Jordan Peterson

Controversially, psychologist and public intellectual Jordan Peterson advises “enforced monogamy” for societies with high percentages of “incels.” As Peterson’s proposal resonates in manosphere circles, this chapter reconstructs and briefly evaluates the argument for it. Premised on the moral importance of civilizational sustainability, advocates argue that both polygamous and socially monogamous but sexually liberal mating patterns result in unsustainable proportions of unattached young men. Given the premises, monogamous societies are probably justified in maintaining their anti-polygamist social and legal norms. The case for imposing stricter sexual norms on socially monogamous but sexually liberal societies is weaker, however, as male involuntary celibacy in those places isn’t as directly caused by male intrasexual competition, and since less intrusive social interventions are more likely to ameliorate “the incel problem.”

The political narrative regarding Jordan Peterson now appears set in stone-he is an ideological warrior of the right. Fans and detractors alike seem to agree on this much. The only residual dispute, still capable of generating enough friction to power a small town, is whether this political identity renders him a messiah or a Führer. This, much like knowledge of the universe, depends entirely on one's point of observation. To those on the left, Peterson is the leader of a dangerous political cult of angry, sexist, transphobic, racist young men descending, like the hordes of Genghis Khan, upon the civilized world intent on rape and pillage. To those on the right, he is a martyr in the advanced stages of beati!cation and the savior of a lost generation in a fading civilization. The truth? His political philosophy is more enigmatic than either his acolytes or despisers care to acknowledge, or perhaps can see. Peterson's actual political philosophy is rather obscure, at least to those who believe a political philosophy worth the name must consist of more than an opinion on the pronoun ze. There are three reasons for resisting the caricature of Peterson's politics in either its hagiographic or demonizing registers. First, there is his consistent reticence and circumspection regarding the contours of his political philosophy. Second, there are the distorting e"ects of his ubiquitous media appearances, which tend to re#ect the political preoccupations of interviewers who set the terms of discussion. Thirdly, there is the ideological predilections of his legion of followers who use his image, content, and words in ways which to do not necessarily re#ect his actual political thought. To be clear, I do not contend that Peterson is a misunderstood radical progressive at heart. I simply advance the modest thesis that his political philosophy, which evidence suggests does sit at some latitudinal distance to the right of the conventional, if increasingly ill-de!ned, political spectrum, is more complex than prevailing caricatures suggest. In pursuit of this thesis, I will adopt an unfashionably agnostic perspective as to the relative merits of his political ideas and their social impact. Those with a penchant for Peterson hagiography, or demonography, can consult the abundant content available in both categories. The idea that Peterson is at all reticent and circumspect with regard to his political views will strike some (perhaps many) as hopelessly naïve. This is a man, after all, who shot to public prominence on the back of his opposition to the mandated usage (as he saw it) of gender pronouns. I do not deny that his stance in relation to this particular issue situates him securely in the company of those who proudly identify themselves as conservative. Search …

This essay will seek to introduce briefly the background and idea of what I call a confrontational approach to theology. It will begin by outlining the biblical background of this often-ignored portrait and then will proceed to outline how this theological approach can breathe new life into our approaches toward God.

This paper analyses Dr. Jordan Peterson's quest for Greater meaning, especially as expressed through the lenses of psychology, philosophy and religion.  Why has Dr. Peterson appealed so greatly to millions of young adults in this current nihilistic culture?  How is Christianity functioning in the ecology of his family system?  Where may this potentially be leading?

This article builds on C. S. Peirce’s suggestive blueprint for an inclusive outlook that grants reality to his three categories. Moving away from the usual focus on (contentious) cosmological forces, I use a modal principle to partition various ontological layers: regular sign-action (like coded language) subsumes actual sign-action (like here-and-now events) which in turn subsumes possible sign-action (like qualities related to whatever would be similar to them). Once we realize that the triadic sign’s components are each answerable to this asymmetric subsumption, we obtain the means to track at which level of complexity semiosis finds itself, in a given case. Since the bulk of such a “trinitarian” metaphysics would be devoted to countenancing un-interpreted phenomena, I argue that current misgivings about sign-based ontologies are largely misplaced.

En los últimos dos años, el escritor canadiense y profesor de Psicología en la Universidad de Toronto Jordan B. Peterson (Edmonton, Canadá, 1962) ha construido un discurso firme y a contracorriente sobre cuestiones controvertidas del pensamiento actual. Además, lo ha hecho llegar a un público amplio, a través de la distribución en las redes sociales de sus clases, conferencias y publicaciones y del contacto directo con personas que discrepan de sus ideas.

Milo, the 'poster boy' of the alt right, has had a rocky few years since then, resigning from Breitbart over 'pedophilia' remarks, his book contract with Simon & Schuster cancelled, and being recently banned from the crowd funding website Patreon. Peterson's popularity, on the other hand, has continued to expand with almost two million YouTube subscribers (one million more than Milo), and his appeal has clearly spread across the social spectrum in a way the media has failed to fully acknowledge. This broad appeal is something beyond the ability of Milo, with his conceited hauteur and ruthless mockery of his opponents.

Last Friday, fans of both Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek lined up outside together in the rain to find out, shuffling their way into the Sony Centre for Performing Arts in Toronto for what some had promised would be the Debate of the Century. I saw no protesters. Fans of both men stood beside each other in the main hall, using the large screen of Zizek and Peterson hanging in the centre of the room as a backdrop for smiling selfies with friends. As they entered the theatre, Vivaldi’s Spring concerto poured over the audience as they found their seats, shook their umbrellas, and settled in for the debate.
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Simply by virtue of the public personas they had cultivated, and their monetary attachment to their fans, no performance from either of these two was ever likely to disrupt those carefully constructed brands, and this was likely never going to be anything other than what I would deem ideological amusement.

Please read from original source: https://medium.com/@terrylnewman/happiness-capitalism-vs-marxism-a-missed-opportunity-16f06a234ed1

Published in Quadrant, October 2018, as 'Why Jordan Peterson Matters.' Canadian psychologist Dr Jordan B. Peterson is promoting a form of naturalistic morality which revives the ancient framework outlined by Roman philosopher Cicero, in Book I of De Officiis (On Obligations).

Peterson wird als einer der einflussreichsten westlichen Intellektuellen gehandelt, was - wenn es stimmen würde - ein Armutszeugnis für "den Westen" wäre. Aber es stimmt nicht. Neben triviale "Weisheiten" à la "du sollst deine Frau nicht schlecht behandeln" und "du sollst nicht töten" treten zutreffende Beobachtungen zur Winner-Takes-It-All-Mentalität unseres kulturalisierten Zeitalters, das aber nicht wirklich analysiert, sondern lediglich in seiner postmodernen Interpretation (unzutreffend als "marxistisch") denunziert wird. Dem stellt Peterson seine eigene sozialdarwinistisch- biologistische und traditionalistische (biblische Mythologie) Rechtfertigung gegenüber. Dem Psychologen bleibt im Angesicht des allgegenwärtigen "suffering" nur die Aufgabe, das wunde Subjekt zu pflegen und es wieder in ein System einzupassen, das nun mal so sei, weil unser  Reptiliengehirn nicht anders könne. Ein bisschen wenig für einen hoch gelobten, durch das Internet zum Star gewordenen Intellektuellen, der - genau besehen - außer alten Hüten wenig zu bieten hat. Das versucht der hier vorliegende Text zu zeigen.

I'll be presenting this research to the Public Philosophy  Network Conference, Philosophy from all Walks of Life, at Michigan State University, October 2019.

Part of what makes any reasonable defense of what ecofeminists rightly diagnose as a culturally constructed logic of patriarchal and speciesist domination difficult is that, as we find in for example Jordan Peterson,  there’s no obvious way to divorce its human chauvinism from its speciesism from its patriarchy; they’re a package deal. Any weakening of one of the legs of this three-legged stool and the whole stool collapses. Unfortunately, however, it's a logically and empirically rickety stool to begin with. We begin with Peterson’s red meat diet, but what we soon discover is that his diet is really just an invite (a metaphor) to his diagnosis of what he thinks has gone awry in Western civilization soup to nuts. The diet symbolizes the masculine reclamation of a social order threatened by caricature cut-outs of feminists, “postmoderns,” “Leftists,” “Marxists” and environmentalists.  Consuming "red meat" signifies everything from conquering threats posed to the patriarchal order by those who’d reject the male-privileging gender pay gap, to “Postmodernism’s” critique of gendered pronouns, to Peterson's climate change "skepticism." The all-meat diet elicits Peterson’s offer of tough love to young mostly white men he depicts as victims of an emasculated system of Western values. The only thing is: Peterson is wrong.

Jordan Peterson’s remarks on the nature of truth are voluminous. Despite this, widespread confusion persists on Peterson’s understanding of truth. One reason for this is that Peterson’s treatment of this notion is scattered and unsystematic. Another reason is that the scholarly work on Peterson’s truth is lacking. It is the goal of this paper to clarify Peterson’s views by deploying instruments of analysis from contemporary philosophical literature. After critically discussing Peterson’s views, I conclude that his truth is best understood as an anti-realist notion. Finally, I propose some developments to Peterson's views by emphasizing his remarks on the value and human-dependence of truth.

Prompted by the thesis that an organism’s umwelt possesses not just a descriptive dimension, but a normative one as well, some have sought to annex semiotics with ethics. Yet the pronouncements made in this vein have consisted mainly in rehearsing accepted moral intuitions, and have failed to concretely further our knowledge of why or how a creature comes to order objects in its environment in accordance with axiological charges of value or disvalue. For want of a more explicit account, theorists writing on the topic have relied almost exclusively on semiotic insights about perception originally designed as part of a sophisticated refutation of idealism. The end result, which has been a form of direct givenness, has thus been far from convincing. In an effort to bring substance to the right-headed suggestion that values are rooted in the biological and conform to species-specific requirements, we present a novel conception that strives to make explicit the elemental structure underlying umwelt normativity. Building and expanding on the seminal work of Ayn Rand in metaethics, we describe values as an intertwined lattice which takes a creature’s own embodied life as its ultimate standard; and endeavour to show how, from this, all subsequent valuations can in principle be determined.

This essay argues that acknowledging the existence of mind-independent facts is a matter of vital importance, in that acquiescence before the layout of the world is something demanded of knowing agents from the most elementary empirical deliverance to the most abstract construct. Building on the idea that normativity requires the presence of more than one option to choose from, the essay shows how the cessation of one's life is the disjunctive alternative of any experiential episode. This much has been missed, it argues, because of a generalized failure to appreciate how even the simplest atomic contents embroil their subjects in acts of assent. Its account thus casts a new light on relativism and skepticism, revealing them to be provisional luxuries supported only by the cognitive labor of others.

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.