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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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I watched 30m of a Peterson 'lecture' a co-worker recommended to me. It kind of opened my eyes. Peterson is basically a 'motivational speaker' that presents himself as an academic well enough to fool people that only understand academic aesthetics. He doesn't even try to back up his claims or references, he just makes wildly abstract and generalized claims about human civilization and draws analogies that sound like they support that perspective. They sound right enough to people that want to believe that there is an expression of their culture that is inherently 'good' and all of civilization's problems are based on corruptions of that culture. But in the minds of his fans he's offering 'proof' of this perspective by appearing academic, even though he offers none.
he's a TED talk basically.
most TED talks are like that. sophisticated sounding gibberish that has no real world merit, but sounds really cool and interesting.
Yeah. Every once in a while there’s a good one though.
It really has become so easy to make yourself seem smart and credible these days. The fact that people thought Trump was a "good businessman" is absurd
Give millions of people across the US the same money, connections, and opportunity and they would all be just as successful if not more.
This shines brightly in his "debate" with Slavoj Zizek
https://piped.video/watch?v=qsHJ3LvUWTs
Also love that Peterson is glued to his laptop while Zizek fucking slams shit down with nothing but paper notes.
I wish Zizek had went harder on that fool.
I felt like Zizek understood that debating Peterson directly wouldn't benefit him, and instead took his case to the audience, sort of bypassing Peterson himself and focusing on the ideas he wanted to share.
However, I don't disagree. I wanted to see more of Zizek shaking is head in his "my god" disbelief at the bullshit Peterson was peddling.
Zizek actually said as much in an interview some time before (or after?) the debate. He was well aware that debating Peterson directly would be extremely difficult due to the "techniques" he uses. So Zizek focused on getting a message to the audience.
The few times he did engage were hilarious smackdowns though ("where are all these 'postmodern marxists'???")
Oh I know. It’s just frustrating because I really wanted to see an intellectual destroy Peterson and I thought this was gonna be my chance to do it.
Like fuck man, I’D debate Peterson and am confident I would wreck him, and I’m just a fucking carpenter working in camps.
I like watching crowder get destroyed sometimes but he’s not smart enough for me to give a shit when it happens.
As far as I'm concerned Zizek went the right amount of hard, considering how effortlessly, utterly, and thoroughly he dunked on Peterson without Peterson ever having any idea what had happened.
In no way was that fair play. That was the rudest thing I've ever seen done to a person where I yet personally applauded the maneuver. I love Zizek.
Peterson left that debate believing discourse had happened and that's just hilarious.
He's basically a conman. It's impressive in a way, I've watched enough of it a few times to see how convincing he is. Anyone who doesn't want to believe it will sniff the bullshit after 3-5 minutes of him doing nothing but blow smoke and talk in self reinforcing circles with no facts.
If you want to agree with him, it's very easy to think he's informed and speaking the truth. Which is why he's so dangerous. He's like the gateway drug to right wing extremist views. He tells men all the things a lot of them want to believe. About how their inadequacy isn't their fault. How everything was stacked against them. Reinforces their sexism, their anger, directs it. Then they're listening to all the other even more blatant alt right voices and most of them never come back.
He's just a glorified self-help guy who's gotten way more attention than he deserves by saying mildly offensive things. He should never have been allowed to become a target for outrage. Once that happened, he figured out how to monetize it and it was off to the races. It's like a feedback loop.
I highly recommend watching his debates with Sam Harris
It really shines a light on what a fake sophist charlatan Peterson is. Harris is so clear and plainspoken in comparison. His ideas are sophisticated, but explained simply.
People don't actually like the smart and capable. They like bombastic, big mouth bullies who deliver sound bites and agree with them, or worse yet just a guy they recognize.
Everyone complains about how we only have old guys running for President, when we had several other options in the last primaries. We just picked the worst ones because the others seemed "boring" or people didn't know them
There's a little known Aesop Fable called "The Clown and the Countryman" that illustrates something close to this
https://www.infoplease.com/primary-sources/fables-fairytales/aesops-fables/aesops-fables-30
Well, before we can say that Peterson is fooling people by only aesthetically presenting as an academic first we need to define fooling, then we need to define academic and then we need to define presenting. Without that shared substrate we can't make any value judgements about him because if we don't have that, we don't have anything.
That sounds like a lot more trouble than he's worth.