Jordan Peterson: Gender Pronouns and Free Speech War

I think that one of the main problems with Jordan Peterson is something that is quite common and can happen to a lot of people, which is: the lack of applied knowledge.
Exactly, lack of applied knowledge, or lack of knowledge altogether as Laura pointed out earlier in regards to the Israel-Palestine conflict. It's like he is really smart, so with little data he can come up with great insights. That works sometimes but it has its limits, and in the end there's so much you can comment on this or that Bible passage without confronting the fact that part or most of it is disinfo.

He knows his Bible well, but did he ever read about the origins of the Bible, what parts came from which tradition, which ones were propaganda of the times and so on?

So he approached the debate with Zizek in the same fashion. Instead of actually trying to understand what Zizek was saying before the debate, he just reviewed the Communist Manifest and proceeded to criticize it in front of Zizek, to which Zizek replied "Yeah, I agree with you". :lol:

And now it's the same with Palestine. He just got the opinions of his pro-Israel friends and then proceeded to see what great insight he could come up with that 'info', instead of actually doing the minimal amount of research to get a valid insight. And because the opinions of his pro-Israel friends confirm his 'insights' of his superficial reading of the Bible, well then it must be true.

In short, Jordan Peterson didn't do his homework.
 
Well, I did finally watch the video, and I think it was made to look deliberately ugly. I think he/they wanted to portray that the ideologies of the ones mentioned in the video, like Foucault, lead to an ugliness, which we are seeing today.

It is almost like an Economist cover, only in reverse, with the symbolism involved.

...Or is it Trump derangement syndrome in reverse. I don't know, but it is surely unsettling to see what is happening to people now, on both sides of the spectrum.

What I disliked the most was his 'Taco Gulag' uniform. What's the deal with that? Seems like a not-so-subtle contempt for everyday working people. Pretty standard fare for the intellectual elite, but surprising from a psychologist who has made his living counselling people in that exact same situation - trapped in a dead-end job and maybe burdened by debt and bad habits with little hope for advancement. Instead of compassion for the masses who have been subject to a parasitic financial class throughout history, cheap laughs I guess?

IMO the main distinction between intellectuals on the right and on the left is the way they ascribe responsibility for societal ills. For conservatives, it's mostly personal responsibility and so top-down or legislative institutional change is almost taboo. For liberals, it's mostly institutional responsibility and any talk of personal change or philosophical understandings of the self and suffering is blaming the marginalized for their own suffering. The conservative blindspot then is that they miss that sometimes there are definitely institutional problems that could probably be most addressed on macro-scale change to prevent ponerization, like China's targeting of corporate crime, and state subsidies for housing, education, etc. The liberal blindspot is that sometimes when someone is down and out, it's mostly their fault and no amount of institutional support will change their situation and can even encourage evil to taking root in one's own personal life by creating dependency on the state and a victimhood mentality.

Sure, some millennial working in a Taco Gulag can probably benefit from some self-improvement just like the rest of us, but that doesn't mean that the messed up reality of the financial oligarchy and its MSM spellbinders just disappears.

At the end he masks up and gets ready for a riot, suggesting that the working class is deeply connected with antifa & BLM. In reality, a lot of those who make up those groups prolly aren't just your everyday worker in the fast food industry, there are also a lot of misguided university-indoctrinated youth led by CIA or FBI instigators.

But then, that's the problem with propaganda, which this video clearly is - it doesn't reflect reality. It's more like a 'two minutes hate' for conservatives. Some of the anger is directed in the right direction, at postmodernist intellectuals, but in general it comes off as a tasteless piece of garbage.
 
I think JP's been working on a book called We Who Wrestle With God or something.

I did a quick search about this and found that JP first(?) revealed this in a tweet on Nov. 3, 2021. I can't find the book so I don't think it's out (yet?).

I looked a little more and found a couple of snips from larger lectures that may explain the source of the title (of course all these stem from his lecture Biblical Series XIV: Jacob: Wrestling with God uploaded Nov. 27, 2017).

This first video was uploaded Apr. 19, 2022, but I don't know if the date is correct for the lecture itself. It's not from one of JP's pages and has been edited for emotional effect. The text is my reconstruction from the auto-generated transcription.

Israel, Those Who Wrestle With God (4:02 minutes)

There's another thing, too, that I learned when I was going through these biblical lectures. It was a fascinating thing to do. It was the story of Jacob who became Israel, and Jacob was a real trickster, you know. He was a morally ambiguous figure, to put it mildly, and he tricked his older brother out of his birthright. He was full of tricks and he had a lot of tricks played on him too, and maybe learned something as a consequence. Anyways, after running away from his brother, who had murderous thoughts and for good reasons, for like about 20 years, maybe it was only 14, but doesn't matter. It was a long time. He decided that he would go back and try to make peace and he came to this river. He sent his family across the river along with his belongings- and partly as an offering to his brother, a peace offering- and he had a dream. And he dreamt that he wrestled with an angel all night and that the angel was God. And ... he won!

Which is very strange because, well, first of all he was a trickster figure, you know, like he wasn't your most upstanding moral creature. He wasn't Noah for example. And second, well, it was God! You know? It’s like if you're gonna wrestle with someone and lose, there's an opponent that's likely to take you out. And it's a very interesting story because what it does indicate, what's so cool about it, you see, Jacob's name is changed at that point, to Israel. And Israel means those who wrestle with God. Then that's so, that blew me…

That’s one of the things I love about studying old stories is, now and then, you come across a piece of one and you see into it, you know, you see down into the depths that characterizes- it's very difficult but it happens sometimes, and it just flattens you, you know. To think that if Israel … is the chosen people of God, that’s the hypothesis, and what Israel means is those who wrestle with God … that seems to me to be such a hopeful idea because, well, everyone does that to some degree. I mean, you do that in your life. [it sounds like a 'removal' edit was done here] Because who the hell are you and what do you know? You know? You're struggling all the time with, well I would say, with good and evil. When you're struggling with yourself you’re struggling with the world. To portray that as 'wrestling with God' that's perfectly reasonable from a metaphoric perspective. And the idea that that’s what characterizes the true people of God is that willingness to wrestle, that’s really something because it … kind of indicates that you're here as a contender. You know? You're not here to be happy, you're not here to be complacent, you're not here to be materially satisfied- not that that would be possible anyways- but that you're here to contend with the structure of reality. Right? And that's what will satisfy you because there's something to you. You know? You're not weak and nothing. There's something to you.

And God only knows how much, how hard you need to be pushed in order to go beyond where you are but, you know, to some degree, if you have a choice, you know, it's not that uncommon that what we'll do is choose to be pushed to the limit, especially when we're at our best. We think, “Well, where's the limit? It's here. Maybe I can manage that. I’m going to push myself right to the damn limit. Then I'm going to push myself a little bit over just to see if it's possible.” And if that happens, then you know you emerge with the sense of triumph. “I'm now more than I was.” Right? And maybe that's what you're here to be is to be more than you were. Right? To push those limits. And to do that you contend with the world. You wrestle with God. You don't casually say: “I believe.”

If JP is saying Jacob was a trickster and not a morally sound person, whose name was changed to Israel, wouldn't Those Who Wrestle With God be against God?

This next clip is on the same topic and is from JP's official 'clips' page. It was uploaded July 17, 2023, so it might be from a lecture from around that time.

The very first thing that struck me was the lack of his usual energy that I'm used to seeing. He starts out with slavery being wrong but saying the reasons behind knowing it's wrong are not so obvious. He goes on to state that Marxists complain about slavery constantly but, within the confines of their ideology, questions why they believe slavery is wrong if, to believe in the idea of slavery, one must believe the individual is sovereign. He then moves to the Exodus story. Then from 1:57 - 6:41 (again, my reconstruction from the auto-generated transcription):

It's Okay To Wrestle With God (9:05 minutes)
https//www.youtube.com/watch?v=OetYaHFJw1

God tells Moses that the Israelites need to be free. Now, by that time we also know something about Israel.

So, I learned this. I did a series of biblical lectures in 2017 and I learned that the name Israel means “those who wrestle with God.” And that just flattened me when I learned that because Israel is regarded as the chosen people. And it's so interesting that the chosen people are those who wrestle with God. I think, “Well, what does it mean to ‘wrestle with God’?” Well, it comes from a story of Jacob. Jacob wrestles by a river, before he goes to meet his brother, who he betrayed, he wrestles with God on the banks of a river- God, an angel, it's not exactly clear in the texts, it’s often interpreted as ‘God’- and God breaks his hip or dislocates it. But Jacob survives the encounter although his leg is damaged after that, and then he's renamed Israel and he'll be the father of those who wrestle with God. What does it mean to ‘wrestle with God’? … Those who believe in God, interestingly enough, it's those who wrestle with God, and I would say, well, that's what we all do because we all wrestle with meaning and purpose and significance and we all wonder about the reality of ethical endeavour we wonder about the difference between good and evil we were tormented by our consciences for not living up to our moral obligations. We shirk our responsibility, or don’t. We're wrestling … with good and evil. And you think: “Well why would you damage your hip if you were wrestling with God?” And I would say if you're wrestling with questions like that and all that happens is you dislocate your hip, you've got away pretty bloody easy because it can be a lot worse than that. And so I'd say, you know, who is God to break Jacob's hip? It’s like, no no, you got it backwards there buddy. If you're … torn into pieces by questions of ethical orientation, and generally those are the questions that tear us into pieces, then mere damage of that sort from which you recover, that's Mercy. That’s for sure.

… Israel. That's the people who are chosen by God but they're the people who wrestle with God. And then you think, “Well there's got to be an association between that and this idea of being called out of slavery.” And so I've been thinking about that. It's like the people of Israel are not to be enslaved. Why? Well, how do you determine the course of your life under conditions of duress? You think about it. You think painfully about it. You know? You search your conscience. You try to reconfigure your life. You think in every way you possibly can about the problems that beset you and maybe you talk over your problems with people that you love and you try to generate a solution in your discussion and you do that all honestly. And that's all wrestling and maybe you can't do that without freedom. Right? And so, if your highest moral calling, in some sense, is to wrestle with God, then freedom is a precondition for that because if you're doing what someone is telling you, which is what you would be doing if you were enslaved, then you're not wrestling with God, you're just doing what the tyrant tells you. And maybe it's necessary for this wrestling to take place so that we can continually orient and reorient ourselves towards what is good. … I thought about this partly because I've been thinking recently about the right to free speech and why you have that right. You know? Is it one right among many? It's often conceptualized that way. You're granted a set of Rights by the state, one of which is the right to freedom of speech. And why do you have that right? Well, so that you can pursue your own interests, let's say, so you can say what you want to say.

He then goes on to 'free speech' saying that he does not believe that the existence of the right of free speech is necessarily granted by the state because the state allows it, but rather it exists because the state that doesn't allow it, doesn't allow their people to think. (Yeah. This was kinda hard for me to sum up so it might not be right.)

At the end of the clip, @8:22, he sums up this portion with:
And so that seems to me, in accordance with this notion, that the people of Israel, if they're the people who wrestle with God, must be free because they can't do that wrestling if they're operating under compulsion … And it's necessary to wrestle in that manner to move forward because life is actually complicated and difficult. And so, unless you're able to contend with the conditions of your life in some deep manner, there's no possible way that you can move forward.

I was looking for something along the idea of 'stagnation' in the transcripts and came across these quotes.

Q: (L) Am I making any mistakes in managing the problem? Am I supposed to manage it?

A: Of course!! If you were not making mistakes, now that would be a problem!

Q: (L) I don't know what that means. As long as I am making mistakes, I'm okay?

A: Unless you would like to transit quickly to a higher density unilaterally!

Q: (L) What does that mean? I guess, if you don't make mistakes, you have stopped learning...

A: Because you have finished your lessons... "Time to move on."


Q: (L) Is there any thing that would help Linda at all with this? What does she need to see, if anything?

A: She will not see it until she stops struggling.

It sounds like JP stopped learning, became stuck and is now wrestling with god.

A: Wait and see. We would only ask “What profiteth it for a man to own the world when he loses his soul?”
...
A: Another way of saying it is “if you lock yourself in the old way, when the old way ends, it will take you with it into the pit.
 
I've just been watching some of the Peterson interview with Brand, and I've found some of the things he said to be surprising, and enlightening and very revealing about him.

He actually says, "The mistake the materialists made was to look for God in nature [...] If you're looking in nature, then you're not going to find God because that's not where he is. [...] We shouldn't be confusing God with what isn't God and one of the things the scientists and enlightenment types have done is to help us figure out where God isn't. [...] And the reductionist materialists who say there's no God in the material world, it's like, well yeah... and what's your point!?" He quotes Elijah as equating God with the little voice inside you, which Peterson interprets to mean conscience.

Firstly, this tells me a whole bunch about his perception of the world, which again highlights for me how much I take for granted my own perception of the world. How can you look at any manifest thing in this reality and not see God/intelligence in it? And this from a man who actually played for one of his university classes a computer generated animation of what's going on in a cell during DNA replication.

Secondly, I think this demonstrates that he maybe equates himself with God, or that God is something inside him and other people, and that's all there is to it. It's completely egocentric! What, the human spirit is the only thing that can be used as evidence of God? Good grief, look around you, man.

It appears as though Peterson thinks of himself as a believer in God, but doesn't consider the idea of intelligent design. How is that possible? Does he see religion and materialism as two different things that just coexist? The big bang happened and evolution happened, and then God was just inside people?

It shows how much one is lost in the fog of trying to put together the pieces of this reality when you don't have a strong metaphysical, ontological framework.

He's truly gotten lost in the Jewish, Old Testament view of reality. And he thinks he's a Christian?
Thanks for pulling that out.
IMHO, this clearly shows that JP was and is one of the reductionist materialists. When he talks about the practical world, there's no God for him there. It's a purely materialist philosophy that has its place in today's world but is woefully inadequate at providing a comprehensive understanding of the universe and man's place in it.

Any talk of religion is only from a sociological and cultural point of view.

He only brings out God when he needs to moralize. For him, God is merely a metaphor, a handy tool for getting his materialist points across. He had that famous moment where he did a Bill Clinton and said it depends on what "exists" means when asked if he believes if God exists.

Personally, I always liked the guy for his ability to put woke idiots in their place with simple logic, but that's more or less the extent of his usefulness to me.

I bought 12 Rules for my wife and I tried reading some, but I found there was not much in there that was actually useful to me. Also, he likes to say that he worps hard on being very precise with his language, but actually the way he speaks and writes is way to wordy. Again, evidence of his liking the sound of his own voice.

I wish him good luck and I hope he'll have some kind of epiphany, but I'm afraid that he's so far gone now that it would be terribly difficult for anyone to face all those lies he'd lead himself to believe.
 
It just baffles me that he doesn't undertake deep research into other areas than his own expertise. He certainly would not make psychological declarations without knowing his topic thoroughly. But then, maybe he doesn't? Maybe this situation has exposed that his research is not as deep as it should be even in his own field?

One aspect of psychology that I learned from Peterson was Piaget's theory of learning and development. It featured heavily in his early psychology lectures which were his best work and where he had the most knowledge and experience. At the time I was impressed as it seems very nice to have a basic schema to help unravel the complexity of childhood development and learning and I appreciated Peterson's teaching.

Previously, I recall Peterson saying he didn't necessarily have a genius memory, but instead had a large framework with which he gradually added layers of information. This reminded some of the "Mosaic consciousness" mentioned by the Cs which was seen as showing a certain greatness of his mind/being - affirmed by his "great soul". It seems now, similar to his beloved "dominance hierarchy" concept that he clings tightly to, these are somewhat rigid structures in his mind and, instead of utilizing them as rough frameworks with flexibility and sometimes reversibility, he becomes more entrenched in these patterns and eventually decays within them.

Ray Peat was a more left-centered and exploratory individual than Peterson and he spoke against the rigid, hierarchical development and learning championed by Piaget. In the article Intuitive knowledge and its development he mentions Piaget's "genetic epistemology".

It was in first reading this article that I first had some inkling of the rigidity and limitations inherent in Peterson's psychology worldview.

Peat mentions how: "Although the phrase "genetic epistemology" was coined by Jean Piaget, a major philosophical and scientific theme of the 20th century has been the idea that the "forms" of knowledge, for perceiving space, or logical relations, or language patterns, are derived from our genes, and that they are somehow built into the arrangement of our brain cells so that we spontaneously think in certain ways, and don't have the capacity to transcend the nature of our inherited brain. In that view, children have their own pre-logical way of thinking, and their thought (and language development) must proceed through certain stages, each governed by some "structural" process in the nervous system."

This is in contrast to Peat's understanding of learning and development where he believes that even:

"
The awareness of young animals is particularly impressive to me, because we know the short time they have had in which to learn about the world. Any instance in which a young animal understands a completely novel situation, in a way that is fully adequate and workable, demonstrates that it is capable of intellectual generalization.

Beyond that, I think animal inventiveness can teach us about our own capacity for inventiveness, which both the genetic and the behaviorist theories of knowledge totally fail to explain."

He gives examples of animals learning in novel situations and displaying complex creativity and inventiveness:

- "Spiders that build architecturally beautiful webs have been favorite subjects for theorizing about the instinctive mechanisms of behavior. When spiders were sent up on an orbiting satellite, they were in a situation that spiders had never experienced before. Spiders have always taken advantage of gravity for building their webs, and at first, the orbiting spiders made strange little muddled arrangements of filaments, but after just a few attempts, they were able to build exactly the same sort of elegant structures that spiders normally build. (My interpretation of that was that spiders may be more intelligent than most neurobiologists."

- "Nesting birds often swoop at people or animals who get too close to their nest. Early last summer, I had noticed some blue jays that seemed to be acting defensive whenever I went into one part of the yard. On a very hot day at the end of summer, a couple of plump jays were squawking and apparently trying to get my attention while I was watering the front yard, and I idly wondered why they would be acting that way so late in the year. I had gone around the house to water things in the back yard, and the birds came over the house, and were still squawking, and trying to get my attention. I realized that their excitement didn't have anything to do with their nest, and looking more carefully, I saw that they were young birds. As it dawned on me that they were interested in the water squirting out of the hose, I aimed the stream up towards them, and they got as close to it as they could. Since the force of the stream might have hurt them, I put on a nozzle that made a finer spray, and the birds immediately came down to the lowest tip of the branch, where they could get the full force of the mist, holding out their wings, and leaning into the spray so that it ruffled their breast feathers. Their persistence had finally paid off when they got me to understand what they wanted, and they were enjoying the cool water. As new young birds, I don't know how they understood hoses and squirting water, but it was clear that they recognized me as a potentially intelligent being with whom they could communicate.

- In conclusion, he notes that: "When the brains of such different kinds of animal work in such similar ways, in situations that contain many new components, I don't think it's possible to conclude anything except that intelligence is a common property of animals, and that it comprises "generalization" and much more. It's obvious that they grasp the situation in a realistic way. The situation has structured their awareness. Some people might say that they have "modeled the situation in their mind," but it's enough to say that they understand what's going on. With that understanding, motivations and intentions form part of the perception, since the situation is a developing process. Ordinarily, we say that we "infer" motivations and intentions and "deduce" probable outcomes, but that implies that the situation is static, rather than continuous with its origin and outcome. In reality, these understandings and expectations are part of the direct perception."

Before he passed, Ray Peat was correct about important topics such as the covid vaccine, Israel/Palestine, the deep state, 9/11, the war in Ukraine and the dichotomy of left/right thinking and generated opposition. These are all things Peterson has struggled to come to grips with. He would be unlikely to read someone like Ray Peat, however, as he is not credentialed in a mainstream manner in the way that Jordan respects, like Shapiro who graduating from Harvard.

Peterson focuses mostly on the fixed, narrow focus of our animal natures and social patterns as espoused by Piaget and others, often at the exclusion of the more creative, experiential model of thinking, being and learning.

He is of course correct in his narrow psychological assessment of situations and I learnt plenty from him, however, as many have mentioned, his knowledge has become stale and increasingly routinary - interestingly portrayed so well by Castaneda in the chapter of the predators mind.

Recently I have been reading another psychiatrist/self help guru Richard Hawkins. He is known for using kinesiological muscle testing for determining truth and uses his map of consciousness to model reality. His model is the inverse of Peterson's where "success" or increasing in power/moving up his hierarchy means moving into more non-physical dimensions such as increasing love and enlightenment with things that Peterson obviously covets such as fame and material success being either neutral or seen as largely negative. The Cs have recently stated that his method of obtaining truth is correct and his books are much more expansive, open, creative and unlimited than, as Gabor Mate described it, Peterson's repressed, negative, hierarchical view of psychology. I plan to do more of an expansion on Hawkins teachings once I have completed his books in another thread.

As a youngish Man when Peterson first hit the scene, I did perceive him as a Father figure, and it is terribly sad to see the way he has turned. As others have mentioned, at his best, he was prolific. I attended one of his live appearances and the atmosphere was electric, his presence was truly enlivening and he did certainly help many. Ultimately though, our focus must be higher and more creatively focused than simply "cleaning our rooms" and climbing dominance hierarchies. His teachings helped young men at a certain time in the past, but we are riding the wave and such rigid, hierarchical descriptions of life and thought are no longer fit for purpose in our reapidly changing world.

Peterson's somewhat rigid approach has robbed him of mental flexibility and emotional stability. This has led to his downfall. His reliance on officially certified thinkers, closed circle of sycophants, disgust for "conspiracy" theories, ignorance of history and lazy attitude to continual knowledge accumulation has pushed him close to the abyss.

Thankfully, as he has done in the past, I hope he will see the light and be able to pull himself through and maybe, just maybe, this forum may be able to help him.

 
But as many noted, at some point he became very repetitive. You cannott stay at the same level on the "esoteric journey" forever, because then you will fall. The only way to go is onwards and upwards. But it seems his unwillingness to move on and go deeper, including doing deep research and slaughtering sacred cows, has led to his (temporary?) downfall. Good intuition and a "great soul" are not enough. You also need loads of knowledge and the ability to listen and question yourself.

Comparing the heroic way how the majority of the Palestinians morally still stand strong, even in the eye of death, stay decent and faithful - and then observe JP's "stagnation/downfall" - IMO shows how essential it is - no matter what - to continuously be capable of questioning your own (temporary) beliefs.
"The only way to go spiritually is onward and upward." Thank you for the reminder.
 
I am totally distant from this discussion, especially from a cultural point of view so if I b*lls*it, trash it:-D. But watching the funny video of the Spanish guy considering JP a charlatan, and reading you, I was reminded of the wizard of oz. Could JP also be analyzed as something like a trickster?

I don't know that I'd call him a trickster, but more of a revolutionary. Not a revolutionary in the sense of someone great who overthrows an oppressive regime and saves the people who were living under it, but more a revolutionary in the sense of someone just as asleep, who has no idea what they're doing and has fallen under the influence of an ideology which allows them to have some sort of macrosocial effect on their reality in order to vent their feelings of powerlessness and anger.

It's the type of person that helped to lead Gurdjieff to his second 'unconquerable aim', which Laura once talked about in an old sott podcast, where she quotes from G.'s book, Life is Real Only Then, When I Am.:

G. said:
As a result of the memory in my automatic mentation of the sight of all sorts of terrors flowing from the violent events which I had witnessed, and finally from accumulated impressions arising from conversations with various revolutionaries in the previous several years [...] there had crystallised in me little by little, besides the previous unique aim, another also unconquerable aim.

This other newly arisen aim of my inner world was summed up in this: that I must discover, at all costs, some manner or means for destroying in people the predilection for suggestibility which causes them to fall easily under the influence of mass hypnosis.

Laura's analysis of the above was that G. realised that the revolutionaries themselves were as suggestible as everyone else, and all they can bring about is more of the same which has befallen humanity before.

Peterson is suffering from this same ailment: he's a would-be revolutionary with the predilection for suggestibility which causes him to fall easily under the influence of mass hypnosis.
 
Although disappointing, I understand what happened to Peterson and I'm not really surprised. I recall when I was learning about the Greek philosophers in school how mesmerizing it was to imagine these enlightened sages sitting on marble porticoes amongst the lyre music and amidst a rich mythological tradition, acting as a font of knowledge for things such as proper governance, scientific and mythical understanding, and methods of logical deduction. This was the wellspring of enlightened Western Civilization and our intellectual heritage. I had been out of school for a decade sniffing around different questions in my mind before I seriously considered the idea that Plato wasn't some sort of demigod.

Whereas this was only a small part of my education and a casual interest of mine, it seems Peterson built an entire academic career around the idea and became crystalized around an identity as a paragon and conservator of the classical Western value hierarchy. I remember a debate he was having with Sam Harris about the Bible, and Harris' argument was that since most of the Bible is demonstrably false, atheism was a more objective assessment of religion, while Peterson's main argument was that stories appeal to higher values in people and give life meaning whereas atheism can never do that and leads to a dead end. It took a while to process as they continued to talk past each other on this basic point, and I thought they were both right and they were both wrong in a way. While Peterson is right that the stories often have a moral that can appeal to a sort of higher calling, it is important to separate history from culture in order to maintain an objective focus. Peterson and the conservative intelligentsia commingle history with mythology because they are captivated with their cultural heritage and traditions to the extent that it becomes an external ideology which defines their sense of self. Harris is right insofar as this causes people to act on lies which are then used to justify atrocities that wouldn't occur in a more objective society, however saying that this proves atheism is certainly reaching a good bit on his part. My interpretation is that it is fine to take artistic license with stories in order to impart a moral, but it should be clear that it is a story or a legend, even if it is loosely based on factual events. History is much more rigorous and should only concern itself with facts that can be documented and deduced, and history itself often contains cultural morals, even though it is less entertaining than storytelling.

So Peterson's immense intellectual energy has been crystalized around the Bible as an authority on Western values and history, and until he hits rock bottom and has to refuse his "magnetic center," he will be trapped by that perception. Peterson is a bit like a focused laser which has can brilliantly illuminate an object within a concentrated area, whereas the forum has more of a "floodlight" approach which sends awareness out in many different directions. While the floodlight cannot illuminate any one area as brilliantly as the laser, the floodlight can light up an entire room where the laser does not.
 
I did a quick search about this and found that JP first(?) revealed this in a tweet on Nov. 3, 2021. I can't find the book so I don't think it's out (yet?).

I looked a little more and found a couple of snips from larger lectures that may explain the source of the title (of course all these stem from his lecture Biblical Series XIV: Jacob: Wrestling with God uploaded Nov. 27, 2017).

This first video was uploaded Apr. 19, 2022, but I don't know if the date is correct for the lecture itself. It's not from one of JP's pages and has been edited for emotional effect. The text is my reconstruction from the auto-generated transcription.

Israel, Those Who Wrestle With God (4:02 minutes)



If JP is saying Jacob was a trickster and not a morally sound person, whose name was changed to Israel, wouldn't Those Who Wrestle With God be against God?

This next clip is on the same topic and is from JP's official 'clips' page. It was uploaded July 17, 2023, so it might be from a lecture from around that time.

The very first thing that struck me was the lack of his usual energy that I'm used to seeing. He starts out with slavery being wrong but saying the reasons behind knowing it's wrong are not so obvious. He goes on to state that Marxists complain about slavery constantly but, within the confines of their ideology, questions why they believe slavery is wrong if, to believe in the idea of slavery, one must believe the individual is sovereign. He then moves to the Exodus story. Then from 1:57 - 6:41 (again, my reconstruction from the auto-generated transcription):

It's Okay To Wrestle With God (9:05 minutes)
https//www.youtube.com/watch?v=OetYaHFJw1



He then goes on to 'free speech' saying that he does not believe that the existence of the right of free speech is necessarily granted by the state because the state allows it, but rather it exists because the state that doesn't allow it, doesn't allow their people to think. (Yeah. This was kinda hard for me to sum up so it might not be right.)

At the end of the clip, @8:22, he sums up this portion with:


I was looking for something along the idea of 'stagnation' in the transcripts and came across these quotes.



It sounds like JP stopped learning, became stuck and is now wrestling with god.

I just read this piece by Laurent Guyenot, and it has a pretty good description of how Christians like Peterson end up worshipping Yahweh.

One man, in the second century AD, saw clearly that Jesus could not possibly be the son of Yahweh, that he was instead his archenemy. His name was Marcion. Scholars call him a Gnostic, because he taught that Yahweh was an evil demiurge, and Christ the good god coming down from Heaven to save us from Yahweh. Most texts we call Gnostics promoted this view, in one form or another. In the Apocryphon of John, also from the second century, Yahweh (or Yaltabaoth) is the first of a series of demonic entities called archons, who usurps the position of God by proclaiming: “I am a jealous god, there is none other than me.” Yaltabaoth and the other archons attempt to imprison Adam in the Garden of Eden, a false paradise. But Christ, who is the first aeon, sends Eve to Adam to release the light trapped in him, and lead him to eat the liberating fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

Modern scholarship has established that Gnosticism arose within Judaism, probably in Samaria. In the highly regarded opinion of Gilles Quispel, Gnosticism was a Jewish heresy before it was a Christian heresy. During the first three centuries there were Christian Gnostics and anti-Christian Gnostics, but all are Jews.[5] As a Jewish heresy, Gnosticism can be seen as a rejection by spiritual Jews of the materialistic and sadistic nature of Yahweh. Gnostics, however, still took their Torah too seriously and accepted the premise that, before becoming the god of Israel, Yahweh had been “God”, the creator of the world. In that sense, they were still under a biblical delusion.

In the Jewish infancy of Christianity, there was a struggle between Gnostic Christians and anti-Gnostics Christians. Marcion wrote the first evangelium and established the first organized ekklesia. It was still very strong in the early third century, according to Tertullian, who also tells us that the Gnostic teacher Valentinus almost became bishop of Rome (Against Marcion). Gnostics, relying on Paul’s teaching, believed that Jesus’s new covenant freed them from Moses’s covenant, but their enemies insisted on continuity, and claimed that the New Covenant (or Testament) fulfilled rather than contradicted the Old one. The anti-Gnostics ultimately prevailed, and the Jewish Tanakh became part of the Christian canon. That might have been a wise political move as long as the purpose was to convert Jews. But as Christianity became a Gentile religion, it resulted in Gentiles worshipping Yahweh along with Christ.

Christianity has given us the powerful story of Christ, the man who wanted to free Jews from their evil, ethnocentric god, and was martyred for it. But Christianity also became Yahweh’s Trojan Horse into Gentile civilization. The spirit and the teaching of Christ came to us mixed with the spirit and the teaching of Yahweh. The spirit of Yahweh is the spirit of mass murder: “The spirit of Yahweh came upon him (Samson), and he went down to Ashkelon, where he killed thirty of their men and despoiled them” (Judges 14:19). The spirit of Yahweh is in all Israel, now, stronger than ever before, fed by a century of bloodbaths orchestrated by Zionists.

In a book written under the pen-name Seymour Light, The Marcion Thesis, Revisited, which I recommend, Nick Kollerstrom (also author of the memorable Terror on the Tube) points out that, if we had to draw Yahweh’s portrait, he would have to be a dragon: he “rides through the heavens” (Deuteronomy 33:22) with his wings (Psalm 17:8, 36:8, 91:4), while “smoke rises from his nostrils, and from his mouth devouring fire” (Psalms 18:8 and Samuel 22:9). Yahweh also shares with the evil dragons of lore his lust for gold which he hoards in his dwelling place: “Mine is the silver, mine the gold!” (Haggai 2:8). (According to 1Kings 10:14, the amount of gold hoarded each year into Salomon’s temple was “666 talents of gold”). Like dragons, Yahweh is also a consumer of young virgins: thirty-two of them were offered to him after the slaughter of the Midianites, presumably burnt as holocausts together with the oxen, donkeys and sheep that were also part of Yahweh’s share (Numbers 31).

In the episode of Elijah’s contest with the prophets of Baal, Yahweh’s devouring fire is given as the definite proof that he is God: “You must call on the name of your god, and I shall call on the name of Yahweh; the god who answers with fire, is God indeed” (1Kings 18:24). How spiritual! It is Yahweh’s devouring fire that is now unleashed on Gaza.

You better realize it now: Yahweh, the god of Israel, is Satan.
 
What this all leads me to wondering is what kind of calibre of mind are we dealing with with the imminent arrival of Caesar into a nascent 4d world? I personally think this will happen inside ten years. What kind of mind understands the enemy, what makes it tick, and how to preserve liberty in an expanded reality? How to face up to an intractable foe, lacking remorse or even restraint? To face an Eye of Darkness, insatiable in its drive to control. That will require a remarkable mind. We're just laying the groundwork today, paving the way for a groundswell in the future, which of course asks that we pay due attention of both left and right, watching all prominent tendencies. We ought to be raising kids independently of the mainstream school system perhaps. I have no kids but I do have nieces and nephews growing up in the current climate and I kinda worry for them.

If you read Guyenot's back catalogue you find a strange clique of people who become entranced by a foreign power, why internalise a system of beliefs and commandments, who survive despite many hardships to thrive and prosper en masse. And they don't all see eye to eye vis a vis Israel today. I think the Jewish conscience will survive our current catastrophe and will remain a potent voice for good; low in numbers but strong on insight. Good will to those brave souls who dare to bear witness to the objective data.
 
Well, his spectacular missing the mark about many things and his recent fall notwithstanding, I think Jordan deserves a whole lot of credit.

As others have said, his message of basic morality, get your act together etc. has helped millions break free of nihilism and desperation, and awakened a new spark in them. It was a giant service to humanity.

(Yes, such moralizing can only go so far: as St. Paul/Ashworth said, the "law" can only ever be an intermediary step; but it's a crucial first step: it is through obeying a set of sound "rules" that we get in touch with the divine, by showing us our shortcomings and incapacity for consistent acting, by liberating us from nihilism while also producing a new crisis: the eventual realization that a) we are so mechanical that we can't even consistently apply simple rules and b) that this is not how it works anyway. This can then drive us towards a connection with the Higher, where true morality lies, which is relative to our individual life paths and the specific situations we find ourselves in. However, trouble begins when we stay at the level of moral rules and "absolute teachings": fall is guaranteed.)

His second great achievement was that he almost single-handedly killed New Atheism from the public consciousness: by showing that science and religion can be reconciled and indeed only make sense when taken together, and that you can think and talk intelligently about religion without having to accept silly dogmas. He had an earth-shattering effect in that regard, too.

Not to mention of course that he was the first guy with some institutional clout who stood up against the gender insanity and other aspects of wokeness, and did so brilliantly.

For me personally, and I think for many others, he also opened my mind to conservative/"right-wing" thought, which made me realize that there is a lot of merit in that tradition, and that there are many brilliant thinkers to discover here. That a lot of leftist and feminist thought is simply wrong; that there is greatness in Western civilization, a greatness worth taking seriously and preserving; and also that our individual roots and cultures are worth exploring, celebrating and taking seriously. The real kind of diversity. This is obviously not the whole picture/story, but a crucial one that I simply blocked myself from accessing because of preconceived notions. JP's lectures and interviews played a big part for me getting over that block.

It is also no mystery for me why the Cs called him a "Great Soul": the guy has a big heart, is smart, has a strong drive to help others, and was driven since an early age towards exploration and finding out the truth about the human condition; he suffered mentally and physically on his journey, but used this suffering productively. Eventually he found his life's mission, that everything before has prepared him for, and carried it out splendidly and (mostly) gracefully. I mean, that's the kind of stuff Great Souls do, no?

So yes, he has fallen hard, due to his own shortcomings and weaknesses, which were easy to exploit. But I think the reason why it's so infuriating and we all are kind of grieving for him is that he had such an impact on the world, including us, and we therefore feel connected to him (as do many others). It's hard to see someone like that fall.

He may not be the best researcher and most brilliant author, but he was certainly one of the most talented lecturers ever seen, and he had precisely the skillset needed to carry out his mission.

Indeed, he should have called it a day at some point. Instead, he allowed himself to be sucked into Twitter addiction and NeoCon circles. The whole thing is a tragedy and a car accident.

But thanks man for your service. Hope you will be able to stop your soul from further fragmentation and downfall.
 
Throughout all this I was wondering what kind of a person he would have been at home, as a father but also as a husband. I know they had a terrible time with all Mikhiela's early health problems. Also that their son would have lacked much attention due to this - which we can understand. His daughter certainly seems to have taken on board the not so good traits of Jordan it appears.
What I am really getting at is how was it for his wife? How was she really treated? I imagine him to have been quite a demanding husband due to his emotional instability and need for attention.
I wonder whether he actually ruled his household and his wife in quite the autocratic and authoritarian way. Possibly due to his inherent ego problems he may have been quite intimidating - even unconsciously.
Everyone supported him in his meteoric rise to success. (however that rare media stardom came about!).
Did they actually experience at home what he preached outside? Or was it a totally different ballgame? It always was in the back of my mind.
Especially concerning his wife's illness/cancer. It seemed to come out of the blue, or was it just kept from the media?
We all know Gabor Mate's book 'When the body says NO', and however much it devasted Jordan I hesitate to wonder was he more devasted that he had lost his rock? As his downfall stemmed thereafter methinks.
But also what caused her cancer in the first place? Could it have been the demands his success took on her health or psychological aspects behind the closed doors that we never hear about usually. I certainly do NOT wish to undermine his grief, nor the fact that he loved her.
Is what his daughter is doing now learned behaviour? Or is this her natural chosen pathway?
There are certainly some very dubious traits surfacing, handlers or not, as to this current bent for power/politics.
But also as I said much earlier on the War thread, I got the distinct impression that it does not appear to be the same J Peterson. He does not appear to be 'here', especially his eyes. Everything feels very 'distant' no matter what he rabbits or parrots.
But as has been rightly said - the soul knows anyway at a higher level, whether there was some acquiescence or otherwise.
Even in a coma.
I would guess that when Laura was doing her abduction and similar hypnosis regressions before, that Jordan's particular case may also have been found to be quite the same? Forms of memory manipulations etc.Even a 'walk-in'?
Or an extremely clever case of hiding his deep rooted beliefs throughout his whole career until this crazy emotional reactionary outburst, with no genuine remorse. Very odd. So many have said how uncharacteristic this was and how shocking.
Well only the C's have the objective answer.
 
I was reading an article based on this book, and I found something that I think might apply to JP:

There can be no critical opinion on a topic if you don't have a serious database in your head. Critical thinking is not a set of procedures that you can apply and improve regardless of the amount of knowledge. If students don't know the facts, they have nothing on which to think critically. To solve a problem, you need to know what you are talking about. It has long been established that top experts in one field are hardly better critical thinkers than laypeople in matters outside their expert domain, because they lack factual knowledge of those other fields on which to make expert judgments. You can be a Nobel laureate physicist, and a 10-year-old child has a more valuable critical opinion about football than you - because, for example, he knows more teams, players, results, knows football rules and moves better, and based on all those facts that are in his permanent memory, will more accurately predict the outcome of a game or assess the quality of a player than you, a genius physicist.

I think that JP thinks that he had discovered a scientific method which allows him to discern a truth about many topics, without having to do a homework of learning the facts about the topic that he is expressing his opinion, but there is no scientific method that would allow somebody to do that. You have to do your homework.
 
Thanks for that quote, @Persej. It's spot on, IMO.

As an anecdote, I recently noticed that I was thinking about a problem (in Linguistics) all wrong before, because I lacked more data. I assumed it was just me being unable to think critically, but once I collected more pieces of information, the problem became clearer. It was just a reminder to me of a) the importance of continuing gathering knowledge, never assuming that you can extrapolate what you know in one area to another so easily, and b), not giving up too quickly and beating yourself in the head, while doing the heavy work and seeing where that leads us.

Some of these intellectuals have a real problem with a), me thinks. Possibly having very little self-doubt too, and forgetting that they may be knowledgeable/smart in one area, but that that doesn't translate into being a genius in all domains.

It also reminded me of the book "Prehistory of the Mind", and the analogy of the mind being like a cathedral, with naves connecting different areas. Depending on the person, some areas are really well connected, while in others, it's more like "isolation chambers". Hence a person seemingly being very smart and grounded in one area, and dumb as a rock in others. A reminder of humility and an incentive to learn more! The sad thing is that that's NOT how a person with lots of "disconnected" chambers will see it (Dunning-Kruger effect and all). They'll assume they are thinking perfectly well about many issues they have no clue about. :headbash:

Just my 2 cents.
 
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