Jordan Peterson: Such a Professor, Maybe a Feminist.
The arena was dark and my worries about who would be sitting next to me subsided as Jordan Peterson was introduced on stage and the cushioned fold out seat to my right remained open.
His talk, however, was anything but the popular video clips about gender, climate change, or any other area where he’s proposed arguments counter to regularly growing narratives.
Jordan Peterson emphasized self-improvement through your relationships and community, reaching goals without being a tyrant to yourself or others, and finding a partner who is a worthy opponent, as good as or better than you because that is part of your destiny of becoming more than you already are. That’s right, it wasn’t Brene Brown or Oprah talking about the importance of play and the larger value of reciprocal altruism, it was Jordan Peterson, who also asked you to confront the tragedy of your existence by bettering yourself and participating in your family and community.
Of course, he took an audience question about COVID lockdowns and entertained his followers by applying basic concepts of child psychology and development to how COVID lockdowns affected people of various ages. While childhood development is a worthy area to consider in going forward with supporting children’s education and socialization post-COVID, those types of arguments almost seemed too easy, not enough of a challenge, for him to deliver. As China deals with mounting losses from their recent full opening from COVID, he called the lockdown out as doing more damage than good. The 90 seconds dedicated to the topic was met with cheers, which he could have continued to engage, but changed course.
Peterson answered philosophical questions about the individual versus the collective with Jungian-style application of collective experiences and symbols. His talk of maintaining one narrative to benefit social order was the base logic supporting his more controversial arguments about gender identity, however, the social commentary was not present, even with the crowd ready to support it.
The commentary on relationships was respectful without talk of traditional roles or subservience that other conservative social commentators push either in words or in their own visible partnerships. His wife’s opening was about date nights and how that structure and commitment held their relationship together. He compared finding a partner to finding someone to play basketball against…what fun is it if you’re seven feet tall and you choose to go against someone who is three feet and one inch? You’re going to excel and get better if you have a worthy opponent, are tilted towards failure, and optimally challenged. Nearly all educated women would support that message.
His warm up discussion about objects and focus didn’t quite seem to tie in once he got going, but it did get him in the direction of explaining how your brain makes you feel, depending on whether or not you’re moving towards reaching your goals. When something isn’t relevant to your expectations and goal, you might get anxious or disappointed. He almost mocked the audience’s expectations that he was going to go into his social commentary by instead giving a talk he must have used in a “sensation and perception” psychology class about the structure of the eye and its links to your brain.
In again presenting the base of his arguments, but not the surface commentary, he made the leap that not everything is driven by power because if it was, then the 4–5% of psychopaths in our society would be in charge. While a nice use of psychology stats, it’s a bit of a stretch to say that because the most power-hungry people rarely make it to the top that our structures are not oppressive nor have a history related to oppression and power.
Whether realized or not, the audience was provided the ground work with a professor-style presentation in which he didn’t care if the talk wasn’t what you expected, it was you needed…or at least, it was the presentation the professor wanted to give.
Aim up, your soul depends on it.