The Podcast

There is a Jordan Peterson interview online from May 2018, a podcast in London, Intelligence Squared. The title of the episode is: “Jordan Peterson on Gender, Patriarchy and the Slide Towards Tyranny.” The interviewer was Anne McElvoy, senior editor at the Economist. What I write below are from my notes on this interview. Jordan stated that his focus was to help individuals not members of identity groups. He pointed out that this self-help advice that he offers to the public in his lectures and books is not a finger-wagging, judgmental morality by perfect, supercilious, self-righteous, smug paragon, from on high, lecturing less successful people. He claims to be successful because people know that he too has feet of clay, and they sense that he wishes them well, not to criticize and yell at them. He distances himself from berating, moral injunctions, top-down moral lecturing and guilt tripping. I sense that he is not built like that, and that he really cares for his public, and wants them to be happy, healthy and successful. He wants to help the individual not the collective. He offers that life is suffering, and the authentic, moral adult must confront suffering and truth directly, and accept responsibility for making one’s life and the world better, and that is where meaning is found. He criticizes social justice activists that do not develop the self but blame and seek to change the world out there for their unhappiness, frustration and grievances brooded on. They are ignorant and lost, but they push an ideology of omniscience and moral superiority. Leftists view the world as a battle ground of rival ideologies. The patriarchy has its capitalist and individualist ideology that is mere opinion but serves to preserve this power elite, corrupt and to be overthrown. Power struggles is between factions sparring over opinions. Competence, merit and truth are just buzzwords justifying the oppression wielded by the male patriarchy. Archetypal truths have been watered down and bastardized into mere ideology. Peterson affirms that the individual sovereignty is the theological and philosophical claim underlying politics. Politics can degenerate into a mere ism. Individualism came about through thousands of years of development. The Right goes too far and turns fascist with claims of ethnic and racial superiority. Reasonable progressivism is acceptable, but the Left goes too far when pushing equality of outcome. This is their stated public policy, demanding equivalent representation of all possible identity groups at all possible levels of all possible hierarchies, claiming all tyrannical prejudice is to be rooted out. These social justice ideologues are filled with anger, hatred, envy and resentment: they express no gratitude for how good they have it in the West. They are obsessed with unfairness in fair America. Gender for them is a social construct, not a biological assignation from birth. Jordan seems to anger McElvoy by asserting that feminism play identity politics with men as the resented oppressors, and women as the oppressed victims. She disliked him saying that women express aggression by gossip or innuendo, and men use threat of force or actual force to express aggression. She accuses Jordan of being Hobbesian. He denied that, countering that he was also ½ Rosseauan. He argues that culture is both security and tyranny. We are good and evil. Nature is both benevolent and catastrophic. He asserts firmly that he is not dialogue. Most of this video were Peterson’s well-known views that I have gone over elsewhere. Two new perspectives are worth mentioning. Right abo above where Jordan self-refers as Hobbesian and Rousseaua, regarding culture as security and tyranny, nature as catastrophic and benevolent. He is declaring himself to be an ethical and ontological moderate. Notice that he refutes being an ideologue because these polar traits and polar viewslead to extremism, radicalism, mass movements and evil. That is important to identify groupism, extremism, totalism and mobism as evil. Peterson affirms that the individual sovereignty is the theological and philosophical claim underlying politics. Politics can degenerate into a mere ism. Tribalism underlies tyranny.