Good backgrounder. Would love a similar read on why his approach and content seems to engage so many right now.
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I have been thinking about that a lot and am not quite sure.
Part of it is his professorial manner combined with him validating far right ideas.
But his appeal to young men is an interesting puzzle.
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There is absolutely no puzzle. His appeal to young (white) men is obvious. Plays into power fantasies. Same goes for Ayn Rand.
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I agree. We haven't even touched on xenoestrogens yet, for example.
My main critique of pomo, identity politics etc is b/c to me they're tools of late capitalism.
Conviviality hard to monetize, thus constant atomization polarization etc. Keep people suspicious of each other.
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The hilarious thing is that postmodernists represent a very, very small portion of Peterson's critics or ideological opponents.
It's all grand narrative social activist stuff, identity politics, critiques of colonialism and capitalism and so on.
Nothing remotely pomo about it.
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I haven't seen a single interview w/him being questioned on capitalism.
It's been brought up briefly in his convos w/Russell Brand & Philip Dodd though in each case the questioner hadn't prepared anything in sufficient depth to get around JBP's minimal precision requirements.
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I meant his opponents, not him.
He keeps railing against his supposed pomo or neomarxist opponents. How many can you find?
Most of the hit pieces for example are from your typical liberal/neoliberal journos and such. These people are not Marxist. They're often not even lefties.
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So it's pure clickbait then. The critics you mention have no moral center. Angry people click more, etc.
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It could be that he provides adherents with ways of thinking about “returning to the past”, and that this engages them.
(Photo shows Donald Schön’s 1971 “Beyond the Stable State”, which describes this in more detail).
Trying to understand why he’s popular *now*, though.
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I have some easy answers - accelerated cultural collapse/economic inequality, great uncertainty about the future - but much like 's aside about cultural politics I am a bit skeptical. They're too neat.
An actual explanation is probably a bit too complicated to summarize.