Jordan Peterson: evaluation

Transcript context

…I reread some Jung to have this talk with you. Aha. So when you go to university, you can pick your peers, and you can pick peers throughout history. Or mentors, let’s say, because they’re certainly not peers, but they at least serve as a peer group. So I would say you go to university to familiarize yourself with what’s great about the past. Maybe you go to university with the attitude that there was something great about the past, too. That’d be a good start. And that’s one of the things that I think the universities have fallen down on in a terrible way. Because they don’t separate the wheat from the chaff. And they make the presumption that the past is nothing but brutality. And believe me, the past is brutal. There’s no doubt about it. But to think about it as nothing but brutality is a major error. I think it’s unbelievably useful to take time to write. The reason that I’m able to speak fluently, I would say, and to lecture the way I do is because I spent a tremendous amount of time writing. And that’s given me a corpus of knowledge that I have at hand. It’s not just recognition knowledge, right? It’s a recall. I know the stories. And then, of course, I’ve practiced that a lot. So I would say if you want to become a good educator, which perhaps might mean that you were following in my footsteps, for better or worse, is like, well, you have to learn to read, and you have to learn to think critically, and you have to learn to write, and then you have to learn to speak. You have to get good at all those things. And they’re all worth getting good at. They’re unbelievably powerful skills. This is one of the things that’s so sad, in some sense, about the degeneration of the humanities, is that pragmatic people, practical people, think that there’s nothing more useless, in some sense, than a Bachelor of Arts degree. And that’s exactly wrong. If you can communicate, there’s nothing more powerful than the ability to communicate, period. So what a Bachelor of Arts degree should do is make you a great communicator, someone who can really formulate an argument, and who can do that in writing, and who can do that in speaking. And that makes you — powerful isn’t the right word — it makes you authoritative and competent. And that’s a good thing to be. I mean, how is that going to not work out well? Final question, and you have three minutes to answer. Then you must leave for your plane. Let’s say you’re speaking to outside parties, and they want to support the creation production finding of more disruptive public intellectuals in a positive way. What is your advice for them?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.