Jordan Peterson - Without Religion There's No Art & Poetry (Secular Talk) - General

How about the part where it is reasonably demonstrated Peterson is either knowingly misleading people or just has no idea what he's talking about whenever he mentions neomarxism and postmodernism? How about the part where it is said that the only way to reasonably understand conclusively what he means by his use of words at all is to watch 10+ lectures and some written material, which is either a manipulative rhetorical tactic or a failure in expressing philosophy?

This is a high energy thread. I was jesting before, but I would like to know what the anti Peterson folks have to say in regards to my earlier question... minus the multiple choice. Why do you think people agree with Peterson? Why do people who resonate with the fella feel the need to defend him on a forum such as this?

To put it bluntly, because Doctor science psychology PhD man validates their already shitty views and they'll take all the scraps they can get.

Same reason people defend any other self help charlatan. He knows how to appeal to emotion while sounding intellectual without actually having much substance. He's able to give some crazy ideas, like his Wahhabist view of women, a veneer of legitimacy that makes him seem above the garden variety nutjob. He's a good manipulator, that's all there is too it.

Politics have been stagnant in the "everything's ok" spectrum for a while. It's only been recently, arguably with ISIS and the presidential candidacy of Trump, that people became more invested again and they were subject to misinformation and inflammation from pretty much every angle. Identity politics have become much bigger as well and all these factors contribute to create a skewed world view of oppression, if you hadn't been in the loop for years prior and if you aren't dedicated enough to do your research rather than believing everything you're told. From the perspective of the average right winger, all you ever hear about is how some SJW said that all white people should die and you read all these propagandized Facebook memes from right wing outlets, ranging from free market supporters to literal nazi blogs, that talk about how progressive politics are going to lead to "ethnic natives" being replaced by ISIS and how European politicians are cowards and traitors to their country for not deporting them all and how you're being silenced by the bourgeois and progressive academia because everyone else calls you an asshole for being so inflammatory. Somewhere along these lines, YouTube skeptics and the alt-right showed up. Where Jordan Peterson fits in is as a moderating voice. He has an extremely reductive and regressive view of history, social development and activism but he isn't a literal nazi and can put up a civil enough facade to not come across as a complete lunatic. Coupled with his self-help work, that makes him very appealing not just in the way of having loyalty to "the man who helped you salvage your life" but also because no conservative wants to be associated with mouth-frothing radicals who want to commit genocide. In terms of his conduct and ideology, Peterson is very much an old school conservative (free market supporter, religious, blind trust in authority, hates communism) who has an irrational parasite inside of him, i.e. he one day read on the news that an SJW said all white men should die and he immediately decided that the entire left was going to literally end western civilization (which according to old school conservatives is just the US in the 50s). The way I see it, alt-right pundits exploit the insecurities that have naturally popped up due to the global society we live in and sell isolationism and tribalism as the solution to a problem that has been accompanied by a technological renaissance, fostering cooperation and innovation between nations for the past 40-something years, bringing possibilities and convenience to even the lower class. The problem is that people are more and more worried about becoming obsolete in a world, where the competition is vast and scattered across the globe and automation and service jobs replace manual labor and the internet exacerbates the perception of that because it's like this for everyone. And that's kinda the root of all the fears of immigrants stealing our jobs, replacing our culture. It's not really a thing motivated by smug superiority (for most people anyway) but a real tangible fear of losing your livelihood, being unable to climb the social ladder because there is no space for you left. The problem with that line of thinking is that instead of directing their protests towards the people who are responsible for keeping the nation comfortable during these transitional periods (*cough* THE GOVERNMENT *cough*), conservatives like to pin the blame on powerless foreign actors (like immigrants) or liberal shadow organizations that conspire against them. For capitalism, globalism is the natural evolution. Either you have planned economy or the companies operating in your country will set up worldwide trading networks to guarantee the most price-efficient production pipelines and highest possible profit margin working with the best possible talent the entire world has to offer. If you lock yourself out of that, you are an idiot and the nation will stagnate and die, which is why no business owner gives a shit about politics because they're making hella cash doing business abroad unless they're assholes who want to make hella cash by working no-risk markets like real estate abroad while also wanting to keep foreigners out of setting up shop in their turf while also being misled by biased media exposure and fearmongering about terrorism and brown people to keep their shitty world view intact. TL;DR: Jordan Peterson's popularity comes from a mixture of societal developments leaving people doubtful of their prosperity, biased media exposure riling people up against foreigners and progressives and Peterson being both trusted for his self-help work and exploiting the aformentioned doubt and media exposure to make $80k/month and to make people feel justified in their hatred, a hatred that he shares, because he got bamboozled by biased media exposure and turned activism into a hateful caricature in his head. (Why did I make this post so long? It took me like 3 hours.)

While this clearly applies to many of the people the alt-right looks up to, this doesn't fully explain the appeal of Peterson in that he has never actually in any serious capacity rallied against foreigners and globalism, and has instead spoken on the erosion of what he feels is both the natural state of things and the currently most optimal situation in the social and political realm, choosing to remain relatively silent on economics. The real question one might ask is why is there such a large overlap between hating the left and progressivism and fearing globalism?

For one thing, among the far right (Alex Jones, EDL, Stormfront, etc) the term globalist/globalism has been a dog whistle for "jews" for years already, and it has been more or less since the original Nazis. Globalism is the natural progression of a capitalist society, or even any society with access to the transit and communication systems we do, opposing this is a naturally conservative point of view as it's opposing social advancement and change, thus conservatives oppose globalism and progressives support it. As conservatives hate progressives, they can use their different opinions on globalism as a reason to hate progressives. Further to the right groups offer up scapegoats and conspiracy theories telling people that the reason for all this is a secret organization of jews/gays/communists/nonwhites/etc. This then is why the far right loves Peterson so much, his apocalyptic rhetoric puts people in a mindset where they're more susceptible to those conspiracy theories.

Many branches of the right are united by the end goal of preserving the status quo and having no investment in change. The only thing that really changes between them are the means and what they view as responsible. To tell you the truth, I made a mistake in looking at globalism from a purely economic perspective when it's almost exclusively used in a socio-political or cultural sense. In those ways, globalism means that every individual nation is gonna have its cultural identity destroyed and replaced by a politically-correct "world culture". I'm not an American, I'm German and my theories with why people flock to the alt-right comes from seeing the development in that context. Germany is a lot more progressive in terms of government intervention than the US but that hasn't really stopped conservatism from becoming more widespread. The big boogieman in German alt-right ideology is "islamization", that German culture is being subverted and replaced by immigrant muslims, who make no effort to integrate and who burden social care programs by refusing to work and by being terrorist recruiters. In a way, it's a more direct analogue to globalism, the idea of change piling up in general seems to manifest itself as "no longer being German" in the minds of many German conservatives. The problem is that a lot of the time, people divorce the status quo from the history that made it manifest in the first place, which leads to a lot of misunderstandings of law and what "the way things should be" even is. There's a reason historical enthusiasts often talk at length about the politics and economic factors leading to stuff happening. Conservatives often just see the ends and the means without the motivation and that immediately breaks the foundation their image of history. They just don't seem to care or think it's all lies. Like how Jordan Peterson doesn't attribute the nazi rise to power and World War II to complex interactions between socio-political and economic factors of the past but to "the nazis wanting to spread chaos". This kind of abstraction leads to a lot of interpretative freedom and muddling of the Feindbild. Expanding his views on the nazis to who he calls "post-modern neo-marxists", Peterson just doesn't interest himself with the circumstances of his opposition, what they stand for, how they came about. To him, it's just all "chaos" to deliberately undermine "the way things should be". According to Wikipedia, Jordan Peterson became like this when he started becoming interested in the psychology behind the Cold War:tm:, which eventually led to his clinical psychology degree, and he got hella spooked by mutually assured destruction and 20th century European totalitarianism. He's already shown that he doesn't distinguish between liberal activism and Stalinism or Maoism, he probably doesn't know what any of these things are in context of their history. Maybe he read in a history book about how "Lenin was a progressive dude (for the time) who supported liberal policies (for the time), which eventually led to millions of people to die horribly (for the time)". For a good while, I figured he was just brainwashed by McCarthyism and the Red Scare since he was born during that time but then I remembered that he's Canadian. So... would that make Jordan Peterson the 1950s Americana equivalent of a Wehraboo? High brow humor, I know. TL;DR: I was wrong in making globalism an economic concept, it's a socio-political concept that I believe has its roots partially in economic fears. The reason hate for the left is so universal instead of direct is because people often vaguely recall political history without understanding its broader context, which leads to misattributing motivations and opening the possibility of broad conjecture and interpretation. i.e. communism is a left wing ideology so socialism, as an offspring of communism is also, so the Soviet Union, and all its ills, happened because of left political activists. Why Jordan Peterson is popular despite never rallying against globalism or foreigners is because he's rallying for preserving "the way things should be", which is something that just about everyone on the right agrees with because preserving the status quo is the whole reason conservatism exists for. Just as a disclaimer; I really don't believe I know what I'm talking about, I just like yapping about people who don't make sense to me. I try to not construct all of my arguments with lapses in logic but man, I'm too tired to think straight anyway.

Where do you think these ideas come from originally? I know it's hard to say, but if you had to guess generally... And that word can be applied to the rest of my questions. Is there any hope for those who harbour such ideas? Are they bad people? or are they just confused in your estimation?

Obviously where those ideas came from is going to vary, but I think it's largely to do with socioeconomic factors, the area they live in, how they were raised, the media they were brought up to consume, etc... They're definitely not bad people for the most part, they're just victims of being overly exposed to certain ideas over others and taking those on board. Outside the most hardcore Trump supporters, I don't think they're irredeemable but they need to open their minds to critical thinking and start looking at the bigger picture.

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While I believe your attribution of Peterson's connecting of progressivism with totalitarian marxism to just confusion is a bit of a simplification of his beliefs on the matter (from what little of them I understand), I guess there is some sense in the overlap being fear of further change, however that can't really be all of it, can it? There's a chasm between conservatism and the far right that can only be bridged by mutual opposition to what they see as unbridled progressivism and danger to the ways of life they wish to exist, but a chasm nonetheless. Surely all opposition to globalization isn't driven purely by fear of displacement of the social and cultural status quo, a fact demonstrated by the far left's opposition to it as well (or rather, call for a different type of globalization). I think economics does factor into this a great deal for some, even though most people neither understand it nor care about it as much as the primordial fear of finding their society unrecognizable and foreign. Peterson, for instance, seems to speak of the underlying inherent corruption and inevitable slide towards totalitarianism that he believes all ideology that owes anything to marx at all entails, backed by hypocritical use of postmodernist deconstruction for erosion of all that is natural and good in some amoral zero-sum grab for power, in the realization that all ideology is arbitrary and backed by power coupled with some vague confused notion that every power-backed narrative of normality outside your own is oppressing you. He makes more use of the fact the word "marxism" lies in the same semantic field as words like "totalitarianism" and "the left" than any other rhetorical tool, and the fact that anything inspired by marx would necessarily fall into such a category as "neomarxist" by the majority of people, in the full knowledge that anybody not engaging directly with the works of any of the people he namedrops will take his calm and collected yet passionate and true-to-self word for it. Kind of like the sophists of old in a way, coupled with his teachings of self help and what seems very similar to arête, now that I think of it. Quite ironic, considering he is seemingly opposed to any form of philosophical relativity.

That's what I mean when I say right wing ideology and people who believe in it don't make sense to me. Whenever I try to think about the motivations of conservatives and alt-right, I just don't get it. There's always a black box factor that keeps understanding perpetually at arm's length, whether it be misinformation or politically charged language that muddles what they're trying to say. When people on the left protest, it's generally pretty clear what they want; they want LGBT rights, they want for racially-motivated police assaults to stop, etc. They can fuck up when it comes to how they protest but that's not new in any way. When people on the right protest, there's so many different people who want different things in different ways. Often they protest "being replaced", that God Hates Fags or "being silenced" or "violence". Like, Black Lives Matter is a really broad decentralized movement and some chapters just go on riots and shit, which I don't support at all but conservatives take this as an act of open rebellion, like "these people rioted so they can just keep getting killed by racist cops". You could argue they just don't want to encourage rioting as a way of political discourse, which is valid, but since then the right has been far more willing to escalate than the left. I don't want to say "right wingers protest against liberal policies because they're isolated idiots who got indoctrinated into illogical, racist, fearmongering hate by nazis and no matter how they swing it, they will always be the 'feels before reals' party that nobody should listen to because their argument isn't standing on fact, it's standing on self-righteous conjecture and convenient half-truths that are not only taken out of context but often also make use of false information planted by people in their own ranks" because that sounds like it's too broad, too dehumanizing but sometimes that's really what I think, just out of sheer frustration.

I'm just a globe trotter, mate. Thanks for the answer, As for the man himself... Do you think he's confused? Or knowingly trying to corrupt other people? Just an estimation of course. There are some in this thread who have called him a charlatan, not sure if you're among those. But anyway, those who have been vehemently against the man of the thread, what are your thoughts in regards to the above question?

The fact you joined this month, have only posted in this thread and your location keeps changing is somewhat suspect, but I'll humour you one last time. Quite frankly I don't know enough about the man to see whether doing any of this benefits him or he's just fallen prey to disinformation, but I've seen people in his position the same thing for personal gain countless times, so I wouldn't put it past him.

I think he probably earnestly holds the views he's been spreading, and is trapped by his own hubris. The dude is smart and has achieved quite a lot academically, but that doesn't mean he's incapable of making mistakes. His "debates" aren't usually with people in the fields he's trying to shoehorn himself into. He's not talking to the people he should be about contentious issues, and his fan-base has become rabid enough that most people qualified to enter the "arena" as he likes to think of it won't. Left unchecked, that's a pretty dangerous state to be in. He's built in a shield from criticism where he can dismiss anyone "against" him as some postmodernist or whatever, and he's got a lot of contact with people that are functionally fascists. He's basically set himself up to self-radicalize. He's also got financial incentive to keep playing with controversy. He's making what, ~$50-80k a month through Patreon now? Peterson should take his own advice from his 12 rules: Rule 3: Choose your friends carefully-- Why does his work attract so many hateful people? Rule 10: Be Precise in Your Speech-- This has already been covered pretty extensively, but it feeds into Rule 3. If Peterson actually said what he meant, maybe people that actually believe in grand conspiracies and such wouldn't misuse his work Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world-- Since his overarching philosophy about the world is rooted in an undefined or self-contradictory term, maybe he should figure out precisely what he means before rallying others against this thing Rule 9: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't.-- He's often OK at this, but again he tried to start an academic blacklist, and isn't actually talking to people experienced in the fields he's trying to talk about without much personal background. If he doesn't actually share the same views as people that think the left is hell-bent on the destruction of modern society and such, and actually cares about academic freedom and isn't just using the guise of free speech as a cudgel to beat down others, he's certainly put himself in a situation where he could quickly devolve into such a state.

"Postmodernist neo-marxism" is his version of cultural marxism, which is a term that has anti-globalist/antisemitic origins. Whether he's dogwhistling or just borrowing it for his own purposes (probably the latter), a lot of what he talks about in regards to politics does imply that he believes in some kind of far-left conspiracy present in western governments. It's not uncommon for people to try and "fix" some kind of racist, far right conspiracy theory because they believe in some similar threat from a different demographic. The skeptic stereotype exists because a bunch of idiots took white nationalism and replaced every instance of "Jewish globalists" with "SJWs". It never changes the narrative though, and that's why they're accepted by the people they tried to differentiate themselves from.

Thanks for the answer and the conversation. As to your suspicions. A friend of mine had linked me to this board a few times in the past and I wanted to join the conversation (and mess with him a bit) As to the different country thing, I have a VPN on from time to time.