Jordan B. Peterson’s Self-Help Book for Misanthropes Part 3, Final Part

An examination of Jordan B. Peterson's book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

Part 1 can be found here: https://moira-j-moore1.dreamwidth.org/433646.html
Part 2 can be found here: https://moira-j-moore1.dreamwidth.org/433918.html

Mom bashing.

Life sucks for boys. Everything favours girls now, but it should continue to favour boys.

Hypocrisy.

Denial about his own behaviour.

Denial of facts in general.

He tells a story of harassing a co-worker and fails to understand that he was a total ass.

Trigger warning: In an execrable example of Peterson’s approach to “therapy,” a patient makes the mistake of telling him that she thought she might have been raped. There are no details about the acts of sex or rape – That might involve examining the behaviour of the men, and we can’t have that – but Peterson’s dismissive approach to rape is typical of a misogynist, and it might be hard to read.

Rule 8: Tell the Truth – Or, At Least, Don’t Lie
Or, This Book Isn’t Long Enough So I Need Another Chapter

No harmless lies that avoid unnecessarily hurting someone’s feelings. Being blunt really is the best way to go, even if it accomplishes nothing more than crushing the person you're talking to.

Oh, he’s so proud of telling the truth to potentially violent men. I’m just going to put one link here to an article talking about what happens to some women when they stand up to potentially violent men: https://mic.com/articles/135394/14-women-were-brutally-attacked-for-rejecting-men-why-arent-we-talking-about-it#.k3OnHQWNH

But, as we already know, this book isn’t meant for women.

A few times, Peterson says he didn’t know himself when he was younger. Because he was, like, so complex. He therefore assumes no one else can possibly know themselves, either.

“I have seen people define their utopia and then bend their lives into knots trying to make it reality. A left-leaning student adopts a trendy, anti-authority stands and spends the next twenty years working resentfully to topple the windmills of his imagination.” (page 210)

Don’t upset the status quo.

This quote made me think of Hollywood movies. If you’ve got a movie that’s pro-military, most people think nothing of it. If it’s critical of the military, all over a sudden there’s an agenda and why can’t movie makers and actors just stay out of politics?

He swings from bashing beliefs he doesn’t share to criticizing a woman who avoids conflict and smiles and is submissive. (Like women in the Bible.) She doesn’t challenge authority. Which is now a bad thing.

He says hiding oneself isn’t healthy, which I agree with, but he wants to shut down everyone who disagrees with him. So ….

This is just justification for his own behaviour. I’m not saying he doesn’t have the right to write this book, or give whatever kind of speeches he wants to the universities that invite him. But to at the same time attack people who disagree with him, like those who protest his speeches at universities, I think there’s a word for that. Hm. I think it starts with an ‘h.’

Now revolution is a good thing.

I’m not going to type out the paragraph vilifying mothers, but I will point out a running theme in this book regarding parenting. Mothers selfishly spoil and protect their sons as a means of controlling them. Men might be too strict with their sons, but this is discipline meant to make the sons strong and good citizens. Daughters aren’t mentioned much.

“You can use words to manipulate the world into delivering what you want.” (page 209)

Like asking a complete stranger for a favour in order to create a relationship they might not even want?

I’m getting bored with this book.

There is a lot about this chapter about denying reality, and the damage it can do, which I agree with, in principle. Unfortunately, Peterson denies a lot of reality.

“That Word [god’s] transformed chaos into order at the beginning of time.” (page 223)

And that order is harsh, and brutish, and cruel. Because we deserve that.

More stuff that you’ll find in every self-help book.

Rule 9: Assume That the Person You Are Listening to Might Know Something You Don’t
Or, How to Use What a Person Says to Change Their Perception of Their Own Experiences

This is about listening to people to let them figure out what to do, not to try to tell them what to do or think, and to engage in meaningful communication in general. I agree with this idea. Too bad he twists it all to hell.

I guess I should have expected that he would get around to blaming the victims of sexual assault. A woman unlucky enough to be his patient told him she thought she had been raped, she wasn’t sure, and his first instinct was to assume alcohol might be involved.

She did encounter the men in bars, and she did drink. I say this not because I think drinking with strange men means she was creating an environment in which men were entitled to rape – Peterson puts all responsibility on her behaviour – but to address the fact that Peterson went straight to the assumption that alcohol was involved before knowing where she encountered the men. His shocking lack of detail means we have no valid way of knowing whether the consumption of alcohol was in fact a factor. Just because they drank didn’t mean all judgment was out the window.

This is what he says:
“My client told me that she would go to a bar and have a few drinks. Someone would start to talk to her. She would end up at his place or her place with him.” (page 235)

Do proper doctors usually refer to their patients as "clients?"

This information, so to speak, is basically useless. What’s “a few?” Two? Five? Eight? How long was she at the bar? One hour? Three? Was she someone like me who can easily down three or four drinks over a couple of hours without doing anything I regret the next morning? (I don’t drink and drive.) Or was she a lightweight who was so obviously drunk that a decent man would put her in a cab instead of taking advantage of her?

Do you want to know how much the men had to drink? No idea. The behaviour of the men isn’t addressed. At all. It’s all about her, how she created an environment in which the men inevitably felt entitled to sex.

“Alcohol can cause ambiguity. That’s partly why people drink. Alcohol temporarily lifts the terrible burden of self-consciousness from people. Drunk people know about the future, but they don’t care about it. That’s exciting. That’s exhilarating. Drunk people can party like there’s no tomorrow. But, because there is a tomorrow – most of the time – drunk people also get into trouble. They black out. They go to dangerous places with careless people. They have fun. But they also get raped.” (page 234)

So, because getting raped is such a common part of drinking too much, we should just shrug it off.

You know what he doesn’t say? That people have too much to drink and rape other people.

“So, I immediately thought (page 234) something like that might be involved. How else to understand ‘I think’?” (page 235)

Maybe she had said yes but changed her mind, so she wasn’t sure if it was rape. Maybe she agreed to dominant/submissive sex for the first time, without knowing how such relationships are supposed to operate, so didn’t know if ignoring her safe word or signal was actually rape. Maybe she was in a long-term relationship and she didn’t know if she actually had the right to say no. To name a few possibilities. The latter doesn’t apply to Ms. S, but he was asking a generic question, so I provided this realistic alternative to his assumption.

Then she added that it had happened five times. That seemed to clinch his opinion that she hadn’t been raped at all.

Peterson doesn’t bother to waste details about why, truly, she thought she might have been raped, but he spends a lot of time talking about the fact that she had no sense of self or purpose and didn’t know how to think for herself.

A tangent I think is significant. On page 235, Peterson writes about this patient: “She dressed, however, like a professional. She knew how to present herself, for first appearances. In consequence, she had finagled her way onto a government advisory board ….”

Way back in the beginning, Peterson had talked about how appearing confident made you feel confident, and others would treat you better as a result. In the case of this woman, she used this as a trick to finagle her way into a position she didn’t deserve.

Back to the victim-blaming.

“I understood much more clearly and precisely, however, how easy it might be to instill a false memory into the mental landscape as soon as my client revealed her uncertainty about her sexual experiences.” (page 237)

The next couple of pages are weird, as he describes two different “stories” about what could have happened to her, that he might have told her to explain her situation. The first is basically claiming she brought it on herself by being so aimless and not understanding what she wanted. The second is that she had been a genuine victim of sexual assault. The weird thing is where he put the stories on the political spectrum, because of course there must be a political spectrum.

“If I had been the adherent of a left-wing, social-justice (Yes, he actually uses that term, and yes, he is derogatory) ideology, I would have told her the first story. If I had been the adherent of a conservative ideology, I would have told her the second.” (page 239)

In short, the social justice approach says it’s all her fault, the conservative approach says that the rape was the sin of the rapist. He provides no explanation for assigning those ideologies to those “stories.”
What gets weirder, the “It’s your fault” approach is the one he pushes, which he has identified as left-wing, while he is right-wing. He’s not making sense here.

At no point does he ever think, “Huh. Maybe she was raped.” It was all just, how do you really know what rape is?

“Miss S would have had to talk for twenty years to figure out whether she had been raped.” (page 240)

Well, obviously she would have had no help from him if she tried. He doesn’t even talk about why she engaged in this behaviour if it wasn’t what she truly wanted, even if it wasn’t rape. Yes, alcohol was involved, but that doesn’t change the fact that she started the process, a pattern of behaviour she knew she’d developed, before she started drinking. So, what’s going on there? Was it really nothing more than her not having any sense of self?

I’m not saying that an absence of saying ‘no’ implies consent. I’m not saying that starting the process means she asked to be raped or deserved to be raped. I’m saying that this behaviour was worthy of investigation, but he couldn’t be bothered to engage in it. He claims examining one’s own behaviour is essential to health and order and all that, but if it’s on his time, he’s damn well going to control what behaviours you examine.

His approach was that the only problem was her interpretation of events. He actually seems to believe that this does not represent imposing his ideology on her. Fortunately, she left his practice. It turns out she could think for herself after all. It’s probably one of the best decisions she’d ever made in her life. I hope she was able to recover from the damage he no doubt inflicted on her.

“People think they think, but it’s not true.” (page 241)

Then he tells people what they must do to think, according to his rules. And he criticizes the use of strawman arguments. Ha ha ha!

He really likes Freud. He says you can tell Freud was a genius because everyone hates him. I wonder if that’s what Peterson tells himself when people disagree with him. Anyway, while I think ‘hatred’ is a little strong, it is true that Freud had some freaky ideas. Follow the link to find a story of the strange connections between painful menstruation, masturbation, and noses. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1984/02/freud-and-the-seduction-theory/376313/

Another story about a mom acting like a martyr and making everyone’s lives difficult.

Rules of listening that I think are pretty common. At least, it’s what lawyers and other people who engage in alternative dispute resolution are taught to do. Listen attentively and give a summary of what you’ve heard to make sure you understand the other person correctly. Unfortunately, he abuses this process by making the goal about changing the other person’s memory of the past.

Another criticism of strawman arguments. Seriously, Peterson needs to spend more time examining his own behaviour.

A brief return to dominance and hierarchy. I knew we’d get there sometime.

This is the only worthwhile paragraph from this section:
“Then there is the conversation where one participant is trying to attain victory for his point of view. This is yet another variant of the dominance-hierarchy conversation. During such a conversation, which often tends toward the ideological, the speaker endeavours to (1) denigrate or ridicule the viewpoint of anyone holding a contrary position, (2) use selective evidence while doing so, and, finally, (3) impress the listeners (many of whom are already occupying the same ideological space) with the validity of his assertions.” (page 249)

I don’t ridicule everyone’s viewpoint when it differs from mine, but I’m definitely ridiculing his, because he’s a hypocrite who’s expressed an intention to harm other people. Obviously, I’m selecting the evidence that supports my argument. Who doesn’t? But you have to give me this, almost all the evidence I’m using is from his own words. And I haven’t taken any of them out of context in an attempt to twist their meaning. I used the context to inform my understanding of their meaning. As to listeners, I don’t expect anyone to read this. I’m just expressing myself. But self-deluded me can actually have fruitful, civil conversations with people who disagree with me. Shock! Sometimes I change their mind, sometimes they change mine. Sometimes we just agree that the other person’s point of view is valid, and that’s also a healthy outcome.

The important thing, though, is that Peterson is guilty of all of this, to a vicious degree, while acting like he isn’t.

Rule 10: Be Precise in Your Speech
Or, Treat Your Listener Like an Idiot Who Can’t Understand Your Point the First Time

Everything is connected and we don’t really think much about anything until something breaks down. He took about eight pages to say that. How many analogies does he think we need before we get the point?

Hey, chaos is back!

You know, I kind of want to be chaos. She sounds like a powerful being. She’s all about transformation, and our culture sure needs transforming. Forward, Peterson, not backward.

He spends a Very. Long. Time. saying you should be clear about what you want, when you want it, and as problems develop, or at some point it’s going to blow up in your face. Honest self-evaluation, honest evaluation of the world, honest expression to others. Great ideas, just, we get it already.

Rule 11: Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding
Or, I Don’t Have a Firm Idea About What This Chapter is About, So I’ll Throw in Everything

He writes about kids skateboarding off of public property, doing stunts on rails and stuff. He admires these kids greatly, making it clear they’re almost always boys, because that matters. He then writes of another area where “skatestoppers” were installed to stop this activity. He implies that this is because the Powers That Be are too concerned about the safety of the skateboarders. This area was meant to be for the growth of plants. The skatestoppers were placed after damage had already been done by the skateboarders, to get them to stop using that particular area. Peterson complains that the changes, including wear caused by the skateboarders, makes the place ugly. The skateboarders wouldn’t respect the space, resulting in changes in the attempt to protect the space, but the problem can’t possibly be the skateboarders themselves. Oh, no, it’s an oppressive system trying to crush boys.

People like living on the edge, he says. That shouldn’t be interfered with.

A while back, Peterson said you shouldn’t let your children be jerks. I guess destruction of property is ok when it involves boys showing off how brave they are.

Bashing UK socialists of the 1930s – they hated the poor, you know – and socialism. And the socialists of today. They all disguise “their resentment with piety, sanctimony and self-righteousness.” (page 289) I guess Peterson is a leftist after all. Good for him, that he knows himself so well.

Once more, he uses the term social justice as though there were something wrong with justice.

“People motivated to make things better usually aren’t concerned with changing other people - ” (Page 290)

Just changing how they perceive the world and getting them to act accordingly. But not trying to change the world. Never that. Making things better doesn’t mean making the system better.

His father, a teacher, called an Indigenous student a cow. Sounds like Dad was a jerk.

Peterson has me stumped. I freely admit that I have no idea what these stories about his life have to do with the subject of the chapter.

Repeating himself.

The education system is skewed against boys, he claims. “In modern universities women now make up more than 50 percent of the students in more than two-thirds of all disciplines.” (page 297)

A few pages later, he says that if you take out the courses dominated by men, the percentages are even more skewed. Well, yeah, if you ignore the evidence that doesn’t support your argument, your argument appears stronger. But it isn’t. Remember back when he criticized people who used selective evidence?

He doesn’t address the fact that men have dominated upper education for centuries, at least in most European countries and their colonies. Or that in those one third of courses, men dominate women. It’s ok when the percentages work in favour of the men.

“Boys are suffering, in the modern world.” (page 298)

Actually, everyone in the modern world is suffering. That’s why it needs changing, and not back to the rigid rules of dominance that Peterson favours. We tried that. It didn’t work for people who weren’t precious, fragile, straight white Christian men.

Being defeated by a girl is way worse for boys than being defeated by boys.

Well, yeah, because girls and women are devalued in our culture.

He refers to friendzoning again.

Did you know that women in higher education have a hard time establishing long-term relationships? Why? It’s because women want to “marry up,” while men are willing to “marry down.” What terrible terminology. And Peterson doesn’t refer to the male ego which often, though not always, stops them from marrying up.

In law school, I met a woman whose income was likely to, in time, rise above her husband’s, who was a high school teacher. Her husband was asked how he would feel about his wife earning more than him. Why? Because that’s still a thing. His answer was something like, “I don’t care who buys the Mercedes as long as we end up with one.” That’s a rare attitude.

Here’s a fun Fox article that agrees with a lot of things Peterson says about what feminine and masculine should be. http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/02/08/society-is-creating-new-crop-alpha-women-who-are-unable-to-love.html

Peterson says women want a good provider once they have children. As a lawyer, I came across many situations in which the father had always been the primary caregiver. Whether that was recognized by the judge was a problem. Why? Because people like Peterson declare that this isn’t natural. Patriarchy.

Peterson often refers to animals, and the way they do things, as proof of the natural order of human relationships. Let’s take a look at some animals in which the male is the primary caregiver: (This is copied off the web page.)
• 1) Seahorses. Perhaps the most famous of all animal fathers are seahorses, which are known for being one of the only male animals in the world to get pregnant. ...
• 3) Marsupial Frogs. ...
• 4) Darwin Frogs. ...
• 5) Mimic Poison Frog. ...
• 6) Emperor Penguins. ...
• 7) Namaqua Sandgrouse. ...
• 8) Greater Hornbills. ...
• 9) Rheas.
http://www.neatorama.com/2010/06/17/12-impressively-active-animal-fathers/

This is a motive behind his plan to create a website designed to destroy courses he doesn’t agree with:
“The strong turn towards political correctness in universities has exacerbated the problem. [Single motherhood.] The voices shouting against oppression have become louder, it seems in precise proportion to how equal – even now increasingly skewed against men – the schools have become. There are now whole disciplines in universities forthrightly hostile towards men. These are areas of study, dominated by the postmodern/neo-Marxist claim that Western culture, in particular, is an oppressive structure, created by white men to dominate and exclude women (and other select groups); successful only because of that domination and exclusion.” (page 302)

Aw, poor precious, fragile, straight white Christian male who has to ignore enormous tracts of evidence in order to make his weak argument look convincing. Reasonable people have facts – remember, he doesn’t like facts – in centuries of law and history, he’s got entitled white male rage.

Also on page 302, he writes:
“Of course, culture is an oppressive structure. It’s always been that way. (Emphasis his.) But it’s awesome anyway, and you shouldn’t try to change that. Criticize it, sure. But not in those university courses he dislikes.

Hierarchies are good again, once more divided between winners and losers. And the consequences are great for everyone! “The price we pay for that involvement is the inevitable creation of hierarchies of success, while the inevitable consequence is difference in outcome. Absolute equality would therefore require the sacrifice of value itself – and then there would be nothing worth living for.” (page 303)

Strawman argument alert: If you say Western culture is oppressive and ruled by men, you’re basically saying that women have made no contribution to culture and have no power at all. Also, individual men who tried to make things better for women invalidate the proposal that, on the whole, the oppressive system was largely created by men.

He says that communist countries killed a lot of their own people, millions. I’m not disputing that. But Canada hasn’t been ruled by a communist government, and we practiced slavery, as well as cultural genocide against the Indigenous populations that, many times, ended up in murder, to the point that entire nations were wiped out. And talking about stealing property, the Canadian government stole property from Japanese Canadians during the Second World War in order to pay for the cost of their internment. But Peterson would have to engage in studies involving the history of groups who aren’t straight white Christian men in order to know about these practices, and we can’t have that.

The crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the centuries of slaughter of “heretics,” the slavery, and the genocide perpetrated by Christians, well, we’re just not going to talk about any of that.

He claims that he has some beliefs that might be left-leaning, and then proves that he doesn’t. He says wealth inequity “is a threat to the stability of society,” but forced wealth redistribution isn’t the way to fix that issue. He also doesn’t propose any actions that will. Are we supposed to wait until wealthy people become generous with the care of all people, instead of just their personal causes? Like voluntarily paying all of their employees a decent wage? Or stop putting money in off-shore accounts in order to avoid paying taxes? ‘Cause we have no reason to believe this will happen.

He complains that university courses with the aim of “the demolition of the culture that supports them…” get government funding, and “If radical right-wingers were receiving state funding for political operations disguised as university courses, as the radical left-wingers clearly are, the uproar from progressives across North America would be deafening.” (page 313)

But his publicly-funded agenda of encouraging his own students to attack the programs he doesn’t agree with, because he’s radical right-winger, that’s ok.

I’m providing a link to an article that discusses the government funding private Christian schools that discriminate against LGBTQ people have received in the past. Now I, a left-leaning socialist, think discrimination against LGBTQ people is immoral and culturally destructive. Maybe radical right-leaning people like Peterson don’t. http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/christian-schools-received-20m-from-infrastructure-fund-1.1329280

A “What does this even mean?” statement:
“There isn’t a shred of hard evidence to support any of their central claims … that the prime lesson of history is that men, rather than nature, were the primary source of the oppression of women (rather than, as in most cases, their partners and supporters)….” (page 313)

If men aren’t the oppressors, who are these partners and supporters? Is he not talking about husbands/ male partners? I have no idea what he means by supporters. He doesn’t bother to explain.

Of course, there’s a ton of evidence that men were the primary source of oppression of women, at least in Canada post-contact, and I can’t believe he doesn’t know that. The laws and court cases make it all clear. (Voting, women being barred from Senate seats until 1929 because they weren’t considered “persons,” the double-standard for seeking divorces, to name three. This link elaborates. http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/women-and-the-law/ ) The logical conclusion is he’s choosing to ignore that evidence because it undermines his argument.

There’s a term for that, in academics, when someone puts forth an argument knowing there is evidence against it, but instead of acknowledging that evidence and trying to combat it, just pretends it doesn’t exist. It’s a violation of something or other.

Lobsters!

Bunch of stuff he’s already written about how hierarchies – as they are now, of course – are all about nature and are best for everyone and the society.

Trying to give equal pay for equal work is too complicated, so just don’t try. How’s that for living on the edge?

Women’s problems are largely to do their failure to be aggressive enough. Maybe if he took one of those gender study courses, he’d know how often women are punished for being aggressive, in any setting you can think of. Bitch, tease, slut, bossy, ball-buster.

Repeating himself.

More about manipulative mothers. By the way, fathers are rarely manipulative.

He talks about matriarchal societies in which power was taken by men. Patriarchy exists again.
“…consciousness is symbolically masculine and has been since the beginning of time….” “… attentive wakefulness, clarity of vision, and tough-minded independence. Those are masculine traits.” (page 324)

His mom didn’t try to manipulate or coddle him. So, that’s one woman. It’s about her letting Peterson get into a fistfight instead of intervening. This finally brings us back to the “safe bad, dangerous good,” theme, which we haven’t seen for thirty-eight pages.

Don’t worry, that lasts only two paragraphs.

Then he moves on to a story about a job he had on a railway line crew. For some reason, that includes a tangent about the Northern Cree Indians (Haven’t seen ‘Indigenous’ or even “aboriginal’ yet, because he doesn’t truck with that political correctness.) which, for some reason, includes this description:
“… quiet guys, for the most part, easygoing, until they drank too much, and the chips on their shoulders started to show. They had been in and out of jail, as had most of their relatives. They didn’t attach much shame to that, considering it just another part of the white man’s system. It was also warm in jail in the winter, and the food was regular and plentiful.” (page 327)

A needless slam. The Indigenous have chips on their shoulders. And like to go to jail so they don't have to support themselves.

Anyway, everyone gets a nickname from the crew upon joining. Often, the name is a least partially derogatory. A new guy gets a name he doesn’t like and won’t respond to. Peterson describes him as a jerk, but I have no faith in Peterson’s descriptions of people. He is an excellent example of the unreliable narrator.

Still, even if the guy was a jerk, that didn’t rob him of the right to refuse to respond to a nickname imposed by him on others. The guys started throwing pebbles at his head. (He was wearing a hardhat.) “Even this failed to improve his humour.” (page 328) Imagine that! But they kept doing it, because they had the maturity and viciousness of undisciplined eight-year-olds. He left, apparently deciding life was too short to deal with these pathetic losers.

If women did this, Peterson would call it shaming and bullying. When men do it, it’s enforcing a code of behaviour.

Repeating himself.

Referring to The Simpsons characters, he calls Nelson Muntz’s mother a slut. Classy.

He calls the Iron Man movies fascist. A wealthy capitalist, a brilliant man who imposes his will on everyone else. You know, dominance. Peterson should be all over that.

“Partly what this means for the future is that if men are pushed too hard to feminize, they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology.” (page 330)

Yeah, we already know that when people are pressed to give up their privilege and power over others, they return to the violence that enabled them to steal that privilege and power in the first place.

“Men have to toughen up. Men demand it, and women want it….” (page 331)

Ah, a man telling women what they want. Thanks!

Seriously, how many times is he going to talk about selfish mothers?

When boys do disruptive things, like spinning donuts on icy parking lots with their cars, and disobeying teachers, that’s just boys pushing themselves and testing authority, and that’s good. Ignore the damage that might do. Don’t interfere with their skateboarding.

Rule 12: Pet a Cat When You Encounter One on the Street
This chapter is almost entirely about his daughter’s significant health problems and the pain it has caused her and the family, so I’m not touching it.

Coda
Nothing new, and nothing worth commenting on. (/cut)