BridgeConsoleMasher wrote: ↑Thu Dec 27, 2018 7:55 pm
Except conversely I can't really keep blaming him for people getting pissed off about something he said, only for him to clarify it later and we're all back to square 1. You can talk about right-wing internet trolls that he enables with 4 minute sensationalist videos, but I've seen him on several accounts dissociate with them as far as he's selling self-help books.
Not specifically, but of course that's not barred for speculation. I've dug up on it for a bit and can find sense if he's rebutting against Marxist schools of thought that it's a product of westernism, and/or it fitting into a more recent narrative of his that I noticed where he talks about historical tendency for social systems to adopt it prior to advents in technology that help us modernize.
If he's used it as a means of dismissing problematic facets of hierarchies, that's a different thing.
That's sorta what I mean. He keeps his principles vague enough that while he implies many terrible things, if called he can deflect and claim a softer position.
Which goes back to my earlier position that the best approach is to limit discussion to the impact he's had on discourse or people's lives via the actions of his devotees. He can certainly disavow them, and we could argue about his intent, but the followers exist and have concrete outcomes which is easier to focus on.
Although in this instance there is the alternate approach of simply rejecting his foundational premises entirely. So tangenting off into hierarchies, we could go thusly.
They exist. The way they exist, the degree they exist, what they exist between, those can be debated, but they clearly do.
Peterson rather infamously used the example of certain species of lobsters to suggest that hierarchies exist in nature, rather than being the product of human creation (which he'd broadly suggest is a claim shared by most forms of progressive thought.) People get hung up on that, whether that's true or the nuance of the argument that they're manmade, whether the hierarchies of human societies have anything in common, whatever.
But there's an implicit premise in Peterson's argument: that because Hierarchies are found in non-human animals, they are... good? Inevitable? His position is slippery, but the function of his argument is that their existence deflects or negates the arguments for dismantling them.
But... why should that be so? That is, why should the natural occurrence of a thing have bearing on it's usefulness or desirability to human society? That something happens in nature is cause to examine why that is, how it functions, what outcomes it brings about, that is true. But uh... civilization is built on the foundation "fuck nature". Hunting paths drying up due to too big a family? Raise them yourself! Not getting enough food off these plants you were harvesting? Find teh biggest ones and get better ones next season! In a dick-waving contest with another nation with whom military conflict would be devastating? Fuck gravity, fuck vacuums, fuck the effects of negating both on the human body,
we're going to the moon.
Even if humans are naturally prone to tribal behavior or forming hierarchies, we're clever bitches. We can figure this stuff out over time if we're motivated to it.
So instead we should be asking, what differences in outcomes do each have, and which is overall better. Would it be best merely to minimize them? Important questions that we aren't asking if we dismiss the entire concept as unattainable due to "human nature".
