#lobsterism

Why Jordan Peterson Is Always Wrong

from above link quick quotes:

“According to Peterson, universities are full of ungrateful radicals, determined to undermine the intellectual and spiritual foundations of Western civilization, insistent on advancing a dangerous totalitarian agenda that pushes for “equality of outcome” in every sphere of life.”

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Take Bill C-16, which amended Canada’s Human Rights Law in 2017 to include gender identity and first rocketed Peterson to fame. The primary purpose of the act was to protect trans people from discrimination in areas such as housing. The word “pronoun” doesn’t appear anywhere in the text (…) Nevertheless, Peterson was utterly convinced that C-16 was a totalitarian “compelled speech” bill and made a name for himself outside of Canada for his strident denunciations. C-16 has been on the books for a few years now, and no one has been charged with a Pronoun Crime.

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The only real link between Marxism and the wide array of social movements and schools of thought that Peterson associates with “postmodern neo-Marxism” is that they all feature complaints about the existence of various forms of oppression. The idea seems to be that since Marxists think workers are oppressed due to their economic position and feminists think that women are oppressed due to their position in a gender hierarchy, the latter is a “version” of the former.

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A third, deeper problem with Peterson’s analysis is that despite his objection to “equality of outcome,” he continues to believe in “equality of opportunity.”Yet in a society where wealth can be inherited, this distinction is untenable. One generation’s outcomes necessarily shape the next generation’s opportunities. Having rich parents or poor parents is the difference between having an array of choices and a narrow menu of options.

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Peterson famously asks us to consider the lobster, our genetic relative, and the way it competes to form dominant hierarchies at the bottom of the ocean floor. The bigger lobsters push around the smaller lobsters — why should things be any different in the human world?

It’s winner-take-all in the lobster world, just as it is in human societies, where the top 1 per cent have as much loot as the bottom 50 percent — and where the richest eighty-five people have as much as the bottom three and a half billion.

no one on the Left wants to eliminate all forms of hierarchy. The question has always been how many and what kind of hierarchies might be justified, not whether hierarchy should be permitted at all.

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“Don’t blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city? Let your own soul guide you.”

while no one denies that personal problems very often have nonpolitical dimensions, they sometimes have transparently political dimensions, too. Insisting that people exclusively focus on the dimensions of their problems that social progress can’t solve is as foolish as saying that no one should go to the doctor because not all human suffering is caused by curable diseases.

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Throughout Peterson’s books, he frequently describes modernity as a period where the meaning provided by faith has eroded under the assaults of overambitious scientific reason and corrosive postmodern philosophy. The result has been either a cynical withdrawal from the world or a totalitarian impulse to bring meaning back through force.

Peterson avoids asking whether capitalism bears any responsibility for the crisis of meaning he and others have diagnosed.

Peterson’s unwillingness to look at the transformative effect of capitalism while complaining about the decline of sacred meaning might explain why he puts so much stock in attacking relatively obscure French philosophers. By implying that it is an “ungrateful” set of intellectual sophists who are responsible for the current conditions, Peterson can avoid looking very deeply into the tension between his support for traditionalism and his role as a cheerleader for global capital. Far easier to point the finger at Derrida and Foucault than to ask whether an ideology built on the axiom “everything has its price” might have something to do with declining faith in eternal values.

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here is one thing “I” will add: capitalism is failed as much as communism. at least, on an ethical level:

it was capitalism that invented slavery. it was capitalism that created global warming. it was capitalism that invented all sorts of different and “creative” porn genres that involves even children. no way that’s happening in communism.

it WAS and it STILL IS capitalism that wants to sell weapons, that start wars, that exploit other countries. capitalism goes way too fast, x is cool today and x is shit tomorrow. capitalism needs a lot of resources. moar resources! cut more trees! release more shitty gasses to the atmosphere! but also hey, you got resources? YOU GIVE ME YOUR RESOURCES NOW! you don’t have power to stand against biggest capitalistic force, so you get rekt. just like a little shitty lobster.

who is the biggest capitalist? united states. ruled by whom? corporations. clearly, all politicians funded by those corporations or the very capitalist himself like trump becomes the politician. you can vote for x and lose or you can vote for y and lose. yah! great system. but in the mean time don’t stop fighting amongst each other and calling each other names cause that really matters.

once your capitalism as strong as united states’ your corporations will be as strong as theirs too and there will be no way to stop them from ruling the country anymore and starting wars in other parts of the world and politicians will just become their puppets.