Postmodern Neo-Marxism — Jordan Peterson’s Shadow

it's not optional to understand this it's absolutely crucial to understand this this unholy marriage of the postmodern nihilism with with this marxist utopian notion so reprehensible and so incoherent and so cult-like you don't know how deep this war goes in some sense they're not interested in in at all in education they're interested in the indoctrination of people as young as young as they can get their hands on in the post-modern neo-marxist universe there's nothing but power it's an assault on is everything that's been established since the enlightenment rationality empiricism science everything it's not only that it's up for grabs that's not the thing it's to be destroyed that's the goal to be destroyed post-modern neo-marxism it's one of the terms that jordan peterson is most famous for it galvanizes the ire of his fan base and sends the anti-peterson crowd into a veritable apoplexy it is impossible not to be stirred by the vehement passion of peterson when he's talking about the post-modern neo-marxists now whether the feeling stirred is total rage at peterson or the so-called social justice warriors really depends of course on your own political leanings for those of us who are partial to a jungian brew this should have immediately stirred our suspicions because now looking back at it it is painfully obvious that what we're seeing is a dance of the archetypal shadow peterson's narrative about the postmodern neo-marxist goes as we will see beyond all proper bounds and into the realm of conspiracy theory it's not simple dismay with a cultural trend it is a belief that this is a nefarious plot to overtake and overthrow our society when you put it like that it's not too hard to see that what we're talking about here is jordan peterson's shadow it's written everywhere in this discourse it makes a straw man out of his opponents and makes the french continental philosophers into scapegoats for the decline of the west and what's so perfect about it is that peterson's discourse consolates the shadow of the so-called social justice warriors they see an old privileged white man this is what i'm saying to you why the rage bro you you're doing well but you're a mean mad white man dismissing their oppression and calling them ungrateful for not loving the world that they live in the first thing that you might want to note about post-modernism is that it doesn't have a shred of gratitude and there's something pathologically wrong with a person who does have doesn't have any gratitude especially when they live in what so far is the best of all possible worlds and so if you're not grateful you're driven by resentment and resentment is about the worst emotion that you can possibly experience carl jung would have had an absolute feel today for an age ruled by controversy loving algorithms peterson's discourse was like crack cocaine and i think it's about time we pierced that veil in this episode we're going to explore post-modern neo-marxism is a manifestation of jordan peterson's jungian shadow and more specifically how michel foucault represents his bet noah he says in his terrible alberta french to do this we're first going to briefly reconstruct peterson's argument which comprises three main pieces this is the relativism of post-modernism the neo-marxist sleight-of-hand and the attack on enlightenment values once we've done that we will look at how peterson's argument is a manifestation of his shadow in the form of an elaborate conspiracy theory that invokes the american psyches worst nightmares communism and an attack on the enlightenment values of its founding fathers what is this a communist country or something this is america we are also going to look at why peterson's shadow has been so explosive firstly because it is a collective shadow of one group in society and secondly because it powerfully constellates the complementary shadow of the so-called social justice warriors in short it is a cocktail of shadow psychology jacked up on algorithm juice and fueled by mob mentality the first time i came across jordan peterson was on joe rogan's podcast a few months after his first appearance and i immediately was in love with his ideas his uh combination of young and of nietzsche is just like intellectual catnip for me there's actually only one aspect of peterson's thought that i'm not that keen on and yet it happens to be the reason why i and so many others have discovered and while i'm sympathetic to many of his points in the context of the culture wars his main argument is built on what can only be described as a conspiracy theory as fans of jp we have all heard the post-modern neo-marxist spiel 100 times but i'm going to try here to reconstruct the overall argument so that we all know what we're talking about for peterson there are three critical aspects to the post-modern neo-marxist framework the first part then is the post-modernist element the second half of the video we touch a bit on the slipperiness of this term postmodernist but for now we'll take it for granted and focus on peterson's characterization of this movement which for all intents and purposes is made up of jacques derrida and michel foucault other than one passing reference to leotard another society and a few to le can peterson never really discusses any other philosophers of this era in any depth his targets are derrida and foucault peterson identifies one doctrine above all with this tradition and that is relativism jp usually frames this in terms of there it is there is nothing outside the text basically the idea is that when you're reading any text there are an infinite number of interpretations that can be brought to bear on it but this is just the beginning because the world is far more complex than any text and so any interpretation we make of the world is only going to be one interpretation among many there's no canonical interpretation no final and ultimate truth this relativism is the first aspect of peterson's postmodern neo-marxist equation the second element is the neo-marxist piece peterson argues that in the 1960s and 70s the post-modern philosophers pulled off what he repeatedly calls a slice of hand a sleight of hand slights of hands sleight of hand sleight of hand a sleight of hand this sleight of hand sleight of hand sleight of hands sleight of hand the argument goes something like this so he says the french philosophy in the mid 20th century is riddled with marxism but in the 1960s and 70s as the horrors of the gulags and of mao's cultural revolution begin to emerge especially with the publishing of alexander solzhenitsyn's the gulag archipelago communism becomes an untenable position and so now the communism is untenable the french philosophers who are so fond of karl marx are left with a major problem what do they do about marxism and so they find a solution they perform a slice of hand that allows them not only to keep their marxist philosophy but in doing so devise an even more nefarious plan where they can of course try to take over the world so the way the philosophers did it was they swapped out marxism's narrative of history being a never-ending class struggle between the rich and the poor and they replaced that with a slightly more abstracted version they transformed the marxist dialogue of rich versus poor into oppressed versus oppressor and with that done french philosophy ostensibly left behind marxism and instead fomented a different type of revolution classic marxism had been reborn as identity politics but that's not all this is where the argument if it hadn't already enters the unambiguous waters of conspiracy theory peterson seems to argue that these post-modern neo-marxists were not merely teaching their beliefs but that there was some sort of method to it all instead of the marxists taking over the world through a violent revolution the neo-marxist or cultural marxists take over society by capturing the educational system they're not interested in in at all in education they're interested in the indoctrination of people as young as they can as young as they can get their hands on so to speak this isn't an accident but a plot they know exactly what they're doing and they know exactly why they're doing it and that brings us on to the third element of peterson's argument the target of the post-modern neo-marxists and true to form these pesky post-modern neo-marxists target the same thing all shadow villains go after everything we hold dear and the second thing it's an assault on is everything that's been established since the enlightenment rationality empiricism science everything clarity of mind dialogue um the idea of the individual all of that is is not only you see it's not only that it's up for grabs that's not the thing it's to be destroyed that's the goal to be destroyed just like the communists wanted you know wanted the revolution to destroy the capitalist system it's the same thing we have our bet noir and say with the old pharisee god i thank thee that i am not as other men are we don't want to know that we are the other men there's a lot of holes in this argument of peterson about post-modern neo-marxism and i suppose the first thing we should point out is that most of this argument was taken from a book by a guy called stephen hicks i want to recommend a book first to everyone here it's called explaining post-modernism and it's by a gentleman named steven hicks and for a breakdown of the many many scholarly errors in hix's book i'd highly recommend jonas psychis video dissection which i'll link in the cards and down below in the description we should also talk about the extremely controversial term post-modernism it's worth remembering that post-modern isn't a term that these philosophers apply to themselves in fact foucault publicly and passionately excluded themselves from the category and so it's a slippery term that we must be careful with these philosophers don't fall into such a natural grouping together that we can talk about their views as being homogeneous when peterson talks about the focus of post-modernism being a skepticism of grand narratives you have to remember that this was leotard's characterization of post-modernity and not a manifesto written by a group of philosophers who call themselves post-modernists thirdly the collapse of marxism is not nearly as dramatic as peterson makes it out to be who's very far from becoming a taboo position in the 60s and 70s solzhenitsyn's gulag archipelago which peterson identifies as the catalyst for downfall of communism was published in 1974. in the next election in 1978 the french communist party received its highest number of votes ever in total they got 5.8 million votes up from 5 million in 1973. that's more than 20 percent of the french public voting for the communist party and while communism star was waning the communist candidate for the 1981 french presidency still received 4.4 million votes that's very far from being an untenable position we also have to talk about peterson's characterization of daradat and fuco as being fervent marxists anyone who's studied either thinker in any depth knows this to be not just patently false but bizarre dereda is perhaps the least political of all the so-called post-modernist philosophers he finally broke his silence with 1993's specters of marx but this is much more a dismissal of marxism and a transcendence of it than anything else foucault on the other hand was the french philosopher most known for savaging marx and marxists he became a member of the communist party for a year when he first entered university but unlike his classmates he left disgusted with marxism this was in the 1940s long before anything about the gulags are about mao in 1975 when fuco was protesting the impending execution of 11 spaniards without trial by the fascist regime of general franco a young militant asked foucault if he would give a talk to his group about marx foucault snapped at him don't talk to me about marx anymore i never want to hear anything about that man again ask someone whose job it is someone paid to do it ask the marxist functionaries i've had enough of marx these are hardly the words you'd expect from the man peterson credits with figuring out how to resurrect marxism under a new guys this early flirtation between fuco and marxism isn't unlike peterson's own relationship with socialism in the preface to his epic neo jungian work maps of meaning he talks about his membership of a socialist party where he first went to university in the meantime however my nascent concern with questions of moral justice found immediate resolution i started working as a volunteer for a mildly socialist political party and adopted the party line economic injustice was at the root of all evil as far as i was concerned such injustice could be rectified as a consequence of the rearrangement of social organizations i could play a part in that admirable revolution carrying out my ideological beliefs doubt vanished my role was clear looking back i'm amazed at how stereotypical my actions reactions really were i could not rationally accept the premises of religion as i understood them i turned in consequence to dreams of political utopia and personal power the same ideological trap caught millions of others in recent centuries the jungian shadow is the parts of ourselves that we hide in darkness the parts that we repress jungian analyst robert johnson calls it the long bag we drag behind us the shadow is always with us we're not aware enough of it it bleeds out young calls us the archetype of projection and this is the way in which we come to know the shadow we know it by how we react to others and to the world around us a certain imbalance between the external stimulus and our reaction suggests the workings of the shadow archetype with that in mind let's talk about michel foucault and let's listen to the way that peterson characterizes the french philosopher foucault in particular who never fit in anywhere and who was an outcast in many ways and a bitter one and a suicidal one his entire life did everything he possibly could with his staggering iq to figure out every treacherous way possible to undermine the structure that wouldn't accept him in all his peculiarity and it's no wonder because there would be no way of making a structure that could possibly function if it was composed of people who were as peculiar bitter and resentful as michel foucault so you couldn't imagine this functioning society that would be composed of individuals with his particular makeup as a big jordan peterson fan this profile is actually a little haunting because it sounds uncomfortably close to the way peterson is portrayed by the people who despise him the mean mad white comment was not predicated upon my historical excavation of your past it's based upon the evident vitriol with which you speak in the denial of a sense of equanimity among combatants in an argument so i'm saying again you're a mean mad white man and the viciousness is evident the unempathetic comments about the outcasts with the poor mental health brings to mind the reactions on twitter to peterson's journey through his hell of getting over benzos the comments about iq and about the misfit whose voice was charged with bitterness and resentment this sounds like a portrayal of peterson himself by his opponents and that is no coincidence in his work psychology and religion carl jung writes the following about the projection of the shadow modern science has subtle eyes its projections to an almost unrecognizable degree but our ordinary life still swarms with them you can find them spread out in the newspapers in books rumors and ordinary social gossip all gaps in our actual knowledge are still filled out with projections we are still so sure we know what other people think or what their true character is we are convinced certain people of all the bad qualities we do not know in ourselves or that they practice all those vices which could of course never be known we must still be exceedingly careful not to project our own shadows too shamelessly we are still swamped with projected illusions seen through a jungian lens then peterson's rebellion against derelict and foucault is him shadow boxing with his own repressed sight peterson abandoned the path of social change in favor of personal transformation and personal responsibility he abandoned the possibility of transformation in one quadrant and he focused his belief on another the light of this focus on personal transformation and the depth of his knowledge casts a dark shadow however and we see this manifesting in his blind disdain for the postmodernist now you might be tempted to say that this idea of the shadow it's fascinating it's really interesting but also isn't peterson right aren't the postmodernists obsessed with power and are they all marxists and while foucault does talk a lot about power his conception of power isn't like peterson's character of it as this hobbesian boogeyman of groups fighting tooth and nail to the death foucault's conception of power is very far from the hubsyan and you would actually expect peterson to have recognized foucault's use because it comes from the two men's shared favorite philosopher friedrich nietzsche nietzsche was a much more substantial influence on foucault than marx ever was fuco's conception of power is derived from nietzsche's will to power power in this sense isn't a hobbsian battleground but a neutral force power is the ocean that we swim in foucault didn't want to abolish power any more than he wanted to abolish oxygen kevin bukhod victoria and daniel zamora made some very interesting observations about this in their interview for jacobin magazine on fukuo's experimentation with neo-liberalism fuco did not believe in revolution but rather in day-to-day micro-resistances and in the need to invent one's life he thought one's relation to oneself was the first and ultimate point of resistance to political power it was i think only in his last decade through his interest in techniques of the self that he started to grant a subject more autonomy thus power gradually started to take shape as a blend of the techniques of constraint than the techniques of the self in which the subject constitutes itself power and resistance are now two sides of the same coin the relation to the self thus becomes a potential space of freedom and autonomy that individuals can mobilize in opposition to power since power is omnipresent foucault's thought didn't aspire to liberate the individual but rather to increase his autonomy using techniques of the self to garner more autonomy for the individual and to rebel against tyrannical political institutions who does that remind you of this isn't exactly the hobbsian battleground that peterson was so afraid of it's not his nightmare of the exercise of arbitrary power this is his own exact form of rebellion this is another nichon lover talking about using power in a nature sense to attain the autonomy of the individual against a structure of power in one of the greatest ironies in the history of ideas peterson's main targets actually have the potential to be his greatest allies if only he could pierce through the fog of his shadow for long enough to do so foucault was against the tyrannical uses of power and concerned himself greatly with the struggle against it this sounds like a playbook peterson could have learned a lot from instead we get an intense shadow projection in a rather ironic twist peterson ends up making satanically possessed demons out of the two philosophies and the french tradition who are most heavily influenced by his philosopher of choice friedrich nietzsche his shadow doesn't just end with a demonization of foucault and darida's personality however but extends much deeper in the psychological field that studies conspiracy theories a conspiracy theory is defined as explanations for important events that involve secret plots by powerful and malevolent groups in the movements of these postmodern neo-marxist philosophers peterson sees a conspiracy to destroy the west he argues that the postmodernists managed to transform marxism and with this transformed marxism these neo-marxists plan to succeed where other revolutions have failed they are going to take over and destroy western culture from the inside i mean these this this intellectual war that's going on in the universities is way deeper than a political war it's it's it's and way more way more serious than a political of course this picture is just a little bit too perfect and it's something that should have raised our suspicions when the nazis came to power the people of europe were already used to seeing the jewish people as the enemy in the north american psyche we have a similar relationship with communism if you want to get americans riled up about something there's no better scapegoat than the good old commies and it's not simply a question of communism the target of post-modern neo-marxism is nothing less than our western values as a whole that's the goal to be destroyed just like the communists wanted you know wanted the revolution to destroy the the capitalist system it's the same thing so what we have here is a malevolent plot to deconstruct our western society everything we hold dear is under threat and by who none other than america's cold war enemies the communists this is a conspiracy theory and more than that it is a direct gaze into the shadow of jordan peterson and the shadow of our modern western culture we are possessed everyone has some jacked up opinion on the culture wars people are filled with fury the fury is completely unbalanced one might argue that this is down to the outrage fetishism of the algorithms but i would argue that these algorithms are in fact virtual bellows amplifying our culture's archetypal shadows our culture has become an archetypal battleground and obviously this is very far from being a one-sided affair peterson is reacting to a shadow on the other side and they're reacting to his there's something happening in the world but we have to be very very careful here about getting involved in the realm of the gods we are being possessed and thinking of ourselves as soldier in some battleground of the divinities this is what runs so counter to peterson's true message and a message i strongly believe in make your bed brush your teeth as valterra would put it cultivate your own garden you are human you are one person surrounded by other people forget about this war between aries and artemis and focus on what it is to be human love your neighbor love yourself that at least is a whole lot simpler to do this stuff is just an intoxicant it's like an eighty absent that everyone in the culture is drinking every single day if you find yourself getting really worked up and angry and thinking that other people are possessed by the devil that you are a white knight going to save the world you have gone beyond your proper bounds jordan's haters think that he's a lost cause but this is very far from being the case in his interview with john verveiki we see peterson genuinely open to being corrected he respects verveiki and knows that he operates in good faith and that his knowledge is superior in this domain and so peterson genuinely asks for showing that he's not so certain and that he is willing to learn am i misreading early darada and foucault by attributing to them the claim that that that it is power that they identify as the central spirit and am i wrong in saying that that's just a modified marxist claim while we might desire a bit more caution in the public sphere and suggest that perhaps we could do more pause before rushing into an archetypal war with a lack of knowledge nevertheless i think peterson is open to learning and he is a man who knows enough about the shadow that he could even take this kind of criticism on board my only fear is that as far as jp is concerned it's already too late i'll leave you with a quote of carl jung's from his book psychology and religion the change of character brought about by the up rush of collective forces is amazing a gentle and reasonable being can be transformed into a maniac or a savage beast one is always inclined to lay the blame on external circumstances but nothing could explode in us if it had not been there as a matter of fact we are constantly living on the edge of a volcano and there is so far as we know no way of protecting ourselves from a possible outburst that will destroy everybody within reach it is certainly a good thing to preach reason and common sense but what if you have a lunatic asylum for an audience or a crowd in collective frenzy there is not much difference between them because the madman and the mob are moved by impersonal overwhelming forces that's everything for this episode of the living philosophy if you really enjoyed it please give the video a thumbs up down below and if you really enjoy the this video and the channel in general then why not head over to patreon where you can get access to early scripts sometimes early videos and lots of other cool things like get your name in the credits and just generally support the channel and as ever if you have any thoughts insights or feedback i'd love to hear from you down in the comments otherwise i shall see you next time thank you for watching

Channel: The Living Philosophy

Views: 85,380

Keywords: jordan peterson, jordan peterson shadow, jordan peterson postmodernism, postmodern neo marxism, postmodernist neo marxist, postmodern neo-marxism jordan peterson, postmodern neo marxist, jung shadow jordan peterson, jungian shadow jordan peterson, jordan peterson derrida, shadow jordan peterson, jordan peterson the shadow, jordan peterson marxism, neo marxism, jordan peterson conspiracy theorist, the shadow jordan peterson, shadow carl jung, Jordan peterson conspiracy

Id: 3kDpEKM7ZBI

Length: 25min 55sec (1555 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 07 2022