Our Generation Is FAILING, Why Jordan Peterson Is One Remedy
Our Generation Is FAILING, Why Jordan Peterson Is One Remedy. Our greatest threat may be our own success. Bulldozer parents give rise to the regressive left, calls for massive government intervention, and censorship.It seems that in our own success we have lost risk and responsibility. Without risk young people grow up overly sensitive and scared. They demand authority solve their problems. Without responsibility we become dejected and angry.Jordan Peterson's rise to prominence can be explained by the need for guidance and responsibility. His lessons can help guide young men toward solving their problems and finding their mission. But this is only one side of the culture war.On the social justice and feminist side we have utter outrage and in our desire to protect the weak our society has caved to the demands of petulant children who can't fathom dealing with struggle.It isn't simply conservative vs liberal, authority vs liberty, the culture war is extremely complicated and encompasses many ideologies and factions. But one thing is certain, helicopter parenting, bulldozer parenting is paving the way for violent and angry children who never experience adulthood to take over society.
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Every generation faces some kind of unique challenge, and I believe our greatest challenge is our own success.
With our wealth and automation, we've gotten rid of risk and responsibility.
On one side of the culture war, you have parents who are bulldozing all obstacles away from their children so these young people grow up without actually facing any challenges.
When they become adults, they're too fragile to actually live in the real world and thus they demand government intervention.
They want safe spaces where they can be safe from bad opinions.
They think criticism is harassment.
They demand censorship because they're used to someone being in control all the time.
On the other side, you see a loss of responsibility.
We have machines taking over, we have an abundance of food, and now we have young people who don't know what they're doing with their lives.
They feel bored, disaffected, or depressed.
Many just sit around playing video games all day.
And this is why I see someone like Jordan Peterson becoming so prominent.
He speaks to young people when he says, you need some responsibility in your life.
You need a mission and something to do.
Naturally, people on the left, who are very fragile, get offended and outraged by this because they've never actually dealt with a real challenge.
Today, I want to talk about what I see are some of the root causes in the culture war, not all-encompassing, but I want to talk about my upbringing, why I think I've fallen on one side of the argument, why someone like Jordan Peterson has become so prominent, and a story in the New York Times talking about I kid you not.
Young people so fragile that in one instance a woman had to leave college because there was sauce on cafeteria food.
I'm not joking.
There was sauce on the food and her parents had to protect her from sauce.
This is not an exaggeration.
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The first story I have is actually from a couple years ago, December of 2017.
From Reason.com, the fragile generation, bad policy, and paranoid parenting are making kids too safe to succeed.
The story begins.
One day last year, a citizen on a prairie path in the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst came upon a teen boy chopping wood.
Not a body, just some already fallen branches.
Nonetheless, the onlooker called the cops.
Officers interrogated the boy, who said he was trying to build a fort for himself and his friends.
A local news site reports the police then took the tools for safekeeping to be returned to the boy's parents.
Elsewhere in America, preschoolers at the Learning Collaborative in Charlotte, North Carolina, were thrilled to receive a set of gently used playground equipment.
But the kids soon found out they would not be allowed to use it, because it was resting on grass, not woodchips.
It's a safety issue, explained a daycare spokeswoman.
Playing on grass is against local regulations.
And then there was the query that ran in Parents Magazine a few years back.
Your child's old enough to stay home briefly, and often does.
But is it okay to leave her and her playmate home while you dash to the dry cleaner?
Absolutely not, the magazine averred.
Take the kids with you, or save your errand for another time, after all.
You want to make sure that no one's feelings get too hurt if there's a squabble.
The principle here is simple.
This generation of kids must be protected like none other.
They can't use tools, they can't play on grass, and they certainly can't be expected to work through a spat with a friend.
And this, it could be argued, is why we have safe spaces on college campuses and millennials missing adult milestones today.
We told a generation of kids that they can never be too safe, and they believed us.
And this leads me to the story recently from the New York Times, how parents are robbing their children of adulthood.
Today's snowplow parents keep their children's futures obstacle-free, even when it means crossing ethical and legal boundaries.
The story says, taken to its criminal extreme, that means bribing SAT proctors and paying off college coaches to get children into elite colleges, and then going to great lengths to make sure they never face the humiliation of knowing how they got there.
Those are among the allegations in the recent college bribery scandal, in which 50 people were charged in a wide-ranging fraud to secure student admissions to colleges.
And now to where this actually gets scary.
In her practice, Dr. Levine said she regularly sees college freshmen who have had to come home from Emory or Brown because they don't have the minimal kinds of adult skills that one needs to be in college.
One came home because there was a rat in the dorm room.
Some didn't like their roommates.
Others said it was too much work and they had never learned independent study skills.
One didn't like to eat food with sauce.
Her whole life, her parents had helped her avoid sauce.
Calling friends before going to their houses for dinner.
At college, she didn't know how to cope with the cafeteria options covered in sauce.
Here are parents who have spent 18 years grooming their kids with what they perceive as advantages, but they're not, Dr. Levine said.
The reason I was really interested in talking about this issue is because for one, yes, I focus much of the time on the regressive left and these young people who are extremely fragile and demand authoritarian measures to protect them from things they perceive as threatening, such as words on the internet.
But many of these people are struggling.
Many of them have massive debt.
Many of them are calling for government intervention into their lives because they're not successful.
And then I look to myself, and I look at how I was brought up, and what I experienced, and I am successful.
And I think a part of this is why many conservatives believe in personal responsibility.
On one side, you have wealthy, elite parents in big cities clearing out all obstacles and developing their children into overly sensitive and scared human beings.
On the other side, you have people who are carved out of wood.
People who work from a young age, work the family business, and have to defend themselves and build their own lives.
They then end up being on one side of the political debate.
But we do have another side of this coin, and that's the loss of responsibility which I mentioned early on.
people who just don't have anything they have to do.
Without that responsibility, then they're bored, depressed.
And as we know, the opioid crisis is actually tied to unemployment.
If people don't feel like they have something to do, they get sad, they get bored, and sometimes
they get angry.
Now, to get personal, when I was growing up, I dropped out of high school, never finished.
I worked the family business at a young age.
At a few points, as I was a late teenager, I was homeless while working at Chicago's O'Hare Airport.
And I've actually experienced the real world, and I've tried to meet people of all stripes and all backgrounds to try and better understand what the world is really about.
I look to how I grew up, and I look at the struggles I faced, and how it prepared me and strengthened me to push forward and become successful.
And I think many young people are missing this, and they're becoming angry because they're not successful.
Now look, a lot of these young people who went to college, they played by the rules.
Their parents told them exactly what they should and shouldn't do, and they said okay and they did it.
And it didn't work out for them.
Now they don't know how to live, and I kid you not, the New York Times highlights a story of a young woman who didn't know how to eat food without sauce on it.
That's crazy to me.
I've eaten some pretty weird stuff as I've traveled the world, and I've been pretty concerned with parasites.
I think many people are just too trapped in this bubble.
But again, on the other side we have the loss of responsibility.
And there's a reason why I bring up Jordan Peterson.
One of his messages that he says to young people is that you need responsibility.
He acts kind of like a father figure and it seems like he may be filling that void for at least one side of the culture war.
Now obviously he's speaking out against the collectivism and authoritarianism that comes from the overly fragile and sensitive regressive left.
But he's also telling young people on the other side, avoid the extremism and take some responsibility for your life.
Last May, we saw this story from the Washington Post.
The profound sadness of the Jordan Peterson phenomenon.
Who the hell are you, really?
Jordan Peterson barked the question at us through a permasquint, like a character in a western.
Peterson does this sort of thing a lot.
The brusque dad schtick is very much a part of his appeal.
But who is Jordan Peterson really?
The easy part first.
Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist and professor who has become famous for his viral self-improvement lectures and his equally viral opposition to Bill C-16, which added gender identity to the forms of discrimination covered under Canadian human rights law.
Being anti-political correctness is part of Peterson's message, but it is not nearly its entirety.
The professor is far more concerned with sharing his philosophy of life, and millions of young men especially are buying his books, watching his YouTube videos, and flocking to theaters such as the Warner to hear him share it.
Peterson himself will tell you that serving as a father figure is his heaviest burden, Much of his work is dedicated to pushing a generation of confused youths to build character, put their lives in order, become adults.
I want to talk to you about how people exist in the world.
He told those in attendance last week.
And that's what his tour is all about.
It is also what makes it profoundly depressing.
Peterson's bestseller is a wordy self-help epistle for young men—it's mostly men who follow him—in need of direction.
Inside a cover invoking an old-school, gold-embossed Bible are lessons such as stand up straight with your shoulders back.
Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient, and tell the truth, or at least don't lie.
These rules are drawn from Peterson's study of what he describes as archetypal myths.
The stories of Christianity, the pantheon of ancient Egypt, quotes from Milton and Dostoevsky, mixed with neuroscience and psychology.
They do throw some criticism his way over leaning oddly into conspiratorial obsessions with neo-Marxist liberal professors, meaning to march us to the gulag via the gender equity in the classroom or something.
And his interpretations of certain principles that loving your neighbor as yourself should be a utilitarian act, for instance, lend themselves all too well to the right-wing ideology that would pretend structural issues such as racism don't exist, and that people should and must care for themselves alone.
Jordan Peterson is absolutely not beyond criticism, and he really does play to one side of the culture war, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
While I would like to see some unity between the opposing factions, Jordan Peterson is doing something extremely important in telling young people to clean up your room, Which in my understanding is a metaphor for getting your life in order and figuring out what you're doing, what's your goal, and what's your mission.
That's why I think many people respect him.
Wayward youth who are depressed, bored, and have no responsibility are being told, you are responsible for your responsibility.
No one will come to you and bestow a great mission or quest on your shoulders.
No one will bequeath you a legendary sword and tell you this is what must be done.
You have to find it.
I learned those lessons at a very young age, when I was wandering around downtown Chicago, homeless and just skateboarding, crashing at various friends' houses, or sometimes outside.
I realized that there is no great mission.
The only mission is what you decide it is.
And for me, that kind of changed how I perceived Life.
And it changed me rather politically.
I stopped looking at different sides of the coin as the enemy or the friend.
I stopped looking at moral truths as absolute and realized that there really is some kind of subjective vision that people have, while there is still an objective reality.
And then I started to talk with people who were on the other side of where I was politically, because I was rather far left growing up.
I started talking to people who are conservative and I realized they just have a belief, an opinion.
It's different from my opinion, but it's not necessarily fact-based.
Some people are utilitarian, some people aren't.
It's like the trolley problem.
How would you act when you have five people on one side and one person on the other?
Do you pull the lever to save five or to save one?
What would you do?
There's no right or wrong answer.
We don't know necessarily what we should do.
But obviously, because of this experience I had in my life, I do fall on one side of the issue.
While I am socially liberal and believe in a lot of progressive policies, I view the rise of the progressive left as something rather terrifying.
Young people who are scared of the world and want a nanny state or some kind of system to protect them.
I certainly think there are bad actors on the other side of that coin.
Young, bored men who do things out of spite or malice or just boredom.
They act with reckless disregard because they just have nothing else to do.
And that's why Jordan Peterson is excellent, in my opinion.
He's a solution to that side of the problem.
But what do we do for the people that are overly fragile?
While the bored young men on one side can look up to Jordan Peterson and get pulled away from radicalization and find some responsibility in their lives, do something meaningful, what about the regressive left?
Who speaks to them and tells them that other people feel differently than you and that doesn't make them bad people?
I don't know if we have someone like that, and that's what truly scares me.
Admittedly, I don't think that I'm always perfect.
I think I actually do a lot of things wrong.
I try my best not to, but of course, I have opinions, I'm a person, I'm not perfect, and I feel like sometimes I make content that's probably just gonna make things worse.
I really do.
I try not to.
I try to talk about how I feel, and as any human being, I sometimes feel certain ways and make videos about them, like this one.
Maybe in a month or two months, I'll look at this and say, why did I make that video?
But, typically when I look back at my content, I say, this is how I felt and what I saw, and I just try to be honest.
Ultimately, the point I'm trying to make is, the greatest challenge we face, at least right now, this is how I feel, is that we've become so successful, we don't have responsibility.
Do we need to farm?
Do we need to wake up at 6am every day to make sure we survive?
We really don't.
We're rather comfortable.
So we have young people laying in all day, sleeping in all day, playing video games, going to the coffee shop, reading books, and just not really doing anything that's going to change the world because we're wealthy and successful.
And then because of that, we've seen the emergence of bulldozer parents who won't let children actually struggle.
And struggle is extremely important to build character and become strong and independent, and it's important to succeed.
If we don't find someone who can speak to the regressive left the way Jordan Peterson has spoken to those on the other side of the culture war, I think it'll just spiral out of control.
Maybe they'll go crazy enough, like how they attacked Chelsea Clinton, and that'll result in someone just saying, you know what, those people are nuts, and then people will just disregard them.
But I think because of this trend in bulldozer parenting, it's not going to stop.
Parents are going to keep doing this.
Young people are going to continue to be scared of sauce.
Again, not an exaggeration.
There are these extreme and weird scenarios where they're just terrified of the real world.
What's going to happen when these young people get into office?
What's going to happen when they start running companies?
Will they be able to run companies or will they become the future homeless who demand money from the government because they don't know how to survive?
I don't know entirely.
I don't know exactly what's going to happen, but I felt like We do have a challenge.
Our challenge is our own success.
And while Jordan Peterson is absolutely far from perfect, and is absolutely deserving of criticism, he does provide a very important remedy for one of the ails we see on one side.
Telling people to get your life in order, and be responsible, and to inspire young people to stand up and do something is extremely important.
I think ultimately what I'm saying is that we need someone like that to de-radicalize the regressive left.
To stand up and say, respect your neighbor, love your neighbor, and realize that we're all trying to make the world a little bit better.
But we don't have that.
So, hence you'll see me on one side of this debate, typically.
But it's also probably because I've dealt with real strife in the real world.
I've experienced hardship.
I've been homeless.
I've had to struggle to survive.
And because of that, I'm just not that worried about offensive words, and I think people deserve their freedom.
And I think we have to look at how our actions resonate and carry on.
Too many people will not think about what happens after they do something.
Hey, let's ban someone.
Not realizing that when you ban them, you actually help radicalize them.
But let me know what you think in the comments below and we'll keep the conversation going.
This was a bit of a rant.
Just, I wanted to talk about these issues because of this story I saw in the New York Times.
And I was just stuck on it.
Normally, I read news all day and just non-stop read these stories.
But today, I was just sitting here thinking and I was like, you know what?
Maybe I should just take these thoughts and put them into a video and send it to you.
And you can comment and let me know what you think.
And we'll leave it there.
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