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Well, Dr. Jordan Peterson, welcome to Sydney on your Australian tour. You're talking to packed-out

houses and the interest is extraordinary and we've had the opportunity to talk personally and I can

understand why. I want to begin with something that Churchill wrote in the 1930s and he said this,

one of the signs of a great society is the diligence with which it passes culture from one generation to

the next. When one generation no longer passes on the things that are dear to it, it's heroes and

their stories and its religious faith, it's in effect saying that past is null and boy, it's of no

value. He goes on to say that leaves young people feeling a lack of direction and a lack of purpose

and opens them to the dictum of Karl Marx that are people derived of their history are easily

persuaded. Have we stripped down young people of purpose and left them open to being bullied around?

Well, there's two things about that that I think are really worth laying out. The first is an

analysis of the purpose of memory because people think that the purpose of memory is to remember

the past and that's not the purpose of memory. The purpose of memory is to extract out from the past

lessons to structure the future and that's the purpose of personal memory and so you're done with

a memory when you've extracted out the information that you can use to guide yourself properly in the

future. So if you have a traumatic memory for example that's really obsessing you if you

analyze that memory to the point where you figured out how you put yourself at risk and you can

determine how you might avoid that in the future then the emotion associated with that goes away.

So memories has a very pragmatic function and cultural memories the same thing is that we need to

extract out stories from our past that structure our future and we need that because

...