Marxism: Zizek/Peterson: Official Video — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 7:50Good evening and welcome to the Sony Center for Performing Arts.
2. 7:56Please note: during tonight's presentation,
3. 7:59video, audio, and flash photography is prohibited
4. 8:04and we have a strict zero tolerance policy for any heckling or disruptions
5. 8:18And now, please welcome
6. 8:22your host and moderator,
7. 8:25President of Ralston College
8. 8:27Dr. Stephen Blackwood.
9. 8:38Thank you.
10. 8:40A warm welcome to all of you here this evening,
11. 8:43both those here in the theater in Toronto and those following online.
12. 8:49You know, it's not very often that you see a country's
13. 8:53largest theater packed for an intellectual debate.
14. 8:57But that's what we're all here for tonight.
15. 9:00Please join me
16. 9:08Please join me in welcoming to the stage
17. 9:10Dr. Slavoj Žižek and Dr. Jordan Peterson.
18. 9:38Just a few words of introduction.
19. 9:41There can be few things I think now more urgent and necessary
20. 9:48in an age of reactionary, partisan allegiance and degraded civil discourse,
21. 9:56than real thinking about hard questions.
22. 10:00The very premise of tonight's event is that we all participate
23. 10:06in the life of thought,
24. 10:09not merely opinion or prejudice
25. 10:13but the realm of truth, accessed through evidence and argument.
26. 10:20But these two towering figures of different disciplines and domains
27. 10:28share more than a commitment to thinking itself.
28. 10:33They are both highly tuned to ideology and the mechanisms of power.
29. 10:41And yet, they are not principally political thinkers.
30. 10:47They are both concerned with more fundamental matters: meaning, truth, freedom.
31. 10:54So it seems to me likely that we will see tonight not only deep differences,
32. 10:59but also surprising agreement on deep questions.
33. 11:05Dr. Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher. He has not one but two doctoral degrees,
34. 11:12one in philosophy,
35. 11:21one in philosophy from the University of Ljubljana,
36. 11:24and a second in psychoanalysis from University --
37. 11:28[crowd cheering]
38. 11:31Let's hear it for psychoanalysis!
39. 11:35From the University of Paris VIII.
40. 11:37He is now a professor at the Institute of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana
41. 11:43and the director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London.
42. 11:50He has published more than three dozen books,
43. 11:54many on the most seminal philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries.
44. 11:59He is a dazzling theorist with extraordinary range,
45. 12:04a global figure for decades,
46. 12:06he turns again and again with dialectical power to
47. 12:12radical questions of emancipation, subjectivity, and art.
48. 12:19[crowd cheering]
49. 12:29[crowd laughing]
50. 12:36Dr. Jordan Peterson is an academic and clinical --
51. 12:40[crowd cheering]
52. 12:47an academic and clinical psychologist.
53. 12:49His doctorate was awarded by McGill University and he was subsequently
54. 12:54[crowd cheering]
55. 12:56[laughter]
56. 12:58We've got some McGill graduates out here.
57. 13:01He was subsequently professor of psychology at Harvard University
58. 13:05and then the University of Toronto where he is today.
59. 13:09[cheering]
60. 13:13The author of two books and well over a hundred academic articles,
61. 13:17Dr. Peterson's intellectual roots likewise lie in the 19th and early 20th centuries,
62. 13:25where his reading of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and above all Carl Jung
63. 13:30inform his interpretation of ancient myths, of 20th century totalitarianism,
64. 13:37and especially his endeavor to counter contemporary nihilism.
65. 13:42His "12 Rules for Life" is a global bestseller, and his lectures and podcasts are followed by millions around the world.
66. 13:51[cheering and applause]
67. 14:00Both Dr. Žižek and Peterson transcend their titles, their disciplines, and the academy.
68. 14:08Just as this debate, we hope, will transcend purely economic questions
69. 14:14by situating those in the frame of happiness --
70. 14:18of human flourishing itself.
71. 14:22We're in for quite a night.
72. 14:24A quick word about format:
73. 14:27each of our debaters will have 30 minutes to make a substantial opening statement,
74. 14:33to lay out an argument.
75. 14:35Dr. Peterson first followed by Dr. Žižek.
76. 14:39Each will then have, in the same order, 10 minutes to reply.
77. 14:44I will then moderate 45 minutes or so of questions, many of which
78. 14:50will come from you, the audience, both here in Toronto and online.
79. 14:56With that, let's get underway.
80. 14:59Please join me in welcoming Dr. Jordan Peterson for the first opening statement.
81. 15:04[applause]
82. 15:16Well, thank you for that insanely enthusiastic welcome,
83. 15:21for the entire event and also for being here.
84. 15:23I have to tell you first that this event,
85. 15:28and I suppose my life in some sense,
86. 15:30hit a new milestone that I was just made aware of by a stagehand today backstage
87. 15:36who informed me that last week, the tickets for this event
88. 15:40were being scalped online at a higher price
89. 15:44than the tickets for the Leaf's playoff games.
90. 15:47[cheering]
91. 15:48[Peterson laughing]
92. 15:54So I dunno what to make of that.
93. 15:58Alright. So. How did I prepare for this?
94. 16:02Uhm.
95. 16:03I went -- I familiarized myself to the degree that it was possible
96. 16:07with Slavoj Žižek's work,
97. 16:09and that wasn't that possible because he has a lot of work and he's a very original thinker
98. 16:14and this debate was put together in relatively short order.
99. 16:17And what I did instead was return to what I regarded as the original cause of all the trouble, let's say,
100. 16:23which was the Communist Manifesto,
101. 16:25[audience laughing]
102. 16:26-- and what I attempted to do --
103. 16:28because that's Marx, and we're here to talk about Marxism, let's say,
104. 16:32and, umm...
105. 16:34What I tried to do was read it,
106. 16:37and to read something you don't just follow the words and follow the meaning,
107. 16:43but you take apart the sentences and you ask yourself,
108. 16:47at this level of phrase and at the level of sentence and at the level of paragraph,
109. 16:52"Is this true? Are there counterarguments that can be put forward that are credible?"
110. 16:59"Is this solid thinking?"
111. 17:01And I have to tell you, and I'm not trying to be flippant here,
112. 17:06that I have rarely read a tract
113. 17:09-- now I read it when I was 18, it was a long time ago. That's 40 years ago.
114. 17:13I've rarely read a tract that made as many errors per sentence --
115. 17:18conceptual errors per sentence as the Communist Manifesto.
116. 17:21It was quite a miraculous re-read.
117. 17:24And it was interesting to think about it psychologically as well because
118. 17:27I've read student papers that were of the same ilk, in some sense,
119. 17:33although I'm not suggesting that they were of the same level of glittering literary brilliance and polemic quality.
120. 17:40And I also understand that the Communist Manifesto was a call for revolution and not a standard logical argument.
121. 17:46But that notwithstanding, I have some things to say about that author's psychologically.
122. 17:51The first thing is that it doesn't seem to me that either Marx or Engels
123. 17:56grappled with one fundamental -- with this particular fundamental truth
124. 17:59which is that almost all ideas are wrong.
125. 18:04And so, if you --
126. 18:06It doesn't matter if they're your ideas or someone else's ideas,
127. 18:10they're probably wrong,
128. 18:12and even if they strike you with the force of brilliance
129. 18:14your job is to assume, first of all, that they're probably wrong,
130. 18:17and then to assault them with everything you have in your arsenal
131. 18:21and see if they can survive.
132. 18:24And what struck me about the Communist Manifesto was, it was akin to
133. 18:28something Jung said about
134. 18:30typical thinking, and this was the thinking of people who weren't trained to think.
135. 18:33He said that the typical thinker has a thought, it appears to them like an object might appear in a room,
136. 18:40the thought appears, and then they just accept it as true.
137. 18:45They don't go the second step, which is to think about the thinking.
138. 18:51And that's the real essence of critical thinking,
139. 18:53and so that's what you try and teach people in university,
140. 18:56is to read a text and to think about it critically
141. 18:59-- not to destroy the utility of the text, but to separate the wheat from the chaff.
142. 19:04And so what I tried to do when I was reading the Communist Manifest was to separate the wheat from the chaff.
143. 19:10And I'm afraid I've found some wheat, yes, but mostly chaff.
144. 19:14And I'm going to explain why,
145. 19:16umm, hopefully, uhh,
146. 19:18in relatively short order.
147. 19:19So I'm going to outline 10 of the fundamental axioms of the Communist Manifesto.
148. 19:26And so these are truths that are basically held as self-evident by the authors.
149. 19:31They're truths that are presented in some sense as unquestioned, and I'm going to question them
150. 19:37and tell you why I think they're unreliable.
151. 19:42Now, we should remember that this tract was actually written 170 years ago --
152. 19:46that's a long time ago!
153. 19:48And we have learned a fair bit since then about human nature,
154. 19:53about society, about politics, about economics.
155. 19:55There's lots of mysteries left to be solved,
156. 19:59but we are slightly wiser, I presume, than we were at one point and so
157. 20:04you can forgive the authors to some degree for what they didn't know
158. 20:07but that doesn't matter given that the essence of this doctrine
159. 20:13is still held as sacrosanct by a large proportion of
160. 20:18academics.
161. 20:20Probably.
162. 20:21Are among the most -- what would you call? --
163. 20:24guilty of that particular sin.
164. 20:28So, here's proposition number one:
165. 20:311. History is to be viewed primarily as an economic class struggle.
166. 20:37Alright, so let's think about that for a minute.
167. 20:41First of all, the proposition there is that history is primarily to be viewed through an economic lens,
168. 20:47and I think that's a debatable proposition because
169. 20:50there are many other motivations that drive human beings than economics
170. 20:54and those have to be taken into account.
171. 20:56Especially that drive people other than economic competition, like economic cooperation, for example.
172. 21:03And so, that's a problem.
173. 21:05The other problem is that it's not nearly a pessimistic enough description of the actual problem because history
174. 21:14history, this is to give the devil his due,
175. 21:20The idea that one of the driving forces between history is hierarchical struggle is absolutely true.
176. 21:28But the idea that that's actually history is not true, because it's deeper than history,
177. 21:34it's biology itself because organisms of all sorts organize themselves into hierarchies.
178. 21:39And one of the problems with hierarchies is that they tend to arrange themselves into a winner-take-all situation
179. 21:46and so,
180. 21:47and that is implicit in some sense in Marxist thinking because, of course,
181. 21:51Marx believed that in a capitalist society capital would accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
182. 21:57And that actually is in keeping with the nature of hierarchical organizations.
183. 22:01Now, the problem with that isn't so much the fact of
184. 22:07so there's accuracy in the accusation that that is a eternal form of motivation for struggle
185. 22:15but it's an underestimation of the seriousness of the problem
186. 22:18because it attributes it to the structure of human societies rather than the deeper reality
187. 22:24of the existence of hierarchical structures per se,
188. 22:26which as they also characterize the animal kingdom to a large degree are clearly not only human constructions.
189. 22:33And the idea that there's hierarchical cometeition among human beings,
190. 22:38there's evidence for that that goes back at least to the Paleolithic times.
191. 22:42And so that's the next problem, it's that, well,
192. 22:46this ancient problem of hierarchical structure is clearly not attributable to capitalism
193. 22:53because it existed long in human history before capitalism existed
194. 22:59and then it predated human history itself.
195. 23:02So the question then arises, why would you necessarily, at least implicitly,
196. 23:07link the class struggle with capitalism given that it's a far deeper problem?
197. 23:11And now, it's also, you've gotta understand that this is a deeper problem for people on the left,
198. 23:15not just for people on the right.
199. 23:17It is the case that hierarchical structures dispossess those people who are at the bottom
200. 23:22those creatures who are at the bottom, speaking, say of animals.
201. 23:25-- but those people who are at the bottom, and that is a fundamental existential problem.
202. 23:30But the other thing that Marx didn't seem to take into account is that
203. 23:33there are far more reasons that human beings struggle than their economic class struggle
204. 23:40even if you build the hierarchical idea into that, which is a more comprehensive way of thinking about it.
205. 23:46Human beings struggle with themselves, with the malevolence that's inside themselves,
206. 23:50with the evil that they're capable of doing, with the spiritual and psychological warfare that goes on within them,
207. 23:56and we're also actually always at odds with nature, and this never seems to show up in Marx.
208. 24:03And it doesn't show up in Marxism in general. It's as if nature doesn't exist.
209. 24:08The primary conflict, as far as I'm concerned, or a primary conflict
210. 24:12that human beings engage in is the struggle for life in a cruel and harsh natural world.
211. 24:19And it's as if that doesn't exist in the Marxist domain.
212. 24:24"If human beings have a problem it's because there's a class struggle, it's essentially economic"
213. 24:28it's like, no!
214. 24:29Human beings have problems because we come into the life starving and lonesome
215. 24:35and we have to solve that problem continually,
216. 24:37and we make our social arrangements, at least in part, to ameliorate that.
217. 24:41As well as to, well, upon occasion exacerbate it.
218. 24:45And so there's also very little understanding in the Communist Manifesto
219. 24:49that any of the hierarchical organizations that human beings have put together might have a positive element.
220. 24:56And that's an absolute catastrophe because hierarchical structures are actually necessary to solve complicated social problems,
221. 25:03we have to organize ourselves in some manner,
222. 25:05and you have to give the devil his due, and so it is the case that hierarchies dispossess people
223. 25:11and that's a big problem. That's the fundamental problem of inequality.
224. 25:15But it's also the case that hierarchies happen to be a very efficient way of distributing resources
225. 25:19and it's finally the case that human hierarchies are not fundamentally predicated on power.
226. 25:26And I would say the biological/anthropological data on that are crystal clear.
227. 25:31You don't rise to a position of authority that's reliable in a human society primarily by exploiting other people.
228. 25:39It's a very unstable means of obtaining power, so --
229. 25:42[audience jeering]
230. 25:43so that's a problem.
231. 25:47Well, the people who laugh might do it that way.
232. 25:51[laughter, applause]