A
In some ways, I am obsessed with Jordan Peterson. He is a
genius, who lately, with his veering towards radical altruism at the expense his
modest, implied, formed support of rational egoism as the preferred human moral
code, upsets me. My frustration with his wrong turn should lead me to never
study him again. But I am not willing to abandon him yet.
He is an individualist in part, as Christians classically
are, in part a bit for individualism and even self-interest. In the main,
though, he and they are altruistic in their ethics and collectivism in their
group-identifying prioritization.
Below is a 5:57 minute long video excerpt from Jordan’s
interview with The Epoch Times in maybe 2017. I wrote notes on it and slightly
edit it below for clarity and then make comments. Its title is, Jordan Peterson
Explains That Collectivism is Tyranny under the Guise of Benevolence (which it
is, Ed Says). A reporter is interviewing Jordan.
But, before I go over the Epoch-Times/Peterson interview
tape, I will digress for a moment.
I copied and pasted this AI version of Jordan Petersons
views on collectivism and individualism, posted online on 9/9/25. I will
comment on the AI points:
AI:
“To understand Jordan B. Peterson's views on collectivism versus individualism,
consider these key points:
- Definition
of Individualism: Emphasizes personal
responsibility and the importance of the individual in society.”
My
response: I must unpack this: Jordan does emphasize personal responsibility—as
he should--but wrongly dismisses and fails to prioritize the individual’s right
and obligation to assert his natural rights, his constitutional rights, his
legal rights, and his property rights, and his liberty rights to run his own
affairs. Jordan seriously underestimates the importance of knowing and asserting
one’s rights as the vehicle for driving the route of personal individuation and
asserted supercitizenship.
A
corollary point to make is that Jordan mistakenly dismisses the importance and
value of seeking happiness as a moral, desirable goal. This requires
explanation, for if one is selfish, indulging whatever impulse one feels, or
gives in to any or all desires and temptations, and claims to be an
individualist and happy to boot, it is obvious that he is shallow, callow,
selfish and his feeling of happiness gained by getting his way will be a high
for him temporarily, but his overall feeling of being unhappiness will increase
as his character and will keeps being bad or getting worse.
Happiness
has an essential moral component: unless one is kind to oneself and to others,
one is not a person of good will and good character. Without a benevolent deity
constantly instilling love and optimism into one’s consciousness, and if one
does not act ethically, then one cannot be happy. And the positive, merited
happiness and attitude of the spiritually and morally good person is a goal and
after effect of being noble and good, both in self-care and other care.
This
happiness is compatible with and likely inseparable from asserting one’s
legitimate rights and doing one’s duty.
- AI: “Definition
of Collectivism: Focuses on group identity and
collective goals, often at the expense of individual rights.”
My response:
To be an altruist, to group-identify more than individual-identify, to
prioritize collective goals over personal goals, at the expense of individual
rights, is to grow evil and tyranny in the world.
AI: “
- Psychological
Perspective: Individualism fosters
personal growth and self-actualization, while collectivism can lead to
conformity and suppression of individuality.”
My response:
Jordan used to talk about how individualism fosters personal growth and
self-actualization while collectivism can lead to conformity and suppression of
individuality, but now, 8 years later, he has backed away from these positions
somewhat. He rejects categorically individualism, self-interested,
self-consciousness and egoism, accusing individualists of being guilty of
Luciferian pride and rejection of godly ways.
He may think totalitarian
collectivism can lead to tyranny and suppression of individuality, but his
recently discovered and announced hyper-altruism
promotes social and political collectivism, be that his intention or not.
AI:
“
- Historical
Context: Peterson discusses how
collectivist ideologies have led to totalitarian regimes throughout
history.”
My
response: Collectivist ideologies do lead to totalitarian regimes.
AI:
“
- Moral
Responsibility: He argues that individualism
promotes moral accountability, as individuals are seen as agents of their
own choices.”
My
response: Individualism does promote moral responsibility—much better and more
so than collectivism, and groupists are often slaves to the collective will,
whereas individualists are much more inclined to be agents of their own
choices.
AI:
“
- Cultural
Implications: Individualism is linked to
innovation and progress, while collectivism can stifle creativity and
personal initiative.
My priority: Individualism is linked to innovation and
progress, and collectivism always stifles creativity and personal initiative,
and this will lead for humans to perish if individuating and egoist ethics are
not the cultural norms of the West by 2080.
B
Here is the excerpt: “Jordan (J after this) Well, but that’s
the issue is that caring for someone or for a group of people is a very
complicated thing. And it doesn’t always mean, be compassionate and feel sorry
for them because they’re downtrodden.”
My response: Jordan is wise here: I agree that social reform
intentions often go astray with unintended consequences, especially if we grow
government control over private lives by legislating morality. It is acceptable
to feel compassionate for the downtrodden but growing government and socialism
grows tyranny evil and groupisim with the terrible side effect of increasing
the amount of people that are poor and downtrodden; socialism never works, and
it and federal solutions usually make things worse.
J: “It’s not enough, like a lot of the structures that we
put in place to help people over the long run are rather harsh in their
operation in the short. And so, the values that are associated with that can,
trait conscientiousness for example which are reasonably good predictors of
more conservative leaning political beliefs aren’t very warm, fuzzy virtues.”
My response: We want warm hearts with cool heads: We want
people to solve problems personally and that is the best macro-solution upon a
few good strong enforced laws under limited government. If people were
personally maverize most social ills would dry up and evaporate.
Jordan: “They’re cold, hard, judgmental virtues. They’re the
demands for performance for example that go along in the workplace. But if you
want to take care of an infant who’s crying, you want warm, instantaneous,
impulsive compassion, because there’s a problem and you have the solution,
right.
The baby is not. The baby is too cold. The baby needs to be
fed. You can fix that right now.
If you’re dealing with, with systemic poverty, for example,
of trying to determine how to how to produce more opportunity for everyone to
benefit from everyone’s abilities, you have to use a hell of a lot more than
compassion to get there.”
My response: I agree: Real virtue, tough love, rational
virtue seems cold and harsh but for an adult or adult society, it is kinder by
far in the long run.
J: “And so to think of a community in the positive sense of
being driven by nothing but empathy which is really one of the central
arguments of the postmodern types—at least that’s what’s driving some of their
argumentation—is it’s an absurd position so it’s, so it’s not so much that they
confuse the two things as they fail to differentiate the concepts.”
My response: Postmodernists feign compassion, a pretext to
grab totalitarian power over the masses, and to force all to conform to their
Marxist ideology, or face the torture rack, prison, or the firing squad.
Empathy, warm feelings, and compassion is no justification
to brutal federal oppression of the masses as a solution far worse than the
disease. They may confuse the two or lie about being compassionate just to lull
the credulous, keeping mass opposition down while they gain grow, revealing
their true natures and intentions once they have amassed enough arms and
followers to overthrow the government and culture.
J: “I take it, it’s very, very difficult to build functional
structures that help people thrive individually and socially over long periods
of time.”
My response: As a proponent of mass individual
supercitizenship in a free market constitutional republican government and
economy, I propose that beyond these strong, limited functional structures, we
fare best by having no external functional structures, but rather a personal
egoist plan of individuation as each citizen’s internalized functional
structure to guide her to act and save herself for the benefit of herself
first, and then for all indirectly.
J: “And merely being empathetic, man, that’s just going to
get you nowhere. A three-year-old is empathetic. And I’m not dismissing that.
Empathy is important but as a problem-solving mechanism, it, it has very
limited ability.”
My response: I agree.
Epoch Interviewer: “You talk briefly about national
socialism and collectivism, the difference being from my understanding of
fascism was made to control the individual. Marxism was more the control of the
means of production. Socialism is more the means of controlling the fruits of production,
if I’m not mistaken. And I think we have seen the destructive nature of
collectivism in destroying the individual, right?”
My response: Socialism, fascism and Marxism have slight
differences, but they are all altruistic and collectivist, so the evil
similarities far outweigh niggling differences.
J: “Well, I think that, uh that’s actually the point in, in
large part. I mean Derrida for example coined a term he called phallocentrism,
which, which he regarded as the central axiomatic position of the, of the West,
hey. Not only the Enlightenment West but also the Christian or Judeo-Christian,
for that matter, West, prior to the Enlightenment. Derrida went after the
tradition running through Judeo-Christian through modernism and the and the
Renaissance and Enlightenment and criticized that. And that was the idea that and he was critical
of this.
It's the presupposition that culture is first
male-dominated, which is a presupposition which I take great exception to
because it’s a radical oversimplification of the historical story to the degree
that culture was male-dominated. It was only dominated by a very small number
of males. Most males were serfs or soldiers, or, or cannon fodder for that
matter, or coal miners dreadfully toiling away for their work, certainly as oppressed
as women were in general by the absolute poverty of the conditions.”
My response: Jordan discovered or relays a profound truth
here; historically, Western culture or any culture was not male-dominated (it
was by an elite ruling class of society, dominated by a few males). Most men
had it no better than most women, severely oppressed and severely impoverished.
What Jordan implies and what I will make explicit is that
human rights abuses, tyranny, oppression, exploitation, enslavement of human populations
everywhere, forever in the past is less the fact that these elites were
male-dominated, but that the real source of the unjust treatment of the masses,
both men and women, is that elites everywhere abuse and rule over the masses.
To make things better, we have to figure out how permanently
to get rid of elites. That is the key to growing a just society, not going
after male-domination, more an effect generated by the social structure of overbearing
elites trampling the masses, than the self-generated cause of mass subjugation
going on in any society. Eliminates elites, and democracy, prosperity and
freedom can become worldwide, and only a worldwide citizenry of individuating
supercitizens can eliminate elites, potentially forever.
J: “You know up till 1895 the average person in the Western
world lived on a dollar a day in today’s money, right. So, I mean you don’t
have to go back, back very far in time before you find everyone oppressed, but
not by the socio-cultural system, merely by that by the absolute insane
difficulty of life itself.”
My response: Well, the socio-cultural system and its
outreaching institutions are oppressing the masses everywhere, in the past and
in most countries today, but, to Jordan’s point, that unjust dispensation is rooted
in human nature and in the nature of the world itself. To paraphrase Jordan,
hierarchies for humans are naturally, instinctually constructed social
structure growing out of human nature, and the Pareto principle seems to occur
naturally, and thus people divide or self-divide themselves into the ruling,
oppressing elites, and the rule, oppressed masses.
J: “Well, so Derrida described the West as male-dominated
which I think is a, as a, it’s something to take serious issue with as, as a
blatant claim. It is not differentiated enough or sophisticated enough.
And he also and he also said it was Logos because Logos is
the second person of the Christian Trinity and Derrida knew that perfectly
well. And so his criticism—Derrida was a smart man—make no mistake about it.”
My response: Derrida seems to condemn Western society as
inherently as wholly corrupt and unjust because it is male-dominated (Men are
the evil ones in this world.), Christian dominated (Christianity is the
religious and moral cover for the oppressors.), and Christ or the Divine Logos
is corrupt and unjust, not loving, merciful and self-sacrificing.
Christ as Logos indicates to me that the love of reason and
reasoning in the West does reveal that reasoning (We reason, use language,
define our terms accordingly to concepts conceived, and weave together a
metanarrative for our people to live by and extract meaning, hope, happiness,
salvation, and purpose from.), the West’s greatest intellectual and cultural
gift to humanity, originates from Judeo-Christian sources, as well as from
ancient Greek secular society (Ben Shapiro’s take that Western civilization is
a happy cultural marriage of borrowings from Jerusalem and Athens.)
The admirable Stephen Hicks and other Randian intellectuals
from The Atlas Society and ARI, if intellectually honest atheists and secular
humanists, must acknowledge the contribution to the West, celebrating reason
and reasoning, a gift from Judeo-Christian sources.
Only if the atheists, Christians, and Jews work together,
can the West survive and evolve, as rational religion enables us to go forward
into the future, building onto our proud, rich heritage.
What is required in 2025, is right-wing populism, not
fascism, but right-wing populism, the masses educated and self-educating,
becoming, a majority of them, individuating supercitizens.
When the masses, each of them is a hybrid creature, part
intellectual giant, part ethical lion, part brilliant poet, and part commoner
in wealth and occupation (a housewife or an electrician), when they get each of
them their own lives in order, and then work together to run society, this is
when elites and class structures disappear, or the differences are slight and
rather inconsequential. This is Mavellnialist populism, the only cure for human
tendency to set up a stratified, exploitative, tyrannical, unjust social and
legal arrangement.
We are all evil more than not from birth, and social power concentration
turns each of us into morally radioactive monsters, but the cure is not the
Thomas Hobbes approach that an absolute monarchy is required to keep the people
in line, beasts which we all are.
The solution is to train the masses up into individating
supercitizens. Only then will they peacefully cooperate and police each other
without the need to coerce or use violence against one another.
Power, centralized, does corrupt all, but it corrupts a
citizenry of individuating supercitizens least of all. The masses must rule
society if we are to have any chance at all, and that is no easy or permanent
fix, for it can always crumble, going back to tyrannical, class society where
the few elite inflict their will upon the longsuffering but masochistic masses
eager to be dominated and abused, of someone will just do their thinking for
them.
J: “And lots of things he said were correct. Like one of the
propositions, he laid forth was that there was a near infinite number of ways
of interpreting any situation or any text, which happens to be technically
true. And that’s being discovered in all sorts of fields, including artificial
intelligence.”
My response: There are infinite interpretations of anything
but some interpretations are more wholesome and sensible and socially useful
than others, and we want to develop those interpretations for our own sake and
for society’s sake, always as ontological moderate, understanding that we need
to seek, appreciate and learn from almost any alternative interpretation all
the while building our primary interpretation of reality and the rightful human place in it,
as our justified and justifiable grand Western narrative.
J: “So the central claim that he begins with is actually
true, and it’s not surprising that it had such a powerful effect on the
humanities, because it’s actually an extraordinarily powerful and, an
undermining idea.
But he took it much further. He took it in directions I don’t
think it should have gone in at all. But the logocentric idea is that his
criticism of the idea of the logocentric society is a deep criticism of the
idea that the individual as a speaking force is a communicative agent, is the appropriate,
highest value upon which a culture should be built.”
My response: The Western axiomatic, fundamental assumption,
that the individual, man or woman, gay or straight, regardless of color or wealth
and power status, is the sovereign locus of civilizing action, legal citizenry,
and the necessary ruler of his world—in voluntary conjunction and united
association with the other members of the masses—this is the logocentric ideal,
that the individual, the rational egoist (if we take it far enough as Rand and
I have), this radically free-thinking, free-speaking, free-acting is a force
for good, social justice and social harmony, this communicative and communicating
agent is the highest value upon which any high culture and high civilization
can and must be built—a constitutional, free market republic—all of which
Derrida rejects, Peterson partially embraced—more so 8 years ago than now--,
and all of which I embrace and advocate.
J: “He took that apart and criticized it, and that’s, that’s
a deeper criticism, I would say, even in Marxist criticism which was mostly
about unequal power relationships. Derrida went deeper than that. And the
postmodernists that occupy the universities are anti-individual right now,
right down, right down to the bedrock.”
My response: Derrida the professor and his acolytes, the postmodernist
academics in Academia, are anti-individualist, right down to the bedrock.
This seems counterintuitive: are not members of the ruling,
economic and political elite, supposed to be more individualistic than the
masses they rule over?
Well, Eric Hoffer answers this better than anyone, even
Jordan, and Hoffer may only hint at an answer implicitly or directly. The dirty
little secret is that members of a ruling class, academics, soldiers, clergy,
plutocrats, generals, journalists, labor leaders or politicians are considered
as a generalization to be more individualistic than the masses they rule over.
Reality points to it being the other way around: rulers run
in packs, and the most powerful ruler is the most evil member of his class,
because he is the most selfless, purely group-oriented, self-hating, and
power-addicted and power wielding, a real menace to society.
The masses in Hofferian scheme of things, are group-oriented
and run in packs leading lives of quiet despair, but they retain enough individualism
and self-interest not to be totally vicious, utterly altruistic and
ideologically possessed, in their non-mass movement phase of existing. If
radicalized, then pure altruism and ideological zealotry drives them to be crazy
and cruel.
Once they are awakened to serve as cannon fodder for the
revolution in service to the radical elite and elitists that command their fervent
allegiance and self-sacrifice as minions of the holy cause on the march to
remake society, these minions of this mass movement readily die for their
cause, but, even then, their group-orientedness is not as pure and complete as
the Stalinist monsters at the head of the movement.
Derrida, the postmodernists and the cultural Marxist
ideologues that captured American Academia, in the last 20 years as chronicled
by both Stephen Hicks and Christopher Rufo, they use skeptical epistemology as
a rhetorical weapon to divorce the masses from the traditional grand narrative
and dispensation which they lived under and supported. But deep down the epistemology of the postmodernists is totalistic,
being the fanatics and true believers that they are. They are pure, nihilistic
altruist moralists—immoralists actually. Their collectivist economics if
Marxism. Their collectivist government arrangement is totalitarian, be it
secular Russia or sacred Iran, fascist Hitler, or Communist Stalin.
These postmodernists feign skeptical and relativistic
epistemology as a weapon to overthrow the culture and set the masses adrift so
they can be swept into the revolutionary mass movement while scared, confused
and directionless, desperate to find an ism to escaped from their despised
selves into, an ism allowing them to escape from their unbearable, frustrated
blemished selves.
Postmodernists are epistemological absolutists or dogmatists,
true believers in what holy cause they are so proud and willing to fight for
and die for. A proponent or follower of a mass movement, which justifies its
existence and wicked actions based upon a holy cause which provides all the
answers anyone could ever want, is a pure collectivist in his social, religious,
economic and political associations—this is how true believers, postmodernist
while arranging conditions for the revolution—reveal themselves as
revolutionary, epistemological ultraists or zealots once openly violently
taking over society, then the purges commence.
This is what ties postmodernism to Marxism: epistemological
collectivsim links directly to a person moral collectivism (radicalized, pure
group-oriented altruism); economic collectivism or socialism enforced on all,
and finally in legal, social structures of totalitarian centralized government,
political collectivism.
This is how
postmodernism is epistemological cover for bring in Marxism and
totalitarianism, a most undesirable and wicked ‘improvement’. Stephen Hicks has
written and exposed this use of postmodernist epistemology as a cover for
advancing the revolution while the masses remain asleep and still attached to
the status quo and its cultural story.
This is not just a cultural Marxist phenomenon and story; it
applies to and could be the goal of the radicals to introduce upon a free
people other members of the collectivist family of social arrangements, systems
like fascism, nationalism, theocratic regimes like Iran, Leftist or rightist
regimes. They are all postmodernist skeptics about the system they seek to
replace, until it is cast down and they their real, total epistemological
certainty, black and white thinking, is exposed and admitted to. They can do
anything to anyone and feel morally justified in doing it for the cause.
What dismayed me is that at a pivotal time a few years ago
in my intellectual maturation process, though I was 60 years old, Jordan was
central in teaching me that individuality was the sovereign idea of the West,
but his early exposure to socialism and his love of altruism as a cultural
Christian.
He may suffer from a
still residual tendency as a professor to rule the masses rather than allow
them liberty to maverize and run their own lives (This is psychological
speculation about him from my theorizing, no evidence of it being so), he seems
alarmed about all the masses the individuals doing their own thing on a grand
personal scale, or his realignment with conservatives and Christians is making
him back away from his earlier promotion of individualism.
He is coming down hard now on Ayn Rand, individualism,
egoism as the avatars of Luciferian pride, selfishness and rebellion against
God, the sources of evil in the world. Peterson needs to nudge Christians to
accept Randist egoism and merited prideful individualism and finding happinesnes
in this world, and to blend that with Christian faith—less altruism please and
more individuating and egoism accented—so we can reach my goal of
Mavellonialist rational religion for the masses in the future, the
individuating supercitizens.
J: “And so that’s partly why they push collectivism to such
a degree. They don’t give a dam who you are. They care what your group identity
is.”
My response: Jordan is right in this last statement.
Postmodernists, Leftist ideologues and cultural Marxists and Progressive push
collectivism to gain total power over the masses, and that is their only aim,
all else is lies and cover for their true goal.
You as one of the masses, your personal identity is irrevelant.
You are only an avatar of your group identities.
The masses as individuating supercitizens must counter than
insisting that anyone’s group identities are important but secondary in
importance to the individual identity which each one of the masses is to and
should cultivate who she is as a living, accomplished great soul and living
angel, a living singularity. She will push altruism and other care and others interests
as her minority emphasis, but her primary obligatory function—as commanded from
on high by the Mother and the Father and other good deities, Individuators and
Individualists all, is her enlightened pursuit of her glorious self-realized
self-interest in building God’s kingdom here on earth, converting chaos into
cosmos, dark into light, and hate into love.
