Most people are for or against gay marriage based on their object level feeling about gays, and their tribal affiliation. A coherent worldview like that is a powerful and beautiful weapon in the hands of the person who is committed to it.īut it wasn’t the charismatic performances that convinced me of Peterson’s honesty, it’s clips like this one, where he was asked about gay marriage. A lot of the discussion about the linked interview has to do with rhetoric and argument, but to me, it showcased something else.
When the C-16 controversy broke, said media assumed that Peterson would meekly play out the role of outgroup strawman, and were utterly steamrolled. It’s also light-years and meta-levels away from the sort of simplistic frameworks offered by the mass media on either the right or the left. Peterson spent decades assembling worldview that integrates everything from neurology to Deuteronomy, one that’s complex, self-consistent and close enough to the truth to withstand collision with reality.
#Jordan peterson the passion of christ movie movie
Peterson loves to talk about heroic narratives, and his own life in the past few months reads like a movie plot, albeit more Kung Fu Panda than Passion of the Christ. Rationalists can forgive a lot of an honest man, and Peterson shoots straighter than a laser gun. It’s his commitment, above all else, to seek the truth and to speak it. The majority of the rationalist community (present company included) are socially liberal and trans-friendly, confident about our atheism, and mistake theorists who see bad equilibria more often than intentional malevolence.īut the most salient aspect of Peterson isn’t his conservatism, or his Christianity, or Manicheanism. Peterson is a social conservative, a Christian who reads truth in the Bible and claims that atheists don’t exist, and a man who sees existence at every level as a conflict between good and evil. As a community, we haven’t quite figured out what to make of him. And he got rationalists talking about him, which I’ve done for several hours now. He wrote 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, a self-help listicle book inspired by Jesus, Nietzsche, Jung, and Dostoyevsky. He showed up on Sam Harris’ podcast, and on EconTalk, and on Joe Rogan and Art of Manliness and James Altucher. With that, I decided to ignore Peterson and go back to my media diet of rationalist blogs, Sam Harris, and EconTalk.īut Jordan Peterson turned out to be a very difficult man to ignore. I’m going to use people’s preferred pronouns regardless, but I’m happy I get to keep doing it in the name of libertarianism and not-being-a-dick, rather than because of state coercion. The sort of conservative who thinks that C-16 is the end of Western Civilization hailed Peterson as a heroic anti-PC crusader and has been breathlessly retweeting everything he says, with the implied #BooOutgroup.Īs the sort of rationalist who googles laws before reacting to them, I assured myself that Peterson got the legal facts wrong: no one is actually getting dragged to jail for refusing to say zir.
The sort of liberal who thinks that this law is a great idea slapped the alt-right transphobe label on Peterson and has been tweeting about how no one should listen to Peterson about anything.
The psycho-philosophizing YouTube prophet rose to prominence for refusing to acquiesce to Bill C-16, a Canadian law mandating the use of preferred pronouns for transgender people. It seems that most people haven’t had much trouble making up their minds about Jordan Peterson.