rationalskepticism.org

Rumraket wrote:One of my friends is deeply infatuated with this guy and for the life of me I can't figure out why. Then I linked him the video from RationalityRules about JP's preposterous conception of truth, and his response was that the video was "fail". We had a back-and-forth on Facebook about it but I think I managed to convince him that JP's idea of truth is ridiculous, though he says we have to discuss it over beer at some point. I'll be looking forward to that, and I have been taking some notes on a lot of JP's ridiculous crap.

Besides his whole "it's the marxists, who are essentially post-modernists" crap (the history of which he also gets completely wrong) that he also likes to throw on SJWs, he's a huge apologist for the massive economic inequalities of the world. You will hear Jordan Peterson talk at length about how some of the people who make lots of money, also work 80-hour weeks and this has a high cost and many people wouldn't like that and bla bla bla, and then he will give examples of his former client as a psychologist who worked as successful lawyers at big law-firms and stuff like that. These people are millionaires and their hard work apparently justifies their earnings in Jordan Peterson's views.

This is basically conservative economic apologetics. It's a diversion. We are supposed to just accept that this is the state of affairs in society because similar outcomes also happen in nature.

The kind of economic inequality that is the biggest problem is when powerful lobbying organizations and super-pacs, or extremely wealthy international organizations have so much economic influence that they can basically buy off entire political parties and rig the whole democratic system to keep themselves rich and influential. But according to Jordan Peterson, if you sort of read him between the lines (no wonder conservatives love him so much) those of us who dare complain about it should just shut up and get with the program, because "it happens in nature".

This has nothing to do with fucking lawyers working 80-hour weeks and making a million dollars a month. This is not the economic inequality I have a problem with. What I have a problem with is the kind of economic inequality that results in a fucking bank-CEO being able to basically crash a bank, with consequences for everyone and everything who had savings or investments in it, yet still run away with a 50 million dollar bonus.

Or how about the fact that the top 80 richest people in the world own more than the bottom 3.7 billion people? No amount of hard work can justify that level of wealth or income inequality. But someone like Jordan Peterson would have us accept the status quo because some of the people who make that much money also work very hard.

In essence, he's just a giant apologist for the status quo. Ironically he seems to be advocating for a kind of social Darwinism. You either have what it takes or you don't, and if you don't, too bad because that's just how nature is. Never mind that he also gets most of nature wrong. Which is unsurprising given that his definition of truth basically reduces to "if it makes you better able to survive and reproduce, it's true, and if it doesn't, it's false".