BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL WITH JORDAN B PETERSON LECTURE FOREWORD FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL ENGLISH TRANSLATION It's a truism and probably an oversimplified one that since the dawn of the scientific revolution a wedge has been driven through the heart of our society and the moral systems that we use to unite us. So those would be religious systems that have been subject to an intense critique from the scientists and you know it's a pretty effective critique even if you have maintained a traditional faith. The scientific onslaught is no joke and that's a problem as far as I can tell because the problem is is that you're still left with the problem of how you should act. Nietzsche would say that we're running on the fumes of christianity in the west because over it's fifteen hundred years of absolute domination, it produced a consensus of morality that was predicated on metaphysical presuppositions that organised societies. Those societies are predicated on certain beliefs like the belief that something divine inhabits each individual. You know that presumption that's embedded in law. It's the idea of natural right that there's something about you that's so valuable that even the law has to bow to it even if you're reprehensible. Even if you're convicted and reprehensible. Now that's the idea that people came up with. That idea ist a bloody miracle because your general proclivity is so that if someone is even accused of doing something terrible, that's enough so that you can stone them to death or do whatever you're going to do with them. The presumption of innocence before guilt, of all the things that aren't automatic, that's one of the things on top of the list. It's interesting to me because it seems to me that that presupposition that there's something valuable transcendent about each individual. I wouldn't call that a scientific presupposition but it seems to be a highly functional presupposition. I think in that it isn't unreasonable to notice that societies that have valued the individual and made the law subject to the individual even with regards to voting because that's basically what voting does: putting sovereignty in the hands of the people. Those societies actually seem to work now whether they'll work. For the next 300 years who the hell knows. I don't know but they worked pretty well for the last 500 years. We've got it pretty good right now and I suspect most of you are rather pleased that the law recognises your value as individuals and you take that for a granted right. You think you have natural rights and of course, they are a logical consequence of your transcendent value and that's nested in this. Nietzsche's observation is that it's nested in a set of metaphysical beliefs and his idea was that if you wipe the metaphysical beliefs, eventually you wipe out the whole system. Because you've knocked out the cornerstone and it might take a long time for the thing to shake and fall but but it will. Whether he was right or not is hard to say. It looks to me that what's happened since Nietzsche announced the death of god and the late 1800s is that Western society is oscillated between extremes. Extremes on the right. Extremes on the left. Democracy is somewhere in the middle but it's not obvious to me that that can be maintained without the underlying metaphysics. That's a problem because whatever you might say about the underlying metaphysics: it's not true the way science is true and that could be okay because there might be more than one form of truth. In fact, I think there is pragmatic truth and I think pragmatic truth is actually deeper than scientific truth. And pragmatic truth is the truth that enables you to act in a manner that's best. That improves the probability of your existence and your reproduction maximally.