The first time I waded through the collected polemics and YouTube punditry of Professor Jordan Peterson — the unthinking man’s televangelist, inflated to the status of serious truth-seeker by respectable newspapers around the world — I was expecting to be at least slightly dazzled by his rhetoric. But no matter how long I stared at the magic-eye picture of jumbled platitudes, masturbatory nightmares about being devoured by an all-consuming mother figure, and occasional sensible tips about making your bed, it failed to resolve into a work of epoch-defining insight. Instead, it reads as if St. John the Divine of Patmos settled down and got a job selling insurance but occasionally had flashbacks to when he used to lick blue fungus off cave walls and babble about the Great Dragon.
The only way Peterson could have acquired a reputation as an intelligent person is by cultivating an audience of people who hate the humanities, and have therefore never read a well-written book.
From the OP:
Thanks for this thought. I can’t verify it in any way, but it does seem likely; may explain why people who like JP don’t see what a god-awful incoherent writer he is – they turn up their noses at anybody who is coherent. (They’re all Post-modern cultural Marxists, doncha know).
She is being way too kind here.
I’ve read a lot of Jordan Peterson and dealt with his troll followers.
Jordan Peterson is a conperson and hate merchant reflecting his troll fan club’s hate and and bigotry back to them for money.
He is similar to and going after the same demographic as Ann Coulter, Alex Jones, and Rush Limbaugh.
He’s an uneducated person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.
from the title I was expecting a one-word description—but I’m not gonna suggest the word.
In other news: logging in required me to prove I was human by calculating 0 + 4. That’s a pretty low bar to jump, most computers have been able to do that, at least since 1948, and Allan Turing is spinning in his grave.
Oh! The hell with it: the word LOOKS rather like the Russian word for ‘cap’ when written in Cyrillic.
“have therefore never read a well-written book.” could almost certainly be simplified to “have therefore never read a book.”
It’s amazing how easy it is to make a good living pandering to rightwingers.
I’ve always thought of him as the Deepak Chopra for people who don’t trust brown people.