Friday, April 15, 2022

Analysing a Long Tirade by Jordan Peterson


Here is his tirade:

The Biggest THREAT To Our Society WE MUST FIGHT Against | Jordan Peterson's BRUTAL Speech
18th of March 2022 | Pursuit of Meaning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6VDgysKmtU


Here is my analysis, time signatures (like the first one, 2:32) meaning what he says at that point is what I am (usually) debunking:

2:32 "plight of other societies, throughout the history of mankind"

Ambiguous. Other than Western?

Or other than Modern Western, and that would include the society of Queen St. Bathilde who outlawed selling Christians as slaves and who thereby over time made slavery obsolete?

2:53 "when they live in what's so far the best of all possible worlds"

  • 1) "So far" and "what is" compared to what again? Is today's Western Civilisation better than the one of 13th C. France? Or is the Western Civilisation, including 13th C. France, better than extant alternatives?
  • 2) It would seem Mr. Peterson is confusing "possible" with "actual" ...


And the overall concept of "not a shred of gratitude" asks the question whether "the society we live in" is what you should be first and foremost showing gratitude to.

Above God? Above close family and friends? Above the ones one chose to learn from (without school compulsion interfering in the choice, except in contributing to decrease its efficacy)? Above the Christian faith and Church?

Well, that kind of demand for gratitude sounds pretty much like the Babylonian view, probably how Haman felt about Mordekai ...

3:01 Oh, "resentment" and "arrogance" are:

  • both of them emotions (so there is a purely emotive definition of arrogance, you need not look at the circumstances to see if someone's pride in what he has or scorn for what the other has can be objectively motivated - sounds too post-modernist for my taste!)
  • and some emotions are bad and some are worse than others ...


To Aristotle, every emotion has its correct place. Every one is bad outside that correct justification.

But if we humour the point of view, it seems Mr. Peterson sounds a bit resentful in this speech. Against post-modernists as well as against people who are "5 % post-modernist" but who in crowds contribute to post-modernism prevailing.

If in twenty people are each 5 % post-modernist, either they have different 5 % of Derrida and therefore do not constitute a crowd, least of all one capable of imposing him - or they are sharing the same 5 % of Derrida and therefore not sharing the other 95 % of Derrida, and their crowd is therefore not overall post-modernist. Or there are cases between the two.

People who do impose post-modernism are people who together and each of them have more than 5 % of Derrida - or of some other post-modernist.

"resentment, arrogance and deceit"

Deceit is not an emotion, it is an act.

JP isn't mixing apples and oranges, he's mixing apples and orange juice.

3:42 "that even a building like this represents"

Picture shows the building type that is easier to distribute among shareholders of Blackrock than among normal people owning a building in a normal way.

Absolute wealth can reach a point where it is absolute insurance of someone's very top heavy power over someone else.

4:34 Some people don't agree with letting me speak. Or at least with allowing my speech to actually reach the public at large.

And I very certainly do believe in logos and in the individual. However, I do not believe in individual-ism, in making every right and title centred on an individual as opposed to a community. I believe the 1860's seeing an increase in individual rights at the detriment of some communal ones, has caused impoverishment.

4:48 "you are an exemplar of x" (post-modernism) is different from "you owe gratitude to x" (JP) exactly how?

If JP thinks I am an ungrateful traitor for not upholding all and sundry parts of Modern Western culture, and a Black Postmodernist thinks I'm a privileged White for being part of Western culture, how is one of them more or less Babylonian or collectivist than the other?

5:30 The "working class" saw its standard of living elevated as a working class after decades and centuries, but initially came into being as industrial working class by individually getting their standard of living in artisan and rural ownership degraded considerably.

5:43 I don't think you can make Yugoslavia responsible for the failings of Stalinism.

Note, I don't like Yugoslavian attitudes to education and Christianity and I am happy Croatia and Slovenia are now free.

But the oppression of thought went along with a modest prosperity of food and buildings, on the poorer side, but not a disaster - and the murderous part started after this was rejected.

One cannot compare this to the Holodomor.

And everyone who is against Capitalism is not necessarily a Marxist. He can be a Syndicalist. He can be into Albert de Mun and René de la Tour de Pin (two men who are to Christian trade unionism what another Albert and René are to comic books). And in case you don't know, the prosperity of a company like Loréal over the years comes from the Syndicalist heritage of the latter, via Action Française. He can be a Fascist, and there are Fascisms that didn't fail - like Franco's.

6:42 "you don't apologise and you don't back down"

What is it you'd like other groups than your version of Conservatism to do?

What is it we would need to do before God on a day like Good Friday?

How is dialogue preserved? By some people admitting guilt and apologising. I prefer if it's the right ones who admit guilt and to my taste, people like JP are among these right ones. He's resentful of people who are resentful of parts of the world we live in.

He's an inspiration for the kind of legislation Russia has against "hooliganism" - meaning disrespect for society.

Some societies do need to be disrespected, and since Adam, this applies to some degree to every one of them.

A good society can not only deal with those disrespecting it, but also learn from them (or at worst pretend to) ... recall that time when an English King stood with the back naked in a Cathedral and got scourged, like Christ on the pillar, for having contributed substantially to the murder of St. Thomas Beckett? Catholics attributing miracles to him were lucky that they lived under a Catholic (more or less) kingship and not under a disciple of JP.

7:36 That 80 % of theses aren't cited means what?

That a few examples of each thesis dutifully are bought means what?

Well, it means among other things that someone who is not a Neo-Marxist but who manages to pass a thesis also gets into the library and can be consulted.

It also means, some subjects are overfunded, and I'd gladly cut down JP's subject, namely psychology.

And when it comes to tax money, I'd be happy for a society in which people were not forced to attend sessions with psychologists and psychiatrists whom they don't think they need, and this obviously funded not by their paying voluntarily the fee, but by tax money or by them being charged the fee, like families in China are charged the bullets.

Some people in France speak of a foreign invasion in relation to the number of Mosques and of Halal Restaurants ... wait a minute, no one thinks France is occupied because of all the number of shrinks that can be seen having offices in Paris about as frequent as bakeries?

8:19 You want to defund OISE?

Sounds like an option - if you agree to homeschooling, unschooling and private schools. As I recall, JP, unfortunately, doesn't.

A clientele is forced into institutions paid by tax money.

If I shall be grateful to Swedish schools for teaching me nearly excellent French, why should I not also be resentful for them pushing me into what may probably have been what is called "clinical depression" through the bullying I went through? People have started to get aware of bullying - but have not taken the radical anti-bully option of saying : a bullied person's dad can take him or her out of school, without stating the reason, and a bully who's caught can be thrown out of school without a long process, since that particular type of education is an option, but neither a strict obligation, nor a strict right. (If anyone calls me a Neo-Marxist for saying this, he hasn't read Marx' and Engels': "10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c." - please note : "all children in public schools" - no children working at the farm, no children sweeping the floor of the master of their own future trade, no children homeschooled, no children schooled in private schools).

9:48 Note JP's tirade against freedom "it's not the kind of thing that makes people happy, it makes them troubled ..." ... yeah, I think Stalin would have been fairly proud of JP.

Freedom is a prerequisite for things that make one happy. Freedom is the prerequisite of responsibilities freely chosen and not just foisted on one.

For instance, if a boy of 14 and a girl of 12 are not free to marry and together educate their children, that's one freedom they lack, that's one source of happiness they lack and that's one source of income for people like JP when they deal with their frustrations, unless it's the undertaker who does so. Dito obviously for quitting school and starting a job (employment or own business, the latter normally less available in this age group, but not impossible) which is a normal prerequisite for caring for one's family.

King Louis IX married a girl of 12 or 13 (I've seen both figures, they didn't have modern statistics back then) and this was not because he was a jerk - he was a saint, canonised by the Church - and also not by abusing royal privileges of being "above the law" - it was absolutely within canon law. And some people have pretended this was of course not very common, it was extremely rare, people saying this have been conservatives ... well, they take their stats from England 1820, not from France around 27th of May 1234.*

I have taken other stats** from the great-great-grand-parents of Marie-Antoinette and a generation before (available on wiki) and got one in seven ladies married before 16. It was not extremely rare as they said.

10:03 "that you shoulder the responsibility of the freedom"

Fine ... there is a very old synonym for shouldering the responsibility, and that is marriage. When exactly did JP start advocating for lowering the marital age and for fewer people studying and more marrying young?

* Som JP-minded jerk goes nuts about my citing a fact from wikipedia. Or referring to a statistic which I have taken by painstakingly going over article after article on wiki, extracting exactly the relevant information, when a man married a woman, and getting the next one, for the article on the man or the article on the woman, by looking up the father and the mother and in each or one of these the year in which the persons married. This type of research argues I am a lazy slop, too pampered to look at the original works of reference - of which only little would be available on the internet, therefore blocked from one who researches from a position of homelessness. I had to rewrite the date and the ensuing sentence.

** Here is the article:

Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : A Generation or Two More Back
https://filolohika.blogspot.com/2021/11/a-generation-or-two-more-back.html

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