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Hsieh's case is an instructive one: given infinite means to pursue happiness, attract friends, have artists and musicians and intellectuals play court to you, would you be able to construct an alternative way of living more satisfying than the conventional ones?
Jordan Peterson's message: "you should do what other people have always done" -- only becomes salient after the inflection point when enough people have become unmoored from what people have always done for it to be a message worth articulating
The enormous contempt directed at him by intellectuals concerns the awkward gap between the homespun homilies from the prairie that he delivered through the medium of scientistic (Darwinian) and esoteric (Jungian) idioms.
This strikes intellectuals as pretentious, to which the Petersonian reply is: *those homespun homilieis are in fact the most profound wisdom that exists* and its continued survival into the presence is *proof* of that....
The claim is susceptible to the same critique as any form of conservatism (whose wisdom? and when was it really like that, etc.?) and of course will be reviled by radicals
But that we all have a creaturely nature typically best satisfied by certain homely contentments of love and procreation and that the saints and geniuses among us who would only be fettered by those arrangements are few and far between actually is wisdom
I asked Peterson if he had read the Culture of Narcissism -- he had not heard of Christopher Lasch...
Or would you be doing whippets? https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1335198131127001088?s=20
Lasch presented similar ideas in a way that modern intellectuals were comfortable engaging with, even if they were hostile to their content.
Peterson availed himself of the new media and the culture war to bypass the gatekeepers and go directly to the public.
Peterson availed himself of the new media and the culture war to bypass the gatekeepers and go directly to the public.
The aspects of his cod intellectualism that make intellectuals cringe were not incidental to his popular success -- using Tony Robbins-like means to spread an ethos quite antithetical to the other-directed success mongering of the commercial self-help guru....
It's a category mistake to evaluate the phenomenon according to traditional rubrics of interpretation or criticism. Yes, the ideas are a farrago, yes, they encode valuable wisdom. Above all they show how imperiled that wisdom is by a culture in flight from it.
