THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Jordan Peterson inflames the Assemblies of Wokeness

Jordan Peterson inflames the Assemblies of Wokeness

Leftists can be reduced to tears by a book they have not read! How come? Because they are complete authoritarians. They slavishly accept what Leftist authorities say. Rather than think for themselves they have a few themes handed down to them that govern all their responses. Their opinion leaders in the media and elsewhere declare somebody or something to be bad and the Leftist followers acccept that as a simple all or nothing rule. If their leaders declare someone to be a racist they fully accept that regardless of what the evidence indicates. They are essentially robots.

So their tears make sense if you allow for their crippled minds. Peterson has been declared to be a "racist" (etc.) by Leftist information sources so they completely accept that as truth. And being disturbed that your employer is supporting racism is reasonable enough by itself. It is the deficient information source about racism that is the problem. Slavish acceptance of what Leftist information sources say is the problem. It is essentially a problem of empty heads

If you don’t have any matches handy, let alone a book to burn because it is not yet published, then maybe crying in anticipation of publication makes sense.

Scrap that. Little of what happened at Penguin this week makes good sense. This single small episode shows that little cliques from the Assemblies of Wokeness have big aims to kill off a vibrant, free and intellectually diverse culture. The timing was perfect too. Just as Donald Trump (almost) conceded his defeat, it has become clear why Trumpism is here to stay.

On Wednesday VICE World News reported that emotion boiled over at a staff meeting when employees of publishing firm Penguin confronted managers about its decision to publish Jordan Peterson’s latest book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life.

Some Penguin employees spoke to VICE about their reasons. One mentioned a co-worker who thinks Peterson “radicalised” their mother and father. Another mentioned how publication will “affect their non-binary friend”.

Another staff member described the heightened emotion: “People were crying in the meeting about how Jordan Peterson has affected their lives.”

Penguin employees followed a well-worn path: to prove that diversity in the 21st century cannot make room for the likes of Peterson, Penguin staff accused him of being transphobic, an icon of hate speech and white supremacy.

It is true that Peterson once stood next to a fan who wore a T-shirt that said: “I’m a Proud Islamaphobe.” And that is evidence of precisely nothing.

Another employee criticised Penguin for not acknowledging that it wants to make money from Peterson’s book. Ye Gods, a company wants to make profits from goods it sells in the open and free market.

Then Twitter exploded. More woke warriors tried to tear down Peterson and his upcoming sequel to Twelves Rule for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Peterson was accused of being an anti-communist. And the problem with that is … what exactly? The author was also accused of being anti-Semitic. Again, no evidence is mentioned.

Peterson in an interview in June posted on his YouTube channel.

Since news of the brouhaha at Penguin broke on Wednesday, many have suggested that the emotional staff members objecting to the publication of Peterson’s book should find a job outside publishing, or at least read his first book before wanting to ban his new one.

That overlooks the fact that the woke are, if nothing else, strategic. Reading the book would strip them of blissful ignorance. And there is a reason they choose to work in schools, at universities, in bureaucracies, at public broadcasters and in the arts, too. There is no creative space for pursuing a woke agenda if you’re a welder, a plumber or running a pizza shop.

As one literary agent told The Times last month, the tension arises “from an industry in which staff are left-wing but the structures are entirely capitalist and market-driven”.

“The main way for the young to express their idealism is through protest,” said the agent, adding that this tension created headaches for publishing bosses.

Not to mention the bigger headache for a functioning democracy. Wokeness has moved beyond the university campus. For many fully fledged adults, it is their secular religion, call it the Assemblies of Wokeness. The movement is tribal, increasingly well organised and, importantly, premised on a new morality. Not all woke pursuits are bad. But those parts that undermine basic values in a democracy are rotten. For example, when followers of the Assemblies of Wokeness dismiss dissenters as immoral apostates who must be silenced. Unlike many other religions, wokeness often struggles to offer redemption to sinners.

The staff uprising at Penguin is part of a much deeper and broader battle over diversity waged inside a growing number of industries and institutions. Most people are understandably attracted to nice ideas such as diversity and tolerance. These people often fall prey to more canny members of the woke movement, whose dual aims, like most religious leaders, are power and control. They colonise different spheres of public and private life, from corporations to the kitchen table, if Gillian Triggs had her way. And taken to its logical conclusion, they will usher in a stifling, intolerant puritanism that will beat historical antecedents hands down.

In a modern-day parody of Orwell’s 1984, they use phrases such as “diversity” and “inclusion” to cleanse ideas from dissenters so that their utopian vision is not threatened. For them, a Peterson book cannot be ignored, it must be pulped.

These visionaries employ “sensitivity readers” to ensure new books won’t “upset” people by presenting different views. They shame authors such as Lionel Shriver for cultural appropriation because, as a middle-aged white woman she dares to write fiction that deviates from her own life experience. Shakespeare would not survive woke culture. And JK Rowling is their numero uno nemesis for pointing out that some trans rights impinge on the rights of others.

On the other side of this raging battle are people who understand that genuine progress is messy, exhilarating, nonlinear and beyond the wit of authoritarian social engineers: that progress relies on a robust marketplace of ideas where even a weird chap who consumes only meat, salt and water can write freely about his 12 rules for a good life.

Slowly, more people are coming to realise that a great deal rides on maintaining such a healthy marketplace of ideas. While zealous adherents of wokeness may not be well suited to listening to other points of view, others might be prevented from joining the hardliners if they are encouraged to wonder about where wokeness leads.

Who, for example gets to call the shots in a woke world? And who will be left standing when a woke mob come for you if you question their increasingly dogmatic diktats? How can we work out that a consensus has become both wrong and dangerous, except through dissenting voices? A few chats about courage of dissenters from the past, and the empowering morality of freedom of expression won’t go astray either.

To its credit, Penguin put out a statement this week defending its right to publish diverse points of view. What a win-win week for the publishing company. Given the ideological make-up of its staff, Penguin surely knew that a town hall-style meeting would become a platform for emotional outbursts, public controversy and lots of free publicity. Job well done.

Apart from guaranteeing healthy books sales, Penguin employees have also boosted Peterson’s celebrity. Just as more people might be questioning Peterson’s credibility as a role model for his earlier preaching about an ordered life, the behaviour of Penguin staff reminds us why this deeply flawed Canadian psychologist speaks for those who are marginalised and mocked by woke folk. These will include many who voted for Trump in 2016, and many who added nine million more votes to Trump’s final tally, even as he lost to Biden.

Interesting, the staff disturbance at Penguin over Peterson erupted the day after Netflix released Hillbilly Elegy, a movie that surely overlaps with Peterson’s base. Ron Howard’s movie is based on the memoir by JD Vance, a bestseller in 2016 as elites in coastal metropolises struggled to understand the rise of Trump. The movie and reaction to it offer more evidence of a continuing cultural divide that can only fuel Trumpism.

Vance grew up poor in the midwest rust-belt of Middletown, Ohio. He spent summers with his mother’s family, a ragamuffin crowd of hillbillies from Kentucky. There is no father, only a revolving door of men who hook up with his drug-addicted mother. And a smoking, cursing, loving grandmother — his “Mamaw” — who extracted him from a destiny where kids leave school early and end up jobless and hopeless. Teenage pregnancies are rife, along with crime, addiction and violence. Against all odds, Vance joined the military, served in Iraq and went to Yale Law School.

The movie recaptures the social decay of deindustrialised America in Vance’s memoir. Though Trump is not mentioned in the book, or the movie, Vance’s bootstrap story of survival and success explains why millions of Americans, left behind by globalisation and other elite obsessions, sided with a wealthy insider who campaigned for the working class as a boisterous and shameless outsider.

Curiously, critics who have panned the movie complained that it has been cleansed of politics. What, precisely, do these highly educated writers need S-P-E-L-L-E-D O-U-T for them? In one scene, at a Yale dinner for prospective interns, an urbane law partner from New York asks the young Vance what it’s like when he returns to home to the “rednecks” in Ohio. He may as well have called them deplorables.

The movie is a two-hour screen adaptation about politics being downstream from culture. So is the tearful outburst of staff at Penguin. At polar ends of the spectrum, both show that dysfunctional cultures produce dysfunctional politics.

Politics might become less polarised when there is less mocking and more genuine engagement by people trying to step into the shoes of others, regardless of their class and cultural backgrounds.

For all their years of higher education, the woke have not worked out that while Trump will soon be gone, Trumpism thrives on their misguided quest for power.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/jordan-peterson-inflames-the-assemblies-of-wokeness/news-story/fd447cce72584bd797aa02d9f206ce86

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Jordan Peterson inflames the Assemblies of Wokeness

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