I am putting in the first volley of the Jordan Peterson Expose. I got an e-version and started with the operatically titled Overture. It didn’t take long to find stuff that reveals him to me to be someone who has managed to bypass the last 50 years of the history of ideas. Early times yet, and I will pursue reading. It’s kinda like listening to one of my high school teachers. Confident in their knowledge and authority, but so clearly out of touch, his style makes for a pretty easy folksy read from what I can tell early on.
So let’s start with a quick sample:
Imagine someone betrayed by a trusted lover. The sacred social contract obtaining between the two has been violated. Actions speak louder than words, and an act of betrayal disrupts the fragile and carefully negotiated peace of an intimate relationship. In the aftermath of disloyalty, people are seized by terrible emotions: disgust, contempt (for self and traitor), guilt, anxiety, rage and dread. Conflict is inevitable, sometimes with deadly results. Shared belief systems—shared systems of agreed-upon conduct and expectation—regulate and control all those powerful forces. It’s no wonder that people will fight to protect something that saves them from being possessed by emotions of chaos and terror(and after that from degeneration into strife and combat).
Wow. The guy is a shrink, but I don’t see a take on Freud here. A betraying lover is violating a social contract precipitating chaos? Well, in the first instance, yes, but from my reading of Freud, this violation is often necessary to progress to a deeper level of mutually established order. Shared belief and agreed upon conduct alone will reify a dynamic situation. It is this reification that can lead to violence. The so-called violation is a means to communicate the need to re-evaluate and adjust the social contract. Rules and valid beliefs do not stand alone. They depend on context. The last fifty years have precisely focused on historical challenges to attempts to fix belief and conduct. Peterson seems to have missed this human project. He somehow thinks that what he regards to be generative of order to be order per se. Though he talks of progress, belief, conduct and the order stemming from these never do progress. At most they can be protected from disitegration into meaninglessness and chaos.
There’s more to it, too. A shared cultural system stabilizes human interaction, but is also a system of value—a hierarchy of value, where some things are given priority and importance and others are not. In the absence of such a system of value, people simply cannot act. In fact, they can’t even perceive, because both action and perception require a goal, and a valid goal is, by necessity, something valued. We experience much of our positive emotion in relation to goals. We are not happy, technically speaking, unless we see ourselves progressing—and the very idea of progression implies value.
So: no value, no meaning. Between value systems, however, there is the possibility of conflict. We are thus eternally caught between the most diamantine rock and the hardest of places: loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable. In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.
Meaning and value are a zero-sum game, ours or theirs, yours or mine. No learning, no adjustment, no deliberation, just the potential for conflict. À la Trump, the West has been giving it away, and everybody else has been laughing while taking folks to the cleaners. “They took away Christmas! What’s next?” A headlong rush into meaninglessness. No mention that the West itself has been taking an over one thousand year walk away from Christianity and many other so-called traditions because they are effectively troublesome or downright bankrupt. If there is a loss of meaning, it is likely that what was held to be meaningful, was but an illusion. This compulsive return to illusion, a reification of a heuristic for living, is actually behind the desperation he talks about.
Peterson sees culture as fixed in tradition. He has absolutely no sense that contestation in this domain is the way to enhance order by enlarging the field of who can live civilly within it. All deep questioning is but a threat to order. Inevitably this means some remain privileged within the sphere of order while others are marginalized or inhabit an exclusively different sphere. It is this kind of zero-sum thinking, turned into panic, that led Hitler to feel that Germany had to protect itself by securing the resources necessary to its preservation. All that was non-Aryan threatened to overtake Germany’s share of limited global resources and had to be dispatched from its territory. We are witnessing similar tendencies today. The planet is just too small for this kind of thinking.
Psychologist (psychoanalyst) yes, conservative, yes. sometimes not so soft-spoken white guy yes but I don’t get the vitriol with which people treat this guy. Comparison to Hitler, really? A lot of the posturing against JP has been positions on C16 and the implementation of the use of new gender pronouns within the trans community. I agree that the certain of these ideas: “no value, no meaning” beg the question and call for an interrogation, particularly across cultural lines. His positions tend to be conservative (as he himself professes), but unfortunately the tendency these toward identity politics seems to end debate and nuance, and throws people into camps. If you question the forced adopton of these new pronouns that will apply to at best 1% of the population, then you are somehow transphobic. I don’t think JP sees language and culture as fixed, but rather he sees them as changing from within a culture or from the bottom up, not being implemented as law or from the top down.
The Hitler thing in my post is not HITLER! I am referring to history that has been done in the last while that examines everybody’s fave demon’s rather prosaic socio-historic perspectives. In this history [I promise to find the source I am referring to], Hitler’s view of the human project centred on an ethnic struggle over scarcity, real ecological scarcity. He was just protecting his own from a larger decadent, uncontrolled cosmopolitanism. [Think a version of “top-down” perpetrated by the liberals and bankers of the day.] I think there are all kinds of echoes of this today, from Trump and Orban, in particular, and perspectives within the Brexit and French nationalist crowd as well, among others. I see this as a typically conservative reflex that doesn’t have to go straight to death camps.
This historical work I am referring to uses documentary evidence to say that the Jews were not meant to be killed from the start. They were to be shipped east to live in the areas vacated by the many more disdained and murdered Slavs. It’s just that there was a minor hitch when Russia eventually took the offensive. Not able to carry out the stalled forced migration plans, the Germans were happy to settle for other means to manage the resulting bottlenecks.
In this regard, Peterson is the poet of Western nationalist value resources, gathering inspiration from his brand of “science”, mythology and religion. His positions seem to gravitate back to the essences [i.e. values] found in current norms of order: they are to be protected. Yet, these claims to essence could use debate. As he is on the winning side of norms, he is a difficult position regarding the optimal pace of change. Also, the notion of top-down here is a bit of a red herring, in my view. He seems to presume that there is an ecological scarcity of cognition and sense-making for the establishment of value, and he is doing what he can to ensure that this be prudently managed. In these matters, I don’t share the anxiety, nor see any scarcity, but imaginative possibilities.
More importantly, nowhere — so far — have I seen him provide an analysis of how his own traditions lead to their own value dead end. For Peterson life loses meaning only as a result of a forced retreat from traditional values to avoid conflict. This is a limited understanding that disregards how the internal dynamics of these traditions lead us to their problematic limits to order.
Once, maybe even presently, it was common sense that the minority of blacks were inferior and should be treated accordingly, at best, with paternalistic condescension. As 12 Years as Slave and the history of lynchings demonstrate, compulsively holding onto such views leads to cultural psychosis. The history of our treatment of the, albeit, smaller minority of mixed sexed people — such as medically “fixing” them into a gender category without their consent — demonstrates behaviour that, minimally, calls for accountability. Inevitably, patriarchy, gender, race, class, or any other, ultimately, exclusionary order will breed contestation. Best to negotiate rather than retrench.
I’ll limit myself to a sentence or two here as I have yet to delve into the text and am limited to a few youtube videos. The jump to death camps, even by mere analogy worries me. It is a debate ender, like calling someone an anti-semite or a homophobe. I am struck by the irony of terms like micro-aggression and toxic masculinity. The white male has become the hapless whipping boy for all the evils of contemporary society. Far from a retrenchment ( more like trying to hang onto the last deckchair on the Titanic) of white male dominance, I think there has to be some place for OUR inclusion in the discourse other than as ubiquitous bad guy.
I have no doubts that lots of sensible women and LGBTQ+ folk free to be well-adjusted are pretty chill about us, and don’t mind having us around, so long as we work with them concerning any rough edges.
Again, no death camps; just perspectives on social organization. Circumstances have such perspectives operationalized in particular ways. No claim whatsoever that JP goes there or lives in such times.
I have been procrastinating on my end of the JP thingy. THE BOOK is here.
I pass by it and it looks up at me hopefully with a goofy little smile.
Something about JP bugs me and it is more clear when watching him online holding forth.
He is the prototypical nuclear DAD!
He is a very moral and responsible Patriarch.
He is a benevolent dictator and a control freak.
My own dad was like that although my father was funnier.
All families are little facist dictatorships.
Some are more extremist, some more self destructive, some look great from the other side of the fence.
JP’s partner enables his role as most wives do, because they are pragmatists.
Kids love continuity and a gentle envelope of law and order.
I am the only member of OG who was not a dad so I never moved to that next level. This fact leaves me out of box in some fundamental way in regard to taking on JP.
For example is JP closer to me than I want to admit?
Would I have reverted to some unconscious conservative template as a dad myself?
Is arguing JP just an exercise in agreeing with him but with the addition of some of my own fussy technical qualifications?
Nazis and the notion of scarcity.
Peterson’s use of the lobster metaphor has some uncanny relationship to ensuring one’s position in the face of scarcity.
Nazis initially considering deporting Jews.