The Things You Don't Know

Finn, There are Things You Don’t Know —

I had a vision of The Throne of The Sith - and Who Was On It.

Ren. And Me.

elvenstar 

“I see the Emperor and Empress as a pair, representing complementary energies. Male/female, active/passive, giving/receiving etc. They have to do with this world, the real, the tangible, the material. Another pair could e.g. be the Magician and High Priestess referring to more spiritual aspects.

I'd say that yes, they have an important message coming up together. They could be representing real people in a couple, or something more abstract. But what the message is depends on the reading. Are they friendly, supporting each other, creating a whole? Or battling each other, representing opposing attitudes or influences?

“The answer to all of this, everything that we’re talking about, is education into early history. 

Until people understand the Stone Age, the nomadic period, the agrarian era, and how culture, how civilization built up. . . 

In Mesopotamia - the great irrigation projects. Or in Egypt where you had. . . Centralized government authority became necessary to master these. . . 

You had a situation, an environmentally difficult situation like the deserts Mesopotamia, or the peculiar character of Egyptian geography where you can only have a little tiny fertile line along the edges of the Nile. 

Otherwise, desert landscape. 

So [understanding] civilization and authority as not necessarily about power grabbing but about organization to achieve something for the good of the people as a whole. 

Peterson: 

That’s exactly the great symbolism of
The Great Father. 

Paglia: 

By reducing all hierarchy to power, and selfish power, is utterly naive. It’s ignorant. 

I say education has to be totally reconstituted, including public education, to begin in the most distant past so our young people today, who know nothing about how the world was created that they inhabit, can understand what a marvellous technological paradise they live in. 

And it’s the product of capitalism, it’s the product of individual innovation. 

Most of it’s the product of a Western tradition that everyone wants to trash now. If you begin in the past and show. . . And also talk about War, because War is the one thing that wakes people up, as we see. 

Peterson :

And as we may see. 

Paglia :

Yes, War is The Reality Principle.

The Old Maid of Anchorhead

“The exuberance of blood –the erect spirit – of Edwardian times had been drained. 

“Though in theory there were enough men for most women to marry, that was cold arithmetical nonsense for the hundreds of thousands who had lost The Only One They Ever Loved, and who were still wearing black and would never wed. 

The current author is old enough, just, to remember great-aunts who did not marry ‘because of the War’ and lived single lives – albeit quite cheerful ones – focused on fruit cake and friendship. 

THE IMPORTANT DISCUSSIONS WE AVOID 

Just one of the negatives of portraying life as this endless zero-sum game, between different groups vying for oppressed status, is that it robs us of time and energy for the conversations and thinking that we do need to do. 

For example, why is it, after all these decades, that feminists and others have been unable to more fully address the role of Motherhood in Feminism? 

As the feminist author Camille Paglia has been typically honest enough to admit, motherhood remains one of the big unresolved questions for feminists. 

And that isn’t a small subject to miss or gloss over. 

As Paglia herself has written, 

‘Feminist ideology has never dealt honestly with the role of The Mother in Human Life. 

Its portrayal of history as male oppression and female victimage is a gross distortion of the facts.’

If asked to name her three great heroes of twentieth-century womanhood, Paglia says that she would select Amelia Earhart, Katharine Hepburn and Germaine Greer : three women who Paglia says ‘would symbolize the new twentieth-century woman’. 

Yet as she points out, ‘All these women were childless. 

Here is one of the great dilemmas facing women at the end of the century. 

Second-wave feminist rhetoric placed blame for the female condition entirely on men, or specifically on “patriarchy” . . . 

The exclusive focus of feminism was on an external social mechanism that had to be smashed or reformed. 

It failed to take into account women’s intricate connection with nature – that is, with procreation.’ 

Or why, ‘in this era of the career woman, there has been a denigration, or devaluing of the role of motherhood.’  

The ongoing dishonesty about this leads to presumption being piled on dishonesty, and ugly, misanthropic notions of the purpose of women becoming embedded in the culture. In January 2019 CNBC ran a piece flagged with the heading, ‘You can save half a million dollars if you don’t have kids’.

As the piece went on: ‘Your friends may tell you having kids made them happier. They’re probably lying.’ 

It then referenced all the outweighing problems of ‘extra responsibilities, housework and, of course, the costs’.

Or here is how The Economist recently chose to write about what it called ‘the roots of the gender pay gap’, a gap which the magazine claimed has its roots in childhood. 

One of the main factors which is responsible for women on average earning less than men during the course of their working life is the fact that women are the ones who bear children. As The Economist put it, 

‘Having children lowers women’s lifetime earnings, an outcome known as the “child penalty”.’ 

It is hard to imagine who could read that phrase, let alone write it, without a shudder. 

If it is assumed that the primary purpose in Life is to make as much money as possible, then it is indeed possible that having a child will constitute a ‘penalty’ for a woman and thereby prevent her from having a larger sum of money in her bank account when she dies. 

On the other hand, if she chooses to pay that ‘penalty’ she might be fortunate enough to engage in the most important and fulfilling role that a human being can have. There is in that Economist viewpoint something which is widely shared and which has been spreading for decades. On the one hand women have–largely– been relieved of the need to have children if they do not want them, the better to pursue other forms of meaning and purpose in their lives. 

But it is not hard for this reorientation of purpose to make it look as though that original, defining human purpose is no purpose at all.

The American agrarian writer Wendell Berry put his finger on this almost 40 years ago when there were already, as he put it, ‘bad times for motherhood’. 

The whole concept of motherhood had come to be viewed in a negative way: ‘A kind of biological drudgery, some say, using up women who could do better things.’ 

But then Berry hit on the central truth: 

“We all have to be used up by something. 

And though I will never be a mother, I am glad to be used up by motherhood and what it leads to, just as–most of the time–I gladly belong to my wife, my children, and several head of cattle, sheep, and horses. 

What better way to be used up?”

Is this not a better way to think about motherhood and life? 

In a spirit of love and forgiveness rather than the endless register of resentment and greed?

“Superhero stories were written to be universal and inclusive, but often they’ve been aimed, it must be said, at boys and young men. Perhaps that’s why a mainstream myth has developed in which comic-book superheroines are all big-breasted Playboy girls with impossibly nipped waists and legs like jointed stilts in six-inch heels. But while it’s true that superhero costumes allow artists to draw what is effectively the nude figure in motion, there have in fact been more female superhero body types than male. 

The first superheroine, you may be surprised to learn, was not a voluptuous cutie in thigh boots but a raw-faced middle-aged housewife called Ma Hunkel, who wore a blanket cape and a pan on her head in her debut appearance, All-American no. 20, 1940. A harridan with the build of a brick shithouse she was the first “real-world” superhero—with no powers, a DIY outfit, and a strictly local beat—and the first parody of the superhero genre all in one. Ma Hunkel, aka the Red Tornado, was a Lower East Side lampoon of Siegel and Shuster’s lofty idealism. 

The mainstream has forgotten Ma Hunkel, although, like all the rest, she’s still a part of the DC universe and now has a granddaughter named Maxine Hunkel, a talkative, realistically proportioned, and likeable teenage girl who also challenges the superbimbo stereotype. But, of course, the comic-book industry in the throes of the war machine did churn out its fair share of pinup bombshells and no-nonsense dames with names like Spitfire and Miss Victory, or the strangely comforting Pat Parker, War Nurse. 

With no particular ax to grind against the Axis forces, Pat Parker was driven only by her desire to dress up like a showgirl and take to the battlefields of Western Europe on life-threatening missions of mercy. 

She was prepared to take on entire tank divisions with a refugee quivering under each arm. What made her tank-battling activities especially brave was the fact that this war nurse had no special powers and wore a costume so insubstantial, there could be nothing secret about her lunch, let alone her identity. But, absurd as she may seem, she did her best to exemplify the can-do, Rosie the Riveter spirit of those women who were “manning” the home front. 

And then there was the most famous superheroine of them all. Wonder Woman was the creation of William Moulton Marston, the man who, not incidentally, invented the controversial polygraph test apparatus, or lie detector, that is still in use today. 

Marston was a professor at Columbia and Tufts universities, and Radcliffe College —and a good one, according to accounts of the time— and the author of several respected works of popular psychology. Like other forward thinkers, Marston saw in comics the potential to convey complex ideas in the form of exciting and violent symbolic dramas. He described the great educational potential of the comics in an article titled “Don’t Laugh at the Comics,” which appeared in the popular women’s magazine Family Circle in 1940 and led to his getting hired as an educational consultant at DC-National. 

Marston coupled his ideas with an unorthodox lifestyle: his wife, Elizabeth, was also a psychologist, and is credited with having suggested a superheroine character. 

Both were enthusiastic proponents of a progressive attitude toward sex and relationships. They shared a mutual lover, a student of Marston’s named Olive Byrne, said to be the physical model for the original Harry Peter drawings of Wonder Woman. Together, Marston and Peter (with indispensable input from Elizabeth and Olive) developed a fantasy world of staggering richness. 

For sheer invention, for relentless dedication to the core concept, the Wonder Woman strip far surpassed its competitors. But unlike traditional pinups, the girls of Wonder Woman were athletic and forceful. 

They wore tiaras and togas while they engaged in violent gladiatorial contests on the backs of giant, genetically engineered monster kangaroos. 

Wonder Woman was traditionally sexy—there were pinup shots—but in most panels, she yomped and stomped like some martial arts majorette, outracing automobiles for fun. 

1941’s “Introducing Wonder Woman” began when an air force plane crashed on an uncharted island inhabited exclusively by beautiful scantily clad women capable of carrying the full-grown air force pilot “as if he were a child.” 

The man, Captain Steve Trevor of US Army Intelligence, was the first to ever set foot on Paradise Island, and within moments, the queen’s daughter, Princess Diana, had fallen in love. 

A two-page illustrated-text section revealed the history of the Amazons since their slavery at the hands of Hercules. Encouraged by their patron goddess Aphrodite, they liberated themselves and set sail for a magical island where they could establish a new civilization of women, far from the cruelty, greed, and violence that typified “Man’s World.” 

On Paradise Island, the immortal women set about fashioning their fabulous alternative to patriarchal, heliocentric society. 

In this first issue, Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, consulted apparitions of Aphrodite and Athena, who clarified that Trevor had been sent deliberately by the gods. 

It was time, apparently, for the Amazons to emerge from seclusion and join the worldwide struggle against Axis tyranny. 

Trevor had to be sent home to complete his mission against the enemy—but he was not to return alone. 

“YOU MUST SEND WITH HIM THE STRONGEST OF YOUR WONDER WOMEN!—FOR AMERICA, THE LAST CITADEL OF DEMOCRACY, AND OF EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN, NEEDS YOUR HELP!” 

A contest was declared to identify the most appropriate candidate. 

Tests included outrunning a deer and culminated in the favorite sport of these immortal ladettes: bullets and bracelets. A kind of Russian roulette, the game saw the final contenders facing one another with loaded revolvers (where the staunchly antiwar Amazons managed to get hold of working firearms remains a mystery). Bullets were fired at the opponent, who was obliged to deflect them with her bracelets in order to win the game. The loser took a flesh wound to the shoulder. 

In the end one champion remained: a masked brunette, revealed in a not entirely unexpected twist to be Princess Diana herself. 

“AND SO DIANA, THE WONDER WOMAN, GIVING UP HER HERITAGE AND HER RIGHT TO ETERNAL LIFE, LEAVES PARADISE ISLAND TO TAKE THE MAN SHE LOVES BACK TO AMERICA—THE LAND SHE LEARNS TO LOVE AND PROTECT, AND ADOPTS AS HER OWN!” 

However, within this world—and supplying it with depth and enticing richness—lurked barely hidden libidinal elements. 

To begin with, it has to be said that these Amazons were drawn to be sexy. 

Whereas Siegel rendered Superman in dynamic futurist lines and Bob Kane gave Batman the look of a Prague potato print, Peter brought a flowing, scrolling quality to his drawings of superwomen in action and at play. Everything was curved and calligraphic. The lips of his women were modishly bee stung and glossy, as if to suggest that Hollywood-style glamour makeup never went out of vogue among the warrior women and philosopher princesses of Paradise Island. 

However, as you may expect in a society of immortal women cut off from the rest of the world since classical antiquity, the diversions of the Amazons turned out to be somewhat specialized, to say the least. 

As the strips developed, Marston’s prose swooned over detailed accounts of Amazonian chase and capture rituals in which some girls were “eaten” by others. 

Moreover thousands of years of sophisticated living without men had bled the phallic thrust out of sexuality, leaving the peculiar, ritualistic eroticism of leash and lock. 

Marston and Peter built slavery and shackles into “Meet Wonder Woman,” and as the strip progressed, the bondage elements became more overt, increasing sales. 

For instance, chief among Wonder Woman’s weapons of peace was a magic lasso, which compelled anyone bound in its coils to tell the absolute truth and only the truth—shades of Marston’s polygraph. 

Moreover, it wasn’t long before she was breathlessly demonstrating the joys of submission to “loving authority”: A Nazi villain’s slave girls were released in one story, with no idea what to do with their lives out of captivity. 

Wonder Woman’s solution was to allow them to continue to express their nature as born slaves by relocating to Paradise Island, where they could enjoy bondage under the loving gaze of a kind mistress instead of the crop-cracking Hitler-loving Paula von Gunther. 

The flipside of the Amazons’ essentially benign and formalized endorsement of healthy S/M was the dungeon world of sadistic bondage, humiliation, and mind control that existed in the world beyond Paradise Island. 

These were crystallized in the form of Doctor Poison, a twisted dwarf in a rubber coat. Wielding a dripping syringe, Poison hated women and loved to humiliate them. In a surprising twist, “he” was revealed to be a mentally ill woman acting out of her frustrations. 

The women of Paradise Island embodied an enticing blend of the politically right-on and the libidinous. As such, they were exemplars of a newfangled twentieth-century creed that was the same old bohemian “free love” with a new lexicon culled from psychoanalytical theory and the pink and squeezy world of dreams and desire. 

Theirs was a kind of radical Second Wave separatist feminism where men were forbidden and things could only get better as a result. 

Indeed, in Marston’s feminine paradise, happiness and security were in far greater supply than elsewhere in the superworld. 

In looking at other superhero comics he had noted, “it seemed from a psychological angle that the comics’ worst offence was their blood-curdling masculinity. A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to the child as the breath of life.” 

And so, while Batman was a brooding orphan, and the destruction of Superman’s Krypton had robbed him of his birth parents, the magnificent scientists Jor-El and Lara, Wonder Woman could ride her invisible plane down the rainbow runway to Paradise Island and check in with Mom any time she wanted. 

Queen Hippolyta even had a magic mirror that allowed her to observe her daughter at any location on Earth. 

It was closed-circuit television by any other name, but in late 1941, Hippolyta’s magic mirror could only be a product of imaginary feminist superscience. 

There were some similarities with Wonder Woman’s male predecessors. Like Superman, in his way, Wonder Woman fearlessly championed alternative culture and a powerful vision of outsider politics. And, like Batman, she was thoroughly the progressive sort of aristocrat. 

She preached peace in a time of war, although she was as eager as any other superhero to tackle her fair share of Nazis. 

Unlike the essentially solitary Batman and Superman, Wonder Woman had a huge cast of friends. Her allies, the Holliday Girls of Beta Lamda, were a rambunctious group of sorority sisters fronted by the immense, freckled redhead Etta Candy. 

As the gorgeous Wonder Woman’s inevitable fat pal, Etta’s positive energy and physicality added an earthiness and humor that complemented Diana’s cool grace and perfect poise. 

When Marston died of cancer in 1947, the erotic charge left the Wonder Woman strip, and sales declined, never to recover. Without the originality and energy that Marston’s obsessions brought to the stories, Wonder Woman was an exotic bloom starved of rare nutrients. 

Once the lush, pervy undercurrents were purged, the character foundered. The island of Themiscyra was scraped clean of any hint of impropriety, and all girl-chasing rituals ceased, along with reader commitment to the character. 

It wasn’t long before Wonder Woman was coming across as an odd maiden aunt—a disturbing cross between the Virgin Mary and Mary Tyler Moore; but Elizabeth and Olive, her inspirations, continued to live together. 

The unconventional, liberated Elizabeth was one hundred years old when she died in 1993, the true Wonder Woman of this story.”

The Hero is a Villain

SISKO: 

Let's think about it. 

A Starfleet security officer is fascinated by a nineteenth century French melodrama, and now he's a leader of the Maquis, a resistance group fighting the noble battle against the evil Cardassians. 

DAX: 

It sounds like he's living out his own fantasy. 

SISKO: 

Exactly. And you know what? 

Les Miserables isn't about The Policeman. 

It's about Valjean, the victim of a monstrous injustice who spends his entire life helping people, making noble sacrifices for others. 

That's how Eddington sees himself. 

He's Valjean, he's Robin Hood, he's a romantic, dashing figure, fighting the good fight against insurmountable odds. 

DAX: 

The secret life of Michael Eddington. 

How does it help us? 

SISKO: 

Eddington is The Hero of His Own Story. 

That makes me The Villain. 

And what is it that every hero wants to do? 

DAX: 

Kill The Bad Guy. 

SISKO: 

That's part of it. 

Heroes only kill when they have to. 

Eddington could have killed me back in the refugee camp or when he disabled the Defiant, 

but in the best melodramas The Villain creates a situation where The Hero is forced to sacrifice himself for The People, for The Cause.

One final grand gesture. 

DAX: 

What are you getting at, Benjamin? 

SISKO: 

I think it's time for me to become The Villain.

“The answer to all of this, everything that we’re talking about, is education into early history. 

Until people understand the Stone Age, the nomadic period, the agrarian era, and how culture, how civilization built up. . . 

In Mesopotamia - the great irrigation projects. Or in Egypt where you had. . . Centralized government authority became necessary to master these. . . 

You had a situation, an environmentally difficult situation like the deserts Mesopotamia, or the peculiar character of Egyptian geography where you can only have a little tiny fertile line along the edges of the Nile. 

Otherwise, desert landscape. 

So [understanding] civilization and authority as not necessarily about power grabbing but about organization to achieve something for the good of the people as a whole. 

Peterson: 

That’s exactly the great symbolism of 

The Great Father. 

Paglia: By reducing all hierarchy to power, and selfish power, is utterly naive. It’s ignorant. 

I say education has to be totally reconstituted, including public education, to begin in the most distant past so our young people today, who know nothing about how the world was created that they inhabit, can understand what a marvelous technological paradise they live in. 

And it’s the product of capitalism, it’s the product of individual innovation. 

Most of it’s the product of a Western tradition that everyone wants to trash now. If you begin in the past and show. . . And also talk about War, because War is the one thing that wakes people up, as we see. 

Peterson: And as we may see. 

Paglia: Yes, War is The Reality Principle. 

My father and five of my uncles went to World War II. 

My father was part of the force that landed in Japan. 

He was a paratrooper at the time of the Japanese surrender. And a couple of uncles got shot up and so on. 

When you have the reality of war, when people see the reality, the horrors of war - Berlin burned to a crisp and so on. 

Starvation and all. . . Then you understand this marvelous mechanism that brings water to the kitchen. 

And you flip on a light and the electricity turns on. 

Peterson: I know, for me, and I suppose it’s because I have somewhat of a depressive temperament. . . 

I mean one thing that staggers me on a consistent basis is the fact that anything •ever• works. 

Because it’s so unlikely, you know, to be in a situation where our electronic communications work, where our electric grid works. And it works all the time, it works one hundred percent of the time. 

And the reason for that is there are mostly men out there who are breaking themselves into pieces, repairing this thing which just falls apart all the time. 

Paglia: Absolutely. I said this in the Munk Debate in Toronto several years ago. All these elitists and professors sneering at men. It’s men who are maintaining everything around us. 

This invisible army which feminists don’t notice. 

Nothing would work if it weren’t for the men. 

Peterson: A professor is someone who’s standing on a hill surrounded by a wall, which is surrounded by another wall, which is surrounded by another wall - it’s walls all the way down - who stands up there and says I’m brave and independent. It’s like, you’ve got this protected area that’s so unlikely - it’s so absolutely unlikely - and the fact that people aren’t on their knees in gratitude all the time for the fact that we have central heating and air conditioning and pure water and reliable food. . . It’s absolutely unbelievable. 

Paglia: Yes, I mean people used to die. . . The water supply was contaminated with cholera for heaven’s sake. People don’t understand. To have clean water, fresh milk, fresh orange juice. All of these things. These are marvels. 

Peterson: And all of the time. 

Paglia: All of the time. Western culture is heading - because we are so dependent on this invisible infrastructure - we’re heading for an absolute catastrophe when jihadists figure out how to paralyze the power grid. The entire culture will be chaotic. You’ll have mobs in the street within three days when suddenly the food supply is interrupted and there’s no way to communicate. 

That is the way Western culture is going to collapse. And it won’t take much. 

Peterson: Single points of failure. 

Paglia: Because we are so interconnected, and now we’re so dependent on communications and computers. . . I used to predict for years it’ll be an asteroid hitting the earth, and then we’ll have another ice age.

The 3-Quark Model of 1990

“Something CHANGED in The Culture around 1990...”

— Camile Paglia 

If you love somebody enough

You'll follow wherever they go

That's how I got to Memphis

That's how I got to Memphis

If you love somebody enough

You'll go where your heart wants to go

That's how I got to Memphis

That's how I got to Memphis

I know if you'd seen her you'd tell me 'cause you are my friend

I've got to find her and find out the trouble she's in

If you tell me that she's not here

I'll follow the trail of her tears

That's how I got to Memphis

That's how I got to Memphis

She would get mad and she used to say

That she'd come back to Memphis someday

That's how I got to Memphis

That's how I got to Memphis

I haven't eaten a bite

Or slept for three days and nights

That's how I got to Memphis

That's how I got to Memphis

I've got to find her and tell her that I love her so

I'll never rest 'til I find out why she had to go

Thank you for your precious time

Forgive me if I start to cryin'

That's how I got to Memphis (x8)

The Worlds of Men and Women

Peterson: See that also seems to me to be related to the postmodern emphasis on power because there’s something terrible underground going on there. And that is. . .

I think this is the sort of thing that was reflected in the Soviet Union, too. Especially in the 20s when there was this idea, a radical idea, that you could remake human beings entirely because they had no essential nature.

So, if your fundamental hypothesis is that nothing exists except power, and you believe

that, then that also gives you the right in some sense to exercise your power at the

creation of the kind of humanity that your utopian vision envisions. 

And that also seems

to me to justify the postmodern insistence that everything is only a linguistic construct.

It again goes down to the notion of power, which Derrida and Foucault and Lacan are

so bloody obsessed with.

It seems to me what they’re trying to do is to take all the potential power for the

creation of human beings to themselves without any bounding conditions whatsoever.

There’s no history, there’s no biology, and everything is a fluid culture that can be

manipulated at will.

In Canada there are terrible arguments right now about biological essentialism, let’s

say. And one of the things that happened, which was something I objected to precisely

a year ago, is that the social constructionist view of human identity has been built

11

now into  Canadian law. So there’s an insistence that biological sex, gender identity,

gender expression, and sexual proclivity vary independently with no causal relationship

between any of the levels.

And so that’s in the law, and not only is it in the law, it’s being taught everywhere. It’s

being taught in the Armed Forces, it’s being taught in the police, it’s being taught to the

elementary school kids, and the junior high school kids. And underneath it all I see this

terrible striving for arbitrary power that’s associated with this crazy utopianism.

But I still don’t exactly understand it. I don’t understand what seems to be the hatred

that motivates it that you see bubbling up, for example, in identity politics, and in the

desire to do nothing but, let’s say, demolish the patriarchy.

It kind of reminds me. . . And this is something else I wanted to talk to you about.

You’re an admirer of Erich Neumann and of Carl Jung. 

The Neumann connection is really interesting because I think he’s a bloody genius. 

I really like The Great Mother.

It’s a great book and really a great warning, that book. And also The Origins and History of Consciousness.

Paglia: One my most influential books.

Peterson: Yeah well that’s so interesting. I read an essay that you wrote. I don’t remember when it was.

Paglia: It was a lecture I gave on Neumann at NYU, yes.

Peterson: Yes, it’s always been staggering to me that that book hasn’t had the impact that it should have had. I mean Jung himself, in the preface to that book,

wrote that that was the book that he wished that he would have written. It’s very much associated with Jung’s Symbols of Transformation. 

And it was a major influence on my book, Maps of Meaning, which was an attempt to outline the universal archetypes that are portrayed in the kind of religious structures that you put forward.

But the thing that I really see happening. . . And you can tell me what you think about this. 

In Neumann’s book, consciousness - which is masculine, symbolically masculine for a variety of reasons - is viewed as rising up against the countervailing force of tragedy from an underlying feminine, symbolically feminine, unconsciousness. 

And it’s something that can always be pulled back into that unconsciousness.

The microcosm of that would be the Freudian Oedipal Mother familial dynamic where the mother is so overprotective and all-encompassing that she interferes with the development of the competence not only of her sons but also of her daughters, of her children in general. 

And it seems to me that that’s the dynamic that’s being played out in our society right now.

And it’s related in some way that I don’t understand to this insistence that all forms of masculine authority are nothing but tyrannical power. 

So the symbolic representation is Tyrannical Father with no appreciation for the Benevolent Father, and Benevolent Mother with no appreciation whatsoever for the Tyrannical Mother.

I thought of ideologies as fragmentary mythologies. 

That’s where they get their archetypal and psychological power. 

In a balanced representation you have the Terrible Mother and the Great Mother, as Neumann laid out so nicely. 

And you have the Terrible Father and the Great Father. 

So that’s the fact that culture mangles you have

to death while it’s also promoting you and developing you. 

You have to see that as balanced. 

Then you have the heroic and adversarial individual.

But in the postmodern world - and this seems to be something that’s increasingly seeping out into the culture at large - you have nothing but the Tyrannical Father, nothing but the destructive force of masculine consciousness, and nothing but the benevolent Great Mother.

It’s an appalling ideology, and it seems to me that it’s sucking the vitality - which is exactly what you’d expect symbolically - it’s sucking the vitality of our culture. 

You see that with the increasing demolition of young men, and not only young men, in terms

of their academic performance. 

They’re falling way behind in elementary school, way behind in junior high, and bailing out of the universities like mad.

Paglia: Well the public school education has become completely permeated by this kind of anti-male propaganda. To me, public school is just a form of imprisonment.

They’re particularly destructive to young men, who have a lot of physical energy.

I identify as transgender myself, but I do not require the entire world to alter itself to fit my particular self-image. I do believe in the power of hormones. I believe that men exist and women exist, and are biologically different. I think there is no cure for the culture’s ills right now, except if men start standing up and demanding that they be respected as men again.

Peterson:

Okay, okay, so I’ve got a question about that.

We did a research project a year ago trying to figure out if there was such a thing as political correctness from a psychometric perspective, to find out if the loose aggregation of beliefs actually clump together statistically. And we actually found two factors, which I won’t go into. 

Then we looked at things that predicted adherence to that politically correct creed. There were a couple that were surprising.

One was - being female was a predictor. The personality attributes associated with femininity - so that would be agreeableness and higher levels of negative emotion - were also both independent predictors.

But so were symptoms of personality disorder, which I thought was really important.

Because part of what I see happening is that. . . I think that women whose relationship with men has been seriously pathologized cannot distinguish between Male Authority and Competence and Male Tyrannical Power. They fail to differentiate because all they see is The Oppressive Male.

And they may have had experiences that. . . Their experiences with men might have been rough enough so that differentiation never occurred. Because it has to occur. And you have to have a lot of experience with men - and good men, too - before that will occur.

But it seems to me that we’re also increasingly dominated by a view of masculinity that’s mostly characteristic of women who have terrible personality disorders, and who are unable to have healthy relationships with men. But here’s the problem.

This is something my wife has pointed out, too. She said, ‘Well men are going to have to stand up for themselves.’ But here’s the problem.

I know how to stand up to a man who’s unfairly trespassing against me. And the

reason I know that is because the parameters for my resistance are quite well defined, which is:

We talk, we argue, we push, and then it becomes physical.

If we move beyond the boundaries of civil discourse, we know what the next step is.

That’s forbidden in discourse with women. And so I don’t think that men can control crazy women. I really don’t believe it. I think they have to throw their hands up in. . . In what? It’s not even disbelief. It’s that the cultural. . . There’s no step forward that you can take under those circumstances, because if the man is offensive enough and crazy enough, the reaction becomes physical right away. Or at least the threat is there.

And when men are talking to each other in any serious manner, that underlying threat of physicality is always there, especially if it’s a real conversation. It keeps the thing civilised to some degree. If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone [for] whom you have absolutely no respect.

But I can’t see any way. . . For example there’s a woman in Toronto who’s been organising this movement, let’s say, against me and some other people who are going to do a free speech event. And she managed to organize quite effectively, and she’s

quite offensive, you might say. She compared us to Nazis, for example, publicly, using the Swastika, which wasn’t something I was all that fond of.

But I’m defenseless against that kind of female insanity, because the techniques that I would use against a man who was employing those tactics are forbidden to me. So I don’t know. . . It seems to me that it isn’t men who have to stand up and say, 

‘Enough of this.’ Even though that is what they should do, it seems to me that it’s sane women who have to stand up against their crazy sisters and say, 

‘Look, enough of that. Enough man-hating. Enough pathology. Enough bringing disgrace on us as a gender.’

But the problem there - and then I’ll stop my little tirade - is that most of the women I know who are sane are busy doing sane things. They have their career. 

They have their family. They’re quite occupied, and they don’t seem to have the time, or maybe even the interest, to go after their crazy, harpy sisters. And so I don’t see any regulating force for that terrible femininity. And it seems to me to be invading the

culture and undermining the masculine power of the culture in a way that’s, I think, fatal. I really do believe that.

Paglia: I, too, believe these are symptomatic of the decline of Western culture. And itwill just go down flat. I don’t think people realize that masculinity still exists in the world as a code among jihadists. And when you have passionate masculinity circling the borders like the Huns and the Vandals during the Roman Empire. . . That’s what I see. 

I see this culture rotting from within and disemboweling itself, literally.

Now I have an overview of why we’re having this problem, and it comes from the fact that I’m the product of an immigrant family. All four of my grandparents and my mother were born in Italy.

So I remember from my earliest years in this factory town in upstate New York, where my relatives came to work in the shoe factory.

I can remember, still, the life of the agrarian era - which was for most of human history - the agrarian era where there was The World of Men and The World of Women.

And the sexes had very little to do with each other. 

Each had power and status in its own realm. 

And they laughed at each other, in essence. 

The women had enormous power. 

In fact, the old women ruled, not the young beautiful women like today. 

But the older you were the more you had control over everyone, including the mating and marriage. 

There were no doctors, so the old women were like midwives and knew all the ins and outs and [had] inherited knowledge about pregnancy and all these other things.

I can remember this. And the joy that women had with each other all day long. Cooking with each other, being companions to each other, talking, conversing. 

My mother remembered, as a small child in Italy, when it was time to do the laundry they would take the laundry up the hill to the fountain and do it by hand. 

They would sing, they would picnic, and so on.

We get a glimpse of that in the Odyssey when Odysseus is thrown up naked on the shores of Phaeacia and he hears the sound of women, young women, laughing and singing. 

And it’s Nausicaa, The Princess, bringing the women to do the laundry. 

It’s exactly the same thing. So there was. . . 

Each gender had its own hierarchy, its own values, its own way of talking. 

And the sexes rarely intersected.

I can remember in my childhood in a holiday - it could be a Christmas, it could be a Thanksgiving, whatever - women would be cooking all day long, everyone would sit down to eat, and then after that the women would retire en masse to the kitchen. 

And the men would go. . . I would look at them through the window and see all the men.

The men would be all outside, usually gathered around the car - at a time when cars didn’t work as well as they do today - with the hood up. 

And the men would be standing with their hands on their hips like that. 

Everyone’s staring at the engine. 

That’s how I learned men were refreshing themselves by studying something technical and mechanical after being with the women during the dinner.

So all of these problems of today are the direct consequence of women’s emancipation and freedom from housework thanks to capitalism, which made it possible for women to have jobs outside the home for the very first time in the nineteenth century. No longer to be dependent on husband or father or brother.

So this great thing that’s happened to us, allowing us to be totally self-supporting,

independent agents has produced all this animosity between men and women,

because women feel unhappy.

Women today - wherever I go, whether it’s Italy or Brazil or England or America or Toronto - the upper-middle class professional women are unhappy, miserable.

And they don’t know why they’re unhappy. They want to blame it on men. The men must change. Men must become more like women. No. That is the wrong way to go.

It’s when men are men, and understand themselves as men, are secure as men - then you’re going to be happier.

Peterson: Well, there’s nothing more dangerous than a weak man.

Paglia: Absolutely. Especially all these quislings spouting feminist rhetoric. When I hear that it makes me sick. 

But here’s the point. Men and women have never worked side by side, ever. Maybe on the farms when you were like. . . Maybe one person is in the potato field and the other one is over here doing tomatoes, or whatever.

You had families working side by side, exhausted with each other. No time to have any clash of this. It was a collaborative effort on farms and so on. Never in all of human history have men and women been working side by side. And women are now. . . The pressure about Silicon Valley - they’re all so sexist, they don’t allow women in, and so on. Men are being men in Silicon Valley.

Peterson: Especially the engineers.

Paglia: And the women are demanding that. . . ‘Oh, this is terrible, you’re being sexist.’ Maybe the sexes have their own particular form of rhetoric, their own particular form of identity. Maybe we need to reexamine this business about. . . Maybe we have

to perhaps accept some degree of tension and conflict between the sexes in a work

environment.

I don’t mean harassment — I’m talking about women feeling disrespected. Somehow their opinions, when they express them, are not taken seriously. Even Hillary Clinton is complaining ‘When a woman writes something online she’s attacked immediately!!!’ —

Everyone is attacked online!

What are you talking about? 

The world is tough. The world is competitive. 

Identity is honed by conflict. The idea that there should be no conflict, that we have to be in this bath of approbation. . . It’s infantile.

Peterson: That’s right. It’s absolutely infantile.