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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The hard and far right just call everything to their left “Cultural Marxism”, so Peterson does the same thing.
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This really is the crux, isn't it? Peterson's interpretation of anything left is "radical" by the time you've passed neoliberal economic policy, interventionist foreign policy or right-leaning Democrat social policy.
Meanwhile he calls Ben Shapiro, Molyneux et al. "reasonable".
Again, you bring up Molyneux. JBP's new definition for beyond acceptability on the right is notions of racial superiority.
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Read anything his buddy Shapiro has to say on Palestinians.
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Works both ways. Until switched due to outcry, this articles top illustration was a montage of Hitler & JBP
forward.com/news/national/