By David Futrelle
I think I may have found the Jordan Peterson-est post in the Jordan Peterson subreddit so far.
I dunno, dude, maybe DON’T TALK LIKE THAT.
But yabha — clearly besotted with the pompous, reactionary, slap-happy Canadian academic who has become staggeringly popular amongst Men’s Rights Activists, alt-rightists and other terrible men — continues on in this vein, attempting to ask his fellow Petersonheads how he can rebut people who point out that Peterson’s admonition to “clean your room” doesn’t help much if you’re too poor to have a room.
Except he puts it like this:
Oversimplifying here, but there are 2 apparently conflicting models of the world: one in which identity politics is a distraction from individual responsibility, and another in which issues of identity preclude individuals from effective action, and need to be solved before embarking on any projects of the self.
A common reaction to the clean your room directive is that one needs to ensure they have equitable access to a room in the first place.
Can you share some examples of effective discourse with individuals that subscribe to issues of identity (race, gender, sexual preferences, etc.)?
Dude, just because you love Jordan Peterson, you don’t have to try to be as pompously incomprehensible as he so often is.
Some of those who attempted to answer yabha’s convoluted query were a bit blunter than he was.
“Clean your room is a metaphor for focusing on your individual life [rather] than on others,” wrote AmazonExplorer.
So for the homeless person in need of a room, the advice of “cleaning their room” is exactly what they need. Perhaps instead of wishing for a communist utopia, they need to drop that heroin addiction that destroyed their life in the first place, maybe try to land a job, learn some skills.
(Hey, I said they were blunter; I didn’t say they were convincing.)
Another noted with some puzzlement that “everytime I engage in these conversations I end up being accused of bigotry.”
Gosh, why would anyone accuse you of bigotry when you claim that poverty is the result of individual failings and has nothing to do with centuries of, you know, racism and structural inequality?
But I digress. Others answered yabha’s question in language that was nearly as pompous and muddled as his. One commenter started off a vast wall-o-text with this:
I think there are more than the two modes you describe and the space between the two is where you will begin to find the ground upon which discussions are possible. There are many between the two perspectives who both, at the same time, understand that individual responsibility is paramount within our own lives, and that there are truths to be understood when assessing the role that identity plays at the levels of control beyond mere individuals.
Dude, you could have just said: That’s a false dichotomy. Maybe the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Amazingly. one commenter actually called out yabha for his pomposity.
“[H]ave you always written so formal, maybe even Peterson-esque?” wondered someone called TheOwlInTheTower.
It is definitely not a normal conversational style, more along the lines of the kind of language used in a published academic work. I am sorry if this question makes you uncomfortable, being analyzed isn’t too much fun. I just noticed that there are followers who emulate Jordan Peterson and I feel like some of those people in a way have assumed and defend an “identity”.
Woah.
Alas, TheOwlInTheTower didn’t take this any further, and began backtracking a little in the very next sentence:
I can definitely understand though, that if someone really moves a person in a certain way that they might find comfort and strength in emulating the person who gives them that rock.
That’s a big backtrack. But I still wonder if it’s only a matter of time before Mr. Owl gets thrown out of the cult.
That has GOT to be a Poe troll.
Edit: Peeked, and I’m wrong, unless they’re putting a shitton of effort into creating the character history.
Old Thesaurus Rex there really does type like that.
What in tarnation was all that word-wigglin’ he wrote?
…It’s got English words, but I can’t decipher them somehow!
They use so many words to say so little.
Actually, most published academic work still makes a point and HAS a point worth making, and doesn’t rely on barrages of bafflegab to get a non-point across, as Jordan Peterson does. I’ve peeked at some of his stuff, and I have to say, what with his multilevel diagrams that look like they’re saying a lot but aren’t actually saying a thing, he makes Sebastian Gorka’s diploma-mill doctoral thesis on terrorism look downright lucid. Between the jejune misreadings of Jung, the ludicrous lobster shit, and the self-help pablum that basically boils down to “don’t try to change anything about the world, just fix yourself…no, no, you’re doing it wrong” — well, there’s no There there. A person could go in endless circles trying to figure out just what exactly one is supposed to do to be a self-actualized Individual à la Peterson.
And his lectures on YouTube are no help either; that whiny droning voice of his is about as engaging as nails on a chalkboard, and he goes in endless waffling circles just as much there as he does on the printed page. I honestly get the sense that they (whoever they are) gave him his Ph.D., and whatever else, just to shut him up and make him go away, because otherwise they’d have him waffle-whining at them forevermore.
Peterson is Schrödinger’s Moron — what he says is not that bright at all, but since he’s so elaborate and roundabout in his dimness, you might think that gee, maybe he’s a misunderstood genius. He could literally be saying anything. But if you open the box and shake it out, you get a dead and stinking flyblown cat. Nada más.
The sad part is, he rakes in more in a month on Patreon than most real geniuses make in an entire year. Which tells me one thing: Stupid, bigoted people really are willing to pay a lot to see their biases endlessly confirmed.
Or in the words of that true misunderstood genius, P.T. Barnum: There’s one born every minute.
Verbosity conceals paucity. 😛
edit: that’s a response to the OP, NOT to Bina!!! 😛
As far as psychology or philosophy professors or speakers go, isn’t Peterson bland and unoriginal in his presentation?
I posted the above comment before reading the comments section and Bina’s, so his ordinariness has already been discussed here.
“Peterson is Schrödinger’s Moron — what he says is not that bright at all, but since he’s so elaborate and roundabout in his dimness, you might think that gee, maybe he’s a misunderstood genius”
I gathered that most of his fans have not completed university degrees and if so, most certainly not in psychology or philosophy because as far as academia goes, he’s nothing special, in fact, below average I would say.
Forget uni grads, even autodidacts well read in either psychology or philosophy would find him wanting. I can’t imagine that he was ever super popular with his actual students, unless maybe his college courses are more compelling than his youtube videos?
Ugh, trapped in a lecture hall with this pretentious douchebag? Sounds like pure nightmare.
Seconding Bina. But I think there’s an additional reason people like Peterson, manosphere and alt-right YouTubers and trolls who come here and post teal deers bloviate endlessly without saying much. If they put their opinions into clear and concise words, it would expose how hateful they really are and their ideas would be dead easy to refute. Some part of these (mostly) dudes know they’re just plain wrong and they feel compelled to hide it underneath psuedo-academic babble. It’s not just that they’re not as intellectual as they pretend to be, they’re desperate to hide how wrong they are. It’s harder to refute a point when you can’t figure out what their point actually is.
I assume that first ramble is asking: “How do I talk to filthy SJWs without getting called a bigot?” I feel I must be misinterpreting it, because I’ve yet to see an alt-rightist who was genuinely interested in “effective discourse.”
I-I just…can’t stand Peterson and his fans…the way they dodge any attempts to get them to admit to their hideous beliefs! Peterson uses this kind of language so he can say “I never said (horrible things)”
There’s a great tongue-in-cheek yet very insightful satirical article on how Peterson is actually a brilliant Stephen Colbert-style performance artist.
“If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” is pretty much Jordan Peterson entire strategy and he makes a lot of money thanks to it.
This reminds me so much of the creepier fandom of Ayn Rand. When she was still alive, many of her admirers would go to her talks dressed either exactly like her (if female) or in outfits in line with her strict views on aesthetics. Because Rand basically hated everyone who wasn’t her, she would usually ridicule them for doing so. She would also ridicule them for having different views in aesthetics to her, as any art that sat outside her preferences was “deviant” or plain “evil.”
Ninja’d by Bina in one of her excellent-as-usual posts 🙂
Nonetheless,
Just no, owl-tower-guy. I agree, it’s “not a normal conversational style” but it bears little resemblance to good academic writing.
Most academics (in my field, anyway) actually know how to write. This whole verbose/pompous = intellectual thing has got to die in a fire. It’s one of the biggest obstacles I encounter when teaching inexperienced students about academic writing. Clarity and conciseness (why don’t we say ‘concision’ btw?) are what counts. That, and reasoned argument with evidence.
Academic papers are often difficult for a layperson to understand, but not because they’re purposefully trying to be obtuse (at least, the good ones aren’t.) It’s just that academic papers tend to assume a certain level of familiarity with the subject material and can often involve jargon that is not widely known. But the jargon is generally used to communicate very specific and well-defined concepts, it’s not meaningless filler that gets shoved in to sound smarter.
@Mish: D’awwww, thank you! I’m blushing.
@idli:
I’m sure any “compelling” aspect to his classes at U of T (where I am now SO thankful I never went) is strictly due to his controversy factor, not to any substance (or style) in his presentations. People probably go to hear him simply because he offends “SJWs” and “politically correct snowflakes”, the kind of people they’re annoyed at for reasons they struggle to define, other than “Those people are smarter than me, and I want to take them down a peg. How dare they think they’re smart?”. Little do they realize that what it is that offends us about him is that he’s so elaborately idiotic…and that they are so gullible and backward. And that following him isn’t taking us down even a hair; it’s an own goal at best.
But you’re probably right in your estimation that his fans are not uni-educated, or if so, not in the fields where he purports to specialize. If they have degrees, they’re probably MBAs: Masters of Bugger-All, basically awarded to those who have no bachelor’s degree, but who still need something impressive to hang over their desk in the loan-shark office so that people will think they’re somehow official.
You’re also correct that even autodidacts who have read in his (ahem) discipline but not received formal degrees in that specialty aren’t impressed. I’m highly unimpressed by his limited and (predictably) sexist view of Carl Jung, who certainly didn’t push the Petersonian theory that women’s sole role was to birth, dispense sex, clean house, and breastfeed the oh-so-ingenious (and always male) Individuals. I never took psych during my English major days (partly because too many others were doing so as a “bird course”, but partly also because I knew it would likely make me neurotic) but I did read Jungian materials on the side, for my own edification and fun. One thing I made note of was how many of the leading Jungians were female — among them, Jung’s own wife, Emma, who co-wrote (with Marie-Louise von Franz) a terrific analysis of archetypes in the Grail Legends. It struck me that Jungian analysis was well ahead of its times in terms of its approach to gender: women weren’t soulless, mindless creatures of the dark and the void (that would be Peterson himself, ha ha), but had an animus, just as every man had an anima (and was certainly no genius of the light, either; just a human being, often very fragmented, whose analytical task was to piece the shattered self back together.) Women have intellectual gifts to bestow, in other words…and to deny them an equal position in the grand scheme of things is monstrous and a crime.
And none of it ever precluded social-justice activism, either. On the contrary, social justice is a road to self-actualization, and a very reliable one. It’s not just “spoiled brats waving paper on sticks”, as Peterson snottily characterizes it. I can’t tell you how much more my life began to make sense after I got involved in progressive and leftist politics. Or how much more my mind developed when I did that, as opposed to lying on a couch in Peterson’s office (yes, he’s apparently a practicing shrink — pity his patients!) and maundering on in response to his stock questions, which never lead anywhere…much less in the direction of an actual resolution. I owe my good mental health to being the exact opposite of what Peterson thinks I should be.
And from experience, I can recommend it.
This commenter really hit the nail on its head with that sentence.
So I know this person whom I just recently found out is a Peterson fan. Their career is not going great at the moment (like, not badly either, but not great) and I know they think they’re being held back by SJW:s because they’re not as politically correct as you’re expected to be these days. It’s almost like they see themselves as belonging to a certain group (the non-PC group), and believe they are hurt by negative feelings others might have against this group!
A friend just linked me to a story on JP based on his recent visit here to Oz. Two things really stood out:
1. he claims that Jane Goodall repressed some key findings of her research on chimps because it confirmed that male dominance and hierarchy was natural. Unsurprisingly, Goodall’s institute is not impressed. He’s seriously claiming that Goodall was hiding findings that she didn’t like.
2.
All this alt right violence is our fault, folks! Thank the gods for JP (/s)
Wait, I thought everyone is supposed to “clean their own room” first, rather than asdume they’re being oppressed by the system? Odd, how that works, that oppression doesn’t exist unless it’s “PC culture” that oppresses you.
(Also, I somehow suspect that they’re “stop blaming others for your troubles!” thing doesn’t stop many of them from blaming the women of the world on them not getting the sex they want and feel they deserve. Dirty rooms aplenty…)
I’ve also noticed this kind of writing allows fans to dismiss people who disagree as “not smart enough to understand the concepts”
Seconding Mish and Bina – I also work in academia and Jordan Peterson’s work always reminds me of the essays from third rate undergraduates who spent the entire year playing Beer Pong and are now using all the long words they can find in a panicky cover up of their ignorance
Seriously, I had only a vague idea of who this schmuck is. I then vaguely recalled some NPR article (interview?) I heard about him wanting to misgender people because…rights? And now he’s suddenly everywhere and I have no idea why. I even read that really long ‘intellectual we deserve’ article to try to understand thing one about Jordan Peterson, and all I can see is bloated blathering that makes no sense.
This guy is like Time Cube Goes to College.
@calmdown
Translation: “how can I make SJWs see how wrong they are, without them arguing back, being mean, or mocking me?”
Whenever I think of Peterson’s fanbase, I can’t help remembering two things.
1. Peterson is a hardline Catholic.
2. Peterson’s fanbase are mostly the sort of smug atheist men who call themselves “rational.”
I would have thought that these two things would contradict one another, but weirdly they don’t seem to. I don’t have any hypotheses as to why, it’s just genuinely bizarre.
There’s a nightmare scenario in which significant numbers of these disconnected, alienated, radicalised young men end up converting to a hardline form of Catholicism because Peterson told them to; and they end up capturing the culture of mainstream Catholicism. It sounds unlikely until I remember that this is literally what happened with other alienated young men turning to Nazism and capturing the Republican party.
Mish:
That’s the thing about cult-prone individuals: if you “save” them from one cult, they’ll look for another to join. In this case, they don’t need to look far.
I got this far :
There ain’t enough fuck you in the world. And I’m way too sober to continue reading so I’ll just keep this for later.