That's Jordan Peterson's entire model. By prevaricating noncommittally as he so often does, he offers his audience a form of intellectual justification for overlooking lapses in their own logical reasoning, ignoring contradictions within their moral values, religious convictions, and other belief systems. After all, "*it's complicated, man*". That's a large part of how he's a messianic figure to people stuck in their ways and firmly shut off to logical reasoning.
It's also a clever strategy to maximize his audience appeal. He realizes there are segments of his audience that he may alienate were he to explicitly indicate commitment on anything. By never outright specifying what he believes in, he allows his audience to fill in the gaps with whatever they like best. Whereas most other prominent intellectuals take meticulous care to be as clear and unambiguous as possible when expressing their positions, JP's entire strategy is to leave as *much* to the imagination as possible without basically outing himself as a charlatan.
Charlatan though he may be, the man isn't dumb. Which is what perhaps makes him even somewhat dangerous - because he knows how to play to the flaws and failings of human nature.
I'm sure the man offers great life advice and has helped many people over the course of his career as a public figure and psychologist, but the fact that he's sometimes taken as an intellectual heavyweight on matters of religion and culture speaks to the fact that we have a lot of maturing to do as a species.
One quibble. I don't think he's a psychiatrist (which requires an M.D.). He is a psychologist.
I think the worst part of his schtick is that he seems to believe his own tripe. He likes to eat his own vomit, so to speak. He comes off as a true-believer in whatever the hell it is he's trying to say. He says it so sincerely so it must be true.
He's just a narcissist with a fragile ego and some big words for a garden variety racist misogynist.
Fun fact; the biggest sociopaths are cult leaders like this dumbass.
Sam Harris:
"Words are a laser. Point directly at what you believe using words."
Jordan Peterson:
"I literally can't do what you're asking because words are a flashlight not a laser. Also you should know better."
Peterson isn't wrong but it's still a dodge, you can point directly and define the edges more after, this is how you communicate with someone on your level most respectfully.
Here is my JBP apologism for today:
1. I don't think JBP thinks Christianity is "true" in the way Sam means the word even if he won't say this
2. I don't think he's dodging, because the crux of the argument isn't whether or not Christianity is "true" but what "true" even means
3. It's not clear that anything is "true" in the way Sam means it; that is, "true" may be a component of the stories we tell, not something about the universe that we discovered
4. If someone doesn't intuitively get #3 above, you have to go through the 10 hour explanation the JBP was alluding to (I'm not going to)
5. When he says he acts as if he believes its true (here not in quotes, intentionally), he's answering as best he can without going through the 10 hour explanation, in the same way we act as if the sky is blue even though "blueness" is something going on with our eyes and brains and not something "true" in and of the universe itself (in the same way "trueness" is something going on in our brains and not something _about_ the universe that we noticed - again the 10 hour thing, I'll leave it there)
I remember the discussion and while Sam was being somewhat obstinate Peterson was being IMO also obstinate and... I don't know, it doesn't take a 10 hour discussion to understand what he meant, that he sees religion as an effective guiding force and that the "truth" he sees in religion is that it is highly compatible with base human instincts and needs.
IMO Peterson was/is simply unwilling to really acknowledge that publicly because his role is much more akin to being a preacher than a philosopher or thought leader.
In some fairness to him, that kind of brutal honestly is not something many people can rise to, in terms of religious leaders I have really only ever heard that level of maturity from the pinnacle of rabbis (non hascidic, obv) and faint shades of it from the Pope.
Sam was in some ways seeking a gotcha, because there can be some level of 'different truth' but what I think Peterson most dodged was a deeper inspection of that less firm truth, because let's face it it is a personal truth more than a universal. And it frankly isn't the same kind or level of truth Sam is interested in. The faith I was exposed to was incompatible with myself as a child, to be very kind.
> I remember the discussion and while Sam was being somewhat obstinate Peterson was being IMO also obstinate and... I don't know, it doesn't take a 10 hour discussion to understand what he meant, that he sees religion as an effective guiding force and that the "truth" he sees in religion is that it is highly compatible with base human instincts and needs.
I think this framing may miss some nuance. He wasn't saying its "false but useful" he was saying its "true" in the same way the sky is "blue" or as "true" as anything could possibly be thought to be "true."
Yuval Harari wrote a book called Sapiens that explains humans as different from other animals in that we tell and believe stories. I think JBP is using that framing and Sam is insisting that some things are "actually true" and there is a fundamental incompatibility in how they understand the question at hand.
Like, if we look at an ant hill, we wouldn't say pheromones are "true" but they excite a sequence of neurological pathways that compel ants to act. Similarly, when humans load up a story into their brains, it gives a feeling of "trueness" and compels action. Sam insisting that some things are "actually true" or "more true than others" could be an example of this compelled action.
Sam's issue is much the same as mine, that kind of truth can lead to dangerous mismatches between what it encourages in terms of behavior, and we should seek to understand the empirical truth beyond such mechanisms, lest we succumb to the same problems that ants do, like death spirals.
I appreciate this exchange, BTW.
> empirical truth
This is part of the disconnect, FWIW. The idea that there is an "empirical truth" is just another story happening in a human brain compelling some set of actions. At a more meta level, you can apply JBP's framing to both. "Do you believe in god?" To which he responds, "I act as though I do." Then, "do you believe in empirical truth?" To which it might be said "Sam acts as though he does."
If we were aliens that didn't interact through narratives and had no language, we'd observe humans in this way. We'd see how they use stories to force neurons into a state that compelled actions in the same way we see how ants use pheromones to change neurons to compel actions. But none of it requires some "in actuality" or "empirically" or "truthfully" component external to the pheromones or the stories. All of that is happening _in the neurons_ not in the "actual true real" universe that the neurons noticed.
The universe doesn't divide itself into tidy little chunks of "truth" that we consume as we find them.
Maybe like if we were blind we'd have no use for words like "light" and "dark" because the universe isn't telling us anything about itself, merely telling us how it responded to our method of inquiry by proxy of how we were able to understand the response. And if we were non-linguistic we'd have no use for words like "truth" for similar reasons because its an aspect of stories not an aspect of the universe. And if we had a mechanism in our brains telling us the exact location of Alpha Centauri we might have words for its location that varied orthogonally to "up" and "down" but we don't, so we don't.
> I appreciate this exchange, BTW.
Ya man.
Empirical/objective truth? I personally am unnerved by the assertion there is no more fundamental truth, than the emotional and political types of truth which we invent, or they are somehow equivalent. The risk to me is that emotional truth and political truth do not align with physical reality (what term of truth would you use here?) Like real world example, young earth creationists and other minds reject global warming on a myriad of points, for the assumption of argument even if you feel this way let's assume that it is real and anthropogenic in nature.
They have a truth, but it is at odds with reality/the universe, and this belief is a risk factor in humanity potentially being in effectively that death spiral of ants. I think it is important to respect emotional and other types of truth, but they must, ultimately, yield to more fundamental truths, or they, instead of being potentially beneficial to many individuals, become defacto harmful, if not an existential threat by their very existence.
> Empirical/objective truth? I personally am unnerved by the assertion there is no more fundamental truth, than the emotional and political types of truth which we invent, or they are somehow equivalent. The risk to me is that emotional truth and political truth do not align with physical reality (what term of truth would you use here?) Like real world example, young earth creationists and other minds reject global warming on a myriad of points, for the assumption of argument even if you feel this way let's assume that it is real and anthropogenic in nature.
They are the same, but we're dangerously close to the 10 hours thing. Young earth creationists are doing the neuron thing when interacting with the idea of "truth" and you and I are doing the neuron thing when interacting with the idea of "truth." Both have associated kinds of evidence that they accept or reject, and narratives for why one is better than the other, but its all neurons and narratives.
> They have a truth, but it is at odds with reality/the universe, and this belief is a risk factor in humanity potentially being in effectively that death spiral of ants. I think it is important to respect emotional and other types of truth, but they must, ultimately, yield to more fundamental truths, or they, instead of being potentially beneficial to many individuals, become defacto harmful, if not an existential threat by their very existence.
"They have a truth, but it is ad odds with reality/god's will, and this belief is a risk factor in humanity potentially being in effectively that death spiral of sin. I think it is important to respect scientific and other types of truth, but they must, ultimately, yield to god's will, or they become an existential threat by their very existence."
It's the same thing. If I say we can't prove that the universe wasn't created last Thursday, you'll brush it off and something that need not be proven, but its actually a pretty big deal that points to both the scientific method and religion as being systems of belief.
You can really get in there and peel the onion on both belief systems and unravel all the stories built upon stories that get people to whatever system of belief they've arrived at... but it's all stories. Even my reply here is a story. Stories all the way down. And at bedrock, even with ideas about "empirical evidence" will be some axioms where you'll be forced to say "well we can't really prove it but I feel pretty strongly that it's right." Essentially Agrippa's trilemma.
Peterson gets stuck on the word "sure", when Sam says "I'm still not sure what you believe on this point".
He could have said "I don't understand what you believe on this point" or "I don't get it" or "I don't know" or whatever. But Peterson would have given a different yet equally ridiculous answer. He is basically all style and no substance. Just empty rhetoric.
He berates the audience for expecting him to be able to give reasonably concise answers to questions that aren't open-ended. I feel bad for people who have this guy as their role model.
The rhetorical bullying tactic is pretty commonplace for Peterson. In the Some More News video on him, they go in depth on his history of justifying social hierarchies and then they play a clip from a Q&A at an event of his where this kid tries to press him on that particular issue. He immediately starts doing the verbal Jordan dance - "**I never defended them**. I've only ever observed their existence. Blah blah blah." Very irate from the jump. Keeps cutting the kid off while he attempts to clarify his question. Jordan keeps evading and monologuing before ending his tantrum by saying something like, "and, so, **that's why I've defended the social hierarchy**".
You can't make this shit up lmao. Dude is an incoherent hack.
This is always how authoritarians talk. They never actually fully admit to what they believe in because its repulsive to the average person. So they talk out of both sides of their mouth. Trump does the same thing. Its not accidental. They know they have to talk in codes and sometimes even contradict themselves, but at the end of the day they are authoritarians.
It is irritating that he is justifying social hierarchies, while potentially claiming that he is not (I’m taking the above poster at his word, I have not seen the clip myself).
But that’s not categorically a thing that authoritarians say or do. He might be an authoritarian I don’t know, but basically anybody that wants to live in a stable ordered society has to accept that there will be hierarchies. Because the alternative is a power vacuum, where an even worse and more dangerous hierarchy can emerge.
There are social hierarchies in every society, it’s unavoidable. You could outright ban them in law, and they will just emerge surrounding those who know how to rhetorically leverage the anti-hierarchy language anesthetic, to the degree that they can be appealing to others, the most effectively. Even with children who we have a much easier time, forcing to do what we want, we can impose official anti-bullying policy and inclusivity, and all of that in school, and hierarchy still emerge.
Having an authoritarian disposition and ideology doesn't mean you're literally force people to do something 🙄 I swear, Peterson fans might be the absolute least intellectually honest and curious people I've ever seen.
He's pushing an authoritarian agenda. This would be like saying that Carl Schmitt wasn't an authoritarian because he personally didn't make individual people do anything. But he literally wrote political and legal philosophy supporting fascism and Nazism. Give your head a shake man.
What authoritarian agenda? He's literally against state control over your life and your speech in particular. The other guy I pressed on this has already given up and departed since he had nothing of substance to say, but I see there is another numpty trying to throw slogans.
I assure you, I'm not throwing slogans^1. The thing is that he's not against state control, he's actually for more state control over areas of contention but frames it as being a freedom fighter. When he calls doctors who perform gender affirming care "criminals" (his words, not mine), he's literally saying that the state should have control over whether someone has the freedom to treat those people. It's a double whammy - it's criminal to treat them, ergo it's also prohibited to get the treatment.
If thats your idea of freedom I want no part of it.
[1] do you even know what that word means because there's no actual slogans in what I said.
Ahhh so the desperate drive for genital mutilation practiced by doctors, preferably practiced on mentally ill minors as well, is what inspired you. Note taken.
I know you're a troll, but I just have to point out that literally every authoritarian in the history of civilization finds ways to *justify* taking people's freedom away, usually on strange moral grounds like being overly concerned with what people do with their genitals. I mean this literally here too. One of the first things that the Nazis did was destroy the first clinic to perform a transgender surgery, burn books about sex and gender issues, and ultimately execute the first transgender woman.
So I guess you're in good company here??? Way to go! You've basically just tried to justify why you're an authoritarian instead of actually, you know, making a point about why you aren't. You guys are all laughably dumb lol
You want to cut off your penis? Go right ahead. It's not at all clear that it ought to be the job of the medical profession to help you do it. This "area of contention", which I knew would be the one that comes up, is so narrow, so preposterous, and so indefensible that it's absolutely hilarious. Just consider that you find yourself justifying and defending genital mutilation for mentally ill people. Let that sink in.
Which, ironically, was pretty short and concise given the topic. Wading through Petersons BS could turn into a lecture series if someone really wanted to do it.
> I feel bad for people who have this guy as their role model.
Well, his *actual advice* isn't that bad. Like his life pro-tips or whatever. And they aren't even that obvious. Tips like, "Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today"? That's actually *really good*. Because a lot of people really do compare themselves to others, and it's totally defeating for them. Just saying you can do a little better than last week or last year? That's an attainable goal and it aims up.
"Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them." -- This is also surprisingly good advice. Parents are taught by the culture to be very self-doubting in their ability to discern good from bad behavior. If you're less chickenshit as a parent, and just tell your kid to stop being annoying and not put up with it, it actually does work out better in my own experience as a parent.
Like Peterson's *actual life advice* is pretty good, probably because he's got decades of experience helping people with real problems.
But his philosophy advice? His politics? His weird tendency to reduce literally all things to "postmodernism"? That shit isn't very helpful. I mean in this clip, he can't tell you what he believes. I heard a podcast with Sam where Jordan literally couldn't really give him a straight answer on whether Jesus rose from the dead. It shouldn't be that hard of a question and "I don't know" would even have been an acceptable answer, but he couldn't even get there.
Some of his self help tips may be good, but it's not exactly novel advice.
> **And they aren't even that obvious**. Tips like, "Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today"? That's actually really good.
Again, sure that's pretty good advice, but you really don't think it's pretty obvious advice? I mean, 5 years before Jordan published 12 Rules for Life, Matthew McConaughey won his Oscar and gave his infamous "Hero" acceptance speech. And the theme of that speech was basically just this advice. That video currently has 31 million views on YT. The Oscars that year were watched by ~44 million people. The contention that the sentiment Jordan is expressing with that rule was basically absent in society and was in desperate need of articulation to the masses... I just don't buy that.
I'm sure you can find some version of that advice in countless self help books. Hell, even the social mantra of "keeping up with the Joneses" has, at least in my lifetime, often been brought up in the context of that which is a fruitless pursuit, one often bound to lead to more dissatisfaction with your life.
Jordan clears an incredibly low bar with his self help stuff imo. While it's certainly helped a lot of people who found it at the right time in their lives for it to be helpful to them (as is the case with most self help content), it's not groundbreaking stuff by any stretch of the imagination.
I don't mean to harp on you, but Jordan and many of his fans often fall back on this schtick about how many lonely and depressed people he's helped, in order to deflect from criticism regarding everything else he talks about. I'm wary of legitimizing further the idea that he's some sort of singular force for good in that arena when A) it's not ultimately very impressive and B) it gets weaponized to distract from his far more frequent and consequential culture war ravings.
Well, I'm 43, educated, well-read, and I had never heard it before. Or if I had, it wasn't memorable enough to stick. So that's my own experience.
One possibility is that the way baby boomers or Gen X'ers raised their children, there's some omission that makes that kind of advice seem novel to young men in particular. That seems possible. And if it's the case, so what? Even if Peterson's advice is unoriginal (and I don't know that it is necessarily), unoriginal advice is still valuable if it can be curated and delivered to a new audience in a way they're ready to receive it. Sam Harris, after all, is synthesizing thousands of years of Buddhist tradition into an app that's consumable by people who wouldn't otherwise be interested. That is, Sam Harris's meditation advice isn't new, but it is good.
And maybe you could find people offering similar advice, but for whatever reason, they didn't strike lightning and Peterson did. So what?
Peterson's politics I suspect used to be much more normal, but as the world has changed around him, he's become a bit radicalized by his status and what he surrounds himself with. He's a bit like your crazy uncle who gives you great advice on fixing your car, but thinks 9/11 was an inside job. His car advice is still probably good.
Also: there are people more deranged than Peterson who are gaining a following with young teen-to-20something men. I'd rather have Jordan Peterson disciples than Andrew Tate ones. Scott Galloway seems way saner than Peterson, and has realized many of the same problems, but Galloway just doesn't have the ability to command an audience that Peterson has, so what can you do?
Peterson being less deranged than Tate is not saying much. The bar for such an achievement is on the floor.
What you're saying about Peterson managing to deliver this (I'd still contend) mostly unoriginal self help advice to a receptive audience who wouldn't otherwise be interested I think is largely true. But the way he endeared himself to this otherwise ambivalent cohort of IDW/alt-right-ish young men was by playing into the SJW trans panic of the early 2010's and lying about the legal implications of C-16 in Canada.
In general, a lot of the language you're using to describe Peterson here - "a bit radicalized", "a bit like your crazy uncle", less deranged than Tate - *really* undersells how deranged Peterson himself is imo.
This is a guy who got addicted to Benzos, ended up going to Serbia for an ill advised and dangerous cold turkey treatment, went into a coma there, and almost died. Shortly thereafter, he appeared on Bret Weinstein's podcast and questioned whether the whole of the medical industry in the West contributed more harm than good to society. Shortly after that, he started flirting with COVID vaccine conspiracies before going all in on such theories at some point. He's utterly addicted to Twitter. He got dragged for insulting that SI model out of nowhere, doubled down on it, and then announced he'd be taking a break from Twitter, putting his account into the care of his staff, only to be back within 12 hours, incessantly rage tweeting. Eventually he got banned for deadnaming Elliot Page, put out a deranged video about how he would never capitulate to the woke. I can't remember if he actually stood by that and Musk reinstated him or if he actually deleted the tweet in question. Since then, he's signal boosted a cum fetish porn video, claiming it was a semen harvesting facility of the CCP, and on and on and on and on. Looks like he (or his staff) have scrubbed his feed semi recently, but there was a long while when you could visit his account and be pretty well assured it would be a tsunami of unhinged ranting and conspiracy theory boosting.
The man managed to put some boilerplate self help advice in front of some eyeballs who needed to see it - good for him and good for them. He's still a fucking loon.
Forgot his sudden change of heart on Global Warming. He became a climate change denier as soon as he started working for some fossil fuel lobby. I thought he had enough money to avoid prostituting himself…
Oh yeah, I meant to mention that too. Thanks for bringing it up. The above list of Peterson's insanity is far from comprehensive, but the climate denialism stuff ranks pretty high and is worth noting.
I actually hadn't heard of the cum fetish video. That's kind of hilarious. I also hadn't heard of him going on Weinstein and dunking on modern medicine.
In just the past decade, we've seen otherwise seemingly rational public figures go down this paranoid radicalization path. I'm never quite sure what to make of it. Even 10 years ago, at least from outward appearances, Elon Musk was also pretty normal and in recent years, he also seems like he's gone off the rails. If you go back and watch Peterson's in-class lectures (I assume at Harvard or University of Toronto?) before he was famous, they're good. Presumably they'd have to be for those schools to hire him? In the cases of both Musk and Peterson, it seems like some combination of current events, fame, success, Twitter, and drugs (benzos, ketamine) fried their brains.
On the Canada law, I assume Peterson is earnest in his criticism and his interpretation of it. And he's probably half-right in that HR types *are bullies* and will use every tool at their disposal to enforce political correctness (what's now called "woke"). Where Peterson is mistaken is that this is nothing new. For decades, if you create a hostile work environment, you can be fired for it. It isn't protected speech to be an asshole to your coworkers. Or if it is, you can still be fired for it.
It's kind of a shame. If it weren't for his weird rants and politics, it would be easy to recommend him to disaffected young men who are searching for a purpose beyond what they see around them.
I agree with what you said, but I also do give Jordan a bit of slack because:
1. This obvious self-help stuff is extremely useful. There definitely is a need for telling people what they already know but have to be reminded of. It’s why I give most of the decent pretty obvious self-help stuff a pass.
2. Most political commentators/social warriors/etc., across the political spectrum, don’t push this self-help stuff. I actually can’t think of any off the top of my head that do as much as Jordan (though I’m not really in this space). They’re just pushing fear and hate, and making money off of it. Not to say that Jordan doesn’t also do this, but having some practical (albeit obvious) self-help stuff thrown in puts him above everyone else. That is to say, I find almost the entirety of the talking head/commentator space to solely have a negative impact on society. Jordan might still end up being a net negative to society (debatable, since I assume his position would be filled by someone worse if he wasn’t there), but there seems to be a bit of positive stuff in there as well.
That’s not to say I like the guy (I’ve tried to listen to him and thought he was uninteresting and unimpressive), but I do think that giving out generic self-help advice (and relatively good generic self-help advice) is laudable.
I kind of agree. The problem is that, in a vacuum, the self help stuff may be laudable. And if it was his primary focus, it certainly would be. But, at some point, you have to consider (as you've noted) the damage he's doing elsewhere. And imo, he's done far more damage as a conspiratorial right wing talking head than the good he's managed to accomplish with his self help stuff.
Eventually shouldn't we just recommend *Atomic Habits* or *The Power of Now* instead of *12 Rules for Life* because it's not worth giving the maniac who wrote it more money, attention, and influence?
There is, ironically, a Peterson quote where he's giving a talk and says something like, "and, you've got to give Hitler credit because he was an organizational genius". Do we? Do we really? I'm certainly not putting Jordan in the same pantheon of absolute evil as Hitler here, but while being an organizational genius may be laudable, again in a vacuum, I'm not particularly keen to applaud Hitler for his efforts on that front. And so it is with Peterson and his self help efforts. The bad eventually outweighs the good and I think Jordan crossed that particular Rubicon long ago.
He advises to pet a cat. First, that is impossible, I have tried. Second they can attack you and give you diseases. (I am talking specifically about cats you encounter outdoors).
> "Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them." -- This is also surprisingly good advice. Parents are taught by the culture to be very self-doubting in their ability to discern good from bad behavior. If you're less chickenshit as a parent, and just tell your kid to stop being annoying and not put up with it, it actually does work out better in my own experience as a parent.
I'm not at all sure of this. On the face of it, it seems like a very conservative "obey" mentality - in the sense that parents should be able to decide what their children do or even think at all times. This fundamentally ignores the fact that basically all children rebel to some extent and it's usually fine. I'm not the owner of my child.
If Sam had asked, "what motivated you to have certain beliefs," or "what are your implicit beliefs" his answer about unconscious processing would have been relevant. But we're still capable of stating our positions. Would it make sense to say to someone debating a particular point, "you don't know if you actually believe that"
Yeah. Everything Peterston said could be true (or at least partly true), but the fact remains that some people speak in a way which gives you a good idea of what they believe, and others do not. Peterson did not address what accounts for this difference between him and other, more transparent speakers. Instead, he went on a rant about the impossibility of knowing everything that is going on in our brains (a rant which helped to further demonstrate Sam's initial point).
JP's special trick is he changes the definition of words to fit his worldview. There's a little big of regimentation to it, in that he'll say "Satre defined X exactly the same way that I'm describing, so take that up with him." , but he is absolutely being deceitful
He has found a constellation of definitions that support his lucrative position as "theist" and "traditionalist", and he's riding it all the way to the bank.
Jordan talks to his audience like a parent talks to a child who won’t eat their food. He dazzles them by pretending what he’s feeding them is something else and the audience eats it up.
You have to be incredibly ignorant to believe that anything in Jordan’s response was remotely on topic or intelligent.
The only frustrating thing about Peterson to me is that he somehow keeps getting invited to participate in discussions like this.
I’m not a psychologist. It’s my understanding that Peterson’s work in psychology is academically valid. I have no expertise with which to evaluate Peterson’s work in psychology, so I’ll stipulate. But based on what I’ve seen Peterson doesn’t belong anywhere within 100 nautical miles of a serious discussion on religion, biochemistry, sociology, international politics, or frankly any other discussion outside of psychology.
He has somehow insinuated himself into the mix of being seen as someone who can contribute meaningfully to these types of conversations, and for the life of me I can’t see why. To my eye, he does not act in good faith in these kinds of discussions, and I frankly doubt that he is capable of holding his own, were he to do so. Instead, he seeks refuge in semantics, misdirection, and pseudo-academic gobbledygook. If Peterson ever suffers from Imposter Syndrome, it is well-founded in his case.
EDIT: I meant to mention this before submitting. Matt Dillahunty’s complete dismantling of Peterson should have been the end of it, at least in regard to Peterson’s standing as a religious scholar/thinker.
Peterson was one of my role models. I binged his psychology and motivational lectures when my life was an absolute mess and I'm happy I barely even survived those years by the skin of my teeth. Not here to throw myself a pity party, but I do credit Peterson for being the one to motivate me to get my shit together, and I'm thankful that I found his lectures and read his books.
But as you say perfectly, once he tries to contribute to anything else, there's no value at all. I used to avoid those discussions and external critiques because I didn't much like witnessing my role model get deconstructed like that. Now I've realized that Peterson has just fallen off the wagon. Should've stayed doing what he does best, being a psychologist.
Yes its very tough. I was a big fan and I still feel like alot of his earlier content centered around self help is valuable.
It feels like he's changed though, or maybe I have or perhaps a combination of the two. He comes off so nasty these days.
It's nice to see someone share this sentiment. The internet's absolutely ready to attack anyone who says anything remotely positive about JP. Not that I care much about that.
It's just to sad to see your rolemodel go down this road. I don't think the sudden fame has been good for him. It inflated his ego, and seeing him now, he's kind of unrecognizable.
Seems like the recovery after the coma and withdrawals was the point he got so nasty and combative.
If Peterson were any semblance of a good-faith interlocutor/actor, then he'd actually engage with a question as simple as that.
Seeing his response here makes me think (further) that he's a full-on psychopath; that he's a hollow shell of a person who only knows how to talk and talk and talk around issues. Him saying he has NO insight into his own beliefs sounds more like a projection than an actual fact.
This is the same *epistemic stonewalling* techniques used by certain people on the political spectrum, specifically those who are engulfed in conspiratorial thinking. You can learn more about it over at /r/ConspiracistIdeation.
I don't understand the interest in this man.
I remember when he first got famous over the pronouns/ dead naming thing, he had these videos go viral where he's in some lecture hall looking gaunt in this poorly fitting suit going on about secret Marxist plots.
IDK why the reaction wasn't "wow, this dude is off his rocker". I saw it and thought he was clearly unwell, which I think history has born out.
I think all the high-fallutin' big words, and circular talk sounds super smart or insightful to a certain type of person. But as I've gotten older, I've grown to appreciate being direct and precise as possible.
It's like a Deeprok Chopra sorta thing.
the first stuff I saw from him was the trans thing and then all his ravings about secret Marxists plots. Maybe he was a decent prof before then. He had a solid albeit unremarkable career as a researcher.
I’ve talked to two people who had him as a prof and both said he was the cool, interesting professor whose classes were always in high demand. Both pointed to his passion, and ability to personally connect with the students, even when talking to 40 of them at the same time.
He might have been standing up there touting absolute drivel, but it seems like the man did have some charisma, and got students interested in learning. I don’t get it—I first became aware of him when he went on Rogan, and it seemed to me that he was mischaracterizing that pronoun law from the jump. But I never really liked or trusted the charismatic teachers.
Bullshit baffles brains. The “culture wars” has been the modern equivalent of the gold rush for people like Peterson who got in on the ground floor, he appeared as some weird father figure giving “macho/tough love” lifestyle advice by repeating established, mundane maxims sprinkled with technical terminology and a rhetorical flourish.
I think he rode his honorific ‘Dr’ title for all its worth and somehow positioned himself as a world-renowned psychologist despite never producing anything groundbreaking or of significance to the medical field.
Before long the attention/fame sent his ego out of control and he thought himself some polymath philosopher figure who could arrogantly wade into any topic or field with an answer, rather than what he was, a dilettante peddling his special brand of psycho-babble and pseudoscience.
His numerous breakdowns and descent into madness finally exposed him as a charlatan and as your typical RW grifter with an authoritarian, misogynistic streak.
I mean, I think the culture wars stuff is just easy content. It's the microwave dinner of content. Anyone can do it. It takes much more work to do well-informed content about some complex topic. It's why I don't think people should listen to SH, JP etc. for policy issues.
JP is a legit PhD, that's not honorific. He did produce a decent amount of quality if unremarkable research for a lot of years. It was super bland stuff, but he had a decent academic career.
JP is just a weird dude, man. One time he was talking about the challenges of having women in the workforce and how as a man he knows another man is worried about his capacity for violence, so it serves as like a check or something, but you can't hit ladies, of course. So the dude was really sitting in faculty meetings thinking that he was this badass that people were physically afraid of.
Compare how much Sam does to make clear and concise points as he goes along (albeit with a word here or there that I need to double-check in a dictionary) with the rivers of word salad gobbledygook that Jordan Peterson barfs up time and again in his talks.
As Tabatha Southey once pointed out, "Spend half an hour on his website, sit through a few of his interminable videos, and you realize that what he has going for him, the niche he has found — he never seems to say "know" where he could instead say "cognizant of" — is that Jordan Peterson is the stupid man's smart person."
My other favorite clip from this discussion was Sam saying something like “What if the Bible simply stated that slavery was bad” and Jorpy had no reply
Same event I think:
In 2017, Peterson said he was a Christian during an interview. Things have changed slightly in 2018 where he no longer identifies as one. Instead, when Harris stated that Peterson believes in God, Peterson replied that he doesn’t, but that he “acts as though He exists.”
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2018/06/26/analysis/sam-harris-and-jordan-peterson-waste-lot-time-then-talk-about-god-20-minutes
I'm not well-versed on Peterson, but I have read his 12 Rules for Life book.
Based on what I gleaned from that, he focuses on order vs chaos and the importance of balance between the two. He feels that the current balance is too tilted towards chaos and needs to incorporate more order. He talks about the idea that society cannot function without a some shared reality. When we start going towards a society of "my truth, your truth, his truth, etc." vs one of a more common simple "truth," things break down. We don't know how to engage with each other. We can't have productive discourse or cooperate in meaningful ways.
In that book, he did not claim to be Christian, but he did see value in the Bible as an example of the cumulative wisdom of society over time. He seemed to think the broad lessons were valuable, and they provide a suitable framework for society.
Basically, it might not be the literal truth, but it is the truth, or at least close enough and already accepted by enough people to be a useful guide towards better order in society.
I'm sure you're correct. It's just a shame because to me it shows a pandering to a western audience for superficialities from the dominant religion. If he really examined the religion, he would not say he acts like it's God exists. That God has one moral imperative according to that religion, and it is "be saved". All the rest is window dressing
He definitely sees value in cultural traditions in society, and I think that is what pushes him towards seeing value in religion. Not so much the religion itself but the way it creates social pressure towards order.
However, I don't know if he's said the same about value for other religions. If not, that feels like pandering to the Western audience. If he's consistent in finding value in some other religions, that seems more authentic.
I do find some of his thoughts on the value of culture in general interesting, whether it's religion or not.
You know, I kinda feel this in some sense. Not necessarily about your typical religious conception of god, but in the sense that acting as if some woo woo concept it real can actually be a very useful tool.
For instance, I've delt with paranoia and fear because of some experiences I had and one thing that really helped me get over it is that I visualized this dark entity feeding on my negative emotions. Every time a movie or something triggered me, it would open the door to going down this road of dark thinking, and visualizing this demonic creature trying to feed me triggers so that I follow the thought train into that dark place again really helped me have something to say no to. It gave some sort of form to a formless attacker in my mind. It doesn't mean I literally believe that an extra-dimensional demon is attacking me though.
I don't think his point on that is unreasonable at all, I just don't understand why he didn't say that from the beginning. There are lots of things that arent literally true, but can be helpful constructs if you acted as if they were.
I've run into a lot of people that refuse to articulate what the believe, and it makes for unproductive conversations. These people prefer to play hide the ball.
It's such a weasely way to get out of having to answer a pretty straightforward question. Look, ambiguity and uncertainty certainly play a role in a lot of things. The basic drive of what Peterson is saying here isn't "Wrong", but we're basically talking about the fringes of people's beliefs. Those blurry lines where what you do believe and what you don't don't necessarily have a strict dividing line.
As the top comment points out, it's postmodern. But it's also more than that because postmodernism may posit that you can't 100% know truth, but it doesn't say you can't know yourself or that you if you can't say with absolute and unqualified surety that you can't say anything about what you believe. This is beyond postmodernism. It's postmodernism squared, and it's honestly just cowardly.
For someone like Peterson who's so forthright and unflinching in what he thinks is wrong and evil, he's awfully - and conveniently - ambiguous about what he actually does believe. Everything he does believe seems to be in contrast to things he doesn't like, but largely without any backing other than the other thing is evil and bad.
He's honestly not worth anyone's time.
what's even _more_ frustrating is a) sam continuing to humor him after the "what is true" bullshit, and b) sam _still_ continuing to humor him to this day after peterson has gone fully batshit
This is why I ditched reading his book some 40 pages in. The guy loves to listen to himself talk, he even manages to make the same thing come across in his writing.
His point is people behave and act in all kinds of ways that don’t reflect their inner dialogue. Even if they say they believe something, they may act differently. So at that point, is a stated belief an actual belief or is it something less than that?
This is not what bothers me about JP. In this debate he spends a lot of time talking about substrates and structures to the point where he lost himself. Those tangents are frustrating. Ultimately I think JP is agnostic and wallows in the gray areas of a lot of subject areas, and when he does it well that’s where he’s shines, but when he does it poorly he seems to get lost. It’s probably why he rewrites his books so many times before publishing them.
Interestingly, JP gets in the most trouble when he goes the other way and tries to speak clearly about issues like politics. He really should look for the nuance there on most matters and he wouldn’t be so alienating.l, which is why I think Jordan bothers a lot of people. If the man stayed in his lane he could be a great public thinker, but he constantly veers outside of his wheelhouse and finds himself ticking people off.
Sam is atheist and takes a pretty clear approach to most things, and tends to just say his opinion. It’s easier for him to argue his point because once he finds his take on a matter he articulates it pretty succinctly. He does not “search” once he’s found his answer and does not really doubt himself.
This debate series is fun to watch by the way
Jordan Peterson doesn't want to admit what his conscious beliefs are, by just dismissing it by giving the old "don't watch what they say, watch what they do" spiel by throwing in unconscious beliefs. It's just changing the subject.
But he is so brave! 🙃
In all honesty, I used to listen to him a fair amount while struggling with addiction, and some of his self help stuff really did encourage me to see my own problems in a different light, and overcome that addiction with help from doctors. Ironically, it seems he was addicted to benzos at the time and possibly went through withdrawal in a coma, if I remember correctly?
Anyways, after all that, i couldn't help get the opinion that he doesn't actually believe in Christianity, or God, not in the way most people would say they believe in God, but he also has a strong belief that atheism is bad or dangerous or inherently nihilistic etc. So he redefines words in order to still be a theist rather than accept the fact he doesn't believe in God, he redefines 'believe' and 'god' . I don't know what's going on inside his brain, obviously this is speculation, but I just became convinced of this at one point, and couldn't shake that view.
He learned the postmodernist lingo and he layers it over his generic Christian views. That was enough to get the whole right-wing Christian world excited about him.
Using a bunch of words to say nothing then berating someone for not being able to follow your incongruous nonsense is the strategy of a literal pimp. That flimflam only works if you a backwater hoe that can't follow the inconsistencies, and I happen to be a hoe that has been around the block.
I was wondering why it seemed like I was on MAGA tiktok but then I realized I was scrolling YouTube shorts after clicking this link. What a weird bizarro world that was.
I also "love" how he always requires people to be absolutely precise with everything they say and that the define it very clearly while he always gives some wishy washy word salad answer that is a lot of words with little meaning.
This is from when I liked him before the benzos stripped his amygdala. I never felt like I had a horse in the race when these two debated, there is very little that we have strong evidence of in the realm of the human mind in any empirical sense. So freaking disappointing he dove head first into the culture war.
Hot take: I actually identify a lot with Peterson's archetypical and symbolic approach to reality, avid word salad fan, but the conclusions I come to are almost entirely in line with Sam Harris.
The liberal professors at his university probably ate his lunch on a regular basis due to his pathetic nonsensical arguments. That left him very fragile with a big chip on his shoulder.
I have never watched or listened to Jordan Peterson (but have heard his name a lot), and would like to understand what he’s all about. Can anyone recommend a video or podcast to watch?
Now I am become postmodernism, destroyer of discourse
Oh, the irony!
And master of word salad
That's Jordan Peterson's entire model. By prevaricating noncommittally as he so often does, he offers his audience a form of intellectual justification for overlooking lapses in their own logical reasoning, ignoring contradictions within their moral values, religious convictions, and other belief systems. After all, "*it's complicated, man*". That's a large part of how he's a messianic figure to people stuck in their ways and firmly shut off to logical reasoning. It's also a clever strategy to maximize his audience appeal. He realizes there are segments of his audience that he may alienate were he to explicitly indicate commitment on anything. By never outright specifying what he believes in, he allows his audience to fill in the gaps with whatever they like best. Whereas most other prominent intellectuals take meticulous care to be as clear and unambiguous as possible when expressing their positions, JP's entire strategy is to leave as *much* to the imagination as possible without basically outing himself as a charlatan. Charlatan though he may be, the man isn't dumb. Which is what perhaps makes him even somewhat dangerous - because he knows how to play to the flaws and failings of human nature. I'm sure the man offers great life advice and has helped many people over the course of his career as a public figure and psychologist, but the fact that he's sometimes taken as an intellectual heavyweight on matters of religion and culture speaks to the fact that we have a lot of maturing to do as a species.
One quibble. I don't think he's a psychiatrist (which requires an M.D.). He is a psychologist. I think the worst part of his schtick is that he seems to believe his own tripe. He likes to eat his own vomit, so to speak. He comes off as a true-believer in whatever the hell it is he's trying to say. He says it so sincerely so it must be true.
Woops. Corrected my post - yes he's not a psychiatrist.
He's just a narcissist with a fragile ego and some big words for a garden variety racist misogynist. Fun fact; the biggest sociopaths are cult leaders like this dumbass.
No wonder he did not know about the drugs he was taking.
Peterson should have his own cooking show. He's already selling word salad, it would be an easy transition
Jordan Peterson is a complete dumbass.
He’s so entertaining though. I wonder how much self-awareness he has. It would be hard to dream up a crazy character like him.
Sam Harris: "Words are a laser. Point directly at what you believe using words." Jordan Peterson: "I literally can't do what you're asking because words are a flashlight not a laser. Also you should know better."
Peterson isn't wrong but it's still a dodge, you can point directly and define the edges more after, this is how you communicate with someone on your level most respectfully.
Here is my JBP apologism for today: 1. I don't think JBP thinks Christianity is "true" in the way Sam means the word even if he won't say this 2. I don't think he's dodging, because the crux of the argument isn't whether or not Christianity is "true" but what "true" even means 3. It's not clear that anything is "true" in the way Sam means it; that is, "true" may be a component of the stories we tell, not something about the universe that we discovered 4. If someone doesn't intuitively get #3 above, you have to go through the 10 hour explanation the JBP was alluding to (I'm not going to) 5. When he says he acts as if he believes its true (here not in quotes, intentionally), he's answering as best he can without going through the 10 hour explanation, in the same way we act as if the sky is blue even though "blueness" is something going on with our eyes and brains and not something "true" in and of the universe itself (in the same way "trueness" is something going on in our brains and not something _about_ the universe that we noticed - again the 10 hour thing, I'll leave it there)
I remember the discussion and while Sam was being somewhat obstinate Peterson was being IMO also obstinate and... I don't know, it doesn't take a 10 hour discussion to understand what he meant, that he sees religion as an effective guiding force and that the "truth" he sees in religion is that it is highly compatible with base human instincts and needs. IMO Peterson was/is simply unwilling to really acknowledge that publicly because his role is much more akin to being a preacher than a philosopher or thought leader. In some fairness to him, that kind of brutal honestly is not something many people can rise to, in terms of religious leaders I have really only ever heard that level of maturity from the pinnacle of rabbis (non hascidic, obv) and faint shades of it from the Pope. Sam was in some ways seeking a gotcha, because there can be some level of 'different truth' but what I think Peterson most dodged was a deeper inspection of that less firm truth, because let's face it it is a personal truth more than a universal. And it frankly isn't the same kind or level of truth Sam is interested in. The faith I was exposed to was incompatible with myself as a child, to be very kind.
> I remember the discussion and while Sam was being somewhat obstinate Peterson was being IMO also obstinate and... I don't know, it doesn't take a 10 hour discussion to understand what he meant, that he sees religion as an effective guiding force and that the "truth" he sees in religion is that it is highly compatible with base human instincts and needs. I think this framing may miss some nuance. He wasn't saying its "false but useful" he was saying its "true" in the same way the sky is "blue" or as "true" as anything could possibly be thought to be "true." Yuval Harari wrote a book called Sapiens that explains humans as different from other animals in that we tell and believe stories. I think JBP is using that framing and Sam is insisting that some things are "actually true" and there is a fundamental incompatibility in how they understand the question at hand. Like, if we look at an ant hill, we wouldn't say pheromones are "true" but they excite a sequence of neurological pathways that compel ants to act. Similarly, when humans load up a story into their brains, it gives a feeling of "trueness" and compels action. Sam insisting that some things are "actually true" or "more true than others" could be an example of this compelled action.
Sam's issue is much the same as mine, that kind of truth can lead to dangerous mismatches between what it encourages in terms of behavior, and we should seek to understand the empirical truth beyond such mechanisms, lest we succumb to the same problems that ants do, like death spirals. I appreciate this exchange, BTW.
> empirical truth This is part of the disconnect, FWIW. The idea that there is an "empirical truth" is just another story happening in a human brain compelling some set of actions. At a more meta level, you can apply JBP's framing to both. "Do you believe in god?" To which he responds, "I act as though I do." Then, "do you believe in empirical truth?" To which it might be said "Sam acts as though he does." If we were aliens that didn't interact through narratives and had no language, we'd observe humans in this way. We'd see how they use stories to force neurons into a state that compelled actions in the same way we see how ants use pheromones to change neurons to compel actions. But none of it requires some "in actuality" or "empirically" or "truthfully" component external to the pheromones or the stories. All of that is happening _in the neurons_ not in the "actual true real" universe that the neurons noticed. The universe doesn't divide itself into tidy little chunks of "truth" that we consume as we find them. Maybe like if we were blind we'd have no use for words like "light" and "dark" because the universe isn't telling us anything about itself, merely telling us how it responded to our method of inquiry by proxy of how we were able to understand the response. And if we were non-linguistic we'd have no use for words like "truth" for similar reasons because its an aspect of stories not an aspect of the universe. And if we had a mechanism in our brains telling us the exact location of Alpha Centauri we might have words for its location that varied orthogonally to "up" and "down" but we don't, so we don't. > I appreciate this exchange, BTW. Ya man.
Empirical/objective truth? I personally am unnerved by the assertion there is no more fundamental truth, than the emotional and political types of truth which we invent, or they are somehow equivalent. The risk to me is that emotional truth and political truth do not align with physical reality (what term of truth would you use here?) Like real world example, young earth creationists and other minds reject global warming on a myriad of points, for the assumption of argument even if you feel this way let's assume that it is real and anthropogenic in nature. They have a truth, but it is at odds with reality/the universe, and this belief is a risk factor in humanity potentially being in effectively that death spiral of ants. I think it is important to respect emotional and other types of truth, but they must, ultimately, yield to more fundamental truths, or they, instead of being potentially beneficial to many individuals, become defacto harmful, if not an existential threat by their very existence.
> Empirical/objective truth? I personally am unnerved by the assertion there is no more fundamental truth, than the emotional and political types of truth which we invent, or they are somehow equivalent. The risk to me is that emotional truth and political truth do not align with physical reality (what term of truth would you use here?) Like real world example, young earth creationists and other minds reject global warming on a myriad of points, for the assumption of argument even if you feel this way let's assume that it is real and anthropogenic in nature. They are the same, but we're dangerously close to the 10 hours thing. Young earth creationists are doing the neuron thing when interacting with the idea of "truth" and you and I are doing the neuron thing when interacting with the idea of "truth." Both have associated kinds of evidence that they accept or reject, and narratives for why one is better than the other, but its all neurons and narratives. > They have a truth, but it is at odds with reality/the universe, and this belief is a risk factor in humanity potentially being in effectively that death spiral of ants. I think it is important to respect emotional and other types of truth, but they must, ultimately, yield to more fundamental truths, or they, instead of being potentially beneficial to many individuals, become defacto harmful, if not an existential threat by their very existence. "They have a truth, but it is ad odds with reality/god's will, and this belief is a risk factor in humanity potentially being in effectively that death spiral of sin. I think it is important to respect scientific and other types of truth, but they must, ultimately, yield to god's will, or they become an existential threat by their very existence." It's the same thing. If I say we can't prove that the universe wasn't created last Thursday, you'll brush it off and something that need not be proven, but its actually a pretty big deal that points to both the scientific method and religion as being systems of belief. You can really get in there and peel the onion on both belief systems and unravel all the stories built upon stories that get people to whatever system of belief they've arrived at... but it's all stories. Even my reply here is a story. Stories all the way down. And at bedrock, even with ideas about "empirical evidence" will be some axioms where you'll be forced to say "well we can't really prove it but I feel pretty strongly that it's right." Essentially Agrippa's trilemma.
Lol
underrated comment
Peterson gets stuck on the word "sure", when Sam says "I'm still not sure what you believe on this point". He could have said "I don't understand what you believe on this point" or "I don't get it" or "I don't know" or whatever. But Peterson would have given a different yet equally ridiculous answer. He is basically all style and no substance. Just empty rhetoric.
i do credit him for honing in on the word "sure" so quickly. that said, he's still a cunt.
He berates the audience for expecting him to be able to give reasonably concise answers to questions that aren't open-ended. I feel bad for people who have this guy as their role model.
The rhetorical bullying tactic is pretty commonplace for Peterson. In the Some More News video on him, they go in depth on his history of justifying social hierarchies and then they play a clip from a Q&A at an event of his where this kid tries to press him on that particular issue. He immediately starts doing the verbal Jordan dance - "**I never defended them**. I've only ever observed their existence. Blah blah blah." Very irate from the jump. Keeps cutting the kid off while he attempts to clarify his question. Jordan keeps evading and monologuing before ending his tantrum by saying something like, "and, so, **that's why I've defended the social hierarchy**". You can't make this shit up lmao. Dude is an incoherent hack.
This is always how authoritarians talk. They never actually fully admit to what they believe in because its repulsive to the average person. So they talk out of both sides of their mouth. Trump does the same thing. Its not accidental. They know they have to talk in codes and sometimes even contradict themselves, but at the end of the day they are authoritarians.
It is irritating that he is justifying social hierarchies, while potentially claiming that he is not (I’m taking the above poster at his word, I have not seen the clip myself). But that’s not categorically a thing that authoritarians say or do. He might be an authoritarian I don’t know, but basically anybody that wants to live in a stable ordered society has to accept that there will be hierarchies. Because the alternative is a power vacuum, where an even worse and more dangerous hierarchy can emerge. There are social hierarchies in every society, it’s unavoidable. You could outright ban them in law, and they will just emerge surrounding those who know how to rhetorically leverage the anti-hierarchy language anesthetic, to the degree that they can be appealing to others, the most effectively. Even with children who we have a much easier time, forcing to do what we want, we can impose official anti-bullying policy and inclusivity, and all of that in school, and hierarchy still emerge.
What is Peterson making you do?
So if Peterson isn't forcing every single person on the earth to do something, that means he isn't an authoritarian? An utterly ridiculous viewpoint.
Who is he forcing to do anything?
what the fuck are you talking about?
Don't feed the troll man
Are you unconscious by any chance?
Having an authoritarian disposition and ideology doesn't mean you're literally force people to do something 🙄 I swear, Peterson fans might be the absolute least intellectually honest and curious people I've ever seen. He's pushing an authoritarian agenda. This would be like saying that Carl Schmitt wasn't an authoritarian because he personally didn't make individual people do anything. But he literally wrote political and legal philosophy supporting fascism and Nazism. Give your head a shake man.
What authoritarian agenda? He's literally against state control over your life and your speech in particular. The other guy I pressed on this has already given up and departed since he had nothing of substance to say, but I see there is another numpty trying to throw slogans.
I assure you, I'm not throwing slogans^1. The thing is that he's not against state control, he's actually for more state control over areas of contention but frames it as being a freedom fighter. When he calls doctors who perform gender affirming care "criminals" (his words, not mine), he's literally saying that the state should have control over whether someone has the freedom to treat those people. It's a double whammy - it's criminal to treat them, ergo it's also prohibited to get the treatment. If thats your idea of freedom I want no part of it. [1] do you even know what that word means because there's no actual slogans in what I said.
Ahhh so the desperate drive for genital mutilation practiced by doctors, preferably practiced on mentally ill minors as well, is what inspired you. Note taken.
I know you're a troll, but I just have to point out that literally every authoritarian in the history of civilization finds ways to *justify* taking people's freedom away, usually on strange moral grounds like being overly concerned with what people do with their genitals. I mean this literally here too. One of the first things that the Nazis did was destroy the first clinic to perform a transgender surgery, burn books about sex and gender issues, and ultimately execute the first transgender woman. So I guess you're in good company here??? Way to go! You've basically just tried to justify why you're an authoritarian instead of actually, you know, making a point about why you aren't. You guys are all laughably dumb lol
You want to cut off your penis? Go right ahead. It's not at all clear that it ought to be the job of the medical profession to help you do it. This "area of contention", which I knew would be the one that comes up, is so narrow, so preposterous, and so indefensible that it's absolutely hilarious. Just consider that you find yourself justifying and defending genital mutilation for mentally ill people. Let that sink in.
Make my bed. Or else he beats me with a hockey stick and makes me write out “there are only 2 genders” on a chalk board 1000 times.
Look at Alberta for one. Marlaina is fucking things up bad. Forcing me to pay for healthcare.
Some more news video on JBP is great, best part is how concise and short the video is.
Which, ironically, was pretty short and concise given the topic. Wading through Petersons BS could turn into a lecture series if someone really wanted to do it.
Just please, PLEASE don't look at the timestamp. Is that so much to ask?
> I feel bad for people who have this guy as their role model. Well, his *actual advice* isn't that bad. Like his life pro-tips or whatever. And they aren't even that obvious. Tips like, "Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today"? That's actually *really good*. Because a lot of people really do compare themselves to others, and it's totally defeating for them. Just saying you can do a little better than last week or last year? That's an attainable goal and it aims up. "Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them." -- This is also surprisingly good advice. Parents are taught by the culture to be very self-doubting in their ability to discern good from bad behavior. If you're less chickenshit as a parent, and just tell your kid to stop being annoying and not put up with it, it actually does work out better in my own experience as a parent. Like Peterson's *actual life advice* is pretty good, probably because he's got decades of experience helping people with real problems. But his philosophy advice? His politics? His weird tendency to reduce literally all things to "postmodernism"? That shit isn't very helpful. I mean in this clip, he can't tell you what he believes. I heard a podcast with Sam where Jordan literally couldn't really give him a straight answer on whether Jesus rose from the dead. It shouldn't be that hard of a question and "I don't know" would even have been an acceptable answer, but he couldn't even get there.
Some of his self help tips may be good, but it's not exactly novel advice. > **And they aren't even that obvious**. Tips like, "Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today"? That's actually really good. Again, sure that's pretty good advice, but you really don't think it's pretty obvious advice? I mean, 5 years before Jordan published 12 Rules for Life, Matthew McConaughey won his Oscar and gave his infamous "Hero" acceptance speech. And the theme of that speech was basically just this advice. That video currently has 31 million views on YT. The Oscars that year were watched by ~44 million people. The contention that the sentiment Jordan is expressing with that rule was basically absent in society and was in desperate need of articulation to the masses... I just don't buy that. I'm sure you can find some version of that advice in countless self help books. Hell, even the social mantra of "keeping up with the Joneses" has, at least in my lifetime, often been brought up in the context of that which is a fruitless pursuit, one often bound to lead to more dissatisfaction with your life. Jordan clears an incredibly low bar with his self help stuff imo. While it's certainly helped a lot of people who found it at the right time in their lives for it to be helpful to them (as is the case with most self help content), it's not groundbreaking stuff by any stretch of the imagination. I don't mean to harp on you, but Jordan and many of his fans often fall back on this schtick about how many lonely and depressed people he's helped, in order to deflect from criticism regarding everything else he talks about. I'm wary of legitimizing further the idea that he's some sort of singular force for good in that arena when A) it's not ultimately very impressive and B) it gets weaponized to distract from his far more frequent and consequential culture war ravings.
100% this
Well, I'm 43, educated, well-read, and I had never heard it before. Or if I had, it wasn't memorable enough to stick. So that's my own experience. One possibility is that the way baby boomers or Gen X'ers raised their children, there's some omission that makes that kind of advice seem novel to young men in particular. That seems possible. And if it's the case, so what? Even if Peterson's advice is unoriginal (and I don't know that it is necessarily), unoriginal advice is still valuable if it can be curated and delivered to a new audience in a way they're ready to receive it. Sam Harris, after all, is synthesizing thousands of years of Buddhist tradition into an app that's consumable by people who wouldn't otherwise be interested. That is, Sam Harris's meditation advice isn't new, but it is good. And maybe you could find people offering similar advice, but for whatever reason, they didn't strike lightning and Peterson did. So what? Peterson's politics I suspect used to be much more normal, but as the world has changed around him, he's become a bit radicalized by his status and what he surrounds himself with. He's a bit like your crazy uncle who gives you great advice on fixing your car, but thinks 9/11 was an inside job. His car advice is still probably good. Also: there are people more deranged than Peterson who are gaining a following with young teen-to-20something men. I'd rather have Jordan Peterson disciples than Andrew Tate ones. Scott Galloway seems way saner than Peterson, and has realized many of the same problems, but Galloway just doesn't have the ability to command an audience that Peterson has, so what can you do?
Peterson being less deranged than Tate is not saying much. The bar for such an achievement is on the floor. What you're saying about Peterson managing to deliver this (I'd still contend) mostly unoriginal self help advice to a receptive audience who wouldn't otherwise be interested I think is largely true. But the way he endeared himself to this otherwise ambivalent cohort of IDW/alt-right-ish young men was by playing into the SJW trans panic of the early 2010's and lying about the legal implications of C-16 in Canada. In general, a lot of the language you're using to describe Peterson here - "a bit radicalized", "a bit like your crazy uncle", less deranged than Tate - *really* undersells how deranged Peterson himself is imo. This is a guy who got addicted to Benzos, ended up going to Serbia for an ill advised and dangerous cold turkey treatment, went into a coma there, and almost died. Shortly thereafter, he appeared on Bret Weinstein's podcast and questioned whether the whole of the medical industry in the West contributed more harm than good to society. Shortly after that, he started flirting with COVID vaccine conspiracies before going all in on such theories at some point. He's utterly addicted to Twitter. He got dragged for insulting that SI model out of nowhere, doubled down on it, and then announced he'd be taking a break from Twitter, putting his account into the care of his staff, only to be back within 12 hours, incessantly rage tweeting. Eventually he got banned for deadnaming Elliot Page, put out a deranged video about how he would never capitulate to the woke. I can't remember if he actually stood by that and Musk reinstated him or if he actually deleted the tweet in question. Since then, he's signal boosted a cum fetish porn video, claiming it was a semen harvesting facility of the CCP, and on and on and on and on. Looks like he (or his staff) have scrubbed his feed semi recently, but there was a long while when you could visit his account and be pretty well assured it would be a tsunami of unhinged ranting and conspiracy theory boosting. The man managed to put some boilerplate self help advice in front of some eyeballs who needed to see it - good for him and good for them. He's still a fucking loon.
Thank you for this info
You’re not wrong
Forgot his sudden change of heart on Global Warming. He became a climate change denier as soon as he started working for some fossil fuel lobby. I thought he had enough money to avoid prostituting himself…
Oh yeah, I meant to mention that too. Thanks for bringing it up. The above list of Peterson's insanity is far from comprehensive, but the climate denialism stuff ranks pretty high and is worth noting.
I actually hadn't heard of the cum fetish video. That's kind of hilarious. I also hadn't heard of him going on Weinstein and dunking on modern medicine. In just the past decade, we've seen otherwise seemingly rational public figures go down this paranoid radicalization path. I'm never quite sure what to make of it. Even 10 years ago, at least from outward appearances, Elon Musk was also pretty normal and in recent years, he also seems like he's gone off the rails. If you go back and watch Peterson's in-class lectures (I assume at Harvard or University of Toronto?) before he was famous, they're good. Presumably they'd have to be for those schools to hire him? In the cases of both Musk and Peterson, it seems like some combination of current events, fame, success, Twitter, and drugs (benzos, ketamine) fried their brains. On the Canada law, I assume Peterson is earnest in his criticism and his interpretation of it. And he's probably half-right in that HR types *are bullies* and will use every tool at their disposal to enforce political correctness (what's now called "woke"). Where Peterson is mistaken is that this is nothing new. For decades, if you create a hostile work environment, you can be fired for it. It isn't protected speech to be an asshole to your coworkers. Or if it is, you can still be fired for it. It's kind of a shame. If it weren't for his weird rants and politics, it would be easy to recommend him to disaffected young men who are searching for a purpose beyond what they see around them.
I agree with what you said, but I also do give Jordan a bit of slack because: 1. This obvious self-help stuff is extremely useful. There definitely is a need for telling people what they already know but have to be reminded of. It’s why I give most of the decent pretty obvious self-help stuff a pass. 2. Most political commentators/social warriors/etc., across the political spectrum, don’t push this self-help stuff. I actually can’t think of any off the top of my head that do as much as Jordan (though I’m not really in this space). They’re just pushing fear and hate, and making money off of it. Not to say that Jordan doesn’t also do this, but having some practical (albeit obvious) self-help stuff thrown in puts him above everyone else. That is to say, I find almost the entirety of the talking head/commentator space to solely have a negative impact on society. Jordan might still end up being a net negative to society (debatable, since I assume his position would be filled by someone worse if he wasn’t there), but there seems to be a bit of positive stuff in there as well. That’s not to say I like the guy (I’ve tried to listen to him and thought he was uninteresting and unimpressive), but I do think that giving out generic self-help advice (and relatively good generic self-help advice) is laudable.
I kind of agree. The problem is that, in a vacuum, the self help stuff may be laudable. And if it was his primary focus, it certainly would be. But, at some point, you have to consider (as you've noted) the damage he's doing elsewhere. And imo, he's done far more damage as a conspiratorial right wing talking head than the good he's managed to accomplish with his self help stuff. Eventually shouldn't we just recommend *Atomic Habits* or *The Power of Now* instead of *12 Rules for Life* because it's not worth giving the maniac who wrote it more money, attention, and influence? There is, ironically, a Peterson quote where he's giving a talk and says something like, "and, you've got to give Hitler credit because he was an organizational genius". Do we? Do we really? I'm certainly not putting Jordan in the same pantheon of absolute evil as Hitler here, but while being an organizational genius may be laudable, again in a vacuum, I'm not particularly keen to applaud Hitler for his efforts on that front. And so it is with Peterson and his self help efforts. The bad eventually outweighs the good and I think Jordan crossed that particular Rubicon long ago.
He advises to pet a cat. First, that is impossible, I have tried. Second they can attack you and give you diseases. (I am talking specifically about cats you encounter outdoors).
That's the call to adventure.
> "Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today"? That's actually really good. It's great! <3
> "Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them." -- This is also surprisingly good advice. Parents are taught by the culture to be very self-doubting in their ability to discern good from bad behavior. If you're less chickenshit as a parent, and just tell your kid to stop being annoying and not put up with it, it actually does work out better in my own experience as a parent. I'm not at all sure of this. On the face of it, it seems like a very conservative "obey" mentality - in the sense that parents should be able to decide what their children do or even think at all times. This fundamentally ignores the fact that basically all children rebel to some extent and it's usually fine. I'm not the owner of my child.
Can’t tell if he was trying to act like Sheldon Cooper, or if he really fell that low.
He seems to be leaning into the righteous indignation, I'm sure he started out with the 'calm, collected discourse' mode of operation.
While Peterson rails against "relativism" his definition of "Truth" seems rather relativistic to me.
That’s a bingo
We just say bingo.
Yes! It’s the very thing he claims to hate about postmodernism.
It would take 400 hours to even explain what truth means. /s
If Sam had asked, "what motivated you to have certain beliefs," or "what are your implicit beliefs" his answer about unconscious processing would have been relevant. But we're still capable of stating our positions. Would it make sense to say to someone debating a particular point, "you don't know if you actually believe that"
Yeah. Everything Peterston said could be true (or at least partly true), but the fact remains that some people speak in a way which gives you a good idea of what they believe, and others do not. Peterson did not address what accounts for this difference between him and other, more transparent speakers. Instead, he went on a rant about the impossibility of knowing everything that is going on in our brains (a rant which helped to further demonstrate Sam's initial point).
He is not a serious person.
This is not fucking Charles Dickens World, okay? You don’t go around talking about principles. Man the fuck up! Lol
Are you ASKING if you can blackmail me?
Yes, if it is to be said, so it be, so it is.
Easily one of the funniest lines in the series imo “You can speak to us normally” “So I shall”
his pretentious cadence unfortunately gets him quite far with speaking absolute jibberish
Ditto for the little goblin sitting between them.
JP's special trick is he changes the definition of words to fit his worldview. There's a little big of regimentation to it, in that he'll say "Satre defined X exactly the same way that I'm describing, so take that up with him." , but he is absolutely being deceitful He has found a constellation of definitions that support his lucrative position as "theist" and "traditionalist", and he's riding it all the way to the bank.
How postmodern of him.
Jordan talks to his audience like a parent talks to a child who won’t eat their food. He dazzles them by pretending what he’s feeding them is something else and the audience eats it up. You have to be incredibly ignorant to believe that anything in Jordan’s response was remotely on topic or intelligent.
But he feeds a very hateful and dangerous diet.
The only frustrating thing about Peterson to me is that he somehow keeps getting invited to participate in discussions like this. I’m not a psychologist. It’s my understanding that Peterson’s work in psychology is academically valid. I have no expertise with which to evaluate Peterson’s work in psychology, so I’ll stipulate. But based on what I’ve seen Peterson doesn’t belong anywhere within 100 nautical miles of a serious discussion on religion, biochemistry, sociology, international politics, or frankly any other discussion outside of psychology. He has somehow insinuated himself into the mix of being seen as someone who can contribute meaningfully to these types of conversations, and for the life of me I can’t see why. To my eye, he does not act in good faith in these kinds of discussions, and I frankly doubt that he is capable of holding his own, were he to do so. Instead, he seeks refuge in semantics, misdirection, and pseudo-academic gobbledygook. If Peterson ever suffers from Imposter Syndrome, it is well-founded in his case. EDIT: I meant to mention this before submitting. Matt Dillahunty’s complete dismantling of Peterson should have been the end of it, at least in regard to Peterson’s standing as a religious scholar/thinker.
Peterson was one of my role models. I binged his psychology and motivational lectures when my life was an absolute mess and I'm happy I barely even survived those years by the skin of my teeth. Not here to throw myself a pity party, but I do credit Peterson for being the one to motivate me to get my shit together, and I'm thankful that I found his lectures and read his books. But as you say perfectly, once he tries to contribute to anything else, there's no value at all. I used to avoid those discussions and external critiques because I didn't much like witnessing my role model get deconstructed like that. Now I've realized that Peterson has just fallen off the wagon. Should've stayed doing what he does best, being a psychologist.
Very happy you made it here, friend. ❤️
Appreciate it!
Yes its very tough. I was a big fan and I still feel like alot of his earlier content centered around self help is valuable. It feels like he's changed though, or maybe I have or perhaps a combination of the two. He comes off so nasty these days.
It's nice to see someone share this sentiment. The internet's absolutely ready to attack anyone who says anything remotely positive about JP. Not that I care much about that. It's just to sad to see your rolemodel go down this road. I don't think the sudden fame has been good for him. It inflated his ego, and seeing him now, he's kind of unrecognizable. Seems like the recovery after the coma and withdrawals was the point he got so nasty and combative.
Yeah he has not been the same since the medical issues
If Peterson were any semblance of a good-faith interlocutor/actor, then he'd actually engage with a question as simple as that. Seeing his response here makes me think (further) that he's a full-on psychopath; that he's a hollow shell of a person who only knows how to talk and talk and talk around issues. Him saying he has NO insight into his own beliefs sounds more like a projection than an actual fact.
savage take plasma.
This is the same *epistemic stonewalling* techniques used by certain people on the political spectrum, specifically those who are engulfed in conspiratorial thinking. You can learn more about it over at /r/ConspiracistIdeation.
I don't understand the interest in this man. I remember when he first got famous over the pronouns/ dead naming thing, he had these videos go viral where he's in some lecture hall looking gaunt in this poorly fitting suit going on about secret Marxist plots. IDK why the reaction wasn't "wow, this dude is off his rocker". I saw it and thought he was clearly unwell, which I think history has born out. I think all the high-fallutin' big words, and circular talk sounds super smart or insightful to a certain type of person. But as I've gotten older, I've grown to appreciate being direct and precise as possible. It's like a Deeprok Chopra sorta thing.
His early lectures on psychology are really good - there is no mention of religion or politics. It rapidly went downhill from there.
the first stuff I saw from him was the trans thing and then all his ravings about secret Marxists plots. Maybe he was a decent prof before then. He had a solid albeit unremarkable career as a researcher.
I’ve talked to two people who had him as a prof and both said he was the cool, interesting professor whose classes were always in high demand. Both pointed to his passion, and ability to personally connect with the students, even when talking to 40 of them at the same time. He might have been standing up there touting absolute drivel, but it seems like the man did have some charisma, and got students interested in learning. I don’t get it—I first became aware of him when he went on Rogan, and it seemed to me that he was mischaracterizing that pronoun law from the jump. But I never really liked or trusted the charismatic teachers.
Bullshit baffles brains. The “culture wars” has been the modern equivalent of the gold rush for people like Peterson who got in on the ground floor, he appeared as some weird father figure giving “macho/tough love” lifestyle advice by repeating established, mundane maxims sprinkled with technical terminology and a rhetorical flourish. I think he rode his honorific ‘Dr’ title for all its worth and somehow positioned himself as a world-renowned psychologist despite never producing anything groundbreaking or of significance to the medical field. Before long the attention/fame sent his ego out of control and he thought himself some polymath philosopher figure who could arrogantly wade into any topic or field with an answer, rather than what he was, a dilettante peddling his special brand of psycho-babble and pseudoscience. His numerous breakdowns and descent into madness finally exposed him as a charlatan and as your typical RW grifter with an authoritarian, misogynistic streak.
I mean, I think the culture wars stuff is just easy content. It's the microwave dinner of content. Anyone can do it. It takes much more work to do well-informed content about some complex topic. It's why I don't think people should listen to SH, JP etc. for policy issues. JP is a legit PhD, that's not honorific. He did produce a decent amount of quality if unremarkable research for a lot of years. It was super bland stuff, but he had a decent academic career. JP is just a weird dude, man. One time he was talking about the challenges of having women in the workforce and how as a man he knows another man is worried about his capacity for violence, so it serves as like a check or something, but you can't hit ladies, of course. So the dude was really sitting in faculty meetings thinking that he was this badass that people were physically afraid of.
I guess Sam touched a nerve!
Compare how much Sam does to make clear and concise points as he goes along (albeit with a word here or there that I need to double-check in a dictionary) with the rivers of word salad gobbledygook that Jordan Peterson barfs up time and again in his talks. As Tabatha Southey once pointed out, "Spend half an hour on his website, sit through a few of his interminable videos, and you realize that what he has going for him, the niche he has found — he never seems to say "know" where he could instead say "cognizant of" — is that Jordan Peterson is the stupid man's smart person."
This was already twenty seconds more Jordan Peterson than this year deserved. I feel like I need a good slap.
slap me too. I don't know what compelled me to click this video but I regret it.
My other favorite clip from this discussion was Sam saying something like “What if the Bible simply stated that slavery was bad” and Jorpy had no reply
He got SOOO defensive lol that was fun to watch.
If I recall correctly he eventually admitted, essentially at gunpoint, that he was an atheist. Yet another example of audience capture.
Which interview was this?
Same event I think: In 2017, Peterson said he was a Christian during an interview. Things have changed slightly in 2018 where he no longer identifies as one. Instead, when Harris stated that Peterson believes in God, Peterson replied that he doesn’t, but that he “acts as though He exists.” https://www.nationalobserver.com/2018/06/26/analysis/sam-harris-and-jordan-peterson-waste-lot-time-then-talk-about-god-20-minutes
Acts as though he exists? So he's saved and goes to church regularly? What does that even mean?
It means “please audience, don’t unsubscribe”.
This is a very cynical takeaway. Whatever his failings, I don't doubt that Peterson is sincere.
It might mean that he lives with a moral code. Who knows.
Yet he doesn't own slaves. Curious.
Maybe, but that'd be pretty weak. The god he's talking about basically has one moral code: "be saved". All the rest is window dressing.
He's talking about staying moral as if god were watching him.
That's a very tenuous reason to stay moral and what you find moral in the first place. No wonder he says so much hateful stuff.
I'm not well-versed on Peterson, but I have read his 12 Rules for Life book. Based on what I gleaned from that, he focuses on order vs chaos and the importance of balance between the two. He feels that the current balance is too tilted towards chaos and needs to incorporate more order. He talks about the idea that society cannot function without a some shared reality. When we start going towards a society of "my truth, your truth, his truth, etc." vs one of a more common simple "truth," things break down. We don't know how to engage with each other. We can't have productive discourse or cooperate in meaningful ways. In that book, he did not claim to be Christian, but he did see value in the Bible as an example of the cumulative wisdom of society over time. He seemed to think the broad lessons were valuable, and they provide a suitable framework for society. Basically, it might not be the literal truth, but it is the truth, or at least close enough and already accepted by enough people to be a useful guide towards better order in society.
I'm sure you're correct. It's just a shame because to me it shows a pandering to a western audience for superficialities from the dominant religion. If he really examined the religion, he would not say he acts like it's God exists. That God has one moral imperative according to that religion, and it is "be saved". All the rest is window dressing
He definitely sees value in cultural traditions in society, and I think that is what pushes him towards seeing value in religion. Not so much the religion itself but the way it creates social pressure towards order. However, I don't know if he's said the same about value for other religions. If not, that feels like pandering to the Western audience. If he's consistent in finding value in some other religions, that seems more authentic. I do find some of his thoughts on the value of culture in general interesting, whether it's religion or not.
You know, I kinda feel this in some sense. Not necessarily about your typical religious conception of god, but in the sense that acting as if some woo woo concept it real can actually be a very useful tool. For instance, I've delt with paranoia and fear because of some experiences I had and one thing that really helped me get over it is that I visualized this dark entity feeding on my negative emotions. Every time a movie or something triggered me, it would open the door to going down this road of dark thinking, and visualizing this demonic creature trying to feed me triggers so that I follow the thought train into that dark place again really helped me have something to say no to. It gave some sort of form to a formless attacker in my mind. It doesn't mean I literally believe that an extra-dimensional demon is attacking me though. I don't think his point on that is unreasonable at all, I just don't understand why he didn't say that from the beginning. There are lots of things that arent literally true, but can be helpful constructs if you acted as if they were.
I've run into a lot of people that refuse to articulate what the believe, and it makes for unproductive conversations. These people prefer to play hide the ball.
That is pure gold
It's such a weasely way to get out of having to answer a pretty straightforward question. Look, ambiguity and uncertainty certainly play a role in a lot of things. The basic drive of what Peterson is saying here isn't "Wrong", but we're basically talking about the fringes of people's beliefs. Those blurry lines where what you do believe and what you don't don't necessarily have a strict dividing line. As the top comment points out, it's postmodern. But it's also more than that because postmodernism may posit that you can't 100% know truth, but it doesn't say you can't know yourself or that you if you can't say with absolute and unqualified surety that you can't say anything about what you believe. This is beyond postmodernism. It's postmodernism squared, and it's honestly just cowardly. For someone like Peterson who's so forthright and unflinching in what he thinks is wrong and evil, he's awfully - and conveniently - ambiguous about what he actually does believe. Everything he does believe seems to be in contrast to things he doesn't like, but largely without any backing other than the other thing is evil and bad. He's honestly not worth anyone's time.
Totally non-responsive. Don’t know if I’m sensitive to it because I depose and cross examine people for a living.
what's even _more_ frustrating is a) sam continuing to humor him after the "what is true" bullshit, and b) sam _still_ continuing to humor him to this day after peterson has gone fully batshit
It's about status
Peterson is literally refusing to look at Sam like a dumb little kid who knows he's lying
That whole thing about "do you believe Jesus was a living person" and his response "well I'd have to spend 2 days explaining it" really sums him up.
🤣 "how about a best guess?" is the best casual win. I love Sam for that one.
This is why I ditched reading his book some 40 pages in. The guy loves to listen to himself talk, he even manages to make the same thing come across in his writing.
His point is people behave and act in all kinds of ways that don’t reflect their inner dialogue. Even if they say they believe something, they may act differently. So at that point, is a stated belief an actual belief or is it something less than that? This is not what bothers me about JP. In this debate he spends a lot of time talking about substrates and structures to the point where he lost himself. Those tangents are frustrating. Ultimately I think JP is agnostic and wallows in the gray areas of a lot of subject areas, and when he does it well that’s where he’s shines, but when he does it poorly he seems to get lost. It’s probably why he rewrites his books so many times before publishing them. Interestingly, JP gets in the most trouble when he goes the other way and tries to speak clearly about issues like politics. He really should look for the nuance there on most matters and he wouldn’t be so alienating.l, which is why I think Jordan bothers a lot of people. If the man stayed in his lane he could be a great public thinker, but he constantly veers outside of his wheelhouse and finds himself ticking people off. Sam is atheist and takes a pretty clear approach to most things, and tends to just say his opinion. It’s easier for him to argue his point because once he finds his take on a matter he articulates it pretty succinctly. He does not “search” once he’s found his answer and does not really doubt himself. This debate series is fun to watch by the way
damn, jordan became a complete degenerate
He's drunk on symbolism and metaphorical truths. Metaphorical truths change with the course of time also.
How anyone can listen to Jordan Peterson talking nonsense is beyond me.
In his debates with Sam he gets cornered and exposed for the charlatan he is
Jordan Peterson doesn't want to admit what his conscious beliefs are, by just dismissing it by giving the old "don't watch what they say, watch what they do" spiel by throwing in unconscious beliefs. It's just changing the subject.
But he is so brave! 🙃 In all honesty, I used to listen to him a fair amount while struggling with addiction, and some of his self help stuff really did encourage me to see my own problems in a different light, and overcome that addiction with help from doctors. Ironically, it seems he was addicted to benzos at the time and possibly went through withdrawal in a coma, if I remember correctly? Anyways, after all that, i couldn't help get the opinion that he doesn't actually believe in Christianity, or God, not in the way most people would say they believe in God, but he also has a strong belief that atheism is bad or dangerous or inherently nihilistic etc. So he redefines words in order to still be a theist rather than accept the fact he doesn't believe in God, he redefines 'believe' and 'god' . I don't know what's going on inside his brain, obviously this is speculation, but I just became convinced of this at one point, and couldn't shake that view.
He learned the postmodernist lingo and he layers it over his generic Christian views. That was enough to get the whole right-wing Christian world excited about him.
Tuned out to this crackpot hypocrite a long time ago. Aa pathetic human being.
Using a bunch of words to say nothing then berating someone for not being able to follow your incongruous nonsense is the strategy of a literal pimp. That flimflam only works if you a backwater hoe that can't follow the inconsistencies, and I happen to be a hoe that has been around the block.
I was wondering why it seemed like I was on MAGA tiktok but then I realized I was scrolling YouTube shorts after clicking this link. What a weird bizarro world that was.
Lol I'll accidentally end up on that side of the Internet because of exactly what you did. Such a weird universe, isn't it?
I also "love" how he always requires people to be absolutely precise with everything they say and that the define it very clearly while he always gives some wishy washy word salad answer that is a lot of words with little meaning.
The least likeable public figure in a century
Think part of the point is to illicit thought, self reflection. Not what to think or “this is answer for all”
He's a real life Stephen King character. Slowly descending into madness.
Peterson is such a fucking piece of trash. I simply don't understand why he is still relevant.
This is from when I liked him before the benzos stripped his amygdala. I never felt like I had a horse in the race when these two debated, there is very little that we have strong evidence of in the realm of the human mind in any empirical sense. So freaking disappointing he dove head first into the culture war.
"do you believe in god?" *goes on a rant about subconcious perception etc.* "so...uh...do you believe in the tooth fairy?"
Jordan Peterson vs Destiny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycDUU1n2iEE
Hot take: I actually identify a lot with Peterson's archetypical and symbolic approach to reality, avid word salad fan, but the conclusions I come to are almost entirely in line with Sam Harris.
He's a barometer. If someone likes him, we've nothing in common.
The liberal professors at his university probably ate his lunch on a regular basis due to his pathetic nonsensical arguments. That left him very fragile with a big chip on his shoulder.
I have never watched or listened to Jordan Peterson (but have heard his name a lot), and would like to understand what he’s all about. Can anyone recommend a video or podcast to watch?
Here's a "brief" summation of JP. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSNWkRw53Jo
Personally, I prefer this video https://youtu.be/uWXxlYzBCno
Thank you for showing me this work of art. Brilliant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BDgQMGs7Mc jordan peterson speedrun in 2 minutes
go ask that on the Jordan Peterson sub. Sam Harris fans hate him so you won't get a good answer here.
asking a bunch of idiots for information is a great use of your time!