Blandford Parker

Parker has a video out about 9 moths ago in criticism of Jordan Peterson. The title of the video is: Is Jordan Peterson right about Nietzsche? Parker advocates that Peterson makes errors in relying on his two of his secular saints--Freud and especially Nietzsche.

Parker seems like a brilliant, eloquent Professor, certainly a liberal but probably not a Leftist. He is a retired English professor. He likes much about Peterson but dislikes that Peterson is so dismissive of Marx, an evil, totalitarian Communist thinker that should no credibility with anyone anymore. Jordan so discounts Marx and it is the appropriate, reasonable response.

I know little about Freud but Parker is worried that Peterson's affinity for Freud and especially Nietzsche is  idolizing and sanctifying two of the major contributors to postmodernist nihilism that is ruining and annihilating Western civilization. If I may interpret Parker, he is concerned that Peterson is adulating Freud and Nietzsche, two of the leading introducers of nihilism and postmodernism, the very forces of meaninglessness and barbarism that Jordan wants to inspire young people to refute as they as individuals find meaning in their lives and develop themselves.

Parker defends Marx and suggests that Nietzsche adulation led right to Hitler. Parker impugns Nietzsche as willing to wipe out the common people, as dismissive of Christ and Socrates, two heroes for Parker. Parker has a point and when Peterson recovers his health, he may need to answer these points.

For myself, I would not pay much attention to Freud, have no regard for Marx, but think that I can see why Jordan finds Nietzsche appealing. Nietzsche championing of the superman can lead to Nazism, but more importantly I imagine that Nietzsche was for average men become supermen through self-realization and hyper-individualism, and it could be that Peterson identified these same implications growing out of Nietzsche.