I have to open this with thanks for Dr. Jordan Peterson. I have to thank him for encouraging people to think critically about themselves and the world. Just that alone is worthy of praise.
     But praise is not all I have.
     When you look around for criticism and praise of Dr. Jordan Peterson’s work there is stratification in both categories but along the same lines. There are people making commentary that is analytical and interesting (the best example in the way of critique at least in my mind being the commentary by the YouTuber ContraPoints, which I saw near the completion of this piece and that does what I am trying to do here ten fold better), and then there is all the rest. The former is nice to see and is evidence that his overall public message, which is use your head (emphasis on your) is being accomplished by his work.
    This piece is a bit scattered, I will abstract Peterson and also talk to him, so half letter and half analysis. I will praise some elements of his thinking, yet more than anything this work is a somewhat groaning critique. Because the greatest conceptual failing of Dr. Peterson is the only that could exist at such detriment as to push me (just me, I don’t expect it to be the same for others) to standing abreast of him as a whole. Not to say that I do not and will not respect his work and use what he has inspired in me. I will. But I cannot advocate for his implicative worldview, or him as a thinker as a whole. Before we go any further I’ll say that my critique of him is not the one we’ve come to expect, the one we are used to seeing. The structure of general critique of his thinking has a couple elements, but they amount to the idea that his work implicates the superiority of a white-hetero-male dominated world. Whether he does or does not, for he both does and does not (more on that later), that is not my critique. I have three:

• Dr. Jordan Peterson cannot envision a world where all are made well.

• Dr. Jordan Peterson's fears are overblown to such a degree to render them as outright cowardice.

• Dr. Jordan Peterson offers no substantive vision of an interesting future for humanity.

5 Agreements

    Before we go into these critiques, I feel it is first important to offer a critique of the critics of Dr. Peterson, or at least the implications of their arguments. Those people who reduce him and cast him out without any consideration or substantive thinking about any good that he’s putting out there. Most criticism of his work comes from some variance of a political enemy (it does here too I think). Typical of us on the left there is a lot of indignation and lack of understanding as to why his message is appealing. So let's clear that up first. Instead of trying to tear down his fort, let's look at what structures within we want to keep or use as blueprints. No need to burn it all if there is some good there, which brings us to our first point. I'll list it and the rest then we'll go through them before returning to the critique. They actually end up reading like a list of recommendations for the left to pick up speed a bit. So, the elements of Dr. Peterson that are worth keeping in my opinion:
    

• We have to talk about stuff.

• Western society is not all bad.

• Taking responsibility for your life is a good idea.

• Individual people deserve to be treated as individuals.

• You are a legend.

    
First point, we have to talk about stuff. 

It is clear that the left's achilles heel in propagating a beneficial worldview that results in meaningful action is its increasing inability to have level discourse with dissenting opinions. The strongest case in my opinion for backlash against liberal politics resulting in tectonic shifts to the right (President Donald Trump's election, Brexit, etc.) is that when the left has been in control it has continually demonized its already beaten enemies. If you call someone a bad person and shut the door on them they really have no recourse but to dig in or stop paying attention. Since the position on the left stands in the concept of treating people well, it has the problematic tendency to denounce detractors as moral inferiors. The problem here is not that the left is wrong, quite the contrary. The natural procession of egalitarianism is the light that shines in the darkness. The problem is that the left has closed the table to those who disagree. Therefore, whenever the left comes into power, it doesn't have the capability to retain it because those voices (a large part of many populations) are silenced and they regroup, harden, recruit, then rise up. They don't integrate, they don't change sides like they should. Thus it is hyper-critical that the left begins working on discussion, conversation, and peaceful integration of its message. We all know that the cure for bigotry is exposure... and yet we refuse to share the room with a bigot. Dr. Jordan Peterson brings this point up again and again and every time it is met either with avoidance or agreement, but rarely detraction. On Bill Maher he asked something like, "if the democrats win what will they do to mend the divide with the Republicans?" No one had an answer. If we can't look at someone who is misguided in the eye and value them as we say all should be valued, then we prove ourselves unfaithful to our core argument and we end up looking like petty tyrants.

Next thing to keep around, some of Western society. 

I like rap, I like classical music, I like West Coast parties, I like Canadian affability, I like barbecue, I like rock and roll, I like Homer, I like Tolkien, representative democracy had some solid ideas, capitalism is fun when you and your friends start a business and throw your heart into the effort. All of these things came in some loose sense from people from or (sometimes forcibly) integrated into Western Societies. If we redact and revise every cultural creation of the West we end up not fully utilizing their potent and whatever manifest goodness can be found in them. Now of course the left doesn't want to do this, not even the hyper-left (I think), it is more so that the left also wants to understand the world in terms of dynamics that make people's lives worse and wants an honest look at what those dynamics are. This is good, but to eschew Western society as some kind of force of evil inherently because it exists as a power structure isn't actually applicable enough to be effective when thinking about building the future. This is a formative point for Peterson, and it is one that pulls back the veil quite effectively. Many a progressive rebel are far too quick to denounce any and all creations of Western society just as quick as they are to revel in its benefits. This childish posturing is not conducive to effecting real impactful change. If the idea of the White House in flames is more exciting than campaign finance reform to you, you might want to look at what you are really after and stop trying to kid us otherwise. You also may want to look at where your anger originates on a personal level, next point then.

Taking responsibility for your life is good. 

Now its not good if you pretend it's the only thing there is. It's hard to run a race with no shoes, it is plainly hard to be the oppressed classes. There are embedded systems keeping people from rising, from how law enforcement treats minority offenders to the disproportionate lack of access to investment capital for anyone who is not a white male and much more. There are ingrained prejudices that must be routed out of our collective skulls like kicking a drug habit. But everyone knows, everyone including anyone who reads this, that within whatever bounds the world contains you to, you do have the freedom to be a better person. This is important, because this is an element to Dr. Peterson's thinking that is so highly attractive to some, and so blasé to others. It is this line of thinking that creates early dedicated fans of Dr. Peterson. I will speak for myself in example, but the reason this point was and is so attractive to me is that I have done some really terrible things to people. I personally have caused notable pain, stress, and misfortune in many people, hundreds if not thousands all at once (wish that was an exaggeration). I have individually hurt people as well. The specifics aren't important, but I know that I was once a worse person than I am now. I once had the capacity to be so blind to the darkness in my important proceedings that I destroyed nearly every shred of goodwill towards me in my community. I have evil within me. Not just that which I refer to, which others know of as well, but more that no one knows about. We all have deep sick sins of the heart that we are continually working on liberation from. Thus those who have glimpsed into the darkness of their own being, who have enacted it by hurting others or becoming addicted to neurosis or substance, those that have robbed and fought and yelled and been terrible people in their own way, or that know they have the capacity for it, really benefit from this message. For even if I were in chains I could choose to be a better person, and I should make that choice if I can. Not to say we shouldn't endeavor as a whole to break the chains around those who are chained (by the way i'm definitely not in chains and don't pretend to be).

Individual people deserve to be treated as individuals. 

The elementary basis for building a just world is to truly care about people, not as defined subsets, however real, but as the people they are when they act. The actions of a person are the only thing by which they can be truly judged individually. The emotional and psychological dramas by which they realize the story of their lives are theirs alone. They are human beings, they should be treated as human beings. It is on this stone that bigotry and racism are broken into falsehoods. But on the left we do have a tendency to stratify people into sections, the basis for identity politics and social analysis. As we stratify, we either are treading perilous ground or are just smart enough to understand that categorization of people is a tool to understand systemic social dynamics, and that individual people should be treated as individual people also. I think for most of us it's the second, but watch out for the first. I've been part of many conversations where the kind of statements we were making about groups of all sorts were assumptions that gestured towards a special kind of bigotry, one that is so sure that the target of it was in the wrong or in the right that we didn't care that it was bigotry. It's not actually bigotry if its against the oppressive demographic is the argument. Now while there are illuminating mechanics of that idea (mainly the reality of situated systemic oppression, which is a fucking important idea that everyone needs to understand), there is also the reality that ascribing characteristics to a group and then demonizing it is also the core operatus of racism. So the current state of hyper-left arguments that those belonging to the dominant class are inherently oppressive will only be able to last so long. It will have to evolve. At least it will if it wants those people to change. Just like racism won't be able to last so long, because its built on a falsehood: that people aren't people. Dr. Jordan Peterson forcefully iterates this message, and to good effect, true justice can only exist at the individual level. The rest is darkness. It doesn't matter which person you degrade to a dog or elevate to a rival, if you hate people within a group because they are in that group, then are saying that the people within that group are that group, rather than people themselves. This is to deny the truth that compassion emanates from: that people are people, feeling, unique, complicated, individual people, and that should come in to play in how you treat them.

You are a legend. 

Life should be a magnificent story, a great adventure, one in which you are your own legend, where you finally become the you you want to be. Just hearing that kind of talk is good for the heart. I like that Dr. Jordan Peterson sounds that tune though he is of course not the first to play it. That’s all on that. It’s a good thing to hold in your heart.

So I hope we can see the good in these past five praises. They aren’t new ideas, in fact they are quite ancient in some senses. But in each generation new thinkers rise up and spout them in the contemporary lexicon and that is a very good thing.

3 Disagreements

The main mechanics of Dr. Jordan Peterson's worldview are thus: self-liberation and ultimate fruition of your highest potential is not just a possibility, it is a dormant reality. Since that is true, and since the final power of personal evolution does rest on you, people should be judged along the lines of development towards that fruition of their own highest potential (let's stop, that’s the self-help stuff, and it doesn't have many problems, its when we make the next jump that things get interesting). The proven path to this highest potential is the one that actually seems to have existed historically, and the one that we see being effective in the world currently. Since judeo-christian people in the West have operated at a level of activity that has allowed them to become the most prominent power with the most relative freedoms and prosperity, this is the proven path that has actually existed. Therefore the development of the fruition of the highest potential for a group is measured loosely along the rubric of success that was produced historically in the West (this is where the hetero-white-male dominated world is implied, Jordan doesn't care what the people look like he might say, as long as they bring goodness and success. The only problem is that his rubric for success is the white-hetero-male, and therefore those already situation in general power structures are validated beyond what mere competence grants them). The traditional core elements of Western culture are then understood to be a blueprint for human success, from the originative stories of religion to the greatest examples of achievement there is a thread running that is foundationally effective. Indeed this foundation runs deeper than that, this thread pulls down to human nature, for the very reason that Western culture has discovered this perfect recipe is because it mirrors the human condition at a primordial level both physically and psychologically. There are certain biological precepts that continue to reinforce the dominant path (such as inequality, hierarchy, and more). Thus to regress on the traditional trappings of Western civilization is to threaten the destruction of it and all humanity.

That's where it ends.

And the fact that it ends there is the most damning thing about it all for me personally, which will be reviewed in the final argument of this analysis.

Let us now with that system in mind visit my critiques. They share a theme, which is: what aren't you saying? They are again:

• Dr. Jordan Peterson cannot envision a world where all are made well.

• Dr. Jordan Peterson's fears are overblown to such a degree to render them as cowardice.

• Dr. Jordan Peterson offers no substantive vision of an interesting future for humanity.

Dr. Jordan Peterson cannot envision a world where all are made well.

Whether or not inequality exists as a product of the natural natal state of all life on earth really doesn't matter, and arguments that inequality must exist because it always has, maybe for billions of years in some instances, and certainly for thousands of years, are immediately mute by taking out your cell phone and just looking at it. There it is, the cell phone. Once upon a time, human's could only speak with someone in earshot, now I can talk to anyone in the world, any time in the world, in a hundred different ways. Before this, the long lineage of homo sapiens operated under the complete manifest fact and truth that it was not possible to talk to someone who was far away. Now of course the response here from the other side of the argument could be, "but it is the success of how things currently are and were that produced that advancement, even the actual production of the cell phone is built on a system that is efficient because of inequality." Well by that same virtue whatever advancement is made to destroy base inequality would also be a success of the system that came before it, even as that system was irrevocably altered and replaced.
    To pretend like the proposed “fact” that inequality is hardwired into biological life and human civilization at large means it cannot be overcome is outright unimaginative and almost offensively stodgy in my opinion. We are human beings. We travel to space. The notion that we can't eradicate grinding inequality that sees much of the world still suffering is ludicrous.
    We can do anything, this I believe.
    Now, I don't think that Dr. Peterson would disagree. But I think that for lack of not saying it there is an inherent message in his work that the aim of eradication of situated manifest inequality is in error. That it somehow must absolutely come at a cost of our civilization or the cost of the success of the individual. We will talk about that in the next point.
    If everyone should be treated like an individual and if Dr. Peterson believes that people should also generally be treated with a modicum of decency as well as honesty then it stands to say that a logical evolution of that line of thinking is that every individual should be cared for at a basic level if they can be. Now, it may not be the state’s place to do so specifically, but if a world can be envisioned where all are made well, and it can be achieved not at the expense of the individual but by the lifting of individuals to egalitarian foundations, then society should contrive to do so. There are some that say that Western society does in fact do that, raising as many people as it can up through its machinations, and it does, but the fact is it's not doing as quickly as our potential might allow, and sometimes potential needs direct planning in order to blossom. 
     Simply because this thinking is counter-current to the hierarchical posturing of the past doesn't mean it is not applicable to a positive future, it doesn't even have to be a non-hierarchical future. Egalitarianism doesn't refute the idea of naturally existing hierarchical structures. If everyone is living in paradise, the hierarchies just reform to not be about such dire situations as they do now. Instead we worry about paradise things. But paradise is a problem too, a big one for Dr. Peterson.
    Dr. Peterson talks often about the imagined utopia of the left as a product of a marxist positioning. But frankly, us young folk aren't very historically situated these days. when I think about a world where equality is realized I am not thinking about a world where culture is erased like the socialists of old, just the opposite. I think about cultures of all people having the safety to breath and both solidify old traditions as well as build new ones. Safety and room to interrelate and express alongside each other. I think about a land where honor flows from person to person, but isn't forced, instead humanity has awoken to the truth that to look another being in the eye and know them to be a sacred individual is to know that the eventual culmination of this hard twelve thousand year journey, no matter how much longer it takes, is for all of us to hold each other up in love and a helping hand towards everyone's personal and collective dreams. But what is forced is basic standards of living. To use a similar lexicon to Dr. Jordan Peterson, does not a good father provide a home, health, and food for the children? Shouldn't the literal children of the world all have the same?
    I do believe wholeheartedly that a post-scarcity civilization that does doesn't rip people down but instead lifts people up is possible. It may take a very long time to get there, but let's set our sites high, put our packs on our shoulders, and get to the climb. Now whether or not life will be as interesting then, no one knows. But the striving for it is the most interesting thing possible for humanity, it is the end goal of honor, the eden of respect. It is the rational result of the good elements of all things humanity builds.

Dr. Jordan Peterson's fears are overblown to such a degree to render them as cowardice.

    This is the one that I had a hard time seeing, because the precept of the idea is fairly attractive and holds many truths.
    Above, when I described the mechanics of Dr. Jordan Peterson’s worldview, I was talking more formatively. In order to understand this point, we need to talk politically. So, Dr. Jordan Peterson’s worldview from a political standpoint seems to be thus (I am going to try to be concise at the high risk and general folly of missing a lot of nuance): the left-wing progressive ideology is one that posits the world as a class struggle and not much else. The left has replaced its original (seemingly better) argument that this struggle is among traditional class divides and has instead picked up the firebrand of identity politics as the core hinge of the class struggle. Dr. Jordan Peterson makes arguments across the board that the postulates of identity politics have a lot wrong with them, generally the fact that they eschew traditional analysis of life and personal/societal posturing (the actual “facts” if you will). That they do this belies an indignation towards traditional structures (which have been successful in some ways) that itself is a facade of progression over a terrible underbelly of thirst for power with a heavy dose of nihilism. This power emerges in the form of controlling thought through pushing a progressive worldview forcibly into the political/social reality. Most of the people in the worldview don’t even really know they are doing this, but it doesn’t matter because more and more their aims are to end opposition in such a way that has a distinct undertone of the cultural slash and burn communism of eld. Postmodern Neo-Marxism is the term he uses, the Postmodernists being wrong because they propound (in Dr. Jordan Peterson’s mind) a worldview that tears down the validity of traditional success structures in favor of a worldview that doesn’t build meaningful individual human progression into its foundations. The Neo-Marxists being wrong because they are well… Marxists (I don’t disagree. Also, not sure this group really exists even in Dr. Jordan Peterson’s mind, rather they ended up being Neo-Marxists unwittingly in the vast majority of cases. They are ideologues that are possessed by an ideology that stems from Marxism even if they don’t know it). The Postmodern Neo-Marxists have (aside from gaining control of high thought in most Western countries) infiltrated the majority of lower level, and therefore more tactile, places of governance and education (most education actually… which is true. I did have a progressive worldview shoved down my throat for most of my schooling). Due to this multiplicitous domination of various levels of discourse, they are on a path to specific domination of the societal system in order to push their worldview, which for them supposedly comes from compassion and wanting things to be good for all, but which in reality stems from a latent wish for power becoming less and less latent over time. The eventual realization of this progressive worldview must needs be a totalitarian reality that is directly imposed into society by force because there are clearly similar symptoms here, as described, to the brutal communism of days gone.
    …Shit. That wasn’t concise at all. I also missed a lot, especially the philosophy stuff. Nomatter, let’s press on.

    So, in short: the free speech-hating SJWs are concerned primarily with power grabbing and will have us all in the gulag if we don’t do something to stop them, as evidenced by their current early encroachment on core rights.

    Now look, there is way too much correct in these ideas for comfort. The reality is that the hyper-left has many symptoms of oppressive and tyrannical thought that manifest in their goal to make people equal and to tear down oppressive systemic realities. They do want to change the way you think, they may be willing to impose it by force. This is quite troubling. And for a time, a very small time, I saw this terrible spectre that Dr. Jordan Peterson sees. The spectre of the left that would maybe like to see me behave differently and is willing to force me to do it growing into an unstoppable cabal and throwing down civilization in order to control it. And again, some of it is right. But one day I woke up and realized something:
     The level of fear that Dr. Jordan Peterson distills for his audience is so intensive that it borders on cowardice. It also has a reflexive tool of building up the viewer to be a brave intellectual viking for challenging the status quo. Just as much as Dr. Jordan Peterson prescribes excellent masculine values, he is here manipulating that good work to other effects.
     For to ascribe these values, which are problematic, to the entire spectrum of ideas that the left contains is just bad analysis, and fearful analysis. We all know what fear mongering does, it makes our minds weak. And unfortunately, Dr. Jordan Peterson is guilty of it. Just as the left is. For now I believe he has construed a leviathan where there only exists a head cold.
     You fight a leviathan with an army of monster-slayers.
     You fight a head cold with rest and medicine.
     All of us should be terrified of a leviathan.
     None of us should be terrified of a head cold. 
     We are adults. We can analyze this stuff without reverting to calls of apocalypse.
     As a white man I end up having minor friction with the problems Dr. Jordan Peterson sees (though they don’t bother me). The basework for compelled speech (just for the record, I am adamantly, almost militanty pro-trans and am careful about pronouns), the idea that I have sinned just by the color of my skin, the notion that I should stop being masculine in the traditional sense of the word, etc. I really have two choices. I can rage against the little injustices levied at me and burst into weepy tears thinking about young men who are left to drown in a sea of meaninglessness and arbitrary hate. Or, I can stand up straight with my shoulders and look at these ideas plainly, not letting them hurt anything other than my pride. Along with that I can see the good in the ideas, I can listen to more moderate versions of the ideas (which are held by far more people by the sake of their moderateness), and I can make adjustments to my worldview where I see appropriate. I can assume what I personally believe to be the truth, that hot on the heels of hundreds or thousands of years of male-dominated and white-dominated societal structures, we should expect some vitriol and some very pointed critiques. I choose not to be broken by it.
      I am fine, happy even, to see the feminists and SJWs and others rage in their fight to change the world because they’ve earned the right. “The Lie of White Privilege” is my favorite talk of yours because for once you didn’t hold back and damn man did you really pull apart the left with a kind of casual fervor that is an absolute joy to watch, but it obfuscates the truth. The truth is that men that look like you and me have been in power, still are in power, for a very long time. And for a very long time of that very long time everyone else that didn’t look like us didn’t have it so well. It’s not just about competence. It is also about control.

Dr. Jordan Peterson, may I introduce to you the pendulum. 

     You see there is an inevitable little motion it makes when it is released high from one side. It swings almost as high to the other, not quite though, and eventually it settles in the middle. Well, here we are, witness it swing. I think you are part of the swing back towards the middle, which is fine (though in your perspective I think things will get a bit worse before they get better). But here’s the deal.
     I refuse to lift these stifling worldviews that the hyper-left is entertaining to the level of civilizational threat, because most people don’t give them much credit anyway. You act as if the hyper-left is gaining speed and subverting the entire structure of Western civilization. Well with Trump in the White House and Great Britain floating out to sea on its own I have to wonder if this is true. With more and more people every day eschewing the crazy and out there viewpoints and taking the ideas there that are salvageable and returning to more reasonable and analytical viewpoints I have to wonder what world you are looking at. I mean if we weren’t more moderate than our extremists make us seem I don’t think you would be so popular among people on the left, which you so increasingly are.
     Finally on this point, I suspect that your alarmist signalling is due to the fact that this problem is more emphasized in education, and I have to agree. So, though I think your fear is overblown in the extreme, I do think that the message is important. I just caution a little more nuance, for now you are beginning to look like a firebrand instead of a thinker.

Dr. Jordan Peterson offers no substantive vision of an interesting future for humanity.

NOTE: Ender’s Game - I recently talked to my friend Ender, and some others, about my critique here, and he had a good point: JP doesn’t feel like its his place to make the kind of commentary I suggest in this next section. They are probably right. Still, when a thinker has built himself on poking holes in the veil, it would be nice if he described what he sees when he looks through those holes. Ultimately I want JP to go down as one of the greats, I believe he can only do so if he addresses the issues I raise here.

This is the big one for me: Dr. Jordan Peterson doesn’t actually have a future to offer.
    Again and again in his talks he offers sensible returns to traditional form, he offers interesting new critiques of norms within the progressive ideology, he offers messages to get your stuff together… and little else.
    ContraPoints says it well, “Dr. Peterson will bring up a widely accepted and factual point such as, ‘there are biological differences between men and women’ which is true. But he will bring it up in the context of a discussion about women being underrepresented in the workplace.” The question is, where is it going? What are you actually saying? Why won’t you say what it is you are alluding to? Again and again this same scenario plays out. He stops short and we are left to wonder as to his implication.
Sometimes it seems like Dr. Jordan Peterson would just favor a casual return to traditional familial and societal structures, one that sees the sensible areas of it integrated into modern life, and that is the ghost point of his work. Sometimes it seems like he would literally like to return to a world where women don’t work and great white men are at the helm of the ship, if not by actual design but as the product of a worldview’s logical extension. Sometimes it seems like he is actually a deeply closeted equalist, but one who maintains self-determination as the equalizer rather than external actors. Sometimes it seems like he thinks an apocalyptic war is almost on us and we need to group up to fight it. Sometimes it seems like he just wants to reform higher education. At one turn I see the spectre of a dictator, at another I see the spectre of a sage. Sometimes it seems all these things and more or less because… he isn’t actually saying what he thinks people should do, aside from get themselves together. He never says what he thinks comes next. He never proposes an application of his thought into an actual structure in society. He never says, “I think a way this idea could be tested at large is by doing X,” or if he does it's too rarely. He never says, “I think humanity can succeed as a species by doing Y,” aside from a clean room, communication, and free speech. He never says, “If we take idea Z and apply it to (insert any institution aside from education), we arrive at a system that is better than the one we have in Canada or the US or wherever.”
    What are we left with?
    Well his clearest vision and his answer to almost everything is for all of us to individually get ourselves together, and so I guess the logical extension of that is some sort of erudite paradise where everyone has realized an idealized version of themselves. Since Dr. Jordan Peterson makes a subtle case that as you get yourself together you fall more and more into line with a traditional value set, we could envision that the world would ‘naturally’ return/advance to a traditional format for society (despite the fact that there actually is no place in time I can think of where one has existed as he imagines). That’s fine and there are clear elements of truth there (people do seem happier once they stop being wild and start focusing on substantive, meaningful and soberer things, but that’s for them to decide). Altogether I guess this goal for the future isn’t explicitly harmful. It may be implicatively harmful though in more than one way, as it seems to implicate the superiority of one cultural format.
    Sometimes though… sometimes it feels darker. Sometimes I see this hollow where his message ends and in it is a shadow, a shadow that is complicated by his mentioning that he has great capacity for evil within him. I don’t like the feeling, and I wish I didn’t have it.
    But the feeling could be assuaged if Dr. Jordan Peterson would just do it, would just say it, whatever he really thinks comes next.

    He is hurting himself much more by what he doesn’t say than by what he does say.

    A final note here, my favorite philosopher is Kierkegaard (he is one of the only ones that describes the primary religious experience in a way that I can be absolutely sure he actually had it). Once I looked for some commentary from Dr. Jordan Peterson on him, but I couldn’t find much of it. I found one lecture where he talked about Kierkegaard’s idea that if everything got too easy we would want for difficulty, which is not a good reason to not make things easier (especially the privileged for the underprivileged, who have no lack of difficulty). It’s probably true though. Similar to that, Kierkegaard saw that everyone in his circle of intellectual colleagues were trying to make things easier by their thinking and it wasn’t helping push discussion into new territories.  Thus he resulted to make it:

    “[his] task to make difficulties everywhere”

    I hope that the wish to make problems and poke holes in current thinking (in my mind an important goal in philosophy and a worthy one) is why Dr. Jordan Peterson doesn’t talk about his good ideas for the future. Because there is also another possibility: that he just doesn’t have any.

Conclusion: A Canadian Professor in the Dirty South

    Sometimes when Dr. Jordan Peterson says certain things I stare at the screen now with my eyebrows all scrunched up wondering if he can possibly think this or that problem is so small as to be broken away by one chink in the armor of its construction. But then I remember something: Dr. Jordan Peterson is Canadian university professor. I am not, I am a Southerner in the United States and a college dropout who has been pretty damn successful. You see, out here all these theoretical problems that Dr. Jordan Peterson is dealing with in his mind are there to be dealt with in the streets. I must give him some slack then. I don’t think he realizes what it is to be in the things he talks about societally, both on the end of that which he deems good but far more so that which he deems bad. I think he is also from a country where the stakes are lower. Even just a bit, it makes a difference. Most of his critiques of society are very much in the realm of ideas, and the only arena in the world that exists purely within an exchange of ideas is higher education where no one has to or is making any fucking money anyway and people can be absolutely ludicrous in a thousand thousand ways and it doesn't really matter because its college and it ends and then life begins. Also, and quite unfortunately, he is just a college professor, and we all know that they are certainly the most myopic, underexposed, and intellectually masturbatory cohort of humans to have ever lived in the annals of recorded history. I knock him most for that.

     Dr. Jordan Peterson, though I have taken leave of your work and not suffered for it, I thank you for making some very good points. I would like to see the self that you are refusing to give birth to, though.

I would like to see what grand visions you might conjure.