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.
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