What does this community think about Jordan Peterson? My son is a huge fan and while listening to and purchasing his books I have mixed feelings. I tend to have a more Sam Harris approach to life and the meaning of life.
Doesn’t hurt to educate yourself in depth psychology. The fact that he’s a popular speaker says something about our current situation.
I missed the previous post on him which was referred to below, and I've logged in multiple times daily the last 3 months, though I intend to search for it. On anything but religion I find him fascinating. He is frustratingly squirmy, and evasive on religion, and tediously belabors over and tries to redefine key words of a question: "What do you mean by 'truth', 'religion', 'God', 'believe'", etc. I once heard him admit that there are some good rationales for Atheism, and then every video I've seen since he has backtracked from that. Atheism-Is-Unstoppable does a great job of taking the air out of him in two videos on the matter:
He’s been afflicted by a persecutorial complex by “Marxists,” who happen to be every post-modern thinker that he doesn’t like. And he trips himself clumsily and inadvertently into post-modern relativism when he claims to have adopted a “Nitzschean,” “will-to-powerish,” “vital” conception of truth. Truth is any belief that promotes survival and overcomes self-destructive alienation. He justifies belief in god, and the truthfulness of god’s existence, on that basis.
I think JP may be an effective clinical psychologist, but as a thinker he’s ridiculous. He has a fixation with Marxists and Marxism that transcends phobia and lands squarely into the realm of paranoia. His sociological thinking is stunted and circular: he believes that nature placed everyone else under the control of a few white males because those few white males are the best equipped to rule us. Predictably and unpersuasivaly he pontificates that any effort of the ruled to change this power structure is contra-natura. He also believes in god. Therefore, his little scheme is governed and validated by the imaginary dude whose superhuman wisdom is to be harvested from the religious writings that we’re all familiar with.
I don’t think that he is dangerous. Sam Harris gave him quite an intellectual beating when they met in a podcast. I think his thinking requires his opponents to come up with a discourse that doesn’t put down his audience. It’s perfectly doable.
He's a celebrity academic who's dangerous in my opinion.
He's compiled a list of universities to boycott which he thinks are too left wing. I think he's frightening.
He's the respectable face of the far right.