On Jordan Peterson

I've never been impressed by Jordan Peterson. When he first started making the rounds on the internet a few years ago, I just figured him as just the latest in the large and never ending category of public thinkers who make their money by telling shiftless white dudes that the world really does belong to them by right and that women and minorities are stealing it from them. It's a nice and well worn path to success, and now that he's at the point where more people actually know of him, I just wanted to go over some of the things from his profile in The New York Times that highlight for me just how empty a vessel Petersen's intellect really is.

The thing that can't be stressed enough about Peterson's ethos is that is embarrassingly lazy. For example, a foundational principle of Peterson's philosophy is that women are an inherently chaotic force that, unless properly contained and directed, are a threat to functioning society. As evidence for why we should just accept this, Peterson says this:

"You know you can say, ‘Well isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine’ — well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything. If you change those basic categories, people wouldn’t be human anymore. They’d be something else.
They’d be transhuman or something. We wouldn’t be able to talk to these new creatures.”

Never mind cultures that didn't portray women as chaotic forces of evil, but just examine the reasoning on display. Here is a supposed public intellectual saying that we cannot critically examine why cultures throughout time and all over the planet have done everything they can to keep women out of power and realms of influence even and especially when they proved more competent than their male competitors (Hatshepsut being a prime example). We're supposed to just automatically accept these portrayals as unvarnished truth that we as a modern society are ashamed to admit because of political correctness.

Also keep in mind that Peterson is a psychologist whose entire job is to dig into where people's preconceived mental notions and behaviors come from and why we continue them. Apparently, investigating the motives behind thousands of years of concentrated effort to denigrate and subjugate half of the population is not only a waste of time but also a fundamental threat to what makes us human.

This is just stupid. It's nothing more than Peterson refusing to question his own assumptions and trying to pass it off as ancient wisdom that's keeping us from spiraling off into some kind of Philip K. Dick dystopia. I guess we should all be grateful that he's doing such important work.

The next thing I want to delve into is why Peterson's entire message of self-reliance and self-determination is hypocritical bullshit. Here's his response:

"He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”

Mr. Peterson does not pause when he says this. Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end."

He goes on to say:

"But aside from interventions that would redistribute sex, Mr. Peterson is staunchly against what he calls “equality of outcomes,” or efforts to equalize society. He usually calls them pathological or evil.

He agrees that this is inconsistent. But preventing hordes of single men from violence, he believes, is necessary for the stability of society. Enforced monogamy helps neutralize that."

Peterson would write on his own blog that when he's talking about the enforced monogamy he's talking about isn't some police state where the government forcibly pairs women with incels, he just means enforced monogamy in the cultural and societal sense where women are just expected to marry and have sex with men so they don't get angry at the world and start killing people.

Again, this is complete and utter nonsense.  Peterson, like so many libertarians before him, wants to set up some kind of demarcation between culture and government where cultural norms just enforce themselves. This is a smoke screen that stupid people mistake for substance.  

 

Back in the good old days of socially enforced monogamy, you know what kept women from owning property, having control of their inheritances, and working jobs where they could build significant independent income? Laws. Cultural norms have been, and always will be, enforced by the state- pretending that setting up a culture that mandates women grow up to become wives won't come with complementing government action to ensure that's the path they take is either ignorance, obfuscation, or some mix of the two. With Peterson, it's hard to tell the bullshit he's merely selling from the bullshit he earnestly believes.

But let's look at another portion of the interview, where Peterson is talking to a fan and brings up The Feminine Mystique

"I read Betty Friedan’s book because I was very curious about it, and it’s so whiny, it’s just enough to drive a modern person mad to listen to these suburban housewives from the late ’50s ensconced in their comfortable secure lives complaining about the fact that they’re bored because they don’t have enough opportunity. It’s like, Jesus get a hobby."

Let's break down a couple of things here.  Remember, Peterson's whole message revolves around the fact that the world is going the way it's going because men are being robbed of their ability to successfully determine what their own lives are going to be, that society is deeming them useless, dooming them to lives of ennui and dissatisfaction. And yet, when reading a book by a woman who describes exactly this same phenomenon, he doesn't understand why they're so upset. He genuinely doesn't seem to understand why women stuck in lives they have no control over would be so dissatisfied living them simply because they have material comfort.

On top of all that, remember that Peterson's solution to violent men is to remake society we live in so women have less independent opportunity so there are more of them to be sexually available for the "lesser" men who can't compete with the opportunities women create for themselves and leave those men in the lurch. In Peterson's world, women are simply the means for men to lead more fulfilling lives and all the self-reliance, deterministic messages that spew out of his mouth just don't apply to them.

Lastly, I want to dive in to why Peterson has earned a reputation for being the Deepak Chopra to budding fascists. At one point in the interview, Peterson says this

"The left, he believes, refuses to admit that men might be in charge because they are better at it. “The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence."

So, here's the rub in all this. For Peterson, white privilege doesn't exist, which creates a bit of a problem since in virtually every aspect of society, from income to wealth to job opportunities to even prison sentences, being white and male gives a person perks that can't be accounted for by education, ability, or really any other factor. This presents a problem because you can't ignore the preferential treatment given to white men because 1. It robs white men of their supposed victim-hood that Peterson is capitalizing off of (basically, you can't be robbed of your privileges by feminists if those privileges don't exist) and 2. If he acknowledges that race and gender confer undeserved advantages to his audience, well, there goes his audience. So what's a hack to do? Well, obviously, he squares this circle by saying that those privileges were earned by men being just that competent.

How this ties into fascism is that the base of all fascistic thought is that current hierarchies and the societies that built them are the natural and superior ways of being, that all of those who are at the top are there because of merit, and anyone clamoring to rise above their station is a threat to the system and must be subjugated or destroyed. 

When Peterson talks in those vague generalities about how we need to make culture more Christian because Christianity has been around for so long and is the "root" of Western civilization, about how men are at the top of societies hierarchies because they're just simply the best people to be in charge of things, he's very careful to not say that other religions or women are inherently inferior. That's the the thing that separates him from more explicit fascists like Milo Yiannopoulus or Richard Spencer, which isn't an accident. I'm sure Peterson can see how Milo went from being a media darling to hawking supplements on InfoWars or how Spencer went from a hotshit college provocateur to begging for money to fund the lawsuits against him after the Charlestown rally last August.

By avoiding the explicit condemnations of inferiority that other alt-right thinkers engage in, Peterson gets to keep his hands clean, so to speak, with the veneer of respectability and all the money that comes with it. If members of his audience drift towards more explicit speakers advocating the superiority of white men who call for more extreme suppression of women, minorities, and Jews, Peterson can throw his hands up and say "Not my fault. I never said anything like that." 

 

And sure, he may be technically right, but Peterson is the well-dressed, well-spoken doorman for a whole slew of vile, reactionary politics that are growing in popular and political power across the world right now.  And we shouldn't let his suits or manicured speech patterns get in the way of us recognizing that and calling him out as such.