Thanks for your comment but I’ve seen way too many instances of Peterson ranting, and loudly demonizing people that he disagrees with to agree with you about him (e.g, vegans are part of a “crazy religion”). If he chooses his words so carefully, why does he so often contradict himself? For example, saying that you need to have your own house in order before you start tackling the problems of society, but then saying that MLK had a moral obligation to be a leader of the civil rights movement (even though he was a philanderer and entirely imperfect human being)?
If he’s so precise, why does he lump all feminists into the same category as Andrea Dworkin, a radical feminist from the 1970s when there are something like 17 subtypes of feminism? Why does he use lobsters as an example of how a dominance hierarchy is natural when we haven’t shared a common ancestor for over 700 million years and lack of seratonin affects lobsters in the exact opposite way that it affects humans? That’s not very precise at all. It’s creating an intellectual-sounding framework for your biases and shadow-based thoughts.
Peterson doesn’t yell in people’s faces. He’s more polite than that, but when he’s with people he thinks will be sympathetic, he has no issue with ranting about people who aren’t there to defend themselves. He is a very emotional man, and I think that disturbs him, because it doesn’t fit with the 1950s view of what masculinity is that he embraces. So, instead, he’s concocted an entire intellectual sounding framework that doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny in order to compensate.
He’s a fascinating guy, and I really enjoyed his lecture on the mythological foundation for our concept of God, but the man has a whole lotta issues that those who emotionally respond to him seem quite willing to gloss over. I don’t think it’s so much that they want to be Spock like. It’s more that they have a lot of the same emotional triggers that he does, and because those make them feel uncomfortable also, they glom onto someone who puts a better-feeling spin on them by giving them an intellectual-sounding explanation. Rather than those triggers being a place of uncertainty and other “non-masculine” emotions, they can be transformed into a moral crusade against a dragon that must be slain “for the good of society.” Peterson gives voice to their fears and makes them seem not like a perceived weakness (which feels bad), but rather like a holy crusade (which feels good).
What he should be doing, instead of blaming feminists, SJWs and Neo-Marxists (whatever the fuck that actually is) is to more fully align with his ideas about self-responsibility. When you say you should take responsibility for yourself, that doesn’t mean you people over there, it means you the speaker do it first. You acknowledge how you may have contributed to other people’s pain and disempowerment even if that wasn’t what you intended. You take on how you have co-created the world that you live in. That’s what real self-responsibility is. That’s what real shadow work is. That would be a true contribution to society if he did that.
