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Originally Posted by ResAlien
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Not bad, as far as polemics against Peterson go. Of course, the whole things rests on the premise that anyone appealing to young white men must be vaguely sinister. The Cathy Newman interview took the same tack:
But your audience is made up mostly of young men, isn't it? as if that's something dark and troubling.
The author betrays his own political agenda here:
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To him, the hierarchical structures that underlie Western society are preordained, and questioning them is like questioning the weather, or the train schedule, or the Marvel Studios balance sheet. “You don’t change the world by going and waving signs at people you’ve defined as more evil than you,” he insists in a tirade against the efficacy of protest. If life has dealt you a bad hand, summon your inner übermensch and get thee to the laundromat.
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The West today is one of the least hierarchical societies in history. And the principles Peterson defends are largely liberal ones - individual autonomy, freedom of speech, rule of law.
It never ceases to astonish me how ardent progressives are in their desire to overturn the institutions and values that have created the most liberal, tolerant, progressive (not to mention affluent) society the world has seen. Does it never occur to them to consider why women's liberation, abortion rights, gay rights, labour rights, etc. all happened first in the West?
As for Peterson's admonition to clean up your own life before you go trying to change the world, it's actually pretty conventional mental health advice. We all try to internalize everything that's good in our world and externalize everything that's bad. The good is because of me, the bad is because of them. But that's an unhealthy feature of human psychology that most people need to overcome to find maturity and happiness.