The Decline of Jordan Peterson

[Music] foreign [Music] Peterson is a Canadian media personality clinical psychologist author and Professor who received widespread attention as a public intellectual for his views on cultural and political issues often described as conservative Peterson has described himself as a classic British liberal whilst teaching in the faculty of psychology at the University of Toronto he published his first book maps of meaning the architecture of belief which combined psychology mythology religion literature philosophy and Neuroscience to analyze systems of belief and meaning Peterson's early online lectures are delivered with energy authenticity and a tangible appreciation for the array of interests he drew upon for material in his book and so if a system sets out a structure and says here's a pathway to attainment the women won't rebel against that they'll go along with it and that's working very well for them at the moment he released a three-part YouTube series in 2016 called Professor against political correctness Peterson was troubled by two developments a federal amendment to add gender identity and expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act and the University's plans for mandatory anti-bias training he criticized the ACT to amend the Canadian Human Rights and the criminal code passed by the parliament of Canada to introduce gender identity and expression as prohibited grounds for discrimination Peterson argued that the bill would make the use of certain gender pronouns compelled speech and related this argument to a general critique of political correctness and identity Politics the social destructionist view of gender isn't another opinion it's just wrong well the proposition that's instantiated for example in this in this particular visual which is a good representation of the of the philosophy of the policies is that there's no causal relationship between these four dimensions of identity and and that's palpably absurd why are you against the use of alternate pronouns I'm against the use of of legislation to determine what words are that myself and other people are required to utter because I don't believe that other people have the right to determine what language I use especially when it's backed by punitive legislation in relating his argument about compelled speech to a general critique of identity politics Peterson became a focal point for a largely encourt and centerless dislike of what would popularly become known as wokeness Peterson emerged at exactly the right moment as a mix of academic rabble Rouser but uniquely not from the left combined with elements of the pop culture intellectual and with further elements of the provocateur contrarian and essayist such as Gore Vidal and Christopher Hitchens what I am is something unbearable particularly for the world of Journalism in the world of cliches I'm a realist I mean and obviously if you want to keep the system the way it is you must see to it that anyone who is realistic who draws attention to the illness into the corruption must be discredited so he's cynical it's not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard it is the right of everyone in the audience to listen and to hear and every time you silence somebody you make yourself a prisoner of your own action because you deny yourself the right to hear something in other words your own right to hear and be exposed is as much involved in all these cases as is the right of the other to voice his or her view he was similar to them in their critiques of hierarchies of power and cultural sacred cows but diffid in that whilst they had hedonistic even slatenly impulses he was pronouncedly more straight laced and whereas they had an equal disdain for the crass ignorance and hypocrisies of the right and the flakier aspects of the left Peterson was by his own admission a traditionalist many of his grievances were hardly new marginalized groups are infantilized by a culture of victimhood and offense taking political correctness threatens freedom of thought and speech ideological Orthodoxy undermines individual responsibility but he appeared to bring heavyweight intellectual Armature to standard complaints about social justice Warriors he claimed that Concepts fundamental to social justice movements such as the existence of patriarchy and other forms of structural oppression are treacherous Illusions and that he could prove this with science I hit a hornet's nest at the most propitious time he later reflected and men men work more longer hours they work more dangerous jobs they're more likely to move they're more likely to work outside they're more likely to participate in jobs in the stem fields that are scalable they make more money for those reasons and that's all hidden under the idea that the reason that men and women make different amounts of money is because of their gender it's my idea of the patriarchy there's a system of male dominance of society yeah but that's not my sense of the patriarchy what's yours well in what sense is our society male dominated the fact that the vast majority of wealth is owned by men the vast majority of capital and is owned by men women do more unpaid labor very tiny proportion of men and a huge proportion of people who are seriously disaffected are men most people in prisoner men most people who are on the street are men Peterson's lectures and conversations soon gathered millions of views in 2018 he published his best-selling second book 12 rules for life an antidote to chaos with chapters such as stand up straight with your shoulders back treat yourself like you are someone you are responsible for helping and set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world the book was full of time on it even hokey old concepts with a central idea that suffering is built into the structure of being and although it can be unbearable people have a choice either to withdraw which is a suicidal gesture or to face and transcend it the other parts of the work explored and criticized the state of young men the upbringing that ignores sex differences between boys and girls moral nihilism relativism and lack of respect for the values that built Western Society the parts of the work exploring and criticizing the state of young men had a massive catalyzing effect becoming for many young men a practical and welcome framing device through which to see and begin to alter their lives responsibility That's What Gives Life Meaning it's like lift a load then you can tolerate yourself right because look at you're useless easily hurt easily killed why should you have any self-respect pick something up and carry it make it heavy enough so that you can think yeah well useless as I am at least I could move that from there to there well what's really cool about that is that when I talk to these crowds about this the Man's eyes light up and that's very like I've seen that phenomena because I've been talking about this mythological material for a long time and I can see when I'm watching crowds people you know their eyebrows lift their eyes light up because I put something together for them as part of the promotion Peterson ascended to an interview on Britain's Channel 4 with a slightly flat-footed and unprepared Kathy Newman in exchange that catching and framing Peterson's rollicking momentum went viral I don't think that young men are hear words of encouragement some some of them never in their entire lives the fact that the words that I've been that I've been speaking have had such a dramatic impact is an indication that young men are starving for this sort of message now they're not being taught that they that it's important to develop yourself seven women running the top ftse 100 companies in the UK the first question might be um why would you want to do that why would a man want to do it a number of of men although not that many who are perfectly willing to sacrifice virtually all of their life to the pursuit of a high-end career these are men that are very intelligent they're usually very very conscientious and they're willing to work 70 or 80 hours a week non-stop specialized at one thing to get to the top so you're saying women are just more sensible they don't want that because it's not an Iceland I'm saying that's part of it if the law firms didn't use these masculine criteria then perhaps women would do better but the market sets the damn game and the market is dominated by men it's not the market is dominated by women they make 80 percent of the consumer decisions the more Newman inaccurately paraphrased his beliefs and betrayed her irritation the better Peterson came across bolstering his preferred image as the coolly rational man of science facing down the hysteria of political correctness why should your rights to freedom of speech Trump a trans person's right not to be offended because in order to be able to think you have to risk being offensive I mean look at the conversation we're having right now you know like you're certainly willing to risk offending me in the pursuit of Truth why should you have the right to do that it's been rather uncomfortable but you're exercising your freedom of speech to certainly risk offending me and that's fine so you haven't sat there and I'm just trying I've just tried to work that out I mean ha gotcha you have got me you have got me I'm trying to work that through my head yeah much of Peterson's appeal seemed to stem from his pulling no punches and asking young men to account for themselves and take responsibility for their own betterment and framing this in terms of a noble and decent challenge a model with roots and precursors stretching back through History Literature myth and philosophy but also creating a permission structure for them to critique and push back against what he defined as a corrosive cultural relativism that was deconstructing and devaluing masculinity gender and identity itself as things to Aspire to develop and refine on the way to self-realization he also strongly emphasized existing research that showed contrary to the beliefs and efforts of the social constructivists that gender differences in the most egalitarian societies actually maximized showing that gender proclivities between men and women were real and not abstract or constructed and that when given the ideal circumstances to do so those procla activities would come to the fore the exact opposite of what the social constructivists were hoping for I know everyone's shocked when they hear this this isn't shocking news people have known this in the scientific Community for at least 25 years there's only two reasons that men and women differ one is cultural and the other is biological and if you minimize the cultural differences you maximize the biological differences the idea of gender equality that is very important in in in Scandinavia I think it I don't think that equality of opportunity is a problem I think that's a great thing but that has nothing to do with equality of outcome to strive for equality of outcome is well it's a Fool's game and likely to be extraordinarily it has proved to be in the past extraordinarily dangerous as well as impossible the biggest differences between men and women in the world in terms of temperament and interest are in Scandinavia and they've maximized as a consequence of the egalitarian policies means that the more egalitarian your state the bigger the personality differences between men and women as a successful prominent academic these young men could look to him and quote him as a figure within Academia where what they saw as the worst excesses of work deconstruction were being indulged especially in the humanities where such ideas were being propagated into the political and cultural mainstream without being challenged or contested such young men now had their academic Firebrand at a surprising number of students and Millennials from across the ideological Spectrum were at the very least aware of and quite willing to acknowledge or even integrate much of Jordan Peterson's ideas into their overall appreciation of contemporary Academia and culture his constellation of beliefs attracted a heterogeneous audience that included Christian conservatives atheist Libertarians and Centrist pundits even among many Skeptics he was considered to varying degrees legitimate and relevant but even at this height in his influence and popularity many of his lesser qualities ones that would later become more pronounced were also already in evidence aquariusness an initial amenability and receptivity that would give way to a kind of crotchety standoffishness and an absence of the qualities that made the likes of Gore Vidal and Christopher Hitchens so compelling Rich satire and ironical self-awareness witty turns a phrase wielding comebacks a raconteur's storytelling and timing a pronouncement that feminists support the rights of Muslims because of their quote unconscious wish for brutal male domination and an unwillingness to express any particular empathy towards trans people to make any distinctions between them as individuals on the one hand and as representations of a trenchant ideological and political discourse on the other his contrarian stances on topics such as white privilege the gender pay Gap and the enforced use of gender-neutral pronouns were seeing him demonized as an alt-right villain by many on the left nevertheless during this High Noon of Jordan Peterson's cultural influence there were two significant appearances one was at Oxford where he held forth before a receptive audience in the heart of the academic establishment and as I said already I'm not an admirer for example of hate speech laws even though there's plenty of hateful speech because I think the best thing to do is to leave Free Speech alone as much as you possibly can not because that will result in the perfect conditions for Free Speech but because anything else that you're likely to do is going to make it worse rather than better the second and for me the most crucial appearance around this time was when he joined Stephen Fry in a monk debate against Michelle Goldberg and Michael Eric Dyson to discuss whether political correctness was an enemy of free speech The collectivist Narrative that I regard as politically correct as a Pastiche of post-modernism and neo-marxism and its fundamental claim is that no you're not essentially an individual you're essentially a member of a group be your ethnicity and it might be your sex it might be your race and that you should be essentially categorized along with those who are like you on that dimension in that group and proposition number two is that the proper way to view the world is as a Battleground between groups of different Power you view the individual from the group context you view the battle between groups from the group context and you view history itself as a consequence of nothing but the power Maneuvers between different groups it stood out as a unique opportunity political correctness critiqued through an intellectual collaboration between a self-described liberal and Stephen Fry who was trying to distinguish between the robust relatable and decent elements of liberalism on the one hand and the strident prissy and flakier excesses of identity Politics on the other and a self-proclaimed classic British liberal and Peterson challenging political correctness from the perspective of someone bristling at compelled speech and academic activism the promise of such a collaboration and its Effectiveness and coherence on stage was enormous an ideological Coalition that if properly followed up on or expanded with multiple iterations of other partners and crossovers could have shifted the needle and puncturing the pretensions and listening the profile of identity politics and political correctness and made the left as a broader idea more palatable to mainstream people as it happened shortly after these appearances Jordan Peterson was faced with a string of crises after his wife Tammy was diagnosed with a rare form of kidney cancer he was prescribed benzodiazepines to calm his anxiety only to find himself dependent and experiencing Dreadful side effects which caused an inability to stop moving along with a sense of Doom and Suicidal Thoughts he was critically sick and an absolute Terror Insomniac for weeks was freezing and unable to get enough clothes on his blood pressure so low he couldn't stand up his return was gradual but he found himself in his own words forgiven by his audience Here I Am the sky he said I'm a clinical psychologist I got tangled up with benzodiazepines I'm talking to people about getting their house in order and things collapse around me the irony it's almost unbearable he approached his return with the hypothesis of including myself in the audience of reprobates to whom I'm lecturing I don't assume that I abide by all these rules there are targets for attainment and hopefully that has protected me at least to some degree against the perception of undue moral superiority in many ways the harrowing experiences mellowed him and made him more philosophical harking back in one interview to the years before the varied crises and public notoriety when his life was full of levity and playing and joking around with his children but by now other impulses were already setting in he had lost his luster as a contrarian which to a large degree is Reliant as a Trope on a perception of redoubtable toughness and composure his detractors found sufficient means to relegate him in some quarters he was being perceived as a bit of a spent force or an eccentric he had written a follow-up to 12 rules that whilst containing some new ideas had no doubt personally cathartic and herself as an academic and expressive exercise was nonetheless seen by many as him pouring in the same litter box he would sign up to a Content distribution deal with conservative Media Company the daily wire further placing him outside the mainstream discourse and emphatically courtenang off a left or center-left audience who might retain some interest in his perspectives in a novel by Alan hollinghurst one character laments of another he has become more brutal more sentimental this is an apt phrase for Peterson whose personality seemed to maximize with him in interviews coming across as sentimental modeling lacromos and easily susceptible to open weeping but with his aversion and resentment toward woke ideology and activism also maximizing to hitherto unseen levels of invective and spite most clinching his spite for perceived outrage is an entitlement on the left led to him losing the intellectual underpinning of proportionality he lamp asks liberal politics in Western democracies Canada in particular but his criticisms of autocratic impulses and Trends on the right and America in particular are dispassionate and nominal his remarks on the capital Riot attempts to undermine Democratic institutions with baseless accusations of fraud our aloof often with a grudging or somewhat disengaged mentioning and passing for the most part Peterson now dwells in a limited right-wing and libertarian ecosystem of podcasters and social media Elon Musk let Peterson back on Twitter after he had been suspended for refusing to stop misgendering and dead naming actor Elliot page now that he has access to the social media site again his posts sometimes negatively highlight the plight of young women in Iran and otherworthy causes and issues but are more frequently and dispiritingly close to the banal invective laced with hyperbole demagoguery and cheap sarcasm that can be found practically anywhere he promotes anti-vaxx theories retweets climate change to nihilism promotes a lecture intended to discuss the quote undeniable need for fossil fuels and the toxic underlying nihilism of the climate concerned left describes Canadian plans to make all new cars emissions free by 2035 as utterly deluded and criminally virtuous signaling and exclaims keep your damned hands off my car Justin Trudeau or face the consequences describes the Twitter files as truly worse than Nixon's Watergate describes trans youth as adolescents whose pandering cowardly medical professionals utterly inexcusably castrated them and labels them sanctimonious butchers while still popular his shrunken appeal maximized resentments and reactive rather than narrative framing or Paradigm shifting rhetoric has given him the feel of a public figure who was largely played out occasionally there will be perspectives that almost hauntingly evoke the globetrotting figure of a few years back but his claim to being a mainstream enduring academic provocateur and contrarian has waned and there is little Prospect of a third Act we have seen the decline of Jordan Peterson foreign [Music]

Channel: Echo Chamberlain

Views: 129,155

Keywords: jordan peterson

Id: Ta0hwiff5Sc

Length: 20min 36sec (1236 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 27 2022