On February, April 19, 2019, I debated Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek in Toronto, April 19 at the Sony Centre. Dr. Zizek is a Slovenian philosopher and professor at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, whose works on cultural studies, psychoanalysis and, above all, for the purposes of our debate, Marxism, are world-renowned. The topic? Happiness: Marxism vs Capitalism. This is the official video. Many bootlegs have already been released, but that seems inevitable given our current state of technological capability.
I started with a critique of The Communist Manifesto, which is the central revolutionary document of the Marxist movement (rather than addressing, say, Zizek's work, which wasn't what the debate was about).
Good evening and welcome to the Sony Center for Performing Arts. Please note: during tonight’s presentation, video, audio, and flash photography is prohibited and we have a strict zero tolerance policy for any heckling or disruptions And now, please welcome your host and moderator, President of Ralston College Dr. Stephen Blackwood.
A warm welcome to all of you here this evening, both those here in the theater in Toronto and those following online. You know, it’s not very often that you see a country’s largest theater packed for an intellectual debate. But that’s what were all here for tonight.
Please join me in welcoming to the stage Dr. Slavoj Žižek and Dr. Jordan Peterson. Just a few words of introduction. There can be few things I think now more urgent and necessary in an age of reactionary, partisan allegiance and degraded civil discourse, than real thinking about hard questions. The very premise of tonight’s event is that we all participate in the life of thought, not merely opinion or prejudice but the realm of truth, accessed through evidence and argument.
But these two towering figures of different disciplines and domains share more than a commitment to thinking itself. They are both highly tuned to ideology and the mechanisms of power. And yet, they are not principally political thinkers. They are both concerned with more fundamental matters: meaning, truth, freedom.
So it seems to me likely that we will see tonight not only deep differences, but also surprising agreement on deep questions. Dr. Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher. He has not one but two doctoral degrees, one in philosophy, one in philosophy from the University of Ljubljana, and a second in psychoanalysis from University -- Let’s hear it for psychoanalysis!
From the University of Paris VIII. He is now a professor at the Institute of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and the director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. He has published more than three dozen books, many on the most seminal philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries. He is a dazzling theorist with extraordinary range, a global figure for decades, he turns again and again with dialectical power to radical questions of emancipation, subjectivity, and art. We’ve got some McGill graduates out here.
He was subsequently professor of psychology at Harvard University and then the University of Toronto where he is today. The author of two books and well over a hundred academic articles, Dr. Petersons intellectual roots likewise lie in the 19th and early 20th centuries, where his reading of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and above all Carl Jung inform his interpretation of ancient myths, of 20th century totalitarianism, and especially his endeavor to counter contemporary nihilism.
His 12 Rules for Life is a global bestseller, and his lectures and podcasts are followed by millions around the world. Both Dr. Žižek and Peterson transcend their titles, their disciplines, and the academy.
Just as this debate, we hope, will transcend purely economic questions by situating those in the frame of happiness -- of human flourishing itself.
Each of our debaters will have 30 minutes to make a substantial opening statement, to lay out an argument. Dr. Peterson first followed by Dr. Žižek. Each will then have, in the same order, 10 minutes to reply. I will then moderate 45 minutes or so of questions, many of which will come from you, the audience, both here in Toronto and online. With that, let’s get underway. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Jordan Peterson for the first opening statement.
Well, thank you for that insanely enthusiastic welcome, for the entire event and also for being here. I have to tell you first that this event, and I suppose my life in some sense, hit a new milestone that I was just made aware of by a stagehand today backstage who informed me that last week, the tickets for this event we’re being scalped online at a higher price than the tickets for the Leafs playoff games. So I don’t know what to make of that.
Alright. So. How did I prepare for this?
I went -- I familiarized myself to the degree that it was possible with Slavoj Žižeks work, and that wasn’t that possible because he has a lot of work and he’s a very original thinker and this debate was put together in relatively short order. And what I did instead was return to what I regarded as the original cause of all the trouble, let’s say, which was the Communist Manifesto, -- and what I attempted to do -- because that’s Marx, and were here to talk about Marxism, let’s say, and, umm...
What I tried to do was read it, and to read something you don’t just follow the words and follow the meaning, but you take apart the sentences and you ask yourself, at this level of phrase and at the level of sentence and at the level of paragraph, Is this true? Are there counterarguments that can be put forward that are credible? Is this solid thinking?
And I have to tell you, and I’m not trying to be flippant here, that I have rarely read a tract -- now I read it when I was 18, it was a long time ago. That’s 40 years ago. I’ve rarely read a tract that made as many errors per sentence -- conceptual errors per sentence as the Communist Manifesto. It was quite a miraculous re-read.
And it was interesting to think about it psychologically as well because I’ve read student papers that were of the same ilk, in some sense, although I’m not suggesting that they were of the same level of glittering literary brilliance and polemic quality. And I also understand that the Communist Manifesto was a call for revolution and not a standard logical argument. But that notwithstanding, I have some things to say about that authors psychologically.
The first thing is that it doesn’t seem to me that either Marx or Engels grappled with one fundamental -- with this particular fundamental truth which is that almost all ideas are wrong. And so, if you -- It doesn’t matter if they’re your ideas or someone else’s ideas, they’re probably wrong, and even if they strike you with the force of brilliance your job is to assume, first of all, that they’re probably wrong,
and then to assault them with everything you have in your arsenal and see if they can survive. And what struck me about the Communist Manifesto was, it was akin to something Jung said about typical thinking, and this was the thinking of people who weren’t trained to think.
He said that the typical thinker has a thought, it appears to them like an object might appear in a room, the thought appears, and then they just accept it as true. They don’t go the second step, which is to think about the thinking. And that’s the real essence of critical thinking, and so that’s what you try and teach people in university, is to read a text and to think about it critically -- not to destroy the utility of the text, but to separate the wheat from the chaff.
And so what I tried to do when I was reading the Communist Manifest was to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I’m afraid I’ve found some wheat, yes, but mostly chaff.
