JORDAN PETERSON IS A MORON.
No, Jordan Peterson is not “a good philosopher”.
I mean he says dumb shit, and is full of himself — so I don’t know exactly what makes someone “a good philosopher” but we are not off to a great start.
There is some thought given to the idea that there was this Golden Age Jordan B. Peterson, before his crippling benzo addiction and medically induced coma made him crazy Jordan B. Peterson, and I want to counter that notion a bit.
Jordan B. Peterson has always been a crazy arch-conservative. I could go through his early lectures and note his use of the term “Fourth Reich” — he misspoke though, as many Nazis love to do. I could point out his obsession with the Nazis and telling his students you all would have been Nazis if you were alive in Nazi Germany (presumably some would have been Nazis, but I think we can rule out some students, ya know, for stuff). I could point out how he said Hitler might have been accelerating the carnage (killing the Jews) to punish the white Germans — the real German citizens for their weakness — as opposed to committing an ethnic genocide. To illustrate he said if he was Hitler he would have made the Jews work for the war effort instead of “just killing” them — displaying a stunning ignorance about the history of World War II considering there were not just “liquidation” (a Nazi term) camps, but also work camps and ghettos where what he is describing happened.
On an H3H3 interview he claimed Hitler was a war hero based on a discredited story. He completely avoided the many strange tendencies and relationships with female relatives that Hitler had. He claims Hitler was “molded by the crowd” — not about the Jews specifically, but went onto say the Germans “had every right to be angry” — engaging in Nazi apologia. Hitler was, in fact, not molded by the crowd. He was a racist who very plainly stated his wishes and desires to commit pogroms against the Jews and other minorities. He engaged in a systematic propaganda campaign against the German people under the coordinated efforts of the Nazis. They engaged in mafia like tactics and ruled over the population with fear.
Given that he was a Professor, having worked at Harvard University by this point in his career, he is either strangely ignorance about Hitler — however he’d have to not be in order to even spread these falsehoods. These falsehoods come from a place of know that — for most people the story of Hitler is a bad man came along, and did bad things to the Jewish people, until the US stopped him. Basically your template for any superhero story with a Dr. Menace or a Commander Doom as the villain. These conspiracies, about Hitler, and what the Nazis actually did, or did not do, are pervasive because while historians have a pretty good grasp of the events, it is simplified for most people. How did the gas chambers kill 6 million Jews? They didn’t, many other methods, including good old bullets to the head, were used. Starvation, also used. Didn’t Hitler get into power with Socialism? No, he co-opted the populist appeal of Socialism, but his governance involved rolling back civil liberties, privatizing government, allowing kleptocrats to run roughshod over the bureaucratic state. Sound familiar? That is why people peddle these myths, because they blur the lines, and make it so people are more tolerant of increasingly right wing ideologies — like the Nazis did. It started with deporting people — it escalated to murder. So he is either so staggering ignorant about history — strange for a Political Science undergrad — and just by sheer luck his views to map perfectly onto that of Neo-Nazis who want to downplay if not outrightly deny the Holocaust. Keep in mind, denying the Holocaust does not have to take the form of declaring in some mythological event, but rather regarding it as “not a crime against humanity”. Making people feel as though “the Germans had every right to be angry” — Jordan Peterson.
Again, not off to a great start. He’s either actively influenced by or somehow accidentally influenced by a Nazi view of the world.
Everything Jordan B. Peterson says — while some value may be drawn from it on some superficial level, we’ll return to this later — is draped in Nazi imagery. The decision of relating life’s challenges to “slaying a dragon” — Nazi imagery. His relationship with Christianity and belief in God not so much as a faithful belief that their is a loving creator and or some or all of the Bible is true, but rather seeing that as an unchanging mythology that will guide man into Utopia — that was the way Hitler and the Nazis saw Christianity. Not as a true belief, but as a way to motivate rubes. He talks openly about beliefs in God and Christianity in this way — “you act as if God exists”. It is not a belief to him but an act, a performance the people put on to keep them happy and subservient. Nazis. This is his worldview — whether than is accidental or not.
His self-help could be construed as being valuable in the sense that literally any self-help book is helpful. Having read quite a bit myself — 12 Rules for Life, is very similar to 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and some of Rich Dad/Poor Dad particularly with it’s disdain for academia. Some of them, such as “someone else always knows something you don’t” can be found in every self-help book. There is some interesting attempts to hook people such as letting skateboarders skate or petting cats, but there are dark aspects of the book such as where she blames a career woman with a drinking problem for getting rape (in his mind). He claims to also be talking about a real patient, which seems…wrong for a doctor to do. Either way, cleaning your room is good advice. De-cluttering too. Just do it. You have too much stuff. The problem is, if you need someone like Jordan Peterson to tell you that, what does that say about you?
I don’t think a broad series of standard to slightly troubling self help advice percepts is a philosophy. The reason this was front loaded with an examination of his, at best Nazi-ish worldview, as in directly — is because I feel like views such as that, and a potential to even fall for the misinformation that he did and then spread about Hitler and the Holocaust are more fundamental to how he views the world. His philosophy. Far more so than telling people to pet cats and switch to an all beef diet.
Let’s talk about why Nazi ideology is bad. It’s incoherent. It claims to will make a nation great, but then raids it and squanders its resources. It masquerades as a left wing movement, only to push the nation as far right as possible. It limits access of resources to an ever shrinking cabal of elites despite saying it is for the people. All right wing political movements have fleeting shades of this. If someone were to consider the dry conservatism of “53% of people are takers” Mitt Romney to be the most honest form of Conservatism while still retaining a place in the Overton Window — that incoherence begins there — but the end goal of Fascism is complete incoherence. An ignorant and confused population, that is desperate. That they can prey upon. So it is incoherent by design, and thus resistant to change. That’s why the Nazis were more quickly overtaken in the war effort by more “liberalized” nations (even if they look more right wing in retrospect). The Nazis resisted innovations like the atomic bomb, for example. This is a big problem Peterson’s philosophy has — similar to the Nazis, it is stuck in the past.
He has a book called Maps of Meaning. This, I believe, is the core to understanding Jordan Peterson. Even more than the Nazi stuff, although they are related. In Maps of Meaning Jordan Peterson goes to try and search for man and their relationship with symbols. Think the symbol of two snakes curled around one another being a common symbol because we knew about DNA before discovering it. Now, look, I have smoked weed too, but…Maps of Meaning makes a pretty bold claim, that many of these symbols are fixed and unchanging, which isn’t true. This is seen in his videos talking about Disney films. For example, he will say that Beauty and the Beast is an archetypically perfect film, while simultaneously disregarding that these Disney films are massively updated from their original stories. Moreover, he misinterprets them. He will say that The Beast represents masculinity, but Gaston is in the film as the representation of masculinity and he’s bad. The Beast was also cucked and locked in a castle by the town. Doesn’t seem super masculine to me — to be beaten like that. Especially since much of Peterson’s worldview leads to an ubermensch — the one he warns will be fucking all your daughters if you don’t let boys have snowball fights (he did this as a serious segment back when he was “the sane and normal Jordan Peterson”).
Most of Jordan Peterson’s logic revolves around certain works and symbols being untouchable. That we should not be allowed or permitted to enjoy art or create art that does not conform to certain boundaries unavailable to anyone else. Jordan Peterson adorns his house with Stalinist and Communist art made to glorify the state — to remind him of the horrors of Communism — but I think it’s very telling of what kind of art he likes. Art made to placate a certain worldview. It’s why movies like Frozen which won awards and garnered a huge fanbase, are actually horrible, because it featured two sisters and the man was bad (as if this is some crazy new plot idea either). This again, feeds into Jordan Peterson’s philosophy.
The world is fixed and unchanging, and everyone should act as if God exists, regardless of whether or not he is real in that sense, and only the elite intellectuals should manage society, and nobody should have the freedom to explore, especially not sexual stuff, or trans stuff, because of these 12 Rules for Life and then 12 more no one remembers that I made up.
I hate to say this feels like a flimsy philosophy.
The way I read Jordan B. Peterson is this — some of those lectures, which I discussed earlier, were him veering off topic in a Psychology Class as he is a Psychology Professor. Now since then several colleagues of his have come forward and condemned some of his comments and said they didn’t approve of his behavior at the time — but his strange Nazi apologia would have been dismissed as colorful exaggeration for a psychology lecture. I think with a lifetime now or Conservative media hits, and signing with the Daily Wire should make it clear that all of these right wing dogwhistles and statements he made in those lectures he uploaded were part of a coordinated effort to raise his profile in Conservative circles. That makes the philosophy he has displayed to be motivated reasoning. There is a clear path between the philosophy he espouses and where he is today.
He is verbose. He can dazzle people by bullshit — misusing big words and science terms and his doctorate to make people feel like he is saying more than he is, if I am being charitable.
Also, he is firmly a Climate Change denier. He talks about it like a Satanic Panic to convince people to avoid having children. This has hastened with his relationship with The Daily Wire, which takes Fracking money through the Wilkes Brothers, backers of Ted Cruz.
So no, lousy philosopher. I think you can barely call him a philosopher. He believes symbols are fixed and unchanging, when we know this is not true. He thinks that different systems, both political, religious, and economic cannot operate, which is not true. His philosophy is not more coherent than the “America First” crowd, and just as silly and stupid, even if he puts a nice suit on it.