1 00:00:02,460 --> 00:00:07,280 You may not realize it, but you are currently funding some dangerous people. 2 00:00:07,280 --> 00:00:12,440 They are indoctrinating young minds throughout the West with their resentment-ridden ideology. 3 00:00:12,440 --> 00:00:16,840 They have made it their life's mission to undermine Western civilization itself, 4 00:00:16,840 --> 00:00:21,260 which they regard as corrupt, oppressive and “patriarchal.” 5 00:00:21,260 --> 00:00:25,800 If you're a taxpayer—or paying for your kid's liberal arts degree—you're underwriting 6 00:00:25,800 --> 00:00:27,960 this gang of nihilists. 7 00:00:27,960 --> 00:00:32,940 You're supporting ideologues who claim that all truth is subjective; that all sex differences 8 00:00:32,940 --> 00:00:37,120 are socially constructed; and that Western imperialism is the sole source 9 00:00:37,120 --> 00:00:39,780 of all Third World problems. 10 00:00:39,780 --> 00:00:45,580 They are the post-modernists, pushing “progressive” activism at a college near you. 11 00:00:45,580 --> 00:00:50,360 They produce the mobs that violently shut down campus speakers; the language police 12 00:00:50,370 --> 00:00:55,770 who enshrine into law use of fabricated gender pronouns; and the deans whose livelihoods 13 00:00:55,770 --> 00:01:01,200 depend on madly rooting out discrimination where little or none exists. 14 00:01:01,200 --> 00:01:05,689 Their thinking took hold in Western universities in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when the true believers 15 00:01:05,689 --> 00:01:09,640 of the radical left became the professors of today. 16 00:01:09,640 --> 00:01:15,040 And now we rack up education-related debt—not so that our children learn to think critically, 17 00:01:15,040 --> 00:01:21,460 write clearly, or speak properly, but so they can model their mentors' destructive agenda. 18 00:01:21,470 --> 00:01:26,029 It's now possible to complete an English degree and never encounter Shakespeare—one of those 19 00:01:26,029 --> 00:01:30,899 dead white males whose works underlie our “society of oppression.” 20 00:01:30,899 --> 00:01:35,090 To understand and oppose the post-modernists, the ideas by which they orient themselves 21 00:01:35,090 --> 00:01:37,440 must be clearly identified. 22 00:01:37,440 --> 00:01:42,660 First is their new unholy trinity of diversity, equity and inclusion. 23 00:01:42,660 --> 00:01:49,580 Diversity is defined not by opinion, but by race, ethnicity or sexual identity; equity 24 00:01:49,599 --> 00:01:54,619 is no longer the laudable goal of equality of opportunity, but the insistence on equality 25 00:01:54,620 --> 00:02:03,100 of outcome; and inclusion is the use of identity-based quotas to attain this misconceived state of equity. 26 00:02:03,100 --> 00:02:08,000 All the classic rights of the West are to be considered secondary to these new values. 27 00:02:08,000 --> 00:02:12,600 Take, for example, freedom of speech—the very pillar of democracy. 28 00:02:12,600 --> 00:02:16,680 The post-modernists refuse to believe that people of good will can exchange ideas 29 00:02:16,680 --> 00:02:18,480 and reach consensus. 30 00:02:18,480 --> 00:02:25,180 Their world is instead a Hobbesian nightmare of identity groups warring for power. 31 00:02:25,180 --> 00:02:29,680 They don't see ideas that run contrary to their ideology as simply incorrect. 32 00:02:29,680 --> 00:02:34,540 They see them as integral to the oppressive system they wish to supplant, and consider 33 00:02:34,540 --> 00:02:38,720 it a moral obligation to stifle and constrain their expression. 34 00:02:38,720 --> 00:02:44,160 Second is rejection of the free market—of the very idea that free, voluntary trading 35 00:02:44,170 --> 00:02:46,200 benefits everyone. 36 00:02:46,200 --> 00:02:50,260 They won't acknowledge that capitalism has lifted up hundreds of millions of people 37 00:02:50,260 --> 00:02:55,900 so they can for the first time in history afford food, shelter, clothing, transportation 38 00:02:55,900 --> 00:02:58,180 —even entertainment and travel. 39 00:02:58,180 --> 00:03:04,980 Those classified as poor in the US (and, increasingly, everywhere else) are able to meet their basic needs. 40 00:03:04,980 --> 00:03:11,960 Meanwhile, in once-prosperous Venezuela—until recently the poster-child of the campus radicals— 41 00:03:11,960 --> 00:03:15,020 the middle class lines up for toilet paper. 42 00:03:15,020 --> 00:03:17,760 Third, and finally, are the politics of identity. 43 00:03:17,760 --> 00:03:20,340 Post-modernists don't believe in individuals. 44 00:03:20,340 --> 00:03:24,900 You're an exemplar of your race, sex, or sexual preference. 45 00:03:24,900 --> 00:03:27,240 You're also either a victim or an oppressor. 46 00:03:27,240 --> 00:03:32,700 No wrong can be done by anyone in the former group, and no good by the latter. 47 00:03:32,700 --> 00:03:36,700 Such ideas of victimization do nothing but justify the use of power 48 00:03:36,700 --> 00:03:39,280 and engender intergroup conflict. 49 00:03:39,280 --> 00:03:44,340 All these concepts originated with Karl Marx, the 19th-century German philosopher. 50 00:03:44,340 --> 00:03:50,140 Marx viewed the world as a gigantic class struggle—the bourgeoisie against the proletariat; 51 00:03:50,140 --> 00:03:53,760 the grasping rich against the desperate poor. 52 00:03:53,760 --> 00:03:59,780 But wherever his ideas were put into practice—in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, 53 00:03:59,780 --> 00:04:06,260 to name just a few—whole economies failed, and tens of millions were killed. 54 00:04:06,260 --> 00:04:10,680 We fought a decades-long cold war to stop the spread of those murderous notions. 55 00:04:10,680 --> 00:04:14,760 But they're back, in the new guise of identity politics. 56 00:04:14,760 --> 00:04:20,300 The corrupt ideas of the post-modern neo-Marxists should be consigned to the dustbin of history. 57 00:04:20,300 --> 00:04:25,300 Instead, we underwrite their continuance in the very institutions where the central ideas 58 00:04:25,310 --> 00:04:29,789 of the West should be transmitted across the generations. 59 00:04:29,789 --> 00:04:35,440 Unless we stop, post-modernism will do to America and the entire Western world 60 00:04:35,440 --> 00:04:38,860 what it's already done to its universities. 61 00:04:38,860 --> 00:04:45,800 I'm Jordan Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, for Prager University.