Playing the Devil's Advocate

In the previous post of this series, I promised to write about in some detail (and with examples) why the snake oil which Jordan Peterson is promoting is essentially useless. Then there is the issue of how his followers are setting themselves up for failure and disappointment. Well.. as it turns out, I am not the only blogger who has the concerns or written about them. Therefore I will start by talking about, and link to a few posts, written by others who have made similar points.

While you might not like choice of font and page layout, stonerwithaboner recently wrote an interesting post about Jordan Peterson. To summarize, it draws attention to the fact that Jordan Peterson has a history of fame seeking and playing fast and loose with ethics. Now, this is not all that surprising. In fact, it have been shocking if that was not the case. What is perhaps more interesting is that Jordan Peterson has a peculiar obsession with maintaining hierarchy.

As those who have read my posts for years might remember, an obsession with maintaining hierarchy and status quo is one of dead giveaways of a CONservative, even if they identify as something else. And this brings us to another giveaway of the CONservative mind if you can call it that).. an obsession with outward appearance of “order”. His infamous ‘clean your room’ bullshit line is just one of the many instances in which he talks about “solutions” that have no relation to the problem at hand.

It also provides an insight into the type of con he is running. You see.. somewhat successful conmen often make many “common-sense” and unobjectionable claims to make themselves seem normal and lower the defenses of their marks to push a scam. That is why politicians cannot stop talking about patriotism, small-town america, family values, freedom etc while fucking their underage mistress, voting for wars which don’t affect them, fellating corporations who fund their election campaigns- all while screwing the rubes who voted for them.

Then there is the question of why Jordan Peterson does whatever he is doing. In other words, what is his motivation? Based on what we know to date, it is clear that a quest for power, fame and money (in that order) are the driving forces behind his public persona. To be clear, I am not against people achieving fame or making some money as a side product of doing what they believe in or like. However when the quest for power, fame and money are the primary motivation, one has to be highly suspicious of whatever is being peddled by that person.

And this brings me the world-view that Peterson is peddling. What is the product he is selling? Spoiler alert, it is a secularized version of traditional CONservatism. You know, the same bullshit ideology where gullible men are supposed to make large upfront sacrifices for the hope of a “meaningful” existence. However instead of using the alleged authority of an imaginary god and religion, his version pushes the scam based on its secular equivalents- “western” civilization and capitalism.

The dishonest crap that Peterson is pushing is no different from religious and cult leaders in previous eras pushing for human sacrifice and witch-burning to a stupid and desperate audience in order to “please the angry gods and restore order”. And how exactly will all this work? Well.. nobody knows. For starters, the way women behave and society functions today has really no connection with what men are willing to sacrifice. Face it.. the probability that a guy who is conventionally considered a good husband will get screwed over in divorce court is far more than anything resembling the ‘they lived sorta happily ever after’ fairy tale ending.

The way things works in real life is linked to something (anything..) being possible and the probability of it occurring. The fact that women will screw over devoted husbands and chase after rich, handsome or powerful non-committal men has everything to do with it being possible and likely. In other words, a lot of the disruptive social changes you see around yourself have to do with broader changes in society and how they affect the feasibility and probability of previously uncommon outcomes. Let me explain that point with an example.

I am sure that many of you have received numerous phone calls for fraudulent tech support, emails claiming to be from some bank or scammers claiming to be from the IRS. Ever wonder why stuff like this was uncommon 10-20 years ago, but is now ubiquitous? Well.. it comes to the much reduced cost of running such scams as well as and the ability to run them from overseas- thanks to the internet and seamless international financial connections. To put it another way, these scams were always around but could not be implemented on a large-scale in the past because it was not just not possible to do so.

Similarly, many of the problems afflicting the gullible devotees of Jordan Peterson have always been around. It just happened to the case that structure and functioning of societies in previous eras put a serious cap on their growth and proliferation. However the structure and functioning of societies does evolve over time. As many of you might know, the majority of decent paying jobs or vocations right until the middle of the 20th century involved hard or difficult physical labor. That is why society in those eras seems patriarchal.

Once technology progressed to the point where varying degrees of mechanization and automation made most jobs that were physically hard either easy or redundant, it was simply not possible to maintain the existing social structure. That is why the social changes of the late 1960s occurred all over the then industrialized world at about the same time. And that is why women started entered reasonably well-paying jobs in such large numbers at around that time. The subsequent increase in female sexual freedom was inevitable, as was the massive increase in divorce rates.

In the next part of this series, I will write more about why these socio-economic changes were pretty much guaranteed to create a number of adverse outcomes for men. My focus will be to show these changes lead to the rise of SJWs and all the other socio-cultural bullshit which surrounds us today. Having said that, the most important takeaway from this post should be that following self-anointed leaders who demand personal sacrifice to please some mysterious “god” is an exercise in futility.. and kinda funny to watch from the outside.

What do you think? Comments?