here's a question to dwell on are
thinkers more powerful in changing the
course of history or politicians that's
the intersection where Jordan Peterson
stands right now in his life because the
answer to this question determines
whether Canada will ever get to see a
prime minister Jordan Peterson there's a
lot of food for thought in this next
clip so let's get into it Jordan why why
don't you go in there and see if you can
be the leader of a great country like
Canada and do something about it has
that conversation ever taken place at
this phase of your life yes
and well I've thought about a political
career at different points throughout my
whole life starting literally starting
when I was 14 in fact that's what I
thought I would do when I was 14 I
worked for a political party in Canada
it was a socialist party as it turns out
and uh I had that option open to me when
I was extremely when I was very young
but I figured out when I was about 16
that I didn't really know anything and
so I had ideas and I was capable of
functioning in the realm of ideas and
putting them forth even then I would say
in a somewhat compelling manner but I I
figured out partly because I had worked
with a lot of small business people
these are all people who'd built
businesses from the bottom up they were
all immigrants because everybody in
Northern Alberta was an immigrant and
they didn't share my left-wing
presuppositions but they were very
admirable people and part of what made
them admirable to me wasn't their
facility with ideological conception
so it wasn't an intellectual attraction
it was a practical attraction I had
worked in restaurants in this little
town I grew up in Fairview I talked to
them one day about uh the Socialist
Party in Canada and Alberta at that time
had a pretty good small business
platform probably better than the
conservatives had in terms of what it
would do for small businesses and I
asked them one day why aren't you in
favor of this small business platform
because they wouldn't vote for the NDP
the Socialist Party to save their lives
they said well we don't want to be small
business people we want to be big
business people and so I learned then
that com well the guy I worked with his
name was Scotty Kyle and Scotty was a
rough guy he was about 35 I was about 15
at that time and Scotty had been an
alcoholic and he had like all his teeth
knocked out in fights and like he was a
rough guy but he is super funny and he
was really smart and he said to me one
day people don't vote their reality they
vote their dreams and I thought hey man
that's a good phrase you know that stuck
in my mind for the rest of my life and
so when I went to college I went to take
political science and literature and I
wanted to go into law school I wrote the
elsat and I was set to go to law school
I wanted to take corporate law and the
reason that I wanted to do that was to
understand my enemy that was the idea
but I I realized about a year into my
college education for a variety of
reasons that partly reading George
Orwell but that wasn't all of it but the
party level activists I never liked them
from the beginning I thought I don't
trust you guys you just seem to be
driven by resentment not not genuine
care for the working class and in doing
that they probably lost a budding
political mind in Peterson you know why
I say that when you dig through Jordan's
vast body of writing you uncover his
famous letter to his father at the age
of just 25 that spells out exactly the
political disillusionment he felt at the
time among other things that serve a
glimpse into a young Jordan Peterson he
wrote quote I looked for what I wanted
to find where it was obvious to everyone
it would be in politics and political
science in the study of group Behavior
this took up the years I spent involved
with the NDP and in studying political
science until I learned that the
application of a system of thought like
Socialism or any other ISM for that
matter to a problem and solving that
problem were not the same thing in the
former case you have someone who is not
you to blame the rich the Americans the
white people the government the system
whatever as long as it is someone else I
think we can hypothesize why that is
back in the 1970s and ' 80s the world
was still reeling from the genocides and
Wars of the the second world war
probably making a young and inquisitive
Jordan Peterson extra wary of the
right-wing Canadian populists at the
time but the other end of the spectrum
gave him no political Refuge I remember
Jordan once speaking about the one
moment that disillusioned him from the
leftwing parties of the time as a
teenager I was reading George Orwell's
diagnosis of leff's parties who Orwell
said didn't love the poor instead just
hated the rich so it's not Compassion or
Justice driving it but instead
resentment and self-righteousness
perhaps it was another one of such
Crossroads that Jordan Peterson stood at
back then and if parties of the left in
Canada stayed true to their credentials
of justice and equality we might have
seen Jordan rise through their ranks and
become a very different character to who
he is now any case I started to get
interested in psychological motivations
for political Behavior especially as I
went through my political science degree
because there was an increasing emphasis
as we moved away from the classics which
is what I studied in the the first
couple of years to more modern political
thinking let's say it was all quasi
Marxist in that the political scientists
believed intrinsically that people were
only motivated by economic concerns and
I just never believed that I thought
that's which economic concerns and why
well those questions weren't a asked by
political scientists they took economic
determinism as a starting point and that
never sat well with me I thought there
was a mystery there because it wasn't
obvious to me what motivated people and
we're not ruled by our bellies as far as
I'm concerned so the idea of pure
economic determinism was a non-starter
and that's really when I started to get
interested in Psychology and I've made a
choice all the way through my life the
choice has always been say political
sociological versus psychological or
perhaps spiritual and I've always chosen
the psych psychological work at the
level of the individual and I don't
think I'm going to stop doing that I
mean I have had discussions serious
discussions with people about a
political career
and first of all in my current situation
it isn't obvious to me at all that that
wouldn't be less effective than what I'm
already doing and that's what's at the
heart of it at the end of the day for
Jordan it's less about power and more
about the Legacy and impact that he can
create in people's lives It's actually
an interesting debate from a historical
perspective because almost every
powerful leader in history as a thinker
and that has influenced him the most
whether directly or indirectly Nelson
Mandela was influenced by South African
humanist thinkers like Desmond Tutu
Margaret Thatcher's economic revivalism
borrowed from Milton fredman's ideas and
men like lennin were a product of KL
marks and socialist philosophers before
him does Jordan Peterson fit more in the
former camp or the latter one way to
answer that question is to see the
massive impact that Jordan has had
simply through his words and ideas in
the last few decades that's all we have
to go by and yet his insights have
reverberated across the world in ways
that hardly any politician can think of
doing it sounds paradoxical from the
outside because politics is where the
real power lies but perhaps in the world
today words that can influence millions
of people to take one tiny step in a
direction create a much larger wave of
change than anyone can fathom the New
York Times in 2018 agreed to calling
Jordan Peterson quote the most
influential public in election ual in
the western world and considering the
untapped hunger for intellectual
engagement in young people especially
men for the crisis of meaning that
enveloped the new generation Jordan
sprung on the scene at just the right
time and created an impact that few
people could replicate it's easy to
argue how positive or negative that
impact was but from the point view of
sheer power I think that we're realizing
that the pen and microphone are more
formidable tools in the 21st century to
make a change that any seat of
government could be look those are hard
jobs and it's very and you get boxed in
very quickly and they're also brutal
jobs and it isn't obvious to me that I
have the stomach for it I don't really
like fights in fact I don't like them at
all part of the reason that
I said what I said back in 2016 when I
first stood up and voiced opposition to
what the universities were doing and
also what my government was doing was
because I could see where that was going
I could see that it was going to
generate conflict of All Sorts I knew
for example that all this pronoun
foolishness was going to confuse
thousands particularly of young women
because there's a whole there's an a
very large clinical history of that sort
of thing happening for 350 years so
that's detailed in a book called the
history of the unconscious which is a
great book by a man named Henry
ellenburger who wrote the best book on
the history of psychoanalytic thinking
and so I knew that um in any case part
of the reason I spoke up we're going to
have that fight right
now and we're going to make peace
because I don't want to have this fight
every day for the rest of my life and so
it's going to be a pain to fight through
it because it's always a pain to fight
through a conflict but if you can fight
through it you can make peace and then
you don't have the conflict and I really
don't like conflict
so I don't like it deferred because I
know what happens if conflict is
deferred you get weaker because you
backed off and the conflict gets more
intense because its tentacles grow in a
sense it's like not paying your not
paying a utility bill it's like for the
first month it's not that big a problem
despite that I believe it's hard to rule
out Jordan Peterson venturing into
Political Waters as rough as politics
might be it's always possible for a
change of mind to catapult him into the
political Arena if there's genuine
utility for him that he believes there
is one thing is for certain that
Politics on a larger picture has a lot
to gain from a character like Peterson
making his way in that doesn't even have
to be with direct participation but can
also happen with him being the
influential mind that gives rise to a
political Avatar In His Image maybe
someone can rise up as an embodiment of
the ideals and values that Jordan
espouses and magnify Jordan Peterson's
impact through the governmental seat of
power until then there's already
millions of people that can testify to
the impact of Jordan Peterson in their
own personal lives