Alright Veeky Forums, I need some perpective...

Alright Veeky Forums, I need some perpective. I have become facinated by Jordan Peterson and his lectures along with the authors he recommends such as Carl Jung and Solzhenitsyn. Have I been convinced by a master persuader or are his ideas actually meaningfull and lucid? I know many here are smarter than me so I would like to hear your opinion.

Other urls found in this thread:

c2cjournal.ca/2016/12/were-teaching-university-students-lies-an-interview-with-dr-jordan-peterson/
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

*I asked this on Veeky Forums and got no response

I mean you can appeal to an institution and see he's a (I think) tenured professor at a prestigious school and went to Harvard etc.

It's prolly no different than any other great professor you had in college.

what exactly is preventing you from making up your mind about it?
there's no need for you to get married with his ideas, if they appeal to your sensibilities, you can provisionally hold them until you find more attractive substitutes.

He taught at Harvard. He's tenured at Toronto University.

He makes 60k oer month from Patreon suppoerters so something unique is resonating with people. Most profs from good universities are unknown outside of thier respective field.

Jung was a kook in a long line of German idealist psychopaths, he was also on the payroll of the OSS [most likely like Peterson who's on the payroll of the CIA, he's totally MKUltra 2.0 fyi]. Also Solzhenitsyn's work is a pure work of fiction

Read "Another View of Stalin" by Ludo Martens and "The Destruction of Reason" by Georg Lukacs

You, my friend, have schitzophrenia. Please seek help for the sake of yourself and your family.

He's a (bad) meme but the authors he recommends are very good.

I have some background in psychology and there Jung has lost its significance; he is considered pseudoscience now and that's what I think of him.
However I don't think there is necessary something wrong with finding knowledge in religion or literature as Peterson argues. In fact I like this approach. But Peterson does it from a biased lens.

I prefer Nassim Taleb approach. Even though I disagree with him also on some major points. Taleb too thinks that religion is useful but he does not analyse it like Peterson does.

Taleb to me is more down to earth. Though many people dislike him for his arrogance and tendency to throw grenades. I dislike Peterson because of the biased analysing. Not to say that Taleb does not have any bias, every human has, but he does tend to back-up his stuff with facts.

I prefer if people find their own knowledge in literature and religion, and not preach their own personal views of it onto others - the latter what I think Peterson does.
I enjoyed his lectures about personality though if he sticks with the facts.

Peterson brings so many newfags, I just hope they acclimate properly. Nietzsche, Jung and Dostoe are very interesting and I love reading them, but in a lot of ways are kind of juvenile. And I have no idea why Peterson never mentions Kierk

Peterson is not nearly smart enough for Captain Kierk

If you actually want to understand Nietzsche and Jung you must start with the Greeks and Christianity. You can't just jump into them like every other edgy idiot undergrad

he does mention Kierkegaard. He's done multiple videos on him.
also none of those people you mentioned are "juvenile" unless what you mean by that is that they're usually some of the first people that newfags start to read, but that doesn't say anything about the complexity of their creative corpus nor the difficulty of the ideas that most lay people nowadays don't understand anyway even if they try.

@OP I think Peterson is cool but he surely has his faults, especially when it comes to what he calls postmodernism. He definitely sweeps people a bit with his pathos but he definitely has some interesting and fresh takes on old philosophers, just make sure to hear the other side of the argument from people like foucalt or deleuze

this

>and not preach their own personal views of it onto others - the latter what I think Peterson does.

You fail to see his project and the reason for his popularity if you can't see why his preaching is necessary and heartening. The triumph of oral culture needs to be filled with leaders that can send people on to find their own knowledge. But you can't expect them to make room within the glut by saying nothing, or allowing themselves to be silenced. He's the right person for the job, and now he needs to figure out how to either ramp up his campaign or announce his departure, otherwise he's got a rough road ahead.

>He's done multiple videos on him.
Has he though?? Link
>unless what you mean by that is that they're usually some of the first people that newfags start to read,
That's exactly what I mean, this sounds pretentious but being appealing to the layman and teenagers is usually a bad sign

How mentally cucked are you by your political ideology?

Crypto anti-semite.

Gotta lovehim.

the first archetype Jung presents is that of the false father figure projection, heed his warning

>Have I been convinced by a master persuader or are his ideas actually meaningfull and lucid

He's good at self help, probably good at psychotherapy, and he has some interesting things to say about meaning, Christianity, psychoanalysis (particularly Jung) and Nietzsche. His understanding of many philosophers leaves a lot to be desired though, yet he often speaks very authoritatively about them. Furthermore, even if you agree with the fundamental points of his preaching about Marx and postmodernism, it is apparent he isn't incredibly familiar with the topics. He is often prone to bizarre forms of bias. He doesn't cite enough in his lectures for the assertions he makes. He is prone to making baseless (ridiculous) claims such as the time he claimed that sexual discrimination didn't exist prior to the 20th century (yes, this happened--it's online, in an interview.)

That said, he's great at motivating people, and his insights into religion are pretty good. I think it's dangerous how popular he is and how so many people take his word as gospel though. He's like Sam Harris on steroids. If he wasn't tenured, he would have been fired long ago for being a fairly eccentric and unprofessional academic (lack of citations, aggressive public polemics)

To put it briefly, you're far better off reading the authors he brings up than you are listening to the man himself. I can't speak about his psychology, but his philosophy is broken on a fractal level. Just start with Jung and Nietzsche and forget about Peterson entirely.

>He is prone to making baseless (ridiculous) claims such as the time he claimed that sexual discrimination didn't exist prior to the 20th century (yes, this happened--it's online, in an interview.)

[citation needed]

"Are you denying the existence of discrimination based on sexuality or race?

I don’t think women were discriminated against, I think that’s an appalling argument. First of all, do you know how much money people lived on in 1885 in 2010 dollars? One dollar a day. The first thing we’ll establish is that life sucked for everyone. You didn’t live very long. If you were female you were pregnant almost all the time, and you were worn out and half dead by the time you were 45. Men worked under abysmal conditions that we can’t even imagine. When George Orwell wrote The Road to Wigan Pier, the coal miners he studied walked to work for two miles underground hunched over before they started their shift. Then they walked back. [Orwell] said he couldn’t walk 200 yards in one of those tunnels without cramping up so bad he couldn’t even stand up. Those guys were toothless by 25, and done by 45. Life before the 20th century for most people was brutal beyond comparison. The idea that women were an oppressed minority under those conditions is insane..."

from: c2cjournal.ca/2016/12/were-teaching-university-students-lies-an-interview-with-dr-jordan-peterson/

That's right. Sexual discrimination DID NOT EXIST in 1885. Because, you know, "life was tough for most people". The whole paragraph under that question is a train wreck. He downplays racial discrimination too.

He's an ideologue.

Read some of the literary folks he is namedropping and discover that they are much more worthwhile than he is.

>Carl Jung
Pseudoscience.

He sort of has a point but it wasn't what he claimed it to be.

>The idea that women were an oppressed minority under those conditions is insane

That's the important thing to take out from here, that life was not just "tough for most people" but that life was a legitimately harsh struggle that you were lucky to make a proper living in.

A woman pair bonding with a man to form a family unit in those times was the most practical thing for a woman to do for survival. Keep in mind that the thing most relevant in limiting women's opportunity was circumstance, survival, and widespread technology and educational opportunity for the population as a whole.

One particularly pivotal technology that did the most to enable women to self-determine their lives was the birth control pill, which alongside enabling women to self-determine their fertility, is not without its hormonal side effects that have non-trivial effects on women's temperament and neurology. The contemporary idea of the default woman's predisposition is subtantially different on a neurochemical level, presuming that the birth control pill has ubiquitous use in the west.

Peterson is a meme.

Jung and Solzehnitsyn were both about five times the man that Peterson is
Why do you privilege him over them?
Is it because you're a fucking idiot?

Even if he has a point he's not making a good argument.
>Discrimination against women didn't exist because men also had a hard time
Hmmmm

l ron hubbard for teens

But he outright claimed discrimination didn't exist for women. Not to mention that these arguments don't even extend to the upper classes.

Not to mention that women were usually held to tighter moral standards, prevented from doing the same things as men (legally in many cases, but also just from societal pressure or not being admitted to certain things), denied education, etc etc.

calm down asshole

lol nice argument, idiot

I'm not going to say that "Discrimination didn't exist for women" is an accurate thing to say, but I'm making the case that what Jordan Peterson said is more accurately along the lines of "The problem of women being systematically denied opportunities was vastly overshadowed by the practical difficulties of survival, which both men and women had an unmistakably horrible time of, to the point that discrimination in the contemporary sense was irrelevant."

That's definitely what his argument was pointing towards, but his statement is inaccurate. It would be fair to give him the benefit of the doubt on the pure accuracy of his language - he was excited and people make hyperbolic statements when excited, and he's also old. He made a hell of a gaffe when he was making a comparison between the Left & Right and he said "Totalitarian Left" twice in his talk at Western University(Ontario).

>It would be fair to give him the benefit of the doubt on the pure accuracy of his language
The man has a PhD, if he means something then he can say it himself.

Where do I even start with Christianity? And why not read Man and his Symbols which is literally a book explained by Jung and Jungists for the laymen and A Nietzsche Reader? They're both introductory books exactly so that you can understand their ideas without reading everything that they influenced them.

>Where do I even start with Christianity?
With the Greeks

Already started with the Greeks
>inb4 peruse with the Persians meme

what kind of greek did you start with?

Mate, come on. He's old.

People with PHDs are mortal too, they don't suddenly gain the ability to have transcendantally perfect and accurate speech every waking moment for the rest of their lives upon completing their thesis.

>He's old
Why the fuck should that be an excuse?

The bearded kind

Look Guatama, when time passes people get old and when people get old their brains get worse. That means they get progressively worse at thinking and speaking as they get older.

OK, so that's one more reason not to care about what this guy says. By your logic we should let a bunch of 20- and 30-somethings run the planet. I hope you're a troll.

Pete brought him up in part 10 or 11 of the Biblical series

>Totalitarian Left
? Is totalitarian an inherently right term? Has it always been?

>they're both introductory books so that you can understand their ideas without reading everything that they influenced them.
lol that's not how it works user.

The only thing I've said is that you should give someone the benefit of the doubt that they may not be speaking what they mean one hundred percent of the time, and that brain deterioration when aging is a relevant factor for this.

If you want to put that into a hyperbolic strawman I can't stop you, but you should probably think of what I'm saying with slightly more nuance than "If old people perform worse than young people in a measurable way then NO OLD PEOPLE SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO DO ANYTHING"

Totalitarianism is when an ideology is put into a position of ultimate authority. Leftist Totalitarianism is communism, Rightist Totalitarianism is fascism.

>Leftist Totalitarianism is communism
Exactly... so how is saying that a gaffe?

>The only thing I've said is that you should give someone the benefit of the doubt that they may not be speaking what they mean one hundred percent of the time, and that brain deterioration when aging is a relevant factor for this.
So you're saying that Peterson suffers from dementia?

To expand you are not reading the Greeks to understand Nietzsche, you read them to understand the world, "roughly speaking," and then read Nietzsche for his opinion and insight about that world. Nietzsche was a ancient greek philologist before he produced his own work, and I believe his father was a Lutheran minister. Reading Nietzsche without knowing the Greeks/Christianity is like reading a book by Lebron without knowing basketball

This is a legendary post, my friend.

I may be misremembering the exact words and I can't find the exact clip to cite, he was saying something along the lines of "The radical xenophobia of the totalitarian left, and the radical equality of the totalitarian... left."

It wasn't him saying that the left wasn't totalitarian, and more that he accidentally ascribed a non-leftist attribute to the left when he meant from context to attribute it to the right, and was about to make the opposite attribution to the right but realised he messed up his word selection.

>Where do I even start with Christianity?

The Gospels, user. The Gospels. Why start anywhere else? Start with the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Ecclesiastes is a great book. Not really very Christian desu, has some nihilistic and cynical undertones, but it's beautifully written and full of wisdom. Also short, like 13 pages.

>vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
>what does man gain by all his labor under the sun?
>a generation comes, and a generation goes, but the earth remains forever.

>better the dead man who is already dead,
>than the living man still alive.
>yet better than both is he who has never existed; who has not seen the evil done under the sun.

>for the wise man is no better than the fool forever.
>as the wise man, so lives the fool.
>and how does the wise man die? As the fool!

>I saw that man should work and enjoy the fruits of his labor; for this is a gift from God.

>who knows that the spirits of men go upward, while the spirits of the animals return to the dust?

Brb gonna go re-read Ecclesiastes

You can jump into it, it would just be harder, and you would miss most of the ideas and misinterpret ideas, but its the ambiguity that could inspire you to learn more.

I remember there being one of the Personality lectures where he talked about kierke for a significant portion of the video. It's one of the later ones

>beating your average professor only guilty of having expressed some opinions resonating with internet crowd with a full blown autistic pseud that writes books full of shitflinging and REEEing about academia not orgasming over his profound teenage revelations
Even the schizofrenic CIA guy managed to make a subtler bait.

Don't fall for Christianity meme too hard. Nietzsche critiques a whole lot of Christian ideas from an atheist's perspective but recognizes the historical importance of the religion. You only need passing familiarity with the concepts even if that. Most of the memers telling you to go for Christianity are "dude Christianity is the best religion lmao, Christ for lyfe xD" retards. I find it ironic ironic that Nietzsche appeals to these retards.

This

>idiots peeved by this post
>it just states the obvious
Fucking hell, are you people ready to defend Jung's insane mysticism because a guy who fits your ideology praised him? I just know that these are the same people who snared at the crazy New Age, crystal-healing, zodiac-believing sluts you can regularly catch on facebook and tumblr until they found out through their favorite podcaster that materialism is a Marxist thing.

About Solzhenitsyn, he's the worst meme this board has ever had. He was never taken seriously by anyone worthy of being taken seriously, and rightfully so.

Jung was a literal schizophrenic.

I've only heard of Peterson recently and on lit. Literally never read or heard what he has to say.

Jung is the most profound thinker I've ever read. He survived all of the new age bullshit through today so I'm not too worried wether or not he'll survive the rightist appropriation of his ideas.

>Jung is the most profound thinker I've ever read.

...

hahaha of course he thinks that
christ, what a cunt

Not that user, but do y'all really think a trendy reactionaries political rambling has more weight than Jung?

Anything has more weight than Jung. Mainly because Jung has no weight.

Depends if you "get" it or not. If you're stupid Jung is going to seem retarded. If you "get" it, you'll realize Jung was an incredible genius.

>think a trendy reactionaries political rambling has more weight than Jung?
What the fuck are you on about. Who thinks like this? Where did this question follow from

>u dumb
wtf I love jung now

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Jung. The synchronicity is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of new age spirituality most of the jokes will go over typical persona’s head. There’s also Jung’s alchemical autism, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Gnostic literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these jokes, to realise that they’re not just funny- they say something deep about COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS. As a consequence people who dislike Jung truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn’t appreciate, for instance, the humour in Jung’s existential catchphrase “What you resist, persists,” which itself is a cryptic reference to Nietzsche’s German epic Ecce Homo. I’m smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Jung’s genius Id unfolds itself on their e-readers. What fools.. how I pity them.

And yes, by the way, i DO have an Ouroboros tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It’s for the anima’s eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they’re within 5 archetypes of my own beforehand. Nothin personnel kid

kek saved this it will come in handy one day

komrade, yes

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Jung. The synchronicity is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of new age spirituality most of the concepts will go over typical persona’s head. There’s also Jung’s alchemical autism, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Gnostic literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these concepts, to realise that they’re not just abstractions- they say something deep about COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS. As a consequence people who dislike Jung truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn’t appreciate, for instance, the truism in Jung’s existential catchphrase “What you resist, persists,” which itself is a cryptic reference to Nietzsche’s German epic Ecce Homo. I’m smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Jung’s genius Id unfolds itself on their e-readers. What fools.. how I pity them.

And yes, by the way, i DO have an Ouroboros tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It’s for the anima’s eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they’re within 5 archetypes of my own beforehand. Nothin personnel kid

Lucky for you Veeky Forums has pretty much come to a consensus on Peterson, check out the weekly debait thread

>I know many here are smarter than me
I wouldn't be so sure about that...

It's funny how people here rage about him because he's saying stuff about trannies and marxists even though that has nothing to do with his actual work.
What no one seems to understand is that he's laid out a very convincing case for an existentialist perspective on reality which is actually grounded in biology and psychology. that's what maps of meaning is, nothing about some lefty conspiracy or postmodernism..
and I don't think he actually thinks that there is a "postmodernist conspiracy" I think he just tries to get the term trending so people understand that there are some extremists on the left who are using critical theory, which appropriately used actually is kind of useful, to argue for their own ideology. but it doesn't work, obviously, hence all of the contradictions in their rationale

>It's funny how people here rage about him because he's saying stuff about trannies and marxists even though that has nothing to do with his actual work.
It really is his entire method of approach not where he ends up that is problematic.

>What no one seems to understand is that he's laid out a very convincing case for an existentialist perspective on reality which is actually grounded in biology and psychology
His domain is obviously literary theory, he doesn't seem to have any meaningful grasp of other fields beyond reading abstracts of scientific articles to back up his hypotheses which he derives from the humanities.
His understanding of science is fundamentally flawed and I doubt he has read the likes of Popper, Kuhn, etc and that's why when he tries talking epistemology he sounds so awkward. He jumps between being a positivist, utilitarian and pragmatist without making it explicit if you haven't noticed. People who are finding him convincing have similar flawed understandings of science, they want pop psychology/biology to confirm what they know without trying to understand how natural science develops or bothering to look to deeply into the basic methodological groundings.

>His domain is obviously literary theory,

>phd on the neurobiology of alcoholism
>licensed clinical therapist, professor of psychology

>He jumps between being a positivist, utilitarian and pragmatist without making it explicit if you haven't noticed

I haven't noticed desu, in what regard do you think he jumps between perspectives?

Jungian psychology is rooted in literary theory, of course after the 80s you're going to have people gathering neurobiological data and contextualizing it to reinforce its hypothesises. Working in academia doesn't automatically mean your adhering to the best standards.

You can't be a scientist and a moralist at the same time. The whole way he tries to transform a narrow positive neo-Darwinian account of behaviour into a normative social ethic is muddled.

>Jungian psychology is rooted in literary theory, of course after the 80s you're going to have people gathering neurobiological data and contextualizing it to reinforce its hypothesises.

show me where in my post that i said anything regarding jung and neurobiological data

>You can't be a scientist and a moralist at the same time
Why would you think that?

>The whole way he tries to transform a narrow positive neo-Darwinian account of behaviour into a normative social ethic is muddled.
Iirc he only said that a certain social behaviour is required to constantly maintain the stability of a given social system and anything beyond that is just him trying to figure out on what principles our society is build upon while asking if any of his conclusions hold any purpose or value for the future
it's the whole nature vs nurture debate all over again imo, he's asking what biology has to offer and if it may lead to a more stable society while others have asked if societal influence on the individual has more impact and if humanity in itself has the power to formulate a stable society

and why are you claiming that he doesn't have higher standards when it comes to his scientific knowledge? I've watched quite a few of his lectures and he's citing neurobiological and psychological studies left and right
his lectures on the statistical distribution of the big five in men and women as well as in liberals or conservatives are pretty insightful in that regard

If you are currently well off, or you have prospects, or you feel that you are on the right path and are not depressed and scattered and confused about your current station in life, then you have no real reason to listen to JP. He doesn't really have anything to offer you.

But if you are those things, then he might have something to offer you. He's a good speaker, though not much of a thinker. He will point out various other stories and passages that might be valuable to you, and if you find any of them valuable you should go and read those in full, but he himself is not much of a thinker. You can't expect him to be any more than just a university professor of psychology; he's not going to figure it out for you, just give you some guidance (which depending on your reading level can range from shallow to moderately deep)

Ultimately, you'd be better off doing the following:

>reading philosophical and psychological works extensively on your own
>joining some community of discussion around these things, not Veeky Forums because this site attracts people with weak personalities (hence the love for anonymity)
>get involved in something, like a physical sport

...

Savage.

nice argumentation

Nature isn't moral, science investigates nature, unless you're stuck in a medieval Thomistic notion of "nature" you're not going to be able to find morals in nature.

I also question the value of an equilibrium approach towards analysing contemporary society. Capitalism empirically isn't characterized by stability but chaos and innovations that come to fast to ever reach any equilibrium state, that's the point. You can't poise the problematic appropriately with an equilibrium approach. Stability is the result of conservativism, it has to be imposed otherwise you're faced with constant change, Peterson is a liberal and wants to find it naturally emerging and that's where the cognitive bias comes in. If you really want to find stability you have to look for force and how it's being imposed to stop change.

And I don't mean he's not citing things, he has a hypothesis and is trying to confirm it but there's noting inherently specially scientific about that. I can come up with an idea and start trying to find articles on Google Scholar to back up my claim and start making 1 hour monologues to upload to youtube and I can probably portray crazy ideas and convince people to believe in them (flat earth, etc, etc). The thing is he has an esoteric notion of truth so it would be very difficult to "disprove" to him anything he puts forth since what's "true" isn't necessarily empirically disprovable.

Also be sceptical when someone starts bombarding you with citations, read the source material to see if they are actually saying what is being claimed.

>unless you're stuck in a medieval Thomistic notion of "nature" you're not going to be able to find morals in nature.
>He hasn't read Chinese philosophers because he's afraid of the translation process

I'm a barbarian, baby

Why can't mods just ban these shitty threads. He's of no value to this board.