Common Ground or Line in the Sand

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Along with hundreds of thousands of other Americans, I’ve been following Professor Jordan Peterson for a while.

 

Professor Jordan Peterson went from being a frankly unknown lecturer to an internet and media sensation who has had a huge impact on numerous lives, when he published a Youtube video a while ago expressing his refusal to use made-up pronouns under threat of punishment under law in Canada, following the implementation of HR C 16 and the so-called “Ontario Human Rights” code that specifies the policies that will govern its implementation.

Many things make this refusal interesting. First, Peterson has spent most of his adult life researching the formation of totalitarian regimes and knows deeply how the compulsion of speech is a critical part of that (explaining why “this is the hill [he is] prepared to die on”). Second, his simple defense of free speech, made more courageous by the fact that his job was at risk, struck a chord with hundreds of thousands of people who have started listening to some of his amazing lectures about human nature. Peterson is not political per se, but his work has profound political implications.

Recently, he gave a lecture in which he indicated that he had just spoken to ten out of Canada’s 20 most important journalists, and all ten said they were now self-censoring because they felt threatened by reactions to their honest beliefs/claims from those who might be well described as cultural authoritarians.

Those authoritarians are now using law and violence to harm other people who choose not to comply actively with their preferences. In such a world, what does someone like me – who fights for liberty by always finding the common ground with others – do when these others are not interested in common ground and have already started building the very totalitarian regime whose prevention is the very purpose of fighting for liberty in the first place. At the very least, a declaration has to be made… Hence, this week’s show.