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Jordan Peterson - The "Intellectual" We Deserve
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You think the majority of people in those lectures were Gamergaters?
Heh. I imagine he keeps it as imprecise as possible so he can score a one up on "smug atheists".
Sorry thought we were talking about his current audience.
He could sell out lectures on anything right now though.
Like literally anything.
About racism in the abstract, or Nazism, which was racism taken to ideological and political extremes?
In the abstract he thinks people are fundamentally individuals. Racists invoke group identity so that they can take credit for things they never did. A great modern example of this were those flyers that evoked Roman sculptures and talked about western civilization. Just because western civilization is awesome (just like most civs are awesome) doesn't mean those are YOUR achievements, and just because you're white doesn't mean you have any claim to that anymore than a black person does. So it lets people feel good about things they didn't do. And then racial othering simplifies the world's problems into clear enemies. Mexicans took your jobs. The blacks are causing crime. Etc. So in the abstract it's dishonest laziness used to manipulate people into evil.
I don't think I need to say much about Nazism. I'm paraphrasing what he said but he thinks that if you sat in a dark basement for ten years and thought of the most evil things you could possibly do, and then multiplied that evil by 100, and then did it on an entire continent, that's what the Nazis were. Archetypal evil. And the Soviets, and the Maoists.
People argue about it because Peterson has said he is a Christian, but also espouses positions and ideas that would argue against Christianity. Peterson did this to himself. He also said it would take him about three years to get it all straight, and to me that just sounds like he wants to write another self-help book.
If he supports evolutionary psychology, for example, he has to avoid the central belief of Christianity itself: a dualistic soul in addition to the body. After all, the promise of Christianity is a life after this, and you need the self to be a thing in order for this to occur. There's nothing of the brain to justify other concepts associated with that dualistic argument either, as free will can't exist without such an entity. How is one a Christian if they cannot adopt the central special snowflake element that makes the theology what it is? Much of his love of Ayn Rand also shows a paradox, for it's here he argues for a type of self-transcendentalism? But there's no self to do that, for that isolationism of individuality is not actually there. It's another layer of befuddlement.
And that's just the entry level problem. Peterson gets worse by insinuating that all activity in America is Christian-based, even if it's from atheists, Buddhists, or Muslims, as if the molecules of land that make up America are actually Christian. Again, Peterson did this to himself when people call him out as a paradox, for he only offers ammo to those arguments thrown his way.
Racism in the abstract. What does he say about systemic racism?
Excel, those Bible lectures were late last year!
He's a bloody idelogical extremist. He calls for entire departments of study to be removed from universities. He identifies things he doesn't like as postmodern neomarxism that will destroy western civilization.
He's a former socialist who says George Orwell convinced him to stop being one.
He doesn't believe in climate change
This is just not true. It's frankly dishonest to claim so.
Well I just addressed racism in the abstract as intentional philosophy, but as for your question I think he disagrees with modern institutional theories of systemic racism.
https://youtu.be/64MlP8mbJPo
11:21. He says playing the equity game makes people fall further into tribalism, is an impossible task, etc.
He calls the concept of white privilege the most racist thing and a marxist lie... and did so at a conference for Soros conspiracy theorists who believe in the Cultural Marxist villain.
He's not a far right ideological extremist by any reasonable definition. I don't see anything in him remotely close to the far right. I do understand that sometimes we disagree on what the far right is.
Yes, I think he's an alarmist. There is nothing I see in today's politics which will destroy western civilization besides a slight bit of temporary illiberalism which will subside in due time. Also, lol at the Frozen shit.
I'm well aware of the story.
Yeah, he's made some silly tweets in the skeptic category. Curse of the contrarian. What I was referring to was the couple of times, well before he had any kind of fame, he made impassioned pleas to the public advocating for regulation of fishing because ocean ecosystems globally are in collapse.
It's what I believe, therefore it's honest.
For the millionth time, he said feminists defend muslims because of their unconscious wish for brutal male domination. BALANCED
Yeah that's one of those times he turns into a total crank. It's probably because fairy tales are his "thing" and grrr they changed the Snow Queen!
This is part of the core reason I feel sour a lot of the time I see people talk about Peterson in happy, glowing terms.
He opposes any and all concepts of social and systemic narratives. It's all about the individual, per usual conservative/libertarian bullshit. He believes personal change can lead to changing society, but apparently when you have a group of society sharing a narrative and understanding, this is a problem. On one level, it absolutely can be, but this depends on the narrative: having a movement on the rising precariat class in America is one based on understanding how this country's gone to shit for over thirty years, much different than those proposing Kekistan and race realism. Peterson's problem is any activity that involves a collective is cultural-Marxism for it attacks something of society, even if what's being named is, in fact, a problem.
It's so infuriating because he has entertained that we have problems before, but the fuckin' moment you start trying to help group people to define them in relationship to the problem, Peterson becomes aversive. The inequality problem is the most obvious of this, because he's gone on record saying we increasingly have a rigged game, but he has never, not even once, supported any effort in addressing it in awareness or policy change.
It's not cultural-Marxism to admit that based on your skin tone, you're treated as unpeople in America, for we don't have a society based on meritocracy: our games are increasingly on erroneous divisions and social games. Worse still, it's through personal change -- seeing and becoming aware that we have a system fundamentally based in divisions, and thus conflict -- that would allow an individual to want to change society, likely with other people who are or could become aware of it too. Once again, Peterson has a problem with something that, at the very fucking root of it, is part of the philosophical axiom he supports and talks about.
The "intellectual powerhouse" seems to have problems once his small seeds of ideas begin to blossom. Deal with your own suffering, but once you start acting socially to handle suffering, even if it's the same problem you're facing, hold on, bucko. Perhaps one of the reasons he never goes deep in his arguments is because the deeper you go, the more it sprouts against his pseudo-isolationism self-improvement narrative, even if logically as it goes deeper it naturally morphs into collective social awareness and social narrative framing.
To accept suffering, fundamentally, is to become aware of the problems divisions make. "I suffer" largely because "I" have defined myself in a way that creates division, and social suffering is just that applied to the whole of society, typically projected onto people. You can't just stop at the person and say anything beyond that is collectivist, for the problem has the same source with only the scale changing. If you don't accept the scale is the only thing changing, then ultimately you don't really care about the problem.
You know what I see here? Excuses, and dodging.
The far right ain't just the alt-right.
"One" of those times? I gave this as an example but he has so many of those. Because he is a total, unbalanced crank and wacko. I mean how many more examples of him being a nutcase do you need before you admit it?
Then how does he explain how different groups are treated differently. What would his solutions be? Looking at the timestamp, he's saying don't look at it through the lens of identity politics, so what are the other options? Judging by his other videos, I can guess that he wants to take an individualistic approach to it, but that's just colorblindness. Even if you ignore it, groups being treated differently still exists.
Also, I believe scientists control for other factors before saying it's this thing or that thing.
He said that if a school talks about equity, diversity, white privilege, inclusivity, parents should take their kids out of the school. Not far right, but it's pretty ideologically right.
One of those times.... those times. That is his core ideology.
This is why I said you're being dishonest.... and you are.
If you want to stay on topic you can post Peter Hitchens stuff in here.
Don't try to distract by trying to get us to hitchens our wagon to some other discourse.
I want to expand on this point as I wasn't the most articulate with it...
The problem here is that he's giving a decent pep talk, but it's not much more than that. It's a bunch of good PMA build yourself up suggestions, and maybe he's good at addressing/getting through to people who need it, but after you get hooked by this side of him where do you go?
To his Twitter, etc... to follow the man who just made you feel like getting your shit together. More of his videos, because that last talk changed the way you live. Etc...
And at this point you're exposed to his bigoted/backwards/harmful stuff, and you're primed to digest it.
Not everyone will, some will be able to separate the man's various teachings, but for many they're part and parcel, and I'd argue he's not saying anything anywhere worthwhile enough that it justifies the end result.
He's also not the most articulate or intelligent thinkers/speakers, and his work in general has issues as the OP exposes.
I think understanding Nietzsche as comparable with what he's saying is a misunderstanding. I guess you could agree that he doesn't actually think Nietzsche is comparable with what he's getting at but raised some pretty good points. The problem with that is most of the good points also essentially inevitably lead to attacks on the system that Peterson supports. Thinking that we've yet to make a new value system just isn't a particularly radical line of thought, though I tend to side with Professor Deirdre in saying we have indeed created a new value system even if it has a lot of historical baggage.
I'm mostly going off the fact that he absolutely can't stand post-modernism and supports much of what Nietzsche was against. He's a christian (maybe) positivist, against critical reinterpretations of society.
He might not be misunderstanding him, but he's certainly at least using Neitzsche in a bizarre way.
It's a criticism because I think this approach doesn't do any favors to those lost boys, I tend to call them the radically alienated, or to Nietzsche. I'm not against anyone reaching out to them, I think an important issue for society moving forward is dealing with that, because that group is only going to get bigger. I just don't think Peterson is going about it in the right way for them, and that the way he is going about it is mixture of harmful for broader social reasons, anti-intellectualism, and clearly self-serving.
He's all about the assertion that we already having meaning. For him we moved away from it and need to go back, but also it's biological. That's a core tension he doesn't deal with particularly well.
I'm not well versed in him either, and I'm mostly approaching the topic from an angle of him being a peddler of the new kind of anti-intellectualism.
I don't think anyone said anything along these lines. Moreover, I'd say Peterson, who's all about the "Classic Liberal" label, probably self-identifies greatly with "Enlightenment Values." I'm not sure what else being a Classic Liberal is supposed to even refer to.
I don't understand what this has to do with Peterson though? I'd say this logic is simply why most intelligent people aren't generally particularly big fans of politics. I don't see what part of his work is focused on this in particular other than its asocial bent.
I don't want to link to any of his videos. That said there's one in particular where he addresses Foucault so feel free to watch that if you want the specifics. But you don't even really need his specific argument. The only reason I know about the guy is because he made himself famous by pedaling anti-post-modernist nonsense to people scared because they don't understand it. This includes his whole "cultural-marxism" thing, which is both incredibly stupid and an incredibly big problem in anti-intellectual culture.
It's one thing to take issue with Derrida's writing or whatever. It's one thing to even disagree. But he poses these writers, and thus all of the academics that have been partially affected by their work, which at this point is probably more or less everyone, as existential threats to society. He also simply doesn't seem to understand them particularly well. I mean he believes post-modernists are all secret Marxists. That's probably because he doesn't actually understand post-modernism or Marxism at a very basic level. Ironically positing Marxism as somehow non-western is hilarious. Only a moron can't draw a line from Ferguson, Smith, Hume, Kant, and Hegel to Marx.
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I don't think he understands Derrida very well but it's no secret Derrida was a Marxist. The whole French academic circle of that time was critically influenced by Marxism.
We're talking about the guy who says Orwell convinced him to stop being a socialist.
Being influenced by Marxism and even having been one at one point doesn't make a figure a Marxist. One of the major points of post-modernism is the rejection of meta-narrative. Marxism is one of the major meta-narratives.
The two are irreconcilable at a very basic level. You can be a post-modernist that likes Marx, but you can't be a post-modern Marxist any more than you could be a post-modern Hegelian.
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Also, his infamous list of "cultural marxists" he wants kicked out of academia and have his followers harass and shit? The fact he's even using shit terms like cultural marxism to begin with? The fact that he completely misrepresented what C16 was and built up a large following on "Canada's trying to force you to use the right pronouns and will throw you in jail if you don't!", attracting all kinds of transphobic indviduals because of that misrepsentation? Him calling women wearing makeup a "sexual display" and thus women that complain about sexual harassment at the workplace are hypocrites? And then of course stuff like the Frozen example being referenced here among so much others (which, considering what he thinks about makeup apparently, yeah.... you really think it's just because they changed a fairy tail and there's not something else entirely going on there)? Sure seems to turn into a "total crank" an awful lots, in lots of ways that oh so mysteriously just happen to overlap with the far right, just by pure coincidence, apparently.
The dude's far right, through and through. This shouldn't be up for debate at all. Calling him a crank is just sugarcoating it for no good reason. Like seriously, calling him "balanced"? What kind of "balanced" person thinks that stuff? What kind of "balanced" person wants to shut down entire divisions at universities? What kind of balanced person thinks Frozen is propaganda? What kind of balanced person thinks that makeup is inherently a sexual display and thus women who wear makeup and complain about sexual harassment are hypocrites? There's nothing balanced about any of that. The guy's just far-right through and through and I don't see any honest reason to sugar-coat that by trying to call him a crank in those particular instances but still insist he's balanced elsewhere, as if those areas just magically don't count or something or are some insignificant part of who he is or what he's selling. That's the very backbone of who he is! That's the very backbone of what he's trying to pitch. There's just no reason to pretend he's anything else.
I have to agree with others that you don't seem to be being honest here. You can't simultaneously be a "balanced individual" and someone who "turns into a crank" on any number of different subjects. Those tend to be kindaaaa exclusive. People who are balanced don't suddenly turn into cranks time and time again on any number of different tangents. It's one or the other. So which is it?
But Orwell was an anarchist who distrusted Labour/socialist movements as he believed that even giving the means of production to the working class would still maintain a pseudo-capitalist class structure, ie. people would not be free.
He's not even Peter Hitchens by the sounds of how he rejected left-wing politics.
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Peterson just might not have the best reading comprehension
I honestly hate conservatives who read 1984 and Animal Farm. They clearly don't get it. And much like Thomas Sowell, I'm still very skeptical of these frauds who claimed they were socialists in their youths and display such a horrible misunderstanding of the left at every instance.
I think if this is what is in Peterson's soul, then he is being severely Nietzschean.
Sure, but consider that Nietzsche repeatedly asks those who read him to "go their own way" - contradicting Nietzsche's philosophy after having read it is not a misunderstanding of Nietzsche. To be Nietzschean isn't just to follow all of the tenets of Nietzsche's thinking. Not that I think Peterson is Nietzschean, to be clear - I don't know him that well and probably won't.
There's something similar going on with the alt-right. From what I've read, Aristotle and Nietzsche are popular among the alt-right, and Richard Spencer considers himself to be Nietzschean. It's hard to figure out what being Nietzschean means in these contexts, though.
I don't know how you can be so confident that Peterson is not helping any of the lost boys. We have had people in this thread post and say Peterson helped them, at least. What about Peterson allows you to say he's anti-intellectual, or furthers anti-intellectualism?
Oh I see, you mean that kind of meaning - I thought were asserting Biblical meaning. Then I would argue that's the central tenet of Nietzsche, too, and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra the wisest men are those who see we already have value in this world, and they come to love life through that realization (I'm bastardizing the revelation here). To anyone who says we don't have meaning yet, I would say "Well, what are you waiting for? What is preventing you from gaining meaning?" - meaning is a personal thing, after all. It can't be assigned to us or discovered through an external process.
You definitely know him better than I do, so I can't say anything on this.
It's more of an underlying trend I've noticed - he seems suspicious of the conclusions people are inheriting.
I found a few and I'll watch them later - thanks.
I do think you're right that Peterson seems to try to return to older values, but it's not as though he's a purist. He's just pulling the things he likes - the things he thinks he can save, and promoting them. That could be a successful undertaking.
"Marxism" is a huge term, and I get the feeling that he means something very particular about it (which is vague to me). I agree that calling Marx non-Western would be ridiculous - does he outright say that? Hahahaha.
Sorry if my response was less than quality. I'm having a concentration issue right now but I know I won't respond to this later if I put it off now.
Nawh, just responding to the back-and-forth problem on Peterson's beliefs that nearly hijack any deep conversation about him on the internet.
Peterson is so loose with the definitions -- which is funny as he argues for "precise speech" -- that one naturally concludes that if Peterson is a Christian, he's surely some "spiritual but not religious" sort of reformist about it. Does he argue in favor of the Christian ego? He says he's a Christian but never once has talked about the special snowflake self of Christianity: a soul. This is one of the biggest paradoxes of Peterson.
I've yet to watch it, but I imagine Rationality Rules dissects this issue of Peterson in his most recent video, seeing as how it's exclusively about this topic.
Man....Peterson. Dude is a danger. Fundamentally. His pep talks are nice but he himself has said he wants attendance to the humanities or anything resembling Marxist education shut down. To "0%".
I mean. Not even saying "I have some issues with postmodernism, marxism and how prevelant it is."
No. He really seems to be trying to wage philosophical/political warfare.
Like what kind of fucking anti-intellectualism BS is that....coming from a fucking professor a former Harvard professor. Holy shit.
I mean. Not even saying "I have some issues with postmodernism, marxism and how prevelant it is."
No. He really seems to be trying to wage philosophical/political warfare.
Like what kind of fucking anti-intellectualism BS is that....coming from a fucking professor a former Harvard professor. Holy shit.
I tried to say this a while back. I realize no one wants to claim him, but he really isn't a Christian. He likes to obfuscate any actual stances he has and he's making 80k a month on patreon pandering to conservatives - but he does not believe in anything we recognize as Christianity.
I think if you follow Peterson for a little while it's actually quite clear wether he is Christian or not.
First is his most famous answer: "I act as if God exists."
In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson describes God as Being itself, as truth.
Finally there is his stance on the Bible and the creation myth. He clearly sees these stories as valuable for their lessons and insights, making them "true" in a sense but not in a LITERAL sense.
Everything put together, he's not what most people would consider a Christian.
First is his most famous answer: "I act as if God exists."
In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson describes God as Being itself, as truth.
Finally there is his stance on the Bible and the creation myth. He clearly sees these stories as valuable for their lessons and insights, making them "true" in a sense but not in a LITERAL sense.
Everything put together, he's not what most people would consider a Christian.
This is the literal position of the Vatican.
It's hilarious that your description could be the literal definition of a practicing catholic and you come to the conclusion that it is unChristian.
You just described a parable which is literally what is used in the bible to define norms in ways that people will understand.
Like WTF is the definition of Christian to some of you?
Believing that the Bible is the literal word of God or some other shit that would get you burned as a heretic with the Cathars?
There's so many branches of protestantism that Peterson could probably fit in one of these if he consider the bible to be a norm to live by and that dude 2000 years ago died.
At worst it would be a heretical branch of Christianity (which for Catholics not so long ago was basically anything that is not Orthodoxy or Catholicism).
Believing that the Bible is the literal word of God or some other shit that would get you burned as a heretic with the Cathars?
There's so many branches of protestantism that Peterson could probably fit in one of these if he consider the bible to be a norm to live by and that dude 2000 years ago died.
At worst it would be a heretical branch of Christianity (which for Catholics not so long ago was basically anything that is not Orthodoxy or Catholicism).
Jordan himself has argued that the literal definition of truth is information that is useful in a Darwinian sense (ie. it improves chances of survival).
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