Jordan Peterson

This article discusses the fascinating rise of Canadian psychologist cum self-help guru Jordan Peterson: first in relation to the problems with identity politics that have helped facilitate it; second as an improbable Nietzschean and Jungian revival sixty years after the hippies made these two figures fashionable; and third, as a reductive and dangerously evangelical response to serious, pressing cultural problems. If the culture wars are back on - as Peterson keeps saying and his enormous popularity at least partly suggests - and the youth are turning en masse against the discourse of equal rights begun in the sixties, then it's vital he be called out for harnessing that rebellion in reductive, aggressive and quasi-religious terms. Rather than Peterson's charismatic and proselytising brand of PC-bashing, I suggest, curious and disillusioned young people need exposure to calm thinkers on this subject – people like the English philosopher John Gray, who for twenty years has been critiquing liberal humanist complacency but through careful application of Arthur Schopenhauer's saner reflections and sensible caution about the myth-intoxicated visions in Nietzsche and Jung.

In this episode of Philosophizing with Champagne, I discuss some ideas that I am currently working on for my forthcoming book, Mapper of Meaning: The Philosophy of Jordan Peterson. I have titled this episode "The world and the word." Listen and see if these words change how you view an interesting portion the world...

This essay presents a cognitive stylistic analysis of Philip Larkin's "Talking in Bed," highlighting the linguistic functions that aid the reader in the meaning-making process. In the poem, the realization of truth dawns upon the persona in the final moments of a lingering introspection, shedding light on the reason for which he is lying in bed beside his partner, profoundly incapable of uttering a word. It seems to him, in the end, that truth is indispensable to human relationships. This essay represents a thorough attempt at textually analyzing the poem, broaching snippets of knowledge from multiple fields—philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and literature—all in an attempt to present a comprehensive interpretation of Larkin's poem. The aim is to further evidence the speaker's realization, that the articulation of truth is a vital element in a healthy relationship, and to provide an understanding of the stylistic technique most utilized by Larkin, namely, the linguistic deviation he usually deploys by the end of his poems. I argue that the ambiguity he instills at the end of this poem makes for a cognitive attempt at empathically communicating to the reader the sense of meaninglessness the persona suffers from throughout the poem.

Prof. Jordan B. Peterson, Tribalism, the Patriarchy, Women, the SJW Tribe, MGTOW & Women Who Champion Masculinity !! When women get paranoid, who can help them, and how? [Note: Paranoid women tend to oscillate between withdrawal and turning nasty, which men typically don't know how to handle without becoming doormats, or by going MGTOW]. Can a counsel of wise mothers help paranoid women? If so, how? When men of one tribe get in conflict with members of another tribe (or internally), who can help them to resolve their differences without injury or bloodshed? [Note: Traditionally, women have not got involved. They have just watched on the sidelines , and offered themselves to the victors]. Jordan B. Peterson is Professor of Psychology at Toronto University in Canada. He's into the psychology of everything, including of religion, as I am. Jordan's main strength seems to be his ability to destroy damaging political correctness by having his finger on the plus regarding all scientific studies ever concluded in the field of psychology (and in the fields of many other related disciplines as well). But Jordan is wrong about some things, and he's SO used to being right, and his self-defence tactics are so good, that he's developed blind spots where most others fail miserably in challenging him. This is why I need to challenge him face-to-face, and on camera, very soon now. First, the concept of the Patriarchy is not an irrelevance. I define the Patriarchy as a system that has evolved over time with a view to protecting women and children at the expense of men, which men have put up with as a set of tribes (e.g. the class system) for the sake of stability and growth, and women have accepted traditionally as a set of local tribes (i.e. motherhood guilds) with their own pros and cons. The Patriarchy, in the Western World, is also intimately connected with the evolution of Capitalism and it's dark side. Capitalism works when it's the Servant of Humankind. Capitalism gets unstable (chaotic) whenever it becomes the Master of Humankind. So what I refer to as the Patriarchy here has to do with social order, AND the dark side of Capitalism. Second, Jordan speaks freely of hierarchy. He seems to be in praise of hierarchy as having brought modern day living a long way and, for many, but not all, well away from the days of most people working in the fields all day, 6 days a week, regardless if the weather, having a day off on Sunday to be spent mainly in church. He encourages us to look on the bright side, and is optimistic about science, artificial intelligence, automation and new social orders taking most people ever more so in the direction of paradise reclaimed. But, I'm not so optimistic, because I say that if all dark sides are not checked, evil is very likely to triumph over good, big time ~ some kind of apocalyptic Armageddon here we come. The human race lurches from one catastrophe to the next, our ecosystem is showing signs of creaking at the seams, species are dying out like there's no tomorrow, and the next stock market collapse may make worse than a third world country out of the West. Maybe the human race will survive, but not without much turmoil, distress, horror and death. Jordan says hierarchies are founded on competence. I say they should be but, too often, in reality, the determining skill turns out to be that of ability to bullshit / lie / come up with the most plausible propaganda / sucker the whole of society the best. Then there's the matter of paymasters and puppeteering with the dark side of Capitalism investing heavily in its own survival. Feminist critics of Jordan says hierarchies tend to be Patriarchal in nature and bound up with power struggles. Jordan disagrees, but here I don't think he provides much evidence. I see power struggles everywhere, with evil forces getting the better of good forces ever more so and upcoming generations just keeping their heads down, and/or running amok. One evil force I'm particularly interested is that of covert narcissism, creating victims of us all. But I DO see forces of order regrouping and getting ready to bring about a now long overdue turn around in the world. Jordan and other celebrity 'content creators' are doing battle with the endless linguistic creations of Feminism and its SJW Tribe, and with their vocalism and refusal to back down. Then there's the war of the sexes, typified by the book title, 'The War on Men and Boys', and by the rise of the MGTOW movement, and by women ending up manless (and therefore childless) because 'no man is good enough for them'. Clearly, Global Islamification is on its way, as all but Muslims are finding excuses for not marrying and/or not breeding. But I'm not worried about this because I think an Islamic globe will create a global level-playing-field from which happier futures will arise. AND, Islam respects testosterone just as much as it does oestrogen, AND it has solutions to the problems that these hormones can create in spades, when no allowances are made.

Det är inte oproblematiskt att kombinera jungiansk texttolkning med mer konventionella exegetiska metoder. Medan historisk-kritisk metod fokuserar på vad som är bakom texten, utgår man i det jungianska perspektivet istället från att texten är en manifestation av det kollektiva undermedvetna, universella arketyper, för mänskligheten gemensamma strukturer i psyket – författarens medvetna intention blir därmed inte allt vad texten kan betyda. Inte sällan tenderar jungianska tolkningar att gå utanför traditionella, ”ortodoxa”, kristna lärosatser, och tona ner det redemptiva (återlösande/försonande) i texterna (vad Kristus gjort för oss) till förmån för en läsning som mer handlar om att imitera Kristus och stimulera personlig transformering.
I denna tolkning av ovanstående bibeltext – Matteus version av Jesu prövning i öknen – vill jag visa att det går att fruktbart kombinera jungiansk och historisk-kritisk hermeneutik i vad jag kallar en modifierad jungiansk texttolkningsmodell, inom ramarna för en ”klassisk” kristen tro; samt argumentera för tesen att prövningen är nödvändig för uppfyllelsen av Jesu kallelse och att det öknen symboliserar är en nyckel i all personlig och andlig tillväxt.

Psykologisk exegetik har haft dåligt rykte, och det finns resonabla skäl till detta. Under modernismen har relationen mellan psykologi och teologi/exegetik ofta präglats av misstänksamhet, inte minst p.g.a. Sigmund Freuds religionskritiska inställning och materialistiska utgångspunkt. Exegetiken har under samma tid dominerats av historisk-kritisk metod, med lite utrymme för andra angreppssätt och modeller – inte minst gentemot teorier som inom de egna leden uppfattats som spekulativa och anakronistiska. Detta trots att psykologin först utvecklades som en underdisciplin av teologin. Freuds lärjunge, Carl Jung, var dock mer öppen och positiv till både religion i allmänhet och Bibeln. I och med postmodernismen och uppbrottet från det historisk-kritiska monopolet inom exegetiken finns det idag större öppningar och acceptans för bruket av psykologiska modeller/teorier. Ökad metodpluralism (inte bara filologiska och källkritiska analyser), förståelse av läsarens/uttolkarens betydelse i den hermeneutiska processen (sedan Gadamer och Ricoeur), och en mer positiv syn på religionens potentiellt transformerande funktion har bidragit till detta. En liten notis kan göras angående det aktuella fenomenet Jordan Peterson, som ironiskt nog blivit populär bland konservativa kristna och (tidigare) anhängare av den s.k. ny-ateismens företrädare (Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins m.fl.). Oavsett vad man anser om Peterson, så har han bidragit till ökat intresse för bibliska berättelser tolkade genom en psykologisk-jungiansk lins; vilket reser frågor som kyrkan bör kunna bemöta och besvara.

A partly personal essay on the new radical right and the confected moral panic about free speech in universities, especially surrounding imperial history, and the penetration of reaction into both intellectual and intimate lives. Contains Bruce Gilley, Nigel Biggar, Niall Ferguson, Jordan Peterson, 'Sargon of Akkad' and all your other faves.

Descartes holds that the tell-tale sign of a solid proof is that its entailments appear clearly and distinctly. Yet, since there is a limit to what a subject can consciously fathom at any given moment, a mnemonic shortcoming threatens to render complex geometrical reasoning impossible. Thus, what enables us to recall earlier proofs, according to Descartes, is God’s benevolence: He is too good to pull a deceptive switch on us. Accordingly, Descartes concludes that geometry and belief in God must go hand in hand. However, I argue that, while theism adds a layer of psychological reassurance, the mind-independent reality of God would ensure the preservation of past demonstrations for atheists as well.

In this article I discuss the relationship between analytical psychology and theories of human social evolution. More specifically I look at debates in evolutionary studies and anthropology regarding the priority of matrilineal social structure in the emergence of Homo sapiens. These debates were occurring in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and they provide the context for many of the assumptions of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. In this essay I will explore these issues in relation to analytical psychology. I will also discuss the work of anthropologist John Layard who proposed matriliny was humanity’s original form of social organisation. Interestingly, Layard’s field work had significant impact on Jung. I will also compare the work of Layard, and other theorists who adopt matrilineal theories of human social evolution, with the theories of Jordan Peterson. Peterson has developed an idiosyncratic evolutionary conception of analytical psychology, one in which he explicitly rejects the notion of matrilineal priority in human evolution. He also adopts certain assumptions about the evolutionary origins of contemporary socio-political hierarchy, assumptions I argue are not supported by data from numerous fields of scientific enquiry.

Postmodernism is often blamed for post-truth, but the blaming is as often done post-truthfully. This becomes clear when one uses a lens of a specific topic, like history. This chapter considers the caricature of postmodernism crafted by Steven Pinker and Jordan B. Peterson. It aims to show that by using the perspective of a historian, one can find the harshest critics of postmodernism driven by the same disregard for truth as is ascribed to postmodernism. First, it confronts a common definition of postmodern philosophy with its twisted version. This enables the chapter to show later how, rather than simply misrepresenting it, Peterson and Pinker imbue postmodernism with significance which pertains to their ideological visions of the world. These include historical errors, a false version of postmodernism’s history, and a misleading systemic outlook on the historical process. Finally, it reflects on their distortion as specific examples of post-truth.

The article discusses the coertion of junior/casual staff by senior tenured academics within Higher Education in order to rally support on what are political matters.  Focussing on a major dispute in Australia over the proposed Ramsay Centre, which would support the study of Western civilisation, it raises questions of possible coertion within what should be a scholarly environment that fosters intellectual freedom.  Reference is made to the controversial incident in Canada where senior Faculty bullied the young academic Lindsay Shephard.  The article draws on, and discusses, the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, George Orwell, and Jordan Peterson on the subject of coertion, and the role of language in imposing 'Politically Correct' thought.  Historic comparison is also made with the behaviour of pro-Soviet academics employed in Australian universities during the Cold War.

Canadian psychologist and professor, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has become a bit of a celebrity among right-leaning libertarians, conservatives, and right-leaning liberals.  In his talks, he seems to move from topic to topic “floating like a butterfly” while lacking Muhammad Ali’s moral heroism. Peterson uses nativist (innatist) arguments that rarely seem justifiable

Deliberation is often seen as the site of human freedom, but the binding power of rationality seems to imply that deliberation is, in its own way, a deterministic process. If one knows the starting preferences and circumstances of an agent, then, assuming that the agent is rational and that those preferences and circumstances don’t change, one should be in a position to predict what the agent will decide. However, given that an agent could conceivably confront equally attractive alternatives, it is an open question whether rational choice theory can ever eliminate indeterminacy. The clearest support for such a limitation comes from the “Buridan’s ass” scenario, where an agent is confronted with two (or more) equally attractive/unattractive options. Does rationality by itself have the resources needed to prevent such paralysis of action? Those who cannot accept the idea of decisional impotence devise various ways to avoid it: postulating a neutral valence, tipping the utilities, positing sub-personal influences, and bunching the options. I argue that each of these responses is either unwarranted or flawed. All parties to the debate agree that, factually, paralysis of action is not a pervasive phenomenon. This is either because (i) the utilities one assigns to two or more options can never be balanced or because (ii) thanks to some non-rational faculty (say, the will), we would not be stuck even if those utilities were perfectly counterpoised. By looking critically at four untenable responses, I aim to show that (i) is often just a dogma and (ii) is by no means a silly position.

Following recent work by Don Ross (Ross, 2000; Ross & Spurrett, 2004), I contrast the influential theories of Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland in information-theoretic terms. Dennett makes much of the fact that the morphological shorthand which emerges before a witness as she looks upon cohesive aggregates of matter commands some measure of predictive power. This, for him, speaks against eliminating recourse to an intentional vocabulary. By contrast, the eliminative materialism defended by Churchland does not gloss such informational compressibility as an explanatory desideratum, and thus regards the informational noise which accrues at higher levels of description as patently unacceptable. Yet, since it is unlikely, as Ross et al. (2007) have recently suggested, that anything remains once we subtract the appeal to patterns, I argue that the ubiquity of informational compression in scientific explanation seriously undermines the claim that talk of the mental could be eliminated.

"The biggest danger of Quixotism, to my mind, is that people will be turned off  the entire progressive project. All the antagonistic jargon and lists and simple black-and-white morality and name-calling and moral self-righteousness reads as madness to people who might otherwise be sympathetic or potentially persuadable to progressive causes."

Please read the article here: https://quillette.com/2019/04/07/in-the-culture-wars-be-a-sancho-panza-not-a-don-quixote/

One person’s prophet has always been another’s crackpot. Nowhere is this more obvious currently than with psychology professor turned public intellectual Jordan B. Peterson. Peterson has attained a large following online and is esteemed by centrist members of the American media. Yet few intellectuals are currently so reviled by younger leftists. This article argues for some conceptual and cultural-historical clarification of Peterson’s work. I suggest that Peterson and some (not all) of his leftist critics are actually on the same side of an effort to preserve the open-access order (the basic political-economic organization of the Western democracies). However, they focus on different problems endemic to such orders. While his critics focus on power imbalances and material inequalities, Peterson is a manifestation of the need to manage spiritual crisis while at the same time maintaining relative openness of access to political and economic institutions. Recurrent spiritual crisis, I argue, inheres in open-access orders. Because these orders depend on impersonality and value relativism, they provide no spiritual grounding for individuals. In open-access societies, spiritual crises get temporarily resolved by the development of ‘secular theodicies,’ modes of making sense of suffering in a world in which God is dead. Peterson is a purveyor of a secular theodicy, the contours and context of which are shown through consideration of Peterson’s writings and online videos.

I've researched and written a lot about Foucault through the years. I've reworked it and put together here, but there is also a lot's of new stuff. Some questions that might find an answer within the covers (all in Croatian though):

What is the relation between power and punishment? How did the discourse of war and why change in Foucault, and why is this important? How does a compound picture of totalitarianism offered by Arendt and Foucault help one to understand the phenomenon and why it may be still important today? What the hell is genealogy after all? Is Socrates ironist or parrhesiast? Is it possible to be both? Can knowledge save us on Nietzsche's planet? What does it mean that Agamben has an eschatology and Foucault hasn’t? Why does Bulgakov's Pilate ask Jeshua, the vagrant, about the truth? On a bit more actual and perhaps more morbid note, how does Larry Nassar's case look through Foucauldian lenses, few centuries away from controversial innocent bucolic pleasures from the Will to Know? What would Foucault say on political correctness? Why are Camille Paglia and Jordan Peterson wrong on Foucault, designated by the first as Cagliostro of modern times? Where does Foucault stand between the two poles, one being Rousseau’s total political transparency and the other Sade’s dark castle of murders? What are the similarities and what are the differences between Conrad's and Foucault's ethics when “principles won’t do“? What is the relation between madness and parrhesia after all?

Truth is produced through examinations and disciplines but also through struggles and techniques of the self. Truth as an ordeal, la vérité comme l’épreuve: Foucault’s project is not a sociology of power but history of alethurgy, the production of truth. And the famous pathos of truth? Love, beyond Valentine cards, can transform the subject. It’s the greatest ordeal of all. Promotion to be held in June on the Faculty of Political Sciences in Zagreb and announced on its web site. Hope there are not too many typos etc. in the book. We prepared it in a hurry.