We had noticed the theme of collectivism, particularly it's rejection manifested in his family, the local community, and then the wider community he joined at college and through socialist politics, but were aware that these latter elements had been coloured "in the most intimate manner", by the thoroughgoing education in religious belief and practice, he underwent from a young age. We had also noticed an element of conformity with the middle class values, wholly compatible with modern 'Christian virtue', which had manifested in a tension with socialist ideals, and influenced his conceptions of success, virtue, and willing adoption of the protestant work ethic.
The rejection of external "ideology" from an implicit ideological position, caused him somewhat of an existential dilemma, he writes: "Such realizations upset my beliefs (even my faith in beliefs), and the plans I had formulated, as a consequence of these beliefs. I could no longer tell who was good and who was bad, so to speak – I no longer knew who to support, or who to fight."
If we analyze this a little more closely however, we see that what he had rejected and called 'ideology': political practice and organization based on concrete class divisions, ran counter to his internalized conception of masculinity, virtue, achievement, which is to say his internalized ideological framework. This tension was unbearable for the young Jordan, not to mention the sexual tensions and frustrations we feel at this age but which seem absent from his narrative for whatever reason. "This state of affairs proved very troublesome, pragmatically as well as philosophically. I
wanted to become a corporate lawyer – had written the Law School Admissions Test, had taken two years of appropriate preliminary courses. I wanted to learn the ways of my enemies, and embark on a political career. This plan disintegrated. The world obviously did not need another lawyer, and I no longer believed that I knew enough to masquerade as a leader.
I became simultaneously disenchanted with the study of political science, my original undergraduate major."
Is this sadly not too common a theme? We start out in the world, full of youthful exuberance, a strong sense of right and wrong, a sense of power and ability to shape the future, but within a matter of years, in so far as you are able to succeed, conform, and healthily adjust to the competitive alienation and stream of humiliations, the world has changed and implanted the ideology of Capitalism within you, made you a self interested, self absorded, or repressed & docile body. At once denying, diverting, and exploiting your natural human instincts.
The 'enlightened cynicism' of his dorm mate, & George Orwell facilitated the negation of that social element of practice he had admirably thrown himself into, and renewed the architectural facade constructed from birth, of a struggle between good and evil, now represented by "the collective" vs the individual, and manifesting in individual greatness vs the pettiness of the herd. Is it any surprise he still to this day finds much to support his position in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche?
At this point we get some insight to how little work the young Peterson was putting into his theoretical socialism: "When I moved to the main campus at the University of Alberta, however, my interest (in "the structure of human beliefs", "political philosophy")disappeared.. I was taught that people were motivated by rational forces; that human beliefs and actions were determined by economic pressures. This did not seem sufficient explanation. I could not believe (and still do not) that commodities – “natural resources,” for example – had intrinsic and self-evident value. In the absence of such value, the worth of things had to be socially or culturally (or even individually) determined."
Despite the fact that we've seen from his own story, how economic influences (not necessarily pressures, though the boardroom incident alludes to a pressure to conform, fit in, be productive, achieve etc,) do have the power to shape human belief and actions, ie his own rejection of socialism in favour of more commercially acceptable positions, changing his interests and ambitions despite doing two years training to practice law etc,. Peterson retains within him, from the earliest time, a religious, mystical, universal conception of truth, as bestowed hierarchically, a logocentrism which assigns and derives values from non-existent things, and which has an inverted consciousness of man as under the control of alien forces which in actual fact he has created and continues to fashion.
Would we say clean air, hunting grounds or stream water are natural resources or commodities? They certainly have commodity forms in the modern world, a bottle of evian, carbonated, Oxygen bars, etc, but these are not their natural character. Things which have objective value: land, water, tools, property, were appropriated at various times by various groups throughout Western History, who then exchanged the use of their inherent value, for an exchange value. Is the use value of air, land and water not pretty self evident?[1]
The fundamental basis of conservatism, being displacement and disavowal of the actual social antagonisms and advantages one tries to preserve, this is a predictable move, and pretty essential if we are to travel with Jordan on the journey from Socialism as fetish, to phobia.
What's more, if society, culture or the individual values and assigns worth to Capitalism, surely this must therefore be the best of all possible worlds? And were it not, would it not be completely within the power of the individual, society or culture to change it?
"This act of determination appeared to me moral– appeared to me to be a consequence of the moral philosophy adopted by the society, culture or person in question. What people valued, economically, merely reflected what they believed to be important. This meant that real motivation had to lie in the domain of value, of morality. The political scientists I studied with did not see this, or did not think it was relevant."
This "appearance" is an understandable inversion common to the mystical, authoritarian personality structure, but if you analyze it the logic is insane: Is he really suggesting slave traders or plantation owners thought their activities of moral importance, that the British Empire was conducted with a view to the moral improvement of it's subjugated populations? I'll stick with the knowledge that egoic consciousness, acquisitiveness and the need to eat, though taken to horrendous extremes of greed & avarice were the source of these commercial enterprises, and no value higher than the individual's material gratification existed.
A good Nietzschean question to ask would be what value does one extort by the use of morality? It would not be out of keeping with modern Capitalist activity, if we learned that various plantations or shipping companies offered 'more ethical' slave accommodation than others: "transport your human resources comfortably", though it's doubtful the market for ethical consumerism had developed so far at that point. While they weren't subjected to the horrors of PR, Slaves were in no way spared the horrors of Christian discipline & master morality, the same means Nietzsche suggested the weak used to conquer the strong, attacking their life affirming instincts through anti-sensuous Christian morality.
As Freud has it:
"In what does the peculiar value of religious ideas lie?"[2]Peterson continues: " My religious convictions, ill-formed to begin with, disappeared when I was very young." But clearly the evidence in his narrative points to the contrary.
"My confidence in socialism (that is, in political utopia) vanished when I realized that
the world was not merely a place of economics."
Clearly his initial confidence was misplaced, and unearned. His crude Christian morality merely finding expression in the most compatible secular framework; Utopian Socialism. Seemingly applying the same rigour to his analysis of Value as Socialism, whether the world is or isn't a place of economics is a question he shows no signs of being able to answer. "My faith in ideology departed, when I began to see that ideological identification itself posed a profound and mysterious problem" Because contrary to what he says, the attachment to religio-moral conceptions of order, truth, reality, his ingrained ideology, determined his rejection as ideology of those opposed to his own.
As he himself asserts this to be true of the world, should we not assume his valuing a moralo-religious/philosophical framework, above a rationalist/materialist one, to be "a consequence of the moral philosophy adopted by the society, culture or person in question."?
This current permeates his character, and the narrative in which he describes it.
He disavows the ideology he has adopted, and which determines his interactions with; socialism; religious congregations; fellow students; lecturers etc,. & those he takes issue with today.
He says, "All my beliefs – which had lent order to the chaos of my existence, at least temporarily – had proved illusory; I could no longer see the sense in things. I was cast adrift; I did not know what to do, or what to think.", then a few paragraphs later he's having another existential crisis.
Having skipped through more Weltenschmerz, anxiety about the Cold War, and his rejoining University to study psychology (where did he get the money to do all these courses?), we find him working with Prison inmates where a double cop killer rescues him from the attention of someone he describes as "exceptionally muscular, and tattooed over his bare chest. He had a vicious scar running down the middle of his body, from his collarbone to his midsection. Maybe he had survived open-heart surgery. Or maybe it was an ax wound. The injury would have killed a lesser man, anyway – someone like me."
It's clear this triggered some kind of frustrated response in him, as he describes:
"Some of the courses I was attending at this time were taught in large lecture theaters, where the students were seated in descending rows, row after row. In one of these courses – Introduction to Clinical Psychology, appropriately enough – I experienced a recurrent compulsion. I would take my seat behind some unwitting individual and listen to the professor speak. At some point during the lecture, I would unfailingly feel the urge to stab the point of my pen into the neck of the person in front of me." Trying to imagine whether or not he could be capable of acts of brutality and through some means of mystical revelation discovering he could, he says: "This discovery truly upset me. I was not who I thought I was."[3]
How many layers of ideology will he try and strip away in the introduction, without ever getting to the walls of 'his fathers house', the conformist ideology of a middle class, Christian upbringing?
"Surprisingly, however, the desire to stab someone with my pen disappeared. In retrospect, I would say that the behavioral urge had manifested itself in explicit knowledge – had been translated from emotion and image to concrete realization – and had no further “reason” to exist. The “impulse” had only occurred, because of the question I was attempting to answer: “how can men do terrible things to one another?” I meant other men, of course – bad men– but I had still asked the question."
I doubt this story, it's a nice narrative, which I don't think at all get's to the root of our primal violence/ At the end of the day he merely manages to convince himself that he could complete a hypothetical task. It's clear the walls still stood at this point, despite the winds of the world and men that came knocking.
Next he describes the manifestation of pretty severe schizoid symptoms -compared to those evident in his recollected early social interactions-. He begins hearing an internal voice criticizing everything he says, thinks, feels; "Which part, precisely, was me –the talking part, or the criticizing part?...I decided to experiment. I tried only to say things that my internal reviewer would pass unchallenged"
by conforming fundamentally to the values of this internalized voice of judgement, one might suggest, his superego, he eventually manages to feel "much less agitated and more confident when I only said things that the “voice” did not object to. This came as a definite relief. My experiment had been a success; I was the criticizing part." but at what cost this primary identification?
Is this not merely the internalization of what he'd already clearly adopted as a coping mechanism externally, adherence to the value system of his middle-class, christian upbringing internalized in the form of a savagely critical, overbearing superego? [4]
"Nonetheless, it took me a long time to reconcile myself to the idea that almost all my thoughts weren’t real, weren’t true – or, at least, weren’t mine. All the things I “believed” were things I thought sounded good, admirable, respectable, courageous. They weren’t my things, however – I had stolen them. Most of them I had taken from books. Having “understood” them, abstractly, I presumed I had a right to them – presumed that I could adopt them, as if they were mine: presumed that they were me. My head was stuffed full of the ideas of others; stuffed full of arguments I could not logically refute." Despite this realization of his own inauthenticity, something about which there is no shortage of writing in Socialist, Marxist, and French existentialist theory- in the very next sentence Dr Peterson does the very thing he condemns himself for, reverting to someone else's thoughts, drawn from books and adopted as his own: "I read something by Carl Jung, at about this point, that helped me understand what I was experiencing. It was Jung who formulated the concept of persona: the mask that “feigned individuality.”"
This kind of inconsistency is quite evident in some of his interviews, where he may for instance be attacking the concept of intellectualism, or the culture figure of the intellectual, by reference to an obscure passage of Nietzsche's oftentimes impenetrable Zarathustra, which is to say embodying that with which he takes issue. The bold font almost perfectly mirrors, the process of primitive accumulation in which the germ of our global capitalist economy took root. This is in no way intentional, Peterson himself would never recognize that fact, being not only an advocate of the Capitalist system as conducive to individual freedom, but also of traditional conservative conceptions of human nature as brutish, confrontational, domineering, competitive. the point is he believes it wrong when he does it, yet does it again, and further vocally supports an economic system founded upon the exact same principles of appropriation.
Furthermore is this whole practice he describes, means of identifying oneself, appropriation etc,. not yet another manifestation of the WASPish, middle class values ingrained into us in youth, which is to say an expression of more or less modern capitalist practical activity? Freedom, to chose a role; 100 different types of alienated, socially destructive labour. Freedom to choose your lifestyle; from a well stocked range of luxury electronics, entertainment systems, and package holiday experiences. Freedom to make yourself; a productive and valued consumer. Freedom, to choose your leaders, from a limited range of cut price nobheads twice a decade. It's certainly not uncommon for people to find immediate opposition to the situations they seek to reject in spirituality and religion. Particularly not those people who have been primed towards such views since birth, through tradition, social customs, and family pressures.
It's not hard to perceive the ways Peterson has retained this cultural, social and individual virus, and the more you think about it the more apparent it becomes, that it has severely hampered and thwarted his ambitions in life. We have the example of splitting[5], when he highlights his idealization of the board of governors and devaluing of his college student comrades; his inner critic taking issue with every subject he began to study only to later on lose interest in (law; political science; etc,.); stronger, more authoritative voices from outside leading him from the hopeful aspirations of youth (the world does need lawyers!) onto uncertain, unsteady pathways; and the pretty serious case of persecution by an internalized, negatively critical voice, weakening and attacking his ego leading to an almost complete psychic disintegration, only averted by his self described identification with this voice, and what it represented.
It is with a heavy heart I must leave you, for now. Hopefully in the following pages we can share in the joy of Jordan breaking his psychic armouring, dependence on dreams of nuclear holocaust and global catastrophe, and finally releasing his thus far unexpressed sexuality from the control of his persecutory superego.
"The strengthening of the ego dissolves the infantile attachment to God, which is a continuation of the infantile attachment to the father."
-Wilhelm Reich,
Mass Psychology of Fascism_____________
[1] As Marx explains in "Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1", the commodity remains simple as long as it is tied to its use-value. When a piece of wood is turned into a table through human labor, its use-value is clear and, as product, the table remains tied to its material use. However, as soon as the table "emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness". The connection to the actual hands of the laborer is severed as soon as the table is connected to money as the universal equivalent for exchange. People in a capitalist society thus begin to treat commodities as if value inhered in the objects themselves, rather than in the amount of real labor expended to produce the object. Peterson highlights the inadequacy of this view but he also negates the process of labour: directly in the case of referring to "natural resources" as commodities. All resources, like morals, have to go through a productive process, whether petroleum, copper or gold, they are hard won through the labour of people who, owning no property besides their bodies and minds, are forced to make a marketable commodity of themselves.
"The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things". What is, in fact, a social relation between people (between capitalists and exploited laborers) instead assumes "the fantastic form of a relation between things". This effect is caused by the fact that, in a capitalist society, the real producers of commodities, the working classes remain largely invisible.
-sections 163; 164-65; 165
[2] "Future of an Illusion", Chapter 3
[3] "They held or tied him down and pulverized one of his legs with a lead pipe. I was taken aback, once again, but this time I tried something different. I tried to imagine, really imagine, what I would have to be like to do such a thing. I concentrated on this task for days and days – and experienced a frightening revelation. The truly appalling aspect of such atrocity did not lie in its impossibility or remoteness, as I had naively assumed, but in its ease. I was not much different from the violent prisoners – not qualitatively different. I could do what they could do (although I hadn’t)."
So how does he know he could? Is this not a perfect illustration of the logocentric mind? For it, reality need have no correlation in the external world for it to exist.
[4]Perhaps I've so far failed to realize another antagonism springing therefrom, I wonder whether the academic life young Jordan had thus far embarked upon, ran contrary to some aspects of his internalized ideology? He seems to suggest earlier on, in disagreements with "political scientists" regarding the importance of morality, that he found traditional academia to be lacking in spiritual niceties, lacking a moral purpose or acknowledgement of the importance the young Peterson attributed them. Perhaps it's a combination of that and what I think is signified by his intricate awareness of the raw masculinity of other men, of their poise, dress, character, ie the boardroom, or prison facility, betrays a kind of fetishization of masculinity in my opinion. He doesn't betray much detail about his early life, so we can't be sure, but in terms of what he has come to advance as positive masculine traits, there seems to have been the influence of at least one strong male role model besides John Wayne.
[5] Notes on Splitting
the failure in a person's thinking to bring together the dichotomy of both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole. It is a common defense mechanism used by many people. The individual tends to think in extremes (i.e., an individual's actions and motivations are all good or all bad with no middle ground). {Is this not exactly how Jordan B Peterson treats of Post-Modern thought, art, and literature? Marxist theory? Left Wing Politics? Moral relativism? etc,.}
The concept was developed by Ronald Fairbairn in his formulation of object relations theory; it begins as the inability of the infant to combine the fulfilling aspects of the parents (the good object) and their unresponsive aspects (the unsatisfying object) into the same individuals, instead seeing the good and bad as separate. In psychoanalytic theory this functions as a defense mechanism.
In psychoanalytic theory, people with borderline personality disorder are not able to integrate the good and bad images of both self and others, resulting in a bad representation which dominates the good representation. {could this not account in some part for the superego type voice which attacks him?} This school hypothesizes that they consequently experience love and sexuality as perverse and violent qualities which they cannot integrate with the tender, intimate side of relationships{could the fantasies of stabbing the person in front of him, stabbing people from behind have any sexual connotation at all? Perhaps this explains not only the absence of any talk of a single girlfriend thus far, but his apparent sympathy with sexually unsuccessful misogynists in the "incel" community}.
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