^^^
Jerky, the same article was posted by Guruilla upthread.
He also said that the 'revelations' contained in it made him suspect that JP had nefarious connections...or something. If you have a chance Guruilla, could you please clarify?
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by Heaven Swan » Mon May 28, 2018 5:41 am
by Jerky » Mon May 28, 2018 5:43 am
Heaven Swan » 28 May 2018 09:41 wrote:^^^
Jerky, the same article was posted by Guruilla upthread.
He also said that the 'revelations' contained in it made him suspect that JP had nefarious connections...or something. If you have a chance Guruilla, could you please clarify?
by Heaven Swan » Mon May 28, 2018 6:08 am
by guruilla » Mon May 28, 2018 3:09 pm
Heaven Swan » Mon May 28, 2018 5:41 am wrote:^^^
Jerky, the same article was posted by Guruilla upthread.
He also said that the 'revelations' contained in it made him suspect that JP had nefarious connections...or something. If you have a chance Guruilla, could you please clarify?
Peterson vs. Petersonism May 6, 2018 , by Norman Young
North America’s Most Popular Clinical Psychologist Is Better Than His Own Philosophy
Peterson’s Project
For Jordan Peterson, truths about the objective world are the purview of science; phenomenological truths about our subjective valuation of the world are the purview of myth. This is an absolutist fact/value dichotomy which could easily lead to cultural relativism. But Peterson avoids relativism by means of Darwinism. “True” values are those that natural selection has conditioned humans to feel in order to survive.
When Peterson explores biblical and mythological texts, he appears to be taking religious ideas seriously. What he is really doing, however, is constructing a myth of his own from Darwinian premises. Myths are created, Peterson suggests, by observing behavior and “extracting out” patterns. Peterson begins his mythopoesis with an observation he believes to be fundamental: that human beings behave differently toward familiar things and unfamiliar things. The abstract idea of familiarity and unfamiliarity are then hypostatized, becoming “the known” and “the unknown”, the domains of Peterson’s mythical world. In the center of this barren cosmos is the individual, a hero, forever hacking away at the unknown and constructing knowledge from her pieces.
Peterson’s Darwinism-based mythical world-picture is intended to help secular people escape nihilism by giving them access to a quasi-religious source of transcendent meaning. This is one step beyond Victor Frankl’s logotherapy. Unlike Freud, who was primarily concerned with analyzing a patient’s past, Frankl immersed patients in visions of achievement in the future. Peterson noticed that, in terms of personal psychological benefit, life-transcending religious goals are superior to the kinds of temporal goals people set for themselves. Peterson’s myth offers secularists a long-term, overarching purpose to their life grounded in a mytho-religious view of themselves as courageous explorers.
Against Peterson’s unquestionably successful self-help methodology stands the mocking voice of King Solomon.
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What profit hath man of all his labor wherein he laboreth under the sun?” Ecclesiastes 1:2-3.
“Man in his pomp will not endure, he is like the beasts that perish.” Psalm 49:12
Biblical wisdom deconstructs the temporal sources of meaning embedded in pagan mythology (i.e. self-worship) as well as the virtues of self-reliance and competence which spring from it. As Nietzsche pointed out in On the Genealogy of Morals, Judaism was a “transvaluation of all values … [which] triumphed … over all more aristocratic ideals”. The moral revolution embedded in Judaic Revelation is fundamentally at odds not only with pagan mythological conceptions of the world (like Peterson’s) but also with the evolutionary processes that selected for them. Instead of valuing strength, competence, and achievement (i.e. fitness), Judeo-Christianity values lowliness, meekness, and humility.
If Peterson lived by the values he preaches, he would focus, as his followers do, on his own competence and personal achievements. Instead, Peterson gets choked up when young men see him as a father-figure and tell him that he has been their salvation. This is not the behavior of a heroic explorer; it is the agony of a guilt-ridden saint. Nietzsche might like Peterson’s myth, but he would gag at his displays of worthless pity-morality.
Peterson desires to improve the lives of fragile young men who are offered little more than nihilism by modern culture. This makes Peterson better than his preaching. What he preaches is an empowering neo-pagan heresy built on a materialist metaphysic. What motivates him to preach is Christian charity and the fact that he sees a spark of the divine in every young man. As is common among Liberal Protestants, Jordan Peterson no longer believes the Christian dogmas he was taught in his youth. Yet he still acts like a believer.
Peterson’s Popularity
My description thus far might not be immediately evident to the casual observer whose exposure to Peterson is limited to one of the three primary types of online video clips: 1) Peterson making circuitous but palpably conservative political arguments; 2) Peterson waxing lyrical about the psychological brilliance of Biblical passages, or 3) Peterson defiantly objecting to the political argument-from-compassion regarding the coerced use of transgender pronouns. In these clips, Peterson appears more like a Right-wing political pundit than a Christian saint. Myopic Left-wing critics even describe Peterson’s support for the cultural value of Christianity and his criticism of feminism as a gateway drug to the alt-Right. That is not accurate. However, to understand Peterson’s rise to fame, one does need to understand the current political moment on the Right, especially the American Right.
In 1980, while Milton Friedman was popularizing libertarian ideology and world peace was being threatened by totalitarian communism, Ronald Reagan built a populist Republican coalition out of religious traditionalists, libertarians, and former Democrat union workers. Reagan’s jokes about government’s regulatory incompetence resonated with traditionalist conservatives who wanted to see federal power shrink relative to the power of their extra-governmental social institutions and also with American workers who saw how ludicrous OSHA regulations could be.
Nearly 40 years later, much has changed. The Religious Right has declined in political significance. Libertarian ideology is widely seen as stale and uninspiring. The regulatory state has become significantly more competent. In addition, the Cold War is over, and “socialism” is no longer a dirty word. In sum, the Right is no longer united by an economic enemy. The common enemy is now primarily a social one. American workers who are rarely troubled by economic regulations, these days, are instead irritated by diversity guidelines which suggest that they are implicitly racist. The entire Right wing, religious and atheist alike, oppose social policies premised on cultural relativism or the idea that biological categories (or even science itself) are patriarchal constructs.
Another important change was the dramatic decline in religious belief and observance. Americans increasingly describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated (“nones”), and many who are religious precariously position their belief atop an essentially Darwinist metaphysic. Deep-seated philosophical materialism explains why the only critique of communism that lingers in the popular imagination is an economic one: “communism doesn’t work.” People have forgotten that the best intellectual arguments against communism were religious in nature, including Peterson’s favorite from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Jordan Peterson fits neatly into the American cultural and political moment on the Right. He rocketed into the limelight by taking a stand against a Canadian law mandating the use of gender-neutral pronouns. He increased his fame by recapitulating arguments of great conservative authors of the recent past and couching their social critiques of Left-wing ideology in Darwinist terms. All the while, Peterson managed to avoid the typical routes to obscurity by successfully straddling the philosophical divide between fundamentalist Evangelicals and fundamentalist New Atheists. He satisfies Christians by giving religious texts (especially the Bible) an important place in his understanding of the world. He satisfies New Atheists by subordinating religion to an Enlightenment understanding of what constitutes objective truth.
The final piece of the Peterson popularity puzzle is his style. Peterson speaks and writes in impressive-sounding language sprinkled with psychological jargon. He is often imprecise, even equivocal, and seems to be saying much more than he actually is. He also surrenders to popularly-held philosophic presumptions (e.g. that all articulated knowledge, especially moral knowledge, is reducible to an adaptive Darwinian story). In sum, Peterson’s writing resembles the sort of thing that rises to the top of internet discussion forums – which is precisely what happened on Quora, according to the “overture” of his new book, 12 Rules for Life.
Lest I be thought to be gratuitously insulting Peterson, the following is a typical passage from his magnum opus, Maps of Meaning:
“Unprotected exposure to unexplored territory produces fear. The individual is protected from such fear as a consequence of ritual imitation of the Great Father—as a consequence of the adoption of group identity, which restricts the meaning of things, and confers predictability on social interactions. When identification with the group is made absolute, however—when everything has to be controlled, when the unknown is no longer allowed to exist—the creative exploratory process that updates the group can no longer manifest itself. This restriction of adaptive capacity dramatically increases the probability of social aggression.”
What Peterson means is this:
People don’t like unfamiliar places, things, events or ideas. Tradition protects you from these. But, government-mandated conformity to tradition leads to stagnation and possibly violence.
The kernel of his paragraph is a banal insight. But, the way Peterson phrases it would get many “likes”.
Perusing Peterson
Not all of Peterson’s insights are banal. Peterson touches upon many profound ideas as he enthusiastically explores the works of great authors. He brings into dialogue some of the best religious thought and some of the most sophisticated evolutionary ideas (both as understood by laymen) and attempts to resolve the dissonance between them. The ambitious project of Maps of Meaning was to take religious critiques of totalitarianism and fit them into the Darwinian metaphysical framework assumed by most scientists who study the human being. The project of 12 Rules for Life, far less ambitious, was a similar attempt to reconcile some religious ethical common sense (discipline your children, treat individuals with dignity, focus on changing yourself, etc.) with that same framework.
For those interested in Peterson’s investigations, I recommend his video lectures more highly than his books. It is more interesting to watch his intelligent and creative mind at work than to read a particular stream of his consciousness that has fossilized on the page. As Peterson might put it, he likes to explore at the edge of Chaos, just beyond the bounds of his competence. Sometimes the result is a dazzling display of intellectual achievement. Sometimes he falls flat. Either way, it is an enjoyable show.
https://thinkoutsidepolitics.com/2018/0 ... tersonism/
by JackRiddler » Fri Jun 01, 2018 9:29 am
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/05/ ... ology-exam
MAY 27, 2018
CURRENT AFFAIRS’ COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY EXAM
Identify the principles of masculine order and feminine chaos…
by LYTA GOLD
If you ask Jordan Peterson, best-selling author and professionally miserable Youtuber, the complex and multivariant strains of human myth-making can all be boiled down—like a lobster in a pot—to one very simple syllogism: Order is masculine, chaos is feminine, and socially-enforced monogamy is the only cure for male unhappiness. (He does not posit a cure for female unhappiness; the joy of chaos is obviously its own reward.) Peterson’s work has become very popular among incels, gamergaters, and other internet-men who have never studied the humanities but feel perfectly entitled to opine at great length about human history, religion, art, psychology, and politics. Their affection for Peterson’s teachings makes a great deal of sense, give that Peterson doesn’t seem to know much about anything, either.
If a mythic superstructure of masculine order and feminine chaos undergirds the entirety of human thought, we would expect to find it in every myth. Read the following examples and answer the questions in essay format. This is a take-home, open-book exam, and it counts toward 30 percent of your final grade.
1. The Egyptian goddess Ma’at/Maat is frequently represented in Egyptian art as a seated young woman, but she’s more than a mere deity. According to classicist Christopher A. Faraone and Egyptologist Emily Teeter: “…maat appears both as the abstract concept of truth and correctness in the cosmic and social spheres and in anthropomorphic form as a goddess (Maat) who personifies truth and order.”[1] Ma’at/Maat was highly significant as a guiding principle in Egyptian culture, and embodied subtly different meanings at different points during the long development of Egyptian religion and philosophy. The Egyptologist Vincent Arieh Tobin tells us: “Ma’at was not simply one aspect of Egyptian thought; it was, in effect, the entire basis for the Egyptian understanding of the universe. The importance of Ma’at, moreover, extends beyond Egypt, for it was part of the general Near Eastern intellectual milieu out of which there eventually grew the complex system of biblical theology.”[2]
Maat
Ma’at is less familiar in the contemporary imagination than her father, the sun god Ra. Together, Ra and Ma’at oppose chaos (isfet) as embodied by the masculine serpent god Apophis/Apep, who is constantly trying to devour the sun and end all life. Apophis, however, is no real threat to the order of the cosmos. Maulana Karenga, professor of Africana Studies, writes: “There is never any doubt that the Maat of Ra will triumph over the isfetic threats of Apophis.”[3] That’s quite a relief.
A. Reconcile the masculine serpent god Apophis, servant of disorder, and the feminine goddess Ma’at, triumphant symbol of order, within a Petersonian framework. Show your work.
B. Is it possible to have a universal principle of mythic truth with a glaring counter-example from one of the most significant and influential ancient human civilizations?
C. Are “universal principles of mythic truth” doomed to failure no matter what because human beings are complicated, and myths contradict each other even within the cultures that spawned them, let alone across the wide spectrum of human faith, belief, and tradition?
D. Between you and me and Peterson, do you actually fear sometimes that a raging, violent masculine darkness will swallow light and truth and order?
2. In the Lokasenna[4], the Norse god Loki shows up drunk at a party and engages in flyting—that is, an insult contest. Loki, god of fire of mischief, is a disruptive, chaotic force in Norse mythology, and also associated at times with serpents. When he bursts into this particular party, he calls all the goddesses unfaithful sluts, and accuses the male gods of cowardice and other “unmanly” (ergi or argr[5]) behaviors. It’s all a big mess: Odin brings up the time Loki turned into a mare and fucked a stallion and gave birth to an eight-legged horse; Loki brings up the time Odin went around dressed like a witch (the compilers of the Lokasenna fail to specify whether or not Odin lived in a swamp). Everyone’s drunk; everyone’s miserable; everyone’s unfaithful; everyone’s failing to uphold monogamy and the gender binary. Loki may be the most openly genderfluid of the gods, having mothered that eight-legged horse, but nobody—from the crossdressing Odin to the masculine ski goddess Skadi—is particularly good at obeying cishetero, monogamous norms. Even Frigg, Odin’s seemingly conscientious and agreeable mother-goddess wife, totally banged Odin’s brothers while he was away.
When Loki first joined the Aesir (the Norse pantheon), they tried to enforce moral behavior and social cohesion by giving him a goddess wife, which doesn’t appear to have had any significant impact on his mischief (plus, he was already married to a frost giantess, with whom he had three lovely monster children).
A. Was it unfair to expect Sigyn, Loki’s goddess wife, to reform a difficult trickster? Isn’t it kinda bullshit that when Loki was bound by the guts of their son Narfi to a rock, and the venom from the serpent’s fangs dripped in his face, Sigyn had to wait beside him, holding a bowl to catch the venom? What does this symbolize about the horror of enforced monogamy?
B. What would have happened if the Aesir had instead respected Loki’s previous marriage, his genderfluidity and his shifting pronouns? Given Norse cultural beliefs, would that have been a Bifrost too far?
3. Another mythological figure often associated with snakes is Athena, goddess of wisdom, born from the masculine generative power of her father Zeus. Like Loki, she’s somewhat genderfluid, refusing marriage and childbirth, and often dressing in armor. But she’s also an expert weaver, and when a mortal girl named Arachne “accepted praise that set her/above the goddess in the art of weaving,/a girl renowned not for her place of birth/nor for her family, but for her art”[6] Athena takes great offense. She challenges the impoverished mortal Arachne to a weaving contest, because much like a certain eminent lobster-philosopher, she’s extremely defensive when challenged.
Athena’s finished tapestry displays the Olympian gods in all their authoritarian patriarchal glory, upholders of the cosmic order. “Weighty on their thrones,”[7] the gods are represented as wise judges, seated high above political considerations. But Arachne, in a total SJW move, decides to depict the gods as they actually are: brutal rapists and murderers who prey upon mortals.
A. In some versions of the myth, Athena freely admits that Arachne’s tapestry is technically more proficient than hers, but in every version she still turns poor Arachne into a spider for daring to tell the truth about the gods. Is it possible that “political art” just means art that offends the feelings of powerful people?
B. Pretend you’re Jordan Peterson. Justify the transformation of Arachne, using the following concepts: authoritarianism, political art, and free speech. Create a coherent framework that allows you to position yourself as a defender of free speech while actually believing that all ideas besides your own are incorrect and should be suppressed.
4. Turning to contemporary mythology, we find the prevalence of the slacker husband and the long-suffering wife/girlfriend (Homer and Marge Simpson, Peter and Lois Griffin, basically every ’90s sitcom and a decent number of Judd Apatow movies). The competent but humorless wife upholds order, as a direct descendent of the Victorian angel in the house archetype. But in this depressingly familiar modern myth, the husband remains a lazy, useless, immoral slob.
A. Could it be that the wife’s conscientious and agreeable devotion to her husband merely enables his permanent adolescence?
B. Can his laziness and unwillingness to fairly participate in household chores be considered a low-key form of abuse?
C. Do we need to tell young men more than just “clean your room”, but “share responsibilities equally and treat women as equal partners, because women are goddamn human beings, not your fucking helpmeets?”
D. Could the loneliness and misery of so many young men be the result of a winner-take-all patriarchal structure that tries to enforce false gender binaries, commodifies women as property, and sets unrealistic expectations of wife + house + career in a collapsing late capitalist society?
E. Or is Marge Simpson just a chaos witch?
[1] Faraone, Christopher A., and Emily Teeter. “Egyptian Maat and Hesiodic Metis.” Mnemosyne, vol. 57, no. 2, 2004, pp. 177–208. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4433545.
[2] Tobin, Vincent Arieh. “Biblica.” Biblica, vol. 73, no. 2, 1992, pp. 293–297. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42611263.
[3] Karenga, Maulana. Maat, the Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt: A Study in Classical African Ethics, p. 206. New York: Routledge, 2004. https://books.google.com/books/about/Ma ... s2OPbmHMUC
[4] The Lokasenna is short and extremely fun and I highly recommend reading it in full.
[5] Greenberg, David F. The Construction of Homosexuality, p. 244-245. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. P. 244-245. https://books.google.com/books/about/Th ... hFRgR-1awC
[6] Ovid. Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin, p. 189. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.
[7] Ovid, p. 192.
Lyta Gold
- www.counterpunch.org - https://www.counterpunch.org -
Jordon Peterson’s Public Tantrum of Inner-Turmoil
Posted By Reverend Aaron
On June 1, 2018 @ 1:45 am
Jordon B. Peterson: The little known Canadian college professor who made his entre into the broader public perception by throwing down a public freak out over the use of pronouns and how to avoid being a complete piece of shit when you use them. That is to say, no one had ever heard of this deeply tormented individual until a law was proposed in Canada, C-16, recognizing the harassment of others, based on purposeful misuse of self-identifying pronouns, as harassment (um, because it is).
How-ever you might feel about gender and the issue of self-identification, that is to say, whether you are an archaic bigot or a decent, thinking person who wants to treat people with some sense of universal respect, one can logically deduce that the act of purposefully misgendering a person for the sole intent of disrespecting that person, is, eh hem, harassment. Jordon Peterson saw this logical evolution of human understanding and compassion as a threat. To what? Well, many can and have speculated: “White Privilege”. I’m inclined to agree. Peterson would talk you in disingenuous circles of disagreement, as he his oft known to do, but I think there are other, more unique to Peterson, issues at play other than his willful disregard for the reality of White Privilege. I wanna take a look at what I think those issues might be. And, yes, I use the word “issues” for more than one reason.
After Peterson burst onto the teary-eyed victim card scene with his gross misrepresentation of C-16, the rest of the world got our first glimpse into his seemingly complex set of ideas. He wrote one of those bullshit self-help books, and those Misogynists that were capable of reading bought it like it was the new Milo, but without all the “icky gay stuff”. He now sells out huge halls and, last told, was bringing down about 50k a month on Patreon. His little transphobic tantrum has treated him well, so far.
We are going to be taking a look at the basics of his schtick – what it is he has been tricking all these poor dumb fuckers with following his gross verminous slithering into the broader lexicon – and quickly explain why its utter and complete, baseless, donkey-shit. We will then move on to what effects his baseless donkey-shit rhetoric has on the broader discourse, with specific emphasis on those who feverishly follow him (see Incels and Men’s Rights Activists). And, we will then attempt to understand what could motivate someone to be this astoundingly awful.
I’m not going to be doing a deep deconstruction of Petersons alarmingly misleading concepts of “Cultural Marxism”, Socialism in general, Post-Modernism, Patriarchy, etc. because to do so, as others who have tackled his mountains of garbage have found, ultimately requires a series of pieces to properly explain not only his views, but how he has completely misconstrued the ideologies he is commenting on. Which then requires a tutorial on each of the issues he has misconstrued. That’s just too tedious a process for my purposes here, and there are a number of adept creators who have done a great job of it already (I would refer folks to Zero Books and Three Arrows on Youtube as well as Sam Seder’s Majority Report for a proper flogging of Peterson’s sad swamp of disingenuous lies).
The purpose of this piece is not necessarily to deconstruct Peterson’s crap, but to attempt to better understand why he has embraced it. So, we will be glossing over the bullet points of his hissy-fit world-view just enough to facilitate our ability to armchair-psycho-analyze this shitbag a little, and then see if there is anything useful to be learned from it.
Cultural Marxism
At the core of Jordon Peterson’s narrative is the notion that “Cultural Marxists” – which according to Peterson is essentially anyone who doesn’t ascribe to his defeatist world-view – have infiltrated, or joined forces, or been infiltrated by, or whatever, by the Post Modernists, (or vice versa?) Anyway, the short, simplified version is: the class struggle as described by Socialists such as Marx is, in Peterson’s… thingy, been “shrouded” in the Post-Modernist concept of Haves vs. Have-Nots, or simply the powerful vs. the powerless. But, at no point in Peterson’s blusterous career has he managed to tell us, though, just at what point, and just what specific Socialists, made this somehow nefarious and sneaky transition. I mean, can he point to when, say, cats like Chomsky, Zizek, and Dr. Wolff (insert well-known modern socialist here) got together, conspired, plotted, schemed, and came up with, “We’ll pretend to be Post-Modernists although we won’t ever actually act like it, and then, walla, women will become feminazis, and white men will be then able to blame all of their personal short-comings on said feminazis”? Seriously, Peterson, when exactly did that happen and how exactly did that imaginary transition then translate into every single person on the Left being somehow a part of it? It sounds incredibly fucking ridiculous because it isincredibly fucking ridiculous. At no point has there everbeen a transition of, or take-over of, one of these two schools of thought by the other. Its bullshit. But, if you tear past the surface of Peterson’s rhetoric you will find that exact bullshit assertion.
Peterson believes that all liberals, Progressives, Social Democrats, Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, LGBTQ+ Rights Advocates, etc, etc, have been fooled by this nefarious scheme of Cultural/Post-Modernist/Marxist/whatever into caring about the equality they crave for all people, as opposed to them actually just caring about and wanting equality for all people. What’s more, the true “agenda” of the “Social Justice Warriors” is to make men slaves to so-called “Feminazis”. I shit you not. That’s what this hack piece of shit is crawling around the country on his Lobster Belly selling to ignorant, disaffected, pissed off white boys. Profiting off of their disaffected ignorance then in turn telling them its “Social Justice Warriors” fault the American Dream hasn’t panned out for them. It’s the “Cultural Marxists” fault Sally Popular Pants won’t give them the time of day. But, ultimately, what it all comes down to, is it’s all women’s fault (sic). And that’s where we enter his loyal stable of Incels and Mens Rights activists (but, we will return to them later).
For now, let’s move onto…
Peterson’s Perversion of Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey
The Hero’s Tale, or the Hero’s Journey, as illumined by Joseph Campbell, is one of taking action, engaging the world, confronting its evil righteously and in turn learning from that experience. It’s a self-reliant journey of discovery, not just to the other end of the world’s greatest obstacles, but to the other end of our own inner struggles as well. And more importantly, how we take personal responsibility for the world around us and the part we choose to play or not play in it.
Jordon Peterson’s take on the hero’s journey is a sick, sad, convoluted, self-destructive perversion that rallies its warriors to inaction, self-pity and reactionary anger. Jordon speaks of the Underworld, and slaying of dragons, et al, in the traditional metaphorical sense of course, and in much the style popularized by Campbell. But, Peterson casts his heroes as having the Underworld thrust upon them, as opposed to something a proactive warrior engages purposefully. While Campbell’s hero seeks out the dragon, Peterson’s is suddenly confronted by it. While Campbell’s Hero mindfully seeks out and engages the chaos of the unknown, Peterson’s Hero finds himself forced into the midst of it, bereft of foreknowledge, as if abruptly awakened to some immediate existential dread.
Joseph Campbell tells us that Heroes find the wisdom they otherwise lack in the quest to engage the dragon, in the engagement of the unknown, in the struggle against the odds, in leaving the familiar and safe for the dangerous and the unknown. Peterson, in his ridiculous self-help book, tells his readers not to engage injustice until they have figured out all of their own personal demons. He, in fact, tells his followers that they need to clean their rooms.
He does give his followers a dragon to fear – The Social Justice Warrior/Cultural Marxists. But, he tells them only that they “must not stand for it anymore” – “it” being equality for all otherwise marginalized peoples, but more specifically women. What we thinking people, with an ability to empathies, understand clearly to be simply the struggle for equality for all, Peterson sees as a threat to some imaginary historic “divine” role of Patriarchy being all things somehow equal, under threat. What Campbell recognized as the fight for justice and wisdom so intrinsic to the long story of the search for the betterment of the broader human condition, Peterson sees as all he and his followers should be ultimately crusading against. Or, more precisely, cowering from and crying about. Peterson tells his followers they must tell the truth, but anyone espousing a truth that challenges his own, becomes the embodiment of the dragon, of chaos, of evil itself – The Social Justice Warrior.
What this glaringly hypocritical and emotionally stunted hack is doing, is couching his self-victimizing, defeatist view of some so-called “Heroic Patriarchy” in the ageless inspirational tales of the true Hero’s Journey. Peterson has taken a timeless understanding of self-sacrifice, courage, honor and universal truths for all people (regardless of gender or ethnic or national origin), and regurgitated it as some justification for, specifically, White Men to feel like suffering victims of some fucking imaginary oppression. And, I frankly fail to see how this is not, on some level, a purposeful perversion of Campbell meant to sell Peterson’s own self-loathing to his followers, thereby justifying it for himself on some even deeper more repressed level.
Incels Got Mad Love for Peterson
Involuntary Celibates, or “Incels” are, what the name clearly implies (guys who can’t get laid). But, upon closer examination we find something far less benign, something frighteningly angry, dangerous, reactionary and violent. These are people who not only believe that it’s not their personal fault that they can’t get laid, but that the entire world has literally conspired against them to make it so. Incels believe they have been oppressed by “Normies”, by what they call “Chads” and “Staceys” (aka, people who get laid), and they are convinced that any and all violent outbursts against society are justified as manifestations of their oppression. They are, in short, violent, sex-deprived terrorists.
As should not be surprising, Incels see no correlation between their deep-seeded misogynistic loathing of society in general, to their inability to attract a loving partner. Incels disassociate their own reactionary misanthropic tendencies from the responses such behaviors tend to garner, and they replace it with an even deeperhatred and loathing of society in general. Incels, therefore, are fertile minds for the likes of Peterson and his victim-card version of the Hero’s Journey. And, in light of Peterson’s recent support for the immensely disgusting concept of “Forced Monogamy”, the world of terrorist Incels have flocked to him accordingly in droves.
The Sad Cesspool That is Jordon Peterson
The astounding level of mental gymnastics behind literally all of Peterson’s ideas; the manner with which Peterson routinely justifies his notions on easily debunked interpretations of various schools of thought; the way with which he refuses to be saddled to any specific position; the way with which he posts livestreams of him sobbing over the so-called plight of men; the way with which he perverts the nature of the Hero’s Journey; the way with which he attracts the most grossly reactionary, misogynist and misanthropic elements in society, are all manifestations and symptoms of something deep, unaddressed and repressed on the part of Peterson.
I am obviously no trained psychologist, psychoanalyst, or clinical diagnostician by any stretch of the imagination, but I can clearly deduce by this man’s public behavior that he is deeply emotionally disturbed and hurting. This is a man who clearly has no command of his emotional faculties nor any want to discover the root cause of his emotional instability. Or, maybe, he in fact does know the cause of his sad depressing struggle but is unwilling to heed the Hero’s call to confront it?
It seems obvious to me, that his outburst in relation to C-16, and the subsequent 15 minutes it has brought him, not only brought him one hell of a lot of cash, but the spurious air of validation for his lack of personal accountancy, volition and action towards self-betterment. I am convinced that Peterson is smart enough and educated enough to understand that, upon any substantive scrutiny, his entire schtick falls apart as reactionary and counter-productive to actual personal growth. But, he’s making money, he’s selling books, he’s making waves and getting lots of attention. He’s milking it. And, that brings me to my most personal of assessments, and possibly most damning of assessments of Peterson.
I have reached the conclusion that Peterson feels justified in his lies. Again, I am asserting that Peterson doesn’t actually believe his own garbage lies, but he does believe he deserves to profit from them. In other words, “It’s Peterson’s turn, and he is gonna get him some! The world has shit on Jordon B. Peterson long enough, and it’s his turn to do the shitting and get some fame and recognition.” It’s a gross exploitation of suffering, ignorant and confused young minds for the purpose of personal self-fulfillment. Jordon B. Peterson is the very worst kind of White Privileged, reactionary, selfish pieces of crybaby crap the West has to offer, and this writer is convinced he knows it and doesn’t care. I hereby invite Peterson to prove that he is not knowingly inspiring a generation of dangerous, reactionary, Incel terrorists in the wake of his sad, diluted quest to fill the unaddressed and depressingly emptier sides of his otherwise pathetically unhappy existence.
Shame on you Jordon B. Peterson, your new suits aren’t worth any of the carnage you are knowingly causing, and Joseph Campbell would be utterly repulsed by your want to slather his legacy in the depressing, reactionary, cry-baby, white privileged Cesspool of shit you have built for yourself.
Aaron Alvarez, aka “Reverend Aaron,” is Co-Founder of Punks For Progress.
Article printed from www.counterpunch.org: https://www.counterpunch.org
URL to article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/06/01 ... r-turmoil/
www.currentaffairs.org
Two Ways Of Responding To Conservatives
Instead of criticizing them for poor character, we should show why their “ideas” are shallow, incoherent, and will make people miserable…
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/05/ ... servatives
It should be easy for a leftist to concede that not all criticism of conservatives is of equal validity or equal persuasiveness. Personally, I think a fundamental requirement of intellectual honesty is to make sure your arguments are fair, and that you are not distorting the truth for ideological reasons. It’s also important, if you are actually trying to advance your ideas, to think about which points are the most likely to convince people rather than which ones are the most satisfying. I have strongly criticized the Democratic Party in particular for its habit of throwing every criticism it can think of at Donald Trump, instead of selecting and emphasizing the criticisms that have the most substantive merit. For example, Chuck Schumer recently condemned Trump for issuing a commemorative coin with Kim Jong Un’s face on it. I am fairly sure that (1) hardly anybody cares about this and (2) the strategy of painting Trump as “soft on North Korea” is both doomed and stupid.
I want to examine two published articles that criticize University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson. Both of them are written from a left perspective, and reach very damning conclusions about Peterson. Both writers clearly think his ideas are harmful and his popularity is depressing. And yet I think one of them is an effective, accurate, and devastating critique, while the other is a desperate, unpersuasive, and counterproductive one. (The good one is not mine, though I do also recommend mine.)
Let’s start with the bad one, which is Bernard Schiff’s article in The Star, “I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous.” I’ll summarize it as quickly as I can (i.e. at considerable length), and perhaps you can see why I think it’s so weak while appearing quite strong. Schiff is a former colleague of Peterson’s from the University of Toronto, who professes himself deeply concerned with the direction Peterson’s career has taken. Having once supported Peterson’s bid for tenure, Schiff says he is now “alarmed by [Peterson’s] now-questionable relationship to truth, intellectual integrity and common decency, which I had not seen before.” Schiff wants us to know that he does not write because of animosity toward Peterson, but “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.”
Schiff narrates the full story of his friendship with Peterson. When Peterson first arrived at the university, Schiff says, his “CV was impeccable, with terrific references,” and while Schiff’s colleagues were wary of Peterson—whom they found “eccentric”—Schiff persuaded them that Peterson “was a divergent thinker, self-educated in the humanities, intellectually flamboyant, bold, energetic and confident.” Schiff developed a close personal friendship with Peterson, who was “attentive and thoughtful, stern and kind, playful and warm.” Schiff admired Peterson’s marriage: “His wife, Tammy, appeared to be the keel, the ballast and the rudder, and Jordan ran the ship.” (Schiff apparently sees nothing objectionable about a husband who treats his wife like a boat.) On campus, Peterson “was as interesting as I had expected him to be,” but was a “maverick” who flouted the university research ethics committee. Schiff says he attributed this to Peterson’s “unbridled energy and fierce independence, which were, in many other ways, virtues.” Peterson held audiences “rapt,” his student evaluations were “for the most part, excellent” and some students called him life-changing, but Schiff says Peterson had a tendency to “present conjecture as statement of fact” and often seemed like a “preacher.”
Schiff says that over time, Peterson became more “intense,” with an “incredible energy,” a “great fervour and commitment.” He also became more political, but had an “off-putting” tendency to be “categorical.” The “highs and lows of his emotional range” were increasing, and there was a growing “fierceness” for this “man of extremes.” Finally, when Peterson became famous for publicly opposing the expansion of the Canadian Human Rights Act to cover gender and sexual expression, Schiff says he felt betrayed:
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.
Schiff says that he began to suspect Peterson’s public political pontificating was “ not just about free speech.” He suggests that Peterson had learned from “authoritarian demagogic leaders” how to make a crowd roar, and that Peterson is seeking publicity and has realized that he can profit off anger and resentment. Peterson has now become “dangerous” and “emotionally explosive.” He sees himself a “social order warrior” fighting against those who “upset the social order” and wants to be a martyr. In doing so, he “has done disservice to the professoriate.” And because Peterson “smart, compelling and convincing,” and a “powerful orator,” “we should be concerned.”
Why don’t I think Schiff’s article is a very powerful criticism of Peterson? Because, generally speaking, I don’t think calling someone a brilliant, dangerous, maverick who changes lives is a particularly good way of getting people to question them. Here is one of my tests for whether a criticism is going to be powerful: Does it reinforce the person’s self-conception or undermine it? At one point in the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton tried to call Donald Trump “dangerous Donald.” It made him sound like exactly what he wanted to convince people he was: a man who terrified the political establishment. When Milo Yiannopoulos was called dangerous, he embraced it as a brand and used it to sell books. Jordan Peterson likes to think of himself as a genius who has happened upon truths that “have been kept secret from the foundation of the world,” and who is upsetting the stuffy academics who attack his style because they cannot handle his arguments. What could better confirm this than a long lament by a stuffy academic who dwells mostly on Peterson’s style without really engaging his substantive arguments?
Even in his own portrayal, Schiff is a sap with poor judgment, a man who convinced his rightly-skeptical colleagues to embrace a man who turned out to have poor ethics, delusions of grandeur, and a willingness to misrepresent reality. To me, however, Schiff looks even worse than that. He is still naïve about Peterson. He still apparently thinks Maps of Meaning is a serious contribution to academic psychology rather than the ravings of a glib and voluble crank. He still doesn’t understand that Peterson was never a real “thinker,” and has to assume Peterson has “changed” or “gotten worse” because the truth would reflect so badly on Schiff and the entire University of Toronto psychology department. He continues to heap totally-unjustified praise on Peterson, building Peterson up as a “rogue intellectual” even while insisting that the opposite is the case. He even coins the phrase “social order warrior,” which Peterson would probably proudly embrace.
Some of the supposed criticisms aren’t even criticisms. Schiff thinks being “extreme” is in and of itself bad, which it isn’t. And I detect a hint of the odd liberal tendency to find “indecency” worse than “injustice”; Schiff says that even though he has a trans daughter, that “was hardly an issue” compared to Peterson’s personal betrayal of Schiff. But it should be the other way around: The fact that Peterson may have misled his friends is nothing compared to the harm that his views may do to the social acceptance of transgender people. Schiff seems to care a lot about norms: yes, Peterson misrepresented science, but in doings so he “abused the trust” of the “professorial position,” and it seems to be the violation of trust rather than the actual problems with Peterson’s arguments that most concerns Schiff. Oh, God, and Schiff seems to even defend the idea of sending Peterson to jail if he refused to pay a fine for failing to use a pronoun correctly.
My guess is that if you didn’t already dislike Peterson, you’re unlikely to do so after reading Schiff’s article. I also doubt many of his followers will be particularly unsettled by most of what Schiff has to say. Indeed, responses on Peterson’s Twitter feed suggest that most of his followers think Schiff simply sounds petty, jealous, and bombastic. Schiff does make a number of criticisms that aren’t just ad hominem, saying that Peterson has a “now-questionable relationship to truth, intellectual integrity and common decency,” that 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” But those are serious claims requiring serious support, and Schiff dwells mostly on the personal side of things.
Here is an interesting online exchange between someone who likes Peterson and someone who loathes him:
LIKER: Some scientists have responded to this thread with criticisms of @jordanbpeterson. Here are a selection:he’s awful/ an asshole/ for morons/an ignorant idiot, beneath contempt/ repellant/ old fashioned/ a total huckster/ bizarre/ Profound stuff…
LOATHER: Why do you expect anything deeper than what Peterson provides? You want my critique of Heidegger, I will give you pages.You want my critique of a clown, it’ll be laughter. You’re not entitled to anyone inventing intellectual depth on his part just because you wish he had it.
Now, I think that line about the clown is funny. But I’m also not sure it’s wise. You can laugh at the right all you like, but in this country they’re in power. The Democrats tried the “Isn’t he awful and terrible and dangerous and for morons?” response against Donald Trump. It didn’t work, because those who accepted Trump’s self-characterization as an anti-establishment crusader just became defensive at being called morons. If a figure’s ideas are popular, they cannot be written off with mockery. Instead, we need to patiently and empathetically show people who might be taken in by the figure why they’re “ignorant” and “hucksterish.”
To see an example of the type of criticism I mean, we can look at Eric Levitz’s article about Peterson in New York magazine, “Jordan Peterson Does Not Support ‘Equality of Opportunity.’” Levitz’s conclusions are just as critical as Schiff’s, but they are much harder for Peterson and his supporters to write off. For one thing, they are not personal: They are a direct attack on Peterson’s “ideas,” and they show with precise and forceful logic why Peterson’s political ideology is an ignorant mess.
Levitz discusses one of Peterson’s core talking points, the idea that leftists are totalitarians because they desire “equality of outcome,” whereas Peterson himself believes in something far more defensible called “equality of opportunity” along with a “natural hierarchy of competence.” Peterson implies says that “diversity, inclusivity, and equity as a triumvirate” mark out the “too-excessive left,” with “equity” being the “abhorrent” idea of “equality of outcome.” Now, I’m sure a lot of people pass over these words rather quickly; after all, so many people talk about “equality of opportunity” that it would seem a bizarre point to single out among Peterson’s voluminous spewings. But Levitz wants to draw our attention to the implications of what Peterson is saying. First, Levitz disposes with the idea that social justice leftists believe in some kind of totalitarian Harrison Bergeron-like absolute equality. (“I do not know any feminists who blame the patriarchy for the fact that no woman has ever played middle linebacker in the NFL.”) In fact, leftists argue for things like paid medical and family leave, equality in educational funding, universal health care, and prison reform, and critics like Peterson who claim to support “equal opportunity” are mostly silent on the actual left-wing programs that would expand such opportunity. But Levitz points out just how little Peterson seems to care about the actual existing opportunity disparities, automatically ascribing differential social outcomes to “hierarchies of competence” without ever taking seriously the evidence about race and gender based injustices:
[Progressives feel] it safe to say that the economic chasm between black and white households might have something to do with the fact that, for most of American history, chattel slavery, Jim Crow laws, and discriminatory housing policies barred the vast majority of African-Americans from the opportunity to accrue wealth. And liberals are also fairly confident that “hierarchies of competence” do not fully explain the disparate market incomes of the one percent and middle class, in a nation where beloved public school teachers live on the edge of poverty, and Donald Trump lives in the White House.
The United States is “a nation where women are still routinely subjected to domestic violence in their homes, sexual harassment in their workplaces, and gender bias at their schools” and “our entire economic system relies on women performing incalculable hours of reproductive work without receiving any formal compensation at all.” It’s only if we assume away a mountain of social scientific evidence of the importance of race and gender (and assume away a black-white wealth gap that has been present since slavery) that we can see anything “meritocratic” about the existing order. The notion of “competence” itself is also unhelpful, since the question is “competent at what?” As Levitz points out:
The fact that the market delivers enormous rewards to people who design collateralized debt obligations — and piddling ones to those who care for the elderly — is a reflection of government policy, not metaphysical truth. Jordan Peterson owes his newfound fortune to the construct of “intellectual property rights,” and the willingness of nation-states to enforce such rights through coercion. A single mother raising four children — whose labor will one day help subsidize Peterson’s Old Age Security pension — receives no compensation for her efforts, because policy makers have chosen not to make a similar “intervention” in the market on her behalf.
In fact, “equality of opportunity” is a questionable concept to begin with. There can never be any such thing, because one generation’s “outcome” is the next generation’s “opportunity.” Those who end up with more will have more wealth to pass on to their children (unless you levy a 100 percent inheritance tax and ban private schools, which presumably Peterson supports, since he believes in equality of opportunity). But it’s worse than that: There are countless ways in which parents differ in what they give to children. The real problem is the idea of meritocracy itself, which is always going to be a myth, given the strong influences of both nature and nurture in determining the trajectory of any given human life, and which is always going to disfavor those who happen not to be endowed with the particular traits the meritocracy rewards (such as being good at swindling people). A better approach than “equality of opportunity” involves guaranteeing everyone a good standard of living, and ensuring that both the state and economy operate according to democratic principles without concentrated power. We can have long debates about how to do this in practice, but since “opportunity” will always favor those who have won the lottery of parents (whether financially or genetically) it’s impossible to avoid also adjusting outcome if you do believe in trying to equalize opportunities to the extent possible. (Not that Peterson does seem to believe in that, given how little time he spends advocating ways to close existing opportunity gaps, and how much time he spends justifying the resulting outcomes.)
Levitz points out that critics of social justice like Peterson and Shapiro pretend to be interested in ideas, yet ignore actual existing left-wing principles and policies in order to beat up on the most extreme caricature of the teenage campus activist. As Levitz says,“instead of engaging in an honest debate about whether equality of opportunity exists in the United States, they chose to misconstrue their point-of-contention with “SJWs” — and proceed to delegitimize concerns over structural inequality by equating them with a totalitarian ideology.” This is the crucial point. I do not care very much whether Jordan Peterson’s University of Toronto colleagues felt betrayed and disappointed by him, or whether they think he is bizarre and unpleasant. (He is.) I don’t think many members of the general public care what they think, either.
We can criticize people like Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump, for being rude, dangerous, depraved, apocalyptic, untrustworthy. But they will correctly point out that these are the exact things someone would say who could not actually offer a better and more accurate vision of the world. We could say “He’s brilliant, but he’s lost his way.” But a lot of people will just hear “He’s brilliant.” (For God’s sake, never say “He’s brilliant, but…” about someone who is obviously not at all brilliant but would very much like to have his enemies say that he is.) Instead of making it personal, then, I recommend directing one’s attention to the core of their noxious ideology, helping people understand why it is so shallow, stupid, and immoral rather than simply calling it those things. And we can’t lure people away from these ideas until we have better ones of our own, and can articulate them with greater intellectual precision, greater moral force, and greater persuasive power.
by guruilla » Fri Jun 01, 2018 1:36 pm
How Jordan Peterson’s Fame Affected His Private Practice
A former patient says she got “hurt”; Peterson’s lawyer calls her "disgruntled"
JONATHAN GOLDSBIE JUNE 1, 2018
“You know,” Jordan Peterson said, to a large audience at the University of British Columbia this past February 15, “I’ve also been accused, three times in my career, of sexual impropriety. Baseless accusations. And the last one really tangled me up for a whole year. It’s not entertaining.”
When Samantha, a former patient of Peterson’s who does not want her real name used in this story, saw a video of those remarks on YouTube, she wondered if Peterson was talking about her. Eight days prior to that talk, the College of Psychologists of Ontario (CPO) — the profession’s governing body — had released its decision regarding her professional misconduct complaint against him, the culmination of what for her had been a challenging 10-month process.
The dates roughly lined up. Her complaint against Peterson, however, had not concerned sexual impropriety.
“That is not what this is. This is not that,” she said in a recent sit-down interview. “This is about a bad doctor who didn’t do his job, and I got hurt.”
Jordan Peterson, the public figure, often talks about the patients of Jordan Peterson, the clinical psychologist. While he doesn’t name them, he frequently tells their stories and cites their issues, both to illustrate examples of the social ills he opposes, and as evidence of his success in helping people. (In his book, he notes that he has disguised details of their identity. Elsewhere, he does not say this.) By Peterson’s own description, his life as a public figure became “too hectic” for him to continue providing private counselling because he was worried he could “drift” or “make mistakes.” Ultimately, his public role won out, and Peterson left his private practice and stopped seeing patients.
Before he did, in the months when his old and new lives overlapped, one patient believes he did her more harm than good. Because of this, Samantha filed a misconduct complaint with the CPO that led to the regulatory body expressing “concerns” over a number of Peterson’s practices.
A note on the CPO’s website, published in early February, described in broad terms an “Acknowledgement and Undertaking” that Peterson had entered into with the college as a result of an allegation of professional misconduct. The undertaking, to be in effect for a minimum of 90 days, was “to address issues of communications with clients, which may constitute boundary and/or quality of service issues,” with Peterson agreeing to develop “a plan to prioritize clinical work with clients above other competing interests.” Late-March news stories in The Varsity and National Post provided no details about the findings beyond what the college released. Because the CPO’s Inquiries, Complaints, and Reports Committee chose not to refer the complaint to the Discipline Committee for a full hearing into whether professional misconduct had occurred — opting to instead resolve the matter by providing Peterson with advice and obtaining certain undertakings from him — the substance of the matter was kept confidential.
But CANADALAND has obtained the full 18-page decision by a three-person panel of the CPO’s Inquiries, Complaints, and Reports Committee, a document that comes to the following conclusion:
“After reviewing the investigation materials, including copies of Dr. Peterson’s email correspondence with [Samantha], the Panel formed concerns regarding Dr. Peterson’s use of email in general in communicating with [Samantha]. The Panel believed that its concerns regarding Dr. Peterson’s email communications could be characterized more broadly as either an issue regarding the quality of services, or as an issue regarding boundaries with clients.”
Upon reviewing Peterson’s clinical notes from his sessions with Samantha, the panel concluded that she did benefit from his services in a number of ways. Samantha, however, feels differently.
Taken as a whole, the document suggests a portrait of Peterson as a professional struggling to manage competing interests — raising concerns about the quality of his care, his respect for patients’ boundaries, and his safeguarding of patients’ privacy — during a period when his life rapidly changed.
In summary, here is what CANADALAND learned through our interview with Samantha, by reviewing her complaint and the CPO’s decision on it, and by verification through other sources:
Shortly before Jordan Peterson decided he couldn’t be both a media personality and a practicing psychologist at the same time, he cancelled sessions with patients, later claiming illness, while maintaining an appointment to appear on television; he responded to messages from patients with auto-reply emails which brought up the challenges of his burgeoning fame, directing recipients to send argumentative emails to his ideological opponents; he employed his wife to sort through emails from patients without first asking for their consent; he shared potentially identifying information about patients with other patients; and he twice visited the restaurant where Samantha worked, returning after she had implored him not to, having seemingly forgotten that she worked there.
When asked questions about Samantha’s allegations, the college’s findings, the management of his practice, and his public comments concerning accusations of “sexual impropriety,” Peterson wrote in an email to CANADALAND:
“The complaint you are referring to was submitted to the College last year. After their investigation, I was instructed to reconfigure the methods I was using to handle my email in the wake of the huge volume of messages I began to receive after the investigation was completed. I had already done so months before, in any case. The College took no other action, and I have a professional obligation to make no further comments.”
The next day, Peterson’s lawyer, Financial Post columnist and Newstalk 1010 host Howard Levitt, sent CANADALAND a letter, by both email and hand delivery, threatening to commence “proceedings for libel and injurious falsehood” if any of the information contained in the detailed questions to Peterson were published or circulated.
“Proceeding with such a story,” he wrote, “provides credence to scurrilous allegations by a disgruntled former patient/client whose reportage has already been thoroughly rejected.” (We have published the full letter at bottom.)
The letter included a printout of Peterson’s page from the CPO’s member’s directory — recently scrubbed of information concerning the professional misconduct allegation, at the conclusion of the undertaking’s 90-day period — describing it as “unblemished.”
It is not clear when, precisely, Jordan Peterson left his clinical practice as a psychologist.
In late March of this year, he told The Varsity, the University of Toronto’s main student newspaper, that he’d put his practice on hold more than a year earlier, “long before this undertaking was formulated, as the constant demands on my time made it impossible for me to continue properly.” (He had also taken a break from teaching classes at the university, where he is tenured, for the 2017-18 school year.)
In a brief phone call with CANADALAND last week, Peterson said that he stopped seeing clients in June 2017.
And to the National Post’s Christie Blatchford this past January, he said, “I haven’t been doing it this year because, well, I folded up my clinical practice because my life has become so hectic that I can’t. I have a rule for my practice, which is when I’m listening to you I don’t think of anything else. And so my life has to be in pretty good order for me not to drift. And I don’t want to drift during a session, because, first of all, it’s your time and second, because you make mistakes that way. And I don’t want to make mistakes.”
At her late-afternoon therapy session on September 27, 2016, Samantha claims Peterson was “distracted.”
“He made me sit there while he did an email,” she says. “And he said, ‘It can’t be helped.’”
Earlier that same day, he had published a lecture to YouTube, “Professor against political correctness: Part I,” and introduced the world to his opposition to the Canadian government’s Bill C-16, adding gender identity and gender expression to the prohibited grounds of discrimination in federal law. The Varsity reported on the video immediately, publishing an article at 1:33 p.m.; by the next evening, the National Post had picked up on the story, which would go global in the following weeks, growing from a campus conflagration to an international controversy.
Samantha had been seeing Peterson at his U of T office every other Wednesday since June 2016 — mostly to sort out issues concerning employment prospects, to help her move beyond restaurant jobs.
Things went well enough in their sessions that summer, but Samantha was developing an attraction to Peterson — what she has since come to understand as a case of transference, a well-known occurrence in therapy in which a patient unconsciously redirects feelings for a third person on to their therapist.
Samantha told Peterson about her feelings in a mid-October email, and he praised her for disclosing them, encouraging her to be open with him about such things and that it was something they would “definitely have to keep an eye on.” This left Samantha feeling vulnerable, but eager to address the issue in their next session.
Peterson cancelled her next appointment, set for October 26, in an email sent early that morning on which Samantha was bcc’d. He would later tell the CPO this was due to illness.
But that afternoon, Jordan Peterson was in TVO’s Toronto studios, taping an episode of The Agenda with Steve Paikin on the topic of “Genders, Rights and Freedom of Speech,” according to the episode’s producer and another person who appeared on it. The episode aired that night.
Peterson does not appear to have mentioned this to the CPO. In summarizing Peterson’s comments to them about his need to reschedule his patients’ appointments, the panel wrote that “Dr. Peterson acknowledged rescheduling one of [Samantha’s] appointments, and indicated that this was due to illness. He stated that he had to reschedule all of his clients’ appointments scheduled for that day.”
When Samantha responded to an email that offered new dates to meet, she received what appeared to be an auto-reply aimed at his growing number of supporters — attempting to mobilize a letter-writing campaign in his battle against political correctness at the university:
Hi
Thank you for writing.
At the moment, I am unable to keep up with my email correspondence, although I will try at some point in the future to respond personally.
If you are emailing me about current PC-related issues, you could consider sending your comments to the following individuals. Remember that the only way that any of this can be straightened out is through carefully articulated and reasonable arguments. I would say that the vast majority of the letters I have received have been exactly that, and it’s just what is needed. Assume rationality on the part of the recipients, and make a careful case. We want to play in the court of reason. CC a copy to me, if you wish:
The message then gave email addresses for seven U of T officials who had taken him to task for his stated refusal to refer to students by their preferred gender pronouns, or whose opinions on the matter he hoped to sway; he offered additional information about some of them, e.g., “authors of the letter censoring me” or “in charge of HR policies at the U of T, including the mandatory antiracism training demanded by the socalled Black Liberation Collective.”
Samantha continued to see Peterson through early December 2016. At times, she says, they would discuss how his growing celebrity was affecting him.
“He was pretty giddy about all this stuff. It was certainly no concern for me. Everything was focused on him.”
As Peterson became more embroiled in the public sphere, Samantha found herself confused by what she described as his erratic demeanour. The first time she saw him after confessing her attraction towards him, she found him harsh and forbidding, “a 180” from how he’d been in previous sessions. He did not bring up the fact that she had shared her feelings towards him. Peterson later explained this was because he placed greater urgency on other issues she had raised, which the CPO panel found to be a “reasonable course of action.”
Eventually, at a subsequent appointment, she brought it up herself, telling him she’d be leaving as a client because the transference wasn’t being dealt with.
That’s when she recalls Peterson becoming sheepish and coy, looking down and avoiding eye contact.
He encouraged her to play out the fantasy in her mind to see what the consequences would be. She recalls him saying, “Well, you can’t help who you’re attracted to.”
“He asked if I was scared I would be trouble for him,” she wrote in her complaint. “I said yep. He responded that lots of trouble has walked into that office and that there was more than one way to solve a problem.”
She says she found his tone ambiguous and suggestive.
“When I think about it now, the only thing I think is he was just using me to feed some need for validation,” she says, looking back. “That’s it.”
“Dr. Peterson,” the panel wrote, “believed that he appropriately dealt with the transference issue by discussing transference and encouraging [Samantha] to play out the fantasy scenario in her imagination, but to embed that in an imaginative dramatization of all the real-world consequences that would ensue.”
The panel agreed that his “approach to dealing with the issue of transference appeared appropriate in the circumstances.”
In their final session, in early December, Samantha says that Peterson “looked very, very ill,” had “lost a lot of weight,” and “drifted.” With possible reference to her upbringing, she claims he said, “You grew up wild, and now you need to be tamed.”
According to the CPO’s synopsis of his submissions, Peterson maintained that he worked with Samantha “in good faith” and “sought to provide high quality care at all times.” He also acknowledged “that he was briefly ill during December 2016, but states that his illness did not interfere with his clinical practice,” except for the one time he rescheduled their earlier appointment.
At 5:39 p.m. on Sunday, December 11, Peterson sent Samantha a brief email: “Would you please provide your phone number for my records? Thank you.”
An hour later, she did, despite having already given it in earlier messages when first arranging to become a client.
At 9:20 p.m., he sent an email on which she was bcc’d:
Subject: Dr Peterson on vacation until end of year
Hi
I’ve been in the middle of a political storm, as you may know. I’ve decided to take a break until the end of the year. So my clinical appointments are suspended until early January. I will be in touch late in December to make new appointments for the New Year.
Until then, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Dr Peterson
The message did not provide information for patients who might require assistance while he remained unavailable, such as referrals to other psychologists or links to mental health resources.
The CPO took issue with this omission in their findings.
“It appeared to the Panel that this might have been a significant period of time during which clients needing services may not have had access to their psychologist,” they wrote. “The Panel believed that remaining unavailable to clients for several concurrent weeks could place vulnerable clients at risk without having a comprehensive plan and mechanism in place to ensure clients are receiving needed services when such events arise.”
Two days after receiving this email, Samantha informed Peterson that she would not be returning as a client in the new year.
“Please accept my best wishes,” he wrote back.
The month after Samantha left therapy with Jordan Peterson, he showed up with his wife and some guests at the restaurant where she worked, while she was on duty as a server.
She says she’d told him the name of the restaurant chain many times, and in one of their final sessions, recalls him asking — and her telling him — at which of the chain’s locations she worked.
“I burst into tears in the back. Had to be taken off the floor early,” she wrote in her complaint. “My bosses have never seen any such behaviour from me and took careful note. I did not serve his table. I did not engage him in any way.”
They did not end up interacting at the restaurant, and Peterson told the CPO panel that he neither remembered she worked at that location nor saw her there. The panel found the explanation reasonable.
Shortly after Peterson’s visit to the restaurant, in the early hours of January 19, 2017, she wrote to politely remind him that she worked there.
“I understand I am no longer your client, but I would hope where I work would be of some consideration for you when eating out in the future. … I don’t have much, but I have that job. Please be more careful.”
The following week, she emailed a request for appointment receipts, so that she could seek reimbursement from her employer’s benefits program.
It was to the same Gmail address with which they’d communicated throughout their client-therapist relationship, but she received an apparent auto-reply:
I am trying to answer the majority of the emails that I am receiving. Many people are sending me carefully thought through, heartfelt and often profound letters, as well as words of support, which I appreciate and which have been practically very helpful. However, I literally cannot keep up. A few days occupied with other matters and I am hundreds of emails behind.
Please do not presume that your email is unwanted or unwelcome (or, indeed, in most cases, unread), and please do not feel slighted if you do not receive an answer. I would like to answer every letter but it is simply impossible to do that and to maintain my other obligations.
If you are writing a letter, and you would allow me to make it public, please indicate (and also whether you would want identifiers stripped away beforehand). I would like to make an accessible archive of such writing, partly because so much of what I have received is of such high quality.
Many of you have also been concerned about the volume of hate mail that I might be receiving. I have received a total of three negative letters, none of which could be truly considered hate mail. That’s it, for the last four months. Perhaps I have received something approximating two thousand letters of support over that time period. So that’s a pretty good ratio.
Truly, thank you for writing.
Sincerely,
Dr. Jordan B Peterson
Samantha didn’t hear back about the receipts and so tried again three days later.
She got the same auto-reply: “I am trying to answer the majority of the emails that I am receiving…”
She tried again the following week.
Again: “I am trying to answer the majority…”
She responded, “THIS IS A HORRIBLE WAY TO TREAT PEOPLE!!!!!”
Again: “I am trying to answer…”
In its decision, the CPO panel expressed concern that such auto-replies “may have invited the involvement of Dr. Peterson’s clients into his personal or academic matters unrelated to his clinical practice in an inappropriate manner” and that they “might reasonably be interpreted by a client as Dr. Peterson indicating that he was dealing with other matters and was not available to assist them.”
In mid-February, Samantha got in touch with U of T’s Department of Psychology, which forwarded her message to Peterson and left him a hard copy. At 11:40 that night, he emailed her: “I have been swamped with emails. Apologies for missing this. I will take care of this this weekend. I hope that you are doing well.”
“I am not doing well,” she replied the next day. “I doubt severely that it’s because you are so besot with emails that the ethics of your practice should go out the window. Looks like excuse. And shoddy footwork. And avoidance. And a lack of accountability. It isn’t okay to hurt me.”
Again, the auto-reply: “I am trying…”
That evening, Samantha says, Peterson and his wife showed up to her place of work a second time. She wasn’t there that night, but her manager — recalling her reaction on the previous occasion — sent her a text.
Although unsure whether her former therapist’s repeat visits were the result of an intention to somehow interact with her or inattention to what she had told him, Samantha says the anxiety of this was too much.
“I left my job because of it.”
Although it is not clear from the panel’s summaries of Peterson’s submissions whether he acknowledged attending the restaurant on more than one occasion, Samantha’s former manager confirms both visits.
Peterson told the panel that he would no longer go to that location.
Samantha learned in a January 2017 Toronto Life profile of Peterson that he referred to his wife Tammy as his “executive assistant” and that she handled all of his media requests. She wondered if that meant his wife had access to the intimate emails she had sent to him, and the thought of it humiliated her.
In an email exchange resolving Samantha’s receipt issue (he told her the appointment-booking software should have been issuing them automatically), Peterson made an attempt to patch things up and re-initiate therapy.
“If you would like to schedule an appointment again, I would ask that you cc [Tammy’s email address], if you would do so,” he wrote. “Don’t include any personal information. She is helping me sort out my email, and keep track of messages that I need to respond to and not miss. And you don’t have to cc her, if you feel that would constitute a barrier to continuing.”
Samantha shifted most of her communications with him to text message.
He eventually texted back in mid-March: “I don’t use text. That’s the reason for the delay. You have to email. It’s best to cc Tammy, who helps me schedule and keep track of what is vitsl [sic]. She knows nothing about you except that you are a client. I am, as I said, inundated with emails and other requests, so this is the way it has to be right now as I have no other solution.”
After sending several more texts without a response, Samantha made her complaint to the CPO on April 5, 2017.
Although Peterson told the panel his wife had no access to patients’ personal information, the panel shared some of Samantha’s concerns about privacy.
They wrote, “If Dr. Peterson’s wife, whom Dr. Peterson indicated was officially employed to assist with his practice, accessed his emails for scheduling purposes only, the Panel would not have formed any concerns. The Panel noted, however, that Dr. Peterson indicated that his wife was assisting him with sorting through his emails.”
They recommended that in the future, Peterson should inform patients that staff might have access to some of their personal information, and have patients sign consent forms to that effect.
The CPO panel also noted a different potential privacy violation that Samantha had not flagged: Peterson had sent her reminder emails that included his daily schedule of appointments, each timeslot accompanied by a patient’s initials. She was shown not just her own initials but those of several others.
The CPO wrote that they were “concerned this could lead to a potential breach of clients’ confidentiality…a client could recognize another client when arriving or leaving an appointment and would be able to discern that individual’s initials from Dr. Peterson’s emails.”
While Jordan Peterson no longer sees patients, his patients may have little choice but to see him. Their former therapist is now world-famous, and his former patients still play a role in his life and in his celebrity. Asked by The New York Times to cite an example of left-wing bullying, Peterson told this anecdote:
He says one patient had to be part of a long email chain over whether the term “flip chart” could be used in the workplace, since the word “flip” is a pejorative for Filipino.
“She had a radical-left boss who was really concerned with equality and equality of outcome and all these things and diversity and inclusivity and all these buzzwords and she was subjected to — she sent me the email chain, 30 emails about whether or not the word flip chart was acceptable,” Mr. Peterson says.
The details of that story appear specific enough that they could easily identify his ex-patient to her boss and to any colleagues who were aware of the “flip chart” exchange. CANADALAND asked Peterson if he had permission from this former patient to use her story publicly or if he was concerned about her being identified. He did not answer the question.
Samantha does not know if any of Peterson’s other patients might have had similar experiences. She doesn’t know if anyone else has read her intimate emails to him. She doesn’t know if he visited her workplace as a sort of post-treatment communication, or if he simply forgot that she worked there. And she still doesn’t know, when her former psychologist publicly blasted three people for “baseless accusations” to a crowd of his fans, if she was one of them.
What she is certain of is that she should not have been made to worry about any of these questions.
“It’s been probably one of the most painful, horrible things,” Samantha says of the nearly two years of her life since first meeting Peterson, including the difficult CPO complaint process.
“There were so many avenues to avoid this kind of pain for a person. So many places where I could have been taken care of, right? But none of these measures were employed to make sure I was okay. None of them.”
http://www.canadalandshow.com/how-jorda ... -practice/
by JackRiddler » Fri Jun 01, 2018 2:26 pm
guruilla » Fri Jun 01, 2018 12:36 pm wrote:There's no doubt the MSM is heavily promoting JBP; there's also no doubt it's mainly demonizing him in the process, which is as valid a way to promote someone as lionizing them (to be fair, it's both, sometimes even by the same pub. as with NYTs two famous articles).
We saw something similar with Assange.
Ironically, the one indisputably good thing about the JBP phenomenon - that it opened up a window for long, considered, conversations in the mainstream
- is the thing his opponents seem most determined to sabotage (witness the Munk debatedebacle). SJW-types don't want discussion
This is the very climate that made necessary a JBP (phenomenon) in the first place, just as deep state secrecy & skullduggery made Wikileaks necessary
he responded to messages from patients with auto-reply emails which brought up the challenges of his burgeoning fame, directing recipients to send argumentative emails to his ideological opponents;
by JackRiddler » Sun Jun 03, 2018 7:17 pm
by American Dream » Wed Jun 06, 2018 8:26 am
by liminalOyster » Wed Jun 06, 2018 11:01 am
Richard Poplak sets Jordan B Peterson’s house in order: a (scorching) review of 12 Rules For Life
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
Jordan B Peterson
Allen Lane, 2018
This is just the fucking worst.
Imagine a self-help book written by the Darth Maul of tenured campus bad boys, an act of trahison des clercs so severe that it calls into question the entire five-thousand-year academic project—a book that seeks to make accessible to a general audience a mélange of mysticism, philosophy, psychology and dietary recommendations, assembled into a package so intellectually low-cal that it would be hilarious were it not basically a to-do list for a generation of tiki torch-wielding neo-Klansmen.
I speak here, of course, of 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos, by Jordan B Peterson, the once-obscure University of Toronto Psychology professor who acquired a legion of super-fans after posting a series of self-help talks on YouTube. Peterson’s profile went supernova after he put his stamp on the identity politics debate with a lecture called ‘Identity Politics & The Marxist Lie of White Privilege’, which would be note-perfect as a Key & Peele sketch, but is incomprehensible as anything else. His YouTube channel, as the new book’s Introduction reminds us, has many millions of views; and the Publisher of this publication [Publisher’s note: Poplak means The JRB] reckons his sales figures are comparable to that of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century [Publisher’s note: they’re probably better on a year-on-year basis], which makes Peterson that rarest of things in our Age of Idiocracy: one of precisely two bonafide intellectual superstars.
And what sort of intellectual does the Idiocracene usher forth? The kind that writes a self-help book for assholes, basically. 12 Rules for Life is a Gladwellian shotgun blast of childhood anecdotes, Bowdlerized mythology, common sense behavioural techniques, grossly undercooked philosophical concepts (Heidegger’s ideas get a proper reaming here), along with a soupçon of mystical Christianity, a dash of Eastern religious-type stuff—oh, and emoticons. (¯\_(ツ)_/¯) It’s all ready-made for the Trump era, where resentment of ‘postmodern’ campus lefties and their intersectional, Black Lives Matter, materialist tendencies have become fodder for prime-time alt-right outrage.
Peterson honed his persona on television, so it’s not entirely ad hominem to say that the author photo on the jacket offers a stark warning. The Professor is depicted with his chin sinisterly raised as he gazes up at what I imagine to be a classical sculpture he has never before encountered—as if that were even possible. The pretension is ramped up over the course of the Foreword, which is written by Dr Norman Doidge, author of the bestselling [Publisher’s note: yup] The Brain That Changes Itself, who offers an encomium of Peterson so effusive that the book instantly takes on the air of a self-published manuscript written by a lay intellectual who once audited a Phil 101 class at the Winnipeg Technical Institute, circa 1983. But how’s this for some insight into the man the New York Times describes as ‘the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now’:
‘They had art,’ says Doidge of Peterson and his wife’s middle-class Toronto home:
[B]ut they were overwhelmed by a huge collection of original Socialist Realist paintings of Lenin and the early Communists commissioned by the USSR. Not long after the Soviet Union fell, and most of the world breathed a sigh of relief, Peterson began buying this propaganda for a song online. Paintings lionizing the Soviet revolutionary spirit completely filled every single wall, the ceilings, and even the bathrooms. The paintings were not there because Peterson had any totalitarian sympathies, but because he wanted to remind himself of something he knew he and everyone would rather forget: that over a hundred million people were murdered in the name of utopia.
Yeeeaah, I’m not so sure about that line of reasoning. While I’m no shrink, Peterson actually is—a shrink, I mean. And I wonder whether he’d buy that nonsense from a patient. Why not just ask Siri to send a daily ‘Lenin was bad news’ reminder? Or—even better—why not just remember it inside your own head, along with a decent banana bread recipe and your wedding anniversary?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Indeed, a staunch Tyrannophilia runs through the book like a fugue—the tyranny of the Self, the tyranny of the Ideal Individual, who must take his place at the centre of Being (as per Heidegger, thank you very much) and at the centre of the mystical sign of the cross (Peterson experiences this motif in a dream), which represents ‘suffering and transformation’.
‘How could the world be freed from the terrible burden of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other?’ asks the Professor. ‘The answer is this: through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path.’
This sounds like a man who has to walk through snow to get to his university office.
How did Peterson become such an effective Iron John bromide machine? He is a clinical psychologist, a professor of psychology, and a renaissance-style polymath, which in his case means cinching seven or eight basket-weaving disciplines together into one spectacular black hole of knowledge, a negation of the very principles of rigorous scholarship. Peterson appears to have read widely, which is to say: not deeply. Many academic bullshit merchants have done queasy work jamming thinly understood Big Concepts into stocking-stuffer books, but never have they tried to force Charles Darwin, Carl Jung, Jesus Christ, Goethe, Dante, Erich Neumann, Yeats, and literally hundreds of others into a fucking Huffington Post listicle.
The book, if you hadn’t picked this up from its title, is divided into twelve chapters, each concerned with a Rule for Life, such as Rule 6: Set Your House in Order Before You Criticize the World, or Rule 11: Do Not Bother Children When They are Skateboarding. It has a self consciously old-timey feel about it, like a hipster barbershop or a cocktail list at a TripAdvisor-approved speakeasy. This serves as a major clue concerning Peterson’s politics: nostalgia is the gateway drug to hyper-conservativism. ‘Hopes can be disappointed,’ noted the conservative intellectual Mark Lilla. ‘Nostalgia is irrefutable.’
And it’s dangerous. The obsession with archetypal masculinity, and ancient (inherently conservative) social structures, is perhaps the most unwelcome feature of the new right: it quickly takes on the contours of a death cult. But to have truly lived in this terrible age—to have properly grasped the mendacious insanity of the identity politics double negative—you really have to read Jordan Peterson in South Africa. Come ye faithful scorned North American males, come and shoot an elephant in one of our many hunting lodges, your trigger hand steadied by the musky-smelling game ranger in his khaki kortbroek as the shot rings out over the savannah. Then read Peterson with a gin and tonic in hand, watching as the sun sets over Aafrikah.
Somewhat disappointingly, Peterson’s views are less ecstatically or mystically repressed-homoerotic than you’d think. They’re simply misogynistic: his empathy, for women in particular, regarding women in particular, stops at the tip of his pen. But he does believe men are under threat, and that this poses existential civilisational difficulties. Order in the archetypal narratives, he reminds us, is represented by the male; chaos by the female. (It is literally too painful to quote him on this.) Nature—which he defines, per Darwin, as that which selects—picked the traditional family structure for mammals over two-hundred million years ago. It worked for sabre-toothed tigers in 75,000 BCE; it must work for Homo sapiens in 2018.
Should we not question some of these verities? Do we need to live like cave-folk in order to find happiness? Peterson doesn’t seem to believe such interrogations are necessary, mostly because of something called ‘dominance hierarchies’, which are the primary ‘facts’ of nature. ‘The dominance hierarchy is not capitalism. It’s not communism, either, for that matter,’ asserts Peterson.
It’s not the military-industrial complex. It’s not the patriarchy—that disposable, malleable, arbitrary cultural artifact. It’s not even human creation; not in the most profound sense. It is instead a near-eternal aspect of the environment, and much of what is blamed on these more ephemeral manifestations is a consequence of its unchanging existence.
Well. If, like me, you get the sense that this shit runs jauntily alongside National Socialism, fear not, because remember!—Peterson disdains ideology. He’s far more interested in the mystical proto-scientific guff that, hey, if you’re up for it, provides the scaffolding behind toxic ideologies.
One way to sum up Peterson is to call him Hobbesian, which is an insult to Hobbes, so let’s not. That said, without rules—his rules, to be specific—the world is a hard zero-summy type of place, with alphas and betas and gammas all vying for the same hot chicks, the alphas coming out on top, so to speak, every time. He and his acolytes tend to characterise empathy, both in the social and political realms, as a form of moral relativism—one of the great bugaboos of the nineteen-eighties neo-conservative movement, resuscitated here as a negation of the absolute virtues that are inherent in the hero narrative and other archetypal ‘maps of meaning’ (to borrow the title of Peterson’s first book). The intellectual bear trap here should be obvious: that in the social and political realms, absolute virtues are not applied absolutely. Peterson steps into the trap and keeps on walking.
It’s worth noting, though, that the interrogation of the ‘power relations’ inherent in functioning societies—i.e., not mythical or archetypal fan fiction-created societies—tends to be a necessary endeavour, largely because it steers us towards virtuousness, not away from it. Virtue is not hardwired into us and then ignored by Millennials who are on their phones all the time; nor is virtue some latent human power waiting to be uncovered by the application of twelve pithy rules. In the real world, virtue is encoded into our societies through both custom and its political extension, laws—which in turn take their power from precedent, and which in most cases, due to various and manifold inequities, are not applied equally, and not with equal rigour. In other words, our social systems, along with our mores, evolve; they are also fallible.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In Peterson’s construction, moral relativism—along with its handmaidens, ideology and nihilism (and by extension despair)—take root because we ignore these fundamentals, and are thus constantly forgetting archetypal notions of virtue. Owing to the complexities of our modern social relations, all sorts of weird people have got it into their heads that they can circumvent the natural order—hence transgender bathrooms and black woman playing presidents on the telly. Viewed this way, such acts of social chutzpah do not represent transformation or progress, but an upending of and an assault on Nature.
I’ll spare you the pseudoscience that follows, but perhaps the most risible aspect of Peterson’s outlook is that social relations can’t be governed by kindness, nor can they be tweaked for fairness. It’s been proven that serotonin can be self-administered by a simple change in attitude, he tells us, so stop complaining about being discriminated against and change your posture. (This is an actual Petersonism, I shit you not.) It’s not for us to restructure society, or to moderate and perhaps improve on, say, the Scandinavian welfare state. (Peterson wouldn’t lower himself to such base political considerations.) It’s for individuals to pick themselves up, pull up their socks and, as per Rule 1, ‘Stand up straight with your shoulders back’.
In other words, stop whining and get on with the hero’s journey, you big wusses.
For Peterson, as for many of his followers, egalitarianism is merely a gateway drug for USSR-style communism. The problem, according to this crew, is not the fascism inherent in white male resentment, but the fascism that arises from trying to ameliorate the effects of white male dominance. No ‘privilege’, per se, exists—just a postmodern neo-Marxist construction that attempts to realign privilege, to unmoor nature from itself.
Peterson, it should now be clear, is a crank of drunk uncle proportions. But he is also the ‘the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now’, which should not be mistaken for an exaggeration. It’s all caved in on itself, the Western world and its various satellites, in their various stages of orbit decay or escape velocity—we’re all Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angelus Novus’, gazing at the detritus of history, blown back to the future by the force of the mess. And there’s Jordan Peterson, waiting for us with his rulebook, reminding us to eat a decent breakfast, to pull our flies up, and to refuse futzing with pronouns to accommodate the transgendered.
12 Rules For Life is paleo-intellectualism crossed with a Hallmark card. We’re all going to die in a ball of fire.☹
Richard Poplak is a filmmaker and journalist. His latest book is Continental Shift: A Journey into Africa’s Changing Fortunes, co-authored with Kevin Bloom. Follow him on Twitter.
https://johannesburgreviewofbooks.com/2 ... -for-life/
by JackRiddler » Fri Jun 08, 2018 3:18 pm
by guruilla » Sat Jun 09, 2018 7:36 pm
liminalOyster » Wed Jun 06, 2018 11:01 am wrote:Blue ribbon contender among staunch competition for best JBP takedown. Not 100% endorsed but close to perfect in its way.
It’s worth noting, though, that the interrogation of the ‘power relations’ inherent in functioning societies—i.e., not mythical or archetypal fan fiction-created societies—tends to be a necessary endeavour, largely because it steers us towards virtuousness, not away from it. Virtue is not hardwired into us and then ignored by Millennials who are on their phones all the time; nor is virtue some latent human power waiting to be uncovered by the application of twelve pithy rules. In the real world, virtue is encoded into our societies through both custom and its political extension, laws—which in turn take their power from precedent, and which in most cases, due to various and manifold inequities, are not applied equally, and not with equal rigour. In other words, our social systems, along with our mores, evolve; they are also fallible.
by guruilla » Sat Jun 09, 2018 7:43 pm
Jordan Peterson is Mapping and Modeling the Masculine to Multitudes of Men
As with all my criticisms of Peterson, what follows is not a reaction against his political incorrectness or his challenge to current ideological givens, almost all of which I am in accord with. Rather my truck is with the sorts of radical solutions Peterson is offering up —frequently half-baked and half-cocked—and, above all, with the confused philosophical, psychological, sociopolitical, and metaphysical or spiritual presumptions they are nested in.
The Persuasive Power of Charisma
One thing we do know from history is that men who are able to exert a powerful influence over large numbers of people are invariably seen at the time as benevolent by those they influence, even while history (i.e., given some distance from the period) often testifies otherwise.
Cultish behavior—and whole movements—is contingent on the persuasive power of charisma. Charisma is a largely unquestioned currency in our culture. Mostly I think this is because, when we are under its sway, we conflate it with virtue. Yet there is no more evidence of a correlation between charisma and virtue than there is of one between virtuous words and virtuous deeds.
A New Order of Monsters
Nature abhors a vacuum, and where chaos and incoherence reigns in the cultural debate, the need for order—even the slightly simplistic and moralistic order that Peterson is offering—increases.
Based on much of what he says, it’s fairly clear to me that Peterson is appealing to the young male in limbo by both mapping the hero’s journey and attempting to model it to him. He has said that he wishes to “encourage” people, to instill them with courage, and that as courage increases, so does the capacity for heroic action.
There is an inherent danger in this, because it creates a sort of infinity loop that potentially goes nowhere: if Peterson’s heroic journey is to become a public figure who proselytizes about the hero’s journey, and who inspires others to follow his example and embark on their own hero’s journey, he risks doing little more than inviting them to imitate him and follow his 12 rules to worldly success. But there can only be one Jordan Peterson.
Ironically, while Peterson admires Nietzsche, who wrote “Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster,” Peterson advocates becoming a monster (owning one’s monstrous nature) in order to battle monsters. So far, I have not heard him address the danger of such reasoning, namely that it might lead to the unleashing of a new order of monsters into the world, in a kind of Shadow succession drama.
This is implicit also in his insistence on a primary polarity of order and chaos (and his apparent leaning towards order/masculinity), which I think is a largely arbitrary (false) dichotomy. One (wo)man’s order is another man’s chaos.
A Dangerous Assumption
Peterson turns to mythic narratives (Jungian archetypes and Bible stories) to extrapolate the desired social order, on the assumption that this is the purpose and the origin of these stories. This is a dangerous assumption, because the stories in question are about realities that transcend the social—and even the temporal—order of being.
Myths are a means to see beyond the world. They are not ways to reorder the world to make the myths more literally true or practical, and in the process render the world more mythical. This, at base, is the totalitarian instinct: to impose absolute realities (those that pertain to eternal truths) onto the relative sphere of temporal (social, human) existence.
What his most vocal critics fear is that Peterson is either a witting or an unwitting bellwether for a reemergence of archaic, mythopoetic quasi-religious or occultist drives historically associated with fascism; or at least for a lot of semi-organized, orgiastically inspired young men violently imposing their idea of order onto what they perceive as chaos. In the wider sense of using force to solve problems—which would include the “antifa” movement)—this is essentially what “fascism” does.
Jordan Peterson, SJW?
“Hailing myth and dreams as the repository of fundamental human truths, they became popular because they addressed a widely felt spiritual hunger: of men looking desperately for maps of meaning in a world they found opaque and uncontrollable. It was against this (eerily familiar) background . . . that demagogues emerged so quickly in twentieth-century Europe.”
~Pankaj Mishra, “Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism”
As an example, admittedly minor but nonetheless illustrative: Peterson’s response to the New York Review of Books article quoted above was peppered with expletives, insults, and a threat about how he’d “happily slap” the author around if they were in the same room together. Was this a case of Peterson semi-consciously modeling his idea of what true masculinity looks like?
Anything but contrite, Peterson defended his behavior afterwards as appropriate, most of all because Mishra had made a racist slur against Peterson’s Native American friend. Ironically, Peterson was behaving exactly like a social justice warrior, some of whom openly advocate violence against racists and fascists. His self-justifications suggested he was in accord with their view, and that, to paraphrase Harry Callaghan, “There is nothing wrong with slapping as long as the right people get slapped.”
By choosing to focus on the most offensive element in Mishra’s article ~ or the most politically incorrect ~ Peterson deflected attention (starting with his own) away from the more serious arguments in the piece, destroying them ad hominem, not by intelligent counter-argument.
The Measure of a Man
At the very least, aren’t the historical trends Mishra cites worth factoring into Peterson’s project? Peterson’s claim to be actively looking for critical dialogues to help him find the weaknesses in his model suggests he would be open to at least considering this argument. Instead, he hurls cuss words and threatens violence.
It was as if his response were designed to fan the flames of panic which his project had already kindled in so many “liberal” hearts and minds. At the same time, it served to stoke the very same coals of moral indignation—and the notion that it can be most honestly expressed via threats of violence—that he claimed to be trying to dampen down. Something similar occurred when he was quoted by the New York Times prescribing enforced monogamy as a solution to involuntary (male) celibacy.
Maybe Peterson’s engine of cultural revivification runs on nitroglycerine?
Peterson can talk all he wants about trying to restore order and initiate dialogues between opposing viewpoints. But if the result is an increase in polarization, then it suggests Peterson’s idea of masculinity and heroism may be overly dependent on proving how many dragons he can slay.
It seems tragically bound up with an unconscious, compulsive evocation of monsters.
https://auticulture.wordpress.com/2018/ ... on-answer3
by liminalOyster » Sat Jun 09, 2018 7:57 pm
guruilla » Sat Jun 09, 2018 7:36 pm wrote:liminalOyster » Wed Jun 06, 2018 11:01 am wrote:Blue ribbon contender among staunch competition for best JBP takedown. Not 100% endorsed but close to perfect in its way.
It's a fun read but it struck me as 50% performance art, ... isn't much by way of thoughtful argumentation, and too much ideological posturing by half, suggesting someone who knows they are preaching to their own choir.
by Sounder » Sun Jun 10, 2018 6:18 am
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