I came across a fascinating podcast video put out online on 1/25/2023 by conservative host, Jake Julius of rattlesnaketv. I took notes on this 30-minute snippet from a two-hour debate on political correctness held on 5/5/2018; the debaters defending political correctness were Michael Eric Dyson and Michelle Goldberg; Stephen Fry and Jordan Peterson were opposing political correctness. I will respond to noted content.
To make it more complicated, Jake Julius interrupts the snippet periodically to make brief remarks clarifying what the debaters are saying. He is moderate and fair and does not strain to make Peterson and Fry seems smarter or morally superior to Dyson and Goldberg.
What pleases me and give me hope is that Jake Julius completely understands Peterson’s moderate, pro-Western, conservative point of view: if Julius gets it, then the 2.9 million viewer are getting it, and perhaps Westerners and Americans are finally waking up to the lethal dangers of cultural Marxism, so that we can yet save America and ultimately the world.
Jake Julius (Jake after this) makes some entry remarks before running the video: “Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and British actor and activist Stephen Fry take on blogger Michelle Goldberg and American political commentator Michael Eric Dyson in a free debate about political correctness in modern society.
Jordan Peterson and Stephen Fry destroy an angry intellectual (This is Mike Dyson, Ed Notes.)”
This is not a debate between left and right but a debate between critical thinking and activism.”
My response: Jake is sensible: neither the left or the right hold a monopoly on critical thinking nor on foolish activism. I like the way he uses these words and he implicitly defines, and openly ascribes these terms in accurate, objective, fair ways—referring to Goldberg and Dyson as activists and to Peterson and Fry as critical thinkers.
My interpretation of Jake’s implicit definition of critical thinking is that the critical thinker, conservative or liberal, has a moderate, logical lens through which he characterizes ideologies, noting their good points and their bad points. The moderate or impartial critical thinker would size up and treat a liberal as a person worthy of praise or blame when warranted by personal behavior, not their ideological stances.
My interpretation of his implicit definition of an activist is that the activist (These two happen to be cultural Marxists, woke, social justice warriors and ideologues, but this definition would also apply to an identitarian true believer on the alt-right or fascist end of the spectrum.) is an extremist, an ideologue, a subjective, emotional enthusiast, a black and white thinker who regards his ideology and its supporters as always right, always morally perfect, and the opposition as fanatical, unreasonable, always wrong, and rotten to the core without redemption, probably born that way, so horrible and foolish.
Michael Dyson (M after this) is the first speaker: “There are no bigger snowflakes than white males that complain, ‘Mommy, Mommy, they won’t let us play and have everything we used to have, back when we were right, racist, patriarchal, and dominant: we hated gays, lesbians, transexuals. You have to share. This ain’t your world. It is everybody’s world.
Let me tell you the story of the fish in the water. The fish did not know they were swimming in water, and the dominant did not know they were dominant. (Ed Note: the dominant just assume that they are dominant because that is the natural order of things, that is how it is and that is how it should always be, but the Leftists are challenging that ‘presumption of permanent privilege’.).
The best thing the devil did was to make people believe that he did not exist, and that is how it is with white racism. (Ed Note: Yes, the devil is most effective by working in secret; if we do not know he exists, and how he works, we cannot stop him from taking over the world. Dyson is equating whites with being blue-eyed devils, the epitome of evil on earth, and that we own the world, and our cruel unjust dominance, if we can just deny it exists, cannot be challenged or overturned, so we whites can continue to be racist, unjust and evil, and we can even feel virtuous though that it is a total lie and fraud as are we, from Dyson’s point of view.)”
Jake: “If you are white and have a problem with the cultural Marxist narrative (Ed Note: Jake is offering this statement as representing how Dyson is characterizing and chiding white listeners offended by his accusing whites of being systemic, innate, unchangeable, total racists.) going on in our society, the only reason for that is you want to go back to the old days of suppression of minority groups.
Behind your façade you are not just for living and let living; that you do not care what is the color of someone’s skin, who they sleep with: under that façade is a cunning plan, and Mike Tyson has your number.
If you watched this video (Ed Note: without foreknowledge about cultural Marxism) Dyson would make a lot of sense to you. The audience were pro-Dyson at the beginning but by the end of the debate Jordan Peterson and Stephen Fry had won them over.”
Jordan Peterson speaks (J after this): “I think this is one of the primordial sins of identity politics players—on both the Left and the Right—let us be clear about that. I’m no fan of identitarian politics. Playing the group identity game runs the risk of tribalism, on the Left or Right.”
My response: Jordan Peterson implies but never mentions that the individual, the critical thinker, the reasonable, impartial observer are moderate or good and that the group, the fanatic, the zealous ideologue and activist, the enthusiastic partisan peddling his holy cause are extreme, immoderate and evil, but these appear to be his presuppositions and mine, through which we want people to avoid becoming extremists, passionate devotees of their holy cause, their ism and sacred ideology, the mass movement that they have joined and are shoving down the throats of everyone across the whole earth.
Peterson often decries tribalism—group versus group, and warns that identitarian politics and the group identity game wholeheartedly adopted and engaged in by the woke Left and alt-right white supremacists (very few in number and without followers or prospects), as the source of the murderous regimes and genocides of the 20th century.
Peterson also alerted me to the fact that the postmodernist Marxist view the world as only group versus group and the ontological substrata of all life and reality is an eternal battle between quarreling tribes for raw power and supremacy.
Peterson regards that worldview as false, cynical, dangerous, and evil. There are always such forces at work in the world, but people can also be lawful, civil towards each other, cooperate and build a peaceful, free, civilized, lawful democracy where all gain wealth and happiness, and that is the society we must work towards. The West provides us with that world better than anyone else, and the Leftist and Alt-Right identitarians hate all that is good, and they seek wipe it out, and replace it with their Utopian hells on earth.
J: “Group rights is problematic. It is the obverse of individual rights is individual responsibility. You can hold an individual responsible and the individual can be responsible. How do you hold groups responsible? First of all, it flies in the face of Western justice predicated on the idea of individual innocence and individual guilt. You cannot assign group guilt.
We saw many times in the 20th century what happened when the concept of group guilt gained hold in polities and their justice systems. It was catastrophic.
Okay, you want group rights. Where is the group responsibility? How do you hold your group responsible? We don’t want to talk about that. We are too busy rectifying historical injustices hypothetical and otherwise. That is not to say there were not plenty of horrible historical injustices. How to resolve those injustice is not by group rights with an absolutely catastrophic historical record in my opinion.”
My response: Identitarians on the Left hide behind love, compassion, reforming and seeking to rectify historical injustices by assigning group rights as the noble downtrodden to be elevated at the expense of identified opposing groups assigned group guilt, to be punished, discriminated against, subjugated, and perhaps liquidated.
The purveyors and leaders of group rights radical or revolutionary movements—or fascist reactionary movements—disguise their true objective, immoral gathering of absolute power and wealth unto themselves—behind their holy cause.
Assigning group guilt does not move us away from dark altruism, groupism and collectivism towards genuine reform of historical injustice. We can assign to groups, of any sort, be they in the alleged or actual role of being the oppressing groups or the oppressed groups, group responsibility for going too far in their censoring free speech and free thought, in their use of violence, war, terrorism, rioting and violence to swarm societies and grab control.
Jordan is reminding the audience that only as sovereign individuals can reform be brought to a people. We may execute a few leaders and imprison a few of the worst psychopaths—like done with the Nazis after World War II—but we leave the German people alone, though their collective guilt and individual guilt for letting Hitler stay in power is factual.
We do not want the new, victorious group or party, and its ruler, like Franco in Spain, when triumphant in the late 30s, to execute thousands or tens of thousands of the defeated Leftist opposition, as he did.
Peterson is for Western individualism, for individual rights as opposed to true believers on the Left and Right that see the problems of the world in terms of collectivism, group rights, group-living, group morality (altruism-collectivism), group identity. These Communist and Fascist radicals view solutions as workable only in terms of collectivism, group rights, group-living, group morality (altruism-collectivism), group-living, group identity, and a strong man or dictatorship of the proletariat to win and hold the country subject to its ideology and values, as a totalitarian polity and police state.
I go farther than Peterson, the Christian and scientist. He is for individual rights and individual responsibility as citizens in a capitalist democracy, parliamentarian or congressional like US: that is a good, necessary start but is morally and politically insufficient to bring about the Western counterrevolution to cultural Marxism, espoused by Jordan, Chris Rufo, et. al.
I am for individual morality (egoism-individualism) but Peterson is for modified individual morality more altruist than Ayn-Randian (altruism-individualism).
I support individual identity as the primary emphasis with group identity as the secondary emphasis. Jordan supports group identity as the primary emphasis with individual identity as the secondary ethical, cultural, economic, and political emphasis.
I favor individual rights over group rights, but Jordan seems more conservative now, likely weighing individual rights and group rights as of equal emphasis as is typical of altruistic Christians—by contrast, I am an egoist Christian and egoistic polytheist.
I favor individual-living as the primary mode of social existing and group-living as the minority emphasis in social arrangements. Individual-living is socially and familially optimal for teaching the young that their life-long, personal telos or obligation from the good deities, one of which it is advisable that they worship and converse with, is to self-realize as cooperating, law-abiding, peaceful seeking their interests in happiness, plenty and liberty, empowered by the self, by God, by natural law, and by the Constitution to live as anarchist individuators supercitizens in this free market constitutional republic. That is the only way to rectify historical injustices.
I suspect that Jordan is for group-living. He and Dennis Prager have taught me so much, and that debt is huge and significant, but now, though I follow them still, my Mavellonialist morality and philosophy offers more than they do.
Stephen Fry (F after this): “The reason that Brexit in Britain and Trump and national movements all over Europe, now energized, are not a turn to the right (Ed Note: Leftists accuse any turn to the right as being nativist, white supremacist, white nationalist, and fascist. Those positions exist but the people are being democratic and will stay democratic and that is what Fry is bring up and agrees with.) but due to a catastrophic failure on the Left.
I am still a Leftist (Ed Note: Fry is a gay atheist.) but I promote my cause politically through the right channels, not through the channels of education (Ed Note: Activist academics brainwashing youths.) or political correctness.
Fight openly for what you believe. Political correctness is not working, and it offends the masses that are turning to the right. You are recruiting agents for the right.”
Jake: “Fry is an atheist and a Leftie, but he is absolutely brilliant, not afraid to disagree and have a conversation. He is introspective and notes when the Left has gone too far. Jordan and Fry attack the opposition’s ideas not the opposing people as people.”
My response: Jordan and Fry attack oppositional ideas, but Mike Dyson attacks not only the ideas of the opposition, but uses ad hominem attacks against them too, hitting below the belt.
We need to recognize that true believers, ideologues, and postmodernists seek to win by using every tactic, fair or foul, to gain the upper hand and win an argument.
M; “I agree with you about individualism. (Ed Note: I doubt that seriously. For Leftists, the individual is a mere avatar of his group identity, and he finds liberty only in serving the collective.). What I am saying to you we have not been permitted to be individuals. We have not been allowed to express our personalities and autonomy. When a cop rolls up onto me in a park and shoots me, while not at the same time shooting a white kid just because he is white, we black and other minorities are not being treated as individuals.
Women too as a group are treated with misogyny by sexist, patriarchal men and that discrimination is a group dynamism, not treated as individuals. If we get beyond the unfair benefits of those on the right have gotten from their group identity than we can move beyond it (Ed Note: Group identity as the problem of oppressor groups versus oppressed groups required legal protection of oppressed groups by legislating limits on the ‘oppressor groups’ in the name of justice, equality, righting things, all interpreted through group identities.).
America is so racist says the great American philosopher Beyonce Knowles that if you challenge its racism, you are challenging America. We are instead challenging inequality, the refusal to seem me as an individual. After you see me as an individual, we will see.”
Jake: “Dyson is a postmodernist. He speaks loud and fast and uses big words. He pulls the victim card and makes everything about power and oppression. He puts all these things together. Peterson and Fry are smarter than him and see through this postmodernist rhetoric.”
J: “Let us assume for a minute that I have gained benefit from my white privilege. That is fine. What percent of my present level of attainment is due to my white privilege? Do you mean 5%, 15%. 75% and what do you propose that I do about it? How about a tax on my privilege?”
My response: Dyson is accusing Jordan of being quite successful due to his white privilege, not due to his individual effort and hard work. Jordan is for individual identity, that each individual is responsible for his success or failure, and group identity is not causal. Jordan is denying that his personal identity has much to do with his group identities.
Ideologues like Dyson push group identity as the problem and group identity solutions. They talk justice and compassion, but deep down they are out for raw power, and seek to take the world back to feudalism is 1463 where group identity was all, all were collective and ruled by a king or lord as serfs. The intellectual elites like Dyson would rule the masses again, while bowing to the king or lord to stay in power as part of the ruling elite. This is their only, and fundamental objective; intellectuals do not mean the masses well at all—they are not nice people.
M: “You talking great shit right now.”
J: “Let us be precise. How would you on the Left define going too far for you didn’t like equality of outcome. You tell me how to dispense with my white privilege and exchange me when the Left has gone too far and they clearly can. This debate is not about political correctness. It is about the Left going too far so we can identify that so the reasonable Left can be ascendant again.”
My response: I hope to mix Eric Hoffer’s rich understanding of mass movements, fanaticism, and collectivism with the implied preference in Hoffer’s resorting to individual movement, moderation and individual enterprise and undertaking as the ideal way to solve social problem.
I would like to introduce Hoffer’s rich understanding and Mavellonialist morality to serve as a bulwark against the Left going to far, as it is now a mass movement, with Marx as God, Communism as the religion or holy cause, and the totalitarian state as the secular Vatican set up to run the victorious revolution, once it is instantiated.
Jordan does not label the Left going to far as the behavior of adherents of a holy cause on the march in their current mass movement, but I believe that is what he is referring to.
Jake: “Jordan points to Fry as an example of the reasonable Left, drowned out by louder militants.
How does Peterson’s white privilege bias block him from being allowed to see or debate, to get an equal voice?”
M: “That is terminologically implicit in the problem, beginning at the point of your question: how does Jordan Peterson get his equality back? Really? Jordan Peterson #1 on Twitter. Number 1 best seller. This is what I am talking about. Why the rage, bro? You have done well but you are a mad, mean white man and you are going to get us right. I have never heard so much whining as I hear from snowflakes on this stage. There is so much whining you could start a vineyard.
Empirically and precisely, I say, what about white privilege. Your question is pseudoscientific, dismissive, non-empirical and without justification. The truth is: White privilege does not act according to quantifiable segments. It is about the degree to which we as a society are willing to grapple with ideals of freedom, justice and equality upon which this nation is based.
We are talking about a collective identity. Are you Canadian? Or are you that by yourself or are you part of a group? When America formed its union, it did so against another group.
The reality is those that are part of a group identity and group politics that denied the legitimacy of the (Ed Note: oppressed groups) other groups. The (Ed Note: oppressor groups resent the oppressed groups, Dyson insists, for the oppressed stirring the pot.) group resents these other groups. All I am asking is equality of opportunity and equal outcomes, along with the hackneyed ideas of the halcyon Civil Rights days, seeking real equality of opportunity or equality of outcome.
The oppressed were once enslaved, now free, now liberated into oppression with no means or skills to compete. LBJ said blacks started 100 years behind. I think Jordan Peterson is not suffering anything but his sense of entitlement and resentment, and his own privilege is invisible to him. It is on display with intensity and ferocity on this stage.”
J: The Left goes too far when it engages in violence: that is not a sufficient response. The Left needs to admit (Ed Note: My words, needs to admit added for clarification.) that their set of ideas led to a catastrophes of the 20th century.”
My response: The mass movements of the 20th century grew out of dangerous group identity (The individual only exists as a member of a group and as an oppressed, exploited, enslaved peon, reverent and deferential to the king or dictator, ruling all a head of an all-powerful state.) politics, altruist-collectivist morality, and a willingness to let the government tell the people how to live.
We need to limit how far the Left and the Right can go, to save future generations.
J: “Leftist ideas led to genocide in the 20th century. It is not enough just to be against violence and for justice. Decent people do not want violence and they do want justice. I’ve had advantages and disadvantages. You know nothing about my background because I am a mean white man.
Let me repeat: I have no answer yet for (1) when does the Left go too far? (2) It is conceivable that I am a mean man meaner than some then less mean than others but that is how race got dragged into that remark. It is a better exemplar of what is wrong with the Left than anything else that could have happened.”
M: “I imagine the hurt, anxiety and insult that you feel.”
J: “I am not a victim. I do not feel hurt. I feel appalled.”
M: “You are a racist.”
Jake: “Here we see critical thinking versus activism. Peterson and Fry are more than willing to accept the flaws on their side. Look at the activists: they can’t admit any fault on their side.”
My response: Peterson and Fry are critical thinkers. They rate people as individuals. They see ideas as good or bad based on their content, not within the context of applied ideological purity They see flaws on the Right as well as on the Left.
Dyson and Goldberg are ideological activists, fanatical, true-believing Marxists. There are no flaws in their movement: its members, presuppositions and doctrines are infallible and without fault. The adherents of opposing views are without merit and lack all truth and virtue.
Goldberg: “Political correctness is for social change, but you want me to define when the Left goes too far. Do you want me to deny Marxist categories?”
J: It is up to you.”
Goldberg: “The Left goes too far when it is violent or censorious, shutting people down and denying them a platform. What do you want?
J: I want you to go deeper. I want to contend with the set of Left-wing ideas that produced all the Left-wing pathologies of the 20th century, and to define how you think Left-wing thinking has gone too far and it obviously has.”
M: “Has the right-wing gone too far?”
J: “Of course, Auschwitz.”
M: How about more recent examples?”
J: “I do not like identity politics and have been against it for 30 years.”
Jake: “Dyson was not answering Peterson to explain where the Left has gone too far. Instead, he keeps pushing Peterson to produce examples of right-wing excess.”
My response: Dyson will not admit to murderous Left-wing, implying there are none, but he is only too willing to get Jordan to confess to right-wing excesses, but Jordan sees through this ploy and will counter.
Neither Dyson nor Goldberg come forward with strong, specific examples of the Left going too far. Goldberg did not want to renounce her Marxist categories. She cannot do that.
Jordan is pointing out that bad ideas are upstream from demagogues, dictators and spellbinding gurus peddling doctrines that animate energized masses serving as the adherents of mass movements. These lead to violence, suppression, censorship, war, revolution and the installation of totalitarian governments, and the rights and perhaps lives of millions of subject are threatened or harmed. Bad ideas lead to bad behavior, and good ideas lead to better human behavior.
Jake: “If talking to Leftists and they don’t understand that ideas of socialism and Communism inherently bad, and we have receipts for it, you know you are dealing with an ideologue. The same applies to ideologues in favor of ethnonationalism, racial supremacy or fascism, and we have the receipts for them too.”
F: “This has been a fascinating mixture of cultures. I know huckstering, snake-oil, pulpit talk when I hear it. We need not take ourselves so seriously. We should not feel so certain. We should exchange passionate ideas but feel some doubt about the ideas.”
Jake: “Fry and Peterson use big words but make what they say understandable to the public. Dyson uses big words to obscure, to confuse and to intimidate.”
D: “You are just saying that blacks are not smart and are without verbal facility, just settling for hucksterism, snake oil and condescension from white males.”
Jake: “Dyson is playing the race and victim card.”
My response: Ideologues often do not realize that their holy cause is empty, false and cruel, but some of its advocates realize this, but cynically talk the talk of a true-believer, using the cause as a vehicle to gather power and wealth to themselves.
Jake: “Dyson sees race, power and oppression everywhere, while the other debaters can talk without race being the center of every conversation. This is a sickness.
J: “It is part and parcel of this ideological catastrophe, of political correctness . One is for equality of outcome if one has any sense, even if one is selfish. One is best served by allowing the self access to the multiplicitous talents of all. To discriminate against others for arbitrary reasons unrelated to competence is abhorrent. Historic inequity is the way to address inequity; indeed, it will only make it worse.”
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