Matt and Chris are back in the headspace of the Alchemical Lemon, Jordan Peterson, with what was supposed to be a shorter format decoding episode. You can judge for yourself how well that worked out!Nevertheless, this is still a 'recoding' episode of a previously decoded guru. For those interested, Jordan was covered way back in Episode 3 and jointly with Bret Weinstein in Episode 18. It seemed about time to dip back into the ineffable well of the undisputed master of metaphors given that he seems to have revived his old Agenda Insight persona (minus the Fedora).This time we find Jordan in a foul mood delivering some stern advice to the Christian Churches on how to attract and recruit young men. He's been on a bit of a roll recently (since joining the Daily Wire) and thus far has delivered unsolicited 'messages' to Christians, Muslims, and CEOs. The mind boggles at how much advice he will have provided and to how many groups before the year is out!So join the decoders for a (theoretically) condensed decoding of a paradigmatic modern guru on the rampage. Think we are kidding? Think again sunshine. Listen... NOW! Do it, before it is too late.LinksPeterson's Message to Christian ChurchesOur original episodes on Peterson: Episode 3 & Episode 18Take down of Peterson's apologetic video on the war in Ukraine by Ukrainian Toronto TelevisionAn ex-fan's perspective on Jordan's trajectory from Rebel WisdomLex Fridman with Tim Kennedy in Ukraine (Instagram)Glenn Greenwald promoting Alex's War' DocumentaryYour Gurometer Ratings!If you want to play along you can add your own scores for Jordan or any of our previous gurus here:Rate the Gurus websiteAnd if you want to check the collected results:Gurometer Results
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist decode and sometimes recode some of the greatest minds the world has to offer.
I'm Professor Matt Brown and with me is the Pinocchio to my Geppetto Associate Professor, Chris Cavanaugh.
Hello, Chris.
Hello, Matt.
I'm very impressed with your ability to think on the fly, add in that notice about recoding as if it was Just natural.
Water's off a duck's back.
Water off a duck's back.
That's how that expression is usually said, but yes!
So what's this about recoding, Matt?
What are you talking about?
Well, it's funny you should ask.
It's very funny because it was you that just told me that we're going to call this a recoding episode.
So it's odd that you would ask me that.
Look at you destroying the illusion.
Illusion.
Peeling back the podcasting curtain.
But that's okay.
Go on, go on.
It is indeed a recoding episode because we're going back to some of the greatest hits.
Revisiting Jordan Peterson in this case.
Because sometimes, Chris...
You know, they keep doing things even after we cover them.
They lack the good grace to just go away and preserve themselves in amber.
They keep talking.
They keep releasing things.
And sometimes we can't resist.
We have to dig back in.
Yeah.
And we've talked about the possibility of recovering old gurus that we looked at.
And one of the other things that we have been discussing recently is the possibility of releasing shorter...
More condensed episodes looking at specific techniques or short form content and this kills two birds with the one stone because what will possibly happen today is that you will have a shorter focused episode on a short piece of content.
This is like a 10 minute piece of content from Jordan that we're looking at and it is highlighting his evolution.
So we initially covered him way back in, I think, our third or fourth episode.
And we might talk about how he's evolved from that as we go through the things here.
But yeah, you're not going to get the usual 40-minute intro banter.
We're going to leap into things and leap out.
This is a test episode, really, for...
A new, shorter, bite-sized format.
It doesn't mean the other longer decodings are going away, but just that, you know, we're evolving.
We're like the gurus.
We're playing around.
We're rotating shapes.
I feel good about it psychologically.
It feels like there's less pressure.
Like, you can look at something small, offer whatever thoughts we might have, and then just walk away.
And it doesn't have to be a monumental thing.
So, we'll see how it goes.
Yeah.
I promise you.
I really promise.
I won't sidetrack us for that long, but I just have to note something that's been going on in the guru sphere that I've noticed recently.
And we've been discussing amongst ourselves and with the listeners as well, the possibility of doing this episode comparing Infowars, Alex Jones' network to what's going on in the Dark Horse and Brett Weinstein's podcast and how there's really strong parallels.
There in the content and the kind of rhetoric.
And similar to that, I've noticed increasing amounts of crossovers between the kind of traditional conspiracy gurus or alternative health like RFK Jr.,
anti-vaccine advocates, Alex Jones, David Icke types, and the secular gurus that caught our attention.
And the most recent examples of this are the Glenn Greenwald is doing a Q&A to promote a documentary about Alex Jones.
Alex Jones has been on this channel hyping up the documentary.
So that suggests it's not going to be a critical evaluation, but a puff piece.
And it's by a director who has a history of making sympathetic portrayals of maligned communities, if you will.
But I looked at some comments that she's made.
And she basically argued things like Curtis Jarvin is not really right wing and so on.
So again, it's clear what you're going to get here.
But just like Glenn Greenwald promoting an Alex Jones documentary is probably not something that I think people would have had on their bingo card like five years ago.
As you know, we're in the process of writing an article about some of this stuff.
And one of the patterns that's become clear as we've been writing stuff down.
Is that these gurus sort of fall into two categories.
Like, there's the ones which kind of stay the same, and they arguably weren't that bad to begin with.
They might well, you know, have some centrist or right-wing sympathies.
They might be somewhat heterodox and be skeptical of whatever.
But, you know, they seem kind of normal.
And then there's this other breed which have these conspiratorial innings in particular, and they just seem to spiral, don't they?
The trajectories are quite different.
And Glenn Greenwald, maybe it's hindsight, but it seems like the seeds were there.
I don't know.
Yeah, I was never a fan of Glenn Greenwald, including with the Snowden leaks.
What Snowden released was important information, but Glenn Greenwald's particular role in that seems largely just simply as a result of being the right...
Person there to receive that information and kind of overstated because of that.
But in any case, it's more whatever you think of him, this overlapping world of the more widely recognized, like conspiracy theorists.
I mean, there's always been the connection with Alex Jones and Joe Rogan.
Joe Rogan has always been conspiracy theorist friendly.
But it just seems to be becoming...
A wider trend, and it's perhaps, I think, linked to the greater receptivity in the mainstream right to conspiracy theories, especially after the Trump presidency.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I think that's right.
And I noticed that Lex Friedman, who we recently covered, was being...
There was an Instagram photo of him with Tim Kennedy.
Tim Kennedy's an MMA fighter or ex-MMA fighter, but he's also complete conspiracy theorist, like right-wing loon type.
And the image was being presented as they're both there helping to sort things out in Ukraine, you know, work out when the situation gets dire, these are the kind of people you want in your country.
And you're just like...
And it was retweeted.
I think it might have been Mike Sarnovich that was retweeting that.
So that's why I came across.
And it's just like, there's a lot of, yeah, connective tissue around that, even amongst, you know, the seemingly bland, naive figures in that ecosystem there.
They're only ever like...
A small degree of separation between hosting Alex Jones for a marathon conspiracy session.
I guess you're right.
Well, a lot of this is kind of tangentially related to Jordan Peterson and the stuff we're going to cover today because I think the common denominator there is that magnetic attraction to the hot button stuff that is attracting everyone's attention at the moment, you know,
and conspiracy theories and whether it will COVID and anti-vaccination stuff, or it could be that anti-woke.
Outrage or whatever.
But that magnetic attraction to the hot-button issues that is almost guaranteed to make a splash and get a lot of attention, that seems to be the common denominator.
Alright, so what we're looking at today is a video put out by Jordan Peterson on the Daily Wire media channel called Message to the Christian Churches.
And the Daily Wire is...
Ben Shapiro's online media network.
And Jordan Peterson has now been signed by them.
I think almost immediately after his Twitter ban.
I'm sure it was in the works for a long time, but, you know, he released his kind of response to that outrage on The Daily Wire as his opening salvo.
And that was a particularly unhinged and melodramatic response.
But it subsequently...
He emerged, as Will's show in these clips, that it wasn't just that topic, you know, him being personally targeted for a penalty on Twitter that caused that.
This seems to be the delivery style that he's going for with his content there.
This kind of stern uncle sitting cross-legged and in a nice reading room lecturing the young people today about what they are getting wrong and what society needs to do Put things right.
Yeah, that's definitely the tone.
And would you say, Chris, it's that Jordan Peterson has sort of entered a new phase?
Like, there was a phase there where he was back, but he was recovering from his illness and he was clearly a bit disheveled and not all there.
But he seems to have pulled himself up by his bootstraps and put on the three-piece suit and he's back, baby.
Yeah, I'm curious about that because, yes, I will say that these videos and the kind of, you know, we'll look at the content, but the eloquence at which he speaks is not that different to pre-Koma Jordan.
And that is different from like his long-form podcast, which he released after coming back, which were more stilted and displayed an emotional fragility.
Which seemed more pronounced than before.
But I kind of wonder, is this the result of better editing and shorter selected clips, like reading from a script or that kind of thing?
Or is it that he actually has recovered just from the ill effects of his treatment in Russia?
And I don't know.
I'd say a little from column A, a little from column B. I was going to mention the same thing, actually, which is that these released episodes, like the one we're covering, are much shorter, as you said, and they're also clearly edited, so the production values are high.
It's a bit different from him getting on his computer at home and just meandering away for two or three hours, like we do.
It's been produced.
It was actually something that David Fuller and his...
That he released charting his disenchantment with Jordan Peterson's trajectory.
He highlighted this change from the kind of scrappy recording his lectures in his home office to high production values as a conservative commentator on the Daily Wire.
And that as David seen it, this was him betraying, you know, the original promise that he offered.
From my perspective, you asked Matt, like, is this a new phase?
I think it's a new phase.
I have to say that I always, from the first moment I started to listen to Jordan Peterson's content, one struck me for like two things.
One was the amount of religious references in it and the overt Christian aspects of it, which seemed to me to go not noted enough at the time because it felt like a huge aspect of me.
And secondly, how clearly...
Conservative and kind of traditionalist he was in his outlook.
And that included skepticism about global warming and a whole bunch of fairly bog-standard conservative stances.
And this new content that he's producing, it is much more Bond villain-esque and dramatic conservative commentator.
But I think it's just a more pronounced version of what he was always offering.
People overuse this for us, but talking about mask off.
But I think he's offering much the same message he has.
He's just being more confrontational about it.
Yeah, no, I totally agree with you.
I only meant that it's like a new phase in his personal life, that he's gathered himself together and he's now back at the...
Back at the coalface doing what he did before.
It's slightly different in tone.
He's got, like you say, he's got more of the fire and brimstone stern preacher about him, as we'll hear.
Yeah, yeah.
So maybe we should move to a couple of the clips.
So the way he opens it, and I've seen other videos where he opens it in the same way.
I think he might...
be doing this for every video that he releases from now on, but let's hear the humble Jordan Peterson, how he begins the video.
Hi all.
It is of course completely presumptuous of me to dare to write and broadcast a video entitled "Message to the Christian Churches", but I'm going to do it anyway because I have something to say and because that something needs to be said.
You heard the title swoop right there.
But I feel that that faux humility at the start of like, you know, how presumptuous of me to dare offer my opinion on this topic.
It's belayed almost immediately in the video by his referencing of how successful his content is and how popular it is and, you know, how many Christians and Muslims and people of all stripes.
Galler important messages from what he's released.
I took a risk and rented out a theatre in Toronto on the off chance that there might be an audience for what might be described as a psychological approach to our ancient stories.
And lo and behold and miracle of miracles, there was.
I completed 15 or so lectures walking through the first biblical book, sold out the theater, and attracted, surprisingly, millions of viewers, Christians, Jews, Muslims,
and atheists.
That's right.
That's simply a device, obviously.
He is presumptuous.
There's nothing wrong with being presumptuous.
I mean, his whole brand is based on telling people what to do and how they should live their lives and why they're wrong about X, Y, and Z. So that's fine.
But as you say, even though it's titled Message to the Christian Churches, Most of it is dedicated to other things.
Like, as you said, the first part of it is dedicated to him talking about how important his career has been and how much influence he's had.
And then a large part of the next part is just, like, what's wrong with society and how the woke and the Marxists and the postmodernists are...
Basically evil.
So it takes him a little while to get around to actually giving some advice to the Christian churches.
It does, but I think it's like a setup because it's a one-two punch.
The first half of the video was him highlighting why, in particular, his message is received so well by young men.
And then the second part is saying, and you Christian churches have an opportunity to follow my technique.
And to pull these young rudderless men into your orbit, which is like quite a sinister message in a way.
You know, it's I mean, we'll get to it, but let's hear him how he introduces that.
And the majority of those who watched online were young men.
That is not a phenomenon that can be easily accounted for.
But let me try.
Now, in the West, because of the weight of historical guilt that is upon us, a variant of the sense of original sin, in a very real sense, and because of a very real attempt by those possessed by what might be described as unhelpful ideas to weaponize that guilt,
our young people face a demoralization that is perhaps unparalleled.
This is particularly true of young men.
So the missing context there at the start was he was saying how surprising that lectures on the Bible would be of interest to young men in particular, and then all of the rest of it.
Yeah, so according to Jordan Peterson and his worldview, well everybody, but young men in particular are beset by these left Yeah,
there's a little bit as well that I don't really understand where the mystery is because producing self-help content Oriented towards men on YouTube gets you a following amongst young men.
Like, where's the mystery there?
Like, if you take his biblical lessons as separate from that, well, I guess I suppose the traditional view is those that would be interested in biblical analysis and stuff would be old bearded theologians, not like young hip dudes online,
right?
But like...
That's belaying the fact that there has been a resurgent interest in traditionalism and religiosity amongst, in particular, young men and the right-leaning amongst that set.
Oh, which comes first is probably a question.
Christians, people growing up from a conservative background in the United States and other countries like Australia.
And there are like these, you know, less so in Australia, but there are still revivalist type modern, there's this modern resurgence in that brand of Christianity.
And even though it's a large element, a subculture, I suppose, which is feeling somewhat disenchanted with the modern world.
So, you know, I guess it makes sense.
If you want to give some point to Jordan Peterson, I think there is an aspect to it where if the dominant culture in your liberal enclave is secular and broadly liberal-leaning,
the way to rebel is to seek out something.
Different from that, right?
And that might be looking for more conservative social values and like a traditional religious outlook.
This is like a pattern that's very familiar.
If your society is predominantly religious, the way to rebel is to seek out secular, you know, rock culture or something like that, right?
Rebellious teens will look for ways to annoy parents and authority figures in whatever way, you know, is available to them.
Yeah, and young people consume self-help material, I think, a lot more than older people.
So anyway, it's no great mystery.
That's fine.
But that's his setup.
And take us through it.
What happens after that?
Okay, so he sets out that there are three accusations leveled at society in large, but young men in particular.
And here's what he opens up by saying.
When in grade school...
Boys are admonished, shamed, and controlled in a very similar manner by those who think that play is unnecessary, particularly if it's competitive, and who value a docile, harmless obedience above all.
Shades of Dolores Umbridge.
Following all that, because that's not enough, even when pursued assiduously for total demoralization, Is the inculcation of an extremely damaging ideology, which essentially consists of three accusations.
Okay, so one point to note there, Matt.
I just have to check.
Do you know who Dolores Umbridge is?
Yes, yes, from that storybook.
She was the terrible headmistress of a school in a book.
Harry Potter.
I was getting mixed up with a different one.
Were you thinking of the one in the Roald Dahl book?
Yeah, I was thinking of the Roald Dahl character.
Maybe there's an echo there in that archetype.
But in any case, it's just interesting to me throughout this content that a lot of the references that Peterson draws on are contemporary.
Pop culture.
And I, you know, this, this is in keeping with the way that he likes to delve deep into Disney movies and this kind of thing, but yeah.
So, you know, the archetype that he drew from there is in the Harry Potter franchise.
Just interesting.
Yeah, as opposed to the Bible, say, giving a message to all the Christians.
But yeah, the other thing you could hear there is his enunciation, his tone in this, which is pretty similar in his more recent material.
There's a real note of venom in his voice, isn't it?
He spits the words out.
Yeah, and he also, you know, the...
Another thing which you hear echoed from the last content we looked at is like the kind of Jonathan Haidt view that now children are not allowed to play.
Boys are told rough and tumble is like not acceptable.
And I, again, I just feel so skeptical about how that actually comes in.
I'm not saying that you don't encounter things in the most progressive lefty spaces, or maybe some material in schools, which is discouraging of that kind of play.
But like, it just, it feels so dramatically overstated.
Still, I bet you if you go in the toy shop, you will find tons of toy guns and swords like in the content.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, that stood out to me too, Chris, which is like listening to it, trying to listen to it charitably.
Every point that is made is kind of in reference to this extreme version of leftism that I'm sure exists in some way, shape or form in some places in the universe.
All the time it does feel like it's getting built up into being much, much bigger than it actually is.
Like, he casts it as, like, young men in particular are being demoralised and are being inculcated with just nothing but shame and given a worldview that is total nihilism.
And, you know, I look outside my window.
You know, I have to take it on faith that, okay, that's happening somewhere, but I live across the road from a school that's over the back fence, and the kids at lunchtime, it's a madhouse.
It's a monkey house over there.
They're running around, screaming, yelling, acting like kids have always acted.
So, you know, maybe Jordan Peterson is exaggerating a little bit.
Yeah, and the, I don't know, like, what tends to happen when this is presented, right, is people will cite articles in the New York Times or like, you know, when we were talking to Sam Harris, he mentioned what's being taught at the elite schools in Manhattan or whatever.
And I don't doubt that's the case.
I don't think it's hard to find people, find articles in the Guardian that are annoying or that kind of thing.
My issue is...
The presentation that this is now the dominant accepted narrative across all schools and the West, in Western society.
Not like elite progressive schools in the richest parts of America, which is a very different claim.
Yeah, it's a very different claim.
Yeah, so he's setting up the thing I think you're going to play next, which is these three ways in which leftists are, I guess, yeah.
Three ways in which they're accusing young men of being the devil, essentially.
Yeah, so let's go through them relatively quickly.
So here's accusation one.
Number one, human culture, particularly in the West, is best construed as an oppressive patriarchy, motivated by the desire, willingness, and ability to use power, defined as the compulsion of others against their will.
To attain what are purely selfish and self-serving ends.
This is true at every level of analysis.
Marriage is akin to slavery, friendship to exploitation, political disagreement to war, and business arrangements to deception and theft.
And this is true not only of the current social arrangements that characterize our culture, particularly in the West, but also the fundamental reality of history itself.
Okay, so the number one is that human culture is oppressive.
All of human culture.
I think if you let him waffle on enough, he would argue that there is a valorization of non-Western cultures, which doesn't suffer from this.
But in this version, it's just that all analysis of society and history is essentially negatively valenced.
There's no celebration of achievement.
It's all about exploitation.
Yeah, so just to be super clear, this is Jordan Peterson's framing of...
The West or civilisation and where it's gone wrong and it's gone wrong in adopting this very leftist view of things in which everything is oppression, essentially.
I'm going to try to throw him a bone again, but also to illustrate where I think is the problem here.
I use Twitter, so do you.
I've read Twitter threads and sometimes they start off quite well, but it could be something about health or some random thing about whatever.
And then the thread devolves into patriarchy and colonialism and oppression and somehow this random thing is linked back to that.
So I'm going to grant...
Jordan Peterson this, right?
If you look, you can find people with quite strong ideological views who are sometimes guilty of linking, connecting everything to this kind of narrative.
But again, I would say to Jordan Peterson, he should be careful not to confuse some person on Twitter, as you said, some hyper-progressive educational institution with everything.
I don't think it is broadly reflective.
Yeah, and like you say, there are strands of academia and political thought which focus on those aspects to the exclusion of all else and do have like a myopic tendency and often like a conspiratorial bent to them as well.
You can perfectly criticise those and you can also, you could talk about the value of reconsidering, looking critically.
At hegiographic accounts and so on, right?
So if you take the moderate version of saying that purely focusing on the negative aspects of history is misrepresentative and similarly, but just the same as having a history that only celebrates the achievements of an individual society or type of people,
right?
That's also misleading.
So that's the first pillar anyway, that human culture is now painted as oppressive in the West.
And next we get...
Number two.
Human activity, particularly that undertaken in the West.
is fundamentally a planet despoiling enterprise.
The human race is a threat to the ecological utopia that existed before us and that could hypothetically exist in our absence.
We might well be construed even as a cancer that threatens the very viability of the complex systems that make up the ecosystem of the earth that shelters and supports us.
We are facing a Malthusian catastrophe of overpopulation and biosphere degradation.
And we have to place extreme limits on our wants, even our needs, so that survival itself, even in a much reduced form, can be guaranteed.
I just want to say, I really liked the Soto voice, even our needs, after the wants.
The delivery is so dramatic.
Every sentence is dialed up like...
On the spinal tap dial, he's up at 12 for, like, drama level.
It doesn't go up to 12, Chris.
It goes up to 11, but I know what you're saying.
I know that's the point.
I know.
Yeah, I mean, well, actually, on this point, this is where he's most clearly wrong, surely.
Like, the human race is a danger, is a menace to other species.
Like, there were a lot more species around before we really got going with industrial revolutions and stuff.
What he's doing here is basically, Arguing that the most extreme elements of Extinction Rebellion, the ones who basically adopt an Agent Smith style approach to humanity, that they're representative of what the dominant view in the West is.
And again, no, it is not.
But the moderate version of that is much harder.
And that's why he doesn't, because the moderate version is that humans have documented destructive impacts on the environment, and that we're facing climate change which could prove very damaging to future people and our current societies.
And we are seeing that.
And habitat destruction is going on, and you are seeing a big loss in biodiversity.
That's a shame.
And, you know, loss in soil qualities, the Great Barrier Reef near where I live is in serious danger.
And, yeah, like you said, there's this trick of taking this extreme position.
Like, there are people out there, right, who's, you know, anti-natalist, people who say we shouldn't, nobody should have children.
There are people who want, who think the human race should go extinct.
And there are people that are, you know, extremists in environmentalism, just like in anything else.
And it is a trick to make out that that sliver, that sliver of a sliver of public opinion is the dominant paradigm.
Like, I'm a hardcore environmentalist and that's just not true.
And you don't endorse that.
I don't endorse anything.
Agent Smith was not presented as a hero.
Like, you know, the kind of speaking truth to power, right?
Like, the whole point of the Beatrix is that he...
He has a point about, like, the destructive capacity of humans is right, but, like, the solution that, you know, your cancer on the Earth that needs to be destroyed, that's why he's the villain.
He's the villain of the piece, not the hero.
And this speaks to the fact that, you know, Jordan Peterson, long term, sometimes people like to present him as if he's a techno-optimist, and he is in the sense that he kind of imagines that it will all be...
Technological innovation which solves that.
And I too believe that will be a big part of how these issues are addressed.
But the other component which people try to downplay is that he's a climate change sceptic.
He promotes outlier opinions.
He does things like, despite claiming to have read 200 books on climate change, which is a childish claim in itself.
He will then share an article from the Daily Mail about the cold dweller causing doubts about whether climate change models are accurate.
That is not the thing which is done by somebody that has a sophisticated grasp of the topic.
Yeah, that's right.
His real views are far more...
On one hand, he's caricaturing the environmentalist movement.
It's not an obscure...
You know, fringe movement anymore.
You know, it's a mainstream concern up there with the economy and defense and other things.
Even in a lot of right wing.
Yeah, it circles, yeah.
So that's the bit that really annoys me.
Like, it's fine to have different views than myself say on, do you want to save the pandas or the wombats and so on?
Okay, fine.
But they actively misinterpret and don't want to admit about the actual scientific data.
That supports the various concerns.
I think they misportray things.
I'm not speaking very well today, but they misrepresent things in a way that really annoys me.
That's the word.
Yeah, I said version, so we're both doing that.
Okay, so the last accusation then, and I have some things to say about this, so let's play it.
Number three.
The prime contributor both to the tyranny that makes up the oppressive patriarchy and structures all of our social interactions, past and present, and the unforgivable despoiling of our beloved Mother Earth is damnable male ambition,
competitive and dominating, power mad, selfish, exploitative, raping and pillaging.
You might think that I'm overstating the case.
Think again, sunshine.
Oh, that last line.
That last line.
You know, Jordan Peterson was previously caricatured by Tan Nahasi Coates in a comic as the Red Skull, a villain, the villain in the Captain America novels.
And he was complaining about that caricature because they presented the Red Skull as doing a dramatic version of Jordan Peterson's.
Ideology.
And I don't know what he was complaining about, because his delivery is very much like, who says Pink Against Sunshine?
That's a, I don't know, like a 1970s British cop drama or something?
Well, that's on brand theme.
This is the guy who likes to say bucko.
You know, isn't it an illustration of the theme that we seem to see with these gurus is some of them become like caricatures of themselves as they evolve.
They have that style that, you know, in this case, it's this authoritative, you know, fire-breathing, authoritarian, older uncle type thing, giving you stern advice.
He's kind of realized that works for him and he's leaning into the stereotype of himself more and more as time goes by.
And we've seen it in, say, Brett Weinstein, who was...
Who is so elaborate now in his shtick.
It started off as a reasonable portrayal of a very thoughtful academic, but it sort of evolved into a supernormal stimuli.
It's exaggerated.
He should be tapping his glasses on the ridge of his nose.
Yeah, he should have a pince-nez.
But the other thing that I'm going to criticize Jordan for just structurally is he...
He said out that he was going to give these three accusations, right?
But the actual way it is, is that the first two are the accusations and the third is the purported cause, right?
The explanation for the previous two accusations, because he's saying...
The, like, human culture being oppressive and human activity destroying the planet is caused by men.
I know, and it's not really a third thing.
I know, I noticed that too, because he mentions men in the first two.
You know, men are the ones who are doing the oppressing, ambitious men are the ones who are destroying the world.
And then he goes, the third thing is that it's all blamed on men.
And so, no, that's not a third thing.
We'll turn now to a bit more how he elaborates this point.
But you were talking about the style and people becoming caricatures.
And one thing that we noticed in the previous coverage we did of Jordan Peterson was this elaborate metaphors that he creates and also his tendency to go...
Off on the tangent in the middle of a sentence and kind of roam around before coming back to the point, right?
And I just want you to bear that in mind as I play this next clip.
Let's see if you can hear any of that.
We in the West are facing an all-out assault at the deepest levels on what that old joker Jacques Derrida deemed the fell-logocentric conceptual structure of civilization itself.
To take that apart, that's a society centered on the encouraging, adventurous, masculine spirit, and that privileges that hated word of all things, the divine logos.
And what should we worship and celebrate properly other than that, deconstructionists?
The words of that mass murderer Karl Marx?
Because there are actually asides in the speech, right, where he's like, you know, what should we worship other than that?
And that hated concept and blah, blah, blah.
Like, it's kind of like a running commentary on his own, like, highly verbose prose.
And it's again, this notion that what...
The mainstream opinion is that we venerate the words of Karl Marx as an alternative to the theocentric logos of, presumably, Christianity and the other Abrahamic.
Oh, and masculinity.
Don't forget masculinity.
But how about Kneeler?
Is that not an option?
That's not on the board there?
No, no, he knows what leftists want.
Yeah, I mean, like you said, it's asides within asides within asides.
So it gives you a headache to follow what he's saying a little bit if you're trying to figure out the point that he's making because he does nest in those asides and then he's made it a rejoinder to his own aside.
And you actually forget where did he start?
What was he originally getting at?
Well, we pointed out in this previous content that he used to do, well, I think he still does it, but he has this tendency To do like a mime caricature of the side that he's opposing, right?
And he presents them as saying, well, you might say, oh, that's just all patriarchy and blah, blah, blah.
And he doesn't actually quote people.
He just creates an extreme caricature version.
And then he says, well, and like, no, yeah, it's not like that.
And then beats it down.
And in this one, it's like he, through his asides, is creating emphasis and you, you know, The impression it gives is that he's responding to the rejoinders, but there's nobody offering them except him and his content.
So it feels like this kind of framing technique that makes it sound more convincing.
It's not actually presenting the alternative argument.
It's presenting like a strawman version.
Yeah, a strawman caricature.
Yeah, it's quite an effective technique because if you take it on board and go, yes, there really is this thing where you're trying to make everybody feel ashamed all the time and that we should all just kill ourselves because we're a cancer on the earth and just men are inherently bad and we should all become composite,
then you can nod along and go, well, yes, I don't like that.
I'm agreeing with you, Jordan Peterson, because that sounds really bad.
Huge if true.
But apart from some, you know, characters on Twitter, I'm not sure whether these people actually exist at all.
But he snuck in there, Chris, that the good, healthy society that this evil perspective demonizes is inherently masculine.
Yeah, it's the adventurous, masculine, striving, conquering.
Yeah, it's easy to miss.
With the divine logos, which for Jordan Peterson involves, as he's spelled out in other content, emulating Christ.
And there's a very heavy, theocentric and traditional Christian morality play attached to his...
Ideal conception of the world.
It's like kind of 1950s.
Yeah.
The imagination of 1950s America.
It is, in fact.
Actually, Chris, this is a bit of an aside of our own, but it's fun.
I've been reading, well, listening to an Audible, the original Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, yeah?
So, you know, we both enjoyed it.
We watched the TV series recently, and I read it when I was a kid.
So I thought I'd reread them today.
You know, it's good.
It's not bad for a bit of classic sci-fi.
But, man, I mean, I'm not usually particularly a sensitive reader when it comes to that kind of, you know, politically incorrect social mores in old-fashioned science fiction.
I guess it was written in the 50s.
But, yeah, it reminds me of this because it does strike a discordant note to the modern ear because the kind of thing that Isaac Asimov is describing is kind of what Jordan Peterson is describing, right?
Like, all the characters are men.
The women don't have any role in anything apart from to be victims or bossed around or just little side characters and they're all kind of silly and emotional and so on.
And the men are all these sort of grizzled 1950s types and they're smoking cigars in the future, which is another little thing that kind of feels weird.
But they're all like hard-boiled, tough guys and it's sort of the vision of how...
Society works, even in the far distant future.
Is that 1950s hyper-masculine, hyper-dominating, hyper-aggressive and competitive and just power-oriented thing?
And yeah, Isaac Asimov sort of took that as a given, which was interesting.
So anyway, I think you're right.
He's just a very, very socially conservative guy.
Yeah, I mean, his whole aesthetic style also represents that.
But let's move on a little bit to him.
In this clip, he doesn't use the word, but he's basically complaining about, you know, the concept of toxic masculinity and how it's applied.
So let's see if he does a good job of that.
This is not only wrong theologically, morally, psychologically, practically.
And scientifically, it is literally anti-true.
It's not a mere misstatement about the nature of reality, a minor conceptual error, but something that literally could not be farther from the truth.
And something that distant from the truth comes from a place that cannot be distinguished from hell.
Okay, that's a nice example of good old-fashioned rhetoric, isn't it?
Like it sounds very analytical, doesn't it?
You know, it's not merely wrong, but actually the antithesis of truth.
I mean, it boils down to saying you just really, this is a place where hell, you know, this is hell, this is the devil would be saying something like this.
It's that untrue.
You're just saying that you don't like it.
You're just saying you don't agree with it.
You can just say that.
Yeah, you know.
For somebody who has a habit of complaining about people being hyperbolic, you know, on the left side of the spectrum, my God, man, that is...
And also, especially given Jordan Peterson's rather loose attachment to what the word truth refers to.
Like, he famously had multiple hours with Sam Harris trying to debate that truth does not actually necessarily relate to, like...
Something being, you know, objectively true.
It's very, very complicated, yeah.
No, I think, look, this is really raising the stakes for Jordan Peterson in terms of his guru status.
Like, the pseudo-profound bullshit here is just really strong.
Like, he's a good speaker, especially edited like this.
Very articulate.
There's a whole bunch of big words, and it's strung together, and it gives the impression of someone who is...
He's being truthy.
Eloquent?
Well, eloquent, but also precise and saying something profound.
But if you stop and think about it, he's just riffing.
He's just saying they're wrong.
He's just saying they're wrong.
That's right.
And he's saying it using 50 words and big words of that for dramatic effect.
Yeah.
And, you know, just, again, you could take issue with the way that toxic masculinity is used in progressive spaces without Going to these levels, right?
It's histrionic.
But Chris, I guess as well as it being histrionic, it does serve a role in terms of translating whatever point he's making into that cosmic architecture that he has, which is like social justice warriors and whatever are not just wrong.
It's not just a pernicious influence on society.
Like it's literally the devil.
You know, something that's this untrue is coming from hell.
Yeah, so it's a slew of hand in a couple of different ways.
Yeah, and so now we get, I mean, we already have it, but now there's the more explicit pivot towards the Christian aspect of that.
So let's continue on.
The Christian church is there to remind people, young men included, and perhaps even first and foremost, That they have a woman to find, a garden to walk in, a family to nurture, an ark to build, a land to conquer,
a ladder to heaven to build, and the utter terrible catastrophe of life to face stalwartly in truth devoted to love.
So one point just to note there, Matt, I saw from your eyes that you picked it up as well.
Jordan's characterization of life.
Was the utter terrible catastrophe of life to face stalwartly, right?
So that fits with his presentation that we saw in the earlier content where he has this fixation on pain and suffering and supposedly talking about the unacknowledged beauty of existence and stuff,
but really heavily fixating on the dark, oppressive.
There's an idea that people are fallen and they've fallen into the terrible realm of history and self-consciousness with its knowledge of suffering and finitude and its necessity for work which is associated with that because if you know that if you know that there's you and that you know that you can suffer because you're limited and that you could die then you're cursed with work because even if you're okay right now You're not like a lion who's going to go to sleep and
be happy or like the zebra beside it who won't run away when the lion is sleeping.
We know about the future.
So we're cursed to work and make sacrifices constantly.
That's our destiny, let's say.
And it's an interesting thing given the rest of it, which is presenting that basically you are the first person character, the main person in a...
Glorious story that is yet unwritten.
And that part as well, the language at the start where he says, you know, well, the Christian church has a message for everyone, but perhaps first and foremost to young men.
And then the examples are, go and find a maiden, like kill a dragon, build an ark, right?
There seems to be a rather strong emphasis on the message to...
Young men as the potential heroes of their own stories there.
Yeah.
Well, many would dispute some of that stuff, particularly that the church particularly has a responsibility to minister to young men over and above other demographics.
I don't think many priests, ministers would say that.
But I actually read an article from a conservative Christian pastor in the United States who didn't like what Jordan said here.
And he spotted the same thing I did, which is that...
Jordan Peterson has mischaracterized what a Christian church's role here on earth is for.
It's not to help young men go and slay a dragon and conquer new lands and find a maiden, all that stuff.
That's Jordan Peterson sort of imposing his own thing onto the church.
I wouldn't do a very good job of presenting how churches see their mission here, but I think it's roughly on the lines of...
Yes, you're in a body and it's decaying and there's this physical world, but it's there to remind you to lift your eyes to the kingdom of heaven and so on.
And there's an afterlife and so on.
There's this beautiful, serene eternity.
That's different.
That's very different from what Jordan Peterson said.
I think that Jordan Peterson, like you said, is adding his interpretation on it, which is essentially that for him, the Christian story is this narrative that, if followed, provides All of the tools to become the heroic,
competent male figure.
And I think he would also head nod towards that.
Yes, this applies to women too, but it's quite clear who the emphasis is on in his material.
So he is adding that for him, the Christian mythos is not just a kind of...
Supernatural morality play, but the guide to being a fully realized human.
And I think there are various people in different church denominations who peddle a similar message that, you know, following the Christian life is not just about your spiritual salvation, but it's actually about transforming your life here by embodying,
you know, Christlike qualities.
Yeah, yeah.
Look, I mean, it's complicated, obviously.
We've got lots of churches, like, you know, modern Catholic church has got a big thing in terms of social justice, making the world a better place, and contributing to community.
You know, all churches generally have stuff about contributing to community and so on, but the way he's framing it, he's misrepresenting it.
Like, it varies, it's complicated, whatever, but Jordan Peterson's characterization of it is not quite right.
Yeah, we're jumping a little bit ahead here, but I think the way that the video...
And this is quite relevant to this discussion.
So let me just play it up.
Your churches, for God's sake, quit fighting for social justice.
Quit saving the bloody planet.
Attend to some souls.
That's what you're supposed to do.
That's your holy duty.
Do it now before it's too late.
The hour is nigh.
So, like, Jordan Peterson sees religion as kind of a...
Like, I think this message actually illustrates how Jordan Peterson isn't really a proper Christian.
Like, amongst left-wing circles, he's seen as a Christian advocate and so on.
And he is kinder.
But when he's perceived from people within, like, an orthodox tradition, like, you know, he's an abstract...
You know, Christian.
He's got a very bespoke Jungian archetypal, symbolic kind of interpretation of it in which religion is there as a support structure for being the sort of John Wayne exhortation to young men to be all they can be.
It's different from how an orthodox religious person would see it, I think.
I mean, I think possibly, but there are trends in Like, all traditions have lots of different strands within them, and I think, basically, Jordan channels an extremely conservative perspective, like a kind of traditionalist perspective,
but he de-emphasizes aspects, you know, the overt supernaturalist, and kind of retreats to metaphor and unclear components for that part.
Like you were saying, with truth, right?
Like, he won't even be clear and say that he believes that God exists.
He says he lives his life as though God exists.
But, you know, religious apologetics are quite sophisticated and have been doing similar things for centuries, redefining the way that, you know, how you approach truth and validate things and that kind of stuff.
But I think that one point I might disagree with is the notion that he's not...
Doing justice to what a Christian or religious worldview offers.
Because I would argue that that last part where he reels against social justice and saving the planet, that in some respects it's very hard to argue that him lecturing the churches about dropping that message when,
from my Catholic upbringing, they taught me to bring the good news to the poor, tell prisoners that they are prisoners.
No more, and so on.
Like, whatever way you look at it, there's been a huge emphasis in Christian doctrine on the salvation of souls, yes, but on justice components, right?
And even institutions like the Catholic Church, where they are extremely conservative in so many ways, have also argued that it is part of the Christian faith that they have to be good stewards of the environment, right?
The current pope made an encyclical.
I think it was this pope.
Yeah.
About that.
That's right.
Exactly.
Even in the medieval period, the churches were the ones who set up hospitals, right?
So, they were looking after people's bodies as well as their souls, right?
So, I don't think that the environment or poverty or disease is necessarily off-limits to the church.
That's completely true, and I agree with that.
Again, the dramatic villain delivery is just, it's cringeworthy, but I guess my pushback is that there are strands of conservatism within all of these Christian traditions who would be very much on board with Jordan Peterson's view that the church shouldn't be promoting environmentalism,
should always stay a hundred miles away.
From anything that looks like modern social justice endorsements.
No, I agree with you.
Those factions exist, right?
There's so many factions across...
Michael O 'Fallon.
Yeah, they exist.
There's so many factions, and this is why we're struggling to characterize what churches really do.
But I'm just saying that Jordan Peterson is being incoherent.
If he's saying that the churches have a responsibility to help young men make their bed and contribute to a masculine, confident, conquering society...
If that's their job, then you can't say that looking after sick people...
Or worrying about poverty or the environment is off limits either, right?
They're all social roles that aren't concerned with the afterlife or your eternal soul.
Yeah, so it's like, it's contradictory, his message in many respects, because he otherwise lauds, you know, institutions and traditions for the role that they have in providing services like therapy, right?
Like mental health advice in a pre-modern age and so on.
But there's three clips to finish with, Matt, and I think they all...
fall into the part that for me makes this video not just farcical but to some extent creepy or like you know I'm not saying that this video in itself is likely to have a huge impact it's just a really a bombastic conservative message but I think that these clips that we'll look at are part of the reason that people are right to be A little bit concerned about Jordan Peterson's
potential impact on society and vulnerable populations of the internet.
And Nadi is not just delivering a self-help message about stand up straight and tidy your room.
And let me show you what I mean.
So here's the first of them.
So join us.
We'll help fix you up.
And you can help fix us up.
And together, we'll aim up.
And here is a message to those young men skeptical about such things.
What else do you have?
You can abandon the churches in your cynicism and disbelief.
You can say to yourself, narcissistically and solipsistically, the church does not express what I believe properly.
Who cares what you believe?
Why is this about you?
Do you even want it to be about you?
What if it was about others?
What if it was about your duty to the past and to the broader community that surrounds you in the present?
Okay, so before I editorialize, anything that strikes you as concerning there?
Yeah, I find it a little bit dark too.
And how to explain why?
I think...
He characterizes it as being narcissistic and solipsistic and selfish to have your own opinion about what's true and what's not.
You've got nothing else, right?
Unless you grab on the church, a church, and submit yourself to their doctrine.
Forget about whether you believe it or not.
Just put it first.
Commit yourself to this bigger cause.
Then you'll have absolutely nothing.
You'll just fall into the kind of nihilism that he hates.
It feels kind of fash.
It's just kind of fascistic to me.
Well, I mean, so, you know, that advice could be applied to people to join any sort of group that took control over what they should be doing and give them a mission.
And there's lots of groups willing to do that for people who seek them out.
But it's particularly this part where I read it as kind of negging, right?
If you have a sense of insecurity and that you don't matter and whatnot, then I don't think this kind of message resonates that much with you because you think, well, you know, I have my own opinions.
I don't need to be told what to do.
But if you're someone that's like, you know, deeply depressed, insecure about your identity or whatever, and somebody tells you, stop obsessing about yourself.
Stop succeeding on what you want.
Like, who cares?
And I've got a solution for you.
And you can have value, right?
You can be a...
Part of this bigger system, which is bigger than you, which will give you a purpose to your life.
Like if you take it in a moderate way about stop being so self-obsessive and seek out things that will give your life meaning and instead of wallowing in self-pity, try to do service to others.
But there's an older side of it and it's in his delivery or the kind of sources that he's pointing people towards, which is essentially saying...
There's a solution to your weakness, and it's to submit yourself to the authority of these traditional outlets.
And your belief that your individuality matters is just like cancer given to you by modern culture.
Like, if you go back, that will lead you to meaning.
And yeah, it's just...
I have a quote for you that might help, Chris.
See if you can spot where this is from.
You're not special.
You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake.
You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
We're all part of the same compost heap.
We're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.
Fight Club.
Fight Club.
It's the same kind of thing.
I was on board with that.
No, I mean, it's not entirely wrong.
It's just, it's the same kind of...
It's the same kind of message.
And it's fine.
Yeah, you could dedicate yourself to the Catholic Church.
You could dedicate yourself to the fictional fight clubs, terrorist, anti-capitalist, liberal thing.
Or you could dedicate yourself to the Moonies or something.
I mean, it's not good advice, I don't think.
And I don't think it's ever good advice to tell people that don't think for yourself what you think is true or not doesn't matter.
Just find some people that seem to know what they're doing and submit yourself.
Yeah, and, you know, there's always the position that you can take the more moderate version, which is, like, modern, particularly American culture, as we often comment on the podcast, can be, like, too self-indulgent, too much individualistic.
And there are things to criticise there, but it is the level that he takes it to, and the kind of dramatic delivery and stuff that makes the creepiness filter in.
Like, I'm with you.
I liked Fight Club.
I was sympathetic to the idea of blowing up the big buildings and so on.
I wasn't sympathetic.
Well, more than, you know, the anti-Ikea consumerist empty kind of thing and that fetishizing your individuality and so on.
Like, you can take his thing.
I'm basically agreeing with you.
You could take his thing.
You're an anti-capitalist hipster, I know.
No, that's not what I'm saying.
I'm saying that you could dial what he's saying down to 1.5.
Yeah, probably five is fine.
Yeah, and you can say that, yeah, it is a good idea to look to devote yourself to other people.
It is a good idea not to ruminate so much and think that you're this unique special snowflake whose needs and wants and things should always take first priority.
Like, if you dialed it right down to that, you could find a way in which it made sense.
But he doesn't.
He dials it up to 12. No.
And so the next clip, again, in combination with that, here's another message that he offers.
What if it was incumbent upon you and vital to your health and willingness even to live to rescue your dead father from the belly of the beast where he has always resided and to restore him to life?
Well, what indeed?
What if?
Have you ever considered doing that, Chris?
Rescuing your dead father from the belly of the beast where he's always resided and to restore him to life?
So you got that reference, right, Matt?
With a little help from you, I eventually got the reference.
Did you want to tell the sweet listeners?
That's Pinocchio.
That's from Pinocchio.
And as we know, Jordan is very interested in the Pinocchio story, very emotional about it.
So we've had Harry Potter, now we've got Pinocchio.
But like for me here, the issue is not the pop culture reference because, you know, all right, fine.
Disney contains important life.
Lessons and long, enduring archetypes from cultural narratives or whatever.
But the point is that this framing is now switched to, don't you want to be a hero?
Don't you want your life to be, you know, an adventure and valuable?
So gone from the emphasis on you don't matter to you can become this...
That heroic figure who battles wheels to pull your follower up from the depths.
And that's different.
But Chris, this is why I said it kind of sounds a little bit fash, because that's the same thing, right?
The sort of fascistic appeal from the olden days, 1930s and 40s, was you would totally submit yourself to this bigger thing, completely dedicate yourself to the broader thing, not think for yourself, and also be a freaking hero.
Rampage across Europe.
You know, sitting on top of a battle tank or something.
You know what I mean?
Like, that was the kind of messaging that was in the posters and so on.
You get to be both, you know?
No, agreed.
And again, I think this is why people have been very critical and highlighted concerns, right?
And you might regard some of the way that people have framed Jordan Peterson's effect to not take account.
Of the positive aspects, the impact that he's had on particularly young men, many of whom will sing his praises.
But I think you have to acknowledge this darker side to the message that he's giving.
There is that component to it, and you can see it in the communities that he ends up fostering and where some of their interests end up lying.
Anyway, so...
Yeah, look, I mean, to explain a little bit, I don't think he knows he's being fash, right, necessarily.
I think, you know, he feels all this stuff at this level.
He doesn't, I think, realise that the things that are appealing to him do have those very dark resonances.
For him, it's very sympathetic, you know, it's Pinocchio and stuff like that.
That's also why, like, despite his constant reference to how he's a student of fascism and totalitarianism, he is completely ill-equipped to recognise that strand amongst,
for example, he didn't note it at all in Stephen Molyneux.
When he interacted with him, he doesn't recognise it in any of the online communities that find him an appealing figure for various reasons.
He basically denies that there's any connection there.
Or indeed with Orban, right?
His pallying around with Orban, who has very overt totalitarian tendencies, you know, such that they are receiving chastisement from free speech.
Organizations and human rights organizations and so it's that blindness to right leaning fascism which is really clear and it's a big component of why he receives criticism and it's justified criticism.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
I'm not saying that he's like a secret.
Fascist and he's secretly trying to convert people to fascism.
I think he's accidentally kind of reinvented it.
You know what I mean?
Out of ignorance.
He's got a gut feeling attraction to that traditionalism, to the masculinity, to devoting yourself to a higher purpose, to these sort of grand things.
And he's accidentally blinded into this like a freaking idiot.
But the other comment that I'll make here is this.
It's more on the pseudo-profound bullshit sort of thing.
Like, he ratchets straight into this metaphor about rescuing your dead father from the belly of the beast to restore him to eternal life without any explanation directly from that previous clip that you played.
Yeah.
It makes no sense except as some kind of avant-garde poetry.
And you have to decipher it.
And in trying to decipher it, after you explained it to me, I was Googling it, and people asked these questions on Reddit.
What is Jordan Peterson talking about when he's talking about rescuing your father from the belly of the beast?
And then it's amazing.
People will write essays about what they think Jordan Peterson was saying.
So that Gnostic or enigmatic kind of way of speaking is...
Yeah, it's the antithesis of clarity.
Anyway, it's something else.
It's this weird poetry.
When you have a large community of highly devoted, highly motivated people who are hanging on your every word, it's inevitable to some extent that that will happen, right?
But there are people who, through the way that they speak, encourage it and sometimes lean into it.
And I think...
Not just in this reference, which I think for Jordan is just kind of like breathing, like describing something in relation to Pinocchio.
It's just like him making a reference to the Bible.
But he definitely does encourage that.
And, you know, his constant exhortation is, it's complicated.
My views on this are very deep and they're hard to understand.
And in most occasions, they're not.
You know, he spent years avoiding.
What he specifically meant when he was going on about the double helix being related to genetics.
And then when he actually did explain it recently in the interview with Dawkins, it's just a very stupid, simple to understand thing where he thinks that people's consciousness could go down and they saw the little strands of DNA in the helix when they took mushrooms.
Yeah, and you could take mushrooms to perceive molecules.
Yeah.
It doesn't even make sense.
No, it doesn't.
Because you don't have visual...
It's dumb, I know.
But that's the key point, isn't it?
Like, when you stick to this metaphor, and it's very eloquently expressed in poetic metaphor, but it's vague.
And that's what gives people the space to fill in the blanks with a whole bunch of meaning, personal meaning for them, which turns it into a kind of, you know, transcendent poetry.
And this is what makes him like a real guru in the religious sense.
You know, people do the same kind of fine readings of the Bible or other scriptures or utterances from prophets.
And like you say, Jordan Peterson actively encourages people to do the same thing with him.
And he made a mistake.
I think he probably realizes it himself.
He made it a mistake to actually be clear about what he meant about the double helixes and stuff because it was much better.
Something that would be like too difficult to explain.
Yeah, that was much better because the explanation was terrible.
So, okay, the last clip again tied into the part that raised my hackles most from this conversation.
Here is him giving advice to the church on how they should interact with young men.
Say!
Young men are welcome here.
Print some flyers and put them in a box by the billboard.
Signal the existence of those flyers with an arrow, with the words, more information about attending here.
Tell those who have never been in a church exactly what to do, how to dress, when to show up, who to contact, and most importantly, what they can do.
Ask more.
Not less of those you are inviting.
Ask more of them than anyone ever has.
Remind them who they are in the deepest sense and help them become that.
So you had some of the trademark, you know, you could hear the wavering in the last couple of sentences coming in there.
And that is something that many Jordan Peterson fans point to, to say, well, he has this real...
Genuine commitment to helping young men become fully actualized.
And he deeply feels the pain, right?
And this is why they respond to it.
And I think that's an aspect to it.
But I can't help, you know, look at it from the lens of effective psychological manipulation.
And essentially, he's talking about if you place...
Extreme demands on people.
And if they're accompanied by these other aspects that he's laid out in the previous clips that we were talking about, that you can rope in people, right?
And he's like, don't be afraid to put extreme demands on people and kind of tell them that they have to give more than they ever thought that they could.
And it is, like you say, there's versions of that where it's purely saying, you know, Be willing to give people the chance to show what they're capable of.
But there's another very troubling aspect of that, which is take control of wayward people and bend them to your ideology with promises of heroism.
And it's there, and he doesn't see it at all.
Yeah, well, there's a couple of comments.
One is that...
With respect to his very well-known expressions of emotional empathy with young men, I'm a little bit cynical, slightly, because it's well-known, for instance, in psychology that if you want, say, for someone to tell you a secret,
then what you do is you tell them very, very personal things about yourself, and it's just a natural human thing to reciprocate.
So this is what confidence tricksters and stuff like that do, right?
That's a standard thing.
You know, his emotional affect in caring so much about the young men, it definitely elicits the same kind of emotional loyalty in response.
So, deliberately or not, I think it works like that.
The second thing I'll say is about his advice to churches, right?
He flipped from two things.
He started off with some very practical things.
Practical things like put a sign up and have some flyers with an arrow pointing at the slides.
So those were concrete, and they were stupid.
I mean, I'm sure churches have thought of these things, right?
Churches would love to get more people attending.
That's what they all want to do.
They want to grow their congregation.
I'm sure they've thought longer and harder and tried harder and longer to do it.
Putting a sign up saying, young men are welcome.
It's like the YMCA already exists.
Yeah, like, trust me, Jordan.
Churches and youth organisations of all kinds have been trying to recruit for years.
They've tried these things.
And then the second advice he gave was all kind of what, you know, teach them how to be the real them or something or, you know, embrace their true nature.
And it was just, that's just vague bullshit, right?
Like, that doesn't mean much at all.
So, it seems to be the standard thing for me is that these...
These guru types, when they try to be concrete, like if they're talking about the DNA helix or they're talking about how to practically recruit and encourage young men to go to church, it's stupid.
Or it's mundane.
Yeah, it's mundane.
And then if you look at the other stuff, it's all very abstract and complicated and poetic.
But if there is any core to the content, it's something mundane or it's just meaningless.
Well, you know, actually what you said made me think that...
In some way, maybe what Jordan Peterson is feeling to appreciate is why what he puts on YouTube and whatnot has greater appeal than the church that would put up a flyer.
Is that he has effectively melded the self-help genre with the traditional Christian conservative ethos and pop culture.
Analysis.
So those three things come together in a particular appealing package for online digestion.
And then when you add to that, that he's a famous culture war figure who generates outrage and whatnot, it's really like a honey trap of cognitive hooks.
Whereas traditional churches, they cannot necessarily apply the same hooks because the pastors are not...
Like Jordan Peterson types and also what they're offering is what's on the tin, which is like traditional religious, you know, masses, right?
Masses where if you go to Catholic or Protestant masses, at least ones that are similar to I did as a child, they don't leave you feeling like the hero that's going into Noah's or the wheel's belly, not Noah's belly.
That would be a very different story.
Yeah, so there's a mismatch, right?
It's much easier for the culture war to be this appealing thing that has launched him defeat him, whereas if he was actually a preacher in a church teaching traditional Christianity, he wouldn't have the same resonance.
He might be a popular preacher, but he wouldn't be the cultural phenomenon that he has become.
Yeah, and I think this is why, if you look at the reactions from more standard, normal Christians to Jordan Peterson, it's kind of ambivalent.
On one hand, they're interested because they would like to capture some of that wildfire, but Jordan Peterson can operate with so many more degrees of freedom than they can.
And he's also a, you know, like any kind of independent prophet type.
He's an unknown factor.
You don't know what he's going to say next.
And a lot of what he does say is not orthodox.
You know, churches have always struggled with this.
Orthodox, organized religions.
You know, prophets always pop up who have extracted the real meaning or the real message from God or from the holy text or whatever.
And they're always kind of a problem.
You know, Jesus himself was a problem in that sense because they're always unorthodox.
So, I can understand why they're a bit ambivalent.
But forget about what we think.
Forget about what the churches think.
It's illuminating, I think, to read the YouTube comments because, yeah, I mean, The vast majority of people disagree with us, right?
Like, this has got, what, a million views on YouTube, 13,300 comments.
I haven't read all of them, but a lot of positive reactions, Chris.
A lot of people feeling inspired.
YouTube is, you know, the comments are notorious for a reason, but I do agree that it's important to bear in mind that this kind of ethereal has a strong resonance for a large...
And for people like us, it's kind of the butt of a joke, right?
Where it's not concerning.
But it does resonate and he is popular for a reason.
But I would also add to that that I think that as he leans more into this, you know, like basically he's now a conservative pundit on a conservative network giving traditional conservative messages, right?
And that as he increasingly leans into that harder, that the mystique, Around him and the tendency for people to say, well, he's not really conservative and stuff, I think is going to fade and he's going to replace some of the audience that he had with the more red blood-brain,
kind of James Lindsay style, just partisan audience.
And I heard him recently on an episode with Franz Duvall, the primatologist who I really like.
And the conversation, I think it was probably recorded a couple of months ago.
And it was quite good.
I mean, it had a lot of the stereotypical motifs that you might imagine Jordan Peterson to bring up.
But it was a relatively, you know, pseudo-academic discussion about sex differences and primates and so on.
And I thought when I was listening to it, those opportunities for that kind of interaction are going to dry up.
The more that he goes into this, like, culture war persona, firebrand, because he won't get interviews with Franz Duvall anymore at some point.
Like, I genuinely do think that as he's increasingly associated with a brand of partisan conservatism, that he's going to alienate some of his access to the more moderate or more intellectual components.
Sure, but I think that won't hurt him because there's obviously a rich, rich vein of social conservatism in the continental states.
No, it won't impact his popularity overall, but it will basically make him more and more into the cartoonish caricature.
And you can see that.
Yeah.
He's a bit different, though, from, you know, like a shit poster like James Lindsay.
But what is he?
Well, I mean, I think more and more he's showing his hand and showing what...
You said, which is what he was all along.
But what that is, is something very new or special about that.
It's anti-communist, it's traditional, Christian, American values, red-blooded men, nationalist, and yeah, just traditional.
Climate skeptic.
Yeah, like that's a...
That hasn't gone away, you know.
As a sociological phenomena, that's been a big thing for a very long time.
There's a big constituency there.
So he'll naturally align with the churches, with the conservative faction.
But he's, in a sense, he's migrating out of the secular guru or like disguised partisan view into just the openly conservative.
Right-wing pun did the speech.
And I guess my point is that, you know, as you saw on his Twitter behavior before he got himself removed and refused to delete the tweet, he was just completely reacting to every outrage clickbait story that crossed his newsfeed.
And he was very much offering, you know, inflammatory takes.
Like, if he stayed, he would be James Lindsay.
Yeah, but...
But Chris, that's the impressive thing about him.
You said all this yourself, which is that, yes, he's a culture warrior, getting angry online, that kind of thing.
Very reactive.
But at the same time, he's got the whole self-help shtick, which he's, I think, still pretty good at.
And he's combined that with the traditional Christian Protestant type stuff.
So that's a very effective combination because he's got those degrees of freedom.
Like, he can make...
Those old-fashioned, boring, staid stuff.
He can make it sexy and appealing to a younger generation.
So I think he's got a winning formula there.
I don't know if he's got much competition in that space.
You know, like the old-fashioned tele-evangelists and the Bible thumpers and so on.
They can't do what Jordan Peterson does.
He's a good hire for what's his face, Ben Shapiro, assuming he doesn't like, you know, go on, like...
Visit Russia again for treatment, shall we say.
Yeah, visit Russia will become the new idiom, but yeah, so, I mean, I think that's on the cards, looking at his behaviour, and there's just so much about him which is contradictory, like his inability to take responsibility for...
The outrage that he generates or his own addictive tendencies, right?
Yeah, well, actually, that's one thing, Chris, that crossed my mind as listening to this, you know, because he's doing what he always does, which is tell everyone what's wrong with them, how they need to change to live a better life and so on.
And has he ever addressed the fact that he fucked up his own life so very badly and is just obviously demonstrably not handling the problem of living life?
Very well, compared to a couple of nihilist, you know, fallen demons like us wallowing in our own corpulence.
You know, our lives aren't perfect, but we haven't had to visit Russia recently.
Yeah, so, but I guess, you know, the counterpoint is, well, but look how influential and successful he's been because of what he does, right?
Oh, yeah, that's right.
He carries such a heavy cross that, I guess, Ben's a...
We can barely imagine the slings and arrows and the burden that he straps to his shoulders in this hellish life that he must endure.
But look, Matt, we said we were going to do a condensed little snap episode.
We'll cut it down.
It'll be fine.
I don't think we've exactly managed that, but I do think we have successfully highlighted where...
Jordan is from where he was and it might be interesting for people to go back and look to the older episode where we covered Jordan.
We also did an episode with him and Brett after he had just re-emerged and he was much more than a kind of cautious person who actually, as you asked Matt, he did acknowledge that he had wrecked his own life and health.
That's right.
So much has happened to me that's been so strange in the last four years that I have a very difficult time making any sense of it.
I can't even really think about, especially the last two years, I can't really think about them in any consistent and comprehensive way.
I mean, my family situation has been so catastrophic and my illness and my wife's illness.
It's just been, although she recovered completely, thank God, it's just been so utterly catastrophic that my thinking about it is...
Unbelievably fragmented.
And I'm struck dumb still to some degree by all of what emerged as a consequence of me making the first videos that I made.
It wasn't easy to take me out.
Although I've been taken out a lot.
Like far more than I thought.
Might be possible.
I can't separate that exactly from intrinsic health problems, you know.
It doesn't seem to.
But, you know, there's always the possibility that it'll be the next one that'll work.
And it's not like I have any shortage of things wrong with me.
There are things wrong with me, you know.
Now, whether they're ethical things or not, that's a whole different question.
But, like, nobody has a, nobody has a, what?
No one has an untrammeled conscience, that's for sure.
There was a degree of responsibility taken then, or it seemed to be.
That's what I mean.
Like, he's gone now.
Like, this is the new Jordan.
It's a new phase.
He's back in the saddle, firing on all cylinders.
Yeah, I mean, even at that time, he was reluctant to offer opinions.
COVID vaccines, right?
So that, like, yes, it's completely...
That hesitancy is completely gone.
And it may be that he just is rolling down the hill again towards the inevitable outcome.
But who knows?
We'll see.
And I just think he's...
People will say this is who he always was.
And I kind of agree with them that the fundamental message underlying his content hasn't changed.
But there are things which have changed.
And it's notable.
And people are picking up on it, right?
It's why he's being clipped.
So widely and so on.
And you can look back at his older content and like that clip with the Vice interview where he basically says, I don't know if men and women can work together.
It's an experiment.
And that's the kind of thing where people were like, oh, that's out of context.
But when you actually look at the context, no, that is what he was arguing.
And when you take that down, the argument is, well, should we have sex segregated workplaces or should we ban lipstick?
From the workplace, right?
Like, that's essentially what it comes down to.
But it's just never expressed so clearly.
And when people try to point out that, it's kind of, well, that's not being fair.
That's not exactly what he said.
But that is what his social conservatism ultimately has at its core.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm not sure what the limits of his social conservatism is.
Yeah, I don't...
It's left unbounded.
Like, he alludes to it and hints at it, as you say, gestures towards pretty extreme stuff.
But it's left as an open...
It's a question.
We don't know.
We don't know.
We just don't know.
The amount of things we don't know, it's huge.
So, yeah, I guess you're not a fan.
You were more positively inclined to him the first time we covered him.
I think at that time you did express some scepticism about, you know, the interpretations of seeing him as extremely Harmful.
And I think from what you've said, like in this content, there's more like the kind of, you know, the fascist part.
It's much less under the surface.
It's like pretty close to the surface in this content.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's interesting, isn't it?
Like if you read some chapters of his books, like 12 Rules for Life, or you listen to some of these interviews, then claims that he's like, Pseudo-fascist or whatever.
It doesn't sound very plausible, does it?
It doesn't sound plausible.
But the more time you spend with him, the more you realize that all of those sort of empty spaces that he gestures towards are not good places by my lights.
Yeah, there's definitely reason to be concerned, I think, there.
But, you know, there are different versions available.
There are people who could read Jordan Peterson and Tika's self-help.
Advice in a kind of moderate direction to correct their life.
Oh, yes.
I think most people do.
And there are also people, I think, who will just take his message as endorsing conservatism, like, you know, social conservatism and tradition and religion and so on, and not, you know, latent fascism.
No, no, but to be clear, that's what I think he is fundamentally, right?
But the reason why I think it...
It sounds fash is because when you point people towards unbridled social conservatism, unbridled submission of yourself to higher powers and so on, when you take all those things to the extreme, then we have a word for that.
I don't think Jordan Peterson...
He understands what he's doing.
And I don't think that most of the people that are Irish fans are a pseudo-fascist at all.
I don't think they know.
And this is the slightly amusing part of it.
I don't think most of them really understand.
His associations are the reason why some people who literally are fascists, right, or authoritarians, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them.
The fact that so many of them think John Peterson is super cool.
Like, there's a reason for that.
Like, they know.
I don't like him, but I think they correctly see him as somebody that provides a potential gateway drug to the harder course.
And, you know, you can view that as, is that his fault?
Or, you know, there's plenty of people that they would opportunistically co-adopt in that respect.
But it's just the inability that he has to recognize much of what goes on in that space that, you know, it speaks to his limitations.
Yeah, that's right.
Mainly I just think it's funny that he's not really aware of what is...
Yeah, I think probably one of the responses that we will get to this episode is people will say, well, we are being naive if we think that he doesn't know what he's pointing people towards and gesturing to.
But I don't really buy that reading because I think, as with most people, in Jordan's story, he is the hero.
Battling against the forces of disorder and chaos and totalitarianism.
So he definitely believes he is the white knight in his life story.
Well, there's a saying which is what?
Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence.
Well, we could change that slightly.
Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to being a narcissistic dick.
Yeah.
Because that can go a long way.
I think in the guru sphere that is an idiom that travels very far.
So, yeah.
Well, this has been enjoyable and we're going to...
At least the slight nod that we will make towards the supposed new format is that we're not going to do the usual accoutrements before we leave.
