{"id":38595,"date":"2018-10-30T09:37:34","date_gmt":"2018-10-30T14:37:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/162.144.72.159\/~jordapq6\/?p=38595"},"modified":"2023-10-19T19:40:45","modified_gmt":"2023-10-19T19:40:45","slug":"notes-on-a-dream-in-oslo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jordanbpeterson.com\/political-correctness\/notes-on-a-dream-in-oslo\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes on a dream in Oslo"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"So it\u2019s 2:39 AM in Oslo, Norway. I woke up in a too-hot hotel room out of a fitful nightmare, which I can only partially remember. I haven\u2019t had a dream that I could recall even that clearly in a very long period of time. The last one was about traveling and speaking and not getting enough to eat. That was about six months ago. It occurred just before I embarked on what has now been a nine-month 85-city world tour,<\/a>\u00a0focusing on my book, 12 Rules for Life<\/a>. I am on a very restricted diet, eating only beef and water, as a consequence of what appears to be a rather intractable auto-immune disease. I was concerned at some deep unconscious level about what might go wrong if I set out to talk with 250,000 people: If I could not eat, then I could not think and then things would not go well. Hence the nightmare. It was a warning of what might go wrong (and has not).<\/p>\n

In this dream I was speaking to a young man. He was very garrulous and irritating, and simply would not shut up. His entire being seemed design to provoke. He reminded me of a young man I met in Edmonton when I was in university in the early 1980\u2019s. He was from Grande Prairie. We became the closest thing to friends that he had ever had. My entire group adopted him, I suppose \u2013 and consciously so. We could see something good about him, underneath much that was not good at all. His older brothers (I think he had five of them) had not been kind to him when he was young. He told us all about it. They had fed him LSD, for example, when he was seven. He was studying Social Work \u2013 an early sign, I suppose, of the destiny of that discipline to degenerate into the utterly catastrophic mess that it now is. The blind leading the blind.<\/p>\n

I listened to him, carefully, as did my friends, particularly Jim, a very physically powerful young man who was pursuing a philosophy degree. Jim hailed from Crooked Creek, Alberta, a tiny frontier town located right near an Indian reserve and no place for cowards and weaklings. I had encountered the friendless young man \u2013 let\u2019s call him Sam — previously in Grande Prairie when I went to the college there a few years before. He drove an ancient Mercedes with swastikas painted on the doors. Sam simply could not exist without causing trouble. He told us himself that it was as if he walked around with a target painted on his back. He was Always Getting Hit. I became thoroughly aware of his annoying side, and used it to play a joke on another friend of mine, another tough kid, Hank, early high-school dropout, later college graduate, coincidentally also serving as a social worker, albeit with some of the roughest delinquents in Alberta, and fortunately and rarely quite sane. I invited Same to play the board game, Risk, with Hank, my delinquent-straightening pal, as an evil test of both their characters. We all drank too much, and Sam started mouthing off, in a more and more provocative manner, as he progressively became drunker and closer to losing the board game. Finally, seeing defeat as imminent, he flipped the board. This did not sit well with Hank, who took his Risk seriously, and did not appreciate being trifled with. He leaped up with murder in his eyes. He chased the miscreant up the stairs, but regained his temper half way to the top of the landing, and turned around in disgust. Sam hid under the bed, and did not come out for the rest of the night. That was sad, and comical, and just as well.<\/p>\n

Later we attended another party, in a packed house, where there were many people we did not know. Sam played his tricks again. He sashayed, I suppose, from person to person (I don\u2019t mean precisely in the sexual sense, although there were dark rumours about his ill-use at the hands of his brothers), offering the most provocative opinions he could possibly manage, in a voice that became louder and louder and shriller and shriller. Many of those who had attempted to befriend him were there, and became progressively worried for his safety. I took him aside and asked him what the hell he was doing. \u201cI can\u2019t help myself,\u201d he said. \u201cI told you. I have a target drawn on my back.\u201d The enemies he was so deterministically generated started to conspire \u2013 to determine who was going to take Sam outside and teach him a lesson \u2013 and the entire gathering began to take on an ominous tone. But there was not stopping Sam\u2019s mouth. He knew what was coming, full well, but was drawn to it, like the proverbial moth to the flame. Finally, Jim lifted himself from the chair he was occupying, walked directly to Sam, felled him with a single punch, and left the party. The tension dissipated. Sam spent a lot of time afterward moving from person to person, \u00a0calling Jim a coward for leaving, but we all knew (and so did Sam) that Jim\u2019s single punch saved our wayward pest from a much more serious beating.<\/p>\n

I know perfectly well that the short time that Sam spent with all of us, a welcome member of our group, prior to this event, was the best time of his life. He told me so, in complete candour, amazed at his good fortune and newfound friendships, knowing full well that he was likely to ruin it, as he did.<\/p>\n

I did not see him after that single punch.<\/p>\n

Sam had never had any proper care or encouragement in his entire life, and had made an unbreakable habit of garnering what attention he could manage by being so unbearable that no one could ignore him.<\/p>\n

I have not brought this episode of my life to mind for thirty years. It came part and parcel with last night\u2019s dream. I was in a discussion with a young man, unkempt, poorly put together, and he simply would not shut up. Everything he said was designed to provoke and to test. He finally pushed me beyond my limit of tolerance. I grabbed him, physically, and threw him against the wall. It was like wrestling with dough. It reminded me of the unpleasant physical play I sometimes engaged in with young boys who had been neglected by their parents when I worked as a child day care worker when I was in my late teens. The kids \u2013 particularly the boys \u2013 would link up to play with me. I would spin them around by the hands in the playground, with their feet flying off the air. I would draw them large-toothed monsters, which they would immediately hang in their lockers. But the ignored boys, the Neverland lost boys? They could not be played with properly. They were too awkward. They got upset at the wrong times. They had no physical resilience, no ability to dance, and they were too desperate. Ignored at home, they lacked the skills to attract other children, and they spent their dismal little lives isolated and alone, avoided by potential playmates, and given a wide berth by adults. One in particular sticks in my mind: every time I sat down on the ground, he would come and sit on my lap. But he was too old for that, desperate as he was, and I could not find it within me to provide what it was too late by that early time in his life for anyone to provide.<\/p>\n

In my dream, I wrestled my opponent to the ground. He was still talking, mindlessly, mechanically, rapidly, nonstop. I bent his wrists to force his knuckles into his mouth. His arms bent like rubber and, even though I managed the task, he did not stop babbling. I woke up. 2:39 in Oslo. I\u2019m not in good spirits.<\/p>\n

Last night I was interviewed by a young journalist from France. He had flown in with a camerawoman from Paris. He had been trying to have what might have been but wasn\u2019t a discussion with me for several months, flying at one point to Rochester New York to attend one of my lectures, but failing to produce the appropriate paperwork for my tour manager. He wanted to talk to me about the degenerating state of modern masculinity \u2013 the alienation felt by what appears to be an increasing number of young men \u2013 and what particular attraction what I have been saying on YouTube and on my podcasts and in my book might have for such people. A part of him really wanted to know, and that was how we opened the discussion. I told him that the dominant narrative in our culture is predicated on the assumption that the West is a tyrannical patriarchy; that all its accomplishments are a consequence of the exploitation of the dispossessed; and that the only true way to a desirable position is through the expression of power. I told him that young men are therefore faced with a Devil\u2019s choice: if they are ambitious and competent (or even ambitious or competent) then they will be treated, not least by themselves, as if they are expressing precisely the traits that produced this terrible tyranny, and are no better than the infinite oppressors of the past. This happens because it has become acceptable in our time to put forward a version of history, the present and the future that is based on a deep hatred for men (or, even worse, a deep hatred for competence). This is a very enervating, demotivating, discouraging story, as it takes what is best about the best young men \u2013 their desire for competence, contribution, cooperation, competition and success \u2013 and turns it into something indictable. As the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had it: \u201cWe are best punished for our virtues.\u201d It is of course the case that subjecting someone to contempt, ridicule and insult for striving forward also rewards and justifies the actions of that part of them that might choose the easy path, in any case. It\u2019s difficult to be good, honest, noble, courageous and forthright, and all-too-easy to remain immature and half-formed. If what is positive is punished, then what is negative has all the arguments it needs at hand to triumph.<\/p>\n

This is the reason for the despair of young men. I explained that to the French journalist, but he could not listen. He was not really there. He had brought a list of pre-prepared questions, \u201chard questions,\u201d as he considered them, and did not have the confidence in his own desperation and curiosity to pursue the question that was actually guiding him. He considered himself a liberal, meaning someone attracted by the more radical end of the left, and the story I was telling him was simply not comprehensible: not without the demolition of what had become not so much his fundamental beliefs as his entire manner of looking at the world. So he did not have the ears to hear, and actually repeated the question three more times. I gave the same answer each time, to no avail.<\/p>\n

We did not have a discussion. Instead, he acted out his version of the tough, hard-bitten reporter, the asker of the aforementioned \u201chard questions,\u201d which were descriptions of episodes gleaned from my adventures and misadventures over the last two years, which he laid at my feet in an attempt to demonstrate to me the moral unacceptability of my ways. Why had I discussed \u201cenforced monogamy\u201d with a reporter from the New York Times? Why had I tweeted the Facebook page of a Communist activist from Ryerson who had posted flyers accusing me of being a public menace by the dozens in the my neighbourhood? Wasn\u2019t all the money I was making from my book and tour merely evidence that I had found a weak spot in desperate young men and exploiting them shamelessly? Wasn\u2019t my comment to Camille Paglia that men remain civil to one another partly because of the underlying threat of physical combat merely a cover for my desire to treat women with violence? We didn\u2019t discuss the reasons why millions of people have read my book, and had their lives changed for the better; we didn\u2019t discuss the strange fact that thousands of people in cities all over the world attend my lectures, where I discuss the necessity of heavy responsibility, confrontation with the suffering of life, and the moral obligation we all share to constrain the evil within us. We didn\u2019t even discuss the plight of young men \u2013 even though he was clearly someone who shared that plight. I don\u2019t think I conducted myself particularly well. I was less even-tempered than I should have been, trying to parry his constant insinuations and accusations and insistences that we did indeed live in a tyrannical patriarchy and that it was sheer heresy for anyone to dispute that fundamental proposition. After we had wrapped up, we spoke a bit more off camera. He told me that he truly believed in a world of privilege for white males of a certain class, let\u2019s say \u2013 a class he belonged to. I told him that he therefore bore guilt for which there was no possibility of expiation \u2013 not from within that scheme of things. I told him that instead of guilt he could decide to take responsibility for his relative good fortune (as well as willingly shouldering whatever disadvantages were also part and parcel of his being). He could do good with what he had been granted, and multiply the talents, so to speak, that were awarded to him at his birth. Then everyone would win. I told him that how much money I was making was not the issue (and certainly not something I am ashamed about) but that what I did with the money was the relevant point. I told him that I planned to put my fortune, such as it is, to the best use that I can imagine, personally, for my family, and for the broader community, if I can manage that, and that I could not think of a better adventure than that.<\/p>\n

But we caught none of that on tape, and I am not optimistic about the future of the interview, once edited and shaped, as it surely will be.<\/p>\n

Afterward, very stressed, I returned to my hotel room. It was about 8:30 in the evening. My wife Tammy was sleeping, trying to shake a persistent cold. She asked me how it went. I said, \u201cterrible.\u201d I hadn\u2019t spent two hours talking to a person. The person wasn\u2019t there, or was barely there (even though the journalist had the makings, I would say, of a fine young man). I couldn\u2019t reach him. Instead, I had a very irritating discussion with an ideologically-possessed puppet and that was both too familiar and too unpleasant. I had a shower, and we went for a steak, and then we returned to our room.<\/p>\n

Professor Janice Fiamengo, enemy of the politically correct, and a seasoned soldier in today\u2019s culture war, was a guest this week on the The Rubin Report<\/a>, a popular talk show hosted by former left-liberal Dave Rubin, who is also a standup comedian and the man who is accompanying me on my endless book tour, opening with a bit of comedy to lighten up my repertoire of existential philosophy, narrative of good and evil and dark psychology that constitutes my strangely popular repertoire. Janice talked of her mounting horror at the terrible ideological possession that has gripped the modern university, and of her decades-long battle with its minions, closing with an exceptional statement, which I am paraphrasing: the disciplines dominated by women are irrational, vicious, provocative, and destructive \u2013 and purposefully so.<\/p>\n

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