I'm Not Sure How Humanity Will Recover From This - Jordan Peterson

rolling the clock forward you and elon tweeted recently about population collapse what do you think is going to happen there oh well i've thought for at least 10 years that the biggest problem in 50 years will be that there's just not enough people i remember hearing you say a few years ago that you thought we'd peak at about nine billion yeah we probably won't hit nine yeah and i think about stats because think about how crazy it is to think that we might be living on earth right now at a time with the most number

of humans that are ever going to exist at one time ever yeah that's highly probable and you know in the past the population collapse in developed countries is precipitous right it's like it fall we fall off a cliff because it's the same everyone knows this from the pandemic the r naught number if fewer people are reproducing next generation you have fewer people to reproduce as fewer people are reproducing and it yeah yeah yeah well i i worked on un committee it's got to be ten years ago now um to help draft the un secretary's general's

report on sustainable economic development and so i looked at all sorts of things like that i was very curious for example about because people have been beating the overpopulation drum since well it really kicked in in the 1960s you know because there were dire predictions by the year 2000 the club of rome came out and said well there'll be riots and mass starvation and mass movement of of migrants and all the things you hear about climate change because there's too many people on the planet and that just didn't happen at all that was just that

it wasn't just wrong it was anti-true it was absolutely wrong what happened instead was that everyone got way richer and the bottom section of the population in terms of economic distribution got lifted out of poverty inequality still exists but that's that power law phenomena we already talked about not that that's trivial it's just unbelievably difficult to determine what to do with there are solutions but certainly getting rid of capitalism isn't the solution and so i looked at population trends and first of all found not that this is an act of genius or anything that as

soon as you educate women and the the size of family shrinks precipitously like below replacement and that's partly because women have other options that that's a huge thing this play out oh yes i mean all the all the countries in the west are way below replacement korea is way below replacement south korea japan way below replacement yeah yeah i think the number one not good number one on the planet it might be chad chad the country in terms of growth uh eight children on average yeah i think nigeria will have more people in it than

china by the end of the century so yeah yeah yeah and musk you know he's a far looking man and and so he's looking around the apocalyptic corner let's say oh we're running out of people and what that means of course is that you run out of young people right you don't run out of old people first because everyone who is here now is going to be 30 years older in 30 years and it'll be young people we don't have enough of and of course young people are the ones who do the innovation and are

going to do most of the heavy lifting etc and so there's going to be a terrible shortage of young people well you see this with some of the things that i i posted that o s data 50.1 percent of women childless by 30 and both men and women are replying to that tweet saying well good there's too many people on the planet in any case i'm thinking how this npc midwitery is so dangerous because it makes people believe that they actually have something grounded backing up their claims yeah yeah well and that this idea that

the planet has too many people on it this is there's no sentiment more implicitly genocidal than that statement [Laughter] so what do you mean too many people exactly and what do you mean the planet and what do you propose to do about that exactly mass abortion is that your answer or should we do something a little more dramatic maybe we'll just shame people out of having children and i've seen people do that literally i saw a professor when i was at an um a ted i think it was it doesn't matter it was a number

of professors talking to a couple hundred students and one of the professors who was an environmentalist activist type and he got up on stage and shook his finger to the whole young crowd saying that him and his wife had only decided to have one child which was in my opinion one child too many for him and told all the young people there if they had a shred of ethical decency that they would lim severely limit their reproductive potential and i stood up and said that i thought that was the most one of the most appalling

things i'd ever heard anyone in academia say to young people which is really saying something because they say plenty of appalling things and it was a very uncomfortable moment and he huffed off the stage but you know in a frenzy talking about how you couldn't talk about such things without being pilloried on ethical grounds and yeah that's for sure you come out as a what emissary of the academic establishment you tell young people that humanity is so corrupt that they should seriously consider not propagating because that violates the deepest of ethical norms and you think

that's a good thing and that that's your right and it was just beyond comprehension it's beyond comprehension but it's associated with like a deeply rooted existential self-hatred and and i mean hatred at the level of humanity is like a virus on the planet that we're a cancerous group alex epstein calls this human racism right right right it's that yeah well we're a cancer on the planet you know unchecked growth just like a cancer it's like that's us say a cancer it's okay we know where your heart is located because what's what's the implications for for

a doctrine like that what do you do with a cancer cut it out yeah that's for sure poison it or whatever whatever there's nothing you don't do to a cancer so you're gonna use a metaphor like that there's too many people on the planet you can use a metaphor like that you know and then you're gonna you're gonna also decide that you're virtuous while you're using it because you're on the side of the planet whatever the hell that means so yeah it's it's unbelievable and a huge part of it's rooted in this existential shame and

and horror at the condition of being human and the fact that life is rife with suffering and a lot of it's unjustified and you know it's a mephistophelian position so mephistopheles was laid out portrayed in girth is faust that's the story of a man who sold his soul to the devil for knowledge it's a story of intellectual pride and gurtha stands in relationship to german literature in the same manner that shakespeare stands in relationship to english literature girth is mephistopheles says straight out twice in in the play once in the first his two books and

once in the first book and once in a second girth that hasn't restated twice existence is such a foul thing because of all its suffering essentially that it would be better if it was merely enough annihilated and that's the mephistophelian stance this whole show should just come to a halt look at how corrupt people are evil reigns everywhere it's nothing but will to power we're destroying the planet with our unchecked ambition all of it rooted in greed and and and machiavellianism and jockeying for position and we're so contemptible that we should just roll up and

die and we should shame women into not having children and we should shame men so they never manifest any planet destroying ambition and it's it's unbelievably appalling it goes all the way down to the bottom the bottom of things that's what's tearing our culture apart this dispute about the nature of existence at the most fundamental level so and the universities have come out on the wrong side what's happening people if you enjoyed that then press here for the full unedited episode and don't forget to subscribe peace