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Audio readings of TRANSlating Everything content and wacky discussions!
There’s a reason Jordan Peterson is as popular as he is on the alt-right
“Like Trump and all other grifters exploiting their followers for the money, they portray themselves as outsiders (millionaire outsiders) and martyrs (though they sacrifice nothing)…all while telling their audience exactly what they want to hear.” — Kareem Abdul Jabar, “Jordan B. Peterson’s DIY Cult: When Malicious Nonsense Passes for Worldly Wisdom”
Note: this article was published in a prior version as “Is Being Anti-Woke The Easiest Grift In The History of Money?” at An Injustice!
We’re on the beach
photo by Elizeu Dias
Someone sets up an ice cream stand.
Where’s the best place to get the most traffic? You guessed it, right in the middle.
Then someone sets up an ice cream stand right next to them.
They split the traffic right down the middle.
Where do you set up the next one?
Nope, you guessed wrong. Not next to them. You make a NEW middle. A new center.
You head further to the right and pick up as much of that “middle” traffic as you can. You get a lot of business, though it is kinda strange just how extreme the people on the other side of the beach now feel to you.
From your POV, it’s you and only you who is still in the center. But to everyone else? You can’t see how far to the right you’ve really gone.
Graphic by me, photo by Elizeu Dias
Imagine the people who want to sell ice cream that far to the right side of the beach.
Now imagine the people who want to buy that ice cream.
The best salespeople on that side of the beach are like Jordan Peterson.
The best customers are the people who call themselves centrists.
The stupid man’s smart person: Jordan Peterson
“Well, he’s a psychology professor at the University of Toronto who got famous for sounding the alarm about how protecting transgender people under Canadian human rights law shall surely lead to Stalinism. Since then, he’s been touring North America as a celebrity lecturer.” — Natalie Wynn/ContraPoints
If you listen to Jordan Peterson or read his best-selling books, you’re extremely likely to find a lot that’s obviously true and accurate.
You may even find a bunch of nuggets that resonate with you.
He doesn’t call for a “white ethnostate,” but he does retweet Daily Caller articles with opening lines like: “Yet again an American city is being torn apart by black rioters.” He has dedicated two-and-a-half-hour-long YouTube videos to “identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege.” — Tabatha Southey
He has succeeded largely by shouting opinions that are both popular with and popular sources of conflict for his audience.
Don’t believe me? Just try it!
It’s easy to scream how irritating student activists can be. Even student activists sometimes shout the same thing about each other from across the commons.
And to be honest, Jordan Peterson is kind of fun to listen to with his cute little Kermit the Frog voice.
“Clearly he has real talent as a public speaker and as a kind of life coach. [But] these are like basic insights of world philosophy and religion… His audience hasn’t heard them in a vocabulary that they connected with, so to a lot of people, Peterson’s ideas seem new and urgent.” — Abigail Thorne/Philosophy Tube
People call him intelligent and charismatic. As a person with endless intellectual curiosity, I can’t help but admit his compulsion for infinite regress over literally any topic or assertion — it kind of compels me along with him.
It’s turtles all the way down, baby!
Kermit tea meme, text by me
But once the buzz wears off and you dig deeper into a delicious Jordan Peterson word salad, you start to take a look around and…
It’s like he turned the far right side of the beach into the coolest self-serve yogurt buffet you’ve ever seen.
I mean…it’s a yogurt buffet. On a beach. What a ****ing alpha.
You thought yogurt was boring, nothing left to discover, but he’s here to make thinking fun again.
And what’s more fun than:
a clear enemy
a clear weapon to defeat them
A totalitarian nightmare
Jordan Peterson’s central political message is that “leftist professors, student activists, campus diversity initiatives, and corporate HR departments are collectively following the philosophy of postmodern neo-Marxism to destroy Western civilization and sink us all into a totalitarian nightmare” (Philosophy Tube).
And holy **** does that sound smart.
I went to grad school. I got my Master’s in Journalism at the University of Georgia. I spent a lot of time in the English department. I stayed in contact with academics and still do a little research myself. So hell yeah this dude’s buzz words resonate with me.
Except if you parse each word and how he’s forced them together into a sentence, you (hopefully) see the stunning truth. Jordan Peterson is the sort of person who uses a pair of scissors to make puzzle pieces fit together.
Where does he get off refusing to respect a person’s chosen address when he won’t stop redefining commonly used words?
Is this guy really the libertarian movement’s treasured academic?
A true academic
“Now I’m going to sound like a post-modernist, which I hate.” — Jordan Peterson
Jordan Peterson has published in academic journals. Can you say the same?
Let’s all raise our hands…
His two most-cited works are in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP), a journal that came under fire for publishing a paper claiming significant evidence for ESP.
Telepathy.
The NYT turned it into national news.
Whether you believe in telepathy and other Firestarter phenomena, can you understand the outright scandal of an academic journal publishing that thing?
It was an outrage! We’re still laughing about it.
You know what else we’re laughing at? Even if it’s just in academic circles.
We laugh every time Jordan Peterson tries to condemn Identity Politics by tying it to Postmodernism.
Why does everyone think that identity politics is postmodern?
Dude. Dudes. Dudettes. Everyone not on the dude spectrum.
There is nothing postmodern about identity politics.
The only way identity politics could be postmodern is for the person arguing that it is postmodern to be postmodern themselves by ignoring the established meanings of the words they’re using.
Like the meaning of postmodern.
Just like Jordan Peterson, there are many writers across Medium, YouTube, and the rest of the blogging spectrum who now use “identity politics” as a kind of catch-all criticism.
But in condemning identity politics for making words meaningless, they miss that advocates for identity politics believe group categories exist and are useful when seeking equality and justice for all sorts of people.
I have been asked by some if I regret my role in bringing Jordan to the University of Toronto. I did not for many years, but I do now. He has done disservice to the professoriate. He cheapens the intellectual life with self-serving misrepresentations of important ideas and scientific findings. He has also done disservice to the institutions which have supported him. He plays to “victimhood” but also plays the victim. — Bernard Schiff, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Toronto and former publisher of The Walrus
Just because JP is wrong about the definitions of the words he uses doesn’t mean he’s wrong to challenge the dogma of the radical left…!
What if that’s not an anti-woke centrist writer’s point?
Sure. We don’t want to throw the baby out with the anti-woke bath water.
“My worry is that you’re leading an international political backlash against what is a very localized problem… If your backlash also targets gender equality, LGBT acceptance, and civil rights, that would be bad, right?” — Philosophy Tube
The harmful impact of Jordan Peterson’s actions is undeniable. It’s as obviously bad as the feeling most people get when putting their hand on a hot stove.
But because Peterson explicitly states he is an advocate for the people he harms, he gives himself (and his advocates) license to ignore all criticism to the contrary.
To be clear, Jordan Peterson is not a neo-Nazi, but there’s a reason he’s as popular as he is on the alt-right. You’ll never hear him use the phrase “We must secure a future for our white children”; what you will hear him say is that, while there does appear to be a causal relationship between empowering women and economic growth, we have to consider whether this is good for society, “‘cause the birth rate is plummeting.” — Tabatha Southey
The “both sides” game is a comfortable home for anti-woke centrists because yes, if you’re addicted to resolving puzzles of logic, you can justify juxtaposing literally anything and work to find a rational resolution in the middle.
Who cares if someone gets hurt? You’re just asking questions.
Here’s another example of Jordan Peterson at his finest.
Twitter avatar for @jordanbpeterson
Dr Jordan B Peterson
@jordanbpeterson
Me and Joe @joerogan "scientists" "absurd and dangerous" And all you viewers and listeners are stupid and fringe. And CNN is reliable and truthful. And on and on it goes. And where it stops nobody knows
cnn.com
Scientists slam Joe Rogan’s podcast episode with Jordan Peterson as ‘absurd’ and ‘dangerous’ | CNN
Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson appeared on “The Joe Rogan Experience” on Monday, making false and generalized claims that the modeling scientists use to project climate change and its impacts are flawed.
11:06 PM ∙ Jan 27, 2022
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Twitter avatar for @jordanbpeterson
Dr Jordan B Peterson
@jordanbpeterson
The climate models can predict the past. Just like models of the stock market. I defy these "modellers" to predict one stock accurately for one year and to bet their own money on the outcome. And one stock is a lot less complex than "climate" particularly out a century.
11:16 PM ∙ Jan 27, 2022
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I guess it sounds smart, but it’s on par with: “You can’t explain the presence of dark matter, therefore you can’t tell me how to fill a gas tank.”
So how do you respond to this?
Well, either you fall into the trap of arguing against the obviously true statement, or you have to guess at what he’s implying, in response to which he can accuse you of misrepresenting him.
“Peterson’s tactic is similar to Ben Shapiro’s: name-drop famous writers and thinkers, keep changing the subject so he never has to fully defend his position, throw out irrelevant facts and studies so he sounds smart. You would be hard-pressed to know what Peterson’s thesis is during a debate.” — Kareem Abdul Jabar, “Jordan B. Peterson’s DIY Cult: When Malicious Nonsense Passes for Worldly Wisdom”
Here’s an example of someone else giving it a shot.
Twitter avatar for @HeerJeet
Jeet Heer
@HeerJeet
"us all"? Speak for yourself, buddy.
Twitter avatar for @jordanbpeterson
Dr Jordan B Peterson
@jordanbpeterson
And I plan to write an article on the technical reasons that Twitter is maddening us all very soon. Bye for now. https://t.co/naJnLabtqz
5:14 AM ∙ May 17, 2022
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Twitter avatar for @HeerJeet
Jeet Heer
@HeerJeet
Another thing about "us all": it's amazing how quickly scolds like Peterson abandon their usual language of personal responsibility and accept the idea of social causes when it suits them.
Twitter avatar for @jordanbpeterson
Dr Jordan B Peterson
@jordanbpeterson
And I plan to write an article on the technical reasons that Twitter is maddening us all very soon. Bye for now. https://t.co/naJnLabtqz
5:26 AM ∙ May 17, 2022
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I don’t know what to do with that either, Jeet.
Fortunately, Sam Harris, the otherwise problematic stalwart member of the Four Horsemen, took to the stage — and let Jordan trip over his own twisted shoelaces.
Anti-woke aspirations
I hesitate to share the below debate. Jordan is so outmatched that I feel embarrassed for him. He reshapes concepts and bypasses questions and digs deeper into crucial questions by rambling pointlessly into infinite regress after infinite regress.
Throughout two nights, Jordan Peterson debates Sam Harris by using the same fallacies that keep tripping him up in his internal arguments, including:
slippery slope
false dilemma
name-calling
poisoning the well
This debate happened in 2018. It’s an excellent learning tool of what not to do. Well, unless you want to earn the label one columnist gave him as “the stupid man’s smart person.”
But for people fed up with feeling overpowered and undervalued, the anti-woke strategy offers an easy path to fragile invulnerability. Just search Medium for the word “anti-woke” and you’ll see countless imitators following the same playbook.
Psychology 434: Maps of Meaning
I don’t want to throw Joe Rogan into this, but he did have a bunch of anti-woke activists on his show.
And I hear Joe is great at MMA, so I’m allowed at least one sucker punch delivered straight from the comedy god Bo Burnham.
Twitter avatar for @CQuill97
ClarkQuill97
@CQuill97
Bo Burnham just summarized every episode of the Joe Rogan podcast
10:56 AM ∙ May 31, 2022
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Like I said earlier, I enjoy that kind of conversation. Endless regress, the intellectual euphoria of going quantum and picking apart the endless pieces of anything and everything.
It’s just that at some point…don’t you have a point?
If it takes you three days to answer whether you think Jesus Christ is likely to have existed…maybe you should just admit you’re unwilling or unable to cultivate concise clarity?
Jordan Peterson’s course description promises that students will learn that “every experience that you have had contains information. If you have fully processed the information in that experience, (1) its recollection will no longer produce negative emotion, and (2) you have learned everything you need to know from it.”
If the course were only about endless sophistry, I’d let it go. But once you get past the fairly shallow but compelling ice breakers, his point becomes a lot clearer, even if he won’t say it outright.
Jordan Peterson takes notions that are vaguely true and dresses them up in lot of buzz words to make empty or abhorrent assertions feel not just accurate but resonant with his audience.
“What he’s telling you is that certain people — most of them women and minorities — are trying to destroy not only our freedom to spite nonbinary university students for kicks, but all of Western civilization and the idea of objective truth itself. He’s telling you that when someone tells you racism is still a problem and that something should be done about it, they are, at best, a dupe and, at worst, part of a Marxist conspiracy to destroy your way of life.” — Tabatha Southey
I don’t think Jordan is dumb, but identity politics is not this dogma that must go unquestioned. His war is against his delusions, misapprehensions, and frightening sales pitches against queer people simply trying to live their lives.
There are sophisticated debates about this going on within leftist circles, just as there are sophisticated jokes to tell about the experience of being trans or otherwise queer.
But Jordan Peterson, Dave Chappelle, and every anti-woke “centrist” on Medium either doesn’t know that or doesn’t care.
They have bigger priorities.
Jordan Peterson fights for the freedom to point his intelligence wherever he pleases
If only Jordan Peterson’s fastest targets weren’t queer people. The ones who have nothing to do with his fight, but boy does attacking them do a lot to galvanize his readers, subscribers, supporters, and money backers.
A lot of people — not just straight white cisgender men, but I want y’all to know I see how many of you are affected by this — don’t enjoy the feeling of progress toward equality.
For people of privilege, equality feels a lot like oppression.
As the saying goes, it’s easier not to complain about patriarchy when patriarchy isn’t the thing that’s making you suffer.
Which side of the beach do you write on?
“[Jordan Peterson’s] view of life, as nasty and brutish, may very well not be an idea, but a description of his experience, which became for him the truth.” — Bernard Schiff, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Toronto and former publisher of The Walrus
If you go far enough in any direction, there’s no one left to champion the center but you. Of course, if you’d just look around the beach, you’d see how far away from the middle you’ve gone.
That doesn’t mean you’re wrong. But it sure as heck means you may want to check whether you sound like Kermit the Frog. You go too far to the right…you might wonder how this could still be called Sesame Street.