Hi everyone I'm from Ryan the BigBrainChungus podcast. I'm gonna be making an episode focusing on dismantling some of the Jordan Peterson ideas on Saturday. So far I'm gonna focus on his idea that hierarchies are natural and organized by competence as the central thesis of the episode. Are there any other arguments out there that you all think are crucial to critiquing his politics? I'm still doing the research part of the episode so any good lefty take downs of his work that anyone could recommend I would appreciate it. Thanks in advance.
One thing that is important to understanding him is his idea of truth being what best serves society, which resulted in that particularly odd talk with Sam Harris.
I think it's clear that Peterson doesn't really believe in God, and has given up on truly believing in him as something existing in the way most people would understand something to exist. But he cannot give up Christianity because of his idea that Christian values are necessary for the society he wishes to live in, and he does not wish to pull these values out of Christianity, but instead find a way to salvage the whole thing.
This can be seen in what his whole academic career is based around; mythical tales that supposedly can be found through time in every society, with particular moral learnings attached, and so are given a universal characteristic of being good and true by the fact that they exist in every society alone. This allows the "truth" to be what can replicate these universal ancient wisdoms best through western society, and this happens to be Christianity.
The core of Peterson is really his attempt to solve his existential dilemma of lost faith, doing so by making Christianity a part of something larger; tying all history and spirituality from across the world into one universal meaningful whole.
He also has this weird thing about wanting to avoid being dominated by alpha 2 year olds and 5 year olds, he keeps mentioning this in his talks and in that one longer part he wrote about a kid trying to dominate him and his daughter at a playground where he fantazised about assaulting the kid.
Also he keeps talking about how pain is the only true thing that lets you know that you really exist and that it is unlike any other feeling. He has a negative philosophical worldview where avoiding pain is the most essential thing, and I'm not at all surprised that this could lead him to using drugs and into deep depression, not to mention creating this whole bizarre world view of universal truths to give meaning to existence.
Thank you I really appreciate your comment. I think his attempt to resurrect a dead god puts him at ends with Sam Harris. I find it fascinating that a lot of the new atheists types went from calling themselves militant atheists to Christian atheists. I hope to expand on the what you mentioned. Thank you I will be sure to include it in my show notes.
I think the best thing you can do, if you can stomach it, is watch a couple of his "Maps of meaning" lectures and notice the kinds of things he likes to repeat and focus on. It is very fascinating to me that his very odd ideas that were not popular in mainstream or in academics eventually became widely known after his rise to fame from the whole "refusing to use pronouns" thing. I'm sure someone could follow his path from a rather respected clinical psychologist to what is really more of an anthropologist through his career, while at the same time moving from being a more typical academic in psychology, to being completely niche in what he later worked on.
Thanks for the tip. I will try to endure the pain of his lectures.
I would recommend looking at some of Cass Eris's stuff. She is a cognative psychologist and she has hours of videos looking at Jordan Peterson.
I've recently watched
- Hakim https://youtu.be/aQ3RL3WZaXg
- Hakim https://youtu.be/XXwUaUf_pOs
- Empire Files w Richard Wolff https://youtu.be/liT7e5M6XfY
https://youtu.be/42eJu22scY8
OP check out this video from a Marxist. It might give you some ideas.
