I’ll be going on it to discuss Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson at 2:30 Eastern today. Discuss amongst yourselves….
It was definitely a high-energy interview. My favorite part was this:
Alex Jones: “WE DON’T NEED JORDAN PETERSON TELLING US HOW TO WIPE OUR ASSES!”
I didn’t misrepresent Jordan Peterson at all. I can conclusively support my case, which is constructed entirely upon his own words. The cargo cultist reaction is about what one would expect.
And this guest is the worst. Totally misrepresented Jordan Peterson entirely. From basic stuff like “Rule two: Take your pills” to big stuff like calling him fundamentally unbalanced, when Jordan answers questions like “do you believe in God” with “I act as if God exists, now you can interpret if you think i believe in God”. These are not the ramblings of an unbalanced person, like this guest appears to think, but the well thought out and articulated answers to fundamental questions Peterson addresses constantly.
You guys are really throwing the baby out with the bathwater on this one and losing credibility FAST.
The funny thing is that it is always Peterson’s fans who misrepresent him. Usually because they a) haven’t actually read his books or b) don’t understand what he is saying.
I did a Darkstream on the subject of Peterson’s core purpose. This is the passage from Maps of Meaning that directed me towards that purpose which I discussed on the show with Mr. Jones.
The great forces of empiricism and rationality and the great technique of the experiment have killed myth, and it cannot be resurrected—or so it seems. We still act out the precepts of our forebears, nonetheless, although we can no longer justify our actions. Our behavior is shaped (at least in the ideal) by the same mythic rules—thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not covet—that guided our ancestors for the thousands of years they lived without benefit of formal empirical thought. This means that those rules are so powerful—so necessary, at least—that they maintain their existence (and expand their domain) even in the presence of explicit theories that undermine their validity. That is a mystery. And here is another:
How is it that complex and admirable ancient civilizations could have developed and flourished, initially, if they were predicated upon nonsense? (If a culture survives, and grows, does that not indicate in some profound way that the ideas it is based upon are valid? If myths are mere superstitious proto-theories, why did they work? Why were they remembered? Our great rationalist ideologies, after all—fascist, say, or communist— demonstrated their essential uselessness within the space of mere generations, despite their intellectually compelling nature. Traditional societies, predicated on religious notions, have survived—essentially unchanged, in some cases, for tens of thousands of years. How can this longevity be understood?) Is it actually sensible to argue that persistently successful traditions are based on ideas that are simply wrong, regardless of their utility?
Is it not more likely that we just do not know how it could be that traditional notions are right, given their appearance of extreme irrationality?
Is it not likely that this indicates modern philosophical ignorance, rather than ancestral philosophical error?
Peterson’s initial error is that he still accepts the false assumptions of the rationalists and claiming myth is dead. I’ll explain the consequences of that error in the Darkstream.