The Problem with Jordan Peterson

the audience frequently will write in or ask me questions or call in and talk about Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson and I've answered a lot of those specific questions about claims that he's made about contradictions or double standards that he's espoused we've also interviewed Jordan Peterson on the show it was back in 2017 and I've expressed some of what I think about Peterson and about what he does but in this video I want to go deeper and sort of flesh out some of the more general thoughts I have about the movement surrounding Peterson he's seen as relevant in some online spheres of political discussion so I think it's a good opportunity to go through some of this stuff and really think about it so as far as some of Peterson's actual positions again I've refuted some of those in the past and I'll probably do that in the future as it comes up whether it's some of his confusion about post-modernism or undervaluing the utility of collectivism or how he plays these epistemological games when it comes to religion and I definitely disagree with him about many specific social and political issues and I'm sure that I'm gonna get some comments after this video where people will say David you didn't actually debunk Peterson's political positions or his socio-cultural positions or his actual views on specific issues here you're not really refuting what he says that's not the point of this video okay in this video we're going to talk about Jordan Peterson himself and his movement and some generally concerning and hypocritical elements of it and to start with it's really important to understand that Peterson denies being a right-winger even though he constantly denounces collectivism egalitarianism political correctness identity politics feminism all of which are typically associated with leftism he's a big proponent of right-wing and conservative ideals like hierarchies traditionalism individualism capitalism and that's fine right I mean Jordan Peterson can be a conservative political pundit but he won't take all of it now maybe he thinks that he can be more effective at pushing this ideology or agenda if he's able to avoid being labeled as someone who's merely on the right I don't know that's a possibility but what's especially silly is Peterson's complaints about being thought of as a political figure at all right he accuses people like many journalists of unfairly associating him with politics and of framing him as a political commentator and framing his messages as political and that it's the fault of the journalists that that's happening you never really thought of yourself as a political author and and public figure but that is how and as I've been saying you know as we've seen so much of your messages about is the personal it's how you as an individual can behave and take responsibility but yet you are being painted in a political light do you see yourself as a political figure not particularly no but it everyone that I'm interviewed by virtually insists that that's what I am right well but the reason for that is that most of our dialogue in mainstream media I would say is always focused on political issues and so if you have a hammer then everything looks like a nail right it's so nice to see people concentrating on psychological and philosophical issues and leaving the idiot politics as far behind as possible because it's certainly uh what would you call it a distraction and a dangerous one at that so it's so funny talking to the mainstream media types because everything they talk about has to be viewed through a political lens and although I continue to insist I did BBC HARDtalk which was aired today and that was a classic example of an interviewer being entirely scripted and trying to push everything that's happening around me I suppose into a political narrative Peterson has this attitude of political what humi political like he's not involved in the realm of politics and that this is how people are wrongly or unfairly trying to paint him now I can think of a ton of non-political public figures who go on news Pro and aren't asked political questions and don't answer political questions because they genuinely don't have anything to do with politics that's not Jordan Peterson right individualism versus collectivism that's a focal point of Peterson's commentary and it's also one of the foundations of politics and of people's existence in one place or another of the political spectrum and then even more explicitly Peterson discusses hot-button political issues like Canadian human rights law American presidents Canadian Prime Minister's immigration policy climate change economics Marxism in equality including wealth inequality the relationship between poverty and crime and on and on and on and he does it on public popular platforms like his own YouTube channel on Joe Rogan's podcast in interviews with journalists in corporate media so it's absurd for him to claim to be bothered by people associating him with politics or people discussing the political implications of what he espouses and then more importantly discussing politics is what made the guy famous in the first place right why is he even so popular first of all he's very effective at tapping into the anti social justice warrior thinking that's happening in the minds of many young people whether these young people were previously on the right or on the left or just people who didn't really think too much about politics they were to some degree annoyed by perceived political correctness on their college campus or on social media Peterson has regularly uploaded videos to YouTube since 2013 but he really grew in terms of the size of his following when he became this outspoken aunt is JW activist political activist I would argue in late 2016 early 2017 around the issue of transgender pronouns if it weren't for that vocal opposition to transgender pronouns two years ago he likely wouldn't have the following that he now has it's all predicated upon this political issue on which he commented and there's a huge market for that right now it is much easier as I've talked about before to become popular and to make money online if you're doing this anteye sjw anti political correctness content than it is creating any other type of content in the sphere of politics and social criticism especially on YouTube which is where Peterson became prominent I shouldn't say this but I'm going to because it's just so goddamn funny I can't help but say that I figured out how to monetize social justice warriors it's so funny I just can't believe it either way but Peterson is also popular because he gives advice about personal development that's often quite good he talks about alienation he talks about how to find meaning in life and some of Peterson's critics on the left I I believe strongly should just admit that Peterson is talking about serious issues and he's communicating real practical ideas that can help people but it's really important to be able to distinguish his competence as a psychologist from his ideologies that are very wrapped up in politics just because Peterson offers possible solutions to common dilemmas that a lot of young people particularly young men face when they enter adulthood and when they try to find their place in the world that doesn't mean that by default everything Jordan Peterson says about politics or philosophy has to be true the ideologies that make up Peterson's worldview like Jungian psychology and fervent individualism are not the only ideologies that can inform most of the advice that Peterson gives so what happens in practice is that Peterson fans will start taking his reasonable advice it understandably has a positive impact on I would say they're probably his life or sense of self-worth as the disproportionately men that follow Peterson which is fine but then he makes the fallacious assumption that what Peterson is telling him to do is inseparably tied to Peterson's philosophical and political outlook Peterson's fans will often assume that because the advice about finding your place in the world is good and useful because Peterson's personal worldview on those issues is true that the politics of Peterson are the only possible cattle of that advice and of that ideology in reality Peterson's giving universal non-controversial advice which is espoused and accepted by many world views often world views that are in direct conflict with Peterson's politics helping people improve their personal well-being for lack of a better term their self-esteem or their interpersonal relationships some might argue this is the point of being a clinical psychologist which is Peterson's profession there are many clinical psychologists who could start YouTube channels and build a following and help lots of people even if you want to argue that Peterson is better suited for it that he's exceptionally good at communicating some of these ideas to young people even if that's true it still isn't proof that his ideological perspective is more valid than any of many other countless other frameworks in psychology and philosophy that can result in positive outcomes for people that are tied to totally different political ideologies there are totally different schools of thought that have done lots of good for people and are backed up by decades of academic justification but if Jordan Peterson's lectures and his views on psychology resonate with you and help you I don't want to discount that what I want to do is remind you that Peterson is not the only game in town and we should be careful about thinking of him number one of some kind of omniscient guru but number two about thinking of him as someone who is able to give this non controversial fairly obvious advice because of his views on politics including individualism a Galit arianism collectivism so on and so forth and you can tell that this thinking exists in part from the anger and the condescension with which Peterson fans argue against anybody who criticizes him I've experienced this right some criticisms of Peterson are unfair and people should push back against unfair criticisms of Jordan Peterson it's good to have reasonable debate about public figures but the level of passion and dedication that you in the Petersons fans on social media scares me because of how it extends beyond the rational to the totally emotionally irrational consider this question why isn't there an astronomer or a computer scientist or a historian with a fan base that will fight to the death for their claims the way many of Peterson's fans do for him it is because many peterson fans have this sort of deep tribal even spiritual connection to the guy and his movement in his teachings and the intensity of Peterson's defenders goes beyond the so-called facts and it goes into feelings and into emotion and into loyalty that extends beyond reason what the peterson fans need to understand is that this type of devotion is partly what fuels the unfair criticisms of peterson it's a circle when a public person has a huge group of zealous attack dogs who pounce on any critic of the movement the movement becomes more fun and attractive to criticise to outsiders now I'm not saying it should be that way but without question this kind of cringy fanboy behavior of so many peterson fans is itself what turns people off of jordan peterson people shouldn't strawman peterson people shouldn't criticize peterson dishonestly but the adoration of his fans is part of what feeds it and you might say oh that's unfair and I'm agreeing with you I'm saying yeah that is unfair but there are many peterson fans who would benefit from being a little bit more self-aware one of the most disconcerting things about peterson fans is how seriously they take themselves something that open-minded people with a sort of healthy diversity of intellectual influences rarely do they rarely take themselves so seriously most people actually learn to become embarrassed about taking themselves so seriously and they eventually grow out of it which may be some peterson fans will do so to be clear I'm not saying Peterson's doing anything to proactively encourage his fans to act this way I've seen videos of people asking Peterson what he thinks of the idea that he's becoming a sort of cult leader and his explanations of why he doesn't fit the definition do make sense I'm talking about the fans themselves and their cohesion and their aggressiveness and groupthink that's what we should really be paying attention to so I said it I said I said the word cult let's talk about that a little bit strictly speaking it's not accurate it's not productive to say that the Petersons movement is a cult per se but if you're a Peterson fan and Peterson was your introduction to philosophy or to psychology or to self-improvement and you know far more about Jordan Peterson that about any other public intellectual or similar figure it would be useful to examine that and to sort of broaden your horizons but this is predictably understandable in a way Peterson's following is largely young men going through the same things that young adults have gone through for a very long time existential crisis the need for a moral code strategies for dealing with daily life and relationships and anxiety and sort of finding purpose and your place in the world these are natural voids that surfaced when we become adults and we realize that we're responsible for our own actions and for our way of life and we've got to make sense of it all right but we should be really cautious about filling those voids totally or mostly with one person's advice that's always a bad idea because we can become sheep and accept everything that that person says without skepticism or without enough skepticism and then you end up in this position of many Peters and followers which is that you think anybody who criticizes that one person must be an idiot and must be attacked on social media the way we're seeing critics of Peterson attacks here's a key point many jordan peterson fans don't realize that the good advice they're getting from Peterson and the positive outcomes that they might experience by applying his advice to their lives aren't the products of Peterson's way of looking at the world a lot of what Peterson touts is universal and you can arrive at the exact same conclusions and ideas through many paths Peterson's values are one way of framing it his fans receive this universally applicable set of truisms and very obvious advice package within Peterson's philosophical and political views about post-modernism and feminism and political correctness and his fans end up thinking that the advice they get from Peterson is inextricably linked to those views when it's not Marxism and political correctness are bad and individualism is good and Carl Jung was a genius and mythology is important therefore I should clean my room and stand up straight and not tell lies and make friends with people who want the best for me that is the key distortion of this entire movement Peterson ties the advice into his ideology either deliberately or implicitly but most of the advice that he dispenses is not controversial it's not unique it's not novel and when people find the advice powerful and useful they adopt the rest of his ideology or they assume that since Peterson was right about standing up straight he must be right about everything else for many of the Peterson fans that I've spoken to personally it's a matter of thinking I'm lost in life so I'm going to go with the self-help guru that seems to share my belief about how lame social justice warriors are or Wow okay look he's got a lot of great advice on his YouTube channel I'm enjoying it he clicks with me in a way that no other intellectual has so I'm hooked into the entire political milieu that he's espousing it would be really useful for the Peterson fans to ask themselves why are they infatuated with this one person and not with any of the other psychologists doing great important scientific work is it actually the content of what Peterson is saying or is it that they're sort of mesmerized by his YouTube videos and is delivery when it's the latter this is not his capacity as an academic it's his role as a de facto spiritual leader that is impressing people and that's where it goes in the cult-like direction so there's an irony when Peterson talks about the importance of thinking for yourself Peterson gives fans a way of feeling smart without actually having to thoroughly study the intellectuals that Peters sites much less the countless philosophers with viewpoints that directly contradict Peterson in really credible and important ways being a loyal unquestioning Peterson fan doesn't really demand much of you right it's easy many in Peterson's audience are relying on his interpretations and his conclusions about philosophical issues and current events without doing much thinking on their own and that's what gurus do and enable their followers to do Peterson's fans like to claim that he uses cold scientific facts to back up his arguments Peterson presents his arguments about gender culture economics politics whatever as hey facts are facts science has already decided and the Peterson fans get hypnotized by this and they develop this attitude that anybody who disagrees with Peterson's conclusions and theories must just be inherently arguing against reason or be afraid of science or not care about what the so-called facts are without actually verifying the cited facts and the theories outside of Peterson's own singular word when you combine that with Peterson's traditionalist moral outrage which constantly says in in sort of summary our society is heading in a dangerous direction and I'm fed up with it it has the ability as it has done to mobilize people who feel disenfranchised by scaring them about a society that's supposedly changing for the worse and then it creates this common monolithic enemy for the Nazis it was the Jews for Trump voters it was Mexicans and the Chinese and liberals I guess who knows for Petersons fans it's this radical leftist postmodernist neo-marxist figure which as is often pointed out is really a concept that Peterson has crudely put together incorrectly by conflating all of those movements but that's actually for another video not for this one but the main idea is that tribalism becomes their source of energy banding together not only against the supposed postmodernist neo-marxists but against anybody who critiques Peterson at all as we've seen on our show they might love arguing for Peters positions but they equally enjoy rallying together against Peterson's detractors and what binds the Peterson movement more than anything is this camaraderie that comes from their indignation toward anybody who's not part of their movement or who criticizes their movement there's nothing wrong with defending and ideology against opposing viewpoints the red flags in the Peterson movement are the group think and the unquestioning allegiance to a single guru like leader so the big picture advice that I have is diversify your sources of so-called wisdom being guided by an eclectic mix of thinkers and ideologies might be more confusing it'll definitely be less straightforward it will be more messy as I like to say it will require you to sort things out for yourself instead of having your worldview spoon-fed to you by one person but that's what it means to be a free and critical thinker and that's why I encourage you to do it

Channel: David Pakman Show

Views: 635,677

Rating: 3.9702132 out of 5

Keywords: jordan peterson exposed, jordan peterson wrong, jordan peterson owned, jordan peterson debunked, jordan peterson followers, jordan peterson fans, jordan peterson interview, jordan peterson sophist, 12 rules for life, politics, news, the david pakman show, david pacman, david packman, progressive, liberal, secular talk, progressive talk, atheist, atheism, agnostic, talk radio, progressive podcast, democrat, progressive news, liberal news

Id: yIh2wQkCqoI

Length: 21min 3sec (1263 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 25 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/happybadger]

I disagree with his view that it isn't a cult. Here are the traits of a cult:

Submission, exclusivity, persecution complex, control, isolation, love-bombing, special knowledge, indoctrination, salvation, group think, cognitive dissonance, shunning, gender roles, and appearance standards.

Show me which one lobsters don't embody. They dogmatically follow one guy with special insights into the human psyche and the (((real facts))) about society. Those loyal to him parrot him, validate each others' relationships to him, ruthlessly hound anyone who criticises him and attack them as feminists and postmodernists and cultural Bolsheviks, and try to live up to his ridiculous ideology that's as conservative as any wonky religious sect.

Here are the individual traits that cults try to target in their recruiting:

Those seeking validation, identity, born followers, those seeking meaning, those with schizotypal thinking, the suggestible, those who constantly blame others, the angry, and those who have low self-worth.

Show me which one lobsters don't embody. They're conservative reactionaries, sexually dysfunctional manlets with conspiratorial mindsets. They're depressed and go on at lengths about how his generic self-help advice brought them out of THE CHAOTIC FUGUE OF OUR MODERN ERA. They're fragile white manchildren who are desperate for any sort of confident male role model in their life and shop from one hollow demagogue to the next until one of them validates them for being a special boy who is smart and fuckable and a big strong alpha male.

Peterson absolutely is a cult. His followers absolutely are cultists. He may not be Jim Jones yet, but neither was Jim Jones until the only way to keep the government off his back was to move out into the jungle. Peterson knows exactly who his audience is, what he's selling them, and what the underlying themes of his message are. To say otherwise is to pull wool over your own eyes because you're afraid of disagreeing with his politics in some masturbatory idealising of civility.

This will end like any other cult. They'll see external criticism as proof of the conspiracy against them, double down on the worst elements of groupthink, the power will go to his head and he'll demand more loyalty and purity from his followers, and eventually they'll radicalise into what we normally think of when we think "cult". The ATF raiding a compound full of explosives is the end stage of the process, not the beginning. Vaguely charismatic ideologues preaching hidden truths to losers is the beginning.

[u/Santamierdadelamierd]

The problem is not with the guy per se! It's a problem of the broken of the easily manipulated and broken YouTube and other platforms algorithms. Somebody paid very generously to promote certin videos. Companies like Cambridge analytica studied the different social networks and managed to promote the guys videos very well. People saw the view counts and thought this guy must the next Foulcault or something. Some of those who voted for Trump might have had some remorse and this guy came our of nowhere to tell them it's ok. The "woke wave" needed a philosopher, needed some prestige. None of the usual clowns from molynueux to shapireux to Alex Jones have that. Here is ab educated guy from one of those institutions run by leftist elitist cucks. He has the credentials and the prestige... Etc... Sometimes, it seems that he himself thinks he would rather be recognized for something other than just dickriding such a mob driven wave. He would constantly refer to his earlier book, maps of meaning, which he probably thinks is his real achievement. Deep in his heart, he feel some shame about an "undeserved attention and fame" ignited by stupid accident and perpetuated by hubris and pressure from the mobs and big bucks... Don't take this too seriously it was just an angry rant and I don't have no sources or evidence to back it up. It might be total bullshit, but that's what I think from seeing many of his mini-clips, yes mini clips because I don't have the patience to listen to his drivel for more than 10 minutes.

[u/son1dow]

Excellent video. Really good delivery, the points are well connected and they make one coherent narrative that conveys some of the core problems with the JBP movement. I'd go way harder at his contribution to making his fans be this way, definitely would include his constantly being wrong about 20 fields, dishonest rhetoric, but if one is trying to hold punches and compassionately convey some of the core problems with JBP, then this may be one of the best vids for it.

[u/TransformativeX]

The ORIGINAL Jordan Peterson Diss Track - Crackpot [a la Eminem Killshot]