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Jordan Peterson, the obscure Canadian psychologist turned right-wing celebrity, explained

From your introduction of Jordan and our earlier reading, i understood he was influential, just didn't then know how influential, or particularly with which groups, and why, specifically. It's interesting to read more as so much other stuff is brought into it good articles. Know more now. One thing is certain for me. I'll die wishing i could have known more. Oh, and maybe that early gut feelings aren't always all wrong either. Hope you get more from this one, and undoubtedly more to come, too.

Who Peterson is, and the important truths he reveals about our current political moment.

By Zack Beauchamp @zackbeauchamp [e-mail] Updated May 21, 2018, 9:59am EDT


Jordan Peterson. Javier Zarracina/Vox

Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. Before coming to Vox in 2014, he edited TP Ideas, a section of Think Progress devoted to the ideas shaping our political world.

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Jordan Peterson is a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, a widely cited scholar of personality, and the author of what’s currently the No. 1 best-selling nonfiction book on Amazon in the United States. The New York Times .. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opinion/jordan-peterson-moment.html ’s David Brooks, echoing George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen, calls him “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now.”

Jordan Peterson is also a right-wing internet celebrity who has claimed that feminists have “an unconscious wish for brutal male domination .. https://twitter.com/_Saeen_/status/955889027957297152 ,” referred to developing nations as “pits of catastrophe .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgcoHmgqLBE ” in a speech to a Dutch far-right group, and recently told a Times reporter that he supported “enforced monogamy .. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life.html .”

[Insert: Enforced monogamy. From a darling of the alt-right, protector of individual freedoms guy. Who would enforce it i wonder.]

[...]

Peterson’s argument starts with a vivid denunciation of Marxism. Human society, like all animal kingdoms, is in Peterson’s mind defined by certain biological truths — including the reality that some people are naturally more gifted than others, and that life will always involve suffering. Marxism, he believes, is rooted fundamentally in the hatred of people who succeed in a capitalist economy — and thus will always result in violence when one attempts to implement it.

“Are these Marxists motivated by love or hatred? Well, is it love or hatred that produces 100 million dead people?” he asks in the speech, rhetorically.

Peterson believes that the failure of Soviet communism has not actually deterred communism’s fans in the West, who still secretly cling to the old hateful beliefs. He argues that they do so under the guise of a school of thought he refers to as “postmodernism,” which he sees as his archenemy.

“Western leftist intellectuals are [fundamentally complicit] in the horrors of the 21st century,” he says. “It’s not that they’ve learned anything since; they’ve just gone underground. And that’s what I see when I see postmodernism.”

Peterson uses the term postmodernism fairly loosely, but he’s referring to, roughly speaking, French philosophers working in the middle of the 20th century, most prominently Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

He argues that these philosophers, famous for their skepticism about objective reality and emphasis on the social construction of human society, were actually crypto-Marxists. The difference is that they change the language — instead of arguing that society is defined by class oppression, Peterson says, they argue that it’s defined by identity oppression: racism, sexism, gender identity, and the like.

“How about if we don’t say ‘working-class capitalists’ we say ‘oppressor/oppressed?’” he says, summarizing the alleged postmodern line of thinking. “We’ll just think about all of the other ways people are oppressed, and all the other ways that people are oppressors, and we’ll play the same damn game under a new guise.”

This makes postmodernism, which he believes has quietly permeated Western culture in the past 20 or so years, a tremendous threat.

“The Marxists aren’t just wrong: They’re wrong, murderous, and genocidal,” he says. “The postmodernists don’t just get to just come along an adopt Marxism as a matter of sleight of hand because their Marxist theory didn’t work out and they needed a rationalization, because it’s too dangerous — it’s too dangerous to the rest of us.”

Actual experts on postmodernism note that the thinkers Peterson likes to cite were often quite critical of Marxism .. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08935699008657943?journalCode=rrmx20 . His reading of these thinkers, as the social critic Shuja Haider points out .. https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/01/23/postmodernism-not-take-place-jordan-petersons-12-rules-life/ , is shallow and deeply uncharitable. “Peterson’s fantasy of neo-Marxist wolves in postmodern sheep’s clothing has little bearing on actual debates in 20th-century political theory,” Haider concludes.

“Peterson’s understanding of Marxism and postmodernism is very vulgar,” Harrison Fluss, an editor at the Marxist journal Historical Materialism, tells me. “He connects the two in [an] overarching conspiracy theory.”

Perhaps more fundamentally, there is no evidence that 20th-century French thinkers have a dominant influence on any sector of the left in contemporary Western politics, let alone society as a whole. I know of no credible political scientist who believes this, and Peterson’s adherence to the notion can lead to bizarre outbursts. For example, he once accused Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of being in thrall to a “murderous equity doctrine” because Trudeau sent a tweet calling feminist activists “inspiring and motivating.”

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But Peterson’s grand theory is brilliant as a political stance — one designed to weaponize the grievances of the kind of young men attracted to the alt-right.

Peterson’s framework serves as a justification for dismissing the idea of any kind of privilege — white, male, or otherwise — as a tool used by closet Marxists to manipulate you. He states this explicitly, calling it a “Marxist lie” designed to enable the Marxist-postmodernist effort to seize control of the state.

“[We cannot] allow people who are manipulating us with historical ignorance and philosophical sleight of hand to render us so goddamn guilty about what our ancestors may or may not have done,” he argues, “that we allow our shame and our guilt to be used as tools to manipulate us into accepting a future that we do not want to have.”

This theory elevates battles over political correctness and free speech into existential struggles over Western society. He is very literally arguing that if the “postmodernists” win, if people start using others’ chosen pronouns, we’re one step closer to modern gulags.

[Not unlike a number of, umm, far-right conspiracy people such as Alex Jones..]

Peterson’s position helps claim the mantle of “facts” and “reason” for the anti-PC right. Because postmodern theorists are skeptical about the notion of an entirely objective reality, Peterson argues, the entire project of “identity politics” is grounded in an irrational rejection of logic and discussion. It’s not only right to reject identity politics; it’s a sign of irrationality not to.

“Postmodernists don’t believe in fact,” as he put it in the lecture on white privilege and Marxism. “They believe that the idea of fact is part of the power game that’s played by the white-dominated male patriarchy to impose the tyrannical structure of the patriarchy on the oppressors.”

These arguments are catnip for a very specific kind of young white man — Peterson himself said in his Channel 4 interview that 80 percent of his YouTube audience is male. These young men are upset about the erosion of white male privilege, about the need to compete with women and minorities for jobs and spots at top universities, and they are angry about the way feminists and racial justice activists describe society.

In Peterson, they found someone telling them that their grievances are not only justified but, in fact, important: that they have picked up on a secret threat to society writ large, and that they are its first victims. Peterson is drawing on a deep well: This kind of anger about the declining social status of white men is incredibly common across the Western world today, and finds a comfortable home in reactionary political movements on both sides of the Atlantic.

“The underlying mass-appeal of [Peterson] is that he gives white men permission to stop pretending that they care about other people’s grievances,” writes Jesse Brown, host of the Canadaland podcast and a longtime Peterson watcher. “He tells his fans that these so-called marginalized people are not really victims at all but are in fact aggressors, enemies, who must be shut down.”

But Peterson isn’t only giving these men an architecture in which to ground their frustrations. He’s also giving them a road map on how to succeed in a society they no longer understand.

Jordan Peterson the self-help guru

https://www.vox.com/world/2018/3/26/17144166/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life