Need a plate of generic, insipid platitudes with a giant helping of bad science and misogyny?
Most of his fans have never really read his more academic works (like the one with the grandma sex dream). So, I guess they like his vibe. But his vibe is weepy alcoholic. What's so great about that?
I recently had a fairly high fever and became pretty emotional over absolutely mundane shit. JBP talks and acts like has a brain damaging fever every day of his life.
I don't know whether he recognizes it but 20 something disenfranchised dudes are uniquely subsceptible to aphorisms without context and if there's one thing JBP does well it's that
He's a university professor. That's their bread and butter. It's a skill they learn to prevent undergrads from nodding off during their lectures.
Weepy alcoholic is coded tragically cognoscent in America.
I hate it when people bitch about the left "not having gurus to help lost young people" or whatever when the right's so-called gurus are worthless sacks of skin like Peterson. Also I'm here because I - in very emphatic terms - do not want a guru.
it's really annoying because personal growth is not even remotely relevant to politics. The left can't "make you a man" because that's something you do on your own. It implies a specific set of ideas about maturity, relationships, and various other things which are your own problem. The right wants to fit you into the hierarchy, so they'll make you a certain thing to fit. We don't, so it's your job to figure out if you want to be a man or a woman or something else, and what it means to reach that. We don't give leftist dating advice because it doesn't make sense, we're not writing a script for you to follow. Just respect potential partners and maybe one will become a partner you respect. Whether you start a family or find someone isn't our political project because we don't want to make you pump out kids for the factories that obey authority.
because that's something you do on your own
It may also be something best done with others, because isolated insulated alienated individuals tend to become reactionary too.
Although yes, it should be done as a group, and it would be better done with a group of leftists because they're more likely to have a positive view of women, minority, work, mental health and so on, it's just not something that needs to be done as a political project. Like, religious leftists should pray together, or leftists with children should share child care tips, but that doesn't make it a leftist goal, y'know?
It doesn't, and it doesn't have to be a "pure" leftist goal for it to matter at an intersectional level. How good is a community if it's made up of atomized individuals lacking in connection with each other? How much "pure" leftism is possible with a bunch of "I am the Main Character, everyone else is NPCs, fuck you got mine" contamination?
I don't see your point. Yeah, that's not great, but it's not a political project and there's not a way to provide specifically masculinity from a leftist perspective. I see a big part of leftist change in society to liberate people from the alienating idea that they're supposed to grow up into anything in particular.
What you're demanding isn't possible by the very boundaries that you demand that it must fit in. If you're stifling my case, the same limitations make yours basically impossible.
You're saying it must be a "political project" in some rigid way but at the same time you want some sort of "make boys feel better about themselves" thing which if isolated and non-intersectional is not a political project goal.
"make boys feel better about themselves"
I don't want something like that, I think inherently the goals of leftist liberation make people feel less pressure to correctly present a gender role, so the utility of a guru like JBP vanishes. You don't need to learn to play your role, because you decide what it means to be you. So we don't need to teach boys how to act, we're by our actions creating an environment where that won't be a problem. The interrim between current world and that world won't be flawless, but that's something best addressed by non-explicitly leftist groups. It's not something "the party" or whatever needs to work on
I'm not disagreeing with you there as much as I'm saying you set excessively rigid parameters for what qualifies as political action in what is an intersectional society and people.
The gurus normal people trust have this pesky tendency to have advanced degrees and call themselves things like "doctors" and "therapists" as if either is better than being screamed at by a car salesman in a room full of sweaty divorces.
The problem is the sell outs. The vaccines cause autism guy, scientists who publish about global warming being fake, Peterson himself has multiple degrees. Unfortunately in this day and age you even have to vet people with qualifications to make sure they arnt the jack ass who disagrees with the remaining 99.99% of the scientific community.
Chopra has a PHD and is a doctor, he'll never tell you that it's in endocrinology and not Quantum Physics however...
Yeah, the lifestyle coach is an inherently evil breed. Unhappy young people don't need a talking head to tell them to buy the book and listen to the podcast, they need friends. Even just a discord where you can get relationship advice from people who have actually been in a healthy relationship is way more valuable.
The closest the Left has to a guru is the Spirit Science guy (He's surprisingly progressive for someone who thinks jews are from space), and I still can't recommend that in good concious unless you need a short cartoon to explain a supernatural concept. The show's decent on Spirituality, it's tying it to Science that causes the problems...
It's almost like Religion and Science are entirely different concepts exploring different ideas, and shouldn't be merged together into one unified force anymore than my keyboard and my dresser!
Mom: clean your room
Teen: shut up femoid!
JP: you need to clean your room to slay the dragon of chaos
Teen: OMG so true!
I used to like him. I fell for the crap. To my 16 year old brain what he said made a lot of sense. He had a handful of good points, and it made me believe the rest of the shit he peddled.
I see him now, I look back on how I hung onto his words like a lost lamb, and I can only facepalm.
I realised that the only thing he is good at is marketing, not psychology...
I'm still pissed that because he badly quotes and misinterprets Jung all the time, people assume Jung is bullshit by association.
I think that Jung is bullshit for reasons entirely unrelated to JBP. His ideas are interesting, but not scientifically sound.
"Lifestyle coaches" are almost entirely facets of reactionary cryptofascist bullshit, and that sucks.
You need to find yourself, you try to let someone else find you for you and you're inviting trouble.
Never take advice on personal responsibility from a guy who intentionally put himself in a coma to avoid taking responsibility for his addiction to a narcotic with zero medicinal properties.
It's so weird for me that he seemed surprised that benzos are, in fact, highly addictive with severe withdraw symptoms. Isn't he a psychologist and potentially someone who is allowed to prescribe such drugs?
Probably thought pill addiction was just a moral failure so couldn't possibly apply to him.
This kind of post is what I was hoping to leave behind with Reddit.
You're lucky you can downvote it lol
Although I'm hoping to find a lobster taking the bait when I scroll downthread in a moment here so it might be good for comedy at least
I like how every year he somehow gets worse. I didn't think he could descend further from professor so annoying he refuses to call students by their preferred names. After the Zizek debate where he had no clue what he was talking about, he's become like a Charles Dickens character. He's like a crazy uncle kept in the attic because he's lost his mind from laudanum.
I hate Zizek but boy did Zizek make Peterson look bad in that debate (though, it’s not hard)
My favorite part is where Zizek, in good faith, asked Peterson to name a few of the Marxist professors. (Peterson at this point of the debate had been saying academia had been seized by Marxist malefactors). Peterson couldn't name any.
Zizek offered the name David Harvey, a highly influential British Marxist professor known for his commentary on Capital. Peterson had never heard of him.
Haven't heard about him in ages. I just assumed Joe Rogan had nicked his audience.
I just want to say that if you are/were a young man, and found some value in some of what this guy was saying to you...thats's OK. Don't feel bad, or embarrassed or mad at yourself or whatever. We are all learning all the time, and doubly so when we're young. Never think that you can't take what is useful and reject what isn't. Fuck knows there is plenty to reject about what this dude says!
Something something broken clocks.
"Clean your room, bucko" is advice many people's moms tried to give them but too many of them had to hear it from a cryptofascist crank LARPing as the world's father figure before they listened to it.
I get it. I'm actually thinking of a particular friend of mine. He lost his father at 14, and his mom isn't the greatest parent. He told me Peterson was kind of exactly what he needed at a tough time in his life. Fortunately, he's always been a smart kid, and saw through the toxic shit. Five years later and he's a queer communist! I guess I'm just saying that if you really needed to hear "clean your room" from a father figure, and it helped you... don't feel bad that Peterson was the guy who filled that role at the time. Obviously I'm speaking to people who have grown to see him differently now.
I get that Gus Fring look every time I hear "Hey, have you heard of Jordan Petersen? Let me show you one of his videos"
"Guru" is a terrible word that applies almost universally to rich grifter assholes.
