By David Futrelle
Some public intellectuals are so public that they inspire entire mini-genres of memes. One can find innumerable memes featuring the indomitable Marxist philosopher and hot dog fan Slavoj Zizek, left icon Noam Chomsky, and panopticon theorist Michel Foucault; even someone as seemingly memeproof as Susan Sontag has inspired a few. Lesser intellects like antifeminist think-tanker Christina Hoff Sommers and wannabe thinker Ben Shapiro have somehow inspired memes of their own.
Then there’s Jordan Peterson. The reactionary Canadian fussbudget psychologist has inspired more than his fair share of memes, of course. But he also inspires something more: actual fan art — paintings and drawings that have been fussed over for hours.
Some are near-photo-realistic portraits, skillfully done if not terribly original — most are copied or traced directly from photos circulating online. Though done with love and a great deal of earnestness, they’re not always what you might call flattering to Dr. P. (Click on any of the pics below to see the full-sized originals.)
The further they get from their photo originals, the weirder they become. This guy almost gets the head right, but he seems to have used a package of hot dogs as his reference for Dr. P’s fingers.
I don’t know what this guy was thinking; he’s clearly got some technical skills but the results don’t look much like Dr. P or anyone else in particular.
This alleged portrait of the not-so-good doctor looks more like a black velvet painting of some rockabilly artist no one’s ever heard of.
Here Dr. P looks a bit like a startled deer.
Here he looks about 14 years old:
The proportions in this one are so far off I can only conclude it was drawn while looking in a funhouse mirror.
Oh, they get weirder.
… and even weirder than that.
In case you’re really taken with Zombie Peterson here, you can buy an 28″ by 28″ art print of him for the low, low price of $53.99 — reduced to $37.79 if you act by midnight tonight!!!1!!
But the strangest bit of Peterson fan art I’ve seen thus far has to be anime Peterson, complete with the requisite huge eyes and hair that seems to have been borrowed from Milo Yiannopoulos.
It’s the kind of art that makes you ask yourself WHY WHY WHY?
Look, I understand why people do fan art — if you’ve got the talent (and even if you don’t) it’s fun to draw pics of your pop star idols or your favorite characters from a show you love. It’s possible that when I was in college I might have drawn/traced pics of Prince and Adam Ant because, I dunno, I liked their music and thought they looked cool. But I was never tempted to draw pictures of my intellectual idols, who were decidedly less glamorous and, more importantly, it just would have seemed wrong somehow, at odds with the sort of skepticism and critical thinking that they promoted.
Drawing glamorized pictures of Jordan Peterson seems even more wrong. Idolized as a Great Thinker for our age, he’s actually a ponderous lightweight offering little more than reheated Jung mixed with assorted reactionary bromides. When he moves beyond the trite — “Clean your room” — he can barely write a coherent sentence to save his life. He’s a misogynist and a transphobe and a dietary crank.
Yes, I made fun of most of these pictures. But I’m much less bothered by the assorted artistic failures on display here than I am by the fact that these drawings exist at all. Peterson doesn’t deserve fans, much less fan art. Find someone or something better to draw. Might I suggest kitties?
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@Katamount I saw ‘Green Porno’ live in Boston about five years ago. It was one of the greatest performances I have ever seen.
She is a goddess.
@gijoel:
Yes! That’s the first thing I thought of!
Well, actually I thought of the literal version, because pipe wrench fight.
@Nequam
Great, now I can’t get the thought out of my head. Not cool man.
@Lainy
https://imgur.com/B0fdcaY
(can somebody tell me the codes for inserting pics? I have desperate need of them)
@Diego – Just make sure the link you post ends in an image format. So, this:
is the exactly the same, but with .gif
@Diego Duarte:
To insert an image, just typing in the URL should work, but it should be only http and not https, it needs to end with .gif, .jpg, or .png, and it should be on a line of its own. So http://i.imgur.com/B0fdcaY.gif should work:
http://i.imgur.com/B0fdcaY.gif
@LindsayIrene
And not a moment too soon. Hopefully soon he goes back to being a nobody. I’m sick of hearing about him.
@Jenora and Rhuu
Thank you!
@Moggie
Honest fan art of JP would depict him leading a horde of sea lions.
“I don’t like Star Wars, so please stop drawing fan art of it.”
This is how you sound right now.
The “pure instinct” justification for hierarchies is still cherry picking nonsense.
Other animals who are millions of years old: ants and bees, matriarchal, communal organisms with disposable males. . Some squids/cuttlefish have two types of males, a large, aggressive one who fights other large, aggressive males, and a “pseudo female” male who looks like and socializes with the females. The females reproduce with both types.
And that’s not even getting into anglerfish or mantises. Even among the famously aggressive chimpanzees, the whole idea of the alpha male was turned upside down when the researchers began dna testing among studied troops and discovered that the babies were often not fathered by the big brute who makes all the noise, but by other, “subordinate” males who treat the females better.
With the hands in pic 2, I’m always going to think of him as Dickfingers Peterson.
In addition to that, there’s thousand of example where animal instinct isn’t the best possible behavior. Some predator exploit the predictability of the flight reflex on their prey to make them “flee” directly toward them, for example. And panic-induced trample in human often massively increase body count in fires and catastrophes.
So any attempt at saying “we should follow our instinct” should at least demonstrate that’s it’s not worse than current behavior.
That, and frankly, if it was instinct, we would already be doing it.
I have severe doubts about how devoted Peterson would be to his ideas of hierarchy if say, Dwayne Johnson showed up at his door asking his wife for a date.
@Weasel-Rah
But but but, Jordan’s a Nice Guy&trade, so Dwayne shouldn’t take his wife. He’s a hard-working beta who deserves a wife. /s
Most species of lobsters don’t behave the way JP claims, the guy is a complete pseudointellectual hack.
Isn’t the reason that he chose lobsters is because they share a neuro chemical we have?
Or, at least, one of the reasons he chose them. According to this article, it’s serotonin.
And what always confused me is that serotonin isn’t an uncommon thing, AFAIK?????
@Rhuu
You are correct. It’s found in basically every animal more complex than a jellyfish, and some plants and fungi (though for a different purpose). I want JP to try to explain how mushroom hierarchies show us anything about how to run society.
@Ash
Unfortunately, I have watched some of his videos. Jordan Peterson is an idiot who is bigoted in so many ways. If anyone actually looks to him as a role model or inspiration, that is just sad. There’s really no context that makes his shit any better.
Damn, right on schedule. Say what you want about JP, but say least his trains run on time!
Told you, dude. Sea lions.
There’s also the fact that, quite bluntly, he rose to prominence by flat-out lying and fear-mongering about a minor change to the Canadian Human Rights Code. He said it was going to criminalize the use of the ‘wrong’ pronouns. In practice, all it really means is that if you’re harassing somebody and deliberately using the wrong pronouns is part of how you do it, it can be treated as a more serious crime. It’s still as difficult to prove as harassment usually is.
I ended up in a rather heated discussion with a couple of old friends about this at one point. One had been listening to Peterson, and hadn’t engaged critical thinking facilities yet. Between myself with some (admittedly minor) understanding of how the law actually works, and the other friend who was ex-military, transitioning, and had pulled up and read the exact wording of the change in question, we managed to get him to stop trying to convince us that Peterson was right.
(No idea how deep it really sank in, but this friend was more the ‘catches bits of pop philosophy every so often and tends to not think about them too critically’ type rather than the ‘personal self-image invested in the status quo’ type, and we’re still on speaking terms, so I like to think we’re good.)
Ahmed,
Can you please point out where exactly David told anyone to stop making Peterson fan art? I mean, he did suggest drawing kitties instead, but he’s not going and harassing the artists or anything.
Also, the difference between this and Star Wars fan art is that Star Wars isn’t misogynistic and transphobic and Star Wars is way cooler than Jordan Peterson. I’d even rather sit through the Jar-Jar Binks scenes in Phantom Menace again then try to sit through a Jordan Peterson video. Much less obnoxious and long winded.
Ash, you can find the man inspirational if you like, but be honest with yourself. All the good parts of his advice are things your mommy already told you when you were five.
Your article says a lot more about you than about Dr. Peterson. It’s also incredibly puerile to level insults without any supporting evidence.
I was moderately disappointed once with a law student that I know. He was passionate about certain human rights issues and I thought maybe he was all right. But then he started describing how the people he works with are usually much more liberal than him. Eventually he started talking about Jordan Peterson and trying to give a nuanced defense. This is a law student and he of all people should know better.
For anyone who hasn’t yet seen Ian Danskin’s recent video on “How to Radicalize a Normie” yet, it might be worth a watch before engaging with the Peterson stans who are showing up here. In particular, it addresses why the incoherence of Peterson’s messages don’t faze them and how that connects with their fixation on getting others to watch his videos and read his books.
weirwoodtreehugger says:
The bigger difference is that Star Wars is a work of fiction while Peterson is a creator of fiction. So a more appropriate analogy on Ahmed’s part would be asking people to stop making fan art of George Lucas.
Though, there’s still the issue of how Lucas is at least honest his works are fiction while Peterson pretends he’s generating facts. Really, it’s more akin to Chairman Mao iconography if anything.