Here’s a short, interesting interview segment of Jordan Peterson with Dave Ramsey talking about why he stopped being a socialist, and how conservatives have trouble articulating their principles.
“I was very young, when I was 16, 13 to 16, I worked with a Socialist Party in the province of Alberta, which is where I grew up. I was fortunate enough to know the leader of the Socialist Party in in my home province of Alberta, who was the only opposition member of parliament in the whole province. It was like 36 conservatives and one socialist, and the only reason the people in my home district voted for this man was because he was a good man. He was a labor leader, and most of the socialists at that time in Canada were former labor leaders, and they did stand at least in part for the genuine interests of the working class.
“I worked with them for a few years, and I got disenchanted, in part, because when I went to the conventions of the party, I met the radical types, and they were the same as they are now. I thought ‘What the hell’s up with you people? You’re just bitter and resentful.'”
“You claim to be caring for the poor but that’s just a lie. You’re just bitter and resentful.”
“So that set up cognitive dissonance in my imagination. I thought, well, if this end of the political distribution has the moral upper hand why the hell is it producing all these resentful activists?”
I served on the Board of Governors of this little college that I went to, Grand Prairie Regional College. And all of the people who were on the board were people, I presume, people like you. They were all owners of small businesses, and they’d been successful. And the towns that I grew up in in Northern Alberta were, like, 50 years old. You know, they’d just been scraped out of the prairie. It was the last of the frontier. And everyone there was an immigrant, so most of the people who had started these small businessmen were immigrants who came there with nothing and built something. And even though I didn’t share their political views, I found them individually admirable. And I also found that the same applied to the small businessman that I worked for at that point. I thought “Well, you’ve actually done something with life.” And there’s a solidity there, a productive solidity exactly. And so it was at that point that I realized I didn’t know anything, and just stopped working on the political front.
“I realized that it was the people who had built productively that had the moral upper hand. They might not have been very good at expressing their ethos, intellectually or explicitly, but in terms of their character, they had they had established a victory.”
“I think this is actually the problem on the conservative front broadly across the world. They’re people of solid character, but they’re not good at articulating the foundations of their ethos, and then when the radical leftists come along and take them apart ethically, they don’t know what to do.”
“Someone comes up to you on the street and says ‘Justify marriage!’ and you think, well, I thought we sorted that out like 25,000 years ago. You don’t know what to say, you have no idea how to justify marriage.”
Discussion of Christmas tree symbolism (light of Christ in the darkest time of the year) snipped.
“When you’re married, you’re acting out a very deep ethos as well, and you don’t know what it is, but everyone’s agreed on it. And a lot of your conservative virtues are things that everybody’s already agreed on. And so when an intellectual comes along and says justify that, you don’t know what the hell to say, and then you can be picked apart.”
Same thing for the profit motive. “If you’re generating profit, it’s obviously the case that that can be used by you for narrow personal reasons, right? You can buy a you can buy a yacht and fill it with supermodels and cocaine if you want. But people don’t.”
“We’re in a situation where you probably do have to learn to articulate it. Because what’s happening is that that central ethos, that traditional ethos, even voluntary exchange, it’s under such vicious attack that if you don’t learn to defend it and articulate it, it’s going to be taken from you.”
“The problem is, you probably have something better to do. But it is doesn’t matter, because at the moment if you abdicate that responsibility, then the radicals are going to take it.” As they did in education.
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11 Responses to “What Changed Jordan Petersen’s Mind”
“We’re in a situation where you probably do have to learn to articulate [the ethos of productivity]. Because what’s happening is that that central ethos, that traditional ethos, even voluntary exchange, it’s under such vicious attack that if you don’t learn to defend it and articulate it, it’s going to be taken from you.”
Economic phenomena such as capital pricing, interest rates and profit are determined by the willingness of buyers to freely offer money against the constellation of consumer goods being offered for exchange.
Pareto optimality demonstrates that the free exchange of buyer and seller benefits both—each profits. Marxism argues that “capitalism” is typified by victims and oppressors. This justifies the use of violence to even out this imbalance.
But if free exchange benefits buyer and seller alike, insinuating a third party into the transaction can only result in one of the parties being defrauded. Thus, Marxism is ultimately based on violence and fraud, making it incompatible with civil society.
As Moses made clear, theft and murder are morally repugnant: Thou shall not steal; Thou shall not kill. These two moral prohibitions alone should serve to illustrate the moral bankruptcy of Marxism.
Moral justification for the private property order is not lacking but the courage to declare, “Thus sayeth the The Lord..” is.
A theological education is equal in value to an economic education and our life and liberty are imperiled when either are rejected. Ronald Reagan tirelessly argued for the moral superiority of free markets. Who will pick up his mantle and build on his work?
Better than a merely factual defense, the most effective rejoinder to attacks from self-righteous radicals are vicious moral counterattacks. To take the example from the video, when challenged to “justify marriage”, Jordan offers an answer along the lines of child-centric, blah, blah. A better answer is to point to the millions of fatherless youth lost in poverty, drug addiction, and crime, and pin that on the attacker’s moral assumptions.
The real mistake is to take radicals’ actions as genuine inquiry, rather than the rhetorical cudgels that they really are.
I noticed in Twitter’s early pre-censorship days that the platform became a source for pithy moral rejoinders of this sort. The usual pattern of leftist talking points diffusing out from the NYT & WashPost to TV and local outlets got disrupted. By the time regular people were hearing the party line, the moral fallacy underpinning it had gotten distilled down to a 255-character zinger. In an earlier era, the Rush Limbaugh radio show served a similar purpose. Adaptive Conservative Cathechism FTW!
Rhetorical counterattacks don’t convince anybody, they’re just cheerleading for people who already agree with you.
What I think does work is growing up seeing the results of the previous generation’s mistakes on full display. That happened to some extent with the crack cocaine epidemic; it was bad for a while, then “drugs are bad mmkay” became a meme because all the people hearing it already mostly agreed with it, because they’d seen enough to come to that conclusion on their own.
The “hoeflation” link a couple posts down deserves a lot more discussion than it’s gotten but it’s more of the same phenomenon. There’s a certain proportion of the children growing up and/or being born now who will see the end result of “living life to the fullest” (if I had a dollar for every time a date told me that was her goal …) and will conclude on their own that it’s a dead end and a waste of a life. Thing is, you can’t tell a woman who wants to “live life to the fullest” that she has her priorities wrong and is headed for self-induced misery – that’s a complete waste of time and will only annoy her. All you can do is let her do what she wants, and once she’s past 40 and doing protest marches while wearing a vagina hat and blaming her unhappiness on a man who doesn’t know she exists, she can serve as an example.
But these things can’t be fixed while they’re in the process of happening.
“I think this s actually the problem on the conservative front broadly across the world. They’re people of solid character, but they’re not good at articulating the foundations of their ethos,..”
Does your “vicious moral counterattack ” provide people of solid character an ethical foundation? Does the outcome of a contest depend on who is more morally vicious (sic)? Is the goal destruction of your enemy or is it something else, such as defense of work’s dignity and value to society?
Does cleaning your room make the world a better place than heaping up the skulls of your political enemies? The Leftist reaches for his moral cudgel; we ought to reach out and embrace those whose productive solidity makes for civil society.
Jordan Petersen compared the bitter resentment of Leftist activists to those with “productive solidity” and understood intuitively which of them were better.
The way I look at it, that is how wealth is created in the world. I take a set of inputs worth $50 (including my labor) and make something worth $100 to you, and you pay me $100. Before, I had a collection of stuff worth $50 nd you had $100 cash, so the world had $150 of wealth. After, you have something worth $100 and I have $100 cash, so the world has $200 of wealth.
Given the above, it is almost tautological that the wealthiest places in the world tend to be those where free enterprise predominates, and the poorest places tend to be those where people cannot engage in voluntary exchange of goods and services. Rule of law, a stable currency, and a reasonable degree of literacy help, but the bottom line remains that free enterprise creates wealth for those who participate in it.
How sad it is that so many in our society believe that the government knows better how to run a business than the owners of that business. Looking at you, California.
JimB – it’s better than that. Anything you purchase is presumably worth MORE than what you pay for it (otherwise you wouldn’t bother). Indeed, in many cases it’s worth a LOT more (being that pricing is set on the margins). So it’s not that you take $50 of inputs and sell it for $100 and that is the value to the person who buys it. It’s more accurate to say it’s worth $150 to them – (splitting the difference), so you actually now have $250 in value.
In fact, the true greatness of a competitive market is that competition actually means that MOST of the difference between the cost of inputs and the value of the product to the customer is actually captured by the customer. These is readily demonstrated by the razor thin margins that businesses in highly competitive markets like grocery stores operate on.
It doesn’t necessarily matter if you can explain your reasoning while debating with some GongFei on X or in a coffeehouse. It’s infinitely better if your children can explain it in class when their teachers try to brainwash them, even at K-6 levels of education. If we’re capable of doing that, then we win. We are not currently capable of doing that, however.
“It’s infinitely better if your children can explain it in class when their teachers try to brainwash them, even at K-6 levels of education.”
I don’t imagine too many children can explain Karl Menger’s theory of marginal value but they surely can articulate the Ten Commandments and demonstrate how they apply to property rights, judicial integrity and social hierarchy. This in itself would serve to shield them from the politics of envy e.g., Thou shall not cover thy neighbor’s goods.
Lefties are “talk” people, not “do” or “make things” people. Their system rewards verbal skills over how-to skills. We have entirely too many of them in society for the good of of those who make and do things.
“We’re in a situation where you probably do have to learn to articulate [the ethos of productivity]. Because what’s happening is that that central ethos, that traditional ethos, even voluntary exchange, it’s under such vicious attack that if you don’t learn to defend it and articulate it, it’s going to be taken from you.”
Economic phenomena such as capital pricing, interest rates and profit are determined by the willingness of buyers to freely offer money against the constellation of consumer goods being offered for exchange.
Pareto optimality demonstrates that the free exchange of buyer and seller benefits both—each profits. Marxism argues that “capitalism” is typified by victims and oppressors. This justifies the use of violence to even out this imbalance.
But if free exchange benefits buyer and seller alike, insinuating a third party into the transaction can only result in one of the parties being defrauded. Thus, Marxism is ultimately based on violence and fraud, making it incompatible with civil society.
As Moses made clear, theft and murder are morally repugnant: Thou shall not steal; Thou shall not kill. These two moral prohibitions alone should serve to illustrate the moral bankruptcy of Marxism.
Moral justification for the private property order is not lacking but the courage to declare, “Thus sayeth the The Lord..” is.
A theological education is equal in value to an economic education and our life and liberty are imperiled when either are rejected. Ronald Reagan tirelessly argued for the moral superiority of free markets. Who will pick up his mantle and build on his work?
Better than a merely factual defense, the most effective rejoinder to attacks from self-righteous radicals are vicious moral counterattacks. To take the example from the video, when challenged to “justify marriage”, Jordan offers an answer along the lines of child-centric, blah, blah. A better answer is to point to the millions of fatherless youth lost in poverty, drug addiction, and crime, and pin that on the attacker’s moral assumptions.
The real mistake is to take radicals’ actions as genuine inquiry, rather than the rhetorical cudgels that they really are.
I noticed in Twitter’s early pre-censorship days that the platform became a source for pithy moral rejoinders of this sort. The usual pattern of leftist talking points diffusing out from the NYT & WashPost to TV and local outlets got disrupted. By the time regular people were hearing the party line, the moral fallacy underpinning it had gotten distilled down to a 255-character zinger. In an earlier era, the Rush Limbaugh radio show served a similar purpose. Adaptive Conservative Cathechism FTW!
Rhetorical counterattacks don’t convince anybody, they’re just cheerleading for people who already agree with you.
What I think does work is growing up seeing the results of the previous generation’s mistakes on full display. That happened to some extent with the crack cocaine epidemic; it was bad for a while, then “drugs are bad mmkay” became a meme because all the people hearing it already mostly agreed with it, because they’d seen enough to come to that conclusion on their own.
The “hoeflation” link a couple posts down deserves a lot more discussion than it’s gotten but it’s more of the same phenomenon. There’s a certain proportion of the children growing up and/or being born now who will see the end result of “living life to the fullest” (if I had a dollar for every time a date told me that was her goal …) and will conclude on their own that it’s a dead end and a waste of a life. Thing is, you can’t tell a woman who wants to “live life to the fullest” that she has her priorities wrong and is headed for self-induced misery – that’s a complete waste of time and will only annoy her. All you can do is let her do what she wants, and once she’s past 40 and doing protest marches while wearing a vagina hat and blaming her unhappiness on a man who doesn’t know she exists, she can serve as an example.
But these things can’t be fixed while they’re in the process of happening.
“I think this s actually the problem on the conservative front broadly across the world. They’re people of solid character, but they’re not good at articulating the foundations of their ethos,..”
Does your “vicious moral counterattack ” provide people of solid character an ethical foundation? Does the outcome of a contest depend on who is more morally vicious (sic)? Is the goal destruction of your enemy or is it something else, such as defense of work’s dignity and value to society?
Does cleaning your room make the world a better place than heaping up the skulls of your political enemies? The Leftist reaches for his moral cudgel; we ought to reach out and embrace those whose productive solidity makes for civil society.
Jordan Petersen compared the bitter resentment of Leftist activists to those with “productive solidity” and understood intuitively which of them were better.
[…] What Changed Jordan Petersen’s Mind. “I worked with them for a few years, and I got disenchanted, in part, because when I went to the […]
@Malthus, you are correct in your top comment.
The way I look at it, that is how wealth is created in the world. I take a set of inputs worth $50 (including my labor) and make something worth $100 to you, and you pay me $100. Before, I had a collection of stuff worth $50 nd you had $100 cash, so the world had $150 of wealth. After, you have something worth $100 and I have $100 cash, so the world has $200 of wealth.
Given the above, it is almost tautological that the wealthiest places in the world tend to be those where free enterprise predominates, and the poorest places tend to be those where people cannot engage in voluntary exchange of goods and services. Rule of law, a stable currency, and a reasonable degree of literacy help, but the bottom line remains that free enterprise creates wealth for those who participate in it.
How sad it is that so many in our society believe that the government knows better how to run a business than the owners of that business. Looking at you, California.
The answer to ALL such attacks is so very simple: “Because it works, and everything you want to replace it with doesn’t.”
JimB – it’s better than that. Anything you purchase is presumably worth MORE than what you pay for it (otherwise you wouldn’t bother). Indeed, in many cases it’s worth a LOT more (being that pricing is set on the margins). So it’s not that you take $50 of inputs and sell it for $100 and that is the value to the person who buys it. It’s more accurate to say it’s worth $150 to them – (splitting the difference), so you actually now have $250 in value.
In fact, the true greatness of a competitive market is that competition actually means that MOST of the difference between the cost of inputs and the value of the product to the customer is actually captured by the customer. These is readily demonstrated by the razor thin margins that businesses in highly competitive markets like grocery stores operate on.
It doesn’t necessarily matter if you can explain your reasoning while debating with some GongFei on X or in a coffeehouse. It’s infinitely better if your children can explain it in class when their teachers try to brainwash them, even at K-6 levels of education. If we’re capable of doing that, then we win. We are not currently capable of doing that, however.
“It’s infinitely better if your children can explain it in class when their teachers try to brainwash them, even at K-6 levels of education.”
I don’t imagine too many children can explain Karl Menger’s theory of marginal value but they surely can articulate the Ten Commandments and demonstrate how they apply to property rights, judicial integrity and social hierarchy. This in itself would serve to shield them from the politics of envy e.g., Thou shall not cover thy neighbor’s goods.
Lefties are “talk” people, not “do” or “make things” people. Their system rewards verbal skills over how-to skills. We have entirely too many of them in society for the good of of those who make and do things.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction