The Jordan Peterson Thread

i hope he doesn't go the way of kanye. since kanye's comments, there has been an explosion of antisemitism online. things like q anon planted the seeds of this kind of worldview. peterson still has a vast following. people take him seriously.

they shouldn't; he is not a serious thinker.

of course they shouldn't, but they do.

xp Definitely not a serious thinker. He's mostly good at clumping various half-baked concepts together into a gobbledygook that sounds good to his legions in the manosphere. He makes them feel like intellectuals.

I’m sure he’d note that he just packed an auditorium in Jerusalem: https://www.timesofisrael.com/jordan-peterson-lightning-rod-of-us-culture-wars-receives-warm-embrace-in-israel🕸/

But yeah, like a lot of Christian conservatives, he probably conflates “support for Israel” with “support for Jews.”

Anyone paying attention (ahem) knows exactly what this guy has always been.

I think it must be nice to have these things be this abstract. I wish I didn’t have to think about how someone who draws much of his support from fairly unconcealed misogyny and authoritarian fantasies was so popular with men. There are clearly enough men out there who think women need to be put back in their place and are increasingly vocal about it. You can talk about how the apparently suffocation of political correctness is forcing people into this charlatan’s arms, but that sidesteps some fairly obvious messaging about how the pay gap isn’t real, about how women use rape as a weapon, about how women are taking too many jobs and that’s why you can’t get one, about how women gravitate to rich men and you get nothing. There’s nothing subtle about it.

I think about growing up in Ireland when divorce, abortion and gay marriage were illegal, and how that’s basically his ideal country, and it gives me chills.

― gyac, Monday, 5 November 2018 12:19 (four years ago) link

xpost yes, was corroborating your point.

Peterson's affect is sort of fascinating, because he tends to this kind of elegiac tone. Like villains in movies who tell the protagonist what a pity it is that they are going to have to torture and kill them.

Someone dug up this Jordan Peterson letter to The eXile, published in the November 3, 2005 edition. pic.twitter.com/xESQgSAQHy

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) December 30, 2022

lol

hahaha

Jordan Peterson trying to use The Exile like a grandma using facebook for the first time, typing "How Do I Message Bobby?" as a status update

Reviewing episode 2 of the JBP show! https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-we-watch-more-of-106734375/

remember when this guy’s kid was hanging out with a recently arrested alpha male type

his kid is a trip. she is allegedly the one who convinced him to stop consuming anything except beef, salt, and water.

I like how “beef, salt and water” is an anagram of said recently arrested alpha male type’s name plus “flabs”.

I hate to say this but "up yours woke moralists, we'll see who cancels who" in his dumb little frog noise is one of the funniest things a human being has ever said

It's hard for me to believe he's not playing a character sometimes.

My experience online has suggested to me that those who habitually use "dude" and "bro" are the derisive, narcissistic Machiavellian, sadistic trolls. Concluded after reviewing thousands of derogatory and inflammatory comments @datepsych https://t.co/oIxYfKzczX

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) February 6, 2023

derisive, narcissistic Machiavellian, sadistic trolls

that's quite an unusual set of characteristics to all appear in the same person at once. I suggest he find those dudes and get to the bottom of this.

well the girls would turn the color of some calamari
when he drove down their street in his red Ferrari
Jordan B. Peterson was never called a dude-bro

I use 'dude' habitually, but only because it's a habit - not due to my machiavellian narcissism

Was funny: the Seattle weekly The Stranger did a sponsored Instagram post this morning advertising Jordan P.‘a upcoming Seattle arena show, and the comments were both hilarious and endless. Post is gone now.

They just posted this follow-up:
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cofurg2yQO5/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

It's often hard to believe he isn't a Scientology plant with the purpose of discrediting the entire field of psychotherapy

The Paramount is a 2800-seat 1920s theater (though he’s doing two shows)

(and The Stranger hasn’t been a weekly since 2017, or a print publication since March 2020)

Not really sure what he's saying here (and not sure he even knows) but I am pretty sure it's bad.

"here's something else that's worth pondering!" pic.twitter.com/HJ5yU13vwA

— bad_stats 🕜💵🖨️🕣 (@thebadstats) February 13, 2023

clicked on that instagram apology to read it and of course the top comment that appeared with it was someone calling the entire Stranger staff the r-word

Making complicated (to the point of unintelligibility) the completely morally uncomplicated is dude’s bread and butter.

but what do i mean by “bread” and “butter”?Because I’m much more succinct than JBP, I’ll just say bread represents order whereas butter is chaos and buy my book for the rest.

oh god my coworker is going to see him live this weekend. He’s generally kind of annoying and stupid (my coworker) but he’s not even a devotee, he’s going bc his sons are big fans and his wife got tickets.

Is there a merch table at his appearances?

it just sells mustache wax

if my sons were really into JP I would have to sit down with a strong drink and think for a long time about my failures as a parent.

I would take it as a particularly self-destructive form of rebellion.

Makes Michael J Fox’s Family Ties Reaganite rebellion seem v quaint & harmless, no?

my early teenage son was JP curious for a time (possibly still is). i think the self-discipline message goes down easy, and the culture war stuff kind of oozes in after that. don’t forget they are exposed to this stuff in context-free blipverts on social and shared among friends.

we were fairly careful not to go full nuclear in retaliation, which would only have resulted in doubling down IMO. but he was thoughtful and seemed to get it when we explained why we weren’t fans.

we are probably a fairly “woke” household and my partner and i will have a good grumble about patriarchal/colonial/heirarchical structures. i don’t like to think that this creates a situation where our sons feel uncomfortable about being young white males and gravitate towards people who tell them that “traditional values” are eternal truth… but y’know maybe it does.

There are at least two different types of flyers on telephone poles in the neighbourhood organising protests against his shows.

Oh Bondage, Up Yours Woke Moralists!

So for a lot of teenagers, Peterson is likely their first experience of psychoanalysis and the Jungian flavor of this body of thought is probably the most compelling to young people. Basically, they learn from him that they have an unconscious — or for Jung, a “shadow” — that they must struggle to integrate or else it will take control of them. This is a powerful message and as far as it goes probably true. (I prefer Freud and Lacan, who were more circumspect about the possibility of integration. Jung and Peterson are both reactionary insofar as they frame inner struggle as a battle that can be “won,” a synthesis that can be achieved rather than a kind of armistice.)

Anyway, the problem with Peterson is that he tells white men that minorities, trans people, and women are standing in the way of their journey toward self-actualization because they want you to be afraid of your shadow. It’s the shift from psychoanalysis to culture war that is toxic. Ironically, Peterson’s scapegoating of others for his own shame and fear is a classic example of projection!

I think teens who are into Peterson should be encouraged to read Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Freud, especially the essays on art and literature. Just go to the source. It doesn’t do any good to deny that Peterson is speaking to something deep within these kids; the problem is that Peterson is using that to turn them onto a political project. But the journey of the self is not and cannot be political. If you mistake your inner issues for social issues you will always be confused, always chasing windmills.

I had a weird situation a few days ago when a Black student in my online rhetoric class approvingly used one of his lectures. He wrote quite well and I made a point of remarking on how his submission ranked among the top five (which is true). I did mention too that I disagreed violently with Mr. Peterson. The student thanked me for grading him fairly.

xp call me don quixote. maybe that's my problem or maybe you're wrong

personally i feel freud, jung and campbell have enough influence in the culture already, can we have something else? i'm sick of all these films that tell the same story over and over because of archetypes man

yeah, so i haven't read the paper but this student was likely responding to something in peterson's work that doesn't have to do with the bigotry. and it is likely that what he enjoys in peterson he could find elsewhere, perhaps in another psychoanalytic theorist. on a side note, it is odd to me that peterson is a jungian and he broke through online in this way as psychoanalysis had seemed so outdated. maybe this means we still crave it after all these years...

treeship have you ever read Fanon?

i haven't but i'd like to. i have a copy of black skin, white masks at my parent's house. would you recommend that one?

yes, mostly because it's the only one I've read myself lol, but I thought of it because of the confluence of politics and psychoanalysis (plus Left's point about hearing from other voices)

I bailed on a budding relationship a while ago over peterson fandom, brought up in the context of interesting ideas about human nature and society. I could have handled it better but I really didn't have any interest in engaging with him after that. I'm sure he has a petersonian explanation for my irrational reaction

perhaps. psychoanalysis is an awful thing when wielded against other people as a way to discredit them as irrational. it is a useful thing when it allows people to forgive *themselves* for the ways in which they are irrational and other than who they take themselves to be.

peterson has absolutely no humility and doesn't even seem to recognize that his own, like, obvious eating disorder and drug addiction are symptoms he should attend to, as they suggest that he haven't actually made peace with himself and is, in a way, in the same position as the young men he chastises for not "cleaning their own room." he remains committed to the battle of "order" over "chaos" even though it is killing him.

that's the weirdest thing about him. like he is so unhappy. perhaps some of his advice makes sense, but his prescriptive story of how people are, how society is, and how one should comport oneself within society just cannot be 100% true based on what his life is like. he must be missing something. (which i have compassion for, not scorn, btw. i don't have the answers either, but i don't claim to and he does.)

all scorn all the time for me

I have scorn for his bigotry, not for his personal difficulties like depression and drug addiction.

this is actually something i've been mooting writing a blog post on in a while. i was listening to a behind the bastards episode on andrew tate, and it turns out they spent the whole episode without really talking about tate at all, but about the background of it, which is something called the mythopoetic men's movement.

which is interesting to me because i was actually involved in the mythopoetic men's movement in the '90s. i guess there probably aren't a lot of women who were. one of the "passage to manhood" retreat weekends in '96 was actually the first time i tried to come out as trans. in retrospect it's kind of hilarious.

anyway the podcast episode is worth listening to. my feeling is that this whole thing is less "not even wrong" than _almost_ right. like, clearly they know there's a problem and that they have to do something different, but they're utterly, utterly off base on what that different thing is. my feeling is that it's impossible to build a sense of communal manhood unless you recognize and value the ways in which the experience of those who are _not_ men differ from their experience, and most guys, they don't just seem to _get_ that shit on a basic conceptual level.

what i'd _like_ to see out of a men's movement, what i would have _liked_ to have seen in 1996, is that when i came out to them, talked about my gender shit to them, instead of staring at me like i had suddenly grown an extra five eyes they would've had the knowledge and wisdom to say "oh, wait, hold on, have you considered that you might actually not be a man at all? like you're welcome to stick around here, you're already here and shit, but here, let's get you the number of a transfem support group. also, check out genderdysphoria.fyi ." none of that, obviously, would have been possible in 1996, but today?