Author: VD

Fake Opposition confirmed

Vox Day Exposes Jordan Peterson And The Left’s Plan To Take Control Of The Nationalist Movement: Vox Day joins Alex Jones live via Skype to break down how Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson are puppets of the left, used to take control of the nationalist movement and destroy its potential. 

That is the name of the video that InfoWars posted on May 7, 2018. It inspired the sort of responses that you can probably anticipate by now.

Vox is obviously jealous of Peterson and Shapiro’s success. He’s trying to be as relevant as they are.

So, about that relevance…. The timing of the video was rather timely, and its title was rather prophetic, because the very next day, May 8, 2018, The New York Times posted an article entitled Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web: An alliance of heretics is making an end run around the mainstream conversation. Should we be listening?

What is the I.D.W. and who is a member of it? It’s hard to explain, which is both its beauty and its danger.

Most simply, it is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels.

The closest thing to a phone book for the I.D.W. is a sleek website that lists the dramatis personae of the network, including Mr. Harris; Mr. Weinstein and his brother and sister-in-law, the evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying; Jordan Peterson, the psychologist and best-selling author; the conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and Douglas Murray; Maajid Nawaz, the former Islamist turned anti-extremist activist; and the feminists Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christina Hoff Sommers. But in typical dark web fashion, no one knows who put the website up.

The core members have little in common politically. Bret and Eric Weinstein and Ms. Heying were Bernie Sanders supporters. Mr. Harris was an outspoken Hillary voter. Ben Shapiro is an anti-Trump conservative.

But they all share three distinct qualities. First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.

Actually, it’s not difficult to explain at all. The “Intellectual Dark Web” is the Fake Opposition, the roots of the Conservative Media 3.0. William F. Buckley’s Conservative Media 1.0 is literally bankrupt, Bill Kristol’s Conservative Media 2.0 lost its last vestiges of credibility due to the failures of the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and now the mainstream media needs a new squad to put on the uniforms of the Washington Generals to go out in front of the public and take a dive.

It is NeverTrump: the media edition.

This is a familiar gambit. Not only are the dramatic portraits of the various Dark Webbers almost identical to those decorating the 2006 Wired piece entitled “The Church of the Non-Believers“, but they’ve even recycled both Sam Harris and Michael Shermer as Very Important Intellectuals du Jour. Frankly, I’m a little disappointed that they didn’t dig up the corpse of Christopher Hitchens and include him too while they were at it.

Who is a member of the IDW? Anyone who a) is not Christian, b) is not a nationalist, c) is vaguely palatable to the political Right, and most importantly, d) will not upset the mainstream media narrative.

Who put the website up? I would assume Eric Weinstein, Bret Weinstein, and Heather Heying, three media non-entities who are attempting to put themselves on par with far more recognizable media figures like Christina Hoff Summers and Sam Harris, in cooperation with Claire Lehmann, whose site is hosting the little clubhouse.

More significant figures such as Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, Stefan Molyneaux, Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, and Ivan Throne are conspicuously absent; one woman, Debra Soh, has less than one-fifteenth the number of Twitter followers that Cernovich has. Needless to say, I’m not exactly surprised by the identities of two of the leading members.

Before September 2016, Jordan Peterson was an obscure psychology professor at the University of Toronto. Then he spoke out against Canada’s Bill C-16, which proposed amending the country’s human-rights act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and expression. He resisted on the grounds that the bill risked curtailing free speech by compelling people to use alternative gender pronouns. He made YouTube videos about it. He went on news shows to protest it. He confronted protesters calling him a bigot. When the university asked him to stop talking about it, including sending two warning letters, he refused.

While most people in the group faced down comrades on the political left, Ben Shapiro confronted the right. He left his job as editor at large of Breitbart News two years ago because he believed it had become, under Steve Bannon’s leadership, “Trump’s personal Pravda.” In short order, he became a primary target of the alt-right and, according to the Anti-Defamation League, the No. 1 target of anti-Semitic tweets during the presidential election.

Now do you see? Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are both Fake Opposition, media con artists to the core. In fact, the very event that reportedly made Peterson famous appears to have been based on a mischaracterization of the law by Peterson. So much for the courage of his much-vaunted stand.

Here is my question for conservatives. If it is correct to reject people for their associations, how can any Christian or conservative not reject Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro in light of their membership in this New York Times-approved club? Especially given that The New York Times is very clear about where the line of acceptable opposition is to be drawn.

Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard. But go a click in another and you’ll find alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich (the #PizzaGate huckster) and Alex Jones (the Sandy Hook shooting denier).

It’s hard to draw boundaries around an amorphous network, especially when each person in it has a different idea of who is beyond the pale.

“I don’t know that we are in the position to police it,” Mr. Rubin said. “If this thing becomes something massive — a political or social movement — then maybe we’d need to have some statement of principles. For now, we’re just a crew of people trying to have the kind of important conversations that the mainstream won’t.”

But is a statement of principles necessary to make a judgment call about people like Mr. Cernovich, Mr. Molyneux and Mr. Yiannopoulos? It seems to me that if you are willing to sit across from an Alex Jones or Mike Cernovich and take him seriously, there’s a high probability that you’re either cynical or stupid.

The Fake Opposition is not even Alt-Lite. They’re simply Not Right at all. And they’re not being invited to speak at Ivy League colleges, appearing on Fox, CNN, and the BBC, and being featured in The New York Times complete with flattering pictures featuring dramatic lighting because they are on our side.

Truth and the true purpose of Jordanetics

Just a few of the typical responses of Jordan Peterson’s cargo cultists to my latest critiques. The interesting thing, to me, is the way the goalposts keep moving, and the way they keep getting more hysterical, the more directly I address what their Broken Prophet has written or said.

I thought Vox Day was supposed to be some deep thinker of the Alt Right (or was it something called The Dark Enlightenment?) I never bothered to follow it up. My Latin is small to none but isn’t Vox Dei the “voice of God”? Hard to take someone with that handle seriously. Now I see all these meandering videos attacking JBP and his book.  VD’s attacks are embarrasingly weak. If he doesn’t like JBP’s squeals against The Right he should just suck it up and watch the drama.

This video is reminiscent of a Cenk Uygur TYT hit piece. You sir, have not represented yourself well here.

You are a fucking moron. He’s never claimed to be of the Left, on the Right, conservative, Christian,……..nothing. Your straw-manning and emotionally driven OPINION of what he may or may not be is no criticism. You Vox, don’t define Conservatism, Christianity, philosophy, psychology, and certainly not Jordan Peterson with your armchair quarter-backing sideline “criticisms”.

I’d like to show you how much of a Gamma male you are now Vox, and not you 6th grade self either. You are pompous, self-aggrandizing coward. You sir, are a jealous loser.

Your such a scrounge little bitch Vox.

Wow. Rekt. Wait, no, it’s just more self congratulatory Vox Day overestimating himself as he’s been doing for decades.

How do you know what someone thinks without direct engagement of question and answer to clarify? That is communication 101.

New it! All this a ploy for you to get attention. Dude Peterson doesnt even know you exist. Peterson fans barely know you exist. He became an intellectual figure through his book Maps of Meaning and his peer reviewed studies that have over 10,000 citations. Your a bloger and failed writer.

Dude. You have less then 3k subscribers. Your comment section on that video is bellow 300. The only People watching you and agreeing with are your mindless fans. How bad do you have be at this game to have been around for a decade, upload regularly, appear on big shows like Stefans and only 2.4k subs. Your a hack.

This guy is projecting harder than anyone I’ve ever seen.

Obviously, you have neither read Maps of Meaning nor watched his lectures. JP is a psychologist not a philosopher like you. JP is writing for an audience of lower IQ , immature folks. You are not his audience.

It honestly just seems like you’re trying to get attention and are jealous of his success

Vox seems to be jealous of petersons succes. You have become irrelevant vox

What seems nuts to me is devoting so much time to a man you obviously disrespect. Why does it bother you so bad that a great many people resonate with Peterson and seem to be helped by him? When you write your book let’s see how well it sells. You come across as a jealous narcissist. Maybe people like Peterson because he doesn’t talk down to them. I got more out of just the contents page of his book than your entire video. Grandiose word salad is a perfect description if you look in the mirror. Would love to see a debate between a man with common sense and one with a chip on his shoulder. Good luck with your Sour Grapes series.

An interesting way to defend the man who supposedly encourages criticism, to be sure. The other thing that is interesting about the responses to my critiques is the way that the definitions of Jordan Peterson’s “truth” keep growing in number. Here are four of the various definitions presently on offer.

  1. If you are going to go for a definition of truth that JBP subscribes to, one should probably go with the one that JBP mentions: pragmatism and the book that he recommends: The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand.
  2. Peterson subscribes to a pragmatist version of the Coherence theory of truth…. On Peterson’s stated theory of truth, an idea can be thought to be true (or false) at a “micro” or “proximal” level – e.g., at the level of a scientific experiment, or at some other level that does not take the morality of the idea into account – yet actually be false (or true) at a “macro” or “distal” level that includes a consideration of whether the idea is pro-survival or anti-survival (i.e., good or evil). For Peterson, it is the macro/distal level – the level that includes a consideration of the morality of the effects of an idea – that determines the idea’s truth or falsity.  For Peterson, the standard of the moral truth – i.e., of the goodness – of an idea is that the effect of the using or acting upon an idea is ultimately pro-survival (of the individual, or a number of individuals, or all of humanity).
  3. Peterson isn’t so much ascribing to a coherence theory of truth, its more a pragmatic form of Nietzsche’s Perspectivism. Perspectivism would hold that there are no objective metaphysical truths, or if there are they are completely unknowable so it doesn’t matter anyways. This is a bit rooted in subjective idealism and phenomology and existenitalism…something something about consciousness/mind being fundamental, that reality is only the perceptions of human consciouness and not in any way independently existening. And then you add on the Will to Power and the human Will being the central force in the universe, yada yada yada. (We are talking about a literal madman here…) So with that basis every Will is subjected to its perspectives, its own way of interpreting its perceptions. Thus no truth is absolute and objective, for any such truth would need to be capable of transcending all limits on perception. 
  4. My understanding is that Peterson argues that human interaction and agency works through logos and narrative, and so can be considered a separate system from objective, scientific reality. Following from that, he says that the narrative structure is embedded in the psyche, and its archetypes can embody psychological truths that he considers more meaningful than scientific truths.

Keep in mind that Peterson fans insist that he speaks with precision and clarity, even though they subscribe to at least five different versions of his definition of truth. So let’s hear what Jordan Peterson himself has to say about truth:

  • I don’t think facts are necessarily true. So I don’t think this scientific facts, even if they’re correct from within the domain that they were generated, I don’t think that that necessarily makes them true. And I know that I am gerrymandering the definition of truth, but I’m doing that on purpose.
  • Your truth is something only you can tell, based as it is on the unique circumstances of your life. Apprehend your personal truth.

Now, what other school of thought do we know that insists truth depends upon adherence to a narrative? Contrast those seven definitions of truth with the two that I favor:

  • Aristotle: To say that that which is, is not or that which is not is, is a falsehood; and to say that that which is, is and that which is not is not, is true.
  • Jesus Christ: Let your Yes be Yes, and your No, No. For whatever is more than these is from the evil one.

In any event, I believe I have finally ascertained the central purpose of Jordanetics and identified the core of Jordan Peterson’s perception of himself as a world savior, thanks to Maps of Meaning. I will go into more detail in a future post and Darkstream, but in essence, Jordanetics is the consequence of the failure of the New Atheism and the neo-liberal world order, particularly as it relates to immigration. No one can believe in the sexy secular science fiction future anymore, and the fruits of mass immigration and multiculturalism have created a growing longing for the Western societal ideal of 1950s Christian White America, which, unlike all the various alternatives proposed, has the benefit of actually having existed and known to function more or less as advertised.

Jordanetics is a desperate attempt to stave off the grand historical trends presently playing out, to prevent the pendulum from swinging back, to avert the growing pressure to rebuild Western societies that are European and Christian. But it won’t work, it can’t work, because by every historical and sociological measure, Man is long overdue for war on a societal level, if not a civilizational one. And remember, homogeneous nations have usually risen out of the ashes of heterogeneous empires.

Interview with Moira Greyland

Many of those observing my ongoing vivisection of Jordan Peterson’s philosophy are of the opinion that these things don’t really matter very much, that discussion of philosophies and moralities is esoteric discourse best left to intellectuals and that distinguishing between good and evil philosophies is irrelevant.

But as the experience of Moira Greyland shows, philosophy matters. Because evil philosophy is always utilized to justify, excuse, and even celebrate evil actions by moral monstrosities. Read the whole interview, it will provide new insight even to those who have read The Last Closet.

LifeSite: Many science fiction and fantasy authors have treated pedophilia, incest, and homosexuality with a creepy sort of sympathy. For example, Robert Heinlein’s “Time Enough for Love,” has a protagonist who has sexual relations with his adopted daughter, clones himself as two women and “marries” them (as well as two men), and finally travels back in time where he has sexual relations with his own mother. The book was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards and Heinlein was called the “dean of science fiction writers,” and his followers have created a “Robert Heinlein award” for science fiction writing.

My question is this: as one who grew up in this world and was so terribly victimized by such attitudes, why do you believe sci-fi and fantasy writers and their fans have such a thirst for this kind of material? What is the connection between these genres of literature and these pathological tendencies?

Moira Greyland: People wanted to have promiscuous sex and the books gave them a map.  The authors writing about the promiscuous sex were hailed as Great Thinkers, and it was assumed that if the people in the books were happy and promiscuous, then it would work out that way in real life.

Throwing off sexual morality meant more sex, more often, with no way for women to refuse without being labeled “prudish.”  It meant an end to the sexual dominance of the biggest and the strongest, and meant any ugly jerk could get laid if he had drugs and a good line.

Sexual morality is questioned, and all the rules are thrown out.  Suddenly, instead of having one husband and one wife, people are having all kinds of sex with all kinds of people, and a lot of people like it.  Some are too drug-addled, drunk or stupid to think through the implications, and others have weak personalities and go along with anything their husband or wife demands provided they can stay married.

But here is the trouble.  Since the new social circle operates on a new rulebook, whether it is the Stranger in a Strange Land rulebook or the Darkover rulebook, it is no longer acceptable to do things the old way.  In practice, the wife who has a broken heart because her husband is carrying on with five women, or five small boys, had better keep her mouth shut or risk losing him.

Since the books delegitimize jealousy and fidelity, troubles in the relationship which normally result from adultery must be blamed on something else.  Now instead of it being normal to hate the other woman, the wife is in the atrocious position of having to blame her own jealousy and possessiveness for her agony.  She can no longer blame her husband for his conduct, and must instead blame herself.

Naturally, in practice, this is a recipe for disaster.  The result is divorce, abortions, broken homes, single parenthood, and always the blame was misplaced.  Adultery does not work.  Promiscuity does not work.  Polyamory does not work.  But if you are in a social circle where they are normalized, you have to swallow the poison pill or lose your social group.

Even in the weirdest social circle, there will be a few good couples who love each other and who just can’t get into the poly stuff no matter how fashionable it might be.  One might even think that those people have a moral compass or a backbone, and they are probably the couple that heads on over to church while the rest of their circle are sleeping off the debauchery.   Are they aware that their morality has saved their marriage and their family?  Maybe.  But you can be sure they do not trumpet their differences.  And years after the dust settles, it will be those couples who say “I always felt funny about the weird sex in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s books.”

And it will be those couples who have stayed together.

Once God is removed from the picture, so are the limits of the moral structure He has imposed on Man. And then, “do what thou wilt” becomes the whole of the law, whether it is “with due regard for the policeman around the corner” or “without overlooking the guidelines of your culture since life is short, and you don’t have time to figure everything out on your own.”

Hollywood values in Albany

Ronan Farrow takes another scalp. At this point, we’re going to have to consider naming him an honorary Native American.

Three hours after the publication of this story, Schneiderman resigned from his position. “While these allegations are unrelated to my professional conduct or the operations of the office, they will effectively prevent me from leading the office’s work at this critical time,” he said in a statement. “I therefore resign my office, effective at the close of business on May 8, 2018.”

Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, has long been a liberal Democratic champion of women’s rights, and recently he has become an outspoken figure in the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment. As New York State’s highest-ranking law-enforcement officer, Schneiderman, who is sixty-three, has used his authority to take legal action against the disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein, and to demand greater compensation for the victims of Weinstein’s alleged sexual crimes. Last month, when the Times and this magazine were awarded a joint Pulitzer Prize for coverage of sexual harassment, Schneiderman issued a congratulatory tweet, praising “the brave women and men who spoke up about the sexual harassment they had endured at the hands of powerful men.” Without these women, he noted, “there would not be the critical national reckoning under way.”

Now Schneiderman is facing a reckoning of his own. As his prominence as a voice against sexual misconduct has risen, so, too, has the distress of four women with whom he has had romantic relationships or encounters. They accuse Schneiderman of having subjected them to nonconsensual physical violence. All have been reluctant to speak out, fearing reprisal. But two of the women, Michelle Manning Barish and Tanya Selvaratnam, have talked to The New Yorker on the record, because they feel that doing so could protect other women. They allege that he repeatedly hit them, often after drinking, frequently in bed and never with their consent. Manning Barish and Selvaratnam categorize the abuse he inflicted on them as “assault.” They did not report their allegations to the police at the time, but both say that they eventually sought medical attention after having been slapped hard across the ear and face, and also choked. Selvaratnam says that Schneiderman warned her he could have her followed and her phones tapped, and both say that he threatened to kill them if they broke up with him.

I wonder how long it will be before Farrow comes under fire for his relentless anti-Semitism. It can’t be a coincidence that so many of the sex criminals he is exposing happen to be members of the same identity group, can it?

I wonder how Jordan Peterson would explain this group overrepresentation among sex criminals? Is that a consequence of high mean IQ too?

Mailvox: an answer to prayer

Apparently the ways of God are very mysterious indeed.

I have been following Jordan Peterson for the last year and his teachings really appealed to me. However, I kept having this nagging feeling that something wasn’t right or some sense of danger. It bothered me that he was always cagey about if he was a Christian or not. All of the fellow Christians I know will tell you pretty quickly they are believers. So I prayed about it and asked that if he was a false prophet or a danger that he would be revealed. Within a few months of my first prayer, the Dark Lord turns his eye upon Jordan Peterson. Prayer answered!

Perhaps it is a coincidence or perhaps it is divine inspiration. But there is no need to take my opinion as given. The truth is out there. And by “truth”, I mean Aristotelian Correspondence truth, not any of the many contradictory definitions provided by Peterson fans. I actually find myself getting increasingly annoyed with the uninformed Peterson fans who quite clearly have not sufficiently familiarized themselves with the teachings of their psycho-prophet and accuse me of doing nothing more than making groundless accusations which don’t prove anything out of envy, ignorance, and malice.

The really strange thing about all of this is that I had no absolutely no interest in Jordan Peterson whatsoever. I knew he made videos and he’d written a bestseller, but I didn’t even know what it was called. I was under the vague impression that the book that sounded a little like Hillary Clinton’s book was the recent bestseller. All I knew is that he got it wrong about Ashkenazi mean IQ and then doubled down when he was called on it. Having previously done the relevant demographic math, I made my point in a matter of minutes – he was wrong and he had to know it – and would have happily left it at that were it not for the angry Jordan Peterson fans attacking me and claiming that the good doctor was a great Christian man dedicated to the truth and a saint who would never have done such a thing.

The more I looked into the man, the more falsehood I saw. Now I’ve seen that every time I quote the man, I am accused of misrepresenting, mischaracterizing, misleading, and lying by the very people who are denying that Jordan Peterson is what he himself claims to be. They will go so far as to claim that he doesn’t really mean what he says, he doesn’t really understand what he says, and he doesn’t actually know what he is saying rather than take the man at his word and accept that he is not what they believe him to be.

Challenge accepted. If they require a conclusively damning case even the man’s own wife can’t deny, then I will give it to them. Deus vult, apparently.

Jordan Peterson is a conservative.

I abandoned the traditions that supported me, at about the same time I left childhood. This meant that I had no broader socially constructed “philosophy” at hand to aid my understanding as I became aware of the existential problems that accompany maturity. The final consequences ofthat lack took years to become fully manifest. In the meantime, however, my nascent concern with questions of moral justice found immediate resolution. I started working as a volunteer for a mildly socialist political party, and adopted the party line.

Economic injustice was at the root of all evil, as far as I was concerned. Such injustice could be rectified, as a consequence of the rearrangement of social organizations. I could play a part in that admirable revolution, carrying out my ideological beliefs….

I had attended several left-wing party congresses, as a student politician and active party worker. I hoped to emulate the socialist leaders. The left had a long and honorable history in Canada, and attracted some truly competent and caring people. However, I could not generate much respect for the numerous low-level party activists I encountered at these meetings. They seemed to live to complain. They had no career, frequently, and no family, no completed education—nothing but ideology. They were peevish, irritable, and little, in every sense of the word. I was faced, in consequence, with the mirror image of the problem I encountered on the college board: I did not admire many of the individuals who believed the same things I did. This additional complication furthered my existential confusion.

My college roommate, an insightful cynic, expressed skepticism regarding my ideological beliefs. He told me that the world could not be completely encapsulated within the boundaries of socialist philosophy. I had more or less come to this conclusion on my own, but had not admitted so much in words. Soon afterward, however, I read George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier. This book finally undermined me—not only my socialist ideology, but my faith in ideological stances themselves. In the famous essay concluding that book (written for—and much to the dismay of—the British Left Book Club) Orwell described the great flaw of socialism, and the reason for its frequent failure to attract and maintain democratic power (at least in Britain). Orwell said, essentially, that socialists did not really like the poor. They merely hated the rich. His idea struck home instantly. Socialist ideology served to mask resentment and hatred, bred by failure. Many of the party activists I had encountered were using the ideals of social justice to rationalize their pursuit of personal revenge.

Whose fault was it that I was poor or uneducated and unadmired? Obviously, the fault of the rich, well-schooled and respected. How convenient, then, that the demands of revenge and abstract justice dovetailed! It was only right to obtain recompense from those more fortunate than me.

Of course, my socialist colleagues and I weren’t out to hurt anyone. Quite the reverse. We were out to improve things—but we were going to start with other people. I came to see the temptation in this logic, the obvious flaw, the danger—but could also see that it did not exclusively characterize socialism. Anyone who was out to change the world by changing others was to be regarded with suspicion. The temptations of such a position were too great to be resisted.

It was not socialist ideology that posed the problem, then, but ideology as such.
– Maps of Meaning

Jordan Peterson is a Christian

Although I had grown up in a Christian environment—and had a successful and happy childhood, in at least partial consequence—I was more than willing to throw aside the structure that had fostered me. No one really opposed my rebellious efforts, either, in church or at home—in part because those who were deeply religious (or who might have wanted to be) had no intellectually acceptable counter-arguments at their disposal. After all, many of the basic tenets of Christian belief were incomprehensible, if not clearly absurd. The virgin birth was an impossibility; likewise, the notion that someone could rise from the dead.
– Maps of Meaning

Lott: Do you believe that Jesus rose again from the dead?”

Peterson: I cannot answer that question. And the reason is because… okay… let me think about that for a minute… see if I can come up with a reasonable answer for that. Well, the first answer would be: It depends on what you mean by Jesus…. I don’t understand the structure of being well enough to make my way through the complexities of the resurrection story, I would say it’s the most mysterious element of the biblical stories to me, and perhaps I’m not alone in that, it’s the central drama in the Christian corpus let’s say. But I don’t believe that it’s reasonable to boil it down to something like “do you believe that or do you not believe it”, you know, it’s not… I don’t know what the limits… I don’t know the limits of human possibility.
– Am I Christian? Interview with Tim Lott.

Jordan Peterson’s approach is that of a psychiatrist, not a philosopher or theologian

I am playing at the philosophical level, or maybe I’m playing at the theological level and what I am trying to do is say what I think as clearly as I possibly can and to listen to the feedback and modify my message when that seems to be necessary and apart from that I am willing to let the chips fall where they will.
– NBC interview

Jordan Peterson believes in God.

Q: How would you define your God? Do you believe in the supernatural? Do you pray?

A: My God is the spirit that is trying to elevate Being. My God is the spirit that makes everything come together. My God is the spirit that makes order out of chaos and then recasts order when it has become too limiting. My God is the spirit of truth incarnate. None of that is supernatural. It is instead what is most real. It depends on what you mean by pray. I don’t ask God for favors, if that’s what you mean.
– Reddit Ask Me Anything, 2017

Taken out of contexts

This defense of Jordan Peterson is very typical of the other attempted defenses of the man and his philosophy that I have seen. From a comment on the Darkstream: The Core Purpose of Jordan Peterson.

That is completely taken out of contexts. Hes encouraging people to clean up there act. The first step is stop doing things you know to be wrong.  Hes encouraging you not to get mixed up in philosophy of weather or not something is actual wrong because you can end up justifying anything. He says in starting out this process you can use your own standard (although he strongly emphasizes looking at tradition) to guide you in stopping the actions you know you shouldn’t do.

The “.Perhaps you will then see that if all people did this, in their own lives, the world might stop being an evil place.” comes way later on the page and doesn’t directly follow the “use your own standard” line Vox is quoting. That quote is suggesting if people stooped lying and started taking care of what is right in front of them and fulfilled there responsibility’s to one another then the world might be better. Not “If everyone does what makes them happy everything would be great”

That is so against Peterson’s world view its not even funny. Vox is deliberately miss-characterizing and slandering Peterson.

Oh, is that so? Well then, let’s read what Peterson actually wrote, in full. The quote I selected and correctly indicated I left out a section of text with ellipses is in bold.

You can use your own standards of judgment. You can rely on yourself for guidance. You don’t have to adhere to some external, arbitrary code of behaviour (although you should not overlook the guidelines of your culture. Life is short, and you don’t have time to figure everything out on your own. The wisdom of the past was hard-earned, and your dead ancestors may have something useful to tell you).

Don’t blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city? Let your own soul guide you. Watch what happens over the days and weeks. When you are at work you will begin to say what you really think. You will start to tell your wife, or your husband, or your children, or your parents, what you really want and need. When you know that you have left something undone, you will act to correct the omission. Your head will start to clear up, as you stop filling it with lies. Your experience will improve, as you stop distorting it with inauthentic actions. You will then begin to discover new, more subtle things that you are doing wrong. Stop doing those, too. After some months and years of diligent effort, your life will become simpler and less complicated. Your judgment will improve. You will untangle your past. You will become stronger and less bitter. You will move more confidently into the future. You will stop making your life unnecessarily difficult. You will then be left with the inevitable bare tragedies of life, but they will no longer be compounded with bitterness and deceit.

Perhaps you will discover that your now less-corrupted soul, much stronger than it might otherwise have been, is now able to bear those remaining, necessary, minimal, inescapable tragedies. Perhaps you will even learn to encounter them so that they stay tragic—merely tragic—instead of degenerating into outright hellishness. Maybe your anxiety, and hopelessness, and resentment, and anger—however murderous, initially—will recede. Perhaps your uncorrupted soul will then see its existence as a genuine good, as something to celebrate, even in the face of your own vulnerability. Perhaps you will become an ever-more-powerful force for peace and whatever is good.

Perhaps you will then see that if all people did this, in their own lives, the world might stop being an evil place. After that, with continued effort, perhaps it could even stop being a tragic place. Who knows what existence might be like if we all decided to strive for the best? Who knows what eternal heavens might be established by our spirits, purified by truth, aiming skyward, right here on the fallen Earth?

Alex Jones show

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.

Book Review: 12 RULES OF LIFE: An Antidote to Chaos

Jordan Peterson is the public intellectual du jour. Some have even declared that he is the most important public intellectual in the world. Primarily known for his videos and lectures, his second book, 12 Rules of Life: An Antidote to Chaos, is a practical distillation of his philosophy that has been an international bestseller and has also been widely and enthusiastically embraced as a useful guide to improving one’s life.

To the extent that this is true, it is a tragic indictment of the extent to which parents have increasingly failed to raise their children properly. Peterson’s rules are pedestrian and childish on their face, encouraging the reader to stand up straight, speak precisely, tell the truth, pet the neighborhood cat, and generally behave the way in which a 10-year-old boy from a good family was historically expected to behave for most of the 20th century in the West. This is all well and good, even if the fact that it is apparently necessary to explain these things to adult men and women tends to inspire one to weep for the state of modern Man.

However, the more sophisticated reader cannot help but notice that Peterson does not follow his own rules, particularly the three which relate to speaking precisely, telling the truth, and getting one’s own house in order before trying to fix the world.

Peterson is an engaging and accessible writer when he is simply recounting events of the past or relating experiences from his own life. He is a sympathetic author, and he effectively communicates the way in which the tragedy and suffering he has experienced throughout his life have made a deep impression on his psyche. It is when he tries to wax profound and articulate his underlying philosophy that his writing invariably wades into a swamp of nonsensical name-dropping that is less Jungian than Joycean, a meandering waking stream of consciousness that not only fails to substantially support the nominal premise, but often bears no relationship to it whatsoever.

To call Peterson’s writing imprecise really does not do it justice. His definitions of “life” and “evil”, both predicated on “suffering”, are so similar that the careless reader skimming over the text might well conclude that life is evil and the deepest truth requires one to inflict unnecessary suffering on others. His many references are seldom very pertinent to the subject at hand and are primarily displayed to dazzle and impress the unsophisticated reader, who little realizes that a reference to Neil deGrasse Tyson or Prince would have been just as relevant to the point being made as the scientific study cited or the Pareto Principle. One of the most entertaining aspects of the book is the way that Peterson never permits his failure to correctly grasp a concept to stand in the way of his brandishing it like a child flashing a fake F.B.I. badge.

Or, more ominously, like a woman’s stalker flashing a fake police badge at her door. For there is a method to Peterson’s textual madness. Every deeper concept is presented and discussed in the most nebulous, most vague, and most plausibly deniable manner. Peterson is slippery and evasive about his own beliefs throughout the book, and only the most well-informed, most careful reader who has a sufficient grasp of the various theologies and philosophies that Peterson references so freely can hope to discern what Peterson actually believes with any reasonable degree of confidence.

But the intellectual fog can be penetrated by an attentive reader. Jordan Peterson is not, in contrast to the incorrect assumptions of many of his readers and critics alike, a Christian or a man of the Right. Nor is he a courageous intellectual, to the contrary, he is a deeply terrified individual. More importantly, he is not a man dedicated to the truth, at least, not the truth in the conventional sense in which in the term is usually understood by the average English-speaking individual, which is why the 12 Rules of Life ultimately amounts to pseudo-intellectual sleight-of-hand meant to direct the reader down the false path of Peterson’s post-Christian philosophy, which for lack of an existing term we might as well christen Jordanetics.

It is strange that the book’s primary objective is so little recognized by its readers, considering that Peterson all but spells it out in both the title of the book as well as its coda. We are told that The 12 Rules are an antidote to chaos, but as Peterson fans are often quick to point out, they are not only practical rules for everyday living, but metaphors for larger concepts as well. And the metaphorical chaos to which Peterson refers in the title is not a messy room, but a messy world that terrifies him, and which he has come to save by creating order out of the chaos with his “newfound Pen of Light.”

The best way to illustrate the never-ending stream of references that serve as Peterson’s reasoning is to simply quote the book, in this case, a section of his chapter explaining the rule that you should treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. And if you find yourself wondering what in the world Anton Chekhov, snakes, Michaelangelo’s Pietà, Oedipal nightmares, arboreal evolutionary adaptations, and the Garden of Eden actually have to do with the importance of taking your prescribed medications, the answer is absolutely nothing.

Text Sample:  There is simply no way to wall off some isolated portion of the greater surrounding reality and make everything permanently predictable and safe within it. Some of what has been no-matter-how-carefully excluded will always sneak back in. A serpent, metaphorically speaking, will inevitably appear. Even the most assiduous of parents cannot fully protect their children, even if they lock them in the basement, safely away from drugs, alcohol and internet porn. In that extreme case, the too-cautious, too-caring parent merely substitutes him or herself for the other terrible problems of life. This is the great Freudian Oedipal nightmare. It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them.

And even if it were possible to permanently banish everything threatening—everything dangerous (and, therefore, everything challenging and interesting), that would mean only that another danger would emerge: that of permanent human infantilism and absolute uselessness. How could the nature of man ever reach its full potential without challenge and danger? How dull and contemptible would we become if there was no longer reason to pay attention? Maybe God thought His new creation would be able to handle the serpent, and considered its presence the lesser of two evils.Question for parents: do you want to make your children safe, or strong?

In any case, there’s a serpent in the Garden, and he’s a “subtil” beast, according to the ancient story (difficult to see, vaporous, cunning, deceitful and treacherous). It therefore comes as no surprise when he decides to play a trick on Eve. Why Eve, instead of Adam? It could just be chance. It was fifty-fifty for Eve, statistically speaking, and those are pretty high odds. But I have learned that these old stories contain nothing superfluous. Anything accidental—anything that does not serve the plot—has long been forgotten in the telling. As the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov advised, “If there is a rifle hanging on the wall in act one, it must be fired in the next act. Otherwise it has no business being there.” Perhaps primordial Eve had more reason to attend to serpents than Adam. Maybe they were more likely, for example, to prey on her tree-dwelling infants. Perhaps it is for this reason that Eve’s daughters are more protective, self-conscious, fearful and nervous, to this day (even, and especially, in the most egalitarian of modern human societies). In any case, the serpent tells Eve that if she eats the forbidden fruit, she won’t die. Instead, her eyes will be opened. She will become like God, knowing good from evil. Of course, the serpent doesn’t let her know she will be like God in only that one way. But he is a serpent, after all. Being human, and wanting to know more, Eve decides to eat the fruit. Poof! She wakes up: she’s conscious, or perhaps self-conscious, for the first time.

Now, no clear-seeing, conscious woman is going to tolerate an unawakened man. So, Eve immediately shares the fruit with Adam. That makes him self-conscious. Little has changed. Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time. They do this primarily by rejecting them—but they also do it by shaming them, if men do not take responsibility. Since women bear the primary burden of reproduction, it’s no wonder. It is very hard to see how it could be otherwise. But the capacity of women to shame men and render them self-conscious is still a primal force of nature.

Now, you may ask: what in the world have snakes got to do with vision? Well, first, it’s clearly of some importance to see them, because they might prey on you (particularly when you’re little and live in trees, like our arboreal ancestors). Dr. Lynn Isbell, professor of anthropology and animal behaviour at the University of California, has suggested that the stunningly acute vision almost uniquely possessed by human beings was an adaptation forced on us tens of millions of years ago by the necessity of detecting and avoiding the terrible danger of snakes, with whom our ancestors co-evolved. This is perhaps one of the reasons the snake features in the garden of Paradise as the creature who gave us the vision of God (in addition to serving as the primordial and eternal enemy of mankind). This is perhaps one of the reasons why Mary, the eternal, archetypal mother—Eve perfected—is so commonly shown in medieval and Renaissance iconography holding the Christ Child in the air, as far away as possible from a predatory reptile, which she has firmly pinned under her foot. And there’s more. It’s fruit that the snake offers, and fruit is also associated with a transformation of vision, in that our ability to see color is an adaptation that allows us to rapidly detect the ripe and therefore edible bounty of trees.

Our primordial parents hearkened to the snake. They ate the fruit. Their eyes opened. They both awoke. You might think, as Eve did initially, that this would be a good thing. Sometimes, however, half a gift is worse than none. Adam and Eve wake up, all right, but only enough to discover some terrible things. First, they notice that they’re naked.

The return to Yellow Journalism

On the plus side, the disappearance of free mainstream journalism means we won’t have to put up with the pretense of objectivity anymore. Megan McArdle explains why the Washington Post cannot exist without Jeff Bezos keeping it afloat.

Critics of the “mainstream media” (or if you prefer, the “lamestream media”) are fond of saying that we’re going to be put out of business by competition from “new media” upstarts. Indeed, as a young blogger, I might even have made a few such pronouncements. And I and those critics were wrong. Traditional media can survive competition for readers just fine. It’s competition for advertisers that’s killing us.

For more than a century, magazines and newspapers were what’s known as a “two-sided market”: We sold subscriptions to you, our readers, and once you’d subscribed, we sold your eyeballs to our advertisers. That was necessary because, unbeknownst to you, your subscription dollars often didn’t even cover the cost of printing and delivering the physical pieces of paper. They rarely covered much, if any, of the cost of actually reporting and writing the stories printed on those pages. And you’d probably be astonished at how expensive it is to report a single, relatively simple story.

But that was okay, because we controlled a valuable pipeline to reader eyeballs — a pipeline advertisers wanted to fill with information about their products. You guys got your journalism on the cheap, and advertisers got the opportunity to tell you about the fantastic incentive package available to qualified buyers on the brand-new 1985 Chevy Impala.

Then the Internet came along, and suddenly, we didn’t own the only pipeline anymore. Anyone can throw up a Web page. And over the past 20 years, anyone did — far more than could support actual advertiser demand.

The companies that won this rugby scrum weren’t the venerable old names with long experience marrying ads to winsome content. They weren’t even the new media companies with their frantic brigades of young staffers generating hot takes. The companies that are winning — mostly Google and Facebook — get content for free from their users, or other people on the Internet. Including us.

Providing the rope with which someone else will hang you is obviously not a very good business model. And in the words of economist Herb Stein, “If something can’t go on forever, it will stop.” Either we will find someone else to pay for the news and opinion and cartoons you consume, or we will go out of business.

When content is king, tedious, inaccurate, and watered-down content isn’t going to survive long, no matter how necessary and important its creators believe it to be. And considering what the consequences of advertiser-supported mainstream media have been, the sooner it dies off, the better.

The encyclopedia of Jordanetics

The great Umberto Eco unwittingly dismissed the incoherence of Jordanetics without even knowing Jordan Peterson was having nightmares about dogs walking on their hind legs, butchering his cousin and offering flesh to him and other survivors of a nuclear holocaust in FROM THE TREE TO THE LABYRINTH: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation:

While in an ideal encyclopedia there are no differences between necessary and contingent properties, it must be admitted that, within a specific culture, certain properties appear to be more resistant to negation than others, on account of the fact that they are more salient: it could feasibly be denied, for instance, in the light of a new system of classification, that a sheep is ovine, or again this particular trait might not be deemed necessary to the understanding of the term sheep in the sentence: “the sheep was bleating in the field.” There can be no doubt, however, that it is hard to deny that a sheep is an animal—and the characteristic also remains implicit for the comprehension of the example we just cited. It has also been observed (Violi 1997: sect. 2.2.2.3) that some traits seem to be more resistant than others, and that these uncancelable traits are not only categorical labels such as ANIMAL or PHYSICAL OBJECT. In the life of semiosis we realize that we are also reluctant to cancel some “factual” properties that appear more salient and characteristic than others.

To explain why certain properties appear more resistant than others, Violi (1997: sect. 7.2) distinguishes between essential and typical properties: it is essential that a cat be an animal; it is typical that it meows. The second property can be canceled, but not the first. But if this were to be the case we would be back again to the same old difference between dictionary and encyclopedic properties. Violi (1997: sect. 7.3.1.3) instead considers properties that are functional and certainly encyclopedic in nature to be similarly uncancelable: hence it is difficult to say of something that it is a box and at the same time deny that it can contain objects (if it couldn’t it would be a fake box).
Often, however, in order to construct and presuppose a local portion of encyclopedia needed for the comprehension of a determined context, we must resort to simplified local representations that set aside many properties that are otherwise (in other contexts) resistant.

In Eco (1984b: sect. 2.3.4) I gave the example of a dialogue between a wife and her husband at midnight in a suburban home. The wife looks out the window and says with a preoccupied air, “Honey, there’s a man in the garden.” The husband takes a look and says, “No, honey, that’s not a man.” The husband’s reaction certainly violates a pragmatic rule because it provides less information than the situation calls for, since denying the presence of a man could on the one hand suggest that what is there is a child or a cat, while on the other hand it could also lead his wife to imagine something more dangerous (why not an invader from outer space?).

In this context, when she is afraid there may be a man there, the wife surely does not assign to the term the properties of rationality, bipedality, or the ability to laugh—all properties that in that context are narcotized (cf. Eco 1979a: ch. 5) and considered irrelevant, but instead those of a living being, capable of movement and aggression and therefore potentially—at night and in someone else’s garden—dangerous. Because it is also part and parcel of the infinite encyclopedic properties of man to be prone to take up a life of crime (don’t we all know that homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to men?) The husband ought then to adjust his iteration on the basis of a local encyclopedic representation, one that he conjecturally considers shared (given the circumstances) by his wife.

If the husband wishes to calm his wife down he must either exclude immediately the property of mobility (by saying, for example, that what she saw was the shadow of a tree) or deny any suggestion of properties suggesting dangerousness (in which case he might say that it wasn’t a man but a stray dog). The ad hoc construction of a local portion of encyclopedia, that organizes only the properties pertinent to the context, is the only strategy that will allow the husband to interact in a reasonable way with his concerned wife.

Jordanetics turns this sort of sensible pragmatism on its head. Consider how it applies to the situation envisioned by Eco. Since truth is determined by whether it serves life or not, the wife’s fear means that the claim that the object in the garden is a man must be true, since the mere possibility that the object is a man and therefore a potential risk to the man’s wife and family would serve life, whereas ignoring, denying, or rejecting that possibility, and by doing so, failing to accept the wife’s narrative, would not only not serve life and therefore be untrue, but would add unnecessarily to the suffering of the wife. Ergo, in the absence of conclusive proof that the object is not a man or otherwise dangerous entity such as an invader from space, it would be evil to do anything except accept the wife’s narrative and behave accordingly.

Notice too the logical consistency and the precision of Eco’s thought. Peterson’s Maps of Meaning, which I am reading now, reads like a parody of the legitimate academic and intellectual that Eco was, when it is not downright sinister.

My interest in the Cold War transformed itself into a true obsession. I thought about the suicidal and murderous preparation of that war every minute of every day, from the moment I woke up until the second I went to bed. How could such a state of affairs come about? Who was responsible?

I dreamed that I was running through a mall parking lot, trying to escape from something. I was running through the parked cars, opening one door, crawling across the front seat, opening the other, moving to the next. The doors on one car suddenly slammed shut. I was in the passenger seat. The car started to move by itself. A voice said harshly, “there is no way out of here.” I was on a journey, going somewhere I did not want to go. I was not the driver.

I became very depressed and anxious. I had vaguely suicidal thoughts, but mostly wished that everything would just go away. I wanted to lie down on my couch, and sink into it, literally, until only my nose was showing—like the snorkel of a diver above the surface of the water. I found my awareness of things unbearable.

I came home late one night from a college drinking party, self-disgusted and angry. I took a canvas board and some paints. I sketched a harsh, crude picture of a crucified Christ—glaring and demonic—with a cobra wrapped around his naked waist, like a belt. The picture disturbed me—struck me, despite my agnosticism, as sacrilegious. I did not know what it meant, however, or why I had painted it. Where in the world had it come from?

It should not be hard to see that Jordanetics is an incoherent philosophy of fear, concocted by a very fearful and mentally disturbed individual who is not the driver of it. And since we, as Christians, are not given a spirit of fear, Jordanetics is neither a theology nor a philosophy for us.

Research request: Transcripts of Peterson videos would be very useful for a comprehensive deep dive into his philosophy. If you’re willing to transcribe a video for me, please shoot me an email with however many you’d be willing to do, keeping in mind that his lectures usually last around an hour, and I will give you a list. Don’t do any without getting a specific request from me, since we want to avoid redundancy.