Need a plate of generic, insipid platitudes with a giant helping of bad science and misogyny?
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One of my favorite examples of Jordan Peterson stupidity is when he was lecturing about some ancient civilization artwork that showed two serpent creatures creating humanity. He said that because the snakes were drawn in a double helix that this ancient civilization knew about and wanted to represent DNA.
Snakes coil around one another in a double helix when they mate. The snake creatures in the art were just fucking.
Source is at 1:15:39 in this vid: https://youtu.be/hSNWkRw53Jo?si=MPWip62wkrMX_bP7
Stuff like this is why I will never understand people following him. Like, I get it. It’s the bigotry. And when it comes to that, nothing else matters. I understand it on paper.
But at the same time… why? When he’s constantly wrong, or when they have to constantly lie about the things he says, why keep listening to him? Why are they like this?
Because he ‘sounds’ smart, so they latch on to that as their plausible legitimacy as to why what he says must be true.
When he talks/writes, he says a lot of words that communicate nothing. You have no idea what his point is.
Don’t forget the time he wanted to quit benzos to show how masculine he was. His doctors wanted to taper him down so his brain didn’t fry (benzo addiction alters brain chemistry and withdrawal can seriously screw you up or kill you if you stop), but trying to taper off over several years wasn’t manly and powerful. So he flew to Russia and got a few potentially sketchy doctors to put him in a medical coma for a month, and that’s part of why he’s so fucked up now.
Oh, or the part where his daughter convinced him to only ever eat red meat, and literally nothing else.
Lobster Peterson: “The way these snakes are drawn in resemblance to the structure of DNA, it is evident that ancient civilizations were familiar with the concept of DNA.”
Bro, they fucking
Hell even if they had ladder double helixes the most reasonable explanation would be a laborer did some psychedelics and either blew a priest’s mind with it or decided to incorporate the thing that blew their mind into some detailed work. It’s not difficult structure to imagine while tripping and ancient people sure did trip from time to time.
In general, assume ancient people were on drugs before you assume ancient people had knowledge of the complex structures they didn’t have the tools to observe.
and ancient people sure did trip from time to time.
And that’s an understatement, lol.
I see a lot of people here talking about how unpersuasive his arguments are. So I think this misses the real issue at hand. Countless young men do find him persuasive. They feel abandoned by everyone else and there is this man who comes along and convinces them he knows “the way”. Talking about how “unconvincing” his arguments are won’t stop this from happening. If anything it will impower in-group type thinking. It’s much more important that we tackle these problems at their source: combat the emotional abandonment of young men
goes out to adopt 1,000 young men
I largely worry about the lack of education that leads to people finding him persuasive. At least, that seems like a slightly simpler issue to resolve.
You can’t solve emotional needs with logic
But you can certainly prevent emotional needs (and probably more relevant: pathological anxieties) that are born from misunderstandings of reality, which are quite common among Peterson’s audience.
You’re trying to tackle the problem at the problem rather than prevent it all together. Peterson is a symptom not the real issue
Maybe, but the way I see it, deprogramming from a toxic culture is attacking the problem at the source to prevent more symptoms from occurring.
I do see other issues here, so education isn’t my only concern. However there is a lot of evidence that education based in critical thinking makes individuals more resilient to cult-style tactics and rhetoric. eta: Cultists’ emotions are often weaponized for the organization’s benefit so this does directly address the emotional needs issue imo.
There are also systemic issues at play here, and many of those affect a much wider cross-section of the general population so they should be more easily addressed. And yet this population loves its identity politics while loathing inter-sectionality, meaning they are the very population standing in tribalist opposition to what their class allies are fighting for. This is another sign that education failed, and that better critical thinking would be an effective counter to influence by JBP and the rest of the IDW, as well as the right-wing hegemony that they support.
He is such a disappointment to me. Early Peterson was just a clinical psychologist who actually gave a shit about men’s mental health. You could filter out his religion and actually get something out of it. Then he turned into… something else.
He’s been oppressed by the soviet propaganda posters he hangs inside his house. You can’t just take those things down! You must remember!
Yes, around a decade (or a bit more) ago I also found him interesting, based on a few short youtube videos or things I’ve read. Was never a fan, but as some other comments mentioned, young men were/are looking for these types of belonging and guidance.
Then I of course grew up, formed my own opinions of the world, and the same time he went further and further to the unhinged side, so yi can’t take him seriously anymore.
I used to like him. I fell for the crap. To my 16 year old brain what he said made a lot of sense. He had a handful of good points, and it made me believe the rest of the shit he peddled.
I see him now, I look back on how I hung onto his words like a lost lamb, and I can only facepalm.
I realised that the only thing he is good at is marketing, not psychology…
Being 16 is the best excuse you could have for believing anything that cretin says. You’re good bro.
It’s understandable - back in the day, he had some reasonable points and an academic veneer. If course, what he was saying tended to have a strong bias, and didn’t stand up to scrutiny, but it’s hard to fault a 16 year old looking for guidance for falling for it. Hindsight is 20 20 - particularly when the negative tendencies ratcheted up rapidly over time.
Since his Russian benzo coma (remember, kids - clean your room and don’t criticise others or systemic issues unless your life is perfect… pay no attention to my crippling addiction as I peddle that advice), things took a hard turn. I honestly think he suffered non-trivial brain damage. He’s far more erratic, bursts into tears at the drop of a hat (while trying to sell “traditional” masculinity, his takes have lost their academic veneer and are self-evidently stupid. There’s a reason he may be stripped of his accreditation.
TL;DR: Peterson went from being a pseudo-intellectual preacher to a lolcow, and (to me) the benzo coma seems to have been the catalyst for that shift.
I didn’t know about the benzo thing. And that was the advice from him I appreciated; the clean your room, etc.
I didn’t realise he was a walking blackout the entire time.
And I think his as following grew, so did his ego, and he began to think he knew way more than he actually did.
Ah well. An oversized ego is as bad as a termite infestation - if you let it grow it’ll eventually make things collapse…
Yeah - it speaks to his long-term lack of principles and integrity, but that’s not on you as a teenager. I’m just glad you grew from it, acknowledged when you were wrong, and grew from it - that’s no easy thing to do.
I did what I did for everything, and I took it with a grain of salt. This had the unfortunate side effect of just not following others and keeping up with the latest trends. Oh well, I feel happier than ever before
This is why the arguments 16 year olds should vote are terrible
I’ll remind you that the GOP not only exists, but is the party of choice for a little under half of voters - MTG, DeSantis, Trump, Boebert…
He’s so smart and articulate! Yeah, if you ate lead paint chips as a kid, or decided that huffing glue as a past time was a great idea.
Why is it that the cringiest fucking weebs like this guy? Does the suit give him some sort of weird dominion over them? These losers should be case and fucking point as to why you need Critical Thinking classes in schools…and it should also fucking highlight why Republicans are desperately trying to make public schools systematically dumber. A generation of highly educated people is detrimental to the conservative ideology (unless your making literally millions of $$$).
A lack of visible positive role models is a big part of it. When nobody else wants to engage with isolated and directionless young white men, people like Peterson will fill the vacuum. Couple that with amoral algorithms of social media generating engagement at any cost, and they soon have an audience.
Ensuring everyone has opportunities and and a sense of inclusion would go a lot further than just trying to teach everyone to recognise false shepherds. That’s just treating the symptom and not the cause, and would likely end up with them falling prey to another wolf with a better sheepskin.
Oh, I don’t disagree. There’s many systemic failures that have to occur for this to happen. YouTube thankfully has gone through efforts to remove it’s radicalization issue, so hopefully we’ll start to see it slow down or peter out over the next decade or so. However, I’m worried that the damage is already done.
I’d probably say Andrew Tate is closer to that.
I just want to say that if you are/were a young man, and found some value in some of what this guy was saying to you…thats’s OK. Don’t feel bad, or embarrassed or mad at yourself or whatever. We are all learning all the time, and doubly so when we’re young. Never think that you can’t take what is useful and reject what isn’t. Fuck knows there is plenty to reject about what this dude says!
I don’t know if it’s a new trend or something, but lots of people have something interesting to say, and say lots of hogwash besides and everyone gobbles it all up including the hogwash. You don’t have to go all in when reading someone’s work. For example, I read Freud and it was quite interesting. Most of it was horseshit (although historically interesting), but he still made the point that we don’t do all that we do consciously , which was hugely important.
Ideas and memes (in the original sense) are there to be examined and weighed against one another, not followed blindly.
So Petersen (I’m not really sure who that is), why not, he might have some salient points, even though he seems to be a controversial figure, apparently rightly so.
I listened to him for a little bit and sounded sensible, but I see a lot of people hate him and sounds like he found some fans and double down and a shit show to cater to them. I don’t know enough to have an opinion lol
The problem with him and people like him is that they start off with truth, and then slowly devolve into a conclusion they drew from that kernel of truth and before you know it they’re operating completely on their conclusions and personal ideas instead of the actual data they began with. Teaching as if their conclusions are just as valid.
It’s a similar strategy to how most religious leaders operate, when giving a sermon. They read the text and then change its meaning to whatever fits their narrative and interpretation best, then they spend the next hour preaching their ideas with the root authority of the audience largely unmentioned after that.
90% of his advice is pretty much just boilerplate self help stuff you can find in thousands of books on Amazon. That stuff gets you in the door and is meant to develop a sense of trust because you might see initial improvement and feel good from the advice.
It’s when he does the rug pull and starts introducing trad nonsense into it that determines how willing a person is to keep following through on listening to him.
Like you mentioned, this is an extremely common tactic used by religious leaders as well as cults. Back in the mid 20th century when the whole self help craze started, many cults took to framing themselves as self help groups to attract outsiders. NXIVM is probably the most infamous example of this. The first few meetings should seem like a normal support group but would soon start ramping up into full on cult mode.
He laces practical advice with misogynistic and bigoted undertones. He tells people to adhere to the “natural order” and you shouldn’t try to improve the world but only strive to improve yourself and be a better worker bee. He stopped practicing psychology and teaching it because what is taught in psychology doesn’t agree with his political views. Recently he has chosen to be a right-wing voice for the daily wire to personally profit off of airing his grievances with society at large. He calls his fellow colleagues in his profession “butchers” for giving gender affirming care and he might lose his license because he is maligning the profession he himself was a part of. He seems that he would rather nuke his credentials to further his career as a pundit. He is a deeply disturbed man that has yet to get his house in order lecturing young people, mostly men, about what it means to be a productive member of society.
he would rather nuke his credentials to further his career as a pundit.
Yep, and to him and the people he takes advantage of, he’d be dumb not to do this. When you value money above all else, it’s a big brain move to do the thing that gets you the most money. He’s good at his game, but it’s an entirely different game than what mature and reasonable adults play.
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Att least before his drug auxin, he wasn’t that bad and there were some alright takeaways between the lines.
Now it’s just sick ramblings from a diseased man.
Don’t forget a mountain of benzos.
I read that in his voice and even my imagination couldn’t make him sound sincere.
And oh, great, now im gonna have “consider the lobster” popping into my head all day. Thanks.
Thankyou. That was thoroughly entertaining.
Who is Jordan b Peterson?
Step 1 of the depressed teenage boy who feels inadequate to tradition-obsessed nutjob pipeline. Also a self-help book/snake oil peddler who says he only eats meat and drinking apple cider made him stay awake for a month.
He was a university professor in Canada. He stepped into the media light after Canada was set to pass a law criminalizing dead naming someone. Peterson became very outspoken against this law because it wasn’t a law banning speech, it was a law enforcing you to use specific speech.
A video of some trans students confronting him went viral, which thrust him into popularity. It’s an interesting video, I suggest everyone watch it. After that, the law was put in place, and Peterson got in trouble with the university, and (quit? Was fired? I forget which).
There are two notable events after the first that everyone here is talking about. Due to the media attention, Peterson sought out therapy and was prescribed benzos, which he quickly became addicted to. He kinda fell out of the media light for a bit, and it turns out he was not going through withdrawal very well, so he and his family flew to Russia, where they induced a coma and he was able to come off of the benzos. I know that he did a podcast with his daughter where they go through exactly what happened, if you’re curious as yo his experience (though I’m sure there’s a summary on wiki or something)
The second event is that (one of?) his licenses was pulled by a college board of some sort after he criticized Trudeau on twitter over something, and he was ordered to go to “social media reeducation” training. He took them to court over it and the judge ruled that yes, the board’s ruling was an infringement on his free speech, but since they’re a private board they can withhold his license until they see fit.
And that sums up everything as neutrally as I can get.
the board’s ruling was an infringement on his free speech, but since they’re a private board
Free speech applies to the private sphere in Canada? It seems like that would have implications on every social media platform, search engine, and so on.
It’s a bit of a gray area. The issue, as far as I can tell, is whether or not he’s speaking in a professional manor on his social media, as he would be expected to with any patient he sees.
But where is the government in this context? The license is through a private board.
It’s an issue of what a private board can cover and enforce their rules over and what they can’t. Anything they can’t is government.
