To ask what your opinion is of Jordan Peterson?

[ethelfleda]

I’ve heard his name a few times now, mainly people saying he is dangerous but that friends of theirs have started raving about him.
I only know what I have read within a guardian article (which I know is a biased source) but he does seem dangerous.
I thought I would ask the MN collective their opinion...

I was disappointed that Cathy Newman didn’t give him harsher treatment when she interviewed him for Channel 4 News

Maybe next time Cathy will prepare properly for her interviews, rather than doing very little research and instead making assumptions about peoples beliefs. Utterly dreadful interview on her part. I was embarrassed for her.

My college roommate, an insightful cynic, expressed skepticism regarding my ideological beliefs. He told me that the world could not be completely encapsulated within the boundaries of socialist philosophy. I had more or less come to this conclusion on my own, but had not admitted so much in words. Soon afterward, however, I read George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier. This book finally undermined me—not only my socialist ideology, but my faith in ideological stances themselves. In the famous essay concluding that book (written for—and much to the dismay of—the British Left Book Club) Orwell described the great flaw of socialism, and the reason for its frequent failure to attract and maintain democratic power (at least in Britain). Orwell said, essentially, that socialists did not really like the poor. They merely hated the rich. His idea struck home instantly. Socialist ideology served to mask resentment and hatred, bred by failure. Many of the party activists I had encountered were using the ideals of social justice to rationalize their pursuit of personal revenge.

And here is George Orwell, in The Road To Wigan Pier, which Peterson says convinced him that socialism was folly because socialists were resentful:

Please notice that I am arguing for Socialism, not against it. […] The job of the thinking person, therefore, is not to reject Socialism but to make up his mind to humanize it…For the moment, the only possible course of any decent person, however much of a Tory or an anarchist by temperament, is to work for the establishment of Socialism. Nothing else can save us from the misery of the present or the nightmare of the future […] Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed it has not established itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all co-operate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions, seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that nobody could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system. […] To recoil from Socialism because so many socialists are inferior people is as absurd as refusing to travel by train because you dislike the ticket-collector’s face.

Can anybody elain why an 'articulate intellectual' who claims Orwell as one of hi main influences can go for years claiming Orwell was against socialism? how is he allowed to get away with something so wrong?

Why is he listened to on Marxism when he admitted he hadnt read any?

He's an interesting guy, I find a lot of his ideas fascinating but there are three things that bother the hell out of me about him.

He doesn't have even a rudimentary understanding of second wave feminism; he consistently misrepresents postmodernism; and he's a Jungian.

It's the latter that I think causes all the problems. To me, Jung and his archetypes are the epitome of an individual taking his male perspectives upon the psyche and stamping them as universal and eternal - - a bit like a cardiologist that assumes all presentations of a heart attack must follow the male symptom experience.

There's no consideration that the tropes within a female's consciousness might be radically different, that our psychological space may map in a way that jars with the male space. If so, then one has to ask how much use male navigation tools will be?

When I read or listen to Peterson, it hits me time and again that he sees through male eyes, reads the world through those lenses and assumes this way is eternal. And this feels right to him because of Jung, who also did the same. And I'm struck constantly when he talks that, as a middle aged woman, these aren't my references, these aren't my rules.

So, of course, he goes down well with young males because he explains their experiences through tropes that map onto their experiences. But for females, well, it all doesn't really work because the figure of "the mother", say, tends to mean a drastically different thing to a female than it does a male.

Patroclus, you said he had only read 1984, yet he says Road to Wigan Pier was one of the 15 books that have most influenced him.

I agree absolutely with packing that his limitations in considering the world through a female lens is his greatest weakness.

I still find him immensely insightful.

Patroclus, you said he had only read 1984, yet he says Road to Wigan Pier was one of the 15 books that have most influenced him

If you read the link posted by Patroclus. you'll see that Mr Petersen can't read.

Peterson.

I’ve read it before.

He doesn’t say that George Orwell was right wing.

I think how he phrases things can be a bit dangerous. Some of his opinions, on the face of them, appeal to a certain group of people who don't seem to have the wherewithal to understand what he's really saying. He's entitled to his opinions, but I don't think he thinks about how they can come across.

I like to really have a good look into someone before I make my mind up on them, but in this case I have to admit that all I know of him is that my husband loves him, to the point that he travelled to Edinburgh to see one of his talks last year, watches endless videos of him on youtube (even on Christmas day ffs) and has his book. The fact that the other people my husband follows obsessively are Farage, Rees-Mogg, Trump, etc, makes me think maybe my impression of him being a jumped-up twerp might be right. He strikes me as being someone who wants to sound clever and sciencey but isn''t really saying anything new. He gets more attention than I do in my house, so maybe that's all you need to know....

He's not pithy.

Goes all round the houses to give life advice similar to my nan's. So actually quite sound but not always practical to modern life.

Pro religion but a bit of a doubting Thomas(I think) who likes tortuous debates with modern atheists.

Very well put by previous poster about his lack of interesting things to say to women.

(And my room is still a mess. Marie Kondo provides more hope for me!)

There is a group of people who are on YouTube in various combinations discussing politics, culture and philosophy. Peterson is one of them.

I listen to them a lot, as does my daughter. We are both left wing.

They seem to get a lot of criticism from the left, and I’d be interested if that branch on the left had a group of people who were debating in the same way, but I haven’t come across them.

"previous posters" I should have typed.

I like him. I’m very familiar with his work. He’s clever. Has some good ideas. Very media savvy. Some of his writing I don’t agree with. I’m a feminist and he can come across as a misogamist but this may be the way he plays the media. I have 12 Rules for Life as an audiobook and I’ve listened through twice. Which says a lot because it’s him reading it.

My wife and my sister both found Peterson extremely useful and insightful, attended his talk in London.

I think a lot of the time people deciding that someone doesn't represent a 'female' perspective don't realise the haughtiness and perhaps ignorance in assuming they speak for all women, or even for the best interests of all women.

What he’s really good at is putting rigour and evidence/illustration behind tenets that the right wing have always believed implicitly to be true.

Which is at least partly why the left hates him.

He is much more nuanced than our dumb it down media can deal with. That does become a problem with the incel types latching on to things they only half understand. Is that Peterson’s fault though?

He seems to have read very little an not to have understood what he has read — he’s an uneducated person’s idea of an intellectual. Plus the entrenched misogyny that makes his thinking so lopsided, and delights the rabid incel fanboys.

Specifically when it came to talking about archetypes I found the female side a bit underwhelming. But I am guesing that goes with the Jungian foots as mentioned?

I do think he has shown bravery at his University. (A bit like Joan of Arc, an unlikely heroine 😉whose opponents think is mad or a charlatan but in their own mind they are on a mission!)

Scatterlit, which intellectuals would you recommend?

And as ive just pointed out, he clearly hasnt read Road to Wigan Pier.

And as ive just pointed out, he clearly hasnt read Road to Wigan Pier.

And ... ?

This thread has been really useful - thank you!
It’s nice to see that MN still have an intellectual force I’ve learned a lot from here over the years.

How is Marxism possibly connected to the idea of white priviledge, as he states??

How can he say this when he hasnt (self confessed) read any Marx

Why does he claim Orwell would have been against anti fascism when Orwell actually joined the international brigades?

Why is he againt anti fascism?

Why does he think soviet communism and post modernism are linked?

Why did he say about Alex Minassian (a murderer of 5) ''“He was angry at God because women were rejecting him. The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”''
&
“Violent attacks are what happens when men do not have partners''

''chaos is represented by the feminine’'

''“The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence,”

Why do people who see through half his bullshit go on to proclaim 'thats what makes him interesting!' rather than seeing through this obvious BS artist?

Why do people see another angry little man ranting about PC and liberals as an intellectual because he throws words he doesnt understand around?

Why has this grifter appeared at the front of Solzhenitsyn books and excused his anti-semitism?

And why is he still arguing against 1930s russia when the modern russia which alligns to his ideals is the present monster?

Stop being impressed by the verbose tirades that are meant to belittle your intelligence and look at what he is trying to sneak through. Its the right who are ruining the world right now and hes their 'godsend'.

Maybe try reading the thread, Laurie, or just reading in general.