Jordan Peterson - Messiah or Poseur?

by cofty 22 Replies latest social current

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  cofty

  A JP video came up on my YouTube feed last week - he was on a panel in front of a huge audience and some poor disturbed guy ran on stage and started crying and wailing to Peterson that he needed his help. It was agonising to watch.

  What was even more disturbing was the comments section. I do not exaggerate when I say that dozens of people were extolling Peterson's wisdom as if Jesus had come again. The parallel to the woman who needed to touch Jesus' garment to be cured came up more than once - and not in an ironic way.

  I have forced myself to endure numerous lectures of his in the past couple of weeks and I have hated every minute. I have never heard a man say nothing but take so long to say it and to do so in such a self-aggrandising way.

  I agree with some of his observations about the culture wars but IMO he is a poseur. Maybe there is something there worth more time and effort but life is too short. I think he is the leader (perhaps by accident) of a personality cult.

  Your thoughts?
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  road to nowhere

  Why? Dont you have anything to do?
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  JoenB75

  He is a great speaker and like Milo he defends conservative values in his own way. I agree that Marxism, cultural relativism and the violent SA hordes from antifa is a great threat to the West.
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  Vanderhoven7

  He encourages people to act responsibly....so he is bound to fetch some criticism.
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  neverendingjourney

  He's a father figure to a generation of young men without older male role models in their lives.

  There's a big market for that sort of thing.
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  hybridous

  I was briefly interested in his 'self-authorship' idea. I thought it might help me work thru some lingering issues.

  I tabled the idea, since I became extremely busy at work & home, and couldn't commit to (yet another) matter.

  Once my obligations thin out, maybe I'll revisit the idea...
  
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  Diogenesister

  He reminds me MUCH to much of my first husband to even begin to be entirely taken in by this man.

  He’s far more vulnerable than he makes out and is a rank hypocrite when it comes to religion. He’s rather egotistical and a true intellect would eat him for breakfast,

  Fully agree he goes all around the houses(and back) to say absolutely nothing, not least when he’s asked a direct question about a subject he dare not be honest about for fear of alienating his audience. Also, loves the sound of his own,..etc

  *I hope he doesn’t ever read this as it would only make his head even bigger than it is (literally and figuratively).

  *the husband that is🤨
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  OneEyedJoe

  Sometimes I want to like him, like when he seemed to change his mind on the spot about anti-discrimination laws (I think this was during a Jim Jeffries show episode) when faced with facts he seemed not to have considered. He seems to think fairly clearly on a lot of topics that are currently confusing a lot of leftists, but when it comes to religious/spiritual/literary topics, he seems like a great example of what happens when a very intelligent person falls in love with their own ideas and decides there is no valid criticism of them. His regular excuse of "it'd take me 40 hours to answer that" or "I'd have to write a 600 page book on that" response to simple questions on religions topics ("do you believe Jesus literally died and was resurrected" or "if all humans ceased to exist would god still exist") is infuriating

  Watching him dance around his claim that no one can give up smoking without a supernatural experience in conversation with Matt dillahunty was painful. His confused way of defining truth in conversation with Sam Harris, doubly so.

  To the extent that he says anything true and useful, there are people out there doing so much more clearly and honestly. He seems mostly to be taking advantage (though, it seems to me that he's doing so unintentionally and out of genuine belief in his own nonsense) of intellectually lazy people that are in search of meaning and want to imagine themselves to have formed an intellectually interesting and novel worldview.
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  StephaneLaliberte

  I don't believe JP ever compared himself to a messiah of any kind. To expect that out of him is to expect what he does not offer in the first place. A Messiah saves people while he wants to help people save themselves.
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  cofty

  OneEyedJoe - you summed up my thoughts exactly thanks.

  For somebody who has done so much good work exposing the fraud of postmodernism Jordan sounds exactly like the philosophers he despises whenever he is asked a challenging question.

  Stephen Hicks is infinitely more interesting and informative than Peterson on many of the the same subjects.

  I think neverendingjourney hit on something when he said that Peterson is a father figure for lots of young men in particular.

  He definitely tries to play both sides in the area of spirituality. He must know he is being dishonest.