Dr. Jordan B. PetersonHello everyone, I’m Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, I’m the author of 3 books, ‘Maps of Meaning’, ‘12 rules for life’ and ‘Beyond Order: 12 more rules for life’. I’ve been asked by the honorable Preston Manning to say a few words about our nation’s response to covid.

So let’s lay out what happened: we faced an unknown threat of indeterminate magnitude. So a new disease made itself manifest on the horizon and we had no way of calibrating the severity of the illness. we panicked.

We then used the panic to justify the imposition of a tyranny that was modeled for us by an authoritative state led by the Chinese communist party. So in our foolish panic we abdicated our political responsibility and we copied the first mover which was essentially communist china.

How did we abdicate our political responsibility? Well we turned over the necessity to consider a multiplicity of options to hypothetical experts on the public health front. And i would say that was an abdication of responsibility because first of all we turned those public health experts into political figures having to adjudicate between a number of competing ethical claims and we also (our political leaders and ourselves as citizens) allowed our responsibility to be usurped by these experts in a time of hypothetical crisis. We then manipulated public opinion in the most egregious possible manner using a collusion between corporations, primarily the pharmaceutical industry, gov and media who all colluded together to use fear to impose tyranny.

And we did that not only by manipulating public opinion through the media but by using opinion polls to sample that frightened public opinion to justify the imposition of restrictions on our basic rights as a consequence of response to that public opinion and then to lie in the aftermath of that and claim that that all of that was based on science, all of that was a lie as i know full well from talking to people who were advising political figures including conservative political figures during the epidemic itself.

We suspended our basic rights, including the rights to travel, the freedom of association, the right to bodily integrity (and there’s barely a more fundamental right than that). And the right to freedom of speech. We did the latter particularly by persecuting people who dared to say anything against the panicked response to the hypothetical covid epidemic.

Here’s a rule of thumb for everyone to consider in the future: imagine there’s a crisis, I suppose now we believe the next one is going to be on the climate front. Imagine that your response to that crisis is a kind of paralytic fear. Then imagine that you use that fear to justify the imposition of any tyranny you feel merited and you do so while accruing power to yourself. Well you’ve just demonstrated that you are not the right leader for that crisis. That’s for sure.

So what else did we do? We did untold economic damage which has not yet unfolded to the supply chain around the world. We’re going to starve tens of millions of people as a consequence of that and put a lot more people in absolute poverty as a consequence of increased energy and food prices. We have no idea what we did on the inflationary front yet, we’ve seen banks beginning to fail in the United States and we have no idea where that is going to end so um that was all part and parcel of the panicked response. We’ve damaged the population’s faith in both public health and science for at least a generation, maybe more because if I was a young person looking back at what happened over the last three years I would certainly be disinclined to trust either experts or politicians again in my life. And the damage to public health I suspect the consequences of that as it unfolds will be that more people will die because they are now afraid of such things as vaccines that would have died if we would have just followed Sweden’s example for instance and left people the hell alone. I don’t know how many of you who are listening know this but Sweden now has the least excess deaths in Europe. So the Swedish model which did involve vaccines by the way but no lockdowns and certainly no mask mandates.

We lied through our teeth about masks. There’s no evidence whatsoever from randomized control trials which are the only form of trial that matter. We lied through our teeth about the utility of masks so that we could look like we were doing something and that on you politicians who pushed that. We also circumvented the scientific process while approving the vaccines and we’re going to pay a big price for that and we’re certainly not done paying that.

And then I would say to the conservatives who are listening, we failed as conservatives because we did not abide by or attend to the law of unintended consequences right. We had a crisis of unmeasured magnitude that was the new illness, we put in incredibly restricted policies to hypothetically cope with it, we lied about the fact that those policies were justified by science. We reeked untold economic havoc on our society, we hurt the educational opportunities of children. And we failed to attend to the fact that a reaction to a crisis can produce a worse crisis than the crisis itself. So all things considered it’s hard for me to see how we could have possibly, had we done nothing at all in the face of this so called pandemic things would have turned out better than they did. So I think there is ample rule for all of us as citizens and especially those of us who are leaders to be as ashamed of ourselves as we possibly could. And perhaps what you could remember from this particular talk is that in our panicked idiocy we copied one of the most authoritarian societies that’s ever existed on the planet, and that would be the Chinese communist party. So pretty damned pathetic all things considered. We should seriously be ashamed of ourselves.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to share those thoughts with you.

Credentials

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is an author, psychologist, online educator, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. The Jordan B Peterson podcast frequently tops the charts in the Education category. He has written three books, Maps of Meaning, an academic work, presenting a new scientifically-grounded theory of religious and political belief, and the bestselling 12 Rules for Life, and Beyond Order, which have sold more than seven million copies.

Summary

Dr Peterson remarks on our nation’s response to covid. He talks of how we used the panic to justify the imposition of a tyranny that was modeled for us by an authoritative state led by the Chinses communist party. So in our foolish panic we abdicated our political responsibility and we copied the first mover which was essentially communist China. We failed to attend to the fact that a reaction to a crisis can produce a worse crisis than the crisis itself.

Lecture de la déclaration de Jordan Peterson, Ph. D., à une audience de la Commission d’enquête nationale citoyenne à Truro