An interview with Jordan Peterson, who believes in witches and dragons

boing
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“do not let your children do anything you dislike”

Literally the cause of generational violent emotional and extreme physical abuse as well as whatever kinds of abuse folks like to separate abuse into (it’s not like it divides so cleanly in praxis) dislike… in my family, especially paired with “dislike” being “anything I don’t want you to do or failing to do what I want you to do.”

Do not HAVE children is better advice as is “divorce and allow your children and family to move on accepting the fact that you are not capable of being near them.”

That would be responsibility.

But go ahead… do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. Just remember losing the chance to be loved by a human is the price, your choice, and the consequences are your own fault.

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You do realize that on such a site many of us have been familiar with this asshole for some time, right?

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Both you and @anon23281680 nail it. Even in that relatively anodyne list of rules Peterson can’t help but express what truly drives him: the toxic masculinity that comes from being (per his own self-descriptions) an atheist who subscribes to “traditional Christian values” – put another way, from being a proponent of the Patriarchy. Effectively seeing wives and children as chattel who should be docile and who should defer to the supreme rationality of the male is another reason why he finds such an affinity with the alt-right.

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Okay, so Peterson (somehow) got you to “take responsibility” for yourself.

But I’m asking for specifics – anyone could tell a husband and father to do that, and on the surface, it seems like pretty commonsense advice.

What in particular did Peterson advise you to do?

“Be rational”? “Control your emotions”? Is that all? Why did you need to turn to Peterson for such nostrums?

You said you get along with your wife better now. Is that also because she accepts a role that Peterson would say she should? What does she think of his claims that women should accept a position of subservience to their “naturally dominant and superior” husbands?

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  • Zen Koan

You’ve taken the first steps toward enlightenment. Remember, it’s a journey, not a destination; a state of mind, not a signpost. Meaning emerges when the meaningless of life is accepted. Be a wave on the ocean, liquid, ever changing, always in motion, capable of consuming the earth itself.

Everyone else will get much more mileage out of Templar’s vastly superior Rules of Life. The rules posited by Tenolar are not absolutes; Templar is no guru, merely someone with much life experience and the patience to make observations. https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://albaab.free.fr/The%2520Rules%2520of%2520Life.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjVgpDbgpfbAhVkpVkKHaEqDY8QFjANegQIBhAB&usg=AOvVaw3ywjt2YMIU13bM1fLONCYX

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This is a good one.

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Thanks.

It points out by way of explaining his popularity,

(It does help if you are male and Caucasian.)

Amen.

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Welcome to boingboing! No, it does not flirt with libel any more than articles in The Onion do. And making fun of preposterous people isn’t really a bad way to address their “arguments.” I’m sorry that you are so upset that he has been mischaracterized so badly, though. Truly. That poor man.

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Okay. Sure. I’ll bite.

For starters, there’s the first rule in his 12 Rules for Life: “Stand up straight with your shoulders back.” I spent too much of my time hunched over, avoiding eye contact. This gave people an impression that I wasn’t sure of myself. I started doing that for a week just to see if it really would make a difference. It did. Not only did people respect me more, but I felt more confident.

Then there’s the whole confronting the monster inside. Instead of saying “Don’t be a monster,” he says, “you have a monster in you.” Seeing things from that perspective helped me accomplish far more where other self-help resources didn’t.

One thing, too, which might not be appreciated in this venue, was his views on gender roles. I started “acting like a man,” (fulfilling the masculine roles in my relationship) and that is probably the thing that improved my relationship with my wife the most.

She’s all on board, and prefers it that way (and she’s not some pushover). The conflicts have dropped, and we’ve gotten so much more done by working with each others’ strengths and weaknesses instead of working in opposition to one another. We’re both marginally happier, and the quality of our lives has significantly improved.

But don’t get me wrong. I’m not a Peterson acolyte (I could be just as wordy about, say, Michael
Moorcock, or The Flaming Lips). I just think that people don’t give him the credit he’s due, and tend to cherry-pick his statements to demonize him (or, as some of his “fans” do, cherry pick his statements to justify their less than admirable ways).

I “turned to Peterson” as it were, because his way of saying it resounded the most with me. His no-holds barred taxi-trip through the collective unconscious presented things in a way that had enough of a subjective consistency to effect pragmatism for my many problems.

But, yeah, he’s a human, and like all humans, has his flaws. One thing I’ve discovered is that everybody has a lot wrong with what they say, but they also have a lot right. We, or maybe just I, should seek to find the truth in what others are saying, and be willing to reject the falsehood in our own beliefs.

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Thank you for sharing.

That sounds like nice, commonsense advice (though again, I don’t know why one need turn to a public intellectual for it). Did you share it with your wife, advising her as well to throw her shoulders back? Or do you consider that more of a guy thing?

Okay, but what does that mean? Would you be okay with her too acting in such “manly” ways? And what, by the way, are the “feminine” roles that she’s fulfilling, but which you apparently think are inappropriate for you to help with, being a man and all?

I’m also wondering, would you characterize those as inherently masculine and feminine weakness? If so, what are some of them?

Thank you for providing some real-world examples of the values of Peterson’s wisdom, but I think I need more specifics before I turn to him for help with my personal identity and relationships.

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Would you mind expanding here? How does one fulfill masculine roles? What does it mean to “act like a man”?

I don’t mean to pry, but those are incredibly vague statements.

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Holy smokes.

Jordan Peterson has become a lightning rod/ rorshach test on the status of free speech and gender issues to name a few.

The way I see it is that he is a nuanced thinker who has explored totalitarianism and mythology deeply and who brings that way of thinking to the modern world.

The NYT article as well as the Vice interview along with a host of other articles I have seen treat the man and his ideas in bad faith if not maliciously. I have watched many hours of his lectures and heard multiple conversations with him and Joe Rogan, Russell Brand and others and never have I heard him say that he wants to go backward to the 50s or wants women to “just behave” Instead, he encourages people to think and explore ideas, have conversations with people they may disagree with and to work on fixing themselves up and being better in the world.

He is not the devil he is made out to be. There may be something about his aspect that makes people angry and not all of his ideas are as well formed as they could be. His main sin, as I see it is that he is challenging the dominant narratives around free speech and gender that many hold as sacred.

His response to the bill C-16 in Canada was him speaking out against something he perceived as compelled speech and a step towards tyranny. Was he correct? I don’t know. However what makes him interesting to me is that he spoke up against something he disagreed with rather than keep quiet.

Most of the things he is mischaracterized as believing are either thought experiments quoted out of context or social science data that contradict the dominant narrative.

I would love to see Boing Boing, or anyone else do a deeper investigation into the phenomenon that is Jordan Peterson.
The reason he has sold so many books and fills lecture halls is not because he wants to go back in time, but because he is inspiring people to be better.

He also really pisses people off, and his detractors seem to take his success as an existential threat that must be stopped.

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Uh, you sure that’s the message you want to send?

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Peterson’s arguments are entirely fatuous. To accept them you need to first accept that there is a universal unconscious, that “male” and “female” refer to things other than male and female (like order and chaos), and that life is a constant battle to “balance” these opposing forces, and that right now order (male) is being crushed by chaos (female) and so if men don’t start acting like men (in the way he thinks men are ordained to act) we’re all doomed. These are not arguments, they are mere assertions, entirely unverifiable, and patently silly. They are, (if you read his precis to “Maps of Meaning”) really, nothing more than his efforts to work out his own neuroses; he then presents the private and very idiosyncratic solution he came up with to deal with his own anxiety as a universal truth, the basis of human existence which we ignore at our own peril. He is, in a word, a sad little crank who has confused (as so many have before him) his tortured fantasies with objective reality.

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Rule 10: Be precise in your speech

So here’s Peterson explicitly aligning himself with the MAGA/Kek crowd. In 2017.

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arya-cat-canals-wow

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Yeah. Here is where the internet and comment threads get fun.
My main motivation is to wrap my head around what the heck is going on with this JP phenomenon. He spent years researching the tyrannies of the Nazis and the Communists NOT to bring more of that into the world but to understand where things go wrong. I can see how that can be read in another way.

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You missed out a “FTFY”, otherwise, total agreement. :+1:

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If only he was just a crank. To quote the great Charlie Pierce from the must-read “Idiot America”:

The American crank is one of the great by-products of the American experiment. The country was founded on untested, radical ideas…The American crank stood alone, a pioneer gazing at the frontier of his own mind the way the actual pioneers looked out over the prairie…American cranks did not seek out respectable opinion. It had to come to them…As the margins (of respectability) moved, the cranks either found their place within the new boundaries they’d helped to devise, or moved even further out, and began their work anew. That was their essential value. That was what made them purely American cranks. The country was designed to be an ongoing and evolving experiment. The American crank sensed this more deeply than did most of the rest of the country.

[…]

A charlatan is a crank with a book deal and a radio program and a suit in federal court. A charlatan succeeds only in Idiot America. A charlatan is a crank who succeeds too well. A charlatan is a crank who’s sold out

Peterson is Canadian, but the distinction is appicable and worth noting: since he was called out on his bigotry against trans people and gained international fame for his (unfounded) opposition to C-16 he has become no longer just a crank but a full-on charlatan (with enough followers of an intellectually undiscriminating nature to validate that “status”).

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It’s simple: Our Boy of Fairview wanted to help people, and feels like the best way to do that is to instill a theocracy (but not a Muslim theocracy) to enforce rigid social constructs and uphold his personal values. Wait, wasn’t he complaining that Cultural Marxists are trying to impose their views on society and it’s bad because tyranny?

Poor J-Man. He really needs help. But because of his status as a public figure he isn’t willing to seek it. His experience in clinical psychoanalysis leaves him incapable of productive introspection.

Then again, he seems to be deliberately stoking hate mobs and directing them at critics and skeptics.

Wisdom can be found in any source but given his behaviour, I’d be loathe to recommend looking for it in Peterson.

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