Jordan Peterson is right about IQ, gender pronouns, and SJWs…but wrong in other regards, and like his enlightenment brethren, clings to democracy and misdiagnoses problem.
The only societies that are not slave societies are western enlightenment democracies. From my C2C interview: https://t.co/jdcmwbl5Cl pic.twitter.com/JcWNYn1LSm
— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) December 4, 2016
He’s right:
SJWs and wimpy professors are products of democracy. Non-democratic countries don’t have those problems.
His argument (in this video and others) is pretty much along the lines of ‘if everyone were X (such as nihilistic), then the world would be a very bad place.’ That’s 7th-grade logic, specifically an example of the reductio ad absurdum fallacy. Not everyone is going to do ‘X’, and doesn’t address the root of the problem as to why democracies have an SJW problem, and also why so many people in such countries feel powerless and purposeless.
If you ask people in non-democratic countries, such as Singapore, if they feel enslaved, the answer is ‘no’. The leftist ‘religion’ of oppression and exploitation arises from an inexhaustible pursuit of an ideal of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ that can never be realized; in a sense, they are slaves of their own ideology.
But also, in democracies, in contrast to monarchies, people are slaves to envy and striving. This is because democracy, despite the pretense of individual control and power, doesn’t give individuals much power (or as much power as they expect), resulting in disillusionment and thus nihilism. In democracy, the lines of power are ill-defined, whereas in a monarchy the monarch is supreme, and this is unquestioned, and because everyone is on the same page in this regard, there is much less confusion and envy. Also, because the monarchy is hereditary, no one is striving to attain it, because they can’t. Alexander Hamilton was right to call democracy ‘the American disease’, although it’s no longer uniquely American.
Peterson is wrong about human psychology and human nature. The reason ‘lifting people out of poverty’ doesn’t placate class envy and angst is because relative wealth matters more, not absolute wealth, and also people generally tend to be self-interested: ‘Yes, millions of Africans are exiting poverty, but what does that mean for me, an American middle-aged male?’ Also, if you raise the bottom then the new bottom becomes the new level of poverty, so it never ends.