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.

Defensor Fidei

Donald Trump is putting the last 38 years of failure on the part of the Republican party’s social conservatives in perspective with his forthright actions in office:

Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order to ensure that the faith-based and community organizations that form the bedrock of our society have strong advocates in the White House and throughout the Federal Government.

President Trump has signed an Executive Order entitled “Establishment of a White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative” in order to:

  • provide recommendations on the Administration’s policy agenda affecting faith-based and community programs;
  • provide recommendations on programs and policies where faith-based and community organizations may partner and/or deliver more effective solutions to poverty;
  • apprise the Administration of any failures of the executive branch to comply with religious liberty protections under law; and
  • reduce the burdens on the exercise of free religion.

Lest you think this is a mere exercise in meaningless bureaucratic symbolism, it’s definitely alarming the right people.

Anyone following the heinous “religious freedom” laws popping up around the U.S. understands that the coded language in a new executive order signed by Donald Trump yesterday has been used consistently and insidiously by conservatives to remove rights from LGBTQ people and women.

Read the executive order HERE. It’s alarming, to say the least.

This will be used to ensure that businesses and organizations have the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people based on religious beliefs…. Be afraid, be very afraid. This has the fingerprints of organizations like Family Research Council and other anti-LGBTQ hate groups all over it.

The mother’s warning

The mother of a murdered Italian girl speaks out with a powerful anti-immigrant gesture that is resounding throughout Italy:

The mother of Pamela Mastropietro, the 18-year-old Roman girl raped, murdered and chopped up by Nigerian drug dealers, chose to make a bold statement at her daughter’s funeral. She personally carried the bouquet sent by Luca Traini, the “White Rampage” shooter who became a hero to many Italians after gunning down Africans in the wake of Pamela’s death.

Magnificent. There is a time for Christian reconciliation and there is a time for Deus Vult. St. Breivik, pray for us.

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.