Far from being a darling of the alt-right or secretly promoting fiendish racist ideology, the largest contradiction in Jordan B. Peterson’s sprawling intellectual enterprise is simply the notion that capitalist classical liberalism is the only game we can successfully play on Earth, even as it contradicts the depths of Christian symbols.
Now, this is not intended to be a hit-piece on Dr. Peterson. I have listened to him since the fall of 2016, and he has radically shaped the way I view the world. He is one of the only people on the North American continent I would consider to be a true intellectual. But in the dregs of hero worship, it is too tempting to simply nod along with all that he says. Why wouldn’t I? He is far older, far wiser. But he is also in the archetypal position of ‘dead father’. He represents the golden sphere of the knowledge of both the ancient past and an intellectual development amid the dynamics of the Cold War. In order to effectively embody the spirit of the son, who resurrects the archaic tradition and redeems the blindness of his father, I must pry where there are cracks and make known the fact that no human being is infallible. In fact, if we believe that any human being has secured the total truth on any subject, then every successive generation is an unnecessary appendage insofar as they seek to develop that subject. The son who is incapable of surpassing the father signals the death of humankind, the end of evolution. As such, I must now bring rhetorical wounds against a man who is simultaneously master, bulwark and gatekeeper.
I attended a New York City talk delivered by Dr. Peterson, where much of his worldview crystallized. He explained that the Soviet Union and the West were engaged in a spiritual war over which type of ‘game’ is tenable to play. He concluded that the system of Western capitalism, built upon Enlightenment and mythological foundations (we will return to the mythological) was objectively superior to the Marxist rejection of hierarchy and obsession with central planning. Human nature, so it goes, aligns with the liberal capitalist mode of production.
But Dr. Peterson has made one profound oversight. It is precisely this: capitalism and classical liberalism have destroyed myth. The technological revolution, and the transformation of communal, local bonds of people with shared values into rent-seekers, wage-searchers and otherwise atomized, separate individuals united only by the search for profit, has destroyed the original foundations of human wellbeing. Economics has completely seized and determined culture. Peterson’s notion that economic success equates to playing a good game, or otherwise participating in the good, ultimately leads to a world defined by Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Trump.
The dominance hierarchy is a point of massive spiritual contention. How can the dominance hierarchies of the West be competent when at the very point of Peterson’s peak fame, they are occupied by Trump, a sophist, a marketer, a chronic liar with no internal life, no self-reflection, who will hand over all his wealth to unremarkable, unspecial, mediocre children? The Trump children earned nothing but by virtue of birth, and yet they are in possession of the keys to the world in ways ordinary lowborn people will never experience. How is this not a fundamental, fatal corruption of hierarchy, existing at the pinnacle of the world’s power? Peterson avoids speaking about Trump for this reason: it would force him to admit that liberal capitalism dissolves, finally, into a kind of madness. Decrying left-right polarization, Peterson upholds a center: that center is capitalist realism. The theorist Mark Fisher wrote a whole book about ‘Capitalist Realism’, the notion that social contract capitalism is the final system of economic-political life, and that’s simply that. Except Fisher rejected it, because capitalism destroys community, tradition and culture. It monetizes all these things and produces economically workshopped monoculture. Is it truly heroic to live in a circle for all of existence, the economization of perpetual Star Wars films serving as the only permanent narrative link between us? That is what Nietzsche’s ‘time is a flat circle’ meant – and it is a kind of hell. A world defined by those who purchased it two generations ago is no treading ground for heroes. Of that, I am certain.
Jordan Peterson lives doing what he loves. He makes a fortune off of Patreon and his new book. There is nothing wrong with that – he played the right game. He lived a life of the mind and was paid for it. The upcoming generation will not know what that feels like. University tenure is a non-starter. Being paid to write means working full-time in retail or food service, and not just throughout one’s 20s. Perhaps for one’s entire life. Monetizing a life of the mind is extremely rare. At Peterson’s lecture, I was surrounded by intensely bright, thoughtful young people, mostly young men. But how many of them will get to live a satisfying life of the mind? How many will instead work in offices, and ultimately aspire toward a more fulfilling life than the conditions of an impersonal network of capital that we are supposed to believe is in any way mythically inspired? I suspect that a new generation of Cains will arise out of the low-wage workers who thought they were promised something better.
When we reach the Biblical stories, we reach deeper problems. Equating Earthly success to playing the right game and achieving the good is, in essence, no better than Oprah’s prosperity gospel. People succeed off of bad ideas all the time. Worse, there are bad ideas we don’t even understand are bad, and are structurally incapable of facing. Here’s one: Professor Peterson gave the example of a person buying land, building a factory, and employing others as a total net good. But what if the factory creates irresolvable climate change over the course of 250+ years and sabotages future generations? What if the factory multiplies and creates a monoculture, stifling all new voices and claiming the globe, as Amazon and Google seek to do? When James Damore was fired by Google, Dr. Peterson was rightfully upset. But this is the consequence of prioritizing economics above culture and spirit – economic entities can slaughter free expression. That is entirely left out of a capitalist’s worldview. In fact, by merely writing controversial material, one can be rightfully denied a job by property owners. Fans of Peterson know as well as I do the deep taboos that linger in science. The subject of IQ alone will ruin lives – if intelligence is the predicate of a good life, and only a minority of us will have high IQs, what is to become of the bulk of us? Well, we will merely be followers, members of a herd. That, again, is no hero’s journey.
I always feel put-off by audiences. I felt frankly alienated, when Dr. Peterson said that rule-breaking, criminal children, if not addressed by the ages of 3 or 4, will be rule-breakers for their entire lives and ultimately end up in jail. Peterson’s words didn’t disgust me, but rather, the audience’s reaction did – it was laughter. We are talking about the doom and mass incarceration of millions of lives. We are talking about fate inscribed in biology – and the audience finds pause to laugh it off as just ‘unruly children are funny’? Perhaps they’re not taking this seriously. Perhaps the depths of this problem aren’t fully understood.
Peterson simultaneously argues for self-improvement in the game of atomized profit-seeking, but also that one’s genes largely determine intelligence and the qualities of success, i.e., disagreeableness, conscientiousness, and so on. Monetizing one’s creativity is largely an expression of personality – intelligence plus conscientiousness, with disagreeableness tossed in to ensure you keep coming out on top of negotiations. If you are born without that cocktail, you must work against your own brain where others have a smooth ride.
The same is ultimately true in relation to identity. You can tell minorities to pull up their bootstraps all you want – but ultimately, if you don’t understand that black people today bear the culture and last names of their former slave owners, you must prepare for the consequences of pretending we’re all starting on the same equal, even ground. What would you do in the situation of someone who was excluded in the founding myth of the country? Every anxiety you have compounded by identity-wounds? It would be a hell that young white men do not face. If myths shape our unconscious relationship to culture and nature, then it does matter whether or not our myths are exclusionary. People feel it. Peterson is right to say that you must face the world, no matter what – but also wrong to defend the ‘free’ market of stock buybacks and socialism for the rich, suggesting that pulling up your bootstraps is the only mode of life in which responsibility may properly manifest in individuals. The conservative desire for a totally brutal, independent society for ordinary citizens, while enabling state subsidies and legal tax evasion schemes (Apple pays no taxes) for the wealthy, is an infuriating double standard upheld by centrist capitalism. It goes unrecognized and becomes smoothed over in Peterson’s gospel of competency.
In a Quora question from years ago, the Professor once argued against universal health care, saying that it is wrong to ‘force’ the hands of doctors, the same line of argument used by Ben Shapiro. I will never understand this in any sense. If you are paid, you have to do work, whether it’s a private or public hospital. Either way, declining work means getting fired. There is no real distinction in ‘forced’ labor here. Of what use are our myths if we share no common community worth funding, for those who would otherwise be bankrupted by their bills? If you say churches or local organizations should provide these services, then see to it that megachurches provide anything at all from their coffers. I guarantee you these ‘Christians’ will cling to their purse strings.
On the topic of transgender people, I split in certain ways with Peterson. As I understand it, he is only opposed to the legal requirement to adhere to proper pronouns, which I understand. I reject state authority as well. But what is the transgender individual, at a deeper level? At its core, it is an attempt to break free from the constraints of biology and achieve ‘one’ where previously there were two. This is a good thing. I see much hope in the transgender movement. And it is mythologically driven.
For all that Peterson speaks of the Bible, so far, he leaves out one vital figure, perhaps the most vital figure: Sophia. In Carl Jung’s Answer to Job, Jung calls Sophia the logos itself. He names Sophia the mediator between humankind and God. Who is Sophia? Wisdom. She is the feminine wisdom exiled from the world, because in Gnostic Christian mythology, she created the world without consent from God, and in doing so, created a false God called the Demiurge, and the serpent and the fall. The redemption of the world is the return of Sophia from exile.
In his epic work of Christian mysticism, Valentin Tomberg wrote that the complete Holy Trinity is not father-son-holy spirit. In fact, it is the Holy Trinity plus mother, daughter and holy soul. The Holy Trinity, according to the greatest master of Catholic mysticism I have ever read, is actually composed of six parts, not three, and it is feminine and masculine in nature. It is intersex, or both sexes, it is fundamentally androgynous. There is so much we do not yet understand about human identity – why must traditionalists cut off all possibility for transformation out of fear alone?
To combine the feminine and the masculine is the goal of all this gender trouble, to make ‘one’ where there is now division. In the Answer to Job, Jung refers to Yahweh, or God himself, as “unconscious”, a monster, a beast of nature. It is only Sophia who is able to create self-reflection through the mediation between Yahweh and Job. it is the feminine out of which the logos is born. If modern feminism is corrupt in spite of this fact, it is because culture itself is corrupt. If the transgender movement is incomplete, it is because it is too political and not enough immersed in the archaic foundations for transforming gender, the mythical synthesis of male and female. But we also have ourselves to blame for removing Sophia entirely from our retellings of the Biblical story – Sophia is the feminine Christ. Without her, there is only cruel and delusional Yahweh, the primal God who shaped the world but who is not fit to run it alone.
But in the Q&A after the talk, Peterson explicitly defined the relationship between male and female as that of Christ and Mary. In other words, Mary raises Christ. The purpose of women is not to become heroes, but to raise them. That is impossible for a truly ambitious woman. If I were born a woman, obsessed with these mystical and philosophical questions, I would resent that statement so deeply I may never recover. Peterson’s philosophy is centered, in this way, upon a male subject. In order to redeem the father, the next generation of mythical thinkers must reorient the woman out of this secondary position. Perhaps that entails changing the very biology of childbirth – with artificial wombs, who knows what will follow. The tranhumanist idea must return Sophia to the world, not be finished at the half-answer of Mary. Valentin Tomberg, interestingly enough, spoke of the Mary-Sophia as the ultimate form of the woman. Both raiser of heroes and the hero herself. That is completeness and perfection. Not this half-answer of women in one corner, men in another, men striving, women bearing children. The reason for the fall and the progress of history is to return to Eden with higher values and more complete myths, not merely to repeat the past. Of that I am certain.
Lastly, the paradoxes of Genesis are not fully appreciated by Peterson’s focus on Western capitalism, property, and contractual profit-seeking life. Ultimately, success in this world is success of the serpent. That much is clear. Satan, and the serpent, are the Gods of this world. And God obeys the serpent! God listens to evil, and bullies Job. God allows evil to run rampant. And this world, crafted in the image of the serpent, is not the place to lay down and hand over one’s lifeblood. Financial success in this nature, this fallen nature, genetic, cyclical birth-death-birth-death nature, is only temporal. Manipulating the mechanisms of fallen nature to secure a wife and get a job are not the full extent of the hero’s journey. The true extent of the hero’s journey is in solving the problem of the fall. It is the return of Christ crucified to heaven. Now, the Marxists have tried to solve this problem, to create paradise and equality on Earth, and they have failed. But I am still committed to the attempt through means other than Marxism.
Finally, Christ himself is the ultimate paradox. I mean, let’s be serious about this. Pontius Pilate and the Romans who crucified Christ were victorious on the dominance hierarchy. Christ was defeated, destroyed. So why, then, is he the maximal expression of the hero in Christian myth? He was crucified by those who did secure wives and careers, and who passed down judgement, and succeed over others. And yet, the man who was destroyed, and not his destroyers, is the ultimate hero. It is because worldly success is not true success. There is a difference. There is absolutely a difference.
My ultimate concern with Peterson’s capitalism is that the modern world has become a place ill-suited for heroes, designed to make us dumb, dull and conformist, and he acknowledges this – he sees the difficulty of the situation, but it is the young, careerless and unmarried who will truly have to figure out a solution. In truth, we will be the ones who face it. The young, those who grew up immersed in the virtual, and the chaotic fragmentation of the decaying liberal order under Donald Trump. That is our inheritance – not the Cold War, not cultural Marxism. Those are both side-shows that make us feel good about our own cultural signaling, while resolving virtually nothing. At the Q&A, two people who asked questions were indicative of madness. One of them opened the question session by asking why Jews have been trying to destroy Russia for two-hundred years. Peterson, wisely, said “I can’t do it”. Touching that question is touching a fine sprinkled dust born of unkempt hair, the aesthetic of the alt-right, But another questioner was taken seriously, though he bothered me immensely. All I could think when he spoke was “Joseph McCarthy”. This kid asked Peterson: “How can we tell the difference between the Marxists trying to destroy Western civilization and the useful idiots?” Some in the crowd cheered. I saw the true nature of that question – authoritarianism. Let’s not be deluded by present culture wars – the right is just as authoritarian as the left, and more successful at implementing its ideas. The original dissident intellectual was the Western leftist. The pendulum will always swing back and forth, and the only way to reject it is to reject the mindset of these damn inquisitors. Yes, I’ve got problems with Western civilization. I live because there are problems to be solved. They are major problems. If the structure is good enough so that nothing major must be changed, then I was born after history ended, and will simply work my way to a cyclical grave. No. I’d rather make a world fit for heroes.
What is a hero? Someone who redeems the blind sight of the past and renews myth by speaking the truth. Well, the truth is that the world of fetishizing Earthly games as a path to goodness and truth is the world that leads to a monoculture dictated by Google, Amazon and Facebook. Individuals unrestrained by mythical truth, modern capitalists, have transformed their ideas into leviathans more massive and powerful than any idea can functionally be. If Jordan Peterson opposes communism, he must also oppose the corporate communism of a world split between a handful of companies that determine the communications, ideas and structure of the world. And that corporate communism is the consequence of believing that classical liberal capitalism is the only way we can possibly live. One entrepreneur, with one idea, one hero – Mark Zuckerberg? No. Something went wrong. He is no Hercules. The myth has degenerated into marketing. It must be made into something more.
Good post. I like Peterson, but share some of the sentiments expressed here.
Really intriguing read. I have also learned a lot of from JBP, and similarly recognize tremendous value in his ideas combined with some significant oversights.
Along with every little thing which appears to be developing within this specific subject material, your viewpoints are generally fairly stimulating. However, I beg your pardon, because I do not give credence to your entire theory, all be it radical none the less. It looks to me that your opinions are generally not totally validated and in fact you are your self not really totally convinced of the assertion. In any case I did take pleasure in reading through it.
I commend you for trying to do an objective analysis of JBP.
However, I feel that you are under the impression that he is unaware of the pitfalls and excesses of capitalism.
He is simply saying that the ‘politically correct’ idea of the ‘evil patriarchy’ perpetuated by the ‘white supremacists’ who absolutely ‘victimizes’ the ‘minorities’ and/or ‘marginalized’ (such as ‘blacks’, ‘trans’, ‘female’, etc ) ..
cannot be all be blamed at the foot of capitalism. He explained this using the lobster analogy that hierarchies exist even in the animal kingdom etc … In other words inequality simply is part of this imperfect world whether we like it or not.
Furthermore, he rightfully acknowledges that there are injustices, biases, discrimination, inequality which are big problems in our society that we need to address objectively and courageously. He cautions though against throwing the baby with the bath water so to speak.
What he vehemently disagrees with is HOW our society specially the youth is being ‘encouraged’/trained/brainwashed to ‘solve’ such big problems by vilifying the ENTIRE capitalist structure as the root of the problem. Because positing that kind of reasoning though well intentioned is dangerous. Why? Imagine the collapse of the capitalist structure.
What would you replace it with? The extreme left nor the extreme right’s solutions are both Scary alternatives.
His practical recommendation rather is to strengthen the individual (guided by ‘authentic’ Christian biblical values) which will consequently strengthen the society as a whole.
On another point, Christ is the perfect man, the ultimate hero precisely because:
1) Christ pursued what is meaningful rather than expedient. ( Rule 7)
Rather than overthrow the Roman Empire who were then tyrannical masters of the Jewish people, He is talking about a being a King NOT of this world. His ideals are to rise above worldly endeavors though important and seek The Kingdom first, and All will be added into you. Ultimately, He willingly sacrificed himself (hero) to saved the lost. John 3:16
2) Christ is the perfect embodiment of his sermon on the mount where He said “the ‘Meek’ shall inherit the earth”.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1522017581195705&id=145917588805718
Indeed this a paradox which characterizes many other realities of life.
Morever, JBP correctly concludes that we all have the ‘Cain’/Nazi guard in all of us. Christianity likewise has always claimed (however politically incorrect it sounds) that humans are by nature evil.
This means, the struggle between the Cain and Abel in us ( integrating the shadow) is between us is real and is biblical as Paul has eloquently opined in
Romans 7:15-20 ..
Therefore, our individual Responsibility is to be a Christ-like individual. One who is not the traditionally thought of as ‘harmless’ and pitiful but one who can truly practice the fruit of the holy spirit (Galatians 5:22-23 New International Version (NIV)
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control.)
In conclusion, Capitalism is certainly not the ideal. There are many ills of society that needs to be addressed. This does not mean that it is entirely incompatible with Christian values.
Maybe, a benevolent capitalist is one that we can always aim for. It doesn’t mean though that it is easy.
We have tried the other alternatives in the guise of egalitarianism (socialism and Marxism) as well as the opposite ideology of Totalitarian Nazism both to tragic consequences. What other alternatives do we have for now?
I hope this helps.
“ that humans by nature are evil”…….if this were true then our specie would never have evolved….but then the majority of “fundamentalist/capitalist Christians don’t believe in evolution or that the Christ of the Bible was truly human…..not to say that JP is in this camp. For me it’s more about nurture/biology and “true” free will. The struggle as I see it is to be human and our archetype is “The Christ” the true human being….my2cents
Excellent points in paragraphs 4 and 5! I am very impressed and hopeful to see a mind like yours that allow the superposition of left-right, biological/mythological, secular/nonsecular thought and then synthesize potential solutions to the projects of the left, of the planet, of the 99%, or whatever. It’s fun and easy to be “the critic” — find problems with the left, problems with the right, but what is needed are people like you who can pull new insights out of this mess without sounding like a defensive or reactionary ideologue. (And not just spouting some lazy centrist bullshit!)
Cold War Kids like JPB are always worried about the real but exaggerated specter of The Red Scare. I can never tell how much neoliberals, Hayak-ians, AynRand-ians, Koch Bros, etc are either shills for corporate greed, heartless Aspergery Libertarians, god-fearing Christian commie-atheist-haters, or just calmly self-interested in keeping their money, (or, LOL, in it purely for the “freedom”).
America is very Liberal in the “classical” sense. We believe in individual liberty in our gut or like a religion. We believe we can pull OURSELVES up by OUR bootstraps. Capitalism is part of this religion. Any suggestion that capitalism is hurting many things is childishly counter-argued with “communism failed!” We are not going to get rid of capitalism (it works!), but the answer is certainly not that we need more individualism and individual freedom. We have a shit-ton of that already. However, people ARE best served by taking personal responsibility in life. This is obvious. That is re-branded and marketed as individualism. Nice slight of hand. Personal responsibility and individual self-mastery are not the same thing as individualism. You can still trade off some hyper-individualism for collective social benefits and common good WHILE still increasing the drive for personal responsibility in each person. Or at least we need to try to mix the two.
Yet we are facing major problems on this planet where the world has to come together and work on problems of the commons (climate change, AI/automation job displacement, polluted air/water, nuclear proliferation, refugee crises, etc). Libertarian neoliberal arguments will not solve these problems (by definition). Today’s people on the right can only cling to their go-it-alone mentality with more unchecked insanity and hallucinations of trusting the ubermensch winners of 21st century hyper-capitalism. This is a death cult, and I think many would rather see the world destroyed that see capitalism knocked down a peg (even one peg!). The craziness of the Trump base makes me think we are deep into the hallucination that is required to sustain the status quo of crapitalist ideology.
It is sad but eye opening to see how susceptible to brainwashing and propaganda humans can be. Neoliberalism and Trumpism require a major wall of denial and tribalism to maintain themselves. We may be close to a breaking point. Maybe not. We almost broke out of the matrix (just a tiny bit) when Crazy Bernie almost took the whole thing down (a peg.) I didn’t think he would do as well as he did — I was gonna just be happy with him loosening up the ability to calmly mention the words socialism and oligarchy without getting shot. He (/we) achieved that! The sky did not fall when he went way left of neoliberal sell-out Hillary. That was enough of a win for me for then.
Maybe it was better that we got to see the DNC screw Bernie right before our eyes (will we soon forget that we saw behind the wizard’s curtain? I’m gonna stay delusionally positive). And, maybe it will be good in the end that we get to see how bad the Trump Show really is and how shallow and corrupt the Republicans are to completely cave and sell out their principles to that horrible man in less than a year. They are retiring in droves to live well in riches guaranteed from the plutocrats they benefited with that tax scam.
The solutions to capitalism in the near term of 10 to 30 years, are likely just higher taxes and careful regulation. Plus higher services, education, healthcare, and safety nets. After that time, I have no idea what the collision of all the above problems of the commons will yield. That is another reason that the plutocrats of today are engaging in full propaganda mode to increase their income inequality — some kind of weird insurance to help them afford their earth-orbiting escape pods (or tiered-safety-level city states and compounds.)
THANKS!!!
I think you misrepresent some of what JP believes regarding capitalism.
JP never says that individuals should be profit-seeking, which is essentially what you attribute to him saying in being a proponent of capitalism. He says individuals should do 3 things: 1. Do something they like; 2. Develop a competence in it; and 3. Do it in such a way that is valuable to others. That 3rd point is essentially where you misconstrue his beliefs on capitalism and the individual. ‘Valuable to others’ could be anything, not necessarily ‘profit-seeking’ activity to satisfy some all-encompassing economic tyrannical model. That is a very big distinction with very real implications for society and our capitalist system that you don’t address. Non-profits, charities, communal living environments (kibbutz, etc.), bartering (more and more pervasive with the internet), among other non-profit-seeking activities all thrive in our capitalist society and provide individuals with meaning they wouldn’t have otherwise had the opportunity to create, let alone income. These activities are all a part of capitalism, a system of freedom of ideas and activity.
The internet has created multiple times more opportunities for communalism than ever existed in human history, something you also do not address. The sudden onset of an ascendant Queer and Transgenderism community has capitalism to thank for their voice.
Your insistence that the IQ debate, rooted in JPs hierarchy paradigm, necessarily creates social outcasts and foes out of, using your example, African Americans, you miss an important distinction. IQ is, like all human and natural attributes, distributed along a continuum. The average may be lower but there are smart and dumb people of all persuasions. IQ does not determine success, though it correlates well, because what we as a free society (which capitalism has proven to be the best developer of out of all the systems we have thought of and tried) value at any time determines success. And going back to what I mentioned above that JP many times expressed as his beliefs, success and happiness in society is dependent on the individual finding their unique interests, develop a competence in it and in such a way that is ‘valuable to others.’ Most African Americans, like mostly everyone, can easily do those 3 things, and many will do them very well and most that do will have high IQs, though many that do will not, regardless of race. So there are many billionaire African Americans, and centi-millionaires, and deci-millionaires, and millionaires, and many many more happy African Americans.
Now, African Americans have, rightfully, other issues that prevent them from attaining those 3 things, that have to be addressed. JP acknowledges that by talking about the biological ethic. That is for another thread.
While I appreciate some of your arguments, and certainly believe they come from a serious attempt to help solve the current conflict, I think your arguments don’t give capitalism enough credit, though everyone acknowledges that capitalism has deficits that are harmful.
Thanks. Drawn to Peterson, and yet a believer in scepticism, I have been looking for good criticism of Peterson, and yours is the only one I’ve found so far. Perhaps what we ideally need is a female scholar of equal stature with a parallel feminine philosophy? Caroline Webb’s ” How to Have a Good Day” is comparable to 12 rules as guidance, but not philosophy.
I’ve recently become aware of bonobo monkeys, whom I gather are as closely related as chimpanzees to humans, but are matriarchal. Another interesting monkey/ape study suggests that in patriarchal societies, the alpha male is far more stressed and arguably has an inferior life to the beta (second highest) male. I wouldn’t be surprised if males, on average, lead healthier and happier lives in matriarchal societies than patriarchal ones. There is an interesting study (and youtube documentary) about a tribe studied by Robert Sapolsky where the dominant males were accidentally poisoned, and the whole tribe changed its character, and retained it over the several generations that were studied.
True alpha males are not brutes, as we are often told. Studies of chimpanzees show that successful alpha males are more like Shrek. Or think of all our heroes, or all the heroes in our folklore, or in our stories, or in our movies, they’re all good guys. Successful chimpanzee alpha males share food equally and break up disputes. The chimpanzee troops like them and will keep the more aggressive chimpanzee males out of power. The troop does have some choice in who becomes the alpha male, and will remove those they don’t like. When male chimpanzees are competing to become the alpha male they will often ‘kiss babies’ to try to win over the female vote.
Great discussion and brilliant essay by a prolific thinker.
Your analysis is full of valuable insights and most of them come down to useful practical advice, for example:
“Let’s not be deluded by present culture wars – the right is just as authoritarian as the left, and more successful at implementing its ideas.”
Precisely true. This point leads us to the consideration that the Western masses have been kept under such a gross mass-deception by the establishment that even the debate the left and right – the two sides of the same coin of shadows and tricksters – maintain, is mere smoke and mirrors, and Peterson himself serves those masters who keep the sinister show in place. Peterson himself represents the archetypal magician, shadow and trickster. By making a vast fortune, he intensified the mass-deception to a unique degree.
I am not the only one who noticed this.
There is YT vide with title: “Jordan Peterson Dismantled” which explained Peterson’s agenda and techniques brilliantly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXYuqrO8LLo
The Left-Right dilemma is false not only in the sense that it is a false dichotomy, but also with view of the fact that each of the two phony ideology-buckets contains at least one aspect through which the Capitalist class and their allies can forever maintain their monopoly in economics and politics. (To fully elaborate on this point would be beyond the scope of my comment.)
Maybe it’s worth highlighting several more points of my future blog that I will address as a critique of Peterson – one is the fact that Peterson is not an economist (just like his predecessor, Ayn Rand wasn’t either) hence his thesis in this domain is worth exactly zero. He is merely echoing the usual popular ignorance according to which “Human nature, so it goes, aligns with the liberal capitalist mode of production.”
In this context we should refer to actual economists such as Keynes, who once made this accurate observation: “Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.”
For the record: “John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, was a British economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and was one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. Widely considered the founder of modern macroeconomics, his ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots.” (Wikipedia)
Even though the typical mainstream narrative considering only two alternatives, “good Capitalism vs bad Marxism” is evidently a false dilemma and a reductive one, it is pushed ad nauseam to manipulate the Western public, and for this purpose even the recent history of the West had to be falsified or suppressed. Because it is a historical fact – albeit largely suppressed and forgotten in the mainstream – that there were several decades in the Western world (in the US after the 30’s Great Depression and in Western and Northern Europe after WW2) when Keynesian interventions were applied, which then yielded a system that we can call an overlap between Capitalism and Socialism – and it was that system to have created the middle class and enabled the talented and ambitious to prosper individually and enrich society collectively. It was a regulated form of Capitalism where those interventions that curbed the wealth hence power of the rich created a space for a more just and less harmful economy. Even the competition itself was fair since the government interventions were benevolent and fostered talent and diligence rather than white-collar criminality.
However, the tricksters and shadows on the top of the power-hierarchy disliked the idea so they went ahead and forced the Western world to make a U-turn back into the uncontrolled unregulated Capitalism (neoliberalism) that ever since the turn has been destroying the West in every sense, while making the rich (especially the parasitic super-rich) even richer. David Harvey calls a “global project”. I recommend to read David Harvey’s “Brief History of Neoliberalism” to at least have a basic grasp of how this system known as Capitalism (the raw, unregulated) works. He refers to the “global project” of the Capitalist class to impose neoliberalism all over the world, and such system of raw capitalism is enforced by the unelected, nevertheless Capitalist-serving EU, who pretend to be some sort of Marxist/Leftist organization. Such an absurd claim is one of the worst jokes in history, yet almost everyone believes it. I do wonder how could the level of mass-education sink that low that so many could be deceived so easily. Spooky.
In the public sphere Marxism as such is profoundly misrepresented (via blatant false statements and fallacies) and Keynes and the Keynesian era is almost never mentioned. Because the idea is to keep the current sub-human neoliberal version of Capitalism forever in place, meanwhile to keep up the appearance – for a very pragmatic reason – that the bad guys are Marxists, hence there is no alternative to the current system of Capitalism other than the very bad Marxism. Because mass-deception is the ultimate tool in the game of both politics and economics – as for the latter, enough to look at the gap between the reality of the Capitalist game and the myth they build around it.
If someone argues with this, and still claims the Left is a “Marxist lobby” I challenge him to quote Marx where he advised to lose one’s gender, identity, go for abortion for the whites but heavily finance non-white masses in the West so they can overpopulate the Western world in less than one generation. It is not Marxism, it is invasion and colonisation of the West – and white genocide par excellence, since the white population is chased into a rat-race to strangle one another while the non-whites are given on a silver tray what the wildly competing white race produces, and while the white will go extinct under such pressure the lazy non-whites can comfortably raise their multiple-size families in the West. It does not take too vivid imagination to foresee the final outcome of this.
I do wonder as well where did Marx advise for the Capitalists to unite against the Western masses, to distribute massive free lunch to 3rd world savages while applying wild Capitalist neoliberal rat-race policy for the Western natives, who are willingly strangling one another in that race, thus helping the white genocide to accelerate, while the non-whites are relaxed, enjoying the massive free lunch given to them in the West on silver tray without moving a finger.
This is not socialism, it is monopoly capitalism, and the Left are the servant of it. The Capitalist class do not need the masses – they shall use robots to replace us and they push neoliberalism to exclude the masses from production (and from life itself) and to keep their monopoly position. To achieve that agenda the Left is used as a decoy, a Capitalist affiliate in a disguised form. The followers of the “leftist” elites are mere deceived, useful idiots or paid agents running the show of insanity to provoke the sane parts of society who would line up in self-defence of their nations and of themselves, but all in vain. The West is sold out to Islam – for oil, money and power, via energy-monopoly – and for that purpose the Right betrays the masses just as much as the Left does. Race-traitors, Islam-collaborators, Judases, the whole lot of them.
In other words, the Capitalist hierarchy is a hierarchy of shrewdness and the top layer of this hierarchy of shadows and tricksters deploy the ancient strategy to divide and rule, and to devise and control groups who pretend to be their enemies, then to maintain a constant strawman dialogue between themselves and their bogus opposition.
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Note, “curiously enough” soon after I posted above comment on Peterson’s YT channel, I got locked out of my YT account, that is I was silenced by the same social media who promote/d Peterson with an intensity and on a mass-scale that we haven’t seen before. The worst joke of all is the contradiction that Peterson who is posing as a champion of free speech and complaining about lack of free speech, while his speech is not only totally free, but it received a unique promotion and marketing by the same social media of the same power-lobby that has abolished free speech and silence every single voice that fights the real fight as real heroes in self-defence against the real dragon. This is definitely something to think about. The reason why Peterson’s speech is so free and so promoted because he is backing the agenda of the hierarchy of dragons and he is appeasing the dragons while fighting the innocent who have been deceived and misguided by the Left wing of the dragon (the useful idiots on the Left, including the LGBT).
Then to make matters worse, the perversions and insanity that the Left elites put in the lime-light are falsely associated with Marxism, and Peterson follows up on this cheap bandwagon fallacy. This is why his work is so popularized by the global capitalist controlled establishment. In other words, while debating the “left” Peterson, he as a false hero is fighting an imaginary dragon. He is arguing against equality, even though what the globalists and leftists (or liberals) intend to achieve in the West is the exact opposite of an equality-based system, hence debating them comes down to the logical fallacy of strawman.
That is to say, cultural Marxism and Marxism that establishment and their preachers like Peterson apply ad nauseam to describe the so-called “leftist” politics, is a gross misnomer. It is a trick deployed as a cheap shot against the decent part of the Western world who would prefer to bring back at least the before-70’s mild form of Capitalism.
The very fact that Peterson fails to grasp the reality around him is revealing and alarming to no end. Isn’t it evident that the great divide is not between the Left and the Right but between the deceivers/tricksters/shadows and the deceived innocent, ie, between the privileged and underprivileged?
Isn’t it evident that there is a world of difference between these two camps 1) an unassuming and unprivileged transgender and a feminist, who will be stoned to death by Islam and 2) those elitist gay and pro-gay celebrities and feminists such as HRC who are pretending to be leftists just to allow Muslims occupy the West and destroy our Christian heritage because they, as atheists fiercely hate Christianity, because Christianity as a cultural heritage enabled the West to develop secular democratic systems, and the elites of the world wish to replace national democracies with a one-world centralised private government that they shall rule?
If in doubt, we can test the above by raising the question: How come that someone like Peterson, who is considered a leading intellectual, even the top philosopher of our time, can afford to be oblivious to the actual social, political and economic reality of the past and present?
How come that Peterson, as a self-proclaimed hero, can afford to commit the mistake to chase phantoms instead, to fight phantom-dragons rather that real ones. How come he can afford to commit the cheapest bandwagon fallacy by debating/spreading hatred of Marx without knowing his work, without studying the communist systems, (since those were in a way the opposite of Marxism) and advocating Capitalism without understanding economics as such, let alone what Capitalism as an economic, political and social system is about? How can Peterson, as a mere psychology professor, claim authority in domains he never studied and never researched? And how can such dishonest acts and double standards as Peterson displays be reconciled with his very own teachings of moral responsibility?
One of the conclusions we can derive from above: when it comes to Peterson’s discussing politics and economics, he is either the archetypal village idiot or trickster and shadow – either way he disgraces himself by spreading his ignorance or deliberate deceit, as he does.
Another point to make is to realise that Peterson even fails as an expert in his own field, when he gives psychological life-advice to large masses that will only breed a new set of overt and covert aggressive narcissists and a new set of enablers of the aggressive types.
Worth watching another video where an ex-therapist presents his critique of Peterson:
A Critique of Jordan Peterson — by Daniel Mackler
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtwP6AbbAUc
Peterson – via his life advices – is effectively breeding narcissistic sociopaths who will very happily walk over large piles of dead bodies, and as such will be the helpers of the upcoming Islamofascist establishment. Meanwhile he is breeding submissive enablers of the tyrannic hierarchy, who shall believe, even without being told, that when they fail and or out of this subhuman system, it shall be their own fault only.
It is then absolute abomination that Peterson is spreading his perverted and manipulative philosophy of malignant selfishness and narcissistic abuse as “Christianity”. An absolutely essential point that you referred to as well.
Thank you for your brilliant essay and for your work in general – and thank you for your attention.
Propaganda
I tried to get through this entire article, which started out with promise, but gradually devolved into yet another shallow, unsophisticated diatribe about the evils of capitalism, and the good that exists in socialism, replete with the requisite misrepresentations of what Peterson is actually saying … which, outside of the obvious positions taken by Peterson, bear little resemblance to the clown parade of strawmen feebly constructed by the author, who appears to fancy himself an intellectual.
Once it became clear that this is nothing more than a poorly constructed mishmash of pro-socialist/Communist/postmodernist/leftist/collectivist propaganda, I decided not to waste any more time on this drivel.
This article started well but like a lot of what peterson says is misrepresented and taken out of context.
Actually, this article SUPPORTS Peterson’s point of view. He does not defend “pure economical” capitalism. He defends the “Western approach”, which is based on personal freedom and Judeo-Christian morality. Capitalism is just a realization of one of personal freedoms: economic freedom
One of Jung’s overriding insights was the necessity of the opposite side of the psyche. Eg that we need to satisfy both competition and cooperation, ie “capitalism” and “socialism” together. Hence one of Jung’s well known quote’s is “Nature is aristocratic but I am a social democrat”. The mechanism to seeking some kind of balance between the two in a democratic society seems to be a sensible level of taxation and responsible social policy, while at the same time allowing competition and aristocracy to do their thing. Public policy as a necessary foil to capitalism – not an overthrow of capitalism which would result in something much worse. That the modern corporation excels at tax avoidance, and are hence subsidized by society, is as true as societies and individuals benefit greatly from corporations. But when corporations offshore their profits to low tax destinations, well the game for the rest us is well and truly rigged.