Like most of his fans at the Peterson-Zizek debate, The Guardian is unimpressed with the Canadian Charlatan:
Peterson’s opening remarks were disappointing even for his fans in the audience. They were a vague and not particularly informed (by his own admission) reading of The Communist Manifesto. His comments on one of the greatest feats of human rhetoric were full of expressions like “You have to give the devil his due” and “This is a weird one” and “Almost all ideas are wrong”.
I’ve been a professor, so I know what it’s like to wake up with a class scheduled and no lecture prepared. It felt like that. He wandered between the Paleolithic period and small business management, appearing to know as little about the former as the latter. Watching him, I was amazed that anyone had ever taken him seriously enough to hate him.
He said things like “Marx thought the proletariat was good and the bourgeoisie was evil”. At one point, he made a claim that human hierarchies are not determined by power because that would be too unstable a system, and a few in the crowd tittered. That snapped him back into his skill set: self-defense. “The people who laugh might do it that way,” he replied. By the end of his half-hour he had not mentioned the word happiness once.
I read part of the transcript. It was actually worse than The Guardian describes. As I noted in Jordanetics, Jordan Peterson knows nothing about Marxism despite the way in which he blathers on about “Marxist post-modernists”. But at least he read The Communist Manifesto in preparation for the debate!
But that’s a fitting epitaph for Jordan Peterson’s career as a public pseudo-intellectual: “I was amazed that anyone had ever taken him seriously.” His fifteen minutes are already ending because even his biggest fans are beginning to see through his act.
