Richard Stanley
Administrator
The following is a long excerpt from a hilarious and sad critique, by Stephen Marche, of a debate between old-school Marxist, Slavoj Žižek, and Jordan Peterson. It turns out that they are both vapid and empty shells, which for me Peterson is no surprise here. What is very interesting to me is that the reviewer points out that both of them are apocalyptic minded based upon their pessimism.
Here, Peterson, at least, is a psychologist, and he doesn't see in his religious focus, discussed on this thread, that the world's religions (not necessarily their underlying mythos) have created (using psychological framing techniques - synthetic Culture) the stiff-necked meta-tribes of respective Chosen People. This is why I am pessimistic about humanity. As a former engineer, the mindset should be to make continual improvements, but such as Peterson are encouraging his adoring mobs to indulge in ever more mud wrestling.
The 2.5 hour debate is at the bottom. I have not watched it yet.
[edited 11/21/19 by Jerry Russell to fix broken video link]
Here, Peterson, at least, is a psychologist, and he doesn't see in his religious focus, discussed on this thread, that the world's religions (not necessarily their underlying mythos) have created (using psychological framing techniques - synthetic Culture) the stiff-necked meta-tribes of respective Chosen People. This is why I am pessimistic about humanity. As a former engineer, the mindset should be to make continual improvements, but such as Peterson are encouraging his adoring mobs to indulge in ever more mud wrestling.
The 2.5 hour debate is at the bottom. I have not watched it yet.
...
The great surprise of this debate turned out to be how much in common the old-school Marxist and the Canadian identity politics refusenik had.
One hated communism. The other hated communism but thought that capitalism possessed inherent contradictions. The first one agreed that capitalism possessed inherent contradictions. And that was basically it. They both wanted the same thing: capitalism with regulation, which is what every sane person wants. The Peterson-Žižek encounter was the ultra-rare case of a debate in 2019 that was perhaps too civil.
They needed enemies, needed combat, because in their solitudes, they had so little to offer. Peterson is neither a racist nor a misogynist. He is a conservative. He seemed, in person, quite gentle. But when you’ve said that, you’ve said everything. Somehow hectoring mobs have managed to turn him into an icon of all they are not. Remove him from his enemies and he is a very poor example of a very old thing – the type of writer whom, from Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help to Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, have promised simple answers to complex problems. Rules for Life, as if there were such things.
The mere dumb presence of the celebrities on the stage mattered vastly more than anything they said, naturally. But there was one truly fascinating moment in the evening. It came right at the end of Žižek’s opening 30-minute remarks.
“We will probably slide towards apocalypse,” he said. And Peterson agreed with him: “It is not obvious to me that we can solve the problems that confront us.” They are both self-described “radical pessimists”, about people and the world. It made me wonder about the rage consuming all public discussion at the moment: are we screaming at each other because we disagree or because we do agree and we can’t imagine a solution?
Both of these men know that they are explicitly throwbacks. They do not have an answer to the real problems that face us: the environment and the rise of China as a successful capitalist state without democracy. (China’s success makes a joke out of the whole premise of the debate: the old-fashioned distinction between communism and capitalism.) Neither can face the reality or the future. Therefore they retreat.
Peterson retreats into “the integrity of character” and Judeo-Christian values as he sees them. Žižek is more or less a Gen X nostalgia act at this point, a living memento from a time when you would sit around the college bar and regale your fellow students about the time you saw that eastern European prof eating a couple of hot dogs in the street.
Unfortunately, this brief moment of confrontation of their shared failure couldn’t last. They returned to their natural subject: who is the enemy? Žižek asked what Peterson meant by cultural Marxists when postmodern thinkers, like Foucault, weren’t Marxist at all. Peterson was an expert on this subject, at least. He gave a minor history of the French critical theorists who transposed categories of class oppression for group oppression in the 1960s.
And they both agreed, could not have agreed more, that it was all the fault of the “academic left”. They seemed to believe that the “academic left”, whoever that might be, was some all-powerful cultural force rather than the impotent shrinking collection of irrelevances it is. If the academic left is all-powerful, they get to indulge in their victimization.
And that was the great irony of the debate: what it comes down to is that they believe they are the victims of a culture of victimization. They play the victim as much as their enemies. It’s all anyone can do at this point. ...
[edited 11/21/19 by Jerry Russell to fix broken video link]
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