So what are you arguing against? You both agree that hierarchies are useful to the point of being inevitable. (Which I would consider the evolutionary reason for their presence in lobsters as well.) That’s all that is being argued, contra the extreme left position that hierarchies are exclusively oppressive constructs.
Peterson isn’t saying that hierarchies are awesome and that we need to make them as numerous and steep as possible. You are just filling that in, because you’ve heard he is “alt-right” and therefore must embody the worst possible interpretation.
No, that is is not what we are arguing. Hierarchies can be useful, but they are not inevitable because, unlike lobsters, we have the ability to decide what is useful and what is not.
You’ll have to take that up with your (and Peterson’s) extreme left strawmen. The oppressive hierarchical constructs we’re discussing are the sexist and racist ones that Peterson and his followers attempt to ground in this sort of genetic determinism.
In the case of gender relations he definitely is, as others have pointed out.
As I’ve said above, I don’t think that Peterson is alt-right (although he reeks of the MRA subset). But he’s discovered it’s a lucrative business to pander to members of that group.
This is not a matter of voluntaristic decision. It either works or it doesn’t and if it doesn’t, people die. Which they did, in tens of millions, last time someone tried to come up with a non-hierarchical social system.
Which wasn’t really a non-hierarchal system. I think you’re assuming that the people who ended up in charge really wanted to create one and failed as opposed to wanting to use the language of non-hierarchy for their own hierarchical ends. But that’s actually irrelevent to the conversation at hand, I think.
You know I’m so tired of these dumbshits who fall for it every time someone wraps up the same ten common sense “how to interact with humans” tips and flavors them with the populist thought mush of the current era… it’s almost always the same shit slurry. I don’t like lobsters either, over-hyped sea cockroaches. It’s great that this guy found a way to make bank from a typically worthless degree… too bad people think it’s new every time. The worst, by the way, is lobster sushi. Some people will eat anything if you tell them it makes them special and superior somehow.
And because they used force to get there. In literally every single case. Same is true of any dictatorship, actually, left or right wing. Because the people who end up in charge believe they have some divine right to rule.
But it’s irrelevant because people can and do make different choices. We (or most of us anyway) don’t live in real monarchies any more, but in somewhat more democratic systems, with far more equality than we did even a couple of hundred years ago. The fact that we have much different systems we live under indicates to me that we can make different choices and build different, more egalitarian structures.
And yet we make such decisions to move away from traditional hierarchy all the time. You can choose to ignore the examples I gave in answer to your question above, but they still exist.
The same argument was made about preserving the hierarchical structure of the divine right of monarchs.
In the example you’re citing, you’re skipping the part where a bad actor took control of that attempt at a non-hierarchical social system and quickly converted it to a rigidly hierarchical one, preserving only the rhetoric as a flimsy justification.
Peterson is very open about his views about the benefits of the traditional Christian family structure (even though he’s an atheist). His followers from the alt-right openly support similarly oppressive hierarchical structures when it comes to sexuality and race. These aren’t secrets.
See above. As an atheist who none-the-less admires and takes as a model the traditional Christian family structure where the supremely rational father is the final arbiter Peterson is effectively a proponent of what feminists and others call “The Patriarchy.”
If we were still living by evolution’s non-existent plan, we’d still be in small tribes and dead before 40. (I’d say ~30, but there will be the lucky outliers.)
Ok! And that would be great. But they are still going to be hierarchical (at the very least because the people in them will have varying levels of ability and therefore authority). And it’s better to work with that.
