The Wasteland of Jordan Peterson | Big Joel

hey everybody this is the second video in my four-part series where I'm just telling you some meandering little stories about YouTube conservatism this time we're talking about Jordan Peterson and just as a disclaimer if you're a fan of Peterson's who's bothered by the fact that I've categorized him as a conservative I really wouldn't worry about it too much I'll explain more in a footnote that I've written but I really wouldn't worry about it you know just take a walk on the wild side entertaining a big Joel video and with that let's get started so when I was in my first semester of college I read TS Eliot's the wasteland in an introductory English class while the poem is renowned for being complicated filled with allusions to canonical works different languages archetypal figures pretentious stuff like that I think the basic story Eliot tells is a simple one the world around us is a wasteland in the wake of World War one and under the crushing weight of modernity we have found ourselves fragmented and without moral center what are the roots that clutch what branches grow out of this stony rubbish son of man you cannot say your guests for you know only a heap of broken images as the poem progresses we navigate this world one fixated on image but image without substance we have taken the narratives that give our lives meaning and purpose and replace them with easily consumable trash are you alive or not is there nothing in your head but that [Music] Shakespearean rag it's so elegant so intelligent there is no water here no spiritual sustenance no way to create meaning it's a wasteland so naturally we're left with a question how do we get out of it and the answer Eliot gives is we have to fix ourselves see this poem is at its core a Fisher King narrative from Arthurian legend the kingdom is in disrepair because the king is injured and to become well again to make the world well again the king must hear the right words in this case data diet vom da Matta translated from Sanskrit we must give sympathize and control this is how we can leave the wasteland can heal the kingdom and at the very least by holding close to these ideals we can set our own lands in order we can sure some fragments against the ruins i sat upon the shore fishing with the arid plain behind me shall at least set my lands in order so I love this poem I loved reading it and hearing what the professor had to say I think it hit me at the right time in my life and it's just one of those things that pops into my vines every few weeks Dada died vom da Miyata in general I just think they're really good words to live by and there's something so pleasing and elegant in their message what's more and I know this is kind of personal but the wasteland reminds me of my dad who died around six months ago not just because my dad loved TS Eliot when he was around my age and loved pretentious stuff and loved talking about archetypes but also because I don't think he was a particularly happy man I don't want to get too deep into this stuff and I don't want to present you some biased image of my father but he was generally pretty invested in his problems in his discomfort and social anxiety in his feeling that the world was pitted against him what's more he put a lot of stock in the idea that he could find some big solution to those problems he was very invested in Buddhism and psychoanalysis and self-help books and so after he died I almost immediately began to connect his life to the story of the Fisher King to me it seemed that like the Fisher King my father was injured that his world was injured because of it and that he was on a quest to find the words that would heal him and I wondered you know what would have been the right words for him what would have healed his kingdom and maybe Elliott was right maybe what my father needed to hear and listened to was as simple as give sympathize control I don't know so why did I start off this video with this incredibly long and annoying intro well it's because I wanted to explain why on some level I'm attached to this stuff this language was useful to me in my life and it reminds me of my dad and the reason that's important is that if it turns out that the ideology of the wasteland doesn't work if there's something in it that we can't accept if we can't look to it for all of our answers then there's something to mourn here right and maybe I'm the only one who feels that way but something tells me I'm not anyway over the last few months I've watched a lot of videos by Jordan Peterson and this is a story about that there's a really interesting video by Jordan Peterson that will be kind of focusing on today a two-hour lecture uploaded on his channel called identity politics and the neo-marxist lie of white privilege and the first important thing I want to point out about this lecture is that Jordan Peterson doesn't provide any kind of real argument against the existence of white privilege doesn't ever work to prove that it's a lie I mean sure he says a few words about how there are tons of factors that predict success in America and that race isn't the only one I can't quite figure out why the postmodernist have made the canonical distinctions they've made race ethnicity sexual proclivity sexual gender identity let's say those are four dimensions along which people vary but there's a very large number of dimensions along which people vary here's some ways people differ intelligence temperament geography historical time you live now and not a hundred years ago attractiveness that's a big that's a big one but you know that's a given right nobody thinks that being black or white is the only thing that matters in a person's life that's ridiculous instead they believe that race is unimportant factor in the way that a person will be treated in our society and that that is an unjust thing or at a few points he suggests that the scholarship trying to prove that white privilege exists is inadequate and this is of course the one thing he'd have to show to prove that white privilege is a lie but he never really commits to that argument in a more robust way he just like isolates of personal intentionally non data-driven perspective on white privilege and is like we you the science police that's personal and not even data-driven we the original paper on white privilege wouldn't have received a passing grade for the hypothesis part of a undergraduate honors thesis we're not even close there's no methodology at all it was called white privilege and male privilege a personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women's studies but he seems to outright ignore the amount of credible information we have on this subject that might be more compelling to him what's wrong with the study indicating that black names on resumes are turned over far more often than white names are where the sample size is just too small on that one how about the historical and economic analysis claiming that property discrimination had a direct impact on the ability of black people to accrue wealth in America how about the literally dozens of papers about how black people are treated unfairly on basically every level of the American justice system boo-boo-boo-boo-boo and I could keep going here but the important thing is Peterson never addresses any of this stuff it's not that I disagree with his interpretation of this robust research rather he just doesn't make an argument about it in the first place probably the case he devotes most of his time to making is that white privilege and it's postmodern ilk is the modern form of militant totalitarian communism basically he thinks that in order to maintain the lie that communism could work after the horrors of Stalinism took its toll academics who wanted to continue advocating for Marxism had to replace their discussion of class struggle with things like identity politics and intersectionality so much data on the catastrophic failures of communism had accrued that even the most intransigent of French intellectuals had to admit that the jig was up but that's a problem because that's the whole ideology you're gonna just give that up what are you gonna do after that well what happened was post-modernism was invented and so it's a sleight of hand as far as I can tell so and and with post-modernism identity politics and while I don't think his thesis here is strong at all while I actually think it's deeply misleading we can see that it doesn't much matter here right because even if he's absolutely right about the history of terms like intersectionality and white privilege that's still not an argument against those ideas if systemic racism does exist and to be clear it does then it exists and it doesn't really matter if the people talking about it are trying to pull some strange Marxist bait-and-switch concepts aren't true or untrue based upon the supposedly shifty ideologues who say them now I could give a few more examples here but I think you see the point and I sincerely hope you believe me when I say that I'm not ignoring the secret real argument that Jordan Peterson makes in order to make my own narrative stronger there would be no point to that I'm not really invested in shaming the guy in the first place know what I want to do is ask a question why does it not matter that Jordan Peterson never makes a real argument against white privilege why is his lecture known less kind of captivating why is the audience eating out of the palm of his hand likely to agree with him about this topic and this is broadly speaking the question that I'll be spending the rest of this video exploring and to do that let's return to the wasteland I don't think it should take long to convince you that Jordan Peterson essentially wants to be a modern TS Eliot it sounds weird but it's not all that surprising Eliot himself was pretty far on the right even calling himself a Royalist like Eliot Peterson believes that the world is losing its grasp on what really matters we don't have much respect for tradition in the West and it's a really really big problem because the ethical responsibility of a human being is to take the dead culture so that's the dead father or the dead God and to revivify it with attention and communication and like Eliot Peterson comes to the conclusion that our response to this must be to take that meaning back in a very personal way regain an appreciation for the traditional and healthy modes of being assumed responsibility sit up straight clean your room at their core jordan Peterson's politics are a politics of psychology to him we are all Fisher kings and by far the most important thing we can do is to heal ourselves set our houses in order in the play of the cocktail party by American English poet TS Eliot one of the characters is having a very hard time of it she speaks of her profound unhappiness to her psychiatrist she tells him that she hopes her suffering is all her own fault taking it back the psychiatrist asks why because she tells him if it's her fault she can do something about it if it's in the nature of the world however she's doomed she can't change everything else but she could change herself we can see this idea come through clearly in a video called I've read some marks and now I'm gonna change the world in it a student interviewer basically asks Peterson if he thinks active is a good thing and Peterson reacts to this question with a mix of skepticism and derision you know I you go out there with a stick and a sign on it that says I'm against poverty it's like yeah no kidding no one before so it's it's it's an abdication of responsibility with the mask of social virtue seemingly the vast majority of activists are inauthentic and silly they use gauche and overly public stances as a way to virtue signal to their friends and avoid the bigger problems in their lives you want to solve difficult problems you figure out how to get along with your brother the one you've been fighting with for five years see if you can staple your family back together see if you can stop fighting with your girlfriend and have a relationship that lasts for more than two weeks what's more most of these people aren't meaningfully helping anyway while he's not opposed to civil action outright he thinks that we shouldn't tamper with the functioning of the world until we are competent enough to do so and competence is a surprisingly restrictive quality to Peterson and they're usually people well they've had a successful relationship they've had a successful family they have a couple of degrees they've established a business like they've made themselves credible in five or six dimensions well then maybe you know enough about the world to dare to mess with its internal mechanisms and if you if you don't have that kind of in-depth knowledge then you should just you shouldn't you should no more work on the economic systems of Western civilization then you should try to adjust the electronic systems of your automobile and this idea crops up over and over again in Peterson's work like say what you want about the guy he does not hide the high premium he places on personal psychology or the disdain he has for people who look to the problems of society it's something any fan of his would immediately recognize and looking at this considering the fact that I am probably the sort of person that Jordan Peterson is expressing a distaste for it only makes sense that he made me think about my own psyche ecology about what I'm doing here see I've always wanted to work with media either making it or talking about it I just loved the stuff and have since I was a kid and I'd like to think that now that I've had this amazing opportunity to make these videos that I've been a fairly decent person about it that I've had integrity I've never said something I don't believe to be true I've never intentionally mischaracterized somebody you know the stuff like that but still are my motives pure does my work come from some perfect healthy helpful place well no I don't think so I like attention plain and simple I like getting money for being creative I like feeling smart and correct about things assembling an in group of people who agree with me and I'm not like qualified to be that kind of person right I don't have multiple degrees I'm not a policy expert nobody asked me to give my opinions when I first started I volunteered them at the end of the day I love making videos but it is a constant source of insecurity in my life one defined both by the unending desire to be well liked and accepted and by the realization that nothing makes me fit to this task that there's no big reason I should be doing it this is I think the power of Jordan Peterson his ability to confront me and I imagine much of his audience with their own sense of angst and inner longing the realization that there is an absence inside of us one that takes up so much of our lives and that reminds us that we are not good not pure not well-intentioned in some idealized way and we won't find our answers to these problems in the issues of society right there is no policy change no activism no socialist utopia that's gonna get us out of this wasteland so why look to those issues in the first place now I don't think it should surprise you that ultimately I can't live thinking this way I find it completely inadequate and there's lots of arguments I could make to try to convince you that I'm right about that like sure I can agree that most people are broken and incompetent in one way or another but I don't think that's a good reason to suggest that we not engage in politics and activism until we have solved those personal problems after all this is the fundamental cornerstone of democracy either direct or indirect that everybody should have an active voice in the way that power operates and I don't think that democracy is good because people are good because they always know the best course of action we should take no I think it's good because I don't trust anybody else to handle that power better the small businessman with five degrees might be a good leader I don't know him but I'm not just gonna hitch my horse to his wagon because he's happy and has made a good life for himself rather he needs to persuade me that he's gonna do the right things and the only way he's gonna do that is if we both have political convictions that we care about and believe in that we basically agree on what ought to be done so I'm not saying that everybody's grade or has to be a leader but limiting civic engagement concern and activism to so-called competent people just doesn't work for me or sure I could say it seems like for a lot of us our problems aren't caused by society but by our own psychologies but that's one of those unfalsifiable claims that sounds good on paper but is really hard to make categorical statements about and let's take the standard example here a guy let's call him slobber works at various retail jobs for 60 hours a week he doesn't like what he does and he doesn't make a lot doing it meanwhile his marriage is falling apart lately things have felt strained he isn't as present as he used to be and his wife is becoming increasingly unhappy about it now just looking at this guy and his marriage are there things he can do to make himself happier and make his relationship better well of course there are I'm not the ghoul of despair here to take away slobbers hopes from him and I believe there are probably a number of things he can do to make his marriage better but that doesn't mean we can't ask broader questions about his situation like is his lack of presence at home because of a deep psychological failing on his part or because he spends most of his life doing work that he finds torturous is his wife mad because he just doesn't have communication skills or does his lack of ability in this area come from the fact that he's constantly worried about paying the bills because his work pays next to nothing see slobber should work on his life in marriage I hope he does but we don't need to confine our appraisal of his situation to that statement alone his well-being is inextricably linked to the society around him - the way that him and others like him are treated and as such if social problems exist then solving them will help slobber or I could say the obvious point that I've already alluded to that even accepting that everything Jordan Peterson says is true it's just not enough to change the way that facts work if I say a fact about the world we live in and you respond that I suck and my house isn't in order well you might be right about that but it doesn't challenge anything that I said and you know that's the main thing I'm gonna need to hear to be convinced that I'm wrong and look I think those arguments are all pretty compelling but here's the problem in the scope of Jordan Peterson's analysis they are rendered irrelevant because each of them in one way or another requires an engagement with what I'll call a termite coined right now in that you can't steal the sociological imagination our ability to situate ourselves not just as individuals but also as nodes in a complex society and culture if we're gonna talk about the importance of democracy or about slobber or about the way that facts work we first need to accept that that stuff is important to our lives that attending to it might give us something of value but the central thrust of Peterson's work is to obfuscate that possibility space and so in a very real way I'm left without a foot to stand on here what's more it's undeniable that Peterson's narrative is a deeply appealing one for one thing it just feels really good like okay it's painful to think that my problems are my own that the only thing standing in my way is my own failings but it's painful in the good way like hydrogen peroxide on a scrape to need when you're a 24 year old white straight guy who's incredibly online there's worse things to hear then you suck and you can make your life better by doing good things you want to solve difficult problems you figure out how to get along with your brother the one you've been fighting with for five years see if you can staple your family back together see if you can stop fighting with your girlfriend and have a relationship that lasts for more than two weeks it's certainly true in my case and so reducing all of society to that conclusion has a pleasant and intuitive logic to it but maybe more importantly Jordan Peterson here is giving us one of the most priceless things imaginable the gift of social apathy the capacity to think and say rational things but to not really care where that rationality might lead us obviously climate change is a substantial global threat that we should work to ameliorate obviously but if you're talking about it and you're not an expert you're probably using this pseudo moralistic stance to avoid other more personal problem an all-important observation - Jordan Peterson the client the global warming problem on the climate is something that needs to be tackled quickly and they can't wait until they grew up and become prime ministers to do it do you think collective responsibility overrides individual responsibility in a huge issue like that no okay I think generally people have things that are more within their personal purview that are more difficult to deal with and that they're avoiding and that generally the way they avoid them is by adopting pseudo moralistic stances on large scale social issues so that they look good did it friends and their neighbors or obviously the gays should be able to get married but not if the whiners are talking about it Australia is holding a plebiscite on whether to legalize gay marriage I'm against the yes campaign but only because it's backed by cultural Marxists I'm curious to hear your views on gay marriage well I would be against the two of was backed by cultural Marxists because it isn't clear to me that it will satisfy the ever-increasing what would you call demand for an assault on traditional modes of being now with regards to gay marriage specifically that's a really tough one for me because if the marital vows are taken seriously then it seems to me that it's a means whereby gay people could be integrated more thoroughly into standard society and that's probably a good thing they're trying to uproot the traditional social roles that help me in some abstract way and since post modernists won't be happy even if they get what they want and since I don't actually care about society treating gay people fairly and equitably screw the gays can get what they want that's fine but is it too much to ask that they want it for the reasons that I tell them to is it too much to ask that they stay in their [ __ ] lanes and finally returning to his two-hour lecture obviously Jordan Peterson doesn't have a real argument against the existence white privilege to have one of those he'd have to examine about a million credible sources and come to the rigorous conclusion that they're all wrong so instead of doing that he'll cede at some point that racism probably does exist it's like racism people are kind of racist or maybe people prefer their in-group it's not that easy or maybe people prefer the familiar to the novel but we all have privileges don't we and the impact of systemic racism isn't total is it and besides that whole concept comes from people who advocate for a communist dictator who hate the idea that individuals are important and complicated and should be treated with care prove that he's wrong on that one or don't it couldn't matter less Jordan Peterson doesn't have to prove that white privilege is a lie because it is an assumption baked into the fabric of his work if white privilege does exist if people's lives and identities are informed by grand systems that are sometimes very unjust then there is a world to care about that goes far beyond our own suffering and sadness and chaos and we can't or don't want to think that so it must all be a Marxist lie I'm not gonna pretend to be an authority on anything I'm not your boss I don't have an inroad to your soul and frankly I'm not trying to get one so instead of asking you to renounce the work of Jordan Peterson and embrace me instead I want to close this video by talking about one moments that I found really striking toward the middle of his lecture Jordan Peterson invokes a passage of George Orwell's the road to Wigan pier where he describes an impoverished woman working in the mining industry I had time to see everything about her her sack apron her clumsy clogs her arms reddened by the cold she looked up as the train passed and I was almost near enough to catch her eye she had a round pale face the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who's 25 and looks 40 thanks to miscarriages and Rhodri and at war for ii in which i saw it the most desolate hopeless expression i've ever seen it struck me then that we meaning the middle class at that time our mistake and when we say that it isn't the same for them as it would be for us and the people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums for what i saw on her face was by no means the ignorant suffering of an animal she knew well enough what was happening to her understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there and the bitter cold on the slimy stones of a slum backyard poking a stick up a followed drainpipe this passage is so beautiful and sad I think this woman is suffering at the hands of a system that just doesn't care about her and the most notable thing about her is that she understands that something's wrong here we like to think that people in the slums can only imagine the slums but this is not true she is aware perhaps innately aware that this her life is not okay and Jordan Peterson goes on to say the acceptable things for a moment how can we not want to help this woman how can we not have compassion you have to have a heart of stone if you if you don't if you read that you don't think man something should be done about this it's really awful but after that Peterson skips forward in the book and quotes George Orwell expressing his distaste for academic socialism how he thinks they hate the rich more than they love the poor it would be a mistake to regard the book train socialists as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited is perfectly capable of displaying hatred sort of queer theoretical in vacuo hatred against the exploiters hence the grand old socialist sport of denouncing the Bruges huazi and you can agree with Orwell about this or not I think his point is probably true to some extent but it's not too important here what is important to me about this moment is that this is the last we hear about this woman he introduces her suffering talk about how hard her life was and then he talks about how the people advocating for her life to be better or bad and shouldn't be trusted and then that's it no more talk of compassion or of redistribution now we've made our points about her and we can get on to the second half of the lecture where we talked about how activists are shitty and lying about racism somehow where we can recycle the same tired line about how we shouldn't give protesters too much credit and get the same facile laughs from the audience I'm against poverty you know that's like classic protest sign it's like really it's like I'm Against Torture it's like it's so obvious you don't get any brownie points for being against poverty no one in the right mind is for poverty because - Jordan Peterson relinquishes brownie points from some hypothetical activists protesting poverty will always always be more important than the poverty they protest no within the story of this lecture the woman's plot is left dangling in essence she's still standing there in that coal mining town in northern England and you can almost picture Jordan Peterson reading by a lamp that her work helped to fuel you can imagine him reading the words Dada diet vom da Matta give sympathise control and maybe Peterson is comforted by those words but I don't know if I can be any more so that's the video kind of a long and intense one there and I hope you liked it and if you did be sure to LIKE comment subscribe and you know give me money on patreon if you want to and on that note now's the time for the patreon question of the video Savannah Madeira is very impressed asks what's your favorite minor holiday like the ones you don't actually celebrate but still kind of passively exists like Earth Day so I'm gonna have to give a really bog-standard answer here say it's Groundhog Day obviously that's the best one right you know little groundhog waking up seeing snow going back at its little cave you know gonna be more winter says somebody I've never encountered okay that's it that's

Channel: Big Joel

Views: 746,663

Rating: 4.4789181 out of 5

Keywords: 12-22-19

Id: wZoHGAK3k-I

Length: 33min 37sec (2017 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Krellick]

Big Joel is a really great leftist YouTube channel by the way. I’d recommend him to anyone interested in some lighthearted video essays with leftist overtones about tv shows and movies

[u/Nikhilvoid]

Was just about to post this! Such a thoughtful take on liberal quietism and liberal dismissal of all possible activism as a product of "mentally unstable activists" whose activism is totally reducible to avoidance behavior.

Peterson is exactly that grumbling white "moderate" MLK warned against.

[u/dotardshitposter]

Wow you guys beat my youtube notifications for some reason.

[u/zappadattic]

Big Joel: 30+ minutes of well made critical points in a variety of topics

Me: I should read some more TS Eliot.

[u/JackTheSpaceBoy]

GUYS. This was posted on the Peterson sub.

The first comment makes a great point that this video is boring. The second comment makes a great point that the video is retarded. 100% serious.

[u/chilloutm8]

I’m a Peterson fan, however this video was really interesting and enlightening. There was one part I would like to ask for help in understanding if anyone could offer it, perhaps this is the best place to ask. When Big Joel mentions the “dogs live” idea, in essence, stating a fact that continues to be a fact regardless of whether someone says “you suck” or not. Would it be fair to say the “you suck” is more of a “refine your opinion/voice to the point where you are able to express it in a way that’s up to par to be contended with?” Not that your opinion or your way of addressing a fact in a productive way is invalid from the get go, rather better it to bring it out and use it?