What Every Progressive Should Know About Jordan Peterson
Why the “Far Right’s Favorite Philosopher” Argues for the American Left
NOTE TO READERS: For those whose impression of Dr. Peterson was formed by reading or hearing mainly second-hand accounts of his positions and ideas, the most succinct refutation of the many online rumors about him can be heard here: https://jordanbpeterson.com/podcasts/54/ (90 min. listen.) For those who encountered him directly through his work, or have a sufficiently open mind, please continue:
What’s happening with the totalitarian? Well the totalitarian is afraid of the unknown… and he’s very interested in sustaining his own belief structure. And the combination of those two things can start off trivially. The more you are convinced that you have to maintain the stability of your current belief structure, the more afraid you are of anything that’s unknown. And the more afraid you are of anything that’s unknown, the less likely you are to go out and explore it, and then the less likely you are to go out and explore it, the weaker you get, because you stop gathering information; and then the weaker you get the more necessary it is that you have to have this this frame of reference, and that it has to remain intact. And this sort of thing starts to cycle, and cycle; so you undermine your own sense of your own autonomy and ability, and you make yourself more and more a rigid tool of the propagandistic system, and you more and more adopt the stance of enmity towards anything you don’t understand, and that’s a spiral that goes rapidly downhill — rapidly into a state that’s characterized by complete internal chaos.
- Dr. Jordan B. Peterson (“Maps of Meaning 11: Losing Religion (TCO)” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtgThjIl1Ao 20:28)
This passage is from a televised lecture by Dr. Peterson that is more than a few years old, but it takes no great leap of the imagination to apply it to the current situation in the United States. Not just in application to the current individual in the White House, but to American society in total. The absolute refusal of the conservative political structure to confront and adapt to changing times is resulting in the calcification of our cultural hierarchy, which is putting us in the fast lane to tyranny.
Dr. Peterson frequently warns of the tendency of hierarchies (like governments) to “calcify,” meaning to become rigid, and consequently brittle. An absolutely rigid hierarchy is a tyranny, which will inevitably collapse (as demonstrated throughout history), because “tyrannies are inherently unstable”. He therefore insists on the absolute necessity of continually updating and maintaining the internal adaptability of a system of government, because failure to seek out and acknowledge new information, and adapt accordingly, will rapidly lead to tyranny, and then societal collapse.
Our political system is calcifying, and it is the direct result of deliberate action by the Republican party. Realizing that their opinions were in the minority, they devised a three-fold approach to gaining and maintaining political power: gerrymander the country to the maximum possible extent; stack the judicial branch with far right lifetime appointees who will support the conservative efforts; and endeavor to suppress voter turnout, particularly among the working class and minorities. All of these tactics serve to push the structure of government away from democracy, and toward tyranny. And they are working.
(The socialist argument of course would be to do away with hierarchy altogether, and avoid the problem that way, but anyone who would make that argument clearly has not confronted honestly the horrors of the 20th century, which, from the Gulag system of the Soviet Union, to Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”, to the killing fields of Cambodia, and on and on, involved the murders of more than 100 million innocent people in the name of socialism, on the road to an egalitarian utopia which obviously never arrived, and should have absolutely demonstrated for all time the catastrophic, murderous folly of communist ideology. (Anyone prepared to face the truth can begin with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s epic masterpiece The Gulag Archipelago 1918–56, which chronicles in sickening detail the reality of life in the U.S.S.R.))
It is no accident that it is the conservatives who are causing the calcification. Maintaining and operating structures is the role of conservatives, according to Dr. Peterson, just as creating and renewing them is the role of progressives. The progressive personality is creative, and therefore less orderly, while the conservative personality is orderly, and less creative. This is partly why the Republicans are kicking the Democrats’ butts, despite having a smaller base. They are executing a plan, and doing so in an organized way. If progressives are to make any progress, they should take a lesson from that behavior.
Progressives need to set their sights on accomplishing a single, clearly definable change within the system — one that will halt, and perhaps reverse, the process of calcification (and its potentially catastrophic outcome). I would humbly submit that this change be: fair voting. And this does not mean re-gerrymandering things in the Democrats’ favor whenever you happen to get the chance. It means, on a local, state, and national level, working toward the following aims: removing human input from congressional districting, and using neutral algorithms to draw lines so as to remove any possibility of political bias; instituting mathematically superior voting systems, such as “ranked choice” style voting, which produce statistically more accurate results; ensuring fair and equal access to the polls, including the requirement that all employers give at least a half day off on election day; and eliminating the Electoral College process for selecting the president. (And, on top of that, both sides ought to be supremely concerned with ensuring election integrity against cyber attacks by our very real enemies.)
Dr. Peterson’s teachings are resplendent with tools that naturally creative people can use to become more organized, and his deeper work contains thorough philosophical justification for the absolute necessity of continually changing and updating government structures, and why the political Left must be empowered to accomplish that task. However, the political level of analysis only comprises about 5% (my own rough approximation, not statistically valid) of his work, and he has much to teach all people who are interested in the problems of life.