Jordan Peterson: More Power To Joe Rogan And The Truckers – RealClearPolitics

-- Jordan Peterson talks with Dr. Julie Ponesse about the connection between massive protests by truckers in Ottawa and the massive protests by members of the news media against Joe Rogan.

"Your observation that the truckers and the Joe Rogans are serving as redemptive agents is a reflection of the brilliance of the idea of individual sovereignty as the basis for political stability," Peterson thought.

"Who should you consult? Not just the people with the ideas. The people who drive the trucks. Well, why? They're navigating the roads. They're delivering the goods, in a real sense. So they know things."

"They are the people. They have families. Their life is real, it is not abstracted to the point where the abstractions themselves become a problem," he said.

And I thought: Just winging it, eh? You try just winging it in front of 11 million people for five years and see if you're still standing, buddy? Do you think just winging it is so easy?

Well, first of all, why aren't you doing it if it is so damn easy?

And second, isn't it something that with all your resources, you can only garner one-tenth of the audience of one man who has like zero production expertise in a studio. He just puts it out online, and all he does is have honest conversations.

Insofar as he is capable of that. Joe stumbles and he knows and admits that. Sometimes he gets too buttoned-down on a given point. But fundamentally he's just trying to do what we're doing here.

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Keep at it, guys. Every time you attack him, it is a million more subscribers for Joe. If they kick him off Spotify, he would have a new platform in two days with twice as many listeners.

Joe has gotten to the point where, as long as he continues to be careful, and he is, I don't think he can be canceled. In fact, I think all the attempts to cancel him only redound to his credit and increase the rapidity with which he is destroying the entire legacy media.

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The only real rationale for opposing free speech, apart from ignorance... is the conclusion that you've already figured it all out. Or you're trying to hide something. Those two things go hand in hand quite frequently.

It is very often that people who are trying to hide something justify themselves with a kind of totalitarian certainty about their beliefs. They double down on them to hide their own moral iniquities.

You have to believe that people like Rogan shouldn't be allowed to just have a discussion with whoever they want and wing it --and you think that people you think you already know. If your life is perfect and you're already living in the Kingdom of God, more power to you. Maybe you're right and you can shut down discourse because the heavenly heights have already been scaled, but I haven't met anyone like that yet.

Most people I know think with not too much thought that there are some things they still have to learn and there are some ways their lives could be improved. How are we going to approach that?

If you want to find out how you're wrong, you should talk to people who don't agree with you. Maybe 90% of what they say is not worth attending to, could be, probably the same goes for you, but 10% might be just what saves you in the next crisis.

This is one of the things I loved about being a clinician. I talked to lots of people who were different from me. Like seriously different from me. And if I wasn't learning something from them it was because I wasn't conducting the discourse properly. They taught me invaluable things.

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You want to differentiate and assess your own beliefs. Why?

Your beliefs aren't a set of facts at your disposal. Your beliefs are tools that you use to navigate the world. And the more finely tuned those tools -- like, I have a shed at home with all sorts of power tools in it. One of the things I learned from renovating houses is that if the job is difficult, you don't have the right tool. And you can go down to Home Depot which has like 50,000 square feet of tools, which is phenomenal. And you can find a little gadget that someone spent half their lifetime devising and it makes that job easy. That's ideas. Ideas are tools. They're not facts.

DR. JULIE PONESSE: And you have to sharpen them. And take care of them. And keep them from getting rusty. And put them away with the right way. Your metaphor is beautiful.

So talking about both the trucker situation and the Joe Rogan situation. It seems in many respects like intellectuals, or elites, have gotten us into this mess. And it is the truckers and the Joe Rogans of the world who are getting us out of it, arguably. What does this say about education, academics, civil discourse, and democracy, moving forward?

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, it says that the highest and the lowest always have to be united. And what that means in some sense is that ---

Well, I learned that in part from watching Wagner's Die Meistersinger (The Master Singer), the opera. The libretto elaborates on that theme in an absolutely stellar manner. In his opera, it details out the actions of guilds of men. And each guild is made out of domain experts. One of the heroes is a cobbler, an expert shoemaker... and if you're a good enough cobbler, you get to sing. And if you're a good enough singer, you get to elect a Master Singer.

It is a lovely structured sequence of metaphors. And so one of the things Wagner did so well in that opera was to point out that true expertise means the differentiation of abstract knowledge all the way down to the point of behavioral implementation. This is one thing I really like about being trained as a behavioral psychologist. I'm very interested in psychoanalytic theory, but it is very abstract. Existential psychology is very abstract, the meaning of life stuff.

Like, yeah, but where does the rubber hit the road? Well, the truckers know that! They really know that because they are down there moving goods to people. They're doing the actual work in the most fine-grade manner. They might have a problem with higher-order articulation. And it is up to their leaders --

DR. JULIE PONESSE: I'm not so sure about that! I challenge every Canadian to get themselves there to have a conversation with all of these truckers. They'd be very surprised.

JORDAN PETERSON: I'm not so sure either. They don't have trouble with enunciating blunt truths.

But you were pointing to problems among the intellectuals. The intellectual chattering class is criticizing the truckers. There's a divorce between the intellectualized ethical framework and the practical reality that working-class people represent.

Your observation that the truckers and the Joe Rogans are serving as redemptive agents is a reflection of the brilliance of the idea of individual sovereignty as the basis for political stability.

It's like, well who should you consult? Not just the people with the ideas. The people who drive the trucks.

Well, why? They're navigating the roads. They're delivering the goods, in a real sense. So they know things.

DR. JULIE PONESSE: They're talking to the people.

JORDAN PETERSON: You bet. They are the people. They have families. Their life is real, it is not abstracted to the point where the abstractions themselves become a problem.

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You saw the same thing with the Yellow Jackets in France. Corrupt energy policies started to make energy too expensive for ordinary people "because we have to save the planet." Well, how about not on our backs there, guys?

We're going to see a lot more of that, I suspect. Especially if the elite-types with their Utopian schemes keep walling themselves up from the people they hypothetically represent.

This is why the U.K. voted for Brexit -- the common people thought, "Nope, [the E.U.] is too abstract. Too much of a Tower of Babel. The leaders have gotten too far away from the people they represent."

And I think they made the right decision, so, more power to Rogan and the truckers.

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Jordan Peterson: More Power To Joe Rogan And The Truckers - RealClearPolitics