Why Jordan Peterson is Wrong About Responsibility

i know i know another jordan peterson video i'm sure you know who he is the world's current best-selling intellectual dark web mega star self-help guru and i'm sure you've heard the criticisms lobsters feminism postmodern neo-marxism and yes we're already inundated with critiques especially here on youtube but today i want to look at something that i think has both been overlooked and is central to jordan peterson's and the wider self-help genres philosophy individual responsibility almost all of peterson's arguments revolve around this idea of individual or personal responsibility you could say it's the meta foundation at the core of his philosophy today i'm going to look at what individual responsibility really means how we can understand it philosophically and why it has its limits the argument i'll draw out is this that peterson emphasizes individual responsibility to an unreasonable degree while discounting the necessity and power of social or collective responsibility that each individual and social are two sides of the same coin but before we start i will say this 12 rules for life and beyond order are both great books i learned a lot there's a lot of insight many ideas to agree with and much to disagree with too i like the psychologization of the biblical stories there's a great chapter on telling the truth another one on assuming the person you're listening to might know something that you don't and i also think he often gets unfairly caricatured but he in his turn repeatedly strawman's and oversimplifies his opponent's arguments usually leftists and postmodernists in a way that i think frankly is irresponsible but taking a thorough look at the idea of individual responsibility helps us to understand why he almost has to do this because of what he's leaving out so first what does peterson mean by individual responsibility both 12 rules for life and beyond order and peterson's wider lectures have individual responsibility at their core the books are replete with phrases like you must take responsibility for your own life period each individual has ultimate responsibility to bear and we must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life society and the world and this lecture and others like it talk of the sovereign individual now first what follows isn't an attack on individual responsibility per se the concept is fundamentally important timeless powerful has been historically fought for and peterson has a lot of well articulated useful insights on how to take responsibility that people clearly want to hear but what i want to focus on is what's left out it's safe to say that peterson is a type of individualist he focuses a lot on the archetype of the hero's journey for example of personal sacrifice of focusing on oneself conversely he's skeptical to say the least of any collectivist or socialist ideologies and ideology or broadly as he says here the enemy of the idea of the individual the sovereign individual which is the central idea of the west i mean and that's manifested in the underlying religious structure what category is to be primary and for me the individuals to be primary and there's a variety of reasons for that first of all the individual is the locus of suffering and also the locus of responsibility so so those are really the two reasons this is illustrated more clearly in book one rule 6 set yourself in perfect order before you criticize the world he writes in it consider your circumstances start small have you taken full advantage of the opportunities offered to you are you working hard on your career or even your job or are you letting bitterness and resentment hold you back and drag you down have you made peace with your brother are you treating your spouse and your children with dignity and respect do you have habits that are destroying your health and well-being are you truly shouldering your responsibilities have you said what you need to say to your friends and family members are there things you could do that you know you could do that would make things better around you have you cleaned up your life to understand why this core foundation is one-sided we need to see what the other side of the coin is we need to ask a really simple question what does individual responsibility mean [Music] throughout history philosophers have interpreted responsibility in several ways the concept has been discussed most frequently in philosophical debates about free will first though let's take it apart response ability etymologically the root of responsibility is to be able to respond to some thing to react to a set of circumstances but it's often used as a value judgment too one person might judge whether another was able to respond in a positive helpful useful or moral way the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy puts it like this the judgment that a person is morally responsible for her behavior involves at least to a first approximation attributing certain powers and capacities to that person and viewing her behavior as a rising in the right way from the fact that the person has and has exercised these powers and capacities so we have several key concepts here judgment behavior power capacities let's look at an example shoplifting say we might judge that it's immoral behavior and the person had the capacity to know it was wrong and had the power not to do it consequently we might hold them morally responsible but what if we found out that the person had dementia we might say that they didn't have the capacity or the power to remember right from wrong or to remember where they were does this diminish their responsibility is this a mitigating circumstance it seems to me anyway that we judge them less morally responsible for the shoplifting than we would someone stealing jewellery for example because they wanted to be rich but if we find out the person has dementia we might say that they didn't have the capacity to know right from wrong and not find them morally responsible and this is if we were judging them ourselves or as a jury say and this is where free will comes in many like the existentialist jean-paul sarch for example have argued that to be responsible for something to be held accountable you would have to have the freedom to have done otherwise to have chosen more morally that is you have to be the cause of the action in action or belief not the dementia say so let's take another example a 16 year old who assault someone if we are on a jury our initial inclination might be to hold them responsible as the cause to blame them to hold them accountable but imagine certain facts are slowly revealed to us they came from a bad home a poor neighborhood the person had been bullying them or taunting them or even stealing from them what if we found out the person was being blackmailed we might still hold them responsible but maybe less so mitigating factors causes from outside the person might lead us to sympathize with them in some way let's take one more example the same child failing a maths test were they irresponsible did they cause the failure of course it depends on the context they might not have studied enough sure but they might have a teacher who has treated them unfairly they might not be able to afford the books they might have a home life that doesn't encourage homework they might have a learning difficulty now let's look at a quote from book 1 rule 3 where peterson tends to discount contextual factors in favor of individual ones he says people create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand faulty tools produce faulty results repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results it's in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it it's partly faked it's partly inability it's partly unwillingness to learn refusal to learn motivated refusal to learn this is the central question asked by many philosophers of free will and responsibility if we're a product of our context of our environment or our circumstances our upbringing and education or even our genes are we ever truly ultimately responsible for anything this position is called determinism and it attempts often to understand human behavior in a scientific way as the psychologist b.f skinner wrote if we're to use the methods of science in the field of human affairs we must assume that behavior is lawful and determined we must expect to discover that what a man does is the result of specifiable conditions and that once these conditions have been discovered we can anticipate and to some extent determine his actions skinner framed the problem of responsibility in the specifically modern and scientific context that science tells us that the entire universe is determined and that everything has a cause why should human behavior be any different he continues a small part of the universe is contained within the skin of each of us there is no reason why it should have any special physical status because it lies within this boundary and eventually we should have a complete account of it from anatomy to physiology if determinism is true if everything is caused then this poses a problem for the idea of individual responsibility because we're not really responsible for anything we do but surely the idea is meaningful in some way does this picture not leave something out the influential american philosopher roderick chisholm uses this example take a flood destroying a dam we might ask the following what caused the dam to give poor construction political corruption maybe cutting corners or was it constructed to the best of the builder's abilities but the rainfall was simply unprecedented in a way no one could have predicted maybe raw materials were supplied by accident maybe on purpose again to cut corners maybe someone sabotaged the dam maybe a river was redirected maybe it was global warming the question is where is the cause where does responsibility lie we can see here that causation and responsibility are identical to one another aristotle put it like this a staff moves a stone and is moved by a hand which is moved by a man do we hold the staff responsible for moving the stone or the hand maybe the muscles the neurons maybe the man maybe he was ordered to move the stone by a death spot maybe moving the stone was a byproduct of another intention like simply standing up the point is this when we look closely we often don't locate a single point of causation find a single ultimate factor that we hold responsible there are of course many factors all partly responsible all connected like a thread of causation like a sequence or a series of responsibility historians approach topics in this way like for example when they ask who was responsible for the holocaust was it a product of hitler's will his unique personality was it more structural a german soldier in the forest shoots a jew under orders he's been told they're the enemy they want to destroy germany it's war they'll only starve later etc do we intuitively hold the soldier less responsible than hitler do we look at the economic factors that caused the war the misinformation the history of anti-semitism many things contribute to a single moment as the philosopher robert kane puts it to retain individual freedom in a world where we're so clearly determined we'd have to somehow be the original creators of our own wills when we can trace most of our behavior backwards to things that have happened to us in the past to media exposure to upbringing education conditioning of some kind but some factors do seem to be more internal than others if a man has every motivation you could think of the education the intelligence the job market but still refuses to get off the sofa to find a job out of laziness then that seems to be an internal cause that he is the one responsible for that lack of action this is the big question the central question how do we draw that line between internal and external causes before we return to peterson let's visualize that line there are interior causes where we intuitively want to hold someone responsible and external ones where responsibility seems to lie elsewhere but oddly this line isn't just inside and outside the person the body genes might lie outside the line because it's not in the person's power to change them if someone is born with a condition that limits their mobility say we don't hold them responsible for what they cannot do but if lazy billy has had a good upbringing is smart healthy able-bodied and there are plenty of jobs available the responsibility we attribute to him and the moral praise or blame that accompanies it moves within the circle if there were no jobs in the area or billy's mother was unwell and he had to look after her we might move this factor outside we might want to blame him less hold him less morally responsible let's take one more historical example when we asked what caused world war one what was responsible the superficial reason we teach to children is that govrillo princip assassinated the heir to the throne of the austro-hungarian empire but there were many other factors colonial expansion treaties between countries nationalism colonialism to say princip was individually responsible for world war one would be ridiculous let's return to jordan peterson okay so remember peter and central argument is about taking responsibility personally and it's a theme of the self-help genre more broadly set your house in perfect order he writes before you criticize the world and note the perfect tip it's a very absolute choice of word but again before we go on taking responsibility for your house for what you can do is perfectly good advice try your hardest and the strategies to do so don't be resentful set your sights on specific goals there's some great advice in these books that can strengthen the internal circle but the question is what's outside the circle what do we do when there are factors outside of ours and other people's control is it not perfectly possible that the organization of social life of the state of our economic systems of our genetic inheritance of our educational systems have effects on individuals that are shall we say less than satisfactory that at least could be improved on the extent to which peterson idealizes internal factors is illustrated most clearly in book one rule three make friends with people who want the best for you in this rule he wants to think twice before helping someone in need for two main reasons that you might be helping for the sake of your own ego and that the person actually doesn't want help he writes are you so sure the person crying out to be saved has not decided a thousand times to accept his lot of pointless and worsening suffering he advises not to assume the person is a noble victim of unjust circumstances and exploitation and that there is no personal responsibility on the part of the victim in one passage he asks how do you know that your attempts to pull someone up won't instead bring them or you further down he imagines a team of hard-working brilliant creative and unified workers who are joined by someone troubled who is performing poorly elsewhere he says does the errant interloper immediately straighten up and fly right no instead the entire team degenerates the newcomer remains cynical arrogant and neurotic he complains he shirks he misses important meetings his low quality work causes delays and must be redone by others not only this he assuredly declares that the psychological literature is clear on this point when the single study he's referenced could be interpreted in many ways training someone for example will always slow you down helping someone is always difficult but there are obvious reasons we do it clear justifications for helping someone who might be difficult it's an odd reference for a clinical psychologist to make the main problem i have with this is the frankly arrogant and unequivocal choice of language the psychological literature is clear on this point he says yet when you look at the source he's referenced one study from the 90s it says this may be because in such teams members who are highly conscientious not only must perform their own tasks but also must perform or redo the tasks of low conscientious members and the message it supports that runs through the entire chapter is worrying it's essentially a skepticism at helping people but of course imagine if everyone acted in this way if no one helped anyone he says in book 1 rule 6 don't blame capitalism the radical left or the iniquity of your enemies don't reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience have some humility if you cannot bring peace to your household how dare you try to rule a city through peterson's lens people become atomized so that responsibility and moral action can only come from within his account of the self makes people individually accountable and unrealistically self-reliant so that help must come from within without any reference to factors that might be too big for a person to overcome themselves and many have already pointed to how this message falls flat in the context of a long list of historical struggles have you thought about looking at your own life mandela are you sure the british are the problem gandhi maybe start by cleaning your room yes dr king you might want voting rights but you are a serial adulterer so yes mr patient you might want this a hundred thousand dollar life-saving cancer drug but have you thought about working harder to pay for it first you really can't afford it and yes the nazis are coming but there are plenty of places to hide if you have made the effort to think it through but you are lazy after all again i'm not trying to belittle individual responsibility you could point to any number of examples where it is applicable i'm only trying to show where it's not where it seems to leave something bigger out the question is not just how do we hold individuals responsible for changing themselves but how do we arrange social cultural and economic life in such a way so that individuals are most likely to be able to change themselves as peterson himself says perhaps the game you are playing is somehow rigged but then he can't avoid the temptation to add perhaps by you unbeknownst to yourself so what do we do when we're faced with problems outside that circle when the game is rigged when there are no jobs when the nazis are closing in when we're denied our basic human rights what do we do when something else really is responsible well we look to something bigger some things in a broad sense are clearly what we might call social cultural or collective in some way language for example etiquette fashion the news cycle our political systems the list goes on these phenomena seem to transcend the individual when we think about responsibility within them they make up what philosopher emmanuel vargas has phrased the social scaffolding of moral responsibility or the moral architecture that is the values and the norms the cultural and social landscape that changes across cultures and throughout history the external factors that encourage or discourage certain speech certain behaviors take etiquette for example we might hold someone morally responsible for being rude for saying racist or sexist things forgiving a nazi salute for constantly interrupting in a conversation but the person has to know that the statement or action is considered wrong they have to understand the social scaffolding of moral responsibility if they come from another country for example we might say that they were unaware as peterson himself says what we deem to be valuable and worthy of attention becomes part of the social contract part of the rewards and punishments metadata respectively for compliance and non-compliance part of what continually indicates and reminds here is what is valued look at that perceive that and not something else pursue that act towards that end and not some other in other words the external factors that motivate us to speak or act in specific ways are culturally and socially situated and determined and we can be aware or unaware of them and how they affect us and others sometimes though it's the social and cultural scaffolding itself that some might consider wrong unethical and in need of changing someone in germany might not have wanted to give the nazi salute even though it was considered the responsible thing to do a slave might not want to use the phrase yes master a woman in afghanistan might want to vote some of these things are clearly social the acceptability of them the motivational power of the tyranny of the majority say as mill put it the external pressures are all larger than any one individual language is a great and simple example here we're of course partly responsible for what we say but the tools the structure the language itself the grammar it's a broader social phenomenon culture is another great example roads and infrastructure moral norms etiquette and political systems are others the central point if we turn to our internal external circle is this some of the factors that contribute towards how people act are external they're larger than any one person and any one person can't affect their change they can also be changed history demonstrates it the question then is how take the campaign for women's suffrage it was an external factor that women couldn't vote and so had impediments to living their lives in specific ways the social scaffolding of moral responsibility expected women to act in specific ways dress in a certain way look after the home not work not get an education not drive not vote to say a woman was responsible for not being able to advance her career in this context is like saying cavrillo princip was responsible for world war one there are larger structural factors and of course when we look to history those factors those values have always been contested morality is socially and culturally constituted and because those factors are often so socially entrenched there's only one way to overcome them or to change them collectively socially through networking campaign building and coalition building through critique through dare i say it ideology instead of acknowledging this peterson writes it's impossible to fight patriarchy reduce oppression promote equality transform capitalism save the environment eliminate competitiveness reduce government or to run every organization like a business such concepts are simply too low resolution but for collective action like the civil rights movement or even building a community bridge say low resolution at first at least is necessary it enables us to come together to form alliances to delineate the outlines of the problem to find a broad agreement that unites a group pursuing a particular goal despite their disagreements not every suffragette agreed on the course of action not everyone in the community agrees where the bridge should be or what it should be made out of not everyone agrees on social values on national history but the low resolution goal in many great social justice movements was clear to take a large external impediment bigger than any single person and to unite into a majority powerful enough to address it in book 2 rule 4 peterson recommends that we notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated great rule he advises us to organize what you can see is dangerously disorganized and he writes what is the antidote to the suffering and malevolence of life the highest possible goal what is the prerequisite to pursuit of the highest possible goal willingness to adopt the maximum degree of responsibility and this includes the responsibilities that others disregard or neglect you might object why should i shoulder all that burden it's nothing but sacrifice hardship and trouble does this not contradict his advice to think twice before helping others does it not include the highest possible social goals does it require forming groups to tackle the dangers and the problems that are too large for any single one of us the reason peterson dislikes identity politics post-modernism feminism marxism and other rhythms he often says is that it reduces individuals to their group identities you become defined by your class gender race your social position as he says here here's the post-modern world it's the hobbesian nightmare it's everyone against everyone else except it's not individuals it's groups and you're stuck in your damn group and it's the only thing about you anyways that's relevant which is why we might base our hiring on it for example and you're oppressed and even if you don't know it it's only because you've internalized it and it's the only thing that's real about you anyways and i can't talk to you because i'm in my own little silo of privileged belief and besides we can't use logic because that doesn't exist and so you're in a group and i'm in a group and all we can do is have a war but this is a perfect example of a straw man it's cheap and easy to betray a position as ridiculous if you uncharitably twist and simplify it i don't know anyone that makes an argument like this when there are never any citations when claims like this are made what postmodern academics like judith butler or michelle fuco for example have argued is that to a variable extent people are the product of their cultural social and economic contexts that they're born into and that in many cases this contributes towards their identities and constrains their possibilities i mean take the history of black feminism in the u.s from this critically acclaimed history it describes how poverty has been integral to the experience of black women even more so than black men since slavery because of overlapping pressures for example black men not earning a living wage and having shorter lives than white men which has left black women widowed with no support a lack of education through deliberate underfunding of black schools particularly in the south cultural norms around black women working in agriculture and domestic service and endemic reluctance to provide aid to black women not to mention political exclusion literacy tests at the ballot box and more obvious racial discrimination is it not reasonable to suggest that this had an overwhelming effect on the extent to which black american women could shoulder the type of responsibility jordan peterson is advocating for does emphasizing individual responsibility over identity in this way not encourage a culture of victim blaming looking to history for evidence does it not require something more social and collective to address such endemic injustice this leads us to next time book two rule six is renounce ideology in part two of this two-part series i want to look at what ideology is and why we need it to pursue those things that transcend the individual that make it easier to communicate within groups we'll see how peterson's critique of ideology is limited by his partial one-sided analysis of responsibility and how a closer look at both draws out even more contradictions in peterson's worldview for now i'll leave you with the words of the man himself align yourself in your soul with truth and the highest good there is habitable order to establish and beauty to bring into existence there is evil to overcome suffering to ameliorate and yourself to better make sure you tune in next week for the second part in this series uh it will be just two parts um but they do fit together they come as a pair you won't have to have watched this one but i guess you're here so you have now and i hope together they make up a cohesive argument against jordan peterson's philosophy and i've tried to make this as fair-handed as possible to encourage just some critical thinking and some skepticism and to consider the other side of the argument if you're a fan of jordan peterson so please do let me know what you think in the comments where i've been uncharitable maybe or where you disagree what i've missed out of course this video wouldn't be possible without all these wonderful patreon supporters thank you so much if you'd like to support then and now you can do so on patreon for as little as a dollar through the link in the description below if you can't afford that just leave a comment press like or just watch the videos to the end even if you leave them running while doing the ironing i don't know it helps the algorithm most of all thanks for watching i'll see you next time

Channel: Then & Now

Views: 117,825

Keywords: jordan, peterson, jordan peterson, responsibility, individual, philosophy

Id: JGtGoKrSIHM

Length: 37min 0sec (2220 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 14 2021