By David Futrelle
People often joke about the whole Jordan Peterson thing being a cult, but the thing is that it really is pretty damn culty. Consider, for example, this tale of one young acolyte’s meeting with the Holy Man after a recent public debate between J-Peet and top atheist skeezeball Sam Harris.
The lucky fella, calling himself mushroomyakuza, posted his story to the Jordan Peterson subreddit earlier this week. He was thrilled to meet his guru, he wrote, because “he really has had a pretty profound impact on my life. It was humbling.”
Contemplating one’s tininess in the universe is humbling. Meeting some fussbudgety Canadian professor with a popular self-help book and an oversized sense of self-importance shouldn’t be.
He was so courteous and polite to everyone he saw, including my girlfriend. Met her with a big “how are you?” and a sweet grin.
She was probably the only woman in the entire audience.
It was a surreal moment for me, having been a fan for nearly two years when the first video of him at UoT regarding gender pronouns emerged.
Transphobia, the gateway drug to Jordan Petersonism.
Then it was my turn.
We shook hands. Good firm grip.
I looked at him and said “Thank you, man.” I said “I’m sorting it all out.”
It is just me or is it getting awfully culty in here? J-Peet tells his young fans to “sort yourself out” and “clean your room” before taking on the world’s problems. So mushroomyakuza is repeating Peterson’s own catchphrase back at him. That’s a little culty, my dude. It’s also not terribly original. It’s like meeting Right Said Fred and telling them that they really are too sexy for their shirts.
Oh but it gets cultier:
Our eyes locked and we held each others gaze. He saw into my soul, basically. There was a moment of understanding that only men have when your eyes lock in a certain way (sorry girls it’s true).
Jesus Effing Christ. It was just a little eye contact! My cats “lock eyes” with me all the time and they’re not “seeing into my soul.” They just want food!
(Though admittedly when I first got my cats at the cat shelter I chose one of them because she looked me straight in the eye and there was a moment of understanding that only people and cats have when their eyes lock in a certain way (sorry dog people it’s true), and I knew I had to pick her and she and I are very happy but then again my other cat is equally great and I picked her because she was a complete goofball, and magical eye bonding had nothing to do with it. But I digress.)
He signed the book with a smile and nod. I said” Thank you” again and he said “You’re welcome. Thank you for coming.” and gave me another firm handshake with another eye lock.
WOW WHAT WISDOM. Embroider that and put it in a little frame.
I wish I’d had time to take a picture, but there was a very long line and people were being pushed along.
People say not to meet your idols, and even though this was only for roughly ten seconds, I was not disappointed.
Thank you for everything you do Dr Peterson.
My body just did a little involuntary shudder.
I mean, it’s one thing to fanboy or fangirl a bit when you meet someone you admire or idolize. But what the hell. HE SAW INTO YOUR FUCKING SOUL!?
You’re in a cult, dude. WAKE UP!
Two more Bill Clinton stories and a cat story:
A friend of mine is from Arkansas and went to some sort of Governor’s Summer Program that Clinton had set up for kids who were promising but poor, the way he had been. My friend had an older brother who had been there the previous year, and when Clinton came around to shake his hand, he said, “oh, your brother was here last year, wasn’t he?” No one had told him that. He remembered the name and the resemblance from a kid he had met once the previous year.
From the 1992 campaign: I was outside the meeting of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, a rare occasion when both Bush and Clinton were speaking. There had to have been at least three times the number of people there for Clinton than there were for Bush, but I saw the TV cameras panning down the lines I knew that it would be shown as exactly the same number. All the pro-Bush people were anti-abortion, and the leader of the group had been screaming back and forth with my group, but as the cameras swiveled towards her, she sank dramatically to her knees, clutching her rosary and praying for the ungodly. Bush arrived, and at first, he smiled at the crowd, and then his lips got all thin when he realized most of it was not for him. Then we were taken around to where Elvis, I mean Clinton, would be exiting the building. My God. He bounced out, threw back his head to drink some Coke, and then he walked out to the crowd. The Secret Service had a horrible time keeping him away from us, because everyone surged forward to touch him as though he could cure the King’s Evil. What made it worse was that Clinton wanted to surge towards the crowd as much as they wanted to touch him. He kept wading in. He would have body-surfed if he could have. So there is his secret. For better or worse, he really loves you, and I mean for realz. The man could start a cult.
As for my cat: I wanted to get a bonded pair, partly because they were hard to place. I had another couple in mind, but the rescue said, “Have I got the cats for you!” They introduced me to a tortoiseshell, who immediately rolled over and hugged my arm with all four legs. So that was that. She was coming home with me that night. Her brother was a lot shyer and more sulky, possibly because of the dumb pink ruff he was wearing (things like that make a black cat easier to see). Marbles has turned out to be very difficult. She has some kind of psychological difficulty, and cannot stand to be in the same room with her brother. Still, she adores people, and I have to acknowledge that she picked me out.
I don’t understand the lobster thing, is it anything to do with the movie “The Lobster” where single people are taken away to a creepy hotel and get transformed into animals if they fail to pair up?
@Cat Mara
Re: /r/kotakuinaction, the Reddit admins saved it because they’d already established a policy for what to do when a head mod tries to kill an active subreddit, which is restrict the powers of that mod and bring the subreddit back, and then evaluate who (if anyone) should replace the current head mod. They literally just followed their already established policy, rather than doing what david-me had hoped and make an exception because it’s /r/kotakuinaction.
In this case it actually took surprisingly long for the admins to decide on that last part, given there was an heir apparent and more or less the entire sub actively backing him.
@Virgin Mary
“The lobster thing” comes from an interview with Peterson in which Cathy Newman was just a mess. The general flow of it was that Peterson would say something, and Cathy would say “so what you’re saying is” and then something that wasn’t at all what he was getting at.
At one point he’d said something along the lines that establishing hierarchies is something that probably has a biological underpinning and that it and some neural biochemical processes are old enough that they go back at least to the point where we share a common ancestor with lobsters. Which she promptly “so what you’re saying”-ed into the notion that we should organize society after the lobster.
…and thus a meme was born.
Not a word of dissent. That’s disheartening. Everyone is pretty much agreed about the accusations of transphobia and misogyny. It’s obvious from reading the comments that very few of the people who thought they should share their opinion have bothered to read 12 Rules for Life. For a bunch of free-thinkers, you’re pretty narrow-minded. Indulging your confirmation bias, you go onto sites like this one just to read more on the subjects you’re already convinced about. Mr Futrelle, I think you were projecting when you said Dr Peterson is self-important. That statement also smacked of envy. He has had a lot of success and, as someone who has bothered to read his book and attend one of his lectures, I believe it is deserved. By the way, I’m not an alt-right incel fanatic, as you and others portray his fans. In intersectional terms, I’m a young, Hispanic woman. There were other women at the talk, hundreds in fact. I identify as a liberal, reason why I used to read your blog; I enjoyed the satire. But now I find your writing overly simplistic or straight-up wrong, because it is not objective. You pander to the leagues of ideologically-possessed leftists that Dr Peterson and other members of the “Intellectual Dark Web” rightfully criticize. Of the many points he has made, one is particularly pertinent: the left doesn’t so much like the poor/dispossessed, as despise the rich, or successful.
Sen, I don’t know what the audience was like at the event you attended but here’s a pretty high-res photo of the audience at the event the guy in my post went to. Obviously there are some women in the crowd (there are a couple right in front of the camera, for example) but, I dunno, looks like a crowd that’s pretty heavily skewed white and male. Expand the photo to see the details. (This is from the twitter thread linked to in the post.)
https://twitter.com/thekavofficial/status/1018212277345050624
@Sen
Could you try telling us how exactly we’re wrong about Lobster Man?
If you are, as you claim, a woman, Sen, shouldn’t you have dropped your Peterson fandom like a hot potato the moment he came out in favor of giving incels sex slaves?
Not the most original gif, but it’s always so fitting
I mean
Come on. How many liberal women talk like this?
Honestly, I’m surprised it took so long for a Peterson fan to make their way here.
@Surplus
Wow. You know that women are capable of holding opinions you disagree with and you shouldn’t be questioning someone’s gender based on their opinions, right?
Since I know you’re going to say it: what WWTH is pointing out is, in fact, different from what you’re saying. She’s talking about how Sen is not speaking in a manner typical of someone who is a liberal, intersectional feminist. You’re claiming someone cannot hold certain beliefs if they’re a woman.
Yeah, I was wondering if I should clarify. I don’t have an issue with the woman part, because we all know the alt-right contains plenty of women. The issue was liberal + woman because this
Is so not something a liberal woman who totally liked this blog until it started criticizing lobster dad would ever say. Ever.
We are dealing with a troll here. The normal assumption of good faith doesn’t apply, in my opinion. Alt-right trolls are nearly invariably men, however they present.
You’re still not allowed to spew misogynistic views on here, though. That affects every single woman commenter here. Being told that, simply because of our gender, we simply cannot hold views out of line with what you expect women to believe is misogyny.
Oh my gosh, a Petersonian! Hello, @Sen, welcome!
http://daringdoosdashingadventures.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/553101__safe_solo_fluttershy_animated_smile_hublogo_faic_spoiler-colon-s04e14_fillivanilli_eyeshimmer.gif
You’re a little bit run-on-sentence there, but, let me try and parse things out to give you a proper reply. Though you’ve asserted otherwise, we do address things pretty thoroughly here, and we’ve had lots of lively debates about worthy topics! Just, y’know, worthy ones. Geordie P doesn’t qualify. I’ll get to why that is presently.
The central theme of your post is about us not paying adequate attention to him; you conclude that, since we’re dismissing him, we must be doing so because we’re biased or uninterested in getting the complete facts. You are incorrect! Don’t feel bad, this is a very normal reaction to running into someone who believes differently. For example, it’s really, really easy for me to believe that anyone who thinks Peterson has good arguments isn’t particularly clever. Their mistakes of logic stand out to me and are easy to spot, whereas correct things they say tend to get forgotten more easily.
(This, incidentally, is the actual expression of confirmation bias, not what you’re talking about in your post.)
http://gifimage.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/fluttershy-yay-gif-12.gif
Anyways, that’s what you’re experiencing. We have good reasons for disregarding Peterson, you’re just not sensitive to them. So you call us narrow-minded, biased, non-objective, pandering, ideologically-possessed, etc. These are all descriptions that further make it more difficult you to understand what our issues are with him. They’re blinders, put on by people who are invested in believing in a thing, and who would experience cognitive dissonance and discomfort to believe otherwise.
(They’re also, I note, not actually useful in a discussion context, and are absolutely not very objective of you to claim. But people are rarely objective, and anyone who claims to be very objective is self-deluding. But that’s a digression for another post…)
Don’t feel bad about doing any of that, by the way! That’s very human, and it’s basically normal brain functioning. Nothing to be ashamed of. Just be aware of it.
Now to the meat of it – you’re wrong about Peterson. He’s a profoundly unclear speaker, and his ideas are intentionally vague. But the man’s a trained scientist – he knows what good ideas look like. They’re clear. You can communicate them in a straightforward way in a few sentences. It might take a lot of time to understand the fine details of the idea, but the basic concept of a good idea is immediately understandable.
This is why it’s ridiculous to suggest that we need to watch hours of videos or read compendiums to understand his idea – because good ideas are lighting bolts, and his ideas are fog banks.
Watching hours of youtube videos about a topic is a terrible way to convey an idea. But you know what those hours of videos are good at? Making bad ideas seem convincing. Videos are awful at conveying concepts clearly, but they’re great at presenting a narrative. Your brain goes a bit passive and just adsorbs the story, making it harder to judge things critically, because you can’t easy stop to think about things – the story is continuing and you have an instinct to follow it. Video is great at making ridiculous ideas more acceptable, and is great at making a jumble of conflicting, vague stories seem like a cohesive whole. Books can be better, but books for laypeople – pop science, self-help, etc – are just as guilty at using narrative in place of good ideas.
http://iambrony.steeph.tp-radio.de/mlp/gif/133944118122.gif
Sorry to disappoint you about your hero, there.
In short – you’ve been hoodwinked, my duck. Taken for a ride. Peterson’s hot garbage. I’d be happy to discuss the details of exactly why whenever you want, if you’re interested in that lively discussion thing we tend to have here. Something tells me you will have a hard time taking off the blinders, though.
Saying that it’s improbable for a woman to support Peterson after his pro-incel remarks is not quite the same thing — and is borne out by the observations made by others that a very large majority of Peterson’s fandom is male. Pick a random Petersonian, find a man well over 90% of the time I expect.
In any event, my remark was not meant to claim that all women believe any particular thing; but rather to suggest a low likelihood that this troll is actually a woman. Again: most trolls who show up here are men, including a lot of the ones who claim not to be.
It’s a matter of probabilities, not certainties, however, and I never meant to imply otherwise.
@Scildfreja Unnyðnes:
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