Controversial views on gender and identity politics have shot an obscure Canadian clinical psychologist and academic to fame. Jordan Peterson, known as ‘the cowboy philosopher’, has waded into the linguistic morass around the transgender debate and been challenging the orthodoxies of political correctness and the culture of victimhood he believes is sweeping across university campuses in the West. His book is a best-seller; his You Tube videos have 50 million views and his lectures are sell-out. The New York Times describes him as ‘the most influential public intellectual in the Western world.’
He has a special interest in the dangers of totalitarian ideologies and believes that academia is in the grip of an accepted worldview that is doing damage. He believes young men are struggling to find themselves faced with accusations of toxic masculinity; that part of the gender pay gap is because women often opt for jobs which are more agreeable and pay less. His musings tie together self-help edicts with wisdom from Carl Jung, Nietzsche and Dostoesvky. And he rails against the University obsessions with ‘white privilege’, ‘safe spaces,’ ‘institutional racism’, diversity, equity, inclusivity. Never mind the alphabet soup of the multifarious choices of gender pronouns.
[I’ve just discovered – having had to look it up – that I am cisgender, which bizarrely means same gender as my body.]
Born 12 June 1962, he is a Sun and Mercury in Gemini trine Saturn in Aquarius probably trine a Libra Moon. Not that dissimilar the Laura Ingraham. He has a strong Mars in Taurus opposition Neptune square Saturn opposition a North Node in Leo, which last can often indicate leadership potential. He’s also got a powerfully and pushily confident Pluto opposition Jupiter square Mercury. He’s got communication written across his chart and he’ll be highly strung with a focal point Mutable Mercury. Though he’s also stubborn and enduring with a Fixed Grand Cross. He has planets in all three Water signs – and an Air/Water chart can be finely balanced between reason and emotion. He does suffer from depression.
His 5th, 13th and 17th Harmonics are all notable – so he might make a few dents in the orthodoxies which so enrage him.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/did-controversial-psychologist-jordan-peterson-become-right/
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When digital clocks and other devices started becoming a mainstream thing, we had to invent words to describe their purely mechanical predecessors.
To learn the new parlance to be able to conduct ourselves with proper politeness and manners should be a fairly cut and dry thing — your concept of your gender happens to match the body parts you have, rather than not matching as is the case with trans individuals? Of course you get the prefix meaning “same” …. everyone has a gender identity and physical body combo, the key is that pointing that out is normalized.
Then again, I’ve never understood all the fuss behind “Political Correctness” because who has a problem with treating others how you yourself would want to be treated? Try swapping ‘pc’ for ‘being polite’ and ‘having manners’ and see how innocuous the sentence becomes.
Fascinating co,Kent’s, Solaia!
I think he’s an interesting man. I do not necessarily agree with everything he says, but I too worry about the effect that extreme political correctness is having on our institutions and I say that as a feminist. Currently in the UK, the debate around trans politics has reached such extreme proportions that the older generation of feminists such as Linda Belos have been banned from speaking at various universities because their views depart from those that are dictated by trans activists. This shutting down of debate is concerning. All part of this current ‘Age of Extremes’ that we appear to be living through.
In a similar vein, for those who didn’t catch this story
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/female-acitivists-selfidentify-as-men-to-infiltrate-maleonly-swimming-session-a3792911.html
I don’t know enough about Jordan Peterson’s views to comment. What little I read, he seemed to be arguing for the ‘old fashioned’ view that men and women do have differences. Not just in suspensory muscles, testosterone and sexual characteristics but also in temperament – women more agreeable/helpful etc and men more competitive. And yes you can blow holes in that simplistic summary but there’s a nugget of truth in it, and it’s not all just social conditioning. Peterson’s answer to why fewer women head FTSE 100 companies was based, I imagine, on the view that not as many women want to exist in that alpha-male, highly competitive environment with staggeringly long hours. Only a handful could cope with financiers’ fourteen hour days and juggle children as well.
There are horrible pay imbalances on gender that need to be fixed, but we still haven’t solved the problem of how businesses cope with women absent through pregnancy and afterwards needing time to cope with children.
I distrust this non-binary/agender obsession that is doing the rounds. Genuine transgenders are a tiny proportion of the population, under 1%. And no one talks about the after-effects of a sex-change – high suicide rates and problems when some discover their identity conflicts weren’t really gender-based at all. And yet we’ve got caught up in all manner of nonsense on the basis of this tiny problem.
Duality isn’t just a Jungian thing – and his was anyway partly the conscious/unconscious dyad. There’s also Zen with its yin and yang. There is a shift over to a less demarcated view of the genders but I doubt we’ll lose the distinction altogether. Both Freud and Jung were men of their time and not exactly tuned into the female perspective in their theories, apart from mother, of course, who was an obsession with both.
No doubt new psychological theories will emerge to cope with the Aquarian mentality, kicking off in the 1990s and magnifying through the 2020s, which tends to be against the biology. But women are still the only ones to give birth and men are needed to impregnate them – and you aren’t going to change that.
He’s a jerk. His whole gig is to give intellectual and social cover to reactionaries.
Wonderful mind working to bring reason and consciousness to the divisions which threaten to destroy us. Long may he continue.
I have been listening to his Youtube lectures about the Bible and fairy tales over the past year and have been seriously impressed. He has so much useful understanding, knowledge and insight which he shares freely. He seems to particularly resonate with the young though I’m a middle-aged woman and I think he’s great.
Sadly this will just continue to propagate divisions upon divisions upon divisions. It seems that the UK has long grown accepting of minorities and alternative views on gender without ‘making a fuss’ or at least in a more pragmatic way – British culture is, for all its faults, better than many at absorbing and accepting the ‘other’ and making things fair for everyone. It’s hard to tell if the explosion of arguing and mini civil wars everywhere is a default result of social media, or a very American way of trying to using jargon, overthinking and political grandstanding to try to create fairness. America invented the horrible trap-phrase ‘political correctness’, after all. As for gender, both modern biology and human history tells us that it’s complicated, and always has been.
I find the American discourse really alien, as whole. Why wouldn’t they just establish effective antidiscrimination laws, and get over it?
Also, college application procedures are inconceivable. Interviews are not fair. Where I come from, we have blind entrance exams. Practically every discipline except for maths and engineering has female majority. But engineering is now approaching 30 per cent female attendance, and we are the one Nation where girls actually now outperform boys in PISA test math. This has promted some “male activists” to say schooling is female biased. Seriously, that learning to concentrate on tasks is female biased. As a male, I would be incredibly offended by such claims.
Also, coming from a country with one of the highest female employment rates, but also most gender based job market, particular claim of “female” employments being worst paid than “male” employments is just atrocious. Telling that nursing or teaching small kids, which are 90 per cent female employments is “easier” than working a paper machinary is totally offensive. Yet someone working a paper machinary gets paid 30 per cent more a nurse does. And it’s not like women don’t apply for those jobs. They do.
My family love watching him, many of my teenage daughter’s male friends are particularly interested in what he has to say. He offers logic and facts in the in the face of emotional opinion, I think he will leave his mark on the young.
You know, he is not always factual. I mentioned his views on gender pay gap. These are not based on a factual assertion of, let’s say, being a kindergarten teacher in charge of up to 20 4-year-old being “less demanding” than building an internet site.
Also, his type of thinkers avoidance of looking at family dynamics effecting worklife is really defying “factuality”, as well. Your daughter and her friends will, unfortunately, discover this at work at the age they would be expected to start a family. It will be more difficult for your daughter, from ages 25 to 40, to simply get an interview it will be for her male counterparts. Her friends will discover, to their horror, their girlfriends and wives who they hopefully consider as smart as themselves, have harder time getting interviews than they do and certainly do get offered fewer promotions. Just based on an assumption they MIGHT get pregnant at one point.
I actually am not crazy about interceptionalism myself, either. But I’m not crazy about the arguments critics of interceptionalism are doing. Despite often positioning themselves as first or second wave feminists, they seem to overlook arguments which were THE VERY core of these feminists thinking, namely social constructions that are keeping women from working. These have not been fixed in The US, at least, where paid parental leaves are applied on employer’s will and childcare is both incredibly expensive and unsafe. Therefore, critics of interceptionalism often seem incredibly reactionary to my Nordic eye.
Hi Solaia – just wanted to say that I agree with you.
He also seems to be a fairly respected Jungian Psychologist. I’m personally a fan of Jung. But to anyone who has studied psychology, it’s kind of ironic that a Jungian is being “pitched” as a champion of factuality. Jungian psychology is highly speculative, and personality testing based on Jungian concept has its’ legitimate critics. Not that Freud, on which much of the French Postmodernist thinking is based, via Lacan, is much more factual.
But it really seems like this all started as a (petty) Academic War, the kind that have been played in Europe since the 12th Century, and then got “hijacked” by alt-right – not actually the left – for their antifeminist agenda. This has been evident even before #metoo campaign, with The Gamergate. I think it may be about Regulus going to Virgo – there seems to be a real paradigm shift happening, with even biological gender shifting (fish are currently being “feminised” and of course, medicine evolving) and bounderies becoming less defined. Might be rough for Jungians, with their love of duality.