How Jordan Peterson Repackages Alt-Right Ideas As Self-Help

[applegrove]

http://www.cracked.com/blog/how-jordan-peterson-repackages-alt-right-ideas-as-self-help/

By Mark Hill at Cracked

"SNIP.....

He Makes These Views Part Of A Strict Personal Moral Code

Listening to people never hurts, and it's eye-opening to listen to Peterson's followers. Here's a 19-year-old who used Peterson's work toestablish healthier habits despite suffering from a serious illness. Here's a man who was motivated to lose weight and gain self-confidence after a nasty divorce. Here's a teenager who tackled their depression so they could get into college.Here's a 20-year-old who described himself as a"shell of a human" with no future until Peterson's words energized him. And here's someone who was motivated by Peterson's teachings to call a suicide helpline instead of ending it all. 

That is the other side of Jordan Peterson.

He recently published a bestselling self-help book called 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos. It offers advice on how to find meaning, how to deal with tragedy, how to make good friends, how to avoid feeling jealous, etc. It's nothing that hasn't been seen before, it's written in a ham-handed style that frames every act as part of an epic battle against a chaotic universe, and many of its arguments are dubious at best.But none of that matters, because people have found genuine, life-changing value in it. A lot of people.

Peterson's young white male fanbase is eating up his argument that privilege is nonsense, because many of them are in fact struggling. No amount of this supposed privilege has given them a good life or a sense of purpose. In Peterson, they're finding both. When 12 Rules was published, there was a joke going around Twitter about a mom who couldn't get her son to clean his room, but Peterson could by arguing that cleaning your room helps keep the dragons of chaos at bay. But guess what: When you're struggling, that kind of melodrama genuinely helps. Every religion on earth has figured that out. His fans, meanwhile, repurpose those jokes into memes about how great Peterson is. Why would they be shamed out of liking the guy who saved their life? ....

That's what makes Peterson both so compelling and so dangerous. The two biggest talking points of his fans are "Jordan Peterson saved me, now let's continue to better ourselves" and "Diversity and tolerance will annihilate civilization and send us to a dark age of chaos." Here's a fan who thanked Peterson for opening his eyes to the truth about how people on his university campus advocating for LGBT rights are actually extremists trying to destroy him. Which means ...



......SNIP"

[RockRaven]

1. He found a niche & is killing it... he's making a fortune on patreon by stroking their sad egos

He is utterly full of crap, it is empty babble that indulges all of the icky uncomfortable feelings that young deplorables have.

[applegrove]

2. I hope he doesn't get into run for office in canada. We are all getting along

with each other in canada. And we even all seem to agree on things like gun control needs to be upped. That diversity is cool. We see stories about each other in the news all the time. I wonder what Peterson feels about civil society, which is high in canada? I think he is a little too dense for the average deplorable to follow. I hope he wanes. What he said about the incel attacker in canada is very creepy. I wish he would just go away.