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hello freak [ __ ] you should step back and this is a narrative that gets repeated over and over again in the social justice Warrior culture this idea that you should just step back and let these others talk because they understand more as long yeah and the others are always other group members right right and somehow their their discourse is to be privileged in reverse because hypothetically they're a member of an oppressed class right of course and you can multiply the numbers of oppressed classes at nauseum which is another part of the problem yeah like the idea is that in in giving them privilege because they have been marginalized you will balance things out you will somehow or another reverse the scale yeah but and that's another example of the class-based guilt idea you know it's um it doesn't seem to me self-evident that I'm to blame for slavery for example I mean being a Canadian it's a slightly different situation I suppose but the the idea that as the member as a member of a culture that you're somehow responsible for the past uh sins of that culture let's say it it it's a very very anti-western ethos it it goes along with this idea of class guilt because your group membership is the most important thing if your group at some point in the past did something reprehensible which of course every group has done that's for sure then you are de facto responsible in the present for that how do you think we got to this point where people are repeating these patterns that were ultimately incredibly unsuccessful and dangerous and deadly in the past like Marxism for example like people proudly Proclaim themselves as having Marxist ideology one in five one in five social scientists claims to be a Marxist how do they not understand the history well why don't you fill people in on how that went bad well the estimates vary but in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959 somewhere between 30 and 50 million people were killed in internal oppression alone so that's pretty bad and then and then in China uh which was operating on exactly the same principles might have been up to 100 million killed during Ma's time and of course ma is still revered in China appallingly enough um and Vietnam Vietnam and Cambodia and wherever these ideas were
implemented Cuba wherever these ideas were implemented the the result was absolute Mayhem absolute Mayhem and I think what happened is that the Marxist ideas are actually quite attractive if you're an intellectual and if you're I would say if you're tilted towards compassion from personality perspective because they're based on doctrines like from from each according to his ability to each according to his need and the idea that you should fulfill people's needs or that Society should fulfill people's needs is on the surface of it an attractive idea of course the problem is who gets to define the needs and who gets to define the abilities and that really is a big problem and well and then those ideas were put into practice uh first in the Soviet Union and Alexander soljan niton who wrote the gag archipelago did a very lovely job of detailing uh in in horrifying detail how those initial doctrines were transformed into legislation and then how those legislation was transformed into endless genocide essentially and and almost destroyed the world let's not forget that um partly with partly with the help of Castro who who just died um the the doctrines when when put into pra into into actual practice were were murder since ously now what happened there were always apologists for the left in the west especially in France especially among the French intellectuals especially in the late 1960s and then when when all of the information about what was happening in in the Soviet Union came flooding forward and that culminated say in 19 Bo 1973 when soier n's book was published the French intellectuals changed their tune instead of agitating on the part of the working class which was which Allied them with murderous marxists they switched and and started to talk about power and and to talk about I group identity it was like a slight of hand the underlying pathological philosophy remained exactly the same but the surface nomenclature changed and that became very attractive and at the same time the Soviet Union dissolved and so one of the problems I think we have now a perverse problem is that these Marxist ideas are very attractive to compassionate intellectuals and we don't have good bad
examples like the Soviet Union around that everybody can point to and go yeah yeah well that sounds good but you know what about the murderous death camps and the millions of people who are suffering we we still have North Korea but you know people treat North Korea like it's a joke instead of like it's an Exemplar of a pathological system and and people have no historical memory like my students and and that's partly because they're taught so badly in schools is they have no idea what happened in the Soviet Union they have absolutely no idea they know a little bit about the second world war maybe and of course people generally know about the Holocaust but they have no idea what happened in the Soviet Union so they have no idea where these ideas could lead and and this and the universities and the high schools are so full of people who are radically left leaning that they're never taught any that students are never taught any proper history you know they're taught about the evils of capitalism and you know I mean it's not like it's not like any system is perfect but there's difference between imperfect and and consciously murderous I think one of the things that you just said that's very important is that it's attractive to compassionate intellectuals people that without really looking at what the potential for these these laws and regulations what the negative potential for them is the the the underlying inclination to lean towards that is that you you you care about people and that you you want people to be okay and you yeah well you're kind of treating them like they're your children yes and and I don't mean that in an entirely sarcastic manner um it's reasonable in some sense to treat other people like people that you love although it's not reasonable in in very many other ways which is why you don't invite every stranger on the street to come and live with you in your house I mean everybody puts up boundaries and and you have to do that but and and people tend more than than we ever expected and I've done a lot of research in this in my lab that people do tend to vote and think their temperament a lot more than than anyone really realizes and and if you're kind
and that's your highest virtue then you tend to treat people like their kin because that's what kind means right it's it's an extension of the word kin but that doesn't work well in larger groups you need other principles and so you you look at something like the idea of of equity which is equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity on the surface of it it seems perfectly reasonable to say well if every resource isn't distributed absolutely equally to every group then the system is unfair and on the face of it that's a reasonable proposition but it falls apart under minimal examination so here's something to think about for for for everyone who thinks that equality of an outcome is a good idea it's like why the hell are you striving for anything then because the reason anyone strives to better themselves or to develop a skill or or to move forward in life at all is to produce inequality you you're trying to rise above the the medial masses every time you make an effort at anything and so everything that we associate um positive movement forward to or positive motivation is actually an attempt to render the world more unequal now you're rendering it unequal in a just way right because we might say well if you work really hard you deserve an unequal outcome well yeah unless you want people to stop working hard and that was the old joke in the Soviet Union you know they pretend to pay us we pretend to work so it's so it's it's it's so thoughtless that that's that's the problem well and it's also extremely annoying for people who've worked really hard and and who've made the requisite sacrifices to become successful along some Dimension to have that immediately attributed to their oppression yes and it's not it's not obvious that that's something we want to do it's like for the social justice Warrior types out there who who might be listening it's like do you are you really willing to say that every single person who's accomplished something has done that as a consequence of Oppression that that's again what the Soviets claimed with regards to the to the successful peasants in the 19 in the just before the 1920s it's like well the peasants weren't emancipated they were surfs
until about 30 years before that they were surfs they were basically slaves and some of them had clambered up to the point where maybe they owned their Hut and a cow and could you know employ someone well the Soviet claim was well that's all theft you got that all cuz you're an oppressor and so then the Soviet intellectuals went into the villages and just imagine how this happened so imagine a village a small town where everyone knows everybody and there's maybe 10 20 people there who are moderately successful okay and so you can imagine that those 20 people have like a 100 enemies at the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution useless horrible people who are jealous and resentful about the fact that these people have been successful okay so now the intellectuals come in and say property is theft success is oppression and then they look for the people in the village who are willing to move against those 20 successful people well those guys at the bottom those hundred resentful jealous murderous people at the bottom they're just waiting for an opportunity to go kick down some doors and that's exactly what they did in the 1920s and as I said they wiped out all their productive peasants and then 6 million ukrainians starved to death they had posters the Soviets produced posters in the 1930s that said essentially um don't forget it's wrong to eat your children so whoa yeah whoa there's nothing about the Soviet there's nothing that you can imagine that's horrible enough so that it matched the reality of what happened in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959 and you know the West knew about this too early Malcolm mugrage in the 30s was documenting for for England for the for English newspapers exactly what was going on in the Soviet Union bloody intellectuals didn't admit it till the mid '70s you know with the exception of people like George [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Orwell