Ignorance of Capitalism Also Risks “Absolute Catastrophe”

Articles like this - written by Paul Joseph Watson quoting Jordan Peterson, are why I've lost much sympathy for these fuzzy-vaguely right leaning Intellectual Dark Web types - the ones who simply shill for rightist ideas, at any rate. I never agreed with them on most substantial issues, but I sympathized with the push to diversify the ideological landscape, at least in mainstream media and academia. And of course, who could like the SJWs these days? Arrogant, dogmatic and narrow minded. I sympathized as much with anger towards them in 2016 as I did with anger against the Christian right in 2006.

Then as now, I also temper that anger with a warning: Don't lose sight of the bigger picture, and don't adopt your enemy's bad habits. Because if you do, you won't be truly victorious even if you do win in the short term political sense. That's how the SJWs happened, and that seems to be happening with the "cultural libertarians" as well.

PJW's article is a complete mess. Its only saving grace is its brevity. Yet it manages to contain everything I've come to dislike about the current crop of online reactionary anti-SJW thinkers. Indeed, as far as ideology goes, they're scarcely preferable to the SJWs at all any more. There is, thus far, no accompanying authoritarian drive for censorship, but the self awareness now seems to be so lacking that I can't help but wonder if even that isn't just a matter of time.

Watson reports:

During an event hosted by The Heritage Foundation this week, the clinical psychologist and best-selling author said that millennials are embracing far-left ideology because they weren’t taught about its disastrous outcomes at school. 

“People are unbelievably ignorant of history,” said Peterson. “What young people know about 20th-century history is nonexistent, especially about the history of the radical left. How would you know? They are never taught about it so why would they be concerned about it?”

Observe firstly that in other contexts, Jordan Peterson has repeatedly denied being a rightist partisan. Yet here he's quoted as addressing the Heritage Foundation - a right leaning think tank last time I checked, repeating oft-heard talking points on the evils of socialism. Not that Stalinist communism is a good system, mind you, but I'd find Peterson's shtick of not being a right winger a bit more convincing if this was a takedown of laissez faire capitalism delivered to a genuinely centrist audience, since that's what we in the west have actually been living under and suffering under for the last half century now. Not socialism.

A warning that people could turn to revolutionary socialism if the extreme inequalities in capitalism are not addressed as they were via Roosevelt's New Deal could be issued, and that would be a good reason to undertake a new new deal, but that's not what we have here. Just talking points that I could copy and paste from nearly any right wing internet source.

Yet here we see an ongoing preoccupation with the dangers posed by socialism and equality of outcome. Not massive inequality, which is much closer to be beast we quarrel with these days. Wealth inequality in the US has never been greater than it is now. I'll sympathize more with the destructive potential of equality of outcome - which I don't honestly doubt - when that's the destructive potential we're actually really staring down the barrel of.

PJW continues:

He also explained that the simplistic socialist notion of caring for as many people as possible was very alluring for people who had an emotional view of humanity. 

Young people are “emotionally drawn to the ideals of socialism, say, or the left, because it draws its fundamental motivational source from a kind of primary compassion, and that is always there in human beings,” said Peterson.

Seriously? And people are not also emotionally drawn to classical mythology or biblical narratives? The kind Peterson specializes in teaching to his audiences? There's no emotional appeal there? There's no emotional appeal in right wing politics? There's no emotional appeal in alpha male hero worship, which we're being asked by the right to engage in, so as to look the other way as far as massive wealth inequality and abuses of power are concerned?

I'll grant the idea that the left should rely a bit less on emotional appeal and also be prepared to back itself up with, for lack of better terms, facts and logic, is one I think they'd do well to heed. The left has ceded too much to the right over the years to let them have facts and logic also. The tendency of a feminized left to rely on moral outrage to emotionally extort agreement from audiences has been catastrophic for progressives over the last several years. It's fed directly into the perception of the left as a cult of self righteousness and moral supremacy that's turned out to be a gold mine for reactionaries of all stripes.

Having said that, just why is it wrong to have an emotionally derived desire to care for the downtrodden and less fortunate in any event? Why are such sentiments bad? Were I Peterson, I'd be much more concerned with the lack of empathy for the poor and sick that I often see in right of center online spaces. Yes, social justice activism on the far left can drive self righteousness and dogmatism. But that's not what's being critiqued here.

This is exactly the kind of Petersonian double talk that David Pakman does such a good job of taking down here, where Pakman critiques an address delivered by Peterson at Liberty University, founded by the late Reverend Jerry Falwell to teach fundamentalist biblical ideas. Because I suppose those are the kinds of hosts you have when you're totally not a right winger:

I find it quite astounding that Peterson's attacks on the "postmodern left's" lack of respect and value for free speech gains applause in a "college" established by none other than Reverend Jerry Falwell, whose Moral Majority were calling for all kinds of censorship, ranging from metal music to table top role playing games and porn to anything deemed not sufficiently "Godly" back in the 1980s.

Is this what the anti-SJW free speech cultural libertarians have sunk to? The same whose criticisms of the regressive left not so long ago centered around just how like the religious right it was? Down the memory hole with that, I guess. We were never at war with Eurasia, we have always been at war with Eastasia, by the sounds of things.

It's especially galling for Jordan Peterson to be this dumb. He's not an unintelligent man, when he's in his element, which is Jungian psychology and comparative mythology. Unless, of course, that's the plan here. Is a man whose area of expertise is the study of heroic mythology not creating a mythos of his own, with which to bind and cement the loyalty of a fan base?

From PJW's article:

Peterson also blamed the “unholy marriage of the postmodern nihilism with this Marxist utopian notion” for the breakdown in social and family unity, a process which has produced an “absolute catastrophe”

The foundation of every mythologized belief system is the creation of a bad guy. For the SJWs, it's the white male patriarchy. And for Peterson, it's "postmodern Marxism." Which are not complex philosophical views with deep and nuanced, sometimes flawed and sometimes insightful observations and theories, but rather simply EVIL! They hate the west and capitalism and success because ... well, because reasons. Or something. The same reasons that SJWs assert that conservatives and Trumpians just hate hate HATE black people and women. Because reasons.

And the reasons are that political mythologies begin with a villain. A dastardly "them" for "us" to fight if we're to be the heroes that our mythical systems cast us as. Every ideological system, my own included, does this.

It's unfortunate that a man of Peterson's true intellectual caliber has chosen to go down the path he has, and I honestly wonder if he's not taking Koch Bro's cash at this point? After all, it did more or less the same thing to Dave Rubin - turn him into a pseudo libertarian right wing shill who gets notoriously evasive and vague when his alleged "centrism" gets called out. Not that the left is without flaws or undeserving of criticism mind you, but as David Pakman puts it, don't say you're not a rightist when you are one.

What I try to do differently, what I urge those who follow me on social media to do differently is to base my political mythology in the material realities of today's world. While I wouldn't argue with Peterson in that Soviet communism was terrible, I'd also urge everyone to look deeper at where the appeal of revolutionary socialism might come from in this day and age. Why might millennials have a better view of socialism than of capitalism? Hmm ... I just don't know! What could it be?

Maybe it's growing up after the great recession? Maybe seeing the banks get bailed out while main street continues to languish? Maybe seeing a long term trend towards stagnant wages and structural unemployment alongside ever skyrocketing profits for a tiny few? Maybe not having health insurance, paying exorbitant prices for pharmaceuticals and premiums for health plans with high deductibles and co-pays to boot? Or being put in serious financial jeopardy by a $500 car repair bill, something that would merely be an inconvenience for someone like myself?

Maybe it's the fact that there's never money for college or basic infrastructure but always money for wars and high income tax cuts? Maybe seeing the benefits of trickle down economics not trickle down for year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation? Maybe it's knowing that they'll be damn lucky to even have a shot at working their way out of a cubicle and into a job with a median income, benefits and some semblance of job stability?

Could it be that?

NO! It's "Ignorance of history!" Which isn't entirely wrong, mind you. Plus, let's not pretend that a lot of anti-Trump hysteria coming from the mainstream left hasn't been prone to excess and hyperbole, to put it mildly. However, it's also ignorance of history when politicians and pundits don't look back on periods of economic downturn and instability - the great depression for instance, and witness an accompanying rise in interest in fascism and socialism. Even though the economy has improved somewhat since the great recession, the damage has been done.

What the hell did these online reactionaries think was going to happen? Not so long ago, after Trump won the White House, it was all the rage to attribute the Democrat's loss to how out of touch they were with the people they were supposed to be representing. About how stupid it was for dumb leftists to beat unemployed white males over the head with vague academic notions of power, privilege and patriarchy. And rightly so.

But too little time has passed for the right wing of the intellectual dark web to get a pass on making their own version of the exact same mistake. Lecturing millennials with limited job prospects, crushing student debt loads and who've seen every form of preferential treatment extended to the wealthy and corporations on the evils of socialism is, if anything, even stupider than lecturing the same for being privileged white males. Damn, you'd almost think the reactionary right and the regressive left were two sides of the same stupid coin, or something.

Who knows, maybe they are.

In the mean time, maybe the rooms that most need to be cleaned are in the White House, in Congress and the countless offices of defense industry contractors and corporate lobbyists in Washington DC. The dragon of chaos that threatens our culture is that of unregulated predatory global capitalism. It uses threats of investment strike and capital flight as its fiery breath, to extort tax free wealth and rock-bottom wages from the polity. And quite effectively. The handful of billionaires who own most of America's wealth have accumulated a hoard that would put even Smaug's piles of gold to shame.

Sooner or later, someone's going to have to slay that dragon. If a relatively reasonable and pragmatic social democrat steps into Bard the Bowman's role and takes up that black arrow in the near future, a bona-fide revolutionary socialist won't be the one to do it in another generation or two, or else the current oligarchical capitalism ends up going full iron heel, and democracy is ultimately and finally sacrificed on the altar of capital.

Absolute catastrophe indeed.

Also, view: The Problem with Jordan Peterson, also by David Pakman. A thoughtful and nuanced criticism, not an SJW smear comparing Peterson to Hitler, or the like.

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The Intellectual Dark Web

"Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web" - An alliance of heretics is making an end run around the mainstream conversation. Should we be listening?" 

So reads a recent New York Times headline, and social media is now abuzz with talk about it.

"Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”

The "Renegades" of the Intellectual web.
Do these look like spaghetti western villains to you?

In case you don't know, this is a loose group of bloggers and academics who are known for bucking the trends in today's cultural spaces. Their names are by now familiar to most of us. Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Heather Heying, Eric and Bret Weinstein, Christina Hoff Sommers, Claire Lehmann, Joe Rogan and Maajid Nawaz, among others. A mixed bag to be sure, though leaning towards a kind of classical liberal consensus. Some more "classical" than others.

The response has been what you'd expect.

The Guardian, showing that it has no intent on slowing its descent into becoming the Infowars of the left, runs the headline: The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ – the supposed thinking wing of the alt-right. THE “INTELLECTUAL DARK WEB” IS JUST A BUNCH OF WHINY RICH PEOPLE reads the subtle and nuanced headline at the outline.com. Nice all caps, guys. We would never have guessed that their great sin was being privileged white males had you used lower case letters. That ever vigilant bearer of the truth, Vox, runs this headline: The “Intellectual Dark Web,” explained: what Jordan Peterson has in common with the alt-right. 

Now to be fair, the Outline article is correct in pointing out that these thinkers aren't exactly marginalized or being censored. Not that they're claiming to be - most are expressing dismay at the state of free speech on campus rather than themselves claiming to be victims. Thus far, many of them hold academic positions, have published best selling books and bring in tens of thousands of dollars monthly on Patreon. So it is a stretch to paint the IDW as a posse of outlaw renegades on the run due to their heretical views. They aren't quite Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, I'll give the reg-left blogosphere that much. Besides, everybody knows that the real victims of marginalization these days are tenured women's studies professors in Ivy League colleges, "diversity officers" at publicly traded Silicon Valley tech giants and bloggers for outlets that are not exactly fringe themselves, like the Guardian. Poor things. It would sure be nice if feminists could just be heard in the media, online and on campus every once and a while.

A more accurate picture is painted in a more recent National Review article:

More substantively, I guess I still don’t get it. Having read the essay twice, it seems to me this IDW thing isn’t actually an intellectual movement. It’s just a coalition of thinkers and journalists who happen to share a disdain for the keepers of the liberal orthodoxy. Weiss recounts a bunch of conversion tales where once-respected and iconoclastic liberal types run head-on into the groupthink or party line of the liberal establishment. They suddenly have a revelation about the enforced orthodoxy of their own side, and as they pull on these intellectual threads, they face blowback and reinforcement from unexpected places.

That National Review more often than not paints a more accurate picture of the world than supposedly liberal outlets like the Guardian and Vox do is something I'm still struggling to become accustomed to. And that's precisely what the IDW, as described in Weiss's New York Times article, is really all about. It's about a complacent progressive left's loss of the moral and intellectual high ground. It shows for once and for all that St. George really has become the dragon. What began in the 1960s as a campus rebellion for free speech against an ossified status quo has itself become an ossified status quo that makes no mistake about its hostility towards free speech.

Regressive left indignation is thus more easily understood, if still unjustified. For one thing, the IDW is far from united behind a right wing banner. Indeed, Ben Shapiro is among its only outrightly conservative members (a poor choice IMO, Victor Davis Hanson is who I'd have gone after had I wanted a right wing intellectual). Jordan Peterson is arguably (and make no mistake, it is an argument) right leaning, given that his now heavily memed description of crustacean society emphasizes the natural occurrence of dominance hierarchies.

Beyond that, we're not talking the G.O.P national convention here.  Consider that one of its purported members, Sam Harris - no fan of Donald Trump, to put it mildly, was also part of the wrecking crew that dismembered the Christian right back in the Bush years. Good to see he'd be happy to repeat the performance with the regressive left.

Could the left even put forward its own IDW candidates? Besides the brothers Eric and Bret Weinstein, two of its central figures, that is? Despite showing his age and being a bit unhinged on occasion, Noam Chomsky is no dummy and has shown some dismay for the postmodern elements on the left. Slavoj Žižek remains the philosopher of the common man, though you wouldn't know it trying to read him sometimes. Kyle Kulinski at Secular Talk does a lot of sharp work. Ditto for Jimmy Dore. I'm sure there are others, none any more fans of excessive political correctness than most people on the right, and without the ideological baggage that conservatism brings with it.

Those pundits and more like them will be needed in the future. Gone are the days when being progressive came with a default sense of intellectual and moral superiority. That's been the true impact of the IDW. The left is going to have to work for it now, and they're out of shape, if the contents of The Guardian and Vox are anything to go by. Once upon a time, being progressive meant you got to be the smart one in the room when your opposition consisted of creation "scientists", televangelists like Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell, climate change deniers, paid shills for the pharmaceutical or energy lobbies, conspiracy theorists a-la the aforementioned Infowars and raving a.m radio talking heads in the vein of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

Weren't those the days?  It's a shame they're gone.

Not the right wing loons, sadly. They're still with us. What's been lost is the default assumption of progressive intellectual advantage and moral integrity. That's been squandered by the SJWs.

Now, being progressive all too often means anti-whiteness events on college campuses and masculinity being toxic. It means equating right leaning libertarians a-la Ben Shapiro with outright Nazis and denying the very science and reason that once made the progressives oh so superior to Christian conservatives as social constructions that privilege socially powerful groups. It means hammer and sickle waving goons giving Nazi skinheads a run for their money and trashing colleges and urban centers. It means apologizing for Muslim extremists from behind the rubric of anti-racism and mindlessly following along with a closed and insular party platform drawn up in feminist theory and critical race theory studies departments without any regard for an outside world dismissed as hopelessly racist, misogynistic and oppressive. Hell, in the wake of #MeToo allegations targeting progressives in Hollywood, they can't even be morally superior to disgraced televangelists any more.

No wonder the progressive establishment is so ornery.

What remains to be seen is whether the IDW will be enough to topple the regressive left hegemony on most college campuses and in the mainstream media. I suspect not. Not yet. The regressive left has shown itself impervious to reason to a degree that even the Christian right was not. This will require more than a posse of intellectual outlaw renegades. It requires popular support and sustained effort on part of a movement that effectively organizes and strategizes. While the anti-SJW cause has come a long way since its genesis on 4chan and gamergate, we ain't there yet.

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The False Promise of a Return to Tradition and Religion

Jordan Peterson is against political correctness, opposed to the hegemony of feminist standpoint theories on university campuses and favors free speech generally. For that reason and that reason alone he is an ally and should be supported. It's well past time for a reckoning with the pseudo-academic left, the feminist and critical race theorists especially. They simply must accede to demands for ideological pluralism on college campuses and in society in general. Play nice or get out of the sandbox. Simple as that.

That said, he has an appeal to the neoreactionary crowd and there are reasons for this that go beyond their shared dislike of the dogmatic intersectional left, that are embedded in his outlook and the things he chooses to emphasize in his lectures. Ideas that, if left unchecked, can and in the not so distant past certainly have rivaled the current regressive left in the danger they pose to the very ideologically pluralistic social order that Peterson otherwise so loudly professes to uphold.

In particular, his approach to the writings of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and their apparent warnings that the philosophical "death of God" would eventually lead to nihilism and/or the seduction of some or another kind of totalitarianism. The idea that "a man who loses his people and his national roots also loses the faith of his fathers and his God" as Dostoevsky puts it. Such a man then becomes a sitting duck either for existential angst and nihilistic despair, or the the appeal of a surrogate religion, in the form of a dogmatic ideology. In any event, the death of God narrative describes a concomitant decline in public morality, the dissolution of the family, falling birth rates necessitating mass immigration that drives still further levels of social disintegration until eventually, society is irrevocably changed and not for the better. This is the central narrative of much neoreactionary thought, the "theonomist" branch especially.

While not something that can be proven absolutely, the idea that a decline in religiosity coincides with a rise in nihilism and/or ideological dogmatism does strike me as being highly plausible. The similarities of fascism and communism with religions has been remarked upon repeatedly. More recently, I've been directly privy to the rise in popularity of the "new atheism" online, and the resultant decline in religiosity among millennials. That this generation subsequently embraced tumblr SJW feminism with the fervency that it has did not, therefore, come as a surprise to me. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and company successfully debunked Christian dogmas in the minds of many, but did not address the underlying need for transcendent belief systems that some people, at least, seem to have. Jordan Peterson would seem to be following in Carl Jung's footsteps - quite intentionally - in pointing this out. And good on him for doing so. 

I should also reiterate the fact that Jordan Peterson does not advocate any branch of neoreactionary or far right thought, near as I can tell. He has delivered scathing attacks on fundamentalist and ultra-nationalist thought that should make clear that his views are more nuanced than his leftist detractors make them out to be.

But his efforts should come with a warning label of their own. Attributing nihilism or the emergence of murderous totalitarianism ultimately to atheism has enormous potential to imply a "solution" that actually exacerbates the core problem. If "killing" God had (and continues to have) unforeseen and potentially disastrous consequences, so too might resurrecting and re-enthroning him. Specifically, the lure of a return to political religion, ultra-nationalism or some kind of traditionalism. This is the notion that underwrites neoreaction, and it's false and highly dangerous, since it ends up simply being another version of the murderous totalitarianisms that Dostoevsky fears will replace religion. The "God" chosen by whichever movement manages to do this (and which religion is chosen and how it prevails over its rivals never seems to get discussed) thus becomes, with no shortage of irony, just one more of the "demons" that names Dostoevsky's work that tackles precisely this issue.

Getting back to the religion and tradition of the past has been tried. Many times, and its rate of success is equivalent to that of the communism that it is touted as an antidote to. It was tried in Iran in 1979 and Afghanistan in 1996, to name two examples. The men who brought down the World Trade Center towers were motivated by precisely those kinds of ideals. So too have been numerous abortion clinic bombings and similar acts of domestic terrorism. There's been an ongoing push to bring religion back into public life in red state America since the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. Hasn't been much of "an antidote to chaos" if you ask me. By all appearances, it's made things worse, not better. 

The Antidote to Chaos?

The counterpart to Dostoevsky in predicting where the "resurrection of God" could well take us would be Canadian author Margaret Atwood. Her vision doesn't look terribly appealing to me.  Historically, the Crusades, the European Wars of Religion in the 1600s, the bloodbath that was the Chinese Taiping Rebellion, clerical fascism in Europe, the religious right in America, and ongoing Islamic Jihadist terrorism should dispel us of any notion that religion confers any special immunity to widespread social chaos, oppression and tyranny. The religious identity that lies at the heart of sacred forms of nationalist identity is never anything timeless and eternal, but decided at some point in the past by affairs that were - for their time - no less bloody and chaotic than the great wars of the 20th century. 

Don't misunderstand me, dear reader. If you find solace in a church or mosque, don't let me dissuade you from any of that. Plus, in the interests of fairness, the assertions made by atheists that religion is actually the root of the problem are likewise wrong and dangerous, as the persecution of religious groups in the USSR and its satellites and copy-cats exemplifies. God is neither the problem nor the solution here. The human propensity towards solving problems of identity, meaning and purpose with fanaticism and dogmatism in belief systems is the problem, and this tendency applies with equally deadly results to religious, identitarian or ideological systems of thought.

My quarrel is not with religion per-se, but with the proposal that a universal return to religion as the core of public life and a concomitant social order of serene small towns and suburbs filled with simple, moralistic nuclear families with traditional gender role churchgoing folk will be good for what ails us. It's the right wing counterpart to the romantic infatuation with communal and egalitarian living that has haunted the left for centuries. The core problem is that the entirety of society will not do either voluntarily. So the tried-and-true building blocks of tyranny: dependency on leaders and dogmas, demonization of outsiders and dissidents, erosion of privacy and civil liberties and good old fashioned brute force will end up having to be trotted out should either of these options be attempted in earnest. 

And that's the real reason why the decline of religion led to the problems that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky predicted that it would. It's not religion specifically and exclusively that confers identity and purpose, and keeps the social order intact, it's collectively held belief systems more generally. When these change dramatically or collapse all together, private angst and social chaos accompany the greater personal liberty that also emerges as a result.  The implosion of communism in the east bloc countries was similarly devastating to at least certain portions of their populations, which doubtlessly explains why authoritarianism is making a comeback in nearly all of them. 

While the SJW movement in the west does need to be stopped, and social alienation is a real problem, we'd do well to think long and hard before putting our efforts behind a revival of public, political religion as a means of solving our social ills. It's easy to forget that the regressive left of our time began in large part as a reaction against the religious right. Better to get rid of both than to make a preference of one over the other.

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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.

What Jordan Peterson gets Right and Wrong About the Regressive Left

Controversial University of Toronto professor Jordan B. Peterson begins this video thus:

Now the Marxist ideas are predicated on the fundamental assumption that, I would say, individualistic western capitalist culture is corrupt beyond redemption, and that it's fundamentally erected to nothing but benefit those who have maximum power.  So then you get the racial issue like white privilege and you get the patriarchy idea, that it's white men in particular who've created this only for themselves and that all of the processes that are used to support this system, including logic, rationality and dialogue, all of those things, are only offshoots of the desire for that small group of power mad creatures to maintain their dominance over the rest of the world, and the only reason that there's any wealth associated with that is because the wealth was generated as a result of oppression.  Now, the thing is is that story is partially true.

What parts would be true, I wonder?  That Marx's works critiqued white privilege or patriarchy?  These had very little to do with Marx, for whom oppression was a matter of economic relations, as were most things. He and Engels touched on the implications of women's reproductive role in their broader subordination to men (Engels would pursue this much more thoroughly than Marx), but otherwise had little to say about identity and culture except that it was ultimately derivative from economics.  Base and superstructure, remember?

Patriarchy did not enter into the leftist lexicon until the late 1960s and early 70s, with Kate Millet's Sexual Politics, published in 1970 being exemplary, and white male privilege would have until feminist theorist Peggy McIntosh unpacked that knapsack in 1989.  In both cases, more than a full century after the publication of Das Kapital.

A more apt comparison would be with Lenin, and his authoritarian notions of a vanguard party that would exist only to advance the interests of the social class whose identity it usurped in order to justify its extremely machiavellian and opportunistic approach to gaining and wielding power for power's sake.  Whether what happened in the USSR was truly in line with Marx's hopes for the future development of man is highly debatable.  Replace a romanticized notion of a red flag waving working class with a romanticized construction of women, people of color and other marginalized identities to emerge out of the new social movements of the summer of love era, led by a vanguard of academics schooled in critical race theory and feminist theory, and you have the basis of today's SJW regressive left.

What are these "Marxist ideas" which hold that logic and rationality were to be dismissed as tools of the white male oppressor?  Really?  Marx regarded his take on historical materialism as a scientific means of understanding history and society.  Its core problem might be that it's too logical and rational.  Two words that all too often fail to accurately describe human behavior.  That it claimed a foolproof means of understanding human social organization.  This was precisely the kind of thing that postmodernism, with its rejection of "metanarratives" and skepticism towards absolute truth and universal morality arose in opposition to.  And this is what's crucial here.  Postmodernism arose out of disillusionment with Marxism (and other strands of western philosophy), not as an extension of it.

Likewise for critical theory.  While it began with a view of social conflict between oppressed and oppressors as an axiomatic principle of social organization that was modelled on Marx's analysis of class conflict, their critique went well beyond mere relations of production to posit that western civilization itself was somehow fundamentally wicked and oppressive. This view was based on the observations that nationalism and racism seemed to trump class consciousness during the era of the world wars, just as Trump uses nationalism and, some would say, racism to similar effect today.  However, the idea that culture and identity, not economic relations, drove history and social relations was a 180 degree deviation from core Marxist thinking.

Leftist identity politics arose out of a quasi Marxist oppressed/oppressor dynamic, but crucially divorces the concept of class struggle from class itself, defined by Marx in terms of relations of production.  Privilege and marginalization in identity politics become intrinsic characteristics of certain racial and gender identities, and so no means of resolving the contradiction via politics - through the creation of a democratic system of universal suffrage and individual rights or via economics - via the social ownership of capital, becomes possible.  What we are left with, then, is a darwinian struggle between the races, defined by relationships of zero-sum adversity.  While it won't be phrased specifically in this way, implied is the notion that noble races must strive against naturally exploitative races for mastery of the world.

Where have we seen this before?

It's worth noting that the whole reason that the fascists and Nazis of early 20th century Europe hated both socialists and liberals is because the primacy of identity and race was to take a backseat to universal ideas of liberty and equality.   This is why Hitler and Mussolini railed against them back in the early 20th century, and why paleo-cons and the alt-right go so wrong when they attack "cultural Marxism" today.  Cultural Marxism is an inherent contradiction in terms.  Any philosophy in which culture and identity are to be axiomatic in social relations, that philosophy ceases to be, by definition, Marxist.

Today's regressive left, which Professor Jordan Peterson rightly criticizes, doesn't hold to postmodern philosophy or Marxism in any principled sense.  Much like their predecessors in Bolshevik Russia and Fascist Europe, today's militant feminist and critical race theorists cherry pick Marxist and postmodern kinds of ideas for their own ideological convenience.  Marxism and postmodernism both have their flaws, but these flaws are not what is wrong with the regressive left.

What drives them is no core philosophical or moral convictions at all, but rather raw machiavellian collectivist egocentrism and opportunism.  To advance their own group interests ahead of all else, at all costs.  They must be stopped, but before that, they must first be properly understood.  This will not be successfully done by a reactionary right that can't let go of its cold war era obsessions with anti-Marxism.

SJW Grandstanders will NOT go Away on Their Own

Youtubber "Mouthy Buddha" praises the stoicism and resolve of University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson in the face of a noisy SJW demonstration against a talk he recently gave.  Mouthy Buddha commends Jordan for "time and time again setting an example for us" as the video shows him largely ignoring a rowdy group of protesters trying to shut down his lecture.  Mouthy Buddha's video may be viewed here.

These sentiments are echoed in the comments following the video.  

"Jon the Bastard" writes, "I wish I could be as stoic as Professor Peterson. The man is a Legend in the making."

"Mike Stewie" writes, "I agree - Peterson sets the standard. While I enjoy listening to the likes of Bearing & Undoomed; an abusive medium is not the way to engage public interest productively. By arguing rationally and non-offensively we make serious arguments, but we also polarize the conversation in a way that shows SJWs for what they are: spoiled & irrational children."

"quizads" writes, "Peterson has truly become a worthy example of nonviolent discourse. I am moved to tears as well."

Others praised him in almost religious terms:

"Jeremy David Evans" writes, "I also almost cried watching his upload.  Truly, he walks his talk. He is shooting for the Christic ideal and reaching it.  When the Israelites were bitten by their own sins and temptations, Moses placed the bronze serpent on a cross so that all who looked on it would be saved. Peterson has taken up the cross of persecution, gained the spotlight, and those of us that see his truth are ever more drawn into that place of truthfulness. The cost is great, but the reward greater: the resurrection of society."

"Marthin Lukas" writes, "Shit....that was.....Jesus-esque......damn it Prof. Jordan."

I would not condemn a man for being stoic and resolved, and I do find Prof. Peterson's conduct in the video to be admirable.  But sometimes turning the other cheek doesn't cut it.  Sometimes appeasement isn't the answer.  Neville Chamberlain is not remembered as a superior Prime Minister to Winston Churchill, and the Dalai Lama no doubt still waits for the communist Chinese to return to their senses so that he can return safely to Lhasa and resume his duties there.  He's been waiting a while now, and will be waiting a long time yet.

People have been waiting a long time for college leftists to come to their senses.  Political correctness was dismissed as a passing fad in the early 1990s, though the ideologies underlying it go back further than that.  Sure, the Students for a Democratic Society did peter out, but their legacy has not.  Feminist theory and critical race theory are multigenerational now.  The umbrella of ideological protectionism - the equation of criticism of the theories with actual misogyny and racism - has sheltered these theories from real scrutiny or opposition for decades.

Sometimes, a firm and decisive stand is what's required.  The SJWs are one of those times.  We've been waiting and appeasing.  Things only get worse.  It's time for the gloves to come off.  It's as simple as that.

The forerunners of today's SJWs did not go away after Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American mind in 1987.  They did not go away after Dinesh D'Sousa published Illiberal Education in 1990.  They did not go away after Christina Hoff Sommers published Who Stole Feminism in 1994.  They did not go away after the minor humiliation of the Alan Sokal affair in the late 1990s, Rolling Stone's false rape story, and have not gone away after Milo Yiannopoulos's repeated exposure of their campus antics.  

Smugly dismissing them as mentally unbalanced, as crybabies or as special snowflakes is not making them go away.  They will not go away despite the fact their women's studies degrees will not qualify them for good jobs.  They will not go away after being unfavorably compared to the generation that stormed the beaches of Normandy or even the generation that marched for civil rights back in the 1960s.  They have not gone away despite being shown on social media time and time and time again for being fools.  

Criticisms spanning the decades, from libertarian, men's rights, traditionalist, classical liberal or marxist materialist perspectives has done nothing, not one thing, to dislodge them.

Voting conservative will not make them go away.  Neither Brian Mulroney nor Stephen Harper did anything about this during their tenures as Tory PMs in Canada.  Nor did Margaret Thatcher, John Major or David Cameron in the UK. Even if Justin Trudeau was unseated by a Tory, even one so un-PC as Kevin O'Leary come 2020, or were Nigel Farage to (somehow) become PM in the UK in the next general, the smart money is on the SJWs becoming more, rather than less vehement. Stateside, they didn't go away after Nixon won the 1972 election or after Reagan won the 1980 election or after George W. Bush won in 2000.  

The foolishness of those who believed Trump's 2016 victory would prompt a rethink on part of identity politics progressives in academia and mass media must by now be perfectly representative of the oft quoted definition of insanity.  

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

In fact, the title of Mouthy Buddha's video really does say it all.

SJWs are STRONGER Than Ever 2017.

He damn well knows this, and admits it in his own comments section:

The title may seem like hyperbole but it's not. Jordan Peterson's views are a minority within a minority in our university campuses, and although many students do side with him, and show him support, the onslaught from the regressive's truly are stronger than they used to be, because academia is now 100% behind the methods and tactics involved. 

They are vehemently against Jordan choosing not to say certain words, but are ok with students screaming "transphobic piece of shit". 

The following is the first sentence in a statement made by McMaster University: 

"We are 'deeply troubled' that Dr. Jordan Peterson has been invited to speak at McMaster." 

Right. He's too fashy, all the freedom for all and free speech stuff is troublesome. 

Let's all get our heads out of our asses here.  The SJWs aren't going anywhere on their own.  They won't be coming to their senses soon, or ever.  Because what they're doing is working, and they damn well know it.  The SJWs are winning.  It's as simple as that.  Brexit and Donald Trump did nothing whatsoever to change that.  One look at the advance of feminism, gay rights, and so on, especially in cultural institutions like academia and mass media make that perfectly clear.  It's so much easier to just shrug your shoulders and capitulate to whatever the latest demands are than it is to do what Jordan Peterson has done and dig in your heels on a matter of principle.  Especially when, unlike the SJWs, you're pretty much guaranteed to stand alone.

And that's precisely the problem.

If you wish to win a culture war, as the SJWs most certainly do, not standing alone is a fairly elementary principle.  And that's just the first of many things the regressive SJWs know that their shoulder shrugging, "what do you do?" asking political opponents don't.

The campus SJWs understand how grassroots activism and organizing work.  At the very least, they seem able to get names on petitions and participants for boycotts and protests.  They analyze the structures of institutions like colleges and look for the weak points where they can get the best results through the application of pressure.  They gain key positions of authority and instruction within academic institutions and use those positions to establish curriculum, guide research efforts and either allow or hinder the career development of students and fellow faculty depending on whether they tow or oppose the ideological party line.  They also structure their ideologies in such a way as to lend credibility to their inclination to use their institutional authority for ideological purposes.  By making claims that erode the perceived differences between scholarship and activism, for example, or subject to postmodernist deconstruction enlightenment notions of objectivity, neutrality and equality of right.

They study media and media relations, and not just on a surface level.  They know full well that the medium is the message.  They deconstruct literature and understand how language frames thought.  They understand the mythopoetic structure of political thought, and understand how important narrative construction is.  They are fully cognizant of the fact that framing and narrative consistently trump even the most airtight of logical arguments.  These people get degrees in English, psychology, sociology, religious studies, media studies and a host of other fields that delve deep into the workings of the human mind and the operations of social interaction.  While their ideas are flawed in the sense that any ideas that take root and become hegemonic in any closed social system become flawed due to ideological siloing, it certainly can't be said that they are lacking in political shrewdness or are fundamentally stupid.  If the SJWs are so dumb, why are they in charge?

They understand these things, and have understood them for decades.  The results speak for themselves.  In Canada, besides academic and media hegemony, a firmly established deep state consisting of advocacy on behalf of women's groups, aboriginal groups, pro-immigrant groups and so on insures that they control the narrative regardless of the party in political office, and genuine dissent carries with it risks of ostracization, job loss or even an appearance before one of our Orwellian "Human Rights" tribunals, as indeed Professor Peterson is being threatened with.

That's quite the little knapsack of privilege we've just unpacked.  The good news is that there's nothing preventing those with a genuine concern for free speech on campuses and elsewhere from understanding the workings of any of the above either.

The end game for anti-regressives, whatever their stripe, will have to look something like this.  I've already published these, but will do so again, to give an idea of what's possible given time and, more importantly, effort.

Three particularly important goals for enemies of regressivism:

• Requiring that intent to harass or create a “poisoned environment” be proven on at least a balance of probabilities or a preponderance of evidence in order to secure a remedy in court over a harassment or hate speech allegation.  “Privileged” people cannot be held responsible, on pain of professional or even legal consequences, for the emotional states of “marginalized” people, given what we know of how the human mind works, regardless of “social context” so prized by regressive social theorists.

• As a corollary to the above, political opinion and opinion on social issues should be a protected category of legal discrimination, especially in employment, just as race, gender, etc.  It should be especially costly to terminate an employee for expressing an opinion on political or social issues, just as it is for protected grounds for discrimination.  Exemptions to this can be extended if the non-expression of certain views can be shown to be a bona-fide occupational requirement.  There’s plenty of information about these  concepts in fields pertaining to human resources management and employment law.

•  Strong College Campus Free Speech legislation must be passed, preferably at the federal level but at least at the state/provincial level.   It's provisions would include the following:

1. Require colleges to adopt, at the governance level, policy statements that make crystal clear organizational commitment to free expression, and make crystal clear that it is not the university's role to protect students or faculty from ideas they find offensive or disagreeable.
2. The campus must be declared open to any speaker invited by students, student groups or faculty.  Disinvitation of controversial speakers should thus be prohibited.
3. There must be serious consequences for actions that result in shutting down speakers on college campuses or harassment of students and faculty for political reasons, including complicit administration failing to act accordingly in response to such events.  Suspensions for first offenses, expulsion/termination for cause in the case of repeat offenses, and even legal prosecution if warranted.  
4. Independent bodies should be established to investigate student and/or faculty allegations of "ideological gatekeeping", which I define as attempts to block the academic progress or careers of students or staff for political or ideological reasons.  This body would also be emboldened to investigate claims of ideological indoctrination in academic settings.  Remedies could include reprimands or other disciplinary measures up to and including termination (in the case of multiple repeat convictions) against offending faculty members.
5. The legislation itself would contain language cautioning academic institutions against fostering or allowing to be fostered a campus culture that romanticizes violent extremism, direct action, and other militant and confrontational forms of activism.  Honest discussion of the above would be permitted.
6. Strong protections for the due process rights of students and faculty charged under any of the above sections, and strong protections for the rights of student and faculty to engage in peaceful and non-disruptive protest. 

People simply must have assurance of their protection from legal or employment related repercussions for expressing their views if regressivism of all kinds is to be pushed to the margins of society.  If they not already have been, these ideas or ideas like them need to be adopted in your jurisdiction.

The SJWs will not go away by themselves. We must know this.  We must accept this.  This means complete acceptance of the fact that they will settle for nothing less than totalitarian control.  They are indeed getting stronger and getting bolder because they've been successful, for the most part.  It doesn't matter how many people dislike them.

The good news is, it doesn't have to.  If dislike can make the jump into no-nonsense organized and effective opposition, I think we'd all be surprised at just how weak the SJWs actually are.