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JORDANETICS: the #1 bestseller in Political Philosophy


JORDANETICS: A Journey Into the Mind of Humanity’s Greatest Thinker is now available for Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.

Jordan Peterson is believed by many to be the greatest thinker that humanity has ever known. He is Father Figure, Philosopher-King, and Prophet to the millions of young men who are his most fervent fans. He is the central figure of the Intellectual Dark Web, an academic superstar, and an unparalleled media phenomenon who has shattered all conceptions of what it means to be modern celebrity in the Internet Age.

He has, by his own admission, thought thoughts that no one has ever thought before. He has dreamed dreams that no one has ever dared to dream before.

But Jordan Peterson is also a narcissist, a charlatan, and an intellectual con man who doesn’t even bother to learn much about the subjects upon which he lectures. He is a defender of free speech who silences other speakers, a fearless free-thinker who runs away from debate, difficult questions, and controversial issues, a philosopher who rejects the conventional definition of truth, and a learned professor who has failed to read most of the great classics of the Western canon. He is, in short, a shameless and unrepentant fraud.

But is Jordan Peterson more than a mere fraud? Is he something more sinister, more unbalanced, and even more dangerous? In JORDANETICS: A Journey Into the Mind of Humanity’s Greatest Thinker, political philosopher Vox Day delves deeply into the core philosophy that Jordan Peterson advocates in both his written works and his video lectures. In doing so, Day methodically builds a shocking case that will convince even the most skeptical Jordan Peterson supporter to reconsider both the man and his teachings.

For a video preview, watch the Darkstream.

From the Introduction:

There are no shortage of intellectual con men out there and I don’t consider myself to be the Truth Police. Having confirmed for myself that Jordan Peterson was little more than a Canadian version of Deepak Chopra or L. Ron Hubbard, I was perfectly ready to return to completely ignoring him, but I was unable to do so thanks to his fans. Instead accepting my critique, or even going over the various points in detail and attempting to rebut them, they attacked my intellect, my integrity, and my motivations. They accused me of jealousy, they accused me of envy, and they accused me of dishonesty, all in defense of a man who was observably lacking in any intellectual integrity at all! It was exceedingly bizarre, especially when I had done nothing more than point out a few of the obvious mistakes the man had made.

So, I decided to begin looking more deeply into this popular professor who was being so widely hailed as a formidable thinker, a thoughtful philosopher, a courageous defender of free speech, and a champion of young men. But almost immediately, I discovered that his reputation was at variance with his actions, as in the case of his deeply ironic decision to ban investigative journalist Faith Goldy from participating in an August 2017 event at Ryerson University called “The Stifling of Free Speech on University Campuses”. The event was cancelled, and with Peterson’s approval, Goldy was barred from participating in the rescheduled event.

When he was subsequently asked about his decision in public, Peterson responded with what I eventually came to recognize was his characteristic bafflegarble, the word-smog he habitually utilizes to conceal his actual meaning.

QUESTION: I understand that Faith Goldy was removed from the original August panel because of her podcast with the controversial Daily Stormer after Charlottesville…. This strategy appears to parallel the SJWs, who wish to deny platforms to conservative speakers. I want to understand why Faithy Goldy was removed from the event simply for associating with identitarians, and if each of the panelists agree with that decision.

JORDAN PETERSON: That’s an excellent question. So, the first thing I should say is that it’s not like we’re unaware of the irony. Number one. Ryerson cancelled a panel about the cancellation of panels about free speech. That’s irony number one. And then irony number two was the panelists removed a speaker for arguably engaging in the act of free speech. Okay, we got that, believe me.

All right, so why did we come to this decision? I sat down personally—the other people can say what they have to say—I sat down with my son and we went through Faith’s interview. I know Faith, I don’t believe that she is a reprehensible person. I think that Charlottesville was very shocking to her and I think that she put herself in a very difficult position. And I think some of that was brave, that she went down there to cover it.

However, I listened very carefully to her podcast, the one that got her in trouble. And my sense was that she wasn’t, she didn’t, she was associating with people whose views she should have questioned. It was her journalistic, um, responsibility to question them. She had to ask at least one hard question. At least one. Three would have been better. You know, and I understand she had to toe a careful line. She was on the podcast, they had invited her on, it’s much more difficult than you might think when you’re facing people, even when you don’t believe them, to be rude enough to challenge them, right? That’s not so easy, especially if you’re an agreeable person and she is a rather agreeable person.

But I believe she, she failed in her journalistic responsibility. And as a consequence of that, she became too hot a property for us. And not just for us. And, well, that was, that was the reason for the decision. That was, that was my reasoning.

Now, this was manifestly not the correct behavior of a highly principled man or even a reasonably honest one. Jordan Peterson did something he clearly knew to be wrong, he did something he clearly knew to be hypocritical, but instead of simply owning up to his obvious failure when called on it in public, he attempted to concoct a ridiculous ex post facto excuse to justify it. Again.

He had to know that he was going to have to face the question sooner or later. He even appears to have prepared for it, and yet this response was the best that he could manage. If you watch the video, you can even see that Jordan Peterson has, he has, a reliable tell that warns the viewer when he’s about to say something that he knows is not true. He also betrays another tell that indicates when he is going to very carefully attempt to conceal the weakness of one of his assertions or conclusions.

Just watch for the repetitions and the adverbs. Once you learn to recognize them, you can identify when Jordan Peterson is trying to pull a fast one on his audience even when you don’t know what he’s talking about.

And the obvious question Peterson’s response raises is this: according to what theory of human rights or journalism does one’s own right to free speech rely upon one’s correct performance of nonexistent journalistic responsibilities?

There is no such theory. It’s a nonsensical assertion. It’s classic Petersonian bafflegarble. But it requires a high level of mental focus to penetrate the fog of Peterson’s word-salad and see what he is literally saying.

After twice seeing Peterson’s shameless dishonesty in action, I decided that it was time to delve deeper into the man’s actual work. Being a writer myself, I was aware that men express themselves differently in different media. Many eloquent speakers reveal themselves to be superficial thinkers in writing, and no few writers—myself included—are unable to express their genuinely profound thoughts in a facile manner in front of a microphone or a camera. Perhaps Peterson was much better in print than he was on video or on the Internet; after all, he was the bestselling author on the planet at the time.

So, I read his bestseller, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. I read his would-be magnum opus, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. I even read his contribution to the UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Sustainable Development of which he was a member, Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A future worth choosing.

And this book is the result of what I learned from reading the three published works of Jordan Peterson.

A word of warning. This book is necessarily more than a little esoteric. It references a number of works with which you may be unfamiliar, and draws obscure connections you may not immediately recognize or that you may be initially reluctant to acknowledge, especially if you are a Jordan Peterson fan.

But you can be sure of one thing. Unlike Jordan Peterson, I am not attempting to deceive, confuse, dazzle, or baffle you. Unlike Jordan Peterson, I am not attempting to change your perspective or your philosophy. Unlike Jordan Peterson, the logic I present is clear and straightforward. And unlike Jordan Peterson, I do not owe my allegiance to anything but the objective truth, as that concept has been defined in the dictionary and understood by Man since the beginning of time.

You need not take my word for any of this. Everything I am writing here is based on material evidence that you can obtain, examine, and analyze for yourself. So clear your mind, set aside your assumptions and preconceptions, and prepare yourself for a journey into the mind of one of the most shameless intellectual charlatans in the history of Man.

UPDATE: Also #1 in Kindle Store  > Nonfiction > Self-Help > Spiritual

The Wrong Kind of Chameleon

An excerpt from Milo’s Foreword to Jordanetics.

I’m a smart person. Really smart, actually, and very expensively educated! But half the time, I just can’t understand a bloody word Jordan Peterson says. And I’ve been thinking recently about why that could be. Ordinarily, I can listen to someone prattling on and quickly get to the heart of what they are trying to express. That’s one of the skills you pick up as a journalist: You learn to quickly identify the core of a problem, the essence of what’s being said. You learn to filter out the noise—and to identify bullshitters. But with Jordan Peterson, once I’ve filtered out the noise, I don’t find a lot left to work with. And there’s another problem. He lies.

When he first began to speak about me, Jordan Peterson described me as “an amazing person.” This was around the time he called me on the telephone, expressing sympathy for the failed assassination attempt on me in February 2017, when I was wrongly accused of supporting child rapists. He offered to do a series of on-camera interviews with me. He described me publicly, and correctly, as “a trickster figure,” explaining that “trickster figures emerge in times of crisis. And they point out what no one wants to see. And they say things that no one will say.”

He continued: “[Milo’s] brave as can be…. And he’s unstoppable on his feet. He just amazes me. I’ve never seen anyone I don’t think—and I’ve met some pretty smart people—I’ve never seen anyone who can take on an onslaught of criticism and reverse it like he can.” Fast-forward to an on-stage interview with Bari Weiss in June 2018 at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Weiss is talking about about a professor who paired me with Hitler and gave us as examples of Very Bad Things. She alleges that I, the interracially married man, am indeed a racist. To which Peterson replies: “Well, possibly, yeah … I haven’t followed Milo that carefully.”

What happened? By his own definition, this is the way demagogues work: by listening to their audience and adjusting their responses accordingly. Why was Peterson suddenly going along with something he knew wasn’t true and rewriting history, pretending he didn’t know that much at all about someone he had on numerous occasions so intelligently explained? I realize that by asking this question, this you’re going to think I’m just wounded that someone I once admired has since soured on me. But that’s the thing. From the first time I heard Jordan Peterson speak, my nostrils picked up a whiff of sulfur in the air—and not just because he dresses in that awful, drab, monotonous Victoriana.

Read the whole thing there. The irony is that I began writing the book to make a certain case, and wound up being led by the evidence to wind up making Milo’s case in the end. Regardless of what you think of Milo, never underestimate his insight.

This Reddit thread full of Postulants of the 12-Rule Path waxing wroth will make for amusing reading afterwards, as apparently the only reason to criticize Jordan Peterson is envy, and Milo, Owen Benjamin, and myself are all just jealous of a mentally ill man with a Messiah complex. If the thread doesn’t convince you of the vital importance of this book, nothing will.

Mailvox: How not to critique

This dialogue rather nicely addresses the two most recent Darkstream topics, Jordanetics and learning how to think effectively at the same time. It is perhaps most useful to contemplate this in juxtaposition of how I have gone about criticizing Peterson and his work.

MC: You are confusing the dialectic process which dates back to Socrates himself with dialectical materialism. “Political philosopher…” yeah, right. I challenge you to a livestreamed debate about your essential premise that Jordan is utilizing Marxism to formulate his philosophy.

VD: No, I’m not confusing that. No, that’s not my essential premise. Yes, I am one of the bestselling political philosophers alive, with three #1 bestsellers in that category. And no, I’m not going to debate someone who has never read my work and misrepresents my statements. Peterson is not utilizing Marxism to formulate his philosophy, but he is utilizing the same structural approach that Marx did. Thesis-antithesis-synthesis is structurally identical to Chaos-Order-More Perfect Order aka 12-Rule Path to Balance.

MC: You said verbatim that “his intellectual approach is fundamentally Marxist.”  This requires a gross misunderstanding of what the dialectic process— I.e., thesis-antithesis-synthesis— actually involves, and its rich history. It was developed in its earliest stages by Socrates through the Socratic method, and it was adopted by the scholastic Christians as the premise for their dialectic. Far from being philosophically Marxist and anti-Christian, Peterson’s adoption of the dialectic method is both a rejection of Marxism, and an acceptance of a method that has been used by Christians for hundreds of years. As for your credentials, I’m not arguing about how many best sellers you have. Any professional, career political philosopher would laugh at your claim that Dr. Peterson’s intellectual method is Marxist. And I’ve read more of your work than you think. The challenge to debate is still open.

VD: Yes, and obviously I misspoke as I intended to say that his structural approach to his philosophy is fundamentally similar to the Marxist approach. You are trying to build an entire narrative on a false foundation. And you are completely wrong about that being my “essential premise” even given that misstatement. I will never debate you, because you are not honest, you are primarily interested in demonstrating that you are a Smart Boy. You’re not a mind reader, you are wrong, and you haven’t bothered to even do your homework on this subject. So, drop it before I remove you from the channel.

MC: Now you’re making a different claim— and I appreciate that you’re no longer saying that Peterson’s intellectual approach is fundamentally Marxist. That may not have been considered an essential part of your argument to you, but as someone who watches your videos fairly regularly (and hasn’t criticized your work once until today), it matters to me how you paint the people you criticize. If you had claimed Jordan was fundamentally Marxist and stuck to it, that would have been an extraordinary claim. And in my defense, I am not at all concerned about being viewed as a “Smart Boy.” I am concerned about discovering the truth, wherever it comes from. And by the way, I’m still buying the book because I think there may be worthwhile criticisms in it. But I could not in good conscience let such a drastic accusation slide so easily. Kick me from your channel, if you will, but I think banning and refusal to debate are beneath you. Isn’t that what we criticize the Left about?

VD: Yes, it would have been an extraordinary claim, moreover, it would have been completely in contradiction to every single reference to Peterson and Marxism in the book I just wrote. Not that there are many, since Peterson is not only not a Marxist, he doesn’t even know very much about it despite his constant blathering about it.  The point is that your criticism was almost completely off-base. At no point did you ever stop to confirm that the meaning you quite reasonably assigned to it was intended, nor did you possess enough information to know that it was obviously an unintentional statement. Why would I ever debate anyone who suggests a totally irrelevant debate topic? There is literally nothing to debate.

So, what is the problem with this critical approach? Some of you will already have a pretty good idea of not only the problem, but the underlying reason for the problem, but we will ignore the latter as being obvious to those familiar with the topic.

First, never begin with a superior posture. Second, never make a definitive value statement at the start. Third, be very cautious about building a mountain out of a molehill, especially from a single piece of evidence. Fourth, always place more confidence in the written word than the spoken one. Fifth, refrain making any personal judgments in the early stages. And that’s just in the first paragraph.

Sixth, accept the responsible party’s expression of his intentions unless there is reason to believe he is lying or being evasive. Seventh, do your homework. Eighth, always be slow to leap to judgment. Express your suspicions, do not make concrete assertions.

All news is fake news

It’s the metahumor here that is the funniest aspect of this story:

He had launched his new website on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign as a practical joke among friends — a political satire site started by Blair and a few other liberal bloggers who wanted to make fun of what they considered to be extremist ideas spreading throughout the far right. In the last two years on his page, America’s Last Line of Defense, Blair had made up stories about California instituting sharia, former president Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former president Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9. “Share if you’re outraged!” his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook had clicked “like” and then “share,” most of whom did not recognize his posts as satire. Instead, Blair’s page had become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55.

“Nothing on this page is real,” read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, reinforcing people’s biases, spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual. What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. “No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”

The amusing thing is the way that the guy doesn’t realize that he’s merely replicated the situation that has existed on the Left for decades. They believe literally everything the mainstream media reports, despite the fact that what is generally known as “the news” is a false narrative that has little more than an incidental relationship with the objective truth of what actually happened.

One should also keep in mind that as Owen Benjamin notes, humor is often predictive. The very humor produced by the overstatement tends to come from the discomfort created by the extrapolation of the current trend, which is why his Gay Town is now at least partly real.

Translation: don’t bet on undocumented immigrants not defacing Mount Rushmore in the next ten years or California not recognizing sharia.

Striking distance

A few more preorders and we can switch the order of the two top bestsellers in Political Philosophy. A bonus for those of you who have tickets to attend a Jordan Peterson lecture: an appendix containing a list of 12 Questions for Jordan Peterson.

Sample: You have said that you consider group identity to be dangerous and pathological. Do you consider yourself to be a Canadian?

Be sure to review it once you read it, as you know there are going to be beaucoup fake reviews on this one, once it comes to the attention of the Jordaneticians Postulants of the 12-Rule Path.

UPDATE: Now THERE is the image we were waiting for. Thanks to all the Dread Ilk who made it happen in preparation for tomorrow’s launch. If you’re on Twitter or Facebook, be sure to share it around.

UPDATE: For a chapter-by-chapter video preview of Jordanetics, watch the Darkstream.

Darkstream: Learning how to think more effectively

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

If you look at at other mistakes that people make I would say probably the biggest one, and the one that is the biggest single problem, is the tendency to apply the genetic fallacy. You see that applied all the time to people like me who are on the Right, but you also see people on the Right applying it to people on the Left. What you need to understand is that it is a logical fallacy to dismiss someone because of the nature of the source. Let me rephrase that: it is a logical fallacy to dismiss something based on the nature of the source.

So the fact that Sam Harris is saying something does not mean that it’s going to be false. Now, if he is playing around with words and that sort of thing then you can have a heuristic that says: Sam Harris is babbling about definitions again and so he’s probably wrong, he’s probably not telling the truth. So it it’s a useful heuristic, but again you cannot place any heavy reliance upon it. You always need to check and you always need to pay attention. What’s what’s important is you apply the heuristic when you don’t have time, but at no point do you ever claim that it has proved anything.

We’re here to help

The USA is graciously offering to protect the freedom of the seas and the financial integrity of several Pacific island nations, whether they want US protection or not.

The US has said it will join Australia in the development of a naval base on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island to “protect the freedom of the seas,” in a move apparently aimed at curbing China’s presence in the Pacific.

Australia, a staunch US ally in the Pacific, had already set its sights on Papua New Guinea’s Lombrum Naval Base on Manus Island earlier in November, seeking to build a deep-water facility for its Navy. Now, Washington apparently has also decided to join the effort, in a move clearly aimed at sending a signal to Beijing, which is already locked in a trade war with Washington and in disputes over the South China Sea.

It is no surprise that the US decision apparently came on the heels of rumors that China might also emerge as the eventual developer of the deep-water base. Some other reports suggested that China approached another Pacific island nation, Vanuatu, seeking to open a military base there.

Apart from that, the US also seems to be concerned that Beijing might use its growing influence over the Pacific island nations to get access to some military infrastructure in the vicinity of major maritime routes in the region. Pence even engaged in an indirect verbal duel with China’s President Xi Jingping at the APEC summit, where the two apparently fought for the attention of the smaller Pacific nations.

“Do not accept debt that could compromise your sovereignty. Protect your interests,” Pence called on the island nations, referring to China’s active policy of giving loans to the Pacific states, which might turn it into a major bilateral lender to island economies.

He then called on the Pacific nations to stick with the US as it allegedly offers a “better option” because it would supposedly never “coerce or compromise your independence.” Xi, in turn, said that “no one has the power to stop people from seeking a better life,” while calling on the Pacific nations to “strengthen development cooperation” as well.

However, in its attempt to outplay Beijing in its supposed rush to gain control over strategic locations in the Pacific, the US and Australia seemingly completely forgot to ask the locals about their take on the prospect of the base re-development.

No one has sought support from the locals, Manus Island Governor Charlie Benjamin said, as cited by Reuters. The project was also criticized by a former Papua New Guinea MP from the island, Ronnie Knight, who said that “there is lot of questions to be answered” first.

“There was no discussion with any of the locals, it has just been bulldozed through again and that is what makes people cross,” he told Australia’s ABC broadcaster, expressing his concerns about potentially “having a foreign base on our soil.”

See, they’re the BAD empire. We’ll save you from them, and all out of the goodness of our hearts. Now, shut up, stop talking to them, and do what we tell you to do. While we’re at it, can I interest you in an offer of some loans at an interest rate you can’t possibly refuse? No, I mean, you literally can’t refuse them. Or else.

Don’t mind us just doing a little construction over here. It’s just a teeny, tiny, little military base. You’ll hardly notice it.

An addendum

In writing an appendix to Jordanetics – note that today is the last day to preorder – I revised my numbers a little to account for the inexcusable omission of Indians – dot, not feather – from my earlier statistical review of his claims concerning the high-IQ subset of the U.S. population. I also took a look at his assertion from another perspective, which in addition to better illuminating the absurd nature of his claim, nicely demonstrates his admitted inaptitude for math and statistics.

Less than 4 percent of the 145+ IQ population in the USA is Jewish. Not more than 40 percent.

Note that even if we were to generously allow Peterson his original assertion as well as a causal relationship between IQ and societal success, his math is incorrect. At the high end of his suggested range, Jews would account for 123,690 of the 713,113 high-IQ population of the United States, or 17.3 percent. At the lower end he asserts, a mean IQ of 110, the Jewish percentage would decline to less than one-twelfth of the 145+ IQ set.

And just to demonstrate how ridiculous Peterson’s original statement was, accounting for the 40.8 percent of the U.S. 145+ IQ population claimed by the statistically-challenged professor would require a mean Jewish IQ of 123.4, with 7.5 percent of all U.S. Jews possessing an IQ over 145.

I’m a little bit dubious of some of the numbers that go into this equation, particularly the estimated mean IQ reported for the immigrant Indian population by Forbes, but they are a damned sight more realistic than what serves as the foundation for Peterson’s attempt to dismiss observable reality as conspiracy theory.

Truly an inexplicably poor performance by Humanity’s Greatest Thinker.

To a Butthurt Boomer

Dear Baby Boomer,

You whine, cry, and kick up a fuss EVERY SINGLE TIME anyone says anything negative about the Boomers. You get defensive EVERY SINGLE TIME, which would be amusing if it wasn’t so annoying

You really must learn to control your reactive Boomer defensiveness. Because it is no business of yours if the younger generations hate your g-g-generation, which has never stopped talking incessantly about itself. We have the right to feel as we do, just as you Boomers had the right to feel so infinitely superior to your unforgivably square parents.

Look, while I can’t speak for younger generations, I can say that on the average, Generation X HATES and DESPISES your generation. That’s just a fact. We hate your stupid music. We hate your narcissism. We despise the way so many of you have neither the time nor the inclination to love our children the way our grandparents loved us. We hate what a pain in the ass you are now that you’re starting to require caretaking but are still determined to live where and how you want to live. We hate the way so many of you are actually hoping to leave nothing to your kids and grandkids and “die with the most toys”. Decades ago, we actually used to joke that your generation would be babbling about “70 is SEXY” when it got old, and then you guys actually WENT AND DID it.

It’s not about the Boomers failing to deliver Utopia. No one ever has. It’s not about the perfection of past generations, some of whom collectively made incredibly bad decisions that have resonated down through the decades. But the fact is that your g-g-generation actually DID do a number of things differently than their predecessors, things of which they were proud, things that “changed the world”, and they are the first U.S. generation to leave its successors materially worse off than they were.

I’m not saying it’s your fault. Obviously it’s not. I’m not saying you are personally responsible. You couldn’t be. We’re talking about macro, not micro here. But your constant defensiveness whenever the subject arises tends to indicate that you at least share somewhat in your generation’s weird, self-obsessed collective consciousness.

Love,
Generation X

Right Ho, Jeeves #6

A HERO AT BRINKLEY is the sixth and final issue in the RIGHT HO, JEEVES series. RIGHT HO, JEEVES tells of the travails of the inimitable Bertie Wooster, summoned from the comforts of #3A Berkeley Mansions, London, to Brinkley Manor by his imperious Aunt Dahlia. Love is in the air and Wodehousian shenanigans are afoot, as Wooster is not the sole guest at the manor, which is also playing host to the fairy-gazing Madeline Basset as well as the famous newt-fancier Augustus Fink-Nottle. But, as always, the inimitable Jeeves is there to set things right and save the day!

Adapted from the classic Wodehouse novel by comics legend Chuck Dixon and drawn by SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN illustrator Gary Kwapisz, A HERO AT BRINKLEY is the brilliant culmination of the RIGHT HO, JEEVES series.

We anticipate releasing the RIGHT HO, JEEVES graphic novel, which collects the entire six-issue series, in a premium 10×7 paperback, before the end of the month. It’s going to be beautiful. In the meantime, the Kindle edition of Issue #6 is now available.