Jordan Peterson

This gentleman seems to be making quite a few waves at the moment, from destroying Channel 4 interviewers, debating Sam Harris,dominating the best-seller list on both sides of the Atlantic, and getting up the noses of the PC brigade in general.
Also a man who the mainstream media love to mis-represent. He seems to have them on the run.

I think he's saying many interesting things, some of which I agree with, others I'm not entirely sure about. He's certainly stimulating - anyone else have any thoughts?

 

I was almost going to make a post about him myself. I have watched a countless number of his talks online, but the more I listen to him, the less I am impressed.

He says a lot of things that are true, but also a lot of which is just basic common sense. He certainly speaks well, too, and seems to connect with his audiences well. But he seems to avoid the bigger picture, either on purpose, or maybe because he just isn't as enlightened and informed on the topics as people like to think he is.

He certainly talks a lot about the problems facing people and society, but never really gets to the root causes to connect the dots.

I mean, he became famous over the whole gender pronouns issue, but he never really gets to the bottom of why so much post-modern idealism is so rapidly being spread throughout society, and what the reasons for it are. He speaks as if it is some grassroots thing that is just happening by mere happenstance.

At the end of the day, Peterson is just another establishment intellectual (like Sam Harris and others) and not my idea of a true free-thinker.

 

I hadn't heard of him but based on his Wikipedia page I'd be interested to hear his views. Not saying I'd agree.. But it's so important to look at both sides of a debate, and sometimes I feel like we spend decades swinging wildly between left and right, liberal and conservative, always going so far out of balance that problems are certain to arise that send us swinging back the other way.

 

He managed to make a big deal about taking a stand and not using someone's preferred pronouns, except that nobody asked him to, and the whole thing was hypothetical. And then he later said that, if a student came to him and asked him to, he would probably use their preferred pronouns. The guy just fills the air with nonsense babbling and is smart enough to be able to turn some interviewers around in circles. Just a middling academic who got a taste of the spotlight and liked it, so now he has to be more and more outlandish and loud to try and keep his audience of disillusioned young men.

 

I just find him interesting - not that I agree with him 100% - I'm not exactly sure how to take some of what he's saying, which for me, is a plus, as I usually pigeonhole people like this fairly rapidly.

The fact that he's controversial whilst at the same time not just another repeater of platitudes of either end of the political spectrum gains him points in my estimation.

Going to read his book '12 Rules for Life' starting next week. Maybe I'll decide for or against, or maybe I'll still be un-decided.

 

His stand was in regard to the law C-16.

 

Picking a side is overrated

 

But what was he standing against? Nobody asked him to do anything.

 

He speaks eloquently and from what I've seen, rarely gets rattled when asked leading questions and statements surrounding ethos and appeals to emotion.

I am in the camp of where I agree with some of the stuff he says but don't agree with other stuff. Regardless, given his conversational style, it is impressive that much of what he says is still fairly well-understood by many people.


I found this conversation interesting between a few people who compromise the "Intellectual Dark Web" and how they (primarily Peterson and Shaprio, although Rubin has certainly provided a platform for several of them ) are making sense of their rise to fame and popularity, amongst a mainstream media and culture which seems to value pretty much the opposite of what they are doing.

 

I too have viewed many of his lectures and videos. I am ambivilant about his message and am skeptical of his popularity. I think people are captivated by his ability to speak and connect with large crowds. His reasoning is attractive and he speaks with assertiveness and eloquence—and I think he needs to be approched with caution. He takes many ideas, some of which are very good, others of which are extreme and potentially dangerous, and wraps them in a beautiful package. And his followers love him, and seem to follow his every word as if he could say or do no wrong. Dangerous, and ironic given his free thinking individualist message.

 

I just bought 12 Rules For Life

 

He's essentially just a glorified self help guru but if the 12 Rules of Life helps people live a better life then why not

But as far as some of the stances he has publically taken regarding political issues, I agree with what YFM said. It isnt hard to poke holes in many of his arguments but he does seem to have garnered a rather devoted following who simply arent going to apply criticism to his arguments

With that said I do find him rather intriguing

 

I first learned of Jordan Peterson when he made Kathy Newman look like the complete idiot that she is.

 

What do you think is the basis of his appeal?

 

I've listened to a few of his talks, and I like some of them. Like anything, I extract the good, and leave behind those things that don't resonate with me. I don't know enough about him to determine if he's ''dangerous,'' or anything, but I have liked some of his talks, and ideas.

 

I'm not sure if this question was meant to be open to anyone but I'll respond...

I think the basis of his appeal is his ability to address many of the issues and problems surrounding identity politics in a cogent and insightful manner. For instance, many of us see the absurdity with the gender pronoun thing, but it seems a lot of people who address such issues, usually use the backdrop of their political affiliation to speak about it and/or do so in an antagonistic way. I found Peterson to be relatively devoid of that when I initially discovered him.

 

I disagree with the conclusion that Peterson "made Kathy Newman look like the complete idiot that she is." She should be credited with accomplishing that herself. He just provided the opportunity. But if we can separate out the personality clash between interviewer and interviewee, the encounter did bring out some features of Peterson's thought that deserve critical scrutiny, and others that raise interesting issues about the society we live in. Jordan Peterson fishes in the same troubled Alt Lite waters as Milo Yanopoulos and Gavin McInnes, tapping into the castration fears of man children ( twenty-thirty something male gamers and basement dwellers) who are having trouble holding steady jobs and forming stable relationships with the opposite sex. He's far more intelligent and better erudite than Milo and Gavin, and may actually have the best interest of his audience of misfits at heart, but he is a right wing ideologue and an apologist for the corporate establishment--which in my opinion need more critics. Basically he draws on the shaky intellectual foundations of evolutionary psychology (formerly known as socio-biology), Jungian psychology, libertarian ideology, and Judeo-Christian to mount an attack on social justice activists, identity politics and political correctness, sneaking in a certain amount of sexism and bigotry along the way.

Like Gavin. he provides rather basic advice for those pathetic guys who find it hard to manage their lives. In Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos, he tells his readers to grow up, which is all well and good. Specifically, he tells them:
Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back (make your body/mind honest, straight and strong).
Rule 2: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping (be honest with yourself about your shortcomings and fix them)
Rule 3: Make friends with people who want the best for you (seek and keep honest, good friends).
Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today (focus only on your honest achievements).
Rule 5: Don't let children do things that make you dislike them (be honest with your kids about life, and prepare them for it).
Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world (be honest with the world about your shortcomings before bashing its imperfection).
Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient (live life being honest with your feelings).
Rule 8: Tell the truth—or, at least, don't lie (say only honest statements).
Rule 9: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't (converse with an honest intention to learn).
Rule 10: Be Precise in Your Speech (make honestly condensed messages)
Rule 11: Don’t bother children when they are skateboarding (let less experienced people make honest efforts in risk-taking).'
Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street (respect other beings - human included - that made honest efforts, despite how low their status is).

All sound advice--so sound, in fact, that it's a bit sobering, and a sad commentary on our society, to think adults have to be told these things--kind of like McInnes' advice to the Proud Boys to lay off the porn and cut down on jerking off to motivate them to have sex with real girls instead of their hands. Peterson left out,"early to bed, early to rise..." but surely no one could quarrel with these recommended behaviors. For this, Peterson has been called "the stupid man's smart person" Is Jordan Peterson the stupid man's smart person? - Macleans.ca and a surogate dad for Lost Boys.
A Messiah-cum-Surrogate-Dad for Gormless Dimwits: On Jordan B. Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life” - Los Angeles Review of Books

All this, though, is heavily laden with religious moralism (empty your mind so it may be filled with the Holy Spirit), and "culture wars" attacks on caricatures of radical feminism and post modernism, some of which came through in the interview with Kathy Newman. Take the lobster, for instance: To be sure, strongest male lobsters get to mate with the most attractive females. Such dominance hierarchies are indeed pervasive in nature. But Peterson wants to commit the naturalistic fallacy (making an "is" into and "ought") in arguing that it therefor should and must be the case with human societies and that "Hierarchy is not a social construct". As an evolutionary psychologist, he thinks that much of our behavior is governed by mental modules that were "hard wired" into our brains through the course of evolution. That, however, is on a par with the Holy Spirit, and article of faith lacking a sound empirical foundation. So are Jungian psychology with its archetypes he believes in. Peterson's strikes me as a bit of an asshole for his fuss about refusing to use people's preferred pronouns. In their real struggle to gain power and advance themselves in society, minorities and women have made a big deal about that which may strike people as silly but were important to them in gaining a positive sense of identity. If an African-American wants to be called that instead of "Black", I have no problem with that (even though they once said they wanted to be called "Black" instead of "Negro" , because I think if furthers the cause of racial equality. Likewise, if a woman wants to be called "Ms." instead of "Miss " or "Mrs", I aim to please. To say "Hell no! I'm exercising my freedom of speech to call you what ever I want"--Negro, boy, Miss, etc., seems needlessly confrontational and divisive. Likewise with transgendered people. To do otherwise seems provocative and cruel.

Calm and articulate as he is. Peterson is an off-base extremist who thinks that feminists, and minority and social justice activists' are trying to destroy not only our freedom but all of Western civilization and objective truth itself--an extreme exaggeration, to say the least. Perhaps most objectionable is the over-the-top hyperbole Peterson uses to compare transgender activists to Chinese Maoists, because Maoism assumes the preeminence of group identity. Sorry, Jordan, that notion is ludicrous. Maoism was a lot more complicated than that, and the only "group identity' it was concerned about was social class. Peterson breezily told Kathy Newman that the wonders of multivariate analysis showed that gender inequality per se is not the cause for the glass ceiling. Same goes for "group identity" and the cause of mass murder of tens of millions by Mao. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and dialectical materialism are rather elaborate and specific beliefs that shouldn't be casually equated with social justice activism or post-modernism. Maoism and post- modernism are very different things, and Peterson simply displays his ignorance in trying to equate them.

 

Typos. Line 5. The phrase should have been Judeo-Christian moralism. As a Christian, I have no problem with Judeo-Christian morality, but Peterson lays the moralism on thick. Another is in the fourth paragraph, line 4: should be Holy Spirit, "an article of faith".

 

Addressing my previous posts with this in mind, it's articles and statements like these, which I think Peterson has admirably been able to avoid much of in terms of pandering to his base or lashing out in a similar manner.

Granted I have not really followed much of him since the Newman interview, but I think this aspect of him, with his thoughts and ideas is what sets him worlds apart from someone like the provocaueteurs of the right, such as Milo Yanopoulous and even makes him easier to listen to than someone with comparable intelligence such as Ben Shapiro, who like those articles authors, similarly
at times is not above insulting the intelligence of the left and his opponents.