It needs to be said: Jordan Peterson is trying to hurt you.
In the pre-Trump world, the Canadian professor and clinical psychologist jumped to the top of everyone’s YouTube algorithm with his refreshing push-back against hate speech legislation in that country. He sounded rational, educated, annoyed and effective. All good traits in a leader.
Peterson’s animus was informed by his self-proclaimed “deep study” into 20th-century totalitarian regimes and the lessons he drew from that utterly evil period. His aim was to pass those lessons on to young people so they could avoid the same mistakes of their fathers and grandfathers.
If you suffer from a mental illness, then Peterson’s advice is probably worth your time. On top of that, Peterson has said on many occasions that young men especially don’t receive any encouragement in life, and all it takes is a few kind words to fill them with rocket fuel. He also tells them to “clean your room,” which roughly translates to: “before spending energy on big political problems, make sure your own heart and mind are set straight.”
If that message sounds suspicious, congratulations, your head is still working.
It sounds a lot like the Islamic lie that “jihad” really means “inner struggle,” not war. What Muslims will never tell you is that “inner struggle” is something they can only pursue after the entire world has already been forcibly converted to Islam. Until then, it’s all war all the time, baby.
So when YouTube recommended Peterson’s latest video called “Message To Muslims,” I was curious. The synopsis of the video is that Muslims should stop fighting amongst themselves, “clean their rooms” and make peace with both the Christians “and especially the Jews.” Peterson says their true enemy is within their own hearts.
Sounds good, right?
Well, the first thing you need to know about Peterson is that Muslims are not his primary audience. He was telling young, European, Christian men to “clean your room” years ago. Indeed, his explicitly-stated mission is to stop such men from cooperating (euphemistically referred to as “radicalising”) and instead adopt individualism which Peterson calls the core beauty of “the West.”
Individualism, he says, is the antidote to the collective mania that led to the insanity of the 20th century. Things like communism, Nazism, socialism, Maoism, feminism, progressivism and all the rest can be avoided if people simply focus more on bettering themselves. But individualism is not like the other “isms” – he thinks it is the pinnacle ideal in a world saturated with ideals.
What Peterson won’t tell you (and I can’t figure out if he’s lying or just a garden-variety ignoramus about how power works) is that individualism is only possible when a person is at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and living within a homogeneous society, both ethnically and culturally. If both of those conditions are not met, individualism is simply a path to slaughter. But Peterson avoids this logic.
It’s not that he can’t see the logic. He’s smart enough to know how first principles work. The problem is that he purposefully never follows the clear strategic logic to its mathematical conclusion for the same reason every conservative his age has failed to conserve anything: cowardice.
Calling someone a coward is heavy language. It has the same weight as calling someone a liar. It assumes a level of agency that the person knows the proper action but refuses to perform it. A brave person is different to a coward because while both feel fear, the brave person acts even in the teeth of that fear. The coward succumbs to the fear and leaves others to die.
In all his reading, Peterson cannot possibly have missed the historical lesson that collective action, solidarity, strategic thinking and a will to power is the formula for any kind of success. The All Blacks against Ireland over the past few weeks proved that getting this formula wrong can be devastating. Peterson may not be a big sports fan, but he surely understands what makes a good team.
I doubt he would risk sitting in front of the All Blacks to explain how individualism is the best strategy at their next test. He would be laughed out of the locker room. Each player in a team must be at their top performance. But if their skills don’t nest together to create a team, everyone loses. There is no such thing as a team of individuals.
Yet, when it comes to collective political action, his primary message for young, European, Christian men has been to recommend individualism and more atomisation. This is the language of a gatekeeper.
Gatekeepers drip-feed tiny bits of “allowed” knowledge mixed with lies to keep you from walking through the gate. Peterson is not stopping you from walking through the gate, he is simply saying that it is pointless to walk through the gate. Gatekeepers trick you into believing there is only another gate on the other side while pretending that their entire motivation is to avoid you getting trapped between those gates.
The gatekeeper is not stopping the people from entering a forbidden place. A robot can do that (hence, artificial intelligence). Rather, the gatekeeper’s job is to convince people that the only way to gain entry is by asking permission. By focusing on the gate, people won’t be thinking about the thousands of other ways to breach the walls.
Sometimes entire systems can be a gatekeeper. The media are a good example. When Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message,” he knew it wasn’t so much that information delivered by a TV was true. Instead, the message of the medium is that when news appears on a TV, then it must carry more truth than if you heard it from your friend or colleague. That’s the magic trick.
Similarly, the process of democracy serves to entrench an oligarchy. After all, if the path to power in a democracy is counting noses, then those who corral the most noses will win. It is a systemic gatekeeper because, by telling people that power is only available through the ballot box, they never think about the thousands of other ways to gain power – like bombs, bullets or breaking skulls.
Peterson’s message is not new. The call for young, European, Christian men (re: Catholics) to reject collective action is central to the propaganda after World War Two. The group of people that won this conflict have spent every possible ounce of energy since 1945 playing whack-a-mole to keep young, European, Christian men separated and oppressed.
At a certain level, this makes sense. After all, the primary role of any government is to find ways to soak up the years between 16 and 35 of young men. Testosterone is the ‘do something’ hormone. When young men ‘do something’, governments want it to be in the required direction (maintain the status quo). If it isn’t, the government must remove the man from society until his testosterone simmers down. This is done in one of three ways: exile, incarceration or execution.
If governments were truly antiseptic, then this model would be effective. But government is a fiction. Governance is always conducted by people with interests. Sovereignty is conserved. Someone always has power, and power can only be used to accrue more power.
Peterson either doesn’t want young, European, Christian men to understand the logic of collective action, or he does not understand it himself. But, as mentioned above, I find the latter hard to believe in a world where team sports are prolific. In other words, one must be willfully ignorant or mendacious to say that political success is an individual sport.
That’s why his message to Muslims is so absurd. If there is one group that understands the formula of political success, it is Muslims. Intolerance, submission, demographic replacement, conservative values and hair-trigger violence – this is how Muslims conquered the Middle East, North Africa and almost made it past Vienna in 1683 to dominate Europe.
Muslims certainly don’t need Peterson’s advice. But they love having people like him as gatekeepers.
Think about it this way: given the number of Muslim immigrants already in Europe, why is Islamic terrorism so rare on the continent?
The answer is that Muslims know they have already conquered Europe, so why bother with terrorism? Muslims and other groups are overjoyed that gatekeepers like Peterson have made it so difficult for young, European, Christian men to act collectively in the interests of their own people group. Rival groups never needed to blow up more than a handful of busses and trains to win.
The lie of individualism has also made it possible for China to rise so quickly. Thankfully, China’s ethnic solidarity isn’t nearly as much of a threat to “the West” as Islam because all China wants is to be left alone to be Chinese. But both Islam and China will be victorious because young, European, Christian men have been lied to that nepotism, solidarity and intolerance are bad formulas for political success, when everyone else knows this formula is the only way to be safe.
These young men are being forced, by design, to play individual sports in a team sport world and Peterson is at the forefront of this disaster. He is trying to hurt you. Peterson may not know the harm his message is causing, but that makes him more dangerous, not less.
Unfortunately, Peterson and the rest of his misguided generation will die in the next 20-30 years, probably in luxury, without ever experiencing the inevitable devastation that their cowardly lies about individualism have created.
If you need life advice, try this: never trust anyone who tells you to kneel. They are trying to get you killed.