Quotes about social decay

Some insights into our current state of social decay, from Tim Kreider, in a New York Times article from a few weeks ago, It’s Time to Stop The American Scam.

    • It turns out that millions of people never actually needed to waste days of their lives sitting in traffic or pantomime “work” under managerial scrutiny eight hours a day. We learned that nurses, cashiers, truckers and delivery people (who’ve always been too busy to brag about it) actually ran the world and the rest of us were mostly useless supernumeraries.
    • American conservatism, which is demographically terminal and knows it, is acting like a moribund billionaire adding sadistic codicils to his will.
    • An increasingly popular retirement plan is figuring [out whether] civilization will collapse before you have to worry about it.
    • In the past few decades, capitalism has exponentially increased the creation of wealth for the already incredibly wealthy at the negligible expense of the well-being, dignity and happiness of most of humanity, plus the nominal cost of a mass extinction and the destruction of the biosphere — like cutting out the inefficient business of digestion and metabolism by pouring a fine bottle of wine directly into the toilet, thereby eliminating the middleman of you.
    • Of course, everyone is still busy — worse than busy, exhausted, too wiped at the end of the day to do more than stress-eat, binge-watch and doomscroll — but no one’s calling it anything other than what it is anymore: an endless, frantic hamster wheel for survival.
    • There is too much that urgently needs to be done: a republic to salvage, a civilization to reimagine and its infrastructure to reinvent, innumerable species to save, a world to restore and millions who are impoverished, imprisoned, illiterate, sick or starving. All while we waste our time at work.
    • (Kreider, 2012) I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.

Review of Jordan Peterson’s first “12 Rules” book

Jordan Peterson is best known as a conservative-leaning psychologist who teaches at the University of Toronto, and also is a practising counsellor.

Serious - Ideology debate thread | Page 123 | nebulous
Dr. Jordan Peterson (center), son of Pepe, Prophet of Kek.

Dr. Jordan Peterson has often been pictured hanging out with students who are part of the far right, and has seemed to have gained an attachment to Pepe the Frog, and in the origins of the symbolism of the frog mascot. He has helped the far right gain dignity with its association with Pepe, by associating it with frogs in Egyptian mythology, and so on. Peterson is a big fan of Carl Jung, and so he shares Jung’s fascination for archetypes and how they theoretically play a role in our psyches. However, I am not sure that Jung had in mind a badly-drawn cartoon frog as an example.

Peterson’s hobknobbing with the far right makes him an easy target for others to discredit. This is unfortunate, since the book itself is compelling. Peterson tries to present himself as an intellectual force to be reckoned with. I remember reading the late Thomas Szasz, another dissident in the helping professions and another powerful intellectual who wrote the book Ideology and Insanity some decades ago, whose fatal flaw was rooted in the author’s association with the Church of Scientology. I can’t help but seeing parallels here. I have no general explanation for it.

Neither book is a waste of your money. Ideology and 12 Rules For Life are both compelling reading and were hard for me to put down. Both books will change you in some way. Ideology was considered a game-changer for the practice of psychiatry back in the 1970s. It is largely the reason psychiatry has moved from being mostly a “talking cure” to being more biologically-based and science-based. But also in both cases, you can only trust their intellectual prowess so far. For this article, we will focus on Peterson’s 12 Rules.

Peterson’s account of the genesis of his book appear to be from a much briefer and  skeletal version of his 12 rules, contributed to an online wiki called Quora. His rules became popular, so he fleshed out his ideas for his book.

The most  compelling reading of all have to do with those topics that are central to his profession. He discusses child-rearing in ways that are so down-to-earth and with such conviction that it is difficult to argue with his ideas. He does the same for his discussion of marriage, and of of the complex needs and tendencies of those seeking counselling. He seems like a Rock of Gibraltar here. Utterly clear and well-written. The book is hard to put down at this point.

For some of his rules, he deviates into discussions of the Bible. He takes on the same authoritative tone of various Biblical stories, but in my reading of it (being a churchgoer), they are clearly his views, not views sanctioned by general scholarship, or by the Church. His Biblical interpretations and exegeses are taken to be his own, and supportive of his rules. In his circle of intellectualism, his grasp of the Bible extends just outside the center of his intellect. The Bible is just one of his tools used in support of the rules. Other writings used this way are the writings of philosophers such as Nietzsche. But one senses that the association between philosophers like Nietzche, Dostoyevsky and his rules are a little too neat and tidy.

Jordan Peterson Kek Boys and Pepe the Frog - YouTube
Jordan Peterson, leader of Kekistan (which only makes sense if you follow right-wing internet memes), addresses the misguided youth of today on their turf. The tweet is located here. “Don’t stay in the underworld” refers to Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from the Underground” which he refers to in his 12 Rules. “Seek your 4chan” — 4chan is a psychologically toxic, un-managed chat site which is rife with hate content, doxxing, shaming and cyber-bullying. Ironic that an academic would be advocating for 4chan. For the record, this is actually Peterson’s face pasted on top of actor Steve Buscemi’s face. I have to admit, the ‘shop job is quite convincing and seamless.

He also cites dissident political writers such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet citizen who suffered the worst of the Gulags and lived to write three hefty books on the experience. This is where things go a little off the rails. While I have long ago given away my copy of the 3-volume Gulag Archipelago, Peterson has used this as an excuse to indulge in the Western intellecutal laziness of conflating communism with a totalitarian dictatorship, the latter of which was the case for the former Soviet Union, which was never close to being a Marxist utopia (indeed, Stalin banned the reading of Karl Marx). This is where Peterson deviates the most from his rules, and where his pronouncements on the evils of Stalinism deviated the most from any semblance the book’s original themes.

It is also where Peterson would find himself the most at odds with scholars such as MIT’s Dr. Richard Wolff, who actually make their living specializing in studying the history and theory of Marxism. This is where Peterson is the most out of his intellectual depth, showing his passive devotion to standard cold war tropes. The only difference these days is, that most socialist voices in our culture have been silenced in recent decades, reducing this to a mostly one-sided debate. This is why in real life, Dr. Peterson can rest on his laurels by challenging “anyone” to a debate about socialism, since he is confident of the success capitalist culture has had in silencing alternative voices, so that no one of any rhetorical skill will take him on. For the record, Dr. Wolff has accepted his challenge, which Peterson has never answered to.

"Pepe Jordan Peterson and screaming Liberal Tears MAGA ...
While we are conflating, Peterson’s support for Pepe has resulted in his likeness being “conflated” with Pepe on various merch, such as bookbags, T-shirts, slacks, aprons and dresses.

Conflating communism with totalitarianism is one thing. Conflating capitalism with freedom is another. Freedom doesn’t come from Capital, it comes from a Bill of Rights, and from laws that protect us. Thus, the tropes of Communism=Totalitarianism and Capitalism=Freedom get aired out here, and it is hard to take since one of his rules tells us to avoid ideology. He fails to see that Capitalism is an ideology just like Communism. He seems hypocritical if he is in jingoistic support of Capitalism while making “avoid ideology” one of his rules. We as a society are so awash in pro-capitalist tropes, that the world doesn’t really need yet another mindless screed against communism, which adds nothing new to the mostly one-sided “debate” about it that exists in our culture.

I would like to state that I am against ideologies also. In politics as in real life, ideologies tend to take a brilliant idea and proceed to completely eviscerate it of all life and meaning. The problem mostly is in the need to enforce ideology. If the ideology was “love”, then we have to love, “or else”. There. I just made love into ideology and ruined it, just like that. Not hard to do. I wouldn’t want to live in that world any more than if the ideology was about something more conventional, like economic systems.

Peterson could have made his point much clearer had he chosen a more neutral ideology. Young adults go through a period of their maturation where they espose many ideologies, and most of these adults are not ideological in a political way. The minute you get it into your head that “All X are Y” or “All X should be Y”, or “All X should do Y”, you are raising an idea or a collection of opinions you once had to a general ideology.  Young adults need to be aware that the world is infinitely more complicated than their ideologies and hard rules, and yes, ideology should be the least important concept in forming a world view. And this, dare I say it, includes the ideology of capitalism.

Natalie Wynn, who has a vlog on YouTube called Contrapoints, has read and viewed enough Jordan Peterson to say something about the structure of his debate style. Peterson would begin by saying something that is uncontroversial and factual (there are biological differences between men and women, for example), then at the same time, imply something controversial (such as women are under-represented in government). So, what is the response? Either you fall into the trap of arguing against biological differences, or you can guess at what he is implying, where he now has the opportunity of accusing you of mis-representing him. His famous lobster argument seems to be used as a similar trojan to justify any form of authority and authoritarianism, no matter how unjust. But to call him on it invites interpretation, and you will be guaranteed that it will never be the right one, since he never truly states his position on authoritarianism.

Peterson’s book on 12 Rules appears to use solid science and psychology as a Trojan horse to push right wing political views and tropes. Be careful what you get out of it. Take his politics, religion and philosophy with a grain of salt.

An editorial about Tiger Woods

(this is a low-brow paraphrasing of the article in this month’s Notebook article in Harper’s magazine)

In this age of illegal invasions of Iraq, and the looting of the treasury and of customers by the banks, why does the press focus so much interest in the penis of a pro golfer? Did Tiger Woods steal your life savings? Did he reposess your house after convicing you that you were elegible for obscene amounts of credit? Can the deaths of thousands of Iraqis be laid at the feet of Tiger Woods? Did Tiger poison our air and our water, did he spew the greenhouse gas that will desertify America? Tiger hangs his head in shame for something that befalls all rich and famous people — the temptation of women who throw themselves at his feet. But compared with these other things, who really must be shamed?

We have made into a “problem” something that usually is common thr0ughout history for the rich and famous. Adultery is now worthy of the psychiatrist’s couch, treatment centers, and talk shows. It is OK to feel sexually aroused in a BMW showroom, but in this day and age you are not allowed to feel that way with your partner in the back seat of one. In the church of capitalism, sexual arousal is now for the purpose of closing the sale, not for procreation or pleasure.

My guess is that Tiger Woods’s real crime was that he didn’t get it.