Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby Heaven Swan » Wed May 23, 2018 9:34 pm

»JackRiddler Tue May 22, 2018 3:27 pm wrote:
guruilla » Mon May 21, 2018 10:57 pm wrote:I can't help think that if there are JBP supporters reading this thread, the chances of them posting are pretty slim. Is that the desired outcome and if so, why? A debate that banishes one side of the argument isn't much of a debate.


Oh these delicate flowers are so sensitive that they can’t post about their hero? The same ones that are so irreparably hurt and damaged by the life-crushing tragedy of being single that they need to commit mass murder of women with assault rifles and vehicles? Too shy to state their views?

Boo hoo.

Alright though, hopefully JPB fans are less extreme than “incels” but it sure looks like a slippery slope. And he insults and demeans them by telling them they’re losers and “low-status’ because they don’t have a girlfriend, and saying they have utterly and completly failed at life if they don’thave children. Don’t his followers have intrinsic worth as individual humans? Uggh.

JackRiddler wrote: First, the premise is false. Odds are they'd want to mouth off, and have so elsewhere on this board. You're doing something like half-and-half yourself.

But allowing your premise for the sake of argument, this reluctance would be the predictable outcome of reading all these people who have posted here, correctly assessing the real-existing JP for the simple twaddle he consistently says, the self-help scams he engages in, the pernicious impact he is having (thanks to the media who have adopted him laughably as a major intellectual), and the dick that he at least lets on he is. Tough shit. Like any other juvenile ideological-emotional fog, "JBP supporter" can be cured. It is not an essential or inalienable personal quality. There is no rule that one must cater it to here. It's not a demographic I care for in particular, so if they don't post, that's okay. We also don't have too many Ayn Rand fans, and compared to Peterson she's-- (well I was going to joke "a genius," but anyway) slightly less lightweight as a thinker. (Hm, scratch that, I think we've found the perfect analogue for disproportionate attention given to simplistic reactionary ideas presented as though radically new and courageous.)

Regarding the board, instead of worrying what JP supporters think (or Alt-Rights, or incels, or the kind of light-fasch types who think "SJW" is a legitimate thing), I'd be interested in attracting more women and more people from backgrounds differing from the norm here, and more people who are smart and take the "rigor" part seriously.


Would be nice.
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby Jerky » Wed May 23, 2018 9:36 pm

"B-b-but, muh DRAGONS!!! and muh LOBSTERS!!!"
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby American Dream » Wed May 23, 2018 11:12 pm

I fail to understand the appeal.


Book Review: Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life

By Sam Rocha

Image

Vancouver, Canada, May 14, 2018 / 06:01 am (CNA).- The meteoric rise of Jordan B. Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, has resulted in a popular book, 12 Rules for Life, published by Random House Canada in January. Peterson’s book has been praised by many as heroic, even by a popular US Catholic bishop. He calls out today’s corrupt University, he encourages men and boys to take pride in themselves, he brings intellectual life into the public square, his defenders say. Well, William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale supposedly did some of that in 1951, and Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind did some of it, too, in 1987. The genre of these books is nothing particularly new, nor are their claims of social decline and cultural devastation. But the book deserves a close reading and analysis, to get at its exact weaknesses on their own terms.

In the introduction, he offers two histories of how this book came to be. In the first, Peterson describes the book as the outcome of his “procrastination-induced musing” on the Quora question-and-answer website, where he has been posting since 2012. In the second account, he cites his more specialized 1999 book, Maps of Meaning, as the source material for his 12 Rules. The combined popularity of Peterson’s Quora replies and YouTube videos of him teaching the content of Maps of Meaning at Harvard and the University of Toronto resulted, he claims, in the release of this self-help rulebook.

This is difficult to take at face value. Peterson’s rise to international popularity had little to do with his Quora profile, his dense 1999 book, or his YouTube channel. Peterson’s rise to fame began in earnest in 2016, after his vocal opposition to the C-16 bill proposed by the Canadian parliament to add “gender identity or expression” to the Canadian Human Rights Act. Peterson took a very public stand against this at the University of Toronto and quickly ascended into international fame, especially among social conservatives and libertarians, overlapping with the political rise of Donald Trump in the United States.

In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson makes a number of claims that obliquely relate to his opposition to the C-16 bill and to the points he has raised in his media appearances since then, but he does not credit any of this as contributing directly to this book. Instead, he cites his hero, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as articulating Peterson’s core idea for the book: an opposition to the view that human beings are created for happiness. In this respect, Peterson unwittingly picks a fight with Aristotle’s ancient and enduring ideas of human flourishing and the good life within the first three pages of his 2018 book about how to live.

Peterson also provides an early footnote explaining his usage of the capitalized word “Being,” a term he uses throughout the book’s nearly 400 pages. Peterson credits his repeated usage of this term to Martin Heidegger. Anyone who has read Heidegger’s Being and Time, however, will find no resemblance between Heidegger’s and Peterson’s notions of Being, including the undifferentiated spelling (Heidegger distinguished between Being and the beings). Peterson’s reference to Heidegger is ultimately an appeal to authority, attempting to justify his use of the term “Being” as an abstract neologism. But it is not remotely true that Heidegger was using Being as a neologism. After all, Heidegger did make up an abstract neologism, Dasein, to explain the way in which Being is experienced through our particular existence. Peterson’s repetition of the word “Being” throughout the book is impossible to understand on Heideggerian terms, and Peterson provides no explanation for it but this one, in his footnote. This example is par for the course: Peterson employs a litany of big names without substantive engagement, while missing the sources that his own ideas are in passive dialogue and conflict with.

In other words, Peterson’s book begins with an oddly incomplete account of its origins and motivations, followed by an unconscious dismissal of Aristotle’s most compelling account of the purpose of life, followed by a lazy attempt to justify using a specialized term as a mystical buzzword for the rest of the book. Yet in some respects, these are the most reasonable eight pages of the book.

As we will see, once his rules begin outright, Peterson wades into a muck of assertions without argument; disconnected similes and examples that insult reason; arbitrary and happenstance judgments; and implications that are dangerous in their banality.

The first rule is really more of an order than a rule: “Stand Up Straight With Your Shoulders Back.” In the first five pages of that chapter, Peterson talks about lobsters, songbirds, wrens, chickens, wolves, bearded dragons, and dolphins, but his main archetypal creature is the lobster. He psychologizes the lives of these lobsters ad nauseum, narrating their desires and intentions, and tells us that we have a direct relation to these ancient crustaceans.

At first glance, Peterson’s attention to animals may make his ideas appear to be Franciscan. Well, he’s a far cry from the Poverello. In his first rule, he advocates for the determinism of dominance hierarchies. He writes, “All that matters, from a Darwinian perspective, is permanence—and the dominance hierarchy, however social or cultural it might appear, has been around for half a billion years,” and continues, saying, “[d]ominance hierarchies are older than trees.”

This determinism supports his first rule about standing up straight with broad shoulders. Posture is an expression of dominance. What is ironic about this rule is that Peterson doesn’t show intellectual dominance; he is unable to make a powerful, upright argument. Instead, he repeats hunched-over Darwinian cliches through lazy analogies and silly deterministic narratives.

The second rule is “Treat Yourself Like Someone You Are Responsible For Helping.” Peterson opens by puzzling over examples where people fail to take their own medication or, far worse, giving medication to their pets more frequently than taking their own. This is what Aristotle called akrasia, the weakness of will present when we act against our best judgments. For the second time, Peterson fails to see that he is in dialogue with Aristotle. Peterson eventually turns to a psychoanalytic reading of Genesis to understand this akratic problem.

He repeats his major preoccupation in Maps of Meaning: the Carl Jung-inspired ying yang of chaos and order. Peterson’s method here is iterative. He repeats “chaos is X” and “order is Y”, or makes similes about them. For instance: “Chaos is freedom, dreadful freedom, too. Order, by contrast, is explored territory.” Or, on taxes: “When your tax return has been filed, that’s order. When you’re audited, that’s chaos.” On Tolkien: “Order is the Shire of Tolkien’s hobbits… Chaos is underground kingdom of the dwarves, usurped by Smaug.” If you don’t follow his points, neither do I.

Elsewhere in the book Peterson occasionally promises that he is not a dualist or a Manichean. But it is impossible to see anything else in this series of disconnected assertions. There are no reasons, evidence, or arguments presented; just chaos is this, order is that.

The closest thing to evidence for chaos and order may be when Peterson returns to his cognitive Darwinism, assuring us that “[o]ur brains respond instantly when chaos appears, with simple, hyper-fast circuits maintained from the ancient days, when our ancestors dwelled in trees, and snakes struck in a flash.” From there, he recovers his social Darwinism, too, claiming that the evolution of the human skull created “an evolutionary arms race between the fetal head and female pelvis.” This all links, he feels, to the archetypal feminine character of chaos and the masculinity of order; but even the simple idea of an archetype is left unexplained. He ends by psychoanalyzing his reader, or perhaps himself, by accusing anyone who has not wished for the annihilation of humanity of being out of touch with their own memory and “darkest fantasies.” The second rule ends in a search for “meaning with a capital M” to “justify your miserable existence”, which, somehow, bears out the meaning of his tortuously phrased rule about “treating yourself as if you were someone you were responsible for helping.”

The rules that follow are shorter, and rely on roughly the same method of generalization and assertions. The sixth rule, “Set Your House in Perfect Order Before You Criticize the World,” is spectacularly ironic for a book so disorganized in its reasons. If Peterson wants to defend order against chaos and suggest that we clean up our rooms, he must lead by example.

Rule number seven sounds fairly unobjectionable—“Pursue What is Meaningful (Not What is Expedient)”—and is the most interesting part of the book. This chapter includes a lengthy section on “Christianity and its Problems,” where Peterson sympathetically outlines Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity, but turns to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov ultimately to reject Nietzsche’s solution and endorse “Jung’s great discovery” that values cannot be invented. Here Peterson echoes the pessimism of Rod Dreher when Peterson says that Christian “dogma is dead, at least to the modern West.” Unlike the fatalistic Christianity of Dreher, Peterson the post-Christian somehow sees a pairing of Jung’s neo-pagan psychoanalysis with Social Darwinism as a productive way out.

In the section that immediately follows the one on Christianity, Peterson shares his personal testimony, knotted in an excursus on Rene Descartes’ modern doubt. This story mirrors his confessional preface in Maps of Meaning. In 1984, Peterson “had outgrown the shallow Christianity of [his] youth by the time [he] could understand the fundamental of Darwinian theory” because, “[a]fter that, [he] could not distinguish the basic elements of Christian belief from wishful thinking.” After this conversion from Christ to Darwin, he flirted with socialism. But all too soon socialism, like Christianity, failed Peterson and he fell back into his doubt. The horrors of the aftermath of World War II and the Cold War—more specifically, the ability for humans to torment each other—eventually led Peterson out of his doubt. “What can I not doubt?”, Peterson ponders rhetorically: “The reality of suffering.” This becomes Peterson’s firm foundation. This foundation does not match his previous claims about Darwinism, but consistency is not valued in Peterson’s approach. He chiefly relies on unargued conviction, without seeming to notice it.

This reveals the deeper reason why Peterson rejects happiness as the proper end of human life. Instead of happiness, flourishing, or the good life, suffering and evil create a negative notion of the good for Peterson, in another unfortunate dip into Manichaeism. Without realizing it, Peterson here touches on Augustine’s notion of perversity in his Confessions, where he famously steals pears with his friends for the sheer pleasure of evil. Unlike Augustine, Peterson’s realization of suffering allows evil to determine the conditions of being for the good. He writes, “The good is whatever stops such things [i.e., tormenting others for the sole sake of making them suffer] from happening.” For Peterson, goodness is the relative cure for present evil.

From this point on, Peterson relies heavily on his ideas on Meaning with a capital M, where the ontological dualism of chaos and order are mediated by Meaning. Peterson’s method is, again, a series of assertions about what Meaning is, and he still provides no arguments or evidence for them. The basic idea seems to be that Peterson’s notion of Being is a dominance hierarchy of chaos and order, rooted in the reality of suffering and evil, and Meaning intervenes morally as the “ultimate balance.” Peterson here repeats the anti-metaphysical orientation of Maps of Meaning, in which Meaning chastens and regulates Being.

Peterson’s Darwinism and psychoanalysis, mixed with his postmodern-sounding theories of goodness and meaning, brings us to rule number eleven, “Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding.” This chapter rails against “Postmodernism and the Long Arm of Marx”. I will save the reader from a close reading, because Peterson’s treatment of postmodernism as an evolutionary adaptation of Marxism is highly simplistic. Peterson mentions French intellectuals like Jacques Derrida (despite the inconvenient fact that Derrida wrote a whole book, Spectres of Marx, outlining a critique of Marx) and also brings up the Frankfurt School, but his formula is that Marxism of any kind equals killing fields in Cambodia and, above all, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, and somehow gets from there to the present day Academy and University. Terrifying.

Peterson’s own sources do not agree with his account. He unwittingly makes constructive use of Theodor Adorno’s essay “After Auschwitz” earlier in the book, and Adorno is a member of the Marxist Frankfurt School and absolutely not a postmodernist. Furthermore, Peterson’s overt reliance on Nietzsche and Jung, a follower of Sigmund Freud, shows that Peterson’s own ideas are built upon two of Derrida’s three “masters of suspicion”: Nietzsche and Freud (the third is Marx). Furthermore, Peterson seems quite unaware of the fact that Marxists and postmodernists do not get along in the Academy. Many Leftists, like Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek, agree with Peterson’s dismissal of postmodernism despite not agreeing with each other on anything else. When Peterson warns his reader to “[b]eware of a single cause interpretation—and beware the people who purvey them” he again fails to take his own advice in his single-cause interpretation of Marxism and postmodernism.

A few final notes: One thing about quickly gained popularity is that one is not always submitted to just scrutiny. That testing over time is, after all, a major measure of value. Conservatives used to be the ones who defended this traditional idea, clinging to their Aristotle, Augustine, and liberal arts, unsoiled by social science and psychobabble. Now, with the rise of Peterson, even this virtue of conservatism has been lost. I pray that some day it will be found. For now, the defenders of Peterson have been unable to defend his actual claims and ideas, opting instead to praise the effects they project in him or the affects they feel in their hearts. They say that he represents strength; but his ideas are weak and brittle. If this is what conservatism has become—unable to defend itself through tradition, substance, and argument—then maybe conservatives deserve a pop-psychology rulebook more then the classics.

For my part, if this is what it takes for men to feel proud about themselves, then maybe they should feel embarrassed instead. If viral popularity is the measure of insight, then any serious thinking person ought to abandon all hope. If simply helping people is a good unto itself, then let the gurus and life coaches take over, managing your diet, your sex life, and your finances.

If anything characterizes this book, it is banality. You will find in it neither bold transgression nor a genius gone bad. Peterson is not an anti-hero or a misguided scoundrel. He is a tenured full professor of psychology at a major research university, who decided to write a self-help book to profit from his newfound fame. His book is opportunistic. There was nothing spectacular about reading it; the experience was mostly boring and tedious. I predict it will be stocked in thrift stores everywhere within a few years.


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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby liminalOyster » Wed May 23, 2018 11:36 pm

JackRiddler » Wed May 23, 2018 3:46 pm wrote:.

The second item is a formula attack piece on an undefined entity projected as "the Left" for its attributed insensitivity to regular open-minded folk like the author.


Jack, I can't imagine our general non-affection/admiration for Peterson is terribly different but I feel like we read a completely different piece. I feel this is probably the best casual piece on him I've read by someone on the (mythical) cap L left. A great deal of what she has written, IMO, seems far more sensible in terms of understanding his appeal. I find him much less fundamentally intelligent than she does but personally and instinctually think he's quite genuine in his intellectual exploration. Worth noting I feel the same way about the Pat Buchanan every once in a while, maybe. A so-called conservative who is totally on the wrong path but still seems driven by a desire to understand and to act that, at least, has a semblance of intellectual coherence.

Not only is this capitalized Left not specified (despite the author's admission she is using a broad category) but not a single example of this Left's supposedly orthodox and unfair simplification and rejection of Peterson's works is mentioned, cited, quoted, linked, summarized or even hinted at.


This is still basically a personal essay. She's not under much obligation to do citations. I don't like Peterson much but I had no trouble at all pulling to mind a font of absurdist crit/hit pieces of the sort she is referencing. They're everywhere. And calling them simplifications is not equivalent to suggesting anything about Peterson is complex, nuanced or even interesting. Only saying they're lazy in their loudness.

There is most certainly a good case to be made for Peterson's potential intellectual alliance with neofascism, but it's a case that has to be drawn out historically to really win. I thought Heaven Swan made one of the best comments herein in that direction - to actually articulate *abstractly* what looks fascist about him. Also, I can't remember the author but you posted something else up-thread awhile back that tied him, via Jung, to slightly post fin-de-siecle Orientalist mystics and, although I didn't entirely agree with it, it was an excellent piece for doing due diligence to place Peterson in a historical context and lineage where he looked quite a bit like pre-War fascist apologists, which is far more productive than those who shout/tweet Fasciste! and parrot overworked Antifa slogans.

Most of it could be presented almost unchanged, making the same complaints about "the Left" and its treatment of ___ (fill in the courageous reactionary truth-teller winning the day's free media coverage as "controversialist").


Is that really how the Horton piece reads to you? I should re-read it in a few days because I seem to be egregiously missing something as I would have described this piece as relatively humble and ingenuous. I am one of those suckers PT Barnum mentioned, maybe.

We've seen thousands of these, it is a ritual that signals and endorses one's belonging to polite society and not to the "extremes" of the centrist horseshoe theory. It's a long tradition to attack "the Left" as out of touch with regular folk, again without defining "the Left," and assuming there is one big thing that covers all possible variations of it. Very usually this comes with a confessional tone of gee golly, this is hard for me to say and I feel so uncomfortable speaking my truth in the face of this relentless omnipresent unnamed orthodoxy, but as friend to "the Left" someone has to finally do it, etc. etc. As a formula, it is akin to the Standard Conspiracy Panic disavowal among journalists. Except the latter usually has a couple of (highly selective) examples to offer. This is methodologically an embarrassing zero for someone who adds her academic credentials at the end. It's really not that hard to shadowbox with the wall of your own room, is it now? It doesn't surprise me her Ph.D. is in Political Science, where one can (sometimes) get away with prejudicial abstract labeling of undefined entities presented as putative dichotomies, and avoid empirical study.


I agree entirely with all of this and have read and scoffed at said piece many many times. I just don't see Horton's as an iteration thereof. Though, please let me take this moment to say how much I also hate (almost all) political scientists.
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby American Dream » Thu May 24, 2018 12:33 am

Of course Refuse Fascism is dedicated to Entryism, on behalf of their sponsors in the U.S.-based Revolutionary Communist Party. Their dogma goes beyond the more orthodox strains of M-L-M (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) Thought however. They have their own distinctive dogma based upon a cult of personality around their party's maximal leader: Bob Avakian.

Sadly, they are not alone amongst left cults. There are many- and Leninist parties in particular are well-representd along the spectrum of cultishness.

I think Wayne Price breaks it down fairly clearly:

The Leninist Party
As is well known, the concept of the party is key to Leninism. It has been put in various terms. The central document of Trotskyism (a variant of Leninism) is Trotsky’s 1938 “Transitional Program.” It’s first sentence — and fundamental concept — is, “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat.” (1977, p. 111) That is, the main problem is not the conservatism of the mass of working people, because from time to time in this era workers and oppressed people have risen up against capitalism. The problem is that the social democrats, liberals, Stalinists, and nationalists, are the respected, established, leaders. These elitists lead the workers into some version of the same old oppression. What is needed, then, is to build a new leadership, a party committed to a revolutionary program in word and deed, which can win the support of the majority of the workers and oppressed.

The advantage of this conception is that it tells the revolutionary minority to not blame the workers for the failure of the revolution. This does not deny that the nonrevolutionary consciousness of most workers is a problem. But there is no point in bemoaning the “backwardness” of the majority, any more than there is in romanticizing the workers. The decay of capitalism will repeatedly push the working class to rebel. The job of the revolutionary minority is to develop its own theory, analysis, strategy, tactics, and actual practice.

The disadvantage of this conception of leadership is that it lends itself to seeing the leadership as the all-important thing. The task becomes to replace the bad leaders with the good leaders, the bad parties with the good party: the party with the right ideas. Instead of focusing on arousing the people, encouraging their independence and self-reliance, the implication is that all they need is to put the right leadership in power. At its worst, the party becomes a substitute for the working class.
Anarchist Organisation not Leninist Vanguardism





liminalOyster » Tue May 22, 2018 9:53 am wrote:From a recent counterpunch piece, this Epcot styled boilerplate vision of fascism reminded me of this thread:

Refuse Fascism’s goals are clear – Working with one voice but through many people and ideas, and through constant non-violent protest they work to wake up masses of people to take political action and to create change until such time that the Trump/Pence administration is no more. It is to stimulate those who do not see the true danger of the Trump/Pence Administration while also sharing alternative narratives to liberate people from their comfort zone, tacit agreement, a lack of information or slumber. It is to enhance freedom while acknowledging the Trump/Pence administration’s danger not only to American civil rights and civil liberties, but to the rights of all people worldwide. A nation and planet endangered and destabilized by the actions of the current Trump/Pence Administration.


Does this paragraph not read like it was authored by AI programmed to string together a bevy of revolutionary truisms input by 9th graders? As if each time it said "the Trump/Pence administration" it would sound slightly off, it's target obviously the result of a filled-in-blank?

Refuse Fascism’s goals are clear – Working with one voice but through many people and ideas, and through constant non-violent protest they work to wake up masses of people to take political action and to create change until such time thatJordan Peterson is no more. It is to stimulate those who do not see the true danger of Jordan Peterson while also sharing alternative narratives to liberate people from their comfort zone, tacit agreement, a lack of information or slumber. It is to enhance freedom while acknowledging the Jordan Peterson’s danger not only to American civil rights and civil liberties, but to the rights of all people worldwide. A nation and planet endangered and destabilized by the actions of Jordan Peterson.


Refuse Fascism’s goals are clear – Working with one voice but through many people and ideas, and through constant non-violent protest they work to wake up masses of people to take political action and to create change until such time that Foucault studies are no more. It is to stimulate those who do not see the true danger of Foucault studies while also sharing alternative narratives to liberate people from their comfort zone, tacit agreement, a lack of information or slumber. It is to enhance freedom while acknowledging Foucault studies danger not only to American civil rights and civil liberties, but to the rights of all people worldwide. A nation and planet endangered and destabilized by the actions of Foucault studies.


Refuse Fascism’s goals are clear – Working with one voice but through many people and ideas, and through constant non-violent protest they work to wake up masses of people to take political action and to create change until such time that TERFs are no more. It is to stimulate those who do not see the true danger of TERFs while also sharing alternative narratives to liberate people from their comfort zone, tacit agreement, a lack of information or slumber. It is to enhance freedom while acknowledging TERFs danger not only to American civil rights and civil liberties, but to the rights of all people worldwide. A nation and planet endangered and destabilized by the actions of TERFs.


Refuse Fascism’s goals are clear – Working with one voice but through many people and ideas, and through constant non-violent protest they work to wake up masses of people to take political action and to create change until such time that The Establishment is no more. It is to stimulate those who do not see the true danger of The Establishment while also sharing alternative narratives to liberate people from their comfort zone, tacit agreement, a lack of information or slumber. It is to enhance freedom while acknowledging The Establishment danger not only to American civil rights and civil liberties, but to the rights of all people worldwide. A nation and planet endangered and destabilized by the actions of The Establishment .


Refuse Fascism’s goals are clear – Working with one voice but through many people and ideas, and through constant non-violent protest they work to wake up masses of people to take political action and to create change until such time that Apu is no more. It is to stimulate those who do not see the true danger of Apu while also sharing alternative narratives to liberate people from their comfort zone, tacit agreement, a lack of information or slumber. It is to enhance freedom while acknowledging Apu danger not only to American civil rights and civil liberties, but to the rights of all people worldwide. A nation and planet endangered and destabilized by the actions of Apu.


Refuse Fascism’s goals are clear – Working with one voice but through many people and ideas, and through constant non-violent protest they work to wake up masses of people to take political action and to create change until such time that Hillary Clinton is no more. It is to stimulate those who do not see the true danger of Hilary Clinton while also sharing alternative narratives to liberate people from their comfort zone, tacit agreement, a lack of information or slumber. It is to enhance freedom while acknowledging Hillary Clintons danger not only to American civil rights and civil liberties, but to the rights of all people worldwide. A nation and planet endangered and destabilized by the actions of HIllary Clinton.
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby Spiro C. Thiery » Thu May 24, 2018 12:38 am

It's a decades old trend. Must be the psychic resonance you get living the world as parrot cage. Maybe this forum should be called Vigorous Gut Feeling.
guruilla » 22 May 2018, 20:36 wrote:The good of JBP = he is holding the West accountable for its excesses and errors in ways that, once articulated, seem fairly self-evident to many people. The bad is that, IMO, he is letting himself off the hook by ignoring the many other ways in which the western capitalist system is accountable, ways the Left have tried and failed to address and from which he himself is now benefiting. He is the taskmaster calling people to responsible action, while not taking full responsibility himself. That means he is (likely) leading people into forms of belief and action that can only hit a wall - or a cliff edge - if pursued passionately enough.
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby Belligerent Savant » Thu May 24, 2018 12:47 am

.
Another one for consideration. Peterson clearly seems to inspire output from others.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/ ... we-deserve


THE INTELLECTUAL WE DESERVE

Jordan Peterson’s popularity is the sign of a deeply impoverished political and intellectual landscape…

by NATHAN J. ROBINSON


If you want to appear very profound and convince people to take you seriously, but have nothing of value to say, there is a tried and tested method. First, take some extremely obvious platitude or truism. Make sure it actually does contain some insight, though it can be rather vague. Something like “if you’re too conciliatory, you will sometimes get taken advantage of” or “many moral values are similar across human societies.” Then, try to restate your platitude using as many words as possible, as unintelligibly as possible, while never repeating yourself exactly. Use highly technical language drawn from many different academic disciplines, so that no one person will ever have adequate training to fully evaluate your work. Construct elaborate theories with many parts. Draw diagrams. Use italics liberally to indicate that you are using words in a highly specific and idiosyncratic sense. Never say anything too specific, and if you do, qualify it heavily so that you can always insist you meant the opposite. Then evangelize: speak as confidently as possible, as if you are sharing God’s own truth. Accept no criticisms: insist that any skeptic has either misinterpreted you or has actually already admitted that you are correct. Talk as much as possible and listen as little as possible. Follow these steps, and your success will be assured. (It does help if you are male and Caucasian.)

Jordan Peterson appears very profound and has convinced many people to take him seriously. Yet he has almost nothing of value to say. This should be obvious to anyone who has spent even a few moments critically examining his writings and speeches, which are comically befuddled, pompous, and ignorant. They are half nonsense, half banality. In a reasonable world, Peterson would be seen as the kind of tedious crackpot that one hopes not to get seated next to on a train.

But we do not live in a reasonable world. In fact, Peterson’s reach is astounding. His 12 Rules for Life is the #1 most-read book on Amazon, where it has a perfect 5-star rating. One person said that when he came across a physical copy of Peterson’s first book, “I wanted to hold it in my hands and contemplate its significance for a few minutes, as if it was one of Shakespeare’s pens or a Gutenberg Bible.” The world’s leading newspapers have declared him one of the most important living thinkers. The Times says his “message is overwhelmingly vital,” and a Guardian columnist grudgingly admits that Peterson “deserves to be taken seriously.” David Brooks thinks Peterson might be “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now.” He has been called “the deepest, clearest voice of conservative thought in the world today” a man whose work “should make him famous for the ages.” Malcolm Gladwell calls him “a wonderful psychologist.” And it’s not just members of the popular press that have conceded Peterson’s importance: the chair of the Harvard psychology department praised his magnum opus Maps of Meaning as “brilliant” and “beautiful.” Zachary Slayback of the Foundation for Economic Education wonders how any serious person could possibly write off Peterson, saying that “even the most anti-Peterson intellectual should be able to admit that his project is a net-good.” We are therefore presented with a puzzle: if Jordan Peterson has nothing to say, how has he attracted this much recognition? If it’s so “obvious” that he can be written off as a charlatan, why do so many people respect his intellect?

Before we address the mystery of Peterson’s popularity, we need to examine his work. After all, if the work is actually “brilliant” and insightful, there is no mystery: he is recognized as a profound thinker because he is a profound thinker. And many critics of Peterson have been deeply unfair to his work, mocking it without reading it, or slinging pejoratives at him (e.g. “the stupid man’s smart person” or “a Messiah-cum-Surrogate-Dad for Gormless Dimwits.”) This has irritated Peterson’s fans, and when articles critical of him are printed, the comments sections are full of people (usually correctly) accusing the writer of failing to take Peterson seriously. An infamous Channel 4 interview with Cathy Newman, in which Newman repeatedly put words in Peterson’s mouth (“so you’re saying X”), confirmed the impression that progressives are trying to smear Peterson by accusing him of holding beliefs that he does not hold. Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic said Peterson is the victim of “hyperbolic misrepresentation” and encouraged people to examine what he is “actually saying.”

But, having examined Peterson’s work closely, I think the “misinterpretation” of Peterson is only partially a result of leftists reading him through an ideological prism. A more important reason why Peterson is “misinterpreted” is that he is so consistently vague and vacillating that it’s impossible to tell what he is “actually saying.” People can have such angry arguments about Peterson, seeing him as everything from a fascist apologist to an Enlightenment liberal, because his vacuous words are a kind of Rorschach test onto which countless interpretations can be projected.

This is immediately apparent upon opening Peterson’s 1999 book Maps of Meaning, a 600-page summary of his basic theories that took Peterson 15 years to complete. Maps of Meaning is, to the extent it can be summarized, about how humans generate “meaning.” By “generate meaning” Peterson ostensibly intends something like “figure out how to act,” but the word’s definition is somewhat capacious:

“Meaning is manifestation of the divine individual adaptive path”
“Meaning is the ultimate balance between… the chaos of transformation and the possibility and…the discipline of pristine order”
“Meaning is an expression of the instinct that guides us out into the unknown so that we can conquer it”
“Meaning is when everything there is comes together in an ecstatic dance of single purpose”
“Meaning means implication for behavioral output”
“Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure operating within that world”

Peterson’s answer is that people figure out how to act by turning to a common set of stories, which contain “archetypes” that have developed over the course of our species’ evolution. He believes that by studying myths, we can see values and frameworks shared across cultures, and can therefore understand the structures that guide us.

But here I am already giving Peterson’s work a more coherent summary than it actually deserves. And after all, if “many human stories have common moral lessons” was his point, he would have been saying something so obvious that nobody would think to credit it as a novel insight. Peterson manages to spin it out over hundreds of pages, and expand it into an elaborate, unprovable, unfalsifiable, unintelligible theory that encompasses everything from the direction of history, to the meaning of life, to the nature of knowledge, to the structure of human decision-making, to the foundations of ethics. (A good principle to remember is that if a book appears to be about everything, it’s probably not really about anything.)

A randomly selected passage will convey the flavor of the thing:

Procedural knowledge, generated in the course of heroic behavior, is not organized and integrated within the group and the individual as a consequence of simple accumulation. Procedure “a,” appropriate in situation one, and procedure “b,” appropriate in situation two, may clash in mutual violent opposition in situation three. Under such circumstances intrapsychic or interpersonal conflict necessarily emerges. When such antagonism arises, moral revaluation becomes necessary. As a consequence of such revaluation, behavioral options are brutally rank-ordered, or, less frequently, entire moral systems are devastated, reorganized and replaced. This organization and reorganization occurs as a consequence of “war,” in its concrete, abstract, intrapsychic, and interpersonal variants. In the most basic case, an individual is rendered subject to an intolerable conflict, as a consequence of the perceived (affective) incompatibility of two or more apprehended outcomes of a given behavioral procedure. In the purely intrapsychic sphere, such conflict often emerges when attainment of what is desired presently necessarily interferes with attainment of what is desired (or avoidance of what is feared) in the future. Permanent satisfactory resolution of such conflict (between temptation and “moral purity,” for example) requires the construction of an abstract moral system, powerful enough to allow what an occurrence signifies for the future to govern reaction to what it signifies now. Even that construction, however, is necessarily incomplete when considered only as an “intrapsychic” phenomena. The individual, once capable of coherently integrating competing motivational demands in the private sphere, nonetheless remains destined for conflict with the other, in the course of the inevitable transformations of personal experience. This means that the person who has come to terms with him- or herself—at least in principle—is still subject to the affective dysregulation inevitably produced by interpersonal interaction. It is also the case that such subjugation is actually indicative of insufficient “intrapsychic” organization, as many basic “needs” can only be satisfied through the cooperation of others.


What’s important about this kind of writing is that it can easily appear to contain useful insight, because it says many things that either are true or “feel kind of true,” and does so in a way that makes the reader feel stupid for not really understanding. (Many of the book’s reviews on Amazon contain sentiments like: I am not sure I understood it, but it’s absolutely brilliant.) It’s not that it’s empty of content; in fact, it’s precisely because some of it does ring true that it is able to convince readers of its importance. It’s certainly right that some procedures work in one situation but not another. It’s right that good moral systems have to be able to think about the future in figuring out what to do in the present. But much of the rest is language so abstract that it cannot be proved or disproved. (The old expression “what’s new in it isn’t true, and what’s true isn’t new” applies here.)

Another passage, in which Peterson gives his theory of law:

Law is a necessary precondition to salvation, so to speak; necessary, but insufficient. Law provides the borders that limit chaos, and allows for the protected maturation of the individual. Law disciplines possibility, and allows the disciplined individual to bring his or her potentialities—those intrapsychic spirits—under voluntary control. The law allows for the application of such potentiality to the task of creative and courageous existence—allows spiritual water controlled flow into the valley of the shadow of death. Law held as an absolute, however, puts man in the position of the eternal adolescent, dependent upon the father for every vital decision, removes the responsibility for action from the individual, and therefore prevents him or her from discovering the potential grandeur of the soul. Life without law remains chaotic, affectively intolerable. Life that is pure law becomes sterile, equally unbearable. The domination of chaos or sterility equally breeds murderous resentment or hatred.


Again: it’s not that he’s wrong when he says that law has a disciplining function, or that too much law is stifling, while not enough is anarchy. But all this stuff about “intrapsychic spirits” and “the flow of spiritual water” is just said, never clearly explained, let alone proved. If you asked him to explain it, you would just get a long string of additional abstract terms. (Ironically, Maps of Meaning contains neither maps nor meaning.) Sociologist C. Wright Mills, in critically examining “grand theorists” in his field who used verbosity to cover for a lack of profundity, pointed out that people respond positively to this kind of writing because they see it as “a wondrous maze, fascinating precisely because of its often splendid lack of intelligibility.” But, Mills said, such writers are “so rigidly confined to such high levels of abstraction that the ‘typologies’ they make up—and the work they do to make them up—seem more often an arid game of Concepts than an effort to define systematically—which is to say, in a clear and orderly way, the problems at hand, and to guide our efforts to solve them.”

Obscurantism is more than a desperate attempt to feign novelty, though. It’s also a tactic for badgering readers into deference to the writer’s authority. Nobody can be sure they are comprehending the author’s meaning, which has the effect of making the reader feel deeply inferior and in awe of the writer’s towering knowledge, knowledge that must exist on a level so much higher than that of ordinary mortals that we are incapable of even beginning to appreciate it.


...


Needless to say, when someone is this convinced of their own brilliance, they can be unaware of just how far afield they have drifted from the world of sense and reason. The diagrams and figures in Maps of Meaning are astonishing. They are masterpieces of unprovable gibberish:

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

How does one even address material like this? It can’t be “refuted.” Are we ruled by a dragon of chaos? Is the dragon feminine? Does “the ‘state’ of preconscious paradise” have a “voluntary encounter with the unknown”? Is the episodic really more explicit than the procedural? These are not questions with answers, because they are not questions with meanings.



...and the coda:



...Tabatha Southey was cruel to call Jordan Peterson “the stupid man’s smart person.” He is the desperate man’s smart person, he feeds on angst and confusion. Who else has a serious alternative? Where are the other professors with accessible and compelling YouTube channels, with books of helpful advice and long Q&A sessions with the public? No wonder Peterson is so popular: he comes along and offers rules and guidance in a world of, well, chaos. Just leave it to Dad, everything will be alright.

This is a fruitless path, though. That’s not just because Peterson is a charlatan. If he was just offering up his brand of “hearty intellectual stew,” as the Chronicle of Higher Education called it, going around “sprinkling in ideas from philosophy, fiction, religion, neuroscience, and a disturbing dream his 5-year-old nephew had one time,” we could just laugh at him. But the Peterson way is not just futile because it’s pointless, it’s futile because ultimately, you can’t escape politics. Our lives are conditioned by economic and political systems, like it or not, and by telling lost people to abandon projects for social change, one permanently guarantees they will be the helpless victims of forces beyond their control or understanding. The genuinely “heroic” path in life is to band with others to pursue the social good, to find meaning in the collective human striving to better our condition. No, not by abandoning the idea of the “individual” and seeing the world purely in terms of group identity. But by pooling our individual talents and efforts to produce a better, fairer, and more beautiful world.

This much should be obvious from even a cursory reading of him: If Jordan Peterson is the most influential intellectual in the Western world, the Western world has lost its damn mind. And since Jordan Peterson does indeed have a good claim to being the most influential intellectual in the Western world, we need to think seriously about what has gone wrong. What have we done to end up with this man? His success is our failure, and while it’s easy to scoff at him, it’s more important to inquire into how we got to this point. He is a symptom. He shows a culture bereft of ideas, a politics without inspiration or principle. Jordan Peterson may not be the intellectual we want. But he is probably the intellectual we deserve.



A similar argument can be made Re: Trump -- the desperate American's President. A symptom of societal ills that remain largely unexamined (and surely won't be solved by any major party candidate).
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby DrEvil » Thu May 24, 2018 7:40 am

^^
Tabatha Southey was cruel to call Jordan Peterson “the stupid man’s smart person.


I think she was right on the money. He's very good at making stupid people feel smart. Take stupid or obvious platitudes and wrap them in fancy language that dog-whistles the hell out of the authoritarian mindset, and voila!
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby guruilla » Thu May 24, 2018 7:57 pm

BS: I find the Nathan Robinson piece more an example of Intellectuals' Envy Syndrome than rigorous analysis; Robinson even used it as a pretext to plug his own book, published 2015:

Image

Top review:
Five Stars
March 16, 2018
Format: Paperback
Fantastic satire of the kind of drivel being peddled by anti-intellectual charlatans like Jordan Peterson these days

I noticed it was selling pretty well after this essay was published; down to 627,521 now. This is may be neither here nor there, but if Robinson is going to mock JBP's intellectuality, then he needs to demonstrate a significantly higher level of analysis while doing so. IMO he doesn't come close. Hold the article up to the light and in the watermark you can clearly read the words "Sour Grapes."

For those who "don't do nuance," I'm interested in discovering the deeper more systemic flaws in JBP's model, not picking apart his personality or second-guessing his ideological leanings, which frankly I couldn't give a damn about. (If one thing's clear in 2018, it's that having the right politics has no bearing on how a person treats other human beings.) To find the flaws requires a) getting past the endless stream of strawman attacks; b) creating a "steelman" out of JBP's thesis, by finding and emphasizing the very best aspects of it, and then tackling them.

If people don't have time for that, fair enough ~ except apparently they still have time for condemnation without investigation. I suppose it deeply satisfies some part of them that needs satisfying, and far be from me to interfere with the self-righteous thrill of moral outrage. But since my time is also limited, I will skip over those comments, or put on Ignore, with, seriously, no offense intended.

JBP is a massive public figure and an unprecedented cultural phenomenon who has been riding a tide of PC-resistance while making a series of claims, arguments, & propositions that fly in the face of the (apparently) dominant ideology. Obviously he is going to be saying stupid things and overreaching himself, and this is going to make him easy game for people who are willing to condemn another human being to eternal hellfire for a wrong Tweet or two. But almost none of the people who are attacking JBP have bothered to look into his more serious work, and those who have, like Robinson, seem too blinded by personal resentment, professional envy, and ideological outrage, to give it sufficient attention to understand it.

Ironically, the result is that they not only seriously underestimate their opponent, but also validate him by reacting more or less exactly as he has been warning people about, by confusing violently expressed opinions with reasoned arguments, as if they are somehow more persuasive, and by believing that derision, superiority, insults, and ridicule are enough discredit someone. (I wonder if this has anything to do with why I am becoming increasingly simpatico with JBP as this thread proceeds?) These voices tend to make it a point of pride that they don't take JBP or his work seriously enough to investigate it in an impartial or thorough fashion. They consider it beneath their interest and "see no reason to change [their] mind, or to think about him for much longer in the first place." Oddly enough, this doesn't stop them from trying to dominate the discussion.

Meanwhile, for those who are interested in going deeper, Jonathan Pageau (an icon carver & JBP associate who appears about as far from a right-wing idealogue as it's possible to get) makes some interesting points about JBP, in an interview he did here: http://nathanmeffert.com/blog/christian ... han-pageau

At the 45 minute mark, Pageau talks about how JBP is trying to negotiate between the extremes of Right and Left to reduce the chances of an explosive collision. (47:40: JBP "is more afraid of the extreme Right than he is of the extreme Left.... He is trying to moderate them.")

Now, I don't think JBP is doing this, not very successfully at any rate. Some of the comments at this thread demonstrate how polarizing his influence really is. But I also don't think Pageau's reading the situation entirely wrong, either.

Pernicious cultural influences ~ if JBP is that ~ not only often have the best of intentions, they even generally have something of true value to offer. The Greeks wouldn't have got very far into Troy without a hell of an offering.
It is a lot easier to fool people than show them how they have been fooled.
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby Belligerent Savant » Thu May 24, 2018 10:20 pm

.

Reasoned points, guru. While I similarly found the name-calling (dismissing JBP as a "charlatan" , etc.) distracting, I largely looked past the pejoratives, drawn instead to the overall premise of JBP as an inevitable by-product of larger systemic malaise. I believe you alluded to this earlier more eloquently:

There's some good in what JBP is saying, and if there wasn't, he wouldn't have struck such a nerve. Culture abhors a vacuum and JBP seems to be what the Zeitgeist/collective unconscious has conjured up to fill the black howl (typo, I'll leave it in) of public discourse created by runaway political correctness, ID politics, and extremely disconnected (and I would say destructive) progressive politics.


That said, I'm a relative layman on the topic of JBP. Will need to dig into your series, and other material, more earnestly before returning to this thread..
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby 82_28 » Fri May 25, 2018 12:14 am

My opinion is that people do not understand their proclivities at the time become the very thing they oppose. Seriously. When I went into the hospital last year I think I posted something here that was totally in line with none of us having any choice in the matter about the Russia russia russia stuff. Because of that, I had no choice, I reasoned, to accept it as real no matter how much or no matter how less. It did not matter whether anything was true. I assumed that the story would have historical legs from there on -- and yes, it persists. That is the thing with this Peterson feller, he seems to not be creating or informing an "underrepresented" community but is piling fuel onto a moral escape route should he ever have to answer for himself for influencing people in bad faith for seductive mind control in a time of "clear and present" social danger. Furthermore, history is dead right now. Nobody gives a fuck. Peterson can now swoop in on his windfall of recognizing this and essentially become the next "Jeff Bezos". In actuality, there are not that many steps for this to happen. Peterson can make up all the shit he wants at this point and people will believe it and it will viralize. Peterson, while droll as fuck and can't keep my interest for more than 10 minutes, does appeal. I find that to be a phenomena that supersedes his figure. I put it on the net attempt at rightist social control as 1994's The Bell Curve.

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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby mentalgongfu2 » Fri May 25, 2018 12:43 am

I wasn't at all familiar with Peterson prior to this thread. I think his influence is not as great as some would imagine, although he has clearly found some popularity.

From the limited reading I've done so far, I would number myself among the unimpressed and skeptical.

For example, his proposal that Men are Order, and Women are Chaos. Sure, as a male, there is a certain desire to believe this pronouncement, but his own examples and analogies come across to me as childish generalities with little application beyond affirmation of pre-existing beliefs.

Perhaps there is something valuable within some of his thoughts, but he has, at best, found himself in disreputable company with some of his opinions. While that does not itself disqualify his works from consideration, it is not an encouraging sign to myself. I'll try to hold off judgment before reading some more from the horse's mouth, but at first glance, I find myself disagreeing with him on most important subjects. A distaste for PC culture and the extremes of the social justice movement is easy to identify with, but once he gets beyond that, the dark conclusions of his philosophy become concerning. I think one of the critical articles in this thread compared him to a modern day Ayn Rand - and my limited reading would echo that along with all the red flags it raises.
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby DrEvil » Fri May 25, 2018 1:00 pm

This quote never gets old:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

- John Rogers


I suspect reading Peterson can have a similar effect.
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby minime » Fri May 25, 2018 1:28 pm

This seems to be the only thread with any discussion in like forever... except maybe for the great forum "forum structure wars"...

So, catch me up: Jordan Peterson... who cares? Why?

Latest obsession in the cult of personality?

I remember back in the day when Rigorous Intuition had potential. Well, maybe not potential exactly.

What's happening while you're doing this?

Anyone get the unsettling feeling something BIG is going to happen this Summer? This Autumn?

LOL
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby guruilla » Fri May 25, 2018 2:27 pm

Now it's personal.

I've highlighted the parts I find significant. IMO, the piece is naive bordering on disingenuous when it addresses the political and ideological questions JBP is raising, but makes some strong, and disturbing points about JBP himself, as well as bringing in some vital backstory.

I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous
By BERNARD SCHIFFSpecial to the Star
Fri., May 25, 2018

Several years ago, Jordan Peterson told me he wanted to buy a church. This was long before he became known as “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world,” as he was described in the pages of the New York Times a few months ago. It was before he was fancied to be a truth-telling sage who inspired legions, and the author of one of the bestselling books in the world this year. He was just my colleague and friend.

I assumed that it was for a new home — there was a trend in Toronto of converting religious spaces, vacant because of their dwindling congregations, into stylish lofts — but he corrected me. He wanted to establish a church, he said, in which he would deliver sermons every Sunday.


Jordan Peterson, a University of Toronto psychology professor turned influential YouTube philosopher, at an event in Toronto, in May. A former colleague of Peterson’s says he is alarmed by his now-questionable relationship to truth, intellectual integrity and common decency.

“(He) spread his influence across the country and around the world through a combination of religious conviction, commanding stage presence and shrewd use of radio, television and advanced communication technologies.”

This could have been written about Jordan Peterson. The language echoes the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of words, that have been devoted to the man — ranging from fawning adoration to critical dismissals — since his rise to public prominence starting in 2016 when he declared he would not comply with a proposed amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act which was, coincidentally, about the power of words. But that quote is taken from Billy Graham’s obituary that appeared in the Times after the American pastor died in February.

Jordan found his pulpit on YouTube and his congregation on social media. His followers have a Bible — 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos — which has sold more than one million copies around the world since it was published in January. He lectures to sold-out crowds, at home and abroad, more like a rock star than a middle-aged academic.

I thought long and hard before writing about Jordan, and I do not do this lightly. He has one of the most agile and creative minds I’ve ever known. He is a powerful orator. He is smart, passionate, engaging and compelling and can be thoughtful and kind.

I was once his strongest supporter.

That all changed with his rise to celebrity. I am alarmed by his now-questionable relationship to truth, intellectual integrity and common decency, which I had not seen before. His output is voluminous and filled with oversimplifications which obscure or misrepresent complex matters in the service of a message which is difficult to pin down. He can be very persuasive, and toys with facts and with people’s emotions. I believe he is a man with a mission. It is less clear what that mission is.

In the end, I am writing this because of his extraordinary rise in visibility, the nature of his growing following and a concern that his ambitions might venture from stardom back to his long-standing interest in politics. I am writing this from a place of sadness and from a sense of responsibility to the public good to tell what I know about who Jordan is, having seen him up close, as a colleague and friend, and having examined up close his political actions at the University of Toronto, allegedly in defence of free speech. When he soared into the stratosphere he became peculiarly unknowable. There is something about the dazzle of the limelight that makes it hard to see him clearly. But people continue to be who they are even in the blinding overexposure of success. I have known Jordan Peterson for 20 years, and people had better know more about who he is.

There is reason to be concerned.

I met Jordan Peterson when he came to the University of Toronto to be interviewed for an assistant professorship in the department of psychology. His CV was impeccable, with terrific references and a pedigree that included a PhD from McGill and a five-year stint at Harvard as an assistant professor.

We did not share research interests but it was clear that his work was solid. My colleagues on the search committee were skeptical — they felt he was too eccentric — but somehow I prevailed. (Several committee members now remind me that they agreed to hire him because they were “tired of hearing me shout over them.”) I pushed for him because he was a divergent thinker, self-educated in the humanities, intellectually flamboyant, bold, energetic and confident, bordering on arrogant. I thought he would bring a new excitement, along with new ideas, to our department.

He joined us in the summer of 1998. Because I liked him, and also because I had put myself on the line for him, I took him under my wing. I made sure he went up for promotion to associate professor the following year, as the hiring committee had promised, and I went to the dean to get him a raise when the department chairperson would not.

When he was renovating his house I invited his family to live with mine. For five months, they occupied the third floor of our large house. We had meals together in the evening and long, colourful conversations. There, away from campus, I saw a man who was devoted to his wife and his children, who were lovely and gentle and for whom I still feel affection. He was attentive and thoughtful, stern and kind, playful and warm. His wife, Tammy, appeared to be the keel, the ballast and the rudder, and Jordan ran the ship. I could not imagine him without her, and indeed I see that she is now with him wherever in the world he goes.

On campus, he was as interesting as I had expected him to be. His research on alcoholism, and then personality, was solid, but his consuming intellectual interests lay elsewhere. He had been an undergraduate in political science in Edmonton, where he had become obsessed with the Cold War. He switched to psychology in order to understand why some people would, as he once told me, destroy everything — their past, their present and their future — because of strong beliefs. That was the subject of his first book, Maps of Meaning, published in 1999, and the topic of his most popular undergraduate course.

He was, however, more eccentric than I had expected. He was a maverick. Even though there was nothing contentious about his research, he objected in principle to having it reviewed by the university research ethics committee, whose purpose is to protect the safety and well-being of experiment subjects.

He requested a meeting with the committee. I was not present but was told that he had questioned the authority and expertise of the committee members, had insisted that he alone was in a position to judge whether his research was ethical and that, in any case, he was fully capable of making such decisions himself. He was impervious to the fact that subjects in psychological research had been, on occasion, subjected to bad experiences, and also to the fact that both the Canadian and United States governments had made these reviews mandatory. What was he doing! I managed to make light of this to myself by attributing it to his unbridled energy and fierce independence, which were, in many other ways, virtues. That was a mistake.

Another thing to which I did not give sufficient concern was his teaching. As the undergraduate chair, I read all teaching reviews. His were, for the most part, excellent and included eyebrow-raising comments such as “This course has changed my life.” One student, however, hated the course because he did not like “delivered truths.” Curious, I attended many of Jordan’s lectures to see for myself.

Remarkably, the 50 students always showed up at 9 a.m. and were held in rapt attention for an hour. Jordan was a captivating lecturer — electric and eclectic — cherry-picking from neuroscience, mythology, psychology, philosophy, the Bible and popular culture. The class loved him. But, as reported by that one astute student, Jordan presented conjecture as statement of fact. I expressed my concern to him about this a number of times, and each time Jordan agreed. He acknowledged the danger of such practices, but then continued to do it again and again, as if he could not control himself.

He was a preacher more than a teacher.

Eccentricities notwithstanding, I didn’t regret having worked to secure his position. His students were exposed to new ideas and were as devoted to him as he was to them. I continued to be one of his strongest supporters at the university and thereafter.

In 2001, three years after Jordan arrived, I took early retirement and left the university. I stayed in touch with Jordan and his family, and while our contacts might have been infrequent, they were always familial and affectionate.

Always intense, it seemed that, over time, Jordan was becoming even more so. He had periods of incredible energy when, in addition to his academic work, he ran a business selling the personality assessment tools that he had developed. He actively collected Soviet, and then Mexican art, on eBay. He maintained a clinical practice. He was preoccupied with alternative health treatments including fighting off the signs of aging as they appear on the skin, and, one time, even shamanic healing practices, where, to my great surprise and distress, he chose to be the shaman himself. And he did all of that with the same great fervour and commitment.

At the same time, his interest in political issues became more apparent. We disagreed about most things, but I don’t ask of my friends that we agree. What was off-putting was his tendency to be categorical about his positions, reminiscent of his lectures where he presented personal theories as absolute truths. I rarely challenged him. He overwhelmed challenges with volumes of information that were hard to process and evaluate. He was more forceful than I, and had a much quicker mind. Also, again evocative of what I saw in the classroom, he sometimes appeared to be in the thrall of his ideas and would not, or could not, constrain himself and self-monitor what he was saying.

That was OK. He was eccentric. There was, however, something about his growing fierceness that unsettled me. Always a man of extremes, it seemed to me that the highs and the lows of his emotional range had increased. But he was hurting no one and my affection and loyalty for him were undiminished.

That all changed, soon enough.

Jordan’s first high-profile public battle, and for many people their introduction to the man, followed his declaration that he would not comply with Bill C-16, an amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act extending its protections to include gender identity and expression. He would refuse to refer to students using gender neutral pronouns. He then upped the stakes by claiming that, for this transgression, he could be sent to jail.

I have a trans daughter, but that was hardly an issue compared to what I felt was a betrayal of my trust and confidence in him. It was an abuse of the trust that comes with his professorial position, which I had fought for, to have misrepresented gender science by dismissing the evidence that the relationship of gender to biology is not absolute and to have made the claim that he could be jailed when, at worst, he could be fined.

In his defence, Jordan told me if he refused to pay the fine he could go to jail. That is not the same as being jailed for what you say, but it did ennoble him as a would-be martyr in the defence of free speech. He was a true free speech “warrior” who was willing to sacrifice and run roughshod over his students to make a point. He could have spared his students and chosen to sidestep the issue and refer to them by their names. And if this was truly a matter of free speech he could have challenged the Human Rights Act, off-campus and much earlier, by openly using language offensive to any of the already-protected groups on that list.

Perhaps this was not just about free speech.

Not long afterwards the following message was sent from his wife’s email address exhorting recipients to sign a petition opposing Ontario’s Bill 28. That bill proposed changing the language in legislation about families from “mother” and “father” to the gender-neutral “parents.”

“A new bill, introduced in Ontario on September 29th, subjugates the natural family to the transgender agenda. The bill — misleadingly called the ‘All Families Are Equal Act’ — is moving extremely fast. We must ACT NOW to stop this bill from passing into law.”

This is not a free-speech issue so Jordan is wearing a different political hat. And what does a “transgender agenda” have to do with a bill protecting same-sex parents? What is this all about?

Jordan has studied and understands authoritarian demagogic leaders. They know how to attract a following. In an interview with Ethan Klein in an H3 Podcast, Jordan describes how such leaders learn to repeat those things which make the crowd roar, and not repeat those things that do not. The crowd roared the first time Jordan opposed the so-called “transgender agenda.” Perhaps they would roar again, whether it made sense or not.

But why “transgender” in the first place? In that same interview, Jordan cites Carl Jung, who talked about the effectiveness of powerful emotional oratorical skills to tap into the collective unconscious of a people, and into their anger, resentment, fear of chaos and need for order. He talked about how those demagogic leaders led by acting out the dark desires of the mob.

If we have a “collective unconscious” there is a good chance that it would include our primitive assumptions about gender and biology. Transgender people violate those assumptions. There is an historical example of how upset our species gets about gender ambiguity in other species. The female spotted hyena is larger than, and dominant over, the male and has a clitoris so enlarged as to have the external appearance of a penis. In the bestiaries of the Middle Ages they were reviled, described as “neither faithful or pagan,” “brutal thugs,” “sexual deviants” and “not to be trusted.” Sir Walter Raleigh excluded the hyena from Noah’s Ark in his History of the World (written in 1614) because he believed that God had saved only the purely bred. That historical lesson tells us how deeply disturbed many of us might be in response to gender ambiguity in human beings.

Transgender people appear early in human history but in these socially progressive times, which worry Jordan so much, they have become more visible. Consciously or not, Jordan may have understood that transgender people tap into society’s “collective unconscious” and would become a lightning rod for attention loaded with anger and resentment. And it did.

More recently, when questioned about the merits of 12 Rules for Life, Jordan answered that he must be doing something right because of the huge response the book has received. How odd given what he said in that same interview about demagogues and cheering crowds. In an article published in January in the Spectator, Douglas Murray described the atmosphere at one of Jordan’s talks as “ecstatic.”

I have no way of knowing whether Jordan is aware that he is playing out of the same authoritarian demagogue handbook that he himself has described. If he is unaware, then his ironic failure, unwillingness, or inability to see in himself what he attributes to them is very disconcerting.

Following his opposition to Bill C-16, Jordan again sought to establish himself as a “warrior” and attacked identity politics and political correctness as threats to free speech. He characterized them as left-wing conspiracies rooted in a “murderous” ideology — Marxism. Calling Marxism, a respectable political and philosophical tradition, “murderous” conflates it with the perversion of those ideas in Stalinist Russia and elsewhere where they were. That is like calling Christianity a murderous ideology because of the blood that was shed in its name during the Inquisition, the Crusades and the great wars of Europe. That is ridiculous.

In Jordan’s hands, a claim which is merely ridiculous became dangerous. Jordan, our “free speech warrior,” decided to launch a website that listed “postmodern neo-Marxist” professors and “corrupt” academic disciplines, warning students and their parents to avoid them. Those disciplines, postmodern or not, included women’s, ethnic and racial studies. Those “left-wing” professors were trying to “indoctrinate their students into a cult” and, worse, create “anarchical social revolutionaries.” I do think Jordan believes what he says, but it’s not clear from the language he uses whether he is being manipulative and trying to induce fear, or whether he is walking a fine line between concern and paranoia.

His strategy is eerily familiar. In the 1950s a vicious attack on freedom of speech and thought occurred in the United States at the hands of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. People suspected of having left-wing, “Communist” leanings were blacklisted and silenced. It was a frightening period of lost jobs, broken lives and betrayal. Ironically, around this time the Stasi were doing the same to people in East Berlin who were disloyal to that very same “murderous” ideology.

Jordan has a complex relationship to freedom of speech. He wants to effectively silence those left-wing professors by keeping students away from their courses because the students may one day become “anarchical social revolutionaries” who may bring upon us disruption and violence. At the same time he was advocating cutting funds to universities that did not protect free speech on their campuses. He defended the rights of “alt right” voices to speak at universities even though their presence has given rise to disruption and violence. For Jordan, it appears, not all speech is equal, and not all disruption and violence are equal, either.

If Jordan is not a true free speech warrior, then what is he? The email sent through his wife’s account described Bill 28, the parenting bill, as part of the “transgender agenda” and claimed it was “misleadingly” called “All Families are Equal.” Misleading? What same-sex families and transgender people have in common is their upset of the social order. In Maps of Meaning, Jordan’s first book, he is exercised by the breakdown of the social order and the chaos that he believes would result. Jordan is fighting to maintain the status quo to keep chaos at bay, or so he believes. He is not a free speech warrior. He is a social order warrior.

In the end, Jordan postponed his plan to blacklist courses after many of his colleagues signed a petition objecting to it. He said it was too polarizing. Curiously, that had never stopped him before. He appears to thrive on polarization. I have no idea why he did that.

I have been asked by some if I regret my role in bringing Jordan to the University of Toronto. I did not for many years, but I do now.

He has done disservice to the professoriate. He cheapens the intellectual life with self-serving misrepresentations of important ideas and scientific findings. He has also done disservice to the institutions which have supported him. He plays to “victimhood” but also plays the victim.

When he caused a stir objecting to gender neutral pronouns, he thanked his YouTube followers who had supported his work financially, claiming he might need that money because he could lose his job. That resulted in a significant increase in monthly donations. There was no reason to think he would lose his job. He was on a sabbatical, and had not even been in the classroom. The university sent him a letter asking him to stop what he was doing because he was creating an environment which would make teaching difficult, but there was no intimation that he would be fired. I saw that letter. Jordan may have, however, welcomed being fired, which would have made him a martyr in the battle for free speech. He certainly presented himself as prepared to do that. A true warrior, of whatever.

Later, when his research grant was turned down by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Jordan told the world he was being punished for his political activities. There was no such evidence. The review system is flawed and this has happened to other academically renowned and respected scholars. (For instance, Prof. Anthony Doob, the former director of the Centre of Criminology at U of T, a member of the Royal Society of Canada and a recipient of the Order of Canada, was funded continuously from the late 1960s until 2006, when he was turned down by the SSHRC. The next year, essentially the same proposal was funded.) These things happen. Jordan, however, took this as an opportunity to rail, once again, against the suppression of free speech by oppressive institutions and into a public relations triumph in the eyes of his followers.

The Rebel, Ezra Levant’s far-right online publication, raised the funds to replace that grant.

This past March, Pankaj Mishra wrote in The New York Review of Books an informed and thoughtful critique of 12 Rules for Life, provocatively titled “Jordan Peterson and Fascist Mysticism.” Jordan’s immediate response was a flurry of angry, abusive, self-righteous tweets, some in response to Mishra’s questioning Jordan’s induction into an Indigenous tribe by referring to it as a “claim.”

Jordan called Mishra a “sanctimonious prick,” “an arrogant, racist son of a bitch,” “a peddler of nasty, underhanded innuendo,” said “fuck you” and expressed a desire to slap him. (As it turns out Jordan had not been inducted into that tribe, and his publisher removed references to the claim in promotional materials as reported in The Walrus by Robert Jago in “The Story Behind Jordan Peterson’s Indigenous Identity.”)

Jordan is seen here to be emotionally explosive when faced with legitimate criticism, in contrast to his being so self-possessed at other times. He is erratic. One of his colleagues at the University of Toronto, Prof. Will Cunningham, said in a recent Esquire article: “There’s my friend Jordan Peterson, who is this amazingly compassionate person who genuinely wants to help people. And then there’s Twitter Peterson, getting placards demanding he be fired immediately. Even I want to get a placard.”

Jordan exhibits a great range of emotional states, from anger and abusive speech to evangelical fierceness, ministerial solemnity and avuncular charm. It is misleading to come to quick conclusions about who he is, and potentially dangerous if you have seen only the good and thoughtful Jordan, and not seen the bad.

Shortly after Jordan’s rise to notoriety back in 2016, I emailed him to express my upset with his dishonesty and lack of intellectual and social integrity. He called in a conciliatory voice the next morning. I was reiterating my disappointment and upset when he interrupted me, saying more or less the following:

“You don’t understand. I am willing to lose everything, my home, my job etc., because I believe in this.” And then he said, with the intensity he is now famous for, “Bernie. Tammy had a dream, and sometimes her dreams are prophetic. She dreamed that it was five minutes to midnight.”

That was our last conversation. He was playing out the ideas that appeared in his first book. The social order is coming apart. We are on the edge of chaos. He is the prophet, and he would be the martyr. Jordan would be our saviour. I think he believes that.


He may be driven by a great and genuine fear of our impending doom, and a passionate conviction that he can save us from it. He may believe that his ends justify his questionable means, and he may not be aware that he mimics those figures from whom he wants to protect us. But his conviction makes him no less problematic. On the contrary.

“What they do have in common is … that they have the answers and that their instincts are good, that they are smarter than everybody else and can do things by themselves.” This was Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state in an recent interview with the New York Times referring to the authoritarian leaders discussed in her new book, Fascism: A Warning. It sounds familiar.

Currently, Jordan is the darling of the alt-right. He says he is not one of them, but has accepted their affection with relish. Andrew Scheer, the leader of the federal Conservative party, has declined any further appearances on The Rebel, but Jordan continues to appear.

Jordan is not part of the alt-right. He fits no mould. But he should be concerned about what the “dark desires” of the alt-right might be. He could be, perhaps unwittingly, activating “the dark desires” of that mob.

I was warned by a number of writers, editors and friends that this article would invite backlash, primarily from his young male acolytes, and I was asked to consider whether publishing it was worth it. More than anything, that convinced me it should be published.

I discovered while writing this essay a shocking climate of fear among women writers and academics who would not attach their names to opinions or data which were critical of Jordan. All of Jordan’s critics receive nasty feedback from some of his followers, but women writers have felt personally threatened.

Jordan presents a confusing picture, and it’s often hard to know what he is up to. In one of his YouTube videos, Jordan said that if you are not sure of what or why someone is doing what they are doing, look at the consequences. They could be revealing.


That keeps me up at night.

Given Jordan’s tendency toward grandiosity, it should not be surprising to learn that he is politically ambitious. He would have run for the leadership of the federal Conservative party but was dissuaded by influential friends. He has not, however, lost interest in the political life.

Andrew Scheer, the current leader of that party, echoed this proposal which appeared with Jordan’s photo on the front page of the Toronto Sun: “Free speech Prof says cut University funding by 25 per cent until politically correct cult at schools reined in.” In a Toronto Star profile, Vinay Menon reported that Peterson saw a potential starring role when Patrick Brown stepped down in Ontario: “I thought about running when the PC party blew up here, I thought that’s a catastrophe and maybe I can bring some depth to the leadership race.” Doug Ford won the leadership on March 10. On March 19, Jordan was in the Toronto Sun saying that Premier Kathleen Wynne “is the most dangerous woman in Canada.” There was nothing new in the article, but those words are signature Jordan, the language of fear. On May 8, the day before the campaign began, Ford announced that he would scrap Ontario’s sex-ed curriculum and tie funding of post-secondary schools to free speech. This echoed, once more, Jordan’s call to make protection of free speech a condition in the funding of universities. Is Jordan involved with Ford’s political campaign? I have no idea, but it’s not impossible.

Jordan is a powerful orator. He is smart, compelling and convincing. His messages can be strong and clear, oversimplified as they often are, to be very accessible. He has played havoc with the truth. He has studied demagogues and authoritarians and understands the power of their methods. Fear and danger were their fertile soil. He frightens by invoking murderous bogeymen on the left and warning they are out to destroy the social order, which will bring chaos and destruction.

Jordan’s view of the social order is now well known.

He is a biological and Darwinian determinist. Gender, gender roles, dominance hierarchies, parenthood, all firmly entrenched in our biological heritage and not to be toyed with. Years ago when he was living in my house, he said children are little monkeys trying to clamber up the dominance hierarchy and need to be kept in their place. I thought he was being ironic. Apparently, not.

He is also very much like the classic Social Darwinists who believe that “attempts to reform society through state intervention or other means would … interfere with natural processes; unrestricted competition and defence of the status quo were in accord with biological selection.” (Encylopedia Britannica, 2018.) From the same source: “Social Darwinism declined during the 20th century as an expanded knowledge of biological, social and cultural phenomena undermined, rather than supported, its basic tenets.” Jordan remains stuck in and enthralled by The Call of the Wild.

We should be concerned about his interest in politics. It is clear what kind of country he would want to have or, if he could, lead.


What I am seeing now is a darker, angrier Jordan than the man I knew. In Karen Heller’s recent profile in the Washington Post he is candid about his long history of depression. Depression is an awful illness. It is a cognitive disorder that casts a dark shadow over everything. His view of life, as nasty and brutish, may very well not be an idea, but a description of his experience, which became for him the truth. But this next statement, from Heller’s article, is heartbreaking: “You have an evil heart — like the person next to you,” she quotes him as telling a sold-out crowd. “Kids are not innately good — and neither are you.” This from the loving and attentive father I knew? That makes no sense at all.

It could be his dark view of life, wherever it comes from, that the aggressive group of young men among his followers identify with. They may feel recognized, affirmed, justified and enabled. By validating them he does indeed save them,
and little wonder they then fall into line enthusiastically, marching lockstep behind him. That is unnerving. The misogynistic attacks on the British broadcaster Cathy Newman, after she was humiliated and left speechless by Jordan in the infamous “gotcha moment” of their TV interview, were so numerous and vicious that Jordan asked his followers to back off. These devoted followers are notorious for attacking Jordan’s critics, but this was different. It was more persistent and more intense. That was not outrage in defence of their leader who needed none; she was the fallen victim and it was as if they had come in for the final kill. Jordan’s inflammatory understanding of male violence for which “the cure ... is enforced monogamy” as reported by Nellie Bowles in the New York Times is shocking. This is upsetting and sad if you are, or were, Jordan’s friend. But it is also frightening.

We would be foolish to not pay close attention and to not take Jordan and his impact seriously. Do I overstate a possible danger? Maybe. I really don’t know. But for historical reasons, silence is not a risk I am willing to take.

“When someone claims to be acting from the highest principles for the good of others, there is no reason to assume that the person’s motives are genuine. People motivated to make things better usually aren’t concerned with changing other people — or if they are they take responsibility for making the same changes to themselves (and first).”

I did not write this, although I might have. It’s taken from 12 Rules for Life. These are Jordan’s words.

I believe that Jordan has not lived up to at least four of his rules.

Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

Rule 8: Tell the truth — or, at least, don’t lie

Rule 9: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t

Rule 10: Be precise in your speech

Heller observed that when Jordan slumped, violating Rule 1 (Stand up straight with your shoulders back), his wife cajoled him to correct that. It may be absurd to take that seriously, but the stakes are real, given Jordan’s stated obligation to have changed himself first. He has done a poor job of that.

I knew Jordan when it was possible to know him up close. He was always a complicated man. Even then, it was hard to get a fix on what he was doing. But some things were clear and consistent. In retrospect, I might have seen this coming. I didn’t.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/2018/05 ... erous.html

For those who follow my own work, there are some striking parallels here with John de Ruiter, the Messianic spiritual teacher I wrote about in Dark Oasis, published last year. JdR is also from Alberta, and his career as world-savior really took off after he caused an apostasy at his Lutheran Church, first challenging the Church elders, attempting a coup, and then leaving, taking some of the core members with him as the foundation of his own Ministry. Similar blueprint to JBP.

In my JBP investigation, I am avoiding doing the kind of deep background analysis I usually do, regarding JBP's possible involvement (knowing or not) with social engineering programs such as MKULTRA. Reason being that including this stuff instantly marginalizes me and renders the output "radioactive." But if RI isn't the place for it, then nowhere is. So here are a few possibly relevant facts about JBP, for/from the healthy paranoid's perspective.

JBP mentions on several occasions how he "had Timothy Leary's old job at Harvard"
He is a fan of Aldous Huxley
He recommended Pinchbeck's Breaking Open the Head in one lecture
He is qualitatively affirming the use of "entheogens" for inducing religious experience
He mentions CIA-asset R Gordon Wasson and Soma on repeat occasions, referring to Wasson as an "amateur mycologist"

Eg: https://youtu.be/wNjbasba-Qw?t=2h23m30s

In 1985, JP moved to Montreal to attend McGill University. He earned his Ph.D. in clinical psychology under the supervision of Robert O. Pihl in 1991, and remained as a post-doctoral fellow at McGill's Douglas Hospital until June 1993, working with Pihl and Maurice Dongier

Maurice Dongier is a founding member of the Société française de Psycho-oncologie (French Society for Psycho-oncology).

Dongier received his medical degree in Marseille in 1951 and took his training at the Allan Memorial Institute [ie, would probably have worked wth Ewen Cameron]

From July 1993 to June 1998, Peterson lived in Arlington, Massachusetts, while teaching and conducting research at Harvard University as an assistant and an associate professor in the psychology department. During his time at Harvard, he studied aggression arising from drug and alcohol abuse and supervised a number of unconventional thesis proposals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson
It is a lot easier to fool people than show them how they have been fooled.
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