Helen Lewis interviews Canadian academic and bestselling author Jordan Peterson about the patriarchy, the alt-right, gay parenting, fascist ideologies, his all-beef diet and much more... See the full interview here.
Helen Lewis: So that's my idea of pariarchy, which is a system of male dominance of society.
Jordan Peterson: Yeah, but that's not my sense of the patriarchy.
Helen Lewis: So what is yours?
Jordan Peterson: Well in what sense is our society male-dominated?
Helen Lewis: The fact that the vast majority of wealth is owned by men, the vast majority of capital is owned by men. Women do more unpaid labor...
Jordan Peterson: A very tiny proportion of men and a huge proportion of people who are seriously disaffected are men, most peope in prison are men, most people who are on the street are men, most victims of violent crime are men, most people who commit suicide are men most men most people who died in wars are men, people who do worse in school are men, it's like... Where is the dominance here precisely?
What are you're doing is you're taking a tiny substrata of hyper succesful men and using it to represent the entire structure of the western society. There's nothing about that's vaguely appropriate.
Helen Lewis: But I could say equally most rape victims are women. Terrible things happen to people of both sexes.
Jordan Peterson: And you could say that with perfect utility, but that doesn't provide any evidence for the existence of a male-dominated patriarchy. It just means that terrible thnigs happen to both genders which they certainly do.
Helen Lewis: But there are almost no women wh rape men, for example. So that is an asymmetry there in sexual violence.
Jordan Peterson: Well yes, there's an asymmetry in all sort of places, but that doesn't mean that western cuture is a male-dominated patriarchy. The fact that there are asymetries has nothing to do with your basic argument.
Helen Lewis: No, but you might...
Jordan Peterson: This is a trope that people just accept. Western societies of male-dominated patriarchy it's like no, it's not. That's not true. And even if it has a patriarchal structure to some degree, the fundamental basis of that structure is not power, it's competence! That's why our society works. It's only when a structure degenerates into tyranny that the fundamental relationships between people become dependent on power. It's not power!
If you hire a plumber, who's likely to be male, it's not because there's roving bands of tyrannycal plumbers forcing you to make that choice. And it's the case with almost every interaction that you have at the face of our culture. You're dealing with people who are offering a service of one from another who are usually part of the broad middle class and who offer, and what you're looking for is the person who can offer the best service. And you can find it! It's not a consequence of being dominated by anything that's tyrannical.
And then again, our cuture, our western culture, which is by no means perfect and certainly has tyrannical elements like all cultures do, is the least tyrannical society that's ever been produced and certainly the least tyrannical society exists now. This whole of patriarchy thing... I think you have no idea how prenicious and dangerous it is.
Helen Lewis: Well, no I don't...
Jordan Peterson: Men and women, throughout history have fundamentally cooperated to push back the absolute catastrophe of existence. A terrible death rate that probablity of chronic starvation, early death, disease, the difficulty of raising children with all the death that was associated with that. And to look backwards in time and say, way basically what happened was men took the upper hand and persecuted women in this thyrannical patriarchy it's absolutely misreading of history. It's a terrible thing to teach young women and it's a horrible thing to inflict upon men...