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Mailvox: truth-bait for the broken

Daniel makes an interesting observation about the similarities between Jordan Peterson’s nameless quasi-philosophy and Dianetics.

There are some interesting overlaps between Peterson’s 12 rules and Dianetics 8 Dynamics. L. Ron Hubbard was also highly intelligent, mentally unhinged, AND deeply helpful to some broken people.

In fact, most ex-Scientologists will tell you that the hook – “Dianetics works” – is, at a basic level, very true for a very lost person. It is the truth-bait for the broken that sucks them in and seals them into the cult.

8 Dynamics of Dianetics:

  • Self: Peterson has rule 1, 2 and 10
  • Sex: Rule 5
  • Group: Rule 3, 9
  • Mankind: Rule 6, 11, 4
  • Animal: Rule 12
  • Universe: not applicable
  • Spiritual: Rule 7
  • Infinity: Rule 8

This all is related to your thesis that methadone is only okay for the addict. A lot of people were helped by Dianetics in the 1950s, before there ever was a Scientology. It was an intoxicatingly useful deception.

While there is no indication that Peterson actually intends to expand his mental chaos management into a full-blown religion, the possibility that it could be a nascent Dianetics 2.0 merits further contemplation. Fortunately, at this point, he appears to be more interested in Canadian politics than in creating an actual cult.

UPDATE: I did a Darkstream discussing this and the first chapter of 12 Rules for Life: Jordan Peterson is bait for the broken.

I particularly enjoyed this comment. I look forward to quoting it again once I have convinced even the most dubious Peterson fan that my case against him and his philosophy is conclusive.

Vox, you are a fucking loon. You know absolutely nothing about the guy and hadn’t watched any of his videos or interviews or read his books or talked to him………but you just knew that he was intellectually dishonest, now you say he’s mentally ill, he’s totally fucking insane, his philosophy is insane and incomplete, he’s a gamma, he’s in a bubble, he’s deluded,……..Dude, you are telling trying to tell the world what the moon is made of after looking at it once.

It’s a good point. Imagine how smart and discerning I must be to be able to do so correctly.

Rule 33: Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.
– Jordan Peterson

You know, there just might be a book in that one.

Why I am crucifying the Crazy Christ

Because that is what one should do with false prophets who attempt to pass off madness and lies as truth. Real, objective, Aristotelian correspondent truth.

I find it mildly amusing that Jordan Peterson’s dismayed fans don’t seem to realize that their responses to my recent Darkstreams on the subject such as the one below don’t dissuade me in the slightest, but to the contrary, confirm for me that they are very, very nervous about their hero’s ability to successfully defend himself from my critical analysis.

What is basically going on here: “SJWs Always Double Down” isn’t selling nearly as well as its predecessor and so you are trying to attract attention, and more potential sales, by attacking one of currently hottest public figures. What happened to you man? You used to be one of good guys but now you are bitter, shallow, barely eloquent and on your way to joining other online right has-beens like Nick Land & co.

What happened to me is that I caught the unmistakable scent of bullshit and sulfur. Contrast the response of the Peterson fan with the response of the Dread Ilk to people like Greg Johnson and Andrew Anglin calling me out. The Dread Ilk knew they had no need to defend me, and they also knew that I would not hesitate to face my critics directly in order to defend my case against the Fake Right. Peterson’s fans, to the contrary, appear to be well-aware that he fears to even address the fact of my existence, let alone attempt to answer for his intellectual crimes.

Jordan Peterson set off my BS radar like no one since Paul Krugman and his repeated post-2008 attempts to claim that he never called for a housing bubble, and I quickly noticed the bizarre way in which Peterson’s fans were repeatedly offering multiple different and contradictory alibis for his intellectual crimes, but I had no idea that the Crazy Christ was building up an quasi-cult around him to make the now-defunct New Atheist fan club of Richard Dawkins look downright moderate and sane.

Consider, for example, the following comments, all culled from a single video of an appearance on Stefan Molyneux’s show.

  • Genius is not a strong enough word to describe the level of insight Jordan Peterson has into the world. Wow, he’s impressive on the worst of days but this one just absolutely blew me away.
  • the word you are looking for to describe JBP is a prophet, or someone who can see into the future and correct and sort things out now while there’s still time.
  • One of the two most important voices in the world today.
  • Dr. Peterson is such an impressive man. In ~1 year of watching and listening to his lectures and speeches/debates I learned more about myself, society, mythology and religion than I did in 4 years of college.
  • my hero emerging in a time of darkness.
  • We in the West, are fortunate to have this great mind during this time of great social turmoil, to guide us and to help us understand and survive the coming deluge of this media manufactured communist typhoon.
  • This great man embodies the emergence of the hero in a positively inspiring way.
  • The world’s center of gravity is always located with Dr. Peterson.
  • Anyone at any age can improve themselves and find missing meaning. Dr. Peterson has been essentially my advisor through his YouTube videos, online tools and books. What a gift he is to humanity.
  • Another fascinating discussion with one of our age’s great minds.
  • If one does not comprehend Jordan Peterson, one does not comprehend the warrior.
  • Jordan Peterson – what a mind!  Impressive – also, I noticed that the question that they were rhetorically asking earlier in the show got answered later in the show.  It was about why Christianity – desert religion – would have found such fertile ground in Europe.  And the answer was all about sacrifice – the whole idea about Jesus being sacrificed for people’s sins, meshing with the sacrifice of present consumption for future planning and storage for a tough winter in Europe. 
  • Jordan Peterson is a genius person’s smart person.
  • Jordan Peterson is the most interesting person I have ever heard speak.
  • Jordan Peterson, the new almighty.
  • Thank you Mr Peterson for saving my generation.
  • My first time really watching Peterson. He is quite wise and sharp as most consider him, and he seems pretty genuine and well meaning as well. 
  • Jordan Peterson at his brilliant best. This man is a gift to humanity. Unfortunately most of humanity cannot even settle long enough to hear him and understand.

There aren’t enough hands on the planet for all the facepalms required. And the fact that the Crazy Christ has now publicly aligned himself with the Littlest Chickenhawk merely serves to further confirm my sense of the man, to the extent one can even call him that.

After all, if we are to utilize what we are informed is the Coherence Theory of Truth to which Peterson supposedly adheres, the truth is that within my specified set of propositions and beliefs is the firmly held belief that a man does not cry in public, much less on camera, over anything less than the death of a) a close friend, b) a family member, or c) his dog. It is both consistent and coherent with that belief to state that since Jordan Peterson cries on camera like a girl on a reality television show who failed to get into either of her two preferred sororities, that property is sufficient to prove the coherent truth of the matter. Which is to say that it is coherently true to observe that the Crazy Christ is neither god nor man.

But to return to a perspective based on the Aristotelian Correspondence Theory of Truth, and therefore, to the real objective world we all actually inhabit, Jordan Peterson is a smart, sensitive man with a broken mind who is little more than a purveyor of psychological snake oil and pernicious philosophy. He is a parody of a prophet, an enemy of Christianity and Western civilization, and there is very little “correspondent truth” in him or in his endless, meandering self-dialogue.

Peterson’s intellectual project is exceedingly immodest, and can be stated in a sentence: He aims at nothing short of a refounding of Western civilization, to provide a rational justification for why the materialists of the digital age should root themselves in the soil of Christian ethics despite having long ago lost the capacity for faith.

That being said, you need not accept my conclusions now. I am merely, as is my custom, calling my shot. I have not even begun to present my case, let alone prove it conclusively. But if you want an idea of what is coming down the pike, you might want to give a listen to a few of my previous vivisections.

This should be amusing

The Crazy Christ’s followers continue their ever-so-convincing campaign of character assassination in lieu of actually trying to defend their hero:

You are trying to provoke him into having a debate with you just so you can get more attention. Pathetic.

Actually, no. As it happens, I’ll be going on the Alex Jones Show on Monday to discuss the two leading charlatans of the Approved Opposition, Jordan Peterson and Benny Shapiro. So, I’m assuming that should more than satisfy any craving for attention that I might have for the foreseeable future.

I’m not trying to provoke Peterson into a debate. Why would I bother to do that when I am confident that he will run away from me every bit as speedily as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, PZ Myers, Matt Walsh, and Ben Shapiro all have? He’s an imposter, he knows it, and if he knows who I am, then he knows that I know it too.

And if he knows anything about me, then he probably knows that all of his usual little dodges, qualifications, and evasions are not going to work.

But in the meantime, I address Chapter Two of the 12 Rules, which explains why Jordan Peterson sometimes doesn’t take his happy pills.

Mailvox: that’s EXACTLY how good I am

Jordan Peterson’s fans are starting to get upset because apparently they think I am too mean. Perhaps Warning: Award-Winning Cruelty Artist At Work Ahead should be attached to my Peterson-related videos.

By the way, how do you know Jordan Peterson is depressed?  You diagnosed him by reading some of his interviews and 2 chapters of that dumb book?  That’s pretty amazing.  You could put a lot of psycholgists out of business and revolutionize the field with your kind of ability. Peterson has a practice doing psychiatry for decades.  Is it not possible that Peterson picked up a lot of this information and developed these methods, from working with his patients?   How do you know Peterson must be talking about himself all the time?

I didn’t need that much. I could have diagnosed him from nothing more than reading Chapter 2 of 12 Rules of Life. Think about it: if you are giving the whole world advice, and you decide that the second-most important thing you have to tell them is “remember to take your pills, because you are not too ugly, ashamed, worthless, and cowardly to deserve to take care of yourself”, then there is absolutely zero chance that you are mentally healthy and the odds are very high that you are suffering from depression, among other mental illnesses.

I suspect many people don’t realize how much an author’s writing unintentionally reveals about the author, particularly to an editor who has been able to see how many authors approach similar subjects in different ways. Frankly, I know more than I want to about the interior lives of the novelists I edit from nothing more than the choices they instinctively, and habitually, make.

But, as it happens, I did not have to do so, because I already knew that Peterson was depressed and taking some sort of drugs for it by his own admission. Chapter 2 is merely iron-clad confirmation that Peterson is telling at least part of the truth about his mental health issues and an enlightening illustration of how deep they run.

Another viewer questions my objectives.

Vox, I question where you are going with this and what you are hoping to achieve. I think there’s great value in critiquing Peterson’s work but again you’ve made a series of unverifiable ad hominem claims regarding Peterson’s mindset and motivations. This is completely unnecessary for the purposes of critiquing the subject content. I’m not questioning your analysis of Peterson – you may be correct – I’m questioning your decision to deploy that analysis in your critique. 

It’s not merely my purpose to critique the content of the 12 Rules of Life. It is my purpose to expose Jordan Peterson for the intellectual charlatan and professional con man that he is. The man is preying upon the intellectually and emotionally vulnerable and is selling them an evil, destructive philosophy while trying to divert them from the objective truths of logic, science, Christianity, and history. My statements about Peterson’s mindset and motivations are far from unverifiable; to the contrary, they are frequently based on Peterson’s own direct statements, verbal and written.

Yet another commits the genetic fallacy while confusing me with the Fake Right.

I’m no huge fan of Peterson, but for someone who repeatedly emphasizes his “high IQ” and how literate and well-read you are, it’s rather astonishing to see you accuse Peterson of being self-obsessed.   Every time I’ve watched your videos, you seem a bit neurotic and thin-skinned, as you routinely call your viewers “morons” and kick them out when they say something that bothers you.  What are you trying to accomplish with these ongoing rants about Peterson, anyways?  The Alt-Right, which you are a self-proclaimed proponent of, is imploding.  They just shut down your buddy Richard Spencer’s website.  Don’t you have other, more important, issues to address?

First, Peterson is self-obsessed. By observation and by his own admission, his talks are more inward-focused self-dialogue than proper lectures. Second, whether I am Hitler or Mother Theresa makes no difference concerning what Peterson is. Third, MPAI. Fourth, I kick people out because they repeatedly attempt to disrupt the Periscope. What I am attempting to accomplish with these “ongoing rants about Peterson” is to expose the truth about Jordan Peterson, which is that he is an intellectual charlatan and professional con man preying upon the intellectually and emotionally vulnerable. And fifth, the Alt-Right is not imploding, but to the contrary, is inevitable. Sixth, Richard Spencer is not my buddy. And seventh, no, I don’t have any more important issue to address.

Vox, are you going to formulate a well reasoned argument at some point or  just keep insulting someone because they may have mental health problems? When did you get your PHD in psychiatry?

It’s not an either/or proposition; I intend to do both. That being said, it’s not an insult to observe that Jordan Peterson is mentally ill or that his mental illness has significantly influenced his worldview, his philosophy, and his most recent book. To the contrary, it is a highly pertinent fact. One does not need a PhD in psychiatry or anything else to observe that someone is crazy or to observe the effects of that craziness. Jordan Peterson isn’t wandering through the night with a knife in his hand muttering “don’t be evil” to himself, he’s doing an intellectual version of that by weeping on stage with a mic in his hand as he begs people to not be too ashamed to take their prescribed medication.

“remember to take your pills” is more of an analogy of you need to do what you need to do to progress you life even if you don’t want to. 

It’s really not. Re-read the chapter, and as you do so, keep in mind that the author has himself been prescribed medication for his mental illness.

And this emailer obviously didn’t think through the consequences of his question.

Criticize Peterson’s ideas and attribute his success to media manufacturing as much as you feel you need to, but do ask yourself why hundreds of people are not lining up to ask you questions like, “My brother committed suicide, and I’m taking care of my sister’s kids (ages 7, 3) until she’s stable. How can I help them cope with the loss of their uncle?”

I don’t need to ask myself that. I haven’t been anointed by the media as the prophet uniquely in touch with the wisdom of the ages and the answers to the meaning of life. I suggest the reader should ask himself whether he thinks it is a good thing that these hurting and vulnerable people are being directed to seek answers from an intellectual charlatan and professional con man who teaches that the Bible is myth and metaphor.

What is Peterson going to tell them anyhow? Affect dominant postures? Clean their room? Make sure they take their vitamins daily? Don’t holocaust anyone? Or is he just going to get weepy on stage again? Perhaps he can draw upon the deep wellspring of his philosophy and tell the children that their suicidal father was pure evil for unnecessarily causing their suffering. That should do wonders for their psyches.

Not everyone disagrees with me, of course. Future Israeli has already seen enough to reach a verdict:

I was a fan of Vox Day and Jordan Peterson… now I’m just a fan of Vox Day.

And this viewer has figured out the true purpose of Jordan Peterson, which is to preach Holocaustianity to a generation that knows nothing and cares less about WWII-era history. (And that sound you just heard was Avalanche’s tender heart shattering.)

I felt something was off as soon as Jordan Peterson showed up he already teaming up with: Ben Shapiro, Denis Prager, Gaad Saad, Ezra Levant, Dave Rubin, Christina Hoff Sommers, Mark Levin (CRTV), Bret Weinestine, Steven Pinker etc etc

His peculiar obsession with Nazis and the Holocaust is the primary reason for Peterson’s unexpected and otherwise inexplicable rise to prominence in the media. Peterson was discovered by TV producer Wodek Szemberg, the producer of Big Ideas, who is, we are told in the Foreword to the 12 Rules of Life, “always on the lookout for potential public intellectuals, who knows how to spot people who can really talk in front of a TV camera and who look authentic….” Then he was picked up and pushed heavily by Ezra Levant of Rebel Media until he was embraced by the neocons and Never Trumpers.

The Reluctant Messiah

Matt Welch of Reason notices that something is seriously off about Jordan Peterson:

There are three truly weird moments in 12 Rules for Life that have largely escaped notice, though they should have set off alarm bells among reviewer and author alike. The first comes in the introduction, where Peterson describes a dream he had while writing Maps of Meaning in which he was “suspended in mid-air, clinging to a chandelier, many stories above the ground, directly under the dome of a massive cathedral.” Messiah much? He keeps going: “My dream placed me at the centre of Being itself, and there was no escape. It took me months to understand what this meant.…The centre is marked by the cross, as X marks the spot. Existence at that cross is suffering and transformation—and that fact, above all, needs to be voluntarily accepted.”

The second is another dream about halfway through the book, in which our hero was again in the air, this time with a view of massive glass pyramids, “all full of people striving to reach each pyramid’s very pinnacle.” Yet there was a further space above all that, “the privileged position of the eye that could or perhaps chose to soar freely about the fray; that chose not to dominate any specific group or cause but instead to somehow simultaneously transcend all.” Jesus.

The final eyebrow-raiser comes in the coda, where Peterson tells a symbolic story about being wowed by a friend’s night-lighted pen, asking for it as a gift, writing down on a piece of paper, What shall I do with my newfound pen of light? then waiting for revelatory response. Among the answers about life that tumbled forth: “Aim for Paradise, and concentrate on today” and “honour your wife as a Mother of God.” Among the questions, What shall I do with a fallen soul? and How shall I educate my people? The final couplet of this inspirational session: “What shall I do when the great crowd beckons? Stand tall and utter my broken truths.”

The only question is whether he’s the second coming or merely John the Baptist.

Neither. He’s not even a plausible antichrist figure, he’s simply a whack job desperately trying to hold his mind together. If Welch thought those three moments in 12 Rules for Life were truly weird, he’s going to be seriously freaked out by Peterson’s posturing in Maps of Meaning. From the preface, which is entitled DESCENSUS AD INFEROS, which means “The Descent into Hell.”

My parents lived in a standard ranch-style house, in a middle-class neighborhood, in a small town in northern Alberta. I was sitting in the darkened basement of this house, in the family room, watching TV, with my cousin Diane, who was in truth—in waking life—the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. A newscaster suddenly interrupted the program. The television picture and sound distorted, and static filled the screen. My cousin stood up and went behind the TV to check the electrical cord. She touched it, and started convulsing and frothing at the mouth, frozen upright by intense current.

A brilliant flash of light from a small window flooded the basement. I rushed upstairs. There was nothing left of the ground floor of the house. It had been completely and cleanly sheared away, leaving only the floor, which now served the basement as a roof. Red and orange flames filled the sky, from horizon to horizon. Nothing was left as far as I could see, except skeletal black ruins sticking up here and there: no houses, no trees, no signs of other human beings or of any life whatsoever. The entire town and everything that surrounded it on the flat prairie had been completely obliterated.

It started to rain mud, heavily. The mud blotted out everything, and left the earth brown, wet, flat and dull, and the sky leaden, even gray. A few distraught and shell-shocked people started to gather together. They were carrying unlabeled and dented cans of food, which contained nothing but mush and vegetables. They stood in the mud looking exhausted and disheveled. Some dogs emerged, out from under the basement stairs, where they had inexplicably taken residence. They were standing upright, on their hind legs. They were thin, like greyhounds, and had pointed noses. They looked like creatures of ritual—like Anubis, from the Egyptian tombs. They were carrying plates in front of them, which contained pieces of seared meat. They wanted to trade the meat for the cans. I took a plate. In the center of it was a circular slab of flesh four inches in diameter and one inch thick, foully cooked, oily, with a marrow bone in the center of it. Where did it come from?

I had a terrible thought. I rushed downstairs to my cousin. The dogs had butchered her, and were offering the meat to the survivors of the disaster.

I dreamed apocalyptic dreams of this intensity two or three times a week for a year or more….

The eye in the pyramid. The spirit writing. And now the cannibalism of the beautiful cousin. How much more evidence do you require? Do you still doubt my take on the man? Do you still doubt my opinion that following this lunatic’s philosophical, theological, or psychological lead is not going to lead anyone anywhere good? Maybe you still can’t smell the bullshit, but how can you fail to recognize the stink of sulfur?

The evil nature of fandom

Bruce Charlton explains why fandom is not beneficial for either the author or the creation:

I recently attended a talk, reading and book signing done by Sanderson; which was packed with hundreds of fans who turned-out and paid money to be there… and I say fans, because in the Q&A session every single one of the couple of dozen questions was related to the most trivial, ephemeral and superficial aspects of his work. There was not one single interesting, insightful, or challenging question asked by this mass of people; not the slightest indication that the novels were anything other than depictions of magic systems and ‘cool’ personalities.

Sanderson is an active Mormon, and all of his work is permeated with a serious consideration of religion and spirituality; both on the surface and as underlying structure. But it was clear that for Sanderson’s fandom this was of sub-zero interest – invisible and irrelevant.

The phenomenon of fandom is therefore at best trivial and fashion driven, there being more incommon between fans (regardless of what they are fans-of) than between fans and the subject of their fanaticism. Fandom is corrupting and destructive of whatever is good in the authors and works that get caught-up by it; and in its advanced form, fandom embodies subversion and inversion of whatever is specific and distinctive in its subject matter; the aim being to reinterpret and rewrite it in line with currently-dominant, top-down, manipulative social campaigns that ultimately emanate from (and are funded by) the global Establishment elites.

So the phenomenon of fandom is a product of evil purpose; and has a malign influence all-round.

My own experience with various fandoms does tend to support this negative view of it. This is why I prefer not to refer to the Ilk, the Dread Ilk, or the VFM as fans. They are certainly destructive, but not of me or my works, and they tend to be refining rather than corrupting.

The cargo cult is going down hard

I suspect Jordan Peterson’s cargo cult is going to react very, very angrily once they understand how badly they’ve been played by their psycho-charlatan false prophet:

You spoke of people thinking you were egotistical, they may have been right. Your whole speech is depressing, and you are unable and just plainly unwilling to say anything genuinely positive about him. You throw out certain things just so people think your being objective but these are not honest. The difference is that Jordan Peterson is honest and people follow him because of that—he is not trying to pull a fast one on anybody. We know he is trying to find truth and is passing those truths he has found. Evidence is him sticking his neck out when defending freedom of speech. He was unwilling to fold although many would have. That’s why the things you say are not believable and honesty it is boring. Difficult to watch. 

I note that this is how Jordan Peterson sticks out his neck “defending” freedom of speech.

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. So, [unintelligible] cancelled a panel about the cancellation of panels about free speech. That’s irony number one. And then irony number two, 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. So….

This is manifestly not the correct behavior of a principled man or even an honest one. Peterson did something he clearly knew to be wrong, but instead of simply owning up to his obvious failure, he attempted to concoct a ridiculous ex post facto justification to excuse it. He had to know this question was inevitable – he appears to have prepared for it – and yet this was the best that he could manage. If you watch the video, you can even see that Peterson has, he has, a reliable tell that warns you when he’s about to say something that he knows is not true, as well as another tell that indicates when he is going to very carefully attempt to cover up the weakness of one of his assertions or rationalizations.

My question is this: according to what theory of human rights or journalism does one’s right to free speech rely upon one’s correct performance of nonexistent journalistic responsibilities?

This is an excellent example of the incoherence of Jordanetics, where dishonesty, hypocrisy, and moral failure is hidden behind bafflegab and straight-up bullshit.

Why do the whole video talks about what jordan peterson IS rather than what he SAYS??? And things you “learned” are all things you already “knew” but that jordan peterson “should understand”. Everything in this video is judging him on the bases of your beliefs, and not an open-minded view of what he thinks. You’ve learned nothing, you’ve judged. Also, unsubscribed. You’re a narcissist. I don’t care if Jordan acts… very intensely. That’s called passion and intensity, something voxday clearly doesn’t have, this guy makes 1 point every 10 minutes. But anyway, that’s not the point. You too judge jordan on superficial details, “how he acts”, not the entierty of what he says. Jordan makes so many points, and he says so many things, based mostly on SCIENCE and a lifetime of exprience and practice in psychology, and this guy “destroyed” him based on his beliefs (christianity, what is evil, chaos and hell… in HIS opinion).

I directly and accurately quoted Peterson’s book to substantiate each of the 12 things I learned about him. I don’t know what more I am supposed to do to speak precisely about the man and his philosophy. Peterson does make lots of points and says lots of things, it is the inherently contradictory and incoherent nature of those points and those statements that illustrates the problem with Peterson’s charlatanry.

Bafflegab and bullshit

Keep in mind that this purports to be a DEFENSE of Jordan Peterson’s self-unmasking in his interview on the subject of truth with Sam Harris. Which is amusing, as it reads a lot more like an indictment.

For Harris, ideas are propositions about what really exists, independently of one’s mind, and science is an attempt to identify facts (i.e., ideas) about reality.  However, to a pragmatist such as Peterson, reality – i.e. the world around oneself – is not the thing under consideration because one cannot  obtain any knowledge at all of what causes one’s sensations: what exists outside of one’s own mind is not knowable.  For Peterson, there are no “facts” about reality.  For Peterson an “idea” is not a proposition about reality.  Instead, for Peterson, every “idea” is a plan of action.  The meaning of an idea is the effect of acting upon the idea. Thus, for a pragmatist, the meaning of “grizzly bear” is not “man-eating beast” but something like “run away!” or “throw a stone at it!”.

On this view, the truth of an idea is determined by its efficacy in achieving some goal (different pragmatists have differing ideas about what sorts of goals should be achieved). For example, if the goal is to remain unbitten, “run away” is a plan of action that is sufficiently true to act upon if running away is an effective way to remain unbitten, but “run away” is not a sufficiently true plan of action to act upon if running away is not an effective way to remain bitten. Likewise, “throw a stone at it!” is sufficiently true to act upon if throwing a stone at the grizzly bear is effective in preventing one from being bitten, but “throw a stone at it!” is not sufficiently true to act upon if throwing a stone at the grizzly bear is ineffective in preventing one from being bitten.

It follows that, for Peterson, science is not an attempt to discover ideas about, or “facts” about, reality.  Rather, science is an attempt to discover plans of action that, given the other ideas we hold, appear to be sufficiently true to act upon in order to attain one’s ethical purpose.  Hence Peterson’s statement that:

“I think of science as a tool, rather than as a description of reality.  And, well, that’s where we differ.”

Peterson’s Pragmatist Ethics/Purpose

For pragmatism, it is not enough for an idea (i.e., a plan of action) to “work” or to be “effective”.  Pragmatism requires the idea to be effective in achieving an ethically good end.  Thus, one might invent a weapon that is extremely effective in doing one thing: turning the Earth and every living thing on it to lifeless ash in milliseconds.  However, such a weapon does not “work” – is not “efficacious” – by the pragmatic standard, because it does not achieve an ethically good purpose.  Hence Peterson’s assertion that the sufficiency of an idea’s truth depends upon the idea being ethically good.

Different pragmatists hold differing versions of what constitutes a proper ethical purpose.  Peterson’s clearly was: survival; survival of the individual or of humanity as a whole.  Thus, for Peterson, an idea (i.e., a plan of action) is good if it is efficacious in achieving survival of the individual or of humanity as a whole.  Staying with the grizzly bear example, if a given idea – e.g., “run away!” – is an effective plan of action for surviving, then the idea “grizzly bear” (meaning “run away”) is a sufficiently true idea because it is a good idea.

Contrast this with Harris’ perspective on truth.   For Harris, “grizzly bear” is not a plan of action.  It is instead a concept of a large, hairy, man-eating mammal.  For Harris, it is true that a grizzly bear is a large, hairy, man-eating mammal because a grizzly bear can be observed to be exactly that, in reality.  In other words, on the Correspondence theory of truth to which Harris subscribes, the concept of a grizzly bear being a large, hairy, man-eating mammal is true if the concept corresponds to the facts of reality.  If grizzly bears – independently of what anyone thinks of them – really are large, hairy, man-eating mammals, then the concept in one’s head (i.e., large, hairy, man-eating mammal) is true because it Corresponds to the facts of reality.  And, on the Correspondence theory of truth, the concept is true whether or not running from a grizzly bear would be effective in avoiding a grizzly bite.

What Harris Seemed to be Missing

At this point, it should be clear to the reader that Harris seemed unaware of the foundations of pragmatism, his talk about arguing with Richard Rorty in undergraduate courses notwithstanding.

Harris wrongly thought Peterson to believe that there are facts of reality that exist independently of ones senses.  Peterson rejects the very idea that one can even consider any reality other than the experiences in one’s own head.

Harris wrongly thought that Peterson views ideas and propositions as ideas and propositions about reality; about the world around one.  Peterson views ideas not as claims about what exists in reality, but as plans of action.

Harris wrongly thought that Peterson views the role of science as the endeavour to discover the facts of reality.  Peterson views the role of science as the discovery of plans of action that are effective in achieving the ethical purpose of surviving.

Harris could not understand Peterson’s refusal to admit the truth of propositions independently of moral considerations because pragmatism is founded upon a whole lot of premises that Harris apparently is unaware of, and that were not discussed explicitly during the Harris-Peterson conversation.

Translation: Sam Harris, for all his various shortcomings, generally uses words as they are commonly understood. These Corresponding Truthy Pragmatists or whatever they happen to call themselves, are utilizing the old charlatan’s trick of calling a spoon a fork in order to prove that one can eat soup with a fork.

Of course, we have no idea if Jordan Peterson’s specific non-truth “truth” is actually pragmatic correspondence truth or not, because this is only one of the FOUR different definitions presently on offer from members of Peterson’s crazy cargo cult.

By the way, I finished 12 Rules of Life today. I’ll do a Darkstream later to discuss my initial impressions, then will start writing my review of the book for Monday, but I really do have to retract my earlier statement that Jordan Peterson is the bastard spawn of Bill Kristol and Deeprak Chopra. He’s actually more akin to the tragic love child of Bill Kristol and Stuart Smalley. And he is most definitely a Gamma male as well as a physical coward who quite literally ran from a fight as a sixth-grader.

He’s also had a tremendous amount of tragedy in and around his life, which I expect accounts for his bizarre equation of both life and evil with suffering.

Anyhow, I’ll read Maps of Meaning next, at which point I will have read more of Jordan Peterson’s work than 99.9 percent of his fans currently complaining that I know nothing about him. Apparently they are also unfamiliar with the concept of “hypothesis” and “calling your shot”. A sample of the cargo cult’s responses.

  • Wow…never realized how incredibly insecure Vox was untill now
  • don’t waste your time… this is the lunatic.  JP is awesome!!!
  • You’re arrogant, puffed up and bitterly jealous. You’re also extremely boring, rambling, and no matter how many books you stand in front of, and no matter how long you ramble on for, you’re never going to convince me that you’re intelligent enough to pass comment on other people’s intelligence. I presume that you got your IQ score from one of those ads at the bottom of a web page for a gutter tabloid. Neither are you fit to tie Jordan Peterson’s shoelaces. He’s clear, you’re muddled. He’s gripping, you’re boring. Incredibly monotonous. He’s funny and witty. You’re painfully and excruciatingly robotic and clearly have no emotional intelligence. Your droning barely conceals your desperate whimper, “Please buy my books too!” My answer to that is NO! get off the screen of my iPad, you sad, pathetic little gnome!
Jordan Peterson is “clear”, while I am “muddled”? That must be more of that incoherent truth in action.

12 things I learned from 12 Rules of Life

So, I finished the book and took a reasonable amount of notes, although considerably fewer than I would have anticipated. This is not my review, which I’ll probably post on Monday, merely a list of things I noted directly from the book rather than from interviews, videos, or statements by his fans or detractors.

12 Things I learned from reading 12 Rules for Life: A Darkstream

  1. Jordan Peterson is doing philosophy and religion, not psychology or science.
  2. Jordan Peterson is a gamma male and a physical coward
  3. Jordan Peterson is a man who is psychologically scarred by tragedy. This is probably why he believes both life and evil are primarily defined by suffering. He has really suffered and he genuinely merits an amount of pity.
  4. Jordan Peterson is not a man of the Right
  5. Jordan Peterson is not a Christian
  6. Jordan Peterson does not understand evil
  7. Jordan Peterson doesn’t entirely believe in individual responsibility.
  8. Jordan Peterson does not know what chaos is.
  9. Jordan Peterson does not follow his own advice.
  10. Jordan Peterson does not have a good grasp of either science or history.
  11. Jordan Peterson’s perspective is shaped by Holocaustianity.
  12. Jordan Peterson is a moderate who worships balance.
UPDATE: Link to video added.

The costs of a Code of Conduct

It will probably not surprise anyone who has read SJWAL or SJWADD to learn that Codes of Conduct chase off the evil male programmers who built the project.

Rafael Avila de Espindola is the fifth most active contributor to LLVM with more than 4,300 commits since 2006, but now he has decided to part ways with the project. Rafael posted a rather lengthy mailing list message to fellow LLVM developers today entitled I am leaving llvm.

He says the reason for abandoning LLVM development after 12 years is due to changes in the community. In particular, the “social injustice” brought on the organization’s new LLVM Code of Conduct and its decision to participate in this year’s Outreachy program to encourage women and other minority groups to get involved with free software development.

The reason for me leaving are the changes in the community. The current license change discussions unfortunately bring to memory the fsf politics when I was working on gcc. That would still not be sufficient reason to leave. As with the code, llvm will still have the best license and if the only community change was the handling of the license change I would probably keep going.

The community change I cannot take is how the social injustice movement has permeated it. When I joined llvm no one asked or cared about my religion or political view. We all seemed committed to just writing a good compiler framework.

Espindola was one of the most prolific LLVM contributors.

What a lot of people still don’t understand is that the Code of Conduct is working as designed when it chases off the productive members of the project.