The Toxicity That Toxicity Created

I know I am going to catch some flak from alt-left purists for this, but I belong to several Jordan B Peterson fan groups on Facebook.  These groups do tend to attract a lot of alt-lite and neoreactionary types of people.  In some ways I wish they wouldn’t, because Peterson’s views are more nuanced than that and he has, in fact, been critical of the alt-right on a number of instances, though he does trade in many of their talking points.  I do have my disagreements with Professor Peterson (not that he’s losing sleep over what I have to say!) and I go over those in detail here. 

However, I can also see his popularity with this section of the population.  Since the decline of Christianity and nationalism in the western world, and the subsequent rise of progressivism and feminism to replace them, many white males in the west have felt as if they were without an identity and without a mythology.  Identity and mythology are crucial to any person’s sense of self, and Professor Peterson, having spent his life studying and teaching depth psychology and mythology, knows this better than anyone.  I ask of the alt-left “What shall be our Mythology” because these are such crucial topics.

A female member in one of these groups made the following post:

I posted this as a comment in a different thread but I'm truly surprised and felt the need to separate this into a different post: 

It's interesting to me that the go-to in this group is mocking, immature personal attacks, and arrogant narcissism rather than respectful dialogue with actual logic/info. 

Very sad to me. It also shows painful insecurity and a simmering anger. Why??
What's going on underneath all this facade? 

What's touching a raw nerve that the majority of people in here respond with anger and ad hominem? (Mostly males, although I've seen a few females exhibit these traits as well.) 

Truly. I'm asking genuinely because the majority of comments on all threads seem to be made by angry boys with no filter, not men. I say that with respect to men because I know a lot of really good honorable men. 

Of all the groups I've participated in over the last few years, groups like this that are predominantly white/male tend to be this way. It's noticeable and it's heartbreaking. 

Anger is usually a symptom of deeper issues/hurts/fears etc.
What's REALLY going on here underlying all this???

I would be astounded if this group was in any way exceptional, at least as far as groups with this kind of political slant go.  Rightly or wrongly, JP has become a lightning rod for people, predominantly white males with neoreactionary sympathies, for reasons I’ve outlined above.  Which are really just a backlash against the anti-white, anti-male sentiments so often expressed in progressive spaces, and the accompanying irrationality and rage.  While a lot of this can just be chalked up to the anonymity of the internet and the license it gives all kinds of people to act like assholes, this has begun to spill into the offline world now.  See the riots on college campuses and so on.

I mean, take a look at a lot of feminist spaces online.  Actually attempting a dialogue with them will get responses of just plain snark or rudeness.  There's no talking to them, and they've made it quite clear that they're not interested in discussion. Now there may be some reason for this.  Maybe after dealing with enough rude males over the years, a lot of women just shut off.  You stop caring what the idiots think.   

While this is understandable, this isn’t helpful long term, because it will eventually drive the other side – nonprogressive males, to respond the exact same way.  Why should reasonable white dudes who are generally innocent of racist or sexist wrongdoing keep trying to reason with and stress mutual trust and goodwill between the sexes when this is the kind of response we get?  It's out of the question now to assume that anything is going to cause the columnists at The Mary Sue or Jezebel, as two examples among many, to be reasonable human beings.  Once people like Clementine Ford or Anita Sarkeesian are your spokespeople, you're pretty much irredeemable at that point. 

As far as the progressive mainstream is concerned, you're either completely with them, or you're a Nazi, racist, misogynist, homophobe, etc.  And their worldview is so hermetically sealed that they refuse to see how ultimately counterproductive this is.  They're so hopped up on their heroic mythology of direct action and “fight the power” that they're completely impervious to any kind of reason.  As Sam Harris recently observed, this is how the left will die.

So eventually even moderate white dudes end up retaliating in kind.  Should it surprise us that red pills are pretty much being mass produced at this point?  Are the academics and pundits on the left really so self absorbed that they thought anything else was eventually going to happen?

And, again as a moderate white guy, you also feel betrayed.  You also hate seeing the so called progressives, the liberals, with their dream that we all be judged by the content of our character rather than the color of our skin, be consumed by their postmodernist, intersectionalist, privilege theory obsessed offspring without so much as a whimper of protest.  When queer feminist theorists and critical race theorists insisted that disagreement in good faith with them was impossible without being racist or sexist, the liberal establishment completely caved.  White male guilt trumped intellectual responsibility and moral clarity.  Should it surprise us that Trump is what we'd eventually have to show for it?

As a modern white male, you were perfectly willing to go along with the liberal ideal until some virtue signalling college chick intentionally took something you posted out of context and made you say something that was light years away from what you intended to say, in order to brand you a racist and win brownie points with the rest of her 'collective' for the umpteenth time.  At some point you clued in. It wasn't about being anti-racist or feminist.  It was about using anti racism and feminism as a club to shame others.  

In the progressive world, winning was all that mattered, even if you "won" over a grotesquely distorted and decontextualized version of what your 'opponent' supposedly stood for instead of what they were actually saying.  Poststructuralist academia declared that the author was dead, after all, so didn't this give feminist bloggers and columnists leave to misconstrue their opponents with complete impunity.  And then they have the gall to decry the Trump administration for its "alternative facts" and to scream heresy against white nationalists couching their arguments in multiculturalist terms and Christian fundamentalists demanding equal time for young-earth creationists as well as evolutionists.  Did the academic left not open the door to this in its embrace of radical social constructivism and ideational relativism in its "deconstruction" of the white male western canon?

As a modern white male, you knew was wrong and perverse, and that you were being betrayed. You might not have known it intellectually, but you knew it instinctively.  

The promised land seen by MLK turned out to be an endless barrage of 140 character or less torch-and-pitchfork maternalistic sanctimony, always delivered with the same buzzwords, catchphrases, slogans and cutesy clever portmanteaus.  And for anyone who tries arguing with them, site moderators and administrators are always on hand to play the banhammer wielding white knight.

 

So yeah, there's a lot of anger.  A lot of it is just vindictiveness and spite.  A lot of it is delivered in the crudest and basest of terms.  Like the angry feminist on the other end of the fiberoptic cable, you stop giving a shit.  You start rolling your eyes whenever women online talk about rape and harassment.  Which is too bad, but they similarly rolled their eyes when false allegations were brought up.  What did you expect when The Boy who Cried Wolf was apparently another of the dead white male canon that was to be banished from the schools and colleges in order to make them more "inclusive."  What makes the issues raised by females so intrinsically valid compared to the issues raised by men?  Nothing other than that they're female issues? 

This is what you get when pandering to college chick egos became what progressivism was really all about, and all the nice social justice concepts were appropriated and manipulated to that end.  For all their fancy degrees and supposed intellectualism, how could the progressives have failed to anticipate anything other than a toxic far right white male backlash.  The toxicity you see, even in Jordan Peterson fan spaces online, is the toxicity that toxicity created.  

Given a different culture among academic and mainstream liberals, one that was more interested in standing with rather than above the common people, things might have turned out differently. Had regressive leftists not doubled down on “power plus prejudice” rationalizations for why it's okay for their holy trinity of women, POC and LGBTQ people to act like assholes, when it’s Nazi oppression when white males do it, and we might be in a different cultural space now.  One without the alt-right or President Donald Trump.  

 

Had the new atheists understood as Professor Peterson understands the real reasons why people gravitate towards religious and mythical belief systems and spoken to that, instead of intellectual smugness: “something something spaghetti monster, something something fallacy, something something invisible pink unicorns, something something inbred Republican hicks,” people like Jordan Peterson would not be gaining the steam that they are.  And while Peterson himself might not be “full fash” as they say in NRx circles, he does lean undeniably right, and he does attract that kind to his fanbase.  

Liberals and progressives would be quite surprised to know how little their opponents give a shit about how correct and infallible liberals and progressives think their ideologies are.  Perhaps they should try a bit of listening and maybe some dialogue instead of doctrinaire smugness and faux outrage, and see as they start getting different results.  Maybe it's well past time that the left rethought its late 60s strategy of a long march through the institutions, especially academia, and the intentional blurring of the distinction between scholarship and activism.  It's producing an inferior quality of both.

And as long as academic and media progressives continue to think that they can shame and browbeat white males into accepting the morally inferior status to which they’ve been cast, reaction is exactly what they’re going to get and their unwillingness to accept this is a measure of their arrogance.  Since we are talking about Jordan Peterson here, we could describe neoreaction as the shadow of the feminist progressive left.  A reflection of the unstated reality that progressivism is much more an assertion of a collective maternalistic archetype than it is a speaking of truth to power.  The purpose of the maternal is not to be venerated for its own sake indefinitely by a population of infantilized boys not permitted by this collective maternal ego to grow into independent men.  

The right wing will offer no real answer, of course.  The right wing will do what it always does once it takes power.  Retrench corporate and state power, indifferent to and often at the expense of the well being of the common people, including the angry white male segments thereof.  We’re seeing this in Trump’s America, and it’s going to make everything worse in the long run.  Antifeminist and anti civil rights anger will serve only to continually perpetuate the cycle, making a reassertion of feminist and black rage in the future, or more likely a deepening of the already intense feminist and black rage of the present, inevitable.  

The rejoinder to a collective maternal archetype is not a collective paternal archetype, but the completion of the archetypal journey of Jungian individuation or the Campbellian monomyth: girl to woman, boy to man and reconciliation between the two.  Resistance to this journey would seem to be the defining characteristic of the culture wars of our time.

If you enjoyed this article, be sure to read its companion pieces: The Nation as Family Metaphor and What Shall Be Our Mythology.