30 Oct 2019

Dan Sanchez on Jordan Peterson Helping the Joker

Bob Murphy Show 8 Comments

This post is dedicated to Andrew MD (who recently derided Jordan Peterson in the comments here). Here’s the audio podcast, and below of course is the video.

8 Responses to “Dan Sanchez on Jordan Peterson Helping the Joker”

  1. Andrew in MD says:

    Wow, I’m honored. I’ll be listening to this on my drive home. I read Dan’s article back when you posted it in Potpourri, so it’ll be interesting to hear how you expand on that here.

  2. Andrew in MD says:

    Good episode Bob. My favorite parts were the discussion of Joker at the beginning and your point at the end that you think Peterson is often too bleak. The discussion of Peterson was fine and I can definitely understand some of the things that you and other like about him. As I mentioned in the “Pharisee” post, I too was once a Peterson fan.

    But I wonder if you’d agree with me that the positive impact of Peterson is largely in further popularizing already popular ideas and works. Because it’s not like Peterson is the first guy to ever advise cleaning your room or taking responsibility for your life in the face of hardship. And yet, whenever someone wonders aloud what the big deal is with this Peterson guy, it seems like his popularity is its own self-justification. I.e., “Look at all the people he’s helped!”

    I agree that, to the extent that he’s pulled people out of miserable nihilism, that’s a good thing. And I also think it’s admirable that he’s willing to reach out to people that the mainstream left considers to be beneath dignity. But I still think that he hasn’t really advanced anything novel; and that he mixes a lot of nonsense in with the valuable material; and that, when challenged on the nonsense parts of his work, he retreats into an even larger cloud of nonsense.

    It also seems that whenever he’s challenged, he gets an automatic tribal self-defense-mechanism response his supporters who see him as “on their side” and being challenged by “enemies.” These arguments from his supporters, in my opinion, often try to litigate Peterson’s words in the best possible light, rather than taking them at face value and making a personal judgement on whether what Peterson said was right or wrong.

    Returning to your point about the bleakness of Peterson, you said that Peterson is overstating things to say that Life is suffering. But Peterson has actually said something much worse. He’s stated that suffering is the meaning of life. And to me, that’s the biggest problem with Peterson’s philosophy.

    So if I was trying to boil down Peterson’s philosophy into a single paragraph from my best honest hearing of him, it would go like this:

    You shouldn’t wallow in misery and nihilism. You should take responsibility for your own failures and suffering and work to improve yourself and the world around you. You should do this because people who do bring order to the world and people who do the opposite bring chaos and suffering to the world. Also, you shouldn’t feel alone in your suffering because everyone suffers. In fact, suffering is the meaning of life. Also, chaos and order must coexist in proper balance because too much order creates tyranny. Finally, don’t worry too much about factual or logical contradictions within the larger philosophy because it doesn’t have to be factually or logically accurate in order to be true. Something is only true if it promotes life/survival. Indeed, some facts are not true.

    And so, If I’ve done my job then that doesn’t seem to objectionable Peterson fans. But to me, I definitely have to disagree with his beliefs that suffering is the meaning of life and that truth is subordinate to Darwinian considerations. I think that those two beliefs are anti-Christian, anti-human, and anti-intellectual.

    I also find his beliefs about order, chaos, and suffering to be confusing at best. This is the part that I called a “psychological magic trick” in my previous comment. Suffering is the meaning of life and it comes from chaos but we should seek to reduce chaos and thereby suffering? Are we then reducing the meaning of life? Too much order creates tyranny, so we should be careful not to overdo it in our quest to create order in the world, but doesn’t tyranny cause suffering too? He also has his whole bit about how men are order and women are chaos. I admit that he’ll frequently hit on something that feels meaningful upon hearing it. But, for me, it always falls down under scrutiny. I’m not an SJW that thinks he should be silenced or anything like that. I just strongly disagree with the people who hold him in high esteem for his original thoughts.

    Man, I’ve really rambled on here. This isn’t like me but it’s really hard to rebut Peterson in a succinct fashion. Let me try to boil it down for those of you who’ll just scroll to the end:
    (1) Peterson’s positive value comes from further popularizing already popular ideas and works.
    (2) Peterson has probably helped a lot of people out of misery and into Peterson fandom but I’m skeptical about the level of impact and long-term effect his philosophy can have.
    (3) Peterson mixes a lot of nonsense in with his valuable material.
    (4) The ideas that are relatively unique to Peterson don’t stand up to scrutiny and, when called to defend himself, Peterson evades direct responses.
    (5) “Suffering is the meaning of life” and “truth is that which supports life/survival” are especially repugnant ideas.

    • Matt M says:

      But I wonder if you’d agree with me that the positive impact of Peterson is largely in further popularizing already popular ideas and works. Because it’s not like Peterson is the first guy to ever advise cleaning your room or taking responsibility for your life in the face of hardship. And yet, whenever someone wonders aloud what the big deal is with this Peterson guy, it seems like his popularity is its own self-justification. I.e., “Look at all the people he’s helped!”
      I agree that, to the extent that he’s pulled people out of miserable nihilism, that’s a good thing. And I also think it’s admirable that he’s willing to reach out to people that the mainstream left considers to be beneath dignity. But I still think that he hasn’t really advanced anything novel

      The ability to re-package existing wisdom in a creative/novel way such that it will effectively appeal to large groups of modern individuals who previously rejected it is a pretty significant one though. The fact that he has helped so many (while so many other promoters of existing wisdom have helped so few) is, in fact, evidence that he is doing something special/important/unique. Particularly so when the message is generally positive, life-affirming, and delivered to a marginalized/underserved group.

      For an even more controversial example of this phenomenon, one might point to the Insane Clown Posse 🙂

  3. M says:

    I know nothing about Jordan Peterson, but what do you mean by “Suffering is the meaning of life”? Or what do you think he means by it? I’m not entirely clear what “meaning of life” is supposed to be. If you said the meaning of life was to survive and replicate, I’d know that “meaning” means goal or purpose. Is he saying the goal of life is “to suffer”? Or something else?

    • Andrew in MD says:

      That’s a good question. Peterson rarely gives concise answer to questions like that so it’s a little hard to say. When he answers questions like this he usually starts off with “It’s something like this . . .” and then gives a long-winded answer that’s feels more like a psychedelic adventure of words than a series of declarative statements.

      But he has said that suffering is the only universal in life. That everyone suffers and that suffering is the only thing that is guaranteed to us. That if we are happy in our lives then we should be very grateful while it lasts because most people are not happy and suffering catches up with all of us.

      I’m hesitant to go much further than that. I think he’d probably say that if there were no suffering, there would be no motivating force for humanity. I think he’d say that our attempts to escape suffering and help others out of their suffering is a primary force in our lives. But I don’t know if he’s ever said anything explicitly like that. He does talk about how your character is defined by how you respond in the face of suffering.

      I will say that I think this part of his philosophy is heavily influenced by his personal experience. He’s had a lot of suffering in his personal life from autobiographical accounts and so I think that his belief that suffering is the meaning of life is a much a personal coping mechanism as it is a general theory about life for him.

      He’s also said that when he tells people who are suffering that suffering is the meaning of life, that they generally feel that a burden has been lifted from them rather than feeling oppressed by the idea. And his personal definition of the word “truth” is unorthodox. So it is possible that when he says that “suffering is the meaning of life” that he just means that saying those words makes people feel better and more capable in their lives in his experience. And that, by his definition, would suffice to make it true.

      • Harold says:

        You have summed up many of the problems I have with Peterson.

        I was going to leave it at that, but Peterson is such a rich source that I ended up watching a few more videos.

        He has written some self-help stuff that people find useful, and that is OK. He is also lauded as a political and philosophical guru, but much of his activity in this area is hollow. As you point out, his use of the terms “religious” and “truth” are particularly problematic. He can define them any way he wishes, but it is encumbent on him to make it clear that he is talking about something very different than is usually understood by these terms. He told Matt Dillahunty he (Matt) was religious because he did not murder and rape people. This is a nonsense argument except Peterson is using the term to mean something totally different from the usual meaning.

        I just looked at Matt Dillahunty’s reflections on his discussion with Peterson. He asked Peterson “what are you afraid we will lose if people stop believing in a god.” This was because Matt thought Peterson believed in belief, rather than in God. That is, that if we believe these things there are benefits. This is something I share – belief in Gods has been beneficial for development of complex societies. Matt said that you can change people, maybe for the better, with compelling narratives, but that is independant of whether those narratives point to truths. However, with Peterson’s version of truth, then these things are true because there are benefits. This is why Peterson needs to have an odd definition of truth. He can then claim that stuff is true, even if in the usual sense of the word it may not be true. There may not actually be a god, but it is true because it leads to evolutionary success. So Peterson claims it takes books to answer the question “do you believe in God?” Most peole can answer yes or no.

    • Dan says:

      His view is that life is full of suffering by its nature. You’ll die, you’ll lose loved ones along the way, etc. He believes in accepting this and striving to better yourself, making the world better on an individual basis, as being the proper response to this fact.

      It’s not that he thinks life is nothing but suffering, but that it is inevitable, and he believes in how you deal with it as being the critical aspect of life. One of the reasons he focuses on this is because many people believe life is about finding happiness. He thinks this is a dangerous trap, and I’d agree.

      One of the reasons he is vastly more successful at reaching people in dark places than his critics is he doesn’t go around preaching a message of finding happiness. He preaches a message of building strength. He preaches a message of shouldering responsibility. He doesn’t say “do X and you’ll be happy.” He says “Do X and you’ll be a little better person than you were. You’ll slowly but surely become a person people can depend on and look to for strength.” Maybe you won’t be happy, but you’ll be worthwhile. That’s a powerful message to someone who can’t see light at the end of a tunnel.

      • Harold says:

        This is Peterson the self help man. He has useful stuff to say that is helpful to people. As Dale Carnegie had useful stuff to say. I don’t have a problem with Peterson as a self help author. I have a problem with his extending this to philosophy and politics.

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