Tate vs Peterson. The Main Event. Part 1

Part 1: Jordan B Peterson

“Look in my eyes
What do you see?
The cult of personality

I know your anger, I know your dreams
I've been everything you want to be
Oh, I'm the cult of personality

Like Mussolini and Kennedy
I'm the cult of personality
The cult of personality
The cult of personality

Neon lights, a Nobel prize
When a mirror speaks, the reflection lies
You won't have to follow me
Only you can set me free

I sell the things you need to be
I'm the smiling face on your TV
Oh, I'm the cult of personality

I exploit you, still you love me
I tell you, one and one makes three
Oh, I'm the cult of personality

Like Joseph Stalin and Gandhi
I'm the cult of personality
The cult of personality
The cult of personality

Neon lights, a Nobel prize
When a leader speaks, that leader dies
You won't have to follow me
Only you can set you free

You gave me fortune, you gave me fame
You gave me power in your god's name
I'm every person you need to be
Oh, I'm the cult of personality

I am the cult of, I am the cult of
I am the cult of, I am the cult of
I am the cult of, I am the cult of
I am the cult of, I am the cult of personality”

Living Colour. From the album “Vivid”. 1988

Tate Vs Peterson.

Ladies and Gentlemen let’s…… get……. ready…… to…… rumble! But before Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate square off against one another, first we need define the stakes at play and why I have contrived to pit these two contenders against one another in the first place.

In the film Conan the Barbarian, the main antagonist Thulsa Doom beckons one of his cultists to jump off a cliff. This is what she does under the spell of Dooms charisma and whatever dark art enlivens it. The lesson for Conan is on the nature of power, not over steel to conquer flesh but minds to command minds towards flesh itself as a unit of power, i.e. biopolitics ancient Sumerian style.  We should observe Conan’s dull faced perplexity to the lesson as an intellectual datum, the gears in his own mind ticking over to process a political idea. But he is not shocked at the moral horror of the scene. He fails to grieve for an instant a young life lost. The audience is so taken by Dooms evil that they fail to see nor judge Conan’s own psychopathy. The possibility of a fight without a hero is just one of the less obvious frames I wish to cast before our pugilists enter in the ring. The liberally minded viewer of Conan probably makes unconscious excuses for turning a barbarian thief into a hero. His parents were murdered. He was sold into slavery. He was a victim of “toxic masculinity”, though this term did not exist in 1982 when the film was released (how fast the times change). They understand Conan as the adult product of a traumatised childhood. In another age he might have been referred to a child psychologist and scripted an SSRI, becoming a little less barbaric and much less real. Might Doom himself have been the product of a traumatised childhood? Why any hero?    

Nevertheless, let’s take Thulsa Doom’s lesson as a given. What is at stake is not “the riddle of steel” as ancient man contemplates the spiritual connectedness between Earth, technology (steel) and power. It is which mega influencer can take the title of heavyweight “right wing” mind virus infecting boys who would seek to become men, man boys who would like to finally grow up and incels everywhere who would like to get some. This is a battle for young men’s minds, and by extension the women who might love them.

I have deliberately chosen these two as they are by far and away the leading contenders in the space. Both deliberately market themselves as influencers to the young (and older) male demographic as to how a man should live. Others such as Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Robert F Kennedy Jr, Russell Brand and Ben Shapiro fail to qualify for obvious reasons. The first (Musk) is a government subsidised entrepreneur whose influence is incidental to tremendous capital. The second (Rogan) is a libertarian liberal whose primary function is to give voice to others rather than be a voice of his own ideology. The third (Kennedy) is a boomer left of centre liberal so far removed from the conservative or libertarian right that he openly supports the notion of a green totalitarianism. Moreover, RFK Jr recently was on record considering infanticide of full term abortion an article of women’s rights, this before a half arsed walk back after receiving flak from his Catholic base (and anyone else with a moral compass). Such an insincere walk back was to be expected. RFK Jr is, after all, an aspiring politician. Second to last (Brand) markets himself more to women with a thing for attractive counter culturists. Beyond that, Brand is on a journey I know not where. The last (Shapiro) is an asset and neo con agent of Zionist propaganda whose stance against pronouns is obviously a gateway drug to get the goyim on side in the forever wars to empower his people and his war corp friends. Enter the Daily Wire. Enter Peterson. Enter Walsh. Enter Owens (for a time) and many others. Enough shaking the air with prologue. Let’s compare our pugilists with the question who will win and who ought to win.

Jordan Peterson

Age before youth we first have Prof Jordan Bernt Peterson. JP’s height is 5’11” and he weighs in at a very muscular 5.2 million twitter follows (we measure biopolitical metrics by non-biological criteria). Insomuch as some formulate masculinity of influencers to include physiognomy and physicality, JP is physically unremarkable even for age and would not be able fight his way out of paper bag. IQ is likely somewhere north of 2 standard deviations (though I can only speculate). JP is on record as not doing do well in the statistical components of his undergrad psych studies. Math not being his strong suit, in my humble opinion JP seems unable to deeply interpret the humanities theorists he is fond of (secondary) reading. He obviously has strengths in delaying gratification, systematizing knowledge and a very strong “verbal IQ”. But even here, like many a fox like fighter, his victories lay in who he chooses to fight (rabbits and weaker foxes) and who he doesn’t (lions and wolves). He dodged the debate with Marxist economist Prof Richard Wolff, I’ll wager because he knew Wolff would go for the jugular and easily find it. Peterson accepted the debate with allegedly Marxist Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek for the opposite reason. Peterson has influencer street smarts and so does Zizek. The latter is far brighter and could have gone for the jugular a dozen times. Again and again through their debate I wondered why Zizek failed to capitalise on opportunity. But Zizek didn’t. And Peterson knew he wouldn’t because they are both performance artists. Both intuited that going easy would be good for business.    

Born 1962, JP is old enough to be a late boomer and young enough to reach the older X gen and beyond to the real youth. Everyone is familiar with his former academic positions in psychology at Harvard and Uni of Toronto, the latter of which was where he catapulted to fame voicing on campus opposition to gender diverse pronouns as forced (vs free) speech and Canadas infamous “bill C-16”. The timeline has him going public against political correctness 2016. From this debut and that of other influencers I have characterised a strange social phenomenon amongst the fandom of small “l” liberal and even smaller “c” conservatives. If a personality says a few spicy things about “woke”, rainbow pronouns and the eternal boogeymen of cold war culture (i.e. communism, Marxism and Russia and her allies), the influencer will have a fanboy for life. Makes no difference what skeletons emerge from the celebrity closet. Makes no difference how incoherent their arguments. Makes no difference the incoherence of the dissident fanboy themselves in both criticising the establishment and then appealing to the celebrity’s establishment academic bone fides (JP is a professor and worked at Harvard don’t you know!). Makes no difference how unstable the celebrities’ personality and how compromised his/her connections. In each and every case, the fan boy/girl once wedded to the influencer becomes an attack dog troll for their guru, playing defence for what I call the gurus “platform entitlement syndrome”. Likewise, the fanboy will defend their God given right to pay $200 for a seat and more for an autograph as some kind of virtue akin to a pilgrimage to Mecca. None are more suspectable to fanboy-itis than the bewitched boomer or older gen X. And no amount of evidence or reason will budge them from being the feminine lunar reflecting the masculine solar in the celebrity, even if the celebrity convinces the fanboy to have discovered the masculine in themselves. Such is the case with RFK Jr. Such is the case with faux conservative politicians from John Howard to Boris Johnson to Trump. Such is the case with atheist centrist liberals like James Lindsay seducing Christian conservatives with endless mantras against the demon Marx. And such is the case with the arch cult of personality of our current age, Jordan B Peterson.

A comprehensive biography and review of bibliography is beyond the scope or purpose of this article. I will not cite sources. This is substack, not a doctoral thesis. Other Peterson critics have screen shots of timestamped tweets I will link to just a video from 2019. I followed JP keenly from his first emergence in 2016, critically devouring his content and only becoming deeply suspicious 2018. From then to now my attempts to deprogram Jordan cultists have been almost universally futile. With or without direct in context quotes, people will see what they want to see. For fence sitters, I offer just a few cautionary points to ponder.

A tyrant in all of us?

Peterson has been very keen to preach a message that those who think they can lead (or should lead) often have the blind spot into their own vulnerability to become the tyrant. In other words, they are agnostic to the little Stalin residing in all of us. JP’s trick here is to take the obvious fact of our imperfection and marry it to some supposedly deep knowledge of the human condition, doing a Slavoj Zizek like move between theory (where Zizek chooses Lacan, JP chooses Jung) and popular culture (e.g. the Lion King or Cinderella). Having made that move, the audience assumes a sage so adept at grand synthesis and so aware of the vulnerability in all of us must have come to conquer the small (or large) Stalin in himself. This psychological trick brought on his audience lacks evidence that Peterson has indeed attained insight into his own moral frailties. But has he? Meanwhile, Peterson the one who warns against others ambitions for power has managed to attempt become the figurehead of an anti WEF group called ARC, making him a rival to Klaus Schwab himself and his successor in waiting Anthony Blair. I wrote of some of ARCs tentacled connections in other articles (see link here).

And Peterson the brand is is elsewhere everywhere. From Ralston College to Acton School of Business to Uni of Austin Texas (which he promoted before starting the Peterson Academy), Peterson is the man who places himself everywhere. When asked if he is a prophet, Peterson seemed not to possess the humility to throw off the question with revulsion. Whilst JP convinces you to doubt your moral capacity to lead, you find yourself automatically thinking he is up for the job.

JP the Theologist? JP the Crypto Christian?

Fanboys were mighty miffed when Cambridge had the temerity refuse Jordie’s application for a fellowship to their School of Divinity. Now I’ll grant the reason for refusal was pathetic. Cambridge claimed JP’s stance against pronouns wasn’t inclusive enough to pass the schools character test. Now we might say this tells us more about Cambridge than it does about JP and his fanboys, a terrible fall from grace for an ultra-elite university founded in 1209. We might also ask why Jordan Peterson went after a seat at Cambridge knowing full well Oxbrige and the Ivy league had taken a woke turn? He kept his own gig at Toronto because he was safe and tenured. But the play for a Cambridge chair looks to me like a status grab to further his brand rather than a principled thirst for knowledge. Further, I have to ask why a psychology professor with an amateur interest in the book of genesis would feel equipped and entitled to attend Cambridge school of divinity as research fellow? All the rabbi buddies in the world does not make Jordan Peterson a rabbi. And for all his circling around Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy via his friend Jonathan Pageau, Peterson himself isn’t even a nominal Christian! His view of Christianity is via a mixed bag of scratched lens including American pragmatism, social Darwinism, psycho-babble and the neo pagan cult of Carl Jung. I’ll wager no Peterson cultist will be able recall the slippery tongued one giving a straight answer on anything creedal. Some of his ardent followers read my substack. Try it? What can you recall him saying? You can’t because he hasn’t. In a 2017 interview with journalist Timothy Lott, he squirmed around the question before responding “lets leave it as yes” to the question of his Christianity. But he was unable (or unwilling) give any account what this means to him. Even the atheist fanatic Richard Dawkins could not criticise the content of Petersons theology. It has no substance to grasp and interrogate. In “12 Rules for Life” Peterson stands at a distance describing “the Christian tradition”, a logos bringing order to pre-existent chaos “at the beginning of time”. This being an extension of a discussion on other ancient myths, we have the usual potpourri placing Christ amongst a mix from Isis to Jung to Nietzsche to the hemispheres of the brain. I understand Petersons surface synthesis. But it is as if game is being played how many intellectual talking points can be compressed into a page or chapter. With a view to what? To synthetize deep authentic meaning? Or instil in the reader a perception that Peterson the sage sees the map you cannot? Earlier in the same text he likens the image of Christ with Mary as reflecting “male/female dual unity” of a Christ who himself is androgyne, part of the perennial representations including the star of David and its upwards (male) and downwards (female) pointing stars. Almost everywhere the qualifier “archetypal”. and more than this the obsession with “order” vs chaos. Order. Order. Order. Peterson is desperate to create order in himself, for himself. He is desperate that you see order in him.

Need we state the obvious. Christ is not Christ because he’s good for serotonin. Christ is not a Jungian archetype. Christ is not even an archetype of Christ. Christ is not the Lion King. Christ is not an archetype of a king. Christ is Christ, prior to and transcendent of man and his archetypal imaginings. He is not the metaphor of a king but rather kings are a metaphor of him. It is the case that every knee shall bow and every tongue confess Christ is Lord and King. Including Jung. Including Peterson. Including You. Including me. Nor is Christianity a stand in for political projects sloganeering “Judeo-Christian values”, “western civilization”, or the “enlightenment” into a “classical liberal” and neo liberal world in which Peterson would like to live. The enlightenment coincided with many goods. The enlightenment also brought us the French revolution, nuns raped over the alter and mounds of soil carried into Notre Dame to replace the religion of old with nature worship far older. The same enlightenment that brought us Isaac Newton brought us the perverse technocratic calculus of utilitarianism and Bentham’s mummified corpse. Beware an historical period named after fallen man providing the illumination towards man. Beware celebrity liberal influencers making a run on investing in conversions to capture the market of the Christian right. Russell Brand has been baptised. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has found a Christian God. Petersons wife has found God, this good for his own brand. Candice Owens has found God. Is this a genuine revival or tapping into a market?

Petersons latest lucrative tour is titled “We Who Wrestle with God” A curious title, the surface interpretation for fanboys is obviously one of struggling with sin. Jordie wants to help us here. But this is wishful thinking on the part of the fanboy, this betrayed by the title itself. Who wrestles with God? Ours is not to wrestle with God, but to submit and know he had won the match before we were born. The devil also wrestle, the devil within. Who is the “we” who wrestle?

Jordan Peterson and Women.

All this brings us to the next pojnt. Like any liberal, JP is completely on board with the ideology of first wave feminism and equal rights in the main. He takes a harder line on the interchangeability of the sexes so far as proclivities towards, and aptitude within, various professions. That is to say, more women than men will always tend towards nursing and early childhood education. Likewise, more men than women will gravitate towards engineering and the military than teaching toddlers. Its biological. It’s also morally ok. No militant social engineering is required to fit round pegs in square holes and vice versa. So make peace with it. I once invigilated an exam hall. On one half of the auditorium a nursing cohort. A couple hundred predominantly white overwhelmingly female students. On the other side a computer science exam. Predominantly Indian overwhelmingly male students. They were studying what fulfilled them. No patriarchy forced them into their choices.

So far so good. But speaking of religion, JP’s formulation of womankind, whilst offensive only to the most radical feminist, is violent on the metaphysical level. How? Within Petersons quasi-religious ontology, in books and on stage, the same motif. He sees our world as having arisen first out of a primitive formless “feminine” “chaos” later becoming ordered into “masculine” reason and differentiation. All this is completely at odds with Peterson the spokesperson for a Christian west. Paganism often contains elements of the primordial divine feminine, a pregnant but stupid Goddess. The pre Christian Greeks turned the divine feminine into superhero sociopaths. The Kabballah of some of Peterson’s Jewish friends imagines a mystical no-thing giving rise to a hermaphroditic Baphomet like first creation from which further sexual differentiation proceeds. But only Christianity formulates the metaphysics of a masculine God the father with the co-eternal and consubstantial Logos of Christ. A father without a mother. A King of Kings without a queen of queens. The Theotokos or Mary object, though feminine and holy, is a created being. But the unrepentant chauvinism of Christianity rescues itself from Petersons more violent misogyny by making the feminine a creation only from perfect good. Good made from good is good all the way down. And so Christian femininity is only good, beautiful, and true. Now I’m sure Peterson can attempt to rescue his own reputation from his words and recast the chaotic as a good of a kind. Still, the psychologist does not easily escape the analyst. Just the other day JP tweeted out about some article or another

“a brilliant analysts (sic) of the psychopathic feminine – pattern reputation savagers of the resentful left”

Here and elsewhere the attitude leaks out railing not just against societo-cidal feminism (the ism) but the feminine per se as emotional, destructive, primitive, psychologically dangerous and savage. She selects her mate to bring order to her.

Peterson the Zionista.

Casting aside of what side you take re the events of Oct 7^th 2023 when Hamas went over the impenetrable wall, we can try perform as value free analysis as possible viz a viz Jordan Peterson and Israel. The west would not be free if under the hypothetical yolk of Palestinians any more than it is under the real control of Israel. In all this we ask if JP is an autonomous dog in the fight or is he the useful goyim, the wagging tail to a body found between Tel Aviv to Washington and into the heart of the US military industrial complex. The writing was on the wall from the very beginning when Canada’s Zion propaganda outlet Rebel News latched onto Petersons rising star. Perhaps more than a passive observer in the star’s ascent, Ezra Levant and Rebel News played defence and crowd funded for Peterson causes. Fast forward just a few years later as JP climbs the food chain to join Ben Shapiros “conservative” media outfit “The Daily Wire” and finally to the meeting with the man himself (and Shapiros handler?), none other than Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu. Shapiro played shadchan here. Accordingly, it should hardly have come as a shock when Hamas went over the wall that Jordan Peterson reflexively tweets to new best friend Bibi “give ‘em hell”. A curious turn of phrase for an alleged crytpo Christian preaching peace, virtue, and individual responsibility, a psychology professor aware of the theory of intergenerational trauma. This was not the first nor the last of JP’s revelations as a rabid zionista, though it was amusing to see some half-arsed walk back from Peterson in the days following the infamous tweet.

From this we can speculate on one or two possibilities. The first is that the anti-trans mega influencer characters meet from a symbiosis of mutual interest. In this we imagine woke is, ipso facto, the real target. The fact Shapiro and Peterson tour the countryside with an additional pro Zionist perspective is co-incidental and part and parcel of the North American experience. After all, lets reflect on a strange feature of North America and the Anglosphere. US states often hate one another, e.g. Texans are almost different species to New Yorkers as they both are different to Americans from the centre all the way up to Canada. But if there’s one thing every American state can agree on its their love of Israel, making Israel the most American of all American states and Zion the central ideology of most North Americans and the Anglosphere from Miami to Milwaukee to Montreal to Melbourne and Manchester and all who dwell there in from age 40 up. It is in essence the picture of the meme where the American left worships at golden calf emblazoned with a rainbow flag and the American right worships a calf wearing a kippah. One will vote Biden and the other will vote Trump.

But is Peterson’s allegiance accidental. Another speculation is that gender pronouns and bashing the reputation of dead French intellectuals are merely props upon which Shapiro and Peterson et al can evangelise Zion-con and neo con interests to American youth. In this more conspiratorial hypothesis, it was never really about the rainbow flag. It was always about using opposition to the rainbow flag as bait to craft authentic high testosterone males to go and die in the Zion con wars the military industrial machine profits from. Clean up your room boys. Shoulders straight. We are going to war. JP is simply a highly pervasive and prolific agent of the cause.      

Where was Peterson during Covid

One of my soap box points is the criteria of moral and intellectual legitimacy to lead a dissident movement. The central question is this. What did you do and not do, say and not say in the first 18 months starting March 2020? Peterson was no fan of lockdown. But he was no opponent either. And his absence from the dissident stage for much of 2020 was covered up by the story that the great sage of individual responsibility and cleaning your room was instead travelling between North America, Russia and other European centres dealing with his benzodiazepine addiction (or managing his adventurous daughter or just using his wealth to dodge high lockdown cities). The surface story is that Petersons carnivore diet healed him and his daughter before resulting in a different illness from which he became depressed and needed SSRI’s. Then the pressures of fame and his subsequent wife’s illness lead to a benzodiazepine (clonazepam) addiction ill treated in Toronto and New York. To this we can add ketamine and God knows what else his treating psychiatrists dreamt up. Even a medically induced coma in Moscow failed to cure him before he went to other treatment providers, first in Florida and then in Serbia. Maybe true. Maybe partially true. Its curious that the almost deadly diet marketed by his daughter didn’t stop her marketing it. Its curious that Peterson required the best psychiatrists across four countries to treat something so pedestrian as benzodiazepine addiction and related akathisia. In any case, Peterson was out of his coma early 2020 was back on the influencer horse by mid-late 2020.

But was Peterson out there fighting lockdown? No. Was Peterson on the ice at the side of the protesting truckers? Of course not. Was it not Peterson who tweeted 13 May 2021

“Off to be vaccinated today. Despite having Covid last May, my antibody levels appeared insufficient to prevent reinfection. Hope Ontario opens up soon”

And he is quoted on his YouTube channel saying

“just get the damn vaccine”

Fast forward to November 2021, in his interview with Dave Rubin, JP stated

“I got vaccinated. And people took me to task for that. And I thought ‘all right I’ll get your damn vaccine’. Here’s the deal guys. I’ll get the vaccine, you leave me f$%^ing alone!”

Fast forward to 2022 when Peterson happily submitted his followers to mandatory vaccination in order attend his tour.

Fast forward further to 22 Jan 2023 and Peterson plays the hard man. On the subject of boosters he tweeted

“over my dead body”

Fast forward finally to the rhetoric of 2024, the fan boy could be forgiven his guru was with us all along. So did he acquiesce as a belief that his immune system (and a first dose) was insufficient? And did he use his influence to suggest others to be vaccinated also to have Ontario freed from lockdown? Or was he vaccinated solely as an act of incredibly naïve compliance without putting up any fight at all? So much for the principled freedom fighter and self-professed member of the “intellectual dark web”. The good professor had a first-class flight to catch. And so he rolled up his arm. Simple as that.

12 Rules for Beta Lobsters

The surface story of 12 Rules for Life is garden variety pop psychology self-empowerment growing out of some old forum posts. The book proper was conceived as a consumer project as his only other work “Maps of Meaning” was too weird and disturbing. Maybe I’ll review it in another substack. Every touring intellectual needs a book just as every Taylor Swift needs an album. Its an object around which to market a cult of personality. Consequently, Jordan Peterson cobbled together an accessible book. I had the misfortune to read two of its chapters in order parse Petersons ideology through the surface story of cleaning your room being a simple step towards self-mastery and self-responsibility.

In chapter1 Peterson describes the hierarchical structure of lobster society. Lobsters have a dominance hierarchy. So do humans. There are winner lobsters and loser lobsters. Same with humans. Lobsters have serotonin. Humans have serotonin. Lobsters have something akin to a posture. Once again, so do humans. Winners have better posture, more serotonin and greater positions in the dominance hierarchy. They have more sex with more female lobsters. Here we start with Petersons appeal to social Darwinism and neurological reductionism. These paradigms matter greatly to him. After all, if you are not like a lobster in some powerful or deep sense, it just becomes a boring metaphor right? But its also an apologetic to your local hyper-wealthy CEO and the cadre of folk invited to ARC. You see the CEO is the alpha lobster with the best social posture. He gets the reward of more serotonin and more women. You too can climb the dominance hierarchy by keeping your shoulders straight and head held high (and cleaning your room). You’ll feel better for it and manage to control some lower rank lobsters in the process. You’ll also have to reconcile with the rightness of the hierarchy. Your local CEO got there on merit. Peterson got there on merit. So quit your incel rants or depressed excursion into computer games. Quit occupying Wall Street too you resentful Marxist. Get a job and get in line and in rank under capital. Read some Ayn Rand. something like that.

The problem with Petersons reductive formulation of merit is its selectivity. How so? Because it fails to define the ethical component of merit and naively fails to recognise the common filters from which the office sociopath rises to the top of the “merit” tree. Jordan Peterson rarely has a critical word against the CEO’s of banking, finance, the military industrial complex and any who can build him the rungs of his ladder to fame. 2020 into early 2021 he likewise failed to use his platform to target the pharma complex supplying his SSRI and benzodiazepine addiction and the jabs he gladly consented too. But against Alpha woke rainbow lobsters in the humanities faculty he has much to say. But Jordan, they too climbed high against competition within their own kind. They too stand tall and can receive some gratifying grants and healthy levels of serotonin. Why is the trans alpha any less worthy than some cherry picked example of merit?     

     

Peterson the Anti-Marxist.

Anyone who believes a social safety net is a good thing in principle is a partial/conditional socialist. Anyone who believes in the concept of any lands or infrastructure publicly owned is a partial/conditional socialist. Anyone who does not realise the monstrous acts of regime leaders from Stalin to Pol Pot is blind or depraved. On the other hand, anyone who does not acknowledge the excesses of worker exploitation in late 19^th century Europe (or contemporary Asian sweat shops) is similarly ignoring reality and incentive to change. Anyone who believes Elon Musk attained his capital without publicly funded assistance is blind. Any who quote Locke without reading his perspective on the Kings prerogative and Mill on private property not directly connected to individual labour misses a huge chunk of liberal theory. Any Christian who bends the knee to unfettered capitalism as ideology without pausing and appreciating dissonance when reading the book of Acts is guilty of idolatry. So many nuances. Is Jordan Peterson emotionally equipped to deal with them?  In Petersons own aforementioned grab at capital, his bestseller “12 Rules for Life” there is the forward by the psychiatrist Norman Doidge. Doidge describes a visit to the Peterson family home. And in the home, soviet paintings and propaganda

“completely filled every single wall, the ceilings, even the bathrooms……It took getting used to, this semi detached house “decorated by a delusion that had practically destroyed mankind”

Completely filled! Am I the only one who sees this hyper obsession as deeply disturbing psychopathology, more so as this is a home cohabited by his wife and occasioned by his daughter, a daughter he named after Mikhail Gorbachev. Do homicide detectives have their bathroom ceiling adorned with serial killers? Do oncologists have pictures of fungating tumours from floor to ceiling? This is not to suggest that Stalin was a misunderstood nice guy. I’m not playing defence for Marxism here. But it is to suggest a complete loss of perspective.  I personally know those who have fled communist regimes. They too cultivate memories of things they experienced, not as North American ideology but concrete events in their life. None of their homes are like this. None of the political formulations (or memories) so black and white.  

That Petersons obsession with Marx and the USSR clouds his own mind is a fact written all over his house. The obsession becomes a problem in Petersons rhetoric when he a) takes the emotional anchor within his audience in agreeing Stalin was a bad guy and we had cold war enemies, b) combining it with a simple reading of Marx about worker exploitation by the capitalist class c) recasting the exploitation as a moral and not just economic fact borne of the capitalist owning the surplus and d) imaging that ALL complaints about power relations are Marxist in character and a moral harm and e) most importantly allege that any complaints about a power divide are covert Marxist are the road back to Stalin. His contention is that Marxist communists hid their agenda behind other causes during the cold war, his evidence being that the academic left were critics of capital.

Consequently when feminists cry “women of the world unite or rainbow warriors cry “trans of the world unite” or American Blacks do similar, they are all occult Marxists resentful of capital and we are one step away from being plunged into the darkest day of the Soviet Union. This is the game Peterson plays.

Now I’m not about to defend any of these woke causes. But we have to interrogate Petersons simple formulation. Might it not be the case that true believer communists checked out of academe in the 60’s and tried to realise their dreams elsewhere, leaving nothing but vapid left of centre careerist liberals behind? Might American pragmatism, consumerism and rampant liberalism been greater driving forces to the ills of today? And why stop at causes he hates when looking for Marxists? I’m a member of a persecuted minority in refusing the covid shot on political principle and refusing comply with lockdowns and mask mandates. As a member of a resentful underclass raging against the marriage of government and capital, am I not also a Marxist? Marxists everywhere if you stare into the abyss long enough.

Peterson the Postmodern Anti Post Modernist

Apart from his animus against social justice warriors from rainbow trans to BLM to third/fourth wave feminism as all manifest Marxists, Peterson’s other main schtick involves railing against French post structuralist philosophers and their ideas as Marxist subversion. As much as we have against Marx, we see an unremittent verbal output against Lyotard, Derrida and, especially, Foucault . Despite this being his act from the outset, quite deeply into his journey ole Jordy confessed only to have read some Derrida and a couple of Foucault’s works (and not the 3 volumes of Marx capital). It is widely regarded on the anti-Peterson left that he received his knowledge, incomplete as it is, through secondary reading via Stephen Hicks self-published work “Explaining Postmodernism: Scepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault”. Without a deep reading and synthesis of his own, Peterson thus runs the grave risk of perpetuating the errors of Hicks, if errors there be. And errors there are, grave errors! That is the claim made not be me but by scholars of these targeted thinkers. My own understanding of these thinkers is not much better than Petersons. But insomuch as Lyotard’s most cited quote defines postmodernism as incredulity to all metanarratives, this obviously includes liberal enlightenment progressivism AND Marxism! However defined as inevitable or the best of all political systems or history and man solely as a process of material economy, post modernism critiques Marxism too. If postmodernism is a kind of critical thinking in a general sense, what is wrong with that? Or shall we make liberalism an idol of worship and the enlightenment the moment in history of the resurrection? If we recast Marxism as any critique of capital or human activity conducted under the banner of capitalism, I might ask what is wrong with that either? We run the risk of throwing babies out with the bathwater here. Are you in favour of the government seizing your home in favour of the needs of the social body? No. Are you in favour of rapacious billionaire’s and asset manager funds using government leg ups to buy up the world turning everything into a rental? Maybe you are not so keen on that either. How can someone who never read Lyotard and barely read Marx say these thinkers have nothing of value to offer.     

As for Derrida, his philosophical project and post structuralist move was about language, not politics. The idea is that that the meaning of a word cannot be in its written definition. Why? Because this definition contains words also begging to be defined. And so we go ad infinitum (i.e. we never leave the dictionary). A word (signifier), its concept (signified) and the coupling of the two (sign) can only be understood as a system (or ecology) of language as a whole, where we understand the meaning of a word as much by what we don’t say and think as what we do utter and what images we do hold in our mind (I know it’s a cat because it’s not a dog, a horse etc. But how to define any of these?). Derrida appreciated that we cannot assume some absolute meaning within spoken utterances or the text on a page when attaching a concept or meaning to a word. And so we can deconstruct it of assumed meanings. Deconstruction is a recognition of a partial estrangement with an absolute hold on meanings. But it also offers a freedom. This is not to say that no rules will be followed or there be no boundaries at all. We must trust the implicit rules in the ecology of language to not let us venture too far into what is not real. But what this means in terms of words and meanings being social or private property or in political terms is open. It might be existentially nihilistic, this arguably a point of view. But it is not necessarily Marxist.     

As for Foucault, he offers extremely interesting critiques of power relations in “Discipline and Punish” and “Madness and Civilization”. The fact he looks at power relations does not in and of itself deny the motive force of other concepts such as love. As any Adlerian psychotherapist knows, one needs a kind of power to actualise love, this being one example. Let’s not be naïve in discounting the value of power in a straightforward sense either. Power of a certain kind is required to reject the pressure to self-censor, to engage in dissident activities etc. Power can be the difference between driving the tank in Tiananmen square or being run over by it. Power over knowledge can dictate if the current younger generation even has an historical record if Tiananmen square even happened. Do the youth of China have power over their own knowledge? Foucault has something to say just as worthy as Orwell.            

The problem I have here is not JP’s bashing of a philosophical school about which he’s knows little and pretends much. Nor is it about his coupling of his view of Marxism to postmodernism as if the former logically leads to the latter and the dreaded Marx is an inevitable pipeline to Derrida (it obviously isn’t). No, the problem isn’t so much JP the prodigious dilettante as JP the one lacking insight. For all of JP’s raging against postmodernism, what he and his followers miss is the fact JP is an intensely postmodern creature himself. His own philosophy of choice is American pragmatism, where truth is basically utilitarian and any correspondence of the functional (whatever works) to the real (what is) is co-incidental. That is to say, gravity is true because ignoring it can result in fatal falls from great heights. But ideologies and advertising campaigns can be true if they result in great profits and God can be “true” if the resultant is a social good. American pragmatism lacks any drive towards the transcendent, the beautiful and the true in itself. It is a very suitable bride to be married to capital, both giving birth to a rotting carcass of dead meaning. In turn come the post moderns to lament the death and feed on what the likes of JP have killed off. Shall we then shoot the messenger because the messenger speaks French?

Now I hear the fan boys cry “but JP is all about transcendence and meaning. His lesser known first book was even so named ‘Maps of Meaning’. He talks about it all the time and gives me a nice little emotional high when I pay $200 to hear him speak “. The problem is that fanboys never seem to parse out what JP means when he speaks of meaning any more than they ask what JP means about God when he speaks of God. They see in JP what they want to see and what they desire that he see in them. JP’s tortured call for defining every word in a proposition IS deconstruction. Only where Derrida et al had the intellect to take deconstruction to the limits of language, JP seems to use it to stop at whatever works….for him…and his ideology….and his fears…..to market his emotion and grift to himself and his consumers. returning to God, when asked “do you believe in God” he has also answered “it depends on what you mean by ‘do’, and what you mean by ‘you’ and what you mean by ‘belief’ and what you mean by ‘in’……”. Good grief! He is radically deconstructive even when he presumes the ‘you” he is directing his answer towards before trying the undermine the concept of “you”. Similarly, when he asks what you mean by meaning as a word, we must have at least some anchor in meaning to ask the question what meaning is! Derrida is fine with this whilst practicing the same deconstruction ole Jordy engages in all the time. Just yesterday I saw JP tweet out a nonsense message where he chooses to use the word (and thus the concept) of “simulacrum”, this being a post modern term of art from Baudrillard. Baudrillard the Marxist! 

More important than theory, post modernism has an aesthetic with a self-consciousness JP lacks. JP’s on stage act is a simulacrum of appearing to think in mid speech, torturing out his genius insights as Monty Python in turn once amusingly imitated Wittgenstein. The problem is that Wittgenstein the genius really was torturing out genius ideas. I can’t help but wonder if Peterson is playing an eccentric Wittgenstein or playing Monty Python playing Wittgenstein.

What of wardrobe? JP markets a surface idea of self-conscious dualism in wearing a double-coloured suit coat, red on one side and blue on the other. Entirely lost on JP is that this mirrors the pop culture image of one of Batman’s minor nemeses Harvey Two Face. Jordie’s unconscious is trying tell him something here. He is slippery enough to evade it by appeal to some word salad leading back to Jung and the dual nature he wants his followers see in themselves more than him (order chaos, good evil, male female etc etc). After all, his fans looking forward view his coat more than he does whilst wearing it. Meanwhile in a truer sense Peterson is just a living billboard for a culture consuming Batman. He is Harvey Two Face, never more two faced than when he says he isn’t. Similarly, when the Peterson grift came to be more accepted by the Catholic right, we then have JP wearing a repeat patterned coat of Catholic iconography. And when he speaks at Orthodox adjacent events, he wears a black coat emblazoned with some Greek and the Orthodox cross from the neck to the waste and across his shoulders. In this do we have JP marketing himself the return of one crucified? I too can play at psychoanalysis. None of this is personal representation of traditional religious aesthetics or commitment to the same. It’s cool and edgy stand out marketing 101, a pastiche of images relying on anchors from the traditional world to sell a product that is Peterson himself and the capital he and his handlers want transfer from you to themselves. JP might as well be a nascar with a Star of David here, a cross there, a reference to John Locke in between and a self help .com on the hood. This is not Peterson a renaissance man. This is a man more made in fashion of Andy Warhol.

Pastiche does not end with JP’s wardrobe. There is also the content of the speech. You might have observed what happens when you drop a half a can of bug spray into a large spider or insect. The creature then runs about and lay still for a moment, usually having come to lay on its back with its little crooked legs hanging in the air. After the moment of stillness, it engages in one last flurry of movement as its legs go hyperkinetic and flail about and the body spins around without any meaningful vector and any hope of escape. And then the bug falls motionless and silent forever. As the dying bug is to its biological life, JP’s wardrobe and rhetoric is to a dying liberal worldview of his generation. We saw this at the ARC launch as we see it in any JP event. Decide on a special coat. Speak the psychological anchors of bygone dreams and appropriations from disparate ideas likely to trigger a positive emotional response in the target “mark” consumer. The consumers are current or disenchanted Tory (UK), Republican (US) or Liberal (Aus) voters, all of whom are the same crew invited to ARC . “Judeo-christian”. “Western civilisation”. “The new Jerusalem”. “City on a hill”. “Light”. Baddy “Marxists” and continental “postmodern” philosophers. Quoting Orwell whilst knowing nothing about Orwell. Meaning. Truth. Locke good. Derrida bad. Marx doubleplus bad. “Prosperity”. “Freedom”. “Responsibility”. “Democracy”. Blah blah blah. Some rousing language. Some mix of collectivism amongst the atomised objectivists. Makes no difference if the speech is barely coherent. He plays on psychological anchors and nostalgia. In the end at the ARC conference and elsewhere, Peterson himself often brought to tears by his own performance, adding to the persona of a man on fire with ecstatic vision (or a mind fracturing under the weight of post SSRI, ketamine and clonazepam burnout and 8 years on tour). Forgive me. But in this salad of “conservative” buzz words - this cartoon wardrobe - this affective incontinence - all I see is that bug on the floor - the last frantic discharges of ideas long corrupted by the utter shallowness of the latter part of the 20th century and its liberal precursors. As with bugs and bug spray, that last hyperkinetic discharge is not so much the bug itself attempting right itself and save its place in civilisation. No it’s more likely those little legs are moving under the force of the same poison that drives it towards rigid paralysis.

Peterson the Anti-Establishment Warrior.

Amongst the fanbase, JP is considered anti-establishment, a David vs the Goliath Marxist infiltrated universities, woke corp and all the governments that replace national flag with that of the rainbow. Moreover, we are asked to believe he was not one of those “who left the left” but rather was always a classical liberal anti socialist warrior and trad leaning hero. Problem is that the right widely believes that the Gramscian take over by the left was compete by the end the of 20^th century. Likewise, the globalism creature didn’t just come down in the last shower. I too accept that globalism and enemies of the traditional right took power decades ago. Moreover, whatever we think of the competency crisis and elite stupidity, the establishment is sufficiently cognizant of the friend enemy distinction NOT to allow a saboteur anywhere near the inner circles. Surely this is obvious.

So how is it that an allegedly dissident allegedly right wing allegedly anti globalist psychology professor managed to get a seat on the UN as a key advisor and policy writer on sustainable development 2009-2012/13? Moreover, we have mentioned the evil WEF, where Klaus Schwab was apprentice to the master the late Henry Kissinger. But Anti WEF common folk in dissident circles might not have heard of the equally powerful globalist group the “Trilateral Commission”. Co-created by Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the trilaterals are still going strong. And Peterson, a man allegedly against the establishment was an invited speaker and respected guest at their annual meeting in Ljubljana Slovenia 2018. This was well and truly after his coming out against pronouns. All this is food for thought when Peterson later becomes the main protagonist in the formation of the anti WEF group the Alliance for responsible citizenship (ARC) I also mentioned. Kissinger managed to straddle both the Euro and American arms of the technocratic globalist complex. Whilst Peterson is more restricted to US empire neo cons as a rival faction, his purpose is the same as pro globalist technocrats as a whole.  All this brings me to the final plea to you dear reader. Peterson is obviously an enemy of the new (woke) ultraleft. He is obviously also an enemy of anything situated within a million miles of socialism or Marxism as defined as a critique of capital. He is obviously also against the nostalgists for a soft socialist agrarian style of collectivist life. But what about the right? One does not need to read between the lines here. Petersons sentiment is anti-trans. But his explicit ideology is neo liberal. His nostalgia is towards a time somewhere between the 80’s and 2000’s before the rainbow flag was hoisted and liberalism went a step too far. But his explicit mission is not to embolden a reactionary movement that lay centre right or further out. His mission is to shut down woke so that it will not awaken the true dissident right towards capturing power. The right is his real enemy. Peterson is not in this sense a path by which young men could move rightwards so much as Peterson is a cul de sac by which they can circle around until de-energised, and he and his ilk return us to the days of Blair and Thatcher and Cameron (and Farage), of Reagan and Bush and Clinton, of Howard and Turnbull and Abbott. None of these leaders and none of those times were right wing let alone anything principled or traditionally anything at all. They were, however, good for business. Peterson is relying on your nostalgia to return capital into the hands of the faction he represents without the rainbow flag rocking the boat. Problem is that this created the monstrous present in which we reside, and his generation created. So the future is up for grabs. Young man, chose your path wisely. Cul de sacs get you nowhere.  

Ends part 1. Next month we explore the contender Andrew Tate

https://www.bitchute.com/video/5eD5Ng7kuGCm/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0USKRii3EZySOpTKvXOEhVpNaceBBra6C-HYPerbjciyvRmsuXJhGOGfI_aem_Ab0dZkNgcK6mmklSkHLjOYmikc5JeiyGsCA2Hgb9_VbxdJjEfC-kRPWIBmymEJZk8Esmhf89Yu3L7tn0pYjrMvVY