Jordan Peterson has no idea what he's talking about

Looks like we'll be witnessing a debate between Jordan Peterson and Eminent Professor Slavoy Zizek in October, showing Peterson going through the Internet world, if not more, then to a near future. The upcoming debate seems to me as a stupid satire, because despite the criticism of Zizek, there is no doubt that he is a political philosopher Erudus, while Jordan Peterson is not.

In fact, the slightest consideration of his comments reveals that he is far from Zizek's depth. He is able to retain his power only through the foolish support of conservative unintelligent commentators, and a mixture of pathetic weaknesses and charming political interviews that failed to investigate categories of his outlook.

What are these categories? First, liberalization. That's something Peterson likes to talk about. But as far as anyone might say, his understanding of liberalism is based on the folk history of Enlightenment, in which the [male] individual, armed with objective light of reason, and who alone is coping with corporate society and puts a free community of equals which may be [or not] under the yoke of an international empire somewhere in secret. Whenever Peterson speaks of reason, it is done with a great A [in the ang. With big R, for reason: look at this interview, for example, in which he fertilizes the reason in terms clearly of Enlightenment. This may be an injustice to him, but it seems that he conceives of reason as a kind of absolute force that the power of objective minds can achieve if they are able to think sufficiently critically.

The pressure comes, according to the scheme, when the individual abandons reason and takes refuge in tribalism, and from there in violence and authoritarianism. It thus attracts a simplified relationship between the loss of respect for the individual and the totalitarian state.

The connection is, according to its claims, based on “in a deepening reading of XX-8x1> history. If this is the conclusion he came to, we can only assume he is unable to read. Totalitarian mentality, as they have noted from the political spectrum from Camya to Isaiah Berlin, is precisely the product of the rationalism of Enlightenment, which Peterson admires. If, as the argument turns out, there is a spirit of reason that is possible for getting caught by all people, then it is possible to create a society in clean harmony, since the interest of any reasonable being is not to conflict with others. Only in such a society is the individual free.

This is the vision that motivates totalitarianism - the individual as an unscathed creature the cause of restrictions that expose his prejudices and other social situations. One can draw parallels between this mentality and the activism of social justice of a certain kind, which no doubt understands the individual as an entity entranted by established social claims that need to be broken through self - control.

However, it is not a completely different vision with Peterson's views and with his proposals that people need to discipline themselves in order to get rid of harmful social attributes. Peterson is committed to the ideal of plurality of values and it would be totally unfair to apply something else to him: in this respect he is a real liberal. But according to his own standards, his oponents are also not real liberals. You attribute totalitarianism, and the modern movement for social justice, an impulse to worship the collective despite how much the individual suffers is a catastrophic diagnosis of both phenomena. Social justice activists of the kind that he despises celebrate the individual as much as he does, and to simulate their efforts in a group mentality is to feed exactly the type of political misinterpretation he himself complains he is drowning freedom of expression.

Speaking of distribution, as poor is its sense of postmodernism. It's a victim when he talks about him that he's read about postmodernism only from the website at the Wikipedia of Jacques Pigidas. He seems to believe that postmodernism is nothing more than a mask worn by Marxism. He makes vague references to knowledge-power, he claims he has read the Faucule, but it doesn't seem ʹ and exposes the concept of tribalism again, claiming he displaces people from involvement in the debate. This is completely incorrect not only because this conclusion is not drawn from the theory in question, but also because social justice activists are constantly talking about the importance of dealing with the oppressor in order to make them understand the sources of their privileges. Criticism should be made in the use of emotional commitment to revile those who attack their movement, but Peterson does not have the intellectual means to do so.

In order to confirm the idea of cultural Marxism, an anti - Semitic conspiracy theory that should not be taken seriously by anyone who has at least superficial knowledge of Marxist theory or Frankfurt School.

This is not a snob trying to question Peterson's intelligence, which I think is adequate. His readings have been quite shallow, which is hardly surprising: this is not his area of expertise. He's a psychologyist, not a connoisseur of political philosophy, and I have no doubt he's good at his profession. But it is a little sad to see how much praise he has received in throwing nonsense about theories that he is not tired of. There's a sharp contrast to one of his liberal ancestors, Carl Popper, a science philosopher who is aware of his indiscretion in political philosophy, read Plato, Hegel and Marks basically before writing a review of the three authors in his canonical work “Open society and enemies of Sy”.

Peterson became very familiar when he protested about the use of gender names, and since then he has been pleased to present his semi-explicit ideas about the world's media apparently without being aware of his concept of understanding.

Huffington Post: