Jordan Peterson vs. Extinction Rebellion: Stupid vs. Evil.

we don't associate extremism with the
outward appearance of academic responsibilities we don't associate extremism with the image of a gray-haired elderly white man with a PhD and yet extremism often arises from the academic university context and the other hand old and outmoded forms of extremism unfashionable forms of extremism like communism well the university setting is often where those extremist views go to die it's often where they linger longest and where seemingly respectable gray-haired men with PhDs try to influence a new generation with their old and outmoded extremist views so you can't you can't judge these things on the basis of appearance alone in this video we're gonna examine briefly two different extremist views on climate change one represented by dr. Peterson and the other by the leaders of England's extinction rebellion it's like okay well what are we gonna do about global warming well good luck figuring that out I don't see a solution on the horizon I look at beyond long Berg's work I really liked the or in long burg I think he's a real genius what Bloomberg did was gather a team of teams of economists multiple teams some of whom were Nobel prize-winning economists he had them assemble teams he had them rank order development goals in terms of the return on investment all of the teams that he averaged across the teams and came up with a final list and and addressing global warming wasn't even on the list you know maybe if you if you increase child nutrition enough and and you produce another I don't know 10 million geniuses as a consequence of that and maybe well then I'll figure out what to do about global warming I'm not making this video to try and make how I'm some sort of hero I'm just saying I'm in prison and the fact of the matter is other things being equal it's not going to be a big deal and also like it's not as big a deal as like being a parent right having a baby and all that stuff because with one of my daughter's I was like but every nigh to three o'clock in the morning walking are up and down carrying her up and down the kitchen I'm sure many people we've got kids remember this and all you're thinking for five or ten years is when the hell am I gonna get to sleep so compared with all that right gang prison is no big deal like the whole conventional campaigning thing is not working it hasn't worked 30 years and it's not gonna work it's just not gonna happen this is massive how this is gonna work is through mass economic disruption economic disruption economic disruption is breaking down the door it's not pretty it's not like well fall through [Music] I've got myself into prison because that's what's necessary and the fact of the matter is I'm sure there's loads of people watching this video have loads of people out there that are making all these excuses and they're just excuses you know I can't go to prison all that sort of stuff you know because of my family because of my career well the fact of the matter is like you could get arrested and go to prison and you could lose your job if you lose a job like then you lose job you get another one it's not the end of the world you know you talk to your partner you talk to your family maybe you lose your partner it's not the end of the world you know life is hard people lose their jobs all the time people split up all the time it's not the end of the world what's the end of the world is the end of the world so and we're not gonna do a damn thing about it either so it doesn't really matter so well what are we gonna do you're gonna stop like having to eat you gonna stop having electricity gonna stop driving your cars you're gonna stop taking trains it's like you're not gonna stop using your iphones you're not gonna do any of that and no wonder so so we have this cliche in english that a man with a hammer is looking at every problem as if it were a nail i think that cliche very imperfectly describes a profound and ongoing problem we have in politics which is that people become attached to a solution they think of that solution in very hallowed ideological terms and then they look around at the problem they're looking for any excuse to apply propound advance that solution that is very clearly the case with the extremism of extinction rebellion their whole discourse about anti capitalism their whole discourse about tearing down the government and end system that was a hammer they already had in their pocket as a bunch of left-wing hooligans that was that was a methodology they were already emotionally attached to and then they see climate change and they're like oh here's a chance to show everyone this hammer we've got by beeping on this nail now we have an interesting contrast here it's Jordan Peterson I can't say it's a hammer he's clinging on to me the hammer is a little bit too active and muscular an image of being attached to a a methodology or a way of life but this guy is just completely committed to maintaining the bourgeois status quo there is just no doubt in his mind that it's impossible to have a society in which people do not have cellular phones and cars and all these other things all the other I don't know enjoyable accoutrement of Western civilization specifically for the wealthier social classes now I've lived in communist countries and Laos and Cambodia both were in a situation of kind of post war post communist devastation and you can learn a lot from that scenario I never lived in Cuba I knew one guy who lived in Cuba talked to me not two different guys talked to me of what life in Cuba was like but you know one of the funny patterns you see in those countries were at that time at least relatively low-tech relatively simple life so there are tons of people who prefer that way of life you'll meet people from Sweden and Denmark who move there and who say that they're happy not owning a car you know they're happy not having even air conditioning and so on they may be literally living in a in a grass hut with either no electricity or very limited electricity now of course we're not talking about outright in an Urkel primitivism we're not talking about returning to surviving in Bronze Age conditions those people from Sweden and Denmark and Germany who came to live on Tara Lee in third world conditions in a village they would be able to take a short trip to a major city and get dentistry get access to a dentist and that dentist office would have electricity and modern standards of Hygiene and modern medical science they'd be able to take a short trip to have access to a hospital and those things when they wanted it but it was not uncommon it wasn't hard at all to find people who had rejected the kind of life that dr. Drew Peterson is endorsing here and he were much happier living by the sight of a river and bathing in the river every day instead of bathing in a proper shower living in much more primitive conditions and we're not gonna do a damn thing about it either so it doesn't really matter so well what are we gonna do you're gonna stop like having to eat you gonna stop having electricity you're gonna stop driving your cars you're gonna stop taking trains it's like you're not gonna stop using your iPhones you're not gonna do any of that and no wonder so so the flip side of that is whenever you look at these places whether it's save Laos or Cuba you also have to look at the brutal reality of what it is that most people appreciate in terms of the enjoyment of life in terms of the sensual pleasures that define life I do not take myself as a standard for this when I lived in inventions the capital city of Laos when I lived in that part of the world I was riding my bicycle back and forth to the archives back and forth to the library I was spending my time studying books politics history philosophy languages and also by the way going to museums and archaeological sites you know that was what I liked to do at the time okay let's be brutally honest about what it is most people most people appreciate about life in Laos or life in Cuba okay alcohol drugs prostitution a lot of prostitution in both of these countries gambling this is not what I do is my time it's not what I appreciate but when you look at the sensual indulgences that really matter to people that they really found we're including you know the exercise of their sexual freedom in my case the exercise of my intellectual freedom my intellectual curiosity the pursuit of Education the pursuit of learning but for most other people that's a much lower priority so what you have to recognize is that even okay even Cuba allows both you know Cuba has jazz music Laos they have their own local traditional music people care about music and culture in ways that they can participate in I don't actually think the bulk of humanity is so attached to individual car ownership to commuting by car as someone like dr. Jordan Peterson you know presumes now I also do not adopt the extremist view that somehow the automobile and the cellular phone have to disappear from 21st century life in order to solve the climate crisis I think that is pseudoscience in the strictest sense of the term you can do the math and you can figure out that eliminating beef from the human diet just beef without even getting into fish and chicken if you just eliminated beef from the human diet enormous impact and you know if you build more railroads and provide buses there are tremendous differences we can make without taking away people's cellular phones you know Congress prison all that sort of stuff you know because of my family because of my career if you lose your job like then you lose job you get another one it's not the end of the world you know you talk to your partner you talk to your family maybe you lose your partner it's not the end of the world you know life is hard people lose their jobs all the time people split up all the time that's not the end of the world what's the end of the world is the end of the world the hammer is not very well suited to the nail in fact the solution they're proposing is wildly laughably irrelevant to the particular problem and as you can see they take this all the way they are extremists in that video clip they were explained to you why you should be perfectly happy to go to jail you should get over your excuses for why it is you you don't want to go to prison let me tell you something guys the type of activism extinction rebellion is engaged in it's ineffective to say the least but about the single most ineffective thing you can do with your time is sitting in a prison cell got a message here from ODS he's in university studying something like ecology or politics of I don't know exactly what major is something along these lines he waits to be saying your video kind of woke me up again from a false perception of what the object of climate change really is in my class alone there are three climate activists that organized the so-called climate strikes in my city to gain awareness of the authorities quote system change not climate change close quote you know the deal there are so many more effective and worthwhile ways to change local government policy in Switzerland than to strike school and protest in the streets for two hours at a time many times ever get pause here the point is here Switzerland is a real democracy they may be the best democracy in the world it was the quality of the system be a separate video to evaluate that who's got a better democratic system Switzerland or suite and go through the Denmark go through the leading lights for having a well well-run democratic system here in Taiwan we have a pretty good Democrat existence too by the way we might rank in the top ten here in Taiwan but regardless your situation is fundamentally different in Switzerland where the government is open to hearing your voice where you can influence government policy in many ways peacefully by participating in the democratic system that's completely different from the situation in Saudi Arabia okay sorry Arabia is an outright dictatorship the situation in communist China which is in some ways a dictatorship but in some ways a very different culture for public politics than Saudi Arabia so there were degrees of despotism there are degrees of dictatorship and you have to recognize how much more productively you could be spending your time if you are lucky enough to live in a well-functioning democratic system like Switzer but what's the problem here the problem is that these protesters they've got a hammer and they're looking for a nail they're already emotionally attached to this fixed idea the hallowed image of protesting in the streets and they're taking that idealized notion of street protests and they're applying it to this you know quote unquote system change this is probably just a new coat of paint over the old ante capitalism this is crypto Marxism crypto communism anti capitalism and trying to say well let's not talk about ecology let's just talk about bringing down the cool cool capitalist system alright so again attachment to the the method and then the particular problem in this case an ecological problem just becomes an excuse to propound that radical and radicalizing method I have a geography teacher who wants to look at collapse ology and Marxism to learn about society's problems while telling us students every second lesson about how bleak society's future is even knowing all the facts frankly better than everyone around me he's even aware of the too cynical solutions I gave in that video starting about practical technological solutions for climate change I somehow got lured into some of the motivating forces of the lies told about climate change that it's all about saving society from imminent collapse I was the one to point out to these activists what I consider the gravest most irreversible threat to the planet ocean acidification but I still somehow got dissuaded from its importance so you see how this works you live in a social situation where certain types of attitudes are being valorized are being encouraged and when those attitudes are linked to something as alarming and motivating as the end of the world you will inevitably start to get some of the same behaviors that we associate with fringe cult groups where human beings are behaving in a manner that reflects the fact that they believe the world is about to end that's exactly the scenario that extinction rebellion has embraced with gusto you know maybe if you if you increase child nutrition enough and and you produce another I don't know 10 million geniuses as a consequence of that and maybe we'll never figure out what to do about global warming what dr. jordan peterson is attached to here is an idea of what it is to have a meaningful life of what it is to have a happy life and he wants to I mean to his credit he wants to extend that to more of the world he talks about how he wants poverty-stricken people in Africa to have this same quality of life for them to also have cars and cellular phones they can also live a life like people in Detroit having to drive an hour and a half to get anywhere and park in a horrible parking lot in front of a big-box store whoo the assumption that America's pattern of did all that's what third-world countries need is deeply defined but anyway he's attached to a very different kind of solution and then is misperceiving the problem in relation to that preconceived and Hallowed solution both of these forms of extremism are predicated upon very fundamental errors one of them is predicated on an emotional attachment to radicalism and the other is predicated on a false attachment to a particular type of life of reckless self-centered self-indulgence I think the reality is if you even look at the type of self-indulgence that really matters to people with an open mind you'll realize that there are people in third-world countries who do live good a good quality of life a meaningful life a rewarding life both from their own perspective and from ours people like to disrespect my truth but the fact is that you know my name is I don't know