Tell me about Jordan Peterson

[DigitalC]

@Sam_Stone

The message the postmodernists are sending is that if you are the member of a group that has historically held power you have original sin and should be ashamed and shut up and let other people run things while you slink away unless you recant and become a champion of the oppressed and follow their lead. On the other hand, if you are the member of an ‘oppressed’ group, all the trouble in your life is the fault of others, and you are not responsible. And your fears are so reasonable that you need safe spaces and protection from language you don’t like, which is redefined as violence.

Speaking of strawmen…

[up_the_junction]

@Sam_Stone

Peterson would have considered himself center-left not too long ago. But he has landed in the company of people like Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Brett Weinstein and others who consider themselves on the ‘left’, and some conservative thinkers from the ‘right’ like Charles Murray, Andrew Sullivan and others who have found themselves unlikely allies who are utterly alienated by the illiberal social justice and postmodern left, and repelled by what has become of the right. I find myself in the same strange place.

We’re gonna need bigger boat.

[johnod]

@Sam_Stone

There seem to be a lot of Cathy Newmans in this very thread. “So what Jordan Peterson is saying is…” followed by attacking straw men.

Peterson would have considered himself center-left not too long ago. But he has landed in the company of people like Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Brett Weinstein and others who consider themselves on the ‘left’, and some conservative thinkers from the ‘right’ like Charles Murray, Andrew Sullivan and others who have found themselves unlikely allies who are utterly alienated by the illiberal social justice and postmodern left, and repelled by what has become of the right. I find myself in the same strange place.

If what people like Peterson are saying is both ‘obvious’ yet being greedily devoured by millions of people (his book has had a long run at #1 on the NYT Bestseller list), perhaps it’s because the right and left have descended into parodies of themselves and people are desperate to just hear someone who seems to be talking sense.

The people running the most scared seem to be evolutionary biologists like Dawkins and Weinstein, who are seeing the very basis of their sciences under attack from both the creationists on the right and the postmoderns on the left who refuse to consider that differences between groups of people could be anything other than socially constructed, that all differences must be due to existing power structures and patriarchal oppression, and that societies can be changed through fiat and control.

Where Peterson comes in is that as a therapist, he sees the narratives in play doing real harm to young people, and is trying to offset it. Peterson says that college administrators and cultural figures are constantly sending messages that are exactly the opposite of what a therapist would say to help someone handle anxiety or depression. The message the postmodernists are sending is that if you are the member of a group that has historically held power you have original sin and should be ashamed and shut up and let other people run things while you slink away unless you recant and become a champion of the oppressed and follow their lead. On the other hand, if you are the member of an ‘oppressed’ group, all the trouble in your life is the fault of others, and you are not responsible. And your fears are so reasonable that you need safe spaces and protection from language you don’t like, which is redefined as violence.

In both cases, it’s exactly the wrong message. So Peterson is trying to do mass therapy in the opposite direction.

Nicely put.