I wouldn’t say smarter, but on a different tack than Ben. Definitelty more polite, or, sometimes, more of an iron fist in a velvet glove.
Milo is a buffoon. Whatever merits he may have, he’s a flashy rable-rouser rather than a thinker in any way.
About as much as you are.
I’m sue this is right; it’s truly desperate out there for so many young men.
Of course,in the interview he addresses why this is also bad for women in the first question put by Newman.
Being told you have permission to be “a man with man feelings” is revolutionary?
I had a discussion with a psychologist for 30 minutes of good talk and explaining, and we figured out he was projecting his insecurities on others and is engaged in some kind of manic splitting.
In this thread, I’ve been plenty critical of Peterson’s excesses, but I also tried to provide a more nuanced perspective. You seem not to have been interested in what I said, though, so I’m not exactly sure what you’re looking for. But if you are more interested now, I can go into slightly more depth.
Have you read any Jung, talking about archetypes of the collective unconscious? Joseph Campbell on the hero’s journey? Morphology of the Folktale by Propp?
I dig this shit. Breaking down myth and fable into its constituent pieces, in an effort to understand how the pieces fit together. Now understand here: I’m not entirely convinced that this effort isn’t a pile of compelling horseshit, a fictional story about how fictional stories work. Even if the first couple steps are true, that doesn’t mean the fifth or sixth steps are. But I dig it anyway.
And the key point about all of these mythic deconstructions is: they are nearly impossible to summarize. If you’ve read Campbell on the hero’s journey… can you remember the steps? I can’t. Like, the hero declines his destiny is one? I think? None of it sticks. The argument is fun when I’m reading, but I just can’t summarize how the pieces work, and how they provide meaning. Well, like I said before, Peterson is in the same sort of genre. And he’s good at it. Meaning: it’s interesting to read his theories, if that’s the kind of thing you’re interested in. He’s like a neo-Jungian, writing down the component pieces of myth. But he’s also a clinical psychologist. He has extensive therapeutic experience. So in his books, he mixes that mythological analysis (he’s especially found of the constituent pieces of Biblical myths) into his psychological self-help-guru stories. Again: I eat this shit up. I can’t recall ever reading anything quite like it since Jung, an amalgam of the direct experience of a clinical psychologist combined with a mythological perspective.
That’s the style of the book. That’s the genre. But it can’t be easily summarized, like most of Jung can’t be. This isn’t a skill that people generally have, not coaches, or fathers, or gym teachers, or anybody else. Most of those father-figures aren’t clinical psychologists, either, so even if they have good advice to give, maybe they’re not experienced in how to deliver it. That is (as I see on preview has already been pointed out), assuming the young men who are such fans of Peterson even have any such positive role models in their lives at all.
As for the Robinson piece?
Well, I also talked about hypocritical criticism like that in my previous post: It’s the mirror image of Peterson at his worst. It contains exactly the same faults that Peterson conveys at his worst. But I enjoy reading Peterson when he’s in mytho-psychology world (not during his paranoid rants about the humanities), and I had to snort some speed and drink ten cups of coffee to even skim Robinson… and even then I fell asleep.
Here is one easy example about “fault” and “responsibility” – and I picked this one because it relates directly to Peterson’s speciality of clinical psychology and Robinson’s unwillingness to read honestly:
Okay, first, that is not what Peterson says in his book.
This is absurdly easy to demonstrate:
So already, we see a blatant mischaracterization of Peterson’s views. There are later sections where he points out that blaming the world can be an attempt to dodge personal guilt, but of course, that is legitimately true. Happens all the time. It doesn’t negate the fact that Peterson also says that the world is filled with pointless suffering which is no one’s fault, and which we have no control over. Here is the self-help guru’s bottom line:
Human beings do better, psychologically, when they take responsibility for the world directly around them, regardless of whose fault it is.
This is actually Peterson’s training and expertise, where I would trust him most – in stark contrast to his silly rants about the humanities. I think maybe it pays to defer to the real psychologist on this particular question, compared to the (…checks…) sociology grad student? Really? Okay. I mean, this one seems like a no-brainer to me. Not only does it strike me as intuitively true, it seems reasonable to me that the clinical psychologist, with a long history of seeing patients, might have better insight than the sociologist into what patients need to hear to turn their lives around. I don’t currently see how anyone could argue on Robinson’s side of this particular issue, after Peterson has been correctly interpreted. But even beyond that, it’s clear to see that Robinson distorts what Peterson said, in order to make a cheap point. Peterson is not saying, in all cases, that one’s position in life is one’s own fault. (He does say that that is sometimes the case.) He says instead that one must take responsibility, in any and all cases, in order to find meaning in life.
How does a reader miss that distinction? By not caring to understand. By reading with axe in hand, ready to grind at any convenience. Of course, it’s not like this is a unique sin. I have no doubt that Peterson is exactly the same way, when reading something from the political left or the humanities that he doesn’t like. Really, I have no doubt that I’ve done it myself. It’s easy to distort an argument before you attack it. You don’t have to deal with what the other guy actually says.
As far as I can tell, Robinson scores plenty of honest direct hits in other places. Peterson says plenty of stupid shit. He makes himself an easy target. But the speed and coffee were wearing off, and my eyes were rolling too hard to follow any more of Robinson’s writing. (I don’t know exactly why I roll my eyes so often at Peterson, and then keep reading. Except that I dig that mythical deconstruction stuff.)
I’m not saying we shouldn’t roll our eyes at Peterson. We should. But we should also roll our eyes at Robinson when appropriate, who represents exactly the same tendencies to oversimplify and misrepresent the outgroup, even while he might also have other useful things to say.
I want to re-iterate the point I made earlier: I keep coming across young men online saying that Peterson changed their life. Which… I don’t rightly understand. But they seem to be saying it. They are saying it.
That they were losers. That they were attracted to radical right-wing ideologies. That they blamed others (women, Jewish people, whatever) for their problems. And that… they credit Jordan Peterson for turning them away from their hateful beliefs, and onto something better. That they feel meaning in their lives now.
Now, maybe that’s more bullshit. Could be. Plenty of bullshit comes from Peterson, so maybe more bullshit comes from the people following him. I feel like he’s totally sincere, but maybe I’m snowed. Could be. But on the chance that I’m not snowed and that I’m reading this correctly, on the chance that a certain number of those young men are actually putting their lives together and taking responsibility rather than blaming others, on the chance that this self-help guru didn’t just write an interesting book (for the people who find that sort of thing interesting), but somehow managed to write a useful book for a certain subset of the population…
Look.
I fuckin hate Ayn Rand. Can’t stand that sanctimonious jerk. But I came across a story once (can’t find where now…) of a guy who grew up in a strict fundamentalist Christian home, abusively so, where his parents told him that nothing in this world was for him. Literally nothing. His entire life’s purpose was to serve others, most particularly his family. Everything he did, he was to do for them. He was essentially their slave, because that was what god wanted. According to his family.
There’s a quote by Philip K Dick, it’s from VALIS:
Call it a sentence, or call it a novel.
But this kid, religiously abused by his family, found in Ayn Rand the words which could heal him. This was the idea that there some things in this world which he could legitimately and honestly enjoy for himself. He didn’t, as far as I read, become some kind of horrible libertarian monster. Ayn Rand, of all people, healed the dysfunction of self-abnegation foisted upon him by his family under the pretext of their religion. That same novel might have been “harmful” to other developing minds, or tedious to someone like me. But we’re not all the same.
The words that bore one person, might heal another. We’re not all the same.
This is what bothers me about the response to Peterson. It’s not just the hypocrisy of people like Robinson treating Peterson with exactly the same oversimplifications that Peterson treats so much of the left with. It goes beyond that. It’s not the test of a human being to be judged based solely on how others roll our eyes at him (even when completely appropriate). Peterson is complex, and he is having an apparent positive effect of pulling young men from the reactionary right. I’m a thousand times happier with Peterson having followers than someone like Richard Spencer. People who can’t see the difference there are just knee-jerk partisans, blinded by their ideology, where everyone outside their bubble is the same shade of evil-tinted black. Should you read Peterson? Fuck no, not at all. Not unless you dig that myth stuff, and can roll your eyes and flip the page when he starts being ridiculous. But I do state that any responsible thinker should recognize the difference between him and the genuine dark mentors out there that the modern internet has cooked up. They are worlds apart.
Peterson is ridiculous. Spencer is dangerous. That is a distinction that we can, and should, recognize and acknowledge and appreciate. It is a massive intellectual failure among people like Robinson not to recognize these kinds of distinctions, exactly the same kind of massive intellectual failure that Peterson himself makes.
Excellent post, Hellestal!
Yep. not sure about “radical right-wing ideologies” - never heard that, but otherwise, the reason why there is so much extraordinary noise about Peterson is …
his messages resonate, and he helps people help themselves.
As for the rest of your post, I’d encourage people to view a video.
Sure, just as long as Peterson doesn’t try to claim that that’s what Bill C-16 tries to enforce. If he does, he’s just engaging in conservatives’ favorite pastime of fabricating social justice controversies from false or grossly hyperbolic premises.
The law as I understand it has two main parts. First, it extends the definition of hate speech so that people in certain gender identity groups are protected against direct threats of violence. Those who criticize the hate speech law as supposedly an abrogation of free speech typically don’t understand the law and its purpose and limits – it criminalizes direct and explicit calls for violence or genocide against protected groups. Secondly, Bill C-16 extends to the gender-identity group protection against discrimination, similar to protections against racial discrimination in employment, housing, and services, and protections against workplace harassment.
The “pronoun” thing is largely an irrelevant red herring. Consider the hypothetical of a bullying manager in a macho work setting who constantly and deliberately refers to a delicate or effeminate man as “she” as a form of ridicule. How would such an employee feel? The fact is, that kind of bullying was already quite properly grounds for a human rights complaint. Is the manager thereby being “forced” to use a particular pronoun? No, he’s simply required to abide by principles of general decency and to refrain from harassment in the workplace. I don’t see that it’s any different for someone who presents with and lives by a non-conventional gender identity. I very much doubt that the law could be used to force co-workers to refer to a person by some unusual non-word pronoun; its purpose, rather, is to prevent workplace bullying and harassment.
Thanks, Hellestal, that’s the kind of thing I was looking for. Also, I missed your earlier post where you linked to an ex-Nazi talking about how Peterson talked him off that particular ledge.
As I said earlier, I’m not so interested in Peterson that I feel the need to participate much more in this thread, but I do appreciate your summary.
It’s not wholly irrelevant, though. During the Newman interview, she asks Peterson “Why should your right to freedom of speech trump a trans person’s right not to be offended?” He promptly and rightly squished her like a bug, but I’m concerned that somehow a “right not to be offended” could become a real thing and (to some limited degree has already done so) and the massive potential for abuse that entails. Peterson is right to oppose the idea, even it currently seems trivial. If the “principles of general decency” gradually evolve to cover these situations, then new words will appear and become widespread. Trying to push the issue through legislation is not the way to go.
I don’t believe, and I’ve never heard Peterson claim, that actual threats and harassment are protected or should be.
The liberal democracies are just now finally getting of the last pointless legal distinctions based on sex, I’d hate to see new ones being created for gender.
I agree with the first part of that, and indeed there have been examples of such abuse – one that comes to mind is a Muslim organization filing suit against Mark Steyn and Macleans magazine over an article he wrote that they claimed hurt their feelings and would cause people to dislike Muslims. Granted, Steyn is an asshole extraordinaire, but my response to the Muslims would have been “tough shit – we live in a free society, and life’s a bitch sometimes”.
The problem there, however, was not this kind of federal anti-discrimination legislation, it was some provincial (BC) human rights legislation and, most of all, it was the ability to appeal to the province’s Human Rights Tribunal, which is a sanctimonious quasi-judicial body with far too much power and far too little accountability. Even so, the BC tribunal dismissed the suit as without merit, and the Ontario tribunal dismissed it as out of its jurisdiction. But it’s these goody two-shoes sanctimonious twerps that we need to worry about, not properly crafted federal legislation that serves a legitimate purpose and is adjudicated by real courts.
I read the story about the 2 year olds. If he is reporting correctly he was watching one toddler prepare to and actually begin to hurt the other one. But since it’s his daughter, he watches for a while and has fantasies about it, that have to do with the disciplining of children to get good outcomes.
I thought that adults who observe one toddler about to hurt another were supposed to do something, right away, pre-fantasy, because they are babies. What do I know.
Imagine being a baby and having Jordan Petersons all around who were watching and fantasizing about you damaging their daughter. I can’t see good outcomes there.
Peterson wasn’t fantasizing about his daughter being hurt, he was fantasizing about some retaliatory violence against her young tormentor. He may have been a little slow to react, perhaps taken aback a little by what he saw in (or projected onto) the little boy, but there is no indication I saw that he was wallowing in fantasy.
Um no, no he really does. At least about Frozen. He referred to it as “reprehensible propaganda”. A freaking children’s movie, for crying out loud.
Hellestal, you must have seen Peterson’s biblical series, right? Which parts of it did you most like? Are there insights of his you remember from those videos?
The only way to behave, for an ethical parent, is to say “So i jumped over and stopped it.” A revenge fantasy about this childs character is screwed up for a number of reasons. He said it in the quote that he was watching and had the time to run a discursive scenario in his head. These things take time, by his account, not mine, when he really ought to be thinking about his daughters safety and the other kids too.
Of course he might be bloviating and boasting about something that never happened and didn’t think the implications through. He’s only a famous psychologist after all.
He did stop it; he describes removing his daughter from the assailant.
Bullshit. A perfectly mentally healthy person can routinely engage in violent fantasy, even against children, even against their own children.
Well, who knows how much time actually passes during the scenario. Peterson himself may not be sure. I doubt it takes more than a few second for a line of thought along the lines of:
What’s that kid doing?
What the…
That little creep…
…then getting up to rescue his daughter. The specific fantasy of what he’d like to have done to the boy could have happened during this time or shortly afterward, it’s not like Peterson was taking the time to mentally compose a symphony or solve a calculus problem while his daughter was being tortured.
Sure. That could be the case, also. We have lots of cases of people telling exaggerated or even fictitious accounts of situations they claim to have been in. There may or may not be intentional dishonesty in the effort.
It’s crazy isn’t it? To think you could even think of propagandising children. You’re not a parent, right?
Any credible psychologist should know the causes of human behavior relate to a mix of nature and nurture. In that story or allegory, Peterson is making an assumption about a very young child who is a complete stranger to him. He’s spreading the message he thinks that child’s behavior can be bettered by discipline, perhaps not sparing the rod as it were. Peterson is guessing, and not taking into account genetics, and sometimes inadvertent environmental exposure which could contribute to misbehavior. He is really only interested in solving problems for those he isn’t bigoted against. So I think he would be much more at ease living at a time in human history when the traditionalist elders weren’t openly questioned and where it was common to dump your child off at an orphanage or institution when they’re unwanted or didn’t turn out the way you had hoped.
My God this thread is an embarrassment. It isn’t that hard to read what the guy actually says. If your reading skills are limited he has plenty of his lectures online. But really it gets ridiculous when people start critiquing his whole body of work on the basis of a quote from his book, taken out of context and turned into a tweet.
The incident with the children on the monkey bars is just part of a discussion about the importance of parents setting limits - “Parent of Friend.” He is discussing how children behave in these provocative ways to see how far they can get, and how parents are meant to exert some level of control. And, yes his point is that children require assistance in learning to regulate their behavior.
Interestingly the chapter, Rule 5 DO NOT LET YOUR CHILDREN DO ANYTHING THAT MAKES YOU DISLIKE THEM, starts with this story:
which brings to mind the recent video of the screaming kid on the plane.