I just wish I’d had this transcript in time to include it in Jordanetics. If you’re still not convinced the man is a complete intellectual fraud, just watch his speech at the Trilateral Commission on the prospects for the survival of democracy:
What can we do in order for democracy to survive? So I would like that to be the main theme for our conversation and I can simply leave it with an advance, and ask you, so what does it take, and, and what can you do?
Well, I should tell you first what I’ve been talking to people about. So my wife and I have been on a hundred-city tour since January, and I’ve spoken to about 250,000 people over the course of that in Australia, New Zealand, and throughout the U.S. and Canada. Some in Europe, mostly in the UK, in the Scandinavian countries, I’m coming back here in March, then to go through the South in them and the East. When I speak to audiences I always watched people one by one because I never speak to the crowd and always listened to the entire audience, because what I’m trying to manage when I’m speaking is to put everybody in the same place so that there’s dead silence. Because if there’s dead silence, that means that everybody’s concentrating on the same thing and that everybody has come to a collective agreement that that thing is up substantive importance, and the most reliable means of silencing an audience of 2,500 people, regardless of where that is around the world, is to make a strong case for the relationship between suffering, meaning, and responsibility.
And the, the case for suffering, I think, is quite obvious, because one of the things that I point out to my listeners is that life has a tragic element and we all are perfectly aware of that, and then we’re subject to that as fragile and finite creatures, and that, that tragic element is amplified by the human proclivity for malevolence, psychological level and at a social level and that’s the reality that we find ourselves confronted with, eternally in some sense, and that the proper antidote to that is not the pursuit of happiness, and it’s not even the existence of the individual rights that are part of the substructure of democratic society, but the willingness to accept voluntary responsibility for those preconditions and then working to rectify them. And the corollary of that is that it’s almost inevitably the case that people find the meaning that sustains themselves through suffering, and that enables them to be motivated sufficiently to constrain their own malevolence is to be found in the adoption of responsibility, and it’s surprising that a message that has that much weight, let’s say, and that little frivolity, because there’s no frivolity, let’s say, in that silence, is people, can democracy survive?
Well, first of all, if you ask the typical person in the democratic society whether they would like it to survive you’re going, the resounding answer to that, it’s going to be yes. The people who are working to undermine it are a tiny radical fringe on both ends of the political distribution, let’s say, with a disproportionate amount exposure and power, and the people in the middle are lost in some sense without a uniting narrative. And a huge part of the narrative that is united democratic countries, since their foundation isn’t the doctrine of rights, and it’s not the doctrine of individual happiness, it’s the doctrine that the individual is the sovereign foundation of the, of the polity, and maybe of the cosmos itself, which is something that I happen to believe given the important rule that consciousness plays in existence itself, and that it’s useful and necessary to call to people to remind them of their responsibility as sovereign individuals.
And so I’m encouraging people to adopt, to develop a vision for their life, to adopt full responsibility for themselves, in a manner, and not in a manner that’s that pertains specifically to their narrow self-interest or happiness, but to something that’s much broader in scope, to think that each person should take on the voluntary requirement to take care of themselves, but also their future self, because each of us is a collective that stretches across time. And whatever you do impulsively in the present merely means that you sacrifice yourself in the future, and that’s not a sustainable or intelligent solution, and you want to take on a responsibility for yourself and your future selves in a way that’s of maximal benefit to your family, if you can manage that, and then, perhaps, if there’s something left over in terms of your capability, then you can do both of those things in a way that maximally supports and serves the community. And for many young people that’s something they’ve never heard is that we’d be in a very bad case too, we’ve made a very bad case, all of us, I would say.
I would say that each of these people, each person has that sovereign responsibility, and that if they adopt it, that actually constitutes something of singular importance, and that’s an old religious idea, in some sense, that each person has a soul, let’s say, that is somehow a center of reality itself, and that that needs to be manifested in life itself, and that if it isn’t manifested, then something of tremendous value is not brought forward. And worse, and this is the end of the case, let’s say, and worse, to the degree that that’s not brought forward then something hellish moves in to take its place And people understand this sort of thing a lot more clearly than you might think, if you explain it to them as if they might understand, and then it gives them a seriousness of purposeness that straightens out their life. And so my sense is the way that you revivify democracy is by remembering its fundamental insistence that the individual is at the cornerstone of the state, and then everything you can possibly do to fortify the individual, simultaneously, the individual is the eyes of the state, the living individual is the eyes of the dead state, and the living individual revivifies the state.
And to the degree that we forget our concentration on the sovereignty of the individual, right, the divine sovereignty of the individual, for that matter, then we undermine the foundation on which democracy is based and then people look for alternatives. They search for meaning elsewhere, extremist movements of one form or another, or they collapse into a kind of nihilism that’s completely counterproductive. And so, well, so that’s been my experience.
This is the nonsense for which tens of thousands of marks pay hundreds of dollars to subject themselves. Notice despite all that useless, bafflegarbling word salad, he never even answered the questions he said he was going to address. And notice too the way in which he never stops selling his con.
How on Earth is the individual taking the sovereign responsibility for himself going to affect, in any way, the problem of foreign elites corrupting the political process to serve their own ends rather than the national interest? How is the mass acceptance of the voluntary requirement to take care of your future self going to hold dishonest representatives accountable for running on one set of policies and then governing on a wildly different one? How is what Peterson said even remotely relevant to the eminently justified widescale loss of faith in a political system that manifestly fails to deliver on its claims to represent the collective will of the nation?
