to be
happy you might be able to will yourself to be unhappy but you can't will
yourself to be happy there are certain preconditions that have to be met that
are quite mysterious in order for you to be happy and then it happens and then
maybe if you're wise you you regard this as a like an in a minor
incomprehensible miracle that somehow you happen to be in the right place at
the right time now I've made the case that the most effective means of pursuing
the good life which is not the same as pursuing happiness is to adopt something
like a stance of maximal responsibility towards the suffering and malevolence
in the world and I think that that should be pursued primarily as an individual
responsibility it's not like I don't think that political and familial larger
organizations are necessary but in the final analysis we each suffer alone in
some fundamental sense and we have our own malevolence to contend with in some
fundamental sense and the proper beginning of moral behavior which is the
proper beginning of the right way to act in the world is to take responsibility
for that I think you do what you can to conceptualize the highest good that you
can conceptualize that's the first thing to develop a vision of what might be
and it has to be a personalised vision as well as a universalized vision and
then you work diligently to ensure that your actions are in keeping with that
and you allow yourself on that pursuit to be informed by the knowledge of your
ignorance and the necessity for acting and speaking in truth and a fair bit of
that I believe is derived I think it's fair to say that that's derived from an
underlying judeo-christian ethic and I make no bones about the fact that I
think of those stories metaphysically or philosophically or psychologically as
fundamental to the proper functioning of our society in so far as it can
function properly and so it's not happiness it's meaning and meaning is to be
found in the
adoption of responsibilities and then I'll close with this the responsibility
is not only to do what you believe to be right that's not is that's duty that's
not enough that's sort of what the Conservatives put forward as the ultimate
virtue which is duty it's notthat it's it's that you're you're acting in a
manner it is in accordance with what you believe to be right but you're doing
it in a manner that simultaneously expands your ability to do it which means that
you cannot stay safely ensconced within the confines of your current ethical
beliefs you have to stand on the edge of what you know and encounter
continually the consequences of your ignorance to expand your domain of
knowledge and ability so that you're not only acting in an efficient manner but
you're increasing the efficiency and productivity and meaningfulness of what it
is that you're engaged in and I think that and I believe that the psychological
evidence supports this even the neuropsychological evidence is that that's when
true happiness descends upon you because it's an indication from the deepest
recesses of your psyche biologically instantiated that you're in the right
place at the right time you're doing what you should be doing but you're doing
it in a manner that expands your capacity to do even better things in the
future and and that's I think that's the deepest human instinct there is it's
not rational it's far deeper than that and it's something that it's something
that's genuine and it exists within us and that constitutes a proper guide if
you don't pervert it with this self-deception and deceit so that's my
perspective
(Applause)
Zizek: okay I'll try if you are stupid enough to believe me to be brief first I
like very much what you began with this grace or whatever we call it moment of
happiness and I would like to would you agree that the same goes for love I
think we have a huge in the habit in French I don't know if in other language
they have it they use the verb to fall in love which means it's in this sense
in some sense a fall you are surprised you are shocked authentic love I think
is something very traumatic even in this sense I always like to use this
example let's say you live stupidly happy life maybe one night stand here and
there you drink with French then you fall in love passionately this is in some
sense all the balance is lost after so but where I second surprisingly maybe
for youth I agree with your point about judeo-christian legacy for which I am
very much attacked centrist and so on and so on you know I wonder if you'd
agree with it I will try to condense it very much you know for me the deepest I
simplify to the utmost something unheard of and I as an atheist accept the
spiritual value of it happens in Christianity other religions you have got up
there we fall from God and then we try to climb back through spiritual
discipline whatever training goodness and so on and so on the form of
Christianity is a totally different one as with philosopher us would have put
it you don't climb to God God you are free in a Christian sense when you
discover that the distance that separates you from God is inscribed into God
himself that's why I agree with those intelligent theologies like my favorite
Gilbert Keith Chesterton who said that this the cross the crucifixion is
something absolutely unique because in that moment of alien in ahmedabad God
for the life of you abandoned me for a brief moment symbolically God Himself
becomes an 80s in the sense of you know you get a gap there and that is
something shows absolutely unique it means that you are not simply separated
from God your separation from God is part of divinity itself and we can then
put it also in other terms maybe closer to you like that that's right for me
happiness is not some blissful unity with higher value it's the very struggle
the fall and so on and that's why I hope we both worry about what will this
possibility of so-called I'm horrified with it Ray Kurzweil calls singularity
and this blissful state I prefer not to know but the final contrary breeze what
I only don't quite get why do you put so much access to this we have to begin
with a person with personal change I mean this is also the second or which one
I don't remember forgive me of your slogans in your book you know first set
your house in order then but extremely common sense naive question here but
what if in trying to set your house in order you discover that your housing is
in this order precisely because the way the society is messed up which doesn't
mean okay let's forget about my house but you can do both at the same time and
I would even say I will give you now the ultimate sample yourself that you are
so socially active because you realize that it's not enough to tell to your to
your to your patient set your house in order much of the reason of why they are
in disorder their house is that there is some crisis in our society and so on
and
so on so my reproach to you remembering would have been another joke your
coffee yes please like individual or social yes
please because this is obvious in extreme situation like I hope we agree to say
to somebody in in North Korea set
your house in order but I think in some deeper sense it goes also for our
society you see some kind of a social crisis and I don't see clearly why insist
so much on this choice because I will give you an example that I think
perfectly does it how do we usually deal with ecology by this false
personalization you know they tell you ah what did you do did you put all the
coke cans on the side did you recycle old paper and so yes we should do this
but you know like I in a way this is also a very easy way to describe yourself
like you say ok I do the recycling show up you know I did my duty let's go on
so I would not say why the choice there
Peterson: ok so well so first of all I have to point out that it's you have
unfairly tasked me with three very difficult questions and so I'm hoping that I
can
Zizek: that’s life, you said life is a challenge and so on
(laughter)
Peterson: yes so so I'm going to I'm hoping that I have the mental wherewithal
to keep them in track and answer them in order but you can help me if I stray I
was very interested in your comments about the about Christ's atheism one on
the cross that final moment of atheism that that's something I I never thought
about it that way
Zizek: Chesterton, ‘Orthodoxy’ read it, it’s a short book,
excellent
Peterson: no,no, it's a very it's a very interesting thought because what it
what it it's a really it's an unbelievably merciful idea in some sense that the
burden of life is so unbearable and you see in the Christian passion of course
torture unfair judgment i society betrayal by friends and then and then a low
death and so that's that's kind of that's what as bad as it gets right which is
why it's an archetypal story right it's about as about as gifts and the story
that you described point so that it's so bad that even God himself might
despair about the essential quality of being right right so and so that is
merciful in some sense because it does say that there is something that's built
into the fabric of existence the tests are so severely in our faith about being
itself that even God Himself falls prey to the temptation to doubt and so
that's okay now this is where things get very complicated because I want to use
that in part to answer the other questions that you answered look there's
there's a very large clinical literature that suggests that if you want to
develop optimal resilience what you do is you lay out a pathway towards
somewhere better someone comes in they have a problem you try to figure out
what the problem is and then you try to figure out what might constitute a
solution and so you have something approximating a map right and it's a it's a
tentative map of how to get from where our things aren't so good to where
they're better and then you you have the person gold in the world and confront
those things that they're avoiding that are stopping them from moving towards
that higher place and there's an archetypal reality to that it's you're in a
fallen state you're attempting to redeem yourself and there's a process by
which that has to occur and that process involves voluntary confrontation with
what you're afraid of disgusted by and inclined to avoid and that works every
psychological school agrees upon that is that exposure therapy the
psychoanalysts expose you to the tragedies of your past you know and and redeem
you in that manner and the behaviorists expose you to the terrors of the
present and redeem you in that manner but there's a great broad agreement
across psychological schools that that's that works and my sense is that were
called upon as individuals precisely to do that in our life is that we are
faced by this
unbearable reality that you made reference to when you talked about the
situation on the cross is that life itself is fundamentally and this is a
pessimism that we might share it's fundamentally suffering and malevolence but
and this is I think where we differ I believe that the evidence suggests that
the the the light that you discover in your life is proportionate to the amount
of the darkness that you're willing to forthrightly confront and that there's
no necessary upper limit to that so I think that the good that people are
capable of is actually it's a higher good than the evil that people are capable
of and leave me I do not say that lightly given what I know about the evil that
people are capable of and I think that I believe that a central psychological
message of the biblical corpus fundamentally is that that's why it culminates
in some sense with the idea that it's necessary to adopt it's it's necessary to
confront the devil and to accept your what would you say your the unjustness of
your tortured mortality if you can do that and that and that's it's a challenge
as you just pointed out that it's sufficient to challenge even God himself that
you have the you have the best chance of transcending it and living the kind of
life that will set your house in order and everyone's house in order at the
same time and so I think that's even
true in states like North Korea and like I'm not asking people to foolishly
immolate themselves for pointless reasons you know if I'm when I'm working with
people who are Clinic clinically and they have a terrible oppressor who's their
boss at work I don't suggest that they march in and tell them exactly what they
think of them and end up on the street it's not helpful you know and so the
pathway towards adopting individual responsibilities happens to be a very individual
one but I do believe that the best bet for most people is to solve the problems
that beset them in their own lives the ethical problems that beset them that
they know our problems and that they can set themselves together well enough so
that they can then become capable of addressing larger scale problems without
falling prey to some of the errors that characterize let's say over optimistic
and intellectually arrogant ideologue he close with one thing one of my
favorite quotes from Carl Jung it's actually a quote that I used at the
beginning of my first book which was called naps of meaning was that if you
take a personal problem seriously enough you will simultaneously solve a social
problem and this bears on on your point because it's not like you're a small
family even the relationship between you and your wife is immune in some sense
to the broader social problems around you and so let's say right now there's
tremendous tension between men and women in the West and that's certainly the
case given the divorce rate let's say that would be some evidence and the later
and later stages that people are waiting to become in - you know enter into
permanent relationships there's a there's a real tension there and then if you
do establish a relationship with a woman or a partner but we'll say a woman in
this particular case you are instantly faced with all of the sociological
problems in a microcosm in that relationship and then if you work those damn
problems out if you can work
them out within your relationship and you can get some insight it's not
complete insight but you can get some partial insight into what the problem
actually is and get the diagnosis right and you've moved some small measure
forward in addressing what might
constitute the broader social concern and what's even better you're punished
for your own goddamn mistakes and that's
another thing I like about the idea of working locally is that you know if I do
broad scale social experiments and they fail it's like well tough luck for the
people for whom they failed but if I'm experimenting on myself within the
confines of my own relationship and I make a mistake I'm going to feel the pain
and then I and that's good that's just it but it also gives me the possibility
of learning and so I believe that you do solve what you can about yourself
first before you can set your family straight and before you should dare to try
to set the world straight otherwise you degenerate into this kind of you
already talked about it is shallow moralizing leave this well I've divided my
goddamn coke cans up and now I can spend more money on new packaging at the
supermarket which is exactly what the psychological research indicates that
people do if they perform a casual moral action they immediately justify
committing a less moral action because they've put themselves in a higher moral
place and you might if you were real pessimist you'd say well that's why they
performed the action to begin with I think that's often true that's associated
with that shallow moralizing
Dr. Blackwood (moderator): Slavoj
Zizek: are we are we too much in this direction or or again I will put in my
Stalinist arms would you go as far as to say who
needs the people we talk for the people no because I don't want to take too
much of the time for the public but you know what interests me would you then
agree because this is how Hegel reads the story of the fall that fall really is
Felix culpa in the sense that for Hegel before the fall we are simply animals
it's through the fall that you perceive goodness as what will drag you out of
the fall so in this sense fall is constitutive of the very you know it's not
you fall from goodness you fall and that's the dialectical paradox your phone
recur actively creates what you fell from as it were and that's the tough
lesson for trip moralist to to to accept but you know where I see very briefly
maybe a counter question what fascinates me we didn't cover this I didn't cover
this but speaking about ideology would you agree what fascinates me more and
more is not big ideology in the sense of projects and so on in our cynical era
people claim all we no longer take them seriously and say walk but and here for
me social dimensions enter enters even our intimate space implicit beliefs
ideological pressure positions why not which we embody in our most common daily
practices for example probably some of you already know it I will nonetheless
repeat a very shortened version I was occupied at some point by the structure
of toilets in Western Europe
Peterson: I know of what your talking about...
Zizek:  I noticed this especially a specificity of German toilets where you
know Rafi doesn't this shit doesn't disappear in water it is their exposure
that you smell it and control it for whatever and immediately associated it with
German spirit of poetry and reflection and so on it's a bad joke but what I'm
saying is that in a sense and I've spoken with some specialists I was so
intrigued by of how do you construct toilets and they admitted it there is no
direct direct utilitarian valgus going to the toilet ideology in this deeper
sense is there another thing that at the same level I repeat one of my old
robes that fascinates me intensely is how it's not just as superficial
psychoanalysts claim we pretend to be moral to believe but deeply we are
cynical egotist quite often in today's times we think that we are free
permissive and so on but secretly we are dominated by an entire pathological or
not even often pathological structure of prohibitions and so on so we may and
this is what interests me so much precisely in today's time where and this is
how would
you agree we would explain the simple fact which may appear weird at how
apparently they so they tell us we live in permissive times take your pleasure
may enjoy it but at the same time there is probably so some clinicians are
telling me more rigidity and importance than ever let the lesson of
psychoanalysis I hope we agree is not this vulgar one you are cannot perform
sexual you go to a psychology psychiatrist he teaches you how to get rid of
authority and so on it's a much more complex situation it's and this is what
interests me immensely all this set of implicit beliefs cow you don't even know
but you you know I will repeat the story that half of you know and my favorite
that niels bohr anecdote you know he had the house outside copenhagen the
quantum physics right and he had a horse through a superstitious above his door
Peterson: yes (laughs)
Zizek: and then a friend asked him what do you believe in it why do I be there
and he said I'm a scientist why then do you have it there because I was told it
works the idea is it prevents evil spirits I enter the house it works even if
you don't believe in it that's ideology today that's ideology today
fundamentally I want to solicit from you to tell a joke don't you see I think I
think that people are are possessed by ideas that aren't theirs there yeah and
their personalities that aren't theirs and that's the great psychoanalytic
insight it's not ideas it's personalities it's way worse than ideas and some of
those personalities might be the ones that are associated with the idea that
freedom is found in maximizing hedonistic moment-to-moment pleasure or
something like that which sounds like freedom for me one of the things that I suggest
to people is that they watch themselves as if they do not understand who they
are or what they're ruled by and then notice those times when they're there
they're where they should be that and that's back to our discussion about
meaning rather than happiness it's like you'll see there are times in your life
where you're somewhere or you've done something and all of a sudden you're
you're together you're where you should be your conscience is not disturbing
you you're you're you're not proud of what you did because pride is the wrong
term but you understand deeply that you've done something that you should have
done you might not understand why you might not even understand what it is but
the study of that can help elucidate the difference between what actually
constitutes you is a very difficult thing to discover and what constitutes the
accretion that characterizes you because of the well let's say you're intense
you're intense proclivity for socialized mimicry and so you know you're I don't
mean you personally but people are amalgams of everything they've seen and
everything they've ever seen they've watch it yeah yes yes and everything
they've read and and to integrate that and define that the truth that
constitutes that integration is incredibly difficult endeavor and one of the
reasons why in twelve rules for life for example I suggested that I'll try to
tell the truth or at least don't lie is because one of the ways apart from
pursuing what you what appears to you to be meaningful one of the ways of escaping
from that possession by the kind of ideology that you're describing which is
like an it's like a it's like an unconscious of unidentified axioms it's
something like that even though they take personified form they're like
personalities is to stop saying things you know not to be true it's a nice
pathway forward it's the original rule was tell the truth and I thought no
that's not any good
because you're so biased and limited and ignorant and possessed that you don't
know what the truth is and so you can't be asked to tell it but everyone does
have the experience of being about to say or do something that they know by
their own they know as deeply as they can know anything about themselves that
that utterance or action is wrong and they still do it now my suggestion is try
to stop doing that and one of the consequences or you can try in small ways
like you might not be able to manage it in big ways but now and then you know
you're tempted to do something that you know to be wrong and you could not do it
and if you practice that you get better and better at not doing it and that
means you lie less and you and you take the easy route less and you pursue
hedonic pleasures that cost you in the future less you start to straighten
yourself out you take the beam out of your eye that's essentially what you're
doing and over time you have some modicum of hope that your vision will clear
up and you'll be able to see the proper pathway forward and that's part of the
process of redemption and it seems to me to be in your grasp you're capable of
doing that you have a conscience it does inform you from time to time correctly
about the difference between good and evil the consequence the knowledge the
consequence of the fall that you described which I think you described it very
eloquent terms and that you can slowly make your way back to the straight and
narrow path that's characterized by maximal meaning but also see that this
instinct of meaning is a sophisticated one it's not that I'm making a case for
the individual like
Iran makes a case for the individual that's not it I'm making a case for
individual responsibility that's not the same thing it's like there is
something that's good for you but it has to also be good for your family if
it's just good for you that's not good enough and if it's good for you and your
family and it's not good for society then that's not good enough either and so
the responsibility is to find a pathway that balances these things in a
harmonious manner it's like a I got a lot of this thinking from Jean Piaget and
his idea of equilibrated States right is you're attempting to find something
like a game that everyone is willing to play that can be played in an iterative
manner and not degenerate well hopefully actually ascend if that's possible
hopefully become a better and better game across time and I do believe that I
do believe that you can do that I do believe that you can do that if you're
guided by truth and I do believe that the pathway to that is the phenomenology
of meaning and then the secondary consequence of that is if you do that now and
then you might be happy and then you should be profoundly grateful because
happiness as we already agreed upon is something like a grace
Again my pessimism comes here I agree with you but the danger here here the
ology can massively enter you describe a nice situation you are whatever to do
something that you know it's wrong but so-called totalitarian ideologies step
in at this point and try to present to you that the true greatness is to do
what you individually think it's wrong for the higher course you know who says
this wonderfully horrible guy Heinrich Himmler of SS, no no no,
Peterson: no, that’s no joke
Zizek: seriously he knew the problem
Peterson: Yes
Zizek: German officers must blue horrible things feel good
Peterson: Yes
Zizek: and his solution was double first to let them know as he put it
somewhere every idiot okay ordinary men can do something great maybe local
sacrificed himself for his country but his reply was his point was but it takes
a truly great men to be ready to lose his soul and to do horrible things for
his country
Peterson: Yeah
Zizek: and I read some good memories of relatively honest communists who broke
down whenever sent to the countryside from inin early thirties and this is what
this is what they were told by apparatchik you will see horrible things
children starving and so on remember there is a higher course and your highest
ethical duty is to is to overcome this small bourgeois sentimentality and so
here see the danger of again my pessimism false meaning which can massively
cover this false narrative ii think also the solution by I wonder if you share
this pessimism French another one by Himmler you know what was his sacred book
I read he all the time had a special leather-bound copy in his pocket Bhadaga
ba Geeta he massively he said his problem was this one he puts it perfectly
Nazi officers have to do SS horrible things how to enable them to do it without
themselves becoming horrible beings his solution was oriental wisdom to learn
to act from distance I'm not really there and this is was the shock of my life
based on this do not the book I found a book the Gaiden wrote many books Bryan
Victoria sane at war it's a shocking book especially horrible from any so
called entire a centrist who claim our monotheism is guilty of everything we
need oriental evidence book is about the apart from a couple of
exceptions the behavior of Zen Buddhist community in Japan in the thirties
early forties not only they totally supported Japanese expansion into include
China they even provided properly Zen Buddhist justification for it for example
the one you know who did this no you are not as old as me I remember him DT
Suzuki the Great Tree yeah but okay he was doing this in the sixties but as a
younger guy he was fully supporting Japanese militarism and one of his
justifications was this one the advice of Japanese military to them to support
Zen Buddhist training because he says it's one of the most horrifying thing
that I've ever read he said sorry don't take it personally but let's say an
officer orders me if I were to tell this to you it would be too obvious so I
pick you I have to kill you stab you with mine and he says if I remain in this
illusionary self then I feel responsible I kill you but he says if you are
enlightened by Zen Buddhism then you know there is no substance reality you
become a neutral observer of your life just a flow of phenomena and you tell
yourself it's not that I am killing you but in the cosmic dance of phenomena my
knife is floating and somehow your knife Falls you know what I'm saying is I'm
not disputing some spiritual greatness of Zen Buddhism I'm saying how even the
most enlightened spiritual experience can serve a terrible cost now because we're
running very quickly out of time and it's clear that this conversation could go
for a very long time I'm going to ask one representative question here and give
you each one minute each and that is and that is simply this coming from online
what is one thing you hope people will leave this debate with and why Jordan I
I hope they leave this debate with a belief in the power of communication
between people with different views
(Applause)
Peterson: and there there there is this there is a growing idea on college
campuses tell me if I go over my minute that there really is no such thing as
free speech because people are only the avatars of their group identity and
they have nothing unique to say and besides that there's no communication
across boundaries of identity or belief and and I think that that's an
unbelievably dangerous and and pernicious doctrine and I think that people of
goodwill despite their differences can communicate and they can both come out
of that communication improved even though there might be some dissent and some
some dissent and some dissent on the way and so that's what I would hope people
would come out
Zizek: I will be more concrete even politically there is today so it appears
this big conflict between all that of modern stuff that you oppose and this all
right and so on I hope sincerely that we made at least some people to think and
to reject this simple opposition there are quite reasonable working the only
alternative to all try it is not political correctness and so on and I know I'm
speaking not for you but for me please if you are a leftist don't feel obliged
to be politically correct please please don't be afraid don't be afraid to
think and especially would you agree one great version of not thinking is how
immediately if they don't agree with you you are labeled a fascist but that's
the laziness people find something they don't agree with instead of thinking
they think about something we all agree was a bad thing up you're a fascist and
so on you know it's not a simple aspect even some of whom I'm deeply critical
no I'm sorry to tell you but he is not a fascist you make it all too easy to
play these games I just want not a positive result but to
shatter you a little bit to make you think
Dr. Blackwood (moderator):I have always felt that the greatest conversations
are unfinished ones please join me in thanking Slavoj Zizek in Jordan Peterson
for a great unfinished conversation!
(Applause)
Zizek: Ah... ah... Hi. It’s nice that we survived this...
Dr. Blackwood (moderator): Thank you, Slavoj
Zizek: I forgot that I.. still wired
(Applause)
Dr. Blackwood (moderator): We did alright. You can go out this way...
(Applause)
Dr. Blackwood (moderator): Good night everyone!
Speakers all leave stage
52
https://www.theguardian.com/books/video/2018/oct/24/slavoj-zizek-tells-owen-jones-clinton-is-the-problem-not-trump
EVENT ENDS