Monthly Archives: July 2021

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist, and the author of the bestsellers Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life & 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, #1 for nonfiction in 2018 in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, the Netherlands, Brazil and Norway, and slated for translation into 50 languages.

Raised and toughened in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta, Dr. Peterson has flown a hammer-head roll in a carbon-fiber stuntplane, piloted a mahogany racing sailboat around Alcatraz Island, explored an Arizona meteorite crater with a group of astronauts, built a Native American Long-House on the upper floor of his Toronto home, and been inducted into a Pacific Kwakwakawakw family (see charlesjoseph.ca). Hes been a dishwasher, gas jockey, bartender, short-order cook, beekeeper, oil derrick bit re-tipper, plywood mill laborer and railway line worker. Hes taught mythology to physicians, lawyers, and businessmen; worked with Jim Balsillie, former CEO of Blackberrys Research in Motion, on Resilient People, Resilient Planet, the report of the UN Secretary Generals High Level Panel on Global Sustainability; helped his clinical clients manage the triumphs and catastrophes of life; served as an advisor to senior partners of major Canadian law firms; penned the forward for the 50th anniversary edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns The Gulag Archipelago; lectured across North America, Europe and Australia in one of the most-well attended booktoursever mounted; and, for The Founder Institute, identified thousands of promising entrepreneurs, in 60 different countries.

With his students and colleagues, Dr. Peterson has published more than a hundred scientific papers, advancing the modern understanding of creativity, competence and personality, while his now-classic book,Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief(released in June 2018as a now bestselling author-readaudiobook) transformed the psychology of religion. He was nominated for five consecutive years as one of Ontarios Best University Lecturers, and is one of only three profs rated as life changing in the U of Ts underground student handbook of course ratings.

In 2016, shortly before the publication of 12 Rules, several of Dr. Petersons online lectures, videos and interviews went viral, launching him into unprecedented international prominence as a public intellectual and educator. His work, public postings and discussions are featured on the following platforms:

Dr. Petersons classroom lectures on mythology and the psychology of religion, based on Maps of Meaning (2016 version here), were turned into a popular 13-part TV series on Canadian public televisionsTVO. Malcolm Gladwell discussed psychology with him while researching his books; Norman Doidge, author of The Brain that Changes Itself, wrote the forward to 12 Rules; and bestselling thriller writer Gregg Hurwitz employed several of his valuable things as a plot feature in his #1 international bestseller, Orphan X.

With his colleagues, Dr. Daniel M. Higgins and Dr. Robert O. Pihl, Dr. Peterson has also produced two online programs to help people understand themselves better and to improve their psychological and practical functioning. The most recent of these, UnderstandMyself, provides its users with detailed information about their personalities, based on work he published with his students here. Tens of thousands of people now know themselves better, as a consequence of completing this 15-minute program.His original self-analysis program,theSelf Authoring Suite, (featured in O: The Oprah Magazine, CBC radio, and NPRs national website), has helped over 200,000 people resolve the problems of their past, rectify their personality faults and enhance their virtues, and radically improve their future. Research documenting the programs effectiveness can be found here and here.

Dr. Peterson has appeared on many popular podcasts and shows, including the Joe Rogan Experience (#877, #958, #1006), The Rubin Report (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Free Speech, Psychology, Gender Pronouns), H3H3(#37), and many more. He is currently working on a new book, tentatively titledBeyond Mere Order: 12 More Rules for Life, slated for publication in late 2020.

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Jordan Peterson | About

Short rant. I cannot believe how many people hate JP.

I have been listening to lectures by JP almost every day for the past 2 years. I dont care if I repeat them, they always serve me well. I started implementing his philosophy into my life.in the last two years I obtained a health care job in a career I have an education for, have received 2 raises and have been given full time hours. It took me 2 years to get the same wage and authority as my female coworkers who have been there for 5+ years (Im a male dental hygienist). I have improved my relationship with my father, and my life in general is on a steep incline that seems to be working well for me. I am happy most of the time, and when Im not, Im not getting burdened by anger and regret; simply frustration and a desire to remedy the problem.

However, my heart recently broke when I had a talk with my father. He is a left-wing Canadian who hates anything to do with the right. Anyone who identifies as right leaning gets the arbitrary label right wing nut job from him and even my own mother cannot stand him when he catches wind of political news because his reactions are immature and predictable. Thats not what hurt.

What hurt is that he finally asked me how I managed to get my shit together so well. I told him about JP, and that I was so excited to finally listen to and understand truth in a way that could benefit me and those around me.

To my chagrin, my father immediately dismissed JP as a right wing nut job. I begged him to listen to some of his interviews or lectures to better understand what he was saying. Instead my father found every sound bite possible of people who hate JP taking him out of context. When I point out how ridiculous it is to think he could be saying anything other than genuine truthful help, my father goes on about how he pushes religion and says you cant have a religious experience without magic mushrooms. I cant believe my own father is listening to this man and only hearing things he hates. Hell ignore a 10 min clip to focus on one sentence and dismiss Peterson afterwards.

Then I came on Reddit to find that theres a whole sub dedicated to straight up hating JP, taking him out of context, and making light of anything he says whatsoever.

Why does my idiot father want to hate JP so much? Why are there a colossal amount of people who havent extracted a single positive message from JP?

My real life is going great, everyone always asks me how I managed to get where I am in just 2 years but when I tell them I changed my mindset because of JP and they look him up, they dismiss him. Ask how I solved my problems dismiss the only answerwhy are so many people not only dismissive but hateful of a person who has helped so many?

It makes me weep for the future.

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Jordan Peterson: Descensus ad inferos - reddit

The left, he believes, refuses to admit that men might be in charge because they are better at it. The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they dont want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence, he said.

Mr. Peterson illustrates his arguments with copious references to ancient myths bringing up stories of witches, biblical allegories and ancient traditions. I ask why these old stories should guide us today.

It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp. Yeah, he says. Why?

Its a hard one.

Right. Thats right. You dont know. Its because those things hang together at a very deep level. Right. Yeah. And it makes sense that an old king lives in a desiccated tower.

But witches dont exist, and they dont live in swamps, I say.

Yeah, they do. They do exist. They just dont exist the way you think they exist. They certainly exist. You may say well dragons dont exist. Its, like, yes they do the category predator and the category dragon are the same category. It absolutely exists. Its a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists. What exists is not obvious. You say, Well, theres no such thing as witches. Yeah, I know what you mean, but that isnt what you think when you go see a movie about them. You cant help but fall into these categories. Theres no escape from them.

Recently, a young man named Alek Minassian drove through Toronto trying to kill people with his van. Ten were killed, and he has been charged with first-degree murder for their deaths, and with attempted murder for 16 people who were injured. Mr. Minassian declared himself to be part of a misogynist group whose members call themselves incels. The term is short for involuntary celibates, though the group has evolved into a male supremacist movement made up of people some celibate, some not who believe that women should be treated as sexual objects with few rights. Some believe in forced sexual redistribution, in which a governing body would intervene in womens lives to force them into sexual relationships.

Violent attacks are what happens when men do not have partners, Mr. Peterson says, and society needs to work to make sure those men are married.

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Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy - The New ...

Photo credit: Derek Story via Unsplash.

Jonathon Van Maren atConviviumputs his fingeron an interesting phenomenon: the atheists and agnostics who are coming around to a pro-Christian view:

Not so long ago, the atheists who retreated to their Darwinian towers and bricked themselves up to fire arrows at the faithfulwantedto be there. Their intellectual siloes were a refuge from faith because they didnt want Christianity to be true. They hated it and thought wed be better off without it. Like [Christopher] Hitchens, they were thrilled to find arguments that permitted them to reject it.

These atheists are finding the Darwinian tower less to their liking, and are laying down their bow and arrow. Not because they doubt their atheism, or evolution for that matter. As John West and others have pointed out, Darwinian atheism has acorrosive effecton culture. But the theory, like atheism more broadly, could still be true and its influence would be no less corrosive.

I call this group the New New Atheists. We still have the loud and aggressive Old New Atheists around, folks like evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne who think wed all be much better off without Christianity, or other faiths. But this seems increasingly like an old-fashioned position. Van Maren cites historian Niall Ferguson, philosopher Roger Scruton, writer Douglas Murray, social scientist Charles Murray, historian Tom Holland, and the famed Jordan Peterson as examples of agnostics or atheists who argue that the West without Christianity would be in serious trouble.

Christopher Hitchens wrote a book calledGod Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Published in 2007, that now seems like a time capsule. From the perspective of 2021, the spitefulness of the title sounds reactionary. More of the moment is Douglas Murray, who provocatively called himself a Christian atheist in afascinating conversationwith blogger Esther OReilly on Justin Brierleys podcastUnbelievable?

The view of people like this carries weight. Peterson has appeared to tremble on the edge of conversion, while withholding it from expectant observers for now. He may be a greater influence as he is. As OReillypoints out, the fact of Petersons not being a Christian disproportionately tilts ears in his direction right out of the gate.

Van Maren quotes Fergusson:

I know I cant achieve religious faith, he went on, but I do think we should go to church.We dont have, I dont think, an evolved ethical system. I dont buy the idea that evolution alone gets us to be moral. It can modify behavior, but theres just too much evidence that in the raw, when the constraints of civilization fall away, we behave in the most savage way to one another. Im a big believer that with the inherited wisdom of a two-millennia old religion, weve got a pretty good framework to work with. [Emphasis added.]

Arguably the Wests inherited wisdom can itself be explained in (loosely defined) evolutionary terms. Traditions dont survive for millennia because they areunfitto guide a healthy culture.

These atheists are only recognizing something that no small number of Jews also see Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager, and Michael Medved, for example. They (and I) would agree with Fergusson that, when the constraints of civilization fall away and in the West, that means Christian civilization we behave in the most savage way to one another. Christianity is suited to the role of a religion for billions of people. Judaism,as Ive pointed out, is not well suited to that role. William Lane Craignotesthe paradoxical effectiveness of Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, in pointing people to Christianity. Craig hassaid he was flabbergastedthat in an interview, Shapiro invited him to offer his personal testimony as a Christian and did not really argue with Craigs apologetic case. My instinct would have been to push back, but Shapiro was the wiser.

Something new, in any event, looks to be evolving, even if still on a modest scale. Weve been encouraged by the responses to Stephen Meyers new book,Return of the God Hypothesis, from self-described agnostics, Brian Keating, Michael Shermer, and James Croft, among otherscientists and scholars, a long way from the petulant jeering of the Old New Atheists. Perhaps Jonathon Van Marens observation helps to explain that too.

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Meet the New New Atheists, Not Like the Old New Atheists - Discovery Institute

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Universities should be safe spaces from assault and bodily harm, but not from ideas and opinions people might find offensive

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The University of Glasgow hit peak woke when it recently announced that it will be urging professors to avoid using the phrase trigger warning.

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Professors have been advised to stop saying trigger warning before sensitive content is talked about because it could be too triggering for their thin-skinned students. Instead, theyve been asked to say content advisory prior to speaking about sensitive matters, in order to ensure U of G remains a safe space.

While this incident took place in the United Kingdom, Canadian schools are not immune to this type of thinking.

A group of current and former students at Ryerson Universitys School of Journalism caused an internal revolt in March, releasing an open letter that claimed the school had contributed to an unsafe learning environment because they were subjected to words and opinions they disapproved of. This letter was written after a group of students was frustrated by the facultys response to a human rights complaint that I initiated against the Eyeopener, one of Ryersons campus newspapers.

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Likewise, for the past year, community members at Wilfrid Laurier University have called for professors David Haskell and William McNally to be fired for the crime of being conservative. Haskell and McNally have been vocal defenders of freedom of expression at Laurier, which the woke mob sees as unacceptable.

People might hope this safe-space culture would stop at the doors of universities, but it has extended into the work world, as well. This idea of not wanting to offend people contributed to the resignation of Bari Weiss, an opinion writer and editor at the New York Times, in 2020. Weiss said she was annoyed with how stories that didnt explicitly promote progressive causes needed to have every detail scrutinized before being published.

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Employees at Penguin Random House Canada proclaimed in November that they were offended when it was announced that the company would be publishing Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson. The employees said the book should not be published by Penguin because they did not want Petersons views to be platformed.

Universities should be safe spaces from assault and bodily harm, but not from ideas and opinions people might find offensive. The harmfulness of safe-space culture was explored at length in the 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.

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The authors said they wrote the book because they observed that students were pathologizing words and ideas as dangerous and violent, which they found illogical. This change started to occur around 2013 or 2014, and became more widespread from 2015 to 2017.

In the book, Lukianoff and Haidt argue that safe-space culture does not work because it relies on three great untruths: what does not kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good and evil people. These untruths contradict modern psychological research and ancient philosophical wisdom, and serve to hurt people who embrace them.

Indeed, the authors found that embracing these untruths has led to increased depression, anxiety and suicides among students. In other words, what was supposed to help students has left them unprepared to deal with stressors and challenges, which leads to increased suffering.

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Lukianoff and Haidt argue students need stressors and challenges in order to learn, adapt and grow. But universities consistently do the opposite, teaching students that they are candles that can easily be extinguished, instead of fires that thrive when faced with adversity.

Trigger warnings, in particular, often have the opposite effect of what they are intended to. A 2018 study out of Harvard University suggested that trigger warnings intensify the stigma associated with trauma, as they serve to enforce the idea that trauma is central to peoples identities.

The study went on to explain that trigger warnings are terrible for people who have never experienced trauma, as they can lead to people thinking that they are not resilient and may lead them to think that they are vulnerable to developing mental illnesses.

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Using trigger warnings communicates to students that words can be harmful. After all, trigger warnings serve as threat-confirmations. This inclination to see threats where they do not exist is associated with an increased risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the study.

The result is that many conservatives are now afraid to say what they really think. A recent study from the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology found that 58 per cent of right-wing professors in Canada claim their university is a hostile climate for their views.

It also found that 45 per cent of Canadian academics say they would discriminate against a colleague who supports former U.S. president Donald Trump, that 17 per cent would discriminate against a right-leaning grant bid and 11 per cent would be more critical of a right-leaning paper submission.

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The study went on to claim that 34 per cent of somewhat right grad students and 62 per cent of very right grad students in North America and the United Kingdom believe sharing their views would make their lives difficult. As a result, right-wing grad students end up being less inclined to pursue academic careers, as conservatives are made to feel like they have to shut up or face consequences.

Given all of the evidence that safe-space culture does not work, I find it confusing why so many students and professors support it. I presented this evidence to various people throughout my academic career at Ryerson, but faculty and students consistently ignored the facts presented to them. I recall one instance where I recommended a journalism professor read The Coddling of the American Mind to understand why safe-space culture does not work, and he said he would never pick it up.

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There are plenty of basic steps universities can take to stop this craziness: adopt a free speech policy based on the Chicago statement; stop using the word unsafe except when it pertains to matters of physical safety; and remove their radical diversity, inclusion and equity offices and instead encourage unity among faculty and students. These solutions might be unpopular, but they are the right moves.

Former British prime minister Winston Churchill said that, A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot endure long. People should be free to speak their minds on university campuses without being punished. If freedom of expression remains a touchy subject on university campuses, the prospects of having a functioning democracy are minimal.

National Post

Jonathan Bradley recently graduated from the journalism program at Ryerson University.

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Jonathan Bradley: Campus safe-space culture is a threat to the very fabric of our society - National Post