Is There Reason To Be Hopeful About The Future?

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life tour. In this part, he takes a question from the audience about whether he is hopeful about the future.

I would say I am hopeful and desperate about the future. I think that is actually the right attitude to have at the moment. For example, between 2000 and 2012, the number of people who were in absolute economic privation in the world plummeted faster than it ever had in history. Part of that was a delayed consequence of the fall of the Soviet Empire; fewer countries around the world were pursuing counterproductive economic visions. As the population radically increased, everyone around the world got much richer. Now, there are still a large number of people who are absolutely poor, and there is an even larger number of people who are relatively poor. But all things considered, we were cruising there for a good while. I see no reason why we could not eradicate absolute poverty pretty much everywhere. I see no reason other than voluntarily willful blindness, stupidity, and malevolence that would necessarily interfere with the eradication of absolute poverty by 2035. We could do that. It is quite obvious.