Jordan Peterson goes to Burger King - transcript

OK. OK. So, Burger King, that name is so bloody complicated. It- it took me like three months of nonstop thought to figure this out. Well, you look at it and you can say pretty confidently, "King", that's actually an instantiation of a patriarchal mode of being, isn't it? It's like, that's the typification of a fatherly figure that exists at the top of all possible dominance hierarchies. I guess that'd be a good way to describe it. And- but it's not a king, per se, when you go to burger king, it's the instantiation of an individual as necessarily being the embodiment of the transcendent ideal of a King. It's a King as such. The typified aspect of kingship as such is inexorably tied up with the word. And what does a typified father figure do? Well he provides, doesn't he? He provides food, and- and shelter, and burgers. Well, yeah, that's bloody well right, a King who provides burgers. Exactly. You know... You know, when Alexander Solzhenitsyn was in the gulags, he thought about food a lot. And there they were given 10 ounces of bread a day, and that's like your food, for the day, and that's it. And one of the things he tried to puzzle out is in what way his life up until that point had been complacent in producing the Soviet state. And that's a question that if you really try to answer it, man, that's rough man, it takes you to a dark place. So I think... Well... No I'd better not... I don't have enough information to answer that competently. All I can say right now is the degree to which we preside to patronize fast food restaurants that aren't instantiations of a sovereign ideal, it may have a bigger effect than we think. You know, the world is a funny place and it's a lot more connected than we understand. And well... Yeah, that's- that's all I can say about that right now.