By David Futrelle
So the bad news is that Jordan Peterson seems to have discovered the NPC meme, and it’s managed to burrow its way into his unconsciousness.
Peterson is currently on an 85-city tour world tour, and he’s been writing a sort of intermittent tour diary for Canada’s National Post. One recent entry in the series, posted earlier this month, offers a self-portrait of a man on the edge. Possibly on the edge of the toilet, attempting to dislodge whatever it is that forms in one’s bowels when one literally eats nothing but beef and salt and water for months on end. (Dr. Peterson, decidedly not a medical doctor, claims to have gone on the diet to counteract some sort of autoimmune disorder; there is no evidence that all-beef diets help with autoimmune disorders or indeed with much of anything.)
The title of the piece gives a pretty good indication as to his mood: “It’s 2:39 a.m. in Oslo and this irritating man has pushed me too far.” Like Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Peterson begins his tale by describing himself awakening from an uneasy dream; alas, he has not been transformed into a giant cockroach, but remains Jordan Peterson.
The dream seems a fairly straightforward wish fullfillment dream, which involves Peterson beating the crap out of someone asking him a bunch of questions:
In my dream, I wrestled my opponent to the ground. He was still talking, mindlessly, mechanically, rapidly, nonstop. I bent his wrists to force his knuckles into his mouth. His arms bent like rubber and, even though I managed the task, he did not stop babbling. I woke up. 2:39 in Oslo. I’m not in good spirits.
The man in the dream is a fairly transparent stand-in for the “irritating man” of the piece’s headline, a French journalist who had flown to Rochester, New York and then to Oslo to interview him. Peterson didn’t much enjoy the interview, largely because the interviewer kept asking questions, as interviewers are wont to do.
Peterson attempted to explain to this poor fellow his theory about why young men are so angry today, which in his mind has to do with evil feminists telling them that all men are bad. And also that competence is bad.
I told him that young men are … faced with a Devil’s choice: if they are ambitious and competent (or even not ambitious or competent) then they will be treated, not least by themselves, as if they are expressing precisely the traits that produced this terrible [patriarchal] tyranny, and are no better than the infinite oppressors of the past. This happens because it has become acceptable in our time to put forward a version of history, the present and the future that is based on a deep hatred for men (or, even worse, a deep hatred for competence).
Peterson was evidently quite astonished and offended that even after he explained all this to the journalist he still had questions, possibly because nothing Peterson says ever makes any goddamned sense.
He had brought a list of pre-prepared questions, “hard questions,” as he considered them, and did not have the confidence in his own desperation and curiosity to pursue the question that was actually guiding him. He considered himself a liberal, meaning someone attracted by the more radical end of the left, and the story I was telling him was simply not comprehensible: not without the demolition of his entire manner of looking at the world. So he did not have the ears to hear, and actually repeated the question three more times. I gave the same answer each time, to no avail.
After the interview was over, Peterson returned to his hotel room, promptly deciding that the interviewer in question was basically an ideological automaton — that is, what many of his fans (and quite a few Twitter trolls) would call an NPC, the human equivalent of a Non-Player Character in a video game programmed with a limited set of prepackaged responses.
I hadn’t spent two hours talking to a person. The person wasn’t there, or was barely there (even though the journalist had the makings, I would say, of a fine young man). I couldn’t reach him. Instead, I had a very irritating discussion with an ideologically possessed puppet and that was both too familiar and too unpleasant.
And so Peterson went to bed that evening convinced there was nothing wrong with any of his answers; the real problem was that he was talking to a robot man. And then he had a dream about beating up that robot man as he “mindlessly, mechanically” babbled on.
This isn’t the first time Peterson has dismissed an interviewer as a sort of NPC. He did the same during his recent interview with Helen Lewis for the UK edition of GQ. “I could replace you with someone else who thinks the same way,” he told her.
That’s the pathology of ideological possession. It’s not good and it’s not good that I know where you stand on things once I know a few things [about you].
Lewis responded to this by proving that his assumptions about at least some of what she believes were dead wrong (as you can see if you keep watching the full video). But he clearly learned nothing from being shown up in this way. Peterson seems to have grabbed onto the NPC idea too tightly to give it up.
Needless to say, many of his fans have picked up on this, and they’re delighted. We can probably expect an entire new genre of YouTube video, featuring Jordan Peterson (allegedly) DESTROYING one (alleged) NPC feminist after another. And there will be memes. Of course there will be memes. Because the people who like to call other people NPC robot monsters tend to be just a teensy bit predictable.
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Just read the article, with the stories about playground kids.
I know this is the same guy who said women should be enslaved to satisfy the sexual proclivities of mass murderers, but dear gods, I never imagined he was so literally, unabashedly a believer of might makes right. He’s literally teaching his followers to trample on the weak to prove themselves worthy. How sick and demented does a person have to be to trash talk abused children. And then he spins 180 and calls the left wing Maoist genocidal killers.
@Marshmallow Stacey: I think the esteemed British social commentator David Robert Lister coined the term “smeghead” with Trump in mind.
Generally if people keep asking you the same question, it’s because you didn’t answer the damn question. I imagine that this exchange went something like this:
“So, what is your opinion about the color of the sky?”
“Well, personally I think that clouds are incredibly important things and provide valuable water to feed crops for cattle. Which, as you know, is all that I eat.”
“That’s nice, but I asked you what the color of the sky was.”
“I already told you, clouds are very important!”
“Sir, what is your opinion about the color of the sky?”
“You aren’t listening to me! I really like clouds! You are clearly ideologically opposed to clouds and that is why you are acting like a robot.”
@Catalpa:
So far, that’s a conversation that can frequently occur with somebody who has a Special Interest™ and is determined to derail any conversation whatsoever onto the subject; I’ve dealt with (and, regrettably, sometimes been) the type–it’s a matter of developing a “does the other person actually give a shit about this?” filter. (Further refinements: “…and in how much detail?” as well as, “Yes, those strangers at the next restaurant table are discussing my Special Interest™. No, this does not entitle me to gatecrash their conversation.”)
And that’s the line that establishes the speaker as evasive, utterly selfish, or both.
@ Chris Oakley
Wins the Internet tonight.
@Katamount
Peter Coffin dissected the “Horseshoe” centrism political theory about how both the left and the right are equally sinister and the best outcome is centrism. His verdict: it’s bullshit and you can’t be in the middle on a variety of issues, since that makes no logical sense.
Why is this in the form of a Youtube video instead of a text article?
@Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
If you’re referring to Wanda’s post on Peter Coffin’s Video on Horse Shoe theory it’s because he does video essays.
I am bothered by this ongoing trend to so-called “video essays”. Not only can’t you read them at your leisure, at any speed you want to, but you can’t search inside of them either, or copy and paste a quotation from them, or do most of the other things you can do with text. And they need a lot of bandwidth, and will stutter and glitch if your connection is slow.
Who ever could have thought this trend was a good idea?
@Surplus to Requirements, Observer of the Vast Blight-Wing Enstupidation
The the viewership apparently, and the bits of ad revenue that come with. You can watch them when you want, you can download them if you wish like a podcast, you and skip forward and back, and set the clip to a specific time if you wish to quote someone like if you wish to take a specific quote of a documentary or an audio file for a project.
@Surplus
I like video essays because I can listen to them while doing something else, and because I find the voices of some of my favorite youtubers to be relaxing. Even if I’m not necessarily paying close attention to what Dan Olson, Ian Danskin, Lindsay Ellis, hbomberguy, Amelia Cook, or Vrai Kaiser are saying, I like having them on as white noise, of sorts (which is not to say they’re boring. Hell no, they are not boring. It’s just that all of the mentioned people are people whose voices I enjoy listening to. They’re people I’d put alongside Garrison Keillor as people I’d enjoy listening to read the phone book).
Though, I do completely agree with the points you raise.
Videos are very good at creating emotional engagement and reaching a large audience. They’re great at delivering pithy sound bites that make viewers feel particular emotions.
They’re not great, however, at delivering easily referenceable/verifiable and in depth academic information. They’re good at making people feel, and sometimes for giving a general overview of a topic, but they’re not great for making people think.
As a result, videos are often used by charlatans (see: Peterson, thunderfoot, etc.) to support their shitty position by providing a medium that is easy to persuade others with and difficult to fact check. (Also by providing $$ if you get a big audience.)
Not all video essays are manipulative bullcrap, of course. But there are a lot, and they are sadly effective.
So Mark Zuckerberg’s sister has a book out explaining how online misogynists misuse the classics, and how social media’s to blame for the manosphere. Ouch. I wonder if she’s getting any presents from her brother for Christmas this year.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/11/donna-zuckerberg-social-media-misoyny-violence-classical-antiquity-not-all-dead-white-men
I also wonder if David’s going to show up in her reference list. Apparently, to preserve her sanity she restricted herself to no more than one hour a day delving into the morass that is the manosphere.
Re: Video Essays
It would be polite to provide a transcript and/or subtitles for the benefit of those with impaired hearing and/or auditory processing issues, as well as those who simply process better as text. As a member of the latter 2 groups, I am entirely unable to gain any informatuon or other hypothetical benefit, cos I pretty much can’t watch the things.
I wonder, are there browser plugins that allow closed captions to be read aloud? I know the CC’s aren’t perfect, but it might help. They are getting better at capturing audio in text.
I like video essays with subtitles, because that helps with learning pronunciation and spelling, and also because I struggle to understand English when it is fast or with some kind of accent. for my native Language, I think it is nice to listen when i am doing tasks and housework. I especially like Shaun from Shaun and Jen because even though he speaks English he is so slow and clear it is possible for me to understand almost all without subtitles.
It doesn’t surprise me in the least that Drumpf thinks staying out of the rain is more important than honoring the dead.
My grandfather, an enlisted man, arrived in France on September 10, 1914, as part of the BEF and managed to survive the entire war.
He’d throw Drumpf headfirst into a latrine trench.
“In Flanders fields where poppies blow,
Between the crosses row on row,
. . . It’s kinda drizzly — let’s not go.”
@Marshmallow Stacey, Weatherwax, Hippodameia:
His hair, that’s why. That’s why he didn’t go, I’d bet anything. So shameful and ridiculous.
@Valentin, I’m a big fan of Shaun’s videos too. His delivery style is one reason. I know some folks on the left write him off as a liberal, but I get a lot out of his videos.
Also, his takedowns of Cinema Sins are hilarious ?
@Dormousing_it
Exactly. None of the other leaders had an umbrella, so he couldn’t have one without looking ridiculous. And presumably his hair reacts to rain the same way cotton candy does, so…
Or he’s the Wicked Witch of the West and water will make him melt?
Personally I think the hair is an unfortunate tribble surgically attached to his scalp . . .
Re: video essays – it turns out you can get a transcript of the closed captions. It doesn’t read very well because it’s obviously been done at least partly by computer but you can get the gist of it.
@Weird (and tired of trumplings) Eddie,
I have no idea if those old Golden Age Magnus: Robot Fighter comics did have ableism in them (or rather, more than usual for their era), but I have read that those old stories did have a racist subtext to them.
Specifically, Magnus’ main story arc was tracking down robots that gained self-awareness and ran off from their human owners to live in freedom, which had parallels to pre-Civil War Southern slave hunters tracking down runaway slaves. Don’t know if any of Magnus’ original writers were aware of that subtext, but the ones who did his 1990’s revival were, at least. Don’t recall how well they handled it, though.
It also sounds like Peterson has conflated “competence” with “being a pushy arrogant dominating jerk”.