Jordan Peterson's Ideology | Philosophy Tube

hello and welcome to philosophy tube tonight's performance is about ideology what is it and where does it come from as a case study i'm going to be looking at the work of jordan peterson but before the show begins i'd like to say that at no point am i going to insult him call him a bigot speculate about his private life or crack low-hanging jokes about lobsters my show is about having fun and staying open to new ideas and although peterson and i would disagree on a number of very important things i'm sure i'd like to start off in the right spirit by saying that his new book beyond order is genuinely pretty good there's a small chance that peterson himself is in the audience tonight in which case welcome to the show in the event of a fire please refrain from shouting fire in the crowded auditorium but instead make your way calmly to the exits which are located on the far left and please remember there is no smoking allowed in the theater [Music] [Music] jordan peterson is a canadian clinical psychologist and public intellectual author of 12 rules for life the 2018 smash hit that made him a household name the subtitle for 12 rules was an antidote to chaos and in the marketing and the hype and even the forward to the book it was billed as a way of achieving objectivity the pitch was that society has become too relativist and nihilist and it's all the fault of these post-modern neo-marxists we've lost our values but here comes jordan peterson and he's going to sort it all out now as a pitch that's quite philosophically muddled and 12 rules was criticized for failing to achieve the objectivity it was striving for and for making a number of leaps of logic that favored right-wing political positions however things have changed a bit since 2018. peterson has been on a nightmare odyssey through the medical system and he's been catapulted into the limelight as a public figure neither of those are easy things to do believe me and now his new book beyond order contains a subtle but very important philosophical shift peterson is now doing a very interesting kind of philosophy called phenomenology phenomenology is famously very simple to understand it let's read a passage from philosopher edmund husserl immediate seeing sehen not merely the sensory seeing of experience but seeing in general as primordial data consciousness of any kind whatsoever is the ultimate source of justification for all rational statements it has this right-conferring function only because and in so far this world is not there for me as a mere world okay let's do an example phenomenology is all about focusing on what you experience so check this out so just go go for a little walk around me and you at home keep your eyes on the couch okay [Music] now then what did you just experience did you at any point see the entire couch no you didn't you could only ever see one side of it at a time and yet in your mind's eye you weren't going there is one side of a couch there is another side of a couch in your mind's eye you experience it as one complete thing and more than that you experience it as being for something it's a couch for sitting on it looks comfy or ugly or whatever maybe it reminds you of a similar couch that you've seen maybe you'd like a couch like this one maybe you'd like to do something on a couch like this one so your experience of it brings in bits of the past and bits of the future and desires and values this is a very different way of looking at the world than a scientist or a computer might peterson actually gives a great example imagine you get an envelope with some important news in it scientifically objectively the envelope is a rectangle of paper and it has ink molecules printed on it but that's not how you experience it this envelope contains your past your future your test results maybe the rest of your life you experience it not just as an object but as something with values and meaning i can see that you're still a little bit shaky on this it is a bit weird so let's do something really cool and apply it to people in fact let's apply it to me for those who didn't realize already i am a transgender woman and when i first started transitioning i would go out into the world dressed how i like to be dressed and some people would see me and they would think well that's a man but by the way that they are dressed and their mannerisms they are indicating to me that they would like to be treated as a woman and if they were very polite they would go hello miss how can i help you and if they were very rude they'd say something else but after a while something interesting started to happen people didn't have that initial experience and then have to think about it they just started recognizing me as a woman something in their brains or maybe in me flipped and they just started going hello miss how can i help you this is similar to but not the same thing as passing passing is when a cis person doesn't realize that you're trans i'm not talking about that because i have trans friends who i know are trans they don't pass to me and yet i just experience them as the gender they are if you've never known a trans person it might be hard to get your head around but i have an old friend who's a trans woman and a while ago she asked me have i ever done anything in front of you that you thought made me look like a man and i said no you kind of can't because my brain has flipped now if you do something stereotypically masculine like burp or fart or scratch your ass i don't see that as oh there's a man i experience it as a woman doing something stereotypically masculine and therefore it's funny to me husil talked about immediate seeing edith stein talked about an experience being primordially given but the bottom line is i just experience you as female and this opens up all sorts of questions like do people recognize me as a woman because i am one or did i become one when they started recognizing me as such is gender something in you or is it a relation between you and other people if a tree falls in the forest and nobody's around to hear it what are its pronouns answers on a postcard please the bottom line for us and peterson is we experience the world not as a collection of facts and observations but a collection of values and meanings we are always in peterson's language telling ourselves a story and if you're very clever you'll already have spotted oh that's why he does all the self-help stuff peterson's always talking about being mindful of what you pay attention to what story are you telling yourself and phenomenology is a great base on which to build that because in theory if you change the story you tell yourself change the meanings you see in the world then you can change the world this week is the one month anniversary of the lewisham arson attack one month since an unknown arsonist savagely took the lives of five people and a homeless man and now another building has burned down in hackney it's terrifying and almost as bad as the fires themselves is the anti-fire hysteria that has been conjured up in the minds of the woke left cancel mob i think wokeness has gone absolutely mad in this country my brother is a smoker he's always coming home smelling of smoke and he has to stand outside to smoke a cigarette because you can't even smoke indoors anymore it's anti-fire wokeness gone mad and i'm not a bigot i'm not my niece is a transgender and i think that that is fine she's in the fire department and with this ongoing arson crisis we have to support our emergency services heroes more than ever personally i think her decision to join the fire department might have had something to do with her marriage falling apart but i support her right to choose or his right to choose it's so confusing biologically he is still a she because she can still get pregnant and objectively that's been the job of women since victorian times so i sent her a message for international women's day and she gave me this big lecture and i said darling if you're really a man then what you're doing is mansplaining she said i shouldn't even speak to my brother she said he's the arsonist because he's always smelling of smoke and he's always going into people's houses with large barrels of petrol and i said darling that's cancel culture he's a traveling petrol salesman of course he's going into people's houses what kind of a world are we living in or a hard-working upstanding handsome man gets accused of something nefarious just because he is always going into people's houses with large barrels of flammable liquid during an ongoing arson crisis [Music] okay we understand the bones of jordan peterson we experience the world not as a collection of facts but a collection of values and meanings now let's build out to the muscles of jordan peterson and talk about structuralism structuralism is famously very simple to understand it let's read a passage from philosopher roland bath a signified can have several signifiers this is indeed the case in linguistics and psychoanalysis it is also the case it has at its disposal of a limited mass of significance i can find the thousands okay well uh i'll give you the easy version structuralism started out looking at texts and saying hey don't these seem to fit into patterns like joseph campbell's hero with a thousand faces supposedly there are these proto myths that keep coming up in our stories again and again peterson's always talking about this stuff he's always analyzing disney or harry potter and saying oh hey you know this symbol is actually a very old thing from ancient whatever and if you learn these maps of meaning that structure your experience then you can start taking control of your life in order to understand the meaning of the text we have to look at other texts by the way text here can mean a literal text like a book but it can also be a play a film a comic this video an interpretive dance basically anything that can carry meaning so then the structuralists were like well what if as well as looking at the other texts we also looked at the broader ideas that are hanging around in the culture like for instance there's this bit in the bible where jesus says render unto caesar what is caesar's and render unto god what is god's and if we want to understand the meaning of that then we should probably read the rest of the bible yeah but also what was the roman occupation of judea like what did caesar really mean to those people back then could be good to know let's take another example there are some recent adverts on the london underground recruiting for the metropolitan police and a lot of them show an officer of color in uniform smiling now on its own that doesn't necessarily mean anything but the fact that the met is about 90 white and the fact that there are ongoing demonstrations in this country against police racism and brutality maybe tells us something about what they are trying to communicate the real meaning of the text or at least one possible meaning of it is given by something that is not present in the text itself basically meaning is like jazz it's about the notes you don't play like i said this should all be familiar to jordan peterson fans but if the structuralists said the meaning is about the notes you don't play the post structuralist said well which notes exactly did you not play and why didn't you play them if we're talking about the broader ideas that are hanging around in the culture why are those ideas the ones that are hanging around what hidden assumptions is the text making where do they come from and whom do they serve what are you not saying i love the royal family i remember when wills and kate got married oh he was so romantic everybody was just so happy for them it was a real coming together moment for the nation or almost everybody was happy for them there were a few killjoys it seems like there's more and more of them around these days in the latest one of these awful arson attacks one of the union jack flags outside buckingham palace was singed slightly by the sparks that came off the orphanage as it was burning and i saw some heartless people on twitter who just didn't care about the flag and i thought how can you be so cruel my brother told me that the fire department wanted to put out the flag but they were afraid of being called racist he just happened to be walking past the fire as it was starting extraordinary coincidence i suppose it's the queen i feel sorry for it must have been terribly frightening for her she's been such a class act really keeping the nation together and that's what i love about the royals they aren't divisive you don't see them out in the streets making a noise and waving signs around i hate how this arson crisis has become just another opportunity for polarization i dread to think how the london mayoral elections are going to play out i know some people think that the royals are a bit old-fashioned but i won't apologize for loving them they're like popcorn or cigarettes i've given up smoking i have but it's hard to resist the temptation i love the smell when a man has been smoking and he stands close to you sometimes you love something even though you know that you shouldn't all righty then so we've got the structuralists who say that meaning is about the notes you don't play and we've got the post structuralists who ask why didn't you play those notes what peterson does is he cuts right in the middle there and he says it's biology check this out if i say i think that female politician is being overbearing and aggressive in a way that women shouldn't be then that sounds subjective somebody might come back to me and say well first of all i disagree and second of all why do you think women shouldn't be aggressive where did you get that assumption whom does it serve but if i say i think that female politician is acting out the jungian archetype of the devouring mother which is present in the evolved collective unconscious of humanity and that sounds objective doesn't it jordan peterson did say that about former ontario premier kathleen wynne and people criticized him for being sexist and he said how dare you i'm not being sexist i'm just reporting the facts you are trying to silence objective truth there's this weird tension in peterson's work because he's trying to have his cake and eat it the core of it is subjective phenomenological experience and then he builds out to a kind of structuralism where he says the world is interpreted through stories that get their meaning from outside the text but then he just stops he seems so incurious about who gets to tell stories whose meanings are allowed to stick and whose are not and it's maddening because the ideas he's discussing are really interesting but it's like he refuses to read any philosophy written after 1967. peterson has said in the past that post-structuralist philosophers like jacques derrida were trying to get rid of the idea of objective truth they're questioning the idea that a text can have objective meaning it's this big threat to western civilization and some philosophers do question the idea of objective truth but i think that when people hear that they go because what they hear is questioning the idea that i can be right questioning the idea that i can win the debate fortunately on this channel we don't care about being right every episode of philosophy tube is wrong in fact i refuse to be correct the goal is to be wrong in interesting ways when philosophers say they are questioning the idea of objective truth what they mean is there are always some notes that are not being played and we can get curious about why knowledge is always known by some person and people have their flaws their blind spots their financial incentives their jockeying for position so what gets called knowledge and who gets to be seen as a knowledgeable expert has a kind of social dimension to it if you wanted to be very inflammatory and provocative you could say well you're denying that there's objective truth or are you saying there are things that i can't know because i'm white or whatever you could spin it that way but only at the risk of looking like you haven't done the reading having looked at the bones and the muscles of jordan peterson now let's look at the crispy outer shell the self-help stuff and if you've gotten a lot of help from peterson's work that's really cool i would never take that away from you in fact i think there's some advice in here that's genuinely really good i particularly enjoyed chapter two imagine who you could be then aim single-mindedly at that i did that ages ago turned out i'm a woman ten out of ten beyond order is basically 12 rules for life again but with the spiciest stuff taken out it's basically just a normal self-help book now and the advice it gives is sometimes pretty good but it's fairly standard across the genre purely by chance i came across this blog by dr nerd love which contains pretty much the exact same advice except blogs don't charge you 20 quid to read them but it's inherited some of the problems of the self-help genre as well for instance i can't help but notice that if i did everything peterson suggests clean my room take responsibility yada yada i would still be living in a country where i'm not allowed to get married start a family or get healthcare the same way everyone else is unfortunately no amount of self-help is going to fix all of your problems but that's an issue with the whole genre not just peterson the reason i bring it up though is it shows us that peterson's work is aimed at helping a particular kind of self what we are talking about here is what philosophers call subjectification and it's famously very simple to understand it let's read a passage from philosopher louis alfazier [Laughter] okay imagine that you are reading the newspaper and you see the headline nation celebrates royal baby now that's not quite the same thing as saying lots of people within the nation celebrate the royal baby is it because by saying the nation celebrates you're subtly implying that anyone who isn't celebrating isn't really part of the nation that's one of the notes that you're not playing if you don't feel this way then you're not really one of us the celebration and the public declaration of it actually constructs the nation and creates national subjects hence subjectification one of the best ways of doing this is to use an emotion if you just say everyone in britain supports the monarchy then people reject the message there are millions of us that don't but by using an emotion particularly one as powerful as joy about a new baby you smuggle the real message under the radar there's a bonus effect as well philosopher sarah ahmed points out that anyone who doesn't have the emotion they are told to have can be called a killjoy at best a national buzzkill at worst a national threat now it's very important to note that people don't always do this deliberately news editors aren't sitting in smoky rooms going we will use the royal baby story to push the secret mind control be careful it's very easy to slide into conspiracy in particular anti-semitic conspiracy theory about jews running the media ideology isn't a conspiracy remember we talked about the notes that aren't being played well the point is we don't realize they're not being played because their absence is assumed to be natural and we all make those sorts of assumptions including me basically ideologies are like everyone's got one we use it every day but you very rarely look at your own unless something's gone wrong so let's take a closer look at jordan peterson's a lot of peterson's self-help work is about having the right emotion in particular he cautions against acting from resentment because resentment just makes everything worse i think this is great advice i've seen it happen in my professional acting career people get rejected at auditions they take it personally they get bitter and then they do get a lead role and they start acting like yeah now i'm johnny big bollocks and it's like dude you are playing hamlet but it's a profit share production in the car park of a toby carvery and slow stop shouting at the makeup artists they become bad actors and nobody wants to work with them so yes i agree with peterson sometimes arrogance and resentment even in the face of genuine injustice can just make everything worse however let's bring in what we just learned about emotions creating subjects in 12 rules for life peterson had a bit of a b in his bonnet about marxists being fueled by resentment this is a very old idea goes back to the 19th century socialists don't care about the poor they just hate the rich this is a theme that some of peterson's more conservative fans jumped on author jim prosser wrote a biography called savage messiah how jordan peterson is saving western civilization which i read with the aid of a large number of painkillers and almost every other page is processed saying marxists are resentful and spiteful and nasty and really i think it's cancer culture i think you're trying to cancel karl marx jim well some of us believe in free speech babes accusing your enemies of being fueled by resentment is genius because it's completely bulletproof a marxist could say well i don't think i am fueled by resentment actually and peterson could say ah well you see it's uh it's unconscious resentment you can't tell but um i had a dream about carl jung and he told me that you are no good and it's also completely irreversible you could say i think marxists are fueled by resentment and marxist could say well i think that you're only saying that because you're fueled by resentment the resentment of marxists and our long history of very successful podcasts but the point of accusing your enemies of being fueled by resentment is that it gives you an excuse not to listen to them particularly if you dress it up in objective sounding language about archetypes and the collective unconscious you construct a community of people marxists feminists trans people who are irrational and resentful and hateful not like us we are compassionate and thoughtful and in doing so you exclude that group of people from the domain of legitimate political discussion and there's a word for this a word for when there are notes that are not being played whose absence is assumed to be natural and which help construct a political community through subjectivification and the word is ideology so it's always good to squat over the mirror and take a good hard look at your own ideology sometimes cause if you don't do the thinking someone else will do the thinking for you hate can be a powerful emotion and make no mistake the people behind these arson attacks whoever they are hate britain when i was growing up i was told that britain is the greatest country in the world we built railways across india we ended slavery we civilized the irish but now some people want to take that history away from us this same mentality that drives these arson attacks also drives the anti-fire mob who are tearing down statues and making a noise and enforcing stalinist fire safety codes and threatening free speech i love britain and i love the values that bind us all together i believe that we need to defend our values and that's why i'm proud to support yvonne schmitz for mayor of london yvonne is accustomed to success he is a businessman a father and an entrepreneur in the field of direct petrochemical supply he is promising to give our brave police heroes much stronger powers to fight the firebugs and the anti-fire work brigade yvonne is the leadership that london needs he'll keep us safe and sound he's always taken care of me he's the best big brother a girl could ask for [Music] [Music] so [Music] this video was sponsored by curiositystream you've probably heard of them they're a subscription streaming service with thousands of titles little mini documentaries about science and technology and nature and history if you like my stuff but wish that it had a bit more sciency bent you'll probably find something to tickle your brain there you could also try watching something and see if you can identify the ideologies at work i particularly enjoyed this little number called the imperfect brain part of a series called the curious mind about how stress anxiety and depression can affect us normally curiosity stream is 19.99 a year but if you go to curiositystream.com philosophytube then you can get 26 off and you'll also get free access to nebula which is another streaming service so hey double trouble curiosity stream don't sponsor any overtly political content so if you're seeing this then you know that my video has absolutely no ideology in it i'll be donating my fee to sisters uncut an organization here in the uk who help fight violence against women and that decision too is completely ideology-free [Music] [Applause] [Music] is [Music] um [Music] [Music] underwater [Music] [Applause] so [Music] emmanuel kant was a real piss ant who was very rarely stable hi dagger hi digger was a boozy bigger who could thank you under the table david hume could out-consume wilhelm friedrich hagel and wittgenstein was a beary swine who was just as schlost as schlegel

Channel: Philosophy Tube

Views: 1,047,578

Rating: 4.6549125 out of 5

Keywords: philosophy, ideology, jordan peterson, beyond order, 12 rules for life, maps of meaning, phenomenology, husserl, anthusser, derrida, poststructuralism, barthes, postmodernism, abigail thorn, philosophy tube

Id: m81q-ZkfBm0

Length: 35min 4sec (2104 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/CrimsonMutt]

that's one way to get ahead of the curve, post the video before it's even up, lmao

[u/ratguy101]

Pretty nice video from Abi. I felt like it was largely echoing points she had already made in her last JBP vid, but put into a more succinct and well-structured package. I actually thought the theatrics were one of the better features here, and got her points across really effectively and engagingly. While I find the topic of "ideology" super interesting, I do kind of wish she approached it with less hand-waving. The jazz metaphor was a good way to quickly introduce phenomenology and subjectification, but it didn't really feel sufficient. I've learnt a bit about both in school, and I do think there are ways to explain the basics a bit more thoroughly than that, while still being accessible.

[u/renMilestone]

Not going to lie, I watched it, but I didn't get the whole bit about the arsonist apologist lady. Just went right over my head that one.

[u/TheGreenAndRed]

Didn't realize this was a new video at first, thought it was a posting of the old JP video because of the recent Red Skull "controversy".

[u/SlaugtherSam]

I wonder if there is already a reference to Red Skull in it.

[u/phelatiofyllis]

I haven't watched much Philosophy Tube, but the line about Great Britain civilizing the Irish is one of the best jokes I've heard in a while. 10/10, instant fan.

[u/TiberiusHecktor]

glad to see we're going to be getting some absolute LOOKS now shes out

[u/Sergnb]

Love that a new video from her is coming, don't get me wrong, but... do we really have to keep talking about that clown? Like is he even getting any traction anywhere but the deep corners of the internet where he is already a revered figure? We just kind of all settled on him being a transphobic nazi propaganda-signaling grifter already, no?

[u/Cuntankerous]

c’mon BUDGET