Jordan Peterson Deep Dive

 Cody the News Guy at "Some More News" briefly looks at the topic of Jordan Peterson:

I don't know how Peterson still has any credibility as a self-help guru after he drove his own life into a ditch a few years back.  But he does.  He is still very influential.  Cody's short video provides a good portrait of the man himself and his style of argumentation and his way of looking at the world.

My takeway from it is that Peterson is a deeply insecure individual who NEEDS for the values of the world he grew up in to remain valid.  That world was patriarchal, Christian, heterosexual, capitalist, with a smattering of liberal-representative democracy.  It was also white supremacist.  And (as the video shows beyond a shadow of a doubt) Peterson is more than happy to quote drivel from nazi-adjacent "thinkers" to "prove" that a certain percentage of the population might be completely irredeemable and useless.  (He leaves it to his readers/listeners to ponder what the skin colour of those "useless eaters" might be.)

Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Peterson wasn't/isn't a bad looking guy.  He's also relatively tall (1.85 m).  These attributes, combined with a brain that works quickly at the task of inventing nonsensical arguments, have given him the self-confidence to rise above his squeaky voice and emotional fragility, and become a semi-charismatic bullshit artist.  He is a guru for a racist-conservative philosophy which he cloaks under a veneer of pseudo-scientific mysticism to appear as reasonable.

[Among several painful, cringe-worthy, infuriating segments, there's one part where Peterson angrily denies a nervous male university student's assertion that he (Peterson) defends the hierarchies he is always defending and celebrating.  The young man is unnerved by Peterson's yelling and gives up his point.  At a panel discussion on a British television show, Peterson's self-righteous indignation is less effective when a woman points out that women are not well represented in most Western representative democracies.  In response to her Peterson whines about being insulted and then starts yammering about how maybe she won't be happy unless 51% of bricklayers are female.  To which the woman smiles sadly to herself about the idiot she's sitting beside.]

Which all gets back to Peterson's emotional fragility.  I don't think he's aware that he's actually a con-man.  I think he genuinely believes in the white, patriarchal, capitalist, conservative worldview he proselytizes for.  When he smooshes together truthy-sounding arguments based on pseudo-facts and wishful thinking, he believes he's doing the Lord's work.  He probably truely believes that civilization will fall apart if father-led nuclear families believing in sky-gods who want us all to work hard and get rich are at all challenged.  His tears for the desperate young men who likewise need their fantasies upheld and for his own crumbling under the pressures of defending a world under attack from pink-haired feminist social-justice warriors are genuine.  As was his total nervous breakdown a few years back.

This is how a guy can write a book called Twelve Rules For Life, have a nervous breakdown and then come out with yet another book with supposedly more rules for life (the majority of all these rules being banalities) and then get a paying gig with racist, babbling speed-talker Ben Shapiro.

Don't get me wrong.  There's stupidity aplenty across the whole political spectrum.  But right-wing ideas, the thinkers of those ideas, and the swallowers of those ideas, enjoy the lion's share of the total quantity of stupidity in the universe.