Jordan Peterson: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think we are underrating or overrating America’s ability to assimilate its immigrants? And what would a Jungian perspective bring to bear on that question? Oh, in the United States, I don’t really see that there is a problem with immigration policy. You guys haven’t had to face the same sort of, what?—crisis over the last five years that Europe has as a consequence of the trouble in the Middle East. It isn’t obvious to me at all that you have an immigration problem in the United States. Not as far as I can tell. We don’t really seem to have an immigration problem in Canada, although our immigration policy is somewhat looser than your immigration policy is. In Toronto, for example — the city I’m from — I don’t know what the stats are. I think 40 percent of the people who live in Toronto were foreign born, and the city is doing extraordinarily well. I think it’s a better place than it was 20 years ago. For some reason, the immigration policy in Canada seems to be working. I think the same thing in the United States. That just doesn’t seem to me to be one of your problems. Isn’t obvious exactly what your problems are. I was at a dinner a while back with a variety of people who are interested in political issues. So the first thing I wanted to know is, “Well, okay, what’s your problems?” Nobody could agree on what the problems were. [laughter] Well, it’s hard to formulate a problem statement properly, right? I mean, if you’re looking at what constitutes difficult cognitive work, answering a question is difficult, but formulating the question properly is even more difficult. I’ve been working with Democrats, at least to some degree, trying to formulate policy that would constitute an alternative to the idiot radical leftist ideology that dominates most of the discourse with regards to democratic politics and the politics of the Democrats. And it’s not obvious what the rank order of the problems might be. But I certainly wouldn’t say that immigration is top of the list. Will anti-immigrant populism come to Canada at the national level? And if Canada has populism at the national rather than provincial level, what will that look like?…

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