Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson

by Ben Burgis

Jacques Lacan wrote that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still a pathological phenomenon: the pathological element being the husband’s need for jealousy as the only way to retain his dignity—identity, even.

Public-sector employees exist partly due to the fact that the capitalist category of ‘productive labour’ does not suffice to meet the need of capitalism, let alone society

As the Ancient Greeks pointed out long ago, we exist socially and politically by convention to remedy the arbitrariness of nature.

The difference between the Appeal to Authority logical fallacy and a legitimate appeal to expert opinion is whether the figure being appealed to really does have expertise lacked by the rest of us.

Peterson’s move here is a version of the Fallacy of Equivocation (the way that an argument can go wrong when a key term is used to mean different things at different points in a reasoning process) called the ‘Motte and Bailey’ strategy.