Is Gender A Social Construct - A Profound Explanation

https://youtu.be/QClcf2fgxTo

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[Music] is gender a social construct i can help you to answer this question for yourself in a non-ideological non-belief-based way but that can only happen if you are genuinely interested in knowing the answer in understanding the answer and also thinking deeply about the question and not taking it for granted this question is much deeper than most people understand it's an extremely deep question that takes us into the nature of reality and existence and the mind itself so the question is how badly do you really want to know or are you just looking for me to validate your pre-existing belief notice that notice that there's a difference between arguing based on this question which is mostly what you'll find on youtube is people arguing based on this question either pro or con arguing it from an ideological position from things they've heard other people say whether it's their professors or teachers or people they look up to public intellectuals or just whatever their preconceived intuitions are and of course the difficulty with probing this question this is a philosophical question the difficulty with probing it is that you have to actually be serious about doing philosophy because you already have a preconceived answer a bias depending on what culture you grew up in as to what the answer is and for the majority of people it's obvious of course there's men and there's women and that's just how it is science says so it's physical it's biological there are chromosomes to even question these things is absurd so notice that you're not coming into this question neutrally with a genuine desire for the truth you're coming into this question with a lot of preconceived ideas and one of the reasons that is is because as you were growing up you had to develop your own sexual identity and that was a struggle for for you you probably don't even realize or understand the depth of the struggle that was there for you to form a healthy sexual identity a healthy relationship and understanding of your own sexuality and its role within a larger society and community that you're a part of and the family that you're a part of for them to have accepted you to love you as you think you are for them to accept your identity this is all complicated stuff and for many people it goes smoothly if they have good parents and so forth but for other people it doesn't go smoothly other people struggle with this for their entire lives so it's not so easy you see and now that you did develop a healthy let's say let's just assume you have a healthy sexual identity you're not confused about it you're not uncertain about it and also you fit in with the larger society so you don't feel like you've been left out or marginalized in any way then uh see you might feel like oh okay i've got that figured out it's not a problem for me but see you've only got it figured out to the extent that you stick to and defend that version of your identity and as soon as it starts getting questioned you get nervous and you get defensive because if let's just say if if your sexual identity is actually a social construction and we start to deconstruct it well if you spent your whole life believing that it's physical reality this presents some problems for your psyche how does your psyche cope with that so you see we have a very deep tangle here of both philosophical issues epistemic issues metaphysical issues and also psychological issues and personal biases that you yourself have from the cultural programming that you received on this on this issue and this is not a philosophical abstraction it might sound like oh well leo this is just it's just airy fairy theory right no it's not theory because you actually believe that you are a man or a woman or whatever you believe you are if you believe you're something else that's what you believe that's not a theory for you that's not high philosophy for you that's your very core of who you think you are that's very deeply personal to you and that's why if you've ever wondered why these on this particular question why this is such a controversial question and it leads to all these fiery debates and emotions and people getting triggered and angry on both sides why this happens is because you should you should feel inside of yourself that it it touches something very deep within you it's not just theory there's something actually practical writing on this namely your survival sexuality plays a very central role in your survival as a human and so this is not just philosophy for many people your whole life is at stake in many parts of the world you will get bullied and even physically abused and perhaps even killed for example if you're admit if you admit that you have homosexual desires just just for that you could get killed and many humans throughout human history have gotten killed for that it's only like in the last few decades where it's become somewhat acceptable and still in many parts of the world even in many developed parts of the world it's still unacceptable to admit such things maybe within your family it's unacceptable to admit such things so the reason i'm saying this we're getting to the topic here but i have to lay a little bit of groundwork for you here because you're not going to understand what i'm about to say unless your mind is extremely open and you are very cognizant and aware and mindful paying attention for your own internal biases that are going to be skewing your your perception of this whole issue because there's some radical territory that this question will take us into and the problem is is that people don't appreciate how radical the territory is sometimes you ask a question that threatens your entire sense of reality and that's basically what this question does so let's lay this out so is gender a a social construction where to even begin here so basically what we're talking about is men and women what is a man and what is a woman what is male and what is female you can make all sorts of fine distinctions between man woman male female um but what you have to start to understand is that man and woman let's work with those terms here man and woman what are these things that's the core question we're asking here what is a man and what is a woman now ordinarily under the materialistic scientific paradigm we tend to think of a man and a woman they're just that is it's just uh physically encoded in our dna a man and a woman are physical creatures that are born they live and they die but that's not really what a man and a woman are in your psyche and in your mind a man and a woman these are abstract categories you never see a man or a woman or men or women out in the world you see specific entities specific living creatures you might say although those two are abstract categories you don't even see any living creatures per se you see a specific thing and even see thing is an abstract category too so see this gets very tricky because our language and the way that we think about reality it all gets entangled very deeply here so let's start untangling some of this stuff so basically even though you think in your mind that a man and a woman that these are just physical things defined by genetics and by biology and by physics and chemistry and whatever you might think it is um actually if you reflect on where your ideas of man and woman came from and what these things are these are ideas not physical objects you thinking that a man and a woman are a physical thing that itself is an idea do you see physicality itself is an idea which you are applying to this category and then you're you're creating these categories you weren't born with these categories you picked them up from your culture and then these categories they're not just a simplistic thing like a lot of people say well leo but it's kind of obvious that like a man has a dick and balls and a woman has tits and a vagina and a woman can have children and a man can't and this is just it's so obvious it's so black and white that how could you even argue against this it sounds like absurdity but there's something more nuanced that's being said here because the way you're creating this simplistic duality between man and woman and ascribing these various features and parts to these abstract categories you have to understand that this is not a given this is something your mind had to invent with the help of society and culture because you didn't just sit down one day as a baby and decide for yourself okay well i'm gonna call that a man i'm gonna call this a woman and for the man you know all the characteristics of a man include a beard and uh you know big shoulders and a big jaw and uh a lack of breasts and testicles and all these things and for a woman she can get pregnant and she has long hair and like you didn't sit down and consciously create these categories where they come from you might say well they just came from nature no they didn't come from nature and here is where look i'm not trying to teach you an ideology or a belief system that i personally have that i think is right that i think you should adopt because i think it's true that's not what we're doing here what we're doing here is we're trying to actually investigate where our ideas of things came from this is like a science that you do on yourself a self-inquiry of a sort where you actually ask yourself yeah where did my ideas of of man and woman come from did i create them or was it fed to me as a child and i didn't even think very deeply about them and just accepted them and who gets to say what is a man and a woman like who gets to to create that list of features and is this list of features is it immutable is it defined somewhere in the physics of the universe like there's a law somewhere like imagine that that god had a had sort of a a book with all the laws of the universe written on it e equals mc squared and a bunch of other things one plus one equals two and so forth and then somewhere in that book it said that a man has testicles and a woman does not and that is that is that that's sort of like the universal definition it's not like that though you see because we ourselves are constructing these labels and these abstract categories and then assigning various properties or features to them and so as we're doing that you should be able to notice that it can be somewhat arbitrary and subjective and relative in how you assign things to these categories and that that could change over time and also that different cultures could assign different features to different categories now you might say leo we have science science is an objective study of reality and science itself says that there's a clear distinction between man and woman these are these are just these are scientific this is not something that we invented this is just basic science but see again how deep do you want to go because we're going to start to go down this slippery slope you're going to start to notice very soon um because as you bring up more and more of your defenses i'm going to keep deconstructing them and so it's going to start happening is that you're going to start sliding down the slope the question is how much slippage down the slope are you going to tolerate at some point it's going to start to threaten you too much so see you have to start to appreciate that science itself is a social construction where did science come from where did you get your ideas of what science is and that science is even valid certainly not through personal experiment you got it from society and in fact if you're a very rigorous scientist you'll have to admit that science has never ever empirically proven the existence of a man or a woman that's not what science does see people have very mistaken silly cartoonish ideas of what science is people assume that science has proven many more things than science has actually technically proven science has never proven that a man has a penis and a woman has a vagina you might say well but of course science has no never how could you prove that that's not something you prove that's like a definition you enforce you construct that definition in order to do your science but that's never proven that's just assumed as a given it's a sort of an axiom that you need in order to do anything in a certain sense i mean what experiment could you run to prove that a man is supposed to have a penis there's no such experiment then people say well leo but what about biology like the chromosomes obviously we know we have a rigorous technical definition of what a man and a woman is a woman has xx chromosomes a man has xy chromosomes we know that but again that's not something that's actually literally proven by science that's something that's see we're dealing with abstract categories these abstract categories are actually a meta scientific phenomenon you have to create these categories in order to then do your science upon it technically all science does is just it does measurements now you can take a human with a body and you know measure his genitals or her genitals and you could take another one and measure their genitals and you can measure their size their weight their length their their type how they look and all this sorts of stuff and you can even measure the dna and make comparisons and see differences but nowhere does it say how to categorize those things into some sort of higher abstract category like man and woman nor has science by the way ever proven the existence of humans what is a human see this problem of being a man or a woman it doesn't stop there what we're really talking about is the problem of identity identity what does it mean for a thing to be a thing see you sit there thinking that you're a human and that that's perfectly obvious and in fact you think that's scientific you think that's just a biological fact no it's not biology has literally never proven that you're a human nor could it even do so in theory because you don't find humans out in the world what you find are you find objects creatures and then you create various categories you create categorize them however you want i mean like literally you walk outside you see a a cat or a dog and you say that's not human whereas i am human now you say and that's a scientific fact that's not a scientific fact now what science can do is science can do some dna analysis and tell you that well yeah the dna of that of that creature over there and that one over there is different by a certain percentage from this creature over here and this creature is more similar to that creature than it is to that creature so yes you can do dna analysis and you can technically find through dna differences and similarities you know what is more resembling of what but that doesn't tell you what is human and what is cat and what is dog you could say ah leo but we can figure that out because humans can interbreed with each other whereas cats and dogs can't interbed with each other and also cats and dogs can't interbreed with humans therefore this is what defines the categories in a rigorous way no it doesn't there are many examples throughout biology and evolution where actually all of those all of these boundaries you think exist that they're all blurred there are different species some species when they're close together they can actually interbreed successfully and then other other even members of the same species sometimes cannot interbreed for various reasons because there's a dna mismatch or whatever they're going to have a a miscarriage or or something like that and so in fact there are no hard and fast lines between what canon can't interbreed and also moreover that's not really the the the deep problem the deep problem is that you yourself are setting the standard of what defines human versus cat versus dog is whether they can interbreed with each other that's your own standard nowhere in the universe is it written that well if two things can't interbreed with each other that must mean they're radically different that's your own standard why do you care about that particular standard of interbreeding or for example for that matter you might say well leo a man can't carry a baby can't be pregnant therefore it's clear that that's a man and that's a woman again but who is setting that standard why do you care about pregnancy why is that a feature that's important to you why don't you care about for example hair and you could say well both men and women have hair so they're in the same category but see that's not useful to you personally to you personally the category of man and woman these are not mere abstractions these are abstractions which are serving a very practical purpose for you like you as an animal have to figure out how to get laid you as a biological thing that survives and reproduces have to figure out how to reproduce and create offspring and how to get your sexual needs met and also your emotional needs for intimacy for connection or socialization beyond that you need to be accepted by your friends and your family and they won't accept you if you have weird categories that don't fit their own categories and society won't accept you and you won't get a job and you won't be able to join the military if you want and you won't be able to fit in at university if you don't accept the categories that they're defining you see so what you have to recognize is that this issue is deeply laden with survival biases on your part the reason you care about pregnancy and penises and vaginas and femininity and masculinity is because you're pursuing these things you need these things in your life these are a deep survival need for you a deep craving for you and much of your existence is wrapped up about this i mean you're you're watching pornography you're you're interested in nudity you're you're interested in orgasms and sex and you you masturbate and you have ideas about what kind of family you want to raise what kind of children you want to have what kind of values you want to teach them like this is very very personal for you i want you to see that this is not just philosophy and the idea of a man and a woman for you you have to also recognize and admit this notice this that for you these are not purely clinical biological chromosomal facts primarily when we say man and woman you're not thinking about dna and chromosomes you will retreat to that justification if pushed into a corner but that's not what you really think about when you think about man and woman when you think of yourself as a man or as a woman you're not sitting there and thinking about your chromosomes or your dna you have no direct experience of these things these are things you learned long after the fact to justify your deep intuitions about what a man and a woman is these these categories and these categories have much more important functional uses in society and in your own life than merely that of how they correspond to differences between chromosomes and dna you have ideas about how a man should behave and how a woman should behave how a man should look how a woman should look how a man should dress how a woman should dress what kind of job a man should have versus what kind of job a woman is supposed to have what's acceptable what's not acceptable for for each of them how they should behave in social situations how they should behave in bed how they should talk what you're allowed to be attracted to and what you're not allowed to be attracted to depending upon how you identify yourself to be what you think is valuable in a man versus what you think is valuable in a woman many of these traits are sort of opposite when you see a strong brash man taking sort of a leadership role in a situation you might think oh that's good that's how a man should be and then when you see a woman doing that you look at her you say oh that's she's she's being weird i don't like that where did you get these ideas these standards and norms you see most people take this completely for granted and just assume well that's just how it is can't be otherwise and it's pointless to question it and to questions is just empty philosophy and word games but it's not empty philosophy in word games and if you study different cultures you see that different cultures and also throughout the history of of time that there were very different standards placed upon men and women even if we ignore for a moment that just the purely physical differences of vaginas and penises and we look more into the role that you play as a man and a woman in a society in your tribe in your family and so on these roles have been very different across time and across cultures different standards the kind of length of hair that one is allowed to wear in a society the kind of occupations that one is allowed to have whether you're a hunter or a gatherer or you're a doctor or you're a teacher or you're a nurse right and even just in the last 50 years our own last generation or two the generation you you grew up in we've seen significant evolution and changes in in these standards and norms and this is actually a deep reason why people debate and fight over this question so vehemently and so passionately is precisely because this question is not purely physical or biological if it was that simple there'd be nothing to argue over and you wouldn't get passionate about this question the reason this question inflames your passions is precisely because you need to fight to defend your ideas of what a man and a woman are because if you don't fight to defend them they'll cease to exist they'll dissolve culture and society will change and then you will be left out you will be left with the old ideas not the new ideas and see this is very threatening because you spent your whole life using man and woman as a sort of an anchor in your life to ground your sense of self your identity and your even your sense of physical reality you assume these things are physical so now if someone like me comes along and starts to undermine that by sowing seeds of doubt in there by starting to get you to question all these distinctions and boundaries as maybe not being physical but being more mental mentally constructed this this can be very threatening to you it threatens your sense of identity and it threatens your sense of understanding of the world because all of a sudden the world you thought you had figured out doesn't make sense anymore and then this leads you to ask deeper questions about like well leo but if that's a social construction then what about science and if that's a social construction then what about mathematics and if that's a social concern what about something else and then where does it stop and usually people don't want to go all the way down the slippery slope they just kind of cut the line off somewhere and then they just stick to defending that line because that's what's convenient that helps them to maintain their sense of reality but it gets way weirder than this we've only seen the tip of the spear here of how deep this problem goes you might say well leo it's obvious to me that i'm a man because i have a penis and testicles and i have high testosterone you know i've measured my testosterone we can measure that and in a woman we see the testosterone is lower obviously she looks different and all of us can tell the difference between a man and woman just even a child can tell the difference so what is the point of all this philosophy why are you blurring lines that are that are so obvious well of course it's true that the majority of us have developed a very good sort of heuristic and intuition for quickly distinguishing men from women and in 95 percent of the cases this works pretty well so from a purely pragmatic perspective if all you care about is just living your life and getting along and then you know knowing who to flirt with and who not to flirt with and who you should have sex with and who you should not have sex with and who you can impregnate and who you can't just making those basic survival distinctions at a practical level yeah for that purpose the category of man and woman are very useful categories no one's arguing with that but that doesn't mean they're not constructed in fact the reason you're constructing things to begin with is because it's very very useful constructions are very useful illusions can be very useful falsehoods can be very useful in fact the majority of what your mind is doing is it's constructing various fantasies and ideas to help you to get by in life and it doesn't care very much whether it's true or not or what the underlying reality is it just all it cares about hey as long as it works i'm just going to continue doing this until it stops working see that's the problem you might say well leo if it's working then what's the problem well the problem is that it works for a while but it doesn't work forever and then you run into edge cases that force you to reconcile your model of reality with the stuff you see out in the world you're walking into a grocery store and you you're checking out at the cashier uh stand there and the cashier for the first time in your life you can't tell is this a man or a woman you can't tell because of the hair and the clothes and the body weight and certain uh you know features that are amorphous or kind of nebulous and androgynous you you literally don't know if this is a man or a woman and the voice is not too deep and it's not too it's not too high and there's some feminine qualities or some mascot so what is this thing see now your mind is is a bit disturbed and not only is it disturbed it might actually creep you out you don't just get disturbed at the intellectual level you also get disturbed at sort of a deep gut level where you're looking at this person and you're just repulsed by this person because your ordinary way of interacting with men or women is that if it's a beautiful woman let's say you're a guy you're a straight guy like you prefer to be attracted to beautiful women you want to be talking to beautiful women because why because it's just it because it gives you dating opportunities of course uh and then uh and if you're talking to men then there's a certain kind of man that you respect maybe sort of a macho man kind of you know manly man type of man and then when you're talking to an effeminate man you feel like oh this guy is weak that like i don't want to be that way i don't like this guy i'm not going to befriend him you might feel that way why because you yourself are in the business of constructing sort of macho man identity why because you think you need that in order to attract that highly feminine woman that you are attracted to right so you're playing this game all the time and then when you're faced with this cashier that you don't know what it is at a gut level you don't know how to react to it and you've got to figure out how to react to it what to do about it is this a good thing is this a bad thing what does this mean for me can can i have sex with this thing or can't i see all of this subconsciously is going on in your mind and what you feel from all that you don't cognizantly realize most of that mostly what you just feel is like ugh i don't i don't like this feels weird it feels creepy and you try to leave as quickly as possible now i hear some objections here is like well leo but surely we could take that person's dna and actually measure the dna and figure out what the chromosomes are and based on those chromosomes that's how we determine what the uh what the identity is here it's a man or a woman and then just just because i can't tell from surface features even the yeah it's an edge case but it doesn't really matter so what underneath all that is it's really a man or a woman and it doesn't matter what this person identifies as as long as they got the proper chromosomes that's just what they are and then you know if they think there's something else well that's their problem they're deluded they're playing games in their own mind but again you're grossly over underestimating this problem of identity of how you think you are who you think you are rather you see man and woman these are not merely abstract categories that are just applying to the people they also apply to you you believe yourself to be one of those or something else that identity that was not scientifically derived you have to notice that if you dare that was constructed by you and it has to be defended by you and to defend it you will use very powerful justifications you will employ science you will employ appeals to authority you will point your fingers at others and at society but you're never going to actually really deeply want to question where your identity came from you might say well leo but it's obvious that i have a penis and therefore i'm a man this is just a scientific fact and there's nothing you can say to argue against this well look at this look at how look at how tricky this gets here but you have to open your mind to really see this see i'm saying here is something very radical i'm saying that when you say that you have a penis and not a vagina i'm gonna make the move that why don't you have a vagina why don't you consider your mother's vagina if you're a man your own who told you her vagina is not yours now you're gonna say that's ridiculous leo um cause she's her and i'm me but you see there's the rub there's the crux of the whole identity problem who's to say you're you and she's her science science has never proven that her vagina is not yours if you think it does then you don't understand science science does not and cannot prove identity of anything the question of identity is a meta-scientific issue it comes prior to science all science does is it just measures stuff again science can measure your mother's vagina it can measure your penis but it cannot say that that vagina belongs to her and not to you and you say well that's ridiculous because clearly i'm over here and she's over there there's no way that her vagina is mine because i don't feel it i can't use it but again that is your standard that you're drawing that you have to feel it and use it why where is the line i dare you to take your finger and to point at the line between you and your mother's vagina what you'll notice if you're honest and open-minded is that there is no such line you might say well the line is the skin it's the boundary of the skin here i'm this organism and she's that organism but there is no line there's no line between one organism and another the skin is just an arbitrary line that you you selected for your own selfish purposes you have to see that you have to see that your own selfishness is completely distorting and biasing this entire inquiry so what i'm saying here is something very radical the idea that you have a penis and not a vagina that you cannot give birth as a man but that women can or other creatures can that this this whole way of how you're categorizing and carving up reality it's all a construction what i'm telling you is your the paradigm you've lived under for the last how many decades of your life is the idea that you're this separate creature here with a penis or with a vagina and so forth and what i'm telling you now is just imagine changing that paradigm such that you start to see yourself as having three and a half billion penises and three and a half billion vaginas remove the bias from your psyche that a penis and a vagina have to be attached to your body because you're going to now further deconstruct the idea that this is your body and that you only have a single body so of course now you're going to switch your identity imagine for a moment that instead of identifying with this body and this one life you start to identify with the entire human species so you now have seven billion bodies now you say leo but i don't feel those bodies so they're not really my bodies i'm just you're just fooling yourself when you're saying that not so fast who told you that to have a body you need to feel the body science didn't tell you that where'd you get that idea if you're honest and you contemplate this deeply you'll realize that you got that idea arbitrarily from your society you didn't think very deeply about this idea it is actually possible to switch your identity to that of identifying with the entire human species you might say well what's to stop me there why don't i identify with the entire planet yeah you could and leo what's the stop if i'm the entire planet why can't i identify with with being the entire solar system right you could well what's to stop me from the from going further nothing nothing is stopping you and so now you might say well leo what is my true identity because because now i'm not like even human anymore what is a human well that's right what is a human a human is a social construction there's no such thing as a human now when i say that it doesn't mean that this that this thing you're seeing here disappears this is the mistake people make is that see they think that when we're talking about social construction or mental construction we're talking about something very simplistic and stupid like well leo why can't i just imagine myself to be a kangaroo and turn into a kangaroo that's not what i'm saying i'm not saying you're doing that when you imagine yourself to be a human that's a conceptual overlay that you're adding on top of whatever is experienced right here the raw experience here let's say it's not going to change it is what it is this body is sitting here and talking to you and ordinarily you project upon my body that it is a human being that it is biological that it is uh a homo sapien that it is uh a man that it is leo these are layers and layers and layers of conceptual abstractions projected upon what is actually here now if you remove all of those this will still be here the colors and noises i'm making will still be here you're still going to see basically the same shape but it will no longer be human it will no longer be leo it will no longer be a man it will no longer be alive even you might say leo but you're just playing word games if we remove all these labels from you you're still you and everything is still the same nothing changes it's just word games mental masturbation right wrong if you think that what i'm communicating to you and this is an advanced communication i am not parroting some ideology to you i'm trying to get you to actually think about the very nature of your being what i'm trying to communicate to you is not merely a word game if you think that you're not understanding my communication watch out for that because it's a very common defense mechanism that people use as soon as we go deep down this slippery slope people just throw their hands up and they just say oh it's all just a word game it doesn't matter let's move on it does matter there are practical consequences to what you identify with because these abstract projections of categories you make they bring in with them entire implicit webs of meaning that you're barely even conscious of see you assume i'm a man but you don't really know for all you know i might not have testicles you don't know that you assume that based upon a certain projection you make upon me you also assume i'm human you assume that i think of myself as this body see because you identify as being a body and a man or a woman or whatever as a human you also therefore project that upon me and you assume that i do the same thing too and you assume that all humans do the same thing and if they don't that they're insane and by this point you're probably thinking i've lost my mind but consider the possibility that not all humans think of themselves as human only some do the ones who aren't very intelligent the ones who haven't thought very deeply about these things but that there are other humans who actually literally do not think of themselves as a human and that is not something that they're just tricking themselves into you could say oh leo but yeah of course you can i mean in theory you could trick yourself into believing anything like you could think of yourself as a unicorn that doesn't make yourself a unicorn right you could be an attack helicopter if you wanted to as the meme goes um but that's not what i'm saying yeah of course of course you can construct any kind of entities you want if you want to think of yourself as a unicorn you can and that will have certain consequences does that mean that your body will turn into that of a unicorn no um but it can have other consequences in your life positive and negative um maybe maybe if you believe you're a unicorn you won't have that crippling low self-esteem problem maybe you'll be able to talk to to girls whereas when you think you're this ugly human you can't do it when you think you're you're a man but you don't match up to the sort of the arnold schwarzenegger stereotype of a man you know you struggle talking to a beautiful woman as as this kind of man because you feel like you're inferior as a man you don't feel like you're a strong sort of stereotypical macho man alpha male and therefore you're you're not confident flirting with her but maybe if you start to believe you're a unicorn even though your body won't change maybe now you think oh well as a unicorn i'm this magical special creature and i'm the only one you know unicorns are rare so maybe maybe that increases your self-self-esteem and you might say well leo maybe that's even true i'll grant you that maybe that's even true you could [ __ ] yourself into believing anything about yourself to make yourself feel good but it doesn't correspond with reality but you're doing this when you create the identity of man and woman you are doing this to yourself you have ideas about what is a good man what is a bad man what is a good woman what is a bad woman and then how you relate to that and then you try to live up to that and then you struggle with that and it makes you suffer and it's difficult or it gets you a sense of pride maybe you do feel like you're this alpha macho man and you've got the sense of pride and you're like yeah none of this affects me it doesn't matter i'm this macho man i was just born this way here i am everything's great well yeah everything's great now and then in 20 years you're gonna lose your testosterone and then you're gonna you're gonna age and you're gonna lose your your macho man physique um and then what happens and then and then you start to suffer and you get depressed and you start to feel worthless because that ideal you had you're not able to live up to anymore and see you don't hold these ideals as just merely philosophy to you these ideals are are are reality you hold them as reality and you hold them as important and on them hinges your happiness and your ability to survive in life identity is a purely imaginary conceptual relativistic thing any identity you adopt whether human man woman programmer engineer artist businessman boxer athlete good bad evil a unicorn these are all imaginary biased partial identities that the mind constructs in order to aid itself in the survival wherever it's trying to survive depending upon the situation it's in it will adopt different masks and personas and identities some of them are going to be more functional some of them are going to be dysfunctional in that environment but all of them will be limited and all of them will limit you and all of them will con will create suffering for you because if you're wondering well what's my true identity if all identities are imaginary what's my true identity well for that you would need to awaken awakening is the realization of your true identity which is infinity the reality is that you're absolutely everything your mind everything that is occurring is occurring within your mind your mind is that which unifies everything or that which creates divisions between things so for example right now you're sitting there and you're thinking well leo i'm a woman and you're a man you have a you have a penis i assume let's just assume that um and you know leo i don't i don't have your penis i don't know i don't know what kind of nonsense you're spewing here but but your penis is yours it's not mine but what you're not aware of is that my penis is literally inside your mind right now what you think of as my penis as being a separate physical object from you or from your mind is not this is a mistake you've made in your awareness of your own mind my penis has never existed anywhere but within your own mind and it's your own mind that told you that that is not your penis you've literally disowned my penis in your own mind and you did that so that you could be a woman if you did not do that you would not be a woman you would not be able to maintain that identity which is precisely why if you're resisting some of the things i'm saying right now or you feel disgusted or offended or triggered by the things that i'm saying or they're making you scared or anxious or nervous the things that i'm saying that's because what i'm saying is directly undermining your fantasy of being a woman you see for you to keep your identity as a woman you have to keep disowning my penis as being generated by your mind for this disconnect to keep happening you have to keep enforcing it which is why you might get emotional here you might be tempted to you know go down in the comments section and leave leave me some nasty comments some snarky remark you might want to argue with me and debate this point but you can't debate this point because what i'm telling you is how it is you can only deny it so the question is what kind of denials will you invent in order to keep disowning my penis as being your own mind that's the real game that's being played here i want you to see the the seriousness of this game when you hold this as philosophy and merely theory that's just one of the mechanisms you use to avoid looking deeply at the issue because what i'm talking about here now is not philosophy and it's not theory it's not an ideology and it's not a belief system of mine you can actually look inside of your own awareness and realize that my penis is your own mind now whether you want to do that or not that hinges on you do you want to really understand or do you want to just keep playing your games and going about life as you always were or do you actually want to question some stuff and realize something new that of course can be threatening to you you have to start to notice that what you identify as is not any kind of objective truth what you identify as is that which helps you to survive and that in fact what helps you to survive are fantasies and illusions not truth so you're very committed to your fantasies and illusions and you're very committed to your sexual identity because you see if you start to open your mind to some of the things i'm telling you this is going to keep you awake at night this might produce an existential crisis for you you might start to question your sexuality and you might start to now open your mind to the possibility that you've had maybe sexual urges that you were denying maybe you had some sexual attraction towards the same sex and you were suppressing those deep in your mind because you were just you had to disown those in order to maintain or construct maintain the construction of yourself as a woman or as a man and so you did that and you're not even aware yet that you did that you might have done that 30 years ago when you were just a baby and to this day it's it's still repressed in your mind you see like like look science can measure a rock it can measure its length height breadth width whatever its size its colors and so forth science can do that but what science can't do is tell you that it's a rock i mean it can but that's not strictly science it's just a meta scientific projection a category abstract category that's made see um now if you look at a rock and you ask yourself does a rock have a gender is iraq male or female it's pretty obvious that rocks don't have gender why would they i mean what is gender after all where did it come from like ask yourself in the universe where did male and female come from when did they come into existence before they were humans before there were mammals before there were even fish they were just rocks none of them were male and female and then at some point male and female came into existence we sort of presume uh how where where did it come from you had some molecules i mean the sort of standard scientific stories that there were some molecule organic molecules in the sea and they kind of collided together and they created little little sort of proto-organisms were those male and female no probably not okay so then that pushes the problem up one level so then okay so that we had these little proto-organisms that weren't male and female and then they turned into like a little proto-bacteria with little dna in there okay so did those already or were those male and female did they have x and y chromosomes probably not chromosomes are like something higher order than just regular d strands of dna so it's like okay well then we have to go one more level okay well then at some point eventually like a bacteria full-fledged bacteria emerged it's like okay well was that male or female probably the first ones weren't okay but then at a certain point the bacteria they became more complex they turned into very complex like eukaryotic bacteria and then and then those started to differentiate and then finally there was some sort of cleavage or division where there's a sort of a specialization it's like there's one that had a little bit different dna than another one and then they all were basically 50 50 half the bacteriums had this kind of dna have them had a little bit of a different dna not chromosomes yet but just a little bit different dna so were those now males and females and you will still probably be forced to no not really i mean and and like uh i mean that's not what we really mean by man and woman anyways we mean something much richer than that but anyways at some point you get to a point where you have like one lizard that's female one lizard that's male they have different organs and even different chromosomes and now finally you say okay well this one's clearly uh male this one's clearly female but do you see how arbitrary all this is there are no lines there are no clear lines there anywhere and the connections you draw between a female lizard and a human woman and a male lizard and a and a human man there are some loose connections you draw there i mean they can both have penises or whatever uh or not and some of them can have you know a lizard like a female lizard can can lay eggs or whatever can can be pregnant whereas a man of uh a male lizard cannot and you can draw certain similarities but you see your mind is drawing all these connections and how you draw and link different things within reality this is not a strictly scientific process this is a subjective relativistic process that is very much biased by what is convenient for your survival what serves you and what serves your identity are you getting this are you starting to see how these abstract categories are projections of your own mind they're not really there i'm not really a man you think i'm a man because that's how you're used to thinking about me and i might even think of myself as a man or maybe i won't it depends don't assume that i'm going to think of myself the way you think of myself and also of course my idea of a man might be very different from your idea of a man so there's not just this sort of monolithic single idea of a man and a woman each human on the planet has their own ideas of a man and a woman there's seven billion different ideas of man and woman on the planet and most of them aren't very original most of them are just blindly indoctrinated into us as children and we just live with them for the rest of our lives without ever questioning them and so what we see with these sort of culture wars that are going on in society politically with the gender sort of wars and the you know trans rights and this sorts of stuff and the lesbian gay issues and whatever else what other identity you know gender identity issues there are multiple different genders that that are like not non-binary so transgender so what we're seeing with all these sort of culture wars is that it's literally a war for the definition of these categories that's why it's such a juicy and intoxicating issue it triggers people a lot precisely because this issue can't be settled physically by science this is a meta-scientific issue which is going to be settled at a societal and cultural level through a culture war so we needed a culture war to get to the point where now where gay marriage is considered acceptable and homosexuality is not considered evil deviant behavior a hundred years ago for example or even even today in many parts of the world in less developed areas like not in america um i usually sort of speak from an american point of view but in in other countries even today homosexuality is considered evil it's considered devilry it's considered it's considered sinful now is that really true if you believe it is if you imagine it is if that's how you define your categories but here now in america we we've we've redefined our categories in the last couple decades such that that is no longer the prevailing opinion and that has threatened many people and the people that threatens the most are those who are the least secure about their sexual desires and their sexual identity there's actually been research done on this the people who are most vehemently opposed to homosexuality are those who themselves have latent repressed homosexual tendencies that they've repressed and denied which is precisely why they're so adamant about demonizing homosexuals it's a projection they're demonizing homosexuals because they don't want to acknowledge that part of reality as being part of themselves and their own psyche so they're disowning it they're actively disowning it but they're not aware that they're doing this so so anyways the point is that these these standards change and you might say well leo but this is still all pure philosophy it doesn't have any practical consequences it does have practical consequences it has practical consequences for how you relate to the opposite sex or even the same sex it has practical consequences for your dating life for your relationships intimate and so forth it has practical consequences for how you raise your children um and here's here's another practical consequence which is going to come pretty soon in the future uh look pretty soon with uh genetic engineering not in our lifetimes but probably in future generations what's gonna happen is that mankind is gonna start to modify our dna splicing it with that of animals and other creatures i mean this is obviously coming just a question of when so this will completely blur the lines of what you consider as human so what happens when we blend the dna of a of a fox and a and a dinosaur with human dna is that a human is it a fox is it a dinosaur is it a man is it a woman what happens if we take some dna from you know from the woman's chromosome and we give it to the man and vice versa what happens when we start creating creatures that combine the chromosomes of both men and women what happens when we create a creature that has a x x y chromosome or an x y y chromosome what is what is that going to be is that going to be a man a woman something else a hybrid do you see how arbitrary all this is these categories of man and woman you can try to cling to them for now i mean even now it's becoming untenable but let's say you can clean them for another generation or two but you're not going to be able to cling to them for more than a few generations at best once all this genetic engineering starts going it's simply not going to hold and even your category of human is not going to hold it's not going to hold for example we could probably extract some dna from from old neanderthal fossils and other you know even older hominid fossils we could we can even you know do the sort of jurassic park thing where we can even birth a neanderthal in the future or some sort of you know earlier hominid we can we can have those and then the question will rise are those human and then we can further take those and mate them with modern humans and then the question will arise are those humans and you see so everything will get completely blurred and so this is very practical right so actually what i'm what i'm talking here has scientific implications it has practical scientific implications because uh if your mind is so close as to only think in these categories to hold these categories as scientific if you're a scientist and you actually believe that man and woman are defined by science and that human kind is defined by science or by dna this is actually limiting your ability to do science you're not thinking enough outside the box you're thinking way too narrowly in some sort of limited black and white dualistic paradigm and future scientists who have a more open mind will outdo you in your science and they will make radical new discoveries and and crazy new technologies that will better mankind or other kind and um and then you will be left in the dust as a dinosaur as the dinosaur that you are and you will go extinct and your philosophy and your worldview will go extinct because there's more accurate philosophies and more accurate worldviews out there and they do have practical consequences and just like albert einstein relativized the idea of space time going from absolute to relative space time and velocity uh the same will happen with the idea of of humans humanity itself will become relativized in the future just through science if nothing else but also there will be big culture wars as like how do we define these things and are there dangers and risks here absolutely now you say leo well maybe maybe you're right maybe maybe technically you're right maybe man and woman are these abstractions but ultimately we got to keep society cohesive i mean what's going to happen if everybody just starts coming up with their own sexual identities and just being whoever they want and one person is a unicorn another person is a kangaroo another person is an alien i mean where does it end it becomes you know it becomes this sort of a pluralistic madness that is an important consideration and i am not saying that you should discard completely discard the notions and categories of men and women these are useful categories i still use these categories in my own life they're effective for certain purposes the only thing is that you just have to keep in mind the limitations of what you're constructing and you have to be honest with yourself that is constructed so there's no problem with construction per se i mean the majority of what mankind does is constructing stuff whether physically or mentally in our minds we're always constructing stuff and and we need our mental constructions the only problem is when you just you cling to them you become close-minded about it you get going to denial of their constructions and you refuse to ever change them that's that's the problem is when you get too rigid about it too ideological about it and there are constructions that are useful and valuable and worthwhile to preserve so for those of you conservatives and traditionalists in the audience who are probably disgusted already um by all the things i've said um you know you're wondering about you know well what about the old traditions that are that are worthwhile to preserve yeah there are there are useful categories to preserve and we should probably preserve the male female category um for a bit longer because it's useful for dating for raising children but also recognize that you have to be careful about it because it's it can also be harmful just because it's useful to you for a specific situation doesn't mean it's it's useful to everybody it limits certain people it might limit your children you have to be open to that you see the constructions and categories that got us to where we are today are not going to be sufficient to get us to the next level of mankind's evolution but nevertheless they can serve as a sort of a foundation we just have to be honest and aware of what the limitations of the foundation are so this sort of like a jordan petersonian idea of like well we shouldn't you know question traditional marriage too much because that's going to lead to families breaking down there's going to be a breakdown of families and then there's going to be violence you know and and then we need strong traditional family values and this sorts of stuff this is sort of the traditional line and um and you know children are going to grow up confused they're not going to know whether they're a man or a woman or a unicorn and this is going to be dysfunctional they're not going to know you know how to relate and how to date and how to flirt and how to do this there is definitely some truth to that concern it's way overblown by conservatives but there is some truth to that is that yeah like for example if you grow up with parents who are very hands-off and give you no pointers and guidance as to whether you're a man or a woman or how to relate to the to the opposite sex and they just say well you figure it all out yourself maybe you're a man maybe you're a woman maybe today you're decided you're a man tomorrow you decide you're a woman and then the third day you know on friday you decide you're a unicorn and yeah just experiment and just kind of go with the flow kind of you know these sort of hippie hippie parents um that sort of tell you this when you're very young they don't enforce a you know a strict you know standard for you of being man or woman you know they buy you toys of all kinds if you're a boy they buy you a barbie if you're a girl they buy you you know hot cars or whatever um or guns and and you know you you grow up playing with in a sort of confused environment yeah it is it does lead to more confusion see that's one of the trade-offs one of the trade-offs of relativity is confusion that's not a mistake that's not a bug that's a feature confusion can seem bad at first but it forces you to actually reconcile and deal with with reality with the complexities of reality you can no longer rely on just simplistic black and white categories without thinking about them here now the kid has to actually think for himself he has to be aware of his own feelings and cravings and desires he has to like be honest with himself about like do i really enjoy playing with guns more or with barbies and if i enjoy playing with barbies do i like do i feel guilty about that as a boy because i want to be like all the other boys or am i cool with that i can embrace that and i can i can be strong enough to take you know the sort of insults that other boys will hurl at me for playing with barbies and liking barbies can i you know resul you know develop a spine or am i going to be insecure that's going to develop some sort of psychological neuroses within me and i'm going to be i'm going to be wrestling with this trauma for the rest of my life because i'm playing with barbies in you know in the playground and all the boys are laughing at me and picking on me and bullying me and punching me and all this sort of stuff and then that's going to make me into like a a [ __ ] homicidal you know serial killer in 30 years that's possible it's absolutely possible and it's possible that you don't develop a firm clear sexual identity within yourself therefore for the rest of your life you're going to be sort of sexually weak and confused and you're not going to know how to flirt with with women too well or with men because you're going to be kind of like splitting the difference there you're not going to be developing a strong feminine or masculine polarity um and you're going to be confused and maybe you're going to be frustrated sexually because you're not going to have the kind of you know polarized sex that maybe you might want and so this whole thing might be very confusing for you it might lead to a lot of suffering and sexual problems is that possible absolutely and we're seeing more and more of that today if you were born 500 years ago in a sense life was a lot simpler because the society was so rigid that you couldn't even bring up the idea that you were gay or not a man or not a woman you probably would have been killed just for saying that so you didn't say it so the choice was easy for people back then you're just a man or a man and a woman but now as a society liberalizes and opens up gives yourself gives us more freedom it gives us more freedom of choice in all different ways you have more freedom as to where you can fly where you can travel where you can live what you can eat what books you can read this is what freedom means i mean you guys you conservatives love freedom at least you claim so well how about the freedom to identify as whatever you want see oh you don't want that freedom you only want as much freedom as you can tolerate and no more because freedom is actually death to the ego so yeah there are consequences to what you identify yourself as but it cuts both ways so see if you start to identify as a unicorn jordan peterson would be right in saying that that's going to create problems because your identity is not just something you identify and define for yourself maybe i could even convince myself that i'm a unicorn but that doesn't mean i'm going to convince you that i'm a unicorn it is a complex social game that we're playing and your identity is defined in relationship to the identities of everyone in your community and in your tribe but that does not mean that there are only one or two fixed identities and that they can never change actually it means the opposite of that jordan peterson has this idea backwards precisely because our identities are constructed socially it's extremely important what others think of our identities and whether they approve of them or not and that's precisely because the identities are not real you see it's sort of like with money money is not real it's purely imaginary but it is extremely practical and important and serves a very crucial function within our entire society like our entire society would collapse if we got rid of the idea of money right now tomorrow and it only works precisely because it's purely an illusion and everybody buys into it as soon as people start doubting the value of the dollar the entire american country would collapse if that happened enough now the mistake that people like jordan peterson make here is they say well that proves the that ploop that proves the reality of the dollar no it doesn't it actually proves the immateriality and the imaginary nature of the dollar so yes it will be much more difficult for you to survive as a unicorn amongst humans who think of themselves as humans than it is to survive as a man or as a woman as sort of a traditional man woman so be careful what you identify yourself as in that sense jordan peterson is correct you're not just free willy-nilly to pick whatever you want i mean you are but you will have to live with the consequences and you better be prepared for whatever the consequences will be so there's a negotiation happening you're identifying yourself in a way that other people will tolerate other people are identifying themselves in a way that you're going to tolerate and yes it is a negotiation that's the social game that's what social construction is but now i have a bit of bad news for those of you who are sort of in the progressive uh lb gtq plus camp who probably have been liking some of the things i've been saying up to this point i have some bad news for you and the bad news is this is that you're still falling into the trap of identity you're a little bit more conscious than the conservatives who are in denial about this whole thing but you're still falling into the trap and you're still creating problems for yourself so here's how see um once you start to open yourself up this idea that gender is a social construction okay then you start to play around with different identities and genders and so forth and you're doing that first of all along the lines of what jordan peterson says is like you could be picking identities which are not very healthy for you just because you have the freedom to pick some identity doesn't mean you're going to use that freedom wisely so you could be doing that you could be just confusing yourself and taking yourself sort of down down a a dead end but also see whatever new identity you adopt let's say you you were born a man and then you decide that you want to be a woman or vice versa um and you say well i was born i was born a man but really my soul my soul was that of a woman and then i've transitioned now i've become a woman and that's who i really am now no you fooled yourself you fooled yourself you just made the same mistake that ordinary traditional men and women make i mean it just you kind of flip-flopped it took you longer um but you made the same mistake in the end because now you identify as being a woman or a trans woman or whatever and you really believe that's what you are that's who you are and again the reason you're so touchy about that and you're so defensive and you get triggered and maybe now some emotions are arising within you maybe some nervousness maybe now there's a little bit of fear maybe now you're not liking what i'm saying because what i'm saying now is again going to threaten your identity and you might say oh leo but but you're being anti-trans now because you know i've worked so hard to overcome all the abuse and all the ridicule and all the confusion in my life and now i finally settled on my trans woman identity and i finally got in there i have a little bit of peace in my life and now you come along leo and now you're disturbing that piece yeah because you're you built a you built a house of cards on a foundation of sand and i'm merely pointing that out to you you see it cuts both ways if identity is truly relativistic and imaginary and it's not objective and it's not scientific and we are the ones defining it that means you constructed your trans identity you also constructed your gay identity or your lesbian identity and if you believe you're some gender that's not a man or a woman but something in between or some you know xyz thing um whatever you think you are i mean you constructed that it's still a limited partial identity and it's going to cause you problems and suffering because every limited identity necessarily causes suffering and problems why because the truth is that there is only one identity infinity you're not a trans woman you're not a gay man you're not a lesbian you're not bisexual you're not some xyz thing you are infinity you're everything and you will never be satisfied or at peace until you realize your true identity which is infinity your everything so beware what masks and roles you adopt and play they're all finite and limited and anything finite is going to be limited and you're going to feel the constraints of that thing and you're never going to be fully at peace because it's not true you're never going to feel fully at peace as a human as a man as a woman as a unicorn as an attack helicopter as a gay as a lesbian as a bisexual as a trans as xyz as a other kin as an alien as anything you're never going to feel fully complete because none of those are complete because all of those are finite and you're infinite the nice thing about the man woman identities is that they have been time tested they've been tested and refined and evolved over thousands of years probably more like hundreds of thousands of years and our culture has also evolved co-evolved with those identities such that they're functional they're functional partially because our culture is designed to make them functional right so it's a sort of a reciprocal self-fulfilling prophecy sort of type of relationship a reciprocal relationship where the two halves were were designed or co-evolved to fit nicely together and work organically smoothly together and for the most part they do there's a nice sort of division of labor division of responsibilities between men and women and it for the most part it tends to work it doesn't work for everybody but for the most part it tends to work and that doesn't mean it works because it's absolutely true in some ultimate sense it works simply because that's how it evolved it evolved to work that way in the same way that there's a symbiosis between a bird like a hummingbird and its long nose beak and a certain flower which also has a long you know long petals and a long you know sort of cone and so there's a there's a very nice fit between the two why is that is that because the hummingbird is you know some sort of absolutely true thing no it's just the hummingbird evolved this way and the flower evolved this way and they co-evolved and they work together this one pollinates that one and this one helps this one you know feed his children with nectar and stuff and it works it's a symbiosis so man and woman is a sort of a set of symbiotic dualities and there's there is sort of a deep wisdom to it there in that sense conservatives have some good idea about that but also you have to recognize that all of these symbioses because everything is evolving not just hummingbirds and flowers everything is evolving including mankind society culture and in fact mankind and society and culture are evolving at much more rapid speed uh orders many organs of magnitude more than hummingbirds and flowers so for the hummingbird the life is easy because it always finds the flower unless mankind destroys the flowers and the hummingbird is [ __ ] but you know life for the hummingbird in a sense is easy it doesn't need to think about these things but for mankind because our environment is evolving so fast every generation we have sort of a new media environment new cultural environment things are changing everything's globalizing you know dna and computers and all this crazy stuff it's all coming online and so um so we are forced to evolve faster so really you are sort of like a hummingbird and i'm telling you that okay you've been a hummingbird but um now stuff is changing you gotta adapt you know you gotta actually change the the shape of your beak to fit into this new thing that's coming online because these old flowers that used to exist they're all dying out they're all changing into something else so you either adapt or you die and for humans we have to do it mentally it's our minds that are the beak that needs to change but also it's possible to change too much it's possible to overswing the pendulum in the opposite direction and you start to you know you start to play around with these weird identities you start to imagine yourself to be a unicorn or something this could end up actually hurting you psychologically you can construct identities that are dysfunctional or just not optimal for life there are identities that are more optimal for doing good in business and others that are not if you walk around dressed as a unicorn you're not going to survive in the corporate world they're going to laugh at you now you might say oh leo but that's just because they're they're they're arrogant and they're obnoxious and they're close-minded and they're judgmental and they're sexist or whatever and that's why like if they were more open-minded i would be able to survive in a business environment you know with my unicorn costume maybe you would but also maybe you wouldn't and consider just because you have the freedom to do anything just because you have the freedom to glue a [ __ ] unicorn horn on your forehead you know permanently attach it with surgery just because you can do that you're free to do that doesn't mean you should doesn't mean it's smart doesn't mean your horn is not going to get stuck in in you know in some doorway or poke somebody in the eye there are consequences to identities and the problem is that see the male and or the man and woman identity these were these were co-evolved for hundreds of thousands of years and they've been sort of polished and field tested a lot so in a certain sense they're reliable they're a good sort of baseline to go to when you don't know anything else because they've been sort of field tested and proven to work whereas once you start to experiment with your own wacky identities it's not that they're not true it's simply that they might not be practical and you may not understand what you're doing a hundred thousand years of evolution is a lot smarter than you especially if you're very young and you know most people who are identi who are playing around with their identities you know these are college kids that are 18 years old 20 years old 25 years old something like that or even younger and that is problematic because at that age you're so ignorant you're so unconscious you're so immature you're so stupid and you're so wrapped up in group think and in conformity see you might be thinking that oh i'm being very independent by coming up with this unicorn identity probably not actually you're probably doing it because friends around you are doing it and encouraging you to do it after all where did you get this idea that identity is a flexible thing fluid thing you didn't derive that through first principles by actually sitting down and contemplating this stuff in some existential philosophical manner the way that i would encourage you to do you didn't do that what did you do you spent your middle school and high school years just talking [ __ ] with your friends and then together as a little you know a little hive mind you guys came up with some ideas where those ideas come from they came from universities they came from academia from you know post-modernist philosophers and so forth and that is also all social construction the strange loop of social construction of course is that social construction is socially constructed post-modernism is a social construction so actually you have to be very careful here because if you've watched a lot of jordan peterson and so forth you might be sitting here thinking like by this point like oh leo you're one of these cultural marxists and post-modernists that he keeps talking about no actually what i'm saying here is something way more advanced and nuanced and complicated than post-modernism post-modernism has some important truths about relativity within it but post-modernism post-modernism itself contains um certain performative contradictions and lack of awareness of its own biases and and sort of logical illogical contradictions so actually what i'm what i'm talking about here is not post-modernism and it's not cultural marxism and it's not just some ideology i learned in university in some you know social studies class or whatever gender studies class i'm talking about something much deeper here i'm talking about metaphysics and epistemology i'm talking about becoming conscious of the very structure of your mind and awakening to your true identity this is beyond anything that is taught in universities or that any post-modernist or relativist or cultural marxist or socialist or communist understands it's beyond anything that social construction theorists and academics understand i'm talking about literally the process by which your entire mind constructs the universe this is very radical and if you think we've gone deep here no this is just the tip of the spear even now an hour and a half into this talk this is just a tip of the spear of this issue if you're interested in more i recommend you check out my other episodes i have many episodes dealing with epistemic metaphysical and philosophical topics that will take you deeper into this work this work is so deep it can't be covered in in even 10 episodes there's way too much way too much here and it's it's way too threatening you would never be able to stomach all of it at once many people would struggle just to reach this point in the episode because they would have clicked off by now probably an hour ago because it got too heavy for them this is not stuff most people want to think about but also this is amazing stuff to think about do you know how amazing it is to free yourself of being attached to any identity any finite identity man woman child adult young old gay straight trans unicorn attack helicopter living creature that's a good one to transcend you know after you transcend being a man and a woman and uh after you transcend being young or old and after you transcend being human try transcending being alive that's what i teach that's the pinnacle of everything i teach everything i teach is designed to help you to jailbreak your mind of the various social constructions that you've adopted just unconsciously being born in society and culture to deconstruct all those to ultimately get to your true identity which is infinity that's what you really want you don't know that you want this yet you don't understand what infinity is as an identity if you did you would you would be so floored so i'm trying to guide you towards realizing your infinite identity but we have to do it in a sort of a roundabout way inch by inch because you're gonna you're a stubborn mule and you're gonna resist all the way that's how the mind is but also you could like you know go along willingly you don't have to be a stubborn mule about this you could open your mind and actually be excited about this stuff because i mean this is exciting this is the best news there is why would you be want to limit yourself to a man woman unicorn identity why why don't you want to become everything do you see how stupid it is to think of yourself as just a man or a woman or trans now i understand why you do it you're afraid you're afraid of letting it all go whether you're a conservative or even if you're a progressive you're still afraid of letting go of your identity and see progressives are sneaky they're they're constructing identities in a higher way than conservatives so that makes progressives think that oh well i'm i'm superior to a conservative because i'm more open-minded and liberal and so forth yeah you are but just by like an inch and um and you're still stuck in your your progressive identity and you still get offended and you're still insecure deep down inside if you check you're still insecure if you're trans you're still you're completely insecure about your identity and you're not able to love yourself completely i mean yeah yeah you've you've worked on it hard let's say and you've you've gone as far as you you've come and that that's that's been good you've needed that to you know to survive and to get to where you are you've made great strides let's say if you're gay lesbian bisexual transsexual whatever you've made great strides especially in the social environment you were in which was hostile to you when you were growing up and so forth i totally get it and i totally get why you want to change culture to be more accommodating and less marginalizing and oppressive i totally get it but um i'm just here to tell you there's higher to go way harder to go and you're still playing games and you're getting stuck in the culture wars in the identity politics you're still getting stuck you're getting triggered by people like jordan peterson just the fact that jordan peterson triggers you already shows you that there's something you're not understanding about yourself and nature and him and um that there's a toxic dynamic going on there so just like he's disowning you you're disowning him and it's a it's not a it's not a it's not a sustainable or truthful or healthy ultimate long-term situation but see there's a point of commonality between you progressives and conservatives because see as a progressive let's say you're like a trans progressive or bisexual or whatever um you have a deep personal experience felt experience of how difficult it is to to grapple with your identity your sexual identity and how confusing it's been and all that and the whole ordeal you went through but what you should be able to recognize about the conservative is that the conservatives they also struggle with that just in their own way in their own conservative way see they are struggling just as much as you struggled to figure out your trans identity the conservatives struggle just as much every day to maintain their conservative identity because they're scared of losing that identity and you might say well what are they scared of leo there's nothing to be scared of well but look at all the challenges you faced when you came out with your weird non-binary non-ordinary identity look at look at all the abuse and ridicule you got look of the lack of acceptance and love you receive look at all the judgment and hate you got and now recognize that that's precisely what the conservative is scared of the only difference between you and the conservative is that you took on that challenge with courage and you faced it whereas the conservative doesn't even want to open that door to that challenge because he's too scared of it and also what would happen if everybody inside he did this all at once you have to be honest that society could collapse if everybody did this all at once that is a legitimate concern now that doesn't mean you have to be paranoid about it it doesn't mean you have to become a hater and a homophobe and a sexist and all this anti-trans because of that but but you have do you understand that where the anti-trans sentiment ultimately comes from and the homophobia comes from and the sexism comes from it comes from a deep gut level fear of what these significant changes and openings to relativity would lead to and the kind of degradation of society social structures that it might result in how it might destroy families or the raising of children or marriage or religious traditions that people are very attached to or even workplace hierarchies and orders now see as a progressive you say well who gives a [ __ ] leo yeah let's destroy all the hierarchies and orders doesn't matter let's flatten the hierarchy to zero well see the problem is that you don't understand what you're really asking for because if that happened in one fell swoop tomorrow i'm telling you society would collapse now that doesn't mean that we can't make changes it just means that you have to appreciate that there's it's very important what your rate of change is and that just because you're progressive and very open-minded you're more tolerant of change but there are other people in society the majority of actually people the conservatives who are not so tolerant of change that's not because they're bad people it's simply because they're not conscious enough nor secure enough in themselves and they don't have an environment which allows them that luxury of change the majority of of people around the world are living in such conditions that they don't even have the luxury to sit around watching this video and entertaining lofty ideas about the relativity of identity no the majority of people if they don't go to work tomorrow on time then their kids will go hungry and that's all they care about that's their highest priority in life and they are barely able to do that because their country doesn't afford them the economic conditions the job opportunities the technology the infrastructure the political you know structures to do that which is exactly why things like trans rights and gay rights are virtually non-existent in underdeveloped countries because that's a luxury to them to them they just need basic water food medicine vaccines education like very very basics of job opportunities a currency that's not going to crash and inflate within a week you know a basic sense of democracy that's not just a tyranny or a propaganda state or something these are the basic things that they need you as a progressive need to realize this so uh really the the sort of the curse of being a progressive is that in a sense you're at the at the cutting edge of the evolution of culture and society that is great in a certain sense you're on the vanguard but in other sense you got to realize that the cutting edge there's more there's more to the knife blade than just the cutting edge and that you have to bring the entire knife blade with you if you want to advance the edge you can't just move the edge and leave the rest of the knife blade behind and the rest of the knife blade has more inertia and mass and bulk and volume than just the edge the edge can move faster in a certain sense if you only consider it separate from the rest of the mass but that mass has inertia and it it creates resistance so that's what you're experiencing as a progressive you're the edge experiencing the resistance and inertia of the rest of the blade and so for you to evolve higher beyond your progressivism you'd have to integrate that that will move you into spiral dynamics tier 2 stage yellow so yeah the trick with relativity is it becomes very complex and confusing you don't know how to ground yourself it becomes more difficult to create an identity but also there are advantages the advantage is that you have more freedom now of course with freedom comes responsibility so even though you have more freedom if you don't exercise responsibility a lot more can go wrong in a sense the man woman these categories were invented for idiots you're born you just take you accept one or the other and then that's it easy simple you have to think about it you have to create anything more it's already been created for you whereas if you're going to be truly creating your own identity whether you're doing spiritual work personal development work or you're just you know trying to figure out your sexual identity and you're creating something new uh you're in uncharted waters there's more mistakes you could make and uh you're just kind of like flying by the seat of your pants you're not really sure what you're doing it could turn out great could turn out awful those are the pros and cons and you have to be very responsible and wise in how you exercise your freedoms but it's also great because if you truly do become conscious and responsible and wise and you do educate yourself with that freedom you can do a lot you can do amazing things in the world with that freedom but for that you need a very deep study and understanding of yourself human psychology philosophy epistemology metaphysics consciousness emotions awareness developmental psychology sociology and many other important topics which i cover on this channel so you're in the right place if this conversation has a sparked a curiosity within you good that was the point now follow up with it remember that i am not here to teach you an ideology or to shove ideas down your throat i am here to guide you towards a personal investigation into the nature of your own mind and by the way when i talk about deconstruction some people will confuse that with the post-modernist deconstruction of jacques dereda that is not what i mean by deconstruction when i say deconstruction i don't use it in that technical philosophical sense i say deconstruction in its most abstract and general sense in the sense of undoing the house of cards that you've constructed throughout the rest the entirety of your life to get you to the point where you're at today for me deconstruction is just questioning everything without bias the mistake that most people do when they try to do deconstruction or debunking or skepticism is that they misuse it by applying it selectively against the things that they don't like and not to their own pet ideas and theories and in this way the deconstruction becomes just another tool of the ego mind and just reinforces the constructions that the ego mind has created so in this way the ego mind weaponizes deconstruction it's a very very sneaky maneuver a very common trap that many scientifically minded and skeptically minded people fall into so i'm all for skepticism i'm the biggest skeptic there is but you have to apply your skepticism without any biases whatsoever and you have to especially apply to the constructions of your own mind that's the true function of skepticism is applying it to the constructions of yourself um and that's not how most people use skepticism most people have weaponized it so yeah this this this channel actualize.org is a massive deconstruction project it's such a massive deconstruction project that most people who get into it and watch my content don't understand that that's what it is they confuse it for beliefs ideas philosophy ideology models just another self-help teaching just on their spiritual teaching it's not that it's a radical deconstruction of everything that your mind constructs and it's such a radical deconstruction that even the deconstruction process itself will of course in the strange loop have to be itself deconstructed because even the deconstruction process you're using is a construction that you've constructed to do your deconstruction which has to be deconstructed if what you truly want is an entire total complete deconstruction there is a big difference between a construction that does deconstruction and deconstructs everything except itself and a deconstruction or rather i'd say a construction which deconstructs everything and then also deconstructs itself leaving behind not even deconstruction are you getting that difference that's a key difference this is post modernism this is awakening this is spirituality in its genuine form this is academic mental masturbation so i hope that clears it up for you uh really you're not gonna be able to understand these issues without contemplating them very deeply so i recommend you go check out some of my prior episodes specifically that explain how to do high quality contemplation i have an episode called contemplation i have an episode called how to use a journal for contemplation or contemplation using a journal one of those i forget the wording exactly and i have episodes called introspection i have a lot of episodes i have episodes about how to ask questions because contemplation is basically questioning how to question i have an episode called how to discover what is true that one would be very useful for you and basically what you want to start to now study if you want to get to the sort of bottom of things i said here is you want to study epistemology i have many episodes about epistemology and you want to you want to study relativity i have an episode called understanding relativism part one and i'm soon gonna be releasing a part two because relativity that's that's the core concept here right ultimately what all that i've said in this episode is that all identity is relative that's all i've said everything else is just an elaboration upon that point all identity is relative if you understand that you've understood everything there's nothing else to understand about what i said here but the problem is that people don't understand that it's very difficult to understand that in the same way that it's not easy to understand that time and space are relative i mean look think about it this way a hundred years ago albert einstein proved and demonstrated to the whole world that time and space are relative and people still don't fathom the significance of that people actually believe that objects are a certain length and height that's not the case general relativity says that an object doesn't have a length or a height an object's length or height depends on the velocity at which you're approaching it and the velocity at which it's moving so you might think that i'm six foot two i am conventionally speaking but i'm only six foot two assuming that you're moving at a certain velocity and that i'm moving at a certain velocity if we were moving at different velocities i would not be six foot two literally now you might say oh that's just philosophy no it's not philosophy that was albert einstein's geniuses to is to realize that i am not actually six foot two when the whole world assumed that i am that's essentially what albert einstein discovered but people still don't don't fathom this they don't care about this because it doesn't matter for your everyday life but people still have yet to acknowledge our society still has yet to acknowledge that all identity is relativistic good luck getting a scientist to to agree that a rock is not a rock or a human is not a human it's not going to compute because these are not scientific questions these are meta scientific questions but anyways i ramble on long enough you get the idea is gender a social construction yes but even social construction is a social construction and ultimately reality is deeper than just a social construction reality is a construction of consciousness or infinite mind so there is something deeper going on than just social construction one of the objections to social construction is people say well leo but then if social construction is true then anything goes no not anything goes people say well leo but if social construction is true and you're saying what walls are socially constructed well why can't i walk through a wall then if i'm socially constructing it no first of all i didn't say that walls are social construction walls are a mental construction which is different from a social construction it's a deeper order of construction there are many layers to construction so a wall is a mental construction but then you say well why can't i imagine the wall being transparent to walk through it precisely because a wall is a physical object that you are constructing that you're not conscious of how you're constructing it therefore you can't unconstruct it if you could become conscious enough to deconstruct your construction of a physical wall you would be able to walk through it but you don't know how to do that because you're not conscious enough nor is that something that the ego can control see the other objection people have said well leo but why don't you do it then show us a demonstration well see because the problem is there how you define you you define me as the ego self the ego self doesn't have access to deconstructing physical walls the universal self does not the ego self so leo can't do it as an ego you can't do it for a selfish purpose you can't do it because you want to show off to somebody or because you want to materialize a million dollars for yourself that's not how it works you have to understand that when we're saying mental construction i'm saying something very very nuanced very advanced and very sophisticated it is not a simplistic stupid sort of law of attraction idea where it's like oh all you got to do is just sit there and imagine there's no wall and the wall will disappear i'm not saying something so stupid in general when i say something for future reference it would be wise of you to assume that i'm saying something intelligent rather than something stupid and you will be more right than wrong the things i'm teaching here are very very very advanced there's only a handful of people on this planet who can fathom the things that i'm saying here and those people aren't watching me because they don't need to so just again like i started this episode i asked you do you really want to understand we have to come back to that we have to close with that do you really want to understand how much do you really want to understand and how much are you just playing games and defending your ideas of the world if you really truly want to understand then you'll you'll be willing to surrender your ideas of how the world is and you'll embark then on an investigation a genuine investigation where you might discover some things that's the people i'm talking to it's very difficult to communicate these things especially to people with very short attention spans who are careless and flippant and closed-minded and think they understand the world everything in the world is more complicated than you think it's more twisted and counterintuitive than you think so don't just trust your intuitions if you think you understand something like gender or physical walls or humans or science you don't understand any of these things notice that you have not investigated any of these things all you have are just your prejudices and beliefs that you've picked up from somebody else you haven't sat down and contemplated the nature of a physical wall for 100 hours if you did you would be much more open-minded to some of the things that i'm saying all right that's it i'm don here please click the like button for me and come check out actualize.org that is my website make sure you visit there because there's exclusive content for free that you can access some of it is paid some of it is free um as far as the paid stuff my book reviews over 200 of some of the best books that i've ever read on self-help and various kinds of philosophical topics and spiritual topics you will find there it's very useful people give me a lot of positive reviews on that you'll find the life purpose course which will help you to find a sense of direction in your life people give me a lot of positive testimonials on that all the time tell me that it's changed their their life you will also find things like my blog where i post exclusive videos and share links and resources you will find the forum where you can talk about this stuff i'm very active on the forum i try to answer every serious question on the forum it's actually quite shocking how few serious questions i receive on the forum so if you're serious about this stuff come ask your questions so i'll answer them or somebody else will and then if you'd like you can support me on patreon.com actualized and i recently launched a new channel the actualized clips channel where if you don't have the patience to sit through a long two-hour episode you can get little bite-sized five 10-minute clips there so make sure you subscribe to that um people seem to be loving it so far and we still got a lot of work to do on it so there will be hundreds and thousands of clips coming over the next year or two and um and that is that and then the final thing i'll say to wrap all this up is i'm working to make my work more accessible beyond just the actualized clips channel and in fact this episode here was one of my early attempts to make my work more accessible that means i'm going to be talking about more controversial topics sort of topical topics topics that are in the news questions common questions that people have and all of this is is an effort to of course attract attract more viewers um but also because at this point my work has gotten so sort of deep and esoteric that i have to we're sort of starting to hit an inflection point where we have to kind of come back out and tackle just more practical matters and kind of like more common questions that people have and one of the things that i'll be experimenting with in the future is i will be releasing some shorter content so i will still be doing long two-hour episodes here and there as i always have but um i'm also gonna try to do some short ones in fact this was supposed to be a short one believe it or not when i first sat down to to to plan this episode out i didn't really plan i'm just riffing here i don't have any notes or anything but um when i first started planning it out i'm like okay well maybe i'll do it in 30 minutes i want to i want to do something like in a 30 minute range um but then i'm like who am i kidding this this topic will definitely take two hours so here we are of course two hours in um but i i promise for sure that over the next few months you will see me publishing some shorter episodes on the main channel that are not going to be clips but they're also not going to be these long two-hour you know spiels these are going to be like i'm going to try to do 20 30 minute episodes we'll see the problem is that my mind is so interconnected with everything that i always want to interconnect everything and it takes two [ __ ] hours to do so um but i will i have to retrain my mind and i promise i'll do some more casual episodes on more casual topics some of you might hate that some of you might like that i mean it's still gonna be profound stuff either way um i'm gonna i'm gonna try to make it uh appealing for both the casual and sort of the hardcore folk and uh i'll i'll receive your feedback on that and then depending on how the feedback is i'll adjust maybe i'll do more of that maybe i'll go back and do the longer stuff i don't know we'll see i'm i'm experimenting i'm at this point where i've done a lot of a lot of very deep material and i've built up a long catalog of that stuff the problem is that this catalog is so deep 95 of people who view my stuff will never will never even scratch like the surface of that catalog so in a certain sense it doesn't make that much sense for me just to keep like pumping out more and more and more like crazy depth because the majority of people just can't fathom what's already there so now my focus is maybe shifting a little bit more towards how do i how do i make this stuff more accessible without compromising the quality of it so that's always the trick there so anyways i look forward to releasing some of those stay tuned for those and then give me feedback and i will take it into account and adjust accordingly you