Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules: My Thoughts (2)
person and I refer to him or her as him or her, and they say to me, no,
I'd rather be referred to as this.
Fine.
Um, the idea that somehow a gender neutral pronoun has some
great significance I don't buy.
Uh, in Persian and in Turkish, they have gender neutral pronouns.
And yet both of those societies are more patriarchal and less tolerant
of non-traditional gender roles or non-traditional sexual orientation.
So the fact that that, uh, gender neutral pronoun is used is meaningless and why,
you know, whatever the number is of these non-binary people in our society, I don't
know, 0.01%, 2%, whatever the number is, why should everyone have to change their,
um, speech patterns to accommodate this?
The main purpose is to demonstrate how progressive we are.
See, I use my preferred...
like just by saying my preferred pronouns are he/him.
Now I've said I'm progressive.
It's meaningless actually.
Uh, it's like in the company that I ran, we have always
hired the best person available.
We've had Japanese people, Chinese people, Sikhs there.
We've had Romanians, Russians.
Um, I don't know Filipinos.
We've had gay people.
We've had everybody, the best person we can find always, but
I don't believe in saying I am a diversity, you know, employer.
I sign on to the diversity statement.
I don't need all of that.
That's the sort of virtue signaling.
Rather the principle should be you hire the best person available.
And I am responsible to myself, to my employees.
And that's how I, I, so to that, making these kinds of virtue
signaling statements, Uh, a condition of employment or, uh, you know,
the whole department's set up to deal with diversity and diversity
is better than lack of diversity.
For example, I don't buy that because Japan, uh, Korea, Finland,
they don't have much diversity and their successful societies.
And you have other societies like Canada.
If you go to Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, you're gonna find a tremendous diversity
of religion, race, and ethnicity.
But what really matters is diversity of points of view.
And I don't think that the societies that are diverse ethnically or in
terms of gender are necessarily better, uh, than less diverse.
But I think it's probably a good idea to have a diversity of views.
And in that regard, I think Jordan Peterson, while I find a lot of his
stuff, I don't necessarily agree with it's valuable to have people like that who
are pushing back against this attempted you know conformity imposition on people.
You must say this, you must make a statement on diversity.
You must, uh, use gender neutral pronouns and so forth and so on.
So with that, I think I've stirred up hopefully a bit of controversy.
And, but I think diversity of views is important and we should respect
everyone's, uh, point of view and be willing to, uh, discuss and
defend our views and also take into consideration the, uh, counter argument.
There you have it.
Thank you for listening.
Bye for now.