Seeing as the media are united in loathing him utterly he ain’t much of a gateway.
I talked to a friend, once, about my opinion on Ayn Rand[1] and he advanced a curious idea that I’ve been turning over in my head ever since. He said that nearly any philosophy (in the loose sense of the world) no matter how idiotic when seen by cooler heads may be exactly what someone somewhere needs to hear to grow as a person, pointing to a friend of his who was hyperscrupulous to a degree that nearly crippled her and how reading Rand at the young, impressionable age that usually produces horrifying randroids actually made her into a rounded person.
Obviously, anecdote, and also obviously, a bit too pat of a hypothesis, but it stuck with me. Perhaps there’s people out there who need Fight Club for some unknowable reason or even, God help us, people for whom Peterson is just the thing. I can’t tell.
What I can tell is that there’s plenty who should, under no account, have anything to do with any of the things I mentioned. That’s… obvious. Painfully so.
[1] A smooth 50/50 blend of loathing and pointing-and-laughing.
And if he were interested in actually studying how our biology affects our behaviour he’d be looking at our close relatives such as bonobos. Instead he looks at a species that’s pretty darn far, phylogenically, from us; almost as if he chose that species only to make a rhetorical point and to prop up the particular hierarchy that he likes.
The mainstream media, sure. The kind of sucker who falls for one of the alt-right’s lines isn’t someone who reads the NYT or WaPo or the New Yorker or Atlantic – if he gets his news from anywhere it’s Facebook and YouTube and Fox News in a best-case scenario.
We don’t know that at all. His actual point was apparently that they also have seratonin pathways, as we do. But, again, so do bonobos, so do tons of species. And they do different things in different species. He’s noting a deep-down, in the cells, commonality and claiming a macro-scale one. He’s an idiot.
Oh! Sorry! A gateway in not a gateway out. Sorry. I misapprehended your point. I thought you meant that he is a way for them to have legitimacy because, as far as I know, he was a fairly good academic before he decided to become a self-help guru.
Then humanity would have been a poor bet; neither the swiftest nor the strongest. Brains and tools helped, but it was probably teamwork that got us through, which isn’t really a hierarchical situation.
As I understand, basic human cultures don’t have a dominance alpha-beta male hierarchy, it’s lot more complex than that. Species like baboons and wolves do. (Oh, and lobsters, I guess.)
The people who believe in the human alpha-beta thing are always male, and usually (a) are assholes, (b) believe themselves to be the alphas (or would be if unnatural female chaos wasn’t sapping their bodily essences).
The same thing happened to oysters - they used to be prole food, them someone decided that the proles enjoying their food was against the laws of nature, or sumfink.
The Lobster is a deep, disturbing allegory about love:
Highly recommended – although it’s fair to say that I don’t feel the need to see it a second time, having endured its bleak outlook and cracked its allegorical code.
Specifically, captive wolves. It has now been discovered that wolves in the wild do not share that dominance structure and are far more cooperative. The whole alpha-beta thing is based on bad science, all the way through.
Not to mention that comparing our species to other species as a justification for any kind of behavior is hypocritical as fuck coming from the same folks who like to crow about our “god given dominance” over the rest of the planet.
Yup. I will quite happily admit that we are irrational, panicky animals, but the bullshit is strongest in those who somehow feel that we are a superior, reasoning species.
Corvids, octopuses, raccoons and cetaceans are all problem-solving tool-builders, too. We aren’t as special as we like to think we are.
