Jordan Peterson served a very important function for society. In a time where all left wing counter arguments were ad hominem he delivered his position in such a precise way as to not allowed them an opportunity for weasle words. Make no mistake the fact that he survived quite so long before the character assassinations managed to catch him is a miracle. People were proactively trying to publicly destroy him since before you even heard his name.
Such a person clearly must operate by definition with a level of attention to detail that must be psychotic. It's not that people took him seriously, psychomyth has always been ropey as hell as a field. It's that the people who seeked to publicly humiliate him like they do to their enemies usually couldn't. And that is an admirable quality in it self.
>>72496 >the character assassinations managed to catch him
They did? I know he's taken a religious bent and comes off a bit strange these days, but I always though his vocal oposition came from the far-left (oh dear, now I'm saying it) types who didn't like what he said about trains.
I still listen to his stuff on occasion exactly for that precision and careful positioning.
My concern these days is that he's clearly developing networks and could be used as an intelligence asset.
As a big fat lefty myself, I have never found peterson particularly to my taste, but from a surface level understanding of the views he represents it's fairly easy to understand why certain types like him. And that's what always annoys me about my lefty peers, they act like that audience is aliens from another planet that they can't understand at all, and are completely unable to empathise with; which really I think says more about themselves than the vaguely right-wing drifting young white male.
it really doesn't take a lot to imagine a few small junction points in my life going differently, and I might be well on my way down that path myself, as might any one of us, and you would be an arrogant fool to say otherwise.
>And that's what always annoys me about my lefty peers, they act like that audience is aliens from another planet that they can't understand at all, and are completely unable to empathise with
I met plenty of those types at uni, where I was involved dabbled in student politics. You get plenty of lefties in student politics, oftentimes a lot more than there are conservative leaning students like myself. I'm someone who can enjoy a lively political debate with somebody whose views and party affiliation are diametrically different from mine. I may walk away thinking they're a bit of a cunt, but I'll be intrigued, if just for the fact that it exposes you to ideas and ways of thinking other than your own. But to quite a few lefties like that, even the idea that you would actually listen to somebody with more conservative views on the off chance you might take away something from it is complete blasphemy.
>the vaguely right-wing drifting young white male.
There's also a lot of pigeonholing that goes on. Just because somebody doesn't share your views, doesn't mean they're right wing. Maybe they're centrist and you're a proper leftie loon. For example, rejecting or doubting some of the more radical ideas about gender diversity doesn't make you a Nazi chronic masturbator.
>>72500 >a few small junction points in my life going differently, and I might be well on my way down that path myself, as might any one of us, and you would be an arrogant fool to say otherwise.
Maybe it's self-loathing but that sense always makes it easier for me to have contempt for someone: they're just as much of a cunt as I am, but apparently too hasty or nasty to have paused and wound up where I did.
Whereas with, say, a proper upper class Tory I can reason out that the reason they're such a cunt is that they've never seen things my way.
>>72502 >MAYBE IT'S SELF-LOATHING
I don't think it is. I respect dull right-wing views, because I can't see myself believing them. But reactionary right-wing views warrant nothing but scorn, because everybody's first thought about immigration and poverty is always "hurr durr just leave them to it and protect what I myself have". You only realise that's retarded if you think about things for thirty seconds, which many people to the right of me seemingly haven't bothered to do. In a way, the best views are the ones that are completely impenetrable at first glance, because you can be absolutely certain that they aren't a knee-jerk reaction and have clearly been considered at length.
I don't loathe myself at all, but I am an avant-garde hippy art poof who thinks concrete ribbons are better than paintings that look like things.
There was a weird moment where his early message of "wash your balls, tidy your room and get a proper job" appeared to be a genuinely radical countercultural position.
I suspect in hindsight, we might recognise that Patreon is a far more dangerous radicalising influence than social media alone. Weird things happen when media figures become financially dependent on the most fanatical 0.1% of their audience.
>"wash your balls, tidy your room and get a proper job"
Not only that but really, he was for a time basically the only person giving no-nonsense and practical advice like that to an audience of disaffected young blokes. The actual efficacy of washing your balls and tidying your room is one thing, the actual material hurdles to "getting a proper job" are another, but when young lads were caught between the nonsense hustle culture of guys like Tate and the sissify in general, or on the opposite end of the spectrum, the feminised therapy-speak of online liberal lefty spaces, where any semblance of internal locus of control is demonised as somehow inherently fascist... He was at that point, at least on the face of it, offering a fairly sensible middle road.
I have fought with depression over and over throughout my life, and on that subject I can mostly agree with petersen's fundamental message. you do have to dig yourself out of it, and he's not trying to sell the bootstraps rhetoric, he's trying to impress the fact that only you can pull yourself out of it. the locus of control thing is again, one of the things that frustrates me most about a lot of lefty discourse. the old socialists were about building things and hard work in unity, not laying about saying "oh i can't do anything i have four self diagnosed disabilities." socialism would appeal to a lot more young men if it still had that vibe to it. they just want a direction, a purpose.
>and he's not trying to sell the bootstraps rhetoric, he's trying to impress the fact that only you can pull yourself out of it.
>the old socialists were about building things and hard work in unity, not laying about saying "oh i can't do anything i have four self diagnosed disabilities."
Petersen definitely has a Kantian vibe in that respect. But is Petersen wrong? If you always blame everybody else for what happens to you or if you use whatever you think is holding you back as an excuse to not try, then how can you ever expect to take control and resonsibility of your own life.
Much of identity politics can be boiled down to "I can't do X because I'm Y and/or Z". Where you are moaning that whatever you think your identity is has been an impediment because society thinks less of you.
>socialism would appeal to a lot more young men if it still had that vibe to it. they just want a direction, a purpose.
I think that the real problem is that white young men have become increasingly marginalised. That argument itself may sound like identity politics, so I have to be careful not to lead my own point at absurdum. But it's true. It's all about diversity, soft skills, and the stigmatisation of boyish behaviour. The whole education sector is geared towards girls and women, and what was once considered normal boyish behaviour like playing rough in the schoolyard, establishing hierarchies that way and being all around more physical is now a no-no. You are supposed to sit still in class, cause no disturbance, and duly absorb the lesson and do your homework diligently. And not much else. Which is much easier for girls than for boys at that age. As a consequence, we've got more boys leaving school or dropping out of uni without qualifications than ever before. Because the style and behaviour of learning that is expected of them simply isn't suited for boys and young men.
Women are told that they can be anything they want these days. And yes, why shouldn't they be. But that's not what young men get to hear. They are told that they are a liability for society, and if anything, that they need to make way for ethnic, gender, and whatever else diversity. And that's why many of them end up disillusioned, with no sense of purpose, and not few are then drawn to fringe beliefs.
There's an important distinction between "i can't do [thing] because society is prejudiced against me" and "it's harder for me to do [thing] because of prejudice, and that's not how it should be", which often just gets lost in discussions. and of course, there's your contingent of grifters who essentially just want to bend it as far as they can for personal gain.
the right wing solution to that is to just ignore it and say "it's fine, what about this black/disabled/working class guy who defied the odds and did [thing] regardless?" the whole problem is you shouldn't have to defy the odds, the game shouldn't be stacked against you. The identity politics grifters don't solve anything because they still want the game to be rigged, they just want the odds tipped in a different direction.
This is the real horseshoe theory, they're really no different underneath the first layer of paintwork.
>the second bit
I agree but really, it's simply one of the points I've given up arguing because nobody is prepared to hear it. it's definitely an issue that's going to cause significant issues in the future, but nobody will admit they were wrong until it's too late.
> it's definitely an issue that's going to cause significant issues in the future, but nobody will admit they were wrong until it's too late.
What I forgot to say in my post but is equally important is that it's not just that young boys are expected to behave more like young girls in school, but we've also got the problem that about 75% of teachers in the UK are female, and one in three primary schools have no male teachers at all. It's not impossible for somebody to go from pre-school to year 12 and pass their A levels without once having had a male teacher. This is bad in more ways than one, because it means there are too few teachers who can inherently relate to young boys and the different kind of attention they need compared to girls, and on the other hand, those boys will spend most of their days every week not having strong male role models and identification figures in their lives. Or who will settle fighting and disputes between boys in ways that go beyond some female teacher chiding them in a shrill voice.
All that was definitely not the case when I was in school in the 80s and 90s. As far as I can remember, at least in secondary school we always had a healthy mix of male and female teachers, and I'm sure many of them were instrumental in inspiring teenage boys to go on and do well for themselves. Because, again, there are just things that female teachers cannot teach male pupils.
That's doubly problematic when you consider the proportion of boys being raised in fatherless households. If you have zero men involved in your life, you're easy pickings for charlatans, because you literally have no idea of what it means to be a man.
>That's doubly problematic when you consider the proportion of boys being raised in fatherless households.
I'm not going to say that's all fishing's fault, and there are very legitimate reasons why parents split up that can lie both with the father and the mother and be well founded. But feminism has in some respect led to the idea of expendability of men as fathers. In our time, the overwhelming majority of divorces or breakups of couples with children are initiated by the woman. The reason can, again, be to escape from an abusive or otherwise unhappy relationship, in which case that's fine, and can serve to keep children out of harm's way. But a lot of times, I doubt that's really what happens. Because I've seen it enough times. Those women often just think they can do better. Because feminism has told them so. And these women then go on to be single mothers, and the biological father will gradually lose importance as a father figure to his children. Because family courts favour women, and often make men pay child maintenance out of their arse while being more and more pushed out of their children's lives. And those women will struggle to find a new partner who is ready for the kind of commitment that comes with being a stepdad. Which then sometimes leads to boys growing up without dependable male role models almost for the entirety of their formative years.
I've observed a cyclical, intergenerational factor. Of the lads I grew up with who didn't really know their dads, most are now never-married or divorced fathers who - at best - see their kids most weekends and don't really know what to do with them. I don't blame them, because it must be really hard to be a dad if you don't know what it's like to have a dad, but that also suggests that it'll be a really hard problem to fix.
There's also a really strong class element that doesn't get talked about. If you're upper-middle-class and can afford to pay generous child support and get good childcare and all of that, divorce isn't necessarily a big deal. If you're already barely keeping your head above water, divorce can have a catastrophic impact on the stability and security of your children. Obviously I don't think divorce should be illegal, but I do wonder whether de-stigmatising divorce and single-parent households has done more harm than good in the long run. The sort of people who shape the culture can't really imagine what it's like to raise two kids as a single mum on benefits or minimum wage.
>I don't blame them, because it must be really hard to be a dad if you don't know what it's like to have a dad, but that also suggests that it'll be a really hard problem to fix.
Just because you didn't experience certain things growing up, doesn't mean you'll forever be deficient and not be able pass it on to your kids. Maybe you never had a dad that you kicked a ball around with at the weekend, or who gave you a bit of father-son talk. Or just hugged you now and then when you really needed it. But that doesn't mean you can't provide that for your own kids, if you give it a try. There's often a lot more latent, hardwired human behaviour like that in all of us than we give ourselves credit for.
>but I do wonder whether de-stigmatising divorce and single-parent households has done more harm than good in the long run.
It's not been all bad. Being a single mum, maybe even unwed, was very disadvantageous 50 years ago. It was massively stigmatised compared to today. Sometimes, parting ways with somebody, even if it leaves you as a single parent, is still better than continuing a marriage or relationship. You now have that choice, and have to fear no real stigmatisation. But there's obviously a tradeoff. A dark side. Where divorce can become a simple lifestyle choice with few strings attached. And if you know you've always got that in the back pocket, it can mean you'll try less hard to make a relationship work.
