Rating: 3/5, average
I promised myself I wouldn’t read any male authors this year, but my dad said I should read this one shortly before he died so I made an exception (kind of, I found a loophole by listening to the audiobook instead of reading it with my eyes, haha).
I think 12 Rules for Life is an argument for conservatism dressed up as self-help. Jordan Peterson isn’t super far-right, he’s more of a centrist that leans right. I think he’s a little more honest than Fox News anchors, but he still twists the left’s ideas and uses emotionally manipulative anecdotes instead of facts to strengthen his argument.
Rule 1, “Stand up straight with your shoulders back”, contains his famous lobster arguments. He says that hierarchies exist and implies that they will always exist because males by nature are competing for female mates and females will always choose the best mates. I mostly agree with this, and I think it’s a good reality check for people who feel entitled and interpret equality as everyone should have the same things regardless of personal merit. It is a little simplistic, though, and evolutionary psychology/applying animal behavior to human society is always a little sketchy.
Rules 2-4, “Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping”, “Make friends with people who want the best for you”, and “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today” are probably my favorite chapters. They’ve been said before in a lot of other self-help books, but they’re good to keep in mind. Jordan Peterson puts things in a way that men can accept them, which I think is good as a lot of self-help is marketed towards women. He talks a lot about how to deal with resentment, which causes a lot of problems in adult life and which many people aren’t really taught to beware of by teachers, parents, or media and only learn about when they go to therapy after something goes wrong.
Rule 5, “Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them”, occupied my mind for a while. Peterson says that society is becoming too accepting of children’s bad behavior, and too afraid of traumatizing kids to apply needed discipline, including physical punishment like spanking. He says that kids who are not punished for antisocial or selfish behavior while they are young will be ostracized by their peers as they get older. He says parents should use the minimum level of force necessary to get their children to do what they need them to do.
I agree with him that some children may need physical discipline, but I think physical discipline can be extremely damaging both to the child and to the child’s relationship with the parent. My father was hit with a belt by my grandfather when he misbehaved, and I was spanked by my father. I think the emotions a child feels when they’re hit – anger, shame, betrayal – stick with them as they grow. Those emotions get repressed in the short term, but eventually get taken out on someone weaker.
I would get hit by my dad, but then he would tell me it’s not okay to hit my brother or sister, even though they’re younger and I have authority over them. It teaches the child that hitting is an acceptable way to try to get someone to change their behavior.
Research shows that instead of abating aggression and defiance of authority spanking exacerbates it. The more your child sees you as a tyrant or an unjust ruler, the more excitement and pleasure they will find in rebelling against you.
I was talking about this with my partner, and the spankings we both remember the most from our childhoods were the ones we received for things we didn’t do. I remember one Halloween when I wanted to dress up as a ghost with a sheet on my head, like in Charlie Brown. My mom said I looked too much like a clan member (we were living in Mobile, Alabama at the time) so she got a white shirt and said we could do my face in white makeup.
I didn’t like the way the patchy white makeup made me look, so I said, “Sheesh” and my Dad thought I said “Shit” and spanked me. I remember crying because I didn’t know what I said wrong. He said I swore, but I didn’t know the word “shit” yet, so I kept trying to get him to tell me what word he thought I said. I was about eight years old, so I would have understood if he had explained it to me.
It’s the misapplied and ill-explained spankings that most painfully undermine your child’s image of you as a reliable authority figure. If your reactions to their behavior are unpredictable, it leads them to be constantly on edge around you and unable to trust you or come to you for help when they get older.
I think spanking is sometimes used as an outlet for the parent’s job stress. It can be exploited as an acceptable outlet for violent emotions like repressed rage at being skipped over for a promotion. Ideally, you would spank for the good of the child, but sometimes parents just spank because it feels good. In that case, it’s really just the parent acting on anger and is not good for the child.
The effects of spanking do vary a lot depending on how sensitive the kid is and how spanking plays a role within the greater context of the parent-child relationship. I think the more supportive the parent is outside of the spanking the more their relationship will be able to weather it (but also if the relationship is better there will probably be less need for spanking). Age also matters – people who were spanked only up to the age of 4 or so probably don’t remember and aren’t affected by it as much as people who were spanked when they were older children as well. It’s hard to explain things to very young children so I could see how physical punishment might be the only way to get the message across. The situation and frequency also vary, as does culture.
I sometimes see parents hit children for crying or screaming, which seems counter-productive to me. I think a kid who is crying is most likely upset or overwhelmed and needs comforting or time apart to calm down, not smacking…
I also saw a kid last week who was stepping on the back of his dad’s shoes as they walked across the parking lot. I think in the situation where the child is doing something to physically hurt the parent, mild physical punishment might be justified as self-defense and a way to teach the child what pain feels like (like if the parent stepped on the back of the kid’s shoes back)… although it would probably be better just to pull him aside and tell him sternly, “Don’t do that.”
I’m not going to have any kids so I don’t know if my advice is worth anything. However, I have a male cat that marks things with urine (the sides of the couch, sometimes doors, random objects). I’ve caught him in the act and yelled “No!” many times but it doesn’t do any good. The reason he pees on stuff is likely because he’s stressed out by my other male cat who bullies him. He’s compelled to pee despite the consequences. Having me punish him doesn’t make him any less likely to pee, it just makes him fear me, which gives him another stressor, which makes him act out more. I eventually gave up trying to punish him and accepted that this is just what he’s going to do as long as both my cats live in my house.
The solution I arrived at was to adapt my house to his behavior. I tape puppy pads wherever he has marked. He still pees on those, but at least it’s easy to clean up. I sometimes put the bully cat in a cage for a while when he’s being mean, which gives the marking cat a break and makes him feel protected. I think taking an acceptance approach and focusing on solving problems and relieving stress can be more effective in eliminating unwanted behavior than a punishment approach which can increase stress and exacerbate the behavior.
I felt like Jordan Peterson’s arguments might be easily interpreted as excusing physical punishment of children, and that didn’t sit well with me. He kind of implies that the parents doing the “real abuse” are the ones who neglect to discipline their kids, which is… hm. He uses the examples of a lady who let her kid not eat and a man who didn’t make his kid go to sleep and he says those are the kids he really worries about, which, fair enough, that is bad parenting, but Peterson frames his discussion in a way that the “good parents” are the ones who give discipline and the “bad parents” are the ones who don’t. If you’re an abusive parent who gives discipline, you can count yourself in the former category and rationalize away your guilt because of the false binary Peterson has set up.
Rule 6, “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world”. Peterson criticizes people who criticize the world before they have their lives in order. I think generally, and on an individual level this is good advice, but in some cases it’s not helpful. For some people, they can’t get their house in order because the world isn’t in order. It can be harder for ethnic minorities and LGBT people to get a job than for straight white people. I don’t think a black person in America has to have a perfectly clean home, perfect relationships, and a wonderful job to criticize police brutality, for instance.
But I do kind of see where he’s coming from. On an individual level, if you only focus on the big issues and don’t clean your room or choose a goal to work towards you’re not going to get anywhere. Also, power, money, and social capital are often helpful in creating social change. For instance, a college activist who holds up signs protesting tuition hikes doesn’t do as much practical good as a lawyer who donates to scholarship funds that that student may be using to attend college. However, the student cannot become a lawyer if tuition rises too high and they can’t afford to finish college, so building up your own power for the future may not fix societal problems that need addressing in the immediate moment.
Peterson often targets just the left, but on this rule he’s criticizing the right as well. I don’t have the text in front of me but he says something about people on the right who ascribe their lack of career success to immigrants or affirmative action and how they should work on themselves first. I think he’s totally right in this and I’m glad that someone conservative is bringing this up in a place where conservatives are likely to read it.
However, Peterson implies that someone on the left who blames racism/sexism for their lack of success is analogous to someone on the right who blames immigration/affirmative action. I don’t agree with that. I think racism and sexism are real problems and they do hold people back, and while it’s not good to obsess about it, it is important to educate the public and make people aware of their biases. I’m less sympathetic to someone who blames other races for their failures because the “favor” that those people believe society gives to marginalized people is an attempt to balance out their marginalization, not to give them special privileges. It’s like if a kid falls down and gets a scab and their caregiver puts a band-aid it, and then the other kid demands that they also get a band-aid despite not having a wound.
Rule 7, “Pursue what is meaningful, (not what is expedient)” … I honestly don’t remember what this chapter was about, but I think it was inspirational? I think this was one I liked. Haha.
Rule 8, “Tell the truth—or at least, don’t lie” – I think this was the one about monitoring resentment and not being afraid of conflict. I believe this is the one with the story about the dragon that got ignored until it got as big as a house. I believe this was a good chapter.
Rule 9, “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t” This is great advice, but I don’t think Peterson takes it himself. He often caricatures the left and doesn’t seem to have a good grasp of leftist thinking. “Rules for thee but not for me.”
Rule 10, “Be precise in your speech”
… THAT’S WHAT THIS CHAPTER WAS CALLED???
I read this on audiobook and I don’t think anything in this chapter had anything to do with that rule. Peterson is kind of precise in that he’s careful not to directly say anything controversial in a way that can be easily quoted but he’s so meandering that I find this rule hilariously ironic.
Rule 11, “Do not bother children when they are skateboarding”. I think in this chapter he talks about how children need to flirt with danger in order to find competence. He talked about this earlier in the book as well when he said people need to find a sweet spot between Order and Chaos. I think he makes a pretty good point there. Our modern lives can sometimes be too well-ordered to the point of stultification, and when that happens we need to seek challenges and new activities.
He talks about the role of men ribbing each other in tough workplaces as a way of finding their place in a dominance hierarchy. Sure? I haven’t worked in that kind of a workplace, so I’ll to take his word for it. It is good not to take yourself too seriously.
Rule 12, “Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street”. Basically, find the good things in life to balance out the bad. He talks about his daughter’s struggles with juvenile arthritis, which sounds awful, and how it can be hard to find meaning in life when life is painful. He mentions that when you’re going through something really hard that you need a plan for (like an illness or dying), you should limit thinking and talking about it to one hour a day, and outside of that just follow the plan. I think that’s a good idea.
Throughout the book, he talks a lot about the importance of being tough and independent. I think this hits a chord with a lot of men. He also tends to portray men as the victims of society. He speaks to men’s struggles, particularly the pressures that society puts on men to repress emotion, be competent, and provide for their wives and children.
The thing that strikes me as weird about Jordan Peterson is that he tries to call out this extra pressure put on men while also reinforcing it. He says men need to toughen up, but also that society ignores male pain. I think he’s trying to reinforce patriarchy without denying that patriarchy is bad for men: he’s saying “this is bad” but also “this is the way it must be, so toughen up”.
I think that’s why he holds such an appeal for men: he acknowledges their pain while trying to patch up the system that grants them privilege. I think men are being offered two deals. Feminism says: “you can express yourself how you want, but you have to share power with women.” Traditionalism says: “You have to buckle down and be tough, but if you do this, you can have more power.” Peterson is trying to push men towards the traditionalist deal by singing of the sweetness of the rewards, while warning about feminism, saying it will lead to reduced productivity and societal decline (whether that will actually happen, though, I’m skeptical about…).
I think 12 Rules for Life is an attempt to rebrand traditionalism as the egalitarian, reasonable, natural thing. He admits patriarchy exists, but he sees it as protection for the woman rather than oppression.
He’s very heteronormative and gender essentialist. Throughout the whole book, he lays out “men are this way and women are that way”, “men are assertive, women are agreeable”. He thinks the point of life is to reproduce. None of his theories apply to gay people; gay people don’t seem to exist within the world as he understands it. In fact, the male social relations that he lionizes are usually quite homophobic and he doesn’t say anything condemning that homophobia.
The first thing I first heard about Jordan Peterson was his opposition to Canadian Bill C-16, which he believed would mean the government could put professors in jail for not using a student’s preferred pronouns. Bill C-16 wouldn’t have put anyone in jail that didn’t commit a hate crime (using the wrong pronouns would not have constituted a hate crime) or advocate for genocide against a protected group.
Peterson posted this video of himself opposing the bill in the Canadian Senate where he gives his reasons for opposing the bill and refusing to use transgender people’s pronouns. In the video, he says something that implies he doesn’t believe trans people are valid:
“Identity is not and will never be something that people define subjectively because identity is something that you have to act out in the world as a set of procedural tools which most people learn—and I’m being technical about this—between the ages of two and four.”
This is a very complex statement and if you hear it casually, it sounds like “identity is fixed between the ages of two and four”, which would be very transphobic because nobody transitions genders before four years old, and implying that that would need to happen for one’s transition to be valid would in effect be invalidating to all trans people.
What he’s actually saying though is a little bit more complicated: “identity is not and will never be something that people define subjectively” – What does he mean when he says identity is not subjective? Does that mean it’s objective? Do the perceptions of others define our identity, or do we get to? This is a deeply philosophical question that Peterson just throws out there like it’s something obvious. “Identity is something that you have to act out in the world” – Does he mean that gender is performative? “as a set of procedural tools that which most people learn… between the ages of two and four” – Is he saying we stop learning about gender expression after the age of four?
Why does Peterson bring up all this stuff in the context of a discussion about whether or not to adopt a law that would offer transgender people protection from discrimination? Saying that identity is objective, in this context, implies that if he looks at a trans woman and thinks she’s a man, he is correct about her gender, not her, since objectivity means the observer, and not the subject, is to be believed about what is reality.
In this context, saying that identity must be acted out in the world implies that trans people must express some kind of gender conformity in order to have their gender recognized. This is a topic that sparks a lot of debate within the trans community, as some people believe you have to put in the work to be recognized as your gender and others believe that people should just accept that trans people are what they tell you they identify as. Both sides of the debate have problems: the side that says presentation matters ignores trans people who can’t pass or prefer to present more androgynous, and the side that says presentation doesn’t matter ignores that if that’s the standard some trans people will be obnoxious about it and throw a fit when someone gets their pronouns wrong despite the other person not being able to tell their gender from their appearance. The latter issue is I think what really scares cis people (and Jordan Peterson) about trans issues, but most trans people I’ve met are pretty chill and won’t freak out if you misgender them once.
Still, I think Peterson is speaking out against trans rights here without learning much about trans people. The way he talks, I feel as if he hasn’t had many talks with trans people, but just follows the conservative line of reasoning and his own internal biases about it.
One of his rules is “assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t”, so shouldn’t he listen to trans people first before speaking on issues that affect them?
I have known some people with advanced knowledge in a certain field who go on to act as if they are omniscient and infallible in all fields. Sometimes they have a self-image that they are humble and open-minded, when in reality that’s just part of their narcissism. They encourage people to come to them with conflicting information not because they might change their minds, but because they’re confident in their ability to resist new information by arguing against it.
When people (particularly men) extoll the virtues of being quiet and listening, it’s often a red flag. They want to be listened to. They don’t want to listen to you. In the TVO interview, Peterson says he wouldn’t go to a class educating about biases even if it were required by his university, but he wants people to listen to his lectures and buy his book, even (and especially) if they don’t agree with his opinions. He wants to change your mind, but he won’t shut up long enough to let you try to change his.
I think he did open up to the possibility of people being transgender a little bit in his talk with Theryn Meyer (titled “I discuss chaos and order with Theryn Meyer, reasonable transperson” implying of course that most trans people are not reasonable). Throughout the video, it’s mostly Peterson talking, with Theryn emphatically agreeing before gingerly making her points.
Peterson: Now obviously, you’re doing everything in your power to present yourself to the world in a manner that makes you easily categorizable.
Theryn: Absolutely. And I guess I don’t necessarily even think of it that way. You know, I don’t think “I want to be seen as a woman so I’m going to do all these things to be viewed as a woman”, I do all these things because I am a woman. I do all these things just because it comes naturally to me. The end product just happens to be a subject that in people’s minds is easily registerable.
Peterson: I would say that’s an act of politeness on your part. One of the things people concluded when I first made my videos is that I wouldn’t use he or she to refer to, say, someone like yourself who wants to be referred to as she. My attitude about that was never that, but having thought through it further, I also realized that my natural behavioral proclivity, and I think that of most people, is to refer to someone by the pronoun that addresses their appearance. Because pronoun use is actually rather casual, you do it unthinkingly and automatically.
In this interview, he says he would call a binary and gender-conforming trans person by their pronouns. He says he never said he wouldn’t do that and that people who interpreted what he said in his earlier video were mischaracterizing him. He did argue that being required to call people by their preferred pronouns would be “compelled speech”, so that kind of implies that he wouldn’t do that if not compelled. Maybe the difference then is that Theryn looks like a woman?
But then he says:
Theryn: I think there would actually be more confusion if people referred to me as he.
Peterson: Right, so part of your case is that there’s actually no way of addressing you that doesn’t produce some confusion, and so using she is the simplest.
When he says there’s no way of referring to her in a way that doesn’t produce confusion, he’s subtly telling her she doesn’t pass. Peterson likes to portray himself as a beacon of reason and openness, but this is a personal insult. Saying a nasty thing with an even voice and a smile on your face doesn’t make it nice. He says he’s willing to use she pronouns for trans people who present as recognizably female, but he implies that he’s not willing to accept that trans women are actually women. If you’re wondering why Jordan Peterson gets so much flak for being anti-trans, this is why. I believe he considers himself something like a “biological realist” and I don’t think he’s willing to move on that, but he can’t discuss it openly for fear of backlash, so he buries it under all this vague stuff about the importance of preserving order from chaos.
He’s also doing that you can’t have your cake and eat it too thing (Cass Eris points it out many times in her YouTube series on 12 Rules for Life). Earlier in the interview he says pronoun use is casual and if a trans woman looks like a woman (as Theryn does – many of the comments are cis women saying she looks more like a woman than they do) he would call her a woman, but if that’s true then why would calling Theryn by she pronouns cause Jordan confusion? I think if you didn’t know Theryn was trans you couldn’t tell by looking at her, so is he saying that it causes confusion because Jordan knows Theryn was born male? Are pronouns casual, like he said earlier, or intrinsic? He seems to be saying he would call a trans woman who looks like a woman she, but once he found out she was trans he would be “confused” about what to call her.
When Peterson talks about biological gender, he doesn’t seem to be aware that there are physical differences in the brains of transgender people that make them think more like the gender they identify as than their assigned sex at birth. I don’t know how much research he’s done on transgender issues, but I get the feeling it’s not much, and if that’s so he should maybe be quiet and listen first before spouting his uninformed opinions.
Something else to note about this interview is that Theryn (at the time this was recorded) believed that binary trans people (trans men and trans women) are valid, but nonbinary trans people are not. This is another reason Peterson appends the moniker “reasonable” to Theryn in the title. Peterson finds trans people like Theryn reasonable because they pose less threat to the established system of gender that Peterson is trying to uphold.
Peterson explicitly says, “If the excluded other wants to be included, the way to be included isn’t to blow apart the category structure.” I think he has in mind here the students who protested his lectures at University of Toronto. Having your speech interrupted by angry protesters is scary, but I think he’s exaggerating the threat nonbinary people pose to society. There are some hurdles to overcome, like choosing a pronoun that is easy to use (“they” seems most popular). There’s also the more nebulous issue of how to treat a nonbinary person (we do tend to treat the genders differently and have different expectations for them), but mostly it seems like you could relate to them like you would any other person. It would mean setting aside gendered expectations and relating to them as individuals.
Peterson often lumps left issues together. He came up with that phrase “Postmodern neo-Marxism”, which I hoped was tongue-in-cheek when I read the book, but the more I hear him talk the more I think he means it seriously. Natalie Wynn did a great breakdown of that term in her video on Dr. Peterson, where she says that the two terms are incompatible because postmodernism is anti-narratives and Marxism is a narrative. Peterson lumps postmodernism in with Marxism because he sees Marxism as a postmodern antithesis of capitalism, an unraveling of the story of the hard working man who gets ahead by effort and intelligence. I actually think it’s interesting that he leaves feminism out of the equation, but I guess he sees Marxism as encompassing feminism, because he sees feminism as a redistribution of wealth between genders rather than classes.
I think he actually has a couple good points about how the leftist white-guilt mentality can lead to nihilism. Guilt is inhibitory, not motivational. If I feel like I’ve done something bad to someone, I tend to avoid them rather than help them. Ideally, I would go apologize and help them but in practice I usually tend to put more distance between us so I don’t have to feel that guilt and can go on living my life. In society this looks like racial segregation, which persists in most places I’ve lived. I think the way liberals can sometimes go about educating by shaming can be counterproductive. For example, all the videos that say “10 things to never say to a [minority]” or “12 things [minority] is tired of hearing”. This shames the people who actually interact and lets people who withdraw feel like they’re doing something good.
More than that, I think he is actually correct about liberal philosophy’s disincentive to prosper. When the left focuses on privilege-shaming, it makes you either downplay your privilege if you have it or try to avoid accumulating privilege if you don’t. If your stance is anti-authority, you never want to become an authority. Which isn’t to say that you don’t work hard – most liberals and leftists I know work hard – but that you may not do the things that would lead to conventional success because you don’t want to become an oppressor. Also, if you better your personal finances, you lose the ability to take part in social complaining about the system and people start to think you’ve lost your sense of solidarity.
Going up another level, everything we do is harmful to someone or something. “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.” All our food and clothing and housing and products are made by underpaid laborers working in horrible conditions. The land we live on was stolen from the Native Americans. Our meat comes from animals penned together with barely any room to move. Our cars are polluting the atmosphere, so going to work is slowly killing the environment. Productivity is having deleterious effects on life on Earth. Our life comes at the cost of other life.
In order to move forward and maintain sanity under these conditions, we have to remain willfully blind in at least some respects. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is about a character who wants to do no harm to the world, to the extreme that she stops eating. First she stops eating meat, but then she realizes that plants are also alive and she doesn’t want to hurt them. She decides to become a plant, eventually choosing death over being the cause of another living being’s suffering. In a way, she’s the pinnacle of ethical action, but at the same time, she’s hurting herself and her family.
12 Rules for Life, Atlas Shrugged, and The Vegetarian all have a similar theme: that selflessness has a limit. In 12 Rules for Life and Atlas Shrugged, the limit is resentment, or the point at which giving makes you start to hate the receiver.
Jordan and his wife Tammy have two biological kids and had many foster kids over the years. I wonder how much that took out of them… I’d think having foster kids would be really hard. I wonder if Jordan ever resented having to support them? I worked at a foster cat house for 3 years and that kind of caring work can be really emotionally draining. It was thinking about Atlas Shrugged that eventually convinced me to leave because as much as I valued the work, it was getting to the point that when I came home I didn’t have any caring left for my partner and my own cats or enough energy to clean the house. You only have so much time and energy so you have to be careful what you spend it on.
The reasons I got into working at the cat house were partially due to my leftist education. I didn’t want to have a car after graduation because I didn’t want to pollute, so I tried to take public transport or walk to job interviews, but often this would mean I’d show up to the job interview late or out of breath, which didn’t go over great and I never got hired.
There’s a thread in leftist thought which can lead one to conclude “bad is good”. Leftism seeks to lift up the underprivileged, and sometimes it can go to the extent to saying that the marginalized are moral and the privileged are immoral. I think this leads some leftists to seek marginalization (and therefore morality and social justice points) for themselves instead of doing the much harder work of trying to lift others into privilege. The thing is, if you want to help others, you have to be in a good place first. You can’t share your good fortune if you don’t have any.
There’s something I’ve been repeating to myself to try to get out of this toxic mindset, which is “Good is good.” It’s so simple and basic, but when media all around you is telling you to feel guilty for the good things in your life, sometimes you need a little reminder to just let yourself enjoy things. Life contains a lot of suffering, but the reason we keep living is because we can also experience joy. Morality can get overly heavy, and sometimes you need to give yourself a little wiggle room so you don’t suffocate. Sometimes you need to let go of the need for structure and story and define existence for yourself as the post-modernist existentialists do.
Jordan Peterson is obsessed with story, too, but it’s just the opposite story of Marxism. Traditionalism is more empowering for men than Marxism, but for women traditionalism is far more disempowering. If all women were to step back from power into the traditional motherhood role, I have no doubt men would use that power to abuse women. Peterson cites a couple of instances of men using their power to help women (the tampon king of India), but history shows that if men have sole control of power they will use it to control and oppress women. We need women lawyers and legislators to protect women’s rights under the law, women doctors to take female patients seriously and make sure women make it into clinical trials, women writers to bring attention to women’s issues, businesswomen to create jobs for women, etc. That’s not to say all women have to work or that child-raising isn’t also a very important job, but the closer we are to gender parity in the professions the less potential there is for women’s needs to be overlooked.
Jordan Peterson is deathly afraid of Soviet Russia, but if his alternative is Gilead, that’s not good either. Men tend to miss these dark undertones in his thought because it wouldn’t take a personal toll on them. Jordan Peterson’s words are like a spotlight on men that leaves women in shadow. Some women take comfort in being told it’s okay to be a housewife, but feminism doesn’t mean you can’t be a housewife, it means you don’t have to be, like in the old days when women’s career options were more limited.
Is there a real danger in Marxism, though? I don’t know. There is a lot of class resentment building up. I think if we elected Bernie Sanders, that would help, but it looks like we’re going to have Biden… I think Peterson and his ilk are exaggerating the threat in the US at least (I don’t know about Canada). Few people are talking about actual Socialism, I sense that most are advocating for more social welfare programs, which is not the same thing as the government taking over businesses. Communism is definitely back in vogue though, especially on Twitter. Peterson raises the bugaboo of Marxism, but capitalism is pretty scary too and we’re seeing the ill effects of it right now as Covid-19 makes class distinctions more obvious than ever. The lowest-paid workers are the most at-risk, and the highest-paid can continue working in safety. Yet the system seems pretty stable, and the government has issued some money to help people get through this time. It may be that capitalism will need to make some concessions to socialism to keep the system functional.
Maybe “Capitalism good, Marxism bad” and “Marxism good, Capitalism bad” are both overly simplistic and issue-prone. I don’t think Marxism is the answer to all our problems, but I think Peterson’s habit of fear-mongering about it is just the other side of liberal hand-wringing about capitalist exploitation. I mean, people at the bottom need money to live, and people at the top need the basics of life provided and are willing and able to pay for them. The system may not be fair, but at least it’s functional, and there is still some ability to rise up the class system (dependent on individual situation).
Anyway, that’s what I got on Jordan Peterson. Thanks for reading so far, and if you’d like, leave a comment letting me know what you think about all this stuff!
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