Who is Jordan Peterson and Why Should I Care?

I've heard the name. He's some professor from Toronto. But apparently he's a big deal, enough so that Foreign Policy thinks he's some sort of latter day Pied Piper luring young men into the embrace of authoritarianism.

The psychologist’s mass appeal hinges on his ability to speak to what one might call the spiritual crisis of masculinity in the West: the deep sense of uselessness and emasculation that an increasing number of men claim to feel due to globalization, technological change, and civil rights gains by feminists and various ethnic minorities.

Peterson’s philosophy is difficult to assess because it is constructed of equal parts apocalyptic alarm and homespun advice. Like the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, whom he cites as an intellectual influence, Peterson is fond of thinking in terms of grand dualities — especially the opposition of order and chaos. Order, in his telling, consists of everything that is routine and predictable, while chaos corresponds to all that is unpredictable and novel.

For Peterson, living well requires walking the line between the two. He is hardly the first thinker to make this point; another of his heroes, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, harking back to the ancient Greeks, suggested that life is best lived between the harmony of Apollo and the madness of Dionysus. But while Peterson claims both order and chaos are equally important, he is mainly concerned with the perils posed by the latter — hence his rules. 

In his books and lectures, Peterson describes chaos as “feminine.” Order, of course, is “masculine.” So the threat of being overwhelmed by chaos is the threat of being overwhelmed by femininity. The tension between chaos and order plays out in both the personal sphere and the broader cultural landscape, where chaos is promoted by those “neo-Marxist postmodernists” whose nefarious influence has spawned radical feminism, political correctness, moral relativism, and identity politics. 

At the core of Peterson’s social program is the idea that the onslaught of femininity must be resisted. Men need to get tough and dominant. And, in Peterson’s mind, women want this, too. He tells us in 12 Rules for Life: “If they’re healthy, women don’t want boys. They want men.… If they’re tough, they want someone tougher. If they’re smart, they want someone smarter.” “Healthy” women want men who can “outclass” them. That’s Peterson’s reason for frequently referencing the Jungian motif of the hero: the square-jawed warrior who subdues the feminine powers of chaos. Don’t be a wimp, he tells us. Be a real man. 

This machismo is of a piece with Jung but also a caricature of Nietzsche’s philosophy, particularly the thinker’s Übermensch (superman), who escapes the stultifying effects of a culture in decline. “I am no man,” Nietzsche once claimed. “I am dynamite!” Dynamite, from the Greek dunamis, meaning “power.” That is what Peterson’s acolytes are after. It is no accident that one of his video lectures is titled “How to Rise to the Top of the Dominance Hierarchy.”

I'm not into philosophy. I post this merely for those who are. Is Canada's great public intellectual of the day a dark threat of some sort as this article suggests? Earlier today I came across an article in The New Republic discussing the rise of a new "male superiority" movement that takes misogyny to a disturbing new level. The article begins with Mark Lepine's massacre of 14 women at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique in 1989.

When Marc Lépine murdered 14 women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989, he claimed that he was “fighting feminism.” When Anders Breivik murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011, he was in large part motivated by his hatred of feminism, which he considered a poison and threat to the future of European men. And when Elliot Rodger killed six people in Isla Vista, California, in 2014, he said he did it to punish young women for rejecting him and sleeping with other men instead. 

In February, the Southern Poverty Law Center added two male supremacist websites to its list of hate groups, for the first time categorizing male supremacy as an explicit ideology of hate. The ideology of male supremacy, according to the SPLC, represents all women as “genetically inferior, manipulative, and stupid” beings who exist primarily for their reproductive and sexual functions. Gender-essentializing male supremacists rely on cherry-picked science and anthropology to bolster their claims that men are inherently dominant. Not only do women owe men sex, they believe, but men are entitled to take it from them.  

Return of Kings is one of the two male supremacist organizations listed by the SPLC. A Voice for Men, founded by Paul Elam, is the other. While Elam’s “men’s rights” movement has enjoyed some favorable media coverage, and he has managed to present himself as a moderate voice for men’s equality, he is no less dangerous, having advocated for both physical and sexual violence against women.  

It doesn’t take longer than a minute on either group’s website to find horrific examples of misogyny and male supremacy on display. “Fatties and feminists” complain about rape because no one wants to have sex with them, wrote one Return of Kings contributor whose bio says he hopes for the “re-birth of tribal-minded men with the core tenants of masculinity.” White women make themselves “unsuitable for handing on Western civilization” when they are “promiscuous,” get tattoos, pursue careers, or enjoy black culture, wrote another.

“You want to reach a point where you have high expectations of a woman but she has little expectations of you,” wrote Daryush “Roosh” Valizadeh, founder of Return of Kings, in a recent blog post. “She must give you submission while you do as you may.”

Is this just the handiwork of a gaggle of insecure goons alienated from the opposite gender or could this be the breaching of a new divide, one of many, that afflicts our society?

Both articles deserve a careful read. What do you think?

It's No Wonder They're Pals.

Donald Trump and Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, seem to like each other - a lot. Trump just has a baked-in fondness for his fellow despots. They're like peas in a pod.

It's not entirely clear that Duterte was inspired by Trump when he announced that his soldiers should shoot female rebels right where Trump is fond of groping women.


Duterte, a former provincial mayor, told a group of former communist rebels to “tell the soldiers…there’s a new order from the mayor. We won’t kill you. We will just shoot your vagina.”

“If there is no vagina, it would be useless,” he said, appearing to imply that women are useless without their genitals.

The President’s Communications Office included the comments in the official transcript of a speech but replaced the word “vagina” with a dash.

Steve Bannon - Every Demagogue Has One

Think of him as the guy who will toss the red meat to the Gullibillies. Steve Bannon, Trump's lead strategist designate and former Breitbart chief, has a lot of people very, very nervous.



Vice News calls Bannon a right-wing Rottweiler. The Bannon/Breitbart juggernaut has inroads to the radical right across Europe and Israel, pretty much any place capable of supporting white supremacists. Breitbart's London organization is considered to have played an instrumental role in nudging Farage's UKIP to an upset victory in the Brexit vote.

Will Trump Embolden Bigots in Canada?

Yesterday we read Kinsella's post about a white power, Alt.Right handbill posted in his neighbourhood. Today we have an account from CBC Ottawa of a woman, Anna Maranta, a rabbi no less, who awakened in the early hours of Tuesday morning to find a swastika and the word "kike" spray painted across the front door of her Glebe home.

"I went to bed a little later than usual and woke up in the middle of the night, around 2:30, and as I was walking back to my room coming down the hall I saw a reflection on my front door, which is a glass window door, that kind of startled me," she said.

"I knew right away it was a swastika."

Rabbi Maranta raised the obvious concern:

"It's one thing to be marching down the street and be yelled at from the sidelines," she said. "This is somebody who came onto … my property, onto a lit porch, somebody who knows my routine, and so it's likely somebody … I know in this neighbourhood, and that hurts me even more."

Maranta believes the election of president-elect Donald Trump could be related to the racist graffiti on her door.

"My first thought is that this is an example of what happens when you allow somebody who is in a position of power to speak openly racist, bigoted, misogynistic language and don't censor [it] in any way," Maranta said.

"It allows other people to express their feelings, to express their hatred, and to feel like they've been given permission to do so because no one has effectively silenced that."

Is this an early glimpse into an AmeriKan contagion creeping across our border? Maybe, maybe not. That said we have to treat it as a threat not just to targeted people of colour, immigrants, Muslims or Jews. It's a threat to our society, to what in part distinguishes us from the sometimes narrow, intolerant bigotry that now seems to flourish elsewhere whether in the US, Britain, continental Europe, South Asia, the Middle East - pick a corner of the world. If we don't want that ugliness in Canada we have to choose to reject it. We have to get serious about hate crimes and reinforce minority protections. We have to realize that America can no longer be our beacon which means we can no longer outsource our economic, military and foreign policy to Washington. We have to chart our own course something we once were pretty good at doing when we had this leader named Trudeau.

Eisenhower saved his departing speech to warn Americans of the dangerous rise of what he termed the "military industrial complex." The warning went unheeded and that complex as it was in the 50s has metastasized throughout American society, the US economy and the nation's body politic. What will Obama have to say as he vacates the premises for his successor? He's given hints in statements during his farewell tour of Europe.

Barack Obama has warned of a "rise in a crude sort of nationalism" following the Brexit and US presidential votes.

Speaking in Greece on his final foreign trip, he said: "We have to guard against... tribalism built around an 'us' or a 'them'."

He said the US was painfully aware of the danger of divisions "along lines of race or religion or ethnicity".

Mr Obama said the UK's vote to leave the EU and the US vote showed that people generally were now "less certain of their national identities and place in the world" and that had produced populist movements both on the left and the right.

Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald, has a report on how Trump's victory has traumatized school children, especially kids of colour, in the United States.

"It's Our Time"

"It's Our Time" may be the meme of the Democratic presidential runoff. Obama used it to powerful effect in his speech last night. Hillary supporters have been using it constantly to bolster their claim that Mrs. Clinton deserves the throne.

To all you rabid Hillary supporters - it's your time when your candidate wins and, please, make sure I'm the first to know just when that happens. Until your candidate wins, it's not your time. Obama didn't deserve to win because he's black anymore than Hillary deserved to win because she's female. So, cut the crap.

Here's another thought. No genuine feminist can also be a racist. Sexism is bigotry and so is racism. You can't fight one form of bigotry and freely embrace another. And there's plenty of bigotry to be found among Hillary supporters.

It's difficult to read too much into blog comments but I'll give you a few examples of what Hillary supporters have been saying:

"the little sooty tan man"

" it was our time little man, not a token black man"

"the flushing sound? thats your buddy husseins chances of becoming prez"

Hillary enjoyed the support of rank bigots of both genders but it was the depth of bigotry among women that took me by surprise. Now I'm not naive. I studied in the states and I've seen, first hand, more than enough racism among American women. What troubles me is how the feminist leaders didn't step forward to denounce this sort of thing during the nomination campaign. Certainly they ought to have been fighting misogyny but also speaking out against the tide of racism that surfaced from their own gender. Instead they sat on their hands.

Genuine feminism cannot tolerate racism. So, what happened?

The Hate Vote

Americans have spent an enormous amount of time, energy and money over the past half century to convince themselves that they had finally left behind their nation's horrible racist history.

Even if Barack Obama should lose to McCain in November, he'll have done his country an invaluable service by exposing just how alive and well racism is in today's America, among Democrats as well as Republicans, even among some feminists who ought to be the last to tolerate much less embrace racial bigotry.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen calls it "A Campaign to Hate."

"Wherever I go -- from glittering dinner party to glittering dinner party -- the famous and powerful people I meet (for such is my life) tell me how lucky I am to be a journalist in this the greatest of all presidential contests. I tell them, for I am wont to please, that this campaign is indeed great when, as history will record, it is not. I have come to loathe the campaign.

I loathe above all the resurgence of racism -- or maybe it is merely my appreciation of the fact that it is wider and deeper than I thought. I am stunned by the numbers of people who have come out to vote against Barack Obama because he is black. I am even more stunned that many of these people have no compunction about telling a pollster they voted on account of race -- one in five whites in Kentucky, for instance. Those voters didn't even know enough to lie, which is what, if you look at the numbers, others probably did in other states. Such honesty ought to be commendable. It is, instead, frightening.

...So I see little to be happy about, little that pleases my jaundiced eye. Yes, voter participation is way up and in the end, the Democrats will choose a woman or an African American and, to invoke that tiresome phrase, history will be made. But this messy nominating process has eroded the standing of both candidates. It has highlighted the reality that racism still runs deep and that misogyny, although more imagined than real, is not yet a wholly spent force. This is an ugly porridge that has been placed before us, turned rancid since the cold, pristine days of Iowa only five months ago. We were, with apologies to Bob Dylan, so much younger then. "