Framing Peterson as a classical charlatan is crackerjack stuff. Bravo.
Would just add that Peterson’s latest catastrophizing follows a court decision which upheld the Ontario College of Psychologists ruling that Peterson be required to take social media training. It’s all moot because Peterson hasn’t practised since 2017, and, given the financial rewards of being an internet guru, he is very unlikely to ever do so again.
One mildly interesting general fact about Peterson is that he endlessly frames his grievances in 1st Amendment freedom of speech terms. Why that’s sort of interesting is the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (=the business end of the Constitution) makes no reference to “freedom of speech”; it broadly references “freedom of expression”, and outlines important caveats whereby the state can limit free expression, so long as the limits are "reasonable and can be justified in a free and democratic society". (Hate speech, etc. Québec has also passed many laws limiting expression in the name of protecting the French language).
The bulk of Peterson’s income may very well come from US supporters, which may explain the way he markets his travails, but it’s also something more broadly noticeable in Canada, which probably says something about the way globalized information is creating new political identities on the right. A number of members of trucker convoy who occupied Ottawa for three weeks in Jan-Feb 2022 in later court hearings referred to their “First Amendment rights”, to which the judge responded, “What’s that?”
Your haters forcing you into a redoubt with your more noxious fans and you living off of the conflict as you get more extreme is a common occurrence nowadays. Michael Tracy and Glenn Greenwald come to mind.
Agree Peterson is a charlatan. The only reason he remains a public figure is that he is one of the few voices with enough intelligence and ability to articulate to be called a right wing intellectual. I’d argue outside his sphere of clinical psychiatry, he is thoroughly intellectually dishonest and makes poor arguments, sometimes seemingly in bad faith.
But in his field of psychiatry, he is apparently quite reputable and accomplished (including his work surround Jung ahem.) Jungianism is not quackery. While many of his theories are controversial, he undoubtedly advanced both the science of psychiatry and modern spiritual conceptions, which science is unequipped to handle. You might call anything spiritual “quackery” as none of it can be proven…but then we’ve just written off essential human questions like “what happens to our consciousness when we die?” and “do we have free will ?” And “where did the universe come from?” Is it quackery to theorize about such even tho there are no provable answers to such questions? I don’t think so… the problem is when people use these to exploit others, rather than help explore these deep questions cooperatively. Cheers
Peterson's field is Psychology, not Psychiatry. Both are legitimate fields, but Psychology also happens to be a field at the center of science's replication crisis. Meaning, I don't think Psychology is fundamentally fraudulent, but it happens to be full of fraud these days.
On Psychology, Peterson seems to be a firm spreader of the notion that IQ is an inheritable, largely immutable thread, and the most important predictor of success in human beings, all notions that have been thoroughly debunked by serious scientists and are also kept around for ideological reasons, be it overt white supremacy or the adolescent need of some public intellectuals to present themselves as contrarian purveyors of forbidden knowledge (people like Stephen Pinker or Sam Harris).
Going back to JBP, it is also curious that before his career as a public intellectual himself, he was promoting a self help program he called Self Authoring, which promised all kinds of personal improvement. I have no idea if it worked or not, but what I find most notable is that the idea that you can improve through engaging in a program like this is fundamentally at odds with his views on IQ:
If Self Authoring can make you more successful in life, then it either increases your IQ (in which case IQ is isn't inheritable and immutable) or it doesn't (in which case IQ cannot be a significant predictor of success). The third option, in which Peterson's views on IQ are correct (which they aren't!), would mean that he's knowingly peddling a system that can't work.
Regarding the big questions and whether or not engaging in them is quackery, I'd recommend you listen to the Conspirituality podcast, as it threads this very line (among others) very well.
Yeah, but psychiatry is almost entirely quackery and human experimentation anyway =P It would be fairly safe to posit Jung as anti-institutional-psychiatry and his material as generally surpassed in a professional clinical sense by MBSR, DBT, etc.
Not only a charlatan but a particular breed of charlatan that resonates especially on the far right, as you point out. Reading this, I also remembered a 2018 book review by Pankaj Mishra of Peterson's famous "12 rules," where Mishra called out the fascist themes in Peterson's book: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2018/03/19/jordan-peterson-and-fascist-mysticism/
Mishra points to the same mix of occultism, half-science, and snake oil that you call out here and notes the direct appeal people like Peterson make to "ethnic-racial chauvinists."
Mishra's 2017 book, The Age of Anger, is worth a read as well. It's an exploration of how the rise of figures like Peterson (and of course Trump, Modi, Orbán, etc etc etc) and the cults that surround them is all a perverted reaction to modernity itself.
It’s been interesting to see the right wing ecosphere and plenty of mainstream media outlets treat post-coma JP as if nothing changed - I didn’t like him before the coma, but he’s increasingly incoherent and belligerent now (his recent tweeting style makes me wonder if he fell off the wagon).
It will always be my greatest shame that I took Peterson seriously for almost 2 years, from his coming out party at the 2016 "freedom of speech" rally when he first went viral (which I later learned was driven by fake outrage based on a completely false reading of the law being protested), to the first time I saw him on a Prager U video complaining about "post modern neo marxists".
I took a lot of IDW guys seriously, and it always amuses me to hear them complain about being cancelled or taken out of context, because every single time it was their own words in their own context that made me realize their critics were right and I was wasting my time with them.
PS: I think either "his" or "Peterson's" has to be removed from this sentence:
"The content of his Peterson’s discourse is again identical with that of a classical charlatan: "
Nice piece. I just want to argue that the hawking of supplements online isn't just the province of charlatans. Not sure what you think about Lex Fridman, but he advertises supplements. A basketball podcast I like owned by the NYT advertises supplements. The Ezra Klein Show advertises supplements. It's odd but it probably speaks more to us all being marks than any one pod dealing in snake oil salesmanship.
Vitamins and other dietary supplements are such a core part of American capitalism that you have to distinguish between the various levels of quackery. There are supplements and then there are SUPPLEMENTS. The latter includes boner pills, anti-aging sera, brain pills, etc.
It's all on a big spectrum, and there is as far as I know very little evidence that any of them do much of anything. But the scope of the claims varies, as does the evagenlism of the people doing the hawking.
Oh, I had never encountered this maxim, but I had definitely come to this realization years ago (during a previous Machine Learning hype cycle). I love this formulation though, thank you.
There is definitely that, but also just the general Joe Rogan-ish strategy of bringing on quacks and letting them talk unopposed, presenting yourself as neutral and rational but having a clear bias in your interview selection, the overall Scientism vibe and "oh the humanities" attitude.
On second thought, I think Charlatan is too much of a word, given John's exhaustive dissection, and he clearly lacks the flair of a Peterson. Fridman is more your run of the mill grifter, exagerating his affiliation to MIT, trying to pass pay to publish papers as peer reviewed, etc. He's halfway between Sam Harris and Dave Rubin, if you ask me.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Not that you're trying to convince me, but since I brought Lex up I'll stump for him a bit.
I've mostly come to Fridman for AI — not sure how qualified he is, but to this layman's ears he does a decent job of eliciting interesting + thoughtful interviews while threading the needle between conversant and humble.
I've read Reddit threads about his MIT experience, to me it seems like reasonable self-promotion. The Tesla paper seems somewhat strange, but it doesn't impact my take on what he's doing now. I didn't love the RFK Jr interview, but that's the only one I've listened to that I thought was pretty worthless. But most of the rest that I've listened to have some value for me.
I consider someone who doesn't deliver on value they've promised a grifter. I don't think he's in that category. Speaking on something and knowing about it often take different skills, and for me the humility he defaults to goes a long way, even if it's exaggerated.
"I consider someone who doesn't deliver on value they've promised a grifter."
Considering that he used his (exaggerated) credentials to start a podcast ostensibly about AI and has gradually turned it into a platform to discuss basically whatever but with a marked bias towards reactionary politics, I would say it does fit the bill.
You may find the label of reactionary politics exaggerated, but it is hard to find a different thread joining some of his most "outside the box" guests like RFK Jr, Ye, and Bibi Netanyahu.
Also, the aforementioned technique of basically giving an unopposed platform to his guests makes him a bad interviewer, an implied promise not delivered.
I think that's a fair read, but I see his promise in a different way. To me it seems like open-source idealism is the common thread through all of his guests. While he did have Bibi on and give him space, on the next pod he had gay Israeli humanist Yuval Noah Harari on for about twice the time. Ye and RFK Jr are people who already have platforms, who are heard — I think this open source idealism is a baseline belief that wanting to take part in a conversation is the only real requirement for being part of that conversation. The corresponding part of that belief (which Lex and George Hotz sort of get into about 2 hours in on the ep I'm listening to now, #387) is that the good people outweigh the bad, these people have more ideas that are good for the world than bad, and that these good ideas will naturally win out on a level playing field.
I've heard some valid crits of this format of intellectual exploration, but it seems pretty present in the world of programming types, which is a powerful faction. I appreciate an unvarnished view from the perspective of a well connected one like Lex, whose temperament I enjoy. I think grifters are intellectually dishonest, not people who believe different things than me or the majority.
Happy to entertain any holes in this formulation, which comes from a fairly Lex-sympathetic viewpoint. I've only listened to about 10-15 eps, he's my favorite podcaster atm, and I haven't gotten bored of him yet.
The entire paradigm of harvesting your audience as an advertising base instead of a subscriber or customer base is that they have more money than sense. Ironic self-own by the audience in supposedly erudite discussions.
Ed P beat me to it with his rebuttal of your statement "...quackish conceptions like Jungianism..." I couldn't agree more. While I don't agree with *everything* Jung wrote- (he was a human being after all, thus some of his ideas and statements are very questionable) he went much further than Freud was willing to go, and strove very hard to apply a scientific and empirical approach to areas of the mind and human culture that have yet and may never be fully explained by Science as we know it today. Labeling anything that can't be proven by western science as illegitimate or "quackish" is equally close-minded as Peterson or any other "thinker" and strongly suggests your faith in science as the one and only truth, i.e., it is superior and final. The same may be said for any believer of any faith or philosophy, and is equally close-minded. Ironically, Peterson's belief in Göttingen anthropology was and is still maintained by some as "scientific".
Cool, he was also a real dipshit and it's telling that his work is so easily misused by psychologically abusive people. You might want to find a new idol.
Physician are usually the ones that battle charlatans, because there are many around, I found interesting charlatans in medieval Islam. Physicians have always tried to demarcate themselves from the Other, whom they labeled as a "charlatan." Certain groups of society, including women and Jews, were an especially convenient target. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15965287/
I found this article interesting because Muslim doctors would target women and Jews because they felt threatened by them. I don’t know if this article is true, but definitely it’s possible that women in science could appear more threatening in that period.
I didn't have the word charlatan on hand to describe Jordan Peterson. I could spot the angle he was working from 20 miles in pitch darkness. I've just referred to him as the Incel Whisperer.
Peterson comes from the modern fashoid camp of masculinism. Fashoid refers to classical fascism of the 20th century, rooted in nationalism, as well as 21st century camps that mimic the psychology of fascism (white supremacy and theocracy are the others).
Masculinism is a nationalism of manhood. Rhetorically, it is frame-flipped feminism (females are the dominators, oppressors and usurpers; males are the victims). The masculinist's ressentiment is that women are the cause of their torment. Masculinism points to a pre-feminism world as an idealized, mythologized state of manhood. Feminism is trickery, and any social gains women have made in the economic, social and sexual sphere could only come at the expense of men. LGBTQ+ rights are seen as puppets of feminism to further divide men from their sexuality.
The masculinist worldview is distinctly fascist: the fantasy of the hero, warrior and master; the valorization of struggle; hierarchy as predestined; as well as essentialism.
Another great piece. Thanks! Totally reminded me of Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World... and weirdly Tim Ferris' 4 Hour Work Week... which I gotta admit seduced me for way longer than it probably should have. Ferris is another supplement hawker (although I don't think he's political, but it's been a long time since I touched base there) and I remember trying quite hard to figure out how to get in on the $$ action. But mostly I enjoyed the fantasy he presented (and the critique of workism, which tbf still holds up). But the supplement stuff, money for old rope as they say. It's an enticing pitch for sure. Anyway, hope you have a great vacation and looking forward to reading the book when it's done!
A moron seducing an audience of morons by talking about a 'sexual marketplace' as an excuse to peacock like an 8-year-old who's obviously going to turn gay. It's men like him that make it so important to treat addiction as a character flaw.
I guess it makes sense that his entire bag is a lack of self-control in an era with more demands on our attention span and vagal tone than ever before.
Though it does beg the question of what Oprah is/how you can be a 'good charlatan'.
I don’t think Dr. Peterson is gay. He doesn’t have nearly enough Botox.
Also I’m pretty sure the currently preferred term for “moron” is “developmentally disabled”.
Anyway comparing JP to a developmentally disabled gender-nonconforming 8-year-old is unfair to developmentally disabled gender-nonconforming 8-year-olds.
Framing Peterson as a classical charlatan is crackerjack stuff. Bravo.
Would just add that Peterson’s latest catastrophizing follows a court decision which upheld the Ontario College of Psychologists ruling that Peterson be required to take social media training. It’s all moot because Peterson hasn’t practised since 2017, and, given the financial rewards of being an internet guru, he is very unlikely to ever do so again.
One mildly interesting general fact about Peterson is that he endlessly frames his grievances in 1st Amendment freedom of speech terms. Why that’s sort of interesting is the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (=the business end of the Constitution) makes no reference to “freedom of speech”; it broadly references “freedom of expression”, and outlines important caveats whereby the state can limit free expression, so long as the limits are "reasonable and can be justified in a free and democratic society". (Hate speech, etc. Québec has also passed many laws limiting expression in the name of protecting the French language).
The bulk of Peterson’s income may very well come from US supporters, which may explain the way he markets his travails, but it’s also something more broadly noticeable in Canada, which probably says something about the way globalized information is creating new political identities on the right. A number of members of trucker convoy who occupied Ottawa for three weeks in Jan-Feb 2022 in later court hearings referred to their “First Amendment rights”, to which the judge responded, “What’s that?”
Your haters forcing you into a redoubt with your more noxious fans and you living off of the conflict as you get more extreme is a common occurrence nowadays. Michael Tracy and Glenn Greenwald come to mind.
Agree Peterson is a charlatan. The only reason he remains a public figure is that he is one of the few voices with enough intelligence and ability to articulate to be called a right wing intellectual. I’d argue outside his sphere of clinical psychiatry, he is thoroughly intellectually dishonest and makes poor arguments, sometimes seemingly in bad faith.
But in his field of psychiatry, he is apparently quite reputable and accomplished (including his work surround Jung ahem.) Jungianism is not quackery. While many of his theories are controversial, he undoubtedly advanced both the science of psychiatry and modern spiritual conceptions, which science is unequipped to handle. You might call anything spiritual “quackery” as none of it can be proven…but then we’ve just written off essential human questions like “what happens to our consciousness when we die?” and “do we have free will ?” And “where did the universe come from?” Is it quackery to theorize about such even tho there are no provable answers to such questions? I don’t think so… the problem is when people use these to exploit others, rather than help explore these deep questions cooperatively. Cheers
Peterson's field is Psychology, not Psychiatry. Both are legitimate fields, but Psychology also happens to be a field at the center of science's replication crisis. Meaning, I don't think Psychology is fundamentally fraudulent, but it happens to be full of fraud these days.
On Psychology, Peterson seems to be a firm spreader of the notion that IQ is an inheritable, largely immutable thread, and the most important predictor of success in human beings, all notions that have been thoroughly debunked by serious scientists and are also kept around for ideological reasons, be it overt white supremacy or the adolescent need of some public intellectuals to present themselves as contrarian purveyors of forbidden knowledge (people like Stephen Pinker or Sam Harris).
Going back to JBP, it is also curious that before his career as a public intellectual himself, he was promoting a self help program he called Self Authoring, which promised all kinds of personal improvement. I have no idea if it worked or not, but what I find most notable is that the idea that you can improve through engaging in a program like this is fundamentally at odds with his views on IQ:
If Self Authoring can make you more successful in life, then it either increases your IQ (in which case IQ is isn't inheritable and immutable) or it doesn't (in which case IQ cannot be a significant predictor of success). The third option, in which Peterson's views on IQ are correct (which they aren't!), would mean that he's knowingly peddling a system that can't work.
Regarding the big questions and whether or not engaging in them is quackery, I'd recommend you listen to the Conspirituality podcast, as it threads this very line (among others) very well.
Yeah, but psychiatry is almost entirely quackery and human experimentation anyway =P It would be fairly safe to posit Jung as anti-institutional-psychiatry and his material as generally surpassed in a professional clinical sense by MBSR, DBT, etc.
Not only a charlatan but a particular breed of charlatan that resonates especially on the far right, as you point out. Reading this, I also remembered a 2018 book review by Pankaj Mishra of Peterson's famous "12 rules," where Mishra called out the fascist themes in Peterson's book: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2018/03/19/jordan-peterson-and-fascist-mysticism/
Mishra points to the same mix of occultism, half-science, and snake oil that you call out here and notes the direct appeal people like Peterson make to "ethnic-racial chauvinists."
Mishra's 2017 book, The Age of Anger, is worth a read as well. It's an exploration of how the rise of figures like Peterson (and of course Trump, Modi, Orbán, etc etc etc) and the cults that surround them is all a perverted reaction to modernity itself.
Peterson’s costumes look like runners up for the sixth Dr Who’s outfit.
It’s been interesting to see the right wing ecosphere and plenty of mainstream media outlets treat post-coma JP as if nothing changed - I didn’t like him before the coma, but he’s increasingly incoherent and belligerent now (his recent tweeting style makes me wonder if he fell off the wagon).
It will always be my greatest shame that I took Peterson seriously for almost 2 years, from his coming out party at the 2016 "freedom of speech" rally when he first went viral (which I later learned was driven by fake outrage based on a completely false reading of the law being protested), to the first time I saw him on a Prager U video complaining about "post modern neo marxists".
I took a lot of IDW guys seriously, and it always amuses me to hear them complain about being cancelled or taken out of context, because every single time it was their own words in their own context that made me realize their critics were right and I was wasting my time with them.
PS: I think either "his" or "Peterson's" has to be removed from this sentence:
"The content of his Peterson’s discourse is again identical with that of a classical charlatan: "
Nice piece. I just want to argue that the hawking of supplements online isn't just the province of charlatans. Not sure what you think about Lex Fridman, but he advertises supplements. A basketball podcast I like owned by the NYT advertises supplements. The Ezra Klein Show advertises supplements. It's odd but it probably speaks more to us all being marks than any one pod dealing in snake oil salesmanship.
Vitamins and other dietary supplements are such a core part of American capitalism that you have to distinguish between the various levels of quackery. There are supplements and then there are SUPPLEMENTS. The latter includes boner pills, anti-aging sera, brain pills, etc.
It's all on a big spectrum, and there is as far as I know very little evidence that any of them do much of anything. But the scope of the claims varies, as does the evagenlism of the people doing the hawking.
Lex Fridman is definitely a charlatan.
Was “AI doomerism is a form of AI boosterism” your point @Pablo? Curious to know why you think Lex Fridman is a charlatan.
Oh, I had never encountered this maxim, but I had definitely come to this realization years ago (during a previous Machine Learning hype cycle). I love this formulation though, thank you.
There is definitely that, but also just the general Joe Rogan-ish strategy of bringing on quacks and letting them talk unopposed, presenting yourself as neutral and rational but having a clear bias in your interview selection, the overall Scientism vibe and "oh the humanities" attitude.
On second thought, I think Charlatan is too much of a word, given John's exhaustive dissection, and he clearly lacks the flair of a Peterson. Fridman is more your run of the mill grifter, exagerating his affiliation to MIT, trying to pass pay to publish papers as peer reviewed, etc. He's halfway between Sam Harris and Dave Rubin, if you ask me.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Not that you're trying to convince me, but since I brought Lex up I'll stump for him a bit.
I've mostly come to Fridman for AI — not sure how qualified he is, but to this layman's ears he does a decent job of eliciting interesting + thoughtful interviews while threading the needle between conversant and humble.
I've read Reddit threads about his MIT experience, to me it seems like reasonable self-promotion. The Tesla paper seems somewhat strange, but it doesn't impact my take on what he's doing now. I didn't love the RFK Jr interview, but that's the only one I've listened to that I thought was pretty worthless. But most of the rest that I've listened to have some value for me.
I consider someone who doesn't deliver on value they've promised a grifter. I don't think he's in that category. Speaking on something and knowing about it often take different skills, and for me the humility he defaults to goes a long way, even if it's exaggerated.
"I consider someone who doesn't deliver on value they've promised a grifter."
Considering that he used his (exaggerated) credentials to start a podcast ostensibly about AI and has gradually turned it into a platform to discuss basically whatever but with a marked bias towards reactionary politics, I would say it does fit the bill.
You may find the label of reactionary politics exaggerated, but it is hard to find a different thread joining some of his most "outside the box" guests like RFK Jr, Ye, and Bibi Netanyahu.
Also, the aforementioned technique of basically giving an unopposed platform to his guests makes him a bad interviewer, an implied promise not delivered.
I think that's a fair read, but I see his promise in a different way. To me it seems like open-source idealism is the common thread through all of his guests. While he did have Bibi on and give him space, on the next pod he had gay Israeli humanist Yuval Noah Harari on for about twice the time. Ye and RFK Jr are people who already have platforms, who are heard — I think this open source idealism is a baseline belief that wanting to take part in a conversation is the only real requirement for being part of that conversation. The corresponding part of that belief (which Lex and George Hotz sort of get into about 2 hours in on the ep I'm listening to now, #387) is that the good people outweigh the bad, these people have more ideas that are good for the world than bad, and that these good ideas will naturally win out on a level playing field.
I've heard some valid crits of this format of intellectual exploration, but it seems pretty present in the world of programming types, which is a powerful faction. I appreciate an unvarnished view from the perspective of a well connected one like Lex, whose temperament I enjoy. I think grifters are intellectually dishonest, not people who believe different things than me or the majority.
Happy to entertain any holes in this formulation, which comes from a fairly Lex-sympathetic viewpoint. I've only listened to about 10-15 eps, he's my favorite podcaster atm, and I haven't gotten bored of him yet.
Cue 'AI doomerism is a form of AI boosterism'.
The entire paradigm of harvesting your audience as an advertising base instead of a subscriber or customer base is that they have more money than sense. Ironic self-own by the audience in supposedly erudite discussions.
Ed P beat me to it with his rebuttal of your statement "...quackish conceptions like Jungianism..." I couldn't agree more. While I don't agree with *everything* Jung wrote- (he was a human being after all, thus some of his ideas and statements are very questionable) he went much further than Freud was willing to go, and strove very hard to apply a scientific and empirical approach to areas of the mind and human culture that have yet and may never be fully explained by Science as we know it today. Labeling anything that can't be proven by western science as illegitimate or "quackish" is equally close-minded as Peterson or any other "thinker" and strongly suggests your faith in science as the one and only truth, i.e., it is superior and final. The same may be said for any believer of any faith or philosophy, and is equally close-minded. Ironically, Peterson's belief in Göttingen anthropology was and is still maintained by some as "scientific".
Cool, he was also a real dipshit and it's telling that his work is so easily misused by psychologically abusive people. You might want to find a new idol.
Yes, Jung is on the cutting edge of mental healthcare in this forward-looking year of 1923…
Nice! Also-ran: Dr. Oz!
I don’t know who “Dr. Oz” is, but what about that New Jerseyite who lost to John Fetterman?
Physician are usually the ones that battle charlatans, because there are many around, I found interesting charlatans in medieval Islam. Physicians have always tried to demarcate themselves from the Other, whom they labeled as a "charlatan." Certain groups of society, including women and Jews, were an especially convenient target. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15965287/
I found this article interesting because Muslim doctors would target women and Jews because they felt threatened by them. I don’t know if this article is true, but definitely it’s possible that women in science could appear more threatening in that period.
I didn't have the word charlatan on hand to describe Jordan Peterson. I could spot the angle he was working from 20 miles in pitch darkness. I've just referred to him as the Incel Whisperer.
Peterson comes from the modern fashoid camp of masculinism. Fashoid refers to classical fascism of the 20th century, rooted in nationalism, as well as 21st century camps that mimic the psychology of fascism (white supremacy and theocracy are the others).
Masculinism is a nationalism of manhood. Rhetorically, it is frame-flipped feminism (females are the dominators, oppressors and usurpers; males are the victims). The masculinist's ressentiment is that women are the cause of their torment. Masculinism points to a pre-feminism world as an idealized, mythologized state of manhood. Feminism is trickery, and any social gains women have made in the economic, social and sexual sphere could only come at the expense of men. LGBTQ+ rights are seen as puppets of feminism to further divide men from their sexuality.
The masculinist worldview is distinctly fascist: the fantasy of the hero, warrior and master; the valorization of struggle; hierarchy as predestined; as well as essentialism.
This book sounds fascinating, looked into it and there's a downloadable copy on white paper here:
https://archive.org/details/the-power-of-the-charlatan-1939/page/n7/mode/2up
This essay is insightful and funny (the harlequino quote is gold). It's right up there with the Enigma of Peter Thiel.
Peterson's clothes, oh my where to begin. If you watch WWE, Peterson's wardrobe looks like the stuff Seth Rollins thought was too much even for him.
Another great piece. Thanks! Totally reminded me of Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World... and weirdly Tim Ferris' 4 Hour Work Week... which I gotta admit seduced me for way longer than it probably should have. Ferris is another supplement hawker (although I don't think he's political, but it's been a long time since I touched base there) and I remember trying quite hard to figure out how to get in on the $$ action. But mostly I enjoyed the fantasy he presented (and the critique of workism, which tbf still holds up). But the supplement stuff, money for old rope as they say. It's an enticing pitch for sure. Anyway, hope you have a great vacation and looking forward to reading the book when it's done!
A moron seducing an audience of morons by talking about a 'sexual marketplace' as an excuse to peacock like an 8-year-old who's obviously going to turn gay. It's men like him that make it so important to treat addiction as a character flaw.
I guess it makes sense that his entire bag is a lack of self-control in an era with more demands on our attention span and vagal tone than ever before.
Though it does beg the question of what Oprah is/how you can be a 'good charlatan'.
I don’t think Dr. Peterson is gay. He doesn’t have nearly enough Botox.
Also I’m pretty sure the currently preferred term for “moron” is “developmentally disabled”.
Anyway comparing JP to a developmentally disabled gender-nonconforming 8-year-old is unfair to developmentally disabled gender-nonconforming 8-year-olds.