Need a plate of generic, insipid platitudes with a giant helping of bad science and misogyny?
One of my favorite examples of Jordan Peterson stupidity is when he was lecturing about some ancient civilization artwork that showed two serpent creatures creating humanity. He said that because the snakes were drawn in a double helix that this ancient civilization knew about and wanted to represent DNA.
Snakes coil around one another in a double helix when they mate. The snake creatures in the art were just fucking.
Source is at 1:15:39 in this vid: https://youtu.be/hSNWkRw53Jo?si=MPWip62wkrMX_bP7
Stuff like this is why I will never understand people following him. Like, I get it. It's the bigotry. And when it comes to that, nothing else matters. I understand it on paper.
But at the same time... why? When he's constantly wrong, or when they have to constantly lie about the things he says, why keep listening to him? Why are they like this?
Because he 'sounds' smart, so they latch on to that as their plausible legitimacy as to why what he says must be true.
When he talks/writes, he says a lot of words that communicate nothing. You have no idea what his point is.
Which is a kind of superpower that makes him hard to criticize. Whenever he commits to a fact or something, that's easy to disprove, and people do it all the time. But, when he just says something about cultural marxism or whatever, it's so hard to unpack what he's actually saying that it's hard to prove he's wrong.
That lets his followers say that he's so smart that even the leftist intellectuals can't take him down. Obviously they don't understand what he's saying either, but that doesn't matter. It lets them adore him as some kind of intellectual hero.
Peterson's got the act of a public intellectual down pat. He's never seen without a suit or with a smile, he has a distinguished haircut and a trimmed beard. He shows no sense of humour and uses big sciencey-sounding words.
That lets him have a symbiotic relationship with incels. He makes money selling them things like books, they get to point to a "public intellectual" who's on their side.
Don't forget the time he wanted to quit benzos to show how masculine he was. His doctors wanted to taper him down so his brain didn't fry (benzo addiction alters brain chemistry and withdrawal can seriously screw you up or kill you if you stop), but trying to taper off over several years wasn't manly and powerful. So he flew to Russia and got a few potentially sketchy doctors to put him in a medical coma for a month, and that's part of why he's so fucked up now.
Oh, or the part where his daughter convinced him to only ever eat red meat, and literally nothing else.
I can only assume he played a bit too much Assassin's Creed before coming up with that one.
Lobster Peterson: "The way these snakes are drawn in resemblance to the structure of DNA, it is evident that ancient civilizations were familiar with the concept of DNA."
Bro, they fucking
Is he the guy that went to Russia for coma treatment?
Yup, to cure benzo habit.
"Depression is a myth; tidy your room. Also, I've been clinically depressed for my whole adult life and I shamble from one crisis to another."
And then he had to do physical therapy afterwards for months to recover from the medically induced coma that only Russia allows since the rest of the world doesn’t allow the procedure since it isn’t backed by any science.
That guy.
I see a lot of people here talking about how unpersuasive his arguments are. So I think this misses the real issue at hand. Countless young men do find him persuasive. They feel abandoned by everyone else and there is this man who comes along and convinces them he knows "the way". Talking about how "unconvincing" his arguments are won't stop this from happening. If anything it will impower in-group type thinking. It's much more important that we tackle these problems at their source: combat the emotional abandonment of young men
It's a lot like how people wonder how others fall for scam calls and emails when they look and sound so obviously like bullshit, you're not the target audience if you see through it.
Countless young men do find him persuasive. They feel abandoned by everyone else and there is this man who comes along and convinces them he knows "the way". Talking about how "unconvincing" his arguments are won't stop this from happening.
There really isn't a way to stop this from happening, short of a complete shake up of American culture and government. The only reason young men gravitate towards JP is because he is telling them what they want to hear.
For the first time in American society, young white men with degrees are no longer guaranteed the middle class life they have always been told they deserve. Instead of realizing that that has been the status quo for literally every other person in the country, and that the system is inherently corrupt......
They are told that they should feel angry, they are told they need to fight to maintain the status quo and domination of power. Jordan Peterson isn't combating the emotional abandoment of men, he's stoking it. His only care is to maintain the social norms racial and sexual supremacy.
Also...... I don't buy that young men have been emotionally abandoned, at least not moreso than any other time in history. Just compared to 30 years ago when I was a kid, men now a days have a plethora of ways to connecting to people, or seeking help.
It's the worst kind of job. Taking advantage of developing teens and their self-issues to make money like that.
How did you steal my alt account? I thought I was the only dipshit on here.
I used to like him. I fell for the crap. To my 16 year old brain what he said made a lot of sense. He had a handful of good points, and it made me believe the rest of the shit he peddled.
I see him now, I look back on how I hung onto his words like a lost lamb, and I can only facepalm.
I realised that the only thing he is good at is marketing, not psychology...
Being 16 is the best excuse you could have for believing anything that cretin says. You're good bro.
It's understandable - back in the day, he had some reasonable points and an academic veneer. If course, what he was saying tended to have a strong bias, and didn't stand up to scrutiny, but it's hard to fault a 16 year old looking for guidance for falling for it. Hindsight is 20 20 - particularly when the negative tendencies ratcheted up rapidly over time.
Since his Russian benzo coma (remember, kids - clean your room and don't criticise others or systemic issues unless your life is perfect... pay no attention to my crippling addiction as I peddle that advice), things took a hard turn. I honestly think he suffered non-trivial brain damage. He's far more erratic, bursts into tears at the drop of a hat (while trying to sell "traditional" masculinity, his takes have lost their academic veneer and are self-evidently stupid. There's a reason he may be stripped of his accreditation.
TL;DR: Peterson went from being a pseudo-intellectual preacher to a lolcow, and (to me) the benzo coma seems to have been the catalyst for that shift.
I didn't know about the benzo thing. And that was the advice from him I appreciated; the clean your room, etc.
I didn't realise he was a walking blackout the entire time.
And I think his as following grew, so did his ego, and he began to think he knew way more than he actually did.
Ah well. An oversized ego is as bad as a termite infestation - if you let it grow it'll eventually make things collapse...
I'm still pissed that because he badly quotes and misinterprets Jung all the time, people assume Jung is bullshit by association.
Mom: clean your room
Teen: shut up femoid!
JP: you need to clean your room to slay the dragon of chaos
Teen: OMG so true!
Never take advice on personal responsibility from a guy who intentionally put himself in a coma to avoid taking responsibility for his addiction to a narcotic with zero medicinal properties.
It's so weird for me that he seemed surprised that benzos are, in fact, highly addictive with severe withdraw symptoms. Isn't he a psychologist and potentially someone who is allowed to prescribe such drugs?
He is such a disappointment to me. Early Peterson was just a clinical psychologist who actually gave a shit about men’s mental health. You could filter out his religion and actually get something out of it. Then he turned into… something else.
Transphobia reliably causes brainrot. It's weird how much faster and harder the effect seems to be relative to other bigotries, but look at Graham Linehan and how he burned his life to the ground.
He's so smart and articulate! Yeah, if you ate lead paint chips as a kid, or decided that huffing glue as a past time was a great idea.
Why is it that the cringiest fucking weebs like this guy? Does the suit give him some sort of weird dominion over them? These losers should be case and fucking point as to why you need Critical Thinking classes in schools....and it should also fucking highlight why Republicans are desperately trying to make public schools systematically dumber. A generation of highly educated people is detrimental to the conservative ideology (unless your making literally millions of $$$).
A lack of visible positive role models is a big part of it. When nobody else wants to engage with isolated and directionless young white men, people like Peterson will fill the vacuum. Couple that with amoral algorithms of social media generating engagement at any cost, and they soon have an audience.
Ensuring everyone has opportunities and and a sense of inclusion would go a lot further than just trying to teach everyone to recognise false shepherds. That's just treating the symptom and not the cause, and would likely end up with them falling prey to another wolf with a better sheepskin.
Oh god, this is so embarassing for us as a society.
Young men look for guidance, and all they find is Rape Tate who tells you to be an alpha male by just being obnoxiously "superior" to others.
John Peanutbutter who tells you to be an alpha male but with science in your brain
fresh and fit who tell you to be alpha males but by figuratively just shaming women
and on the opposite side you have nothing for a while and then you have destiny and hasan who try to make you debate like highschoolers.
Is the world just full of grifters now?
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: yyyyeeeeeeessssssss
I would have appreciated if the bottom right panel said "Hold my benzos" instead.
I just want to say that if you are/were a young man, and found some value in some of what this guy was saying to you...thats's OK. Don't feel bad, or embarrassed or mad at yourself or whatever. We are all learning all the time, and doubly so when we're young. Never think that you can't take what is useful and reject what isn't. Fuck knows there is plenty to reject about what this dude says!
I'd probably say Andrew Tate is closer to that.
I can help you as well. Just turn to Hedonism, which is pretty much the opposite of what Jelly B Peanutbutter tells you to do.
Quit your job, become an artist. Heck, become a twitch streamer, I don't care. Try to do what brings you joy. And remember to eat the rich.
I listened to him for a little bit and sounded sensible, but I see a lot of people hate him and sounds like he found some fans and double down and a shit show to cater to them. I don’t know enough to have an opinion lol
The problem with him and people like him is that they start off with truth, and then slowly devolve into a conclusion they drew from that kernel of truth and before you know it they're operating completely on their conclusions and personal ideas instead of the actual data they began with. Teaching as if their conclusions are just as valid.
It's a similar strategy to how most religious leaders operate, when giving a sermon. They read the text and then change its meaning to whatever fits their narrative and interpretation best, then they spend the next hour preaching their ideas with the root authority of the audience largely unmentioned after that.
Completely agree. I initially agreed with a lot of what he said, but he slowly tries to drown you in the deep end.
He's such an oddity to me in that it sounds like he's speaking very well and in an articulate manner. But then you try to actually parse out what he's saying, and realize it's barely coherent a lot of the time. It seems to be the same model as Scientology as far as I can tell.
He laces practical advice with misogynistic and bigoted undertones. He tells people to adhere to the "natural order" and you shouldn't try to improve the world but only strive to improve yourself and be a better worker bee. He stopped practicing psychology and teaching it because what is taught in psychology doesn't agree with his political views. Recently he has chosen to be a right-wing voice for the daily wire to personally profit off of airing his grievances with society at large. He calls his fellow colleagues in his profession "butchers" for giving gender affirming care and he might lose his license because he is maligning the profession he himself was a part of. He seems that he would rather nuke his credentials to further his career as a pundit. He is a deeply disturbed man that has yet to get his house in order lecturing young people, mostly men, about what it means to be a productive member of society.
Haven't heard about him in ages. I just assumed Joe Rogan had nicked his audience.