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28 - The Jordan Peterson Conundrum ft. ContraPoints & Briahna Joy Gray (Patreon)

Published:
2018-02-14 02:49:22
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2026-06
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Content

Michael explains why the growth of AstroTurf groups like United States of Care signal that the movement for universal healthcare is winning.
Shout out to the African National Congress for ordering Jacob Zuma to step-down.  
Natalie Parrott (@contrapoints) calls in to talk about the false guidance that Jordan Peterson gives to confused young men and strategies to deal with bigots.   
We throw another deserving billionaire in the pyramid.
The crew talks about the naïve idealism of Sam Harris.
Crew Briahna Joy Gray (@briebriejoy) is here in studio to talk about the Katie Roiphie controversy, what many of her critics missed, and what a leftist perspective on how society should deal with sexual assault should be. 

Comments

Emma & Brian

This episode might be my favourite. Great job crew, and natalie/briahna were brilliant

Emma & Brian

For sure, unfortunately i'm late to the party. Just found out about the show after you were on Zerobooks. But i ve been catching up on old episodes at work since then, a little depressed at what i'd been missing out on, but absolutely love it now

TMBS
>>10146857

Thanks so much! The show is still pretty new and onward brother

E

Only recently started listening, but always enjoyed your appearances on TYT; just became a member because of your thoughtful content and (most importantly) your incredible Obama impression where you were celebrating white mortality/ declining birth rates and the arc of history tending towards Sharia - I was in tears, lmao!!!

Gabe

Hi, Full disclosure, I'm one of those 20 year old white male virgins who 'follows' (though that's an overstatement) Jordan Peterson. In particular, I've found his self authoring program and emphasis on personal development/responsibility have been helpful in my mental health. I'm also a meditating, sarong wearing, acid dropping, left leaning abnormality among my peers, but I hesitate to attach any political label like liberal, socailist, or marxist. Anyway, in your discussion with Natalie Parrott, she made a few statements you agreed with I'm interested hearing your opinion on. Not wanting to discuss the 'settled questions' of society doesn't make sense to me. Sure, in the case of women being allowed to work of course I agree that they should, but that's because I'm indoctrinated with those beliefs. Is that really different from not wanting to discuss the previously held 'settled question' that they shouldn't work, or that gay conversion therapy is ethical? If I was born a few decades earlier, I may very well have believed that. All civil rights movements went against the settled notions of their time. Even if what he's saying is dumb and wrong, surely it's worth considering the opposing view. Also, I disagree the idea that he's doing something wrong by stating he uses preferred pronouns in his class. From my understanding, he opposes the legistation of compelled speech honestly on the grounds of free speech alone, and the previous point seems to support that. If that's true, calling him a bigot, or saying his actions are bigoted seems like a stretch to me. If there's something I'm missing here I'm open to hearing it. Also also, given that no trans folk want people locked up for misgendering them, why would it need to be in the law? Anyway I've enjoyed the show and your appearance on tangentially speaking. Sorry for the essay lol.

kyle
>>10156372

I'm not sure if you're interested in feedback from other listeners, but in case you are, I had a few quick thoughts reading your comment. First, I think I see where you're coming from on the point about the things we believe to be settled being the result of our acculturation, however I don't think the fact that these are considered to be "settled issues" is the entirety to their being dismissed as a worthwhile topic of conversation. I think calling them settled issues was a conversational shorthand that implied an awareness of the historical contexts and the political costs of indulging non-marginalized individuals who want to muse about whether others have been given too many rights. I think the fact that these are issues of human/civil rights that were "settled" in the sense that they enabled people to participate in society in meaningful ways is relevant. Your example about civil rights illustrates this well. "Should we allow black people to vote?" and "Should we no longer allow black people to vote?" are both questions that would challenge settled ideas at particular times in history, but to view them on that general level, ignores their context and content. To the point that it's good to consider opposing points of view... maybe it can be, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily the best use of our limited time on this planet. This reminds me of people who defend climate change denial by saying that "science is not about accepting dogma, but about doubting conclusions." It's true, but not all skepticism is worthwhile (e.g., "it's cold out today, so obviously there's no climate change"). I'm sure it would hurt his feelings to hear, but Peterson is not bringing anything new to this conversation. We've had it before, he's not as informed as he thinks he is, and it's not worth the time it would take to engage his retrograde socio-political theories. I don't know if it's cool to suggest other podcasts in the comments of podcasts, but if you want a comprehensive breakdown of why Jordan B Peterson is wrong about the law, search for a podcast called "Serious Inquiries Only." He's discussed this issue often, and in a January 2017 episode, he breaks down the relevant legal statute with consultation from a Harvard lawyer. To summarize some of the less legal analysis though, the idea that these laws are a form of compelled speech is a self-serving misconceptualization that allows Peterson to tap into middle-class white aggrievement. The laws do not require anyone to use any particular words, nor even to acknowledge anyone's gender, only to avoid repeated and deliberate misgendering to the extent that it meets the standards of harassment (and even that only applies to professional settings). As you note, stating "he uses preferred pronouns in class" would not be a bad thing, but saying he only recognizes two genders and that anyone who disagrees is deluding themselves (or ruining society, or undermining our language etc.), complaining that protections for marginalized people are an authoritarian attack on his free speech, or just using his niche opinions to enable the pervasive conservative misinformation campaign about "college craziness" and "PC gone mad" are all worthy of criticism. And, just in case you don't have the time to listen to that podcast, the law would not put anyone in jail for misgendering someone. That's a paranoid fantasy Peterson presents.

John Harwood

This was the best ep to date (and I say that having enjoying so many of the previous ones immensely). BJG brought it, and so did you, MJB. I've had such great conversations with people close to me as a result, and hoping to take it to broader conversations as well. Many thanks, and please keep it up!

John Harwood

(Also, listen to the Second Captains interview on JP recently. Ken Early does an excellent job of interviewing a credulous centrist academic on his stupid book, by being quite gentle and letting her hoist herself on her own petard.)

Omar Omar

The weird thing is that I was on top of this Jordan Peterson thing from the very beginning (humble brag?). I saw him on the episode of The agenda and honestly, my first impression was very positive. That's only because 1. I didn't know the details of the law he was claiming would enact positive speech controls which almost everyone is against and 2. The trans- persons on the other side were insufferable. After checking out his youtube channel and checking out some of his lectures (I can only get though 3) I was really turned off by the generic grand-paesque conservative advice and Carl Jung archetypes bullshit. Over time my being turned off has slowly turned into repulsion as he became outright alt-light. It's been disturbing seeing how many people have had the exact opposite reaction to his work overtime.

Dael Morris

Michael, this was excellent. I picked up the Katie Roiphe thing a little while ago, on the back of internet outrage and commented the following: Here's an article from a blog I often read, Wonkette. It interrogates someone's attempt to articulate their objections to the scope and extent of the current movement to expose sexual misconduct. However inadequately argued, the kernel of the objection - as with many others that are surfacing - seems to be, broadly, that the net is cast too wide. The writer of the Wonkette article objects to this objection. The core of the Wonkette rebuttal seems to be captured in the excerpt below. "Am I going to fall down dead if someone kisses me without asking? No, I’m not. Does the idea of someone asking me if they can kiss me strike me as weird and overly formal? It totally does! It’s definitely not something I am accustomed to. But I also realize that not every person feels the same way I do, and if being overly formal is the price we pay for someone else not feeling violated, it’s not that big of a deal to me. Whatever, I’ll live." I think a part of the original objection is related to this. If it is the case that the writer of the Wonkette article would not find it weird that someone kisses them without formally establishing an agreement, since no harm is done, why don't we privilege that position, rather than the position of the person who does find it offensive? People on the left confronted with this are responding by stating - broadly - that harm is determined by the person claiming harm, which strikes me as the deeply buried concern about this response. It starts to makes preferences the basis for criminal action and undermines the notion of an impartial criterion. The crux of these arguments actually seems to turn on whose preferences we are going to take as authoritative when trying to adjudicate the "middle cases" - the cases on neither edge of the bell curve (neither violent rape, for example, nor saying "hi" awkwardly). Edge cases are easy to resolve. Practically no-one is going to argue that violent rape should be condoned, let alone normalised. Similarly, awkward hellos are not going to be outlawed. All the difficult cases lie on the spectrum between things like these, and a lot of the objection, however poorly articulated, to the current momentum, turns on the perception that middle cases are being treated as edge cases in order to force agreement. That is, there's an (often poorly articulated) objection to the perception that nuanced behaviours are being aggregated and treated as edge cases. So, It feels to many people like moral coercion, and they object to it, even when they otherwise agree. Essentially, people push back, and despite the fact that I generally disagree with the people claiming political correctness is a virus on all other matters, I understand their pushback here. Personally, I'm an absolutist about consent and think that we trivialize both the concept and the practice in our societies. If it were up to me there would be a great deal more enforcement of consent. However I also respect empiricism, and the fact that there are dissenting voices in this argument is empirical. I'm not convinced that deriding them is (a) effective, and (b) I think that doing so risks ignoring whatever the real objection is, underlying the surface objection. It's a very similar dynamic to what happened with Trump, when putative supporters were categorised as deplorable. It is obviously the case that some of them, and their views, are deplorable, but it is also the case that things like fear of loss, reaction to marginalisation, rejection of an economic system that trivialises production jobs, and so on, are genuine. These latter are valid and had they been recognised as valid, and distinguished from simple racism on the part of a core support, and the genteel racism on the past of more monied support, it seems to me that it may have been possible to hive off some of that support and avoid electing the clown. These drivers, rather than the simple racism, are actually worth having a conversation about. It's a conversation that needs to happen, one that leads to serious questions about how we see work, wages, social safety nets, and so on, and is largely the reason there was a Sanders campaign at all. That conversation was smothered under self-satisfied insults, and with it died the Sanders campaign. In the same way that there might once have been a real conversation about social and economic equality in America, there may still be a proper conversation about sexuality, mutually beneficial agreements, ways of relating, and consent in general. But we won't have it while everything is a zero-sum game, and we won't have it while being nominally "right" is the goal of every interaction, rather than figuring out how people with different views can successfully live together.

Dael Morris

On the Peterson thing, someone described him as "the stupid man's idea of a clever man", and that holds. His arguments are puerile, but they're academically structured and most people aren't used to rebutting structured argument, so to his adolescent following he looks like the all-conquering hero. The make-up at work argument, for example that he makes - why do women wear make up at work if not to attract their co-workers and, if we accept usually leftist arguments about banning sexualisation in the workplace, we should then ban make-up at work on the grounds that it has a purposefully sexual goal - is a good example. Anyone spending a minute, would reply that men cut their hair for the same reason, or shave, or wear flattering clothes, and so on. That forces the discussion into (a) either we ban all personal presentation choices in the workplace (a la the common idea of North Korea or Pol Pot's regime) or we accept that work takes place embedded in a social reality broader than the goals of work, and that the behaviors and choices found in the workplace are inherited from that broader context. Once we accept the latter, obviously, the conversation that follows is ridiculously easy: since you can't respond to women's makeup by raping them outside of work, you can't respond that way inside work either, and the whole notion that make-up is a contradiction of positions is visibly dumb. All his points are similarly childish, but people don't have the tools, it seems, to immediately dismantle them. It would be much easier if people realised that Peterson is that whiny kid in class who always insisted on being superficially right at all costs, and for whatever reasons, while the rest of us matured into adults, he found a niche in academia that protected him from having to grow into a person.