T.C. said:I believe he's a social Darwinist.
Well, wiki says the following about social Darwinism:
Social Darwinism, term coined in the late 19th century to describe the idea that humans, like animals and plants, compete in a struggle for existence in which natural selection results in "survival of the fittest."
Which is another distortion, because apparently Darwin meant something else as well, as revealed from works by Peter Kropotkin:
Kropotkin's most famous book, Mutual Aid, maintains that cooperation within a species has been an historical factor in the development of social institutions, and in fact, that the avoidance of competition greatly increases the chances of survival and raises the quality of life. He contended that mutual aid is a factor that is both biological and voluntary in nature, and is an enabler of progressive evolution. Without it, life as we know it could not exist. This can be also seen in the animal kingdom. [...]
The naturalist, Thomas H. Huxley, championed the philosophy of Hobbes in Kropotkin's day, particularly in his 1888 essay, The Struggle for Existence, which promoted an ideology that saw struggle, fighting, and competition as the most important tenets in the survival and evolution of human society. Kropotkin asserted that Huxley's interpretation of Darwinian theory was misconstrued and inaccurate, and viewed Huxley's school of Hobbesian arguments as "taking possession of Darwin's terminology rather than his leading ideas" (Kropotkin 1989, 78).
Another source:
In his seminal publication Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin mentioned two forms of struggle – the first one direct and pits organism against organism in a fight for limited resources, the second what Darwin termed metaphorical that pits organism against the environment, a battle that leads to cooperation between organisms.
Huxley took this first struggle of competition and emphasised that aspect – of organisms competing fiercely against each other. Later, social darwinists took this view and reflected it in human society. We now have many products of this thought-line in modern society in areas such as classical microeconomics, business models and our constant striving for scarce money resources.
Kropotkin, on the other hand, emphasised Darwin’s second aspect of struggle. In his study of animal societies in Siberia, he found little evidence of competitive struggle and more evidence of organisms cooperating to find resources to survive. It could be that his views were informed from a situation where resources were thin and that organisms needed to cooperate to survive rather than the Malthusian opposite of many organisms competing for resources that are somewhat more abundant. Kropotkin also identified that the more advanced species were ones that cooperated more and that “the unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay”.
So, knowing that Peterson is very familiar with Russian literature and writers, what "Darwinism" he subscribes to? Huxley's version or Kropotkin's?